President (To Win Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%↑
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
See Full Big Line
(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
See Full Big Line
(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
See Full Big Line
(R) Jeff Hurd
(D) Adam Frisch
52%↑
48%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
See Full Big Line
(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
See Full Big Line
(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
See Full Big Line
(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
See Full Big Line
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
52%↑
48%↓
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
See Full Big Line
DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
March 24, 2007 08:22 PM UTC
78 Comments
Save us from our saviours!
drag the good Doctor’s name in the mud by calling him “Spongedob”, but Another Skeptic has a diary removed for calling down Edwards for being an insensitive jerk?
Fair and balanced only if you are a lefty, eh?
You’ve indicated otherwise in the past…
with the way this site leans so far to 3rd base…..
I like OUR Doc, but could care less about the real Dobson.
although Colorado leans left too so to a certain degree this is just a reflection of the state.
But I would like to see the contents of the deleted diary. I definitely have a problem with stuff being censored unless it’s truly something that violates the guidelines here. Can someone post it elsewhere and put a link here?
Ut oh, you’re asking for it now. With that statement, you’ve just poked Dobson Pet Shill with a big stick.
And I can predict exactly what he will say: the defeat of Referendum I and A-44 prove conclusively that Colorado is basically a conservative state………yadda yadda yadda.
It was all due to the incompetence of Pete Coors and B.W.B. that they lost the ’04 and ’06 elections, and that they took Republican control of the legislature down the toilet with them……yadda yadda yadda.
They ran a crappy campaign. Kenney played right into the hands of the NO campaign by playing defense. “It’s not marriage…” Had Ridder run the campaign, as he had started to, whereas he proposed that two thirds of Colorado voters believe that people are born gay… Ref I, would now be law. Blame Gill, he also can’t make up his mind about anything.
By the way, 44 was pulled…never voted upon.
I’m aware that the definition of marriage initiative was pulled.
I have no comment on the quality of the campaign run by the proponents of Ref. “I.” (I have issues with the manner in which the campaign against Amendment Two was run 15 years ago!)
about their bias. We all know its there but it’s funny to watch them deny or justify it. It would make it easier if they just posted a list of their favs instead if trying to appear objective in their rankings.
Unlike yourself?
Sure, there’s some bias in their postings, but it is the community that write what we want. We don’t pay a thing for this. Preety nice.
And, of course, there is always the exit door if you don’t like hanging around.
Why dont you make a list of your favs and post it. Here, I’ll start you off: Hillary…continue as the mood stikes you.
I guess Im a little confused as to why you are bothered by this. Was it the Hillary video? You say that you have never voted for a republican, yet you continually bash dems (or at least Hillary’s prime opponents). Do what you want, but dont act like you are the patron saint of the unbiased, because clearly you have your favs.
The rankings are a unique marketing tool, and kind of fun. It helps me identify potential candidates that I know nothing about, in areas that I am not familiar with.
I think its funny to watch people accuse pols of bias as if it mattered. Like I said before, the battle of ideas is not won by who posts what first, its won by who can best present their argument and change minds (paraphrasing my own words).
but I’ve never claimed not to be. This site seems to have an identity crisis. They claim to be balanced but then they make all kinds of slanderous posts when its convient for them. I just wish they would make up their mind either be a partisan site or be a middle of the road site.
As for my personal favs at this point I’m torn between Richardson, Hillary & Gore. I want some one who can win and those are the only three that I think have a chance.
Where did they say that they are balanced? As best I can recall, and I am certain it is just me, but they never seem to respond to those attacks, short of the most recent thing with AS, but that was about the diary that they deleted. So, help me out.
but I seem to recall this blog being originally portrayed as bi-partisan, more of an insider driven blog with Dead Guvs from both persuasions. I wouldn’t have come here otherwise. Additionally, when they do respond, they refute accusations of bias, so if they are not balanced and are only left wing, why not say, “Hey, we never claimed to be fair and balanced so go pound sand.” I can accept the fact that I wandered into Colorado Daily Kos by mistake, no problem. Just lay it out there!
