AZspot
Tuesday 22 March 2011
The other complaint I’m getting is that my gripe about using the “humanitarian” excuse is shallow. “Just because we can’t intervene everywhere to save the people doesn’t mean we can’t intervene somewhere.” To that I’ll just say that when you use this rationale in a blatantly cynical way, you not only abuse and cheapen the whole notion of humanitarian intervention, you create even more cynicism about humanitarianism in general. Being a humanitarian only when it suits your own interest isn’t humanitarianism, it’s opportunism.
Hullabaloo ☀
Wednesday 15 December 2010
…it’s clear that under the stress of rapid social change and economic insecurity, America is morphing itself quite comfortably into a police state, yearning to believe that it is under the most serious threats mankind has ever known (well, except for the real ones like climate change, which they increasingly believe is a hoax)in order to justify putting themselves into the hands of people who say they are protecting them. At this point, like those lab rats who repeatedly shock themselves for rewards, they are so overstimulated that they are excitedly eating up the fearmongering and demagoguery, just so they can watch the authorities use their power to make it stop.
Hullabaloo ☀
Monday 25 October 2010
But we are not living in a world where facts are important. We are living in a world where billionaires love to lecture average folks about how they have to sacrifice for the good of the country while they piss and moan about having to pay another percentage point in taxes on their millions and threaten to blow the world up if anyone even asks them too.
Hullabaloo ☀
Wednesday 24 February 2010
The American conscience, when it decides to act, is mighty—but it is also sluggish and vain. Americans are crushed by the weight of not fulfilling their own high expectations—so the shameful acts of one generation are often rectified by a subsequent generation unencumbered by their own complicity in such acts. So the compromise the Founding Fathers reached on the issue of slavery, in defiance of the spirit of the documents they authored, was eventually righted by the Civil War. The slavery by another name of reconstruction was ignored by a nation weary of conflict after nearly being rent in two—but eventually gave birth to the civil rights movement. The suffragettes were forced to accept a compromise on the 14th Amendment that denied them the vote—but they would ultimately prevail. Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans, Reagan gave them reparations. The American conscience is often slow to action, but not because it cannot recognize evil—but because our view of ourselves as a people guided by justice is so important to who we are that when confronted with proof of our own shortcomings, we recoil in shame and precious vanity. Eventually, with the big stuff, we usually find our way—we see this with our slow, staggering, but inevitable march towards full personhood for gays and lesbians. And while those who stained America’s honor with war crimes have escaped accountability for now, these American takfiris will eventually be judged by history with a clarity we cannot muster today.
American Takfiris (via Hullabaloo) ☀
Wednesday 16 December 2009
And Obama can say that you’re getting a lot, but also saying that it “covers everyone,” as if there’s a big new benefit is a big stretch. Nothing will have changed on that count except changing the law to force people to buy private insurance if they don’t get it from their employer. I guess you can call that progressive, but that doesn’t make it so. In fact, mandating that all people pay money to a private interest isn’t even conservative, free market or otherwise. It’s some kind of weird corporatism that’s very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse. Nobody’s “getting covered” here. After all, people are already “free” to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won’t make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn’t or didn’t want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people’s money against their will, saying it’s for their own good. —- and doing it without even the cover that FDR wisely insisted upon with social security, by having it withdrawn from paychecks. People don’t miss the money as much when they never see it.
Hullabaloo ☀
Sunday 26 July 2009
And by the way, if anyone wants to see some real incoherence on this subject, consult the right wingers who are defending the policeman today, but who also believe that anyone has the right to shoot first and ask questions later if they “feel” threatened in their own home. By their lights, Gates should have been arrested for behaving “tumultuously” but would have been within his rights to shoot Sgt Crowley. This is why conservatives have no standing to discuss anything more complicated than Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.
Hullabaloo ☀
Tuesday 27 November 2007
George Bush should be tied so tightly around the Republican candidates’ necks they can hardly breathe. Every quote of support, every vote, every word of worship should be thrown in their faces and there is a ton of it. He is the most unpopular president, for the longest sustained time, of any president in history. He is the modern Herbert Hoover, a man whose name should become an epithet.
Hullabaloo ☀
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