Robot Heart: Sex, Religion, and Politics

The ultimate crop rotation

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:23:54 -0800

In recent months, the Ethiopian government began marketing abroad one of the hottest commodities in an increasingly crowded and hungry world: farmland.

There’s no profit in helping poor and hungry people, which is why we have poor and hungry people.

buffleheadcabin:jhnbrssndn:mohamedn: What You Didn’t Know...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:28:00 -0800

buffleheadcabin:jhnbrssndn:mohamedn:

What You Didn’t Know about the War.

Finally found my headphones. A lot of this is already stuff that I knew. A lot of this stuff is…ugh…it’s disgusting. This is important to know. Everyone should know this. And anyone who thinks that this stuff is okay has something severely wrong with them. This is indefensible, in the defense of any cause.

"And this is what I find so disturbing about the neo-cons: the idea that there is some kind of..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:12:00 -0800

“And this is what I find so disturbing about the neo-cons: the idea that there is some kind of zero-sum game that allows only so much liberty before security is negatively impacted. The idea that there is only so much power to go around and it’s important to make sure that it’s concentrated in the hands of people just like you in order to protect your own interests.”

- chloelikedolivia

For the record: When Sarah Palin was governor of Alaska, she NEVER had to deal with "boundary issues" with Russia.

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:39:00 -0800

And certainly not in the sense that “we’ve got boundary issues with Mexico.” Maybe I’ve missed the fervor over the huge illegal Ruski population, but somehow, I doubt it…

"The “politically correctness” has got to get out now. I mean, we’re Americans and..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:20:00 -0800

“The “politically correctness” has got to get out now. I mean, we’re Americans and [Palin] sticks up for the American people, not for other people. We’re first. Other people are last.”

- Palin supporter at SARAH PALIN BOOK SIGNING

"Most of the tea partyers I’ve talked to aren’t just Randian selfish autobots or racists who want to..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:55:00 -0800

“Most of the tea partyers I’ve talked to aren’t just Randian selfish autobots or racists who want to see the President’s birth certificate. They’re people who see the same problems as most progressives do — their economic futures being ruined, the destructive feelings of a government that is unaccountable, the increasing tension between different geographical parts of the country — and they feel like they need to do something about it. The problem, in my view, is that the solutions to all of these problems just about any of us can see are being presented by lunatics (Glenn Beck and his radio host crowd) and cynics at the helm of corporate vehicles (Dick Armey and similar raiders come to mind) who are looking to exploit the feelings of desperation and helplessness of these people for their own means. The reason the tea party movement has arisen is because the far right has managed to convince people that it isn’t the corporate lobbyists who’ve engineered the economic policies of the last 35 years who are responsible for the state of our economy — it’s those evil lefty bureaucrats and their allies in those all-powerful poorly paid community organizer outfits like ACORN. And the fact that people like Armey and Beck have managed to commandeer such a movement isn’t just about their evilness or the ignorance of tea party demonstrators — it’s also about the failure of those of us who are progressives to engage these people and bring them into a real populist economic movement against the right targets. Rather than mocking the largely white, southern demographic that makes up this movement, we should be trying to engage with it — no matter how difficult that is — to enlist it on our side. Because if there’s anything creeps like Beck and Armey are afraid of, it’s the people they’ve been duping all along pulling the curtain aside and realizing their predicament.”

- Zaid Jilani (via azspot)

Obstacles:

Progressives’ general lack of interest in legislating Christianity, dicussing America in terms of being “Christian” (which is, to an extent, also code for “white”), and adamant pro-choice stance are among the biggest reasons why tea baggers/tea partiers not only dislike progressives, but view progressives with deep suspicion and distrust. Progressives are often seen as being aligned with: advocacy for “welfare,” advocacy for political correctness, advocacy for affirmative action (all of the above is, to an extent, code for “not white”), advocacy for ensuring rights for out groups that many of the tea partying conservatives would like to continue to treat as out groups on a political as well as social level.

