Phil Plait isn’t strictly speaking a political blogger, but the far right wing of the republican party can’t help trying to ruin the nation by perverting scientific fact at every opportunity. Because of this, Dr. Plait sometimes comments on such lunacy. In a follow up he responded to a group of, of all people, McCarthy apologists:

To the commenters on my original post and elsewhere defending McCarthy because there were in fact communists in America: shame on you. Seriously, shame on you. What McCarthy did — and yes, it was a witch hunt — was directly opposed to all the ideals of this nation: free speech, liberty, presumed innocence until proven guilty, and many more. He was only able to ferret out a handful of so-called communists, but even if he had been 100% successful in his efforts what he did was an abomination for anyone in this country, let alone a seated Senator in the United States Congress. He engendered fear and suspicion, a paranoia and chilling climate from which it took years to recover. He betrayed precisely what he claimed to be trying to protect, and will stand as an object lesson for future generations on what happens when our system fails so utterly.

That’s something to remember when we hear republicans talking about the supposed efficacy of “enhanced interrogation methods.” Whether they are effective or not, they are fundamentally opposed to the core tenets of the nation. Whether the Geneva conventions exist or are signed or are relevant to the conversation at all, the acts alone so grossly degrade humanity that to defend them in any context, with any level of success, is truly horrid.

Michael Ian Black, a really funny dude, wrote up his thoughts about the whole Conan situation. It’s a great read, despite what I think are exaggerations regarding the fervor of “Team Coco,” though I wanted to expand on something he brought up and maybe pivot it a bit.

His early point that Conan is being treated like a working-class folk hero is questionable at best — Conan’s audience has always skewed young, and I doubt that’s changed during the recent surge of support — but his discussion of the origins of his supporters is interesting.

I think the deeper reason people are so inflamed by this petty war is that Conan in his own way has come to represent the aggrieved, the injured, the wrongly terminated. I think there is a sense in this country that giant corporations are ruining everything, even late night talk shows. Something so insignificant takes on greater importance because I think on some level, “The Tonight Show” actually has become a very flawed stand-in for all the jobs lost to corporate greed, arrogance, and stupidity. We see Conan as a victim because we feel as though, like us, he wasn’t given a fair shot. If a guy like that, a guy who has everything, can be downsized and demoted, what hope do the rest of us have?

One way of thinking about it is through the corporate world but, to my eyes, the return of Leno’s Tonight Show has much more relevance when analogized to the current political climate.

The world is shitty right now. Especially for the young, presumably liberal, audience of Conan O’Brien. We elected a vibrant young politician to the presidency a little over a year ago with the idea that he would fight for the progressive liberal goals he said he would. Instead he’s fallen prey to the idiotic desire to crawl to the political centre despite a strong electoral mandate to push the things he said he would push. What’s worse, each time his opposition fumbles he creates new compromises, weakens his position, claims that he needs to be more accommodating to the immovable objects he’s tasked with moving.

And here comes Conan. He’s a young vibrant comedian who’s given a chance to run The Tonight Show, to remake it in his image. And he did that. When he first started, he appeared semi-neutered but as he grew more comfortable with the show, he loosened and began to adjust his new surroundings to who he was and not the other way around.

What’s more, when the news came that he was being cast aside, he didn’t compromise, he became more like himself. And, yes, people loved him for it. Because that’s why they were excited about him being there in the first place.

I don’t know about any of you, but Conan going down swinging felt like a win to me. Maybe it’s a shallow one, but it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get any real ones any time soon.

There are two essential rationales people can use on the left to blame Obama and the White House for the failure of the Senate to produce a bill with a public option and/or Medicare buy-in provisions.

The first is that Obama is a super-genius 11-dimensional chess master who has been setting up all the pieces to knock them down precisely to accomplish health care reform without these two progressive policies in place.

The second is that Obama can swoop into the Senate, jiggle a few carrots, whack a few sticks, and everyone would fall in line and health care reform would pass with the exact requirements of Obama and his White House without further complications.

Anyone who ascribes to either of these positions is a fool, or really digs the DC universe.

