Vorjack: “Ur Doing It Wrong“

Religions are variegated things that allow the individual more control than most folks acknowledge. We’re fond of treating religion as something you’re born into and stuck with barring deconversion. We don’t often talk about the streams of tradition within the religion that an individual must accept or reject.

Look around you: in our culture the chances are you’re going to see someone who is a Christian but holds to different interpretations of what Christianity means. Every sect has a tradition that explains how they’ve come to understand their religion the way they do. Every permutation has an argument as to why their tradition is legitimate. And this is fractal: every community has within it different streams of tradition that emphasis and interpret the components differently.

Perhaps you’re an evangelical who places high importance on the words of the Bible. But why do you take this passage at face value, while interpreting that passage in its historical context? Why is this verse intended only for that time and place while that verse is immortal and internal? Why do you interpret this passage in light of that passage instead of the other way around?

… Rabbi Hillel is supposed to have said that the golden rule is the core of the law, and that all the rest is commentary. If your interpretation of the law leads you towards treating someone in a way that you would find hateful if the situation were reversed, then your interpretation is wrong.

Nick Hanauer: “The Inequality Speech That TED Won’t Show You“

For thousands of years people were sure that earth was at the center of the universe.  It’s not, and an astronomer who still believed that it was, would do some lousy astronomy.

In the same way, a policy maker who believed that the rich and businesses are “job creators” and therefore should not be taxed, would make equally bad policy.

I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a “circle of life” like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

So when businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it’s a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around.

Josh Kosman: “Why Private Equity Firms Like Bain Really Are the Worst of Capitalism“

Romney didn’t make his fortune through venture capital­; he made it through private equity. … Here’s what private equity is really about: A firm like Bain obtains cheap credit and uses it to acquire a company in a “leveraged buyout.” “Leverage” refers to the fact that that the company being purchased is forced to pay for about 70 percent of its own acquisition, by taking out loans. If this sounds like an odd arrangement, that’s because it is. Imagine a homebuyer purchasing a house and making the bank responsible for repaying its own loan, and you start to get the picture.

O.K., but what about this much more virtuous business of swooping in and restoring struggling companies to financial health? Well, that’s not a large part of what private equity firms do, either. In fact, they more typically target profitable, slow-growth market leaders. (Private equity firms presently own companies employing one of every 10 U.S. workers, or 10 million people.)

And that’s when the fun starts. Once the buyout is completed, the private equity guys start swinging the meat axe, aggressively cutting costs wherever they can – so that the company can start paying off its new debt – by laying off workers and cutting capital costs. This process often boosts operating profit without a significant hit to the business, but only in the short term; in the long run, the austerity approach makes it difficult for companies to stay competitive, not least because money that would otherwise have been invested in expansion or product development – which might increase revenue down the line – is used to pay off the company’s debt.

It takes several years before the impacts of this predatory activity – reduced customer service, inferior products – become fully apparent, but by that time the private equity firm has generally resold the business at a profit and moved on.

Richard Beck: “Orthodox Alexithymia“

When theology and doctrine become separated from emotion we end up with something dysfunctional and even monstrous. A theology or doctrinal system that has become decoupled from emotion is going to look emotionally stunted and even inhuman.

What I’m describing here might be captured by the tag “orthodox alexithymia.” By “orthodox” I mean the intellectual pursuit of right belief. And by “alexithymia” I mean someone who is, theologically speaking, emotionally and socially deaf and dumb. Even theologically sociopathic.

… Orthodox alexithymia is produced when the intellectual facets of Christian theology, in the pursuit of correct and right belief, become decoupled from emotion, empathy, and fellow-feeling. Orthodox alexithymics are like patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex brain damage. Their reasoning may be sophisticated and internally consistent but it is disconnected from human emotion. And without Christ-shaped caring to guide the chain of calculation we wind up with the theological equivalent of preferring to scratch a doctrinal finger over preventing destruction of the whole world. Logically and doctrinally such preferences can be justified. They are not “contrary to reason.” But they are inhuman and monstrous. Emotion, not reason, is what has gone missing.

