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Posted Without Comment.65 comments to Posted Without Comment. |
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Copyright © 2012 PostBourgie - All Rights Reserved |
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Posted Without Comment.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKwgV8PAAYE] 65 comments to Posted Without Comment. |
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Copyright © 2012 PostBourgie - All Rights Reserved |
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I think she actually had a single valid point: things *have* been pushed through very quickly, with less-than-stellar results, and that is a reason to be cautious.
But after a while, I stopped listening to her stunning ignorance and started admiring her hair.
“I’ve never been interested in politics,” she says, yet apparently has recently (and very quickly) acquired a lifetime of political knowledge that has allowed her to weigh in on historical developments in policy, and even given her an international macro-comparative perspective to contrast international welfare policy over time. Dang. That’s impressive!
I’m not trying to dismiss the civic engagement she is undoubtedly showing here. It actually is impressive. But what I am questioning is her “ignorant regular folk” modesty coupled with shouting and finger pointing rather than actual questioning of the proposed policy. Get fired up about lack of information. But don’t come at the dude all accusatory after you admit that you’ve been sitting on your ass doing nothing for the last 17 years of your voter eligibility.
*headdesk*
haha, I had a few *facepalm* moments.
I saw this last night and I also caught her ranting and raving at Spector about what the founding fathers would have wanted, and how she doesn’t want this country becoming a communist….blah, blah, uniformed, blah. She also said that she was 35 years old and had never been interested in politics before this.
Conscious, informed reading, researching can be incredibly boring–necessary, but Boring nonetheless. And I thought to myself, how do you reach people like this? How do you communicate and explain, without being a jerk, to this woman who’s probably a decent person, good wife and mother, that she has no idea what she’s talking about?
During the interview, she was backed into some corners and I remember her saying “I’m not that smart,” and I wanted to reach into the television and give her hug. But how do you reach people like this without resorting to eye rolling dismissal?
I’m…speechless.
Is there any response to such blatant stupidity??
I’m not sure whether you’re talking about TARP or the stimulus package here. Their affects might be related, but they’re different, were established differently and have different problems.
In defense of TV…people also visit websites with authoritative sounding writers..who know nothing.
This is what I should have asked….how do democrats, or well meaning politicians, or socially conscious people in general, combat the “liberal elite,” backlash while still reaching people like Ms. Abram thoughtfully, respectfully?
She is certainly a Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Rush, Bill and Glenn…. creation. I’m not defending a 35 year old woman who has never been interested in politics. I’m glad I’m not like her. But I know A LOT of people–Republican, Democrat, or other–like her.
I’m not sure there’s a way. But I’m interested in what people think.
Yeah, I don’t think there is a way to do that for a lot of folks. If you’re not of their tribe, then they don’t want to engage in good faith (and that probably goes double for a lot of progressives).
she said she has a $5,000 deductible where she pays for most of her medical needs out of pocket, yet she’s against a government sponsored health care plan. i don’t get it.
I once “force fed”- NPR (via a car pool )to an assciate who was very much molded from the same stuff as Katy Abrams. This was a change from the usual 24hour ““Focusing on the Family” and other Chrisian radio /media that individual consumed.
I definitely sympathize with Molly’s view point- because you can see how much WILLFUL ignorance some people wallow in. Its not a quick fix however. My experiment with the radio, and more importantly that individual trying to hook up with a handsome (dark skinned)Indian medical doctor who had just started attending our church cracked a little bit of light.
In an environment with out an inbuilt “moral”/social code automatically built into the dialogue… [I mean outside of any faith tradition]. I don’t know where you have the scope to. In fact even though I’m not even 35 years old (sarcasm) I’m very much stating to beleive people are hardwired to think certain ways and nothing you do/say will convience them otherwise
That’s true. There are plenty of people on the far left who believe gluten is bad for you and Bush knew about 9/11 and let it happen. I think the most radical of people are never going to be convinced, but I do think there’s a better way in for a lot of folks like this woman. Things like unions and civic organizations that provide information and force you to bond with people in non-ideological ways are good, and disappearing. Also, my high school did not have a civics class requirement. People don’t even really understand how government is supposed to work.
