I have indulged in political and religious commentary and even came out and expressed a bit of hyperbole toward people opposite of my political views. I sort of regret that a little. On the other hand, I am very angry about the direction this nation is going, both politically and regarding morality and religion. I can't really help lashing out at those who either are pushing that change or who are just letting it happen.
So, what do I want to do with my little blog here? I can't help but take some consideration of the possibility of being read. Though my readership thus far has been pretty scant, the few of you that have read and are, of course, reading this now deserve better from me than to whine and rant petulantly.
There is something to be said for writing whether I feel like it or not, but not necessarily for public consumption. This is the only sort of journaling I have done with any degree of regularity, and I would like to become more disciplined with it, but as long as there is some possibility that others with read it, I feel that I should keep myself reined in and not take unfair pokes at people who might disagree with me, but are otherwise decent folks. I probably should try and be interesting as well, but doing it at the expense of others seems a bit cheap.
Okay, so I have resolved I guess to tone down the rhetoric, but I still feel the need to try and intelligently express my opinion, and if that offends anyone, they are welcome to debate. I will accord them what respect is due the quality of their argument. Hey, that's as fair as I can be. If you disagree, but can't back it up, you have no right to be offended.
Point in case, while I read a number of political blogs and articles, I have refrained from commenting on them lately because of the general lack of civility and the nearly absolute lack of actual discourse. It's pretty much all name-calling and accusation without substantive support for the opposing views.
Opinion is fine and does not require any references or verification. It's how someone feels about something and whether their perceptions are accurate or based in fact, they're entitled to it. I read some comments today appended to an article with a conservative slant. Several of the commenters were supportive and simply echoed the gist of the article.
The dissenting commenters, on the other hand, didn't even refer to the content of the article and instead attacked the people in support. They were called stupid and liars without any explanation of what lies they were supposedly telling. I believe this is what so many Liberals I have debated like to call ad hominem: an attack on the person that is irrelevant to the argument. What's more, they use that label incorrectly themselves because they fling it at you when you simply express disagreement, even if your argument is valid.
For example: stating that Bill Clinton could not be trusted after displaying beyond question that he had broken his marriage vows was considered by many Liberals I knew at the time to be a personal attack on Bill Clinton. It is not even necessarily a comment on Clinton's character to say that if he broke one presumably sacred oath, it could be expected that he held other oaths as breakable. To call him a scumbag or some other such invective is a bit more editorial, however. It is valid to debate a character flaw, but to attach derogatory opinions is not.
To typify the Liberal version of argument, comments on articles in such sites as Pres. Obama's beloved Huffington Post often follow the pattern of "What would Rush Limbaugh know about oil spills? He's just a fat drug addict." Besides the fact that Rush rehabilitated his drug habit and has his weight very much under control, what do those things have to do with his ability to comment on current events?
Yes, these are character flaws that are well known about Mr. Limbaugh, but they are only relevant if the topic involves criticism of people who are overweight or who have drug habits. Bill Clinton's trustworthiness is just as irrelevant if the topic is his knowledge of foreign affairs, or even of military strategy. Just because he is a proven liar that doesn't say anything about his incompetence as a Commander in Chief.
That is the essence of ad hominem. Whatever the person has said, factual or not, the opponent attempts to denigrate them, as if to say "I don't have to address their argument, because they're stupid." That would be tantamount to a Conservative saying that Obama's Health Care proposal (not that he ever actually made one) was bound to be flawed since he is black. I haven't ever heard anyone say anything like that, but the charge of racism is being thrown about more than the shurikens in a stadium full of ninjas. The Health Care Bill is easy enough to attack on its own lack of merits, but it would certainly be ad hominem, and wrong, to condemn it because it may or may not have had an author of any particular sex or ethnic group.
