Has blindfoled hatred become a replacement for intelectual discourse?

Well kids, it is election season again, and the two big political parties are vying for dominance as each tries to unseat the others grasp on what political power they have. I know it is always ugly, but this go around it is particularly brutal and divisive.

What I find the most disturbing about the conversations we are having in this country today is that when it comes down to it right now all that seems to be getting spewed out is hatred, personal attacks and talking points.

This is alarming because in doing so people are not taking the time to actually digest and analyze information, instead they are taking what they receive at it's face value and accepting it as fact. I blame much of this on consumerism, and the fact that most people have fallen into being heavily influenced by advertizing, media and trends; well that and just pure good ole fashioned unadulterated laziness.

I am really not surprised about this in the way our society has become, we now live in a world of on demand, instant access, single serving life as we know it. When you think about it we as a society have become obsessed with convenience and expedience, the public as a whole generally speaking has the attention span of a ferret on cuppa-chino, and most people are so hunkered down trying to pay bills and stay ahead of the mortgage and credit cards that they just don't have time to pay attention, most hardly have time to pay attention to their own children let alone the issues of the day.

This brings me to another mass social distraction that is rapidly eating away at the underbelly of our society: Professional Sporting Institutions!

They are what I see to be one of the biggest threats to our liberty and security because I think for the most part many people who vote are burning up their free time learning useless statistics and information about athletes that if they met them would most likely hate them.

I find it so horribly fascinating that grown adults will spend their lives in such futile pursuits living vicariously through these athletes spending the precious moments of their lives they won't get back on and investing their emotional state in many cases to a bunch of over paid athletes they will most likely never meet or in most cases see live in the flesh due to the magic of television.

I think this really hit home for me Saturday night. I went to Buffalo Wild Wings as I often do because I love chicken wings, and their mango habanero and hot barbeque sauces are amazing. I didn't realize it was game night, through the summer I had often gone there because the place was not very busy, I could sit in peace and work on my lap top on my homework, and enjoy doing so.

This night what struck me is how engaged the crowd was in the game. I stopped working on what I was, and I noticed how just fascinated, or dare I say obsessed they were with the game. Every time their team would cheer the noise was deafening, people came up out of their seats, arms raised hollering at the top of their lungs.

During the in-between times I could over hear conversations of statistics and personal opinions of which players were awesome and which where assholes as if the people forming these opinions had ever actually met the people they were discussing.

This insanity follows me to school as well, I am going to ITT, best known for being a technical school, in the student body I find an interesting mix of people, on one hand you have the geeks like me, those of us who can discuss technology until the cows come home (or we run out of energy drinks) and then you have the people who are there because they have nowhere else to go in life and they are hoping that by becoming a computer technician that they can make a better living.

In this crowd are lots of single parents, or people who had kids in high school. Lots of stories about child support and baby mama drama being slung around, well at least that was until football season started. Now this is all they can talk about. What I find Ironic is that in the student lounge at school there is a television, it will either be on CNN or the NFL channel.

Granted I know CNN is a shadow of its former self and their reporting these days is fairly dismal, but still when the news is on, the student lounge is pretty empty, most folks prefer to stand outside and suck down cancer sticks, you put on the NFL channel, it's standing room only.

With all of this is it any wonder that people can't find the time to pay attention to silly mundane things like the issues of our day that quite frankly are depressing on many levels to think about? Is it any wonder that most people when it comes to forming a political opinion get nothing more than what rolls past them in Facebook or on the evening news while they are waiting to watch sports? The irony is if they didn't put sports at the end of the broadcast how many people wouldn't get any news at all?

This is where we are I find in our society in a silly state of insanity and denial. All politicians have really managed to do with our issues for the last 30-40 years is kick the can further down the road with some quick band-aid temporary fix that only solves a problem long enough to for the attention of the public at large to dissipate to something else that requires less thought and attention.

I think this has really begun to get dangerous in how we form our political opinions because as I said before, how many people are forming those opinions based solely on what they see on their twitter and FaceBook feeds, or a glimpse of news from the MSM?

What I find is that what this leads to is a public that is uneducated and unenlightened as to what is really going on in the world, and I think the political powers that be on both sides of the isle understand this and exploit the holy dog snot out of it.

Politicking has become a game of staying on message, that message is hardly ever nothing but the truth, the whole truth or even a shard of the truth. It has become a game of attacking and pandering, twisting and turning flopping and twitching in a mass attempt to reach we the people with a limited message that will get them just engaged enough to get out and vote on election day, but not enough to pay attention to the shit they are actually up to once elected.

More so it has become a game of each end working against the middle, and I think those in power understand this, this is much to do with why politics has become so divisive. The attitude seems to be that you are either this group or that group, you belong to this party or that party and there is no in between and those who don't fall squarely into either category are squarely ostracized.

