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I just heard Rush Limbaugh say political correctness is or is going to kill us all. Wow! My parents would be totally astounded that good manners would be the death of us all. I mean if only I had knew that when my father insisted I use Sir and Ma’am for my elders or face his wrath (something no one wanted to do) I could have stated but Dad I am only trying to preserve America. When my mother insisted certain four letter words were not to be spoken I could have insisted I am a patriot Mom I do not have time for you policing my speech. Or when they told me the N-word was not polite and would either hurt my black friends or anger them I could have said but Mom someone needs to stand up for freedom of speech. Or when I was taught when to use Miss, MS. Or Mister I could have told my women friends to get a grip. Then of course when they told me to treat everyone with respect and let the actions of a person determine how you deal with them not the color of their skin or what clothes they were able to afford I should have reported them to the Committee on Un-American Activities. Or when one of my first dates said I can open the door for myself I should have placed her under citizen’s arrest ( I did not open doors for her and I think I scored more points than about anything else I did). I have to say Rush I have found political correctness valuable to making friends and influencing people. I never found politeness such a dangerous thing and that is what political correctness ultimately is. People say they want to be treated a certain way or have certain titles used when addressing them and you showing them the respect to treat them the way they have asked to be treated. I mean if a feminazi says she prefers to be called a feminist I respect that right. If a turban head asked to be called Sikh I respect that. If someone prefers to not be held under suspicion when they have done nothing to cause suspicion I am okay with that. Where I come from that is called good ole Southern Hospitality. Of course if you spend your day calling the President stupid and acting as though all lslamic extremists are the norm for Muslims I could see you having trouble with political correctness. Having listened to you now for over twenty years I guess political correctness would impede your style of name calling and provoking anyone who disagrees with you. As I remember there is an old saying that used to mean something, If you do not have anything good to say about someone do not say it. The corollary statement to this would be if you cannot say anything that does not offend someone do not say it. You see as you say often on your show, Rush, language matters except when you are talking apparently. Now you say political correctness prevents us from reporting the bad activities of another because we are afraid of the political correctness police. Au contraire (sissy liberals use French phrases like this, if I was someone of your persuasion I would say Fuck that you French speaking sissy) I think if a liberal is afraid of reporting something awry it is because they are afraid they may be thinking like you. Conservatives do not report because as you have taught them they do not trust the government or it is too incompetent to do anything. Which of course they are only following your mantra that you have so diligently repeated to your listeners over the years. Political correctness could be helpful in your marriage for example if someone states but they want to take away a flag that represents my ancestors and a rebellious government now that’s political correctness gone mad. I say fly the flag, just not on property that is held by the government from which it rebelled. Which the last time I checked all states, cities and counties have agreed to follow the constitution of the United States. So flying the flag on their property would be impolite. Just as it would be impolite for me to keep my old girlfriends pictures hanging in my wife’s and my bedroom. I proclaimed to the world that she won the battle for my heart. Those pictures are not on the wall but go in the photo album in the back of the closet. Believe me I am a lot better off not hanging those pictures. See how simple political correctness is. And as a bonus you survive. So in conclusion I declare this National Political Correctness Awareness Week your marriage may depend on it.
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The NRA is the equivalent of our modern Spanish Inquisition. Wayne Lapierre has become the Grand Inquisitor. He insist politicians vote\believe his way or face ostracization or political death. He does this all in the name of the Second Amendment. They forced their beliefs on the rest of us at the cost of our lives for belief in what is to them an infallible document. We have the right to bear arms says the 229 year old document. It says it we must believe it even if some say you are taking it out of context or the document is a bit dated when talking about guns. They currently hold the government and public on the stretcher because they have money and power.
