Posted by Allen on October 11, 2008 under Kids, Politics | 
The following conversation took place this afternoon between Kelsey and Brandon, both six years old, while riding home from apple picking:
KELSEY: Â We’re gonna vote for Obama.
BRANDON: Â John McCain wants to make it so kids won’t have any money when they grow up.
KELSEY: Â Yeah, that’s why we’re gonna vote for Obama.
BRANDON: Â Me too, I’m voting for Obama.
A pause.
BRANDON: Â John McCain sucks.
Posted by Allen on October 10, 2008 under Politics, Thinky |
I don’t get into discussing politics very much, especially in public forums like this site. Sure, I’ve occasionally posted a pro-Obama video or link, but I stay away from the details of exactly what it is I believe, or why I believe it, or why I support the issues or politicians I do.
And I’m not going to do so in this post, either, though maybe I will do so before election day next month. What I want to talk about instead is why I don’t like to talk about politics, in hopes that I can work something out in my head, and in so doing, be more able to have these conversations in the future.
(As an aside, I’d like to preface the following discussion with the fact that you could probably replace every instance of the word “politics” with “religion” and it would still stand true.)
It’s not that I don’t think I can defend my views or should have to; it’s not that I think I’m so right that I’m afraid of having my worldview or political opinions or ideologies shaken; it’s not that I’m not open to listening to other ideas and viewpoints. I’m always open to being convinced that I’m wrong, even when I firmly believe I’m right. It’s possible that my mind can be changed with an argument persuasive enough, compelling enough, and factual enough.
But the thing is… those sorts of discussions almost by definition are arguments, and I don’t like to argue. At all. And here I mean “argue” in the debate sense more than the fight sense, though I don’t like to do that, either. I have plenty of friends and relatives who love to argue (in both senses of the word), who take pride in their ability to verbally take apart someone’s views, and that’s not an attitude I can fathom in the least for myself.
A lot of my distaste for arguing comes from a lack of confidence in my verbal jousting ability — while my brain works quickly, I have a lot of trouble getting what I’m trying to say to work its way out of my mouth coherently. But even when I’m dealing with dissenting opinions via the written word, my heart pounds and my vision goes all swimmy — fight or flight kicks in, and most of the time I’d much, much rather fly than fight. So I usually try to stay away from situations where arguments are likely to occur (i.e., talking about politics with The Other Side). Also, there’s the fact that I could be far more versed in the details of the issues than I am. A lot of my opinions are high-level and gut-level — I believe the way I do because not to do so feels wrong. Some of what I believe, I believe because these things just make sense to me, regardless of political ideology. But when debates or arguments comes down to a point-by-point back-and-forth on minutiae… well, right now I can’t really hang with that. I can argue up to a point, but then I begin to feel insecure — not in my beliefs but rather in my ability to defend them well. I have friends who can get into discussion particular Supreme Court cases, particular nuances of different areas of law or policy, and rather than risk feeling like an idiot, I tend to clam up and listen (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing).
Yet I notice that I seem to Twitter a lot about politics. Most of my last couple of weeks’ worth of tweets (lord, do I hate that name) have been about politics in some fashion or another, and I think it’s likely a) because the format of Twitter, while it does allow back-and-forth conversation, doesn’t really much encourage it; and b) because of the nature of Twitter, I don’t have to think much about what I’m putting out there. I can make quick observations or snarky, off-the-cuff comments and just kinda throw it into the wild without too much fear of negative repercussions.
And really, as far as repercussions go, what I’m most afraid of is alienating people — especially my family, most of whom are very Republican. I still cling to this middle-school-notion that I want everyone to like me, even though I know that’s impractical, impossible and, honestly, undesirable. But that adolescent need still hangs around in my head, and talking about politics pretty much guarantees pissing off someone. Hell, just my writing these words, admitting I have an opinion and that it’s pro-Obama, is probably going to piss off someone. Or a whole lot of someones. Quite possibly someones in my extended family. So part of my reluctance to talk about these issues is simply a matter of trying to minimize drama in my life, I suppose.