It is tough for anyone who does not belong to either party or movement, when you show this to the world often times people in either group explode and insist that you are one of the hateful bastards from the other group. They call names instead of forming valid discussions and opinions, and it just seems as though snark, dismissal, hatred and cynicism have replaced intellectual discourse.

That is the problem, we have just stopped discussing ideas (and history for that matter) instead today I find myself commenting on issues I feel strongly about, and instead of getting intellectual feedback I get angry hate fueled responses. It is funny depending on who I am talking to because one group has to tell me that I am a racist and a hate monger while the other wants to tell me I am immoral and going to burn in an painful everlasting fiery hell.

I can shrug off either argument pretty easily for one group their ideology in many respects comes from religious theology (AKA fable) the other however I have a bit of a bone to pick with. This is because they beat their drums calling themselves the champions of tolerance, diversity and acceptance, yet if you offer any ideas contrary to their own you get excoriated and called a hate monger and a racist.

This behavior brings to mind the old saying about pots calling kettles black.

More so though, when either argument is made in a debate really what it tells me is that the person in questions standpoint and convictions are empty. They may ardently believe what they believe, but they do not have anything to back up their position other than feelings, talking points, or a book that was written a couple of thousand years ago by a bunch of religious zealots to explain existence to and control the unwashed masses.

What I find really silly is that each side even though they claim to champion individuality either through expression or hard work really at the end of the day seek to make everyone into little carbon copy parrots of each other to expand their base of power and smash all those who oppose them.

I think where we are going wrong is that we as a civilization, as a species are climbing out of the dark ages and into a age driven by science. As science unlocks the great mysteries of the universe all of the sudden the religions of the world are losing their grasp on the populace, and well its getting violent, and it is going to get more violent before it gets better.

Why is this? I feel it is because as we move from a society and culture that get's its values and reasons for existence from region, we really have not found a replacement from which to draw our sense of morality and purpose.

It was easy when religion ruled the day, your purpose in this world was to serve god. And by serving god, well really that meant serving the church when you think about it really it was a brilliant model of religious enslavement and for centuries it worked magnificently.

Now in the last 120 years we silly humans have tried different ways of quantifying our existence and the ideas there have not exactly worked out so well, especially when you look at the ideas that brought us the axis of evil in the cold war and WWII.

I find it Ironic that Communism and Socialism have claimed so many millions of lives through their brutal ugly realities, and for what ever reason people keep going back to those models that don't ever work out in the end saying they just haven't had a proper chance or calling them by a different name hoping this go around it will pan out.

This is the conversation we are not having that is as the world changes from the old world of god and religion into a new world of science and technology, where is our morality and sense of values going to come from, what traditions and rituals are we going to create in order to pave the way for future generations to have peace and prosperity?

If we cannot figure these things out soon we are going to have an awful big mess on our hands that is going to mean one hell of a lot of war. I really do not think anyone in their right mind wants that.

When it comes to ideas how we can get there I am all ears.

Ol' Slappy in DC wanted to me to tell you that this belongs somewhere like the Lifestyle board or your blog.

Quick question: when have Communism or Socialism ever actually been tried? I mean, really tried, not just named.

You see this is exactly what I am talking about, when you respond to a intellectual discussion with snark cynicism and dismissal.

It doesn't gain any kind of intellectual high ground, and personally I find it rather lame, and the fact of the matter is it is a bullying tactic.

Luckily for me I have a pretty thick skin and I don't let it get to me. I do however find it rather pathetic that people think that this passes as witty and insightful, or that it has any place in an intelligent discussion.

In fact what I find is that when having a discussion when someone resorts to such tactics in the course of a discussion it means they have run out of points to make and valid information to add to the discussion, and thus have lost the debate so in an attempt to win by some defacto grand slam they break this nonsense out.

When you lead with it out of the gate, it tells me you have already lost and are not worth debating. That is ok though because I knew someone was going to come along and do it, that has a lot to do with why I wrote this and by leading with this kind of a post you have nothing but exemplified the point that I had previously made.

This is a debate I am not going to have on this thread because that is not what my post is about.

I've had that argument before, it is a gotcha, I name off a few places, you then retort with why it was not pure, and was Communism and Socialism in name only.

That dead horse has been rode 50 miles it has been kicked so many times.

If you can't defend something in a debate, don't bring it up in the first place. And, if you cannot defend your own words (Ole Slappy), you probably shouldn't use them. Calling you on your bullshit is not a "gotcha." It's calling you on your bullshit.

Any of this getting through to you?

I must be getting old, because i just keep thinking how gross it is to eat buffalo wings and work on your lap top.

