"Mad" Miles
07-17-2010, 02:19 PM
Afternoon Waccabboodlybiddlies!
Things certainly heated up here in wacco-landia, yesterday afternoon and evening. I was so amped that I had difficulty falling asleep early this morning. My faux ranting must have pumped too much oxygen to my brain and I couldn't calm those furious thoughts, even while imagining my favorite katana moves, my regular means to decompress and drift off to dream land.
I just want to point something out, and then hopefully, I'll let it go and finally go get my car washed and buy some toilet paper at Costco.
When someone claims something patently absurd, for instance:
Obama is a racist, anyone who disagrees with me that he is a racist, is a racist. The anger from African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and other non-Caucasian Americans (U.S.) for a litany of historical and contemporary crimes, slights and discrimination is just rage jinned up by their leaders to profit from their false accusations of our fine nation. If left alone, those non-white Americans (U.S.) would see how lucky they are, would get with the program, and would quit blaming us innocent white people for things we never did, and never would do. Anyone who says different, and tries to explain why, is a ranting racist who just wants to continue the legacy of racism to profit from that rage.
Most so-called Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not really Palestinians. They're Arab scum that flocked there in 1969 when Yasser Arafat invited them in to give the peace loving, innocent Israeli's a really hard time. They hate Jews, Americans (U.S.) and everything good and just. They will destroy civilization if we don't crush them into oblivion.
Global Warming, aka Climate Change, is not man made. It is a natural variation due to physical forces beyond the control of humans. Any studies, computer models, or other climatological scientific evidence to the contrary is made up by a bunch of greedy hacks on the government payroll who will do and say anything to discredit their critics. Community consensus of the experts is irrelevant. I have the websites to prove it.
Vaccination is just a plot by Big Pharma to poison our children. Putting chemicals into babies bodies. Only a psychopath would do that! It doesn't really work to prevent outbreaks of communicable disease. And if I raise my kids on organic produce and let them run around in the dirt, they'll develop immunities independent of any public health vaccination campaign.
The world is run by a cabal of evil rich men who have been conspiring since the beginning of time to rule us all. The proof is in the symbols printed on our money. No argument can change that fact!
Etc.. You get the picture.
As someone interested in matters of social justice, political freedom, public health and just trying to figure out how the world works, I have opinions, based on years of study, discussion and pondering these matters. If I find something someone says completely out of touch with reality as I understand it, I have several choices:
Ignore them
Engage in a debate by marshalling arguments and references to fact to prove them wrong.
Disparage, laugh at and carry the absurdity in question to its logical extreme in order to satirize the views I find ridiculous.
At various times I choose one of the above, sometimes I combine the latter two. That's what I've chosen to do here, recently.
Sometimes, it takes me great effort not to respond with, "Yer a frikin' idjet!!!" Mostly I just say it, without writing it.
I have little patience for fools, demagogues and liars.
While I believe social reality is created by the complex interaction of human consciousness, tradition, habit, inherited institutions, unconscious drives and desires and who knows what else, there are things that make sense, sort of, and things that are patently ridiculous.
It takes all kinds. Opinions differ. We're all in this together. If we don't hang together, surely we will hang separately.
Life is beautiful, painful, tragic, joyous, precious and weird. If I can come back here a day later and the things I wrote still make some modicum of sense to me, and more importantly, still make me laugh out loud? Then I am satisfied that I've contributed to the incessant chatter among/with my fellow naked apes on this little blue ball.
If only a few people enjoy my badanage, it's worth it. And I have evidence that a few do, given the private emails I occasionally get, the agreement I see in others posts, and the "gratitude" hits I get.
I'm also sure that there are others who read me and think I'm a bloated, bloviating bore. Everyone's entitled to their opinion and the "ignore" option is easy to execute.
Ultimately political power is about numbers. Numbers of votes, amounts of money, numbers of voices, numbers of people in the street.
I know I won't convince any true believers, in what I find patently absurd, to change their minds. No matter how many "facts" I marshall to refute their claims.
Plus it's a lot more entertaining, at least for me, to embrace their absurd claims and joyfully extrapolate from them.
In the Spring of 1976, I was at my first spring conference of a loose network of academic, community activist and public intellectual leftists. Most of us were from the West Coast or nearby. I was a student at UCI. There were presentations, and workshops, both theoretical and practical.
I vividly recall one titled "Zen Marxism." That presenter was an acquaintance / friend, a junior professor who went on to become a software mogul, or so our mutual friend told me years ago.
Mostly it was a big schmooze-fest, party and pick-up scene. It used to be held in Grass Valley every Memorial Day weekend at a Camp Fire Girls camp.
I beg pardon of my fellow veteran waccoons who have read this story in one of my previous posts a few years back. I think I've added some details here, that I haven't shared before.
A group of sectarian Leninists was trying to "seize" control of the organization that put the spring fling on. That organization/network did nothing but organize this conference.
"The League for Proletarian Socialism," seriously that's what they called themselves (talk about a redundant name!) were some M/L groupuscule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupuscule) from the East Bay. Nobody had ever heard of them before.