I am going to argue that liberals (even ones that dont work in a predominately Republican office in TX, like me) cant help but be exposed to a the right-wing viewpoint. It is a little like saying, “yknow, some women take the whole female viewpoint a little too far and shelter themselves from what men really think”. Republicans, especially on the far right end of the spectrum, are impossible to ignore. They will make their point known. Liberal Democrats are much more likely to shruggingly accept Republican agenda, and legitimize half-baked right-wing thoughts, when things like “facts” and “reality” are quickly ignored by Republicans who dont want to have to hear even a moderate left-wing voice.
this.
that was my wtf moment as well.
You’re absolutely right, Molly. (But I don’t use Democrat and Progressive interchangeably.)
She wants the choice! The choice of paying 5k, ignoring the fact that she doesn’t handle her own finances…
Good point. The two are sometimes mutually exclusive, true, and I forgot the contingent of Libertarian-leaning “progressives” whose viewpoint is more about being part of a mocking, elitist club and less about unity and actual progress.
Also ignoring the fact that 5K would get her a lot further than it does now if she has better insurance. Like, the fact that I pay $3k toward my premium per year and don’t have to pay when I go to the doctor. Still too much, but you know.
wow, slow down with all that information…she is perfectly happy with the status quo–dont make her have to change the details of her life for the better!!! That is not what being a conservative woman is about!
right. that seemed abnormally high. and then she admitted that those payments had been hard this year because of some medical issues.
I didnt mean to be so glib. I genuinely dont understand why the price of healthcare doesnt concern her. I have a personal history with self-pay health insurance and it is horrible. I dont believe these people when they say that they have regular, middle-class money concerns, because that is not the voice of a woman with genuine financial concerns.
nah, it’s cool. I mean, this could just be her. she might just be an incurious (if impassioned) idiot.
or a lonely, stifled stay-at-home mom clinging too fiercely to the wrong values out of nostalgia and fear…
How do you explain that to a woman that angry and blinded in a vocabulary she can understand? That makes a lot of sense about the lifetime of images–it really is a visceral response these people are having…it is very, very hard to empathize, but I get that they just feel an auto-response and it isnt terribly logical…
I don’t know how to explain it to people. I think the Democrats are doing a horrible job of trying to explain it, but health care policy is really dry and boring. They’d do a lot better if they had a population that had some understanding of macroeconomics, but few people do. I think that’s what the town halls were supposed to do, and this one kind of did it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFEOdLxuZpU
It could go “Look (cause Obama always says look) private health insurance markets never work because no one going’s to predict what’s going to happen in your life and how much you should save in case you have to pay. Health insurance companies try to figure that out so they can figure out how much to charge you so they can make money, but they can’t figure it out so they make money by throwing sick people off their rolls. So it makes more sense for us all to be a buffer for each other, because we can do a pretty good job of predicting what’s going to happen to the country as a whole.”
but then that sounds like depending on each other, which they’ll just label as socialism.
I also keep meaning to say how much it bothers me that she says programs exist that the framers’ didn’t intend. She seems to ignore the fact that if we had left things up entirely to the explicit intent of the framers she wouldn’t have a say in this at all. She probably wouldn’t have been at the town hall meeting because she wouldn’t have been a voter. I guess she wouldn’t mind, though, since her husband takes care of it all.
So she always seemed to have faith in the government up until now and she never really knew what was going yet she wants everything restored back to the way it was… makes me wonder what’s really bugging her.
Well said!
Ha, maybe she lets her husband do her hair while he is doing the finances.
Now thats a man who can be mobilized to political activism after 35 years of passive observance. Joe the Hairdresser, where are you?
But her curls are so well defined! She must be a pro at plopping.
i get the message!
i’m doing my homework!
sheesh GD!
that also gave me pause…the country has been run into the ground for more than a few years…but now you are concerned…
i had a similar discussion with a friend a few years back.
the best way i could describe to my newly self discovered republican friend with all the ‘facts’
you find the ‘facts’ that are convenient to support your belief
he had no idea what i was talking about…maybe i was having another cryptic/convoluted episode
Yes.
oh, boy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyT_M3aEJKc
Haha, it’s basically turning your head upside down and wrapping a towel around it, turban style. Let it sit for a 15 minutes to half an hour, then release. It helps dry curls without frizz, and keeps them voluminous.
Yeah, I bet they are.
That doesnt sound very Nancy Pelosi-an…
i think she’s confusing her with Orly Taitz, who says that all the time?
It’s teh internets, LF, everything needs a name.
which initiatives have been too hasty? which results have been less-than-stellar?
I wish I had that hair. Not so much the ignorance.
