Disengage
“You’ve sold us all into slavery!”
Okay, admittedly, the crazy is nothing new.
I mean, you’d expect this sort of thing by now, right?
Hat tip to James Urbaniak (Dr. Thaddeus Venture!) for linking what’s been on my mind for the past few days.
Let’s start by asking the obvious question: do you see any reasoning with this sort of thinking? Is there any considered presentation of facts and evidence that will have any impact on it?
Because it’s time to give up.
It would be one thing to just smear the entirety of the American right by painting them all as teabaggers, but that simply isn’t the case — the extreme right is forcing everyone on that side of the spectrum to move away from the center. We’ve known this was happening for some time.
They say you should never bet against human stupidity, but the problem is not the possibility of some kind of “teabagger revolution”, but a loss of political balance. There used to be a there, there. There used to be a coherent ideology. The party of small government, fiscal responsibility wasn’t always wrong.
Regrettably, it’s given way to god-bothering, authoritarian sellouts whose chief flaw isn’t dishonesty, but an inability to articulate any kind of rational policy whatsoever. Gay marriage, gun rights, immigration — all the wedge issue bullshit has been reduced to a noisy distraction.
The looming issue is job creation — in a global economy, we’ve created a league of multinational corporations that no longer employ Americans and aren’t bound by any kind of nationalistic loyalty, much less any means of changing the status quo without tanking a frail economy. The attempt to frame the debate as “capitalism versus communism (socialism)” has failed — hard. The typical American, who’s either had their job outsourced overseas or weathered endless layoffs by taking on workloads intended for several people knows better, even if they fear retaliation in the form of further cut backs if the Bush tax cuts expire or, heaven forbid, some of these companies have to actually start paying taxes in the US.
We all have to live in the same country.
Certainly, the reduction of American authoritarianism to a perpetually disenfranchised class will continue to be an issue well beyond the November elections or even 2012, but there can be little doubt that we’ve arrived at a point where we can not only no longer afford to be ignorant or irrational ourselves, but we can no longer tolerate these qualities in those around us.
The issue is not a matter of alienating anyone; the issue is realizing that this will occur no matter how hard we try to avoid it. Some otherwise nice people are going to have their feelings hurt by the rejection, but this does not relieve anyone capable of thinking and acting as an adult from doing so. Let them catch up on their own or withdraw and complain that nobody cares about their feelings, but don’t feel bad because you can’t give them a pony.
There are real problems and they need to be addressed now.
social network exile 
hear, hear… moments like this where one wishes the corps would crash MERELY so that they wouldn’t have the money to drown out your clarity with jingogasmic PSAs.