This is not my blog.
I contribute things, but that's it. I'm not in charge. So I am not responsible for what is said here. I'm simply responsible for my own behavior, and to choose my friends wisely. But as my father often told me, nothing good happens in a bar after midnight; so if you choose to stay in there, whatever happens is partly your responsibility.
I have sharp Internet elbows. I say outrageous things for effect from time to time. When you try to use humorous turns of phrase, it's easy to piss people off. In general, the Internet could easily be renamed: A Pigpen for Pissed off People anyway. If I woke up tomorrow and everybody's URL began with PPP instead of WWW I'd be down with that. I still say we should call a "call a spade a spade."
But some people like to find offense where it isn't because they've got nothing else but outrage. They're willing to manufacture outrage to suit their crabby worthless worldview. If someone didn't care for my politics, they might take issue with the expression "call a spade a spade," for instance. They're hoping that they could wield a sort of moral Kryptonite they could use to say that any particular argument is settled, because you're obviously not even of sufficient moral stature to dispute with. Political Correctness is the attempt to end discourse by introducing extraneous moral elements that, in general, are imaginary.
But what of the flip side? What of people who claim that their right to express themselves is being impinged by PC, when in reality, no such extraneous elements are being introduced to the equation?
This image, among others, was inserted in the comments here at Maggie's, to mock the people in it. But not in just a humdrum way. They were used as a sort of intellectual club to try to beat the political opponents of the person that used the picture. It was an exponential, not just an arithmetical, extension to the insult.
The person that offered it has nothing of any merit to say about anything. If they told me the sun was rising in the East today, I'd check. If they did have anything of merit to say, they wouldn't have to resort to using a picture like that to complain about being enjoined from fantasizing about the murder of their political opponents.
I must be immune to the charms of the urge to mock the mentally disabled. Because I don't see it. I see two people, in every way my equal in the eyes of the creator, looking directly into the camera -- unashamed, friendly, outgoing, sunny, and smiling. They are useful to other people. They are --get this-- happy. Contrast their demeanor with the crabby, xenophobic, greedy, unfriendly, spiteful, whining, paranoid, and anti-intellectual outlook of the person that placed it here, and the cowardly context of the original sentiment expressed.
Yes, indeed, the photo depicts people who aren't "smart enough" to drink their own urine and eat Spam in their bunker while telling people on the Internet they're praying for an apocalypse that never comes so you can say "I told you so."
I'll take a planet filled with people like the picture, please.
