There are a few local Vermont blogs I read from time to time to keep up with the news from my home state. One of them, Integral Psychosis, written by a fascinating guy who describes himself as a radical, left-wing, “libertarian-socialist” (a label that I find contradictory based on my conception of those words, kind of like a “hawkish pacifist”), approvingly cited this Tea Party-ridiculing post from commondreams.org:
You gotta love those zany teabaggers. Now the people who went to D.C. to protest government-run programs – on government-built roads, with government-funded police protection etc – are complaining the government-run subway system didn’t meet their needs, and Texas Rep. Kevin Brady has sent an angry letter to the subway czar. The kicker: Brady voted against stimulus funds to improve the Metro. Cognitive dissonance, thy name is wingnut.
“I will demand answers from Metro,” wrote Brady to whatever socialist tyrant runs the D.C. subway.
I’ve heard this type of argument many times before, often in debates over public school funding (‘you oppose increased funding for x, therefore you have no right to complain about the quality of service that x provides’), and it’s completely foolish. There is no “cognitive dissonance” involved. I just spent a summer living in DC, and I used the metro to commute to and from work every day. From personal experience, I can say that the DC metro has a lot of problems. Most significantly, there was the crash back in June, which actually resulted in nine deaths. The investigation that followed the crash lasted for the rest of the time I was living there (about 8 more weeks), and caused massive delays every day for the rest of the summer.
Now, is a lack of government funding to blame for all of DC metro’s problems? Maybe, but not necessarily. There’s evidence that the metro system is poorly run: negligent bus drivers keep their jobs, and bus and train operators are overpaid. More money won’t help if inept management will spend it unwisely. But let’s not get bogged down in specifics about the DC metro system. The point is that the specious reasoning exemplified in the commondreams post should be purged from serious debate. It’s true that the quality of service that an agency provides is somewhat related to the funding it gets, but that there are a lot of other factors as well. I wonder if commondreams made similar attacks on democratic congressmen who opposed funding for the Iraq War during the Bush administration but criticized the efficacy of US military efforts?
A tangentially related question: shouldn’t supposedly intelligent people be ashamed to habitually use immature smear terms to deride large groups of people (such as “teabagger”)?
September 19, 2009 at 4:20 pm
The government hasn’t built anything. It’s the people who do the work of our country is the working government. The windbags who are on television moaning and complaining about the problems of the last President they got now, are the same experts who knew how to solve all these problems if they got elected. Okey now that you’re elected, why can’t you do some work? What has been done? The government exists, because it is the money of the citizens from their enterprise and work that is taxed and used. We have a right to not work, to not earn, to close our business. Then where is “the government”? Broke with no visible means of support.
October 29, 2009 at 11:08 am
“A tangentially related question: shouldn’t supposedly intelligent people be ashamed to habitually use immature smear terms to deride large groups of people (such as “teabagger”)?”
Well, first off, it ain’t that large. Second, these people, in all of their anti-intellectualism, dishonesty, and ignorance of history, deserve nothing more than mockery. By and large, they’re shilling for the plutocracy and haven’t figured it out yet. Don’t remember too many of ‘em whining about “bankrupting our future” during the Bush years. Hypocrites.
October 30, 2009 at 4:54 pm
I really have no interest in defending the Tea Party crowd, but I find most anti-teabagger backlash to be at least as anti-intellectual, dishonest, and ignorant as the protesters themselves. A lot of people seem to think that they can bolster horrible arguments (like the one in my post above) by throwing around terms like “zany teabagger” to ridicule their opponents. Often, this seems to be done to avoid addressing any actually intelligent or interesting points from the other side.
There are idiots across the political spectrum. Most of them are hypocritical. You sure don’t hear much from a lot of the anti-war protesters from the Bush years, but it’s not as if the wars have stopped. But there are also smart people, and good arguments, across the political spectrum, and it’s intellectually lazy to use broad smear terms to discredit entire ideologies.