Archive for category Tribalism & Blind Obedience to Authority

Larry Elder’s Conservative Disneyland for the Simple-Minded

In one of those prime examples of conservative projection, Larry Elder, sometime right wing talk radio host, criticized liberals for believing things that are counterfactual (one example was people who believe Dubya knew about 9/11 in advance).  Now his criticism might have more heft if he hadn’t just defended people who believe Barack Obama is muslim by arguing:

Perhaps people believe Obama — who no longer belongs to a church — is a Muslim because of his 20-year association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Wright’s church publication honored the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan as a man who “truly epitomized greatness.”

Take a moment to think about.  People who believe Barack Obama is a muslim are justified in doing so because he attended a Christian church for 20 years.

Of course, that particular humdinger followed another one:

Perhaps people base their assumption about Obama’s religion on what they believe Islam says about the matter. In a New York Times op-ed, Edward Luttwak, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that Obama “chose to become a Christian.” But, Luttwak wrote: “As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.”

If you want an example of pre-modern thinking there it is.  People who believe Barack Obama is muslim based on this argument have embraced pre-modern thinking in its most absurd extreme.  Remind me why these people are being allowed to have any role at all in our public debate.

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Utah Can’t Afford Steven Sandstrom and Ex-Cop Carl Wimmer

On the same day that “Patrick Henry Caucus” founder Rep. Steven Sandstrom unveiled his anti-immigrant bill without a clue how to pay for it, Carl Wimmer announced that Utah must reject $150,000,000 federal dollars being offered to Utah schools.

Police would be fined for refusing to profile

Police would be fined for refusing to profile

I give Republican Representative Sandstrom credit for his bravery.  Today, amidst a mixed crowd of Anglo and Latino Americans who took time out of their day to do their civic duty to protest this big, expensive, government intrusion, unless they were lurking in the shadows, I saw not one supporter of his new proposed Arizona-lite law.

In response to repeated questions about the cost of trying and locking up people otherwise accused of jay-walking or rolling stops, Sandstrom finally said, “whatever the cost, it will be worth it.”

When asked how the law would deal with the many law enforcement professionals who will refuse to participate in racial profiling, Sandstrom got really animated and  announced they would be fined.  OK?  Get it?  This genius is going to fine local law enforcement for refusing to act outside their jurisdiction to conduct mass racial profiling of Utahns who have the misfortune of having light brown skin.

Ex-Cop Carl Wimmer make's Glenn Beck look sane

Ex-Cop Carl Wimmer make's Glenn Beck look sane

Independent estimates put the cost of such a law in the two to three hundred million dollars range per year not counting economic cost of the lost business from boycotts.

On the way home, I heard Carl Wimmer UT-R Herriman on KCPW.

Carl calmly explained that this gift to Utah schools was nothing more than a ploy to buy votes for Obama. Instantly, I considered the possibility that Obama might win Utah in 2012. Then, I woke up and reminded myself that Carl Wimmer is a Utah Republican whose constituents accept this logic as easily as they do the piss poor education their kids get in Herriman, Utah. But hey, if it was good enough for them, its good enough for their kids…I guess.

Someone please remind Carl Wimmer that Utahns pay federal taxes too.  Read more about Carl Wimmer here.

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‘Significant Risk of Terrorist Attacks’

h/t Think Progress

Beware of Dog

One of the many Bush administration programs still in place under the Obama administration is the Department of Homeland Security Homeland Security Advisory System. As of today, The United States government’s national threat level is Elevated, or Yellow (significant risk of terrorist attacks). For all domestic and international flights, the U.S. threat level is High, or Orange (high risk of terrorist attacks).

What the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t say, or perhaps does not know: Americans were 22 percent more likely to be killed by dog bites than terrorist attacks in 2009, when the alert levels were the same as they are now. You cannot make this stuff up.

According to the U.S. State Department’s official report, there were just 25 U.S. noncombatant fatalities from terrorism worldwide. (The US government definition of terrorism excludes attacks on U.S. military personnel).

According to DogsBite.org, which compiles press reports of dog bite fatalities, 32 U.S. fatal dog attacks occurred in 2009.

ALERT: Significant risk of dog attacks. Be afraid, be very afraid…

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“The gibberish of diversity, equality, tolerance, pluralism or multiculturalism has rendered you irrelevant”

I saw this comment on Bagley’s latest and I just had to post it.  If you live in Utah, this is par for the course.  But for our wider audience (the rest of the modern world), this is REAL!

Yep, its true, there are very serious, not legally insane people who really DO say AND BELIEVE this:

etb says:
In a society that has abolished all boundaries, the only boundary left is to abolish that society.

That’s the endgame in this “race to the bottom” scenario. Your allegiance to “moral relativism” under the guise of “honoring” the gibberish of diversity, equality, tolerance, pluralism or multiculturalism has rendered you irrelevant in any discussion about the state of the culture.

You are the fruit of a mass media educated population. All the self-esteem in the world, but you can’t think, or argue, your way out of a wet paper-bag. You are the type of people who have been groomed to welcome the economic and cultural calamities all around us. Your life mantra hasn’t changed since the 60s, if it feels good…do it!