In addition to being adverse to the idea of relinquishing their power and privilege over Others (however differently they might articulate this facet of conservative ideology), tea partiers have also put the mythical self-made man up on a pedestal as an oppositional response to movements to shift the race/class/gender/sexuality/religion balance in America. This means that instead of targeting the corporations—which, according to the myth of the self-made man (regardless of whether the myth holds true in reality) are made up entirely of self-made men—they will instead target those who champion the underdogs. However little it might make sense to scream that the underdogs and their champions are the cause of the problems, however little it might make sense to argue that the corporations who control everything and who have repeatedly and consistently and demonstrably abused their power and control over the past few decades are the pinnacles of good and right…this is what those on the right (the tea partiers) firmly believe. And as nice and as crunchy granola as it is to say, “We should really be working to bring these people into the warm and loving embrace of progressivism,” you have to understand that at the heart of the matter is the fact that they are diametrically opposed to many of the foundational goals of progressivism, and that, uncomfortably enough, many of the reasons for that opposition has to do with wanting to retain power as white, Christian, heterosexuals of a certain class (a decidedly middle middle class) in a society where being all of those things is heavily privileged.

That is, obviously, not the logic behind all tea partying, but. There are significant barriers to progressives reaching out to these conservatives, and many of these barriers are not necessarily things I advocate dropping just for the sake of trying to win over a few conservative hearts. I don’t know how possible this kumbaya project is, seeing as the support for corporations (over liberal lawmakers, and by turns over disenfranchised classes of Americans in general) is a keystone in conservative beliefs.

“If we’re simply going to dismiss the tea party as some crazy phenomenon and not look for its social roots, then we may have to deal with the Becks and Armeys of the world for a long time to come.”

Many of us have looked at its social roots, and we realize that the Becks and the Armeys of the world are better suited to leading these groups because they either A) share core values of the group, or B) have the ethical flexibility to pretend to share core values of the group in order to achieve a self-interested end. I say this as a person who grew up in a majority white, deeply conservative Southern town in the Bible Belt. I’m not just some left coast liberal who thinks these are a bunch of toothless hillbillies with pitchforks. I know these people, I understand that they are legitimately upset at the state of the world in general, but even with that, I honestly don’t know where, with many of them, we could even begin to bridge the ideological gaps that would get them protesting Cigna instead of Washington. (Although notably, the two are so intertwined, it really doesn’t make a difference.)

The administration guts its own argument for 9/11 trials

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:40:00 -0800

The administration guts its own argument for 9/11 trials:

unburyingthelead:

“What I’m absolutely clear about is that I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors from New York who specialize in terrorism” — Barack Obama, yesterday. “Holder said five other Guantanamo detainees would be tried by military tribunals. The five include Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, who is accused of masterminding the 2000 attack on the USS Cole warship in Yemen; and Canadian Omar Khadr, accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan” — NPR, yesterday. “‘Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military commissions … . and about 75 more have been deemed too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material’ … If true, that means that there are 75 so-called ‘Fifth Category’ detainees who might be subject to indefinite detention without trial” — The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, yesterday, quoting The Washington Post.

[…]

Even worse, Holder was reduced to admitting — even boasting — that this concocted multi-tiered justice system (trials for some, commissions for others, indefinite detention for the rest) enables the Government to pick and choose what level of due process someone gets based on the Government’s assessment as to where and how they’re most likely to get a conviction:

Courts and commissions are both essential tools in our fight against terrorism … On the same day I sent these five defendants to federal court, I referred five others to be tried in military commissions. I am a prosecutor, and as a prosecutor, my top priority was simply to select the venue where the government will have the greatest opportunity to present the strongest case with the best law… At the end of the day, it was clear to me that the venue in which we are most likely to obtain justice for the American people is a federal court.

Does that remotely sound like a “justice system”? If you’re accused of being a Terrorist, there’s not one set procedure used to determine your guilt; instead, the Government has a roving bazaar of various processes which it, in its sole discretion, picks for you based on ensuring that it will win. Even worse, Holder repeatedly assured Senators that the administration would continue to imprison 9/11 defendants even in the very unlikely case that they were acquitted, citing what they previously suggested was their Orwellian authority of so-called “post-acquittal detention powers.” Is there any better definition of a “show trial” than one in which the defendant has no chance of ever being released even if acquitted, because the Government will simply thereafter assert the power to hold him indefinitely without charges?

