AZspot

"In the conservative moral system, the highest value is preserving and extending the moral system..."

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:01:11 +0100

“In the conservative moral system, the highest value is preserving and extending the moral system itself. That is why they keep saying no to Obama’s proposals, even voting against their own ideas when Obama accepts them. To give Obama any victory at all would be a blow to their moral system. Their moral system requires non-cooperation. That is a major thing the Obama administration has not understood. The conservatives understand the centrality of morality. They attacked the Obama health care plan as immoral, violating the moral principles of freedom (“government takeover”) and reverence for life (“death panels”). The Obama administration made a policy case, not a moral case. The conservatives have characterized the bailouts as thievery and Obama’s ties to Wall Street as immoral - as being in bed with the thieves. The attacks on government are seen as moral attacks, with government seen as taking money out of working people’s pockets and giving it to people who don’t deserve it. Whether it is the birthers, or the anti-Muslims, or the anti-immigrants or the pro-lifers, the attack is a moral attack. The Tea Party cry is moral - for “freedom” (see my book “Whose Freedom?”), for God, for patriotism. Even jobless benefits are seen as giving money to people who are not working and don’t deserve it. Even Social Security that workers have earned, that are deferred payments for work, are seen as undeserving people “sucking on the tits of the government.””

- George Lakoff

"Links, you see, do so much more than just whisk us from one Web page to another. They are not just..."

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:00:59 +0100

“Links, you see, do so much more than just whisk us from one Web page to another. They are not just textual tunnel-hops or narrative chutes-and-ladders. Links, properly used, don’t just pile one “And now this!” upon another. They tell us, “This relates to this, which relates to that.” Links announce our presence. They show a writer’s work. They are badges of honesty, inviting readers to check that work. They demonstrate fairness. They can be simple gestures of communication; they can be complex signifiers of meaning. They make connections between things. They add coherence. They build context.”

- Scott Rosenberg

Tom Tomorrow

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:58:49 +0100

Tom Tomorrow

Plato's Pop Culture Problem, and Ours

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:34:45 +0100

Plato's Pop Culture Problem, and Ours:

Could Plato, who wrote in the 4^th century B.C., possibly have anything to say about today’s electronic media? As it turns out, yes, It is characteristic of philosophy that even its most abstruse and apparently irrelevant ideas, suitably interpreted, can sometimes acquire an unexpected immediacy. And while philosophy doesn’t always provide clear answers to our questions, it often reveals what exactly it is that we are asking.

Children in ancient Athens learned both grammar and citizenship from Homer and the tragic poets. Plato follows suit but submits their works to the sort of ruthless censorship that would surely raise the hackles of modern supporters of free speech. But would we have reason to complain? We, too, censor our children’s educational materials as surely, and on the same grounds, as Plato did. Like him, many of us believe that emulation becomes “habit and second nature,” that bad heroes (we call them “role models” today) produce bad people. We even fill our children’s books with our own clean versions of the same Greek stories that upset him, along with our bowdlerized versions of Shakespeare and the Bible.

What is really disturbing is that Plato’s adult citizens are exposed to poetry even less than their children. Plato knows how captivating and so how influential poetry can be but, unlike us today, he considers its influence catastrophic. To begin with, he accuses it of conflating the authentic and the fake. Its heroes appear genuinely admirable, and so worth emulating, although they are at best flawed and at worst vicious. In addition, characters of that sort are necessary because drama requires conflict — good characters are hardly as engaging as bad ones. Poetry’s subjects are therefore inevitably vulgar and repulsive — sex and violence. Finally, worst of all, by allowing us to enjoy depravity in our imagination, poetry condemns us to a depraved life.

This very same reasoning is at the heart of today’s denunciations of mass media. Scratch the surface of any attack on the popular arts — the early Christians against the Roman circus, the Puritans against Shakespeare, Coleridge against the novel, the various assaults on photography, film, jazz, television, pop music, the Internet, or video games — and you will find Plato’s criticisms of poetry. For the fact is that the works of both Homer and Aeschylus, whatever else they were in classical Athens, were, first and foremost, popular entertainment.

Hello, Can you help conduct an "Internet Approval Rating" of Barrack Obama's presidency on your blog by putting this widget on the homepage?

Widget: http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/barrack-obama-approval-rating

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:46:47 +0100

/puzzled

You are requesting that I include a foreign “widget” on the “homepage” here when I don’t see it anywhere on your untitled site.

