Dr. Barnett: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Future

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

Over Labor Day weekend I was sitting around doing nothing and eventually decided to sit down in my broke-ass Target folding chair and watch some TV. Flipping around, I came to C-SPAN where a man was giving this fancy looking PowerPoint presentation. So I watched for a little bit, and as I did, I became entranced. Here was a man that was making sense.

When each of us opened our eyes on the morning of September 12th, 2001 and contemplated what we had all watched on the previous day, eacvh of us knew that the world had changed in some extremely important way. Moreover, we were all left with deep, stiring questions. Who were these terrorists? Why did they attack us? How could we be safe? How could we accomplish peace? Today, we still lack answers for these questions.

The tumultous days since May 2003 when President Bush declared major combat over in Iraq have been days of extreme uncertainty and soul searching for this nation. These days left us with more questions. How was a war in Iraq connected to 9/11? Was invading Iraq the right choice? Will we win in Iraq? Can we win in Iraq?

Every day, we are bombarded with so-called answers to these questions. The Moores, the Morrises, the Deans, the Limbaughs, the Coulters, the Hitchens, the Sullivans, the Chomskys, the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Powells, the Kerrys, and all the others have all tried to fill these gaps in our minds. The fact that these questions linger in our minds today is indicitive to me (at least) that none of those people have adequately answered these questions yet.

The crux of the problem is that our leaders have not adequately explained to us what the hell is going on. Bush's current explanation for us about why we are in Iraq is that we are there to "spread freedom", as if freedom comes from Smuckers or something. That's unacceptable. Our leaders have failed to establish serious goals for the future. The "global war on terror" has no defined end. Our leaders need to learn that leadership is not simply making decisions, it's guidance, it's direction, and currently it seems as if we have none. What we need is someone to explain to us what the hell is going on in the world, and where the United States, and our invasion of Iraq, fit into the big picture.

Enter Thomas Barnett, the man I saw on C-SPAN that night. A strategic planner at the Naval War College, Barnett is the kind of guy that I had always hoped existed somewhere within the government. He's does not seek to compress complex issues like 9/11 or Iraq into 30 second sound bites (crap like "they hate our freedom"). His mantra is thinking about war "in the context of everything else".

Today, Thomas Barnett is breaking into the mainstream with David Ignatius devoting a full op-ed column to his book "The Pentagon's New Map" today. The column gives a brief overview of Barnett's ideas. Various writings of Dr. Barnett's can be found on his website, a long with his excellent blog.

On the 20th, C-SPAN (having been rather impressed with his last appearence and probably having sold a ton of DVDs) is going to air a new taping of Barnett's "Brief" at 8PM EST along with a live call-in program afterwards at 9:30PM. I invite everyone to watch, because even if you don't agree with him, Dr. Barnett will get you thinking like almost no one else.

Thanksgiving and America

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

Ever noticed how the word "Thanksgiving" has the same kind of "so simple that anyone with a 2nd grade education could understand this" quality as the term "Homeland Security"? Heh, in any event...

Thanksgiving is probably the only truly American holiday. July 4th comes close, but then again, lots of nations celebrate an independence Day. We have other oddities such as Memorial Day and Labor Day, and perhaps Presidents Day, but these are more like simple excuses to have a day off rather than things we celebrate. On Thanksgiving, though, nearly everyone drops everything and spends time with family, and most likely has a meal that uses some variation on the turkey-cranberry sauce-stuffing paradigm. It's a much bigger deal than your average excuse to sleep late day.

Thanksgiving is oddly reflective of our nation's quasi-secular/quasi-religious nature. Here we have a holiday where one is presumably giving thanks to a certain "God", and yet unlike most religious holidays the traditional idea of a Thanksgiving revolves more around turkey and stuffing than spending time in a place of worship.

Thanksgiving is also representative of our nation's various obsessions with the oddest events. Here we are essentially celebrating how a bunch of nutty religious dissidents got thrown out of England, were afraid of the cultural freedom of the Dutch, and made the hilarious unwise decision to shake the bees nest of fate by setting up a colony in America without having a clue how to survive. Following the deaths of most of the colonists, the following autumn they decided to celebrate the fact that some natives had shown them how to go another winter without finishing the starving to death business. This cooperation between two cultures is supposed to be inspiring or something, even though we know the rest of the story where the successors of these religious dissidents go on to generally kill or otherwise oppress most of the natives on the continent.

