Add Homonym Attacks! #33
Ad Hominem: Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason.
Ad Hominem Attack: An argument that focuses on a personal attack as opposed to the subject in question.
Add Homonym Attacks!: The process by which one inserts a homophone and it bites you.
(It also serves as the title to Inside Pulse Beyond the Threshold’s representative column in the world of Critical Thinking, Science and Skepticism.)
Introduction
We’re going to be a little all over the map this issue. It happens. Deal.
Didn’t I already do this thing?
From CNN
Efthimiou takes out the calculator to prove that if a vampire sucked one person’s blood each month — turning each victim into an equally hungry vampire — after a couple of years there would be no people left, just vampires. He started his calculations with just one vampire and 537 million humans on January 1, 1600 and shows that the human population would be down to zero by July 1602.
Having already written a column on the plausibility of vampires doesn’t make me an expert on these things.
BUT!
One might be inclined to think that somebody professing to be a researcher, would ya know, actually do research. Common vampire lore indicates that one does not become a vampire by merely being bitten by a vampire. Generally speaking, in order to make sure somebody turns into a vampire, they have to make their Vampire First Communion. You know? Like what Catholics do in third grade? Only instead of just pretending that what they are drinking is blood, they gotta do it. Then, the person has to die, and come back to life.
Like Jesus.
All Efthimiou accomplishes is to prove the impossibility of certain specific movie vampires like the ones in From Dusk Till Dawn. You can more accurately prove that From Dusk Till Dawn is not real by means of seeing Selma Hayek pimpingUgly Betty. If the movie were true, she’d be dead. I don’t mean to be fatuous here, but . . . well, they started it.
The First Tuesday after the First Monday in November
Election time is coming up really soon. Here in Chicago the races are sporadically jumping back and forth between annoying and amusing. I am particularly fascinated by the race for Governor.
Our incumbent governor, the lovable, corrupt, idiot Rod Blagojevich faces challenger/ state treasurer Judy Barr-Topinka, who seems like a less likeable version of my eighth grade social studies teacher. My favorite part of this race is that Hot Rod has a disapproval rating of over 50 percent. His buddies are being arrested. Topinka has an even HIGHER disapproval rating and trails in the polls.
Our political system is so f*cked that the Illinois voters have a choice between two politicians whom the majority of people think won’t do a good job. I’m not going to vote for either of them. It’s so bad that the Green party candidate is running about 15% right now. Admittedly, I don’t know much about the Green Party guy, but I’m not going to vote that guy either. In my experience the Greens tend to be a bunch of scientifically illiterate, anti-corporate hipsters who need to be beaten brutally, and without apology.
I’m just saying.
What else is interesting to me here, is that by virtue of watching campaign commercials, I start to realize how big a nut I actually am. Things that mainstream politicians are saying in order to sling mud often make me want to vote for the person for whom said mud is targeted. I watch these ads, and they say things like:
Melissa Bean is against protecting the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.
And I think, “good for her!”
Tammy Duckworth is against using the national guard to protect us from illegal immigrants!
And I think, “Oh I agree; that’s a terrible idea. I should vote for Duckworth.”
Honestly, I don’t even get the point of half of these political ads. First off, these people are spending millions of dollars to get elected, and their commercials look like something I could’ve slapped together with powerpoint. What is that?
“This commercial cost $600,000. We spent $20 on production. $4,500 went to channel 26 so that they would play it during every commercial of The People’s Court. $595,480 went towards finding really unflattering pictures of our opponent.”
I’m just kidding though. Politicians wouldn’t be able to do that math.
Apart from the sub-porno quality of the production values, oftentimes I simply don’t understand the thesis of the advertisement’s argument.
85% of the time our challenger voted with the REPUBLICAN PARTY!
Well, yeah. That is because the guy is a Republican. Oh no! Sound the alarms, the Republican voted Republicanly! Breaking News!
Or suddenly, they’ll start making analogies to other politicians.
