Skip to main content

Red Meat and Nonsense


Presidential hopeful Senator Marco Rubio, R-FL
A few months ago, while in a hotel room in Wisconsin, my brother and I were forced to laugh while watching Marco Rubio’s speech announcing he is running for president. While neither of us have a lot against the junior Senator from Florida, Rubio did something that many politicians do: said something that meant nothing. “When America fails to lead, global chaos always ensues!” He might be right part of the time, but certainly not “always” and Rubio never said he would be doing anything about it. He was throwing out red meat.

It happens all the time and you will see it in nearly every political speech you hear. Rubio is by far not the only offender, or the worst. Politicians from Mike Huckabee to Hillary Clinton say things that make the crowd scream and lose their minds and say afterwards “I’m voting for that one,” and of course, that was what the speaker, either Jeb Bush or Donald Trump, was trying to do. But if you look back at the statement that created all the ruckus, it often was either untrue, misleading, or simply pointless.
Hillary Clinton shouting “we are the party of people!” and the crowd goes nuts. But what on earth does that mean? The party of people? Animals aren’t allowed to vote? I doubt that’s what she was talking about, but she never did clarify. Or Republicans saying “I stand for traditional values!” and people say later “He is anti-gay marriage, I’m voting for him.” But of course, the politician never said whose traditional values he’s backing, or how he will make sure they are protected.
Donald Trump making his racist , disgusting, and desperate comments in the last few weeks is a prime example of rhetoric gone wild as politicians, (yes, Donald is one, whatever he may say) screaming nonsense hoping someone will like it enough to vote for him. Nobody likes illegal immigrants coming here and killing American citizens, so Trump is lying when he says some people do want it.
And Donald Trump doesn’t really believe that Jeb Bush’s wife is an illegal immigrant, like he has said. But those out there who are Trump supporters love it. And the sorry excuses for human beings in this country who are racists like it too. So the Donald screams nonsense to bait them to his side.
When choosing a candidate in the coming months, be certain you watch out for those on both sides of the aisle who will say things without meaning or talk about fixes they can’t deliver, in hopes of getting your vote.
Politicians who throw red meat (pandering to the far wing of their party with high flown rhetoric) aren’t dumb, they are really smart, like Bernie Sanders, a Socialist, who knows he can’t possibly deliver on his promises of free college for all, but says he can hoping for votes. But when someone throws red meat to you so you’ll bark and go crazy, they aren’t worthy of your vote anymore. They just treated you like a dog.


Andrew C. Abbott

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Create Your Own Social Networking Site

Create Your Own Social Networking Site JCOW: Ethical Hacking Top 10 reasons to choose Jcow:- 1. Handle more traffic - Clean codes and Dynamic caching can lower the CPU load and  speed up your website. 2 Make your site more interactive - Well designed Jcow applications help you members to connect and communicate with others more effectively. 3 Add questions to the Registration Form - You can add new member fields, which will be displayed to the registration form, profile form, and the member browsing form. 4 Easily share stuff - Within the AJAX sharing Box, your members can publish status,  photos, videos, and blogs. 5 Customize and Extend your Jcow Network - A Jcow network consists of core apps(like "Friends" and "Messages") and optional apps(like "Blogs" and ""Videos"). You can enable/disable optional apps. You can also develop your own apps. 6 Every profile could be Unique - Members can customize their own profile theme and  add music play...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Problem of Abstraction in Definitions of Data Objects

I think there is a major problem in not being able to understand and work with different levels of abstraction.  By "abstraction" in this sense I mean one concept system that somehow describes or defines (not merely relates to) another concept system.  I think this is a big problem for definitions in data models. Let us take an example in a retail business such as mortgage banking: Customer Name.  Customer Name exists in the business.  They use it all the time.  Maybe it is sometimes called Borrower Name, but the concept is the same.  This is the Level 1 abstraction. Now let us think of data values in a column in a table that holds Customer Name.  These data values are stored as a code of 1's and 0's.  Of course these bits are rendered into something we can read.  However, this is not the same as the Customer Name in the business.  I worked for a place where they prefixed the name of anyone who had recently left with "ZZZ"....
Post a Comment
Read more

The Humpty-Dumpty Principle in Definitions

In dealing with empty concepts, we came across the issue that if somebody uses a term that potentially has an unintelligible definition, they are likely to defend themselves by quickly making up some kind of definition.   I strongly suspect that in such cases, the usage of the term will be inconsistent with the definition.  Which brings us to Humpty-Dumpty. Lewis Carroll (Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) is best known for his children's' books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass .  It is in the latter that Humpty Dumpty - an argumentative egg perched on a wall has the following exchange with Alice: 'And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!' `I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"' `But "glory" doesn't mean "...
Post a Comment
Read more