I would never accuse you of having a faulty memory, but I know mine is cluttered and hazy. I dont remember them refuting it. If someone would point me towards them doing so I would be much obliged.
Id like to regale you all, as I am wont to do, with one of my amazing anecdotes. I was talking about the last presidential election with a good friend who doesnt follow the issues. You know what bothered him about Kerry? The fact that he had so many houses and the secret service would have to guard them all (think of the expense, he said). I bring this up because if the constant refrain is “liberal bias! liberal bias!” than who cares about the issues? Why debate at all if you believe that the deck is stacked?
No, seriously, why bother? Are the posters on here predominately dem? Probably, but so what. We won the leg., the mansion, and a majority of the congressional seats. To think that there wouldnt be an upswing in democratic posters, and a downturn in republican voters is foolish. Was it always this way? I cant say for sure, but I doubt it. I cant remember when pols started, but wasnt it during the republican majority of Colorado government? Do you not think that during that time period there a dominant presence of republicans? Is that fair and balanced? Does it matter? The only time you hear people complaining about the rules of the game is when they are losing. Im open to debate, everyone knows that, and I try to be above board in my debates. You all may or may not have read my last diatribe about this issue, so you all may or may not know, or care, how I feel, which is that I view the need to bleet the “liberal bias” refrain as a cowardly act. Either way, Im done with this topic.
He brought it on himself with his absurd allegations that a cartoon character was gay. He put a sexual orientation on something that doesn’t even exist except in a cartoonist’s mind.
Say what you will, it wasn’t until I understood American Calvinism that I was able to understand this country, its history, and the current incarnation of the Republican party.
My Republicanism is intellectual, and based on a belief in the need to limit government, promote free markets, and protect ourselves from people in the world that are truly evil.
Theirs isn’t. They are true believers in the literal sense. DeLay for better or worse, is an interesting essay into the workings of their minds.
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis understood the dangers of a conservative convergence when he wrote It Can’t Happen Here, the story of a Southern politician, Buzz Windrip, helped to the presidency by a syndicated radio talk show host. His campaign is platform is one of family values, the flag, and patriotism. With the help of the talk show host Windrip portrays those concerned with individual rights and freedoms as anti-American. Lewis clearly understood the possibilities and dangers of religions and politics conflated.
Good stuff…as always. We can only be destroyed from with by boy-kings.
Because it certainly sounds similar. Bob Roberts is one of the best political movies ever made – and Tim Robbins didn’t release the soundtrack for fear it would be misused the way Reagan bastardized Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.”
More details?
It came out in ’92 and was the first movie Tim Robbins directed. It’s a faux documentary about a right-wing singer-songwriter (imagine a folk singer whose lyrics were written by Limbaugh) running for the U.S. Senate in some midwestern state. It’s been many years so I can’t recall if he’s a demagogue or merely a true believer who’s also a coldly calculating master of politics, but it’s well worth viewing. It would be interesting to see it again in light of all that’s happened since then, and to see if it aged well or not.
it’s a bit hard to find but worth digging up. They do a right wing video remake of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde with a little ditty titled “The Times They Are a Turning Back.” He campaigns in a giant flag-bedecked bus named Pride.
I think Stephen Colbert may have borrowed a bit from Bob Roberts, too 🙂
I just read “Elmer Gantry” a few months ago, and it, too, was remarkably prescient! IN E.G., Lewis depicts a completely hypocritical, self-aggrandizing religious leader from the inside out, and was invited to his own lynching after its initial publication in 1929. I got hold of a 1959 print, on which the jacket read “As true today as it was when it was published 30 years ago.” Almost 50 years later, we’re still going strong.
One thing that can be said for our wonderful country, when we latch onto a dysfunctional, ignorant cultural tradition, we’re like a dog with a bone: We just don’t let go!
Never read it, but my 8th grade English teacher used to praise that line, the first in the book. Was I close? To us naive 8th graders in 1959 it was just weird to hear this in class.
