Thoughts on free speech and un-ringing bells

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Wednesday September 01, 2010 · 7:02 PM PDT

2010/09/01 · 19:02

If you've ever seen my writing here, it's mostly meta-

I don't do policy; I don't do a lot of research. These are opinion pieces from 1/310,000,000 slice of the American Pie, and what I see, feel, and ponder. They are as legitimate or illegitimate as anyone elses.

At the very least, cogito ergo sum. You have all the right to disagree with me; but there is a latin phrase that has stood in the corner like a disgruntled referee during some of my pie fights and flame threads in my four years here.

Ad absurdum

This diary is an off the cuff rant about what it means to disagree with someone on a blog.

snafubar

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Wednesday August 18, 2010 · 10:36 PM PDT

2010/08/18 · 22:36

This was inspired by a recent diary by DixieDemocrat

It is what it is. I probably won't reply to anything tonight. It's too much for me. Everywhere I turn - even here - there's just abject anger flying in all directions. The whole country is wound up like those toy planes we used to have with the foot-long rubber bands - and I don't know about you, but I had a lot of those planes in my childhood, and not one of them ever survived with the rubber band intact.

Ought to be a sign.

Either way, here's a rant, and I'm letting go.

The story of the AK-47 in my last diary is not melodrama. It's two doors away, in the hands of a guy who likes to drink a lot.

I'm going back to being an antisocial recluse and hope you all sort this out while we still have time.

Someday I may have the courage to publish my real name - I'm almost curious to see how long it would take them to come and get me given the current level of hyperbole and demogoguery that makes so many rich and so many others rabid.

Dear RedState, and to those in the red states:

snafubar

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Tuesday July 13, 2010 · 2:18 PM PDT

2010/07/13 · 14:18

Warning: this is a snafubar diary. It rambles. Don't whine, you've been advised, and you embarass yourself by wasting time to tell us all how much time you've wasted. It's just one man's point of view. Please move on if you're that busy.

Here's what I've learned about Jobs:

If an oil worker loses their job, it's unthinkable, but if an oil rig blowout ruins the livelihood of a fisherman, it's a price we have to pay.

If a coal miner loses their life, it's an acceptable loss - because we need them to have a job - "good paying" jobs...

...but the very same people who say that are the ones who were ready and willing to cut loose all of GM and Chrysler and every parts supplier, dealership, mechanic and dry cleaner who had a job because of them.

Is it as easy for you to see as it is for me that this country has lost the plot?

A "job" is clearly not a "job", and the way we attack, insult, condemn and now threaten each other over what a "job" means and who should have one seems to be the pin in the grenade that our country is collectively willing to pull on itself.

snafubar

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Friday June 11, 2010 · 12:13 PM PDT

2010/06/11 · 12:13

I keep hearing Glenn Beck and a long list of other clowns who have no real understanding of freedom or liberty keep telling us that they alone know what our "founding fathers" were thinking.

And I'm about ready to make myself famous and run up on a stage to cram a sock down their throats and grab the microphone so I can ask just one question to Glenn "we're all gonna die" Beck, Rush "I'm not fat, I'm just portrayed that way" Limp-paw, Bill "I didn't fuck her but I gave her 20 million out of the goodness of my heart just shut up" O'Really, and that other monkey Hannity.

If you clowns keep insiting that you've got personal ways to commune with the dead and distill from our founders all the thoughts they DID NOT write down in the Constitution - can I just ask you a simple question?

Why didn't they just write it down?

(rant blathers on below the fold)

snafubar

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Saturday May 22, 2010 · 12:46 PM PDT

2010/05/22 · 12:46

That is a line from Jurassic Park, where scientist Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) is expressing his concern about the wisdom of reincarnating dinosaurs into the (then) 20th Century.

I'm going to tell a short narrative about why I have utterly no respect for anyone shameless enough to defend Rand Paul; and to a degree, for those of you who know my antagonism (I say self-defense) towards people of religion, about my watershed moment when I realized I was dealing with people far more intellectually bankrupt than I could ever fail and myself become.

Their duplicity is not masked by their chicanery in language.

Follow me, please...

snafubar

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Sunday April 25, 2010 · 8:48 AM PDT

2010/04/25 · 08:48

Not long after 9/11, while driving from my home in Indiana to stay with my dad in PA for an extended time before he died, I lost my wallet somewhere on Interstate 70. I was scheduled to start a new job in PA while I still had a residence in Indiana. So in order to pass the I-9 form (required to prove I was born in the USA) I needed "at least two forms of ID from list A, or as an alternative one from list B and one from list C"...

Birth Certificate? Well, mother says father has it, father says mother has it...both divorced for 20 years. Good luck there. But let me read off a list of forms of ID that I did have which did NOT satisfy the Indiana requirements to get a replacement:

(below the fold)

snafubar

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Friday April 16, 2010 · 10:41 AM PDT

2010/04/16 · 10:41

UPDATED BELOW WITH SUMMARY for those of you in a hurry.

Definitions of internecine on the Web:

• of conflict within a group or organization; "an internecine feud among proxy holders"

• characterized by bloodshed and carnage for both sides; "internecine war"

• Mutually destructive; most often applied to warfare; Characterized by struggle within a group, usually applied to an ethnic or familial relationship

More below the fold

Disclaimer: this is not a 140 character tweet. I don't do short and simple. Take any pots of the stove, take the dog out for a walk before you start, set your alarm clock if you need to be somewhere.