Neil Gaiman, “Keynote Address,” University of the Arts, May 17, 2012

Someone asked me recently how to do something she thought was going to be difficult, in this case recording an audio book, and I suggested she pretend that she was someone who could do it. Not pretend to do it, but pretend she was someone who could. She put up a notice to this effect on the studio wall, and she said it helped.

So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.

And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.

Mary E. Hunt: “Bishops Search for Condoms in Cookie Boxes“

Emboldened by the Vatican’s hostile takeover of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the [United States Conference of Catholic Bishops] have shown their prowess by choosing to investigate the Girl Scouts of the USA.

… The apparent goal of this exercise of “investigating” gender female persons is to set up and enforce a male-defined model of girlhood/womanhood. A Vatican-, or in this case, USCCB-launched investigation is what Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM, calls the equivalent of a grand jury investigation. There is the presumption that something is wrong, not something right, that there is guilt to be uncovered, not virtue to be unleashed. What is wrong seems to be women and girls thinking for themselves and acting for the common good.

Mark Thoma: “The Need for Countervailing Power“

Before the recession started I could not have imagined that policymakers would fail to put the unemployed first and foremost in all policy decisions. I was sure the unemployed would come before inflation, before banks, before debt reduction and contrived fights over the debt ceiling. How could we possibly turn our backs on millions of struggling households, especially when doing so creates so many additional long-run problems for individual households and for the economy as a whole? Nothing else would be more important than putting people back to work, and we would, of course, come together and mobilize in a national war against high unemployment.

But I forgot something. With the decline in unions in recent decades, the working class has lost both economic and political power. And at the same time, those at the top end of the income scale have gained power both relatively and absolutely. So why would I have ever thought that the unemployed would come first when they have so little organized political power? Is it any surprise that policy has paid most attention to the issues that just happen to be the things those with the most political power care the most about? What was I thinking?

I suppose I was thinking that politicians were honorable, that money wouldn’t trump principle. Silly me. In any case, the question is how to change the balance of power.

Maehem Sez: “I had an abortion“

I’m not going to tell you whether it was a wanted or an unwanted pregnancy.

I’m not going to tell you how far along the pregnancy was.

I’m not going to tell you whether there was a genetic abnormality, or whether my life was endangered by the pregnancy.

I’m not going to tell you any of those things because I think answering those questions, creating the situation from which my experience unfolds offers someone, everyone, anyone, the chance to say, “She deserved to access abortion,” or “How dare she get pregnant and have an abortion,” or find some pity in their heart for whatever piece of my situation offers them the opportunity to justify their judgment, or their sense of false safety.

… None of the, “How did it happen?” matters. It’s irrelevant.

What matters is that I was able to access abortion when I needed to. When I wanted to. When I was pregnant and had the need to no longer be pregnant. When I was desperate to not be pregnant.

Mary Valle: “This Far and No Further“

Now the USCCB is attacking the Girl Scouts. I felt this coming, somehow. Groups of women gathering, independently, just stick in their craw the way a lot of other things — and I think you know what other things I’m talking about — don’t.

The USCCB is concerned that a troop on Colorado accepted a 7-year-old transgendered girl. That’s Troop Business, Bishops. If the girls in the troop think that’s fine, it’s dandy. Girl Scouts are free to make their own decisions. Which of course, might be the problem.

… I’m beginning to suspect that the mere notion of girls meeting, gaining skills and becoming competent human beings is a threat. Are Catholic girls no longer being encouraged to follow their own dreams? To speak their minds? To lead others? (Not to mention doing community service, camping and crafts!)

Richard Rohr: “Vatican Versus American Nuns“

Despite the very clear reforms of the II Vatican Council in the 1960′s, the Roman patriarchy, a closed system that allows no prophetic critique, and their branch appointed officers (bishops), are step by step rolling back both the spirit and the letter of the Vatican II reforms–while pretending and saying they are not. (Remember, if you can reject this Council, then you have the basis for rejecting the other 20 Councils of the Church too! The Pope and bishops had better be very careful!)

