Ice sales benefiting anti-gay organizations.
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theCryptofishist
- Posts: 40312
- Joined: Mon Feb 23, 2004 9:28 am
- Burning Since: 2017
- Location: In Exile
I have been haunted for years by the Sea Scouts who had to give up thier subsidized by the City of Berkeley berth for their boat. They apparently said at the time that the only reason they were part of the national organization was for insurance. Both sides hurt. I have no answers. I hope the debate continues and in a mutaully respectful way.
The Lady with a Lamprey
"The powerful are exploiting people, art and ideas, and this leads to us plebes debating how to best ration ice.
Man, no wonder they always win....." Lonesomebri
"The powerful are exploiting people, art and ideas, and this leads to us plebes debating how to best ration ice.
Man, no wonder they always win....." Lonesomebri
Annnnd, as we go from the sublime to the surreal, and right back to the sublime again...
http://www.gaymeritbadges.com/
http://www.gaymeritbadges.com/
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Apollonaris Zeus
- Posts: 3716
- Joined: Sun Sep 14, 2003 11:17 am
"ice sales operations once again allowed us to make a series of substantial donations to local Gerlach, Empire and Bay Area organizations. This year's list includes: Crisis Call Center Empire 4-H Club, Friends of the Black Rock, Gerlach General Improvement District (GGID), Gerlach High School (read their letter of thanks), Gerlach Medical Clinic, Gerlach Volunteer Fire Department, Leave No Trace, Nevada Museum of Art, Nevada Outdoor School, Friends of the Library, Kid's, Horses & Rodeos, Lovelock/Pershing Chamber of Commerce, Marzen House Museum, Pershing County Humane Society, Pershing County School System, Pershing County Senior Center, ****Lovelock Boy Scouts Association****, People to People Programs, 23five, Black Rock Arts Foundation, Epic Arts, and The Crucible"
personally, I feel that the cost of gate tickets are way out of line ("Gate tickets will cost $300 or $350. There is a LIMITED quantity of $300 tickets available - be prepared to pay $350 if you are purchasing a ticket at the Gate!")
Many of the burners I've come to know just happen to show up and take a chance to see what the event is about. The PROFIT of any portion of any subsidiary of BM should be going to offset the cost of event so everyone can afford to go and not just the rich. If the Bmorg wants to help many of these organizations then donate a few tickets to each group so they can auction them out during there fund drives. that way it promotes our cause (what-ever-the-fuck-that-is)!
But if the Bmorg wants to do it there way, then kiss the ass of every body. But no way in Heaven do I want any part of my money going to any religious organization in any way and the Boy Scouts are a religious group. As far as I'm concern if you hate Gays then you hate a part of humanity.
"I assure you of my own personal appreciation of Scouting as a magnificent experience and form of social and religious commitment."
His Holiness Pope John Paul II, the Vatican
But then again we can see why so many pedophile gays join them especially when they publish books such as, "Scouting for Boys!"
And the boy scouts lie with statements such as this; "have a keen respect for the basic rights of all people"
Now have a nice burn! Cause I'm on my way!
AIIZ has left Montana!
personally, I feel that the cost of gate tickets are way out of line ("Gate tickets will cost $300 or $350. There is a LIMITED quantity of $300 tickets available - be prepared to pay $350 if you are purchasing a ticket at the Gate!")
Many of the burners I've come to know just happen to show up and take a chance to see what the event is about. The PROFIT of any portion of any subsidiary of BM should be going to offset the cost of event so everyone can afford to go and not just the rich. If the Bmorg wants to help many of these organizations then donate a few tickets to each group so they can auction them out during there fund drives. that way it promotes our cause (what-ever-the-fuck-that-is)!
But if the Bmorg wants to do it there way, then kiss the ass of every body. But no way in Heaven do I want any part of my money going to any religious organization in any way and the Boy Scouts are a religious group. As far as I'm concern if you hate Gays then you hate a part of humanity.
