You know, you can give a man a fish and teach him how to fish.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
The fact that the worst insult to a man usually involves some kind of feminization clearly indicates that a great deal of guys view women as somehow inferior.
As someone who works a cushy office job …
… and has worked several minimum wage jobs as second jobs, and worked a few minimum wage jobs before/while I was going to school, shit is hard work.
Burger flipping, washing dishes, washing cars, working in the kitchen at a restaurant, waiting tables, working a cash register at a gas station - I done all of these and got paid much less for doing MUCH harder work than I am doing these days.
I mean harder work in that these are physically (and often mentally) grueling jobs. I often came home feeling like I had my ass kicked and stressed as fuck because I wanted to choke a manager or punch the shit out of a customer.
Everyone wants to treat low wage workers like they’re shit or something less than human, they’ll argue with you over taxes on a purchase and say shit like, “Well, that’s why you work at a gas station” or other snide remarks.
Never mind the fact that it is HARD work. I get so fucking sick of people who want to act like low wage workers are lazy or only work for minimum wage because they want a government handout.
It’s bullshit. It’s hard work and I’m sure there are very few people who work low way jobs because they want to.
Seriously, I think there is a lot of ‘rich worship’ going on with working class folks who vote republican.
It’s like they admire the rich the same way some people admire certain musical artists or athletes.
They will always say that the rich deserve to be taxed less, that they ‘worked hard for that money’. They make excuses for CEOs and shareholders of large corporations who treat their workers like shit or pay their workers like shit.
They admire the rich in ways that seem to make it like they can do no wrong in their eyes - unless said rich person expresses something they perceive as ‘liberal’ or supports gay rights or anything else the talking heads tells them is ‘wrong’ - but exploiting workers? Keeping profits concentrated at the top - no problem - and they’ll come up with excuse after excuse (which is usually a parroting of what some right wing talking head said) as to why it’s okay.
Maybe they think someday they will be just as rich and powerful, maybe they somehow really do think that all rich people got where they are through hard work (which often times they haven’t) maybe they do it out of self loathing, trying to distance themselves from ‘those people’ (the poor) but there certainly seems to be an element of admiration there.
In regards to that last story I posted -
I had an interesting interaction with a co-worker a while back. We had went to lunch together and I can’t remember how we got on the subject of religion, but we did.
He knows I’m a non-believer and he was acting somewhat embarrassed, like he thought that I thought he was stupid or some such and began explaining himself.
He starting talking about how he believes in god but he doesn’t think the world is only 6,000 years old and accepts ‘evolution and science’ as he put it.
I assured him I didn’t think any less of anyone simply for believing in god, and explained that the people who I didn’t like were the ones using their religion to push a political agenda or to be oppressive.
It just really struck me, a few years back, I feel like I probably would have been the one who was on the defensive when it came to discussions about religion.
It seems there has been quite a shift on the attitudes about it in just the past 10 or so years.
The difference between conservative media and the rest of the media.
I’m going to use MSNBC here as an example because of this trope that MSNBC is the “liberal answer to Fox News” - a little disclaimer here, as I’m not a fan of any cable news network. They are all sensational and mostly fluff. I mean, you’ve got to fill a 24/7 news cycle with stuff that will keep people watching and advertisers happy, right?
That said, when MSNBC was busted editing audio or video, they admitted it (go google it for yourself, the links that come up when searching for it all went to conservative websites where they were practically drooling over the fact the MSNBC was busted, and they talk about how Rachel Maddow “gleefully” admitted that MSNBC had used edited video - and I don’t want to link directly to those sites).
The rest of the media will generally issue retractions and admit when they get busted doing something like this.
Fox News? No so much. When they’re called on their bullshit they double down on it. They will try to distort facts or bend things so as to make it look like they are infallible.
The same with their viewers. I haven’t seen anyone trying to claim MSNBC didn’t use edited audio of video in the cases where they have admitted to it.
I’ve found that Fox News viewers seem to like to bring up the fact that “the other side does it too” whenever confronted with Fox’s distortion of reality.
Either that, or they’ll completely deny, no matter how much evidence you show them.
Conservatives get outraged, (OUTRAGED I TELL YOU!!!) over every “scandal” involving anyone who isn’t one of their own, it doesn’t matter if the scandal is real or not.
They will get righteously furious and hammer on it obsessively, making sure it stays in the media until there are sufficient levels of outrage in the rest of the public at large.
