Political Cowardice Disguised As Olympic Spirit
Mar 29, 2008 Rants
As a conservative, I’m usually not one to call for political activism. I tend to prefer the ballot box to the soapbox. Displays like tying one’s self to trees or not buying from Giant Evil Company X “because they are mean to children and puppies,” is better left to the vast morass of leftist nut-jobs. This year, though, I’ve got to pull one from their playbook: I simply cannot, for any reason, understand why every one of the leaders of the free world are not instantly boycotting the Beijing Olympics.
I understand the grand history of the Olympics. That warring nation-states and disparate tribes put their differences aside for the glory of athletic competition. This is just wonderful, it’s also nicely meaningless. The world has changed since then. For instance, back then, some of these same competitors killed children when they thought them imperfect and viewed women as property. Now, children are “just so darn precious, it takes a village to raise them right,” and woman aren’t just the equals of men, well, heck, they’re better! Just ask anyone!
China isn’t any better than those glorious misogynist pederasts of yesteryear. The vast yellow horde has been openly killing of its own young (and old for that matter) and the rest of the word should just mind it’s damn business about it. They are brutally oppressive; just ask Tibet, Taiwan, or heck, just watch that good ol’ footage from Tiananmen. Free-speech in China is as realistic as free love in a whorehouse. In every way the cripplingly authoritarian leadership in China stands opposed to everything that the “civilized” nations of the world stand for. We are, however, asked to ignore this… anyone care to ask why?
Because, in the words of The speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, “”I believe a boycott of the Beijing Olympics would unfairly harm our athletes who have worked so hard to prepare for the competition.”
Well, how ‘bout y’all fancy athletes have a seat at the table and have a big ol’ helpin’ of “get the fuck over it”. The minor unfairness you might suffer practicing a sport that no one really gives a crap about anyway is pretty minor compared to the unfairness the Chinese people suffer every day.
Pelosi, supposedly, is a big anti-china leader amongst the lefties, but she’s ok with us participating in the games out of some misguided sense of fairness. Britain has no intentions of boycotting under any circumstances, apparently, likely including open nuclear aggression, because the “games are sacred”. France is going to ‘wait and see” how well China behaves. “Well gosh, killing Tibetans for speaking is pretty bad, but let’s see if they do something really nasty, like make people work 5 whole 8 hour days in a week!”
The scary thing is that out of all the so-called “enlightened” countries who are hiding behind this “Olympic spirit” bullshit, we’re being put in our place by Germany. Germany! The god-damned Nazis are telling us that we aren’t being hard enough on the dictators! To be fair, the Germans (and Poland and The Check republic are also on board) are hiding behind carefully crafted speeches about how politics should play a part in the Olympics, so they’re staying home. But at least they’re saying something!
Times have changed, folks, time for the big boys to stand-up and stay home. Your athletes will get over it, the Olympics will survive, and may even be stronger since a little bit of backbone on your behalf will give them a heck of a lot more meaning.
Walmart is a soul sucking whore.
Mar 24, 2008 Rants
We used to shop at Walmart when Shawn worked as manager for a call center. His hours were from 4 pm until 12:30 am. He was usually in the door at 1am, and while it was super odd hours—it was when we had super, when we watched shows we’d recorded earlier. We had our ‘evenings,’ when most of the world was dead asleep or just getting up to start their day.
When he got his job working at a bank, all of that changed. He had to be up to be able to get to work at 8:30am and home about 6:30pm. It almost goes without saying that these past ten months have been quite an adjustment. Shawn’s doing well, honestly, it’s me that’s still having issues.
I miss a few things about staying up late. That’s the chance to catch a lot of my online friends from all over the world who seem to be able sign on just when I should be going to bed, catching television shows that I might not see during the day, (no, not porn. I AM connected to the internet, after all.) and the sort of quiet that the night brings without the harsh glare of day.
But I don’t miss the shopping at Walmart.
We’ve been shopping during the day at Publix. Sure, it’s a franchise, but it’s presented as a small time grocery store, and I have never had an issue with Publix. The people that work there have often gone above and beyond what I expect in grocery stores—then again, I was used to shopping at Walmart.