All men are created only as equal as the US government says they are…

via www.hss.state.ak.us

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:24:58 -0800

via www.hss.state.ak.us

"Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:09:20 -0800

“Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

- Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia

"People often take to complaining about how people dress, when they’re actually bothered by something..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:52:55 -0800

“People often take to complaining about how people dress, when they’re actually bothered by something else. Dress is a kind of intellectual short-cut that allows you to get around hard problems—either real or perceived.”

- Morehouse’s New Dress-Code - Ta-Nehisi Coates (via britticisms) (via somethingchanged)

lizcourts: quick personal rant: halloween. don’t even get me started. i love it. what i don’t love,...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:36:20 -0800

lizcourts:

quick personal rant:

halloween. don’t even get me started. i love it. what i don’t love, however, is how some girls think it is an appropriate time to dress with a complete lack of class. cady in ‘mean girls’ nails it— ”in the real world halloween was a time for little kids to dress up in scary costumes. in girl world it was the one night a year a girl could dress like a total slut and no other girls could say anything about it. the hard core girls just wore lingerie and some form of animal ears.”

where in the hell is your creativity? so halloween has become a night to show your body off i guess. i believe halloween should be about becoming someone else. if you want to be a firefighter- go right ahead… i didn’t know they wore fishnets? girls should wear what they want to wear. if you like to be flashy with your outfits all of the time, i have no problem with that. it is when girls use halloween as some sort of scapegoat… they try and come off as classy every other day. with the exception and shield of halloween. it’s like every girl conforms to this idea of being slutty on halloween. be who you are.

blahh.

This is how this reads:

Become someone else…but be who you are.
Girls should wear whatever they want…but they shouldn’t wear fishnets with their fireman outfit.
The problem is lack of creativity…but it’s also the inability to consistently enact stereotypes about what women should be, either “classy” or “slutty” (because you can’t be both, ladies—every hooker with the slut taint on her knows that), every single day of the year, even on Halloween.

Can we please stop worrying so much about what other women are wearing on which day of the year? I assure you, there are better uses of all of our time.

"The press corps that is bashing [Sarah Palin’s] skull in right now is the same one that hyped that..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:13:56 -0800

“The press corps that is bashing [Sarah Palin’s] skull in right now is the same one that hyped that WMD horseshit for like four solid years and pom-pommed America to war with Iraq over the screeching objections of the entire planet. It’s the same press corps that rolled out the red carpet for someone very nearly as abjectly stupid as Sarah Palin to win not one but two terms in the White House. If there was any kind of consensus support for Palin inside the beltway, the criticism of her, bet on it, would be almost totally confined to chortling east coast smartasses like me and Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan. What the people who are flipping out about the treatment of Palin should be asking themselves is what it means when it’s not just jerks like us but everybody piling on against Palin. For those of you who can’t connect the dots, I’ll tell you what it means. It means she’s been cut loose. It means that all five of the families have given the okay to this hit job, including even the mainstream Republican leaders. You teabaggers are in the process of being marginalized by your own ostensible party leaders in exactly the same way the anti-war crowd was abandoned by the Democratic party elders in the earlier part of this decade. Like the antiwar left, you have been deemed a threat to your own party’s “winnability.” And do you know what that means? That means that just as the antiwar crowd spent years being painted by the national press as weepy, unpatriotic pussies whose enthusiastic support is toxic to any serious presidential aspirant, so too will all of you afternoon-radio ignoramuses who seem bent on spending the next three years kicking and screaming your way up the eternal asshole of white resentment now find yourself and your political champions painted as knee-jerk loonies whose rabid irrationality is undeserving of the political center.”

- Matt Taibbi, “Yes, Sarah, There is a Media Conspiracy” (via thesmarttart)

"The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s were led by Christians claiming the Scriptures..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:58:53 -0800

“The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s were led by Christians claiming the Scriptures and asserting the glory of the image of God in every human being regardless of race, religion, age or class.”

