I went out to dinner at the neighborhood anarchist café tonight and there happened to be a book tour for a book which gives all indication of having much more relevance for radical organizing in the USA than a certain French one that right-wing blowhards tend to hyperventilate over.
Of course, severe disconnects between blowhardism and reality are hardly new.
Or, why I hate polls.
Politically, which are more important to you right now?
- Social issues
- Economic issues
- I don’t really care about politics
Hello? Economics is a social science. Economic issues are therefore a subset of social issues.
This, in a nutshell, is precisely why I hate polls. There is no way to reject a question as poorly-worded (or based on a fallacious premise) and therefore meaningless. Even if I skip it, the software probably will use that fact to (mis)interpret this as meaning I just don’t care much about social issues. Whatever I do, I will end up answering the poll incorrectly. There is no escape save to refuse being polled.
I have to say that the new Liberal Democrat / Conservative coalition government in the UK isn’t half bad.
They’re already well on the way to repealing the awful National ID Cards Act that the outgoing Labour government passed. And now their Secretary of State for Justice is talking about alternatives to prison.
I don’t have a link handy to it, but they’re countering of the new governments rhetoric is pretty pathetic, too. Instead of pointing out how proposals to ostensibly replace government-furnished services with decentralized, non-governmental ones might end up promoting elitism and inequality (and offering alternatives that are both libertarian and egalitarian), they launch into government worship.
Really, now, New Labour is not a bunch of social democrats; they’re merely big-government authoritarians who sometimes babble center-left rhetoric. (And don’t forget how Blair shamelessly brown-nosed Dubya and followed him into Iraq.) They’re utterly pathetic. No wonder they lost the election; they deserved to.
If only more US conservatives were saying the things about prisons that Clarke says. I would have a much harder time seeing them as thinly-disguised neofascists if they did. Alas, US-style conservatism is considerably more banal and anti-intellectual than its British counterpart, and our Republican Party has no coalition partner of classic and modern liberals to further drag it in more useful directions. Heck, they’re the ones most likely to introduce national ID cards here: just sell them as a way to make life harder for illegal immigrants, and the rightard crowd will be begging for mandatory national ID cards.
Yes, it sucks that equality is probably going to take a hit in the UK. But equality isn’t everything, and if someone does good in the liberty department I’ll give them praise where praise is due.
There’s plenty of actual things to criticize Obama about (such as his failure to break with the Bush regime’s policy of torture and extrajudicial detention), but his remarks essentially summarize the basics about the mosque and cultural center being built in Lower Manhattan.1 The group that wants to build it has satisfied all the other rules of the game: They have enough money to buy or rent the land and pay to build upon it, and the use they propose is consistent with local land-use laws.
Freedom of religion is the law of the land, and it gives Muslims the right to openly practice their religion. As it was always intended to. Here’s what Thomas Jefferson wrote in his autobiography about the first religious freedom law he played a part in passing:
[When] the [Virginia] bill for establishing religious freedom... was finally passed,... a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination. [emphasis added]
Oh, and by the way, Jefferson also intended for freedom of religion to be freedom from religion for those who have no use for it:
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. [emphasis added]
None of this is to say that Jefferson or any of the so-called Founders was infallible. I’m just quoting him to prove how all the bullshit about them intending the USA to be a Christian nation is just that: pure bullshit. If you’re going to play the original-intent-of-the-Founders card, you actually have to have that card in the deck to play.
It would have been a non-issue if a Christian chapel and cultural center was being built, so it should be a non-issue if a Muslim one is. Anyone who babbles on about a “Christian nation” is spewing bullshit. End of discussion.
1Not “at Ground Zero,” please. That’s bullshit, too. It’s near Ground Zero but not at it. And thanks to how densely built-up Lower Manhattan is, you won’t be able to actually see it from Ground Zero; other buildings will block the view.
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