We dealt with the "threat" in two ways. Quickly forming chapters of a different group to out vote them on the steering committee. In other words, "packing the meeting," in response to their attempt to "pack the meeting." We were successful, mostly because their project was so ridiculous.
But the much more interesting and entertaining way we dealt with the situation, was to walk around all weekend using clichéd<SCRIPT language=javascript>AC_FL_RunContent = 0;</SCRIPT><SCRIPT type=text/javascript>var interfaceflash = new LEXICOFlashObject ( "https://sp.dictionary.com/dictstatic/d/g/speaker.swf", "speaker", "17", "15", "https://www.waccobb.net/forums/", "6");interfaceflash.addParam("loop", "false");interfaceflash.addParam("quality", "high");interfaceflash.addParam("menu", "false");interfaceflash.addParam("salign", "t");interfaceflash.addParam("FlashVars", "soundUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fsp.dictionary.com%2Fdictstatic%2Fdictionary%2Faudio%2Fluna%2FC05%2FC0551200.mp3&clkLogProxyUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fdictionary.reference.com%2Fwhatzup.html&t=a&d=d&s=di&c=a&ti=1&ai=51359&l=dir&o=0&sv=00000000&ip=4cbfd6f3&u=audio"); interfaceflash.addParam('wmode','transparent');interfaceflash.write();</SCRIPT> Old Left and New Left rhetoric as an insult game. It was hilarious!
"What's up you running dog traitor to the working class in league with paper tiger elements of Imperialism?"
"Nothing you revanchist splitter who couldn't understand the Laws of Politcal Economy even in front of a firing squad made up of the comrades you've betrayed!"
"Your reactionary words fail to conceal your craven status as a class traitor!"
"Same to you, but more of it, Menschevik!!!"
You get the idea.
It was fun! Innocent. Creative. And very effective in shutting up a little, crazed sect of true believers who were living in their own cloud cookoo land with little or no connection to the world around them.
Never forgot that. Laughter really is the best medicine. And joyfully humiliating those who spout patently absurd nonsense, is a great way to laugh!
Trying to argue rationally with them, is pretty much a sucker's game. For every fact and sound argument you present, they're gonna keep asserting the absurdities, while cherry picking information and fallaciously extrapolating from it to support their nonsense.
And when confronted with their own absurd views, they'll get huffy, accuse you of being absurd (Duh!) and rely on the fall back position in all school yard arguments.
"You're doing it too!"
"Uh uh, you did it first!"
It's an eternal loop of loopiness. A merry-go-round that, after you've ridden it many times, is no longer interesting or entertaining.
I've moved on, to glorious amusement!
Happy Saturday!
Goddamn Socialists!!!
Things certainly heated up here in wacco-landia, yesterday afternoon and evening. I was so amped that I had difficulty falling asleep early this morning. My faux ranting must have pumped too much oxygen to my brain and I couldn't calm those furious thoughts, even while imagining my favorite katana moves, my regular means to decompress and drift off to dream land.
I just want to point something out, and then hopefully, I'll let it go and finally go get my car washed and buy some toilet paper at Costco.
When someone claims something patently absurd, for instance:
Obama is a racist, anyone who disagrees with me that he is a racist, is a racist. The anger from African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and other non-Caucasian Americans (U.S.) for a litany of historical and contemporary crimes, slights and discrimination is just rage jinned up by their leaders to profit from their false accusations of our fine nation. If left alone, those non-white Americans (U.S.) would see how lucky they are, would get with the program, and would quit blaming us innocent white people for things we never did, and never would do. Anyone who says different, and tries to explain why, is a ranting racist who just wants to continue the legacy of racism to profit from that rage.
Most so-called Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not really Palestinians. They're Arab scum that flocked there in 1969 when Yasser Arafat invited them in to give the peace loving, innocent Israeli's a really hard time. They hate Jews, Americans (U.S.) and everything good and just. They will destroy civilization if we don't crush them into oblivion.
Global Warming, aka Climate Change, is not man made. It is a natural variation due to physical forces beyond the control of humans. Any studies, computer models, or other climatological scientific evidence to the contrary is made up by a bunch of greedy hacks on the government payroll who will do and say anything to discredit their critics. Community consensus of the experts is irrelevant. I have the websites to prove it.
Vaccination is just a plot by Big Pharma to poison our children. Putting chemicals into babies bodies. Only a psychopath would do that! It doesn't really work to prevent outbreaks of communicable disease. And if I raise my kids on organic produce and let them run around in the dirt, they'll develop immunities independent of any public health vaccination campaign.
The world is run by a cabal of evil rich men who have been conspiring since the beginning of time to rule us all. The proof is in the symbols printed on our money. No argument can change that fact!
Etc.. You get the picture.
As someone interested in matters of social justice, political freedom, public health and just trying to figure out how the world works, I have opinions, based on years of study, discussion and pondering these matters. If I find something someone says completely out of touch with reality as I understand it, I have several choices:
Ignore them
Engage in a debate by marshalling arguments and references to fact to prove them wrong.
Disparage, laugh at and carry the absurdity in question to its logical extreme in order to satirize the views I find ridiculous.