- Press Kit - Manhattan Declaration Newsroom - DeMossNews.com

Notably, white Christians argued that mixing of the races was against God’s will and fought integration and the removal of anti-miscegenation laws tooth and nail, often with a Biblical defense. But, you know, that’s not important…

"…America is not an officially Christian nation, but rather a Christian-majority one. So if we apply..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:43:53 -0800

“…America is not an officially Christian nation, but rather a Christian-majority one. So if we apply the same logic elsewhere, then Muslim-majority countries should enshrine shari’ah as their laws, since Muslims are equally convinced that shari’ah is right, and should brook no exceptions for non-Muslims. The same would go for about Hindu- or Buddhist-majority countries. Then what happens then to religious liberty? Or is liberty important only if your views are correct—namely, Christian? I note that the three drafters are Timothy George, an evangelical historian of theology and academic administrator who shows up frequently in such projects; Robert George, a distinguished Princeton University scholar who is a stalwart defender of Roman Catholic conservative social policy; and Charles Colson, another evangelical whose impressive Prison Fellowship ministry arose out of his previous political career, a career that by any account was extremist and ended in the extremes of Watergate disgrace and a prison term. Such authorship confirms the sense that the project of building a “Christian America” according to the value of the Religious Right, rather than building the best possible pluralist and free society, is the agenda guiding such a declaration. Others of us, however, will think that God’s will might run to greater liberty for all, greater tolerance for ambiguity and dissent, greater pluralism of belief and practice, and perhaps paradoxically therefore greater opportunity for the Gospel. For it is not clear to us that such declarations, and the outlook that prompts them, really increase non-Christian willingness to respect conservative Christian concerns, let alone to seriously entertain any proclamation of the Gospel. It certainly is not clear that they move anyone closer to prolife, pro-traditional marriage, or pro-religious liberty views. Indeed, it’s not clear to some of us what good they do at all.”

- John Stackhouse (via azspot)

I also liked:

“It argues for religious liberty for Christians to dissent from views they don’t like (and this point, alas, needs increasing emphasis in America as well as here in Canada). But it also argues that these particular Christian views of abortion, euthanasia, marriage, and more should be enshrined in American law. It says nothing about the liberty of those who would dissent from those views except to assert that because these Christian views are right, they should be the law of the land. What, then, happened to religious liberty on these important matters?”

Good write-up.

"During a White House meeting in early 1984, Ronald Reagan shocked economic adviser Martin Feldman in..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:28:54 -0800

“During a White House meeting in early 1984, Ronald Reagan shocked economic adviser Martin Feldman in insisting that no tax increase in US history had raised revenue. The eminent Harvard economist penned him a memo proving that every increase in tax rates from 1917 to 1969 had actually done so. Arguably the contemporary GOP needs to absorb this lesson and the corollary one that tax cuts cost revenue before it can play a constructive and bipartisan role in the solution of America’s increasingly grim twenty-first century deficit problem.”

- Rosy Scenarios and Red Realities: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and the Deficit (via azspot)

We can’t do math here, either.

"…what’s interesting to me here is the idea of the Progressive Era as where every thing went wrong...."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:12:00 -0800

“…what’s interesting to me here is the idea of the Progressive Era as where every thing went wrong. I’ve seen this repeatedly in right-wing rhetoric in the last decade. Karl Rove read Robert Wiebe’s The Search for Order and saw in it the roots of everything he hates about America. In a New Yorker article several years ago, Rove stressed how the Gilded Age was America’s golden age and Progressivism started the ball of socialism rolling. Never mind that Progressivism was more connected to the Republican Party than the Democrats and that no one was more important to this movement than Republican hero Theodore Roosevelt. Rove, Beck, and others are happy to trot Roosevelt out every time they want to invade a country of brown people or make spurious claims that the modern Republican Party really cares about the environment, but they want to forget about the regulatory state he helped build. It seems quite clear that Rove and especially Beck have no real understanding of Progressivism; in fact, I’d bet Beck couldn’t even tell you that Roosevelt was a Progressive. And the fact that these people think the Gilded Age was a wonderful time tells you a whole lot about what these people want this nation to become. If anyone knew anything about the Gilded Age, the Republicans would never win another election, but, alas, they don’t. In any case, it’s interesting to glimpse the conservative view of history and to see where they think everything went wrong. Oh for the halcyon days of the U.S. military crushing labor strikes, 14 hour days, child labor, cities without sanitation, women ineligible to vote, lynching, no Chinese immigration, and so many other awesome aspects of the late 19th century!”