"I assure you of my own personal appreciation of Scouting as a magnificent experience and form of social and religious commitment."
His Holiness Pope John Paul II, the Vatican
But then again we can see why so many pedophile gays join them especially when they publish books such as, "Scouting for Boys!"
And the boy scouts lie with statements such as this; "have a keen respect for the basic rights of all people"
Now have a nice burn! Cause I'm on my way!
AIIZ has left Montana!
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Steven bradford
- Posts: 351
- Joined: Thu Sep 04, 2003 11:29 pm
- Location: Seattle
- Contact:
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Observer
- Posts: 103
- Joined: Fri Apr 16, 2004 2:12 pm
- Location: Right behind you. Don't look.
- Contact:
I find myself wondering if I'm about to get myself flamed by both the Left and Right at the same time, because this isn't going to fit in with anybody's version of Political Correctness, but here goes.
I've been reading about the traumatic experience of not being allowed to run a boy scout troop, and saw the words "life and death" issue being used. That reminded me of another issue from some years back, and how almost everybody reacted to it. Let's go back to the early 1990s.
Today, one will hear recent grads griping because they got out with their mighty bachelor's degree and a 2.8 average on a 4 scale, and had to "settle" for maybe $30K/year to start. But let's go back, now, to those misty days before Kurt Cobain and see what we can see.
What I could see were an awful lot of people in their 50s being fired, many of whom were agreed to have put many good years in on the job, and were being fired for no better reason than the desire to replace them with cheaper, younger employees, or sometimes even because of a management fad called "creative firing". The idea was that a manager should come by and periodically wipe out a certain number of careers just to keep things humming.
On the other end, there were kids who'd get out of college, who had put in good credible work in fields where they had been given every reason to think that there would be employment opportunities. They would get out, and discover that employers were stubbornly refusing to hire, even in cases in which the employers themselves admitted that their current workstaffs were inadequate in size for the volume of work that needed to be done. Another management fad - that of stubborly refusing to hire anybody for anything until he had 2-5 years of relevant work experience, leaving entire graduating classes in an absurd chicken-and-egg situation.
This may be the issue that got Clinton into office. To take the case of one very highly ranked school, that of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in one news report one could watch as the graduating class in Mechanical Engineering - certainly a practical field - was asked about the job offers they had gotten. Only two of them had any work at all, and it wasn't professional work.
The level of interest many of these people, young and old alike, can be gauged by how many stories one could hear of people who went through much of their vanishing life's savings just sending out resumes and travelling to interviews, of people having queried literally thousands of companies. These folks weren't just sitting back and waiting for opportunity to come to them, they were out pounding the pavement until their feet were bloody from wear, only to encounter what can only be called "stark staring lunacy" as they dealt with Human Resources.
I could tell you about the Applied Mathematician (another practical degree) with a 3.75 on a 4.00 scale who was told that his GPA was too low for entry level work, and that a 3.9 was required. How many people with 3.9 averages do you know? Or how the same gentleman was given the incredible assertion that 600 new PhDs in his branch of Mathematics had applied there that week; in fact, there weren't 600 new PhDs in that specialty on the entire planet, and, as he pointed out ever so patiently to the interviewer "only one of the others is in this metro area right now, and Gopal has to go back to India when his student visa expires". But, as he would later say, the moment he saw the smirk on the interviewer's face, he knew how much of a role reality was going to play in the decision: none at all. What he and so many others were encountering was pure power playing - "I'm going to block your way, just to prove what a tough motherfucker I am".
Not surprisingly, given its refusal to hire the very people who could do the work that it needed to do, that company went belly-up the next year. Bad for them, but scant consolation for anybody else. Now, you looked at this fairly, and you'd see good, hard working people who had a lot to offer, at a time when those who did have jobs reported that they couldn't keep up with all of the work coming in, and you'd see them go out again and again and again, only to get stonewalled by interviewers who you would have said were something straight out of Dilbert, if you had heard of that strip at that point. What eventually came out was that, yes, some people were being hired, but that the great fad of the moment seemed to be hiring nobody but one's own personal friends, and if you had worked long hours putting yourself through a degree program, long enough to preclude having a social life? Too bad for you. You were out of the loop.
