Sunday, August 26, 2012

Building Dungeons In The Sky

Update: I almost forgot to give Mut the hat tip for the anti-Mormon link below!


"Building castles in the sky" is a saying referring to dreams without practical foundations. Kathleen Geier grabs the loopy rape quote from Todd Akin and builds dungeons in the sky. Her essay is so poorly constructed that it's not worth grabbing a quote here. You can read it for yourself if you want. In essence, she claims that Republicans have become a fringe party captured by crazed wingnuts with little more than Akin as a foundation.

Meanwhile, the Federal budget and the Federal Register have grown monotonically over the last several decades. That crude measure of the size and scope of government completely obliterates her thesis that Democrats are doing little more than stemming the tide of reactionary lunacy. It doesn't take much effort and no vitriol* to knock that particular fantasy down.

Dittos for the story of a right-wing blogger who decided to turn the tables on an anti-Mormon bigot who was trying to organized a Mormoniphobic whisper campaign using some social networking tools on an Obama campaign website. The blogger published the contact information of the bigot and has now been threatened with a lawsuit.

Whether or not the act is righteous, it frightens people to see their contact info posted by a political opponent. Here on this blog, I had a troll who used to leave my real name in the comments. That freaked me out completely. Whether or not the bigot was in the wrong, publishing names and addresses is just a bad idea and does nothing to further the cause.

It doesn't matter if it's the anti-religious bigots, the LGBT paranoids or the hypersensitive Kathleen Geier, there's a simple response to their attacks. Education. It doesn't require publishing addresses.

Teacher: "You suck, Mary. Kids, here's Mary's home address so you can all visit her and tell her how much she sucks." (Image source)
* - As usual, I gave in to my baser instincts and left a comment suggesting she seek professional help. Sigh.

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