I'm still waiting for this "Intellectual discourse" the OP keeps talking about but never providing. Seriously, standing there screaming "BOTH SIDES IZ BAD!!!" is the least intellectual view in Politics (other than the vaunted "undecided voter in October") going around.

Oh christ, I tried to read the whole thing and come up with some snarky reply but you lost me when you went off on football.

Jesus, work this shit out on your blog.

Ha ha it would be, but I order the boneless wings when I do so I can just stab them with a fork. I also have a business class lap top that you can clean easily if it gets dirty, I bought it because in the demo they poured a cup of coffee through the keyboard and it didn't skip a beat.

Have you ever seen God Bless America, MrBeast? I think you'd like it.

Actually what has gotten through to me here is that you took something I said about our president who I happen to feel is a bumblefucking idiot personally, and now you have a massive raging mental hard on because of it.

I have no problem referring to Obama by any of the little pet names I have for him because I fancy the man a cheap buffoon in an expensive suit who's charisma and poise seem to evaporate like magical fairy dust when he gets off the teleprompter.

I don't feel a need to defend that to anyone nor am I about to.

You obviously took what I said about Ye Ole Teleprompter and Chief very personally however. The reality is you want to think you are making some kind of carefully crafted point but really in this discussion all you are doing is spewing hatred.

On that note if the idiot that is missing from a village somewhere in Kenya was doing such a stellar magnificent job. You wouldn't have to use anger to defend positions surrounding him.

You would have real numbers and facts to point to, real accomplishments and successes, not just the same tired old schtick about how he inhabited Bush's mess that has been beat to death and is so full of holes it won't hold any water.

the anger really comes out when you get presented with facts like that for every job that Obummer has "created" 4 people have left the work force and just quit trying to find one, and that if you count these people into the unemployment statistics the unemployment rate is nearing 20%

Or how about the fact that there have been more troops killed in Dear Leader's 3 1/2 years than under the entire 8 years of the Bush administration.

How about when it is brought up that Obeezo has basically been fighting an illegal war in Packistan and that under his administration is has become policy to use armed UAV's to rain death from the sky where ever we see fit in the world and that technology is now coming home to the US.

Lets also dive into how under his watch the FBI has begun to implement a system that will use any camera it can access to perform facial recognition searches and tracking of people, and how that with the onset of new technology in computers such as visualization and the new cloud computing centers being built around the world the bandwidth and hardware for the government to track and record our lives with increasing ease and impunity and he is apparently fine with that.

Or lets look at NDAA how they now feel as though they have the power to detain you indefinitely with out charges because they think you are a not so nice guy. Bush didn't do that, albeit he certainly opened the door to it with the patriot act nonsense, but it was Obama that brought this law to fruition.

With all of this now we have the FAA setting up regulations for government drone operations in the US, and cities all around the country are investing in UAV technology like New York for example.

When you start tying all of these things together that you people are blindly following this guy to, it is really scary, and when anyone questions it, it is the same hate fueled response of "Oh well you're just a racist" "Oh well you are just a republican" "Or oh this is all bushes fault"

So no, your tactic is not getting through to me, it disgusts me as being intellectually inferior and lacking in any kind of depth and substance.

My entire purpose behind this discussion here is I want people to think and not regurgitate, I want people to research positions instead of blindly spewing hatred.

And yet, you spewed more blind, misguided, and outright moronic (birther) hatred in that one rant than I have, ever, combined, lifetime total.

I'm not scoring points. I'm not spewing hatred. I'm not even defending the President.

I'm laughing.

We're all laughing.

duplicate post.

I have not seen it, but man this was so spot on:

"Thats not the edge, that's what sells, they could not possibly pander any harder or be any more commercialy main stream because a shocking comment has more wit than the truth..."

I am definitely watching this movie. Thanks for sharing!

See again this is a dismissal tactic, no new or real information, nothing debate worthy. It is all the same garbage I was talking about all over again. No real attempts to counter anything said.

It is ok though because I know you can't take those issues head on and defend a counter position.

I dismiss all birthers equally.

Check Mate. Have a lovely day!

What's blindfoled hatred?

To me it is when someone has a counter point of view and another hates them specifically for it.

For instance, take someone in the Tea Party, and someone from Occupy and put them together. If they are meeting for the first time and they hate each other, or one hates the other simply for being part of the other group.

It happens with republicans and democrats, religious folks and gays, city people and country people, or about any other mix you can think up where people are not "alike"

I will go back to the tea party/occupy example, how much better off would we be when these people meet each other if they could talk rationally and objectively verses getting angry and calling names I bet they would find out they have a lot more in common than they though they did.

My sources have informed me that "blindfoled" has not become part of the lexicon of any known language.

We're still doing extensive research on the speech patterns of the natives of Fruitloopia.