Bullying, thinly disguised

Looking over the comments here (Texas is only 6000 years old!), I am reminded yet again of why I usually skim them, at most.

Running into yet more Texan-bashing is hardly a surprise, just disheartening. Criticizing the power-hungry lunatics responsible for this kind of tripe is one thing, seizing on any opportunity to kick the victims while they’re down is quite another. (Yeah, this doesn’t just apply to Texas.)

Let’s say that you notice that a group of people is being used and abused by one or more power-mad wingnuts of one persuasion or another, with anti-intellectualism as a favorite tool to try to keep them compliant. What is your response? Do you try to do something that might, erm, actually help the situation, or ease some of its effects? Do you take the bully’s route, and decide that these people must somehow be deserving of whatever shoddy treatment they get? Do you poke fun at them, since you could never find yourself on the wrong end of that kind of abuse of power?

No, Barbara Cargill is not in the same league as Pol Pot. That does not make the interests she represents much less scary nor potentially abusive.

I keep telling myself that most of these responses owe more to dependence on skewed mental widgets–which my brain just doesn’t seem to use, anyway–rather than to any real coldness of heart and meanness of spirit. Sometimes that just doesn’t satisfy, though. It disturbs me that this almost passes for reasonable discourse.