Look at how they are STILL hammering on about Benghazi, or how some of them are STILL going on about ACORN, look at how ridiculous the birther nonsense got - hell they impeached a democratic president over a fucking blowjob (and to this day, they maintain it wasn’t about the blowjob - and actually, I’d say it wasn’t about the blowjob - it was about “getting” a democrat who was president and publicly shaming the democratic party).
They don’t obsessively hammer on about it when it’s one of their own, but if a democrat does something - WATCH OUT!!! You’ll hear about it in the press for fucking ever.
Look at every platform the republican party supports.
All of them are about maintaining social status or wealth.
About making sure one group has more rights than another.
Anti-birth-control, anti-abortion - making sure women don’t have the same sexual or career freedom as men.
Anti-gay marriage - making sure that only straight people can marry the person they love.
Anti-workers rights, pro-business, anti-tax - makes sure the rich stay rich and get richer.
Anti-social safety net, anti-socialized medicine - makes sure the poor stays poor, and have less access to medical care than the rich.
Pandering to the religious right - making sure that Christianity maintains social dominance over other religions.
I’m sure there are several more that I haven’t included and will think of later, but all of these policies are made to maintain a social structure, a power structure or what basically amounts to a class system where one group will have more rights than another group - and I’m pretty sure we can all figure out what group I’m talking about.
Ad Hominem
I see the phrase “ad hominem attack” get thrown around a lot on-line, and a lot of people don’t use it correctly.
Someone calling you out for being an asshole isn’t ad hominem.
Being told you are being oppressive isn’t ad hominem.
Someone telling you your opinions are shitty isn’t ad hominem.
Being told that holding a certain opinion makes you an asshole is not ad hominem.
If I say your argument is invalid because you are fucking stupid. That is ad hominem.
If I give you reasons your argument is invalid, and say that you are fucking stupid for arguing from a particular position, that is an insult.
Ad hominem is attacking the person making the argument instead of attacking the argument itself - not saying that someone is being an asshole.
When I was in sex-ed class in middle school, they talked a lot about penises and testicles and erections and ejaculations and semen and even showed pictures of penises.
What they didn’t do was talk about vulvas, labia (majora or minora), or the clitoris.
They didn’t mention orgasms in regards to women, they mostly talked about ovaries, menstruation, pregnancy, the uterus, cervix, and may have thrown the word “vagina” around a few times. They certainly didn’t show any pictures of vaginae.
Looking back, it was like, here’s what a penis looks like! Isn’t that super awesome! Look how it gets hard when the male is aroused. LOOK AT THOSE TESTICLES!!!
Oh, female anatomy? We can’t show that or talk about it except in relation to pregnancy. Someone might get offended.
Fighting against oppression doesn’t make one as bad as the oppressor.
“You’re just as bad”
“You’re a racist for calling out racism”
“Your’re a sexist for talking about sexism”
“You’re just as bad as the people you are angry at because you’re angry”
This is all bullshit oppressors say to marginalize the oppressed.
On working class republicans.
I feel like some people have lived with the comfort of laws that were put in place protect the worker for so long that they forget that these laws are there for a reason, that anything that is for profit will have an incentive to exploit their workers.
It also amazes me that some of the same people who will defend the actions of a corporation by saying that a company’s only obligation is to provide a profit to its shareholders also seem to think that these same companies wouldn’t exploit their workers if these regulations to protect the workers weren’t in place.
While I’m pissing people off, I might as well get this out there too.
I’m not a big fan of the way conservative or republican ideas/bills/laws/whatever are always being described as crazy, insane, or any other allusion to mental illness.
Having suffered from a depressive/anxiety disorder my entire life and having my opinions, statements and concerns dismissed by my ex-wife, ex-girlfriends, co-workers, managers, family members, and “friends” because of the stigma that is associated with any kind of mental health issue has left me with a huge distaste for those terms.
You rarely (if ever) hear the same people who piss and moan about “poor people on food stamps” say anything about the corporate welfare bank shareholders get.
If you press them, they might say something like, “I don’t support any kind of welfare” or “I didn’t support the bank bailouts”, but the fact is they don’t give the same kind of blustery outrage that they give to the poor on government assistance to the shareholders of big banks.
You never hear their talking heads going on about it, you don’t see right wing bloggers going on tirades about it, you don’t see features on Fox News or stories on breitbart.com about it.
The fact that they are more outraged about poor people getting assistance than what amounts to a direct transfer of tax payer money to bank shareholders makes me think it’s really not about the money at all.
I’ve been though 6 presidents in my lifetime …
… and I’ve heard the same complaint of “the media being too easy on them” about each of them from the opposite party.
I don’t think the issue here is conservative or liberal bias, but a bias in general toward the president.
