June 03, 2004

You Got To Laugh...

...we've got Howdy Doody in the WhiteWash House doing all those Craaazy things*

Jesse Taylor over at Pandagon hammers another one out of the park, pointing out (among other things):

The problem here (as it always is in the case of Amnesty criticism) is with the people who only discover the humanitarian organization when it's pointing out something wrong with what the United States is doing. Amnesty does loads of valuable work in places that even the "why isn't anyone talking about this" right doesn't talk about. However, that almost never gets noticed, despite the fact that it makes up the bulk of their work.

If AI gets criticized for disproportionality and ignoring human rights crises because its critics have created a false distribution of their work, the group has no real chance to change. It's already doing what its critics say it should do, but it keeps getting criticized as if it never changes. To make the Simpsons parallel, it's like when Mr. Burns, stacking the company softball team with Major League ringers, kept telling Don Mattingly to cut his sideburns, despite the fact Mattingly had none. Even when Mattingly had shaved a strip to the scalp from one side of his head to the other, Burns kept haranguing him to cut the phantom sideburns, to the point where Mattingly had to leave the team for the sideburns he didn't have.

Amnesty Internation could go totally bald, and they'd still have to leave the team.

First off, I left off the best part of the post. Go see for yourself. I'll wait...

I also wanted to point this post out because it inspired this little gem in the comments:

"Yes, what is it, Smithers?"

"Prof. Reynolds, most of the players you selected for Team Strawman have retired and, er, passed on. Your left fielder has been dead for 130 years."

"All right then, find new some new strawmen. Specious strawmen. Scour the best stupid generaliazations: the French leagues, the Rall leagues, the Negro leagues!"

Posted by: Scott at June 2, 2004 02:02 PM

We salute Scott, and hope you laughed as hard as we did when we saw his little Simpsons parody.

* - with thanks to Robin Williams (I have an internet site, too - sorta) for, among many other contributions to the arts over the years, Reality... What a Concept.

Posted by (: Tom :) at June 3, 2004 06:51 AM