Compare and Contrast

For much of his [p]residency, bush II has hovered around the 30 percent mark. After the lies, after all the blunders, evidently 30 percent of the US public is so stupid and base that it continues to support this historically significant monster.

But it also appears that 30 percent of Ontarians remained loyal to the Ontario Progressive [sic] Conservatives after the surge in homelessness, the deaths in hospital waiting rooms or ambulances, the deaths at Walkerton, the murder of Dudley George at Ipperwash, and on and on.

30 percent of Canadians constitute the hardcore of support for untalented corporate shill Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party of Canada.

It seems that this percentage of people anywhere are possessed of either a selfish callousness (obviously the result of a shallow mind) or sheer, unadorned stupidity, that makes idiotic political choices inevitable.

I've said on numerous occasions elsewhere, that in a better world we wouldn't even have to notice the brain-dead yammerings of these people. Unfortunately we are governed by a political-economic system that rewards selfish callousness, and which depends on a lot of people being stupid chumps, and therefore, our culture promotes the views of these people and puts their representatives into positions where they have power over the rest of us.

I don't want to spend too much time on this negativity, but I was struck by two entries on popular right-wing blogger KKKate MacMillan's "smalldeadanimals" that really reflected the contemptible stupidity that has such frightening sway over our society. Once again though; I'm not writing this post because the ideas I will be critiquing merit such attention, but because they represent the thought patterns of cretins who, as the foot-soldiers of the mass of rot and corruption that calls itself "conservatism," have had far too much influence over our lives, with such disastrous results.

The story begins with this post at sda.com. It mentions some observations (some unremarkable scatter-shot musings actually), from a site called "Winds of Change," but focuses on the blogger's amusement with the media's use of the term "grim milestone" for the 3,000th US death resulting from bush II's invasion of Iraq:

"Grim Cliché Reporting Winds of Change peels back a curtain to expose the steady drumbeat of clichés and sloganeering dotting the media landscape ... well, you get the drift;"

Going to the link, we read further:

"Every 100 deaths in Iraq is a 'grim milestone,' by fiat of the media. It is the most overworked cliche of local journalism ... It requires no thought or reflection. It treats round numbers as the definition of reality. This has been a media trope since the first shots were fired.

I doubt anyone who wrote any of these headlines could explain to you why death number 3,000 was enormously more significant than death number 2,997. Certainly not to the parents of number 2,997.

Does it help you to know these numbers divorced from context? Are there not many Americans who would consider, say, every 1,000 abortions nationwide a 'grim milestone?' Even if you set 1,000 battle deaths (not the AP's preferred 200) as the benchmark for 'grim milestones,' you had a grim milestone every five days during America's involvement in World War II with nary a 'grim milestone' headline to show for it. "

It's difficult to know where to begin with this drivel. Are we to discount 9-11 altogether because less people died in that terrorist attack than in the military "response" to it (that is: attacking a country that had nothing to do with 9-11)? Why don't we put the deaths of 9-11 into "context" by comparing them with US traffic fatalities, or smoking deaths, or handgun deaths? (Or falling of ladder deaths, or deaths due to inability to afford healthcare?)

When you start trying to process these peoples' attempts at sustained thought, you realize the illogic beggars belief. These are the people who insist "We're at WAR!!!" and we therefore must never criticize the Great Leader, and must accept state intrusion into our private lives and the official trampling of our civil rights. But when it's time to discuss the costs of this WAR!!!, then it turns out to be no big deal. "Don't worry about it." "Nothing to see here."

Notice the writer's (probably genuine) attempt at sensitivity: "I doubt anyone who wrote any of these headlines could explain to you why death number 3,000 was enormously more significant than death number 2,997. Certainly not to the parents of number 2,997."

Ah! I see. So every human life is precious then, is it? Especially if they're the lives of our precious "troops" who so selflessly volunteered to defend their country. [And who have instead found themselves fighting and dying in an illegal invasion of a country that never attacked them.] This being the case, we shouldn't denigrate the deaths of US soldiers that didn't happen to make them nice round numbers for the mainstream media to arbitarily increase in importance. So, every death must be counted as a tragedy for the nation to mourn?

Apparently not! For you see, in comparison with the biggest war in human history, the number of US military deaths in Iraq are miniscule. That's right. In "context," that is, in comparison with the most gigantic war in human history, pitting the United States and the rest of the Allies against the might of the two industrial giants of Germany and Japan, the casualties from Iraq are pretty small.

They're also small in comparison with the intense conflict in Korea against the large numbers of Chinese and North Korean regular troops with Soviet air support. And the numbers of US deaths in Iraq are relatively small in comparison to the 10-years of combat against a well-armed insurgency and a well-supplied regular army in Vietnam.

I'm not sure what the point is though. These were major conflicts during a world-important Cold War. And Vietnam caused such trauma to the body-politic in the United States as to produce a so-called "Vietnam Syndrome" that made the average American highly reluctant to send troops to slaughter and be slaughtered imposing corrupt puppet governments on people who had never given Americans any offence.

Are we to believe that so long as the casualties never approach Vietnam or World War II proportions, US presidents are free to toss up to 5,000 soldiers' lives on any mad adventure that can be imagined? This is the point being made here: bush II's invasion of Iraq is not a cause that any US soldier should have killed or died for. The writer at "Winds of Change" discounts the fact that the purported justification for the war (WMDs) was false; the fact that the invasion and occupation have been complete, disastrous failures; the fact that the tyrant overthrown had been embraced by the Secretary of Defence who had overseen the war from 2003 to late-2006; and the fact that this tyrant had done a better job of keeping the country relatively stable than has the ham-fisted US government and its puppets. "Winds of Change" wants to ignore that this war has been about Iraq's oil, and if US soldiers didn't die for oil then they died for nothing at all.

And "Winds of Change" wants us to believe that the media should not emphasize the deaths that represent any sort of "grim milestone" because these numbers are no more important than odd-numbered deaths, and from his computer keyboard, "Winds of Change" would have us therefore ignore all of the US deaths in Iraq because the numbers are comparatively small in comparison to the biggest war the world has ever seen.

In other words, we should ignore all US deaths and let the bush II regime carry on in its business of sending more into the slaughter. (And of course it goes without saying that the numerically noteworthy numbers of Iraqis killed by the violence unleashed by the bush II regime will never constitute "grim milestones" in the US media, because no official body is even bothering to count them!)

I'll continue in another post.