Seekers found that they were being warehoused, that what should have been some of the best years of their lives were going by without them, as they tried to get by on public aid. In my area, food stamps came to $2.50/day. Think of it; a life in which a carton of yogurt is a dangerously irresponsible extravagance, one which would leave you going hungry and cost you calories which you might not be able to make up later. the shelters and food pantries, at this point, were stretched beyond the breaking point, and there seemed to be no way out for many of the long term unemployed. If you drop by a business, and the people there refuse to even let you leave off a resume or fill out an application, what are you supposed to do about that? Tackle them and shove the resume into their hands?
"This is terrible", people said, sort of. "We must do something to make sure that the poor don't stay on Welfare forever". So they did something, a little something called "welfare reform". None of the offending, and frankly, blatantly discriminatory hiring practices were changed. Few, if any new jobs were created by this. The so-called solution to the problem was to cut off the public support of anybody who could not find work after two years, and if that meant that he ended starving to death, because of course food wasn't free (and the food pantries couldn't keep up), well, that was "life in the big city". The attitude was that years of grinding, hopeless misery, hunger and social isolation was just a poor person's idea of a good time, and you had to make those lazy good-for-nothings stop loafing around. The fact that a lot of those "lazy good-for-nothings" were spending almost every waking moment looking for work factored about as much into the discussion as Gopal's travel plans had into that earlier hiring decision - not at all.
Hey, what's reality, when we have attitude and get to look down upon somebody less fortunate than ourselves?
Guess how many voices of opposition were to be found to this? Aside from the Socialists, who were sounding unusually reasonable in those days, practically nobody seemed to see anything wrong with this, aside from the people who were now facing homelessness, starvation and hypothermia come wintertime, because of hiring decisions unwarranted by the facts, which they had no control over. Free will implies the freedom to be an asshole, one little fact of life that Neocon true believers like to forget, when they go on about the wonders of the market. "The market" will not keep people from being absolute pricks if that's what they want to be, and if that's what's in fashion, life is going to become needlessly hard for a lot of people who've done nothing to deserve it.
But I digress, I suppose, so let's get back on track. The affected individuals, by and large, were not holding out for better paying or more satisfying work. The Applied Mathematician I mentioned ended up getting some temporary work as a prep cook, cutting up vegetables, and was glad to have it for as long as it lasted. Gainfully employed people would say "what's wrong with flipping hamburgers at McDonald's", turning a deaf ear when told that, in fact, the person they were lecturing had just gotten done standing in line for one of those positions, along with a few hundred of his closest friends, in a line which had stretched around the block. He got in that line at 4:30 am, waiting for a turn which came at around 9:15, only to see his application torn into shreds and tossed in his face, with a few choice epithets about his ethnic background tossed in for good measure.
Overqualification. Try working your way past that.
So, you might think that onlookers might get a little impatient after watching other human beings getting treated like this for years, and they did - but with those who were locked out and abused, with those who had faced unrelenting discrimination in the workplace, not with those practicing the discrimination. If one was looking for voices of dissent with the very popular position of "let them starve" among the Gay community and other supposed hotbeds of progressive thinking, one would have been in for a long search. as near as I could tell, there were none to be found. To this day, I'm still waiting to hear even one member of the Gay community say that there was something unjust about any of this. I have, however, encountered a long line of members of said community who were proud of their belief that this was good and right, because the unemployed were somehow "priviliged", and making the privileged suffer was a good and righteous act.
