Oh, my goodness, do I love the Dinette Set! On a more serious note, VetGrl on the Daily Kos posted some wise words for the rest of us:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/17/235241/580
Shut up & listen. Maybe you'll learn something' 
Wed May 17, 2006 at 08:52:41 PM PDT
When I was 12 or so, I got interested in watching football. Naturally, I had questions about what was going on. I'd ask my dad, and he'd say, "Shut up and listen. Maybe you'll learn something."
Not the nicest way to talk to your kid, but it was effective. I learned what was going on in the games in short order and to this day (on the very rare occasion that I watch any football) I can still call the penalty and tell you who recovered the fumble before the ref does.
What's the point? It's below the fold.
The "shut up and listen; maybe you'll learn something" advice stayed with me after the games were over and after I abandoned football.
And I've tried very, very hard to apply it to politics. I am, after all, a blue soul surrounded by red voters in the confused state of Ohio.
I cringe when I read things or hear people accusing Bush voters of being stupid or unthinking or sheep-like. I know some of these voters, and I'm related to some of them. They're not stupid, unthinking or sheep-like. They're just deeply, recklessly ill-informed (for which I blame the media, but that's the subject of many a diary on Kos and serious efforts by Free Press, Media Matters and others).
So a few years back I realized that I would get nowhere if, when talking to these folks, I insisted that Bush was a liar or joked about what a moron he was. Instead, I decided to shut up and listen to see what I could learn. Once I started listening, I could discern the issues that really mattered to some people. I saw the absolute truth that ordinary folks are voting against their interests because, when the subject isn't politics, people have a lot to say about health care, retirement, education, and a whole lot of other issues.
From there I can open a dialog with people by sending news articles or opinion pieces I run across that touch on these issues, or by bringing them into random conversations. For example, in 2004 I actually converted a Bush vote to one for Kerry and the way I opened the door to the dialog was a discussion in Congress, led by Orrin Hatch, advocating remote destruction of computers for illegal downloading of music. I knew such a plan would be offensive to this person and it served as a springboard for more dialog. [...]
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Excellent! She is right of course, which is why I am never going to convert anyone. On some fundamental, I don't like people (as a whole) though I like the
individuals that I meet and get to know. That is why I limit my political work to mundane, non people oriented tasks such as going door to door to deliver flyers, making phone calls "to the troops" or speaking from scripts, etc.
But her point: you don't convert anyone by insulting them.
That is why my blog isn't ever going to be helpful as far as changing anyone's mind; it is merely a way for me to blow off steam and to collect cool articles.
And speaking of cool articles, here are some that I found interesting:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060522/blades(my words in
italics)
Yes, I know, I know. For some, a "family friendly" workplace means that they get to use their workplace as day care and get to get paid for looking after their kid instead of working. I don't like that. And I know, all too often father's roles are demeaned or overlooked; I don't like that either. Nevertheless, the following article is well worth reading; I've reproduced a couple of paragraphs of it.Let's face it: today's workplace is set up for the needs of years gone by. How about having family values in the sense that we help set up society which encourages the building up of strong families?The Motherhood Manifesto
by JOAN BLADES & KRISTIN ROWE-FINKBEINER
[...]
On a hot, humid August day, at an interview for a legal secretary position in a one-story brick building, Kiki sat down in a hard wooden chair to face a middle-aged attorney ensconced behind a mahogany desk. His framed diplomas lined the walls, and legal books filled the shelves behind him. Kiki remembers the attorney clearly, even his height of 5'10" and the color of his light brown hair. The interaction was significant enough to remain seared in her mind a decade later. "The first question the attorney asked me when I came in for the interview was, Are you married? The second was, Do you have children?"
It was the eleventh job interview in which she'd been asked the very same questions. After answering eleven times that she wasn't married, and that she was the mother of two, Kiki began to understand why her job search was taking so long.
She decided to address the issue head-on this time. "I asked him how those questions were relevant to the job, and he said my hourly wage would be determined by my marital and motherhood status." What's that? "He said, If you don't have a husband and have children, then I pay less per hour because I have to pay benefits for the entire family." The attorney noted that a married woman's husband usually had health insurance to cover the kids, and since Kiki didn't have a husband, he "didn't want to get stuck with the bill for my children's health coverage."
