Monthly Archives: April 2016

Laziness and Bigotry

18 Monday Apr 2016

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No, RWNJs; it’s actual manners

I’be often wondered why people are so resistant to changing the language with which they address people, groups of people, ideas, and so on.  Why does it cause such anger (mostly on the right) to ask people to please not call Native Americans “Indians”?  Why is there so much rage against addressing folks by their preferred pronoun?  Heck, I read a right-wing lament prior to the 2006 Olympics that using “Turino” rather than “Turin” was some kind of PC insanity.  I didn’t understand it.  It’s okay when someone corrects your pronunciation of their name; why is this other stuff such a big deal?

Bigotry, sure.  A lot of people are simply bigots, and would probably still be calling African Americans “nigger” and Jews “kike” and Irish “Micks” and so forth if they could get away with it.  Sad but true, those people are still with us.

There’s also the piece in there exemplified by all those Tea Party demands to “take our country back!”  Back from who?  Back to what?  WTF are they talking about?  Well, probably back to the day when naming a baseball team “Redskins” was so acceptable that no one gave it a second thought.  When the population of the US was so heavily tilted towards white Christians that they felt they could act and speak with impunity (and usually could, too).  When it was widely accepted that GLBTs were aberrant, sick people engaged in behavior that was patentently amoral and accepted as such (at least openly).  When you could pinch a woman’s ass at work, call her “honey” or “sweetheart” or “babe” or “girl” without so much as a raised eyebrow.

But ya know, I think some of that, and some of the backlash itself, comes from laziness, pure and simple.  People don’t want to learn new terms, new ways of addressing people, new rules of politeness because they’re lazy.  (I’m not excepting myself from this, by the way; I’m hella lazy, too.  I just suck it up and deal, because it’s the right thing to do.)  Learning new terms, integrating them into your daily language, remembering them…it’s all a big pain in the ass and people don’t want to do it.  So instead of sucking it up and dealing, they scream and rant and rave and look like (to be blunt) bigoted douche-nozzles.  It’s not about “we don’t want to give in to the PC police!” so much as “We don’t want to learn new things, waah waah waah!”  (And yes, imagine that in the tones of your least-favorite local 3-year-old, because that’s the emotional level of the demand in my opinion.)

I don’t have a good solution for this—just as “the poor will always be with us”, the lazy will be, too.  And in all of us, for that matter.  If I thought it would help I would suggest you to stare these “the heck with being PC!” folks in the eye and tell them, “You’re only saying that because you’re lazy and don’t want to work!  Would you call someone ‘PC’ if they asked you to please stop mis-pronouncing their name?”  But I don’t think it would, honestly.

But maybe it will help you, when you hear or read about these whiners complaining about the “demands of the PC police”, to think of them whining like a bunch of spoiled 3-year-olds.  It helps me a little bit, anyway.

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A Virtual Secession

17 Sunday Apr 2016

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They will defend your right to discriminate to their dying breath!

Recently there have been a raft of “religious freedom” bills throughout the South (and elsewhere, unfortunately). Most of these seem directly targeted against the Surpreme Court’s recent recognition of marriage equality, although now (e.g. in North Carolina) they seem to be targeting trans citizens.  In my opinion, these bills have fuck-all to do with religious freedom and are simply a method in which bigotry can be re-enshrined in places where the courts have outlawed it.  (To try to tell whether they’re really about “religious freedom”, look at a law and ask, “If this applied to blacks/Jews/Catholics/Asians/whatever, would it be discrimination?” and that should do it.)

I find this cynical and reprehensible, wildly hypocritical (“It’s all about religious freedom!”; no it ain’t, it’s all about being able to be prejudiced without being called on it), and quite frankly unChristian.  How is it in line with the Golden Rule to want to discriminate against your neighbors?  Obviously, it isn’t.  But that’s not what I want to talk about.

