| You've Disappointed Reinhold Niebuhr |
[May. 2nd, 2012|10:25 am] |
An interview of Reinhold Niebuhr conducted by Mike Wallace.
Niebuhr is easily the most important theologian of the last century. So much so that Republican atheists (yes, they really existed once) in the Eisenhower administration had a group called "Atheists for Niebuhr", which I guess is kind of like "Atheists for Jesus".
Niebuhr's words ring true in this interview, but they fail to predict the toxicity of political discourse in the years to follow. The separation of church and state is necessary in a pluralistic society, but the opponents of separation have no interest in co-existing in a pluralistic society. How do you reach a compromise with someone who rejects compromise? |
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| Workaround Reacharound |
[Apr. 27th, 2012|12:03 am] |
LiveJournal won't let me post pictures in comments, so here's my answer to Pete:
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| Pete, I Know You Can Read This |
[Apr. 26th, 2012|08:26 am] |
Embrace it, Pete. Just accept that it happens and celebrate it. You started down this road of your own volition and I WILL mock you about it when you reach its end. |
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| Comic Book Morality And The Modern Military |
[Mar. 16th, 2012|09:52 am] |
This is something that's bugged me for a while, but now that the sergeant responsible for the massacre of Afghan civilians is being shipped home for trial I thought I'd discuss this. I first noticed it as I was watching a History Channel program on snipers. All the older snipers (World War 2 and Vietnam) had various labels for their enemies; the enemy, hostiles, the Germans, the VC, and so on. Then there was a sniper who served in Iraq, and he had one label for his enemies; the Bad Guys. That made me cringe every time he said it. And then his instructor from training was interviewed, and he discussed "the Bad Guys". It was systemic, if not official policy.
I understand the need to dehumanize the enemy. Killing people can be emotionally difficult, so you dehumanize them until they're just targets. Then it becomes easier to sink a bullet into someone's sternum. But dehumanizing and demonizing are two different things. "The Afghans" can have civilians who you shouldn't harm, there are no civilian "Bad Guys" because they are all bad guys. "The Enemy" is a neutral term, it simply refers to those who oppose you. But "the Bad Guys" are evil, and it's your moral duty to kill them.
The sergeant's defense lawyer is saying he was troubled because a friend had been gravely injured in a shooting the day before. Yeah, because soldiers getting injured in Afghanistan is unprecedented. I don't pretend to know what the sergeant was thinking, but I personally think it's dangerous to indoctrinate young men into believing that our opponents are the embodiment of evil. Because if you believe that, I mean REALLY believe it, then killing every living thing in the country becomes the ethically responsible thing to do. And that's how civilians get killed. No doubt the sergeant has been told by superiors time and again that the Afghans are the Bad Guys, and Bad Guys are evil. If that's the case, we can't really be surprised when a "hero" decides to do something about those evil people. |
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| ...And Speaking Of Dumb White Americans |
[Mar. 13th, 2012|10:13 am] |
Yeah, so that Kony 2012 thing. First of all, I'm kinda offended at the idea that no one seemed to care about this problem until a YouTube video was posted. Which plays into my broader narrative of "social networking can go fuck itself". But one thing that really caught my attention was just how much Africans seem to hate the viral video. They seem to interpret (and rightly so) that the video is saying that Africans can't solve their own problems. Their problems need to be solved by white people, white Americans specifically. At the same time as implying that Africa must be saved by the white man (sorry, "white persons") it also plays into our desire for easy, minimalist solutions. Did you post the video on your Facebook? Congratulations! You're Helping! Actually, no you didn't. People are still dying. See, posting a video from YouTube doesn't magically stop people from dying.
So, by way of The Atlantic, come my favorite responses to the Kony 2012 hooplah. Those being the tweets of Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole:
1- From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.
2- The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.
3- The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
4- This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah.
5- The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
6- Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that.
7- I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.
EDIT: To undercut my own argument and prove what a tremendous asshole I can be-  |
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| The Good Fight |
[Mar. 13th, 2012|09:48 am] |
I've ranted before that one problem I have with internet liberals is their belief that true justice isn't fair. Their idea of equality is often little more than reverse discrimination. Call me moderate (or fascist. I've been called that), but justice is meant to be fair and equality is about people being treated the same. So I ran across this story. Hey, if male lawmakers want to regulate women's reproductive health...
"Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner (D-Cleveland) will introduce a bill aimed at cracking down on prescription drugs like Viagra that treat erectile dysfunction. Turner’s legislation would make men jump through certain hoops — such as psychological screenings — before they could obtain the meds. The bill follows FDA recommendations to determine the underlying causes of erectile dysfunction — but that’s certainly not the only reason Turner is putting the measure forward.
'All across the country, including in Ohio, I thought since men are certainly paying great attention to women’s health that we should definitely return the favor,' Turner told TPM. Her bill is one of several pieces of legislation offered over the past several weeks by women lawmakers eager to prove a point about the raging contraception debate.
Their bills seek to regulate men’s sexual health, from Viagra to vasectomies, just as Republican-led state governments and Congress have zeroed in on access to abortion and family planning care.
