Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

If you want one of these, you need to let me know immediately.

Ew

Wow, just… wow.

Not surprising at all. I’ve been in favor of generally discouraging others from voting for some time now. This video and the associated poll (link below) are examples of why. I am genuinely frightened for what remains of the freedoms we’ve inherited when people like this vote.

How Obama Got Elected

I look forward to seeing their final product.

Several years ago when Ohioans voted to ban gay marriage, I pointed out that ballot issues don’t pass with a 67% majority without support from all sides of the political spectrum. Nonsense, I was told. The religious kooks who infest Ohio turned out in massive numbers to let those nasty gay people have it. (Non-religious non-kooks, apparently, didn’t vote on the issue.) It was just more proof that the fanatical religious nut jobs in Ohio were taking over and who knows what kind of hurt the gay community was in for. I maintained, and still maintain, my assertion as stated at the beginning of this paragraph.

In the intervening time, state government has been turned over to the Democrats. Ohio voted overwhelmingly for the Democrat Presidential candidate, because, you know, that’s what religious kooks do, right? They vote for Democrats.

This election cycle, in very liberal California, their gay marriage ban passed with 52%. One of the most liberal states in the nation passed a gay marriage ban with a decent margin of victory. Despite all the talk of the more feeling, more caring, more sensitive, more concerned, morally superior left, gay people still get the sharp end of the stick in their utopias-in-the-making. (Massachusetts included.) There must have been significant support from the left to pass the ban.

The fact is this, gay people: Neither party is your friend. As much as you irrationally cling to the Democrat party, as much as you whirl yourselves into irrational fear of religion and its practitioners, the real instrument that’s being used to suppress you is big government. Personal freedom, the right to make choices about your own situation and circumstances, the lack of interference from others in your personal relationships, life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness… these are all small government conservative values! Conservative values are gay values!

Many of the gay people I know preoccupy themselves with the perceived evil of religion, complaining that religious ideologies are what hold them back. That is complete nonsense. Religious voters want to use the same weapon against you that liberals, who can’t stomach one of your most basic rights, to marry, want to use against you: big government. Instead of concentrating on emotion-based arguments against faith (and they are emotion based, because reason is useless against the unreasonable impenetrable walls of emotion and faith), concentrate on disarming the faithful who attack you from the front, and the false friends who stab you in the back.

For the last week or so up to the election, gas was $1.99. Today as I drove home, I noticed that the price increased 20 cents in a single post-election day.

I’m not the kind of person to attribute things to conspiracies because they require intent, planing, malice, organization, follow-through, and competence, and that combination of qualities in groups of people is difficult to find. I have no idea who I would blame for such a conspiracy because none of the suspects make sense to me. But damn, if you ever wanted to convince someone of a conspiracy, this would be a strong circumstantial point.

I’ve posted here in the past about the HBO mini-series from this past spring, John Adams. I’ve also said that I’ve had a deep interest in the American Revolution for quite some time now, and that series finally motivated me to begin a more serious study of the topic in my free time. I believe I’ve also stated that I’ve formed a great number of thoughts about the perspective this particular part of history provides which applies to our situation today, and likely every period in American history, because we live directly under the words and actions of that period more so than any other. But I’m not sure what to do with those thoughts. Regurgitating the facts and stories researched by others certainly isn’t appropriate for this space, but I’m unsure how to organize my own conclusions (and anti-conclusions) into something coherent to present to all three people who read this page. I’m not sure that information means anything to anyone except myself, and I’m not sure it would be interpreted as much more than the lunatic ravings of a fly-over country simpleton without the brainpower to fully comprehend the subtleties more sophisticated minds find obvious. I disagree with that characterization, but I’m aware enough to know how anything I post could be viewed.

I’m learning as I go. I’m realizing things I was not aware of before because of the shallowness of my American history education during my time in government schools and my apathetic sentence in state college. As I realize things, I have the inclination to present them here as a way of alerting others to the lessons I’ve learned in the hope that I can perhaps spark the desire to acquire a better perspective in someone the way John Adams, the mini-series, sparked it in me.

I suppose I’m thinking of this like writing a term paper or a thesis, except publicly, for an audience whose composition I have only the vaguest idea of. Is not the process of learning a major part of the lesson itself? Would sharing that process and sharing that lesson with others, whoever they may be, be pointless and pretentious, or would it be a curiosity, an entertainment, something of value to others in some way? Would my impressions and conclusions initiate serious thought and reasoned debate with others, or would they cause a lot of eye rolling and hurried clicking over to something more engaging, like XTube? Can any kind of meaningful dialog come from a blog’s comments section or a forum? This assignment would have to be self enforced. There is no teacher and there are no grades and there is no deadline at the end of the quarter. Will I have time to keep up, or will I be overwhelmed by day-to-day life (as I usually am) and let this fall by the wayside? 

Perhaps I should start with a reading list of what I’ve digested so far. I’d be interested in re-reading many of these books and posting a summary and my thoughts every few days or few chapters. Would such a task be worthwhile?

• John Adams by David McCullough
• 1776 by David McCullough
• A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, American’s First Presidential Campaign, by Edward J. Larson
• Duel:Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America, by Thomas Fleming
• Washington’s Secret War, by Thomas Fleming
• John Adams: Party of One, by James Grant
• Washington, by James Thomas Flexner
• His Excellency George Washington, by Joseph J. Ellis
• George Washington: A Biography, by Washington Irving, edited and abridged by Charles Neider
• Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787, by Catherine Drinker Bowen

This is the problem with blogging: I have a platform from which to speak my mind, but limited time and an unknown audience to which I speak. Am I spinning my wheels? Am I over-thinking this? Should I quite fretting and just do it, or spend my time doing something more productive? Am I paralyzing myself by analyzing this? Can you tell I’m running in a mental hamster wheel here?