Emotional Issues - Ok, let's move on

Ok, those were the "big three", IMHO.   Best to deal with the distractions first and move on, I think.

There really have to be more serious issues to contend with in the upcoming US Presidential election.

Emotional Issues - GLBT RIghts/Marriage

A hot topic - a least south of the border - to be sure.

"It used to be the love that dare not speak its name.  Now it's the love that won't shut up!" - Mark Steyn (attributed)

Me?  Couldn't care less.  Knock yourselves out.  Really.  "Judge not", and all that.

Gotta draw the line somewhere, though - right?  For me, that'd be the annual "Gay Pride" parade.  That's where the local politicians - most of whom couldn't care less either - get bullied into attending and showing their "support" for the GLBT community in the name of that PC tenet "inclusiveness".

Tell you what - when someone holds a Gay Pride parade that doesn't include a) "Gays Against Israeli Aparthied", and b) some jerk flapping his John Thomas around, I might be inclined to take the movement a little more seriously.

Until then, I really have more things to worry about.

Emotional Issues - Capital Punishment

This is going to be a short post.

In a civilized society, the state should not put people to death.  That doesn't mean I'm not in favour of putting (mass, first-degree) murderers into a Paul Bernardo-sized box for the rest of their lives, 'cause I am.

Emotional Issues - Abortion

I'm very much in favour of a woman's right to choose, and I don't have an issue with late-term abortions if the mother's health/well being is at risk. I do, however, have a problem with abortion as a form of birth control.

That having been said, this is where it gets prickly on the health care debate.

Under univeresal health care - financed by everyone, might I add - the use of abortion as birth control can upset even pro-choicers.  It's one thing to terminate a pregnancy brought on by rape or incest and it's another thing to have an abortion because either party was too damned lazy/stupid/uncaring enough to use birth control - especially with the slew of STDs out there.  Why not add paying for treating someone who was too lazy/stupid/uncaring to not contract an STD in the first place?

Should the Government be financing birth control through its health care program?  Throw in the religious angle of the prohibition of artificial birth control and you'll get all the Roman Catholics pissed off at you because now *they're* helping to fund something that violates one of their hierarchy's tenets.

This is all further to my earlier post about splitting the base down the middle.  Just because you happen to be on one side of the issue or the other, it doesn't mean you have to walk lock-step with everyone else on your particular "wing".  Throw in enough emotional issues and people will prioriotize what's really important to them and end up voting (nose plugged with fingers) for the other guy.

That's not how you get elected.

More about health care later.

Emotional Issues

I've been called out more than a few times over the past couple of weeks with respect to my views on the upcoming Presidential election in the States.  My responses are going to be too long for FaceBook, so I'll detail them here between now and November 6th.

I'm going to start with what my good friend Michael Marzolini calls "emotional issues".  Michael is the chairman of Pollara, a market research and public opinion company in Toronto.  For years, he was the polling company of record for the Liberal Party of Canada.

At any rate, he categorized moral issues such as abortion and capital punishment as "emotional". 

These issues, he said, divided the elctorate right down the middle and it was political suicide to dwell on them.  I have no reason to believe he was wrong in this assessment.  If your party is polling at around the 40% mark in Canada, you're on your way to a majority government.  If you go in and piss off your share of electorate by harping on an emotional issue - even one that people *want* to hear about - you're going to see your share drop.  Best to have an innocuous blanket statement sitting in the back of the party's policy book and deflect any mention of the issue when asked.

From wikipdeia:

In an August 19, 2012 interview aired on St. Louis television station KTVI-TV, [Missouri Rep. Todd] Akin was asked his views on whether women who became pregnant due to rape should have the option of abortion. He replied:

Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.
 

He was immediately - and correctly - villified for his ignorance.

Wiki also says "Medical experts say there is no evidence to support the assertion that women are less likely to get pregnant from rape compared with consensual sex" .

Right.

I'm not going to get into the abortion issue in the post - that'll be later on.  What I am going to do, though, is give a little perspective on this man because I've met people like him in the past who have said the same thing.  And say what you will about Rush Limbaugh - I think he had the right take on Rep. Akin, and it's worth sharing:

"There are people who hang around only like-minded people, and there are people who hang around and expose themselves to people that disagree with them on things. I think Akin may be one of these people who hangs around with people who only think the way he does about things.

"If you strip this down, what Akin was trying to say was something very simple. ' I don't think abortion should even happen in rape'. That's what he was trying to say. Let's just strip away all the other stuff. There are a group of pro-lifers who profoundly believe that, and they talk to each other, and they try to come up with ways of persuading other people to agree with them on this. Because their view is, it's not the baby's fault. Why are we gonna kill the baby? Why should there be an exception? The baby is the essence of innocence in every act of conception. The baby is entirely innocent, is what they believe, and so an exception to them weakens the entire argument.