It may come off like I'm somehow demeaning Thanksgiving, but I'm not. Generally, the older a holiday is, the more bat-shit insane the story behind it becomes (Random Thought: Ever notice how in a lot of Natvity scenes, the newborn baby Jesus is the size of a two year-old?). Holidays, in a sense, are not about the reason the holiday exists. The usefulness of using holidays to preserve the memory of the past probably started to dwindle when the printing press was invented in the West. Today, what holidays are really about lies in how the people of the present day celebrate that holiday. The memory of Saint Patrick is in very few people's mind on St. Patrick's Day and only the barest few people here in the U.S. know anything about Cinco de Mayo beyond the fact that the number 5 and the month of May are involved. These holidays are really socially condoned occasions to get smashed. With New Year's Eve we've taken this idea to it's logical conclusion and we celebrate the occasion of an accumulator register adding a one..."year++...Let's party!!!"

Thus, what's comforting to me about Thanksgiving and reassuring to me of the condition of our society is how it's still a holliday genuinely devoted to family and togetherness (unlike Christmas which has become genuinely devoted to getting free stuff). This is family values in it's true form, not the "people smiling too much who hate gays" form. This is a holiday that reflects the place of love in our society and also that despite some appearences, we truly appreciate what we have. We have New Year's to celebrate life. We have Independence Day to celebrate liberty. On Thanksgiving, we celebrate the pursuit of happiness.

I Don't Know Which One Scares Me The Most

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

As you probably are aware NBC News recently aquired footage of a Marine in Iraq shooting an injured insurgent who had apparently already surrendered in the head.

This, in itself is pretty disturbing.

Now, however, right-wing bloggers are circulating a petition stating:

It is my opinion that NOTHING should happen to this American Marine. He should be returned to his unit or be given an honorable discharge. We don't need our young men and women taking an extra second to decide if its right to shoot an enemy terrorist when that could mean that one of our soldiers could lose their life. The lives of our soldiers should be the single most important factor in this war against terrorism. The rights of terrorists can come second.

As of this posting, over 130,000 people have signed that petition. I'm sure this is my current lack of sleep talking, but that almost makes me want to cry.

No human being has ever died for a thing. People fight over and die for ideas. America is nothing without the ideas we claim to stand for. Freedom, justice, morality, ethics, reason, due process...They are all just words unless you make them happen. We may not always live up to these ideals, but unless we try to make them happen, our words, our worth nothing. I cannot see how someone can claim to "love America" and at the same time sign a petition urging that we look the other way at a war crime. Moreover, a war against terrorism must be a war for humanity, not against it.

A Lament For a Noble Dream

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

Web design expert/CSS guru/Cleveland resident Eric Meyer has posted a touching dirge-like short essay on his dissapointment with the passage of Ohio's Issue 1 and other anti-gay marriage laws like it...

"This isn’t an attack on America, and it isn’t a promise to leave, and it isn’t a story with any kind of decent ending. It’s a glimpse into one citizen’s inner disappointment. It’s an attempt to exorcise some of my frustration, and to plead a case, however clumsily. It’s a lament for a noble dream, one we seem to have forgotten in the heat and noise of our harried, fearful lives."

Chistopher Hitchens: Dissenter Within Dissenters

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

By now, I have come to realize that I am quite the commited liberal. If people like me (freethinking, non-religious, etc) are to exist in the future, liberalism is the only path to follow. If we have a true comittment to a more equal society, liberalism is the only path to follow. If we want a truly moral society based on rationality and individualism rather than what an old book tells us to do, then liberalism is the only path to follow.

With that said, there is a certain element of self-delusion in modern liberalism. There is that "faith" that because we're right, because we know we're right and we know why we're right, than rationally others will agree with us. Perhaps that would be true if philosophy was required in every school, but until then, you cannot beat religious zeal in the "faith" department. The recent election is a testament to that.

As a result, I think people like Christopher Hitchens, who takes the same set of assumptions and facts that most liberals work with and arrive at a different conclusion, are supremely important. Some people looke at Christopher Hitchens and see a traitor to the liberal cause. That's not really true. Rather, he is more like a dissenter within the dissenters. He does the soul-searching that perhaps we should be doing more often.

Today, Hitchens's column at Slate is entitled "Bush's Secularist Triumph", which is sure to raise some ire in the liberal community. However, as always, Hitchens weaves a fascinating argument. The enemies of secularism, he warns, are not the fundimentalists, the homophobics, and the creationists...The real enemies of secularism are the Islamicists, those who wish to create fundimentalist states, such as Osama Bin Ladin. In that sense, he argues, Bush has done more for secularism than any modern liberal.

I'm not saying I agree with this argument totally. What I like about it is that Hitchens picks up on the fundimental sort of paradox in modern liberalism. Modern liberals are very quick to define a sense of objective right and wrong in domestic affairs. The Civil Rights movement is an excellent example here. The motivation behind that movement was clearly that racism and segregation were wrong, no matter what the argument. There was a very clear moral component at work there. And yet when it comes to foreign policy, the argument is that we should not interfere in other countries, that we should let other cultures define themselves. What happened to objective right and wrong? Hitchens does a very good job highlighting the problem here:

"From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda? Suicide murderers in Palestine—disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO—described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers."

