Dragged From the Bottom

One more reason to vote against Hope

2008-07-25T11:29:00.000-07:00

He voted for the Farm Bill. You can't find something our legislature has passed that irks libertarian sensibilities more, and quite aside from irked sensibilities it just absolutely terrible policy. And, as i am a megalomaniac who loves independent validation I must direct attention to a Q&A with Daniel Sumner, and economist who specializes in agri-biz and policy. Key quote:

Q: Are there any good arguments that support farm subsidies? If so, to what extent and in what manner may they be justified?
A: No.
My longer answer is here.
I look at a dozen suggested rationales for farm programs and reject them all except the last one — which is we have farm programs because we have had them for 75 years and people are afraid of even thinking about a world without subsidies.

And if you want to how exactly this market distorting and price inflating policy keeps being renewed you have to get to the end but it pretty much sums things up:

Q: Why is there such a deep emotional attachment to growing cotton in the U.S.? Given the historical connection with slavery, I would have thought there would be no appetite to prop up an uneconomic industry.
A: The attachment is financial, not emotional. Cotton is a significant crop economically and politically in a few places and the cotton lobby has been very successful in explaining their case (and providing election assistance) to members of Congress.

Fantastic. On the bright side though I learned that Australia which has no farm subsidies recently passed the US as the worlds fattest nation. McCain voted against this malign behemouth now if only he weren't a senile ball of confusion I might have a candidate. At least this makes hash of the notion that we will all starve from high food prices without protectionism.

Comrade Zhang demands deregulation in the name of the people!

2008-06-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

Once communist China advises Syria that "before we invest in Syria you most open your markets, cut your subsidies, and reduce regulation..." I guess one of the benefits of living in a plutocracy is that ever now and then the plutocrats get the right ideas, though something in me doubts this model is sustainable. And once the people really have control its obvious ho bad things can become. Irony of ironies, I think this will become a trade off between 10% growth under a free market plutocracy or 3% growth under a social democracy.

Not that I wasn't already sold on this but...

2008-06-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

the greatest benefit of globalization has been revealed:

For instance, the real price (in 1988 prices) for the basket of the entire Top 100 list [for the U.S.] was $4,313 in 1988; $3,132 in 1993; $2,533 in 1999; and $2,421 in 2004. That is nearly a 44% decrease in prices from 1988 to 2004. At the same time, there was no significant change in the quality of the wines on the Top 100 list.

And lo! Globalization isn't just for wanna-be foodies and fake wine conneisuers.

I'm Starting to like McCain More

2008-04-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

I do find it discouraging when the only candidate open to changing with the times in any specific way is the 71 year old Republican. Against a backdrop of Clinton and Obama peddling change as an ethos more than a plan, McCain goes to a group of people hardest hit by free trade and tells them that they really do need to change:

"I think the answer is to understand that, free trade or not, we are in an information and technology revolution," he said. "So we want people to be part of that revolution, and we've got to be part of that new economy, rather than try to cling to an old economy."

A world apart from the constant use of verbs without objects by the Democrats. "HOPE," "CHANGE!" Hope for what? Change to what? At least McCain gave an example.

Happy Sol Invictus

2007-12-23T07:43:00.000-08:00

I like a good solstice as much as anyone. And in that spirit I shall toss back some eggnog to toast the victory of the sun god.

Republican Irony Alert

2007-12-18T07:48:00.000-08:00

Republican Orin Hatch just denounced opposition to the new FISA bill as based on an "irrational fear of government." Odd for a member of a party that supposedly champions small government.

Romney's character

2007-12-16T19:02:00.000-08:00

Why didn't Romney disavow his church's official racism until they repealed it in 1978? Frank Rich offers a succinct answer:

Mr. Romney didn’t fight his church’s institutionalized apartheid, whatever his private misgivings, because that’s his character. Though he is trying to sell himself as a leader, he is actually a follower and a panderer, as confirmed by his flip-flops on nearly every issue.

A nicely distilled assessment. Romney comes from a family with quite a lot of pull in the LDS cult, and it might have meant something. And even if it didn't he could have simply left it. After all even though I doubt my departure would make much difference I would certainly make it a point to leave were I to find myself a member of a racist organization. But Romney is a follower and a panderer, and his life is a story of seeking approval from the most proximate authority figures. How else could he believe the insane teachings of the LDS church, or keep a straight face when denying he's a flip-flopper?

Arkansas Fashion

2007-12-16T18:31:00.000-08:00

Love the suede arm patches.

Post Script on Huckabee

2007-12-16T17:54:00.000-08:00

I just realized that the popularity of Huckabee somewhat vindicates my long held belief that the Christian wing of the Republican Party cannot properly be called conservative, if you understand the term to imply favoring free markets, opposition to social libertarianism, commitment to civil liberties and property rights, low taxes, fiscal restraint, and sparing use of military power. Read the statements of Barry Goldwater regarding the key issues of the religious right if you think my definition lacks a pedigree. Whatever a platform including faith based programs, a Human Life Amendment, and a marriage Amendment, is, its not conservative as I understand it. I always thought American conservatism had some affinity for classical liberalism but I may be out of it. Their platform is nothing more than a bit of Christian utopianism with a bit of identity politics mixed in to get people riled. Christian Bolshevism is a term of my own coinage that has never caught on but which I like. Huckabee is its epitome. Tagging himself as a "Christian leader" and displaying knowledge of not much more than his religion, he has a spending record any liberal would need to run from and a willingness to do anything to soothe the wounds of the "Values Voter" contingent.

I Heart Huckabee

2007-12-16T15:43:00.000-08:00

But apparently few others in his party do. I for one would love to see him nominated. The ensuing contest would be essentially an execution and for once the evangelical base would be responsible for the humiliation of the Republican Party rather than being its lifeblood. Those in the right wing blogging community know this and their tone is beginning to resemble northern liberal secularists. To my mind the most entertaining was Lisa Schiffen's at the National Review:

You're not in Little Rock anymore. It's hard Huck, when your decisions matter.

Like back home, you were just trying to be nice to that castrated guy who had raped a few women. He had served some time. Why couldn't they forgive him? You could. You have a good heart. Lots of Christian love. So you pardoned him. And what did he do then, Huck?

What if you make a call like that on Iran, Huck? Or Iraq? Or Osama? Or some guy from China who is very civil and polite at the State dinner, and has a little plan for dominating Asia? Everything that happens, Huck, all those reporters are going to want you to say something, everywhere you go, 24/7. And lots of people will act based on what you say. And not all of them have lots of love in their heart, Huck.

and the priceless round up conclusion:

That bait shop on the lake — it's looking good. You'll be surrounded by nice neighbors, real Christians, and you can be the smartest guy in the room. You can go out running every morning. Remember Huck — Jesus wouldn't be dumb enough to go into politics.You were right on that one. Maybe it's not what he wants from you either.

Oh, that's fun to read. This was the post that Ross Douthat said may as well have been titled "Go back to dogpatch you stupid hillbilly!" John Cole has a compilation of similar reactions to Huckabee, and Kevin Drum's reaction gives a pretty good outsider's perspective:

There are a variety of ostensible reasons for this: lack of foreign policy bona fides, too compassionate for their taste, too willing to consider spending money, etc. But I think the real reason is simpler: as with blogosphere conservatives, mainstream conservatives are mostly urban sophisticates with a libertarian bent, not rural evangelicals with a social conservative bent. They're happy to talk up NASCAR and pickup trucks in public, but in real life they mostly couldn't care less about either. Ditto for opposing abortion and the odd bit of gay bashing via proxy. But when it comes to Ten Commandments monuments and end times eschatology, they shiver inside just like any mainstream liberal. The only difference is that usually they keep their shivering to themselves because they want to keep everyone in the big tent happy.

But then along comes Huckabee, and guess what? He's the real deal. Not a guy like George Bush or Ronald Reagan, who talks a soothing game to the snake handlers but then turns around and spends his actual political capital on tax cuts, foreign wars, and deregulating big corporations. Huckabee, it turns out, isn't just giving lip service to evangelicals, he actually believes all that stuff. Among other things, he believes in creationism (really believes), once proposed that AIDS patients should be quarantined, appears to share the traditional evangelical view that Mormonism is a cult, and says (in public!) that homosexuality is sinful. And that's without seeing the text of any of his old sermons, which he (probably wisely) refuses to let the press lay eyes on.

I think this brand of yahooism puts off mainstream urban conservatives every bit as much as it does mainstream urban liberals. They're afraid that this time, it's not just a line of patter to keep the yokels in line.

I love it. A Huckabee nomination would be the realization without the unfortunate consequences of my long held fantasy of turning the country over to the religious right simply to let them discredit themselves so we could all move on. Thankfully if Huckabee gets nominated it will accomplish this but since he will never be elected the evangelicals will be responsible for making the Republicans unelectable, and the religious right will be humiliated and abandoned by the party. This has always been the problem with the evangelical base. Their agenda appeals to almost no one outside the megachurches. Exactly how can you motivate the Charles Krauthammer's of the world to vote Republican with anti-gay hysteria, a religious persecution complex, and a spending record worse than LBJ's? Huckabee has all these things and he's going to humiliate all parts of the party. Good. Roll with pigs and you'll get covered in shit. All this and we don't have to watch what happens when a President uses the Book of Revelation as a guide to foreign policy. Grand.

Not convinced he's unelectable? Browse this post and the assorted links.

Andrew Stuttaford fires back on my behalf

2007-12-14T13:21:00.000-08:00

At Freddoso:

Freedom, Faith, and Postwar Europe [Andrew Stuttaford]

David, you write that "one grave consequence of post-war Europe's loss of faith is its approaching demographic extinction." Putting aside the question as to whether Europe is heading for "demographic extinction" (I don't believe that it is) I think it's important to point out that birth rates are now falling just about everywhere across the globe. There is little or no evidence to suggest that this can be linked to any loss of faith in Europe, or for that matter, elsewhere. Rather it is a by-product of modernity, and it's one that's very welcome too.

Journalists should be history majors

2007-12-14T11:49:00.000-08:00

David Freddoso:

To the debate over Krauthammer's piece, I'd add a Steynian note. One grave consequence of post-war Europe's loss of faith is its approaching demographic extinction. The Italians are on pace to be as dead as the Romans. The Russians are headed there even faster. Can you be free if you don't exist? Or even worse, if you end up under Islamic law?

I'd also point to pre-war Europe, whose loss of religious faith (it's not like it started in 1960 — try 1660) had ghastly ideological consequences — Communism, German National Socialism — that led to countless deaths.

I agree with Ramesh — Romney's statement isn't that absurd.

Typically shallow historical analysis by the religious. If communism were the result of a loss of faith then why did communism take root in Russia, the most highly religious and backward nation in Europe. Indeed its religiosity set it apart so much that many across the Atlantic didn't even consider it to be part of Europe, and its exclusion from the EU is a testament to this attitude's survival. Until 1917 it was ruled by a monarchy whose claims to divine right were supported by the Russian Orthodox Church and believed by many of the people who were kept in a kind of serfdom that despite 19th century reform efforts by Alexander II, was not substantially different from it medieval predecessor. And this monarchy had as much contempt for the lives of its subjects as the Communist regime that followed.

National socialism was never atheistic, there is no case to make that Hitler was an atheist, and it specifically appealed to Antisemitism cultivated by the Catholic Church and dominant Protestant sects. Enough of this. How much intellectual shabbiness is required to take two opposed ideologies that couldn't stand each other's existence, and attribute them to the same nebulous cause?

And while they bemoan the demographic decline of Europe they fail to mention that the Islamic world's population is increasing far faster than even America's yet is far poorer and lives under theocratic oppression. Shall we then take their example and reduce ourselves to poverty and religious backwardness for the sake of demographic expansion? It apparently has never dawned on Freddoso that poorer, less educated societies (and people) are consistently more religious and have higher birthrates. The Economist puts out a fact book that compiles these, often jaw-dropping, stats. Does this then confer some virtue on their poverty and ignorance? After all such widespread ignorance and poverty as seen in Africa and the Middle East is the quickest way to raise the birth rate, though at the expense of any semblance of freedom for women and the brutalization of men. "How can you be free if you are poor and ignorant?" will then be the question that replaces Freddoso's. Is it asking too much to expect that religious people will evince even a modicum of intellectual honesty and constructiveness on this point or will they be constantly blinded by heartache over the approaching nadir of their influence.

Ironically he pinpoints the loss of religious faith as having begun in 1660. This is incidentally a little more than a decade after the treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War, and established a rather delicate and short lived peace but effectively ended the period of international warfare in Europe on at least explicitly religious grounds. This war decimated the population in Germany by as much as 20 percent and claimed around 5 million lives in a Europe with less than 100 million people. This of course leaves out the countless wars rebellions and massacres that tore the continent apart for the preceding 300ish years, which he predictably does not mention.

Weirdly though he doesn't seem to notice that while pinpointing the beginning of religion's decline in 1660, he lives in a world where Europe's population has maybe quintupled (a conservative estimate) since then and has only started declining in the last 5 years though he still manages to claim the loss of faith since 1660 and more recently after World War II is the culprit. Religious people like Freddoso have the unseemly habit of making huge statements that make little sense but and need considerable unpacking, but have the advantage of sounding right to those who want to believe them.

Coda: Notice again that apologists for religion advocate for it without mention to whether or not it is actually true.

No room for the atheists

2007-12-12T21:39:00.001-08:00

Jacob Sullum joins the secular dissenters from Romney's speech.

I have joined the atheist blogroll!

2007-12-12T20:12:00.000-08:00

My first attempt at publicity. Must keep up the posting.

What do Muslim girls do for prom?

2007-12-11T16:58:00.000-08:00

If this is what they have to deal with just to leave the house?

Going to Church can make you kill people

2007-12-10T21:56:00.001-08:00

Ii must confess to breathing a sigh of relief when I found out that the maniac who shot up Pastor Ted "I'm completely straight" Haggard's former flock was not a secular Jew atheist biologist. Instead as one may have been prone to guess, he was the product of a strict, religious upbringing and home schooling. No quicker way to drive someone crazy with hate for their religion than force it on them as children. This is admittedly a rather dark example of schadenfreude, but I don't care. Sorry flymorgue.

