Souls in the abstract, Nancy, not real ornery people next door. Been there, done that got the hair shirt.
It's like Mrs. Jellyby getting all sentimental about the poor kids in Africa while her own kids are wandering around in dirty diapers and getting stuck in the porch railings, or the contemporary equivalents I've known who think that by praying five full rosaries a day on their knees on the hard floor, and offering it up™ for the salvation of sinners, they don't have to actually be kind or vote in such a way as to help those real live sinners in the actual, not Platonic, world.
Y'all just missed the memo - "Christian" now means "right-wing" and "Christian Right" as a distinct term is no longer allowed to be used, and "Evangelical" likewise means "right-wing", and anyone who does not fit the current norms of conservativism is no longer accepted to be either by members of the Virtue Party™ (aka Torture Party) in the same way that "conservative" has been redefined and co-opted to mean "sexist jingo defender of plutocracy" by those running the show.
See, we liberal or moderate "Christians" (self-styled Evangelicals or not) are all apostates, infidels, tolerators of evil, just as bad for "suffering witches to live" as poor Xopher for being one - so we can safely be dismissed as not-Christians, secularists, etc. and consigned to outer darkness (aka Gitmo).
Yes, this is straight out of 1984, and yes, this is an archetypal example of "political correctness" in its original sense - that which is allowed to have been true by the reigning Party. Welcome to the Brave New World of Tashlan-worship. (The truth is not in them.)
Kevin - I've never seen Truth and Reconciliation commisions anything but capitalized, when reading about them. Is your rhetorical snideness due to the same insecurity that makes you set up straw men, or is this simply the only way you know how to debate? (If so, I will cut you some slack, because I realize some people don't honestly know how to argue, and aren't doing it on purpose.)
This is a false dichotomy: to insist on creating some vast paradigm as if all cases must be treated identically on a Platonic plane of abstractions, and then, because that is clearly absurd, to say that there are therefore *no* just grounds for any reparations, is folly - as if to say that because some crimes clearly have mitigating circumstances, therefore *no* crimes should ever be prosecuted.
(It's the kind of pseudo-argument I'm more used to seeing on Town Hall or in the pages of First Things, than here, I admit, though I used to run into it teaching jr high CCD a lot.)
Kevin, it's easy to say that other people should stop bitching about past wrongs, when you're not personally still suffering under the direct consequences of them. It was realizing how deeply and ongoing the costs of the genocide are in the Reservations today, and the *present* effects of American slavery, that made me break with the "justice" meme of the conservative movement in re affirmative action and tribal rights, and also how much the reparations - trifling in $ - for those who were slaves of the Nazi's corporate enablers, has meant to them in terms of the admission of responsiblity by the heirs of those who stubbornly persisted in denial of guilt until this year.
For those few escapees (by marrying out or otherwise being able to "pass" in their respective mainstream societies) to tell the rest of their fellow helots (eg Thomas Sowell, Kenneth Blackwell) to just suck it up and deal seems ...patronizing, to say the last.
It also smacks of wretched denial, to refuse to engage in Truth and Reconciliation - but that is typical of almost all Americans I have met in my lifetime. We don't need no reconciliation, we're the Possessors of Truth, Justice, and Mom's homemade Apple Pie...How *dare* you suggest that we have anything we need to feel sorry for?
And to conflate the value of reconciliation with an abandoning of justice - smacks of the urgent bleating in sermons of the need to "forgive seventy times seven" that the prelates of my Church have used to escape their just punishments for having enabled child abuse by lies and fraud all these generations. (It also reminds me of all the young "post feminists" I see on the net, who argue that women who complain about sexual opression are overreacting, because we've moved beyond all that today and they're just bitter about the past.)
pericat -
Of course, if your purpose in all these flights of reason is to justify, by hook or by crook, excluding same-sex marriages, that definition won't help.
See my post above on arguing with conservative intellectuals. -Yes.
If I was still on the Dark Side, I could twist history and "nature" into pretzels for hours, carefully ignoring the fact that adoption of kids for inheritance purposes by childless couples, either because their children had died, and they were too old, or biological infertility at childbearing years, was standard operating procedure in Roman times, and that various forms of fostering as well as recognized polygyny have been in operation in Western Europe, and in European immigrant communities here, back in those "goode olde dayes" when everyone was straight and square. The census records, as well as family lore, tell different stories.
--I have, btw, come around myself on the issue of gay marriage and civil unions, in the past year, because of it being explained to me as matter of guaranteed legal rights - I think that heterosexuals just don't ever think about those embedded rights that come with the amalgam of church/state weddings, because we take them for granted (like whites not seeing discrimination happening.)