Now, I don't for a second believe that the people that represent those views represent the core of modern liberalism. On the contrary, they are merely a very vocal minority. However, liberals have not disowned these people either, and that's Hitchens objection. If secularism really is the goal, and it is the goal because it breeds more peaceful, more open, and more free societies, why isn't just as much of a goal overseas as it is on American soil? Hitchens scolds that:

"Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. I dare say that there will be a few domestic confrontations down the road, over everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the display of Mosaic tablets in courtrooms and schools. I have spent all my life on the atheist side of this argument, and will brace for more of the same, but I somehow can't hear Ralph Ingersoll or Clarence Darrow being soft and cowardly and evasive if it came to a vicious theocratic challenge that daily threatens us from within and without."

And what we have here, is the very definition of dissent.

Friedman Gets It

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

I think it's fair to say that the NYT's Thomas Friedman gets the point...

My problem with the Christian fundamentalists supporting Mr. Bush is not their spiritual energy or the fact that I am of a different faith. It is the way in which he and they have used that religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad. I respect that moral energy, but wish that Democrats could find a way to tap it for different ends.

Whither Jesusland?

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

I found myself, after Tuesday night, doing some serious thinking. I suspect that many others did some serious thinking as well...

But now what we are seeing is an angry backlash, one that blames religion for Bush's victory. You may have seen the joke cartoon going around about seperating the U.S. into the "United States of Canada" and "Jesusland" to the south...

Here's a better example. This is what Jane Smiley said in a piece today on Slate:

Here is how ignorance works: First, they put the fear of God into you—if you don't believe in the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. Of course, the literal word of the Bible is tremendously contradictory, and so you must abdicate all critical thinking, and accept a simple but logical system of belief that is dangerous to question. A corollary to this point is that they make sure you understand that Satan resides in the toils and snares of complex thought and so it is best not try it.

Now, as an atheist, when I read something like that, I do have a degree of sympathy for that point of view...In my own mind, I have wrestled with ideas like this, that perhaps religion truly is the "opiate of the masses". There have been times when I have gotten seriously angry thinking about religion. However, I was quick to realize that hate and intolerance are not the answer here. My anger will change nothing. I will never gaze upon a United States where a majority of people consider themselves agnostic or atheistic. That's the way it is. I have accepted that I live in a country where religion plays a serious role in everything.

Would it be better if we lived in a more secular society? Yes, in fact it would. The important word there is society. A more secular society is not one where people are forced to give up their religion, but one where the government and the structure of society is neutral to one's religion.

Jane Smiley is wrong. The ignorance we are facing today in America is not religion, but the idea that only one religion can be truly American (in my mind I imagine a man with a southern accent speaking into a poor telephone reciever about how this is a "Christian nation" on some talk radio show...). The problem with "Jesusland" is not the "Jesus", it's the "land". The problem is that religious people don't seem to understand the value of not embedding a certain brand of faith in everything.

What the religious people in this country have to understand is that Seperation of Church and State is pro-religion. It's pro every religion, including that 66% of the world that isn't Christian. That's the idea. If one stops viewing policy in a "Jesus-centric" light, one sees that we need a government that is neutral to religious matters can does not make decisions based on an intrepretation of faith.

Attacking the faith of millions of Americans will not accomplish that goal.

55 Million

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

Before everyone gets too depressed with Bush winning...Just think, 55 million Americans got the message and voted against him. 55 million.

Ohio...*sigh*

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

What I state I live in...In a single night we ban gay marriage or anything that even looks like it after 5 shots of Jager and we give the election to Bush...

The urban areas tried, hell yes they tried...Cuyahoga County, Summit County, Franklin County, Mahoning County, Montgomery County...All the urban areas but Hamilton County basically. So, if you're unhappy with the President you have for the next four years, blame Cincinatti.

...And here is Robert Novak making an ass of himself on CNN...Now we have to listen to the increasingly assinine conservatives blow afterburner-heated air...Ugh...

Election Hysteria

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

It seems to me that there is some sort of rule that everyone has to go totally batshit insane right before a major election.

I mean, look at these quotes...

First off, George Will, who I have long respected as a thinker, despite his conservatism...But then he said this yesterday:

"Which candidate can be trusted to keep faith with these people? Surely not the man whose party is increasingly influenced by its Michael Moore faction.

As opposed to the man whose party has their head so firmly shoved up the fundimentalist Christian right's ass that he backed an ammendment to put homophobia into the Constitution? Mr. Will, the student of history he is, must see the utter idiocy of ammending the Constitution to restrict people's rights rather than to expand them. Will follows that up with this beauty...