Mrs. Hemlepp, RIP.
a dim-witted brawler, cynically opposed to bible thumping members of the YMCA, until he began to see bible thumping as a way of using his rough oratory skills to be a big-shot. And though you never exactly got to like him, you were inside his head from start to finish.
Ever see the documentary “Marjoe?” There was this kid, the child of a preacher, who was trained and groomed from infancy to be a miraculous child-evangalist. His parents were pretty nasty: Used to hold his head under water to punish him, so as not to leave any marks (bad for business). He left the profession in his teens, wandered a bit, then came back to it in his twenties, and decided to do an expose of himself (in the 70s) before getting out once and for all. He had a documentary film crew follow him around a final tour, telling the faithful that they were documenting his mission, or whatever, and then would be sitting with them backstage talking about his history and the tricks of the trade (my favorite: salt-activited dye, with which he painted a cross on his forehead, so that the sweat would activate it and then wash it away, leaving a vision for all to see). He was completely agnostic, by the way.
Of course, I’ve always had a secret longing to be a televangelist myself…. What a gig!
Dire Straits, “I Want My MTV.”
Well, I should say that I disagree that DeLay is an interesting essay on the “true believer.” Everything else including their republicanism being unintellectual, I agree with you.
Whenever you post, no matter the length of the post, I always have to pause, because I know that mental alacrity is superior to mine. In other words, I have great respect for your intellect.
Dobson may be a true believer; Falwell may be a true believer; their followers may be true believers; but DeLay, at least to me, is a person, one of a few, who provides the beliefs with which others believe (sorry about all the punctuation). To be sure, he is an interesting person in that he provides the words and ideas that others will blindly follow, but his words and actions are part of a greater scheme, one of egoism and division. I think he knows that the key to his success, and the success of his party, are the actions of division and egoism. He, and others, know that through straight bullying and control the can manipulate a sizable swath of the population.
I need to read up on American Calvinism (any suggestions?) to respond properly, but my view is that DeLay is too smart to be a true believer, and just smart enough to know how to manipulate the true believers.
I have to tread lightly around Xenophon, because he is too intelligent to mince words.
…then I thought, “Why reinvent the wheel?”
http://en.wikipedia….
I would offer the thoughts that although the Reformed and Presbyterian churches have greatly diminished in numbers and influence, John Calvin lurks still in much right wing politics.
What better source to bolster your arguements that you are one of a chosen few? That your financial success means God has effectively said, “You duh man!” That you are doing God’s work in politics? That non-believers (political or religious) should be hunted down and executed.
In Calvin’s theocratic reign of terror in Geneva, all this was common. The dominant Calvinists hunted down and murdered the Zwengelians (sp) because they held the audacious beleif that baptism should be voluntary later in life instead of at birth.
We see traces of this attitude in the Christian fundamentelists. Calvin may be long dead, but a lot of Americans use his theology to bolster their business affairs.
I always turn to wikipedia when I need a brief description of something that is totally obscure. Calvinism is something that I know of and a little about, but I never thought to use wikipedia. After reading the article, would it be fair to say that American Calvinism is, in effect, Neo-Calvinism?
it is not a prefix that I”m intellectually comfortable with. Just don’t get some of the applications, like “neoliberal.” A prefix or word hard to pin down, IMHO.
I am always leary of terms like Neo-Liberalism, or post-toodlism (nothing is sprining to mind involing post-).
Mainly, whenever I hear it, it is relation to a movement or idea that does not come close to resembling the root word.
My reason for using “neo-calvinism” was strictly in reference to the wikipedia article.
now there’s a doozey!
Took me a long time to get around those two, modernism and its post variety. And as of right now, I can’t spit it back out. Let’s run over to Wikipedia (I finally put a button for it on my Opera Personal Toolbar.)…..
http://en.wikipedia….
Jeez, they even have TWO phases within….
http://en.wikipedia….
