Archive for the '"Sin makes you stupid" - Mark Shea' Category

On Michael Savage’s comments

Kasia July 23rd, 2008

Courtesy of Kit Brookside, here is a story about Michael Savage’s comments about autism and autistic kids.

I suggest watching the video on there - one of the anchors, Jim Watkins, has an autistic son. You can read his follow-ups on his work blog here, here and here.

I especially suggest listening to the video on the second Watkins link. Savage does emphasize that he thinks he was taken out of context, and that the “99%” he was talking about was 99% of diagnosed autism cases, not of “truly autistic” kids. However, Savage repeatedly refuses to respond to questions posed to him by the interviewer, Peter Thorne, many of which are eminently reasonable, and eventually hangs up on the interview.

It seems to me, from my very limited exposure to him, that Savage is not the kind of guy you can have a fruitful debate with. By “fruitful” I don’t mean that either one of you actually changes your mind, incidentally; I mean that you are able to actually talk TO the other person rather than AT him, and that there is some reasonable effort on both sides to at least attempt to engage the other person’s points.

Is autism overdiagnosed? I don’t know. But the thing is, Savage repeatedly refuses to give anything more than what is, essentially, anecdotal and circumstantial evidence to support his claim that it is. (Amusingly, he refuses to say what makes him an authority about this because the interviewer is not an authority on it. So if you are interviewed by a journalist, he or she has to have an advanced degree in the subject you’re speaking about? That’s a new one…)

There is a corollary to freedom of speech, you know. There’s a corollary to just about every freedom we have. Rights don’t exist in a vacuum.

The corollary here is that you can say what you want (within the limits of the law, which are pretty broad), but you are responsible for what you say; and sometimes what you say can have unintended consequences, for which you may be responsible. Sort of like how, in the Laura Ingalls Wilder book The Long Winter, Pa Ingalls points out to a greedy shopkeeper that, despite his legal right to do so, his charging as much as he can get away with for wheat that the townspeople need to keep from starving is going to end up driving him out of business come spring, when people once again have a choice of where to shop. It’s not a threat. It’s a statement of how the market works.

Kit suggests that we consider not supporting his sponsors. This blogger (Greg Reich) actually listened to Savage’s show with the explicit intention of collecting a list of sponsors, which he lists on his blog, and stated his intention to continue doing so indefinitely.

However, I don’t actually patronize any of the sponsors, except occasionally Home Depot (and I prefer Lowe’s anyway), so my boycotting won’t do much good. And I somehow don’t see him getting canned, not with ten million listeners. Again, the market at work.

If you’re of a mind to, by all means boycott his sponsors, and be sure to send them a letter explaining that you are doing so and why. Since I already don’t patronize them, I will do the only things I can do to a guy like Savage:

I won’t listen to him. And I’ll keep doing my little bit to try to keep my debates civil and reasoned.

** UPDATE ** Please note the comment in the combox by Sarah from Home Depot Communications. Home Depot disputes any advertising with or sponsorship of Michael Savage.

Whoo - THAT was a spine-building exercise!

Kasia July 10th, 2008

I’ve posted before about the Lord sending me “spine-building exercises”. Well, I just had another one.

I’ve had a bunch of missed calls that my caller ID identifies as “Levin for…” and I had idly wondered which Levin was trying to get money from me - Carl (Senator) or Sander (Representative). I live in Sander’s district, but I’ve written to Carl before; and with political lists being the tetchy things they are, anything is possible. I have gotten mail from the Republican Jewish Coalition before, even though I am neither Republican nor Jewish. So you never know.

Well, the phone just rang and it was “Levin for” again. I decided to pick up to satisfy my curiosity, Google searches having already failed to resolve the issue.

It was neither Levin. It was the Obama campaign.

Now, I have a high school friend who is working the Obama campaign. He gets sent around the country “trying to win hearts and minds”, as he puts it. If anyone might persuade me to soften my stance on Obama, it would be him - he’s smart, articulate, knew me pretty well in high school, and (I think) is smart enough and open-minded enough to actually hear my critiques and concerns and respond to them. I don’t think even he’d be able to persuade me, but if anyone could, it would be him.

Instead of my suave, smart high school friend, I had a clearly nervous kid who sounded like he might have been early in college, at the oldest, stumbling over his basic talking points.

I was courteous, and I was honest. I told him, upon being asked, that I was NOT an Obama supporter; that I was not registered with a party; that one of my biggest objections to Obama is his extreme position on abortion, which seemed to surprise him. So I asked if he was aware that Obama had opposed the Infants Born Alive Protection Act. He suggested that what Obama maybe thought was that the federal government had no business stepping in; that the decision should be left to the woman.