Since I *tend* on an emotional level to the "marriage is just legalized prostitution, even if there are exceptions" view, my thought was in part, "Why would you guys *want* to get involved in our control-freakiness in regard to relationships?" After all, marriage is expensive, and a lot of het couples don't get married, either. But when I realized it came down to matters of financial rights and other legal issues, emotional aspects of it went right out the window.
And I *think* they would do so, if the justice element was recognized, for more "nice" conservatives (I do not speak of the Hannity/Limbutt/Coulter brigade) because appeals to justice are the core of conservative Catholic intellectual argument - but then, I'm not one any more, because they really *mattered* to me, and the cognitive dissonance between our ideals and reality was insupportable.
Jax, not only that, but marriages not at all intended for children, but to seal legal distribution of property, between older people, have always been made - particularly back in those "goode olde dayes" when landed aristocracy was more open about what it was. (The houses of Buckley and Bush and Scaife don't have titles, and thus people think that they are not as much barons and earls as such folks ever were.)
But you're asking for logical consistency, from an intellectual conservative, and you're never going to get it. You're only going to get its erzatz replica, passed off as the real thing, which is Casuistry.
Trust me, I was raised one. I grew up in a house with subscriptions to The Wanderer and the National Catholic Register and National Review and many other more obscure conservative intellectual journals, all devoted to fanatically hunting motes and ignoring beams, like Crisis, which I know now is also a mouthpiece of Scaife and arms manufacturers as much as NRO and Town Hall - which is where I first encountered and absorbed the memes that the death penalty is the best prevention, being the best cure for crime, and that liberal-atheist-feminist-pagans hate and despise and persecute us, and venerate crime as much as they hate Western Civilization™ and that homosexuality is a dread agenda out to poison and destroy all civilization...
...it was the cognitive dissonance between all these things, and working in a city where I actually *met* gays and feminists and pagans and even some criminals, too, and realizing that the Stories didn't match up to what I was seeing with my own eyes, and questioning after nearly two decades the Narratives I had been given, such as that women didn't deserve to get payed as much because they weren't as valuable because they left to go have babies and squandered their training investment, or that people who didn't own houses shouldn't vote because we had no vested interest in managing the country responsibly--
--and here I am today, like a political asylum-seeker from Umbar enlisting in the defense of Gondor, tearing down everything I believed and carried signs for and voted for up until 1996--
But until a conservative of the Buckley-votary stripe confronts the contradictions and refuses to take refuge in enthymeme and casuistry, you will only be frustrated trying to argue logically. Alan Keyes is simply the extreme example of this, if you have seen the video of his "debates" - he is not an anomaly. I know. I was there - once.
So, anyone here *not* lost someone dear to them, someone who mentored them, anchored them in rough times - several someones, perhaps?
I didn't think so.
Anyone else here using that as an excuse for passive-aggressive behavior, saying stuff and not claiming responsibility for the consequences?
No.
Yes, grief messes you up.
It does not alleviate you from all human responsibility, particularly if you are an adult. You're choosing to come here and interact in abusive ways, in what is someone else's virtual living room, and then playing the pity card when you go over the line.
That commands no respect from me.
I thought he was channeling G.I. Joe myself. Frankly, he's not *that* entertaining, to care one way or the other myself, though it might turn that way if someone with better qualifications than I were to call him on those "tells"...then again, the reaction to the, ah, surgical strike might be amusing, too.
(My family for generations on both sides helped wield nuclear weapons, which is a bit scarier than any Foreign Legion rifles, another reason I'm not impressed with all this macho posturing.)
The alternative is converting them, by reason and exhortation and the words of authorities that they respect, in judicious combination, to an understanding that the oversimplified narrative to which we subscribed - for I was, for most of my life, one of those single-issue prolife voters - is an incomplete, false, distructive myth.
That assumes that most of them, like me, are simply naive and ignorant (in specialized ways) and well-meaning, and just have trusted liars and deceivers.
It will not work for the unscrupulous ringleaders, who know that they are spreading falsehood as they take the paychecks of the Hegemony to promote the chemicals and bullets that Olin makes and the corporate power blocks of Scaife et al.
It will not work for those who are simply so self-identified with the group they happen to belong to that they dare not question it, because to do so is to question themselves.
Those people *must* be contained and neutralized, by being discredited, their true associations and policies and code words exposed and held to daylight, so that all decent folk recoil in horror from the mass of various sorts of oppressions that are the foundation of the Plutocracy, wrapped in piety and carefully promoting the worship of Tashlan these past five decades.
