Says it all
posted by Jim at 1:30 AM
Chances are that if you are reading this you already know me. But if you are a stranger and you are looking for left-of-center political opinions, rambling, senseless rants, and coverage of the Atlanta Braves that can only be described as severely manic-depressive...Welcome!!
3 Comments:
Jim--
Be careful in aligning yourself with the ACLU. Those guys are serious wingnuts. Their bizarre antics detract from the point we're trying to make as often as not.
Mikey
12:46 PM
Mikey:
You have fallen for the classic right-wing trap. Instead of dealing with a particular issue, deamonize whomever is speaking up and you can ignore it. In short: attack the messenger and you won't have to deal with the message.
What is more important, the fact that our government is spying on innocent Americans with no oversight, or the fact that the ACLU is one of the few orgs that has the balls to say something.
Remember Farenheight 9/11? If half the people who condemmed the film actually saw it then it would have grossed over a billion dollars. As it stands the only thing that most people know is that Michael Moore is a Communist who hates America. What was the film about? Were there any valid points made? Thanks to the right-wing media attack machine we'll never know.
I guess my point is ignore the wizard and look behind the curtian.
7:07 PM
Jim--
Of course you refer to a classic rhetorical trick, certainly not the exclusive domain of "the right wing," but commonly employed by the more zealous opinionaters at either end of the spectrum.
On this issue however, the ACLU is hardly alone, so why buy into their propaganda? Why allow them to co-opt Dr. King's totally separate message for their issue-du-jour? Cheap theatrics.
They are so easy to discredit that well, why wouldn't someone?
I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 and it was an absolutely awful, embarrassing movie. Michael Moore had a good schtick back in the "Roger and Me" days, but these days he appears to be a self-absorbed publicity hound and a great discredit to the liberal agenda. Most of that movie was unashamedly out of context, sheer buffoonery, only it wasn't very funny. Again, a guy to distance ourselves from.
I like to refer people back to Eric Hoffer's landmark text, _The_True_Believer_. Hoffer is very persuasive that it's NOT just the message-- the messenger matters. Extremists at either end of any issue are not interested in dialogue and will not be swayed, no matter what. They are cannon fodder. It's the centrists who listen to each other, make compromises and accomplish social change.
I can cite examples from my own favorite social cause: environmentalism. Groups like Greenpeace and The Sierra Club are so shrill and so predictable that even when they're RIGHT, they're wrong. Getting young people arrested in as many different countries as possible and then spitting them out when they're used up... what the fuck is that? Cannon fodder. And what they call "science" makes Ron Popeil infomercials look like JPL. On the whole, I completely agree with their agenda, but I wish they'd JUST SHUT UP.
Contrast that with my favorite organization: The Wilderness Society (www.wilderness.org). TWS is explicitly an inside-the-beltway PAC that deals exclusively with public lands issues with the goal of preserving wilderness. Focused, honest, persuasive. It was TWS that used the Dept. of the Interior's OWN DATA to calculate that ANWR contains in total less than two months' supply of oil. Many people credit them directly for making ANWR to hot to handle for anyone except Repmocrat wingnuts in Alaska, and again, I'm not listeing to that asshat.
Love the blog. Keep up the excellent work, sir!
Mikey
12:41 PM
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