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...Skepticism
Written by Austin Monday, 16 November 2009 08:00
The Obama administration doesn't appear to be any more committed the rule of law or justice than the Bush administration was. In some ways they are arguably worse, since the Bush administration didn't make any effort to hide their commitment to raw power and authoritarian privilege. Every week seems to bring new examples of the Obama administration ignoring or even undermining justice and the rule of law in exchange for expanded, arbitrary power of the executive branch.
This past week has been especially bad, even for the American government, with multiple examples of behavior that we should only characterize oppressive, authoritarian regimes. No government is perfect, of course, but we are seeing a consistent pattern of behavior which cannot be excused as minor missteps. What's more, we are seeing foreign governments living up to the ideals America used to champion while we are left to whine about how upholding principles of justice makes things inconvenient for Americans.
Written by Austin Sunday, 15 November 2009 08:00
Actions speak louder than words, which means you can tell a lot more about what a person truly values by looking at what they do rather than merely at what they say. We can, though, also learn a lot by looking at a person's contradictions. No one is perfectly consistent, and while some inconsistencies may be due to outright hypocrisy, far more are likely due to blindness — probably a self-defense mechanism to prevent us from truly seeing how our real values may be pulling us in a direction different from what our professed values are.
I think we're seeing this in the contradictions between how people treat America's foreign wars versus how they treat domestic health care. The justifications being offered by conservatives and "moderates" for continuing wars in the Middle East are ignored when it comes to questions about providing domestic health care. So what are the real values which lie behind it all?
Written by Austin Saturday, 14 November 2009 08:00
One disturbing feature of extremist rhetoric is how it creates such a heated environment that the only way for people to get quickly noticed is to ramp up their own extremism. This creates a vicious feedback loop in which extremism constantly fuels more extremism and extremist rhetoric itself exacerbates people's actual feelings and attitudes. I think this is what we are seeing among Republicans and conservatives today.
I'm pretty sure that they weren't quite so insane a few months ago, though the potential was surely there. Now, though, their own rhetoric is causing them to get worse and worse. The latest examples are of one conservative Republican saying that Barack Obama is an enemy of all humanity and another conservative Republican strongly suggesting that the military launch a coup against Barack Obama. Tell me again, who were the people suggesting not too long ago that even disagreement with the president qualified as treasonous, unpatriotic, and unAmerican?
Written by Austin Friday, 13 November 2009 08:00
If there was ever any doubt that conservatives are pathologically obsessed with homosexuality, those doubts should have been put to rest in the wake of the recent "Values Voters" summit. No sane person could ever imagine that heterosexual pornography would "cause" homosexuality, but for the Christian Right that connection is just as natural as connecting homosexuality with murder, shoplifting, and bestiality.
You don't have to be insane or mentally deranged in order to be part of an extremist political or religious movement, but the Christian Right seems to be working hard to weld them together permanently. This is a large part of why they act like they are trying to move beyond the boundaries of satire or parody — no matter how bizarre of an idea you come up with to ridicule them, chances are someone now or in the near future will propose it in all seriousness.
Written by Austin Thursday, 12 November 2009 09:24
Sex sells, but sex seems to sell best to those who claim to hate sex the most. In a culture that is comfortable with sexuality and doesn't try to treat sex as something forbidden, there isn't as much value in trying to associate cars, beer, or anything else with scantily clad women (except maybe lingerie?). Sex becomes most valuable as a commodity when it's kept taboo on various levels. Is that why sexually explicit adult entertainment is such a big hit among conservatives and especially conservative Christians — or is it instead the case that they work so hard to ban it because they know they are more tempted by it than others?
Perhaps both are true, but I'll doubt we'll ever know for sure. All I can say with some confidence is that people generally, and I think conservatives in particular, seem far more obsessed over that which they claim to hate than is psychologically healthy. The connection here is so strong that it might be possible to predict what they hate the most by what they spend the most time fussing over and what they spend the most fussing over by what they claim to hate most. Or, if you don't think that's much of a prediction, we may be able to predict what they'll soon be spending more time fussing over by any increases in their protests about what they hate.
Let's look at some of the examples of his phenomenon...
Written by Austin Thursday, 24 September 2009 16:19
Given the speed at which America's looney right creates new silliness to be outraged over, the manufactured controversy over Barack Obama's speech to school children is already old news after just a few days. I think it's worth returning to, though, because certain aspects of it are illustrative of problems in the right-wing generally. It's not surprising that any one issue would express deeper, systemic issues, but the school "indoctrination" issue may do this a bit better than most.
It's counter-productive for ulterior motives and deeper agendas to be so readily visible, but this particular outrage was also hastily contrived. Most "culture war" issues that the far right has pushed were developed over the course of many years, so any early missteps could be easily covered over by consistently using the correct framing later on. Complaints about Barack Obama's speech to school students had to be mobilized very quickly, and there wasn't enough time to coordinate the best excuses that didn't make them look ridiculous.
As a result, more of their true feelings may ultimately be revealed than is typical.
Written by Austin Tuesday, 22 September 2009 11:22
People bringing guns to town hall meetings and presidential events has received a fair amount of attention, but I think it deserves quite a bit more. Although the people carrying weapons to political events probably seem like little more than fringe elements of an already a lunatic fringe, they may be better described as an early warning of far deeper and systemic problems in America. If we don't sit up and take notice now, we may be forced to do so when it's too late.
America has benefited from a relative lack of purely domestic violence over the past decades; we may not have been violence-free, but it's also not been a daily concern for most people. Carrying weapons to political events threatens to turn all that around because weapons are inherently violent — even when they remain unused in a holster, they communicate an unmistakable message of potential violence. Indeed, that's clearly part of the point of carrying them: to communicate a message of violence for the purpose of intimidation.
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