I said “I think if you look at the record, you’ll find that you’re mistaken about Obama’s thoughts on the federal government stepping in; because he’s already said that his first priority as President would be to sign into law the Freedom of Choice Act, which essentially strips states of any ability to regulate abortion at all. Now, if you were to say that the Feds shouldn’t be involved in abortion but it should be left to the states, I think you’d have an argument to make - and a Constitutional one at that -” here he interjected and said, “Yeah, that’s what Roe says” - and I said “- and that’s fine, but apparently Obama agrees with some lobbyists who don’t think Roe goes far enough.” His response to that?

“Well, but if you think of the alternative, McCain, he’s more likely to appoint justices…” and something about “women’s rights”.
At that point I almost laughed out loud. I told him that I was pro-life, and that he and I had very different ideas of what women’s rights were and whether abortion was good for women.
He was obviously keen to get off the phone, but dutifully stuck to his script and thanked me for my time, said he hoped I’d still consider Obama and “sticking with the Democrats” - I told him I’d love to consider “sticking with the Democrats” if they’d have nominated a less extreme candidate. He said something about a “lot of other issues”, and we ended the conversation.

I did tell him that I respected his enthusiasm and what he was trying to do. And I concluded the conversation with “God bless you.”  (I’m sure his receiver was already halfway to the cradle by then.)

He’s right. There are a lot of other issues. And those matter.

But everything I’ve seen about Obama so far, even putting life issues aside for the moment, makes me mistrust him. I’m sure he’s a genial, likable guy in his personal life, but he’s just shown himself to be too “any way the wind blows” for me. I guess the only thing I can say for him is that, in spite of some of the things she’s said that have damaged his campaign thus far, he hasn’t thrown his wife under the bus, so to speak. And I’ll trust that that’s because he loves her, not because he knows that throwing her under the bus would poll badly.

With respect to the kid on the phone, I wish I’d had the presence of mind to tell him some of the other things that bother me about Obama - though frankly, maybe from a tactical standpoint it’s better that I not have. You know, so he can’t be prepared to answer them from the next person?  :-p  OK, that was mean - I’m sorry, Kid From the Obama Campaign.

Since the kid wasn’t terribly confident, I don’t think I really gained a whole vertebra…but it was definitely good practice for me to speak up for life.

Now this is just stupid

Kasia July 8th, 2008

Stupid. And plain wrong.

So the G8 summit is going on, and while these poor overworked world leaders are discussing critical food shortages and rising food prices, this is what they’re eating.

“Questionable public relations move” doesn’t even begin to say it. That must be that British gift for understatement shining through.

And Gordon Brown is lecturing Britons not to waste food. That’s rich.

I admit I’ve wasted plenty of food in my life. It’s a terrible habit, and I’m working on curbing it.

That said, admonishments from world leaders would carry a lot more weight if there were even a shred of evidence that they’re making similar efforts. Kind of like environmental causes: the sincere efforts of people like Mr. and Mrs. DJ to use less toxic cleaners and otherwise try to live green ring louder than a hundred rich yahoos who go around shouting at me to hang out my washing and eat less meat, as they get back into their Land Rover or Hummer or three tour buses (which they’ve left idling) to go on to their next stop. (Include in that latter category Al Gore, who wants me to purchase carbon offsets which are conveniently sold by a company he owns.)

Hey G8! Have you ever heard of “teleconferencing”? You’d knock the carbon footprint of the summit down to about a size 0.5 with that.

At the very least, don’t shovel eight courses of gourmet food into your mouths and then try to talk about food shortages. It’s rude to talk with your mouth full.

It may not be illegal, but it’s still disgusting.

Kasia November 19th, 2007

I can’t summarize this right now. I should be working, but I saw this and it made me so mad I had to post.

What the **** kind of mother creates a fake MySpace account to fake out her daughter’s friend or former friend, poses as a teenage boy who’s interested in said friend or former friend, manipulates the girl (who by the way has emotional problems) into trusting “him”, then starts posting nasty messages about the friend or former friend, which culminate in the girl committing suicide?!

I don’t know what transpired between Megan Meier (the girl who committed suicide) and her former friend. I don’t know precisely what the other girl’s mother said to Megan posing as Josh, or vice versa.

But I do know that this kind of **** is NOT how you teach your child to act. And this unnamed mother involved her daughter in the hoax.

I don’t care whether it’s legal. I care that this is an absolutely inexcusable way for someone who’s supposed to be an adult to behave. If the daughter had cooked it up and carried it out, it would still be cruel, but I could say “Well, she IS only 14.” There’s a reason we have diminished culpability for things you do before certain ages. It’s because society says that you’re young enough, have had little enough opportunity to develop your judgment, that we shouldn’t hit you with the full force of the law.

But if this woman has a 14-year-old daughter, even assuming she was a verrrry young mother, she’s almost certainly at least 30. Odds are she’s pushing 40. She is quite old enough to know better.

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