Susan Sontag understood the connection:
"It is the genius of the United States, a profoundly conservative country in ways that Europeans find difficult to fathom, to have elaborated a form of conservative thinking that celebrates the new rather than the old."
Tyler Cowen starts a blog-war with this quote:
"The more wealth we have, the more government we can afford. Furthermore, the better government operates, the more government people will demand. That is the fundamental paradox of libertarianism. Many initial victories bring later defeats…"
Kevin O’Reilly has a cow. Glen Whitman backs Cowen. Julian Sanchez adds his two cents here.
The newshog examines the nail-biting politics of the new Iraq oil bill that still has not yet passed. Are neocons rallying behind Allawi? Is a coup in the offing if Maliki can’t deliver?
More brutal revelations are following blog scrutiny. There’s a new Blade story, showing that the group paid a former executive director $160,000 last year even though she quit the group in 2004! So that’s where your donations go. Bay Windows has a longer story on the spat between HRC and gay blogs. They have alienated all of us – right, left and center – with their arrogance and secrecy. Money quote:
For many bloggers, HRC’s response to criticism has come off as either defensive or dismissive. After Pam Spaulding criticized HRC for its handling of the Coulter debacle, Solmonese invited her on HRC’s satellite radio show, The Agenda, and allowed her to explain her problems with their response. [Spaulding runs Pam’s House Blend, which has won the Weblog Award for best LGBT blog for the past two years.] But after she made her point, neither Solmonese nor the show’s other host, Boston-based communications consultant Mary Breslauer, directly responded to it or explained HRC’s strategy behind the Coulter incident.
"I don’t feel like they addressed them so much as they wanted them aired to say that they gave the opportunity for an alternate viewpoint of how to handle it,” said Spaulding. She also said HRC appears to be struggling, as many organizations are, to figure out what relationship it should have with the blogosphere. She spoke on a "state of the movement" panel with Solmonese last month at HRC headquarters, and she said he seemed to see the blogs as an obstacle to putting forward the organization’s message. "I think the interpretation Joe gave at that panel was that blogs were somehow obstructive or got in the way of messaging," said Spaulding.
HRC has failed to respond to my five questions, and failed to respond to my emails asking when they will provide a response. It seems as if they won’t. That’s their idea of transparency. Chris Crain is rightly concerned about a quote by Solmonese in the Boston Globe last January:
The article claimed that HRC leaders wanted the organization to be seen as a "steady source of grassroots support for Democrats — more akin to a labor union than a single-issue activist group." In the article HRC President Joe Solmonese said that after the 2004 elections HRC shifted its priorities away from opposing state marriage amendments and towards electing candidates. For Crain, the article showed that HRC had put the interests of the Democratic Party ahead of the LGBT community.
Just remember that before you give them your dollars. Scrutiny continues at Petrelis, Pam’s House Blend and Citizen Crain, among others. Blog power!
If George W. Bush ran Apple computers, this is the kind of product he’d be giving us:
Dubai City, Dubai, 11 am.
The hard right always had a problem with Jesus, the peacenik hippie, preaching love and forgiveness. The Deutsche Christen in Nazi Germany turned Jesus into a muscle-bound blond God who kicked Jewish butt. Today, right-wing Christianism has something much, much milder, but still with plenty of testosterone:
"What we’re saying is that … we’ve been taught the loving guy, the beautiful guy … When we walk into a church, we see ferns. We’re not used to that. We want something that shows the masculine side as well," [Brad] Stine said.
Stine founded GodMen, some kind of follow-up to Promise Keepers. It sounds like a homing signal for every closet case in the evangelical movement. Do they lift weights as well?
That’s a word, apparently, for political campaigning through YouTube-style video. Now there’s a site to track how far and wide your own video has gone and can go: tubemogul.com. And a blog to keep you up to date. Obama long had more independent video exposure online than all top three Republican candidates combined. Now they’ve caught up. This must make the FEC’s heads spin. Good. It’s called free speech.
Well, I asked it, via Tom Mallon:
"Are American writers, artists, and thinkers truly prepared to admit that Islamofascism is a real, and even imminent, threat to everything they are accustomed to thinking, saying, and creating?"
And here’s an answer:
How big is the threat? For me, it just isn’t that big. Islamic terrorists, if they are lucky, will manage a couple of medium profile bombings of tourist sites each year, and maybe something larger (New York, London, Madrid) every few years. This sucks, and our security services should relentlessly hunt down these people and take them out of the game. But is it really that much of a threat to the world?
Our societies, cultures and economies are just too strong to be even mildly shaken by this lame bullshit. Just because some gaggle of religious lunatics manages to kill a bunch of westerners once every 6 months, does anyone really believe that "everything we are accustomed to thinking, saying and creating" is under threat? I call bullshit.
We are SO going to beat these freaks.
Here’s a video of a talk by Stuart Hameroff at the Beyond Belief conference last year. It’s called "Quantum Consciousness Can Save the Soul". It was greeted with skepticism. Hameroff is one of the scientists my "Big Wow" reader cited earlier. You can watch several talks at the Beyond Belief Conference here. Bob Wright discusses "quantum weirdness" with Daniel Dennett here.
The Dish 