3717 Something to consider

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Everything happens for a reason, but sometimes the reason

is that you’re stupid and you make bad decisions.

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• Boston is famous for the Boston Tea Party.
  
• Yesterday was Patriot's Day in Massachusetts, celebrating the beginning of the uprising against the government of the time.
• Yesterday was tax day.
• Those idiots in the mountains out west, stockpiling weapons to fight the government, refusing to pay taxes, you know, that crew, had been passing a rumor that the Obama administration was going to "manufacture a disaster in April that will allow them to take away even more of our rights."  April?  Where did that come from?

(Um, like, I'm confused.  Wasn't it the Patriot act that started that s**t?  You know, that multi-hundred page "law" that was written before 9/11, just waiting for an opportunity to get passed?  And wasn't it that same administration that decided that the President could declare war without the approval of Congress, in direct opposition with the very clear dictates of the Constitution?  Oh well.  I guess some people can't keep their presidents straight.)

Anyway, the Boston bombing doesn't have "all the earmarks" of a Muslim terrorist organization.  Anyone can get a pressure cooker.  Anyone can find out how to build a bomb.  There was no suicide bomber to ensure the timing.  There was a second blast, but in the middle east it goes off in the same area to get the emergency responders, not a block away.  So what "earmarks" are they talking about?  What ethnicity is likely to be able to leave a large heavy package on the street with no one wondering about it?

It looks domestic to me.

It looks like a declaration of civil war.
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3634 Exploding words

Sunday, October 7, 2012

"Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise,
there wouldn't be religious people."

--  Doris Egan  --

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I thought I knew what terrorism is.  I believed it to be acts or threats of violence designed to create fear in a group loosely represented by the target of the violence, for political purposes.  That word seems to have exploded.

According to the local police blotter, "acts of terrorism" and "terroristic threats" now include stuff like a guy standing on his neighbor's lawn brandishing a baseball bat threatening to kill the neighbor's dog if he doesn't keep it confined, or a guy setting fire to the car belonging to the guy who "stole" his girlfriend.

Um, didn't we already have terms for those acts?  Where's the political purpose?  How is it "terrorism", instead of threatening bodily harm, destruction of property, vandalism, whatever it used to be called?

I don't understand.

Likewise, I thought I understood what "bullying" is.  I believed a bully to be one who used size, strength, position, or credible threats to repeatedly coerce or intimidate another of lesser power, the key in the definition being that the bully starts with power over the victim, and the coercion is ongoing. The bully is not expressing anger.  It's simply an exercise in power to hurt.

This word also seems to have exploded.

News item of a few days ago:  A female TV news anchor received an email from a viewer who commented that he was disappointed in her because she was overweight, and said that as such she was not an good role model for youth.  She made the news by responding to that email on the air.  (First off, I don't understand why it was necessary for her to respond on the air, but that's not the point.)  In all of the articles I read, the guy was called a bully, and the story was linked to October being the anti-bullying month. 

Um, don't we already have terms for guys like that?  "Bully" isn't one of them.  He has no power over her at all, no power to injure her physically, financially, or socially.  It was one email where he proved himself a fool.  He did not bully her.  He did not attempt to coerce her.  He simply insulted her.

When we allow words like "terrorism" and "bullying" to explode, we weaken them.  People are using them to get an emotional reaction.  If we allow that to continue, eventually "terrorist" will simply mean "someone who frightened me" and "bully" will simply mean "someone who annoyed me".

We need to guard words to keep them pure.
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3435 Anger, losing hope

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
-- Steven Wright --

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I've been trying to avoid situations, books and articles, and anything else that makes me angry. I don't need anger these days. There's little I can do about the things that make me angry, and so the result is depression.

Yeah, good plan. So what do I do? I start reading Noam Chomsky's 9-11 / Was There an Alternative? (The 2011 updated version.)

I guess I like hitting myself in the head with a hammer.

Americans are idiots! Our leadership are the biggest idiots, because they at least have the information but can't seem to use it.

Get yourself a copy. It's short, fewer than 200 pages. Right now I'm on page 21 and I'm spitting nails.

(You know who knows what's happening, sees the trap, and knows how to deal with it? The French. So naturally we have to vilify them.)

Our current economic woes and the rise of corporate tyranny, the radicalization of the middle east, the loss of friends and allies - it's all part of the plan, and it's working beautifully because we're too stupid and too "cowboy" to see it.

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By the way, the choice of September 11, 2001, may not have been random, and not because of 911 as the emergency number. How many know about the September 11, 1973, US terrorist attack on Chile? Google that date. Scan the first few articles that come up.
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1491 Sunshine

You've heard the newsreaders' reports and our government's assessments of the conditions in Iraq. Sunshine, a 15-year-old blogger in Iraq, has a different view. Her blog is "Days of My life". I highly recommend it.

Some quotes from her most recent post:

The terrorists are like cancer everyday they increase in size and yet no one can vanquish them. they kill innocents in the name of a sect or religion while they don't belong to any. they are only pretenders who don't have ethics, believes, nor humanity .they try to disperse us, and make us live in fear & danger, they want us to be hopeless, everyday many explosions happen, many innocents get killed and many Iraqis get kidnapped, there are more than 5 millions orphans in Iraq, and so many widows, my friend and I counted 12 car bombs in 48 hours, in one of the sides of the city, we didn't count the mines, nor how many times we heard shooting (they are so many to number).Many times I say the terrorists won't succeed, evil don't win, but I sometimes feel they are achieving their goal.

"My mom's aunt live in the most dangerous part in Baghdad, she said 'when the militias threaten the Sunnis, we hide in our Shiites neighbors' houses, and when the militias threaten the Shiites they come and hide in our houses.'"

A different view of the Sunni/Shiite relationship, eh?
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