… No group accepted the reforms and tried to renew itself following the Council like the American Sisters. Yes, they made their mistakes, and also enjoyed certain matriarchal benefits over the laity. Nevertheless, this cruel, humiliating, and intimidating attempt by the Roman Curia (“the place that cares for”) to punish and control the American sisters is being seen for what it is, and what it is not: It IS male patriarchal control, hurt feelings because they are not that much in control any more; and it is certainly NOT anything like Jesus or the Gospel. Patriarchal systems normally engineer their own demise by such gross misuse of power.

Joan Chittister: “Silence about the global treatment of women is disquieting“

You have to wonder, don’t you? What have they been told about women by the religious men who catechized them? What snide jokes and demeaning theology are still being taught about women by patriarchal religions? By the actions of exclusion and control and invisibility and domination and subordination of women by church men and holy elders everywhere? Even here. Even now.

From where I stand, it seems to me that male “protection,” paternalism and patriarchal theology are not to be trusted anymore because the actions it spawns in both men and women have limited the full humanity of women everywhere, and on purpose.

Isn’t it time for us all to really be converted, to say the real Truth about women from our pulpits, from our preachers, from our patriarchs, until both they and we finally believe it ourselves?

Vicki Escarra: “Charity Can’t Do It Alone“

For the one in six Americans at risk of hunger, food banks and their local agency partners are truly the first line of defense, and many times the only resource standing between being able to put food on the family dinner table and going to bed with an empty stomach. However, the charitable food assistance network cannot meet the needs of these families alone. It is only through our public-private partnership with the federal government — through programs like TEFAP, CSFP, CACFP, and SFSP, and sustained support for SNAP and other programs in the nutrition safety net — that we are able to protect families from hunger.

T.M. Luhrmann: “Do as I Do, Not as I Say“

If you want to understand how evangelicals conceive of their political life, you need to understand how they think about God. I am an anthropologist, and for the last 10 years I have been doing research on charismatic evangelical spirituality — the kind of Christianity in which people expect to have a personal relationship with God. …

What someone believes is important to these Christians, but what really matters is becoming a better person. As I listened in church and participated in prayer groups, I saw that when people prayed, they imagined themselves in conversation with God. … They imagine God as wiser and kinder than any human they know, and then they try to become the person they would be if they were always aware of being in God’s presence, even when the kids fuss and the train runs late.

… When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately about what kind of person they are trying to become — what humans could and should be, rather than who they are.

… If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters, they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear. They should talk about the kind of people we are aiming to be and about the transformational journey that any choice will take us on. They should talk about how we can grow in compassion and care. They could talk about the way their policy interventions will allow those who receive them to become better people and how those of us who support them will better ourselves as we reach out in love. They could describe health care reform as a response to suffering, not as a solution to an economic problem.

Paul Krugman: “How to End This Depression“

The truth is that recovery would be almost ridiculously easy to achieve: all we need is to reverse the austerity policies of the past couple of years and temporarily boost spending. Never mind all the talk of how we have a long-run problem that can’t have a short-run solution — this may sound sophisticated, but it isn’t. With a boost in spending, we could be back to more or less full employment faster than anyone imagines.

But don’t we have to worry about long-run budget deficits? Keynes wrote that “the boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity.” Now … is the time for the government to spend more until the private sector is ready to carry the economy forward again. At that point, the US would be in a far better position to deal with deficits, entitlements, and the costs of financing them.

Meanwhile, the strong measures that would all go a long way toward lifting us out of this depression should include, among other policies, increased federal aid to state and local governments, which would restore the jobs of many public employees; a more aggressive approach by the Federal Reserve to quantitative easing (that is, purchasing bonds in an attempt to reduce long-term interest rates); and less timid efforts by the Obama administration to reduce homeowner debt.