"Kerry is more than merely comfortable with liberalism's preference for achieving its aims through judicial fiats rather than political persuasion — by litigation rather than legislation. That preference for change driven by activist judges rather than elected representatives expresses liberalism's condescension about the normal American's capacity for thriving without government tutelage."

I always wondered what GOP talking points would look like if they had SAT vocabulary words thrown in. Unfortunately, it's the "activist judges" talking point that gives it away.

However, George Will's comments are peanuts compared to this...On the 27th, right-wing blogger Roger Simon informed the world that...

If the Kerry does win, the mainstream media will have gotten him elected with their biased coverage and they will pay for it more than they could imagine. And it will be the blogosphere and you, our supporters, who will make them pay. Our strength will grow incremently with a Kerry victory in terms of influence and even economic power. And both will be at the expense of the mainstream media. Yes, we too have "plans."

That's not only hillarious, it's a more than a bit disturbing. So, Mr. Simon, Abu Graib should mean nothing to the American people? 380 tons of missing world class high explosive should mean nothing to the American people? The complete lack of any weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq should mean nothing to the American people? The hillarious refusal of the Bush Administration to admit it's faults should mean nothing to the American people? Nevermind the implication of some sort of revenge for the decision of the people. He seems to be missing the point of democracy here. Any way you look at it, that quote is positively psychotic.

The news isn't all bad...Contrarian and occasional Bush supporter Christopher Hitchens had this to say today:

"Neither electoral outcome can alter that. It's absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it's unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There's no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end."

Someone talking sense on the eve of an election?...The explanation here is that Hitchens isn't yet a naturalized citizen and cannot vote for President yet...Thus, he must be immune to election hysteria.

Re: Documentaries

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

Hmmm...I have a class to get here, so I'll make this quick.

I think the root of my problem with F9/11 is not the politics of the movie (I mean, all Moore wants us to do is vote for Kerry, and I'm already doing that for my own reasons). My real problem is that my intellectual life has been very much shaped and molded by excellent documentaries...Cosmos, Connections, The Day The Universe Changed, Ascent of Man, and many others have all been very important influences for me. All of those series, while they merely stated a series of facts, did so with the purpose of advancing the notion of a more secular, science based society...The idea of trusting in technology and not theology. In that respect, they are all very controversial works.

The beauty of them though, is that they were, under microscopic inspection, right with the details. They create a sort of thread with fact and history and weave it into a tapestry of a worldview. You can challenge the message, but you can't challenge the facts. It works like any well reasoned argument.

There's a bond of trust there between the viewer and the filmmaker.

Morris's Fog of War does something similar in the realm of political dissent. There were very obvious parallels there between the historical view he presented of the Vietnam War, and the mistakes that were being made then, and then the mistakes that Morris saw happening with our current policy in Iraq.

Michael Moore rips all that to shreds. All he cares about is the message, and he will make any accusation, use any innuendo or mold any circumstancial evidence that he needs to produce that message. "Documentaries" like that belittle and soil the legacy of the documentary format by breaking the bond of trust with the viewer. Moore doesn't even make an attempt to establish that trust with the viewer.

Moore has defended this problem by claiming that his works are comedy, not documentary. That, in itself is bullshit. He won an Oscar for a "documentary" (somehting that confoundes me to this day). Everyone knows he makes "documentaries"...He cannot simply change that by claiming a different format. As long as he is making "documentaries", he still soiling the format, no matter what excuse he uses.

If Moore wants to make brilliant, brilliant comedy, he can go right ahead. But as of yet, he has not. He's still making these petty "documentaries".

Now, the people who have decided to counter Moore with Moore-like material, are just as much part of the problem as Moore is. They are solving nothing.

Stolen Honor

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

I was flipping channels today, and what do I see but an extended ad for "Stolen Honor", the anti-Kerry documentary. Told by the lumberjacks that were really there, it tells the story of Jane Fonda and Ho Chi Min's love child, the viscious giant John Kerry. Kerry grew up to be big and strong, and one day, with his big ax and his ox named Blue, he singlehandedly sabotaged the Vietnam War. Years later, he would run for president against Jesus Chr^H^H^H^H^H^H^HGeorge W. Bush. All the whole during this ad, there was a giant banner at the bottom of the screen to go to NewsMax to buy the full video...You know, as a keepsake, for the children.

It would seem that in this day of miracle and wonder, modern politics has created a new art form, the shitty political film. Spurred on by Michael Moore's Triumph of the Wi^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Fahrenheit 9/11, now it seems like everyone with political diahreha has the sudden urge to become a filmmaker ("I really want to direct!"). Something tells me this is a bad trend.

