We have another preacher who is holding forth on homosexuality with some pretty shocking rhetoric. Dennis Leatherman of the Mountain Lake Independent Baptist Church in Oakland, Maryland can claim to be more merciful because, while he says that he positively aches to kill gays “in a fleshy way,” he cannot actually kill because of the Bible. That means that he cannot build the death camps of Rev. Worley — as much as he might want to.
Today in China, unlike twenty-three years ago, nothing happens. Nothing at all. Now check out the latest Panda pics! That appears the message going out to a billion Chinese. The government has blocked any mention of the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 1989. In addition, the country is rounding up dissidents and anyone else who might mention the anniversary or utter thoughts of freedom.
Just when you thought it was creepy for people to stuff their dead pets, Dutch artist Bart Jansen has done one better: skinning his pet cat Orville and turning it into a helicopter. The video shows cows are unnerved by the sight . . . and they are not alone. The Borg Feline is enough to send most people looking for shelter.
I have repeated complained about the runaway copyright and trademark laws — and the failure of politicians to protect the public from draconian penalties and thug-like actions by the industry. Now, the industry is targeting weddings — retroactively — to impose fees for playing that rendition of “Because You Loved Me” to be sure that Celine Dion gets her cut from the happy couple.
The Saudi Royal family has long been accused of not paying their bills, but few have acquired the reputation of Maha al-Sudani, the former wife of Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Nayef ben Abdel Aziz. The princess was stopped trying to flee the Shangri-La hotel in Paris at 3:30 am without paying her six million euro ($7.4 million) bill. It is hard to sneak out of a hotel with an entourage 60 people.
We have previously discussed the trend in the West toward an international blasphemy standard and prosecutions for insulting religion (here, and here, and here and here and here and here and here and and here and here and here and here). Now, one of Spain’s best known underground artists is facing a year in jail for a 54-second film that he did in 1978 that a Catholic group charges is insulting to them and their faith. Javier Krahe’s “how to cook Jesus Christ” was a brief satire based on a cooking show.
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)-Guest Blogger
I am sure you have all seen the comments and political advertisements and articles calling President Obama a Communist, a Socialist, a Kenyan citizen and various attempts to claim that he is a secret Muslim. I had thought I had seen them all when I came across the latest affront to reality. A Gannet newspaper in Louisiana has agreed to run an “interesting” advertisement from an organization calling itself the SOAR Project. SOAR stands for Save Our American Republic.
In my humble opinion, this advertisement goes far beyond any level of reasonableness when it leads with the question, “Will Obama and the Democrats Shoot Catholics and Christians “? Continue reading “Free Speech Versus Facts”→
In the beginning, there was the word. And when addressing propaganda, the word was either persuade or coerce. This is the essential nature of propaganda: to change (or re-enforce if you are already sympathetic) your mind on a particular issue. As the first article showed, the most basic tool of propaganda is connotation/implication. Before venturing into the depths of the lingua tactical of propaganda, I thought it might be useful to illustrate some non-verbal and indirect methods of propaganda.
First we must realize that propaganda is the cultivation of an image. An image that relies upon idea(s) the speaker wants associated with certain people, organizations or actions. To that end, propaganda is essentially image control: seeking to create mental associations in the viewer be they emotional or rational and spreading that image/association through out a given populace. Keep in mind that literacy was for the bulk of human history limited to specialists such as scribes and/or the upper class who could afford education.
Very few people in the ancient world could read, but most of them could see. What better way to communicate the power of those who run a society to those who cannot read than by using a non-verbal symbol to send a message? Perhaps a symbol like a great building or monument. Something that says “we’re here, this is what we are about, this is our place and look what we can do” to the great unlearned masses. This form of propaganda is also as old as civilization. You could argue that it is older than modern civilization, stretching back to the late Neolithic period.