Got to tell you, when I found myself scrounging through the garbage for food, and going to sleep hungry every night because those cans were picked pretty clean, I wasn't feeling too privileged. Or there was that time when I got grabbed by the police who, when they found out that I was partially disabled with motor control problems, thought it was an absolute hoot to handcuff my hands behind my back and make me walk down a stairwell with nobody holding me, trying not to fall down and snap my neck. This is what happens when you're visibly poor enough that some of the local psychos know that you can't afford a lawyer, no matter what happens. And again, I had to wonder what "privilege" was, if what I was enjoying at the moment qualified. But hey, that's just me. YMMV, and other nice, nonjudgmental noises that fashion may demand.
I could go on and on, mention people I knew who died of what would have been treatable conditions because, when they were locked out of work, they were locked out of being able to afford preventative medical care. But I am tired of writing this, and so fucking tired of the experience, and I'm sure that people are tired of reading about it. But I have to say that I find it really remarkable, after years of being told to suck it up when the issue was one of having the chance to do a little honest work, and earn enough to be pretty sure of where dinner was coming from, to find that I'm now being told that my heart should bleed because somebody didn't get to teach little Johnny how to whittle, or had to pass on getting one more merit badge.
In a civilised world, these would be sad things, but in the real one we live in, I'm amazed by the priorities I encounter. It's as if one has to be a member of an officially recognized oppressed group to qualify as a human being, and that kind of pisses me off. Please pardon any misspellings, as I barely bothered to proofread. I just want to be done with this. Matches are in back if anybody needs to light up the flamethrower, now.
I've been reading about the traumatic experience of not being allowed to run a boy scout troop, and saw the words "life and death" issue being used. That reminded me of another issue from some years back, and how almost everybody reacted to it. Let's go back to the early 1990s.
Today, one will hear recent grads griping because they got out with their mighty bachelor's degree and a 2.8 average on a 4 scale, and had to "settle" for maybe $30K/year to start. But let's go back, now, to those misty days before Kurt Cobain and see what we can see.
What I could see were an awful lot of people in their 50s being fired, many of whom were agreed to have put many good years in on the job, and were being fired for no better reason than the desire to replace them with cheaper, younger employees, or sometimes even because of a management fad called "creative firing". The idea was that a manager should come by and periodically wipe out a certain number of careers just to keep things humming.
On the other end, there were kids who'd get out of college, who had put in good credible work in fields where they had been given every reason to think that there would be employment opportunities. They would get out, and discover that employers were stubbornly refusing to hire, even in cases in which the employers themselves admitted that their current workstaffs were inadequate in size for the volume of work that needed to be done. Another management fad - that of stubborly refusing to hire anybody for anything until he had 2-5 years of relevant work experience, leaving entire graduating classes in an absurd chicken-and-egg situation.
This may be the issue that got Clinton into office. To take the case of one very highly ranked school, that of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in one news report one could watch as the graduating class in Mechanical Engineering - certainly a practical field - was asked about the job offers they had gotten. Only two of them had any work at all, and it wasn't professional work.
The level of interest many of these people, young and old alike, can be gauged by how many stories one could hear of people who went through much of their vanishing life's savings just sending out resumes and travelling to interviews, of people having queried literally thousands of companies. These folks weren't just sitting back and waiting for opportunity to come to them, they were out pounding the pavement until their feet were bloody from wear, only to encounter what can only be called "stark staring lunacy" as they dealt with Human Resources.
I could tell you about the Applied Mathematician (another practical degree) with a 3.75 on a 4.00 scale who was told that his GPA was too low for entry level work, and that a 3.9 was required. How many people with 3.9 averages do you know? Or how the same gentleman was given the incredible assertion that 600 new PhDs in his branch of Mathematics had applied there that week; in fact, there weren't 600 new PhDs in that specialty on the entire planet, and, as he pointed out ever so patiently to the interviewer "only one of the others is in this metro area right now, and Gopal has to go back to India when his student visa expires". But, as he would later say, the moment he saw the smirk on the interviewer's face, he knew how much of a role reality was going to play in the decision: none at all. What he and so many others were encountering was pure power playing - "I'm going to block your way, just to prove what a tough motherfucker I am".