- The Conservative Movement and the Progressive Era (via azspot) (via thesmarttart)

It’s called the Gilded Age, as opposed to the Golden Age, because the gold was only present on the most superficial level. You know, like when you gild something? The very definition of the word ‘gild’ is: “To give an often deceptively attractive or improved appearance to.” Even if you don’t know a thing about history, you should know something about language. Sadly, most Americans don’t know anything about that, either.

The degree of ignorance in this country is offensive.

"UCOP has misrepresented the real nature of the University’s financial situation…The state cutbacks,..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:57:00 -0800

“UCOP has misrepresented the real nature of the University’s financial situation…The state cutbacks, though significant, are being used as an excuse to proceed aggressively with further steps toward transforming the University from a public resource, dedicated to the education of the people of California and the pursuit of knowledge, into a profit-making enterprise, a research facility of benefit primarily to industry and beholden primarily to commercial interests.”

- UCSB Academic Senate, via

I think this is the state of affairs at many universities. I know it was at the University of Texas when I was there.

"But the best example of the bad educator is the administrator who, instead of thinking of what needs..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:39:44 -0800

“But the best example of the bad educator is the administrator who, instead of thinking of what needs to be done for the students of the UC system, capitalizes on a crisis of funding to make those students into the cash cow for making the UC profitable. The difference is not between idealism and realism but between two very different sets of priorities, between the social function of education (educating students) and the economic function of being profitable. And that was why Yudof’s ridiculous “cemetery” line was so damningly telling: to make room for a corporation, you have to bury the school first.”

- To Summarize « zunguzungu (via igather)

"One of the greatest victories of the Civil Rights Movement is the triumph of the idea that we as a..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:44:51 -0800

“One of the greatest victories of the Civil Rights Movement is the triumph of the idea that we as a community of dignity, not the marketplace, must secure and safeguard our liberties.”

- Burning Cane: The Plan for White Slavery

I tried to figure out a way to also include the Battlestar Galactica analogies, but…

David Vines: If It Were Me, I'd Be Embarrassed

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:15:51 -0800

David Vines: If It Were Me, I'd Be Embarrassed:

Last Wednesday, a media firestorm erupted after a seventeen-year-old girl named Jackie was interviewed by MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell while standing in line during Sarah Palin’s Michigan book signing. Jackie, wearing a shirt that read, “The US government handed out $700 billion in Wall Street bailouts and all I got was this lousy t-shirt,” was caught off-guard when O’Donnell informed her that Sarah Palin was on record as supporting the bailout…

Jackie was given a platform to tell her side of the story by the blog, Red White & Conservative.

To summarize:

This all started as me, a young 17 year old American going to see a woman I admire and turned into this crazy event hah I’ll start at the very beginning.

She had me read my shirt and then proceeded to ask me “Did you know Sarah Palin supported the bailout” to be 100% honest I was like, are you kidding me? She is trying to use my shirt against me. I was so shocked by the craftiness she had that I was truly stumped. I asked her where she got her fact and she read her little note. Then she asked me what I liked about Sarah, and I talked about the Constitution.

In one day I met a role model, and met the liberal media and their crafty schemes. I fell prey to liberal bias, but I’d like to think I did an okay job.

Kids, she did not do an okay job. She did about as good a job of explaining which of Palin’s policies she admired most as Palin did of explaining which newspapers she reads…and her excuse was about as convincing.

Click through to see video of the encounter.

As David Vines said: “All I can say is that if Glenn Beck had heard me express my political views and then assumed that I was a thirteen-year-old, I would not lift the paper bag off my head for quite some time.”

PS: I really want to see where in the Constitution, there is a defined limit on the size of the government. No, really. I’d like to see where it says, “This is as big as the government can get, and it can’t get any bigger.”