The Poltics of Fear

My wife and I recently had dinner with two other couples at their home. During the course of the evening the discussion turned political. At one point one of the husbands asked if we would go around the table and reveal who we would likely vote for in 2012. The three wives and I indicated we would likely again vote for Obama; one of the guys was leaning toward Ron Paul. The third guy said he had voted for Obama in 2008 but he would now vote for whoever the Republican nominee was. Clearly the character, experience, or the political platform of the final Republican candidate did not matter whatsoever to him; his vote will simply be “Not Obama”.

During the course of the discussion, Third Guy dropped a few key phrases such as: “Socialism”, “redistribution of the wealth”, “entitlement reform” and finally how Obama’s policies were blatantly “anti-business”. Stereotypical (and mythical) opinions regarding Welfare, Unemployment and Food Stamps were also bandied about. Having personal career experience in administering those programs, I was quick to point out their thinking errors… though I had a sneaking suspicion my facts did little dislodge any already congealed ideas in their minds.

I’m not the best at thinking on my feet and, of course, one often thinks of more salient responses long after the fact. Recalling the previous night’s conversation, the nagging suggestion that Third Guy was a regular consumer of Conservative Talk Media came to mind. Given the opportunity to go back in time to the previous evening, I might have offered the following in reply:

Socialism:
As in publicly run institutions for the greater good such as public schools, municipal water supplies, air traffic control? Third Guy had already revealed he was waiting until he reached 65 to retire so he would not be without medical coverage… you know, in order to quality for that Socialist of all social programs – Medicare.

Redistribution of the wealth:
Is he talking about fearing what he thinks WILL happen; or is he completely ignorant that we have already seen the LARGEST REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN OUR NATION’S HISTORY? I am talking about the monumental transfer of ownership from the Middle Class to the upper few percent. There is no shortage of data to confirm this has happened already.

Obama is “anti-business”:
Really? I am curious if the employees of GM, from the highest compensated CEO down to the assembly line, think the government guaranteed LOAN he orchestrated to keep the auto maker from closing, is anti-business. (Conservatives dismiss this as him merely to pay tribute to Unions) The Obama administration even facilitated millions of taxpayer dollars investment in (non union) solar technology company Solyndra, only to have their corporate management squander Our investment and declare bankruptcy. Let’s make this abundantly clear: this private company dropped the ball, not the government.

I find it discouraging to attempt to have any sort of meaningful discussion with people who have surrendered their thinking for mindless parroting of simplistic, and often outright false, propaganda from Conservative handlers. When faced with such doltishness, facts unfortunately become completely irrelevant.

I'll leave you with this little gem I stumbled across on Reddit:

Dust in the Wind

Senate Republicans attempted to filibuster the bill but the “9/11 First Responders Health Care Bill” was passed by the Senate this month and the president is expected to sign it into law. Republicans, philosophically opposed to increasing the Deficit, were cornered into looking like the Grinch who stole Christmas through their opposition for the bill which provides medical coverage, to the tune of $4.3 billion, for September 11th emergency response workers.

The underlying claim is that, in working continuously around the toxic dust and chemicals surrounding the collapsed World Trade Center buildings, emergency responders have suffered a myriad of health related issues. It certainly is not a stretch to conclude that asthma and other pulmonary conditions could result from working in such conditions. However, it appears that pretty much any and all health issues arising with emergency responders working at the site, such as cancer, are now being tied to those hazardous conditions.

I recall the years of litigation regarding the Dow-Corning and the leaking silicone breast implants. Women were claiming a broad range of illnesses on the defective product. Dow paid out millions of dollars in damages after losing their case in court. However subsequent studies have since shown that the illnesses claimed by the women occur no more frequently in the implant recipients than in the general population at large who did not receive the implants.

Though scientific advances in detecting and curing cancer have increased in recent years, various cancers are still one of the largest causes of death in our society. How are we to objectively evaluate that all the claims of diseases suffered by the 9/11 first responders stem directly from their working at the World Trade Center site?

Science will take a back seat to emotional appeals, in this situation, as the "heroes" we all love to love ask of us to acknowledge their sacrifice. But in the run-up to this legislation, I have not seen any independent studies which compare the types of diseases (excluding pulmonary related) claimed from the WTC site exposure and comparing them to the prevalence of the same diseases in the general population.

"Doctors aren't sure, though, exactly how many people are ill, and scientific doubt persists about just how many of the hundreds of illnesses are actually linked to the trade center dust. Doctors still don't know whether there is any connection between the dust and potentially fatal illnesses like cancer" ¹

The political irony here is that police and fire fighters generally tend to lean politically conservative and usually support Republican candidates. During the upcoming election cycles I hope these workers remember which party was the one arguing AGAINST their interests.

For me, the bottom line is that the controversy over this bill would be completely unnecessary were we to have in place a National Health Care System which would take care of ALL sick people, whatever their cause or reason. Why do a few select Americans, who by the way chose a hazardous profession, get to have their health care covered and not their fellow citizens who worked in fields or factories or have simply had the unfortunate luck of having been a victim of probability? Who in Congress speaks for these "heroes"?