“It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” Al Gore [3]
Let’s check in on what GW has to say……. “Pose wha?”
is just the latest incarnation of relativism and subjectivism: There is no absolute reality, only perceptions of reality, with layers of symbols on top of symbols creating a “meta-world” in which we all operate. There are some elements of truth in it, but when taken to the extreme (as it often is), one “truth” is as good as another, creating the absurdity that the people propounding it really had no reason to bother, since their version of truth has no objective value, and the people they are explaining it to have no objective existance.
Yes, I agree 100%, for what my opinion is worth.
Ever since introduced to this in seminary 12 years ago, I see postmodernism – subjectivity – increasingly everywhere. Embracing it on a moderate basis allows me to “let go of” deeply held opinions if someone, through their own life experiences, sees something differently. Neither of us are right, nor wrong. I know that drives absolutists and objectivists nuts, but there it is.
n oversimplification, hence, there may be many truths. Obviously, subjectivity should not be part of defining dates, measures such as absolute zero, etc.
For instance, people of all faiths have reported “good” Near Death Experiences. Christians often report being greeted by Jesus. Non-Christians don’t. An absolutist might say this is impossible, it’s one or the other. I say, “Why not?”
Or, Christopher Columbus. Was he an important figure in history because, from a European perspective, he discovered the New World? Of course. Was he a slaver, an executioner, a mean person? Evidently, yes. But one does not negate the other, and one’s perspective will vary depending on heritage and teachings.
Quantum physics postulates cracks in the objective egg. The “Observer Effect” stipulates that whatever exists is inexorably altered by observing or measuring it. A physicists equivalent to the tree falling in the forest? Hence, the Objective is altered to a Subjective as soon as we enter the picture.
The famous example is a current flowing in a wire. If we insert an ammeter to measure it, we have immediatly altered the current flow in some, perhaps extremely minute manner. Yet, w/o that ammeter, we don’t know what the putative current is!
readAmerican Fasctists, The Relegious Right and The War on America by Chris Hedges. Quite enlightening and thought provoking
read American Fascists, The Christian Right and The War on America by Chris Hedges. Quite enlightening and thought provoking
Is like most people’s netflix queue. I cant remember if you mentioned that in the reading recommendations thread, but I am adding it now.
The thing with anyone who wants to lead the crowd is that he has to be very deliberate about appearring to be a very different sort of animal than he really is is he wants to get an audience. I think there are also instances of people who started out intending to lead a pack of true believers and rise on the crest of a movement who weren’t careful enough and wound up true believers themselves.
By the by, have you read Hoffer’s ‘The True Believer’?
My bookpile by the bed seems to only expand, never shrink.
Brilliant concept, well written and the best book Hoffer wrote. It gave me the foundation for moving people around an issue.
I think DeLay will not go the way of Jim Jones. Although, an argument can be made that Jones was a believer the entire time. Im racking my brain to think of leaders who became true believers, and I know they exist, but I cant think of them.
I have not read it. Parsing and I share an affliction commonly known commonly as “excessive bibliophilism.” Symptons include an ever expanding reading list and groaning bookshelves and nightstands.
“Not a leaf falls that is not part of God’s plan”
Did you know that Augustine, Luther, and Calvin all believed in predestination? Luther is a reformist Augustinian (literally). Calvin is a bad tempered Luther.
http://www.pcusa.org…
You want to mess with Dobby’s mind, ask him why God the omnipotent and omnipresent allowed his chosen people to stumble into a losing war (again). What is it about non-Christians (the Buddist Vietnamese for example), that seems to defeat the ability of us White Anglo Christians to teach them how to live. HOW CAN GOD ALLOW THAT? Shouldn’t he be helping us to spread his word?
If predestination does not exist, prophesy cannot work. But there are some profound problems between predestination, and things like quarks and the probablistic character of material reality. Einstein said God doesn’t play dice with the universe, but he does seem to get in a hand of poker every now and then.
American Calvinism is the justification for genocide and ethnic cleansing of the American Indian in the 19th century.
Think about what ‘Manifest Destiny’ actually means. What ANY Destiny has to mean. Our forebearers were indeed, as Dobby believes, practicing Calvinists. They’re still here.
