notabilia -- All Comments -- In These Times

All 8 comments by...

notabilia

- 28 May 08
- 6:51 pm
Again, In These Times, with the atheist-bashing! I did get one letter to the editor published when you went off on Dawkins, but like all the other pietists, you seem to always let the junior varsity keep up the defense of dear old Dad's religion. Hedges is a modern Parson Weems, enacting his psycho-drama of sin that he just couldn't get enough of in his chosen war zones, and now inflicts on his global flock. Whoever his father was, and maybe he was the white Martin Luther King, maybe he wasn't, the history of Christianity is one of terrible ignorance, persecution, …

Posted to Atheism’s Unholy Trinity
- 29 May 08
- 9:33 pm
Thanks for reading my missive, Marta, but the title of Hedges' book is "I Don't Believe in Atheists" - not " I Like Them Atheists." This parson has chosen to chase wars, believes Christ is his answer to whatever he witnessed, and goes on to castigate rationalists for some imagined "utopian" mindset he likens, absurdly, to whatever inhumanity he noticed along his merry way - did he earn some sainthood by choosing to take notes as genocide occurred around the globe, yet again? He does not stand for the dignity of man. He stands for petulant self-basting of ennoblement - not …

Posted to Atheism’s Unholy Trinity
- 18 Aug 07
- 6:21 am
Excellent notes: Loury's piece was trenchant, and Brooks' book is dead-on. All of this relates to the failed state that is America - its wholesale abdication of responsibility by its elites, the headlong rush by the supersystem to advance the rights of the rich. And so what do you want to do about it - be met with derision by idiots? Issue complaints from the ivory tower? Let's be honest - the resort to drug war crime by outcastes, the insane pilfering of capital by finance traders, the feeble murmurings of the blogging cranks - they all relate only to the …

Posted to The Kids Aren't Alright
- 11 Apr 07
- 11:28 am
Shaw took a principled stand, and for that gets vilified by a site that tries to call itself "worldchanging"? "A substantial military capable of projecting force" - How about we "project force" Steffan to the front lines where he can "project force" to some more innocent civilians? Shaw is absolutely heroic and correct in what he said and did, in not going with the U.S. military's program of the day. I'm sure the Pentagon will find many, many sources for "greening up," drawn from all the easily-bought ranks of the college-"educated" graduates. Martin Seligman, former APA president and guru of "positive"psychology, …

Posted to Uncle Sam Wants Sustainability
- 16 Mar 07
- 4:36 pm
The wonders of the Internet: spewings from a nutcase on an eminently serious subject. The article made the basic point that Christians seem to get folks pouring into their snake-oil seminars, of any dubious stripe, while unions don't even have a union hall anymore. Thanks - is it possible to state how low politics and intellectual life have gotten in this country, or will we just keep getting more and more bad news atop the dung heap? Anytime a "progressive" argues for some kind of "alliance-building" the principles are instantly lost - Jim Wallis and his "covenental sex" had me rolling- …

Posted to Preaching Revolution
- 17 Mar 07
- 9:22 am
This is going to be full-crank mode here, but if Chalmers Johnson read this review that fell off the cliff, I would like him to know that a younger person feels that, if anything, he is not "pessimistic" enough. Engler starts out well enough, lauding Johnson and then describing his knowledge, but before I could hold onto the paper, he went off into Weekly Standard territory, or New Republic at its most lickspittle. Charge #1. Nemesis "lacks analytical force." Yet the next sentence describes it as a "jeremiad." A jeremiad, by definition, has force. Force it's got, even if, in your …

Posted to Americas Own Worst Enemy
- 26 Jan 07
- 7:10 am
This is not a minor matter. Terry Allen has done a major service by writing these profound words. We are more than a few years after the Enlightenment, but hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted on unsupported quackery. If there is no proof, there is only blind luck and the benefits of massage. Why, then, is there a homeopath in my family, and why do otherwise smart women in America and the west chase so many pills, so many rubbings of newt, so much GNC profiteering? Because Americans are so good at not performing self-criticicism. And, as Ms. Allen so …

Posted to Faith Healing with Homeopathy
- 29 Jan 07
- 7:46 pm
Just to respond to some comments, because that's what anyone who ventures an opnion should do: 1. Wolf is right about our superstitions, but that is precisely what science and the Enlightenment was made to counteract, which we owe so much our relative health and prosperity to. Otherwsie we'd still be reading chicken entrails for our medicine. Hope is actually way over-rated, as Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in a great essay about her battle against breast cance rand the "hope industry." Let people have their harmless little idiocies - why? Why let all those billions go to nonsense without comment? Why …

Posted to Faith Healing with Homeopathy