I personally think Obama should have done more to pressure moderate Democrats to toe the line on this issue; I don’t think it would have done any good, but at least Obama would have demonstrated some position. As nice as it is to have a White House administration more interesting in passing legislation than jockeying for power, it doesn’t hurt to bluster on occasion.

But I’m not going to sit here and argue what others have: that Obama is essentially talking a good game in public but sneaking wry grins in private as his plan to limit health care reform unfold. These sorts of extremes do nothing but persist the idea that the executive branch not only does but should have a choke hold on the rest of the government. Quite frankly, even if Obama did have the power and clout to wrangle the Senate into line, which I don’t think he does, shouldn’t we be glad he isn’t doing that? I thought Bush was hated for his abuse of the office, not because he abused it to get things we didn’t like.

Glenn Greenwald has been making much hullabaloo over the White House’s apparent willingness to drop the public option and a medicare buy-in from the Senate health care bill for the sake of getting a bill through Congress before the process manages to collapse in on itself.

Many different progressives have been reminding Glenn that the President isn’t all powerful and that expending his political capital trying to push obstinate senators toward a more progressive bill would almost certainly result in nothing, or worse a deeper obstinacy from senators feeling bullied.

He cites the example of the White House pressuring freshman Democrats with what is essentially ostracism if they don’t vote for a war funding bill as proof that Obama can play hardball with the legislative branch when he really wants something done. But I think this ignores some depressing realities within Congress.

Obama can pressure freshman congressman to support a war bill because they are likely on the left, and people on the left need the support of the DNC and the Obama Administration. But on health care, Obama would have to push people from the Right towards the Left, something for which he can offer no incentives.

Nelson won Nebraska despite Obama losing, not because of it. There’s no pressure he can apply in that situation. And Lieberman is a petulant child who wants only to punish progressive policies. Maybe Obama could have tried the hardball tactics here, and maybe it would have worked, but these two scenarios are not comparable except in the most superficial way.

I thought I should clarify how ‘white’ I am as it relates to that BET Cypher I posted last night. I didn’t really know of Mos Def as a musician until earlier this year — I remember him performing on Chappelle’s show, but I never made the connection that he was an actual musical artist — having first seen him in the Italian Job and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I hadn’t heard of this guy Black Thought, who I thought ‘won’ that Cypher despite all three guys being amazing, at all though I knew very vaguely of his band The Roots.

Still though, I feel a little cheap writing about how ‘white’ I am when just last night I wrote a critique of Andrew Sullivan for talking about how ‘black’ America is. I also didn’t really do this completely by accident. I think that talking about how we talk about race is sort of a big deal. When Sullivan spoke about the blackness of America, what he seemed to be writing about was the culture of the South. Most of his readers who wrote in spoke about being white and Southern. It’s apt that I woke this morning to Ta-Nehisi Coates doing what he does best:

There are many reasons why it’s wrong to presume that your particular, specific, individual narrative of blackness is The Only Narrative Of Blackness Ever In All History.

Blackness is a lot of things, and I think conflating it with ‘Southern’ is probably not a great idea. It’s not wrong, but it’s not all right.

Dave Weigel over at The Washington Independent wrote last night about a Fox News poll last night asking people who they thought wants victory more, Obama or the Taliban. Now, it’s a fairly ridiculous question to ask — because that’s totally irrelevant unless the gusto with which terrorists try to attack you somehow makes them endearing — but I think the results do reveal a worrying bias.

The fact that Democrats overwhelmingly feel that Obama wants it more is a little troubling. Terrorists (and freedom fighters, if you so choose to think of the Taliban in such terms) do outrageous things for their causes. Like, for example, fly jet planes into building and strap explosives to themselves. I’m sure Obama wants to win in Afghanistan, if only for the political capital it will give to the Democratic party after seven years of Republican negligence in Afghanistan, but I think claiming he ‘wants it more’ than the Taliban stretches the point a bit too far.

A fair point that can be made is that the poll specifically targets the ‘Leadership of the Taliban,’ who might not be willing to strap bombs to themselves so much as they are willing to strap bombs to other people in an attempt to build their own power. I don’t really know enough about the hierarchy of the Taliban and such groups to say if there’s a difference in the radicalism of the leaders vs the ground soldiers, but even targeting the ‘Lords’ of the terrorist movements seems incredulous. When it comes down to it, I can’t imagine Obama worrying that the Taliban will eventually kill him, except in some existential abstract manner, but America wiping out every last Taliban member seems like it would be a fairly realistic worry.