You can have faith in the almighty and trust in it’s omniscience, yet free will is what made Adam eat the apple. Was it predestined that man would fall? No, and according to the bible, God was pretty pissed about his creation exercising that free will (at least in the way Adam and Eve did).
America isn’t predestined to be anything. That is what makes us great. We’re able to take on our futures and fight for what we believe we should have, rightly or wrongly, on an individual and national level.
There was also a book, Einstein’s Dreams, that spoke about various possibilities of time. Is our reality the only kind of temporal existence? I doubt it. Religion is our way of trying to codify our morals and values, our reality. Faith is one way of buying into that. Predestination is a way to abdicate responsibility onto the almighty.
So, this is what aggravates me about evangelicals and born again Christians. There is no room to maneuvure – you are holy or not. None of us are holy and it is an immpossible standard to acheive, let alone try to place on an entire nation.
Calvanism fit for the founders to justify their deeds in creating this country. Evangelical christiananity fits for the religious right today to justify their actions.
BTW, Calving was not only a bad tempered Luther, he was a prude.
Phew, enough philosophizin’. I know that was a brain dump on you, but your comments are more interesting than the Edwards conversation.
I’m going to enjoy the sun.
Not sure who Calving was – probably a vetinarian.
everybody tripping over themselves to do God’s will, all the while either having a lucky number or not. One big celestial joke on mankind. Well, a little too evil for my idea of God, but amusing none the less.
Was it Augustine that would today be given anti-psychotic meds? One of these early Christian thinkers was psychotic, from what I could tell.
you were predestined to say that!
As long as we’re getting metaphysical, the only thing that undermined, for me, a very compelling logical argument for “determinism” (the secular equivalent of predestination), was quantum mechanics. First, the argument on determinism:
Imagine the universe at a given instant (already, according to Relativity, a problematic concept, but let’s go on…). Now, in your imagination, duplicate it. Every particle, every creature, every star, every scap of matter or energy, in whatever condition, on the verge of whatever activity, must, by definition, be the same in the two universes. Now, let time flow forward in both. How can their futures possibly diverge? No impetus, no condition, no momentum exists in the second that was not identical to that of the first. The spear about to be thrown in the first is about to be thrown in the second, with the same trajectory, at the same animal, moving in the same way. The chemical reactions occuring in the first are also occuring in the second, under identical conditions, with the inevitability of identical results, ad infinitum. Since there is nothing external to either system that can affect it differently from the other, by the definition of the thought experiment, the two universes must remain in perfect sinc forever. In other words, the future is determined, entirely and absolutely, by the past: The chains of causation leave no room for the arbitrary.
However, quantum mechanics has made the arbitrary a central feature of nature. Particles don’t exist in a given location, moving in a given direction at a given velocity: They exist in a region with a set of probabilities of being here or there. That’s not just how we see it, according to quantum mechanics, but how it actually is. So, when the universes are duplicated, each particle cannot be duplicated in the same exact spot, moving in the same exact direction at the same exact speed: It’s probability-range is what’s duplicated. So the particle itself can turn up anywhere in its range, and the two universes can diverge.
In other words, random chance is a fundamental aspect of reality! (That’s what Einstein meant when he objected to Quantum Mechanics with the phrase “God does not play dice with the universe.” Einstein, however, lost on that one. God is busy shooting craps. Probably why he let everything go to hell).
Okay, not politics exactly, except maybe as an analogy, if you try hard enough….
“oh you’re crazy”
“am I? or am I so sane that you just blew your mind?”
(Do you ever think that that big brain of yours is wasted on posters who reply using sitcom lines?:)
Only when they start quoting “Gilligan’s Island.”:)
No doubt referring to you as “The Professor”!
A) I’m glad you wrote that, because I would have to dig deep to find my physics books.
B) Fundimentally disagree that this (quantum mech) is not political/social (here I don’t mean in the Derrida, Kuhn, sense).
The core belief system of Darwin/Wallace comes to down to spontaneous random mutation. Others long before them noted the pattern of change in nature. Dennis Dedierot the encyclopediest described a system of ‘evolution’ that anticipates Darwin nearly 100 years before Beagle.