The legislation is named for James Zadroga, a police detective who died at age 34. His supporters say he died from respiratory disease contracted at ground zero, but New York City's medical examiner said Zadroga's lung condition was caused by prescription drug abuse. ¹

1. 9/11 First Responders Health Care Bill Faces Key Test Vote In Senate - Huffington Post, December 24, 2010

Too Stupid for Democracy

Okay it is now official, Americans are actually getting dumber. My heart sank when I encountered the following article recently:

A substantial and growing number of Americans say that Barack Obama is a Muslim, while the proportion saying he is a Christian has declined.

A new national survey by the Pew Research Center finds that nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009.

To these fellow citizens I say: you are too f_ing stupid to be allowed to vote.

It is usually the Conservatives who are quick to invoke the Founding Fathers in their bid to take the country back to its supposed roots. Not surprisingly, more Conservatives than Liberals believe our president is a follower of Islam.

Of course, the Founding Fathers would likely turn over in their graves if they knew how the franchise was being practiced today. Never in their wildest dreams did those guys back in 1776 expect anyone other than their fellow wealthy, educated, white land owners to be in charge of the newly emerging republic - certainly not ale-swilling, sweaty every-day laboring rabble, women or imported human farm equipment.

I would be a strong proponent of requiring a “literacy test” as a condition for apply for voter registration. After all, we administer tests to people applying for driver’s licenses. Although I admit there are compelling practical implications of testing someone’s intellect prior to allowing them to hurl two tons of metal down public highways. Which of these two activities produces the most death and destruction?

Anosognosia is defined as a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability. It has more recently been used as well to describe people who are too stupid to recognize how stupid they are (¹ Dunning-Kruger Effect). The malady appears to be spreading in epidemic proportions in this country.

¹ The Dunning–Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.

Moron America and the Tea Bag Movement

Over the last year I have been developing an increasing hate-hate relationship with the news media. And Public Broadcasting is not above incurring my disdain. The other morning I woke up to yet another PBS news story about these moron Teabaggers.

This Tea Bag movement is a fringe nut-case movement of people who are too stupid to be embarrassed at disclosing to the world that they are absolute morons. Yet, the mainstream media gives these groups legitimacy by airing story after story about them.

How stupid are these people? The list is endless… but their crowning statement of idiocy is the choice of name for their movement: TeaBaggers.

From the Urban Dictionary:
teabagger - multiple meanings. 1) one who carries large bags of packaged tea for shipment. 2) a man that squats on top of a woman’s face and lowers his genitals into her mouth during sex, known as "teabagging" 3) one who has a job or talent that is low in social status 4) a person who is unaware that they have said or done something foolish, childlike, noobish, lame, or inconvenient. 5) also see "fagbag", "lamer", "noob"

Fortunately for their opposition, they didn’t call themselves New Patriots or the Not Tax But Spend Anyway movement. This is Moron America at its worst.

Sinking Feeling from Climate Change

My Uncle Marsh used to say: “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” He always elicited a chuckle in me when he said things like that. What can I say -- he was my lovable nutty uncle.

But many of our political leaders, who should know better, proffer a similar attitude… specifically the Conservatives in this country. Be the issue extending medical coverage to the millions of citizens without it, or finding solutions to the global climate issue, their mantra sounds remarkably like my Uncle Marsh… whatever it is, they’re against it.

Conservatives are against placing any credence in the hard science behind the facts of global climate change because doing anything to divert it might dip into the sacred “profit motive” of business. And remember, according to Conservatives, American freedom is pretty much narrowly defined as the freedom to make money.

But science is difficult to argue against. Well maybe not so much in THIS country where half of the population believes that God created every living thing pretty much as they exist today in six days. So you couldn’t blame Conservatives doing the Happy Dance when recently discovered e-mails leaked from the computers of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England revealed differences in details regarding the interpretation of data supporting climate change hypothesis.

Ah Ha, shout the Conservatives gleefully… the scientists disagree, prompting Conservative pundits and talk show hacks to fan the flames of couching climate change as a Liberal plot to stifle business interests. Sen. James Inhofe (R–Okla.), who famously dubbed climate change a "hoax" in a 2003 speech, is now the poster child for what the Conservatives are hailing as “Climate-gate”.

And of course one cannot depend on the news media to air the facts in the light of perspective. Since the topic of global climate change was first brought to the forefront, the Media has presented this as a two-sided issue of equal weight. Even to day they will bring on one scientist supporting the position of global climate change and another who opposes it and present it as though the scientific community is equally divided on the issue. They are NOT! The scientific community will always have those who hold different views, but the number of those in the scientific community who feel the science clearly support the theory of anthropogenic climate change is in the overwhelming majority.

What leaves me scratching my head when I ponder the Conservatives reaction is; don’t you think someone is going to notice? Isn’t someone going to notice that the glaciers in Sarah Palin’s back yard have receded to the size of ice cubes? Isn’t someone going to notice that deserts have increased in size by huge percentages every year? Isn’t famine and loss of drinking water going to be rather obvious when mountain sources of snow melt dry up?

I wonder if, had Conservatives had been in charge on the Titanic, would they have denied that the ship was sinking. No; the deck chairs always slide toward the bow. That isn’t an ice burg, we’re just taking on cocktail ice. Hey if you spend all your money on expensive life boats you won’t have enough for caviar.

Nope, we don’t need health care reform, global climate change is a liberal (communist) plot, and The Titanic is a submarine… just wait; it will be popping back up to surface any minute now.