Bill McKibben: “Too Hot Not to Notice?“

This is a full-on fight between information and disinformation, between the urge to witness and the urge to cover-up. The fossil-fuel industry has funded endless efforts to confuse people, to leave an impression that nothing much is going on.  But — as with the tobacco industry before them — the evidence has simply gotten too strong.

Once you saw enough people die of lung cancer, you made the connection. The situation is the same today. Now, it’s not just the scientists and the insurance industry; it’s your neighbors. Even pleasant weather starts to seem weird.  Fifteen thousand U.S. temperature records were broken, mainly in the East and Midwest, in the month of March alone, as a completely unprecedented heat wave moved across the continent. Most people I met enjoyed the rare experience of wearing shorts in winter, but they were still shaking their heads. Something was clearly wrong and they knew it.

Mike Konczal: “Against Law, For Order“

When neoconservatives say that they are the party of “law and order,” it is important to remember that they care less for the rule of law than they do for the rule of order.

… As historian Robert Perkinson explores in his book Texas Tough, there has always been a distinctly repressive character to the Southern prison, with its chain gangs, forced labor, and limited attempts at reform. These vicious practices, born out of the era of slavery, remain and shape the modern prison. As Perkinson says of the penal labor farms in East Texas, “Nowhere else in turn-of-the-millennium America could one witness gangs of African American men filling cotton sacks under the watchful eyes of armed whites on horseback.”

As political power moved to the Sunbelt and conservatives successfully realigned the South rightward, these brutal tactics became wedded to the Republican Party. The prison is part of the conservative project of race control. As Michelle Alexander argues in The New Jim Crow, mass incarceration locks people of color into permanent second-class citizenship much as the Jim Crow system of de jure and de facto segregation did in the past. Legalized discrimination, political disenfranchisement, and segregation, instituted through techniques like job licensing restrictions and legal requirements for voting, are features of both regimes.

 

Carol Howard Merritt: “(Re)Imagining Christianity“

Right now, on the 21st Century blogosphere, Christians argue whether women should keep silent in churches. That’s right. It’s 2012 and they believe that women are so subordinate that we should not even be allowed to ask questions in a Bible study. First Timothy explains that Eve tasted the fruit first, so two thousand years later, anyone with XX chromosomes should not open their mouths within the walls of a church. If that logic is not a contrived recipe for oppression, I don’t know what is.

In many congregations, women cannot become pastors, elders, or deacons. Leadership is barred from women. Where else in society does that explicitly take place? I can’t think of any place other than a couple of absurd golf clubs in the South.

Ethan Siegel: “The Power of Admitting ‘I’m Wrong’“

No matter who you are, no matter how smart you are, no matter how brilliantly you’ve drawn the conclusions you’ve drawn from the evidence you’ve gathered, there will come an instance where the evidence you encounter will be irreconciliable with the picture of reality you presently hold. And when that moment happens, your response will mean absolutely everything.

Because there is the possibility that your view of reality — the way you make sense of things — is flawed in some way. You have to open your self up to at least the possibility that you are wrong. It is a humbling admission, that you may be wrong, but it’s also the most freeing thing in the world. Because if you can be wrong about something, then you can learn.

… But if you can’t admit that you might be wrong, if your picture of reality is unchangeable despite any evidence to the contrary, if you refuse to assimilate new information and new knowledge and re-evaluate your prior stance on an issue, then you will never learn.

… But if we recognize that our present understanding may not be the final answer, and we can absorb that ego-bruise from possibly not being in the right when we thought we were, we can step forward.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Things which are of human right cannot derogate from natural right or Divine right. Now according to the natural order established by Divine Providence, inferior things are ordained for the purpose of succoring man’s needs by their means. Wherefore the division and appropriation of things which are based on human law, do not preclude the fact that man’s needs have to be remedied by means of these very things. Hence whatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor. For this reason Ambrose [Loc. cit., 2, Objection 3] says, and his words are embodied in the Decretals (Dist. xlvii, can. Sicut ii): “It is the hungry man’s bread that you withhold, the naked man’s cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man’s ransom and freedom.” Since, however, there are many who are in need, while it is impossible for all to be succored by means of the same thing, each one is entrusted with the stewardship of his own things, so that out of them he may come to the aid of those who are in need. Nevertheless, if the need be so manifest and urgent, that it is evident that the present need must be remedied by whatever means be at hand (for instance when a person is in some imminent danger, and there is no other possible remedy), then it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another’s property, by taking it either openly or secretly: nor is this properly speaking theft or robbery.