What Darwin does is tie Biological change to the probablistic character of the material world. Even if they teach creationist Biology, what the hell are they going to do about probablistic Physics?
This war was over when Francis Bacon wrote his first essay, but there are still some battles that will be fought.
You’ve probably already read it, but I still find it fun to go back and review periodically:
http://www.straightd…
I’m not sure about “probablistic”…sound like a WMD:-)
IMHO the only thing that “Squares the Cat” is Principle! Principle looks the same from every perspective.
That is a great way of putting it, Lauren! Think of the evil that a believer in predestination could in good conscience commit, but if they’re holding that lucky eternal lotto ticket, they’re heading upstair at the end of this life…..
tell me that only 144,000 people would make it to heaven, the rest of the believers would inherit the earth, and the non believers would just stay dead. They assured me I wasn’t one of the 144,000, because if I was, I’d know it. After that, the pressure was off for me. All I have to do is make the second team. How hard can that be?
Yeah, I could be pretty content hanging out in perpetual good weather, the lions and the lambs eating soy, and having a good bottle of wine.
The history of Witness’predictions is long and batting zero.
Brilliant theologian, forget even that he was the root individual that started Protestantism.
He used to have dreams where he and the devil were throwing shit at each other.
Origen, second century, castrated himself so as to not get aroused around women.
And so it went and so it goes, with Dr. Dob just the latest incarnation of Christian weirdness.
But Martin Luther actually composed his religious writings while on the can (no shit!):
http://dsc.discovery…
“Oct. 25, 2004 – German archaeologists have discovered the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation – a stone toilet on which the constipated Martin Luther wrote the Ninety-Five Theses that launched the creation of Europe’s Protestant churches.”
AHAHAHA! The more I thought about it the funnier it became. Oh, OQD, I wish I had your ability to communicate humor throug the written word.
Now I’m off to watch “Desperate Housewives.”
is that they had some profoundly beautiful ideas.
Augustine believed that evil happened in the world not because of the failure of God or the presence of Satan, but because of the absence of love. (This, I think comes from Plato and Socrates: “Men do evil only through ignorance”).
The Augustinian concept of the Fall and Grace is not that man was irredemably sinful, but that man was incomplete, and that the Grace of God completed man, and gave him compassion and the ability to love beyond himself.
Luther took it a step farther, and said all you needed to receive Grace was to ask for it; that God gave it to all that sought it.
I’ve never been able to convince myself that materialistic explanations of the world left mankind better off. I guess that’s why I’ve never been able to call myself an atheist.
“I’ve never been able to convince myself that materialistic explanations of the world left mankind better off.”
Read the discussion on Quantum Mechanics here abouts. Since the 1500s science has been slowly but surely demolishing any pretense that revealed truth (ie. scriptural religion) had any literal truth in it with regard to physical reality.
Best case is that the Bible is allegorical, and now the best biblical scholars (not James Dobson) acknowledge that what we have is largely incomplete, heavily censored, and the product of conflicting goals which include creating a priesthood that was largly self-serving. That got us through about 1500 years or so of western civ.
But, on the pure materialistic side since the Enlightenment, we ain’t been doin so hot either. Stalinism, and the misery it imposed on hundreds of millions of people was a pure materialist ‘religion’. National Socialism in Germany was a pure materialist ‘religion’. American Consumerism, is in my mind an artifact of a purely materialist culture. We are economically well past what we need for comfortable sustainable life, we neglect our relationships (reflected in a staggering divorce rate), and plunge many of our children into poverty. We will gladly destroy natural systems for the sake of driving 15 mph faster on the freeway. And, we pretty much all do it, certainly enough to have brought us to the cusp of some impact on the natural world that probably won’t be very pleasant. And we can’t stop. There is no moral authority in this civilization, and we seem to need one.
The substitute for that is not, by the way, social programs from governments.
I think you’re judging early Christianity and reformation theology WAY too much based on current issues. This is a common mistake.