Not surprisingly, given its refusal to hire the very people who could do the work that it needed to do, that company went belly-up the next year. Bad for them, but scant consolation for anybody else. Now, you looked at this fairly, and you'd see good, hard working people who had a lot to offer, at a time when those who did have jobs reported that they couldn't keep up with all of the work coming in, and you'd see them go out again and again and again, only to get stonewalled by interviewers who you would have said were something straight out of Dilbert, if you had heard of that strip at that point. What eventually came out was that, yes, some people were being hired, but that the great fad of the moment seemed to be hiring nobody but one's own personal friends, and if you had worked long hours putting yourself through a degree program, long enough to preclude having a social life? Too bad for you. You were out of the loop.
Seekers found that they were being warehoused, that what should have been some of the best years of their lives were going by without them, as they tried to get by on public aid. In my area, food stamps came to $2.50/day. Think of it; a life in which a carton of yogurt is a dangerously irresponsible extravagance, one which would leave you going hungry and cost you calories which you might not be able to make up later. the shelters and food pantries, at this point, were stretched beyond the breaking point, and there seemed to be no way out for many of the long term unemployed. If you drop by a business, and the people there refuse to even let you leave off a resume or fill out an application, what are you supposed to do about that? Tackle them and shove the resume into their hands?
"This is terrible", people said, sort of. "We must do something to make sure that the poor don't stay on Welfare forever". So they did something, a little something called "welfare reform". None of the offending, and frankly, blatantly discriminatory hiring practices were changed. Few, if any new jobs were created by this. The so-called solution to the problem was to cut off the public support of anybody who could not find work after two years, and if that meant that he ended starving to death, because of course food wasn't free (and the food pantries couldn't keep up), well, that was "life in the big city". The attitude was that years of grinding, hopeless misery, hunger and social isolation was just a poor person's idea of a good time, and you had to make those lazy good-for-nothings stop loafing around. The fact that a lot of those "lazy good-for-nothings" were spending almost every waking moment looking for work factored about as much into the discussion as Gopal's travel plans had into that earlier hiring decision - not at all.
Hey, what's reality, when we have attitude and get to look down upon somebody less fortunate than ourselves?
Guess how many voices of opposition were to be found to this? Aside from the Socialists, who were sounding unusually reasonable in those days, practically nobody seemed to see anything wrong with this, aside from the people who were now facing homelessness, starvation and hypothermia come wintertime, because of hiring decisions unwarranted by the facts, which they had no control over. Free will implies the freedom to be an asshole, one little fact of life that Neocon true believers like to forget, when they go on about the wonders of the market. "The market" will not keep people from being absolute pricks if that's what they want to be, and if that's what's in fashion, life is going to become needlessly hard for a lot of people who've done nothing to deserve it.
But I digress, I suppose, so let's get back on track. The affected individuals, by and large, were not holding out for better paying or more satisfying work. The Applied Mathematician I mentioned ended up getting some temporary work as a prep cook, cutting up vegetables, and was glad to have it for as long as it lasted. Gainfully employed people would say "what's wrong with flipping hamburgers at McDonald's", turning a deaf ear when told that, in fact, the person they were lecturing had just gotten done standing in line for one of those positions, along with a few hundred of his closest friends, in a line which had stretched around the block. He got in that line at 4:30 am, waiting for a turn which came at around 9:15, only to see his application torn into shreds and tossed in his face, with a few choice epithets about his ethnic background tossed in for good measure.
Overqualification. Try working your way past that.