Rick Perlstein: “Behind the Right’s Phony War on the Nonexistent Religion of Secularism“

One of the most robust and effective conspiracy theories on the right, the notion that “secularism” – or, just as often, “Secular Humanism” – is a religion is meant to be taken entirely literally: right wingers genuinely believe it refers to an actually existing religious practice. How do conservatives know? Because, they say, the Supreme Court said so. It was, as religious historian and Lutheran minister Martin E. Marty has written, “an instance where one can date precisely the birth of a religion: June 19, 1961.” That was the day the Court ruled in the case of Torcaso v. Watkins striking down the Maryland Constitution’s requirement of “a declaration of belief in the existence of God” to hold “any office of profit or trust in this state” — specifically, in atheist Roy Torcaso’s case, the office of notary public. In his decision, Justice Hugo Black, writing for a unanimous court, further asserted that states and the federal government could not favor religions “based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs” – and, in a fateful, ill-considered, and entirely offhand footnote explained: “Among religions in this country which do not teach what would be generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others.”

From here, things get wacky. As unearthed by the outstanding scholar Carol Mason in her masterpiece Reading Appalachia from Left to Right, in 1974 a Jesuit priest and Fordham University law professor named Edward Berbasse argued that “since humanism is now considered by the court to be a religion , it must be prevented from being established by the government.” An activist asked him if that meant they could win their fight to ban the satanic textbooks being forced down their children’s throats in Kanawha County, West Virginia by taking the matter to the Supreme Court. “I think you may have the material if you can get a crackerjack lawyer,” Father Berbasse responded. A Supreme Court case was never actually attempted – not least because, as Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons have pointed out, “While historically there has been an organized humanist movement in the United States since at least the 1800s, the idea of a large-scale quasireligion called secular humanism is a conspiracist myth.” In Kanawha County, the textbook fight was fought out with dynamite instead. Nationwide, however, the conspiracist myth took on a life of its own – even unto the halls of Congress.

For Secular Humanism was not just an imaginary religion. It was, as the subtitle to a 1984 book still revered by religious conservatives, put it, The Most Dangerous Religion in America. How so? Because it held that man, not God, determines human affairs. From that, as Martin Marty explained, the ascendant religious right developed the claim that “when a textbook does not mention the God of the Bible … it necessarily leads to a void which it must fill with the religion of Secular Humanism.” (It’s a religion. Thus the capital letters.) And that any textbook which does not mention the guiding hand of God is rock-solid proof that the “secular humanist” conspiracists had written it; the absence was the presence.

Jamelle Bouie: “The Only Reasonable Response Is Alarm“

The 2012 election isn’t a debate between two variations on welfare state capitalism—it’s a choice between two visions of American society. Will the United States be a place of solidarity between people? Will we build a society where everyone has the tools to succeed? Will we care for the least advantaged in the best way that we can? Or will we indulge the hyper-individualistic id of American life, and create a place where opportunity is reserved for those who already have it, and everyone else is left to defend themselves against the unbridled market?

Believe me when I say that I’m not exaggerating for the sake of the election. The Ryan/Romney/Republican is a complete departure from the post-war political consensus in a way that wasn’t true of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, or even McCain/Palin. Ryan wants to return to a world of tremendous social and economic injustice, and the GOP has signed on wholeheartedly. It’s alarming, and those of us who fall within the liberal tradition, that’s a necessary and reasonable response.

Steve Fraser & Joshua B. Freeman: “Locking Down an American Workforce“

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights, and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance — unless, that is, you traveled back to the 19th century when convict labor was commonplace nationwide.