As it turns out, Calvin really had no corner on the market on the idea of “predestination.” It was not a major emphasis of his teaching, contrary to current thought, because his ideas on the subject differed little from his contemporaries. He essentially believed the same teaching that the Catholic Church did on the subject, as well as the other reformers, who all based their theologies on the ideas of Aquinas, who based their philosophy on Augustine, who in reality based his ideas on the classical Greeks, Plato, Aristotle, and many others who tended to hold to the idea that human’s days were numbered by the gods and the underscored the futility of trying to escape destiny (remember Oedipus?).
So, if you really want to be accurate about it, you’ll blame the idea of predestination not on Calvin but on classical Greece, which, by the way, is what nearly every other part of our civilization is based on.
Trying to pin wrongs both past and present on philosophers who lived centuries or even millenia ago really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Sure, you can tie virtually every stream of thought today back to some classical antecedent, but does it really make any sense to do so?
Axial religions are all the rage. Zoraster, Mani, etc., although I still can’t stand Joseph Campbell. Too Camelotish. in the Kennedy sense of the word.
The important Greeks end up being the pre-Socratics. Trust me, it took me over thirty years to come to accept that; I have a well stocked library of Plato. But Heraclitus, et.al. got it right, and Plato and Aristotle got it wrong. The last 2,400 years have pretty much been one of those classes where you missed a critical lecture and didn’t find out until the final exam.
No surprise to find Dobson and DeLay in the mutual admiration society. They’re both just the latest incarnation of bible-thumping snake-oil salesmen. Neither would recognize a decent human value if it rolled over them in a Lexus.
Based on the report in today’s Washington Post, the Attorney General of the United States was involved in discussions about firing the U.S. Attorneys — despite repeated denials:
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales met with senior aides on Nov. 27 to review a plan to fire a group of U.S. attorneys, according to documents released last night, a disclosure that contradicts Gonzales’s previous statement that he was not involved in “any discussions” about the dismissals.
Justice Department officials also announced last night that the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility have launched a joint investigation into the firings, including an examination of whether any of the removals were improper and whether any Justice officials misled Congress about them.
This is a very serious matter. Top officials at the Department of Justice and the White House may have broken laws by lying to Congress and obstructing investigations. That’s why we need a Special Prosecutor in this case.
Fitzgerald anyone?
h/t ThinkProgress
OK. Suppose I walked into my kitchen this morning and saw that while the heating elements of my toaster were glowing read, even after 10 minutes my bagel was neither browned nor burned. Then suppose I head a voice from my toaster commanding me to go to the state legislature and tell Joan Fitzgerald to privatize RTD. Suppose further that some of you read this post and are convinced by my eloquence and force of personality and also go to Joan Fitzgerald and tell her, “O sinful woman, heed the voice of theProphet of the Toaster and ye shall be rewarded.”
Now, Joan Fitzgerald would rightly want to know why we want RTD privatized, and it won’t be enough just to say, “Trust the toaster!” After all, not everybody will have had or will be capable of having the toaster experience, but everybody is capable of thinking for themselves. Now it’s marginally possible, that we could give good reasons for privating RTD, and in a sane world we would prevail (and deserve to prevail) on that basis. But if that is the case, what’s the point of talking about the magic toaster at all? If we have good reasons, we don’t need to appeal to the magic toaster…or to God.
Similarly, if Dobson and his friends have something useful to say about public policy, they can say it without dragging God into it. On the other hand, if I’m irrational and still want to get my way, I can resort to hiding my irrationality in piety or mysticism, hope that you’ll be polite enough to “respect my inner life,” and not ask any hard questions. In short, if I have to invoke God in public policy discussions, I’m probably scamming you–and, deep down, am aware of it.
have you thought about setting up a shrine to the toaster? Could be big….
…I was thinking about persecuting heretics by proposing a toast.
…so I was thinking of clotted cream.
…the Cambridge people are glad Colorado’s gone blue. Of the magic toaster, however, it’s traditonal to say, “Whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent.”