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March 27, 2003

Philosophical Reset: The Middle Path

“Daniel-san, must talk. Man walk on road. Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk down middle, sooner or later, get squished just like grape.”

~Mr. Miyagi (as if you didn’t know.)

We here at WWR have been taking a lot of heat for our philosophical stances in the past, oh, week or so. The reasons are easy to see. Since the war in Iraq started, passions have been inflamed and both the right wing and the left wing are playing out a miniature version of the invasion of Baghdad all over the internet…namely, they’re both entrenching themselves, preparing for a long, bloody battle…and they’re both looking at Centrists as the Ultimate Enemy. Either side is likely to attack those people who have decided that neither of the two radical political wings knows what the fuck they’re talking about. We’re in the middle of just such a skirmish right now.

It seems that as long as we were bashing the idiotic right-wing “pundits” like Ann Coulter and Mike Savage, we were everybody’s heroes, but as soon as we turn around, hold up our hands and say, “now wait a minute, we don’t agree with a lot of left-wing stances either,” our former “friends” not only get their raw, unbleached cotton panties in a wad, they turn viciously and bite. We are accused of being Republicans, Reaganites, and Conservatives, none of which is remotely true. Andy is a libertarian, and I am a registered Democrat. But because we’re not as “Lefty-As-Thou,” suddenly we’re Satan’s own hyperconservatives.

Oh, but let’s not just talk about philosophical differences, they say. The fact that we don’t agree with their stances makes us bad people…the most egregious, irresponsible, and breathtaking use of argumentum ad hominem it has ever been my dubious honor to witness. Apparently we are now “selfish,” “poor excuses for human beings,” and we make all right-thinking people nauseous.

Full disclosure, “selfish.” I am a thirty-something scientist who is the child of much older, Depression-era parents. My father grew up on a farm in South Carolina. My mother grew up in the mountains of northern Georgia after her father couldn’t make enough money to feed his family as a sharecropper. She later moved to Atlanta when her father, through his hard work, became one of the most valuable employees of the Fisher auto body plant there. I was raised to be very tight with my resources, as one never knows when they will go away. Growing up, we recycled everything…and I don’t mean a once-monthly trip to the aluminum can place to get our $1.50 per metric ton. I mean we recycled aluminum, plastic, containers, paper bags. I learned to mend my own clothes because I was taught that to throw things out after they show a little wear was irresponsible. Everything organic produced in our kitchen was mulched and converted to soil in a compost heap…everything except, as Eugene Walter put it, “the coffee grounds and the citrus.” We grew some of our own food, even after my dad became a radar engineer with the FAA.

My parents have supported everyone in our family that needed it with open hands. I never knew my paternal grandmother or my maternal grandfather…they died long before I was born. My paternal grandfather died in our house after a years-long convalescence at the age of 97, and my mother’s mother did precisely the same thing in the same room twelve years later. I stood by her bed, held her hand, and watched her die, with all of my family standing there with me. My father is long since retired, and he is currently taking care of my mother who, just this past year, had three strokes that left her lucid, but completely unable to move her left side. I live 200 miles away from them, but I do whatever I can to help, including helping them financially and with physical labor whenever I’m home. My parents are poor. They live in a modest home in a rapidly declining part of Montgomery, and even though my dad made good money at one time, it all went to support family members and friends who needed it.

I have spent I don’t know how many days and weeks at nursing homes and the children’s hospital in Montgomery, Alabama volunteering. I have spent who knows how long at local food banks hauling canned goods to regional distribution centers.

I have devoted my entire professional career to repairing what is, in my opinion, the worst environmental disaster in the world…the loss of biodiversity. I first worked for the largest environmental non-governmental organization in the world, writing and publishing a book on the freshwater biodiversity of North America for them. I also contributed to their effort to identify the status of every bird that occurs in the Indo-Malay region. I currently am doing the same thing, only I work to preserve the biodiversity of America’s public lands.

I researched world water conflicts, and helped produce a report that showed every watershed in the world that crosses international political boundaries. That report, I am told, was used in a summit between Israel and Jordan just last year. Never fucking tell me that I’m socially irresponsible and selfish.

I bring all this up not to blow my own horn, but because I’m incensed and outraged that any stupid clueless motherfucker has the unadulterated gall to call me “selfish.” It’s not merely stupid – hell, I can forgive stupid, since it’s one of the most common human traits in the world – it’s a miserable, self-serving lie.