Piro Brings the Funny

I'm a regular MegaTokyo reader...I even have the Kimiko blanket (which is quite the blanket, I might add). However, lately MegaTokyo has been dragging...I'm not sure what's been wrong with it, it's just seems like it got bogged down in telling the minutiae of the storyline for weeks with what seems to be no real action. I had thought perhaps that Piro had lost sight of that other side of MegaTokyo; the humor.

But Piro seems to have found that in the last few strips. Today, he really nails it. The funny is definitely back.

"They want to be free!"

Promise

I, Anthropic, being of sound mind and body, hereby promise:

1. In the event that I decide to leave a forum, I shall not make several posts where I have a hissy fit and then proceed to demonize honorable posters, all the while making myself look like a PSYCHO BITCH.

2. I shall never reappear in a forum in the guise of a white gansta' rappa' who ain't 'fraid to walk the streets of Compton.

Not Surprising, but...

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

While it's not all that suprising, the New York Times has endorsed John Kerry for President...

However, what is surprising is how scathing the criticism of Bush is in the editorial:

The president who lost the popular vote got a real mandate on Sept. 11, 2001. With the grieving country united behind him, Mr. Bush had an unparalleled opportunity to ask for almost any shared sacrifice. The only limit was his imagination.

He asked for another tax cut and the war against Iraq.

Hopefully, Kerry's speechwritters are taking notes...Later, the Times goes on to say:

We have specific fears about what would happen in a second Bush term, particularly regarding the Supreme Court. The record so far gives us plenty of cause for worry. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous Justice Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush selection, J. Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives must be subordinate to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to Nazis.

It might be a little late in coming, but I think it's pretty clear that the mainstream press has woken up and smelled the coffee.

In other news, my birthplace's paper of record, the Akron Beacon Journal, has also endorsed Kerry:

George W. Bush has embarked on paths both at home and abroad that depart radically from the concept of sound stewardship.

Yep, that pretty much sums up my opinion too.

Ohio State Issue 1

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

Guess what's going to be on the Ohio ballot on Nov. 2nd...

Issue 1. Proposed Consititutional Amendment -- State of Ohio (Proposed by Initiative Petition - A majority yes vote is necessary for passage)

Be it Resolved by the People of the State of Ohio:

That the Constitution of the State of Ohio be amended by adopting a section to be designated as Section 11 of Article XV thereof, to read as follows:

Article XV

Section 11. Only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this state and its political subdivisions. This state and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage.

This has got to be one of the stupidest ideas this state has ever had (and we've had many). Now, the first sentence is simply the standard boilerplate banning of gay marriage. That's bad enough, but the second sentence really takes the cake. Look carefully at that...It would ban, in the State of Ohio, any kind of civil union for anyone. Not just civil unions between homosexuals, but any kind of civil unions. So, as I understand this, it would ban any sort of law about common law marriages.

This is assinine.

Now, I can see where people, with their cultural ties to religious traditions, would want to restrict the tradition of marriage to heterosexuals. I understand that argument, and I think it's a load of crap, but I get the idea.

However, these dodos that want to ban civil unions have lost their minds. That crosses the line from a cultural argument to an argument built purely on hate.

On the one hand, I'm a little worried this made it on the ballot, but on the other hand, my no vote of this abomination is a real opportunity to tell the religious right to go fark themselves.

Re: Swing Voters

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

It would have been funny if one of the "undecided" voters at the debate had gotten up to ask his question, looked down at the notecard, looked up and said "Aw shit, I just decided," and sat back down.

Writer's Block

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

Andy has generously asked me to write for this blog. While he generally goes for the satirical angle on politics, my style leans more towards political ranting.

So, for the last few days, I've been sitting here thinking about what to rant about...And it's not that there's any lack of things to rant about. On the contrary, there's far too much. I could rant about the fear-mongering on the Left about Bush reinstating the Draft, or the fear-mongering on the Right about liberals wanting to "ban the Bible". I could rant about how things will get worse politically before they get better.

However, those are mostly things that annoy me. There are also things that simply scare me. Things like this:

Gays and lesbians should not be allowed to teach in public schools, Republican Jim DeMint said Sunday in a U.S. Senate debate.

The remark came late in the first debate between DeMint and Democrat Inez Tenenbaum — a testy and acrimonious hour that broke little new ground on their positions on most issues.

DeMint, a Greenville congressman, said the government should not endorse homosexuality and “folks teaching in school need to represent our values.”

Tenenbaum, the state education superintendent, called DeMint’s position “un-American.”

DeMint said after the debate that he would not require teachers to admit to being gay, but if they were “openly gay, I do not think that they should be teaching at public schools.”

My first reaction is to analyze this in a logical fashion. Where exactly does one draw the line at what constitutes "our values"? Who exactly is "our"? Would someone who is openly an atheist be allowed to teach in Mr. DeMint's schools? What about a teacher who is openly socialist?

