Friday, March 13, 2009

To Blame or not to Blame

A commentary in today's JT by local liberal activist Sister Michelle Olley has me scratching my head.

On the one hand she says:

Billions of people are caught in the unrelieved miseries of poverty, hunger, homelessness, disease, illiteracy, family disintegration and injustice while the tax evaders, risky investors, irresponsible spenders, overly compensated CEOs etc. wash their hands and insist that they are not responsible for the starvation, infant mortality, crime etc.

And then this:

When we start blaming each other for some problems, we can't focus on working together to bring about the best outcomes. To blame rarely enhances our understanding of the troubling situation and often hampers effective problem solving.

I blame Sister Michelle Olley. Her overly simplified attack on business and excesses by people in business have left her unfocused while hampering her "understanding of the troubling situation" that we find ourselves in.

6 comments:

Caledonication said...

I would suggest that you try working together to bring about the best outcome.


;-P

Anonymous said...

Denis, good thoughts. Liberals apply communist theory of collectivism and combine with socially engineered "solutions" (like, why can't we all just get along) to the world's inequities. First tactic is that they site all the woes of the world, throw them into a heap of misery, blame the misery on a vast jumble of key phrases like CEO's, corporations, climate change etc., and then sprinkle the mixture with a shallow kumbaya "work together" plea. Of course, anyone who has common sense knows that it is against human nature to work together and people will work together in the short term for money, survival or both. But liberal mindset is to worry about the big picture instead focusing changing/improving their lives and the lives of others for the better. The media is what is fomenting this addiction to global change-hope cliches and other absurd mind-speak. People like the Sister lament for the wrongs of the world, when it is up to the Sister to create heaven on earth, to offset the bad stuff, because that is as much control as any person has. I think blaming societies' ills has become a national past-time for lazy liberals - they'd be better members of society by improving their own lot and being content.

Anonymous said...

"it is against human nature to work together and people will work together in the short term for money, survival or both."

please elaborate

Anonymous said...

Funny. It sounds like she's blaming the blamers!

I do disagree that it's against human nature for people to work together. Do a search for "human cooperation" or "altruism" on scirus.com, for instance, and you'll find all sorts of studies that indicate there is a biological basis for it.

Mixter

Anonymous said...

Denis, I am curious why Mixter's comment refers to an anonymous post as coming from a "she." How would Mixter know gender from a post that is anonymous? Is our privacy protected if we send posts in, or is our identity known to you or others? This is confusing.

To respond to the most excellent question posed by Mixter, I'd say that my point was missed. Blaming world's ills on big vast faceless entities does not solve anything. And it is wearisome and repetitive as teachers at schools teach it to students, I had it taught to me when I was a student, colleges teach it, the media panders it -- and to use a faux tautology defense by blaming the person who points it out as the blamer, is specious at best. But nice try.

Anonymous said...

Actually, I was referring to Sister Michelle Olley in that part of my comment, Anonymous... Sorry that wasn't clear.

Mixter