But now that I have all of those reasons/excuses out there, aren’t I really saying… that I’m a coward? I just admitted that I’m afraid to admit to or back up my opinions. Whatever I claim the reasons to be, it all simply boils down to cowardice, pure and simple. And I don’t want to think of myself as a coward.
So… no more. I’m not going to be afraid to state my opinion, and I’ll back it up as best I can, if need be. If you feel that you can respectfully tell me I’m wrong and think you can convince me of your points, preferably using verifiable facts to back up your position, bring it on. As I said, I’m always open to learning and having my mind changed. But I’m not going to get into any comment-thread flame wars with anyone.
As a liberal, I’m a big proponent of free speech. I firmly believe that you’re entitled to your own opinion, no matter how backwards, asinine, hypocritical or short-sighted I think it may be. The flip side is that I’m also entitled to my opinion, and this site is my venue for expressing it. If you don’t like my political opinions (or my opinions about anything else, for that matter), you’re under no obligation to read them and can either come back when I blather on about something innocuous (which will surely be soon) or, if I’ve bugged you that badly, not at all.
Just don’t hate me because my opinion is different from yours, and I’ll try to do the same.
Posted by Allen on July 12, 2007 under Music, Politics |
We now break with this nice stream of blogging silence we’ve actively cultivated for the following emergency message:
Next Monday, July 15, new royalty rates go into effect for Internet radio stations which will effectively kill the entire ‘net radio market. These new rates are upwards of ten times higher than any other type of radio broadcaster must pay (and are retroactive to January of ‘06), and most ‘net radio stations would end up having to pay amounts far, far greater than their profits would allow. The new rates say that stations have to pay 33 cents per hour per listener, so a station with only 5000 listeners would have to pay royalty fees of almost $1.2 million per month to continue broadcasting. And that’s a fairly small station. The RIAA got this legislation passed so they could kill ‘net radio and make more money for themselves via record sales and larger broadcasters; it looks like their strategy is going to work if something isn’t done.
(EDIT: I got my math wrong, or rather, my figures: it’s not 33 cents per hour, it’s .33 cents per hour. Still, that figure represents far more than the profits most stations make. A station with only 5000 listeners having to pay $12K month in royalty fees is still excessive. But man, doesn’t $1.2 million for 5000 listeners sound more terrible and impressive?)
If you ever listen to any ‘net radio — whether that’s Radio Paradise or Pandora or AOL Radio or anything in between — please visit SaveNetRadio.org to see what you can do. Really, at this point “what you can do” means “call your Congressional representative(s) and tell ‘em to support the Internet Radio Equality Act.”
Light up those phones, people! Save Internet radio! Give those asshats at the RIAA what-for!
Posted by Allen on October 6, 2006 under Media, Politics |
Dear CNN.com:
Fuck you.
Maybe you think that what your viewers want to see when they come to your site in search of news is “Girl gang-raped at three years old.” Maybe you’ve got oodles of statistics saying that, yes, what your audience really, really wants to read about is some whackjob mother who put her toddler in the oven. Maybe you’ve held focus group tests which tell you that yeah, what people want is more news stories about little kids getting their heads eaten by bears.
But I don’t.
If it was only occasionally that I had to confront these Awful Horridness Happens to Children stories, I think I could likely deal with it, just ignore the stories, but the fact is: every time I visit your site, there’s an article from that category in your Top Stories list. You might as well have a Childhood Tragedy section linked in your navigation menu at the top of the page.
(As I was writing this letter, I went to your home page to see what kind of Awful Horridness Happens to Children article you’re featuring now, and currently it’s “Police: Man says he killed 4 kids.” Lovely, thanks.)
I have two little girls, and I worry enough about them, about the random unspeakable tragedies which could strike them, without having to be presented with “news” of the horrible things happening to other children each time I click that CNN.com link. Those stories don’t make me feel better about or more grateful for my own healthy kids, they don’t make me appreciate them any more than I already do; they only sicken me with grief for the parents and families of those poor kids.