Unsurprisingly, most of these bigoted laws have come out of the South, primarily states that were part of the former Confederacy.  There have been laws in Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina to force trans citizens to use the bathroom of their birth sex rather than their gender.  And usually people shake their heads at this stuff, say, “Yeah, that’s the South,” and move on.  But something surprising is happening this time:

A bunch of businesses, organizations, and artists are saying they’re done.

In case you haven’t seen, the draconian North Carolina law has caused businesses like PayPal and Deutsche Bank and performers such as Bruce Springsteen and Cirque d’ Soliel to pull out of performing there.  The NBA is also threatening to pull next year’s All Star game from there as well.  As you may imagine, hard-right folks are calling the companies and performers everything from “bullies” to “child molester supporters”, and trying to pretend their happy Springsteen et. alia aren’t coming to their state.  (Which wee all know is BS, but never mind.)

And it made me wonder.

It seems like we’ve been relighting the Civil war over various areas of bigotry and discrimination multiple times over the last 150 years.  (I’m hardly the first to point this out.)  There was the Civil Rights/anti-Jim Crow fights of the 60s; the battle over women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment in the 70s; the “Southern Strategy” of Richard Nixon; and the recent battle over marriage equality.  A (depressingly) huge number of folks in the South seem to want to keep their region firmly in the 19th Century, and get angry and resentful any time they’re forced to confront their bigotry and prejudice.  And now they’re actually being punished for it.

So I wondered if this isn’t sort of like a slow-moving, virtual secession.  I mean, I don’t anticipate the South actually breaking off from the rest of the country legally, but what if the region were slowly but steadily to suffer the same fate staring North Carolina in the face?  (A fate that caused the right-wingers to back down in Arizona and Indiana, by the way.)  What if these states stood by their “principles”, and were cut off by banks, job-rich high tech firms, entertainers, sports leagues, and the like?  What if the Titans were removed from the NFL, and the Predators from Nashville, the Hornets from Charlotte?  No more visits from Taylor Swift or big rock acts or what RedState insists are “has beens”?  What if the Federal government started denying Title IX funds because these states were breaking anti-discrimination laws?  What if the amount of tax dollars that flow into these states?  (“Red” states receive far more tax money than they contribute to the Federal government, while “blue” states pay in far more than they get back.)

Maybe “the South” wouldn’t be legally cut off from the rest of the U.S., but they kinda would be, wouldn’t they?

No, I don’t think it would actually happen.  And if it did, I doubt the right-wingers would be particularly happy to finally get what they want (and they would blame the Left for their poverty, lack of jobs, increased infant mortality and teen pregnancy rates, etc.).  But it seemed an interesting thing to think about.  And I have to think it was fear of something like this—or at least a portion of it—that caused Jan Brewer of Arizona and Mike Pence of Indiana to step back from the brink.

I used to wonder how far to the right the right would have to go before the left finally got off their lazy butts and pushed back hard.  Now we know.  And it’s kind of satisfying, don’t you think?

Republicans Can’t Do Math

10 Sunday Apr 2016

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So why do we keep voting them into office?

Recently I got into a . . . discussion . . . on Twitter.  (You can’t really have discussions on Twitter.  For one, you’re limited to 140 characters.  And for another, most people don’t want to discuss, they just want to bludgeon you.  Sometime, if I’m okay with being sued, I might relay some of my conversations with Cathy Brennan, an extremely unpleasant radical feminist who is one of the most abrasive, obnoxious, litigious, angry people I’ve ever seen online.  And I’ve been online a really long time.  I mean, since Reagan was President.  To say this woman is “transphobic” is to understate things so massively I can’t even express it.  See, what happened was…Wait, where was I?  Oh, right; Republicans and math.)

Anyway, this person––who was not a bad or unreasonable guy––insisted to me that “both sides” had problems with math, citing the amount that the debt has doubled under Obama, just like it did under Bush. I didn’t bother telling him it was a genuinely idiotic comparison, as Bush had been handed an economy running at a surplus and quickly destroyed it with two obscene tax cuts, two unbudgeted wars, a huge new (also unbudgeted) federal drug program, and some phenomenal mis-management, while Obama was handed an economy in free-fall with a skyrocketing deficit, which he turned around and now has the deficit coming down.  But when you’re “debating” with someone who reiterates that absurd right-wing canard about the government giving away “free stuff”, you’re not speaking to a person well-acquainted with actual facts.

