With so much going on in the political world lately, its difficult to pick a single topic.
Gun legislation dying in Congress, because "it'll never work". (Uh, hello? Australia anyone?) No, seriously, have our members of Congress looked at what sweeping gun regulations did for Australia's death by gun rates? No links present atm, sorry, I didn't save those, but The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has a good bit of information for it this week.
The sequester, particularly the FAA furloughs, and Congress speeding a bill through to stop those due to the delays in air travel. (Guess they didn't want to be inconvenienced. Bonus for us~)
Mail laced with Ricin sent to the President, a Senator, and a Judge. (Was Anthrax too obvious for you?) I suppose this was only considered political due to the targets since motive is as of yet unknown from what I gathered.
The (somewhat laughable) George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. (In which he can tell you that you're wrong for deciding to not invade Iraq and why his decision was the right one and you're wrong for saying otherwise.)
And finally, the bill to stop warantless email snooping. Interesting fact currently no email is needed at all to be able to go through your email correspondence. Frikkin fantastic. Thanks to this bill though (provided it, you know, passes and they don't amend it all to hell to basically make it useless at protecting whatever privacy we deluded ourselves into thinking we had) that will stop and search warants will be required to be able to take that sneakypeak.
Here's a little gem from the article:
Senator Jeff Sessions said major city chiefs of police, FBI groups, district attorneys and others had expressed grave concerns about the bill. "It seems to me these concerns are very real," he said. "In the real world agents sometime have to do 30, 40, 50 pages [of] documents to get a warrant. It intimidates them and they just don't try. [Some] cases, particularly terrorism cases, may never be followed up on simply because of that burden"
I'm sorry if the agents are too LAZY to do the jobs REQUIRED of them when they wish to go searching through and invading someone's privacy. That sounds more like an issue that their superiors need to address directly with said agents, rather than attempting to compromise the freedoms and rights that we as citizens are told that we have. If someone wants to go through any of my things, they better have a bullet-proof reason for wanting to do so. (How many bids that mentioning ricin and the President set off some flags somewhere? If you think I'm paranoid about thinking that, you clearly haven't been paying attention, now have you?)
I'm amazed sometimes that we can get anything done with our elected officials being as split as they are... when it, you know, gets done.
Friday, April 26, 2013
Thursday, April 11, 2013
'Tis barely a scratch!
Ok, so a few issues with Ever Changing Civility's post, and I'll try to keep this gentle and draw as little blood as possible. Do note, that I enjoy playing something of a Devli's Advocate, and while I may not agree with the side I happen to be advocating for, its fun to do so. Though the parallels in this writing were clear, the humor behind it clearly missed its mark. You may not be in his target audience. (Side note: nothing is offlimits to comedians.)
To start with, I don't think I'd call an article by a political comedian an editorial, atleast not a factual one, and always take a comedian's words with a grain of salt. Sure, you can have an editorial with humor in it, but that's not this. There are, ofcourse, parallels with the United States' issue with immigrants and immigration, most notably, of the illegal variety. That's quite clear, which makes it funny and makes you roll your eyes at all the right moments. Still, comedians are very tongue-in-cheek and in your face. In some cases, they don't even believe what they're joking about. Given the Editor's Note near the top of the article, it's clear that CNN is attempting to make sure that people reading it are aware its written by a comedian as well.
I also wouldn't consider it blatant racism, given they're talking about -Zombies-. I don't care how many parallels are being drawn to the current state of affairs in the real world. He's still talking about zombies. Brain eating, undead, shambling zombies. You can't be racist against zombies.
I'm sure if, by some amazing feat of timewarp-mojo, and immigration rules and regulations were as strict (or stricter, as some would like) than as they are now, yea, we wouldn't be here. Do you know who would most likely be here though? The people that our forebearers killed through disease, and famine, and war, shoving them onto tracts of land barely large enough to accomodate them. Would that be such a bad thing?
Zomg, they're stealing mah jerbz! Meme. Couldn't help it, sorry. The trouble with this is that, while they may work jobs that are "less appeasing", the jobs are still ones that non-immigrants would work, however since we typically demand more money for our time, these jobs go to the immigrants who work for less. I think I need to steal some rose colored glasses here, because any company that hires immigrants soley to avoid certain laws and increase their profit margin can curl up in a deep dark tunnel and never crawl out. Actually, I'd gladly bury the tunnel behind them. They treat their workers like crap, don't give anything back, and use it all to line their pockets.
