SwimFinsSF

A Few Political Tid Bits

During my usual poking around today I found a few things that I thought would be worth sharing.

First - I was curious, based on previous discussions, what the Impeachment process is for the President and other federal officials was. In talking to the guys in my carpool there was a lot of confusion as to what it means to ‘impeach’ a president and how that relates to the actual removal of an official from office. This article cleared some things up for me:

LII Backgrounder on Impeachment

The other thing I figured I’d pass on is from Untelevised… Poll numbers made me chuckle… Take them for what they’re worth (probably not much):

Nearly Half Say California Recall Is Silly

I’ll refrain from snide comments!
Happy Friday!

Other Points of View

Here’s an interesting question. How do you go about forming your opinions on topics (political or whatever)? Is it from the TV News? Is it from the Newspaper? Is it from information on line? Is it from talking to people? Or some combination of all of these?

Here’s why I ask. I form my opinions based on gathering as much information from as many sources as I can and then fleshing those opinions by discussing them with other folks to see if there are holes in my theories. If there are holes in my opinions I may change my opinion or I may strengthen them based gathering additional points of view. I’ve been very known to change my opinions over time based on this kind of discussion and I’ve found that its made me a little more conservative over time ( seems to happen when you mix up young idealism with practical reality! )

There are problems with this model though. First of all, we tend to surround ourselves with people with similar mind sets so I tend to spend a lot of time preaching to the choir which doesn’t always help to find flaws in the theories I come up with. Living in San Francisco I tend to have a lot of rather liberal points of view which I enjoy but it also means that Kevin, being raised Southern Baptist in North Carolina, is probably one of my few conservative sources of information ( he’s actually really liberal too but he knows the NC folks VERY WELL! )

Another problem I run into is with my style. I’m very similar to my family when it comes to debate - you make a statement of opinion in the form of statement of fact and see if people disagree with it. This has the effect of either getting people’s dander up and sparking an interesting debate or making people walk away from the discussion. Kevin usually takes the latter for fear of getting in a sparing match with me (which I enjoy as friendly discussion but he hates because of my style and he doesn’t see much point). This I should work on.

The last part of this whole thing I find is often, by the time people have formed opinions, they’re relatively resigned to them and discussions tend to get rather heated and emotional. I’m DEFINITELY guilty of this and combined with my style of debate I frequently find myself in discussions that are more a battle of wills than they are an educational debate where both sides learn a different perspective. Taking a deep breath often helps me!

I guess I’m just thinking out loud at everyone else’s expense - but it seems to me that we could all use a little more healthy discussion with folks that don’t share our point of view and where we can put our emotions and our resignations aside in hopes of learning… Might make the world a little more friendly.

Or maybe I’m just INSANE… I probably am!

Childhood Friends

Ughh.. its like 12:20 and i’m just NOW getting ready for bed.. on a SCHOOL night… Kevin and I went out to dinner with a friend of mine from when I was like 7 years old and his Girlfriend… They came over and hung out for a bit and then we went to Blowfish Sushi for dinner and had a great dinner.. Had the best time… Talked about all sorts of stuff… Was kind of a trip since I LITERALLY hadn’t seen him since I was a rug rat…

Anyway.. Had to share.. I’m off to bed!