"A neighbor, Cody Askeland, 19, said the brothers were home-schooled, describing the whole family as "very, very religious."

See how necessary religion is for morality!

Matthew Murray lived there along with a brother, Christopher, 21, a student at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla.

Oral Roberts University! Another fine example of the high ethical and educational standards of Christian education. I suggest a Google news search. It will keep you busy for a month reading tales of stupidity, graft, and sleaze. All under the auspices of Jesus Christ Savior of Mankind. (JCSM)

"I was just expecting for the next gunshot to be coming through my car. Miraculously — by the grace of God — it did not," she told ABC's "Good Morning America."

Solipsism is never very becoming. Unfortunately for two sisters the next bullets went through their bodies, ending their lives. But I am sure God withheld his grace to fulfill his mysterious, inscrutable plan, which we filthy mortals can't hope to understand. If I were the mother of one of these victims I might be inclined to administer a good kicking to this twit.

About 7,000 people were in and around the church the time of the shooting.

7,000! What a waste of man-hours.

New Life, with a largely upper middle-class membership, was founded by the Rev. Ted Haggard, who was dismissed last year after a former male prostitute alleged he had a three-year cash-for-sex relationship with him. Haggard admitted committing unspecified "sexual immorality.

HA!

This story is a sad example of the stifling morass of stupidity surrounding religion. From the home schooled and brainwashed gunman to the almost victim spouting selfish grotesque drivel about how she escaped by the "grace of god" while two people lay dead, to the pathetic life story of the victim Phillip Crouse, a former skinhead who probably felt saved from plotting his own spree against the cursed people of Ham by this ridiculous melange of consumerism, spirituality, self-help, and mawkish bourgeois sentiment.

What would have been prevented this was not more faith in public life but a bit of education. Instead of locking their children up to be homeschooled, isolated, inundated with superstitious, mind shrinking nonsense, and forced to endure personality engineering with all the compassion of Paris Island, it might have helped to try and teach them not to fear and loathe the entire modern world so they would have been able to see a place worth going to when the comfort of fantasy land they were living in disappeared.

Oddly enough they won't release his sermons anymore

2007-12-10T21:17:00.000-08:00

"It doesn't embarrass me one bit to let you know that I believe Adam and Eve were real people." -Mike Huckabee 1990

Mitt, I knew John Kennedy. John Kennedy was a friend of mine. And you're no John Kennedy.

2007-12-10T20:20:00.001-08:00

Not that I have any great love for JFK but I must say Romney's insipid speech on his religion didn't exactly meet that standard. I can't help but resent being told the requirements of freedom by a man who believes it somehow credible to think that Joseph Smith, a serial polygamist, rapist, fraud, demagogue, theocrat, and fantasist is a latter day prophet and revelator of the will of the creator of the universe. Apparently we need a person of faith in the White House but to even deign to wonder what that faith entails is hideousl un-American and tears at the fabric of our society. I can't help but notice a parallel between this and the importance Romney believes should be placed on the record of his entire political career before he began running for president This might be a clever way of preempting any questions on why a grown man in his late twenties and early thirties couldn't find it in himself to leave what was an officially racist cult until 1979.

Steve Chapman at Reason says it better than I, though I will have more to say so maybe I can gain ground.

Daily ejaculation of stupidity

2007-12-10T19:52:00.000-08:00

No not Christians breeding, but a column by Pat Boone. Notice how easy it is to be welcomed by the religious right webzines as a commentator. No qualifications in journalism or even anything to recommend his intelligence. Just a washed up shitty singer willing to shill for the logically deficient and paranoid. What does Pat nominate as the number one threat facing the country? The ACLU. I would have gone with SARS but maybe he's more with it than I am. Nonetheless, for a lesson in how to ignore history, science, the Constitution, logic, and even the basic rules of causality, check it out.

I liked this little nugget of wisdom:

It's not just "happening." Somebody's got it in for us, and doesn't intend to stop until we are no longer the America we've been for 250 years.

Yes 250 years. I guess if you placed the founding at 1776 (the earliest possible date) 231 might equal 250 if you are either looking for a nice number that will melt warmly with a quartile ring into the ears of believers, or can't do second grade math.

Going to church can make you very stupid (aka: Sherri Shepherd watch.)

2007-12-05T10:28:00.000-08:00

Truly.

Religion is child abuse

2007-12-03T15:57:00.000-08:00

For those who take such objection to the notion that religious instruction constitutes child abuse I do wonder how they would answer two questions. If this had happened as a result of anything but religious belief would the judge have allowed it, and would there be any reason not to label the boy's indoctrination as child abuse. Its a filthy lie that kills and, unlike history's other great fantasies, we applaud it.

I agree with every word

2007-11-29T16:02:00.000-08:00

I am now a postgrad

2007-11-27T21:53:00.000-08:00

I hope its not by virtue of unreadable writing but I have been upgraded to postgrad level blogging.

Marcus Ross and hilarious irony

2007-11-27T17:54:00.000-08:00

Marcus Ross has a phd in paleontology from the university of Rhode Island. The only problem is he is a young earth creationist who was granted that phd because he wrote a dissertation which disproves everything one would need to believe to be a young earth creationist. How he resolves the cognitive dissonance as reported in the NYT is the sweetest irony:

'At the conference I asked Ross whether he still believes what he wrote in his graduate thesis. His answer confirmed him as the product of the postmodern university, where truth is dependent on the framework: “Within the context of old age and evolutionary theory, yes. But if the parameter is different, portions of it could be completely in error.”

So now to justify their nonsense creationists are making common cause with the only group of intellectuals who can rival them in the dubious category of bullshit artistry, post-modernists. This isn't new. I wrote about a Harvey Mansfield column defending religion when he claimed:

Atheists today angrily hold religion to a standard of justice that the most advanced thinkers of our time, the postmoderns, have declared to be impossible. Some of those postmoderns, indeed, are so disgusted with the optimism of atheism that, with a shrug of their shoulders, they propose returning to the relative sanity of religion.

It is a bit of poetic justice that I get to watch religious people attempt to salvage dignity for their beliefs by allying themselves with nihilistic nonsense developed by people who don't share their beliefs, despise them, and who rarely offer anything but obscurantist gibberish. The liberal university may yet be a friend to religious conservatism.

Defending the meaningless

2007-11-27T17:14:00.000-08:00

An article by Stephanie Coontz makes the case for less government involvement in marriage. I've long believed the entire controversy over gay marriage could be diffused if the government restricted itself to granting the only thing it should grant, civil unions. There is less opposition to gay civil unions and granting the attendant rights. The battle is over nomenclature but as Coontz points out the practices surrounding marriage have been subject to such historical flux that aside from the one aspect of it being between a man and a woman nothing else is consistent:

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

In 1215, the church decreed that a “licit” marriage must take place in church. But people who married illictly had the same rights and obligations as a couple married in church: their children were legitimate; the wife had the same inheritance rights; the couple was subject to the same prohibitions against divorce.

Not until the 16th century did European states begin to require that marriages be performed under legal auspices. In part, this was an attempt to prevent unions between young adults whose parents opposed their match.

The American colonies officially required marriages to be registered, but until the mid-19th century, state supreme courts routinely ruled that public cohabitation was sufficient evidence of a valid marriage. By the later part of that century, however, the United States began to nullify common-law marriages and exert more control over who was allowed to marry.

By the 1920s, 38 states prohibited whites from marrying blacks, “mulattos,” Japanese, Chinese, Indians, “Mongolians,” “Malays” or Filipinos. Twelve states would not issue a marriage license if one partner was a drunk, an addict or a “mental defect.” Eighteen states set barriers to remarriage after divorce.

In the mid-20th century, governments began to get out of the business of deciding which couples were “fit” to marry. Courts invalidated laws against interracial marriage, struck down other barriers and even extended marriage rights to prisoners.

But governments began relying on marriage licenses for a new purpose: as a way of distributing resources to dependents. The Social Security Act provided survivors’ benefits with proof of marriage. Employers used marital status to determine whether they would provide health insurance or pension benefits to employees’ dependents. Courts and hospitals required a marriage license before granting couples the privilege of inheriting from each other or receiving medical information.

The article also does me the turn of obliquely demonstrating how the current battle over marriage has nothing to do with control over what relationships we feel are competent to rear children. If it were then the those involving a partner who was a "drunk, an addict or a 'mental defect'" would also be prohibited. But I suspect this smacks too much of eugenics to be said aloud so as the number of groups we can vocally discriminate diminishes, conservatives focus on those still sufficiently loathed.

Every other tradition surrounding marriage has changed and this one will as well. And if we're to avoid the affront to good sense that is a marriage amendment, the government should simply stop issuing marriage licenses and restricting itself to granting recognition which has no relation to a shifting cultural institution over which it has never effectively exerted control and where it has, has usually reinforced the worst bigotries of the unwashed many.

Mumbling like he's on drugs

2007-11-26T18:12:00.000-08:00

McCain rehashes the same tired lines of the supporters of the War on Drugs but on thing intrigued me. He claims that in his state (AZ) first time drug offenders are sent not to prison but a rehab program where their progress as they come off drugs can be closely monitored. I don't think they should be sent to prison or to rehab or even paid attention to by the state, but the lack of effort these days on the part of Republicans to even try to reconcile their proposals with what have traditionally been called conservative principles is shocking. I do remember hearing that government programs of social reform and behavior modification cast a net a bit too wide (and expensive) for those of the small government, personal liberties, and individual responsibility cloth but evidently John McCain sees no dissonance with these principles and endorsing a program that welcomes first time, private users of senselessly illegal substances into the loving arms of state run, tax payer funded rehab. I am sorry but I don't think I could be called indifferent to my civic duties if I don't wish to pay to rehabilitate someone who never asked to be rehabilitated for using a substance that I didn't give to him. But alas being soft on drugs must mean you are soft on hippies or some other pariah group conservatives fear.

And another question: Why the fawning and utterly obsequious thanks to the police officer for... being a police officer? The cop spoke about three times as intelligently as McCain and I doubt needed his gold star of approval for his life's work. Is it impossible to disagree with someone without thereby impugning the dignity of everything about them? Or was McCain just attempting to use another opportunity to pander to talk-radio conservatives who gain life strength from paeans to those who carry guns like Mormons from goofy underwear? Because I really doubt the cop cared at all.

Those Ingrates in Darfur

2007-11-15T18:02:00.000-08:00

How Can We Raise Awareness In Darfur Of How Much We're Doing For Them?

A tragic lack of gratitude.

I use only the finest vests for my martyr missions

2007-11-15T16:29:00.000-08:00

Yes it is their religion. It is not poverty, not depression, not mental illness, and not the injustices imposed by the West. The wealthier you are, the more likely you are to support terrorism. We've known this for a while but reluctance to seem intolerant and denounce one religion to the exclusion of others makes many silent. To all secular people suffering this malaise... psst: Their all laughably stupid, but they're not all as violent and crazy. Alan Krueger from Princeton synthesizes the data here well enough for me to read it on the bus ride home.

More abortion logic.

2007-11-11T15:37:00.001-08:00

From the LA Times, Gary Wills has a column raising some some of the objections to the anti-abortion crusaders that I've made here. He adds a few insights from science, Aristotle, and Aquinas. I reproduce here in full:

Abortion isn't a religious issue
Evangelicals are adamant, but religion really has nothing to say about the issue.
By Garry Wills

November 4, 2007

What makes opposition to abortion the issue it is for each of the GOP presidential candidates is the fact that it is the ultimate "wedge issue" -- it is nonnegotiable. The right-to-life people hold that it is as strong a point of religion as any can be. It is religious because the Sixth Commandment (or the Fifth by Catholic count) says, "Thou shalt not kill." For evangelical Christians, in general, abortion is murder. That is why what others think, what polls say, what looks practical does not matter for them. One must oppose murder, however much rancor or controversy may ensue.

But is abortion murder? Most people think not. Evangelicals may argue that most people in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons. It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons. Not even evangelicals act as if it were. If so, a woman seeking an abortion would be the most culpable person. She is killing her own child. But the evangelical community does not call for her execution.

About 10% of evangelicals, according to polls, allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change the nature of the thing conceived. If it is a human person, killing it is punishing it for something it had nothing to do with. We do not kill people because they had a criminal parent.

Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past. If it had, late-term abortions and miscarriages would have called for treatment of the well-formed fetus as a person, which would require baptism and a Christian burial. That was never the practice. And no wonder. The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion is not treated in the Ten Commandments -- or anywhere in Jewish Scripture. It is not treated in the Sermon on the Mount -- or anywhere in the New Testament. It is not treated in the early creeds. It is not treated in the early ecumenical councils.

Lacking scriptural guidance, St. Thomas Aquinas worked from Aristotle's view of the different kinds of animation -- the nutritive (vegetable) soul, the sensing (animal) soul and the intellectual soul. Some people used Aristotle to say that humans therefore have three souls. Others said that the intellectual soul is created by human semen.

Aquinas denied both positions. He said that a material cause (semen) cannot cause a spiritual product. The intellectual soul (personhood) is directly created by God "at the end of human generation." This intellectual soul supplants what had preceded it (nutritive and sensory animation). So Aquinas denied that personhood arose at fertilization by the semen. God directly infuses the soul at the completion of human formation.

Much of the debate over abortion is based on a misconception -- that it is a religious issue, that the pro-life advocates are acting out of religious conviction. It is not a theological matter at all. There is no theological basis for defending or condemning abortion. Even popes have said that the question of abortion is a matter of natural law, to be decided by natural reason. Well, the pope is not the arbiter of natural law. Natural reason is.

John Henry Newman, a 19th century Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism, once wrote that "the pope, who comes of revelation, has no jurisdiction over nature." The matter must be decided by individual conscience, not by religious fiat. As Newman said: "I shall drink to the pope, if you please -- still, to conscience first, and to the pope afterward."

