Resting On Your Laurels...

I am forever running into this nonsense argument all over blogdom...and people who seem like otherwise good thinkers spin out and go right off the road when they say it.

Here's the bogus argument: "So & so has a right to their opinion because they did such & such..."

Or it's equally bogus cousin: "You don't have the right to your opinion because you have never done/been/lived/etc such & such..."

Crap, crap, and double extra secret crap with a side of crap. Are you saying that because John Kerry was in Viet Nam and did heroic shit and got medals, that he at some point did not change into a pus-filled, bloviating windbag and scurrilous human being of the lowest order? Fuck me...Mengele was a Doctor, should I go to him for my second opinion? Huh?
I'm not a Doctor, Mengele is, plus he is the scion of a wealthy family...according to your flawed logic I should have him on my panel of advisers and let him baby-sit my kids!

Stupid.

People change inevitably as they age and go through life altering experiences. One-time Hawks sometimes get exposed to carnage and become sissified Doves, bleating for Peace as people harder and tougher than them plan their genocide. Good men, battering themselves against the shoals of life, sometimes become bad men, or just weak men.
It can work both ways, though it seldom does...someone who was once bad can now become good, but human nature tends to make goodness flow more naturally into bad, or more often than not, some kind of entropic, generic neutrality that tends to make decisions based on self interest rather than the rightness of a thing.

I'm not a woman, and I'll never be able to be a mother, but should that set of irrelavent facts keep me from peering through a bathroom window and deciding that this mother who is drowning her kids is doing a Bad Thing?
And yet you would tell me that because I am not a Jew, or a Woman, or a Black Person, or whatever, that I can bring nothing to the discussion because I have never won a Silver Star or had a vagina, or have been to Venezuela?
Did that last paragraph twist your head a little bit?

Good. Now you know how I feel when confronted by sincere, yet illogical nonsense that otherwise good, intelligent people write, thinking that they have said something profound.