The attorney insisted that this blatant discrimination was perfectly legal--and he was right. Pennsylvania, like scores of states, does not have employment laws that protect mothers.
Recent Cornell University research by Shelley Correll confirms what many American women are finding: Mothers are 44 percent less likely to be hired than nonmothers who have the same résumé, experience and qualifications; and mothers are offered significantly lower starting pay. Study participants offered nonmothers an average of $11,000 more than equally qualified mothers for the same high-salaried job. Correll's groundbreaking research adds to the long line of studies that explore the roots of this maternal wage gap. "We expected to find that moms were going to be discriminated against, but I was surprised by the magnitude of the gap," explains Correll. "I expected small numbers, but we found huge numbers. Another thing was that fathers were actually advantaged, and we didn't expect fathers to be offered more money or to be rated higher." But that's what happened. [....]
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From the New Republic, an article by Peter Beinart entitled "Nice Ass".
This article describes some of the things that drive me crazy about my fellow liberals:1) we are open minded to the point of letting our brains fall out and 2) we often worry way too much abou the popularity of our ideas rather than worring about the quality of our ideas.http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060522&s=trb052206In the last year or so, I've spent a lot of time with my fellow liberals. I've gone to retreats, conferences, seminars, working lunches, and brainstorming sessions. And, while it is always dangerous to play anthropologist with your own tribe, I've come to a couple of conclusions. For starters, we're too nice. Not too nice to conservatives--too nice to one another. The first thing that often strikes me when I arrive at these conclaves is how many others have not. Name tags lie on tables, seats remain unfilled. And the discussion begins. Over time, stragglers wander in, but, before too long, others wander out. Someone gets a cell phone call, checks the number, and heads for the exit. Someone else fishes a BlackBerry from his suitcase and begins to tap. The condition of American liberalism is grave, we all agree, but evidently not grave enough to put our cell phones on mute.
Then there are the ramblers. Most conference-attending liberals, I can happily report, are articulate, thoughtful, and succinct. But faced with the minority who are not, we crumble. In the middle of a lengthy, off-point, barely comprehensible soliloquy, a speaker stops and declares, "I'm not really sure this is relevant" or "maybe this doesn't make any sense." But, even after this cry for help, the chairman never steps in. Instead, the monologue continues, as more BlackBerries emerge from suitcases.
This, of course, is exactly what drives people crazy about liberals. Faced with irresponsible, destructive behavior--from public housing tenants who deal drugs, public school teachers who can't teach, dictators who flaunt the international system, or fellow liberals who won't shut up--we look the other way. After all, who are we to judge? Doesn't everyone have the right to their opinion?
[....]
But, if liberals must eradicate self-indulgent niceness, they must also confront an even bigger scourge. Let's call him nascar Man. Nascar Man hovers over every discussion I've ever attended. You don't always notice him at first, but, sooner or later, someone invites him into the room, and he proceeds to suck out all the air. Nascar Man is the guy liberals need to win, but usually don't. He loves guns, pickup trucks, chewing tobacco, and church on Sunday. He thinks liberals are high-taxing, culturally libertine, quasi-pacifist wimps. And, once liberals have conjured him up, they no longer say what they really believe--even to one another.
The problem starts with the failure to draw a basic distinction: between what liberals believe and what Democrats should say to get elected. Inevitably, in my experience, the two are conflated, and, inevitably, the latter tramples the former. Should liberals invest more power in the United Nations? Should they spend large new sums on the poor? Should they support gay marriage? The propositions are not refuted; they are rarely even raised, because no one wants to incite nascar Man's wrath. Nascar Man inhibits intellectual inquiry. He's the bully everyone wants to appease.
[...]
Expelling nascar Man is not synonymous with moving liberalism to the left. To the contrary, by making certain liberal orthodoxies politically taboo, nascar Man insulates them from intellectual challenge. The assumption that court-ordered gay marriage is politically suicidal, for instance, prevents liberals from debating whether court-ordered gay marriage is actually a good idea. The assumption that Americans consider the United Nations ineffectual prevents liberals from deciding whether we think it is. When New Democrats invoke nascar Man to crush more radical ideas, they confirm the left's suspicion that centrist liberalism is a vacant, opportunistic creed--committed to nothing but the accumulation of political power. At a gathering of liberals, the easiest thing to say is that some piece of liberal dogma is too high-minded and forward-looking for the benighted American people to accept. The hardest thing to say is that some piece of liberal dogma is wrong.
