Politics

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You’re already paying taxes, and you probably know somebody with Lupus (even if you don’t know it yet).

Make your voice heard: support Lupus research
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Rick “Burn the Witch” Santorum shows his poor grasp on reality, morality, and basic logic.
Catholic Online – Featured Today – Fishers of Men

Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

This is so wrong in so many ways.

These priests he mentions are pedophiles. Pedophiles don’t do what they do because of “liberal society” or because of what professors teach in class. They don’t even do what they do because of their sexual orientation toward male or female. They do what they do because they’re sick people who have a compulsion to breach the trust and consent of children.

I sort of expect ignorant cretins walking the streets to connect same-gender orientation with pedophilia, because it’s the kind of thing the truly stupid and hateful of society tend to assume.

But the idea that an elected official, a Senator no less, would buy in to such wayward and criminally irresponsible thinking — it’s sickening to me. And that a church publication would put it out there without at least saying “um, this guy’s an idiot and we don’t endorse him, but here’s what he had to say” is equally creepy to me.

It was academic and political and cultural liberalism that has championed children’s rights in this country and elsewhere. Without liberalism, they’d still be working in factories and treated as less-formed humans and purely as property.

When is the liberal leadership going to stand up in this country and unashamedly state that being liberal is NOT the same as being relativist?? I hear them tip-toeing around it… and God bless Howard Dean in spite of any eccentricities, he’s actually trying to get this message across. But come on. Make a noise. Shoot this stuff down.

Last night I was reading this article in the Guardian, that was published in 2002, about the “Millennium Challenge” wargame, where the military was outfoxed by the ex-marine consultant they hired to play the bad guy: Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Wake-up call. I got the link from a post over on Antonella’s blog. She’d linked it because the story is also used in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink.
I’ve been reading Blink as well, and I may have more to ruminate about that, because it’s remarkable (and everybody’s reading it, it seems, so others may have done the ruminating for me).
Anyway, what converged in my head when looking at this story was what I saw earlier the same night when watching a movie with my daughter. See, we were watching the last of the old Star Wars movies, Return of the Jedi. And for years I think I undervalued the movie in general — I think it’s better than I remembered. Not great, but better. Still, it really is a sort of “Muppets in Space” flick and a little annoying at times. But I digress.
In that movie, we see brave rebel forces sacrificing their lives when fighting the overpowering Empire. Because the rebels don’t have the resources of their enemy, they have to be more clever, daring, and ingenious in their tactics.
Not only they, but also the cute little (evidently human-eating?) Ewoks, whose Endor is overrun as part of the clash, have to bring whatever means at their disposal to the task of dispatching the Empire forces.
As I was watching, I couldn’t help but wonder (and be pretty sure) that people like Bin Laden have seen this movie and others like it (because after all, Star Wars wasn’t especially original — it mainly repackaged a lot of tropes from previous Hollywood fare). Every time I saw an Ewok or a Rebel fighter use the Empire’s own destructive power against it, or crash a ship into an Imperial destroyer, I thought — hey, all it takes is a slip of perspective to see that other people could easily see themselves as the heroes in their own story, fighting the Imperial Americans. Would this be a fair perspective? Maybe not. But perception rules. If the US and the west in general are perceived as evil oppressors, it doesn’t take much to convince oneself that they should be brought down at all costs.
Anyway, that’s nothing new — the point’s been made plenty before. But what struck me was the ingeniousness of the ‘good guys’ in the battles of Star Wars, thinking outside the box and hitting the lumbering Empire in ways they don’t necessarily expect.
Then I read the Guardian article and am reminded of the tactics Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper used when imitating Saddam in the giant wargame:

As the US fleet entered the Gulf, Van Riper gave a signal – not in a radio transmission that might have been intercepted, but in a coded message broadcast from the minarets of mosques at the call to prayer. The seemingly harmless pleasure craft and propeller planes suddenly turned deadly, ramming into Blue boats and airfields along the Gulf in scores of al-Qaida-style suicide attacks.

And I thought about how he essentially did the sort of things that we’ve seen the underdog do in movies for generations (or in books even before that), and you have to wonder: How the heck could the US military have such a major blind spot? And how can we, in general, invade countries whose cultures and point of view our leaders seem to so basically misunderstand??
Like I said … nothing new here. I’ve seen others ponder the same thing. But it was an odd juxtaposition that made it so clear to me — Ewoks and Arabs. Go figure.

