First Blog: My Views and Intentions.

Welcome to my blog.

First, let me explain my name: Georgia Yellow Dawg. I'm from Georgia, and I generally don't vote Republican. Hence, yellow dog. I'm also a diehard Georgia Bulldog fan, hence the spelling "dawg." Also, please note the colors of the page.  In this very simple layout, the title of the post is in red and black, an homage to my Dawgs, and the rest of the page is blue, for my political views.

I'm a liberal from Georgia. Yes, we exist. We exist in a state full of contradictions. I honestly think that Georgia has a lot of good people, and a lot of well-intentioned people. Like many in the South, Georgians have their sets of prejudices but generally seem to set them aside for individuals that they know. If you're white and you live or have lived in the South, you've more than likely heard this conversation:

"I don't like (members of ethnic group/religion/etc.)."
"Well, what about (member of ethnic group/religion/etc.)? You sure seem to like him/her."
"Oh, he/she is different."

I call it the Ethnic Exception Rule. For whatever reason, the idea that people are people, and decent people tend to be the rule rather than the exception, doesn't seem to occur to a lot of prejudiced individuals. I would say that I don't know why... but I think I do.

It's the Right. The political right. The other side of the aisle makes its business by setting people against each other. Right-wing commentators and politicians spend a whole lot of time telling their listeners and voters how much is right with them, and how much is wrong with their opponents. You are probably familiar with the rhetoric: the faithful listeners are the core, the heartland, the decent people, the foundation, the hardworking, the honorable, the true, the real Americans, while the opposition isn't. It's easy to see the attraction; there are plenty of people who like hearing for several hours a day how good they are and how much better they intrinsically are than other people.

In the process of this, the political right spends a lot of time misleading, a lot of time distorting things, a lot of time making things up. In other words, lying. In case you've never seen this term, I'll be using it a lot: straw man.

A straw man argument is when you represent your opposition's position as something it's not, and then you attack that false position. The nation's been subjected to a lot of this recently. We've heard right-wingers say that healthcare reform as proposed by Democrats contains "death panels" that will "kill Grandma." Well, no decent person would be for death panels, or killing Grandma, right? So then the rest of the argument is spent talking about how horrible death panels are, with the initial lie about death panels treated as a given.

Another strategy is to take positions, or words, or votes out of context. I've already provided something that could be taken out of context. Let's say that Ann Coulter is gathering information for another book. She happens across this blog and quotes part of the last paragraph like this: "... healthcare reform as proposed by Democrats contains death panels that will kill Grandma. Even the liberals admit their own evil!" It makes me look like I'm admitting to it... but in fact, the entire paragraph was about debunking those kinds of arguments. The right wing does this quite often. Ann Coulter is particularly bad about it.

What will I be doing? Part of the time, I intend to cut through a lot of the straw men and the out-of-context stuff. Part of the time, I'll be taking the meanest shots I can think of against right-wing politicians and commentators. I do this to work off stress, so sometimes just debunking things in a reasonable fashion works for me, and sometimes I feel like turning the tools of the right against them. I will try to explicitly separate reason from rant; that way, if you feel like skipping over one or the other, you can.

Thanks for reading. You've just surprised me by doing so.