Of course, once liberals have held a nascar Man-free discussion about what they believe, Democratic politicos may still decide that some of it won't work in a political campaign. That's OK; Democrats don't have to be martyrs. But at least liberals will have established a benchmark against which to mark their progress. Conservatives have enjoyed an advantage in recent years not because their ideas are particularly popular, but because they have clearly understood what they are fighting for. Once liberals silence nascar Man and all the other blabbermouths who sabotage their efforts at intellectual reconstruction, they will as well.
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And speaking of the New Republic, they are outraged that we (the United States) are not committing military force to end the slaughter in Dafur.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060515&s=editorial051506
Never again? What nonsense. Again and again is more like it. In Darfur, we are witnessing a genocide again, and again we are witnessing ourselves witnessing it and doing nothing to stop it. Even people who wish to know about the problem do not wish to know about the solution. They prefer the raising of consciousnesses to the raising of troops. Just as Rwanda made a bleak mockery of the lessons of Bosnia, Darfur is making a bleak mockery of the lessons of Rwanda. Some lessons, it seems, are gladly and regularly unlearned. Except, of course, by the perpetrators of this evil, who learn the only really enduring lessons about genocide in our time: that the Western response to it is late in coming, or is not coming at all.
[...]
This elementary characteristic of genocide--the requirement that the only acceptable response is an immediate and uncompromising response or else we, too, will be complicit in the crime--should have been obvious after the inhumane ditherings, the wrenchingly slow awakenings to conscience, of the '90s; but the discussion of the Darfur genocide in recent years shows that this is not at all obvious. To be sure, there is no silence about Darfur. Quite the contrary. The lamentations about Darfur are everywhere now. There is eloquence, there is protest. Unlikely coalitions are being formed. Movie stars are refusing to be muzzled, and they are standing up and being counted. Even officials and politicians feel that they must have something pained and wrathful to say. These latecomers include the president of the United States.
All of this is to the good, of course. In a democratic and media-maddened society, this right-thinking din is one of the conditions of political action, as domestic pressures are increasingly significant factors in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. But it makes no sense--and, in this instance, it is a sophisticated form of indecency--to care about a problem without caring about its solution. During the Bosnia crisis, there were many people who cared about the ethnic cleansing and systematic rape of the Bosnian Muslims, but they insisted that it was a European problem with a European solution. They were half right: It was indeed a European problem, classically so. But it was perfectly plain to every honest observer of the genocide that there would be no European solution, and that the insistence upon such a solution amounted to a tender indifference to the problem.
The Darfur variety of the Bosnia hypocrisy is now upon us. We are told that this genocide must be stopped, now, now, never again, all it takes for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, not on our watch, fight the power, we shall overcome--but stopped by us? Of course not. This is an African problem with an African solution. The African solution comes in two versions. There is the view that Darfur will be rescued from the genocide by the successful resolution of the negotiations taking place in Abuja--or, more precisely, that the people who are perpetrating the evil are the ones to whom we must look for the end of its perpetration. (At the rally on the Mall in Washington last week, Russell Simmons jammed excitedly that the Khartoum government had just accepted a draft of a peace accord. Def, indeed.) This version of the African solution does not even acknowledge the requirement of military force to halt the evil. And there is the version of the African solution that looks to the troops of the African Union to do the job. Nancy Pelosi is especially enamored of this remedy. She has boldly proclaimed that AU troops must be "given more mobility" and "freed from the restriction that limits their effectiveness," all in the name of stopping the genocide. It would be nice, wouldn't it? But, so far, the forces of the African Union have had no significant impact on the emergency. To ask them to do the job is to admit that you do not really need the job done.
Then there is the other alibi for Western inaction, the distinguished one: the belief that salvation will come from blue helmets.
[...]
I have to admit that the reaction from The New Republic astonishes me.
What about the phrase "There is no oil there" do they not understand?
Tell-a-friend!