If we are to decide the matter of abortion by natural law, that means we must turn to reason and science, the realm of Enlightened religion. But that is just what evangelicals want to avoid. Who are the relevant experts here? They are philosophers, neurobiologists, embryologists. Evangelicals want to exclude them because most give answers they do not want to hear. The experts have only secular expertise, not religious conviction. They, admittedly, do not give one answer -- they differ among themselves, they are tentative, they qualify. They do not have the certitude that the religious right accepts as the sign of truth.

So evangelicals take shortcuts. They pin everything on being pro-life. But one cannot be indiscriminately pro-life.

If one claimed, in the manner of Albert Schweitzer, that all life deserved moral respect, then plants have rights, and it might turn out that we would have little if anything to eat. And if one were consistently pro-life, one would have to show moral respect for paramecia, insects, tissue excised during a medical operation, cancer cells, asparagus and so on. Harvesting carrots, on a consistent pro-life hypothesis, would constitute something of a massacre.

Opponents of abortion will say that they are defending only human life. It is certainly true that the fetus is human life. But so is the semen before it fertilizes; so is the ovum before it is fertilized. They are both human products, and both are living things. But not even evangelicals say that the destruction of one or the other would be murder.

Defenders of the fetus say that life begins only after the semen fertilizes the egg, producing an embryo. But, in fact, two-thirds of the embryos produced this way fail to live on because they do not embed in the womb wall. Nature is like fertilization clinics -- it produces more embryos than are actually used. Are all the millions of embryos that fail to be embedded human persons?

The universal mandate to preserve "human life" makes no sense. My hair is human life -- it is not canine hair, and it is living. It grows. When it grows too long, I have it cut. Is that aborting human life? The same with my growing human fingernails. An evangelical might respond that my hair does not have the potential to become a person. True. But semen has the potential to become a person, and we do not preserve every bit of semen that is ejaculated but never fertilizes an egg.

The question is not whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person, and when it becomes one. Is it when it is capable of thought, of speech, of recognizing itself as a person, or of assuming the responsibilities of a person? Is it when it has a functioning brain? Aquinas said that the fetus did not become a person until God infused the intellectual soul. A functioning brain is not present in the fetus until the end of the sixth month at the earliest.

Not surprisingly, that is the earliest point of viability, the time when a fetus can successfully survive outside the womb.

Whether through serendipity or through some sort of causal connection, it now seems that the onset of a functioning central nervous system with a functioning cerebral cortex and the onset of viability occur around the same time -- the end of the second trimester, a time by which 99% of all abortions have already occurred.

Opponents of abortion like to show sonograms of the fetus reacting to stimuli. But all living cells have electric and automatic reactions. These are like the reactions of Terri Schiavo when she was in a permanent vegetative state. Aquinas, following Aristotle, called the early stage of fetal development vegetative life. The fetus has a face long before it has a brain. It has animation before it has a command center to be aware of its movements or to experience any reaction as pain.

These are difficult matters, on which qualified people differ. It is not enough to say that whatever the woman wants should go. She has a responsibility to consider whether and when she may have a child inside her, not just a fetus. Certainly by the late stages of her pregnancy, a child is ready to respond with miraculous celerity to all the personal interchanges with the mother that show a brain in great working order.

Given these uncertainties, who is to make the individual decision to have an abortion? Religious leaders? They have no special authority in the matter, which is not subject to theological norms or guidance. The state? Its authority is given by the people it represents, and the people are divided on this. Doctors? They too differ. The woman is the one closest to the decision. Under Roe vs. Wade, no woman is forced to have an abortion. But those who have decided to have one are able to.

Some objected to Karl Rove's use of abortion to cement his ecumenical coalition, on the grounds that this was injecting religion into politics. The supreme irony is that, properly understood, abortion is not even a religious issue. But that did not matter to Rove. All he cared about was that it worked. For a while.

The Answer!

2007-11-05T20:03:00.000-08:00

The answer to the question on which I ended my previous post, via Matt Yglesias:

The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State's policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney's office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American "drugs and thugs"; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia.

Its Cheney's influence. This kind of needless incompetence and cronyism populated Rajiv Chandrasekeran's book Imperial Life in the Emerald City like baseball hats at a frat party. Putting incompetents in places of high power has become quite the leitmotif: Remember Michael Brown, Harriet Miers, L. Paul Bremer, Rumsfeld, Karen Hughes and of course Alberto Gonzalez and his minions from Pat Robertson's Regnet University Law School.

Follow the Money!

2007-11-05T19:38:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has an article detailing how the US's continued aid of Musharraf in light of his recent dissolution of just about every legal barrier to the establishment of a military dictatorship and declaration of a state of emergency, conflicts slightly with the Bush administrations rhetoric about spreading democracy.

Well, in the same story it appears that we never did actually support democracy in Pakistan:

While the total dollar amount of American aid to Pakistan is unclear, a study published in August by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated it to be “at least $10 billion in Pakistan since 9/11, excluding covert funds.” Sixty percent of that has gone to “Coalition Support Funds,” essentially direct payments to the Pakistani military, and 15 percent to purchase major weapons systems. Another 15 percent has been for general budget support for the Pakistani government; only 10 percent for development or humanitarian assistance.

We always supported a stronger Musharraf, and wanted above all for him to stay in power as an ally in the GWOT. They know this too:

They would rather have a stable Pakistan — albeit with some restrictive norms — than have more democracy prone to fall in the hands of extremists,” said Tariq Azim Khan, the minister of state for information. “Given the choice, I know what our friends would choose.

Its had some interesting results too. Osama Bin Laden is now registering an approval rating of 46 percent to Musharraf's 38, and leader of the secular opposition party Benazir Bhutto (a woman of all things!) is at 63. I would like to speak to someone who can make sense of a Muslim country where the electorate is split in large chunks between a theocratic fascist, a military dictator, and a female proponent of secular democracy (though I admittedly don't know Bhutto's agenda in great detail). I would be even more interested n speaking with someone who knows why we should keep pumping massive amounts of money to a leader whose commitment to our cause has been flaky, and whose help in it has been, thus far, useless.(Al-Qaeda and the Taliban remain ensconced in the mountains)

Andrew Sullivan has a bad memory

2007-11-05T17:22:00.000-08:00

Consider Sullivan's sneer at what Chomsky says at about 5:00

in light of this post from Sullivan today, about John Podhoretz and torture, where he gets florid to a degree I've not yet seen, saying;

severe mental or physical pain or suffering

This standard has been the case since the Second World War. The argument that no permanent or even temporary physical injury means no torture is a canard, once deployed by the Nazis. Here is their defense of "enhanced interrogation" in 1948:

Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement.

The US rejected such cant and condemned those guilty of using the Bush-Cheney methods to death. It tells you all you need to know about some neoconservatives that they now side with the arguments of the Gestapo against the arguments of the US to defend their own willful ignorance and power.

So Chomsky is preaching nonsense for merely making the suggestion in 2004 that the Bush administration be subjected to prosecution for war crimes over their conduct of the war in Iraq but Sullivan now can imply that they deserve to be put to death? I'll grant that it has been 3 years and he is prone to changing his tune but this is Romneyesque considering the gravity of the treatment he is suggesting for Bush and Co.

Parsed into non-existence

2007-11-02T10:26:00.000-07:00

Absolutely awe-inspiring.

Thou shalt not dispense!

2007-10-30T18:01:00.001-07:00

Joseph Ratzinger has issued commands to Catholic pharmacists not to dispense prescriptions that conflict with their religious beliefs stating:

"Pharmacists must seek to raise people's awareness so that all human beings are protected from conception to natural death, and so that medicines truly play a therapeutic role," Benedict said.

Benedict said conscientious objector status would "enable them not to collaborate directly or indirectly in supplying products that have clearly immoral purposes such as, for example, abortion or euthanasia."

and continuing:

"We cannot anesthetize consciences as regards, for example, the effect of certain molecules that have the goal of preventing the implantation of the embryo or shortening a person's life,"

The Daily show did a bit on this a while ago when they interviewed a Christian (the particular sect escapes me) pharmacist who would not dispense birth control. What was startling was how confident the man was in asserting his right to not perform his job and how righteous he felt he was in claiming he could not be fired for it. I would be hard pressed to think of any other reason that a person can neglect their job and not be fired for it other than religious ones. It seems if you can simply dignify your neglect of civic, legal, social, and professional duties with faith you get a pass. Unfortunately the man was on pretty sound legal ground. The Civil Rights Act specifies that a person cannot be denied employment on religious grounds. What was intended as an effort prevent discrimination has now turned into a regulation inimical to free enterprise. I wonder if a Muslim could claim discrimination because a liquor store fired him when he refused to touch alcohol. I wonder if a Catholic doctor would escape legal culpability if he refused to perform an abortion to save a woman's life and it resulted in her death. I wonder if a Hindu could sue for being fired from McDonald's because as we all know he would object to the beef extract they put in French fries.

That the Civil Rights Act has unintentionally not only prevented a business from freely hiring who it deems fit, has not only created a legal shelter for the professionally negligent, has now made it impossible for a business to operate in pursuit of its own self interest, but has also had consequences with which its liberal authors would not have been pleased is no surprise to those who don't think the government should be delineate good from bad thought to its citizens. Vague legislation like this does not protect minority rights but rather creates micro rights. I can claim any set of religious beliefs I like and to escape punishment for almost any violation of the law I need only to convince a court that these beliefs are honestly held. The locus of determination over how laws are applied has now shifted from a written constitution to an individual's mental state. And I am confident enough in the existence of similar cases that I will assert their existence and let readers do their own research.

Instead of being duly fired for not filling a prescription (his job) a pharmacy must now waste time and resources to accommodate a person with beliefs it could not have asked them to reveal.

This will cheer you up

2007-10-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

Max Blumenthal at the Values Voters conference. Why is it that these people never like to be filmed?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/theocracy-now_b_70314.html

O'Reilly as postmodern linguistic perspectivist

2007-10-29T16:33:00.000-07:00

I came across this video at Reason after clicking on a link to the "Drew Carey Project." Apparently Carey is a libertarian, though as a fan of his show when I was a young'un I suppose it makes sense. The interview is between O'Reilly and Jacob Sullum where Sullum advocates treating all drugs much in the same vein as alcohol. The piece takes its normal course 1) The pretense of a rational discussion is presented at the beginning. 2) O'Reilly makes a gross mischaracterization of the guest's position. 3) O'Reilly dismisses evidence that could counter his point. 4) O'Reilly calls guest a puerile and safe-for-TV name. 5) Full pitch hysteria with images of dead bodies and chaos if the world doesn't listen to Bill O'.

This is all pretty standard fr O'Reilly but notice the gross misuses of language and violations of all rules of argumentative good faith:

"You can spin data any way you want."

Okay, so lets just not use it then. Rather that collect evidence and facts to support our opinions and give our arguments a basis in reality we should rely instead on blind assertion of apriori intuition.

BO: You got[sic] 20 million alcoholics in this country, you got 0 million who are drug dependent either illegally or on prescriptions. That's 37 million Americans who have trouble because of drug dependence. Now why would you an intelligent guy want to put forth a theory that intoxicating oneself is beneficial.

Sullum doesn't actually say that. He says that other substances should be treated the way alcohol is, where personal and responsible use should be tolerated. His assertion that most people who use currently illegal substances was summarily dismissed because O'reilly doesn't like data, and when Sullum brings the work of a UCLA pharmacologist's work on the history of human search for altered consciousness O'Reilly claims that it is invalid because biologists don't agree (a statement we have to take on O'Reilly's authority apparently). This all leaves aside the fact that what Sullum is arguing for is not a theory at all but a conclusion based on evidence rather than an overarching explanation of data.

Sullum: The war on Drugs has tremendous consequences but people are reluctant to consider alternatives...

Bill O': And the alternative is do your own thing?

Gross and hysterical mischaracterization.

S: The fact that alcohol can be abused does not mean it should be illegal.

BO: IT'S ALL THE SAME THING!

How nuanced! Again over looking the fact that of his supposed 37 million people with substance problems 27 million have problems with a substance that is legal. Yet he doesn't advocate making that illegal, just blindly persisting in the same useless course of proscribing use of these substances regardless of its efficacy for no reason other than the fact that it sends what Bill and his over 70 demographic think is the right message. A socialist couldn't think up such a futile show of solidarity.

BO: (yet angrier) Pinheads like you are encouraging intoxication when its one of the worst things in our society!

Sullum: [but responsible] people are going to jail for crimes that don't hurt anyone...

BO: I don't care about that. I care about the dead guy in the street who got run over by a drunk driver!

When did Sullum ever say that drunk driving should be treated leniently? He stressed nothing more than the need to eliminate penalties for responsible users, which drunk drivers are not. But as O'Reilly says, "ITS ALL THE SAME THING" so this distinction hardly matters. This all mixed with some apocalyptic hysteria and images of death and O'Reilly has successfully administered to himself and his audience the perfect panacea to reasoned argument from the opposition.

BO: You irresponsible libertines cause such damage to this society you should be ashamed of yourself.

If one were feeling generous this might be attributed to a harmless, Bushian malapropism rather than grotesque ignorance of the difference between a libertine and a libertarian, but my spider sense tells me he knows the definition of neither and has only a vague notion of the former while being wholly oblivious to the existence of the latter. This accusation leveled by the way after Sullum went to pains to make a distinction between responsible and irresponsible use. This was entirely ignored obviously.

BO: Let me break it to you this way. Getting intoxicated is not responsible. You want to get stoned have fun. But don't get in a car and don't come near my family.

Am I taking fucking crazy pills or did O'Reilly just make Sullum's point for him after doing nothing but ignoring everything he said and screeching fatuous, platitudes. "Have fun getting stoned but don't get in a car" is exactly what Sullum was saying, but O'Reilly gets so flustered by the presence of a cogent argument that he is totally unaware that in trying to obnoxiously take up cudgels against him he took his side. The whole confrontation was apparently not over a difference of opinion. Words surely could not have meant what they were intended to mean. In one breath O'Reilly says that getting intoxicated in never responsible but then gives his sanction to private, responsible use. By what he said it is impossible to believe that he actually understood what the words coming out of his mouth meant. Either that or he is engaging in some kind of postmodern technique of discursive and multi-perspectival argumentation. If you don't know what that means, well neither do I, but it seems to make as much sense as O'Reilly's diatribe does to me, namely none. I am led only to believe that Bill O' is so flustered by the presence of vocalized, coherent thought that his cognitive abilities (limited though they be) were suppressed by some kind of animalistic fight or flight response. Now what kinds of people start lynch mobs.

