childishness
being the parent of three now nearly-grown children, i have had ample opportunity to attempt to legislate morality. my experience-learned rule of thumb whenever dealing with children is that if any one of them is happy with an outcome of an adjudicated dispute, then the fault can only possibly be with the adjudication. (if i could send all three of them away disappointed, i knew i had achieved the proper solomon-esque levels of judgment).
so it is that i find the squabbles between alternate ends of the donkeyphant highly amusing. like kids fighting over the last piece of halloween candy, the only time they can ever agree is when insisting that they and only they are the ones entitled to have it all to themselves. however, since handing that last indivisible piece (for they will insist to you that milky ways are NOT bifurcate-able) to either one cannot possibly resolve the disagreement, (leaving as it will one child smugly and braggadiocially delighted, and the other bitterly resentful of the entire world and everything in it), the only fair thing left to do is to confiscate.
at which point, the wailing cries of unfairness go up in unison.
i know my children hate me for it, and will hate me for it forever, but i could never keep myself from laughing once it got to that point.
so it is that i find the bipartisan teeth-gnashing about the "naivete" of libertarianism to be so highly amusing. setting aside for a moment how profoundly disturbing it is that both sides might be so adamantly disrespectful and opposed to--gasp--citizens rights being actually respected, the bottom line is that when the candy of a person's vote no longer appears possible to be coerced, possessed and exploited, the caster of that vote can only be conceived by the major party apparatchiks to be as a child themselves, too out of touch with political reality to be respected in the least, and only to be berated, ridiculed and cast out from the inner circle of political savants.
republicans all seem to be asking themselves why they lost this week, and to a man and a woman they are pathologically unable to conceive that it might be because they were childishly insistent on the candy of legislated morality. ("ban all abortions, even when mothers die bearing their rapists' children!!!". "gays are subhuman and should feel lucky not to be arrested for their crime of loving another human being not on the party accepted list". etc.) democrats, on the other hand, and no less cluelessly, are congratulating themselves for a 50.2% "landslide" thus "proving" to themselves that rejection and repudiation of the values of 49.8% of the electorate is their highest calling. ("if i pull a living human being only halfway out of a woman's vagina and kill it, that's not murder, that's 'choice'! "i don't care what you believe, i need to confiscate your money to pay for everything you abhor", etc.)
yet, suggest you accept neither, and you're immediately beset by both children as "naive" and "childish" and unfit to decide the future of this once-great nation.
i know it's ok, because i'm laughing at all of them. nope, my candidate didn't have the proverbial snowball's chance. nearly 100% of the electorate (all but 1% by the latest tally) believes adamantly that personal liberty is anathema to good government, and limiting that government only aids terrorists and criminals.
sad, really.
oh well. my nra sticker and my aclu stickers still get along on my ukulele case. at least there's that...
so it is that i find the squabbles between alternate ends of the donkeyphant highly amusing. like kids fighting over the last piece of halloween candy, the only time they can ever agree is when insisting that they and only they are the ones entitled to have it all to themselves. however, since handing that last indivisible piece (for they will insist to you that milky ways are NOT bifurcate-able) to either one cannot possibly resolve the disagreement, (leaving as it will one child smugly and braggadiocially delighted, and the other bitterly resentful of the entire world and everything in it), the only fair thing left to do is to confiscate.
at which point, the wailing cries of unfairness go up in unison.
i know my children hate me for it, and will hate me for it forever, but i could never keep myself from laughing once it got to that point.
so it is that i find the bipartisan teeth-gnashing about the "naivete" of libertarianism to be so highly amusing. setting aside for a moment how profoundly disturbing it is that both sides might be so adamantly disrespectful and opposed to--gasp--citizens rights being actually respected, the bottom line is that when the candy of a person's vote no longer appears possible to be coerced, possessed and exploited, the caster of that vote can only be conceived by the major party apparatchiks to be as a child themselves, too out of touch with political reality to be respected in the least, and only to be berated, ridiculed and cast out from the inner circle of political savants.
republicans all seem to be asking themselves why they lost this week, and to a man and a woman they are pathologically unable to conceive that it might be because they were childishly insistent on the candy of legislated morality. ("ban all abortions, even when mothers die bearing their rapists' children!!!". "gays are subhuman and should feel lucky not to be arrested for their crime of loving another human being not on the party accepted list". etc.) democrats, on the other hand, and no less cluelessly, are congratulating themselves for a 50.2% "landslide" thus "proving" to themselves that rejection and repudiation of the values of 49.8% of the electorate is their highest calling. ("if i pull a living human being only halfway out of a woman's vagina and kill it, that's not murder, that's 'choice'! "i don't care what you believe, i need to confiscate your money to pay for everything you abhor", etc.)
yet, suggest you accept neither, and you're immediately beset by both children as "naive" and "childish" and unfit to decide the future of this once-great nation.
i know it's ok, because i'm laughing at all of them. nope, my candidate didn't have the proverbial snowball's chance. nearly 100% of the electorate (all but 1% by the latest tally) believes adamantly that personal liberty is anathema to good government, and limiting that government only aids terrorists and criminals.
sad, really.
oh well. my nra sticker and my aclu stickers still get along on my ukulele case. at least there's that...
posted by kad barma at 9:46 AM
2 Comments:
"and to a man and a woman they are pathologically unable to conceive that it might be because they were childishly insistent on the candy of legislated morality" might be a bit extreme.
I, for one, think it is in part because we got out-hustled (as in the Democrats worked harder). As for the abortion thing, I figure that given that roughly 80% of Americans believe abortion is wrong and 80% believe it should be legal, and given Republicans picked up about 48% of the Presidential vote, there are a lot of Republicans who believe abortion should be legal. I'm just saying.
On the other hand, do we want to address the Peter Singer Democrats—assuredly a small percentage?
In Good Humor — Cliff
There does seem to be a "grass roots" gap between D's and R's, and a small donation vs large donation difference in the ways they each raise their billions that become slathered all over our corrupted electoral processes. But, judging the outcome of these recent elections on the narrow stripe of "undecideds" that make the difference, I would stand by the extremity of my statement, at least among those who are left on top of the zealots to decide things these days.
I don't question that there are a significant portion of Republicans in favor of "choice", but it's indisputable that the party platform allows not one inch of leeway on the subject. The obvious consequence is that folks unfamiliar with Republicanism are quite often turned away right at the door, and, since it only takes a handful of people out of a hundred to decide an election, the results are as if it were all or nothing. (Because elections are all or nothing).
And, yes, there are many Democrats conscientiously opposed to abortion and inclined to vote that way given a chance, but once you layer on all the other excesses expounded by Republican platform planks (like holding tax breaks for 98% of the population hostage so that the wealthy can continue to escape an historically high percentage of their traditional part of the burden) there are simply too many reasons not to want to sign on with what appears to most people to be the party of the meanest spirit.
Which is ironic, because there's nothing benevolent about the economic oppression of our middle class by the other folks.
Which brings me back to my suggestion that if Republicans really believed in liberty as well as economic conservatism, and could prove it by both words and deeds, not to mention repudiating the wingnuts on the fringes of their tattered little tent, they'd quite likely be ascendent rather than in decline, if not in charge of the White House.
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