So, you might think that onlookers might get a little impatient after watching other human beings getting treated like this for years, and they did - but with those who were locked out and abused, with those who had faced unrelenting discrimination in the workplace, not with those practicing the discrimination. If one was looking for voices of dissent with the very popular position of "let them starve" among the Gay community and other supposed hotbeds of progressive thinking, one would have been in for a long search. as near as I could tell, there were none to be found. To this day, I'm still waiting to hear even one member of the Gay community say that there was something unjust about any of this. I have, however, encountered a long line of members of said community who were proud of their belief that this was good and right, because the unemployed were somehow "priviliged", and making the privileged suffer was a good and righteous act.
Got to tell you, when I found myself scrounging through the garbage for food, and going to sleep hungry every night because those cans were picked pretty clean, I wasn't feeling too privileged. Or there was that time when I got grabbed by the police who, when they found out that I was partially disabled with motor control problems, thought it was an absolute hoot to handcuff my hands behind my back and make me walk down a stairwell with nobody holding me, trying not to fall down and snap my neck. This is what happens when you're visibly poor enough that some of the local psychos know that you can't afford a lawyer, no matter what happens. And again, I had to wonder what "privilege" was, if what I was enjoying at the moment qualified. But hey, that's just me. YMMV, and other nice, nonjudgmental noises that fashion may demand.
I could go on and on, mention people I knew who died of what would have been treatable conditions because, when they were locked out of work, they were locked out of being able to afford preventative medical care. But I am tired of writing this, and so fucking tired of the experience, and I'm sure that people are tired of reading about it. But I have to say that I find it really remarkable, after years of being told to suck it up when the issue was one of having the chance to do a little honest work, and earn enough to be pretty sure of where dinner was coming from, to find that I'm now being told that my heart should bleed because somebody didn't get to teach little Johnny how to whittle, or had to pass on getting one more merit badge.
In a civilised world, these would be sad things, but in the real one we live in, I'm amazed by the priorities I encounter. It's as if one has to be a member of an officially recognized oppressed group to qualify as a human being, and that kind of pisses me off. Please pardon any misspellings, as I barely bothered to proofread. I just want to be done with this. Matches are in back if anybody needs to light up the flamethrower, now.
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Steven bradford
- Posts: 351
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- Contact:
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Observer
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Steven bradford wrote:Boo Fucking Hoo.
Case in point, and a good example of why, when somebody asks me to support Gay Rights or the Arts Community, on general principle I tell him to get lost. Those two communities have little (if any) history of showing any concern whatsoever for the rights or well-being of those outside their ranks, and lengthy histories of crying, making a scene and demanding support when they are even slightly inconvenienced. Notice MoisturePup's call to have Arctic Camp boycotted, not for discriminating against Gays but for not going along with his boycott of a group he feels discriminates against gays, in a way that pales by comparison to what I just described, getting greeted with that oh-so-enlightened "boo fucking hoo".
To find any community more thoroughly self-absorbed than these two would be no small accomplishment, which is why I don't believe in supporting them. I believe in this concept called "the social contract" which in this context, in crude terms would read "if you don't have my back, why should I bother to have yours".
I was, however, mildly amused, having written the words "only to see his application torn into shreds and tossed in his face, with a few choice epithets about his ethnic background tossed in for good measure" to then read
Somehow, Mr.BRADFORD, I doubt this, but any time you want to seriously compare life on the mean streets of Suburban Phoenix with, oh, say, this lovely little place I know called Englewood, drop by and I'll be glad to set that one up for you. Just to be sure to leave me the name of your next of kiin, because I'm not going to be bothered with your carcasse when your field trip is over, probably about 15 minutes after sunset.Steven bradford wrote:Been there, soldiered on.
No, what the Hell ... PLONK! Somebody else can set up the field trip. I've got better things to do than butt heads with yet another moron. Now, does anybody have any real issues to discuss?
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Steven bradford
- Posts: 351
- Joined: Thu Sep 04, 2003 11:29 pm
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Observer
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- Joined: Fri Apr 16, 2004 2:12 pm
- Location: Right behind you. Don't look.