If they are not a minority, as opposed to class 1, like myself, then we're screwed.
Ed -
"Solved the problem" of Carthage - or created a new one?
That's the problem with oversimplistic thinkers. You never stop and ask yourselves if you're creating a worse problem that will come back and haunt your children and grandchildren.
Where, exactly, is the military and economic power of the Roman Empire today?
And stop bragging on how you're a soldier and we should all BOW BEFORE GIBLETS because of this. You're *not* the only veteran here, by a long shot - only the other ones don't brag on it all the time, don't bring it up except when its relevant, and frankly the people I know who talk about what big sojer boys with the Seals or the Rangers or the Wild Geese they were, online or IRL, usually turn out to be REMFS, fakers, or else total psychos who are a good advertisment for world pacifism (like my biological male parent, for one.) Oh, I'm a big *Mercenary,* scary scary me!
It isn't impressive, it's pathetic.
And why should we give a damn what you think, when you brag about your inveterate selfishness?
Why shouldn't we just say, since you give not a fig for the rest of the human race, then be shut to ye? You have made yourself an island, and choose to disdain the commonality of man (for all your specious populism) and therefore you have no claim upon us.
John Farrell, if you send tourists up our way - send them to the remote south-west, out around Keene and past, because those are the poor, rural towns who voted blue. The Lakes Region and the Ski Areas and the Seacoast are pretty and popular, but those are the ones who voted for not sharing their wealth. Except for Portsmouth and those blue towns - I don't think we should support New Castle or Newington or Newfields who voted for Bush but also Lynch, (hm, non-significant pattern there, coincidence of names.) I vow that next time I'm out there, I won't buy fish and chips or ice cream from that stand in New Castle, even though it's good. Let's not reward the wealthy townships' citizens by supporting their quest for bigger and bigger Escalades.
I can't think of any tourist places in Berlin/Gorham, but maybe I'll research some and create an "alternative/progressive vacationing listing" for us. It can be the Temperate Zone's version of ecotourism.
Oh, here's one specific outfit in NH we can support, in Walpole, a blue western township: Alysons Orchard Inn, a bed-and-breakfast which sponsored a skywriter towing an anti-Bush banner over Manchester on Sunday.
Randall, a family we used to know through work refuses to vaccinate, and home schools to avoid the legal issues. (Also home births)
They've lost, I believe, 3 kids out of the 8 they've conceived, as a result.
One cause of vaccine allergy reactions is that some of them are cultured in duck egg medium, and a very few people are seriously allergic to the proteins in duck eggs, and this is a hereditary thing. However, since we don't as a rule eat duck eggs in this country, most people who have it don't realize it, either. (I now know that I have a relative who is, but I have not made the experiment myself.)
As a kid in old southern coastal cities, I spent a lot of time playing after church in 200-year old churchyards while our parents socialized after the service.
There were a *lot* of graves that had one big family stone, and dozens of little tiny blocks around it, for the babies that died before they reached even two years of age.
One of the reasons that we are such a fertile species is that we historically have had such a high casualty rate among juveniles. The evolutionary "mechanism" for preventing overpopulation was a routine mortality rate of in some cases, 50% - or more. (This is also something that can be discovered from studying old geneologies.)
When I had this argument with another old family friend - whose root objection to vaccines is that certain of them were cultured from fetal tissue, btw - the best thing I could point to was this story from the pre-diptheria vaccine era:
A Second-Rate Woman
That story, if nothing else, should make any sane and responsible parent DEMAND the DPT shot for their child. It does kill that way, by forming a mass of tissue over the breathing passages down inside. Nor is tetanus a nice death, either.
Developmental disabilities have existed throughout history, btw, and did not begin with vaccination.
Well, new Electrolite posts for the first time, and a discussion on identity politics that makes me *very* uncomfortable and unwelcome enough that I hesitated even to post at all.
On Daily Kos, where I spend a *lot* of time hanging out, because there I am a small fish in a large pond, and no one is intimidated by my BNF reputation or anything else into clamming up and sitting at my feet, most people use personae, for a lot of different reasons. (I asked.) A majority, but a lot of people *do* use their real names for, but only one out of ca 60 respondents was seriously troubled by it. The overwhelming majority of the minority of people who use their real names were entirely tolerant about it.
One thing I noticed is that a lot of the people blogging under their own names, and who *here* think that everyone else should be obliged to as well, aren't dependent on a clock-punching day job.
That isn't a small thing. Someone just got fired, for example, for asking a "heckling" question at a Bush Rally, from his graphic design firm, who had customers who were upset by this.
