- Abandoned Toaster
- Jun 4, 2008
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The Columbus Dispatch is pretty typical in the editorial department. I see Cal Thomas every now and then, and most letters published seem to follow the news formula of "give both sides equal time". Most of the "crazy" ones are relatively tame talking-point pieces, although I have seen straight-up chain e-mails sent in and printed.
This was in today's:
quote:
I respectfully disagree with the Sunday Forum column “Photo-ID law is as shameful as a poll tax” by Thomas Suddes. Suddes thinks the polls that show that Ohioans are concerned about purported voter fraud are a result of “the oceans of cash spent nationally by Republicans on low-fact, sky-is-falling vote-fraud propaganda.”
I think Ohioans base their view on reality. The Plain Dealer article “Checking ID’s not required for credit” in the same day’s Dispatch mentioned a couple stunned to discover that thieves had cleaned out their checking account to the tune of $4,612.
The thieves were able to rack up fraudulent charges without being required to show a photo ID. Why? Because merchants can ask for a photo ID, but they can’t require it.
Suddes must be assuming that the people who commit crimes such as credit-card fraud and steal $14 billion per year without having to show a photo ID are mutually exclusive from people who vote.
In other words, everyone who votes is honest. Now that would be propaganda.
HERB KIRCHNER
"Voter fraud is real because people who commit credit card fraud and other crimes vote and therefore they're defrauding the voting booth."
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Jun 29, 2011 13:34
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- Abandoned Toaster
- Jun 4, 2008
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Ugh, I saw this one in the paper before I went on a family trip for the Fourth of July weekend and it made me want to slap the guy who wrote it.
David Harsanyi: Too many people? Not a problem posted:
For years, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups have warned us that too many babies will destroy the Earth.
"We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet's life-forms - an estimated 8,760 species die off per year - because, simply put," explained environmentalist Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, "there are too many people." (Well, not exactly that simple when one considers that millions of species had disappeared long before humans selfishly began drinking from plastic bottles.)
In one of his recent works of speculative fiction, The New York Times' Thomas Friedman asked: "How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we'd crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?" Dunno. Maybe we value reality? Perhaps we believe in the ability of humans to adapt and to innovate. Perhaps we've learned that Malthusian Chicken Littles slinging stories about the impending end of water or oil or natural resources are proved wrong so often that we ignore them.
Though, admittedly, it's difficult to ignore the charismatic pseudoscience of Al Gore. "One of the things that we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principal ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women," the former vice president explained at the Games for Change Festival. "You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children (they) have, the spacing of the children."
No doubt capitalism appears terribly unstable to the autocratically inclined Gore, but nonetheless, in this country "fertility management" is not only already ubiquitously obtainable by girls and women but also obtainable by boys and men - and for free at any Planned Parenthood and at many schools. There is also post-fertility management, or 1.3 million yearly abortions - because no one should be punished with a baby.
Then again, perhaps educating and empowering girls should be the job of parents. After all, Gore has blessed Earth with four of his own offspring. Does he believe the world would be better off without two of them? If not, why does he assume that an "empowered and educated" woman would reach the conclusion that having fewer children is a more logical and moral choice? (Many, including Bryan Caplan, author of the superb new book Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think, would probably make a strong counterargument.)
Gore hasn't embraced any nefarious brand of population control. But President Barack Obama's "science czar," John Holdren, co-authored (with Paul Ehrlich of Population Bomb notoriety) a book in the 1970s that toyed with the idea of compulsory sterilization and coerced abortions to "de-develop the United States." (Boy, the tea party is so radical!) Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, openly advocated for population control to weed out undesirables. You'll remember that in a New York Times interview, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she "thought that at the time Roe (vs. Wade) was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of."
Whatever did she mean?
If "too many" people are killing 8,760 species every year, isn't it an imperative to do something? What is holding us back? [Gee I dunno, people like you?] If unrealized human life is only going to sponge off the Earth and decimate our natural resources, don't we have a duty to limit population growth?
Forget that the populations of Brazil and India and a number of other nations continue to grow and life continues to improve. Forget that our own standard of living steadily increases while our population steadily grows. Forget the never-ending ingenuity and development of mankind - especially anything that has to do with fossil fuels.
For Gore, people are parasites, millions of little environmental disasters. And when a man embraces debunked 19th-century notions rather than empirical evidence, well, surely another Nobel Prize is in order.
There are so many things with this article I just... argh. His argument basically boils down to: "Animals died for millions of years without humans, we still haven't run out of fossil fuels even though they said we would, population control is a liberal conspiracy to get rid of undesirables, and population is still growing and we're not seeing any strain on resources." Not to mention he ignores things like The Green Revolution, even with which nearly a billion people in the world go hungry and even more are in crippling poverty, the destruction of entire lakes and ecosystems, and thinks that the science and theories of the affect of population upon the planet hasn't progressed beyond Thomas Malthus' essay. gently caress you, Harsayni.
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Jul 6, 2011 17:18
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- Abandoned Toaster
- Jun 4, 2008
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quote:
Many undergraduates, their fawn-like eyes wide with astonishment, are wondering: Why didn’t the dean of students prevent the election from disrupting the serenity to which my school has taught me that I am entitled?
Campuses create “safe spaces” where students can shelter from discombobulating thoughts and receive spiritual balm for the trauma of microaggressions. Yet the presidential election came without trigger warnings?
The morning after the election, normal people rose — some elated, some despondent — and went off to actual work. But at Yale, that incubator of late-adolescent infants, a professor responded to “heartfelt notes” from students “in shock” by making that day’s exam optional.
Academia should consider how it contributed to, and reflects Americans’ judgments pertinent to, Donald Trump’s election. The compound of childishness and condescension radiating from campuses is a constant reminder to normal Americans of the decay of protected classes — in this case, tenured faculty and cosseted students.
I like to laugh at overly-sensitive teens too but this guy seems to have a real hate-boner for those elitist wussy youth of today.
http://nypost.com/2016/11/20/college-kids-are-proving-trumps-point/
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Nov 21, 2016 08:10
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Jun 29, 2011 13:34
