Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
A link to the essay ‘No, It’s Not Your Opinion. You’re Just Wrong’ came across my Facebook feed the other day and I fell in love with it. If I could I would have the post’s babies. Writer Jef Rouner sums up exactly how I feel when someone tries to avoid being wrong by saying ‘It’s my opinion..’. I am saving this text for the future because I will need it.
Ohio Governor John Kaisch announced he was running for president this week. He likes to claim his policies brought Ohio back from the brink after the recession that started in 2008. The facts say different but he is the perfect GOP candidate because his policies in Ohio have attacked things Republicans like to attack – poor people, women, LBGTQs, schools, unions, and the environment. So, no, you don’t want Governor Kaisch doing to the US what he did to Ohio.
One irrational Kaischism is to talk about cutting taxes and how great Ohio is now because of low taxes. What he fails to say is yes state taxes were cut from local government funds and public schools forcing local governments to ask for higher taxes to pay for police, fire, and the schools. Kasich likes to pass the buck.
An old saying goes that you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. The storm surrounding the confederate battle flag is a good case study for the saying. This is not about an attack on freedom of speech and if you ignore the real history about the confederate flag then you’ve lost any argument about it.
I don’t have much time to waste on people who try to “whitewash” southern history to make it seem like the south didn’t lose the civil war and that the confederate flag is just a symbol of southern heritage.
After the historic US Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, affirming the right of LGBT people to marry and have their marriages recognized in all 50 states, political and religious conservatives whined and cried about the end of religion as we know it and claimed there would be massive lawsuits to force pastors and churches to perform same-sex marriages besides the usual ‘God will smite us all’ end times rhetoric. Relax conservatives, you can still hate same-sex marriage. You just can’t stop them from happening now.
One of my favorite sections of the decision:
It seems like most of the corporate media missed the actual point President Obama made when he used the N-word in a podcast interview that was released on Monday morning. Focusing on the word said rather than the President’s point is one more way the media avoids talking about racism in this country. It is even more ironic for white people to police the use of the N-word – and it proves the President’s point.
I watch the nightly news on ABC and their White House correspondent, Jonathan Karl, is on the same “Tool” level as NBC’s Chuck Todd. Karl is someone who gets a notion and forces his reporting into that narrative. It happened again when he was *SHOCKED* *SHOCKED* I tell you when the Marc Maron interview of the President was released and the President said *gasp* the N-word. Karl clutched his pearls on Good Morning America, at the White House daily briefing, and kept at it during his appearance on World News Tonight.