So I’m done. I’ve deleted your site from my bookmarks and I’ve unsubscribed from the CNN Breaking News email I’ve been getting for the last five years. No more for me.
When the House and Senate passed that disgusting Torture OK! bill which fundamentally altered our values as a nation and pushed us that much closer to the fascist police state Bush & Co. have been working so hard to institute for the last few years, I had to dig to find any coverage of that event — I had to go into your Politics section, and it wasn’t even the top story there when I found it.
When a little girl died after a dental procedure? Top story, front page, baby.
Look, I understand, I do. It’s all about the ratings, the page views — you’ve got to deliver those numbers to the advertisers who pay your bills, just like most every other form of entertainment. (Make no mistake: you are an entertainment organization, not a news organization.) And it’s easier for your audience to digest tragedy befalls child than it is Constitution buggered, especially in bite-sized chunks.
But that’s not what I want out of my news. That tragedy doesn’t personally affect me or my family or my friends; the tragedies regularly occuring in Washington do. I want to be informed, to be educated, to be made to think about what’s going on in my country and my world… not to be bludgeoned with the Hammer of Isn’t It Horrible. Count me out.
Sincerely,
A Disgusted and Disgruntled Ex-Viewer
Posted by Allen on June 1, 2006 under Politics |
Rolling Stone has just published a compelling, massive article on the alleged Ohio vote fraud in the 2004 Presidential election. This thing is really long (and extensively annotated), but it’s well worth reading if you’ve got the time. If the Republicans in Ohio (especially Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Katherine Harris of 2004) and their supporters actually pulled even a quarter of the shenanigans detailed in this article, the implications are both staggering and maddening. If the allegations in this article are true — and a great many of them certainly seem at best plausible, at worst likely — John Kerry should be coming up on the end of the first half of his first term as President of the United States right now.
At this point, I have to admit that I’m less concerned about what happened in Ohio in ‘04 — like so many others not in the media, I was convinced on Election Night that some serious fraud was going on based on the “faulty” exit polling numbers — than I am with finding a way to make damn sure it doesn’t happen again in 2008. [1] I just want everyone’s vote counted fairly. I would be less angry with our current administration (like, say, only at the “outraged” level rather than at the “scorchingly livid” level I’m usually at) if I were convinced Dubya had been legitimately elected either time, but the stink of fraud that hovers around both elections just makes this White House’s reprehensible acts that much more distasteful.
A quote from the article’s author, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr (yeah, that name doesn’t make him sound all that non-partisan, does it?):
If the last two elections have taught us anything, it is this: The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system. If people lose faith that their votes are accurately and faithfully recorded, they will abandon the ballot box. Nothing less is at stake here than the entire idea of a government by the people.
Posted by Allen on May 30, 2006 under Links, Politics, Rants (Not Mine) |
No time to write much of anything today, so I give you instead, just in time for too late for Memorial Day, a proxy for the insightful, witty commentary you normally expect from me: Kung Fu Monkey’s John Rogers discusses the term “chickenhawk” and the convenant the U.S. government — and all American citizens — have with our troops fighting overseas. It’s exactly the kind of impassioned, articulate, persuasive post I hope I have somewhere within me. Go. Read.
Posted by Allen on November 23, 2005 under Politics, Technology |
An article on Wired’s website posits the theory that five-buck-a-gallon gas is good for all of us in the long run. The part of me that doesn’t have much in the way of money these days wants to disagree–falling gas prices have knocked about $60 a month off of my gas expenditures (thanks, 30-mile commute!). But I think the author’s probably right when he says that ridiculously hight gas prices are what’s going to allow us to get to the new energy technologies waiting for us in our future.
It looks like the oil companies might agree, given how far and how quickly prices have fallen. Big Oil would rather maintain their longtime stranglehold on our energy consumption rather than let record profits in the short term lead to a move away from oil (though, of course, I’m sure they really enjoyed those record profits while they could get ‘em). I’ve actually long thought that the only way we’d see serious progress on alternative fuel technologies would be when the oil companies could figure out how best they could profit from those advancements.
