Critical Exponent

Ayaan Hirsi Ali asks in The New York Times where Islam’s moderates are. A better question, I think, is “what are progressives and moderates doing to prevent extremists of all stripes from hijacking social discourse?”

Right-wing Christians in the US bemoan a supposed assault on Christianity, since anything less than a state religion will not do. A presidential candidate needs to placate the religious right, reciting revised history in the process. Another candidate attributes his success to god alone. In American society at large, it matters much more that one invoke the name of the proper deity in the proper way than that one have sensible, concrete ideas to put ethical principles into action.

Do these folks not realize that conspicuous piety in fact speaks very poorly of their character, ethics, and value system?

U.S. Ambassador resigns over discrimination.

This weekend’s NYT Week in Review seems largely devoted to the Wide Stance Scandal:

Abby Goodnough writes about open secrets and hypocrisy.

Sarah Kershaw writes about stings and entrapment.

Laura Maconald writes about how tea-room rituals are such as to not pose a menace to the public order.

My commentary: Normally, this ought to be a private scandal, just like Bill Clinton’s ought to have been. What makes Craig’s actions fair game for the media is his hypocrisy in soliciting gay sex (when he voted against gay rights) outside of marriage (when he proclaims support for “family values”). Interestingly, it seems like “family values” stands for nothing more than “anti-gay”, given that senators who commit adultery with women are not being pushed out.

On a lighter note, I think someone ought to open a gay bar in Idaho called The Wide Stance….

Is there any doubt America is turning into a theocracy? Here’s some more information on the rape victim who was denied emergency contraception and thrown in jail.

I guess it’s not just the Japanese Health minister who thinks of women as “birth-giving machines”.

Is there any doubt that America is turning into a dictatorship? When the government censors scientific discourse, it is time to be very afraid:

“There was a story about a scientist who got authorized to speak at a conference. He was prohibited from using the phrase ‘global warming.’ He was allowed to say ‘global,’ and he could say ‘warming,’ but he couldn’t put them next to each other. It became a charade,” [U.S. Rep. Peter Welch] said.

Obviously, Bush & company want to continue sacrificing peer review on the altar of dogma. Nothing like making public policy with blinders on!

“The right story will set our course for a generation to come,” says Bill Moyers in a speech (text, video) given on December 12 in New York under the auspices of The Nation, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the New Democracy Project.

I found the following paragraphs particularly important:

Reagan’s story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control–a Jeffersonian ideal at the root of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right out from under everyone else, so that democracy no longer has the ability to hold capitalism accountable for the good of the whole.

And that is not how freedom was understood when our country was founded. At the heart of our experience as a nation is the proposition that each one of us has a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” As flawed in its reach as it was brilliant in its inspiration for times to come, that proposition carries an inherent imperative: “inasmuch as the members of a liberal society have a right to basic requirements of human development such as education and a minimum standard of security, they have obligations to each other, mutually and through their government, to ensure that conditions exist enabling every person to have the opportunity for success in life.”

The quote comes directly from Paul Starr, one of our most formidable public thinkers, whose forthcoming book, Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism, is a profound and stirring call for liberals to reclaim the idea of America’s greatness as their own. Starr’s book is one of three new books that in a just world would be on every desk in the House and Senate (emphasis mine)

That, you see, is why I’m a progressive. The purpose of government is not to make the rich richer, but to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to meet their basic needs and strive for their wants. With great power comes great responsibility, as the saying goes, and of course all of us have to give back to the society that sustains us, rich and poor alike. That is the social contract.

Neocons tend to go on about family values and community values. What can possibly speak more to the issue of “values” than having everyone participate, via the proxy of government, in a fair distribution of basic services to every member of society? Why is it acceptable to tithe in Sunday services and give alms to the poor but anathema to use the government to distribute aid fairly, without regard to the geographical and bias limits inherent in individual or local gestures of goodwill?

As I was skimming the headlines on World AIDS Day today, I started thinking about how the current administration’s dogma is hampering efforts to effectively curb the disease: its insistence on abstinence-based sex programs is no help at all.

