Matt Taibbi: GOP gets what it has coming

Matt Taibbi sums up what the GOP has been offering to America:

[W]hile watching the debates last night that it finally hit me: This is justice. What we have here are chickens coming home to roost. It's as if all of the American public's bad habits and perverse obsessions are all coming back to haunt Republican voters in this race: The lack of attention span, the constant demand for instant gratification, the abject hunger for negativity, the utter lack of backbone or constancy (we change our loyalties at the drop of a hat, all it takes is a clever TV ad): these things are all major factors in the spiraling Republican disaster. Most importantly, though, the conservative passion for divisive, partisan, bomb-tossing politics is threatening to permanently cripple the Republican party. They long ago became more about pointing fingers than about ideology, and it's finally ruining them.

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Festivities, Faith, but not Stupidity

At the end of a social event on the weekend before Mardi Gras, a casual friend asked a surprising question. I was bedecked with beads, primarily in purple and gold. This Catholic friend comes up and says something like, "Why are you all dressed up for the Christian holiday? Don't you believe that anyone who believes in God is stupid?" Dumbfounded. It took me a moment to parse this and compose a reply. As we were all heading out the door, I didn't have time to fully answer all the implied misconceptions. So I said something on the order of, "I don't think that; I know many smart people who are faithful." Let me first detail a minor misconception. Sociologically, rituals are important. Mardi Gras (literally Fat Tuesday, also Shrove Tuesday) was adopted by Christians from the earlier Carnival, and Saturnalia before that. It is a long standing late winter festival ending the season of harvest plenty in the days when food preservation was limited, and entering the lean period of rationing until the spring produce appeared (greens, lambs, milk, etc). And festivities are fun, whatever the nominal purpose. The Holy Roman church had so successfully rebranded all the pagan festivals that most Christians are unaware of the deeper not-Jesus purpose behind them, even as they embrace all the pre-Christian trappings. But the big issue is the perception that I, an an atheist, think that Christians (the majority faith at present time and place) are stupid. Many converted Atheists do vehemently decry their former faith and deride its practitioners, as do Dawkins and Hitchens. My parents converted from religious to irreligious, and so I was raised without a particular god and with their lower expectations of people of faith. But that didn't stick. I grew up as a closeted atheist. On Sunday mornings I was dragged to a secular Sunday School where I had to wear jacket and tie from the age of 5. It didn't fool my church going peers. I opted for the less hated liberal-Jew label that try to explain that all invisible friends seemed equally improbable to me. I endured various epithets in public schools hurled at non-Christians by the God fearing. But as I grew older and my peers become more reasonable, I started talking to them about such things. I was actually less surprised to find people of deep faith at my fairly-high-standards college than I was to find sports fans. One of my closest college friends was a Young Earth, Born Again sort. I admit that I would sometimes light his fuse in a room full of geology or astronomy types, just to see to what heights his rationalizations could wax. (Anyone else visualizing Ceiling wax?) I have also been reading arguments from both sides of the God conjecture since puberty. The problem is not whether one side is smarter, but which is the set of assumptions on which their sense of reality rests. Either cause and effect are real and the universe is knowable through a continuing and contentious process of observation, documentation, and modeling (science), or else the continually meddling god of Christianity is possible, as was declared by ancient authority. The majority of the American founders were Deists who believed that if there was a creator God, he did not meddle in the day-to-day affairs of men. I can accept that God, but still don't believe in it. Cosmologists and astronomers are pushing his creative acts farther and farther to the margins. So although I acknowledge the high correlation between less-learned people and deep faith, I do not assume that having faith implies that people are stupid.

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End the use of long-term solitary confinement in Illinois!

Hey all. I haven't been posting since last summer, mostly because I've been drowning in graduate school duties. One of these duties has been interning at Chicago's Cook County Jail. There, I sit in on group therapy sessions for inmates with drug-related offenses. I've been consistently touched by the philosophical and psychological depth of these men, their gentleness and the span of their regrets. These are men who will sit down and opine for hours on topics you wouldn't expect low-SES drug dealers and addicts to have much knowledge of: gender identity is a big topic, for example (these guys live firsthand the consequences of masculinity). And when it comes to living with shame or regret, these guys are almost the best resource you can find. The only place where you can find more affecting people, I think, is at prisons. I've been volunteering for a Chicago-based group called Tamms Year Ten, which advocates for prisoners housed in long-term solitary confinement. I write and read inmates' letters, respond to their requests for photos and magazines, and read their countless reports of abuse-- from medical staff, from Corrections Officers, from mail room staff, and from the state itself. Let's be clear on what "long-term" solitary confinement means. These men at Tamms are housed alone for 23-hours a day, with zero human contact, for decades. Some have been locked up alone for 23-28 years. [More . . . ]

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On not making people pay for things they morally oppose

Bill Moyers applauds the Presidents position on mandating birth control coverage:

The president did something agile and wise the other day. And something quite important to the health of our politics. He reached up and snuffed out what some folks wanted to make into a cosmic battle between good and evil. No, said the president, we're not going to turn the argument over contraception into Armageddon, this is an honest difference between Americans, and I'll not see it escalated into a holy war. So instead of the government requiring Catholic hospitals and other faith-based institutions to provide employees with health coverage involving contraceptives, the insurance companies will offer that coverage, and offer it free.
At Huffpo (same link as above), a writer named Michael Dodd, perturbed that many conservative politicians oppose even this compromise, turns their argument (why should citizens be made to pay for things that they morally oppose) on its head:
Okay, people, those of you who think it is all about "why should we pay for anything?" Why should churches NOT pay taxes? Why do I have to support THEM by paying taxes so that the roads to their buildings are built and the snow plowed? Why do I have to support churches who use the money they save by not paying taxes to pay advertisin­g firms to produce anti-equal­ity ads to suppress equal rights for tax-paying citizens who happen to be LGBT? Why should my taxes make it possible for them to use the money saved to pay salaries to lawyers to shield pedophiles­?

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Author Jessica Valenti discusses the Purity Myth

Jessica Valenti is author of The Purity Myth. She has argued that conservatives who are pushing hard for virginity and chastity (with virginity proms and virginity pledges) are sexualizing women every bit as much as our pop culture, though in an opposite direction. She argues that women should be judged by what they say and do, because of their intelligence and kindness. "Our moral compass does not lie between our legs, but that is what the purity myth is telling young women." And by the way, Media Education Foundation has released a new video about The Purity Myth. Here's the trailer: What follows is a short interview of Jessica Valenti:

Continue ReadingAuthor Jessica Valenti discusses the Purity Myth