A couple weeks ago, Adam Serwer wrote a great post trashing Pat Buchanan and his offensive talk about white American’s ‘losing their country.’ Cutting to the quick, Adam says:

Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today’s legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets.

I have trouble not cheering that paragraph on as I read it, it reads so fucking true. And obviously true. Maybe it’s because I’m from Canada, a nation more forward about its mosaic-esque nature, but it seems so clear to me that what America is all about is not white Americans or black Americans or any colour or creed. They’re all a part of the big beautiful conglomeration.

But while I cheered on that post, the follow ups that came from Andrew Sullivan and his horde of purple prose packed readers gave me that sort of sighed chagrin you get when you see the point, and then you see the person trying to make it drive right on by.

Sullivan was so busy trying to describe how white England is and how black America is, he forgot that the real point was that America isn’t white. The Banjo is an African instrument, and Cajuns originate from the Canadian East coast. America is the people who are there and what they brought with them.

This is not me trying to downplay the Blackness of America, but all this talk about how Black America is was tiring me. The world is not that black and white, pardon the pun, which was the whole point of Serwer’s original post; not that America is black, but that it isn’t wholly white.

Maybe I’m quibbling over semantics — and some of this is about southern white people sharing many cultural commonalities with southern black people, which is more about cultural regionalism than about racial identity, though perhaps they’re overly conflated in the American South — but I think it’s an important distinction.

Don’t you need to actually accomplish something to be awarded the Nobel prize?

It’s probably premature in Obama’s case but he’s certainly got a few things he can cite as evidence that he’s been an agent of peace. What has Neda done? She got shot. I don’t mean this as a knock on her sacrifice or her nation’s desire to be free of a theocratic dictatorship, but that’s really all she did.

Ignoring the obvious rules regarding posthumous Nobel prizes I sincerely don’t understand what anyone is thinking when they espouse awarding a Nobel peace prize to a young Iranian university student who happened to get shot during a political protest.

What’s more, the idea of granting it to one of the reformists in Iran seems equally vapid. While it can be said that Obama won the Nobel primarily because he’s not George Bush, I think we forget how negatively the world viewed President Bush. The simple fact that America is represented on a global scale by Barack Obama has already vastly shifted the rhetoric regarding America world-wide. Add in his accomplishments with respect to nuclear proliferation, and his national-level climate change legislation, and his (supposed) desire to end the Bush administrations abuses of human rights, and we’re a lot closer to world peace right now than we were just a year ago. I still think it’s premature for Obama to win the Nobel, but to consider Neda, or her fellow reformers, as a better choice seem laughably parochial.

In general, I’m supportive of hate crime legislation — though I’m absolutely against hate speech legislation as an obvious affront to free speech — but when conservatives would accuse hate crime legislation of criminalizing thought — the crux of the argument being that the crime is the same but the thoughts behind the crime, killing someone because they’re black rather than because they owe you money for example, differ which makes a crime’s punishment differ based on the criminal’s thoughts — I’ve had little to argue against that point. I’d always known that it wasn’t a wholly convincing argument but it always left a tinge of doubt in my thoughts about hate crime legislation.

There are a few reasons I wouldn’t be able to counter this argument: I have little experience with the law and so don’t feel a comfortable extrapolating in that field; the argument has never been convincing enough for me to sit down and think about why it’s flawed; and finally, maybe I’m just not smart enough to explain why I thought the argument didn’t work. Well, none of that matters because publius, who I think has stepped up his game since Hilzoy retired from blogging, has written what I consider to be the definitive defense of hate crime legislation. You really should read the whole thing, but here’s a snippet that sums up the argument fairly well:

In one sense, all crimes criminalize “thought.” The American criminal justice system requires showing not merely an act, but an intent. If I fall down accidentally and kill you, I can’t be prosecuted. Yes, I committed an act of homicide, but I didn’t intend to do that act.

QED Bitches.

