Tag Archives: If you say you don’t care about politics you are either so disfranchised that you can’t afford to care or you are privileged to not have to care

2016 Presidential Debates or “What fresh hell is this?”

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Winner: Fact checkers. They’ve been in high demand and kept busy. I hope they’re being paid per fact checked.

Winner: Twitter. Once again, Twitter proved its relevance. Without Twitter, I would have thrown something at the TV or died from implosion, you know, all that screaming inside my head and my chest.

Loser: All of us.

To be fair, I learned something useful from the pundits afterwards: From now on, if I ever get into an argument, I am just gonna rudely interrupt you the whole time, contradict you with false information, accuse you of having never done anything and saying/doing things you’ve never done, and threaten to use the judicial system for my personal vendetta against you, and we’ll still end up in a draw with all my earlier trespasses against decorum forgiven because right before the end of the discussion, I’m gonna say that I respect you for your never giving up. Thanks for the great tip!

All the great tweets, memes, jokes aside, as the debate wore on, it became more and more embarrassing by the minute. What are we watching? Are we on Jerry Springer? Trump may belong on that show. Hilary does not deserve this. WE don’t deserve this.

Do we even need the 3rd debate? Donald Trump used both debates as an opportunity to repeat lies throughout the 90 minutes. Why are we giving him this platform? We all have better things to do than to sit through 90 minutes of lies. Asking Hillary to face him off at another debate is giving this man the legitimacy that he has failed to earn over and over again. How many more chances are we giving him? Why aren’t we using “extreme vetting” on him as someone worthy to be “debated” against?

The world according to Trump:

Muslims = Terrorists
African Americans = Inner City dwellers
Women = Pussy for grab

I’ve lost my ability to be agape at Trump’s ability to lie with such ease and at people’s ability to remain “indecisive” on this. To be honest, I envision in the near future this’ll be a go-to case study for Psychology/Sociology/Ethnography 101. “Why did people afford him so many ‘benefits of doubt’ so many times?”

https://twitter.com/kumailn/status/784870837052596224

 

milton-glaser-vote

 

 

“The Distress of the Privileged”

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“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” — Margaret Atwood

I came across a helpful, objective, step by step analysis of “Reverse [Fill in the blank]ism” complaints and the fallacy in those complaints. Often in the call for “compassion”, for understanding, for listening to the other side, these writings fall into the category of apologist-ic argument which, imo, set us back to the starting point – “So, you are saying that nobody sets out to hate anybody. Case closed. Business as usual then?”

Read “The Distress of the Privileged” on The Weekly Sift if you’ve been frustrated with the recent public discourse of invisible privileges and the commandeering of it by the privileged: Ferguson & all the future and past police shootings of unarmed black men, white privilege, Jon Stewart’s now famous intense schooling of Bill O’Reilly, G-A-M-E-R-G-A-T-E, sexism everywhere you look, etc. etc. If you are ever tongued-tied when confronted with “we should listen to the other side”. If you ever experience, with acute pang in your chest, l‘esprit de l’escalier. If you ever want to scream but you can’t really because “what difference then are we from the other side.”

“As the culture evolves, people who benefitted from the old ways invariably see themselves as victims of change. The world used to fit them like a glove, but it no longer does. Increasingly, they find themselves in unfamiliar situations that feel unfair or even unsafe. Their concerns used to take center stage, but now they must compete with the formerly invisible concerns of others.”

“Confronting this distress is tricky, because neither acceptance nor rejection is quite right. The distress is usually very real, so rejecting it outright just marks you as closed-minded and unsympathetic. It never works to ask others for empathy without offering it back to them.”

“[F]irmness together with understanding”, the author suggests, may be the middle path that will move us forward.

“… my straight-white-male sunburn can’t be allowed to compete on equal terms with your heart attack. To me, it may seem fair to flip a coin for the first available ambulance, but it really isn’t. Don’t try to tell me my burn doesn’t hurt, but don’t consent to the coin-flip.” [Emphasis mine]

 

 

 

Can’t keep my mouth shut

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Romney was asked to defend his position on gender equality at work place at the town hall “debate” tonight.

Even though I enjoy the snarky tweets, in all fairness, here is what Romney said (excerpt from L.A. Times)

Romney countered that, as governor of Massachusetts, he had a stellar record when it came to hiring women, accomplished by “a concerted effort” when he discovered that all the people applying for jobs in his administration were men.

“I went to a number of women’s groups and said, can you help us find folks?” Romney said. “And [they] brought us whole binders full of — of women.“

 

 

Not to be picking on the guy, for example, he did not know any qualified women on his own and HAD to ask someone to deliver him a binder?  But even for such a lame example, he lied about it.

Romney then continued:

As an example of his women-friendly policies, Romney cited the treatment of one of his main employees. “My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school,” he said. “She said, ‘I can’t be here until 7:00 or 8:00 at night. I need to be able to get home at 5:00 so I can be there for — making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school.’ So we said, ‘Fine, let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.’”

 

This should teach me. Clearly I do not deserve any sympathy or flexibility for my work load because I do NOT cook.

 

And for the question we have all dying to find the answer to… there is of course a website dedicated to showing us the answer…