Oct 07, 2009 17:40
So, I decided to grab my school newspaper on the way to chemistry seminar to read before it started. I don't know why, it seemed like a good idea at the time. So, all I end up getting was a big headache having to read about some stupid book signing by Max Blumenthal and a bunch of protesters acting like idiots. Not once, not twice, but three times in the same issue. There was a "lead" article in the main body of the text. There was an editorial by the editor, and there was another article about it at the end. What was this a sandwich? So, it pretty much was a chance for the left wingers to feel good about themselves, because a bunch of right winger got to feel good about themselves, you know acting like idiots. "Oh, they are evil haters." "Oh you are evil immoralists." "You want kill all free people." "You want to get lost in wasted eroticism." Yadda, yadda, yadda. Three times. So, of course I had to come online to make it four and vent. ^_~ Pfft. Like anyone reads this besides David.
Anyway, I also made the mistake of looking up stuff about Max Blumnethal and his little wrestling feud with Dr. James Dobson. "Oh, he promotes killing and torturing children." "Yeah, I hate him [Dobson], too." "People should raise children through just explaining things to them because they have fully developed minds at the age of 2." "I am going to make a straw-man from my already constructed views of Dr. Dobson and then reproject them onto God and formulate my opinion from that." Of course, it has to be either one side or the other, not the middle. I mean, the middle is just where the road lies, but who needs that to get anywhere in life. I do believe in the proverb, "Spare the rod, spoil the child." and believe that opposition to it is an artificial (I use that word loosely) construct based on miss use of the idea of child-rearing often used by bad parents. And if you didn't catch it in my sarcastic comments above, most children cannot be simply talked to about their misbehavior, especially at a young age. You cannot set a two year-old down and tell them why they shouldn't be touching electric outlets or crying for selfish attention* or control. (*that is to separate that from attention the child deserves, but since the child as a human nature, it will crave more attention in an out of control nature, such as the child who rules his/her parents in the supermarket.)
In the long run, the people who disrupted the man's [Max B.] talk are examples of what is wrong with the Republican party or even the "right" side of the aisle, in it's inability to discuss topics in a civilized manner. They are like the bully's of the school yard. However, the fact that it is always connected back to anyone who chooses to hold certain beliefs, even if they don't promote hatred, that goes against the "left" they are condemned as hate mongers and intolerant. Now, it is likely that many of the protesters were intolerant (obviously, the were intolerant of Max Blumenthal) but there is a separation between tolerance and acceptance that some in the far left promote, and that is the shift from tolerance to acceptance. That we can no longer merely tolerate behaviors that we may know (as given in a religious text) to be immoral, but that he must actually promote them to be tolerated ourselves.
life,
politics