Walmart sucks every little iota of happiness out of my very being. From the moment I get out of the car and struggle through the parking lot filled with women yelling at their spouses into cell phones, to fighting to get into the door behind the slow-assed family busy thinking the world’s going to slow down for them—I begin to fill with hate and dread.
We went to Walmart tonight because Sunday is Shawn’s day off and we needed groceries. A mistake that will haunt me for several moons. Gaining entrance into the bloated consumer paradise called Walmart was much as I described it above. As we crossed the threshold from sanity to the realm of insane, the harsh, florescent lights blinding me—I was immediately bombarded by the noise of the checkouts. (All of them full and right by the doors of course.) The Walmart greeter was a young sloe-eyed man that watched us enter with all the enthusiasm I imagine a roach would watch our feet pass by his dark little domain. When I offered him a hesitant smile, all I got in return was a quirk of the brow and a half-smirk that seemed to mock me for, oh, I dunno, being amicable.
We quickly grabbed a cart and went on our way as I was beginning to sense foreboding already. Shawn wandered off toward the deli to get sandwich meats for his lunch this week, and I took the cart to go pick up the rest of the groceries. (Deli’s are notoriously slow where we are, I can usually get our shopping done by the time they’ve cut our meat and cheese.)
As I was wondering about, there were several differences between Walmart and shopping at Publix that stood out for me. All the people in the Walmart store simply looked…deflated. Everywhere I peeked about there was hard beady little eyes and tense, shut tight mouths. A mother fed up with her child tearing a scarf from it’s hands and balling it up angrily into her purse—a gaggle of children running past me, screaming about candy and a very tired, pregnant mother listlessly telling them to stop knowing that they wouldn’t listen to her anyway. In the poultry aisle, a husband and wife spent the entire time arguing over the fact that he said told her he liked thigh meat, and well, she’d obviously over heard incorrectly.
Wheeling my cart down the canned foods to grab some canned mexi-corn to add to my special burrito mix—there was an old man dully standing by himself near the beans. He had watery eyes and thick glasses and for some reason I wanted to place a wife beside him, but she wasn’t there, obviously.
People walked fast and did their best not to meet me eye to eye, while in Publix, I’ve been known to make an offhand comment to Shawn and actually get someone to respond to it—or make a joke and have people laugh. Down these aisles, I feel like if I would I’d just get stared at or mothers would pull their children from me.
The floors were filthy here and there. There was a particularly interesting splatter stain in the coffee aisle when I went to pick up the no-name chocolate creamer for my coffee. It looked like a spill of some sort that, instead of being cleaned up, was left to congeal. And then several customers just kept running over it with feet or cart, with no one caring.
Things on shelves looked as if they had exploded or a pack of rabid humans had gone by to fuck everything up and leave in that cartoon ball-of-dust-and-arms-and-legs fashion. Everyone I encountered wearing the obvious blue vest or shirt looked weary, heavy-lidded and simply devoid of any human pleasantry what-so-ever.
And I remembered that this is pretty much how it’s always been. That it hadn’t changed.
It made Publix shine in comparison. There’s a manager that works at Public that knows Shawn by name. We went in one day for a few pieces of papaya. What we were confronted with was the whole thing, and it was pretty damn large; we would have wasted it. Just as we were going to put it down one of the girls that was working produce must have overhead us, because she offered to take the whole papaya and cut a few slices of it for us. We were so impressed, really, that we wrote up something positive for her and gave it to the manager.
He’s never forgotten Shawn’s name since then.
The aisles are always spotless, the floor has never been messy, there’s never a messy shelf or exploded produce that looked like a riot for carrots had come and gone. When Shawn goes in to pick up things without me, they ask him where I am. When we go together, the service is always awesome, even the people shopping there seem brighter, more colorful and certainly far more pleasant.
Don’t get me wrong. As middle to low class as we are, we love Walmart for offering us cheap, we really do. We know they’re selling their soul to the devil to do it, and we’re grateful to be able to go to stores like it to get nice things at affordable prices, but god damn, the environment in which they’re doing it in makes me want to forgo the chance at cheap just to save my sanity.
