Balance

Here's a video of Dara Ó Briain pointing out the idiocies of modern life including the foolish post-modern "all views are valid" and the ridiculous media which "balances" its report by handing the microphone to complete idiots who have an "opposing view":



I'm starting to bother myself with my whining. I'm showing my age when I keep saying "but when I was a kid..." but it is true. When I was a kid this kind of craziness didn't reign. Something went off the rails over the last 30 years. The right blames the 1960s.

I blame the right starting with the 1970s when people gave up on social visions and turned inward with EST, rolfing, and other ridiculous "therapies". This turned into the "me" generation of the 1980s which turned money into their God and the market as their church. It got worse in the 1990s as the new religion became established when even the Democrats under Clinton and the Labour party in the UK under Tony Blair sought a "third way" which was just the left turning into a Mini-Me right wing stump party.

This was capped by the complete idiocy of the George Bush imperial presidency in which wars were fought not where the malfactors came from (Afghanistan and Saudia Arabia) but where -- as Dick Cheney put it -- the bombers would have plenty of good targets and the tank battalions could wheel in formation. The Bush years put Marie Antoinette to shame with the cold indifference shown by Bush to human suffering in New Orleans. Oh sure, he flew over the city on his way back from California and took time out to look out his window and go "tut tut" but did nothing. The highlight of indifference exposed by Katrina was the "Gretna controversy":

The City of Gretna on the West Bank received considerable press coverage when, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (late August 2005), displaced and dehydrated survivors who attempted to escape from New Orleans by walking over the Crescent City Connection bridge over the Mississippi River were turned back at gunpoint by City of Gretna Police, along with Crescent City Connection Police and Jefferson Parish Sheriff's deputies, who set up a roadblock on the bridge in the days following the hurricane.

Wikipedia is too polite. It doesn't bother to mention that the survivors were poor and mostly black. It doesn't mention that Gretna was a racist upscale suburb that didn't want black riffraff -- even starving, dehydrated riffraff -- endangering the peace and beauty of their idyllic lily white town. Send 'em back where they came from. Send 'em back that the end of a gun. Let them die face down in a watery ditch in New Orleans.

The selfishness of the 1970s had morphed into the viciousness of a post Apocalyptic world of violence as a creed for survival. That is a long, long way from the peace, freedom, and social consciousness of the 1960s. But the hatred of the right for the ethic of the 1960s still runs deep. The ugliness of the present is not enough to get these ideologues to realize that their "vision" has turned to nightmare. Instead, they still hiss and become venomous when they communal values of the 1960s are mentioned. This is heresy for the right which is into "freedom of the market" and "every man for himself" and "life free or die". No namby pamby Golden Rule or social concern for the hard realists of the right.