All the discussion over on The Daily Dish about religion and atheism has led to some premature ejaculations on my part. I’ve meant to write about the various forms of atheism and the ones to which I ascribe for a long time now¹ but I never got around to it until these discussions reinvigorated me on the subject.

In particular, the form of atheism I most often identify with, apatheism, is described quite well by one of Andrew’s readers:

Maybe there is a god. Maybe there are many gods. Maybe there’s no god at all. Maybe I could drive myself crazy second-guessing myself and every theologian and pastor and religious friend out there. Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter, and I’ve just got to lead the best life I can, as I see it, and if that’s not good enough in the end — if there be an end instead of a simple fading away — then as far as I’m concerned, any god that would condemn me for doing my best to be the best person I can isn’t a god I’d want to believe in, in the first place.

Dedicated readers out there might recall that I was once a very passionate christian. Well, I called myself christian but I didn’t believe in the holy trinity nor in the divinity of Jesus Christ, so really I was just a guy that strongly believed that God existed. I had debated with myself about the nature of God for so long and in such detail that I had come to the conclusion that God is so far beyond human comprehension that any attempt by us to understand his wishes or obey his will would be a terrible distortion.

Eventually, I argued myself down to seeing it as this apatheist does: I’m going to live my life the way I think is right and good. The god that deems my sincere efforts unacceptable while leaving his criteria ambiguous is not a god I want to worship.

At the time this moved me deeply and I can remember understanding the significance of this shift. I had gone from a mostly-Anglican Christian to an I-don’t-know-what², and I felt great relief at finally overcoming some of my deepest issues with my faith.

Naturally, not long after that I stopped believing in God. Not necessarily as a result of this religious shift, rather I suspect that this shift was merely a stepping stone my psyche deemed necessary as I weaned my mind off the belief in deities. Nonetheless, I had become a full-bore apatheist.

Apatheism can appear deceptively like a form of lazy religion³, but what I believed then and what I believe now are very different. What I believed then was that a god that will ultimately judge my life, but I accepted the impossibility of knowing its criteria and simply lived a life I thought was right.

But to the apatheist, God is not unknowable, God is irrelevant. God, even if he did exist, doesn’t matter.

If everyone but me believed in God, but they didn’t let that belief affect politics, or science, or education, I’d be content. But what I see instead is the vilification of atheism and the slow creep of church into state. And that’s when I’m not an apatheist anymore.

I’d love to not have to care about religion, but quite frankly that’s irresponsible given the growing atmosphere of religiosity in our culture.

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1. With numerous drafts broaching the topic from slightly different angles sitting on this blog from two years ago [↩]
2. I later realized that it was strikingly similar to a view known as ignosticism, though I contend there are still vital, though subtle, differences mostly borrowed from apatheism [↩]
3. Or conversely, lazy religion can be seen as a form of apatheism [↩]

There’s been a really great ongoing debate happening over at The Daily Dish surrounding atheism. It started when one of Andrew’s temporary replacements likened atheists such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins to fundamentalists and religious extremists.

As it’s developed, I’ve read many intelligent arguments on both sides. But the truth is most of the religious side of the debate presumes a level of deference to religion. Atheists, it seems, are not allowed to compare religion to belief in Santa Claus or similar fanciful beliefs. At first it was attacked for being glib, but that does little to alter the fundamental similarities in the belief in Santa Claus and the belief in God.

Subsequently, the argument was made that people spend a great deal of time developing their religious stance, whether it’s through thorough readings of the philosophies of theologians across the ages or merely an internal conflict, and so the comparison is unfair. Admittedly, there are people who examine their beliefs thoroughly, break down all the preconditions of life that their parents instilled in them to arrive at a self-determined philosophy, one which includes God, but those people are a far and away minority. For many people, religion is a part of their life because they’ve never thought about it¹.

Similarly, following an atheist argument that religion can undermine the “development of logical thinking” in children, a religious reader responded with:

I have an 18 year-old and a 15 year-old which my wife and I have raised in the church. They are both at the stage where they are questioning and challenging everything. The idea that I could possibly “brainwash” them into believing anything is specious.

Which isn’t wrong so much as it is unsophistcated. The fact is that the reader almost certainly could “brainwash” their children if they wanted to. We always read of the children who escape from a cult they were born into, but we ignore the fact that many children remain in the cult, contented and certain that their way of life is the true path to salvation.