Menand puts his finger on what could possibly the the most important semantic distinction of the decade in this week’s The New Yorker:

“She was a conservative. What she was not was an ideologue. “

This site has some tongue-in-cheek and yet entirely workable instructions on how to burn a flag without running afoul of the law: Whatever: Cracking the Flag-Burning Amendment
For example, one “flag” is a US flag but with a dot for one of the stars (pictured).

This is fascinating to me because it gets to the heart of what symbols are, and how silly it is to legislate and censor speech in the first place.
Also, Jon Stewart on the Daily Show last week pointed out how ironically the official “rules” for handling flags say that you should burn one when it’s worn out.
Anyway, this is a great object lesson in fundamentalism: namely that there are people who actually believe they can make a rule that says “you cannot burn or deface an American Flag” and have some sense of certainty that those things (“burn” “deface” ” American” “Flag”) are specific, hard-edged concepts without ambiguity or room for interpretation. Just like with scripture or the Constitution or anything else, there is always room for interpretation and context.

Crazy

RollingStone.com:
The Crusaders
: Politics

Speaking to the group, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay — a winner of Kennedy’s Distinguished Christian Statesman Award — called Bush’s faith-based initiatives “a great opportunity to bring God back into the public institutions of our country.”

I wonder … if an omnipotent God wanted to be intimately and explicitly involved in public institutions, would anyone really be able to keep Him out??

Isn’t it sacreligious to assume that God needs our help to accomplish mere influence?

This is a creepy article. And especially creepy is how the “Dominionists” are getting support from so many prominent business people.

This is an excellent overview of the insidious logic behind all these otherwise silly sounding obsessions.

Zero Tolerance, by The Plaid Adder – Democratic Underground

It is truly, truly amazing… the philistine buffoonery that has been allowed to masquerade as enlightened leadership in our country.

Scalia To Synagogue – Jews Are Safer With Christians In Charge

and this (even though it almost pales in comparison to the insanity linked above) …

Harvard President – Women Really Aren’t as Good at Math and Science

The New Yorker

Yet another example of incompetence in Iraq. For ideological reasons, we disenfranchised the majority of people who formed the fabric of the country — professionals and experts and leaders who happened to be Baathist only because that’s what you had to do in order to survive. No gray areas in the mind of this administration, resulting in binary logic like this.

Here’s a question I wish more people would ask: Why didn’t we take some of the billions we’re paying federal contractors and put some of these Iraqis to work rebuilding their country, rather than just ousting them and leaving their idle hands to make devil’s workshops?

So it wasn’t the war or the economy that tipped the balance after all…

Four more years… let’s not be quite so asleep at the wheel this time, ok?

Food for thought:

Religion’s Kidnapping of the Campaign

We liberals sometimes forget that the United States has two sets of Founding Fathers: the Puritans of Massachusetts (inspired largely by the 16th Century French refugee to Switzerland John Calvin) and those remarkable avatars of the American Enlightenment: Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and Paine (inspired by, among others, the 18th Century French refugee to Switzerland Voltaire).

First of all, go vote.

But then, before you start complaining about the Electoral College, be sure you understand it and its history: Origins of the Electoral College :: Ludwig von Mises Institute

And then read a somewhat romantic but still astute (and incredibly eloquent) argument for preserving the institution:

Statement on the Electoral College — Floor of the United States Senate, June 27, 1979 by: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.)

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. explains how the Bush White House is the first to use religion in its particular way.

The White House Wasn’t Always God’s House

George Washington was a nominal Anglican who rarely stayed for Communion. John Adams was a Unitarian, which Trinitarians abhorred as heresy. Thomas Jefferson, denounced as an atheist, was actually a deist who detested organized religion and who produced an expurgated version of the New Testament with the miracles eliminated. Jefferson and James Madison, a nominal Episcopalian, were the architects of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. James Monroe was another Virginia Episcopalian. John Quincy Adams was another Massachusetts Unitarian. Andrew Jackson, pressed by clergy members to proclaim a national day of fasting to seek God’s help in combating a cholera epidemic, replied that he could not do as they wished “without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion now enjoys in this country in its complete separation from the political concerns of the general government.”

This particular statement should be proclaimed far and wide:

“The most dangerous people in the world today are those who persuade themselves that they are executing the will of the Almighty.”

(Note: I disagree a bit, however, about Reagan and Carter and others never using their faith to get support or votes… I recall Carter’s being a Sunday-school teacher being used in his favor by his campaign, to say ‘here’s an honest God-fearing guy who isn’t going to lie like Nixon’ … but still, when it came to making actual decisions about the nation, none of these others openly proclaimed that they were doing whatever came to them in prayer.)

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