She’s just another Ted Kennedy!
Really? She looks sober . . .
She’s just a Nancy Pelosi Wannabe!
I don’t even know who Pelosi is, apart from being a politician representing San Francisco. I’ve asked many people. The average person doesn’t know who Nancy Pelosi is. I believe she is a hated figure among right wing bloggers. Really, I don’t think those are votes that need to be won over anyway. Does the commercial want me to start looking up Wikipedia entries?
Wait. I take that back. I know that Dennis Miller recently made a bunch of lame jokes about Nancy Pelosi. Hell, if the guy from Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood thinks she is a bad politician . . .
Yeah, I don’t know how to finish that sentence either.
Here is the thing, though. Politically, few things are important to me. I really don’t care about taxes. I think they are a pretty high, but an extra hundred bucks one way or the other over the course of the year isn’t going to affect me much. I really don’t care if my representatives in the legislative branch are active at all. We’ve been passing laws for a long Goddamn time. We pretty much have enough. We don’t need full time politicians to pass more laws. Most of the time, Congressman, Senators and the like are just acting busy. Honestly. Being a Congressman is not a 9-5 job. They don’t work year round. When they do show up to work, half of them look drunk.
Why are we paying these guys? They spend more energy and money campaigning to get and to keep their jobs than is required for the job itself. Then they write laws that are usually redundant. So what we end up getting as politicians are a group of power-hungry scumbags, and irritating cock-suckers who think they know what is best for, well, YOU personally.
And then we get other mother-f*ckers who just want to use their impressive political status to f*ck underage boys. Although, I got to say, the whole Foley thing . . . Man, that was entertainment. Right there, that’s the guy. You start off with the Mel Gibson excuse of voodoo pharmacology. That is to say, “it’s the booze that makes me want to have inappropriate relations with underlings of the same sex.” I tell you, my wife drank a couple of Bell’s the other night, and she started to f*ck this 15 year old Jewish girl. Then she stopped and punched her in the face, calling her a “Christ killer.”
Good times.
And then Foley blamed it all on a priest that molested him. And then he said he was gay. And then Nixon speech writers/ game show hosts said, “of course he’s gay; he’s a pedophile.” The irony there being that most instances of molestation occur between men and underage girls.
I thought the whole thing would culminate in an SNL sketch with Foley being caught on Dateline: To Catch A Predator. It writes itself, right? Of course, I never watch Saturday Night Live so it might have been done.
But let’s get off of Foley. (That’s what the underage Congressional page said.)
Right now, the prize for biggest, dumbest prick around has to go to good ole, Rush Limbaugh.
Here is what Rush said last week, in case you missed it:
Now, this is Michael J. Fox. He’s got Parkinson’s disease. And in this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking. And it’s purely an act.
…
[T]his commercial, he — he’s just all over the place. He can barely control himself. He can control himself enough to stay in the frame of the picture, and he can control himself enough to keep his eyes right on the lens, the teleprompter. But his head and shoulders are moving all over the place, and he is acting like his disease is deteriorating because Jim Talent opposes research that would help him, Michael J. Fox, get cured.
…
So this is really shameless, folks, this is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting, one of the two.
Wow. You know Bob Dole faked his arm problems too!
Not to be outdone in the category of insensitivity, Wyoming Republican Barbara Cubin had this to say to her Libertarian opponent, Thomas Rankin.“If you weren’t sitting in that chair, I’d slap you across the face.” Yes, the chair in question is, in fact, an electric wheel chair. Rankin has multiple sclerosis.
Add on top of this the whole Macaca/ Deer head in a mailbox race, the political ad in Pennsylvania that goes something along the lines of, “I’m sorry I slept with that woman, but it didn’t strangle her,” the infamous miscegenation taboo commercial, and good ole Santorum’s wrestling commercial, and Lord of the Rings comments about Iraq, and we can fully realize that political satire has become obsolete. Reality and parody have swapped places.
It’s entertaining and depressing at the same time.