I'm not demanding anything, I'm only asking you to think. Since humans are supposedly the ones with the big brains, whether "G"od wanted that way or we just got really, really, lucky - we ought to try to use them for something noble more often.

This is but one man's opinion. It has no other value. I wrote it, I will not defend it in the comments as it should stand on it's own.

Thank you.

snafubar

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Friday April 09, 2010 · 8:37 AM PDT

2010/04/09 · 08:37

I am not here to slight, diminish, or otherwise disparage MB's new role as playground monitor. I've been one who throws some pretty loaded grenades myself, although few people seem to notice that I'm solely a reactionary flamethrower. I don't have the courage to throw a first punch, but I'll destroy myself to earn the chance to throw the last one.

Some of you know that I got myself excommunicated from Street Prophets for their declaration of civility - so I've seen how "rules" work when they are in place elsewhere.

But what I want to ask you is what any of this does about our larger problem - what people write is a measure of what they think and feel. The reason freedom of expression/speech/religion gets so much of our attention is precisely because we believe in the human spirit, or soul, or whatever word you choose to describe the footprints we leave in the Earth during our walk on it.

So a blog became uncivil, and now rules are in place to filter out the unmanageable. I agree a positive step in regaining intellectual and social decorum has been achieved.

But how many of you ponder where the loose cannons go when they are sent packing?

snafubar

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Monday March 29, 2010 · 8:35 AM PDT

2010/03/29 · 08:35

I've written my share of diaries on the subject, starting back with one that referenced "Kristallnacht" that I was lambasted for. (all linked at the end of the body of this diary)

But my theory all along is this:

1.) Lunatic loners or small groups will increase their acts of lunacy to the point that government at all levels will be forced to react. Those reacting in fear will be mostly from the Right.

2.) Those on the Right will insist that any attempt by law enforcement at ANY level (local, state, or federal) will be de facto evidence of the police state that they've been bleating about all along...

3.) Which they ignore was only made neccessary by their actions...

4.) Which will nevertheless cause them to insist is proof that the government is out to crush dissent and destroy freedom and take away their liberty - cause them to go full-scale and start a conflagration of revolt...

...a revolt in response to a problem they created

Read this comment to one of today's headlines below:

Please

snafubar

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Friday March 26, 2010 · 2:03 PM PDT

2010/03/26 · 14:03

The Republican Party just proved, with their absurdist resistance to HCR for all Americans (keep in mind what we have now does NOT have a Public Option) is that they don't are about LIFE.

They care about their own life, and they care about making everyone else scared that their own life is at risk -- from anybody but Republicans.

What does this have to do with abortion? Simple - think about it:

The same people who breathlessly cite the 40+ Million babies "killed" since Roe v Wade and call it "infanticide", have just fought tooth and nail (and brick through window) to argue that once you're born you're on your own.

Republicans fight to make sure you emerge from the womb - then if you die it's you're own fucking fault - then suddenly they're OK with death.

I'd like to meet this Jesus character they're so sure loves them (and not me), and get a ruling on this one from him. So far he's unavailable for comment.

Republicans don't care about life. They care about what they want to care about and blame everything else on anybody else, and that's just too damn easy.

Snafubar out. I'm too pissed to risk saying anything else.

DON'T KILL BABIES. But it's only fitting to let the adults die...

snafubar

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Tuesday March 23, 2010 · 1:52 PM PDT

2010/03/23 · 13:52

...as long as we know they deserve it.

I'm grim. Again - we had to go through the Stupak bullshit all about abortion. Although Stupak got off his grandstand once everyone knows who he is now (another guy who's hair is creepily similar to Ralph Reed, Tom Delay, Rod Blogojovich, and Rick Perry), and yet the bill was about the 30 million who have already left the womb, and how to keep them out of the grave.

Why is "life" such a fungible term?

Here's where I get in trouble with the Christians.

I'll dig the rest of my hole in the body of the diary.

snafubar

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Monday March 22, 2010 · 4:24 PM PDT

2010/03/22 · 16:24

I have often joked that there should be a spacecraft from the intergalactic emmisary of Truth and Reason arriving any day now...to remind us that the rest of the universe is laughing at the United States of America for still using the word "United" in our name.

Another conversation with my neighbor last night - only the third time I can remember he came to my house just to say hello (he's not antisocial, it's just I ususally see him first because of the geography of the neighborhood, the mailboxes are in front of his house and I'm at a dead end).

And after having his colonectomy, after enduring two years of chemo, they think he's clean.

And he looked at me as seriously as if I were the Virgin Mother Mary herself and said,

"Joe, I'm scared to death of this bill. I don't think I'd be alive"

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Thoughts on free speech and un-ringing bells

My mail to Red State(s): Shut up or shoot me - but it can't be neither

What the current discourse in America has taught me

Mr. Beck, why didn't they just write it down?

"...so worried about whether or not they could, they didn't think about whether or not they should"

There will never be any documentation that will satisfy the AZ law. Ever.

Internecine

On the new rules: why I think the whole saga misses a bigger picture

I don't want to be correct. I really don't

Why I support abortion rights with a clean conscience

DON'T KILL BABIES. But it's only fitting to let the adults die...

United We Stand. (Rest In Peace)