And how does one figure that the taxes pulled out from an illegal immigrants pay check (this is, ofcourse assuming that they're not being paid "under the table" or "off the books", neither of which taxes are taken out of because the government doesn't know about it to tax it) ease the pressure on those that are naturalized and native? This country's deficit is too large for that, and if it really eased the pressure, we wouldn't be getting taxed out our ears everytime we wanted a snickers bar. Nor would there always be talk of raising taxes.
And a misquote on Dean here. Dean said he hoped the Rosetta Stone would teach "zombie" as we'd need it. Good news, Rosetta Stone already teaches so many of the languages present in the world, I don't think they'll have to worry about "zombie" anytime soon. Don't forget that history is written by the victors, and Americans have a way of forcing their views onto others. We may not realize it, but really, we give some places no choice in the matter.
Overall, its clear that you're passionate about immigration laws, and (not completely unrelated) rascism. The few grammatical and spelling errors don't detract from the post as a whole. But there are pros and cons to each side of a debate, it may help to address both and add a weight to them. "Yea, this is a good thing about that side of the stree, but there's this over here, and its so much better because of this thing here." You don't want to completely alienate the other side, or a compromise will never be reached.
And unless you can get the joke and the humor behind a comedian's work, your response may miss the mark just as much as his humor did for you. ^.~
To start with, I don't think I'd call an article by a political comedian an editorial, atleast not a factual one, and always take a comedian's words with a grain of salt. Sure, you can have an editorial with humor in it, but that's not this. There are, ofcourse, parallels with the United States' issue with immigrants and immigration, most notably, of the illegal variety. That's quite clear, which makes it funny and makes you roll your eyes at all the right moments. Still, comedians are very tongue-in-cheek and in your face. In some cases, they don't even believe what they're joking about. Given the Editor's Note near the top of the article, it's clear that CNN is attempting to make sure that people reading it are aware its written by a comedian as well.
I also wouldn't consider it blatant racism, given they're talking about -Zombies-. I don't care how many parallels are being drawn to the current state of affairs in the real world. He's still talking about zombies. Brain eating, undead, shambling zombies. You can't be racist against zombies.
I'm sure if, by some amazing feat of timewarp-mojo, and immigration rules and regulations were as strict (or stricter, as some would like) than as they are now, yea, we wouldn't be here. Do you know who would most likely be here though? The people that our forebearers killed through disease, and famine, and war, shoving them onto tracts of land barely large enough to accomodate them. Would that be such a bad thing?
Zomg, they're stealing mah jerbz! Meme. Couldn't help it, sorry. The trouble with this is that, while they may work jobs that are "less appeasing", the jobs are still ones that non-immigrants would work, however since we typically demand more money for our time, these jobs go to the immigrants who work for less. I think I need to steal some rose colored glasses here, because any company that hires immigrants soley to avoid certain laws and increase their profit margin can curl up in a deep dark tunnel and never crawl out. Actually, I'd gladly bury the tunnel behind them. They treat their workers like crap, don't give anything back, and use it all to line their pockets.
And how does one figure that the taxes pulled out from an illegal immigrants pay check (this is, ofcourse assuming that they're not being paid "under the table" or "off the books", neither of which taxes are taken out of because the government doesn't know about it to tax it) ease the pressure on those that are naturalized and native? This country's deficit is too large for that, and if it really eased the pressure, we wouldn't be getting taxed out our ears everytime we wanted a snickers bar. Nor would there always be talk of raising taxes.
And a misquote on Dean here. Dean said he hoped the Rosetta Stone would teach "zombie" as we'd need it. Good news, Rosetta Stone already teaches so many of the languages present in the world, I don't think they'll have to worry about "zombie" anytime soon. Don't forget that history is written by the victors, and Americans have a way of forcing their views onto others. We may not realize it, but really, we give some places no choice in the matter.
Overall, its clear that you're passionate about immigration laws, and (not completely unrelated) rascism. The few grammatical and spelling errors don't detract from the post as a whole. But there are pros and cons to each side of a debate, it may help to address both and add a weight to them. "Yea, this is a good thing about that side of the stree, but there's this over here, and its so much better because of this thing here." You don't want to completely alienate the other side, or a compromise will never be reached.
And unless you can get the joke and the humor behind a comedian's work, your response may miss the mark just as much as his humor did for you. ^.~
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