Orlando will be explained away as was Newtown and the regular occurrences of gun violence all over our country. Guns do not kill people, people kill people. As if guns had nothing to do with it. I admit it people in our country are violent. But why do we insist they have a right to probably the best method of perpetuating their violent nature. Because they hunt? With AK47s? or they like to target practice with these guns we feel a need to let them have them even though they are used in mass shootings. Anyone knows on the surface hunting and target practice are hardly enough reason to have access to military guns. It is called stretching folks. But we need guns to protect ourselves from governments gone bad. I know you para military groups and others think your weekend trainings will somehow enable you to protect yourself from the government tanks, drones, missiles, and such but if we are honest I do not remember one standoff between these types and the military or police force in which the government forces came close to losing. After all we have the greatest military in the world. Now some will say if there was a good guy with a gun present it would have been different so let us have our guns. This argument of course has so many ifs, ands, and buts it disqualifies itself quite easily. First you always assume no one there had a gun. Thanks to your persistent work this has become very unlikely. Second you assume a pistol of some sort will be a match for an AK47. It will not be. Thirdly, you assume that you will not be shot before you even have a chance to use your gun. After all whenever I am in a crowded nightclub and dancing and drinking I am ready and alert for some gun action at any time. No you are not. Fourthly, you assume that if you start a shootout with the shooter you will not injure even more people during this free for all. And what happens when the SWAT team arrives and they see several people shooting how are they to determine the good guy, the hesitation to make that determination in these situations can cause death of a SWAT member. Or if they shoot first and ask questions later you the good guy may find yourself dead. There is another segment of the NRA crowd who want to argue the finer points between a semi and automatic gun this is a red herring. To mistake the two does not make your argument wrong and to know the difference does not make your argument right. If one merely pulls the trigger once and continuous bullets fly versus if you have to pull the trigger each time is a non sequiter since both happen too fast to stop someone from shooting without taking a bullet. It certainly has no place in the argument in the amount of rounds that should be in the magazine because that is about how long before they have to switch weapons or reload which can be crucial to escape or capture. So some in the NRA knowing the above arguments are pretty silly propose the solution of requiring everyone to have guns everywhere. You see more guns lead to less deaths. Now there is not one iota of proof to this statement but they believe it and to preserve our second amendment rights they demand we all carry guns. This proposal scares me because if I carry a gun and I grow tire of inane reasoning for what has become an epidemic in our country I may go on a rampage at a gun show or NRA meeting to show how ludicrous they are. So please I so do not need a gun. But besides this if everyone has a gun and shots are fired you might stop a gunman or more likely you would have everyone’s guns drawn shooting at everyone else who has a gun. I am not even mentioning the fact it does not take much brains to conclude that there will be more one-on-one shootings by people who do not know how to settle their road rage, political ire, and other anger issues without violence. Another part of this is that everyone should carry will be a deterrent shows no awareness of the mentally ill. First if fear of death kept a person from shooting they would never try to assassinate a president where there is an overwhelming amount of trained firepower present with Secret Service Agents there. Secondly, I assume the mentality is the same as people who attach bombs to themselves mass shooters go in it okay with death or with a distorted reality that makes them think they will somehow survive the incident. Yes they may choose soft targets (although army bases and recruitment centers do not seem soft) but that is more likely because they are stopped and wanded or searched beforehand. In other words the hard targets are not places that everyone has guns but ones which are vigilant about ensuring no guns make it in in the first place. Try to enter a courthouse it is safe not because everyone has a gun but because you are searched beforehand. Of course gun rights advocates play whack a mole if you address ten of their issues they say Timothy Mcveigh used fertilizer not a gun they do not make laws to prevent use of fertilizer (actually they do) and they keep droning on while more people are killed. It is logical fallacy if you have to always leave your current reason for believing something to try another reason to see if that argument works any better. It is called kettle and moving the goal post fallacies. It is as arguments are addressed you throw all the shit out you can think of hoping something will stick. They are still shit arguments but it has not currently been dismissed. It is odd that when the conservatives address issues such as alcohol, drugs, and sex (esp. gay sex) they say just say no. Why this does not apply to guns I cannot fathom. Guys and Gals just say no to guns. But I hear the whimpering whine now but it is our God-given right through the second amendment. Thus they are the Grand Inquisitors if you do not believe in gun control you must be stretched out on a rack until either you recant your belief in gun laws or you die as a non-patriotic heretic. It took a lot of deaths the turn the tide against the Inquisition before the well-being of the people was found more important than church doctrine and purity. Unfortunately approximately two thousand people were killed, tens of thousands more were force to accept their doctrine at fear of death, hundreds of thousands more were exiled before they came to this conclusion. Surely we are getting close to the number that will put well-being over infallible gun rights. The bottom line is do you love people more than you love guns? Do you love people more than your ideology? Do you love people more than being right? Do you love people more than your hunt or sport? Do you love people more than your social standing or political power? Do you love people enough to be open to a few gun laws? If enough of us do, this modern Inquisition can be put to rest. I love you my gay friends, school children, teachers, fellow movie lovers, soldiers, social workers, and others and I am sorry we as a nation have not loved you enough. Okay I get it already Natural Selection is one of the tools in the kit of Evolution. How could I not? Natural Selection gets the most and best press. You know Natural Selection is how the bad traits of someone are eliminated by an early extinction of their lives thus not giving them time to breed and spread their less than desirable traits. Those with the best traits survive longer and are given the chance to breed like rabbits thus spewing their genes all over the place. So the survival of the fittest are those who can survive to and beyond sex. This is\seems to be everyone’s favorite theory.