Its getting old but not the least bit less hilarious

2007-10-26T13:48:00.000-07:00

Another preacher has plead guilty to public indecency and DUI. Oh the catch is he was caught wearing a miniskirt and offered to have sex with the arresting officers. But of course the problem isn't that Christian beliefs breed sexual anxiety, repression, and self loathing. The problem isn't that people like this man who may not have felt quite at home in their church had to overcompensate to defeat the inner demons by becoming a preacher and radio evangelist. And the problem certainly isn't that his community made him feel so tortured about his impulses that booze was the only way he could quell the fear of hellfire while pathetically and perplexedly seeking some kind of outlet. No no, the problem is that we're fallen and need God's grace. Yes.

Story: http://www.volunteertv.com/home/headlines/10816901.html

I'm sure the religious would love to be with the red dots

2007-10-24T13:26:00.001-07:00

From this study the Pew Research Center.

This is not a free country

2007-10-24T08:32:00.000-07:00

A man's family was threatened with torture to get him to confess to a crime he didn't commit. The alleged crime was using a radio transmitter in a hotel room to converse with terrorists on the 9/11 planes. Well the pilot who had stayed in his hotel room before him later claimed the radio as his but it didn't stop the FBI from threatening to finger his family to Egyptian police (formerly mentors to Saddam's secret police) as terrorists. He confessed, he now been exonerated, and all information about this crime committed by the FBI has been yanked from the internet. Not before bloggers got to it though.

Story here.

James Watson juggling dynamite

2007-10-18T18:40:00.000-07:00

This will test the boundaries of academic freedom.

Haven't heard this in a while

2007-10-18T18:34:00.000-07:00

M.J. Rosenberg, whoever that is, has claimed that if Rudy wins he will leave the country. He even goes so far as to concede that it is a juvenile sentiment usually the domain of students, but he doesn't give up the joke. I doubt the country will lose much from his departure so does anyone want to start a pool on whether he actually does it?

S-CHIP/ Krugman is the worst

2007-10-17T21:22:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman recently opined that the reason Republicans oppose S-CHIP expansion isn't because it is ineffective "but because it works." I can't help but think of how Tucker Carlson asked him whether he thought it was helpful that he not only thought his opponents were wrong but also evil. He pretty much epitomize what is meant by bad faith argument. Cato has some goof reason why the program is a bad idea. I am as of now not fully enough versed for sustained comment but the post is worth a look.

More Cato...

2007-10-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

The July discussion at Cato Unbound is also worth a look. Titled The Politics of Abundance it contends that since the 60's America has undergone a shift toward a more libertarian society. At once the governing economic philosophies have assumed a more classically liberal character, and traditional cultural values have ceased to command as much respect.

Both of these are good, and I would argue inevitable. Cultural norms can never remain static amidst a dynamic economy that allows for personal choice and freedom in the labor market. The Soviet Union had some of the most draconian morality laws imaginable, of which the most famous is the treatment of gays.But that is another discussion.

The title of the article reminded me of a piece I read while writing a paper in college that provided the most elegantly simple example of why central planning does not work I have read. It had to do with the Soviet planners attempt to predict the demand for ball point pens. A trivial enough matter but it elegantly illustrated how demand can assume a rational and predictable character only in economies of abundance (where production is responsive to changing market conditions) as opposed to economies of shortage (where a fixed amount of goods must sustain the population for a given time regardless of changes in the market).

My synopsis will be a bit crude but what happened was that the planners predicted the entire country's demand for ball point pens for an entire year and produced just that number. The surplus of pens on the shelves caused the Russians, accustomed to waiting in bread lines and general scarcity, to begin hoarding the now abundant pens in anticipation of a coming shortage. As a result the entire supply of ball point pens was concentrated among the few who had been lucky to find them early, while the rest of the country was left without a quill and loudly demanding the now scarce pens. The Soviets, through their history of unresponsiveness to changing market conditions, had created demand where it needn't have been, and had no way of easily meeting it. The lesson taken being that the only way to ensure predictable patterns of demand is in an economy where production is continually responsive to demand and an excess is can be expected. A free, decentralized, market economy.

The Great Separation endures even here... barely

2007-10-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

Mark Lilla's essay at Cato Unbound serves as a starting point for the interpundit sniping of internet discourse at Cato Unbound. Andrew Sullivan and others have offered reactions. I will focus on one important passage:

What we seem to have forgotten is how unique the circumstances were that made possible the establishment of the American compact on religion and politics. Perhaps now is the time to restore the much needed concept of American exceptionalism and remind ourselves of some basic facts. The most important one that set our experience apart from that of Europe was the absence of a strong Roman Catholic Church as a redoubt of intellectual and political opposition to the liberal-democratic ideas hatched by the Enlightenment – and thus also, the absence of a radical, atheist Enlightenment convinced that l’infâme must be écrasé. For over two centuries France, Italy, and Spain were rent by what can only be called existential struggles over the legitimacy of Catholic political theology and the revolutionary heritage of 1789. (Though the term “liberalism” is of Spanish coinage, as a political force it was weak in the whole of Catholic Europe until after the Second World War.) Neither side in this epic struggle was remotely interested in “toleration”; they wanted victory.

Looking beyond Europe, we note other things missing from the American landscape, quite literally. For example, there were no religious shrines to fight over, no holy cities, no temples, no sacred burial grounds (except those of the Native Americans, which were shamefully ignored). There also was a complete absence of what we would today call diversity: America was racially and culturally homogeneous in the early years of the republic, even if there were differences – in retrospect, incredibly minor – in Protestant affiliation. Yes, there were a few Catholics and Jews among the early immigrants, but the tone was set by Protestants of dissenting tendencies from the British Isles. The theological differences among them were swamped by the fact that everyone spoke the same language, cooked the same food, and looked to a shared history of persecution and emigration. It was a homogeneous country, and what comes with homogeneity, along with some troubling things, is trust.

I am forever amazed by the claim, or rather unsubstantiated assertion, that the values of 20th century democracy can somehow be traced to Christian principles. If anything, it can be traced to Christians existing in fear of each other. The separation was possible only because the similarities between these different groups were substantial enough to give hope that coexistence was possible if they simply relegated the differences to the private sphere. This homogeneity is no longer the case. Forgetting the racial, economic, cultural, and historical differences it is patently obvious that the mere theological differences are large enough that the kind of trust necessary to believe that one's fellow citizen will exemplify the kind good faith that will prevent grabs for power, is no longer possible. We are no longer talking about differences between Anglican and Presbyterians or Catholics and Lutherans. It might be said that these groups have histories of acquitting themselves murderously towards each other. This chastened them though. The groups vying for power now have greater theological differences and no history of violence to make them reticent to attempt coercion. The only proper response is not the provincial (in Lilla's terms) reassertion of the classic separation of church and state, a bourgeois secularism, but in the destruction of their intellectual pretenses and the removal of the mantle of respect they claim in our discourse.

To the highlighted selection, I am baffled by the claims I have read on Catholic blogs that the Catholic Church somehow bears responsibility for the emergence of the values of the contemporary West. After developing a theology to inculcate servility and submission to the Holy See in Europe, they have the audacity to claim that the story of the emergence of modernity is not the story of our wresting the reins of temporal authority from the Church but instead its full ideological realization. This is absurd on its face, and even a scanty survey of philosophy and literature after 1300 will confirm this. I won't go into the history of it but would simply put one question to the believers: Can you name any example of the Church, in an official, sanctioned capacity, acting in belhalf of a democratic movement and against a theocratic/monarchical/autocratic one before 1917? I don't think it can be done.

Getting high to feel good... Medically

2007-10-11T18:53:00.000-07:00

There doesn't seem to be much reason to maintain the ban on medical marijuana anymore. The senselessness of the prohibition of this substance which has no known lethal dosage, is less harmful in the long run than alcohol, and has never been linked to domestic violence and other types of social decay is apparent when considering the medical benefits. But why keep it illegal? Because it has a bad image. It was originally associated with black jazz musicians and later those horribly dirty hippies. And of course it causes pleasure, which the government cannot allow.

Who to toss overboard?

2007-10-10T19:26:00.000-07:00

The Catholic Church has to pay over $600 million to families of victims of its molestation racket. And if you needed any more confirmation of their contempt for women then observe who they throw overboard first to pay for it. The nuns. Sometimes its a pity there is no hell.

More here.

Quote for the Day

2007-10-09T16:56:00.000-07:00

"What influence have ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of Civil authority, in many instances they have seen the upholding of the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberty of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate liberty, needs them not." -James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments

The religious were much more openly hostile to democratic movements in Madison's time than now. The rise of Marxism accounts for this. If democracy was hostile to religion in consequence then Marxism was hostile to it in practice, and the Catholic church tentatively cast its lot with the less pernicious enemy. The ease with which they can abandon any alliance with democracy or affable relations with open societies, and take up a cosy stance with totalitarians, is easily seen in with the Lateran Treaties with Mussolini, the Concordat with Hitler, (which included adulations given on his birthday) and its endorsement of Franco's invasion of Spain.

In a sane world this all might have shamed them and reduced them to ignominy but people who believe they have a tin can on a string to the creator of the universe are rarely so self-conscious. I was reminded of this gem from Madison upon reading an article in Reason about the Danish cartoon controversy and was given to pondering Joseph Ratzinger's reaction to the deluge of rioting and violence enjoined upon the foreign embassies and citizens of Denmark:

In response to several requests on the Holy See's position vis-à-vis recent offensive representations of the religious sentiments of individuals and entire communities, the Vatican press office can state:

1. The right to freedom of thought and expression, sanctioned by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, cannot imply the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers. This principle applies obviously for any religion.

2. In addition, coexistence calls for a climate of mutual respect to favor peace among men and nations. Moreover, these forms of exasperated criticism or derision of others manifest a lack of human sensitivity and may constitute in some cases an inadmissible provocation. A reading of history shows that wounds that exist in the life of peoples are not cured this way.

3. However, it must be said immediately that the offenses caused by an individual or an organ of the press cannot be imputed to the public institutions of the corresponding country, whose authorities might and should intervene eventually according to the principles of national legislation. Therefore, violent actions of protest are equally deplorable. Reaction in the face of offense cannot fail the true spirit of all religion. Real or verbal intolerance, no matter where it comes from, as action or reaction, is always a serious threat to peace.

So the problem is not rioting, arson, and murder. The problem is blasphemy. And so bereft is he of any appreciation for the importance of free speech that he thinks not only should blasphemy be shunned, it should be banned. I know of no other way to read the statement, "The right to freedom of thought and expression, sanctioned by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, cannot imply the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers" as anything other than approval for the destruction of free speech. For there is no such thing as limited free speech. The problem is not that Muslims cannot conduct themselves within the bounds of civil society when offended. The problem is not that every expression of Muslim outrage is underwritten with either a threat or an act of violence. And the problem is not that a peaceful country had its security threatened. The problem is that in a free society people have the audacity to treat religion as they treat any other set of ideas, and mock it. The problem is that blasphemy is not a crime. I don't see how they can be confused as allies when they seek to subject our freedoms to the selective reactions of the faithful.

Not to beat it into the ground...

2007-10-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

but my point about abortion is getting even further airing. Alas, not yet one citation. I should pursue plagarism charges. The fact that I keep seeing this argument turning up thogh is a good sign. Maybe the hysteria and demagoguery that once surrounded it is giving way to sane discussion.

Odd

2007-10-04T20:46:00.000-07:00

Ann Coulter apparently disapproves of torture as long as some one else is doing it. An odd reversal of American opinion towards the practice. She goes thusly:

Our bombers couldn't know with precision where the enemy was holding (and torturing) our troops. McCain and the rest of those POWs could easily have been hit and killed by an American bomb

I take that "and torturing" to mean she thinks torture is a bad thing. I really doubt if she were to write a column about American interrogation techniques in this war she would include such a moral caveat.

I was so ahead of the curve on this

2007-10-04T16:05:00.000-07:00

Matt Yglesias notes the results of polling by Third Way. The results were presaged here. The findings indicate that while many people think abortion constitutes taking a human life very few would want to send women to jail. In my post I speculated that if people truly believe that a fetus is a human being, then the penalty for abortion should be commensurate with that for murder. I hazarded a guess that most people would be unwilling to do this and lo' I am right.

If one thinks of the convicts who have been sympathetic figures it is not hard to imagine that the popularity of the pro-life movement would evaporate when film makers and journalists started chronicling the travails of women imprisoned for having abortions. That only 18 percent would be more than neutral to this is shocking when you consider the fact that 30 percent of the country classifies itself as evangelical Christians. And a commenter on Yglesias' post brings up a good point:

There's an easier way of avoiding the contradiction. I would guess that many people think abortion should be enforced with prison time only on the supply side, much the way locking up drug dealers or prostitutes is more popular than locking up their customers, who are more to be pitied than blamed.

So the support for putting the women in jail may be even lower. This is a common thing when people base beliefs on religious dogma rather than sober thought.

Maybe the pro-lifer crowd wants abortion to be punished with a small fine then. A better thing to do would be to simply mandate a price increase on the procedure. After all a fine could only be instituted if the offender were caught, while a price increase would be a net of finer mesh. This would put them in an ironic position. Undoubtedly as many of them are Republicans, the pro-lifers would be forced to shed their supposed aversion (as advocates of a free market) to government intervention not only in health care but also to the concept of price controls. But there isn't going to be a penalty then what is the point of making it illegal. And if the punishments aren't equivalent to those given for murder then how can someone be convinced that a human life was taken?

A YouTube painfully illustrates this. They haven't given it much thought.