These latest rounds of various court rulings are more of the circus of the absurd, only important in chronicling the speed of the decline and debauchery of reason. That being said, I’ve done what I can do. I’m going out dancing, not sitting in a cave. You enjoy the affects of the blue pill as long as the ride lasts.

Copyright 2010 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved.

Copyright 2010 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved.

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Is the U.S. too stupid to know we’re stupid? Maybe, but there’s a far simpler explanation

Some years ago, I had a coworker who was painfully stupid.  She couldn’t handle the most fundamental tasks of the job and was constantly creating chaos in her wake (I’ve joked for years her filing her system was based on the weather and color her socks – if it was raining everything got filed under “w” for wet or “r” for rain or “y” since she was wearing yellow socks that day, possibly though it might be under “g” for grey).  Yet, when asked, she asserted that she was extremely highly skilled that her work was excellent.  In her mind,  criticism of her work was motivated by personal jealousy and dislike – her boss didn’t like her and that’s why her boss criticized her.  After she was fired, she was devastated, convinced that she’d been done in by a cabal of persons who disliked her intensely and had conspired to undermine her reputation and work.  I would guess she’s out there somewhere now, causing her coworkers no end of grief with her combination of genuine niceness and likeableness and utter crazy making inability to perform simple tasks.

While sorting through my office a while back I found a document a previous coworker had prepared to ‘balance’ the monthly group life insurance bill.  It was obvious she’d spend hours on it; yet simply glancing at it, I could see that her work had been wasted.  She had simply used the pieces of information.  She balanced the bill against the applications for insurance not the actual payroll deductions.  As a result, she contacted the insurance company and made a host of changes to the bill so they matched the applications.  The actual premiums deducted from the paychecks were radically different than those shown on the applications.  When confronted as to why the amount deducted from paychecks was different than the amount paid to the insurance company she had no answer.  She defended herself asserting that the bill “balanced.”

I’ve heard stories of other coworkers who are equally astonishingly unskilled.  Apparently my employer once had a warehouse worker who could not count correctly – he’d record five boxes, someone else would walk up and see six; yet he would assert there were only five because two came from the same person and therefore counted as one box not two. Read the rest of this entry »

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Thoughts on Patriotism: Our National Self-Deception Began Early

Hat tip to Ed at Dispatches from the Culture Wars for this provocative piece from historians Howard Zinn, published by Common Dreams.

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.  [snip]

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early. [snip]

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.[snip]

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

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Zinn’s call to rethink patriotism, to claim a new and different kind of patriotism, one that is healthier, more honest, than what we have seen so much in the last few decades resonates with me. Read the rest of this entry »

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Don’t Become Andrew Breitbart—Or His Fans

Andrew-BreitbartI’m gonna make this simple.  This is Andrew Breitbart.  He’s big in conservative media.  He doesn’t deserve the honor of emulation—intentional or accidental.  Neither do the commenters on his site (biggovernment.com).

I visited there today to read about Democrat Congressman Bob Etheridge’s attack on a street-side interviewer.  By the way (no pun intended), street-side, door-side, and hallway-side interviewing are the latest fashion in conservative attack media.  Basically, they’re trying to be Michael Moore without any style or humor.  These people are dead serious about the truth being more obtainable from impromptu, aggressive, Fox News-style provocation than actually investigating the issues they’re talking about.  Of course, when you view “the other side” as the enemy. . .when conservative victimhood is so very, very profitable. . .when behavior that would have been rude and unacceptable during the last presidency now makes one a hero. . . Read the rest of this entry »

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Current Affairs and Ancient Prophecy are Strange Bedfellows

Every so often, I tune into the Christian stations to watch either The Hal Lindsey Report or Jack Van Impe.  Now you may be wondering what a nice boy like me is doing watching two over-the-hill possibly nutty as fruitcakes right wing televangelists.  It’s an excellent question.

Lindsey and Van Impe are both easily two decades past the peak of their influence.  People like James Dobson, John Hagee and Joel Osteen have had been far more influential in the past decade than either of the older men.  Ted Haggard, before his fall, was exponentially more influential than either Hal Lindsey or Jack Van Impe.  So why watch them?  The short answer is that both Hal Lindsey and Jack Van Impe represent a strain of conservative theology that is shared by many Christian conservatives but which is generally hidden from the mainstream public by Lindsey and Van Impe’s more PR aware peers. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tales of Teenage Depravity: Vice Avenged, Virtue Regained

Tales of teenage depravity are a staple of American cop shows.  The general plotline involves the discovery of a crime of some sort (rape or murder), the investigation uncovering depraved activities by a group of teenagers, an unveiling of deeper crimes and depravity, finally resolving itself in a dramatic confrontation with the legal system in which the teens either see the error of their ways, are genuinely sorry and are returned to a state of virtue, or if they are “bad” kids, their vice is avenged in lengthy prison sentences and/or continued suffering for their sins.  The stories tell us the myriad ways in which normal teenage desire for independence is subverted into a horror show of vice, which must of necessity engulf even the most virtuous of teens.

