Pot calling the kettle

Arianna Huffington on election issues
My Pappy used to have a couple of phrases he used when he observed people complaining about things they were as guilty of or more so.
One was: “Me thinks the lady doth protest too much”
And the other was: “There goes the pot calling the kettle black”
Well, I read the lament by the mistress of the Huffington Post web site, Arianna Huffington, over Americans spending $2.5 billion or so on the current presidential election cycle and not getting much for their money and how so much of the rhetoric was so blasted negative, if not false.
Ok, after I got up off the floor laughing at the irony of her lament, it struck me that she had a point. Most of the comments, so-called news stories, poll reports (all of which are featured quite prominently at the HuffPost) really were contributing very little to the knowledge and understanding of the general voter.
In fact, I find the hyperbole and vitriol at the HuffPost about on a par with the Brietbart site, which offers a counterbalance to Ms. Huffington.
Still, both sites tend to distress me. Not just because of what I perceive as the blithering ignorance of most of the sites’ contributors, as well as their totally polarized view of the world, but the absolute lack of any respect for anyone who holds an opinion different than them.
It strikes me as somewhat of a travesty that the HuffPost deals with such nasty stereotypes of anyone who isn’t associated with or from the East or West Coast cultures and treats them with such distain. It is like these ignorant, unwashed, unenlightened serfs should know their place and just do what we tell them to do as we, the more progressive people, will ensure that they are taken care of and provided for as long as they have the good sense to follow our program.
Sorry, but I am not buying it.
My progressive friend out west says that anyone who reads Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and doesn’t think it is trash just hasn’t matured enough (He also complains about her sexual mores). However, those who have read it and shiver because of the eerie similarities to the path modern culture is taking in the U.S. are obviously people who just don’t understand how wonderful and great the new progressive world will be.
Oops, again, I am not buying it. I may not buy into all of Rand’s “Objectivism” but then I do not reject all of it either. Nor do I reject the Judeo-Christian value system that I was brought up in either. It seems to me that rejecting the religious value system upon which our culture and civilization rests is somewhat a self-defeating approach to the world. But then, I remember that I am just one of those non-progressive, ill-advised and basically unthinking people who don’t understand how much of a scam religion is. Oh, and by the way, it also is the source of all the evils in the world.
You see, my problem is that I don’t see humans as “perfectible.” Nope, that is not going to happen. I suspect that people are going to go on as they have for however number of millennia that it took the species to get to this current level of development acting pretty much as they have before. This is to say that people will be petty, mean, cruel, greedy, grubby, and self-absorbed and just about everything that makes us mad at ourselves.
Reminds me of the old story about the turtle and the scorpion: (Forgive me if you have heard this joke before) There was a turtle and a scorpion who encountered each other on a river bank. The scorpion asked the turtle if he would ferry the scorpion across. The turtle looked at the scorpion and said: You must think I am stupid. You will sting me. The scorpion replied: Now that would be pretty stupid to do because we would both drown. The turtle thought about that for a moment and thought the logic was pretty good, so he told the scorpion to hop on his back and he would take him across. Halfway across the turtle felt a deadly burning sensation in his neck and knew the scorpion had stung him. WHY, asked the turtle as he slid beneath the water dying. The scorpion replied: Because I am a scorpion and that is what scorpions do - Sting turtles.
People are just like that. You may not want to believe it, but we are.