Doom and Gloom, No More!

2007-10-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

I have never been one to believe that humans beings are rational animals, and though I have no formal training in their field, I think economists would agree with me. Bryan Caplan has a column at Reason that unpacks 4 ingrained human prejudices about the economy. The column is excellent though will require a bit more thought to discuss at length, but I will point to one section for the purposes of ego padding:

The danger of the make-work bias is easiest to see in Europe, where labor market regulation to “save jobs” has produced decades of high unemployment. But we can see it in the U.S. as well, especially in our massive employment lawsuit industry. The hard lesson to learn is that giving people “rights to their jobs” is a drain on productivity—and makes employers think twice about hiring people in the first place.

I'm sure I had a post mentioning this.

A Waste of Time and Resources redux

2007-10-02T17:40:00.000-07:00

If I had to speculate I would guess that the priorities of a federal prosecutor who took office only six days before September 11th would be oriented toward something slightly more important than say people selling glass bongs to each other over the Internet. But alas United States attorney from Western PA, Mary Beth Buchanan, thinks not. In fact she also seems to have made it her specialty to bring obscenity indictments against porn producers, novelists, and bloggers. As a result of this millions of dollars have been wasted in a quest which has accomplished nothing more than to saddle Tommy Chong with a hefty fine.

This is after all the Bush administration and when a person believes, as many of them do, that their prudish local pastor has a pipeline to god we might expect such opinions to permeate their professional life. It would be another tolerably risible misadventure in moralizing if not for the glaring contravention of good sense that at about the same time Gonzalez was firing eight competent and sane prosecutors, Ms. Buchanan was being promoted.

The fact that Ms. Buchanan wants to bring society's sensibilities into consonance with something like those of her Wednesday car pool to after-school soccer, does not surprise me but the fact that she has been allowed to spend 12 million dollars doing it and been promoted, should I think stand as quite a testament to the fact that religious conservatives have an affinity for government's ability to engineer society that even a Bolshevik could be proud of. And as such I will rename them Christian Bolsheviks (my own slight to Chris Hedge's misnamed book).

It is not hard to understand why the religious right has so destroyed the Republican Party if you ask yourself a few hypothetical questions. One I would start with might go something like this: If we must spend 12 million dollars of tax revenue on something would I rather it be used to take Tommy Chong's bong away or to subsidize health care? I doubt even Ron Paul would object to spending it on health care given this choice.

America Exhibits Dutch Courage

2007-10-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

While the US House of Representatives is debating about the convoluted ramblings of a total moron, an eloquent critic of Islamic fascism and advocate for liberal democracy against the forces of theocracy has left the country. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been forced to leave the US because she can't afford her security detail and the government is unwilling to help.

Forget the PR value she has as a woman who suffered terribly in life because of Islamic barbarity. Forget the fact that a death threat to her was pined into the lifeless body of Theo Van Gogh. And forget that she has become one of the most vocal advocates for our way of life against its antithesis and against that which seeks to destroy it. We might ponder that this was an opportunity for the United States to make a public display of solidarity with a famous dissident from the ideology we are supposedly fighting. Why would we not protect one of our own against very real threats on her life. Threats which have been enjoined on her for the crime of agreeing with us.

If something happens to her we will have it on our heads that abandoned one of our own to the forces of the ideology we re fighting in Iraq, and while we can spend billions each day on this war we have the audacity to deny the relatively inexpensive luxury of a bodyguard and some surveillance equipment to a woman who was our advocate, at her peril, when she didn't have to be. Our courage is truly Dutch. The truly disgraceful aspect of this is that while there existed some people who felt it necessary to start a fund to defend the servile functionary Scooter Libby, but as yet no one has started a fund to help Ali.

From the World of the Fatuous and Banal

2007-09-30T20:31:00.000-07:00

Tom Friedman manages to say nothing and whine vaguely about a lot. Nothing specific and all things we've heard before. Much more, with all the digressions, it reads like three essays that got copied and pasted together. At least he referenced The Onion.

We've never seen this before!!!

2007-09-26T20:37:00.000-07:00

I am sure that John McCain's illegitimate black baby would have something to say.

A Waste of Time and Resources

2007-09-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

Such was Sam Harris' assessment of the mass Shiite pilgrimage to a nearby holy site shortly after the liberation of Baghdad. The march included fanatical displays of religious zeal such as pilgrims flagellating themselves into bleeding near-corpses and the requisite murder of a few Sunnis along the way. Now were my country to be invaded and rid of a murdering sectarian thug, its infrastructure badly damaged, and the rule of law quite precarious I don't think my first impulse would be to whip myself into a state of near catatonia. Truly a waste of time and resources.

In this spirit I couldn't help but think that a similar verdict could be justly rendered to the Bureau of Prisons' effort to compile a list of acceptable religious texts, as reported in today's New York Times.

In their wisdom they have seen fit to convene a panel of religious "experts" (which is about the same as being an expert in the metaphysics of Bambi) and-after having once removed all books deemed inflammatory, then replaced them-given this panel of "experts" (their designation as such has incidentally upset some others who won't have their say) the task of compiling a list of appropriate material.

I don't see the value in giving books, which have been known to incite violence in the simple minded and desperate, to people who are simple minded, desperate, and known to be violent. Much more the thought has doubtlessly not crossed their minds that rather than give prisoners books claiming to be the dicta of the creator of the universe, we should maybe educate them in the ethical thinking of those people whose thoughts form the basis of civil, western democracy. After all I have never heard of someone being incited to violence when reading too much Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Montesquieu, Kant, Hume, or John Locke. Too advanced for the prisoners? Well maybe the confusion will keep them sedate. Unfortunately no. The main concern of people like Moses Silverman, quoted in the Times, is that we not "throw the baby out with the bath water." My opinion on what we should be throwing out need not be repeated.

Much less why are my tax dollars being spent to compile a list of appropriate commentary on genocidal fairy tales for criminals? I am sure that even the most extreme crimes committed by these men pale in comparison to the incitements of the god of the Old Testament and Koran. And I am sure that not even the most schizophrenic and delusional amongst them can dream such insanity as to be found in the Book of Revelation or such vitriolic babbler-on-the-street-with-sign like prose to be found in the letters of Paul. There really is no separation of church and state, and apparently men who have lost the right to decide when they leave a 5x10 cell retain their right to the scribblings of religious demagogues.

Kathryn Jean Lopez...

2007-09-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

is mentally ill.

Ron Paul is the Only Non-Stooge

2007-09-24T21:29:00.000-07:00

I have often laughed at those who claim that despite disagreeing with someone we should still respect their opinion. After all, I do think that aggressively arguing against someone's point of view rather de facto shows you don't respect the opinion. I tend to take the view that while disagreeing with someone you can still have an appreciation for their intellectual capabilities. But I think in Ron Paul I have someone I respect regardless of his views, many of which I think range from wrong to crazy- his love of the gold standard coming to mind. I respect him because he is the only candidate from either party who is not a completely partisan, whimpering stooge. How easy is it to see Romney standing beside whatever on of those idiots actually wins the nomination and endorsing him with his full TV weatherman smile on display. A field of ten candidates with nine looking to find ways to disagree by parsing each others words and accusing each other of flip flopping. Is there any accusation which is more hollow, more vacuous, more asinine, and more a waste of time? It reduces to claiming, "I agree with you now but in the past I wouldn't have if we were debating like we are now and I promise never to change my mind like you claim to have done recently." Romney is a fraud, Giuliani is insane, John McCain's campaign is something like Hemmingway's old man at sea, and Brownback, Huckabee, and Tancredo believe in ghosts. Ron Paul is the only one who's not a phony stooge.

At Least They Scorned Him

2007-09-24T15:44:00.000-07:00

Buffoon that he is, Jim Gilchrist known mostly for founding the most visible manifestation of nativist paranoia and vigilantism, The Minuteman Project, could hardly be called as pernicious a fellow as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Nonetheless, at Columbia, where Gilchrist was roused off the stage, the President of Iran was given a forum. Well at least the forum had a hostile audience, which in its front page article the Times goes to great length to point out. Among the false, silly, and downright insane things uttered by Ahmadinejad:

“It’s not a crime to be a woman. Women are the best creatures created by God. They represent the kindness, the beauty that God instills in them. Women are respected in Iran.”

That there is not “sufficient research” on what happened to the Jews during World War II.

“We love all nations. We love the Jewish people. There are many Jews living in Iran, with peace and security.”

“In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country.”

I see it as a positive sign that he at least admitted they have women in Iran, though I doubt its outside the scope of his powers of fantasy. We are talking about a man who believes the apocalypse will come with the return of the 12th Imam. A doctrine that like all eschatology, has as much basis in reality as Resident Evil. I really wish someone could have asked him about that. Although a better question would have been why Al-Sadr decided to take a vacation there back in February.

Roger Cohen echoes Dragged from the Bottom!!!

2007-09-20T20:19:00.000-07:00

In the NYT Roger Cohen writes an article about France that was presaged by yours truly. Well Cohen's article is admittedly a bit more polished and informative but it will suffice to say that I am always right and should be assumed to be without question.

What is right about Cohen's article is that unlike Will Cohen recognizes the importance of the character of Sarkozy, and goes through a list of political and cultural taboos that Sarko is breaking. He recognizes that his importance lies not in the technical policy reforms he is making, for those will take years, but in the fact that the personality of Sarkozy marks a sharp contrast with French tradition. No more hugging farmers, no more literary poseurs, and no more politicians drawn from the same incestuous group of friends at ENA France has just been liberated from 10 years of being run by cow kissing a slave to France's fascistic "fonctionnaires" with the energy of brain starved zombie. Not to mention that he was flanked by a wrinkled, weak chinned, aristocratic hangdog, dilettante who fancied himself half Rimbaud half Léon Blum, but could manage only half Gerald Ford half Jimmy Carter. Give Sarko some time.

Iraq is not like Vietnam

2007-09-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

Matt Yglesias has endorsed the position of Steve Simon's pamphlet "After the Surge: The Case for U.S. Military Disengagement from Iraq" which advises withdrawal from Iraq on grounds that we have heard before but Simon does phrase them a bit more clearly.

Leaving U.S. forces in Iraq under today’s circumstances means the United States is culpable but not capable—that is, Washington bears substantial responsibility for developments within Iraq without the ability to shape those developments in a positive direction. In consequence, Iraqi support for the U.S. presence has collapsed. Polls indicate that most Iraqis want the United States to pull out. Moreover, the Iraq war has fueled the jihad and apparently been a godsend to jihadi recruiters—and the process of self-recruitment—as indicated by the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the global war on terror. More broadly, the Iraq war has had a very damaging effect on the U.S. reputation in the Arab and wider Islamic world. Authoritative opinion surveys show this as well. The continued presence of U.S. forces is thus a severe setback in the canonical war of ideas, which the Bush administration has correctly assessed as crucial to American interests. [...]

In 2004, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy to Osama bin Laden, said of the U.S. intervention: “America is between two fires. If it stays in Iraq, it will bleed to death; if it leaves, it will lose everything.” His forecast comes disturbingly close to describing current circumstances. It need not, however, be prophecy. More than three years after the intervention began, to be sure, the United States finds itself in an agonizing strategic position. The time has come to acknowledge that the United States must fundamentally recast its commitment to Iraq. It must do so without any illusions that there are unexplored or magic fixes, whether diplomatic or military. Some disasters are irretrievable. Having staked its prestige on the intervention and failed to achieve many of its objectives, the United States will certainly pay a price for military disengagement from Iraq. But if the United States manages its departure from Iraq carefully, it will not have lost everything. Rather, the United States will have preserved the opportunity to recover vital assets that its campaign in Iraq has imperiled: diplomatic initiative, global reputation, and the well-being and political utility of its ground forces. [...]

But raising the prospect of desperate deterioration in Iraq and its environs after an American military disengagement necessarily tends to obscure two things. First, the presence of U.S. forces has not stabilized Iraq thus far. Second, conditions for instability have become structural elements of Iraqi politics. Given these facts, how long should the U.S. keep troops in Iraq, when its military presence only delays an inevitable escalation of intra-Iraqi fighting?

Well said, but I have yet to hear a single advocate for complete withdrawal grapple with the consequences of allowing Iraq to fall into the hands of the forces of Al-Qaeda, or to the influence of its neighbors. One may see shades of the domino theory here and accordingly cry foul, but there is a crucial difference. Vietnam was at the not encircled by powers hoping to divide up the loyalties of its people for various forms of the ideology we are trying to fight. The neighboring countries of Laos and Cmabodia fell to Communist influence so the domino theorists may feel vindicated but at the time we entered, surrounding countries were not trying to make Vietnam a proxy state. The struggled in Vietnam was at it origin, one against colonialism.

Secondly in Vietnam we were not trying to reconcile two sides in a civil war. In Vietnam we were one side in a civil war, and were fighting against a people trying to expel us. The Iraqis may want us to leave but the fighting there is intra-Iraqi, and aimed at establishing hegemony of religious sect.

And thirdly cultural differences in between Vietnam and the Soviet Union would have made a long term alliance between the two untenable. Sino-Soviet relations were always hostile and a people that had been fighting colonial occupation for decades would not have accepted Soviet influence. Nor would they have accepted it from the Chinese with whom there was a centuries old cultural animus. The Iraqi people are not a nation. The territory is the result of European, colonial cartography and the Sunnis will find more to like with Saudi Arabia, the Shiites with Iran, and Kurds with Turkey. Iraq is thus not only already surrounded by various forms of the ideology we are trying to fight but the regional powers who represent it are know to be positively trying to export it.

If we leave Iraq we will leave it to the influence of powers who have international goals and the people will not be so resistant to their influence. The Vietnamese just wanted us, and everyone else, out. The Iraqis are not fighting a war of independence, rather for fear of each other they are fighting one for tribal hegemony.

"Mean and nasty"

2007-09-18T17:40:00.001-07:00

I can't improve on Mark Steyn's review of the speech give by the governor of my home state on the anniversary of 9/11 so I'll simply link. Suffice to say the speech is as puerile as the above title, but the review is right on the mark and pleasingly... well mean and nasty.

