Uncategorized
-
A Word about Kim Davis
If you have a religious conservative in your life who thinks that Kim Davis is a hero, ask him if he understands the concept 'pluralism'. Ask him if he understands that the whole idea of religious freedom is to allow everybody to practice and believe what he wants without government interference. Government is a civic
-
Quote of the Day: Randolph Bourne
War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities are either intimidated
-
American Elites v. the American Demos: A Short History with Some Help from Gordon Wood
A strong argument can be made that the kind of thing that cultural conservatives hate about Liberalism is really at the heart of what made the country interesting and dynamic in those first decades of the American experiment. The static, community-centered, face-to-face society conservatives celebrate was very consciously rejected by the non-elites in that early
-
Triumph of the Will at Amazon
Even as the company tests delivery by drone and ways to restock toilet paper at the push of a bathroom button, it is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable. The company, founded and still run by Jeff Bezos, rejects many of the popular
-
Black Lives Matter v. Bernie Sanders
In the past one hundred years two models have defined the extreme opposite poles for the oppressed to actively resist their oppressors. One pole is framed by a Gandhian non-violent resistance and the other by Frantz Fanon, the Algerian psychotherapist and theorist of violent resistance. Fanon saw resistance as a zero-sum game. If my existence
-
Post Secularism and the Sacred
Modernity is, among other things, the story of the collapse of meaning that is related to the gradual shriveling up of a taken-for-granted sense of the “sacred” as a given in human experience. The word 'sacred' is still in our vocabulary, but we moderns have hardly any sense of the awe and often terror that
-
A Post-Secularist Age
I've believed for some time that the religious right is fighting an enemy in secularism that is now a paper tiger. The culture war between the religious right and the secular left has more to do with the past than the future–it was a modern battle, and we are no longer moderns. It seems to
-
Quote of the Day: Matt Taibbi
I’m going to say something radical about the Tea Partiers. They’re not all crazy. They’re not even always wrong. What they are, and they don’t realize it, is an anachronism. They’re fighting a 1960s battle in a world run by twenty-first-century crooks. They’ve been encouraged to launch costly new offensives in already-lost cultural wars, and
-
Can A Catholic be a Progressive? (Part 3)
The Catholc Church, because it is sustained by a core group of people who are deeply sane, always has and always will adapt and survive. This core group derives its sanity from its being deeply aligned in a way suitable to their historical cultural circumstances to the Transcendent Real. Sometimes people from this core also
-
George Lakoff’s Progressive Narrative
George Lakoff in his work over the last thirty years makes a serious attempt to lay the groundwork for Progressives to reassert their influence in the U.S., a country today whose narratives are otherwise dominated by Conservatism and Neoliberalism. He argues that all thinking is governed by foundational or deep metaphors that are embodied, i.e.,