At various times I choose one of the above, sometimes I combine the latter two. That's what I've chosen to do here, recently.
Sometimes, it takes me great effort not to respond with, "Yer a frikin' idjet!!!" Mostly I just say it, without writing it.
I have little patience for fools, demagogues and liars.
While I believe social reality is created by the complex interaction of human consciousness, tradition, habit, inherited institutions, unconscious drives and desires and who knows what else, there are things that make sense, sort of, and things that are patently ridiculous.
It takes all kinds. Opinions differ. We're all in this together. If we don't hang together, surely we will hang separately.
Life is beautiful, painful, tragic, joyous, precious and weird. If I can come back here a day later and the things I wrote still make some modicum of sense to me, and more importantly, still make me laugh out loud? Then I am satisfied that I've contributed to the incessant chatter among/with my fellow naked apes on this little blue ball.
If only a few people enjoy my badanage, it's worth it. And I have evidence that a few do, given the private emails I occasionally get, the agreement I see in others posts, and the "gratitude" hits I get.
I'm also sure that there are others who read me and think I'm a bloated, bloviating bore. Everyone's entitled to their opinion and the "ignore" option is easy to execute.
Ultimately political power is about numbers. Numbers of votes, amounts of money, numbers of voices, numbers of people in the street.
I know I won't convince any true believers, in what I find patently absurd, to change their minds. No matter how many "facts" I marshall to refute their claims.
Plus it's a lot more entertaining, at least for me, to embrace their absurd claims and joyfully extrapolate from them.
In the Spring of 1976, I was at my first spring conference of a loose network of academic, community activist and public intellectual leftists. Most of us were from the West Coast or nearby. I was a student at UCI. There were presentations, and workshops, both theoretical and practical.
I vividly recall one titled "Zen Marxism." That presenter was an acquaintance / friend, a junior professor who went on to become a software mogul, or so our mutual friend told me years ago.
Mostly it was a big schmooze-fest, party and pick-up scene. It used to be held in Grass Valley every Memorial Day weekend at a Camp Fire Girls camp.
I beg pardon of my fellow veteran waccoons who have read this story in one of my previous posts a few years back. I think I've added some details here, that I haven't shared before.
A group of sectarian Leninists was trying to "seize" control of the organization that put the spring fling on. That organization/network did nothing but organize this conference.
"The League for Proletarian Socialism," seriously that's what they called themselves (talk about a redundant name!) were some M/L groupuscule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupuscule) from the East Bay. Nobody had ever heard of them before.
We dealt with the "threat" in two ways. Quickly forming chapters of a different group to out vote them on the steering committee. In other words, "packing the meeting," in response to their attempt to "pack the meeting." We were successful, mostly because their project was so ridiculous.
But the much more interesting and entertaining way we dealt with the situation, was to walk around all weekend using clichéd<SCRIPT language=javascript>AC_FL_RunContent = 0;</SCRIPT><SCRIPT type=text/javascript>var interfaceflash = new LEXICOFlashObject ( "https://sp.dictionary.com/dictstatic/d/g/speaker.swf", "speaker", "17", "15", "https://www.waccobb.net/forums/", "6");interfaceflash.addParam("loop", "false");interfaceflash.addParam("quality", "high");interfaceflash.addParam("menu", "false");interfaceflash.addParam("salign", "t");interfaceflash.addParam("FlashVars", "soundUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fsp.dictionary.com%2Fdictstatic%2Fdictionary%2Faudio%2Fluna%2FC05%2FC0551200.mp3&clkLogProxyUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fdictionary.reference.com%2Fwhatzup.html&t=a&d=d&s=di&c=a&ti=1&ai=51359&l=dir&o=0&sv=00000000&ip=4cbfd6f3&u=audio"); interfaceflash.addParam('wmode','transparent');interfaceflash.write();</SCRIPT> Old Left and New Left rhetoric as an insult game. It was hilarious!
"What's up you running dog traitor to the working class in league with paper tiger elements of Imperialism?"
"Nothing you revanchist splitter who couldn't understand the Laws of Politcal Economy even in front of a firing squad made up of the comrades you've betrayed!"
"Your reactionary words fail to conceal your craven status as a class traitor!"
"Same to you, but more of it, Menschevik!!!"
You get the idea.
It was fun! Innocent. Creative. And very effective in shutting up a little, crazed sect of true believers who were living in their own cloud cookoo land with little or no connection to the world around them.
Never forgot that. Laughter really is the best medicine. And joyfully humiliating those who spout patently absurd nonsense, is a great way to laugh!
Trying to argue rationally with them, is pretty much a sucker's game. For every fact and sound argument you present, they're gonna keep asserting the absurdities, while cherry picking information and fallaciously extrapolating from it to support their nonsense.
And when confronted with their own absurd views, they'll get huffy, accuse you of being absurd (Duh!) and rely on the fall back position in all school yard arguments.
"You're doing it too!"
"Uh uh, you did it first!"
It's an eternal loop of loopiness. A merry-go-round that, after you've ridden it many times, is no longer interesting or entertaining.
I've moved on, to glorious amusement!
Happy Saturday!
Goddamn Socialists!!!