Janice Irvine explores the depravity tale or depravity narrative in her book Talk About Sex.  She explains: Read the rest of this entry »

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Gimmickry, Empty Symbols and Politics

I fail to understand why, but apparently Ted Nugent is considered a cogent and intelligent thinker on things political.  Hence his recent comment on Sarah Palin:

If Sarah Palin played a loud, grinding instrument, she would be in my band. The independent patriotic spirit, attitude and soul of our forefathers are alive and well in Sarah. In the way she lives, what she says and how she dedicates herself to make America better in these interesting times, she represents the good, while exposing the bad and ugly. She embraces the critical duty of we the people by participating in this glorious experiment in self-government. The tsunami of support proves that Sarah, 46, represents what many Americans know to be common and sensible. Her rugged individualism, self-reliance and a herculean work ethic resonate now more than ever in a country spinning away from these basics that made the U.S.A. the last best place. We who are driven to be assets to our families, communities and our beloved country connect with the principles that Sarah Palin embodies. We know that bureaucrats and, even more, Fedzilla, are not the solution; they are the problem. I’d be proud to share a moose-barbecue campfire with the Palin family anytime, so long as I can shoot the moose.

Andrew Sullivan archly observed:

Nugent perfectly channels Palin’s appeal to a bewildered, beleaguered, older white America. This appeal is not about policies or even Palin’s actual life so much as projection onto someone of an ideal type that represents something deep down in the national psyche. See if you can observe any policy reasons to support Palin in Nugent’s poem. Now look at the way he conflates her neurotic fundamentalism and delusional grip on reality with those dry deists who founded this country on Enlightenment principles. Then look at how most see her as “authentic” when she is, of course, less authentic than even John Edwards. And note too the judgment that a governor who quit halfway through her first term represents a “herculean work ethic.” We are in Imaginationland here.  And boy, how it makes Nugent – and so many others – feel good again, feel as if they have recaptured their country again. They see in this immaculate misconception (with a bonus miraculous birth to another symbol of the pro-life movement, a child with Down Syndrome!) the salve to every anxiety and view all criticism of her as somehow illegitimate, and stemming from a hatred of the real America. Rejecting Palin, of course, is actually a resistance to fake America, with its magical realist narratives and Christianism as a doomed cover for collapsing social norms, family breakdown and drug use.

I’m with Sullivan in his scorn of her “herculean work ethic” – nothing in her track record is consistent with the description “herculean work ethic.”

At Washington Monthly, Steve Benen:

Regardless, what the Tea Partiers have come up with doesn’t seem especially compelling.

This, for example, is the Contract From America’s tax position.

Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the internal revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words — the length of the original Constitution.

This is a particularly silly proposal. 

Folks can make the case that reforming the code could make it easier to understand. One could also argue that the tax code has loopholes that should be closed. And while I think it’s ridiculous, we can even have a debate about the merits of a “single-rate tax system,” instead of the progressive rate system.

But once we get into maximum word counts, we’ve quickly entered the realm of hollow gimmickry and arbitrary nonsense. It’s a bit like Republicans’ obsession over the number of pages in the Affordable Care Act. Who cares? Sometimes complex policies require complex instructions.

I’m trying to imagine the executives at Ford telling the engineers, “It’s time to design a new Mustang, but you can only use the number of parts found in the Model T. If it was good enough for our forebears…”

These two very different bloggers have keyed into something similar.  It’s not accidental that the right’s favorite public figure right now is the aggressively ill-informed Sarah Palin, nor is it accidental that the right’s favorite political arguments are either uninformed or simply unworkable.

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Complex Capitalists, Complex Socialists

Caught somewhere between the Cartesian view of the world, in which deconstructive analysis was the key to understanding the world, and systems theory, in which a combinative, constructive view of the world is deemed most accurate, lay Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of Structuralism.  Structuralism suffered from the mechanistic, hyper-logical thinking of older eras  but bent closer to viewing our holistic reality.  In the literary field, where I am most familiar with Structuralism, the tenets of the study are referred to as semiotics.  Using semiotic devices, one can create a complete break-down of a story’s plot, represented on only a single line or two, which may then be compared to other stories to find their similarities and distinctions.  While a useful tool in understanding interplay, semiotics is somewhat insufficient as the formula for understanding a whole literary piece, just as structuralism is insufficient for understanding the world. Read the rest of this entry »

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Simple Capitalists, Simple Socialists

Putting faith in the free market (as described by so many clueless capitalists) is like putting faith in heaven. Heck, I believe it exists and I believe it’s beautiful, but I don’t think it’s here or ever will be (at least not under the power or control of man), and I think it’s utterly useless to discuss it in the context of man’s economic systems. Sort of like putting faith in the mythical socialist land of promise, where everyone works for the sole purpose of helping their fellow man, social and psychological diseases have been eradicated by good will alone, and the bureaucracy is more efficiently run than the most fastidious housekeeper’s home. They’re both ridiculous, they’re both juvenile, and yet too many people don’t seem to have been able to move beyond the vision of the perfect government that they first beheld in 8th grade. Read the rest of this entry »

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