"Where is the outrage?"

[Jed Dilligan]

It's the right-wing meme that will not die. Someone points out the injustice of rightwing/corporate doings or the dangerous absurdity of the religious right.

"But where is the outrage," asks David Brooks or someone similar, "when... ?" Fill in the blank with actions or words of either Muslims or left-leaning anti-American leaders in this hemisphere.

Well, my answer is simply: Fuck you. You can't tell me what to be outraged about. You don't control my emotions. You can't make me feel something I don't. Maybe if I grew up in Venezuela or Iran I'd feel it. But these people are strangers to me, while you, my friend, live right next door.

When you poison my food I taste it. When you pollute my air I cough. When you steal my tax money for your inane adventures overseas, I go hungry. When I see your god's name on the money I use, I feel sick. When you enforce medieval laws against marriage, family planning, and certain psychoactive substances, I get REALLY pissed off.

You and I, we're two rocks grinding against each other. We can't live in the same world. One of us will stop existing or the other will. The fight between me and the American right will not end until one of us is gone.

Islamofascists? Never met one. Communists? Never seen one. You're the enemy and nothing you can say or do will convince me otherwise.

[niallmac]

1. OK. I'm kicking this. I 'm printing and magneting this on the fridge.

This is kick ass good old in your face liberal moxie that our Democratic
representatives need to roll up and smoke until the light suddenly dawns.

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. Well said. I've experienced varying degrees of outrage every day

since the theft of the 2000 election. Outrage at the idiocy, gullibility, ignorance, or fear of so many in our country that elevate the piece of garbage onto a pedastel. Outrage at the naked lies and distortions of so-called media members such as Brooks. I am not sure I can do outrage anymore...it is doing me in, wearing me down. What has transpired since 2000 is simply indescribable in the disgust it creates.

[badgerpup]

6. Tell it!

I'm looking forward to a time when life doesn't need to be full of outrage anymore.

[Jed Dilligan]

7. I feel that...

Those rocks grinding together, my metaphor, that's also how my stomach feels. Some days I think I've had enough, but then I wake up at 3 in the morning, pissed off and ready to fight the fight.

Just never let them define you... never let them tell you what your "principles" are!

[Jim Warren]

3. You my enemy...........

“I ain't draft dodging. I ain't burning no flag. I ain't running to Canada. I'm staying right here. You want to send me to jail? Fine, you go right ahead. I've been in jail for 400 years. I could be there for 4 or 5 more, but I ain't going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people. If I want to die, I'll die right here, right now, fightin' you, if I want to die. You my enemy, not no Chinese, no Vietcong, no Japanese. You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. Want me to go somewhere and fight for you? You won't even stand up for me right here in America, for my rights and my religious beliefs. You won't even stand up for my right here at home.”

Mohammed Ali

[alittlelark]

5. Damn, that is a beautiful expression of OUTRAGE

Ali - :toast:

[Jed Dilligan]

8. He said it most succinctly when...

he said, "No Vietcong ever called me a n*!"

And no Islamist and no socialist ever treated me like one.

[alittlelark]

4. I've got your outrage right here.

I'm so overloaded....


:mad: :mad: :mad:


It is kept on the back burner so that I can use my energy to SAVE THIS COUNTRY.

[Phredicles]

9. Recommended!

If I could, I'd receommend it twice for the Ali quote.

[The Traveler]

10. You hit the target

dead center bullseye. Thanks for the clarity.

[galloglas]

11. Where can I join up??

I'd like a little piece of David Brooks myself... like his fuckin' head on a pike!

[undergroundpanther]

12. The right is the authoritarian

narcissist,sociopath personality party,the party of moral degenerates and thugs.And I hate them all.

[Jed Dilligan]

13. And another thing:

You know who's the harder rock? I am. And you know how I know that?

BECAUSE NOBODY PAYS ME TO THINK WHAT I THINK, ASSHOLE!

[Jim Warren]

14. Fookin' A

if I were left on a deserted island with that mofo, there ain't no doubt who gets the coconuts

[Totallybushed]

15. I see your point,

and of course one cannot let the RW dictate to us how we should feel about an issue, any more than they let us dictate to them.

But I would like to think that I hold the beliefs that I do not because they will benefit me, but because they are best for the world. Also, I can't hold genocidal thoughts towards even the RW.

[Jed Dilligan]

16. Whatever you know, beyond your own experience

comes through media.

I believe in the bogeymen the right put up like I believe in Barney the dinosaur.

I haven't seen enough of the world and never will, to know what's best for it.

If you have a magic crystal ball, I'd like to see it someday...

Until then, I'll fight. It's ideas not people that need obliterating. Not that I would mourn the people...

[Totallybushed]

17. I respectfully disagree.

Whatever you know, beyond your own experience comes through media.

We have several thousand years of written history. In fact, is that not the purpose of writing? So that we may learn beyond what we have been able personally to experience? Surely it is one of them, perhap the most important. We have learning and dispcipline and minds that should be able to think logically.

We take what we have learned, however it was learned, and develop a view of the world. And we filter everything through that world view. That's why the RW and the LW can look at the same set of facts and come to diametically opposite conclusions about what they mean.

How do you tell if your world view is the right one? I wish I knew. However, I suspect that if you are consistently wrong about what will happen when you take certain actions, or adopt certain policies, then you might want to re-examine your concepts and assumptions.

