This particular racket - selling unworkable, unscalable "systems" - is positively pre-Cambrian (in internet time). Remember when email spam first started becoming a problem, waaaaay back in 1994 or thenabouts? It always seemed that 90% of those early spam emails were advertisements for turnkey email marketing businesses. Make thousands from your home computer in your spare time through the power of spam marketing! Of course, if there was so much demand for email direct marketing, then somebody would be using it to advertise things other than email direct marketing services...
It's the high-tech equivalent of those ads you'd see in the back of maagzines, saying they'll tell you the secret to unlimited wealth if you send $5 to a PO Box. If you do, you get back a grainy photocopy saying "to make lots of money with no effort, just take out an ad in the back of a magazine offering to tell people the secret of wealth for $5..."
I mean, they have neither seat belts nor air bags on the Enterprise, do they?
The set designer for the original show was once asked, at a Trek convention Q&A, why none of the seats on the Enterprise had belts. Without missing a beat, he responded "If they did, then people couldn't get thrown out of them."
It's the same reason that every bridge computer station (in all SF movies and TVs, seemingly) comes with a half-pound of C4 wired on a hair trigger, and all ceilings are rigged to drop rocks and jagged metal debris when the ship is jostled. Otherwise they would have had to find a more expensive way to show that something was happening, or else be stuck with a much less visually interesting show.
The unwillingness of people to wear seat belts, and even defend the practice of doing so never ceases to amaze me. I've always worn mine, ever since they showed us those classic "Red Asphalt" films in driver's ed. They show slo-mo film of what happens to unbelted drivers going out open windows in a rollover accident. How can you not always wear you seatbelt after that?
Sometimes I wonder if these "religious left" people are actually sent from the religious right to undermine the Democratic Party.
I think they're religious people who see Falwell and Dobson call the shots in the Republican Party and want to do the same within the Democratic Party. So their advice is primarily about increasing their influence in the Democratic Party, and only incidentally about getting Democrats elected or passing liberal legislation. They don't want to put the Democrats in the hands of Falwell and Dobson, they want to become Falwell and Dobson.
The "religious left" sells itself as trying to take back religious discourse from the Falwells and Dobsons of the world, but in practice they seem to spend 90% of their time hectoring Democrats about not being sufficiently receptive to their particular strand of religious politics, which in practice are usually just slightly-attenuated versions of religious right talking points.
If they really were kicking conservative ass from a liberal-religious perspective, that'd be great. But they don't. Instead of James Dobson Is A Giant Hypocrite and Jesus Was A Big Believer In Helping The Poor You Know and The Bible Doesn't Say That You Morons, we get Let's Compromise On Abortion and Stop Talking About Equal Rights For Gays and What Does It Hurt Really To Put The Ten Commandments In Every Classroom Anyway. They're worse than useless.
And again, the weird emphasis on pinning future Democratic success on appealing to the very people least likely to switch to the Democrats (i.e. white Southern and suburban Evangelicals). This is the counterpart to the Mudcat Saunders plan of revitalizing the Democrats by winning over working class Southerner NASCAR fans (instead of the much more viable Thomas Schaller "Whistling Past Dixie" strategy of appealing to Westerners and Latinos). Both of them aim squarely at the most difficult-to-switch components of the Republican base, which is just stupid. Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan didn't build their majorities around retaking Berkeley or Harlem - they went after much easier targets (disaffected rust belt workers, etc.) It's a terrible strategy that's doomed to fail, which would no doubt be explained as the Democrats being insufficiently devout in sucking up to Evangelicals, so they'd better move even further to the right on religious affairs (sorry, gays and women - guess you'll just have to take another hit for the team.). And on and on until the Democratic Party is acceptable to Dobson and Falwell. What a great strategy! Where do I sign up?
The other thing that amuses me about the actual advice the "religious left" spouts is that it's all built around language. The idea is that if Democrats use more religious language and imagery and bible quotes, then we'd show religous voters that we're not hostile to them and they'd be more likely to support us. That's right - religious voters are such easy marks that they can be swayed with just a little more honeyed God-talk. Sheesh, and they accuse us seculars of belittling and disrespecting believers.
Besides, it doesn't work. Bill Clinton filled his speeches with scriptural references (anyone remember the New Covenant?). Obama talks about his faith all the time, Hillary gives a lot of speeches in churches, John Kerry went to mass like clockwork. And still, we get finger waving lectures from the "relgious left" about how hostile to religion we are, and Christian social conservatives are still the unmovable granite base of the Republican coalition.
Finally, Steve Gilliard made the point that this is also an exclusively white endeavor. Blacks and Latinos have strong, integrated religious components to their political structures and no Democrats have any problem with that. So why do we have throw all these people overboard in order to chase these very, very difficult-to-reach voters? It's nonsense.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2007 | 6 |
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