Take down the monuments

All over America, war memorials manifest and encourage pride in Americans who fought obediently in every stupid and even vicious war the elites have wished on us.

Filial piety properly motivates headstones for our fathers who died in battle, whether admirably, tragically, or even shamefully.

But for the sake of truth, for the sake of our contemporaries, and for the sake of those to come, we ought not to be commemorating as though with pride wars we can only regret, and much less those we must regret with shame.

Since the American Revolution not a single war the US has fought was necessary and some have been shameful.

Even the Revolution is questionable.

Only candor can give any hope that our future will not resemble our bellicose past.

And monuments to past wars all over the country undermine and contradict that candor.

Take down the monuments.

If the feeling cannot be avoided that some form of public commemoration is necessary let the Holocaust Museum provide the model.

But it’s best to skip it, altogether.

Yes, the mission will fail

BBC News - Why Taliban are so strong in Afghanistan

What the heck.

It was doomed from the start.

A fool’s errand.

Just another Vietnam.

Really, really big money for the military-industrial complex, though, hasn't it been?

And that was always the main point for so many who supported the neocon wars.

Halliburton was just the tip of the iceberg.

Best to be an ungodly nation

Taliban behead 17 for mixed party

OK, even KOS would agree the Christian right wouldn’t go that far.

Rod Dreher, apostle of liberty. Not.

Liberals control the culture

Don’t be so sure.

Not everyone who mocks religion or rejects religious authorities is a liberal.

Not everyone who refuses to comply with the hyper-repressed morality of Christian officialdom is a liberal.

Not every murderer, rapist, extortionist, thief, or criminal of any sort is a liberal.

Not every director, writer, or actor whose characters are criminals is a criminal, himself.

Not every science-fiction writer is an alien.

Many of Hollywood’s most notorious inhabitants are not liberals, at all.

Ours is indeed a culture that has largely, though by no means fully, escaped the repressive power of the clergy, thrust aside by the sexual and cultural revolutions of the 20th Century with massive and indispensable aid from the Warren Court and its ideological – that is to say, liberal – descendants.

And all of that is to the good.

But it does not mean our culture is controlled by, populated by, or exclusively inhabited by liberals.

If that were so we would have no fear for this fall's election, and perhaps no opponents!

It only means it is not controlled by Christian clergy exercising their repressive power through the law.

Note well what Dreher and those with whom he sympathizes actually want, with all their whining.

They want people to be made to stop laughing at them.

They want people to be forced to at least pretend to respect them.

They want people’s expression to be subject to a clerical censorship insulating them from not only obvious unbelief but disrespect.

They want culture high and low to be made to conform to Christianity’s stupid and fantastically repressive morality.

And maybe more than anything else they want sex driven out of TV, films, plays, music, and all our culture, back into hiding where it was in the good old days of, say, the American 1950s.

Or maybe the 1650s, in New England.

You want to a better view of what they want?

Check out the burgeoning Christian fiction and Christian inspiration sections at your local B&N, whose space is otherwise more and more taken up with toys and games and less and less with books.

And you, reader?

As for me, I want no such thing.

As for Dreher, post-Christian sexuality in America just fills him with disgust and loathing.

And shame, he implies.

And maybe fear.

'Sexual Careers' in Late Roman America

As I said.

Boo, hoo.

Oh, and a tip of the hat to KOS.

Rod Dreher, American Taliban.

Booman asked, What about that 21 year sentence in Norway?

serious question

This was my reply.

- - - - -

Public safety would be best served if he were executed quickly and cheaply.

The Weimar Republic used a small, easily transported guillotine.

I assume that is not possible, but still.

Dead men never do it again.

Others might.

Given, however, that capital punishment is not possible, transportation for life to some place from which he cannot reasonably be expected to return, or anyway cannot return on pain of death, might work out well enough.

Who doubts Norway has wilderness amounting to a frozen hell where a fellow like this might actually survive for a time, but well away from the public to which he would be a menace, up close, with an axe and a dog-sled?

But if his countrymen feel for whatever reason compelled to spend lots of money on the fellow's upkeep while protecting themselves (and us?) from him then by all means let them lock him up someplace forever.

Can you seriously imagine a hearing board deciding to let this guy out 21 years from now?

They would put the fools who let out Jack Abbott on Mailer's say-so quite in the pale.

On the other hand, even in the present case and at least in principle, there is always the bare - even if extremely bare - possibility the system has convicted the wrong guy.

When that happens the public safety is actually harmed in two ways, at least.

First, the real bad guy is still out there posing whatever danger he poses.

And second, when the criminal justice system swallows an innocent man that is a harm to the public of which he is a part.

(The real bad guy being in contrast, of course, a public enemy.)

This risk accompanies any system at all of trying to find and deal with the guilty to protect the innocent, no matter how the guilty are dealt with.

It is not unique to the death penalty.

It might even be smaller, in death penalty cases, given the time and trouble and expense US states must go to before a convicted person can be executed.