"So they sit around amongst themselves -- I'm not being critical of 'em; don't misunderstand my choice of words or tone, and they try to think of ways to persuade other people who agree with them. So Akin goes on TV with Charles Jaco, which is mistake number one, but he goes on with Charles Jaco on local St. Louis TV. And this whole business of a woman's body shuts down in rape, there's no evidence for that. But this is the kind of thing that people who do nothing but talk amongst themselves will conjure up, a belief system like that, and they'll grab on to anything they can to support what their empirical belief is because their ultimate aim is to save life.

"Their ultimate aim is to protect the baby no matter what circumstance the conception occurs in. And I think that's just who the guy is, but he doesn't know how to explain it. He has no clue how to make his case for it. And so he hangs around people who are like-minded and they've devised this belief. He's not the first guy to say this. I've had people tell me that a woman's body shuts down in rape. There's no evidence for this. I mean it's absolutely absurd. This leads to the second problem. This is absurd. That belief that a woman's body shuts down and the whole notion of "legitimate"/"illegitimate" rape, that's the thing that bothers me about it."

Ok, a bit long winded, but the gist of it was that Akin wasn't properly informed.

Somehow I get the feeling this is going to be a recurring theme between now and election day.

 

Good God, it's been a long time.  More than five years.

I started this blog in June of 2006 when the "broad strata" of 17 wanna-be terrorists were arrested in Toronto.  Looking over my posts after that, it's certainly interesting to see how all that played out.

I joined FaceBook in October of 2007 and my writings on this blog just withered.  I think it was easier to get the one liners out and read by my friends than it was to direct them here.  Honestly, I can't recall exactly why - it's just how it ended up.

A lot has happened in the last five years, hasn't it?  A Fabian Socialist was elected to the Presidency in the US, and Stephen Harper finally got his majority government.  I'm happy to report that we haven't sunk completely into the abyss on either count, but things are certainly teetering in the States.  I'm not sure they, this continent, this hemisphere, or the world will be able to take another four years of Obama.  The media doesn't seem to be quite as "on board" this time as they were back in '08.  Shades of "Trudeaumania" - another Fabianist that almost sunk a country.

Bob Rae, the leader of Ontario's first (and only, thank God) NDP government ran into the same problems as Trudeau and Obama.  All very smart and highly intelligent people who ended up dragging the populace down to a level of indescribable mediocrity in the name of equality and equity.  And before you jump all over me on that last one, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron for a summary of Vonnegut's great short story.  Hell, read the story itself if you haven't done so.  You'll see what I mean.

Rae and Obama in particular spent and have spent their time falling all over themselves catering to labour unions, (minority) special interest groups, and indeed to the media that put them there.  Obama has rejected what made the US great in favour of expanding government control of most facets of American life.  He is surely under the impression that those he considers not as smart as he simply cannot be relied upon to fulfil *his* version of the American Dream (whatever that is).

More about him another time.  In the meantime, take a minute and look at my post from July 15 of 2007.  Not much has changed, has it?

Have you seen HBO's "The Newsroom"?

Here's the screed from the first episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7lKNjtvfpc

...and the root of it, as stated by newsman Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) is that we're no longer informed.  And he's right.  We're presented, typically, with two sides of an issue.  On one side is the left, ala MSNBC, The New York Times, NPR, and so on, and the right, FOX, Sun-TV, Rush, and a whack of small-town dailies.  It's our nature, as people, to gravitate to where we're comfortable - where there's a group like us - and once we're there, we usually stay.  We listen to what should have been rational discourse degenerate into shouting matches with people who happen to have different opinions than ourselves and we're content in the knowledge that we're not alone and maybe these other people really *are* assholes after all.

How difficult must it be to permanently reside on one side or the other?  We think it because Hunter wrote, and Garcia sang, "sometimes we live no particular way but our own".  And it marginalizes us.  We are the majority.  We have to be.  Surely it isn't possible that that many people on the left and that many people on the right have no room for - no time for - people with views that are contrary to theirs.  It's not how it should be. We've sacrificed being informed for ten-second sound bites and snarkly little quips that put opposing points of view down. Sometimes so far down that they're never heard from again.

Make no mistake about it.  There are plenty of people on both the left and the right whose mission is to silence the other side.  The left does it with political correctness and the right does it with God and Patriotism.  And it sucks.

So over the next while, and certainly leading up to the US election in Novemeber, I'll be tossing out my own ideas.  Maybe you'll agree with me, maybe you'll find them offensive, and maybe it'll just end up being food for thought.

One way or another, it's going to be fun.