Then it hit me. For all of Colbert’s satire of neocons’ disdain of liberals’ “fact-based reality”, Bush & co are living in a “hope-based reality” of their own. Think about it: they want folks to heed their no-sex-outside-of-marriage and hope that will be enough for the unplanned pregnancy/STD issue to go away. Human nature has shown that the sex drive is so strong that people will often ignore, subvert, or rationalize away any moral codes to the contrary (exhibit A: Ted Haggard). A policy that pins its success on the hope that it will succeeded in changing human behavior where thousands of years of proscriptions have been ineffectual is doomed to fail.

The problem is more fundamental than that, though. Good engineering and good management require a failsafe approach: there has to be a fallback. Even the fallback itself may fail, so the infrastructure must be agile enough to adapt to situations as needed. In the sex-ed debate, advocating abstinence is one thing (and ethically questionable at that: why should the government be involved in that most personal of decisions?). Having the whole AIDS/STD/pregnancy prevention strategy resting entirely on abstinence is another: if people don’t heed the abstinence message, what’s the plan then? Moreover, how do you gauge progress? How do you adapt your strategy?

Of course, this is just one facet of a larger dogmatic issue. Consider the appointment of a family planning czar who doesn’t believe in birth control. Consider neocons’ opposition to abortion. Consider their opposition to non-procreative sex. These speak of a negligent vision, completely removed from reality, that relies on preaching to curb “undesirable” behavior and punishes those who do not hew to the straight(!) and narrow. And that’s the best case. If you’re really cynical, you’d think the plutocrats are paying lip service to social issues (while pinning the policy failures on the supposed beneficiaries themselves for failing to be properly pure and moral) while really creating a large underclass of poor worker bees to prop up their profits.

A Senate report concludes there was no pre-war link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The response by the administration that likes to talk about “personal responsibility”?

White House spokesman Tony Snow dismissed the report, saying, “We’ll let people quibble over three years ago.”

A shrug of the shoulders is all Americans get as thanks for sending their children off to be killed for the profit of plutocrats.

You’ve probably heard about the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, which has been criticized by the people portrayed there as inaccurate and biased. ABC has distributed advance copies to conservative pundits and bloggers, but not to liberals.

Take action to demand accurate and fair reporting by clicking here and here!

UPDATE: Several FBI agents declined to be associated with the making of the movie after producers refused to fix the inaccuracies.

UPDATE: Appletreeblog points out that advance copies were not in fact distributed to right-wing bloggers.

An article in The Nation’s recent “White Heat” issue reports how Lou Dobbs, one of CNN’s stars, has turned his nightly broadcast into a soapbox to air and misinform the public on the alleged threat posed by illegal immigrants:

Many Americans take him seriously. “Outside of elected officials he’s undoubtedly the most influential spokesman for the anti-immigration movement,” says Wayne Cornelius, a political science professor and director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. “I think he’s actually putting real pressure on elected officials by riling up a significant portion of their base.”

[...]

Former senior staffers at Dobbs’s show told me the anchor specifically searches for local stories to support his positions. “He approaches stories with a partisan ax to grind,” one former employee told me, asking not to be named out of fear of reprisal. “He runs the place as a tin-horn dictator. He’s assembled correspondents who feel beholden to him. They are given the line on the story and told how to assemble it in his partisan manner before they’re sent out to do the story.” (A second former senior Dobbs staffer, who also declined to speak on the record, confirmed the accuracy of this description.)

That’s led to blatant distortions of key facts. Dobbs searches high and low for statistics showing the negative impact of immigration on the US economy, and he conveniently leaves out contradictory information.

I don’t watch TV, so I’d be interested to know (a) whether Dobb’s show is billed as an editorial rather than a news program, and (b) whether there is a corresponding liberal-biased counterpoint to this show. Regardless, reporting only one side of the story and completely ignoring contrary facts fails the journalistic integrity test, even for an opinion forum.

Dobb’s response (the video is available here; scroll down to find it) is telling. Rather than refuting the claims in The Nation’s article and editorial, he engages in ad hominem attacks. These include not only name-calling, but also red-baiting (he claims The Nation is repeating socialist arguments, the assumption being that such arguments are automatically wrong) and, paradoxically, class warfare (The Nation’s editor is “vacationing…in the Hamptons”).

It bodes bad for our future that political discourse has descended to the playground level.