Glenn Reynolds today sends his readers to this absolutely exquisite essay from Roger Simon of Pajamas Media, who explains why his support for gay marriage and women’s rights leads him to be such a committed warrior in the War against Islamofascism:
…So, yes, I am a supporter of gay marriage and undoubtedly will remain so, since it is consistent with my values of long duration. And, yes, I will continue to agitate for it in my writing and elsewhere. But in return I call on my friends on the Left –- straight or gay -– to help defend that real source of liberalism the Enlightenment, because if we lose and fall under religious law, there not only will be no gay marriage, there will be no women’s rights, no freedom of the press, no basic human rights, not even – as in the case of Iran – any music.
Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States — the Pajamas Media/ right-wing-blogosphere / Fox News / Michelle Malkin / Rush Limbaugh listener strain — actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and “our women” will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have — not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.
Is the critique of Darwinism basically the same as what you’d find from American creationists?
Much of the rhetoric is similar. There are only so many ways you can argue against evolution, only so many ways you can say the fossil record doesn’t tell you what the biologists say. But there are also differences. For example, in American creationist circles, one of the stronger options is “Young Earth creationism.” People who read the Book of Genesis literally believe in a creation that happened 10,000 years ago, literally done in six days. But the Quran is much vaguer about the time frame of divine action. Therefore, they are not as committed to fitting earth history into thousands of years. So Muslim creationists are almost invariably “Old Earth creationists.”
What about the idea that human beings have a common ancestor with chimpanzees?
That’s definitely a no-no …you will find that Muslims will typically be very reluctant to allow for human evolution.
Setting aside the penguin and his cheerfully obtuse dog, the main “characters” in my strip for the past six or seven years have basically been George Bush and his Legion of Doom administration (and of course their various mouthpieces and enablers). Which leaves me vulnerable to a problem that, say, Charles Schulz did not have to face: my characters keep getting up and walking away.
Karl Rove, President Bush’s longtime political adviser, is resigning as White House deputy chief of staff effective Aug. 31, and returning to Texas, marking a turning point for the Bush presidency.
There’s still a big Donald Rumsfeld-sized hole in my cartoon — watching him testify during the Tillman hearings, I was reminded once again that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. And now Karl, my ever-reliable Machiavellian straight-man, is leaving. Sure, maybe he’ll be back for some corruption inquiry or war crimes tribunal — but it just won’t be the same as having his blandly evil presence in the background of the Oval Office whenever I need it.
Last week, Newsweek ran a cover story on the global warming denial industry, which, astonishingly enough, began with the premise that overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue is not subject to false “balance”.
Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate’s Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that. But Boxer figured that with “the overwhelming science out there, the deniers’ days were numbered.” As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. “I realized,” says Boxer, “there was a movement behind this that just wasn’t giving up.”
(Last week’s most recent example was the glitch in some NASA data, a “gotcha” moment for the glib mouthpieces of denial, to which there was, predictably, less than meets the eye.)
It’s really just a matter of motive. If we ever get serious about addressing greenhouse emissions, it will cut into the profits of various industries, in some cases substantially. Hence, industry has a clear, straightforward motive to argue that global warming is not much of a problem. But — and this is the problem for the naysayers — those who acknowledge the reality of global warming would seem only to be motivated by (a) science and (b) concern for the future of the planet. Hard to demonize that, which is why you’ll constantly hear various talk-radio blowhards ascribing somewhat vaguer, and less plausible motives to the rationalists, i.e., they just want power. Glenn Beck, for instance, compares Al Gore to Adolf Hitler. Occam’s razor should slice through such nonsense like a knife through butter that’s been left out on the table in the middle of another record heat wave. But the well-funded denial industry continues to approach the debate like O.J. Simpson theatrically struggling to pull on an allegedly tight glove in front of a gullible jury, and too many people seem incapable of asking the most basic question: who has the most reason to lie?
I was going to write something about this alarming story by McClatchy reporter Matt Stearns about Bush’s continuing interest in attacking Iran. But Nell of A Lovely Promise already said everything I had to say:
Stearns vastly overstates Congressional opposition to a U.S. military strike in Iran. This passage made my jaw drop:
It’s been the consensus for months among the Democrats who hold the majority that Bush must get congressional authorization before any military strike [on Iran].
Orilly? Then why was a provision requiring such an authorization stripped from the Democratic leadership’s version of the Pentagon supplemental spending bill in April before ever coming to a vote? Why did a similar standalone bill go down to defeat in May with 100 Democratic members voting against it? And why does Stearns not even mention either event?
All of these calls for “unity” and prayers that thousands of people die so that people “wake up” have nothing to do with anyone preventing the Bush administration from doing what they want. They’re simply expressing a deep anger that the dirty fucking hippies don’t agree with everything they say. Ultimately, they’re angry that their pet war isn’t going well and angry that the dirty fucking hippies don’t rely on quite as many adult undergarments as they do. Read the rest of this entry »
I think we really have to ask: why are people who are, by their own account, not just mistaken but completely clueless among the people who are given platforms to express their opinions?
I hate sounding snide about this, but for an adult to be asking this is really like an adult asking “why hasn’t Santa Claus come to my house with presents for me?”
Thanks for tuning in to K@#*-TV, Maui’s most self-aware station
The management of a new Hawaiian TV station is reportedly horrified at the realization that the last three call letters “UNT” do not lead to a particularly euphonic four-letter station name, considering that the first letter will assuredly not be “W.”
They apparently never noticed what their own station name spelled. Neither did the FCC, who would fine somebody hundreds of thousands of dollars if you reported this story on the air and pronounced these FCC-approved call letters as a phonetic whole.
Incidentally, in the same set of approvals, the company now also owns “KWTF.” (As in “WTF?”) Fitting.
Link via our Trebekistan pal Ken Jennings, whose blog you may find habit-forming.
After concluding our Sunday night show at Lollapalooza, fans informed us that portions of that performance were missing and may have been censored by AT&T during the “Blue Room” Live Lollapalooza Webcast.
When asked about the missing performance, AT&T informed Lollapalooza that portions of the show were in fact missing from the webcast, and that their content monitor had made a mistake in cutting them.
During the performance of “Daughter” the following lyrics were sung to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” but were cut from the webcast:
- “George Bush, leave this world alone.” (the second time it was sung); and
- “George Bush find yourself another home.”
This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media.
AT&T’s actions strike at the heart of the public’s concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media.
That’s right. AT&T, like other telcos who say you can “just trust them” not to censor content in the absence of mandatory net neutrality, just did exactly what everyone who’s worried about net neutrality always believe they would do.
What’d that take? About ten seconds?
Why don’t people just laugh in the faces of industries that claim they can self-regulate?