But then I stop myself. It's useless to thinking about this logically. DeMint, and those like him (the Santorum's of the world) lack any sort of real logic and are being driven by fundimentalist, ideological hate.

Finally!

For about as long as Mozilla/Browser aka Phoenix aka Firebid aka Firefox has been in existance, people have complained that the Tabbed Borwser is incomplete. There was no way within the browser to force new windows to open in tabs and get links from external applications to open in new tabs. A number of well known extentions were created to fix this problem, but it's always been a pain in the ass; something else to have to teach people about in the browser. Until, yesterday:



Firefox 1.0 will finally fix this...It's a beautiful thing...*sniff*...

/me wipes tears from cheek.


The Anthropic Review of Books

This is a feature I want to do regularly...I tend to read a lot of books, so it only makes sense to talk about them. This first book review may seem strange, but this book has been annoying me lately:

A Different Mirror by Ronald Takai.

First, let me point out that this is the text for my Ethnics class. Some people have a problem finding out that the past was shitty, especially for those who were not white. Personally, I don't have a problem with this learning these things. History is history whether we like it or not, and undeniably the song and dance show we're given in public school glosses over a lot of the more unpleasent events in our past.

The crux of my problem with A Different Mirror is twofold:

1. Missing the Point

You may recall that the criticism of traditional history texts is that they lack substantive integration of race as a driving factor in history. A Different Mirror has the opposite problem...It covers almost nothing but race. On the one hand, I understand books have to specialize, but there's almost no discussion in this book of the context the book covers occur within.

As an annotated list of bad things, this book certainly succeeds. However, if this book is intended to be a racial history of the United States it fails. I would very much prefer something that integrates with the series of events we've traditionally been given in history classes. If regular history texts say: "Everyone was happy an prosperous in America, and then there was the Civi War. And then everyone was happy and prosperous again," then A Different Mirror would be "White people did bad things, then there was the Civil War, then white people went back to doing bad things". Quite frankly, both views are bullshit.

What I want is history, damn it. For example, the Civil War shouldn't appear out of nowhere in this book. There should be a much wider discussion of the sectionalism that was fueled by the derisive nature of slavery in America. There's almost no mention of the Underground Railroad in this book. In A Different Mirror, outside events generally don't exist unless they can be somehow spun to condemn whites. I shouldn't need another history text just to get some context.

In this book, what we already know barely exists. A good example here is the section Takaki devotes to Thomas Jefferson. Unsurprisingly, Jefferson was a bit of a bastard when it comes to race. On the other hand, Takaki seems more eager to bash him then try to integrate Jefferson's racism and hypocracy into his larger character. There are magnificent contridictions at work within this man. If this was a novel, Jefferson would be an awesome character; torn between enlightenment and utter brutality. We can't see that when Takaki is content with only providing us with a one facet of Jefferson. Mr. Hyde is missing Dr. Jekyll.

2. Cut the Crap

A more serious problem in A Different Mirror is Takaki's habit of stuffing so many quotes from so many sources into a single paragraph that you haven't a clue what the hell he's talking about. If he just wanted to list shit, he should have made a book full of bullet points. If he's got a point to make here, then these sources belong in footnotes so they're not cluttering up everything else. Takaki seems to have a hard-on for synthesis.

In another class, one of the readings was Andrew Jackson's written justification of his decision to force the Indians from the eastern US (which directly led to the "Trail of Tears"). I was struck by how disturbing this thing was. This is akin to Hitler justifying the "Final Solution". Takaki must have been aware of this document. If he was smart, he have just dropped this whole piece into his book (it certainly fits) and not shove bits and pieces of Jackson's words in with a dozen other sources. Let the man dig his own grave.

Final Judgement:
A Different Mirror by Ronald Takai
Score: (**---) Two out of Five Stars

Really, It's Not My Mind That's Warped But the World

It looks like political blogs just came in fashion!

This being campaign season (isn't it funny that campaign season and hurricane season coincide?), there's all sorts of political angst being displayed around campus. So today, for the second day in a row, I walk past this guy screaming anti-Bush stuff in the middle of the sidewalk. I sort of laughed as I walked by. Frankly, I'm voting for Kerry (that's a whole nother post). But, at the same time, the level of political obnoxiousness in this country has reached a critical level.

For example, take this article from my fair school's newspaper:

Discussion of real issues is missing

You would think with a title like that, it would be a fair piece about just how obnoxious things really are...Nooooooo...Take a look at it...That's got to be one of the most hillariously vitriolic things I've ever read.

Why am I getting so fired up by some goddamned "guest editorial" in a college newspaper? I think that's best answered by this quote from Christopher Hitchens:

What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around?