Supporting Darfur makes me feel good... What are we supporting exactly?

2007-09-18T16:39:00.001-07:00

A thought. I would like to know how many of the people who stage die-ins and attend art exhibits to raise awareness about Darfur also want us to withdraw from Iraq. After all we are in Iraq attempting to stop the very thing that is happening in Darfur, and it may be lost on them that if we withdraw the results will in fact be worse than the current Darfur crisis. Intervening in a civil war is apparently a good thing as long as we don't actually do it. That would entail putting people in harms way, and yes actually shooting and killing some of the Janjaweed, who undoubtedly if opposed by the US would be redesignated as "insurgents" or "native resistance" or "people fighting for self determination," which in this case includes the right to determine who to exterminate.

Every credible, sane, and qualified commentator I have read admits that withdrawal from Iraq would remove the last obstacle to a massive bloodletting. Why is it that this genocide doesn't merit opposition but the Darfur one does? I'm sure I needn't list possible reasons.

Evolution blogging

2007-09-17T21:17:00.000-07:00

A nice thing about evolution is that blogging about it inspires one reflect on the rather elegant coincidence of using a medium which uses constant updates of changes to my intellectual development, to write about constant changes to our species' genetic code. The religious can tune out about now if they wish, unless you're one of those who through tortuous logic can accommodate the theory to your holy book. Alas when confronted with people such as this I always refer them to the words of Pierre-Simone LaPlace, "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là." He didn't need any god, and neither does evolution. It works just fine without it.

The New York Times' science section has an article about the gaps remaining in our knowledge of the exact chronology and circumstances of Homo Sapiens divergence from earlier forms. Indeed it looks as if we may have alongside pre-modern humans for some time. This accomplished by geographical isolation of different populations, which hastens evolutionary change, and thus speciation. What should strike one here is how unafraid the scientists are of admitting gaps in our understanding. I will never cease to be amazed at how people who claim to know the mind of the creator of the universe can so unselfconscious as to call scientists smug. The reality is that scientists don't need to be afraid of gaps in their understanding because for one, even if we knew nothing about human origins there is no way to justify using a holy text as some kind of default explanation, and two they are conducting a continuous, sober probe into the origins of species and not administering a metaphysical propaganda machine which can't afford any semblance of inadequacy.

Read the article. If for nothing else but a good update on the current state of our knowledge and the questions to be asked and answered going forward.

Quote for the Day- Mark Lilla

2007-09-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

"In the West people still think about God, man, and the world today- how could they not? But most seem to have trained themselves not to take that last step into politics. We are no longer in the habit of connecting our political discourse to theological and cosmological questions, and we no longer recognize revelation as politically authoritative. This is testament to our self restraint. That we must rely on self restraint should concern us." -Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God

With some notable exceptions I think this is true even here in this most Christian of Western democracies. But it expresses more eloquently (and for me in embarrassingly fewer words) what I tried to say here. The separation of church and state we have in this country is fragile, and is held in place by an all too amendable constitution. Sometime I wish that religion at this country's founding had been mixed with state. There would have been two possible outcomes: The stultifying effects of theocracy would have been so embarrassing in the face of an advancing Europe that to salvage national pride, which has always been hyper-sensitive to condescension from across the Atlantic, we would have forcibly dispensed with it. The other more likely outcome would be that a church would have been nationalized and become an ossified, corrupt, petty, and bureaucratic arm of the sate thus neutralizing its ability to inspire religious fervor and zealotry. After all no state has an interest in breeding fanatics and as with European national churches all religious fervor that threatened governmental authority would be easily neutralized. This would have been the more likely scenario, and it is what I hope is happening now though less formally. We can only hope that George Bush has become such a symbol of the infusion of religion and politics that the religious groups that have supported him will sink with his presidency. I am possibly being too hopeful. I do often wish though that at the Republic's birth we could have had church and state united and have been judiciously done with it when we saw where it took us. This also the reason why I don't fear a takeover of evangelicals or the fashionable fundamentalists as I think they should be dubbed. The results would be so hysterically and comically disastrous for the country and their movement that they would be forever discredited.

The knee jerks so fast sometimes

2007-09-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

While Pharyngula is a great blog to get out one's need to read ridicule of religious fundies, PZ Myers epitomizes what I hate about liberalism, with a post titled "One million +" he claims "we" have killed a million Iraqis, and that it was for nothing more than the whim of a neocon cabal. I think his knee must have jerked into his face. It must take a lot of confidence to make such an extraordinary claim in two sentences. That's the kind of arrogance displays by the religious believers he often pillories so well. Read the comments section for the clusterfuck of groupthink. It may be a thought stopping hammer to protect an infantile president, but I think that calling this symptomatic of Bush Derangement Syndrome is not unjust.

"Apres moi le deluge!" Greenspan on Bush

2007-09-15T14:19:00.000-07:00

If you needed any more confirmation that Bush is not a conservative, and indeed has no comprehension of what the term conservative means, then the newly released book by Alan Greenspan should suffice. The New York Time has a synopsis.

When you run a party which has to appease intellectually dim religious fanatics with money to run programs that serve no purpose and indeed make us a more ignorant and backward country then there can't be an expectation of fiscal restraint. And much like the war in Iraq, when the Dems take office and we reap the consequences Bush will score a propaganda victory. And also much like the war Bush's attachement to ideology got in the way of sound decision making. He's the "Decider"... unfortunately. Rajiv Chandrasekeran's book on Iraq describes this in detail. Although he, and now probably Greenspan, must just be hysterical liberals because for them the family values agenda doesn't trump all.

The Classic Separation

2007-09-13T19:26:00.000-07:00

My article on Muslim outrage over the Swedish cartoons depicting Muhammad might lead the reader with justice to believe that I am a passionate defender of the separation of church and state. I am this and as long as people's minds remain so intractable and unimaginative that they prefer the comfort of a millennia-old book written by people with no understanding of the natural, it will remain one of the cornerstone guarantors of freedom. As long as people derive their beliefs regarding ethics from books which cannot be said to admit of tolerance and open debate then there really is no other way to limit their ability to reflect the barbaric prescriptions of these books in our laws than to say they can't in our founding documents.

What shouldn't be assumed is that I think the separation of church and state found in Western societies is a especially strong defense against theocracy. But through over two centuries of political discourse it cannot be claimed by any impartial observer that religion has not been used as an explicit qualification for office in the minds of voters or that political beliefs have not been directly derived from those beliefs. Indeed it cannot even be a reasonable expectation that secular and religious beliefs are distinct things. If a person believes they know the mind of the creator of the universe it is impossible that they would not want to petition the government to enact laws as such. Laws of which the creator of the universe would approve.

And alas the Constitution can be changed. There is nothing other than public consensus which keeps our government separate from our churches.. Even in this country that separation is tenuous. The separation of church and state reflects the bourgeois, aristocratic values of the 18th century deists who wrote it. Religious fervor was an ungentlemanly thing indicative of a lack of education, cultivation, intellect, breeding, and an excess of "enthusiasm," a word they never tired of using. Religious participation was a social grace and a sign of conformity. And the matter was walled off as strictly private precisely so few of them believed it and knew politically imprudent to say so and thus they created a convenient prophylactic. Their separation of church and state cannot account for a person who actually believes they know the mind of the creator of the universe and believes it wrote one of our holy books. Such a person cannot by definition allow religious dogma to be separated from the law because the books themselves forbid that t be. They do not believe that religious temperance and tolerance are virtues and indeed are unable to. Any unpacking of the beliefs of a so called religious moderate will reveal that his notion of a god is so vague and so shrouded in metaphysical contortions that it bears no resemblance to anything believed in by those such as those Muslims offended by the Swedish cartoons or the people who advocate teaching pseudo-scientific ignorance in American schools.

The separation of church and state is an impoverished notion, and can contain nothing but tepid bourgeois religious belief. The aforementioned values with which religious fanaticism was incompatible were paramount concerns of 18th century gentlemen and more than that their republicanism (they were not democrats) was aimed at preventing people who didn't share these values from gaining power. If you don't believe this then do some reading on the type of men they envisioned occupying the electoral college, itself a relic of classist republicanism.

But alas such people can take power. And they can alter our constitution and the respect and politeness which have been inculcated in our nation towards them is a result of our belief that our government was, by force of our Constitution and the insistence that religion is private, (a singularly American notion) immune to theocratic ambitions. It is not and that is why religion must be confronted, humiliated, and discredited with the only weapon we have and should have at our disposal; free speech.

Quotes for the Day

2007-09-12T23:19:00.000-07:00

"And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the Earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worst, in a free and open encounter?" -John Milton, Areopagitica

"Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans, we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its Republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments to the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." -Thomas Jefferson 1801 Inaugural

Hence the reason people of my persuasion don't burn books, issue Indexes of Prohibited Books, and why we don't ask for apology and censorship of everything that offends us. Bill Donahue, CAIR, ect. If was driven to apoplexy every time someone said something untoward about atheists I don't think I'd be able to get out of bed.

More Muslim Outrage

2007-09-12T22:02:00.000-07:00

The Muslim world is outraged... again. And my stars!... the last country containing containing artists with the balls to dare offend them is Sweden. And now, as if burning embassies, rioting, murder, and vicious threats of violence weren't sufficient displays of arrogance, a dispatch of ambassadors from Muslim countries is demanding that Sweden enact laws to protect them from offense. They suggest something along the lines of, "the protection enjoyed by Jews and homosexuals," which is entirely appropriate as this happens to be nothing.

Hopefully the Swedish authorities will channel Teresa Heinz and tell them to "shove it" but I am not hopeful. The entirety of this episode could be solved by telling these representatives that in a democracy a government has no responsibility to police the thoughts expressed in its nation's privately owned publications but such principles seem to be derogated when the offended group has utterly no comprehension of or respect (something they feel due to themselves) for the concept of free speech, and as such have no comprehension of why in such a society blasphemy is not a crime.

But alas, as we are unceasingly reminded, we must respect people of faith. And in that spirit of respect the Swedish Prime Minister has agreed to meet with Muslims to discuss the criminalization of satirizing Islam. One would be tempted to think this a quite insidious threat to a free press, but this concern has escaped the Muslim representatives, and their proclamations that "work needs to be done," "comprehensive measures are needed," and that "students should be taught to express themselves in ways that don't cause offense or hurt." If their is anything I hold dear it is the freedom to say anything I desire about their illiterate, epileptic, and sanguinary prophet but I along with the people of Sweden will undoubtedly find it in ourselves to refrain from rioting and arson in the face of this utterly castrating arrogance.

I don't know how any sane reader can see this as anything but a direct demand that free speech be abridged. Whether the cartoon is compatible with the perceived journalistic responsibility of the newspaper is irrelevant as a private newspaper has the right to publish anything it pleases, and yes this includes a right to insult. Liberals, Conservatives, gays, and Jews are not protected from offense and the fact that blasphemy is not a crime is indicative of nothing more than the fact that we are not a theocracy- a form of government so natural to them that they have no comprehension of how a people could value a system of government when they don't believe the creator of the universe endorses it.

Is there any way to express this to them? Is there any way to convince them that if they want to end criticism of their religion it is to argue against it or reform? No there isn't and it is stupid to try. This is a threat equal to the threat of terrorism which underlies all their paroxysms of outrage, and it seeks to undo everything that is worth saving in our culture.

The Algerian ambassador called his meeting with the Swedish PM "was an excellent initiative taken in a spirit of appeasement." They're not even trying to hide the creepy historical parallels anymore.

Ponnuru on Fred Thompson

2007-09-11T10:11:00.000-07:00

In a political era in which the cost of a man's haircut can be treated as though it were a window into his soul, you'd think people would be a little more curious what it says about Fred Thompson that he'd do work—even just 3.3 hours of it—for indicted terrorists.

-Ramesh Ponnuru on Fred Thompson's defense work for Libyan terrorists.

Maybe because he believes in respect for the integrity of the American legal system? Something right wingers find it increasingly hard to do these days.

What?

2007-09-10T15:33:00.000-07:00

This has to go down as a classic of obfuscation. The whole presentation here.

What everyone already knew

2007-09-10T14:29:00.000-07:00

A new study describes the differences in brain activity between liberals and conservatives. I never considered myself a liberal but I will say that I never consistently took the same route home from high school.

Tell me about the thousand dollar seed!!!

2007-09-09T21:53:00.000-07:00

Though I try to keep my criticisms of religion academic (or some facsimile thereof) we needn't forget faithful readers that religion is good for a laugh. Pun intended.

Brooks on Iraq

2007-09-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

David Brooks has a must read column about Iraq, even if I do detest its ending. He notes the change in US strategy from using the surge to give Iraqi politicians time to make compromises to using it to help local tribes establish themselves as the locus of law and order. And relates an incident which goes far in illustrating just what a mess this war has become.

"In one scene, a Sunni tribal leader has been captured by the National Police, who are about to hand him over to the Mahdi Army to be murdered. He manages to call the Americans on his cellphone, who launch a rescue mission. After a tense standoff, he’s freed and can go back to stabilizing his town.

In other words, as Gordon notes, a former Sunni insurgent and enemy of the U.S. ends up calling the Americans so he can be liberated from America’s supposed allies."

Tis is of course an indictment of the utter incompetence of the Bush administration in managing the war, traceable to the liquidation of all experienced civil servants, including the army, and their anathematization for petty reasons of politics and PR. Rajiv Chandrasekeran's work on this is great reading though I should mention it is the only book length treatment of the subject I have read. These are reasons to detest Bush. They do not stand as arguments in favor of ending the war or the strategic benefits of withdrawal. Christopher Hitchens recently said that the surge should be supported even if it is not succeeding, and incurred some vitriolic criticism from Andrew Sullivan who asked "so are we to support a policy regardless of its effect?" No not, regardless of its effect, we should support it because of its goal. Anyone who recognizes the necessity of preventing the collapse of Iraqi society into sectarian anarchy, and the loss of a geopolitically central state to the forces of militant (though is there any other kind?) religious fanaticism, would not be hard pressed to find reasons to support the entire effort of which the surge is integral. Sullivan of course wishes to withdraw from Iraq and a reading of his blogs on the subject reveal a disconcerting comfort with the prospect of a sectarian bloodbath.