I think I’d rather stick to shopping at Publix and pay that extra cent or two on my toothpaste than brave the horde at Walmart anymore than once or twice a year or during extreme emergencies from now on.
The Voting Dilemma or Which Nut Do I Vote For?
Mar 10, 2008 Rants
I’m a conservative.
Now, before you go throwing bricks and knives and midgets at me let me say that I’m a staunch (maybe rabid) atheist, I’m pro-choice, pro-drug legalization and crazy opposed to any sort of government censorship, of the internet or *anything*. I’m conservative in the original sense of the term: I believe that the job of the government is to stay the hell out of the way and do as few things as possible.
But I’m also not isolationist or unrealistic. This is a global community and the largest democracy in the world has a job to do in the world as a whole. That includes toppling foreign dictators and shutting down or killing terrorist groups that threaten the world peace. Islam may be the religion of peace but it’s followers are some mighty violent and repressive folks. Not that other religions, specifically Christianity, aren’t equally repressive and have been mighty violent… but I haven’t seen a lot of Baptists flying planes into towers lately. Attack the premise for the war, those pesky WMDs, all you want, there’s room for argument and discussion on any topic, but to deny that militant Islam is a world threat is just plain ignorant.
So, then, the question becomes… who the hell do I vote for in the coming election? As of late the decision has been really tough to make. No matter how much I look at it, I still find that there’s no one person I can support easily (though there are a slew I would quickly vote against) Let’s take a quick look at my options as they currently stand.
Democrats: The violently anti-war stance of the democrats makes me fear they’ll leave us poorly defended and let other more violent entities run unchecked. Do I think that democrats will simply turn the keys of the country over to the next bully on the block? Of course not. Democrats, to me have four fatal flaws that have consistently set me against them in most elections
1. The Nanny State:
The same things that make me pro-choice and pro-drugs and anti-censorship make me opposed to this nanny state mentality. I don’t want or need anyone to tell me what to do *or* look out for me and take care of me (except for the wife!). The left condemns any form of right-wing faith based initiatives on the grounds they are forcing their religion on others. This is a valid concern. However, replacing those religions organizations with federal ones that do the exact same thing (ie tell them how to live, what to eat and what to do) is the 6-of-one-half-dozen-of-the-other bit. In addition, the left practices it’s own severe form of speech censorship, in the form of hate speech legislation. The constitution provides protections for people saying that blacks should vote as much as it does for those saying they shouldn’t. To label one “hate” and make it an Orwellian thought crime is exactly what we don’t want the Christian republicans doing to our internet.
2. The more “Fringe” the better.
No one better than I understands that the government should reflect the will of the majority *with respect* to the minority, however this has somehow become twisted by the left into a strange values system that assigns a belief more weight when fewer people practice it. You know, people that only wear clothes made out of baby gecko skin are probably pretty damn rare, but that doesn’t make them special, it makes them freaks. The left seems so concerned with making sure that these special interest groups get the attention they want that they are willing to trample the will of the majority. The reason people that cut that tongues in half are look on by the majority as freaks is because they are *freaks*. It’s not a misunderstanding and nor do we need sensitivity training. Should they have the right to? Absolutely and without question. Should an employer be able to say “Hey, your resume looks great but you cut yourself and had horns attached to your head. You’re too unbalanced to work here?” You’re dang skippy.
3. Down with whitey/Rose colored glasses
This one really gets me… and not just because I’m whitey. With the exception of the predominant democratic view on straight white society, the left seems to see the rest of the world as a happy place! If it weren’t for us white devils, well, there’d never be any unhappiness. Slavery? Never existed until whitey. Climate changes on the earth? Not until the honky built a fact’ry. Murders and looting in New Orleans? Crazy crackers shouldn’t have made the bad hurricane. Nowhere does the left want to see the realities behind these issues, and a slew of others, unless there is a way to make a white man the cause. And the flip side is that we never blame those responsible. Who was responsible for the animal-like behavior in New Orleans after Katrina? The people that acted like animals, that’s who. Who was engaged in wide spread slavery before “white folk” were even organized into reliable city-states? The Middle East and Africa; not a lot of white folk there.