This is hard to do. If it wasn't, there probably wouldn't be such a hughe L-R divide.

So why do I go off on this tangent? Because I think whatever comes through the media needs to be examined in conjuction with what we have finally determined to be correct. If there is a contradiction, either the media is wrong, or we are wrong. This means, not that we automatically reject what the media says because our world-view can't be wrong, nor do we reject our world-view because the media doesn't lie. It means that we withhold judgment, investigate further, and after a period of time, come to a conclusion.

Naturally, no one is going to do this every time. The whole purpose of a world-view is to make the world comprehensible. If there is only an occassional jarring incident, then your world view is probably pretty sound. If you constantly feel that you've wandered into the Twilight Zone, then you probably need to at least examine your assumptions.

That's the only crystal ball that I have, and I'm happy to share. In the mean time, keep the faith, and keep up the good fight

[Jed Dilligan]

18. Writing's not a medium?

news to me.

[Totallybushed]

19. I'm talking history,

not current events. Philosophy, scence, law, literature, even theology.

You've got to trust someone, and you totally avoided answering my argument.

Good luck to you in life.

[Jed Dilligan]

20. I didn't know you were making an argument,

because I don't know what I'm supposed to be convinced of.

I may believe some things I read or hear people say or see on TV, etc., but none of them outrank my own senses as an authority.

As far as the right and left looking at the same facts and seeing them differently, I don't believe that; I think we see different bodies of "fact" provided by various media. Very few people on either side rely on their actual experience, mostly because their lives are stylistic exercises far removed from the actual business of survival. People who see with their own eyes mostly stay out of politics. On the day that changes the right and the phony left that coddles the right will be destroyed completely, not voted out or put in a minority, but banished eternally from the halls of power, like Confederates, Nazis, Bolsheviks, Manchus, or Jacobins. Another dead or dying gang of obsolete authoritarians.

I don't believe in luck, either, but thanks for the goodwill.

[Totallybushed]

27. I truly believe that

you are mistaken. As far as the right and left looking at the same facts and seeing them differently, I don't believe that; I think we see different bodies of "fact" provided by various media. The hypotheses of different world-views explains so very much that cannot be explained any other way that I have found. And it keeps us from falling into tactical error.

For instance, the vast majority of posters on DU think that conservatives are evil, stupid, ignorant or some combination of the above. But this just isn't so. No doubt there are many that are, but the same can be said for us. After all, the left has Stalin, Mao, & Pol Pot. And, of course, I'm speaking of the average guy, not their leaders.

So, how does this help us tactically? Well, without understanding where they are coming from, we cannot address their concerns in such a way as to convince them of the rightness of our positions. But more importantly, we abandon the middle, whose world-view we should also strive to understand.

Let me give you an example. Many of the posters I have read, and some columnists, too, wonder why conservatives keep voting against their interests as liberals see it. Well, the answer is that the conservatives don't see their interests in the same way. And frankly, neither do the liberals. If right-to-choose, freedom-to-marry, immigration, etc., are unimportant next to the economic issues that we think conservatives should vote on, why don't we just give them up? Because the issues ARE important, to us and to them.

We will never change their minds unless we change their world-view. This is very hard, although not impossible, but it is easier to try to win the votes of the moderates, in whose world-view a hard position on a certain issue may not have been formed.


Finally, I think you are wrong about them disappearing. As base, I think, the world consists of those who want to go their own way with minimum interaction with society or contribution to society, and those who want to improve society. Politics is the history of interactions between those two groups. It will not change.

[Truthiness Inspector]

21. "These people are strangers"

You lost me there, referring to Venezuelans and Iranians. We are all humans, all on this planet together. Iranians are not strangers to me, some of my best friends are from Iran.

So, I'll take the same liberty you afford yourself and say: You can't tell me what to be outraged about.

I happen to give a shit about ALL people, not just people I know personally or who live where I live.

[Jed Dilligan]

22. I have good friends from Iran too,

but none of them are radical Islamists. By "these people" I meant the foreign bugaboos we see in the media (Castro, Chavez, Ahmedinejad, Hussein) and not foreigners in general.

[Truthiness Inspector]

23. If you really have friends from Iran

I doubt you would have written about them as "strangers" and displayed no concern for their conditions.

My friends aren't "Islamofascists" either. If anything, your OP made you out to be dispassionate about the struggles people who are "strangers" encounter in their lives, and that is why I took offense.

[Jed Dilligan]

24. Well, be offended then, I think you're just misreading

I suspect you are out looking to be offended.

Once again, strangers, not all foreigners, just the ones I've been told are my enemy.

EOM

[Truthiness Inspector]

25. Not exactly

I was looking to be outraged, per your title, and ended up offended by your post instead.

[Jed Dilligan]

26. May I ask you

your views on the War on Terror, War on Drugs, abortion, gay marriage, and separation of church and state?

I'd like to have something, rather than nothing, to argue about.

[Leopolds Ghost]

29. What do those have to do with the economic warfare Repubs are waging?

Social liberals have their priorities. They are interested primarily in preserving their own personal rights and liberties. Then there are those folks who care a great deal about their fellow man and recognize the futility of cultural warfare.

[Jed Dilligan]

30. I'd be in the former category

Though I really have to wonder how exactly you don't see the issues I brought up as economic.

[Name removed]

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