You've Got to be Kidding Me: Part 2

Part 2 of the "You've Got to be Kidding Me" series is brought to you by the phrase, "It's common sense!"

Don't bite the hand that feeds you, common sense, don't count your chickens before they've hatched, common sense, bring both a jacket and sunscreen when visiting San Francisco, common sense. For a whole heaping pile of great common sense, I recommend the book of Proverbs, but in matters of politics and economics, common sense is frequently misleading. For some examples, let's play a game. I'll list some applications of common sense, and you tell me which ended disastrously.

1) If you're the president you should be able to get a blow job without causing a scandal.

2) To boost production at home and get us out of the Great Depression the US encouraged "buying American" by increasing taxes on imports and subsidizing American production.

3) In order to protect our oil interests we defended Saudi Arabia, once the threat was over we came home.

4) Sadam Hussein is killing innocent people, may be harboring terrorists and Bush says they have nuclear weapons, so we should go to war with Iraq.

5) The free market caused this financial crisis, the state-capitalists were unharmed except by their dependence on free market countries, so logically state-capitalism is the wave of the future.

6) Reagan believed in small government, cut taxes, brought down unemployment and got us out of a recession, so we should do what he did.

7) Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house and is keeping an eye on them, so we should all sleep well at night.

We can discuss answers to the quiz in the comments section, but the short answer is they're all bullshit. Matters of economics and politics are RARELY simple enough to just apply common sense. Furthermore, common sense should only be accepted from experts. For example, my area of expertise is integrated circuit design, so ideas like cascoding for better supply rejection may sound like jibberish to most, but is common sense to me. Why on earth would we rely on common sense solutions from people who have NO background in topics that are equally complicated!?! That's retarded.

Sarah Palin has no background in international politics, has no background in economics, has no experience in politics at the national level, and has limited local and state level experience. Granted, her experiences in the past 3 years have given her a crash course in all of those topics from her Republican mentors, but that provides at best a shallow one sided perspective on all of those topics. WHY does anybody think her common sense has any application to squat beyond being a mom, being a businesswoman, and having big hair? It's not just her I have a beef with, I'm talking about her whole following of "common sense conservatives," who share the same vain perception that their unqualified opinions somehow carry some weight in matters that affect the nation. Meanwhile, they are free to hide behind the fact that they'll never be in a position of real influence and can happily speculate and say, "see, I told you so!" all they want. The truly sad thing is they are so uninformed that they don't even know if they SHOULD be saying "I told you so!"

Sounds like a lot of harmless speculation, and should be treated as such, but the result in this case is civil unrest. Everybody thinks they know better than the president, and the conservatives cater to their skepticism. It's important for voices to be heard, and if something really is afoot, blow some whistles and find some hard evidence, but the conservatives have crossed the line by portraying Obama as a socialist terrorist threatening our way of life, and with accusations of conspiracy behind EVERY action. Paranoia has been spread to the point where there are local militias sprouting up, politicians threatening "second amendment remedies" (aka armed rebellion), and even a facebook group praying for Obama's death which has over a million members!

I already thought our first black president would likely be assassinated, but with the conservatives portraying him as a terrorist, the man IS going to die, particularly if he wins a second term. Conservative reporting has gotten downright irresponsible and dangerous. Domestic civil unrest is already on the rise and the atmosphere is such that the Department of Homeland Security has issued this warning to all local law enforcement agents to beware of Rightwing Extremists. The new rightwing recruitment strategy is basically to say, "yes, whatever you're skeptical about, you're right! You're too smart to be fooled by this terrorist president, fight with us like minded patriots to defend our way of life!" This partially explains why within the rightwing there are so many denunciations lately. "Oh, most of us do believe in intelligent government regulation, do not support armed rebellion, are not racists, aren't extremists, blah blah blah." There are so many denunciations because there is no definite rightwing agenda, it's basically just whatever the individuals comprising the group pulled off the top of their common sense heads. Yet their conviction is so strong that it's just a matter of time before someone thusly convicted goes all second amendment on the president.

Common sense conservatism is baseless, ridiculous, and dangerous. REAL common sense ought to tell them don't take common sense solutions from amateurs, too vain to realize their baseless opinions are meaningless... EVEN IF THAT AMATEUR IS YOU!


In other news, I highly recommend reading the Rolling Stone article on General McChrystal. The full text is far more valuable than any reports or analysis I have read on the topic. Great article.