Within the last month, we've had Dick Cheney tell the American people that if they vote for Kerry, they'll get another serious terror attack and shortly after we've had John Kerry claim that voting for Bush will bring back the draft. This isn't the traditional mudslinging of campaigns of yore. This is serious. This is a nation waking up to the fact that shit has hit the fan. Politicians spew things like that only when they know that people will believe them (like the author of that trash editorial linked above).

I feel as if I am not contemplating a political landscape here, but a Dali painting.

The Clash of Civilizations

Read these two quotes and let them sort of roll around in your brain for a few minutes:

Quote #1:

"''What if Mohamed Atta had been raised on soul-stretching questions instead of simple certitudes?''"

-Irshad Manji

Quote #2:

"I personally find when there's a confrontation between everything I love -- scientific inquiry, reason, cosmopolitanism, secularism, emancipation of women (and those are the things I love, by the way) -- and everything I hate -- Stone Age fascism, religious bullshit, and so on -- it's a no-brainer. I know exactly which side I'm on, and I knew right away. I felt exhilaration on the 11th of September, and I feel slightly ashamed to say that, in view of the fact that so many people lost their lives that day. But when the day was over, and I had been through the gamut of rage and disgust and nausea and so on -- not fear, I will claim for myself. I'm not afraid of people like that. I'm very angered by them. But there was something I hadn't analyzed when I went into in myself, and I was pleased to find it was exuberance. I thought, "Okay, right. I'll never get bored with fighting against these people." And their defeat will be absolute, it will be complete."

-Christopher Hitchens

I remember that same exuberance Christopher Hitchens refers to after 9/11. In those weeks after the tragedy, there was a vibe going around that we had to change the world to stop this from happening again. That was the exuberance. There was a sudden realization. Irshad Manji got it right; the problem with the Middle East is that their current culture is dominated by fundamentalist thinking that doesn't allow anything in the way of free and open thought. By definition fundamentalist cultures arbitarily set their own moral compass. Thus they can have no independant moral consciousness.

In a free and open society, free expression means that there is always a group of people who believe that the government, or even society in general, is wrong. This keeps the debate open at all times. The effect of this debate is the moral consciousness. We are often told of the value of concensus. The passing of the PATRIOT Act was concensus. A real moral compass emerges from debate.

I have no doubt that right about now some reader will exclaim, "Anthropic you idiot, Bush himself is a fundamentalist!". That's not the point. While I agree that we are not a society free of fundamentalist demons, there are several magnitudes of difference between having a few fundamentalist issues debated in your society and having fundamentalist values thurst upon every crevice of life. Remember, even as you read this there is someone arguing for the legalization of gay marriage or railing against the PATRIOT Act. Whatever failings America may have, the level of public debate today is high. A fundamentalist culture would not even allow such expression to exist.

This lack of expression, this lack of debate, makes fundamentalist-led cultures dangerous to modern societies. Thus, Christopher Hitchen's point up there. Islamic fundamentalists despise everything we stand for. If we want to peacefully co-exist with these people then the long-term solution, for the good of civilization, is to turn the Middle East around by opening up their culture.

At this point in the debate, someone always raises that dictum of political correctness: "We shouldn't be judging other cultures!" And the, I shake my head in disagreement. We should not be in the business of judging other cultures...But, when a culture thick with fundamentalist dogma lashes out as we saw on 9/11, they have judged themselves.

I should stress here that my comments should be read carefully. I am not saying we should destroy the Middle East. I am not saying that we should destroy Islam. I am not saying that the Middle East is inferior to our culture. I am saying that we should not tollerate fundamentalist cultures to lash out at us, and that if the world is ever going to grow more peaceful, we ahve to open up these cultures.

And that is what we are trying to do in Iraq. Iraqis in Baghdad are now going to Internet cafes. The price of goods has radically dropped. The process of opening up their culture has begun. The Iraqis are a strong, industrious people. Given a decade or so, they will thrive, and if we have succeeded, they will created a free, strong culture in the Middle East.

Let us not forget that Western culture was once ruled by fanatical fundamentalists and that there was a time when our cultural progenitors lashed out against more open cultures. That was the Crusades. And yet, today we can look back at the Crusades as insane. We can do that today because Western culture was brought kicking and screaming out of the Dark Ages by the great minds that drove the Rennaisance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. From there, a more secular, a more sucessful, and more intellectual society grew.

It is clear though, that today we can not wait for analogies of those events to happen in the Middle East. In a world where we are all interdependant on each other to sustain our civilization(s), we cannot tolerate cultures that would create 9/11s. That is the reason why invading Iraq was justified. The flood of outside goods and ideas will envigorate Iraq. They can become the catalyst for change in the Middle East. The full impact of intervening in Iraq will take decades to mature.