I use cults as an example, but parents with enough religious zeal can just as easily cause many problems for their children. Home schooling children that the Earth is the centre of the universe and that it’s only 6000 years old and evolution is a lie — all things that Christian parents do² — absolutely affect the child for years to come. No one is claiming that the damage is irreparable — after all, there are atheists out there — but to ignore it because it lacks 100% efficacy is exceedingly naive³.

The problem with having a religious debate is that when atheists argue with fundamentalists nothing is accomplished, but when they argue with reasonable, temperate theists like those reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog, we get nice nuanced arguments which describe God in a manner very different than the norm. The theists seems to forget that atheists are mostly arguing against the edge cases.

I’m staunchly atheist, and confident that there is no God. But when I attack religion, I don’t attack the muted and temperate version that intellectuals believe in, the kind where God is a passive observer, or where he sets the pieces up and has spent the past 12 billion or so years watching them all fall around him like a massive set of dominoes. I attack the religion that forces genital mutilation, stonings, oppression of women, ignorance of science, and all the stuff that the brainy version of religion has eschewed in its development.

Often, atheists (and theists) are accused of ignoring the moderates of the debate, instead focusing on the fringes of their debate, but one thing I’ve noticed as time goes on is that even the extreme atheists, so far as I know, do not argue for the abolition of religion. What they argue is that religion is irrational and that the world would be a better place without religion. The first half of that argument is absolutely true. Religion is the belief in something for which there is absolutely no evidence, an inherently irrational stance. The second half is much more contentious and an argument that I personally don’t accept. That said, the “atheist fringe” is much less extreme than the religious fundamentalists, so to act as though they are equal criticisms seems disingenuous to me.

The edge cases matter⁴. So don’t call upon the “civility” of atheists to sit down and shut up when it comes to the pernicious ills of religion.

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1. I speak from experience; many members of my family have no actual philosophy with respect to their religion, they merely accept it as what they’ve always “believed.” [↩]
2. Obviously not all Christian parents, but these extremes do exist [↩]
3. I’m not advocating the abolition of religion here, nor would anyone suggest state-enforced atheism, but ignoring the problems of religion accomplishes nothing. [↩]
4. On both sides of the discussion [↩]

I don’t get Ross Douthat. People I know keep telling me he’s not a total idiot (obviously, being a conservative implies a certain level of idiocy) but I’ve yet to find any of his words of any value, except perhaps to his own ego.

His most recent New York Times column, for example, extols the “romantic excess” that liberals seem to lack. He claims that “modern relationships have been drained of danger and purged of eros.”

Except he doesn’t think modern relationships are passionless, he think modern liberal relationships are passionless.

Our hyper-educated, socially-liberal elite is considerably more romantically conservative than its blasé attitude toward pornography or premarital sex would lead you to expect.

…

This tameness has beneficial social consequences: When it comes to divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births, Americans with graduate degrees are still living in the 1950s. It’s the rest of the country that marries impulsively, divorces frequently, and bears a rising percentage of its children outside marriage.

…

Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess.

Ignoring the self-pitying Douthat sneaks into that first sentence, as all proper right-wingers must, it speaks to a massive misunderstanding on his part of the difference between passion and responsibility. To say that I’m not passionate because I’m capable of putting a condom on or willing to not pick up the first girl I see at the bar — not that either of those statements apply to me personally; for the moment, I’m speaking for other liberals with more game — is an utterly foolish thing to say.

The idea that something is not passionate unless is it reckless and stupid and embarrassing, exemplified by countless romantic comedies over the years, is a childish belief that most liberals have grown out of. Put bluntly, passion isn’t a quickie marriage, it’s a safeword.

Piling on, I’m not sure why Douthat is cheering on reckless marriage, frivolous divorce, and bastard children (I’m a bastard myself, so no insult intended) seeing as he’s the conservative between the two of us. But, let’s not get bogged down with logic. There’s columns that need writing.

Patrick Appel, filling the void for Andrew Sullivan, questions the usefulness of the new cap-and-trade legislation that squeaked by Congress at the end of last week:

I am eager to spend money to slow global warming. Still, I question whether a crippled cap and trade bill will make it harder to pass decent legislation later on.