What exactly would be the benefit of a “Internet Approval Rating” of ~~Barrack~~ Barack Obama sticky post? Wheelbarrows full of Canadian coins delivered to me? Another unscientific online gauge of internet denizen approval of the U.S. president? A sinister scheme to infect the computing machinery of my Tumblr readers?

And you haven’t even taken the time to update your Tumblr profile photo icon.

"There’s not a trip I make to Iraq where I don’t have to delete somebody’s name from my cell phone..."

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:59:49 +0100

“There’s not a trip I make to Iraq where I don’t have to delete somebody’s name from my cell phone because they’re dead. Every time, there’s a few new names. Everybody has been touched by it. Life, in most ways for people, has gotten much worse. In terms of services, most places here have one hour of electricity a day. People can’t go to sleep at night—it’s like 120 degrees—until 3:00 in the morning or quite late, because they’re waiting for the power to come back just so they can turn on the AC on. No sewage, dirty water, mounds of trash on the street. Baghdad and other areas are heavily militarized, which means that every minute or so when you’re driving, you get stopped by police or army. They search your car. Now, on the one hand, it’s reassuring; on the other hand, it’s just one more indignity and hassle the Iraqis have to go through to survive. And they don’t have the chance to think about the future. They have to think, in many cases, just about how am I going to get electricity today, how am I going to travel what should be a fifteen-minute trip across town that will take four hours because the city is so destroyed and shattered.”

- Nir Rosen

(via adailyriot, fuckyeahpoliticalcartoons)

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:44:45 +0100

(via adailyriot, fuckyeahpoliticalcartoons)

"Bar-Lev’s examination of that lust stands out as the film’s most scathing indictment,..."

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:17:46 +0100

“Bar-Lev’s examination of that lust stands out as the film’s most scathing indictment, puncturing the military’s convenient, frequently deluded myths about altruism and the noble call to serve one’s country. “I wanted to serve myself,” scoffs Russell Baer, a close friend to both Pat and Kevin Tillman in the Rangers who was ordered not to reveal anything about the real cause of Pat’s death (though he had nothing to do with his pal’s demise). “I wanted to shoot guns and blow things up.” He wasn’t the only one: Some soldiers responsible for Tillman’s killing remarked in a report that they were “excited” and “wanted to stay in the firefight” when asked why they continued shooting at Tillman, who was only 40 meters away. As Goff notes, the Armed Forces imposes “a level of wisdom and maturity on soldiers that doesn’t apply to 19-year-olds anywhere, ever.” The bitter irony of Tillman’s death, of course, was that he was a modest, self-sacrificing soldier. Despite his celebrity, he refused all requests for press conferences or public explanations for his decision to enlist (which the government violated post-mortem, just as it tried to overrule his wishes for a civilian, not military, funeral). Though he continually questioned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in conversations — becoming particularly disgusted with the occupation of the former — Tillman insisted on honoring his three-year commitment to the Army, declining offers from his agent to secure an early discharge and return to the NFL. For his sacrifice, leadership, and character, his body was used as propaganda and his family lied to and gravely let down by Congress, which ultimately let Don Rumsfeld and several four-star generals off the hook.”

- The Tillman Story Sets the Record Straight

Conservative Radio Station Polls Whether Muslims Should Be “Registered” In A “Time Of War”

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:00:58 +0100

Conservative Radio Station Polls Whether Muslims Should Be “Registered” In A “Time Of War”:

San Diego radio station KFMB — which, like most talk radio stations in America, features only conservative hosts – had a survey on its home page (now removed), polling listeners with the question, “During a time of war should we register as many Muslims as we can find in a national database?”

The options to answer were (a) No – it’s an invasion of privacy and (b) Yes – gun owners have to, why not Muslims?

I hope you don't mind if I pick your brain right quick.

Is there any valid linking points between Park 51 and the Greek Orthodox church? I can't find anything that makes the two cases at all similar, but there's always a good chance I've over looked something.

Thanks for your time - and for your blog :-D

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:21:00 +0100

/thanks for the kind words and the submitted query.

I reckon you mean this house of worship at “ground zero”. The Greek Orthodox church that sat in the shadow of the World Trade Center and got crushed on 9/11. It seems the rebuilding project hit a snag in negotiations with New Jersey and New York Port Authority over compensation for a mandated land swap:

Negotiations with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for a land swap and public funding reached an impasse more than a year ago. The stalemate is only now generating public attention due to heated protests over Park51, a proposed Islamic community center several blocks away that’s been dubbed the “Ground Zero mosque” by critics.