4. Anti-Business/Pro-gubbment
For some reason democrats have decided to fear the even materialistic goals of business more than anything ever in the history of man. In the same breath they’re all about the state having more power. I know precisely what a business is after: my money. Period. Big Daddy Gov? He wants power. People, little people like you and I, get into business to do what we want and make money for ourselves on our own terms. We don’t want to share our money with some middle manager that just passes down messages from on high. Every business owner on this earth has said “I just don’t want to work under someone else. If I do the work for it, I should get the money for it.” Dictators don’t start businesses, they work regular jobs (like, say, paper-hanger) until one day they decide to run for, say the Reichstag. It’s the run for office that set him on his way to dictatorship. Just think how things would have been better had the ol’ boy decided to use his energy open his own paper hanging shop. The only thing a business can take from you is your money, the government can take your rights, your money, your property and your life.
By in large these issues are the staunchly held beliefs of most major democratic players. So that’s why I keep finding myself being a conservative. Both Obama and Hillary fall with the larger leftist movement on each of these issues. Each of them would increase the size of government, continue the “victim” mentality, and continue to lay the bill for all of their pet projects on the business community as “punishment for success.” Neither one of these primary contenders varies enough from one another that they are even marginally different, other than Hillary’s storied past. Obama is one hell of a speaker and he brings something that a lot of the other candidates do to the party: a real sense of hope and change. However, this could all be window dressing, based on his history in Illinois.
Democrats, in other words, are pretty dreary looking for me. Not that this should come as a surprise. As I said, I’m a conservative. However, I’m also a free-thinker and an atheist. Conservatism has been hijacked by religious wackos and no candidate can make the party cut unless he appeases these people.
While this may be a single flaw, compared to the many issues I have listed for the democrats and the left above, this is, for me a monstrously huge problem. I can forgive and ignore a man’s privately held beliefs if he keeps them to himself. Quietly believing in whatever you want is a right I gladly and happily support. However, trying to teach the children on this country that in any imagined universe evolution and intelligent design are on the same playing field is not just idiotic, but down right abusive. The problem is that the right is so beholden to these psychotic mythologists that they actually had a fucking Baptist minister run and do quite well in the early primaries.
That any group of people can truly think that carefully thought out and researched scientific theories with scads of evidence behind them is “pretty much the same” as a whimsical fantasy dreamed up by animal-sacrificing men 5,000 years ago is so insane that I’m actually finding it difficult to find words that accurately express my anger. And a great many of the political leaders in the Republican Party would gladly state that intelligent design should be offered in any classroom.
Oh, some might run the old party line that this is a state right (think McCain), and on most issues I’d agree, but we don’t have different mathematics being taught, and there’s no reason to teach different science. These things are facts and you can’t just pretend their not just because you don’t know what “theory” means. Let’s also acknowledge while some might say that this is a state issue, ask them what they would want taught in their state, if they could have it their way and you’d get a pretty consistent… and retarded… answer.
This is a huge issue for me, and I find myself willing to entertain more leftist alternatives if my choices are between spend-a-holics democrats who want everyone to be special or crazed bible thumping republicans who think we should learn about the scientific “theory” of imaginary friends. Think Huckabee here. This guy s a great candidate: he lowers taxes, he is pro military and business, he seems like a regular guy and he hates big government… oh and he believes in this bullshit so much he used to indoctrinate people with it for a living.
So, who the hell do I vote for?
On the left we have Hillary or Obama. Leftist and each with other flaws like Hillary’s apparent inability to do business legally and Obama’s lack of experience. Father left we have Kucinich and Nader, lunatics on the fringe of reality, much less society.
On the mainstream right we have McCain and Huckabee (and those like him). McCain is 4 million years old and about as hopeful as a cold glass of prune juice. Huckabee is a FUCKING EX-PREACHER!!!!!!111!!!one one. Ahem. Ron Paul seems to think it’s 1805. Frighteningly enough there are people to the right of Huckabee. Strangely enough it’s not permissible to jail them or hunt them.
Help? Does anyone know of anyone sane running?
Tags: 2008, conservative, democrats, huckabee, kucinich, liberal, mccain, nader, paul, politics, president, republicans, vote
