Demoncrats

Giving Landover Baptist a run for their money! Baptists For Brownback 2008!

[link] Today, in an America filled with adulterers and baby-killers, an even worse sinner casts a shadow over them all—the atheist. Yet atheists are difficult to spot. They hide their sinister cult behind masks of smiles, science and soft, pleasant voices. Your next door neighbor might be an atheist. You just can’t tell.

Imagine if it was simple to identify atheists and their tainted works. Would it not be grand? Think how much easier it would be to protect your children’s eyes, ears and souls from atheists’ influences if their websites, books, movies and yes, even their very clothes, were clearly labeled with a bright scarlet “A”.

Curses! Those godly folks have somehow conspired to place one of those scarlet "A"s on UTI as well! Now if I can only keep UTI from being listed on their Hellbound list... **shakes fist**

Baltimore Group Blog interviews Lakoff about his new book, Whose Freedom, confirming my point that liberals pay too much attention to Lakoff at their peril. Lakoff's argument as presented in the interview combines ex recto assertions, a catastrophic failure to look beyond post-1990 American politics, and a whiff of anti-empiricism.

Most detrimentally to his argument, Lakoff begins by asserting that "Freedom is part of all of American life, and it is central to progressive thought. All of progressive thought has to do with, say, people fulfilling their dreams, people achieving their purposes, people getting their needs met. These are all issues of freedom." The only part of it that is true is the first part of the first sentence, which explains why the following claims are worthless.

The word "freedom" is only central to American politics. In other Western countries, it's only one of several motherhood values of equal worth. As Eric Foner shows, ideas that are referred to in most countries in terms of justice or equality are referred to in terms of freedom in the US. Indeed, it's a uniquely American view that people getting their needs met is an issue of freedom; welfare economists refer to meeting needs as competencies, and ordinary people outside the US refer to that as dignity, human rights, standard of living, or lack of poverty.

Submitted without comment: Ron Brynaert at Why Are We Back In Iraq? has a long post providing some evidence that Jerome Armstrong is the same person as a Freeper named Vis Numar.

[Link] What are the odds that a frequent poster at Free Republic shares the same strange made-up nickname as a well-known Democratic blogger almost certainly appears to use? (for the reasons why I write "almost certainly" see near the bottom of this post)

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What are the odds that a frequent Free Republic poster would gloat about how well two politicians, including Dean, have made use of meet-ups which a well-known Democratic blogger pretty much pioneered:

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2. The following comment left at a posting on this page: "Sally, did you see Jerome Armstrong on C-Span yesterday morning? He was representing MYDD, of course, and I couldn't help but think I was looking at Vis Numar. But what do I know? hay hay - He was very impressive!!"

These and the other pieces of evidence offered are not really slam dunks, but I think they're worth investigating. My operative assumption about the liberal/Democratic divide is that the Democrats are interested primarily with Democratic victories as the only way to advance the liberal agenda. But Ron's post suggests that at least for Armstrong, what matters is power and victory, rather than an agenda or even partisanship.

In his call to renewal, Barack Obama sets a progressive vision of Christianity, talking about poverty and the Bible and how important religion is. Of course, he couldn't resist badmouthing atheists and denigrating secularism.

Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation - context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase "under God." I didn't. Having voluntary student prayer groups use school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs - targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers - that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems.

Somewhat ironically and spookily, the novel I wrote about religious fundamentalism has a character named David Reynolds, a young, black Democratic Senator from Illinois who's a very theocratic left-wing Christian. The main difference between Obama and Reynolds seems to be that Obama is paying lip service to separation of church and state, lauding it even as he denigrates any serious attempt to enforce it.

Forty-five years ago, American politicians often said they supported civil rights and opposed racism but still took care to derail any serious attempt to make the South give blacks the vote. Today, they laud separation of church and state in principle and then bash secular activism using the flimsiest of excuses.

The Democratic Party is supposedly the party that supports the right of a woman to fully control her own body. In fact, the supposed difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats will support the right to abort with their judicial appointments whereas Republicans will not.