“St. Nicholas has nothing to do with this mosque controversy. We believe in religious freedom, and whether the mosque should or shouldn’t be there, that’s a whole different dialogue,” said the Rev. Mark Arey, archdiocese spokesman.

“But it’s a rising tide that lifts all boats. People say the mosque has been greenlighted, but why not this church?”

The entire Ground Zero rebuilding process has taken years longer than expected, due to the arduous rescue, recovery and rubble-removal efforts, followed by the bureaucratic process of establishing property ownership and designing the memorial and buildings.

By late 2008, St. Nicholas and the Port Authority had reached a tentative agreement for the church to give up its 1,200-square-foot site at 155 Cedar Street in exchange for 130 Liberty Street, a bigger site half a block away.

Six months later, the Port Authority said negotiations ended because St. Nicholas demanded too much money and approval power over a vehicle security center beneath the sites. Port Authority spokesman Stephen Sigmund said the church can return to its original location.

“In 2009, we made our final offer, which again included up to $60 million in public money, and told St. Nicholas Orthodox Church that the World Trade Center could not be delayed over this issue,” he said in a written statement. “They rejected that offer.”

Arey said negotiations were in the final stages, with the church “acting in good faith,” when the Port Authority suddenly stopped returning calls. He and other church officials think the agency changed course because the fate of the old Deutsch Bank building next to the new site—which is supposed to become Tower 5 of the rebuilt World Trade Center—became unclear after JP Morgan Chase took over Bear Stearns’ midtown offices and no longer needed a new building downtown.

“Maybe they wanted to figure out what else to do with that property,” Couloucoundis said. “The official account is that the church was too demanding. That’s completely ridiculous. We weren’t suddenly asking for $100 million or to build a church 30 stories high.”

And here is a NY Times article on the matter, written in March 2009. Some more history here.

Father Orthoduck expresses this sentiment on the brouhaha:

Yes, those of us who are Orthodox are paying the price of those of you good “Christian” (NOT) people who are demanding that Ground Zero be maintained as hollowed ground. First we are denied the right to rebuild our church on the same spot because that ground must be “preserved” for posterity. Then, even the ground that we were given has been denied as you good people have spoken up against proselytism near Ground Zero. Now, even our ground has been dug up without asking our permission, because, after all this is hallowed ground. Yes, and that congregation has always ministered to immigrants and foreigners. Father Orthoduck guesses that this means that we can safely be ignored.

Father Orthoduck sounds a little bitter. But, that is because your complaints have resulted in our rights being trampled. Father Orthoduck is trying to remember to forgive, but it is difficult while he sees his fellow Christian being completely unaware of what their advocacy of the violation of the Bill of Rights has meant for us. You see, you meant it to apply only to Muslims. But, in this country the law is applied without regard to race, color, creed. And that means that your pressures against the Muslims are rebounding upon us, who where there long before the World Trade Center.

Incidentally, let it be noted that as a wee lad, I took first Holy Communion in a Greek Orthodox church.

The 10 Commandments: Where the Medium Was the Message

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 05:50:51 +0100

The 10 Commandments: Where the Medium Was the Message:

The second commandment is also profoundly different than anything found in ancient documents when it forbids the creation of any graven images.

You shall not make for yourself a carved image … You shall not bow down to them or serve them… (Exodus 20:4-5)

Technology scholar Neil Postman (who was himself of Jewish origin) wrote,

“It is a strange injunction to include as part of any ethical system [instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience] unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture.” (Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 9. Emphasis in the original.)

The Israelites might have argued that the technological means they used to approach God didn’t matter as long as they were devoted to him and him alone. But God begged to differ, because he knew that the instruments we use for worship always reinforce certain beliefs.

In the case of Israel, if they had used images to represent Yahweh then it might have appeared that he was like every other God. Instead, by forbidding images of himself, God was reinforcing his identity as wholly other. He is not an idol among idols or an image among images – He is the one, true God.

This means that the second commandment is a technological reinforcement of the first. The medium – or lack thereof in this case – was the message.

Nate Beeler

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 04:45:15 +0100

Nate Beeler

"You want to know who the biggest hypocrite in the world is? The biggest hypocrite in the world is..."