On BBC Newsnight (video below), Nobel laureate Paul Krugman was pitted against venture capitalist Jon Moulton and Conservative MP Andrea Leadsom to discuss the merits of austerity. Krugman handily demolished their arguments. Krugman likened austerity to bloodletting, where if the patient gets sicker, even more bloodletting is called for. Krugman is in Europe on a book tour and his ideas are making headlines.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ignited a firestorm on this blog and elsewhere for his proposal to ban all but 16 ounce containers of sodas, energy drinks, sweetened iced teas and other sugary beverages in restaurants, movie theaters, sports arenas and food carts (they will still be available in supermarkets and bodegas). Wondering why he’d make a proposal that could not possibly help him politically and was likely to draw the ire of Big Soda, I did a little research. Here is the abbreviated case against cola:
Well, Sally Field must be aghast. How could even her bird’s-eye view have predicted the over the top report from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? Once the province of current Pope Benedict, the watchdog of orthodoxy that took such a hands-off approach to the child sexual molestation within the priesthood, has issued a stinging reprimand to all American nuns for “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
Headed by American Cardinal William Levada, the crowd that gave us the Inquisition and who tried Galileo, has ordered a crackdown on all U.S. nuns. Overseen by three middle-aged white men American bishops, the Vatican wants the good sisters to toe the Vatican’s increasingly fundamentalist line. And what was the doctrinal crime that got the nuns in trouble? Why, their apparent heretical support for such outlandish positions as supporting universal health care under Obama’s plan, sensitivity to marriage rights for gays, and –God forbid it — advocating females for admission to the priesthood. They are even under scrutiny for praying for Girl Scouts.
Some comments in the ongoing debate regarding the candidacy of Elizabeth Warren got me to thinking about our political system and people’s reactions to it. Warren is criticized by the Right for obvious reasons, given her strong stances on managing the economy and controlling the excesses of the Corporate Culture. In a sense she offends their sense of political purity, but then that is but a given because she is a Democrat. We have seen though on the Right that such conservative stalwarts as Richard Lugar have gone down to primary defeat because he failed the Tea Parties test of what a “true” conservative should be. Richard Lugar failed the “purity” test even though his conservative history is impeccable. In my conception political purity conforms to “party line” thinking, punishing those that fail to adhere in all respects to the standards of a given faction’s concept of standards their candidates must adhere to in order to retain enthusiastic support. I use “faction”, rather than “party”, because our two party political system actually represents an amalgam of various factions imperfectly coalescing under the rubric of a “Political Party”.
From a Left, or even Centrist perspective, there has been both amusement and trepidation about how the “Tea Party” faction has exerted control over the Republican Party. Then too, there is the same reaction to the power exerted by Fundamentalist Christians, a group that at some points overlaps with the “Tea Party”. A human trait is to see the foibles of groups we define as “other”, while being oblivious to the idiosyncrasies of the groups we are aligned with. Liberals, Progressives, Radicals and even Leftist Centrists like to believe that they are immune from the turmoil that they see in their Right Wing opposites, yet the “Left” and even the “Center” also routinely define people in terms of litmus tests of political purity. This was highlighted by certain comments on the Warren thread where people who were seemingly in tune with her domestic policy views, disliked her positions on the Middle East and appeared to hold them against her. This has definitely been true with many progressives and/or civil libertarians in viewing this current Administration. My purpose here is not one of castigation for anyone’s perspective; rather I’m interested in exploring the phenomenon of the belief that political figures need to meet all of our expectations in their positions, or be unworthy of our support. My own perspective is that tests of political purity are self defeating because it is impossible for any particular political figure to be in perfect agreement with all that any of us individually believe and politics becomes oppression without the ability to negotiate. The process of real negotiation requires compromise. What follows is why I believe that is true. Continue reading “The Pursuit of Political Purity”→
In his Slate article, Bad Religion, Ross Douthat argues that even bad religions “have a metaphysically coherent picture of the universe to justify their claims.” Douthat’s argument evokes the Euthyphro Dilemma, inspired by one of Plato’s dialogues. The dialogue features Socrates and religious expert Euthyphro, and has been modernized as “Are morally good acts willed by God because they are morally good, or are they morally good because they are willed by God?”
Calling critics of the plan “ridiculous,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is defending his proposed ban on large-size sugary sodas. I have long been a critic of such measures, but this one is particularly presumptuous in my view. People should have a choice as to what and how much they wish to eat and drink. The ban is particularly illogical since it would simply require people to buy multiple cans of soda unless Bloomberg will next impose a drink limit for New Yorkers. You can have as many Manhattans as you want but do not reach for the super-sized soda. I am waiting for the next bumper sticker: “If Big Gulps Are a Crime, Only Criminals Will Have Big Gulps.”
We have another preacher who is holding forth on homosexuality with some pretty shocking rhetoric. Dennis Leatherman of the Mountain Lake Independent Baptist Church in Oakland, Maryland can claim to be more merciful because, while he says that he positively aches to kill gays “in a fleshy way,” he cannot actually kill because of the Bible. That means that he cannot build the death camps of Rev. Worley — as much as he might want to.