The encouraging part is that we have found a more effective way of moving toward peace in Iraq, if an imperfect peace founded on tribal thuggery. This may be all we can hope for and if so it will prove how tone deaf to culture was and is the neoconservative belief that democracy can be started in a country without correlative traditions and institutions. As Brooks notes:

"The surge was intended to bolster the “modern” — meaning nonsectarian and nontribal — institutions in the country.

But the surge is failing, at least politically, because there are practically no nonsectarian institutions, and there are few nonsectarian leaders to create them. Security gains have not led to political gains."

Possibly, and I have oft wondered if a more lasting and in the long run beneficial solution for Iraq is a dictator in the vein of Pinochet who would genuinely help the country rather than run it as an oil financed fiefdom. For the neocons' this is unpalatable and likewise for the American people who would not tolerate a view of themselves as exporters of autocracy. I myself cannot fully reconcile supporting the creation of a regime I myself would not tolerate. A facile "ends justifies the means" logic is barely serviceable.

He ends with a paragraph that makes me wince on grounds of stylistic preferences:

The key questions now are: Can U.S. troops help Iraqi locals take control of their own neighborhoods? Is it worth more American lives to help them do so? And, if so, how?

Yes, David, I happen to be reading your column and the august newspaper that publishes it to answer those very questions. I don't expect your column to lay them to rest but I don't need to be patronizingly reminded of them.

Republican Retreat from Reality

2007-09-03T18:48:00.000-07:00

Mark Levin has a column at National Reveiw that epitomizes just about everything that is wrong on the American right. By the way, I know that National Review likes to have a bit of fun but what is a baseball capped talk radio buffoon like Levin doing writing in the same space as Bill Buckley? Levin links the Larry Craig scandal to just about every problem with American, and then blames liberals for it. The column is so fatuous and irrational I don't even know how to begin to discuss it but I will excerpt the last paragraph and ask a question.

There is indeed a culture of corruption, and it extends well beyond any single politician. It swirls around big government. It always has and it always will. It has become institutionalized in many ways. And that culture of corruption celebrates clever word games used by unelected judges to exercise power they don’t have as they rewrite the Constitution; it demeans people of faith who speak out against the culture of corruption and for — dare I say — family values; it undermines and seeks to demoralize Americans in uniform as they fight a horrible enemy on the battlefield; it demonizes entrepreneurs and successful enterprises; it uses race, age, religion, gender, and whatever works to balkanize Americans; and so on. This is the real culture of corruption. Let’s call it what it is — modern liberalism. And its impact on our society is far worse than the disorderly-conduct misdemeanor to which Larry Craig pled guilty and for which he has now resigned.

With reasoning like this what kind of thoughts would be beyond legitimacy? Is there anything that could conceivably happen which might make Levin evince even a semblance of self criticism. Are any of his beliefs at all open to doubt or evidentiary testing? When faced with the hypocrisy of his own party for which he is a shill, he simply excuses it and then hysterically blames liberalism for every wordly evil imaginable. Even in the space of one paragraph he feeds the persecution complex of the religious right and then blames liberals for balkanizing people base don religion. So apparently people of faith should never trust liberals but it is the lefties who are balkanizing people. This is a talk radio shriek in a published column. With this kind of reasoning, what exactly can't be blamed on liberals?

Sorry

2007-08-31T09:57:00.000-07:00

If in the unlikely event of a regular readership, I apologize for the lack of blogging but technical difficulties on the home front are proving intractable.

Hitchens vs. Meacham (who is a ponce, though a kindly one)

2007-08-28T11:04:00.002-07:00

For an instruction in the intellectual buffoonery of religious liberals Jon Meacham rarely fails to provide. Great lines from Meacham include, "I believe in God for the same reasons I believe in love." Great, very insightful. Astonishing intellectual rigor. Great lines from Hitchens, "You've been very adept at quoting people. I'd like to know what you think." If you want even better examples read the sit that Meacham moderates On Faith, which I read during masochistic fits.

George Will vs. Sarko

2007-08-28T09:48:00.000-07:00

I think I am incapable of being unbiased when it comes to posting about France due to my incredibly positive experience with their cheese. Thus in that spirit I will disagree with George Will's refusal to acknowledge Sarkozy's election as a good sign for those hoping to see liberalizing reforms of the French economy.

What Will doesn't recognize is that the anti-globalization and anti-Americanism of the left which stifles reform in France is so historically blind, and discredited due to snail-like rates of growth and high unemployment that it has come to occupy in France the position that right wing talk radio occupies in America. Don't forget that in France the Socialists are the conservatives. They are the ones who don't want change, and against all good sense they want to protect a statism whose entitlements they try to intertwine with French identity. And like talk radio they make the same intellectually impoverished and ideologically dogmatic claims about resisting a gravitation to a more liberal system which inevitably gets compared to America.

When I was in France during the tumult over de Villepin's attempt to liberalize French labor laws a friend, who opposed him, could do nothing more than speak in vagaries claiming that unlike America, France had no "working poor" and other such horrors of the American system. It apparently passed him by that they do in fact have quite a lot of non-working poor.

Will's pessimism about Sarkozy needs to be tempered. At least now a French politician has been elected on different rhetoric, and speaking kindly of America and of economic liberalization is no longer anathema to the electorate. Many economic neo-liberals here were overly ebullient at his election and expressed hopes- calling him the French Margaret Thatcher -that he won't be able to satisfy, but he is a step in the right direction and if nothing else will make talk of reform politically tenable in the near future. If you keep in mind that in France the socialists are the conservatives this makes sense. They are the ones who represent what they think is more traditionally French. And as the right here uses cultural demonization of liberals and Reagan-worship, so too do the socialists in France use Mitterrand-worship and anti-Americanism. That's not Sarkozy.

South Park was right!

2007-08-27T22:51:00.000-07:00

Good news. South Park's rather ham-fisted pillorying of the main stream media's cowardice when faced with threats from Islam has turned out to be right as a string of newspapers have refused to publish an episode of the comic Opus for fear of offending Muslims. This will come as news to no one. Not for lack of publicity though but because the world I think has divided into two camps on this issue. One camp who simply expects this sort of thing and treats the perpetrators with the contempt and derision they deserve (South Park), and another who thinks this drooly-chinned cowardice (sorry, "respect") is appropriate.

Here's Volokh's take.

And another.

The glint in the eye of the religious

2007-08-27T08:49:00.000-07:00

Rod Dreher has a review up of the recent essay in the New York Times by Mark Lilla, The Politics of God. Though I wanted to I haven't read the essay as I didn't get a chance before it was put under the protection of Times Select, but from what I have gleaned second hand it takes a decidedly favorable view of the West's separation of church and state. Thus, Dreher is obliged to give it a pan gentle enough to meet with approval in the dew-eyed estimation of an audience attracted to a man who styled under the folksy moniker "Crunchy Con," as if that were supposed to be some clever example of "owning the insult."

In a telling sentence Dreher goes the path that all the faithful travel when attempting to approve of separating religion from government when he inveighs that he would not like to live in a theocracy:

in part because there's no telling whose Theos will be the source of authority.

Ah yes. So I think I may safely assume that if there were only someway to guarantee that it would be Dreher's "theos" in charge then there would be no problem. I doubt he would agree to this either, at least publicly, but the statement lies there lacking any qualifier so I can't help but think it didn't give Dreher much pause to write it. But it is unfortunately an oft found attitude among the religious that they don't value secularism for it own sake but merely because they can't guarantee their own control over the theocracy. Without going into an extended study I should think that the economic and social progress of Western secular societies should give him some reason abjure theocracy.

I can't remember from whom I heard it but the view that, "It is characteristic of the radical that he views power as a good thing so long as it is consolidated in his own hands," seems applicable here, as well as regarding religious believers generally. I could also substitute the word "totalitarian" for "radical" and it would I think, be even more appropriate for after all a belief system predicated on constant, divine, eye-in-the-sky supervision can't help but be so. They don't value our rights, and they don't value the society we have created. It is a society in which they must begrudge us a secular government out of fear for their own fantasy. When they begin to be a bit more popular though just see how separate they keep their religion from their ideas about governance.

Quote for the day

2007-08-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

"What! A ferocious animal has sucked the blood of my family; I tell you to get rid of that beast, and you ask me, What shall we put in its place!" -Voltaire on religion.

Republican retreat from reality

2007-08-24T14:20:00.000-07:00

The most base, petty, and irrational type of pandering to religious bigorty and sexual anxiety? Opposition to birth control. Not abortion, simply birth control. And you wonder why academia doesn't support republicans?

Iraq going forward

2007-08-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan has a post up calling Bill Kristol a thug. I didn't read the article which led Sullivan to this accusation but based on what I have seen of Kristol's rhetoric, I will assume the charge is legitimate. The most unfortunate thing about Kristol being that his great influence in Washington makes the presence of someone capable of this sort of vitriol even more poisonous, as opposed to a Malkin who shrieks from the fringe.

But Sullivan goes on to rehash all the current objections to the continuation of the war. It was bungled, Bush has instituted a torture regime, it was a terrible lack of foresight that we didn't anticipate the Sunni-Shia civil war, new terrorist sanctuaries have been created, ect. He is right to claim that those conservatives who equate dissent with treason are engaging in the worse kind of thought stopping agitprop, but this as well as Sullivan's objections to the conduct of the war don't constitute any kind of critique of whether or not the war ws in the first place worth fighting, or whether or not it still remains so. The most common objection to the war is that it as been bungled. This is an indictment of Bush and his incompetence not the war itself. To object to the fact that the war was bungled implies that if it simply weren't managed so badly then it would not have been a mistake to fight it. But if it was at one time a worthy cause I don't see how mismanagement of it makes it now not worth the effort. I fail to see how the fact that a mess was created means that the mess is not worth fixing.

Assuming we are acting as mediators between Sunni-Shia civil war, we are accomplishing this:

1. We are forestalling what will be one of the most terrible genocides in recent memory until a regional government can strengthen itself enough to control these murderous factions. If you don't believe this then only small amount of research into the way they treat each other will suffice to convince you.

2. We are denying force which represent only the most abject ideological darkness control over a region second only to Israel in strategic importance. Consider the motivation for the first Gulf War.

3. We are fighting and defeating jihadists in the arena that has become their cause celebre. The truth of this last point was borne out by the death of Abu Musab-al Zarqawi, the founder of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

These are goals worth attaining and those who object to this war know it. They don't criticize the nobility of the cause but claim that it was not prosecuted to their liking. They never bother to explain how Bush's incompetence in waging war, now means that the war is not worth waging. They don't offer any constructive solution to the Iraq problem but only criticism (valid though it is) of the way it has been conducted. The morality of abandoning the country to the most retrograde of ideologies- which, by the way, we have already done to the Kurds who have until now done nothing but prosper from our presence- and the consequences, are rarely discussed.

The World's stupidest fatwas

2007-08-23T13:44:00.000-07:00

More good news about how intelligently religion makes people act. I don't know how you can see this as an indication of anything but that the religious leaders of the Middle East are almost totally insane.

Academia cont.

2007-08-23T13:15:00.001-07:00

I should not that Harry from Squaring the Globe has oft cited the Gang of 88 from the Duke lacrosse rape case as the paragons of the wackiness of liberal academia. But a very quick look at the departments where these academics held positions will give a very good idea of their motivations.

The department with the highest proportion of signatories was African & African-American Studies, with 80%. Just over 72% of the Women's Studies faculty signed the statement, Cultural Anthropology 60%, Romance studies 44.8%, Literature 41.7%, English 32.2%, Art & Art History 30.7%, and History 25%. No faculty members from the Pratt School of Engineering or full-time law professors signed the document. Departments that had no faculty members sign the document include Biological Anthropology and Anatomy, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics, Genetics, Germanic Languages/Literature, Psychology and Neuroscience, Religion, and Slavic and Eurasian Studies. Many have criticized the group for rushing to judgment in condemning the lacrosse players, but some in the group maintain that the ad made no mention of innocence or guilt, but rather elaborated on this "social disaster."

So essentially academics from departments whose political mission had a vested interest in the guilt of the lacrosse players signed the document while members of departments where actual learning happens, on average had a slightly more balanced approach. This never gets mentioned on Fox News because it doesn't feed the right's persecution complex.

Maybe the problem's not with academia

2007-08-23T12:37:00.000-07:00

Harry at Squaring the Globe points out the overwhelmingly Democratic tilt of political contributions by faculty in Boston area colleges and universities, which looks pretty bad if you're convinced by the tactics of right wing groupthink.

The title has a bit of a problem with it claiming, "No quota for conservatives" which implies that donations to the Republican party are the only metric that can be used to tell if someone is conservative. According to the hacks I have seen approvingly quoted on his site before like Schlafly and Malkin conservative does equal Republican loyalist, so I think it is safe to assume Harry agrees. But of course in the world of right wing (I refuse to call it conservative) ego massaging the fact that the Republican Party has been transformed into something that is many things but not one of them conservative, is unmentionable.

Never is the notion entertained that the reason academics don't give to the Republican Party might be not because there is a problem with academia but with Republicans. It is again just assumed that a good education means ideological diversity (which of course means equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats) and retreats into a form of relativism where each side is equally correct and must be presented. Far be it academia's position to exercise some intellectual authority and maybe try to push new ways of thinking rather than blandly presenting different ones as all equally good. Relativism and diversity are apparently just fine for the Christian Right when it suits their purposes. It remains the case, however, that it is going to be hard to get the most intellectually elite and engaged portion of the population excited about a party whose main tactics include appeals to religious fundamentalism, (John McCain can't even say he would support teaching evolution in high schools) xenophobia, (just see how much the talking heads love to plaster the faces of illegal immigrants who have committed crimes all over the media) truthiness, (Conservapedia) and big government Christian socialism (George W. Bush). Any conservatives you will find in academia are not going to be populists and in abandoning their traditional fiscal policies, conservatives will lose much of the support they ever had.

