X-Tra Rant

And Happy Holidays, Christmahaunakwanzika, and Festivus. And Merry Christmas.

An excellent excellent article by Wil Wheaton at Salon.com. I’m sure many of us have had this experience, but it really meshes with what I’ve experienced with my dad (although, admittedly and thankfully, no screaming match disagreements.)

The thing is, though, I know better than to bring up politics with my dad. Ever since he started listening to talk radio for hours out of the day, he’s slowly lost his ability to objectively look at the facts and draw his own conclusions. If Rush, Hannity, Dennis Prager or O’Reilly say it, my dad believes it as surely as he believes anything.
…
I don’t just tune out O’Reilly and the rest of the Republican screaming heads. No, I don’t just tune them out: I hate them. I hate them with the same passion and the same fury with which my dad exploded at me, because before those people got rich exploiting Karl Rove’s (er, excuse me, I mean George Bush’s) black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us fantasy world, my parents and I could discuss issues and amicably agree to disagree with each other.

But not anymore. I thought Tookie Williams was probably guilty and deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison. I wasn’t defending him; I was just voicing my opposition to the death penalty. My dad acted as if I loaded the gun for Tookie and helped him aim it at my sister. We weren’t able to have a respectful discussion about the death penalty, because my dad wouldn’t allow it. Bill O’Reilly must be so proud of the world he’s helped to create.

Now here is the terrifying thing: My dad is a really smart guy. He’s so smart, in fact, he should see right through it when these right-wing noise-machine guys throw out facts in favor of emotional arguments to manipulate their audience. He should know when Rush is full of shit the same way I know when Michael Moore is full of shit.

I once had the death penalty debate with my parents. They were both shocked and even bit upset that I am against the death penalty. They hit me with the “What if your sister was raped and killed…” emotional appeal (a sure sign of using GOP Emotional Appeal Arguments and not rational arguments). Of course I’d be pissed and want revenge. But a) That’s why we have a legal system and b) what if it was me that was wrongly accused of a crime, and wrongly put to death? (luckily I’m white and middle class, so the chances of that happening are slim. Another reason I’m against the death penalty - it’s unfair application aimed at the poor and minorities.)

But that’s just specifics. This article gets the overall feel of helplessness when you see a parent, as Wheaton puts it “abdicate rational thinking.” And how despite the disagreements you still love them dearly.

via Wil’s blog.

Wil does somewhat of a retraction. And my linking to that was never meant to associate my parents (especially my father) with a total Talk Radio Repeating Wingnut. Just to highlight that feeling where you see a parent or parents turning against their best interests and occaisionally buying into the talking points that are categorically false. My mind always goes back to the time, right before the war started, where both parents seemed near-furious at me for being agaisnt the war and used reasons like “ties to 9/11″ and “harboring terrorists” and “has WMDs” that have been proven more and more false as the war has gone along (that I argued was false even then). That feeling of helplessness of someone you love and care about dismissing your opinions because they have bought into false emotional appeals that come from the right wing and trickle on down into the everyday media with little opposition.

I’m out of here in mere minutes, so throught Id’ throw up some of the less serious things I’ve run across the past few days.

Apparently bees can be trained to recognize specific human faces. Great, just what I wanted to know. Now that beee I swat away from my head might just recognize me later. (I’m scared to death of bees and wasps)

So did the rovers find evidence of lots of water on mars, or not? Looks like it is going to be an interesting scientific debate until this is hashed out (if ever).

Re: Editorial cartoons. What Liz says.

WordPress 2.0 is coming and it sounds like it’s goign to be pretty sweet. I hope Dreamhost makes a Quick Install of it available. I could use that for a future Top Secret Idea that I’m working on.

Heh. Lisa Simpson vs. Conservative Columnists. Lisa Simpson, Fatality!

Re: Bad dating advice. What CJ says.

Matt got a new car, and even though it looks like a milk truck, it looks pretty sweet. iPod integration sounds very swell.

Go Fug Yourself is such a guilty pleasure website.

Steven Levitt was unimpressed with Deal or No Deal from an economic study perspective. I didn’t watch it because the prospect of a bald Howie Mandell frightens me.

Okay well I’m off. Happy Holidays!