What is especially infuriating about this abuse of logic is that this very accusation is the Liberals' currently favorite bit of ad hominem. Without ever making any mention of race in my criticisms of the Obama Administration's policies, I get called a racist for disagreeing. Again, this is meant to demonize me and imply that nothing I say is of any merit regardless of intellectual or factual content because I must be deriving it from a position of racial bias.
It comes down to this: I am not sure that I can stand to keep fighting for the truth in an environment where people are content to let reasoned debate be shredded by the simple device of attacking the speaker's personal, and irrelevant, characteristics. If history matters to you at all, go back and read what passed for debate just prior to the Civil War and see if we aren't in the same atmosphere.
Despite a clear victory of thought by Lincoln in the Lincoln/Douglas debates, his position (and campaign) was defeated merely by insulting Lincoln's appearance and unsophisticated demeanor. Does anyone today have any question about Lincoln's greatness? In his time Abraham Lincoln was widely hated and despised as stupid and incompetent, even in the Union states. Over 600,000 Americans, including Lincoln, died as a result of that sort of blind hatred when the U.S. population (including slaves) was approximately 31 million. We have ten times that population today. Will it take 6 million dead Americans to resolve our differences this time around?
You think it's not the same thing? They were fighting over slaves and we are just having a political disagreement, right? You didn't actually go back and read the debates, did you? The difference that caused the Civil War was the two very disparate views of the nature of American government. It wasn't slavery, it was the right to enslave and discriminate based on the circumstances of a person's birth that the Confederacy fought for. It was written into their constitution. Theirs would have been a government of some people, by some people and for a lot of other people whether they liked it or not.
We have had several pieces of legislation pass our legislature this past year and a half despite the lack of a majority of popular support. This is no government of the people, by the people or even for the people. This is a small group of elitists who think they are better at deciding our fate than we are. It is their opinion that we aren't capable of doing the right thing if left to ourselves- precisely the argument made by the Confederacy in their constitution about the black race, and it's an even bigger indictment that their constitution wasn't likely even the opinion of the majority of southerners, as is often pointed out regarding the percentage of slave owners in the South and serving in their armies.
The Confederate constitution did not just call for a perpetuation of black slavery; it set up a system in which people of all races would be subject to rule by a portion of Anglo-Saxon white aristocracy. Not only was it a rejection of the American Experiment, it was a step back beyond the Revolution entirely to a notion that an "enlightened" and "genetically superior" minority should control the lives of an inferior majority. It is a premise that seems justified to those who establish it by the very fact of being able to. If this minority were not superior, how could they impose their will on the others?
This being the precise attitude of the current Administration and the party in control of the national legislature, it represents a very real and imminent threat to the governmental system and way of life that was established by the U.S. Constitution and preserved by the bloodshed of the Civil War. They may have a majority of party members in Congress, but they are still collectively a very small group of decision makers who have chosen, despite the understanding that they were elected based on the principles they espoused in their election campaigns to represent that constituency in regard to those principles, to abandon the will of the electorate and do whatever they want to.
That they are not truly representing those who elected them is undeniably demonstrated in the primary election results across the country that have seen overwhelming rejections of incumbents who voted contrary to the desires of the people that sent them to Congress. This is not an across-the-board rejection of incumbents in general, but has been specific to those who supported the socialist agenda of this administration.
The actual elections in the fall will tell whether the people of this nation prefer direct representation, or if they are going to accept the abandonment of the basic constitutional principles of the past 222 years in favor of an oligarchical socialist regime that they will have to trust is benevolent, competent and incorruptible. The Founders did not trust that any such government could exist and they set up the type of government they did because they wanted to protect the United States from being tricked into that kind of farce.
It might be reasonable to gamble that mankind has evolved enough since 1789 that such a government is possible now if there was any shred of evidence to that effect. One needn't look any further than the very people who claim to be such evolved beings to demonstrate the lack of character, ability and yes, compassion, that would be minimally required for it to succeed. Benevolent? Competent? Incorruptible? Are you kidding me?
New Zeal Blog Has Moved
13 years ago