Turner’s bill mimics language found in Ohio’s so-called Heartbeat Bill, which passed the Ohio state House and is now pending in the Senate. The bill would ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, sometimes as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Turner’s bill, she says, offers men a taste of their own medicine — it would require physicians to inform patients in writing of the risks involved in taking erectile dysfunction drugs and requires men to sign a document acknowledging the risks, just like the anti-abortion bill does.
'I care about the health of men as well, and I thought it only fair that we illustrate that and make sure that a man is fully informed of the risks involved in taking these drugs and also the alternatives such as natural remedies or also celibacy,' Turner said.
Women legislators in other states have been making similar efforts." |
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| Stealing Words From More Learned People |
[Mar. 11th, 2012|09:48 pm] |
By way of The New York Times
"In Athens, Austerity's Ugliness" by Nicholas D. Kristof
Europe declared war on Keynes, and Keynes is winning.
In the United States, Republicans lambaste President Obama’s stimulus package as a failure and insist on bone-crunching budget-cutting. If you want to know how well that works, come visit Europe — especially Greece.
Yes, Greece needed a wake-up whack and economic reform, but Republican-style austerity knocked the patient unconscious. Contrast the still-shrinking economies of Europe with the stirrings of recovery in the United States, and you feel lucky to be an American and a beneficiary of President Obama’s stimulus.
It’s stunning here in Athens to see many traffic lights not working, to see beggars pawing through garbage for food, to see blackened ruins of shops burned in rioting. I was even greeted by a homeless man who spoke impeccable British-accented English.
That man, Michael A. Kambouroglou, 35, claims that he studied English literature at Cambridge University and worked for years in the tourism industry, most recently at a five-star hotel. He told me that he had enjoyed a good life, visiting the United States and traveling around the world, until the day nearly a year ago when the collapsing economy caught up with him, and he was laid off.
“To be honest, I never thought it could come to me,” he recalled. “It happened in a flash.” Kambouroglou says he goes out every morning, knocking on doors and looking for work, but in this economy it seems hopeless. The overall unemployment rate here is 21 percent — 48 percent among young people — and the European Union forecasts that the Greek economy (and all of the euro zone) will shrink further this year.
When Kambouroglou’s savings ran out, he moved under a bridge in Athens. The suffering is widespread. Some 250,000 Greeks now receive free meals from churches or shelters, according to the Greek Orthodox Church.
There’s no doubt that Greece had been living recklessly and needed structural reforms. While much of Europe was fundamentally healthy until the crisis hit — the caricature Americans hold of a socialist Europe in decline is a vast exaggeration — Greece truly was a mess. For example, if you’re a business owner, taxation often works like this: Instead of paying a tax bill of, say, $100,000, you pay $40,000 to the state, hand a $20,000 bribe to the tax collector, and keep $40,000.
Republicans are right to see in Greece some perils of an overgenerous government: The state sector was bloated, early retirements and pensions were sometimes absurd, and rigid labor markets undermined Greece’s competitiveness. But the problem was not a welfare state — Greece has much less of a safety net than northern Europe. Rather, it was corruption, inefficiency and a system in which laws are optional.
I drove around Greece and found driving here easy because traffic rules don’t seem to matter. If you’re blocked by a one-way street, you barrel through in the wrong direction. Stop signs are merely suggestive. No-passing markers before blind turns mean: pass anyway, and pray. When an entire economy operates without rules, it has a problem.
Yet instead of structural reforms or improved tax collection, what has changed in Greece, so far, has mostly been slashed budgets. And, as in the rest of Europe, austerity in the middle of recession has made matters worse — just as John Maynard Keynes predicted.
Granted, there are no easy solutions for Greece, but this path doesn’t seem to be working. “It might end up as a social revolution,” Kambouroglou said grimly. That’s too pessimistic, but my hunch is that the latest rescue package will fail (except that it will buy time, perhaps its purpose) and that Greece eventually may leave the euro zone. In any case, the rescue packages seem more about saving French and German banks than saving Greece.
Countless Greeks are giving up on their homeland and emigrating to northern Europe or Australia. Gloom is as thick as a morning fog on the Peloponnesus.
“The state has ceased functioning,” editorialized an Athens newspaper, The Kathimerini.
That’s an exaggeration, but schools, hospitals and social services are devastated. Staff at some halfway houses for the mentally ill haven’t been paid for six months, and electricity has been cut off. “And it’ll get worse,” predicted Dr. Cristos Panettas, the chief psychiatrist of the Psychiatric Hospital of Attica.
One of the earliest recorded economic crises in the Western world came in Athens in the 5th century B.C. Fortunately, Athens was then led by the great Pericles, an early Keynesian who did not respond by slashing budgets.
Instead, he ordered a public works initiative and built the Parthenon. I dropped by the Parthenon the other day, seeking inspiration, and a guide, Miranda-Maria Skiniti, was incisive about the lessons: “We need Pericles today.”
There’s ageless wisdom there for Greeks, Europeans — and Americans. |
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| You Paid How Much For What? |
[Mar. 2nd, 2012|12:46 pm] |
A video from Ashens. It's a touch more amusing (at least I thought so) than his usual videos, and since I know people who play The Old Republic I thought it would be interesting to see what came in the ludicrously huge collector's box. Also, Tom, you need to pick up your package.
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