Ah, those silly Republicans who don't get technology

[giza]

First, I'll quote the post from ontd_political:

Well known "conservative," columnist, and hard-core bigot Maggie Gallagher runs an organization known as "NOM." Contrary to the name, "NOM" is not for kittehs eating cheezburgers but in fact stands for "National Organization for Marriage." Their campaign uses many of the traditional stupid arguments to "fight" gay marriage. With the victories for gay marriage in Iowa and Vermont in recent weeks the NOM people decided they needed to "step it up" a notch and launch a NEW branded campaign to "save" marriage.

However, in a stunning show of ignorance the NOM folks decided to name their campaign "Two Million For Marriage" and in their own branding call it "2M4M." Yes, that's right, they named their anti-gay initiative with the acronym for "2 men for male," a personal ad code for a gay couple seeking a third for threesomes. This has invited a bunch of scorn in the media, alongside what's being directed at other conservatives for calling their "anti taxes" groups "teabaggers," again missing out on the sexual context.

In a show of complete Internet ignorance, however, NOM failed to secure the domain for their campaign, 2m4m.org. It was, instead, registered and used for a site called "Two Men For Marriage," which was built-out over the weekend and is featuring content that combats the fear, uncertainty and doubt that NOM is spreading.

I joked elsewhere that the Republican party is quickly turning into the "Grand Old White Guys Party", and an amazing lack of technology clue and slang clue like this certainly doesn't help the perception of that. Come on guys, is it really that hard to type "teabaggers" into Google?

(Incidentally, the Urban Dictionary term for "teabaggers" has already been updated to reflect recent SNAFUs.)

I'd sure like to see a distribution of age and gender in the Republican Party, including the mean and standard deviation on the age data.

Something I still don't understand is that with all of the problems facing our country, especially right now, with the economic recession/depression we have going on, why are these people fixated over denying equal rights to a small group of people? Don't they have better things to be doing, like, giving to charity, or volunteering in soup kitchens? You know, typical Christian values.

Comments

[heraldotbadger.livejournal.com]

I really have no idea what makes them tick. My dad is a devout republican, and even managed to get me to vote for Bush before I had my -own- set of values. We have debates all the time. I graduated with a degree in physics and minor in economics, so I can hold my own in any debate that is grounded in reason. He is a science oriented person, too, and assures me that the creationists will eventually die out in favor of evolution.

I think that, from our discussions, he is looking for lower taxes and more money and is willing to compromise any set of values to get it. This makes no sense to me. With my background in economics I have explained to him several reasons why higher taxes, or rather more regulations, might actually get him more money by improving the economy, or just won't effect him at all (for instance: higher taxes on consumer goods force the sellers to lower their prices). By the end of my explanation he just got mad and started yelling.

I think his driving force in all this is that he wants more freedom. Freedom of business, freedom to bare arms, freedom from taxation. Again, this makes little sense to me, because even though the republicans favor those freedoms, they limit freedom by limiting civil rights: gay marriage, abortion, etc.

I don't know if this helps you in your quest to understand republicans. I think that the primary problem is that they do not understand why certain things that the government does are beneficial.

PS. we don't make enough money for our taxes to have gone up under Obama. So that argument makes even less sense than I thought it did.

[heraldotbadger.livejournal.com]

haha, still made me smile :)

I think there IS a fair bit of brain washing involved. If you vote this way, you don't love America. If you don't strip all market regulations, you're a communist. etc.

For me, it was my parents endlessly complaining about certain government institutions being over-funded and getting nothing done. Which is still an issue, but not the only issue.

[zeeth_kyrah]

How do we ever know if our values are our own until we look back on them with hindsight?

Exactly this. People who do not reflect, who are not very self-aware, simply mirror the things that excite them or otherwise pull on their more exciting emotions (fear, anger, lust, et cetera). People on TV speaking loudly in angry tones of voice about fearful things excite them and draw their attention in ways they don't realize; and once they've decided something is fact (because the loud, angry talking head said it was) they don't want to re-examine it so much as they want to reinforce it.