I say “lie” with an absolutely clear conscience. Only the most rock-headed dipshit alive could be a regular reader of WWR and think that we mindlessly toe the Republican party line. I know neither Jared nor Reverend Mykeru are stupid, and I know that they both (at least used to) regularly read WWR. They should both be extremely familiar with our Centrist positions, and the fact that we will readily change our positions on any given issue with enough rational, logical persuasion. However, in spite of this, we are accused of being right-wing flacks and witless hyperconservative shills. As a believer in Hanlon’s Law (“Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity,”) I have to say that the latter has been neatly ruled out, leaving only malice, and its frequent rhetorical companion, dishonesty.

For example, let’s take Reverend Mykeru's contention that we imply that all antiwar protesters are idiots. He asserts that we are using confirmation bias, and when I point out to him that we are neither generalizing about all antiwar protesters nor presenting ourselves as unbiased reporters (after all, we’re for the war,) it goes completely ignored. Andy even posted another entry that we’d be glad to shell the idiotic right-wing pro-war jingoists if we see them saying or doing similarly dumbassed shit, but did anybody give us credit for being willing to act with fairness and balance? No, instead, we got even more pus and blame from them. Apparently because we believe that the balance of reasons to go to war outweighs the reasons not to, we are Bush’s lapdogs, and we are complete morons and fuckwits.

Yes, Mykeru said that.

Fuck you.

I loathe Bush. I can’t wait to vote his beady-eyed, ignorant ass out of office. While I won’t go as far as to espouse Mykeru’s Jello Biafra/Zach de la Rocha-esque paranoia about the USA becoming a one party police state, I will say that I believe Bush was elected by judicial fiat instead of a completely fair election. I despise, similarly, quite a few of Bush’s cabinet members…John Ashcroft most especially. I believe he’s the scariest and most dangerous man in politics. Total Information Awareness (which I’m sure you’re aware we’ve ranted against at some length) is an Orwellian nightmare.

But I still think that deposing Saddam Hussein is the right thing to do, for a variety of reasons.

Put simply, not only are these twits showing their baboon-like asses, they’re doing it on purpose, which I can’t abide.

Then there’s Jared. Ah, Saint Jared of the Copiously Bleeding Heart, who, to all outward evidence, thinks that Josef Stalin was really onto something when he collectivized all the small businesses in the USSR into one giant, clunky, pathetically inefficient state machine that not only killed 20 million people at the time, but whose shadow reaches down through the years and is still responsible for Russia’s continued depression. By her rationale, it ought to be perfectly acceptable to tax the living shit out of everybody, because when you’re fucked by the government, it’s not theft, it’s fiscal responsibility! Apparently, everyone should be forced to feel just like she feels. And if you don’t, remember that you’re a pathetic excuse for a human being.

Also, there’s this lovely bit of utter lunacy: I am attached to my ideas of greed and abundance. Yes, that’s right, the guy who drives a ten-year-old four-cylinder car with 200,000 miles on it simply because he thinks that one ought to use things that still work (and because there’s no mass transit where he lives.) The guy who works for a pittance of a salary for the US government when he could have easily gone to law school, medical school, gotten an MBA, etc. and could have just as easily been making six figures right now. The guy who lives in an inexpensive, energy-efficient apartment and who shops for fruits and vegetables at the local farmer’s markets. The guy who is wearing the same shoes he wore five years ago because they refuse to wear out.

You have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. You’re a self-righteous boor, and your advocacy of government-sponsored theft doesn’t make it any less wrong. I also love how you characterize our values as “putting things before human life.” What complete idiocy. Tell me again how a flat tax rate and mandatory redistribution of wealth isn’t anything other than Taxation Without Representation, then tell me why those people that died in the Revolutionary War so that we can have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of our own labors were misguided. Go on, I’ll probably get a few good chuckles out of it.

Advice to anyone concerned: it’s very easy to adopt one extreme or another. You see, when you do that, you can promptly dispense with rational thought and spend your days on sloganeering, polemics, and worthless appeal to emotion. Avoid at all costs having to independently evaluate every issue…it’s a lot of work. In addition, when you pick and choose what’s right on any given issue, whether what’s right leans more to either conservative or liberal thought, you’ve guaranteed one thing…that demagogues from both sides will hate you.

Well, fuck them. Let them hate me.