Someone should clue Governor Kathleen Blanco (D-LA) in on that. Because a few days ago she signed into law a bill banning all abortions except those necessary to save the woman's life, if Roe vs. Wade is overturned. Now this is still not so bad as South Dakota's law, which is meant to get Roe vs. Wade overturned. But at least to me trigger laws come off as "We're dying to reinstitute slavery... oh well, one day the 13th amendment will be overturned and then the South shall rise again." No regional insult intended, of course (Illinois has a trigger law, too, if I'm not mistaken).

In related news, the Court's about to hear an appeal of lower courts' striking down anti-D&X laws in California and Nebraska.

The science panel had some good things. It really did. In particular PZ Myers and Wesley Clark said thoughtful things about problems with science education and with social attitudes to science. But what I can't get my head around is Clark's comment that in the 1950s, it was important that US improve in science in order to defeat "godless communism." He was not saying it just to show the common attitude at the time; on the contrary, he meant everything he said about how communism was a dire threat to the American way of life and how science was the key.

Even discounting the anti-communist propaganda, Clark's speech brimmed with American nationalism over and above what might be expected of a retired General with Presidential aspirations. Ostensibly, liberals are fairly anti-nationalistic people; there's no need to pander to them by implying that American anti-intellectualism is a conservative conspiracy. The United States has been anti-intellectual for nearly 200 years, because of the frontier society.

Yearly Kos should be the last place where people justify science by appealing to the national dick size, to the point of lionizing the military-industrial complex. It certainly shouldn't be a place where people mythologize a past golden age; let's leave that to delusional conservatives.

One of the most common myths about the millennial generation is that it's composed of spoiled brats who don't care about anything and know nothing of the value of work. Although there is one true thing about this belief, namely that millennials tend to be the products of the self-esteem culture where everyone's above average, the bulk of it has very little to do with reality.

So, when Hillary Clinton said that young people think work is a four-letter word because they try to get the best jobs they can out of college instead of settling for the first offer, it was clear she was engaging in ex recto rhetoric. Now the New York Times has the evidence to prove that Clinton's rhetoric was not just pulled out of thin air, but also factually wrong:

Lost in the argument over whether young people today know how to work, however, is the mounting evidence produced by labor economists of just how important it is for current graduates to ignore the old-school advice of trying to get ahead by working one's way up the ladder. Instead, it seems, graduates should try to do exactly the thing the older generation bemoans — aim for the top.

The recent evidence shows quite clearly that in today's economy starting at the bottom is a recipe for being underpaid for a long time to come. Graduates' first jobs have an inordinate impact on their career path and their "future income stream," as economists refer to a person's earnings over a lifetime.

Another thing that is lost in the constant whining about the moral strength of people under 25 is that instant gratification isn't a particularly new invention. Instant gratification in the form of instant messaging may be new, but then again instant gratification in the form of television was new in the 1960s, too. Let's not forget that Animal House was not made in 2002.

If Telus were the only company to ban websites it didn't like, then the situation wouldn't be that bad. But now in the US, the House of Representatives is on the verge of passing a law legalizing this sort of behavior, and far worse abuses. TPM Cafe and Majikthise are on it: what it entails is allowing AT&T and other giants to charge people premium rates for "preferred lanes" (most likely the same quality of service everyone gets today, as opposed to a basic version, which will have people pining for 1998), and to charge websites money for being allowed on the lanes.

The current doctrine of net neutrality forbids corporations to do that. Just like big telecom can't disconnect a unionist's phone service or charge him extra, or lower the quality of calls to competitors and their allies, so can't big cable charge you extra for reading blogs, or create two tiers of net service. Now the House is about to change this, and allow monopolization of the Internet. A hundred years ago, American railway tycoons gouged prices so much that it was cheaper to send goods from New York to San Francisco via London than directly. Today, the Internet is global enough that London won't be an option.

The free Internet's about to become as free as the German Democratic Republic was democratic. You can forget about Skype, or for that matter about lower-quality, paid services operated by your ISP's competitors. You can forget about any sort of competition, since ISPs are usually monopolies or oligopolies. You can forget about surfing at more than 5 KB/s without going broke. You can forget about reading dissident websites. You can forget about Wikipedia, which is already overwhelmed by traffic and can't pay for privileged treatment.

Save the Internet - because a monopoly isn't a free market.