But it reminded me of a very basic fact: Republicans just can’t seem to do math.  And I mean simple math, like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  You know:  K-6 math.

Let’s take immigration.  The Tea Party, the Trumpsters, and of course the Republican Party as a whole want to get rid of every last illegal immigrant in the country.  All of them.  And what I wonder is:  Can’t the G.O.P. do simple math?

(“Obviously not,” I hear you cry.  Yes, you’re right:  they think cutting taxes will increase government revenue; they think giving ACORN a few million dollars will bankrupt us, but fighting trillion dollar wars won’t; etc.  Bear with me anyway.)

If figures are right, there are approximately 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

That’s a lot of people.  I mean, a lot a lot.  It’s basically the entirety of the L.A. metro area.  I mean, it’s a lot.

So let’s assume that you can snap your fingers and gather all those people up with no effort at all.  None.  SNAP!  11 million people appear, ready to be deported.  Now what?

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A Republican politician when confronted w/ this question

Where are you going to put them?  Empty all of L.A. and house them there?  Put them in a corner of Texas or New Mexico where they can wait to be processed?  Better be a damn big corner.  And what would you do with them?  Hand them shovels and seeds and tell them, “Good luck!  You’re number 2,459,345–we should get to you by August of 2019; better start tilling and sowing!” and hope it doesn’t turn into an environmental disaster?

But let’s say you figure it out.  You won’t; but let’s say you do.  (“We’ll make them stay right where we find them while we process them, then when we’re ready we’ll do the finger-snapping thing!  Yeah!  That’s the ticket!”)   So now you have 11 million people handy.  How are you going to get them home?  Bus?  Let’s do a little math:

A typical school bus–you know, the yellow kind without air conditioning or seat belts–seats between 75-90 folks.  Let’s go with 100, just to be conservative.  If you want to transport 11 million people to Mexico, you’re talking about 110,000 school bus trips.   How much diesel fuel is that going to take?  How many bus drivers?  How many hours of travel?

Or put them on a train.  The CalTrain double-decker “baby bullet” trains seat about 150 folks per car.  For 11 million people, that works out to around 74,000 cars.  I’ve seen multi-locomotive trains hauling 75-100 cars on ocassion–not often–so that would work out to 740 100-car train, full-loaded.

(And we haven’t even considered issues such as luggage, children, sanitation for longer trips, the processing speed of the U.S. and Mexican governments, and other related issues.)

Bear in mind that the government couldn’t even get ice to New Orleans after a single hurricane while you contemplate the above–and remember too that New Orleans had only about a third of a million folks in it.  So your problem is to move the entire population of 33 New Orleans’ from wherever they are to Mexico.  I’m not too sanguine about the possibility, personally, even if they’re all right there in Brownsville or Laredo.

This is just the simple math of logistics, too.  I’m not an expert in this stuff—I’m sure it’s way more complicated.  And if the simple math shows it to be this bad, what’s the more complicated situation going to look like?  (Answer:  Ugly as hell.)

Not to mention what would happen when all the Orlandos, Carloses, Jesuses, and all the other folks who work the jobs nobody else wants to do (Picking strawberries?  Cleaning out office buildings?  Laying sewer pipe?) up an leave, all 11 million of them.  Imagine all of New York City—not just the adults, but the whole friggin’ city—plus the whole of Newark, Nassau county, and most of Connecticut just pulling up stakes and leaving.  I mean, seriously:  think about it.  Don’t you think it wouldn’t have some kind of massive effect for everyone else?  What happens to the Northeast power grid?  The trains?  The airports?  Imagine New York City being blacked out, but forever, instead of for a few hours as sometimes happens, usually to chaotic effect.  It’s mind-boggling.

So it’s clear:  Republicans can’t do math.  Remind me again why they are ever put in charge?