Some of us have families who google what we are doing online, then harrass us about wasting too much time on foolish fantasy life. And some of us have personal connections that make the balance between full disclosure and anonymity a complex one.
When I started attacking the Conservative Establishment back this spring, with an expose on the morbid Catholic Separatism of Mel Gibson and Deal Hudson and the rest of Gibson's defenders, I did so knowing that eventually I will probably be "outed" and it will be very uncomfortable when it happens, and I would like to put it off for as long as possible. This is even more true, now that I have started unravelling the money trails and the genuine fascist underpinnings of the Theocon Hegemony, and doing it publicly.
If I were "out to get" my family, I wouldn't care, but I'm not. It's half cowardice, I freely admit, and half charity.
Accountability? I'm accountable to all those who have showed up to read what I write for the past two-and-a-half-years, and ask questions and complain and thank me for stories that made them laugh or cry or both, and who because of my fanfiction have started reading my political statements, and sometimes even changed their minds as a result. They know things about me that I do not reveal to 99% of the people I know in "Real Life," things which I have told because the armour of anonymity gives me the strength to talk about experiences of fear, loss of faith, struggles with depression so as to help others going through similar trials, which one rarely dares to in the mundane world, lest the other scoff and say, "That was not what I meant/that was not what I meant at all."
What does it matter that we know each other only by pen-names, when we can often recognize each other by style and substance alone, after forgetting to sign a post? This last is true in many venues, which is why name-stealing trolls are often quickly identified even without IP logging. Perhaps I do know some of those who post, IRL, without realizing it. So what? I am put in mind of the old stories from Celtic and Indian legend, where identity survives transformation, self-chosen or inflicted, and even reincarnation. We are what we do, speaking ourselves like Thoth uttering the universe.
You can know a man's name, work with him, live next to him, for years - and then he is revealed to be an embezzler, or a rapist, a murderer, or a spy. What did knowing his legal name tell you about him? What mere exterior formal knowledge can illuminate hearts unspoken?
Finally, I'd like to thank Elizabeth Von Marlowe for bringing up the 18th century political writers. I've felt for a long time that with the internet we are reinventing the Enlightenment publishing experience, faster and cheaper, and many of the same phenomenon are true of the web. "Metablogging" is an interesting thing, ongoing epistemology on the fly, defining what it is we are about as we are doing it, and others try to define it for us.
In this, one thing which came up in the dKos discussion was that the world is made more delightful by cool monikers - several people said that, that say, to see the name Rincewind as a posting handle brings a smile, and a twinge of envy: Why didn't I think of that first? There are lots of those, names with puns, ObRefs, wordgames. Or curiousity, as to what story is behind a name that holds a tale in it.
For myself, I think that people have much in common with cats, in the matter of Names.
I wanted assurances that they were going to press the higher officials of the land for information on the prison abuse and the plans for the war before handing over more blank checks to be dished out to folks like Chalabi. Out of seven phone calls I got *one* form letter assuring me that the Senator was yes, deeply concerned about the abuse but was certain it didn't reflect the real America or our troops or affect the noble mission of liberation yadda yadda yadda. So they didn't even keep their promises to send out statements to concerned members of the public on the matters, as all of them pledged to me.
Vote them out? We try. Sometimes it makes a difference, sometimes the courts rule against you, and sometimes they promise to be different from their predecessor but they're not, it's just musical chairs and the game stays the same. I've seen Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, but it doesn't seem to be a documentary...
And around here, it costs a certain amount of money to run for local office, plus time, which when you work full time just to pay the rent, and barely manage that, isn't an option. (I was actually going to offer my volunteer consulting services to a challenger who seemed to be a real difference, because it took me two days to realize that the kids promoting him with handmade signs on the corner *weren't* advertising a car-wash for a charity, but then he withdrew as his campaign imploded under suspicious circumstances. He was underfunded against the Party incumbents as it was - but I certainly couldn't come up with $400,000 to run myself.)
Stefanie - they *don't* represent us. WE elect them and then they go and do what the people who give them money want them to do.
When we call them to demand that they fullfill our first amendment right to bring grievances to the govt on our behalf, they have their flunkeys send us form letters full of Newspeak and pablum to Soma us into quietude again. (I'm working on a collection.)
And the pat platitude the Establishment used to tell us in grade school, how *we* don't need to have revolutions any more like those other uncivilized countries, 'cause if you don't like the system, well, this is America, you can just run for office yourself! - they leave out the bit about how you need lots of money and leisure time to do so...