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:31:04 +0100

“You want to know who the biggest hypocrite in the world is? The biggest hypocrite in the world is the person who believes in the death penalty for murderers and not for homosexuals. Hypocrite. The same God who instituted the death penalty for murderers is the same God who instituted the death penalty for rapists and for homosexuals – sodomites, queers! That’s what it was instituted for, okay? That’s God, he hasn’t changed. Oh, God doesn’t feel that way in the New Testament … God never “felt” anything about it, he commanded it and said they should be taken out and killed. You know why God wanted the sodomites in the Old Testament to be killed? You know why every good king of Israel, the Bible says they got rid of the sodomites in the land? You know, the good kings that came after the bad kings who had allowed the sodomites to infest their land, they had infiltrated … King Asa got the sodomites out of the land, Jehoshaphat exterminated the sodomites that were left from the days of his father, Asa. Why? Because the sodomites are infectious, that’s why. Because they’re not reproducers, that goes without saying, they’re recruiters.”

- Stephen Anderson, Faithful Word Baptist Church Pastor

"We wondered whether the Five Brothers, the nickname for the Romney sons, could handle the constant..."

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:50:41 +0100

“We wondered whether the Five Brothers, the nickname for the Romney sons, could handle the constant drinking and swearing that went on in our campaign - the press corps included. Not to mention all the tawdry stories about crazy-sex you never read about.”

- Meghan McCain

Nate Beeler

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:37:59 +0100

Nate Beeler

Once Upon a Time, in America…

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:33:16 +0100

Once Upon a Time, in America…:

Storytelling is a codified, public strategy. It is often used opportunistically, as a psycho-social trope aimed toward a predetermined result—a schema selling a product or a pitch or a persona, a therapeutic process, a technique to persuade the public to favor a politician’s hairball agenda. Television conservatives, amply backed by parties and think tanks and strategists, don’t do anything by accident—unless it’s a mistake. Crafting their ideology as narrative is a studious marketing ploy. How best to sell this agenda, this tax cut, this Democrat demonization?

Tell a tale. Campfire stories about Commie boogeyman and welfare cheats, bedtime stories about how things used to be, once upon a time. To dip even your littlest toe into the river of conservative media is to hear stories, stories of evil homosexuals, beatific soldiers, heroic Republican presidents, and halcyon days of law, order, authority and traditional values.

The problem is, leftists do not tell stories—whether true or fabricated—that involve the past. Progressives opine for the practical future, a future that they aim to create free of turmoil or injustice. That is, a future without stories. Stories require conflict, emotional desire, heroes and villains.

What kind of story could a liberal tell about an unconflicted and equitable tomorrow? Unless you are able to invoke an idealized past, which you can mythify as narrative, your hands will be tied.For progressives, the past, as a tale told, is not on the docket.

We’re talking about presentation, not laws and rights and actions. As long as American politics remain a matter of simulacra—of rhetoric and persona—the storytellers will dominate the discussion, doing what myth has always done—supply order in place of chaos and uncertainty. This is our modern tragedy: Recent history offers a parade of evil fabulists, from Hitler to Karl Rove to Kim Jong-Il, all of them bewitching storytellers.

The Tea Party movement is nothing more than a cycle of antique fictions told over and over again, distorting themselves as they go.

"While conservatives such as Beck and Palin point to a time past when America had honor, I am..."

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:48:13 +0100

“While conservatives such as Beck and Palin point to a time past when America had honor, I am puzzled. Presumably, Beck and Palin mean America had honor in the eyes of God. Presumably, this honor was due to our limited government and desire for individual liberty. But if we assume this to be true, was God also honored with the systematic displacement of native peoples; the enslavement, lynching, and raping of African women, children and men forcibly brought to our “blessed” shores; and the continual repression of women’s votes just to name a few? Was God being honored when those atrocities were not only permitted, but nationally sanctioned? Is God not honored because millions more have healthcare? Is God not honored because I do not keep what I rightfully earned?”

- Is America’s Honor, a Christian’s Honor? Thoughts on Glenn Beck and the “Restoring Honor” Rally

Mike Keefe

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:45:55 +0100

Mike Keefe

"There’s always been a big audience in the United States for conspiracy theories and religious..."

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:30:34 +0100

“There’s always been a big audience in the United States for conspiracy theories and religious melodrama. The apocalyptic theology of the hard-shell denominations where hucksters like Beck and his costar Sarah Palin have their biggest following basically demands it. It’s Satan worship one year, secular humanism the next. The latest bogeyman is Islamic fundamentalist Shariah law, an almost purely theoretical threat in the USA. Which actually constitutes progress. Back in Mencken’s day the enemies were Catholics and Jews.”