Good to know the Veep has his priorities straight. The Vice-Presidential iPod is vital to national security! Think Progress » Executive iPod privileges:

Heh, if you’ve never seen this before it’s quite funny. John Titor - Time Traveler. John Titor’s 2036 sounds like an uber-libertarian’s wet dream, and the events leading up to it seem to come straight out of the mind of a libertarian power-of-government scaremonger. Quite entertaining, especially since we only have 10 days left in 2005 - the year the next US Civil War starts! (it’s sad some people get suckered in by crap like this and think it’s real)

A must-read

Look. We have a President here who is making a claim of unlimited power, for the duration of a war that may never end. Oh, he says it’s limited by the country’s laws, but they’ve got a crack legal team that reliably interprets the laws to say that the President gets to do whatever he wants. It amounts to the same thing.

I am not exaggerating. I am really and truly not.

September 11 started the war. When will it end? Maybe never. Where is the battlefield? The entire world, including the United States. Who is an enemy combatant? Anyone the President says is an enemy combatant, including a U.S. citizen–no need for a charge, no need for a trial, no need for access to a lawyer. What if they’re found not to be an enemy combatant? We can keep them in prison anyway, and we don’t have to tell their families they’re alive or their lawyers that they were cleared. What can you do to an enemy combatant? Anything you want. Detain him forever, for the rest of his life, because this is a war like any other and we have always been able to detain POWs for the duration of the war. But you don’t need to follow the Geneva Conventions, because this is a war like no other in our history. And oh yes–if the President decides that we need to torture a prisoner for the war effort, it’s unconstitutional for Congress to stop him. They took that position in an official memo, and they have not backed down from it. They have said it was “unnecessary” but they have never backed down from it.

They are not only entitled to do these things to people; they are entitled to do them in secret. When Congress asks for information about them, they can just ignore it. And they are entitled to actively deceive the public about all this.

That’s the power they claim.

What we have here is a President and Administration claiming that the executive office holds unlimited power during a time of war - a war which we have been told by this Administration may last for decades and power which includes invading the civil liberties of American citizens. This Administration thinks they have the right to usurp the Constitution in the name of a war that can’t even be defined.

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety” - Benjamin Franklin

via Atrios

Ohhhhhhhh this ought to be fun! Looks like Uber-lobbyist extraordinaire Jack Abramoff is about to cut a deal and sing like a canary. Somewhere, Tom DeLay just shit himself.

Dick “Dick” Cheney broke a tie in the Senate to pass massive budget cuts including cuts to student loans, Medicare and Medicaid. But hey, at least we can afford those additional tax cuts for the rich and this expensive lie-based war that was supposed to be done in six-weeks and followed by flowing oil and parades for Bush through Baghdad!

The Indy Star did a profile on/interview with maverick Republican City/County Councilman Scott Keller, who was instrumental in helping pass Prop 622 and the police consolidation . I really like this guy and would gladly vote for him if I lived in his district. This is the type of politician that I like - one willing to follow his conscience and do what’s right, party politics be damned.

And to Councilman Jim Bradford, who sent an email to Keller and felllow Republican councilman Lance Langford (who also voted for 622) telling them to get out of the GOP: Keep it up. If you want to make the GOP the party of exclusion, the Official Party of the Bigoted Heterosexual White Male, go for it. It will make people realize that the big tent party, the party that looks out for everyone, is the Democratic Party and you’ll sink your party in Marion County even further.

Link via CJ.

Key Cinemas will return to showing art films

Ron Keedy is getting back into the business he’s loved and known so long — art-house films.

Key Cinemas Beech Grove, 4404 S. Keystone Ave., will abandon its short-lived existence as a second-run outlet for discount ticket family films — which was prompted by Landmark Theatre’s move into the area Dec. 9 with a seven-screen art cinema in the Fashion Mall.
…
With a new booking agent who will help him do business in the kind of films he prefers to show, Keedy will mark his return to independent fare Friday with “Touch the Sound,” a documentary about Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who is deaf.
“I can coexist with Landmark,” Keedy said. “As one woman told me, ‘Landmark can’t play everything!’

This is great news for Indianapolis. While I’m sure Landmark will be very swanky and nice and cozy in the northside mall it calls home, there’s somethign to be said for keeping alive a local business owner who’s been doing this for years and taking more risks than a national chain might be willing to make.