Anyway, all of us pretty much assume we are better off if there is a criminal justice system to find and deal with the dangerous, and deal with them effectively and at reasonable cost, than if there is not, even in the face of what we must hope is a moderately low rate of mistaken conviction.

A rate we must wish to see lowered, certainly, if that does not unreasonably increase costs or the net danger to the public.

That much for the public safety angle.

I don't for a moment suggest there are no other considerations to attend to, of different kinds.

- - - - -

But of course these cannot include moral considerations, though I neglected to say so at the Booman Tribune.

Nor religious.

Divine law, allegedly revealed, surmised, or merely impostured, is out of the question.

As well as the alleged natural or moral kind.

Oh, AP says this.

"In his final words, Breivik regretted not killing more people, apologizing to other 'militant nationalists' for not achieving an even higher death toll."

"American Taliban"?

KOS's equation, Christian right = Taliban, seems less hyperbolic the more I think about it.

American Atheists, under threats, has taken down some billboards denouncing Mormonism and Christianity it had set up near the site of the coming Democratic National Convention, one supposes from the usual scum of good Christians.

They say they would have toughed it out but the billboard company and its employees were threatened, too, and they weren't game.

A minor blip in the news media that had at first reported the billboards, only briefly, pretty much in their normal way of regarding atheism as an affront to American values and were then far from shocked or filled with regret at this development.

What would have happened if the threats had come from Muslims?

You know as well as I.

A nationwide media earthquake.

And we would still be hearing from the Republican clericalists like Newt and Rick and the rest that Obama and the Justice Department are soft of Islam and maybe even sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Jihad Watch and the other Islamophobe websites would be going wild.

The demands for urgent federal action against domestic Muslim terrorism would be deafening from all quarters of the right wing noise machine.

Not a peep, though, about this incident.

And it was common as good American dirt, too.

Muslim terrorism in America, rare as hen's teeth, always gets tremendous press coverage.

Not so the much more common, one might almost say everyday, Christian kind.

All my life, the hatred of nearly all Christian Americans toward atheists has been as open, if not as strong or as violent, as white hatred for non-whites.

I have seen it every time someone, in early days usually someone associated with the O'Hairs and American Atheists, sought to put a stop to Bible thumping or prayer in some public school, or protested the exclusion of evolution from the teaching of biology or, perhaps worse, the inclusion of the Biblical creation myth.

Wikipedia says the founding matron, Madelyn Murray O'Hair, was dubbed the most hated woman in America by Time in 1964, primarily for her efforts to take the public schools out of the hands of the clergy.

That hatred has never gone away and never really diminished.

All my life, it has been pretty much always the same people who loathed blacks, despised Jews, hated atheists, and thought homosexuals lower than the dirt on the soles of their shoes.

Still seems that way, doesn't it?

Conservatism is an alliance of greed on principle with credulity on principle

Mike Huckabee: Chief Enabler for the Religious Kook Bloc

Theirs is, indeed, the stupid party while ours is the – relatively – humane and merely human party.

Both sides are right.

The Fox clericalists are right in claiming SPLC is labeling traditional Christianity itself the enemy and Christianity a teaching of hate.

Traditional Christianity is the enemy and Christianity is a teaching of hate.

And SPLC is right in calling the FRC a hate-group specifically, though by no means only, for their message on homosexuality – a message that is exactly the same as that of every Christian denomination and a core principle of Christian morality.

Plan ahead

So they scheduled their convention for hurricane season in Florida, I hear.

Interesting choice.

But better than New Orleans, I suppose.

Visiting the grandchildren for the weekend.

When we took them all out for daughter's birthday son-in-law reminded me of the essence of modern conservatism.

Un-provoked and out of the blue he launched into a declamation on how, unlike those crazy rich Democrats, he didn't want to pay taxes, at all.

And if they really felt that way about it they could just write the IRS a check and leave him out of it.

He works for a defense contractor, so you can guess his attitude toward military spending and the "war on terror."

He's one of those very frank "Let them die" guys and won't hear of global warming.

His party makes endless noise about patriotism, but all it seems to mean is enthusiasm for war and "the American Way," defined as prioritizing the altogether fictitious rights of property over everything else.

This is what they are really talking about when they say liberty is their supreme political value, if not the only value.

By "liberty" they mean only economic liberty, and that they understand as only markets unfeterred by regard for any competing values.

You and I might think love of country would prioritize democracy and the common good, subordinating all things economic - including the definition of property rights - to that.

You might think lovers of their country would loathe war and cherish peace, and would sacrifice unnecessary military expenses for schools, hospitals, and the real welfare of their countrymen.

And you would be right.

And you would be a socialist.

They get to tell us, the people, what is the American idea?

Ryan and Romney Want to Party Like It’s 1899

Rothschild quotes Nichols quoting Ryan.

“What I’ve been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism.

“I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big government problems that are plaguing us today.

“And so to me it’s really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate—so people can actually see what this ideology means and where it’s going to lead us and how it attacks the American idea.”

Phooey on him and that so-called "American idea" of his.