American Heartland Disease

Welcome friends!

Did you catch the story about the good people of the US Midwestern state of Montana electing some conservative thug named Greg Gianforte to the US Congress?  He was in the news recently for physically attacking a reporter who had asked him a question about the Republican Party health care plan and then lying about it until he found it untenable in the face of testimony from witnesses.  (He was apparently relying on some Fox News reporters to back him up but they opted to tell the truth for once suggesting some elements of the organization may have some latent professionalism and commitment to ideals beyond making President Trump and the Republican Party look good.)  The citizens of Montana are of course free to elect any sort of idiot they like to the US Congress and frankly one doesn’t expect much from a state sparsely populated by the most isolated and provincial of rural folk.  Indeed I was about to let it pass without comment as just one of those things but it did get me thinking about something I found mildly interesting: the tendency of many Americans to romanticize these flyover regions of the country by referring to them as the “heartland” of the country.  The phrase of course is a little play on words involving the notion of a heartland as the geographical center of a nation and the notion of the heartland as the portion of a nation exemplifying its true character.  The problem in this instance is that while the first bit may well be true the latter bit is most emphatically not.  As the results of the recent election in Montana so strikingly illustrate the people of the so-called heartland of the USA today exemplify mostly the effects of a sort of rot or cancer of the American character.  These hicks of the heartland appear to have thrown over our cherished ideals of democracy and free speech in favor of the rather more authoritarian small town virtues of bullying and lying.  I’m afraid it’s time to call it like it really is.  The true intellectual and moral heart of the USA is located not in the geographically central farmlands of the Midwest but in the coastal regions and the large cities where most American and in particular most educated and gainfully employed Americans actually live.

One question that occurred to me is where did this fascination with rural small town life even come from? ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Singapore Conservatives Repudiate Free Speech

Welcome friends!

I read a recent news item on current events in Singapore and it occurred to me I’ve been so preoccupied with the comic stylings of Trumpo the Clown I’ve been neglecting the obnoxious antics of conservatives in other parts of the world.  Let’s take a quick look this week at what some foreign idiots have been up to recently shall we?  The story that caught my eye involved government authorities in Singapore tossing a seventeen year old kid named Amos Yee in jail on the charge of posting online videos and comments critical of Christianity and Islam.  Yes, it seems they determined such criticism might prove more than their feeble minded compatriots can handle.  Technically they found the kid guilty of “wounding religious feelings” and noted by way of explanation his unwelcome brain activity could “generate social unrest.”  Apparently it’s Mr. Yee’s second jail term in as many years.  The government of Singapore just can’t get the kid to shut up.  He was previously booked into Hotel Singapore on the charge of insulting a former ruler of the place.  Don’t you just love and respect countries like that?  I shudder to think what might have happened had he insulted the current ruler.  I’m having a mental image of some martial arts nut whacking his bottom with a great bamboo pole or something like that.  Wait, did that happen to some other kid?  Can’t remember.  But someone was beating someone, that’s for sure.  Anyway, that’s one brave kid, right?  He certainly deserves the respect of liberals and humanists everywhere.

Social conservatives are always trying to pull something like this aren’t they?  Clearly they believe their noxious claptrap can only flourish if no one is allowed to discuss or criticize it and you know I think they might be on to something... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Texas Ain’t So Bad Sometimes

Welcome friends!

Looks like I missed a week there.  Sorry, but life happens.  Anyway, I hate to keep harping on the same things over and over again but since freedom of speech and freedom of conscience are such important concepts for the liberal ethos and the American way of life I feel I really should say something about the relatively recent attempt by Muslim extremists (from a few weeks ago now) to undermine those values and the ensuing funny response in the US media.  I’m talking about that case in Texas where two domestic Islamic terrorists arrived at a cartoonist’s convention (obviously) with bloody murder on their minds only to be promptly bumped off at the front gate by a cop working as a security guard.  

Before I get into my usual quasi-philosophical musings let me just first express my admiration for the aforementioned cop... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Burning Books

Welcome friends!

Did you see the news stories about the recent mayhem in Afghanistan that was ostensibly a reaction to the pastor of some small US Christian church burning a copy of the Quran?  In an article I read on April 5th the toll was twenty-one dead with an additional seventy-three people injured.  Pretty barbaric stuff, but it got me thinking about two themes that I think are important for liberals and secular humanists everywhere: religion and free speech.

Well, actually, I guess it didn’t say that much about religion that we don’t all already know perfectly well...  Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Free Speech Conservative Style

Welcome friends!

I had been planning on writing on a different topic this week but, holy cow, did you catch the news on the recent Supreme Court ruling?  I’m talking about the latest ruling involving that crackpot midwestern Christian religious outfit (well, I suppose more of a clan or cult really – apparently the members are mostly from one family) that I mentioned briefly in a previous posting.  If you recall, their basic philosophy is that God kills US soldiers and sends them to hell because the US does not discriminate sufficiently against gay people.  Yeah.  Anyway, apparently they communicate this message, such as it is, by “traveling the country shouting at grieving families at funerals” and displaying cruel and obnoxious signs such as “Thank God for dead soldiers.”  In the case that came up before the court, they also brought along what one source called their “usual” signs including “You’re going to hell,” “God hates the USA / Thank God for 9-11,” and one that combined the US Marine Corps motto with a slur against gay men.

Well, it seems someone eventually got sufficiently ticked off by these dime a dozen conservative bullies to sue them and that’s the case that finally ended up before the Supreme Court...  Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Conservatives and Free Speech

Welcome friends!

I had a little window into the conservative mindset the other day.  As a lark I looked at the blogger site names “liberal” and “liberalism” and I found to my surprise that there were blogs established under both names but they were both empty (and I’m talking about absolutely no content at all) and inactive since 2002 and 2004 respectively.  Seems Google doesn’t have a policy about releasing and recycling inactive site names so those particular site names are effectively out of circulation permanently.  That seemed a little weird.  Are there really no other liberals out there writing blogs?  Just joking.  No, clearly we have a couple of conservatives out there who are just trying to stifle the conversation as much as they can by taking certain site names out of circulation.  Just to be fair, I checked out the blogger site names “conservative” and “conservatism” and sure enough I found they were active blogs giving the conservative viewpoint.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  It’s not that I imagine there are many people out there looking for blogs to read by manually typing in blogger site names, but I thought it did show a sort of overall mindset that I associate with conservatives, which is that the free exchange of ideas is a horrible idea that can only confuse people and must be prevented whenever possible and by whatever means available.
  
Now that I think about it, I seem to see this type of thing whenever I encounter conservative ideologues in action... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!