The problem, of course, is that this line of thought has appeared nowhere in mainstream politcal thought. It would seem that most people view 9/11 as a crisis that has passed. You hear plenty of talk about the economy, you hear plenty of talk about gay marriage, and you hear plenty of talk about "WMD", that incidental dead-end of this whole debate. Where is the talk of 9/11? Perhaps Bush blew it. Perhaps people would rather not revisit the horrors of 9/11 in their minds. What scares me is that 9/11, a recent event that has to rank in the top 10 most important days in the history of America, is not even an issue in this year's presidental campaign. How is it that Vietnam has entered into nearly every discussion of American foreign policy since at least 1968, but 9/11 barely registers these days?

Well, I take that back...At least a few people realize the significance of 9/11. Here's how Christopher Hitchens answered when Tavis Smiley recently asked him if President Bush deserves to be reelected:

"[sighs] Well, it's a tough call for me. I wasn't-I certainly wasn't for his election the first time round. I didn't want Albert Gore, either, and I'm glad it wasn't Gore, by the way. One has to face that fact. I must say I'm a bit of a single issue voter on this. I want to be absolutely certain that there's a national security team that wakes up every morning wondering how to take the war to the enemy. I don't have that confidence about any of the Democratic candidates, but I think that a Kerry-Edwards ticket would be made up of people who have shown that they are serious on this point, yeah. So I'm not dogmatically for the reelection of the President, but I'm for applying that test as a voter."

-Christopher Hitchens

I've got to say that is precisely where I stand as well. I disagree with much of Bush's domestic policy, and the specter of pissing on the Constitution with a ammendment banning gay marriage is abhorant to me. However, post-9/11, the question of "how to take the war to the enemy" is THE issue for me. I will probably not decide who I vote for until I fill out my ballot, but that issue will weigh heavily in my mind when I do.

Cosmos

I recently was engaged in a, shall we say, heated exchange about science and religion with some pretty hardcore religious/anti-science folk. At various points in the argument people accused me of making science my religion...Now, this is something I'd generally disagree with, because science is in no way a dogma, but I admit I do feel what could easily be spiritual feelings toward science. The sheer vastness and complexity of the Universe, and our ability to understand it astounds me. However, what I feel toward science is an deep appreciation that is fundamental to my being, but it is not a need to worship.

Recently, I've been watching Carl Sagan's 1980 science documentary/philosophical journey, Cosmos. If you're old enough, you may have seen this when it was originally broadcast on PBS, or if you're my age you may have seen/slept through it at school. When it comes to forming belief systems, we all have things which influenced us to a considerable extent. Cosmos is certainly among mine. In 13 hour-long hours Sagan walks the viewer through the rational, ordered Universe (thus the title) that has been discovered by science. Furthermore, it presents his vision of a world where the "demons" of hate, fear, and ignorance had been swept away and people truly began to appreciate the world around them and the power of the human mind to understand it. The purpose of the science in Cosmos is to introduce the viewer to what we know already, and the vastness of what we still don't understand.

The point is that what drives scientists forward are the things they don't know. Some religious people are content in believing that everything they need to know is held in some sacred text. Scientists are the polar opposite. They look out into space and crave the mysteries they haven't solved. They look to the future. There is a satisfaction in knowing that their work will take many lifetimes.

Some religious people talk about sacred truths. Scientists will tell you that nothing is sacred, but perhaps some will tell you that there is much wisdom to be infered from science. Here is my version of one of the pieces of wisdom that Sagan presents in Cosmos:

Long, long ago (on the order of perhaps, 10 billion years) a great star began to die. It's supply of hydrogen fuel was nearly spent and it began to collapse...As it collapsed, the pressures in it's center were so intense that the spent fuel (that is, lighter elements like helium and lithium) began another cycle of fusion. Heavier elements such as oxygen and yes, carbon were created. As the pressures became more intense the star grew closer to death. Suddenly, in a bright flash that would be seen by thousands of stars for thousands of years, the star exploded. During the explosion temperatures were high enough to form heavier elements in small amounts, such as gold and even uranium.

The explosion spewed these new heavier elements out into space, where some of them became part of a nebula where new stars were formed. One of those stars was our Sun. As it wandered away from it's birthplace, it took with it a great cloud of gas and dust, ripe with the heavier elements of dead stars. Gravity and angular momentum soon sent this cloud spinning, but rather unevenly. There were some places were chunks of dust grew and formed planets.

On one particular planet, carbon atoms formed very complex organic molecules. Over 4.5 billion years of evolution, those molecules evolved into cells, and eventually into lifeforms that type on Internet message boards.

It doesn't matter what color you are, what country you're from, or what language you speak. The material that composes all of us all came from the same place; a long dead star. We are all bound together by this fact.

Consider this piece of wisdom carefully: We are all made out of starstuff.