Pretty much the whole first hour and much of the second hour of The Commentators, a talk show on Seattle's biggest talk radio station, was directed at me and my song, Osama Bin Laden, You Ruined My Birthday.
Feel free to listen to the whole thing. (Link fixed!)
The liberal host, Ken Schram, was exceedingly unkind. The conservative host, John Carlson, was not kind either, but he at least almost got it. Both of them thought the song was serious. That I was actually saying what the protagonist of the song is saying, seriously, for myself.
They had lots of people call in, some saying my song was "disgsting," some saying it was "funny." One insightful guy correctly said it was a parody of other people, not seriously stating what I think myself.
The whole thing was awesome.
Re:Bad link?
pudge on 2007-09-11T21:44:07
My usual rule is not to respond to any post using the word "liberal", but your link is 404.First: "liberal" is their deal. They get one liberal, one conservative, and say they have talk from "both sides." That is how they identify him. I wasn't using it to be pejorative, just to identify.
Second: yep, they took down the link, shortly after I posted it. Very very odd!
They play 42 seconds of the song (about 20%) and then the one guy immediately starts ranting about short attention spans.
Then you have this caller at about 28 min: "we didn't start this war" while talking about Iraq.
And their "liberal" host sounds not very liberal. Plus, all of this ruckus about "not taking the 'war on terror' seriously" -- how do you have a "war" against an "overwhelming feeling of fear" anyway? Seems that not being afraid would end that "war" quite handily.
Anyway, as far as liberal/conservative goes, I'll leave you with this. Basically, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who know they're wrong and those who don't.
But to recap the irony, the easy way to get answers (religion aka "belief") tends to just turn into an excuse for fighting. Again, straight from the broadcast: "...they'll believe what they want to believe because that's what they want to believe." Scientifically (or philosophically), it is quite simple. If two people believe conflicting things, one (or likely, both) are wrong. To an engineer, everyone looks like a chimp.
Re:Irony much?
pudge on 2007-09-12T16:30:18
And their "liberal" host sounds not very liberal.Well, neither is their conservative host very conservative.:-) Seriously, they are pretty clearly conservative and liberal if you listen to them often, but both are a lot closer to the center than to the extremes.
Plus, all of this ruckus about "not taking the 'war on terror' seriously" -- how do you have a "war" against an "overwhelming feeling of fear" anyway?
That's just silly semantics. The "war on terror" is, in fact, a war against those who perpetrate terrorism, as you well know.
Anyway, as far as liberal/conservative goes, I'll leave you with this.
Basically, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who know they're wrong and those who don't.
Yes, I saw that ridiculous study. Sad that the Times saw fit to publish such nonsense.
But to recap the irony, the easy way to get answers (religion aka "belief") tends to just turn into an excuse for fighting. Again, straight from the broadcast: "...they'll believe what they want to believe because that's what they want to believe." Scientifically (or philosophically), it is quite simple. If two people believe conflicting things, one (or likely, both) are wrong.
Well, yes, but that assumes you know that those things are conflicting, and most likely, you do not.
It's not just about religion: you're right to mention "belief." For example, the IPCC says that we are merely 66-90% sure that man is causing any significant global warming, and yet many scientists (and activists) walk around telling us the debate is over, which is utter nonsense. They believe what they want to believe because that's what they want to believe (and because they are hoping that their certainty will convince the rest of us).
So if someone says "man is causing significant global warming" and someone else says "no man isn't," we have four choices: the former is right and the latter is wrong; the latter is right and the former is wrong; both are right; both are wrong. We could reject the last two by saying that the latter precludes the possibility of the former being right, or we could allow that if there is another (more?) major source of global warming that this would allow us to split, which would mean the last two options are basically the same.
Regardless of how you want to break it down, the problem is that that the science can't tell us either way. Even to the extent we can measure CO2 levels and accurately hypothesize about the effects CO2 can have, we are utterly incapable of ruling out other sources because we have no reasonable way of measuring the impact CO2 may be having except through correlation, which as any philosopher of science will tell you is an exceedingly poor substitute for showing actual causation. That's why they aren't more certain than 66-90%: because they cannot factor out what other causes there may be, because you can't factor out what you don't know about, and there's far more we don't know, than we do know.
Don't mean to turn this into a global warming thing... the bottom line being that we just don't know enough to judge most of time, yet we often pretend that we do. It's not about knowing you are wrong or not, it's about knowing you don't know. And the older I get, and the more people I meet, the more befuddled I am when anyone tries to imply this is a predominantly conservative trait. Bollocks.
Last night I was reading a disgusting DailyKos article, where the author and almost all of the commentators tried to smear Bryan Suits (who is another host on KVI, a vet of Bosnia and two-time Iraq vet, in the early 90s and recently) as a "shill" for the U.S. government. The author posted he is convinced that Suits is in "Influence Operations," or "PsyOps." Why? Because Suits was actually IN Iraq and posting about his experiences, which the author believed couldn't actually be happening. They make these grand conclusions about discrepancies in Suits life and stories (one place says he is unmarried, one says he is married, OMG! maybe because he was married RECENTLY?) and CONCLUDE he is a plant. They question even his purple hearts! None of what they conclude is remotely accurate.
They did the same thing this week with Petraeus. Just assumed he was lying in everything he said. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: "reality-based community, my ass."
I am not saying liberals are worse. I am saying they are just as bad. I am saying liberal vs. conservative has not one damned thing to do with how stupid people are, or how self-aware they are of their stupidity.
dailykos?
gizmo_mathboy on 2007-09-13T02:03:51
Wait, you still read dailykos?
I'm guessing I'm quite a bit more progressive/liberal than you and I stopped reading it awhile ago.
It just seemed like too much of an echo chamber to me and I read a lot of progressive blogs (at least the posts, the comments in blog seem nearly universally puerile).
Then again, I'm generally trying to spread less than reading blogs like dailykos (nationally political in focus) and something more local or at least a narrower focus (like useperl or slashfood or such).Re:dailykos?
pudge on 2007-09-13T03:40:35
Wait, you still read dailykos?No. I never did. I followed a link there. Note that post is from about 2.5 years ago. There's no "blogs" I read on a regular basis except some personal friends, Soxaholix, and Sound Politics.
