Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, November 08, 2010

"Listening to the American People" "Sending A Message" "Getting It"

The American people disagree about everything. This is what you hear if you actually listen to the American people:
)!^$&?#@<*%!~);[#@(>&!@#$#*!

If "the American people" sent Democrats, or Republicans, or the President, or somebody else "a message" in the mid-terms, it is this:
"Hi. We can't tell our asses from a hole in the ground."

As it happens, we already knew that. But thanks, American people, for sharing.

As for "getting it," I find it interesting that presumably the President doesn't get "it," and Nancy Pelosi doesn't get "it," but apparently Republicans who deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change, who think deregulating for-profit enterprise will lead to better behavior, who think tax cuts unto infinity will cause spontaneous libertopian paradises to spring up from the ground, who think there is no separation between church and state, and who believe that Obama is a socialist do get "it."

Maybe "it" is The Stupid?

Maybe it would be better if we didn't "get it"? Otherwise, we're all very likely to get it in the end.

The next two years look to be very, very bad, indeed.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> This is what you hear if you actually listen
> to the American people:
>
> )!^$&?#@<*%!~);[#@(>&!@#$#*!

So I was at the diner today facing two tubes, one showing
Dr. Oz demonstrating butt falsies on a department-store
mannikin, and the other tuned to Fox with Megyn Kelly's
"America Live" show. Kelly was wearing a striking
black, and black turtle-necked, top -- very Ann Coulter,
very upper-crust right-wing intellectual.

Ms. Kelly had as her guest a "regular person" who
is the public face of one of the Tea Party organizations
in Florida (presumably this was Billie Tucker, director of the
First Coast Tea Party) and she was posing sympathetically-outraged
questions to her guest about the recent case of a Florida school-district
employee, also a woman, who has been "reassigned pending
investigation" for forwarding a (pre-election) chain letter daring to
suggest that the Tea Party is racist. The woman who has
been "reassigned" is not a teacher -- from what I can gather
she is something like a computer tech support person,
and while I do think she should have known better than to
pass along **any** kind of chain mail via her employer's
computers, the sheer affronted outrage (mixed with withering,
though measured, contempt on Kelly's part) being passed
back and forth between the Fox host and her guest had my
mouth hanging open a bit.

"How damaging was this letter to your organization?" asked
Kelly. "We are very much interested in seeing that this woman
is disciplined," was the reply. "We also want her to be
re-educated about the meaning and goals of the Tea Party.
For a person whose employer is entrusted with educating our
children to have been involved in spreading such misinformation
is unacceptable to us, and we think that it is important
for the people involved to become better educated themselves
about this."

Further details of the story can be found at:

http://winsipcuster.blogspot.com/2010/11/cynthia-jones-humphrey-to-be.html
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11/05/school-employee-sends-anti-tea-party-e-mail/

jollyspaniard said...

One quibble, only 33% of republicans don't believe that the climate is changing.

And while there are republican politicians who deny the climate is changing I think you'll find that most of them just give weasely answers. Even Christine O'Donnell didn't actualy come out and say that climate change isn't happening.

What you do have is about a third of republicans who believe that the climate is changing but who feel that the government shouldn't intervene.

This is an entirely different kettle of fish.

I think the big problem relates to one of your big bugbears and it's technological/economic cornucopianism. The belief that the free market and future advances in technology will solve the problem for us. And the political right doesn't have a monopoly on this kind of thinking, there's plenty of people on the left who feel the same way.

The only difference is that the right also has a large proportion of young earth creationist nutters (and I think you can forget about convincing them unfortunately) who skew things.

What we really need to do is attack cornucopian thinking on both sides of the political spectrum. Not that I need to tell you that.