But quite frankly, something is better than nothing. Joseph Romm seems to agree with me — put more honestly, I agree with Romm — and offers this useful tidbit:

It is worth noting that the original Clean Air Act — first passed in 1963 — also didn’t do enough and was subsequently strengthened many times.

So let’s do whatever we can get away with, in terms of climate change. Maybe it’s not enough, but if the choice is between something or nothing, that’s a no-brainer.

As much as I’d like the Washington establishment to do an about face simply because a lot of young people were interested in politics last fall, it’s not going to happen that way. We’re going to have to fight for every inch. So let’s start with this. All avalanches start somewhere.

There was a recent article about Scientology, focusing on the bullying and domineering attitude that Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige, injects into the religion. Here’s what I have to say about Scientology: whatever.

I maintain that the things Scientology have done, ranging from domestic espionage to extreme litigation to the death of church members due to negligence, are not acceptable. But I also maintain that they are not unexpected. Religions in their growth pangs often commit horrific acts in an attempt to establish themselves. You need only look at the violence, corruption, and manipulation of the Catholic church in the middle ages to see evidence of that. And the holy wars of expansion of early Islam are just as telling; no religion has a monopoly on such offenses.

Similarly, Scientology’s “wacky” beliefs, like the multi-trillion-year-old universe and Thetans and the like are no more bizarre than the base beliefs of the Abrahamic religions. The difference is that we’ve grown up in a civilization centred around Moses carrying divinely inscribed tablets dictating the rules of the faith, around Noah building an Ark that carried his family and every single species on the planet for 40 days and 40 nights, around Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt for the sin of looking back upon Gomorrah, around a man who was a god who was martyred and resurrected and ascended to heaven. These stories are not less outlandish, they are more familiar. They don’t carry the stigma of the Space Opera.

None of what I’ve written defends Scientology in any way, but I don’t attack it for doing exactly what countless other churches has done in our history. It’s a double standard that makes no sense.

I know you’re thinking right now that the crimes of other religions are in the past and that because they happened in the past either a) it was ok because it was moderate for the time or b) it’s useless to chastise them for acts they no longer commit.

The first point is wrong, in my opinion. Morals are morals. I don’t care if it was done in exceptional circumstances. Wrong is wrong.

The second point is more valid, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. But Scientology hasn’t committed domestic espionage in the recent history, so to attack them for it is equivalent to attacking the modern Catholic church for the Inquisition or the Crusades.

In the end, I think that, if Scientology survives this initial growth to become an actual religion, it will become less hard line, but that won’t happen due to external pressure. If anything, the continual attacks on the religion from the outside will allow the church to establish a line of defence, just as Iran’s Supreme Leader has for decades by invoking the spectre of American Imperialism. Over time, Scientology’s member will force the church to change. Or it will collapse on itself. And the rest of the world isn’t going to do anything to affect the outcome or its time of arrival.

John Cole, someone I generally agree with, has been getting a little snippy with the blogosphere over its impassioned response to the stolen election and subsequent rallies for justice currently taking place in Iran.

My thoughts are with the folks in Iran risking it all fighting for democracy, but this can not be said enough- this is not about us, it is about them. I love the coverage of events, but please stop with this narcissistic nonsense.

Most of this is targeted at Andrew Sullivan, who has been working with a great level of dedication to get the news about Iran out while the mainstream media did little to cover the story. I agree with John that changing the colour scheme of a website does nothing to contribute to the Iranian people’s fight for a fair democracy, but that doesn’t mean it’s a meaningless gesture.

I’ve followed this story from its early stages, unable to look away, desperate for any new photo or bit of news out of Tehran. I feel the pain of the Iranian people, and I wish I could do something to solve their problems. But I can’t. Their problems are theirs. All I can do is watch and hope that they win the freedoms every man, woman, and child deserves. Quite frankly, writing about their bravery — these people who are fighting battles our forefathers fought for us, so that we could live in a world with the tacit understanding of legitimacy — is all we can do. To lift up our voices and echo the cries for freedom. We need to let them know that while this is their fight, they do not stand alone. The world is watching.