But the dirty little secret is that evolution is pushed forward by cooperation faster than natural selection. Ha at last I said it out loud. Now I know it is not as sexy as Natural Selection. But let us face it; we do not even get out of the primordial ooze without cells working together. We do not come into existence without systems coming together (i.e. Digestive, Circulatory, Nervous, etc.). Hell the USA did not work well as thirteen separate colonies under the Articles of Confederation and had to become the United States to prosper. Many hands make the work lighter. Scientists come together and share information to bring cures for diseases, or advancements in technologies. A Social Contract joined in by everyone prevents anarchy. Our great corporations or people join together as a single entity to accomplish a common goal. And the list could go on. Our religious leaders have told us forever that we need one another and that we are responsible for one another. But do we listen? Noooo! You see we like our individualism even if it keeps us as Neanderthals. If you think about it no gun laws we say because we must protect myself and mine, no immigration laws we say must protect our jobs, use of our welfare systems and my children’s futures, no taxes we must protect our money and our welfare, again and again our notions of individualism keep us from joining together or doing something for the common good, but we honestly believe that a dog eat dog world is the best all because of the good press Natural Selection receives. Cooperation is so boring it never gets front page coverage. So in summary, let me say with a philosophy of Natural Selection we get sex and individualism, two things necessary for masturbation. Yet masturbation does not help with breeding and the continuation of our great traits so I highly suggest cooperation become your philosophy in all things. After all it is necessary for the evolutionary progress. Okay here’s the thing I am tired of religious communities who act as though they are too big to fail. If a religious community does not do significant charity work they need to be taxed. Being and upholding an old tradition does not necessarily justify your current existence. Any community that does not give women an equal role in their work is questionable in my opinion. Gee whilikers it’s the twenty first century. Any community who wish to interpret scripture as commandments to persecute another population is not necessary. As an extreme example take Fred Phelps church it would be a boon to society if they would quietly go away and leave the dearly departed and their families alone. There are whole religious denominations that act as though they are God’s gift of morality to us. Take dare I say it Catholicism. I have never been so pissed as I was when not even three months after the whole child Catholic priest molestation cases saw light, a bishop in the name of the Catholic Church teaching inserted themselves in several issues because as the bishop stated they cared about the preservation of the family and especially children. They had the nerve to claim some spiritual high ground. There was no humility. There was no look at the beam in your eye before you judge the speck in your brother’s eyes.
And I swear I heard throughout this revelation of abuses whatever happens we cannot let the Catholic church die it is too big and does too much good in the world. Really while I am not going to say they should die on the grapevine of religion but it should at least be deemed as a possibility. There should be a weighing in of their inherent sexism in their structure, their ongoing birth control stance, their Vatican bank scandals, and other issues should cause pause to ask do we really need the Catholic Church? The attitude of the Catholic Church toward divorce is a bit dated and in cases of domestic abuse downright dangerous. If we did not approach the Catholic Church as if it was too big to fail they would begin to make some of their teachings more loving and accepting. I know I may sound Anti-Catholic but I am a fan of some of the great spiritual people that have come out of the Catholic Church: Mother Theresa, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, St. Francis and many others. But their presence does not necessarily outweigh genocide of Native Americans, homophobia, Spanish Inquisition, opposition to Liberation Theologians and priests, and others too numerous to go into here. A good Catholic pope such as we now have in Francis does not excuse all the abuses former pope’s teachings have engendered. Certainly if we did moral inventory and usefulness study of the Catholic Church beyond their doors some and maybe many churches would be cited as good and some and maybe many would be cited as wanting. It is not only Catholicism but many other denominations in the South supported slavery, segregation, and second- class citizenship of women all concepts that are by and large thought to be wrong today. So I not only think it is good for any society to reflect if any religious community (I would not exclude Jews, Muslims, Hindus and other religions from scrutiny) is necessary from time to time I think it is healthy for the religious communities as well. Who knows just as corporations change marketing firms from time to time maybe God would like that privilege too. That is not to say a religious community has to be batting a thousand but .300 would be nice. Our world is constantly changing but for the most part our denominations stay the same and are losing any connection to the world outside their doors. So I propose if a church's budget, building and volunteers do not use at least fifty-one percent of itself to promoting concrete actions, not theological words, to helping with crime, poverty, environmental problems, civil rights, and other pressing issues the free ride of tax free property and minister’s salary should stop. Of course people have the right to congregate and practice whatever they want but if they are more country club than charity the free ride should stop. Strangely this could save the slowly dying Church by examining who they are and what they should be doing. In the book of Revelation the churches are judged and some fare better than others wouldn’t you want to be sure you are not found wanting. James the brother of Jesus wrote “Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.” All I am asking for is some old time religion. Nothing is too big to fail except maybe God. |
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