I think I’m going to take one line from the article and add it to my email sig: “It’s not written in stone that humanity has to propel itself with petroleum alone.”
Posted by Allen on September 6, 2005 under Best Of, Introspection, Politics |
“The results are not acceptable.” — The President of the United States
You’re fucking-A right, George.
When I first started this blog a little over four months ago, I wrote a post in which, among other things, I discussed the fact that while intellecutually I recognize the horrible things that sometimes happen to people in disaster situations and wish things were different for them, I don’t really feel much pain or sadness for those people:
I don’t always take the fact that I’m not easily angered to be a positive; I’m afraid it’s symptomatic of something bigger. I know that I don’t feel deeply enough for current events or for human suffering in other parts of the world. I care, but I don’t, y’know, care. I know plenty of folks who do: people who want to fight for issues they believe in or who seem to feel as much for people they’ve never met as they do for the people in their day-to-day lives.
But after New Orleans–and our government’s massive ineptitude and callous disregard for the people of the Gulf Coast region–that’s starting to change.
I’ve been too wrapped up in my own head since the disaster hit, and I’ve tried not to think too much about what’s been going on. I’ve been trying to keep up on the facts, but I haven’t been internalizing it. I know that’s wrong of me, but that’s the way I’ve historically dealt with tragedy of all kinds.
But now that my own little world has calmed down a bit, now that I know my father’s doing better and my dentist appointment is over and my cross-country drive is done, I’m more able to face the horrors of what happened, and doing so hurts. I can’t even fathom the kinds of conditions those people have been dealing with for more than a week. I can’t even fathom the numbers of people who didn’t even survive to face those conditions.
But as sad and horrified as I’m feeling for the survivors, I’m feeling even more rage and resentment for how our government has handled the situation. All of the anger I’ve felt for this administration for the last five years, all of the disbelief at the wrong-headedness and stupidity continually displayed by the men and women we (supposedly) elected to shepherd this country and protect its citizens…all of that is nothing compared to the outrage I’m feeling now.
And, glory be, I’m far from the only one: the mainstream media isn’t rolling over at the administration’s feet anymore, and the results have been wonderful to behold.
I want to share with you some of what’s making me so angry today. I know I’m coming kind of late to the party, and hopefully many of you are already plenty outraged, but if not I hope some of the following will help get you there:
- MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (long one of my favorite commentators, on a par only with Jon Stewart) scathingly, eloquently, calmly blasts the government response to Katrina. A must-watch (Windows Media Player required).
- John Scalzi has a series of articles on his blog about Katrina, but the one that affected me most was about what it means to be poor, to be really poor. He also posted a follow-up piece several days later about exactly why he wrote that post.
I swear, I’m never going to complain about my financial problems again.
(And as a quick aside to everyone, including the director of FEMA, who blames those thousands of people in New Orleans who were too poor to leave town for what happened to them: there’s a very special section of Hell waiting just for you. Please don’t keep them waiting too long, OK?)
- Another Scalzi post on governmental incompetence–and even his readers who normally disagree with his politics are starting to have trouble defending this administration.
- My boy Tim has reached his melting point as well, and fires off what’s easily the most articulate, impassioned essay I’ve read from him in quite some time.
- You might have heard that rapper Kayne West went off-script during the NBC benefit telecast last Friday night, saying that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” I’ve got to say it’s hard to argue much with him. You can see the video–which was edited out of the live broadcast when it aired later on the west coast–here. (Via Mr. Snitch.)
More links–and likely more vitriol–to come later.
Posted by Allen on August 30, 2005 under Links, Politics |
My lovely wife has vented her hippie liberal spleen at the lack of adequate pre-hurricane preparations and our government’s tragically misaligned priorities. Man, she’s all eloquent and stuff when she’s impassioned.