That right wingers so often make such unquestioning assertions such as this is symptomatic of the lack of nuance underlining their worldview. It is a pathetic type of relativism to complain that one's ideology deserves to be presented simply because it doesn't get heard enough. It is a sad fact that not all ideologies are on equal footing. Creationism does not deserve to be taught along with evolution and it is very possible that the underlining ideology of the current Republican Party does not merit serious discussion. But in the rather Manichean world of the right, if the Republicans aren't getting air time then the Democrats are. Independent thought does not occupy a place of reverence for them.

None of these questions are asked. I don't really know the answers and I haven't done thorough research but i feel qualified to make the last few educated guesses about why the Republicans aren't popular with academics. Unfortunately for most right wingers its easier to just get angry at pie charts.

Madison and Judicial Activism

2007-08-23T08:21:00.001-07:00

I often consider the charge of judicial activism from the right to be a canard as no one seems to have any specific definition of it, and it seems only to be flung when conservatives think that the judicial branch has invalidated a law that they think the majority of people want implemented. The ridiculous and thought stopping phrase "the vast majority of the American people" is thrown by both sides but it seems that Laura Ingraham has a specific fetish for it, as if it actually meant that a policy was right, constitutional, and that the wishes of the minority can be summarily discarded.

Lately though I have been readng Gordon Wood's Revolutionary Characters and have learned of the views the founders of this country especially Madison, which centered around the need to protect minority rights. The men who founded this country were not believers in democracy but favored a republicanism which would prevent what is oft referred to as the tyranny of the majority. James Madison was chief among them. During the Constitutional Convention of 1787 he proposed that Congress have a veto power over state laws. This was an impractical proposal then and would be today if only for the fury that giving Congress such authority would unleash, never mind the enormous increase in useless deliberations. Nonetheless Madison was perennially concerned with minority rights and wanted to create some check to protect them against the Constitutional abuses of the majority. The judicial branch over time filled this role and it is doubtful that Madison would have looked unfavorably upon the concept of "judicial activism" and it is obvious now that the right- having become little more than religious populists- little understand why their numbers don't put them on the side of the Constitution or the founders whose names they appropriate so liberally.

All for Jesus, All for Jesus, ect. ect.

2007-08-17T19:53:00.001-07:00

Andrew Sullivan's full response to Douthat is here.

Ross Douthat

2007-08-15T20:33:00.000-07:00

I know I said that Ross Douthat is "continuing to annoy me but I have no other posts about him. Well before I started this blog I read a column by him in The Atlantic claiming that growing trends of religiosity in Europe and secularism in America mean trouble. Well that annoyed and confused me. Then I found a review of God is Not Great which also... annoyed me. Well I will go through both soon so as to establish a trend of Douthat-antagonism and further the Hitchens-boosting theme of this site.

An idea

2007-08-15T16:52:00.000-07:00

Why not have the presidential candidates sit down with someone who has no political capital to lose? Why not have them sit down with Andrew Sullivan, or Hitchens, or Mark Steyn, or David Brooks, or George Will, or anyone else who will say what they think intelligently instead of these debates where candidates tiptoe around each other. After all they will be dealing with people who will do a lot worse than call them on their bullshit. A naive wish I know.

Ross Douthat continues to annoy me

2007-08-15T16:39:00.001-07:00

Taking from Andrew Sullivan I noted the conclusion of Brownback's stump speech at the Iowa straw poll. Well Ross Douthat has taken issue with our alarm over it and again takes the line of apologists for those who seek to blurr the line between church and state.

First:

Yes, indeed: Today, 15 percent of the vote at the Iowa Straw Poll; tomorrow, majoritarian theocratic tyranny. (Hitler came to power by democratic means, you know ...)

Yes so lets just ignore the growing sectarian nature of our politics and not wonder if this is at all worrisome. The Hitler reference is a pathetic and transparent attempt to paint people who actually might believe that in a pluralistic society arguments should be made in secular terms and that leaders should avoid florid, sectarian proclamations in a spirit of making the rest of us feel confident we won't end up living under a government guided by religious principles we neither share nor believe nor understand, as hysterics. I believe Godwin's Law states, "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Well Douthat seems to have just preempted what will be the conclusion of the irrational argument spawned by this.

I would go on, but it would just be the usual tedious argument about how Andrew misunderstands American history, American religion, and the intersection thereof, and how he's trying apply a continental model of faith and politics to a context where that model has never applied, and so and so forth. Instead, I'll punt to Larison:

Yes we all know the historical argument that because religion has never been legally interwoven with politics it has been allowed to grow and thrive without becoming a humiliatingly (for it) arm of the state, and that as such expressions of faith by American politicians do not reference an age of theocracy everyone is happy to have behind them. But apparently Douthat doesn't think there is any danger in our political discourse taking on an increasingly sectarian tone, and as he noted those who do are hysterics. He really seems open to discussion.

He ends by approving of Brownback's statement as a legitimate expression of faith, if a bit vulgar. His closing line is more revealing of the knee jerk piety afflicting Douthat when he says of Sullivan, "with its snobbish overtones and arm's-length distaste for Mother Teresa (!), is the most unfortunate - and revealing - part of the whole post." Is he oblivious as to the reassessment of Mother Teresa that in the years since her death? It is another post entirely but i will conclude by linking to some sources that should give a fair minded person enough doubt of her holiness to at least not punctuate a reference to some one's distaste for her with a childish exclamation point.

Here
Here
Here
Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict
Here

Abortion logic

2007-08-15T15:16:00.000-07:00

I had a discussion a few months back in the comment section of another blog about abortion prompted by the Supreme Court's decision to uphold Bush's partial birth abortion ban. I initially asked if the poster (a pro-life Catholic) believed that abortion should be allowed when the mother's health or life would be endangered by the pregnancy. I believe only Brownback says there should be no exception but I could be wrong and it is immaterial to this post besides.

If a response in the affirmative was elicited then what I intended to argue was that pro-lifers are not truly convinced of their oft repeated slogan that life begins at conception. The truth of this, they often say, is demonstrated by science but they show themselves to have quite little grasp of what it means to make a qualitative judgment based on facts and a quantitative one.

But I digress. If a pro-lifer allows that an abortion be permitted in cases where the mother's life is in danger then he has by course of logic admitted that a fetus is not a full human being and that sentience plays a role in the moral status we afford biological organisms. If life truly did begin at conception then the pro-lifer would be obliged to hold that no matter what stage of development and no matter what the risk to the mother, a fetus could never be aborted. I ask a person to contemplate to themselves whether it would be moral to force a woman to carry a fetus for nine months knowing that its development and delivery could mean the end of her life, and were it to come true would it be an acceptable outcome. I cannot rationalize to myself allowing a fully sentient woman undergo pain and death for the sake of an organism which is clearly not as capable of suffering as she is. It is clear that with regard to the fetus we are not talking about something that is fully human if in times when the life of the fetus and the life of the mother are in conflict, we give priority to the mother. Otherwise, as stated before the death of the mother should be a perfectly acceptable risk.

As I am not a doctor I do not know under what circumstances a partial birth abortion would be necessary to save the life of a mother but if it could be demonstrated that they would never be necessary then I would support the ban because the viability of the fetus is sufficient to grant it a moral status that precludes terminating it. This is provided that the decision is left in the hands of experts and not subject to external review where considerations other than medical would be brought to bear on the question. However, as viability is essentially a judgment call on the part of a doctor I would be wary of establishing laws, and punishments, which have as their basis judgments that are never exact. However unless there is a entirely urgent medical concern then I cannot justify granting a fetus which could be easily delivered by C-section the moral status of a turnip, which is what we do if we allow it to be terminated at will for we don't even allow that to happen to most animals.

Another question to be asked of pro-lifers who believe life begins at conception is what penalty should be imposed on a mother who has an illegal abortion if it were illegal? Under the belief that a fetus upon conception is fully human, the only fitting penalty to my mind would be that commensurate with a charge of first degree murder. Again if the organism terminated was a full human life then they would be obliged to pursue such charges. I am not sure who believes this to be a rational policy. I would not be surprised if they existed and I am sure they do but I suspect these people would be afflicted with such a fanatical and fundamentalist way of thinking that they would be incapable of rational discussion. And if the decision regarding the legality abortion were left to the states then I can easily see scenes reminiscent of Dred Scott being replayed with women fleeing states to escape murder charges and being dragged back. Quite fittingly, like Dred Scott, they would probably be fleeing north.

To say that life begins at conception is a useful slogan but one that has little correlation with reality both our intuitive moral sense of humanness and the practical consequences which would follow from legal implementation of such a view.

Hitchens on 9/11

2007-08-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

"In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting."

-Christopher Hitchens's reaction to 9/11

Possibly an inside joke

2007-08-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

You may not get this joke uness you have spent some time in the UK (or have a small appreciation for dark humor) but this makes me nostaligic for my Glasgow years. Oddly though we called them NEDs.

Why is it only secularists who can say this?

2007-08-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

The civilization vs. mentality question is unimportant in my view. This woman was raised in the culture she condemns and epitomizes why we need to fight this war. Asking the question; "Why do they hate us?" should tell us not what we have to fix but what we have to preserve. It is the battle between the genuine article of a mentality that strives toward human happiness on one hand and one that would shackle it in the name of fantasy. That they hate us only makes me think better of us, and it is paramount that we not we not try to alter ourselves to please them. Yes they have specific complaints about our troops on Muslim holy lands (holy lands? what a joke) and other such things but this is the present incarnation of a struggle that has gone on for centuries and their hatred is symptomatic of a mentality that cannot tolerate the existence on equal terms of difference. That they hate us we should take as a sign that we have accomplished something good and in the face of that threat be more rigorous in saving what we have and not resorting to this.

The Age of Endarkenment

2007-08-15T11:08:00.000-07:00

My quarrel with religion comes from a variety of angles. For one these dogmas balkanize humans into warring sects and a brief scan of their histories shows that the history of religion is that mostly of humanity's ignorance and misery. Also I also despise the religious way of thinking which allows that beliefs without evidence are somehow respectable. This type of wish thinking is much harder to eradicate in the human race and even in Europe as religious dogma loses significance a host of other pseudoscientific beliefs rise up in their place such as acupuncture, New Age therapies, homeopathic medicine, and holistic treatments (on which Seinfeld actually had a hilarious episode), and all other such vague "spirituality" which I have always thought were simply excuses for a lack of imagination and curiosity.

A pharmacologist from Britain comments on the rise of these phenomenon which are not only fraudulent and ineffective but corrupt our way of thinking and detract from real medicine and science. Our "tolerance" for these beliefs because of people's emotional attachement to them has pernicious effects.

Indecision '08

2007-08-14T16:45:00.000-07:00

John Stewart sheds some light on the silliness of the current Obama-Clinton bomb throwing, and the media coverage.

Do you want Alberto Gonzalez to be the one interpreting this?

2007-08-14T15:21:00.001-07:00

I've been waiting to post on the new wire tapping bill until I found a good reason to oppose it which wouldn't be composed of simplistic civil libertarian vitriol, and now I have found one via Balkinization.

Other provisions in the White House-backed bill added to the Democrats' discomfort. For instance, a Democratic bill would have authorized warrantless surveillance "directed" at individuals reasonably believed to be outside the United States. But the administration's draft -- and the one passed into law -- permitted collecting data "concerning" people reasonably believed to be outside the country. Democrats said the difference between collection efforts "concerning" foreigners and "directed" at foreigners could be enormous, allowing intelligence officials far greater leeway.

The bill was reported as giving the NSA the authority to surveill foreign to foreign communications without warrants, but the language of the bill is considerably more liberal. What exactly does "concerning" mean. Lederman still claims the bill covers only communications "directed at" someone overseas. While I am not a lawyer and I could be very wrong I do not think that overseas warrantless wiretapping violates anything in the Constitution or any Court ruling, nor do I am I sure it violates the "spirit" of the laws. Maybe the "directed at" phrase is a bit more restrictive than "concerning" but it certainly too vague for my comfort especially given this administration's ability to defy common sense in its interpretation of civil liberties and the wording of legal documents. Remember Alberto Gonzalez's opinion of the Constitutional right to habeas corpus?

I think it would be prudent to more clearly define who is a foreigner.

Also Lederman reports that the Democrats deliberations on this bill included a fear that they would give Bush an excuse to call them weak on defense as was basically his 2006 strategy. That the Democrats can't stand up to a President as politically weak as this one and with approval ratings as low as his shows how ineffectual they truly are. That at this point in his administration they can't come up with some rhetoric to counter that of the Bush/Rove team is astonishing. The Congress has a 17% approval rating and I have long since joined that 83%. I suspect it they are legislating to cover for their presidential candidates.

More of the same

2007-08-14T13:02:00.000-07:00

Harvey Mansfield in the Weekly Standard (still faithfully losing a million dollars each year) offers his opinion on the recent atheist tracts. It is filled with the usual appeals, "we might infer," "we can suspect," "Edmund Burke speculated," ect., and the usual canard that atheism produced the greatest tyranny ever know (sorry it was Marxism and Fascism both violent, totalitarian ideologies of which Fascism was not atheistic but rather had more similarities with ancient paganism) Yes we all know the traditional connection people have made between God, government, and morality but he does nothing to answer the obvious objection that since David Hume anyone exercising epistemological diligence will find it impossible to believe in god. And he furthermore is blind to the fact that it is the contention of these books that as science makes it more and more impossible to believe in god even for the philosophical layman we should try to find a different basis for our ethics- specifically one which takes account of human experience and suffering, which appeals to god do not- a point with which Sam Harris is especially concerned. And any view to history will find that religions negate the value of human suffering hence the use of fire to purify souls during the Inquisition and the cult of suffering and poverty started by Mother Teresa. So I think that in the 21st century it is not outrageous of us to claim that with all the outrages against human dignity through human history maybe the most familiar aspect of human society (religion) ought to be jettisoned as it loses it value in explaining the world. (it has already done this)