I can’t talk politics with my family at all, my mum, dad and sister are all right of centre and are vehemently against all other races, I generally consider myself left of centre and liberal and find racism offensive, any political discussion in my family leads downhill very quickly.
Redirection is generally very useful for people like this. My personal favorite, when the situation allows, is innocently misunderstanding them. This tends to work especially well with Dr.J’s uncle, who has never seen a turd so smelly he won’t stir it. He never gets into the resulting fussing and fighting, but he likes to try and poke people till there’s a mess he can sit back and watch. Since he likes to try and be subtle, it’s usally pretty easy to pretend you don’t understand what he’s getting at. And since a lot of goading is faux mumbling under his breath, it’s also pretty easy to just pretend you didn’t hear him say anything. Works wonders for the Family Harmony, and the best part is that it drives him absolutely batshit and he can’t do or say a damn thing about it.
Are you joking? I overheard my grandfather and my dad talking about a feral pig problem they were having up near where my granddad lives (east Texas countryside). They’re not supposed to be there so it was pretty common for people to go out hunting them, I’m sure they ate them too… no knowledge of how good they taste but I can’t imagine it being bad. I’m not sure whether you had to have a permit to shoot them or not.
Neat they’re in Florida too. Pigs must be little escape-artists.
Feral pig is quite good, but it’s much leaner, gamier, and tougher than farm-bred pork. It’s excellent when smoked for several hours, so that it is extremely tender. I think it tastes better than farmed pork, which can be fairly bland.
And to continue the feral pig hijack: I’ve never heard of any place having a season or limit for feral pig. Grab a weapon, it’s time for a Cull!
But don’t the feral pigs have a pretty good shot at culling the unwary hunter?
The Vanigma Monomolgues?
I often find myself biting my tongue around my uncle (by marriage), who never saw a minority he couldn’t put down. Black, Asian, Middle-Eastern, gay, female…he’s a broad-spectrum bigot. And my mother and aunt would never, ever, ever forgive me if I ever actually called him on any of it, because it would seriously mess up “family harmony”.
Seems to me that, no matter what you say, you’re going to be an evil Republican fat-cat bastard. So, why not just take it and run? She brings up logging? You say:
“Hell, just cut the whole damned forest down, pave it over, and build a buncha Starbucks. It’s just a bunch of stupid trees. The only people who give a shit are those hippie tree-hugging queers. I say, pave them over, too.”
Education?
“Hey, I got mine. Screw these kids. I pay for their education now, and in ten years they’re just going to be after my job. Fuck 'em. Send 'em all to janitor school.”
Iraq?
“The only problem with our military strategy in Iraq is we’re not using enough bombs.”
You’ve seen South Park. Every time your sister starts talking about politics, you start channeling Eric Cartman. Make a game of it with your parents. Who ever gets her to stroke out first, wins.
Your sis is a loon.
But I have to agree with her about logging on federal property. ESPECIALLY park lands, but to a lesser extent, national forest lands as well. In general, the forests should be managed along as natural a cycle as possible. Now, for years and years, the very concept of fire was taboo in land management. Fire was to be suppressed and prevented in all cases. Period. This principle has rightly been eroded, since it has become clear how important it is in many ecological niches, and also since massive fuel loading has become a huge problem.
The solution, however, is not in “selective logging.” The solution is in prescribed burning. Decrease the fuel load to a naturally-occurring level, then let nature take her course in terms of low-level maintenance fires. Let the fuel pile up, and the likelihood of a 1988 Yellowstone or a 2003 San Diego fire goes up year after year after year.
Selective logging, IMO, is a bogus system in which private companies are given rights to public lands (for a modest fee, or in some cases an outright subsidy,) and what does the public really get? Massive clearcuts, erosion problems, and ecological devastation on a large scale. I’m an ecologist in the Park Service, and I have seen tons of cases (I’d even say a majority) where loggers have ripped out every tree in a forest (while leaving titanic piles of fire-ready detritus), ignored riparian zone regs, destroyed perched wetlands, ignored regulations for erosion fencing, and gone waaaay outside of their contract areas to harvest prime trees. It’s a plague. It’s a horrible system. They can get away with this because they do not have to maintain the land, and because the profit margin is enormous. They’ll just move to a new parcel next time, and the feds do not have the personnel or resources to enforce regs on every piece of public lands.
Don’t even get me started on the bullshit replantings I see all the time. Loblolly pine monocultures. Might as well be bare, sun-scorched rock for all the biodiversity it’s capable of sustaining. But as long as people keep seeing their fucking DEER and their goddamned TURKEY, they think everything is just snappy. Bah.
If a company wants to harvest trees, let them fucking buy their own land. Let’s put that public money into responsible land management, huh?
Uh, sorry for the vein-popping rant. I digress. Otherwise, yeah, she sounds like a closed-minded doofus.
Honestly, I don’t emphatically disagree - allowing controlled burns, or at least not aggressively fighting all fires, is a good strategy. However, you’ve seen the shit storm that the Parks service is still getting for allowing selective burning in the Sequoia forests, I assume?
Had she made the points you did, heck, even mentioning or acknowledging that fuel load in most Federal park land is incredible would have kept me calm, and relatively happy. Like I said, I don’t feel that everyone has to agree with me. I think that the advantage of selective logging over controlled burns is that the risks of having a fire get out of control, such as what happened in the Los Alamos fire, are much higher than they would be otherwise with a lower fuel burden.
And monoculture forests suck big donkey phallus. Hell, monoculture always has risks: anyone else remember the Potato Famine?
I think our disagreement is more a matter of whether it is possible that a well managed selective logging program can be used to reduce the fuel burden that does exist now. Not a disagreement about what the better long-term strategy for managing forests is.
Still plenty of room for good honest disagreement, of course.
Hey Ogre - you got the pine beetle yet? It’s eating up huge, and I mean HUGE swaths of pines in the Canadian Rockies. We’re hoping for -40°C for a couple of weeks this winter to kill 'em all.
I have to second Miller’s comments - that’s the perfect way to handle the situation.
Plus, it’s pure comedy gold.
My hat’s off to you, Miller
My brother and I are on opposite ends of the political spectrum. We have an agreement NOT to discuss politics. Ever. If it starts to creep into a conversation, all one has to do is say, “Not going there” and we change the topic! Works so far, but we’re both content to bite our tongues and keep the peace. Some people just won’t shut up about their ideas, no matter what.