I was thinking of TARP specifically — which wasn’t an Obama plan, but I think it’s fair to mention since she said nothing about Obama.
Yes, the results of TARP have slowed (and maybe even turned around) the freefall of the economy. But execs at financial firms are *still* getting millions of dollars in bonuses of stimulus money, and meanwhile, it looks like we’re headed for a jobless recovery with the unemployment rate at nearly 10%. That’s what I mean by less-than-stellar. I know it wasn’t promised to be a cure-all, but still.
Good for you for being decent enough to empathize with her. I know that this sort of viewpoint is born out of insecurity and powerlessness. That she doesnt handle her own finances–her husband handles everything, even though they have their own business–and had no political views previously is very telling. I hate her, I hate her agenda, I hate her presumably equally angry, ignorant, emasculated husband, her progeny, and I probably hate her community too.
But how do you reach people like this without resorting to eye rolling dismissal?
Well she did emphatically state; she’s “only 35 years old” wtf? And yes my eyes are rolling.
The problem is, she is that smart. It doesn’t take much to be better informed than she is, and she’s clearly capable of taking in the information she chooses to absorb. She just doesn’t care to know what she’s talking about. The Constitution is online. I’ve never seen anything in it that indicates the founding fathers promoted faith-based philanthropy (though please point it out, if you see it), as she seems to think, but I have seen a lot, like in the preamble, about how the Congress is authorized to raise taxes to promote the general welfare of the nation.
I think it’s actually part of the problem with the way political discourse is framed — people get on TV with an authoritative sounding title but no one asks them how they know what they say they know. Now people think they can believe what they want and have it be true.
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Well God Damn Molly…
I was talking about TARP but I conflated the terminology.
hahha, had to calm down from that clip a little
this is a conversation i’ve had with slb before. i think that many of us have sort of hardwired ideological inclinations; the needle on the dial can move a few points in either direction, but i think it’s sort of set in stone.
(Or maybe the way we believe things is sort of set in stone, and not what we believe? I need to work this out some more.)
and where was the disconnect? After enduring expensive medical issues with inadequate insurance, what was the leap to healthcare being a retail commodity and not an entitlement for all? I dont understand it, and when I hear that viewpoint, it still doesnt seem to have a logic…I am genuinely curious…
Well, I think that’s really the problem, now you have a black president promoting what really is a new entitlement program, and so middle- and lower-class whites who have been told by Republicans all their lives that their tax dollars are supporting “welfare queens” in the city who just don’t want to get jobs. . . it’s hard to combat a lifetime of those kinds of images with the simple assertion that, for complicated economic reasons no one is trying to explain — the government might actually be able to make things cheaper.
I dont know…for a wealthy woman, I think she could do better…
Right. How do you make it sound like it’s good for someone like Katy Abram’s household finances in the short term? It is so hard to frame it in a way that doesn’t involve providing for other people, who might, in her perception, take advantage of the system at the expense of her family.
do i still have to do my homework GD?
quad just gave me cliffnotes…
yeah. the whole thing is so arrogant: i’ve never paid attention to this stuff in any detail, but my voice deserves to be heard on this complex policy matter — and on national television.
As a slight aside, I went to a talk by Grace Lee Boggs, famous (Asian-American) civil rights activist and widow of equally famous (Black) civil rights activist James Boggs, a couple years back. She talked about how she spent an entire year (!) just sitting and listening to James and the other black activists, absorbing it all in, thinking, *learning*. She would talk with her husband about the issues, of course, but she didn’t assert herself as a central mobilizing voice until she had spent a substantial amount of time just listening. She couldn’t stress the importance of this enough.
The woman from the town hall represents the antithesis of the kind of activism/civic engagement/democratic duty Boggs and many other stood for.
Joe the Hairdresser…what a brilliant concept…
Anyone who regrets voting for Clinton is dead to me. Great curls be damned.
Ok Shani, I am a dumbass, what is plopping?
When the freak did Nancy Pelosi call anyone a brown shirt?
She looks like a scruncher to me, though…I bet those curls are crunchy…
there’s a name for this?!
i’ve been doing this for years
just to keep the towel on the dang head…and it’s considered a method now!?
jeez
…and they smell like disappointment and bigotry…
[...] it comes to important, complicated issues like health care reform, which is why we spent all August seeing footage of really, really dumb people yelling nonsense at members of Congress instead of explanations of the various bills being debated. [...]