kurt's nightmare

Generally, I post once a week. Topics are randomly selected and depend mostly upon whether it's baseball season or not. Other topics will include sex, politics, old girlfriends, music, and whatever else pops into my little brain. If you'd like to read, or ignore, my blog about China: http://meidabizi.blogspot.com/

Name:
Location: Dayton, OH, Heard & McDonald Islands

I'm an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dayton. I represent no one but myself, and barely do that. I'm here mostly by accident.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

We Are the Champignons!

This is the last entry before Tuesday's election. I don't have much to add to what is the torrent of information, disinformation, misinformation, and simply irrelevant nonsense already out there.

I would urge my readers to vote, but one isn't a citizen and the other, I think, isn't old enough.

I was wondering if someone stopped me and asked me why I was voting the way I am (pretty much a straight Democratic ticket), what my answer would be?

I guess it would be because they aren't Republicans. I think that's a good enough reason.

The Republicans, or at least those who appear to be in power and driving policy, seem to stand for some positions I find worrisome (for some, I just offer shorthand):

  • We are in a war on terror. Which may last forever
  • Checks and balances are a luxury--in a war on terror
  • Torture, or an indistinguishable subsitute, is permissible--during such a war the President can identify enemy combatants (alien or citizen) and deny them access to legal representation without any appeal outside of his own branch of government
  • Global warming is sufficiently confusing that we shouldn't worry about it
  • Katrina victims in New Orleans are a bunch of whiners and often colored
  • Evolution is sufficiently confusing that we should also teach untestable, unfalsfiable claims that provide virtually nothing in the way of a research program as comparably scientific
  • Christians have access to truth that others fail to
  • Israel must be defended at all costs and at all times, except the End Times, when Israeli Jews must either convert to Christianity (suitably interpreted) or die
  • Iraq
  • Iran
  • North Korea
  • Pakistan
  • Sudan
  • Burma/Myanmar
  • Afghanistan
  • Chechnya
  • Homosexuals don't deserve equal rights
  • A President who lies about a consensual sexual relationship in a deposition for a case that is thrown out deserves to be impeached and removed from office
  • A President who authorizes torture, violates international law, and eliminates habeas corpus for those he identifies as appropriate, should be immune from investigation, censure, or any other penalities
  • Health care
  • No Child Left Behind
  • Conservative principles that include ignoring deficit spending, embrace Military Keynesianism, and send mixed and confused signals about immigration
  • If something is "good for business" (appropriately interpreted), it is unimportant that it conflicts with one's principles, or damages more people than it benefits
  • The environment
In short, a vote for Republicans in this election seems to say this (unless, perhaps, one is either a single issue voter and can identify a single issue worthy of voting them back in, or one who, in some sense, benefits from the points above):

please keep treating me as if I'm stupid, cannot possibly understand complexity, and will vote for you because you have made me afraid.

There's a country song where the complaint is registered that one's object of affection treats the narrator as a mushroom: "You keep me in the dark, and feed me ______________" [scatological reference deleted].

I don't like being treated that way, and even if I weren't a Yellow Dog Democrat (for the most part), I would vote against the Republicans for having done so.

That's a good enough reason, this time around.

8 Comments:

Blogger Bazarov said...

Aye, I can't vote, but do my best to persuade those around me who can to vote as I would. The only real issue that has grabbed my attention is the smoking thing. Have we really gotten to the point where we are telling people what they can and cannot do on their private property? What happened to the invisible hand of the free market? Would a bar really continue to allow smoking if it was hurting them financially? I guess people don't make choices, vote with their dollars, or think for themselves. It's like the porno sales down in Cinci...people don't really want that stuff, it's forced into their eyeballs, ears, and minds. Spiders don't hang around places where there are bugs to eat! No! They come to piss off people who don't like spiders, period. I guess that's why we have to stop allowing our gov't to defend private property and businesses and use our votes, and not our dollars, to force our wants on others. Does this make me a commie for calling porno and smoking bans unAmerican?

10:26 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am hoping the returns all continue to be democratic landslide. The scary part is whether those in power will relinquish power. 80% of all voting will be on electronic machines. There is a special running on HBO about hacking voting machines, I don't have HBO, but my friend saw it and he said it was depressing enough that he doesn't feel like voting now. Yikes!!! God I hope HBO over exaggerated the problem or this whole democracy experiment in nation building might fall apart. 200 years then crap. Missouri and Ohio are the key states for winning the senate. The big incumbent Jim Talent has been tied or behind by 2 to 4 % points. He looks like a pencil neck geek you would beat up in high school which would explain his basic hatred of society and everyone not like him.

12:25 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm still trying to analyze the "champignon" in the title of your post. That's what has taken me so long to respond (ha-ha!). Are you refering to the mushroom cloud hanging over North Korea ot the one that will potentially be caused by the Bush administration's bizarre lack of attention to the illicit trade of small nuclear weapons? Or perhaps you're refering to the fungus (or rot) caused by six years of a Republican run government? Or the mushrooming national debt? Or mushrooming interest rates? Maybe the mushroom you're referring to is a hallucinogen and perhaps furnishes the only real explanation for the re-election of Bush Jr. In fact, that seems like the best possible analysis of your title: half the country has been happily addicted to mood-boosting, ignorance-inducing mushrooms for the last six years while the rest of us have been desperately trying to get them to come back down to earth before all of our social services are stripped away and the fantastically unsuccessful war on terror erodes even more of our essential human rights. But with the elections behind us, and a terrific amount of repair work in front of us, perhaps I should interpret your "We are the Champignons!" in its very French sense, as delicacies that were buried in mud. Now that we've been dug up, we're nothing to "truffle" with. But let's not forget our earthy roots, or the truffle sniffing pigs in Washington will eat us alive. Congratulations on your book, Kurt!

2:17 PM  
Blogger kmosser said...

Dare I think Ms. Triangirl skipped the last part; perhaps the mention of country music caused her to avert her eyes?

11:59 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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