- Glenn Beck’s religious rally nothing new

A letter to my students

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:13:51 +0100

A letter to my students:

Welcome to Berkeley, probably still the best public university in the world. Meet your classmates, the best group of partners you can find anywhere. The percentages for grades on exams, papers, etc. in my courses always add up to 110% because that’s what I’ve learned to expect from you, over twenty years in the best job in the world.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that you have been the victims of a terrible swindle, denied an inheritance you deserve by contract and by your merits. And you aren’t the only ones; victims of this ripoff include the students who were on your left and on your right in high school but didn’t get into Cal, a whole generation stiffed by mine. This letter is an apology, and more usefully, perhaps a signal to start demanding what’s been taken from you so you can pass it on with interest.

Swindle–what happened? Well, before you were born, Californians now dead or in nursing homes made a remarkable deal with the future. (Not from California? Keep reading, lots of this applies to you, with variations.) They agreed to invest money they could have spent on bigger houses, vacations, clothes, and cars into the world’s greatest educational system, and into building and operating water systems, roads, parks, and other public facilities, an infrastructure that was the envy of the world. They didn’t get everything right: too much highway and not enough public transportation. But they did a pretty good job.

Young people who enjoyed these ‘loans’ grew up smarter, healthier, and richer than they otherwise would have, and understood that they were supposed to “pay it forward” to future generations, for example by keeping the educational system staffed with lots of dedicated, well-trained teachers, in good buildings and in small classes, with college counselors and up-to-date books. California schools had physical education, art for everyone, music and theater, buildings that looked as though people cared about them, modern languages and ancient languages, advanced science courses with labs where the equipment worked, and more. They were the envy of the world, and they paid off better than Microsoft stock. Same with our parks, coastal zone protection, and social services.

This deal held until about thirty years ago, when for a variety of reasons, California voters realized that while they had done very well from the existing contract, they could do even better by walking away from their obligations and spending what they had inherited on themselves. “My kids are finished with school; why should I pay taxes for someone else’s? Posterity never did anything for me!” An army of fake ‘leaders’ sprang up to pull the moral and fiscal wool over their eyes, and again and again, your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph.

Now, your infrastructure is falling to pieces under your feet, and as citizens you are responsible for crudities like closing parks, and inhumanities like closing battered women’s shelters. It’s outrageous, inexcusable, that you can’t get into the courses you need, but much worse that Oakland police have stopped taking 911 calls for burglaries and runaway children. If you read what your elected officials say about the state today, you’ll see things like “California can’t afford” this or that basic government function, and that “we need to make hard choices” to shut down one or another public service, or starve it even more (like your university). Can’t afford? The budget deficit that’s paralyzing Sacramento is about $500 per person; add another $500 to get back to a public sector we don’t have to be ashamed of, and our average income is almost forty times that. Of course we can afford a government that actually works: the fact is that your parents have simply chosen not to have it.

AZspot

"In the conservative moral system, the highest value is preserving and extending the moral system..."

"Links, you see, do so much more than just whisk us from one Web page to another. They are not just..."

Tom Tomorrow

Plato's Pop Culture Problem, and Ours

Hello, Can you help conduct an "Internet Approval Rating" of Barrack Obama's presidency on your blog by putting this widget on the homepage? Widget: http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/barrack-obama-approval-rating

"There’s not a trip I make to Iraq where I don’t have to delete somebody’s name from my cell phone..."

(via adailyriot, fuckyeahpoliticalcartoons)

"Bar-Lev’s examination of that lust stands out as the film’s most scathing indictment,..."

Conservative Radio Station Polls Whether Muslims Should Be “Registered” In A “Time Of War”

The 10 Commandments: Where the Medium Was the Message

Nate Beeler

"You want to know who the biggest hypocrite in the world is? The biggest hypocrite in the world is..."

"We wondered whether the Five Brothers, the nickname for the Romney sons, could handle the constant..."

Nate Beeler

Once Upon a Time, in America…

"While conservatives such as Beck and Palin point to a time past when America had honor, I am..."

Mike Keefe

"There’s always been a big audience in the United States for conspiracy theories and religious..."

A letter to my students

Hello, Can you help conduct an "Internet Approval Rating" of Barrack Obama's presidency on your blog by putting this widget on the homepage?

Widget: http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/barrack-obama-approval-rating