Elise - crossed with LOTR. Saruman tells the workers he is on their side and all he does is for the common good which is what he also tells the neighbors even as he starts wars secretly and foments coups within them.
"Just trust me, I know what I'm doing and it'll be wonderful - so long as you Eorlings don't listen to negative selfish people with agendas like that Eomer who wants to take over and that idiot Gandalf who wants to screw it all up..."
No clark I was speaking generally, that there is this debate going on whether the US military or any military can or ought to have a "zero abuse" policy etc etc etc all hinging on [real or perceived] military necessity/culture etc - when in fact it is irrational to expect the military to be *better* than the civilian population from which it comes.
Particularly when it is infact drawn from that civilian population and not a special deliberately isolated group like Janissaries or condottieri. The fact that these people were in many cases National Guards troops is *very* significant - not because of a [real or perceived] difference in training levels, but because they are not from base culture, but from civilian in larger part.
If we don't like it, we can't externalize it - can't say it's the fault of The Other [in this case, the Military Mind], and not us, hoi polloi.
And the culture, as a whole, though here and in progressive Blogistan there is rejectionof that ideology - *does* admire and accept and endorse macho violence, without even any excusing "necessity" to provide a moral cover (the way blogger rightgirl justified Tailhook and pilloried the "political correctness" of the investigation.)
Just watch a teen-guy oriented movie, and listen to the crowds cheering when someone is killed or injured. The victim doesn't have to be evil, what gives the sense of righteous glee to the audience is that the victim is stupid/ugly/weak.
Or in hockey, where it's just "us" versus "them" with no moral narrative framework, even skeletal, constructed to justify the violence.
And - unsurprisingly to those of us with history backgrounds, who know that jousts and gladiatorial games were equally popular with both sexes, but surprisng to those who still believe the myth of the dainty female - it *isn't* just the guys who cheer to the decapitations and gorings and the blood on the ice and who talk about it with relish at work. It's "nice," dainty-looking fashionable women too.
The propagandist framework for the mindless endorsement of the powerful crushing the enemies of the people has long been in place. In 1984, footage of guncrews strafing civilians is openly shown in the movie theatres to cheering citizens who laugh at the atrocities and the splurting blood. I've *never* had difficulty believing that, not since I read Orwell at age 12. It's the spirit of grade school nastiness - the Old Adam - given public approval and equally importantly, no reining-in by disapproval. It may be latent in everyone, but giving it free rein is a different matter, and results in Kristallnacht and lynch mob postcards.
It isn't fair to blame the weapon for the sins of those who have forged it and who wield it.
Well, there's one big elephant in the room that no one's mentioning.
And that is - peacetime civilians in America, commit atrocities.
Every damn day.
This is what drives me absolutely bgfck about the whole "women in uniform, do you want Our Girls, Your Daughters, coming home in body bags?" handwringing rhetoric of the conservative establishment. Everything else aside - is my life somehow more valuable than my brother's, is it necessarily a weaking of the military, all the other issues - this is the emotional thing which is used to short-circuit logic and trigger pavlovian responses in the public.
And, as I say, it drives me fng *nuts.*
Because what it comes down to is, it's okay for women to be killed, so long as they haven't a prayer of defending themselves.
They fished bones out of the river last month - "Down by the banks/of the Ohio." Prime suspect is the boyfriend.
There was a woman shot in her driveway by her ex, along with her new lover, for the crime of refusing to be owned by her former man.
There were six or seven rapes of teenage girls downtown last year, and they didn't do anything serious about catching the guy.
This is not a part of the country with a high crime rate, either.
But "that girls were raped" is axiomatic, in the mirror of Achilles' shield that is our homeland. That serial killers are going to be male and their victims female, is axiomatic. That whores are legitimate targets, not even worth police investigation - families of those "trash women" in Washington state and Canada could have told you that, years ago. It's okay for them to be shot/beaten/raped, so long as they're not being "unwomanly" by taking up arms...
Abner Louima. How many young men shot while trying to get out their identification, for the crime of being black and poor? What about the scandal that was the news on 9/10, that was forgotten and has not been reawakened in the SCLM since, about Miami and the stash of stolen guns kept to plant on the bodies of those shot by mistake?
So before we expect or dismiss or pardon or are shocked or outraged or surprised at the military committing atrocities against those we officially designate as unpersons - before we blame some special military alien mindset, as we so easily blame "the Arab Mind" (as we blamed 'the Oriental Mind,' and 'the Celtic Mind" in past generations) - we need to turn the cold eye of Justice on ourselves, the culture from which our armies are born.
Sword in the hand of the wielder, I tell you.
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