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To remind any (even marginally reasonable) person reading this of what this latest exchange is about, I had mentioned a real life scenario which became all too familiar during the early 1990s: good, responsible, hardworking people with decent (or even excellent) skill bases being locked out of employment for reasons that could not reasonably be said to reflect on them. At a time when many simply couldn't get work, period, despite have made far more than a reasonable effort looking, a few demagogues (eg. Newt Gingrich) scored some quick and easy points with know-nothing constituencies by pushing something called "welfare reform", under which public aid would be cut off for all recipients after two years, regardless of whether or not it was possible for them to find work.Observer wrote:Notice MoisturePup's call to have Arctic Camp boycotted, not for discriminating against Gays but for not going along with his boycott of a group he feels discriminates against gays, in a way that pales by comparison to what I just described, getting greeted with that oh-so-enlightened "boo fucking hoo".Steven bradford wrote:Boo Fucking Hoo.
At the time, prospective applicants outnumbered jobs offered many, many times to one. Pointing this out to one of fashionably loudmouthed Neocons at the time often produced the unbelievable answer that the numbers were irrelevant, because "one just needs one job". By that logic, every round of musical chairs should end with everybody having a seat of his own, because "you only need one seat". With even a hint of common sense, one should quickly know better than to say something that foolish.
What this policy would have meant, had it ever been implemented as described, would have been mass starvation, with people dying in the streets and children wandering amongst us with their stomachs bloating up, a la Somalia. As extreme a reality as I'm portraying, no extemism can reasonably be inferred from the portrayal. The private charities in the major cities had never been set up with the thought that they were going to be feeding people by the hundreds of thousands, in the case of the very largest cities. If there is no paycheck, and no public aid, with what does one buy food? Even temporary work was largely unavailable, as the way in which the government kept the official unemployment rate out of the double digit range was creative, to say the least; "fraudulent" was more like it.
So, in response to a recounting of the horrors that came close to being made a reality, with little public disapproval, we have Mr.Bradford dismissing all with a broad, smugly ignorant sweep of the hand, and the proclamation that he had been through all of that and dealt with it. I'm reading this, and as much as I know what to expect to see happen when people get back from the burn, I'm still going to be amazed by it.
Obviously, Mr.Bradford hasn't been there and hasn't dealt with everything described, because if he had, he'd be dead right now, and his current rate of posting seems rather high for that of a corpse.
One can not survive without food indefinitely. That's not a political point of view, that's just simple reality, and the only two sides on that question are the right side and the wrong side. It's like arguing over whether or not 1+1=2.So at that point, I plonked Steve with good reason. Either he's one of those people who lives to stir the pot, in which case a dialog with him is headed nowhere, because irritating others is how he gets his jollies, or he's completely delusional and honestly believes that he was able to survive for a protracted length of time, as in over a year, without food. If he really believes this, again, there's no point in arguing with him. Why argue with an escaped mental patient?
What I know is coming, and what will still amaze me, as it has amazed me so many times before, is that as clearly nuts as what Steve has to say is, I'm going to see a whole string of people writing in to defend it. This, I think, is the most disheartening reality of the American political scene. On the one hand, we have the Far Left, represented by people like MoisturePup, who right now is trying to get yet another group of Burners boycotted - BMORG, this time, for daring to contribute to the Bush campaign (allegedly), as if this wouldn't be their call to make. On the other hand, we have people on the Far Right saying "let the poor starve" and trying to rationalize that - and finding a lot of popular support as they do so.
What I don't hear very often, these days, are voices of sanity, people somewhere closer to the center, more interested in common decency and common sense than in seeing if they can make points with their equally extremist buddies as they play a game of "can you top this". I keep hoping that acting and thinking like an adult will come back into fashion, but with each passing year that seems less and less likely, because widespread sanity is getting to be such a remote memory, that it is becoming less and less of a natural thing to return to. The old habit is being lost and new ones ingrained, and the future implicit in the new ones is an incredibly dark one.
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Steven bradford
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