Florida County Unanimously Bans Atheists from Delivering Invocations at Public Meetings

From Raw Story via AlterNet:

The county commission in Brevard County, Florida, voted unanimously on Wednesday to prohibit atheists from offering invocations at public meetings, Hemant Mehta  reports.

The commissioners voted to send a letter to David Williamson, founder of the Central Florida Freethought Community, indicating that his group doesn’t qualify to deliver the invocation because it is defined as “an opening prayer, presented by members of our faith community.” 

More here.

If we're going to do this, if we believe that prayer before public meetings doesn't violate the first amendment, then we can't show favoritism, which would clearly be tantamount to the government "establish(ing) an official religion." So we've got to give everyone the chance to do their thing, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, Satanists, Hindus, Scientologists and other UFO cults, pagans, Flying Spaghetti Monster worshipers, and yes, atheists.

That's why I think it's better just to do away with these kinds of government invocations and benedictions altogether. But the Supreme Court tells us that's not what the first amendment means. So let's bring on the atheists and other weird religions. It's the only way.

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Winkie

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BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Saddam Hussein was an evil and brutal dictator. But Iraqi Christians were not persecuted by his secular regime. Indeed, his longtime foreign minister, deputy prime minister, and close advisor Tariq Aziz is, in fact, a Christian. So Hussein's reign was horrible, but Christians were allowed to worship there freely.

Of course, that all changed once the US toppled his government. And now we have ISIS persecuting Christians. While the US itself isn't doing the persecuting, our invasion and horribly botched occupation made it all possible. So it's our fault. If we had left Iraq alone, Christians there would have nothing to fear as far as religious freedom goes.

What's the lesson here? The denomination in which I grew up, the Southern Baptists, were by far the biggest religious group supporting the 2003 invasion, and they are now, I'm quite certain, absolutely horrified by what ISIS is doing over there. Here's the lesson: be very careful what you wish for because you can never be quite sure what you're going to get.

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Ferguson, gun control and Second Amendment hypocrisy

From Salon:

But 30 members of the open-carry group the Huey P. Newton gun club did march in the streets of Dallas earlier this week, armed with AR-15s, shotguns and rifles, chanting about Black Power. One of the marchers by the name of Drew X, with the New Black Panther Party, was quoted as saying, “If they don’t get these people under control with this police brutality and this abuse, this gonna be an international crisis.”

And this has the right wing very confused. A quick look around the Internet finds some perfunctory commentary supporting the group’s right to bear arms, but eventually people are pointing out the fact that one cannot be a “felon” and own guns. Finally they get down and dirty with assertions that the demonstrators must be bloods and crips and start whining that African-Americans are racist for mentioning that people of color are particularly at risk from police abuse. And then there are the hilarious jokes like this one: “If black people could get some marksmanship training it would really cut down on the number of innocents killed by stray bullets in certain neighborhoods.”

There’s a reason for this confusion and it goes to one of the fundamental reasons why these gun proliferation proponents are so passionate in their desire to be armed at all times. Let’s just say it isn’t fear of the federal government.

More here.

Who's the man with the master plan? This really cracks me up. The usual Second Amendment enthusiasts really don't know what to say about black militants embracing open carry. And their confusion is both funny and delightful. I guess they only mean open carry for people who share their politics. And skin color. But they can't really just come right out and say so, can they?

The Huey P. Newton Gun Club, indeed.



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Anti-Abortion Tea Party Congressman Who Asked Mistress to Get Abortion Could Win Primary

From Mother Jones:

Rep. Scott DesJarlais, who pressured a woman—one of two patients he admitted having affairs with—to get an abortion in the 1990s, appears to have narrowly avoided becoming the fourth Republican incumbent to lose a primary this year. With 100 percent of precincts reporting on Thursday, he led state Sen. Jim Tracy by 35 votes—34,787 to 34,752. (The results are not official and a recount is possible, although the state has no law mandating one in such circumstances.) The abortion revelation emerged after DesJarlais' 2012 primary, when the only thing standing between him and reelection in the deeply Republican district was a token Democratic candidate in the general election.

More here.

This reminds me of the proverbial soccer mom who is staunchly pro-life...until her teenage daughter gets pregnant. I have absolutely no doubt that many, many Americans who identify as pro-life are quite sincere, but stories like the one linked above, and there seem to be a lot of them, when put together with anti-birth control attitudes, anti-sex ed attitudes, and opposition to giving assistance to poor single mothers, all make me kind of not take the pro-life movement too seriously these days. From where I sit, it seems to be a bunch of empty and contradictory rhetoric, more about scoring political points and scolding the sluts than it is about saving lives.

I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

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Lindsey Graham: If Obama Doesn't Go On Offense, Terrorists Are 'Coming Here'

From the Huffington Post:

"[Obama is] trying to avoid a bad news story on his watch," Graham said on Sunday. "This is not a replacement for a strategy to deal with an existential threat to the homeland. To every member of Congress, we've been told by every major intelligence leader in our nation that we're threatened. The homeland is threatened by the presence of ISIL in Iraq and Syria. To change that threat, we have to have a sustained air campaign in Syria and Iraq. We need to go on offense."

More here.

For anybody who hasn't realized that the Republicans jumped the shark on foreign policy a decade or so ago, here's their latest piece of 70s sitcom absurdity. These days, Republicans jump the shark several times a week.

The deal to me is that ISIS is CLEARLY a regional threat, with virtually no ability to project their force abroad, and I mean with suicide bombers and whatnot. Also, they seem to have their hands pretty full in Iraq at the moment. To even entertain the notion that they are a direct threat to the continental US is to engage in high absurdity. This is not a serious statement Graham is making.

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Ferguson Cops Busted? New Video Seems To Show Brown Paying For Cigarillos

From Crooks and Liars:

Ferguson police's attempts to demonize Michael Brown, the unarmed African-American teen killed by Officer Darren Wilson, may have hit a small snag. The very video they released at the same time as they identified Wilson as the officer responsible for shooting Brown six times, including twice in the head, may show the opposite of what they intended.

More here, with video.

Not that this ultimately matters, because, you know, the police shouldn't perform summary executions of suspects in the street, but it appears Michael Brown did NOT, in fact, steal anything at all. Indeed, the tip off to law enforcement about the "robbery" didn't come from anyone working in the store; it was from some confused bystander.

What this means is that the Ferguson PD is DEFINITELY trying to get the public to think that killing Brown is okay because he was just your typical "black thug." A lot of people have fallen for it. And what that means is that we have a lot of stupid, ill informed, and possibly racist citizens in this country, who are all, like, oh, he stole cigars, so it's okay to shoot him in the street.

They did the same thing with Trayvon Martin, let loose the cry "BLACK THUG!!!!" I am thoroughly disgusted. As if killing Brown wasn't enough. They've got to turn him into a racist caricature worthy of death.

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Who rules America?

From the Hill courtesy of Hullabaloo:  

"The analysts found that when controlling for the power of economic elites and organized interest groups, the influence of ordinary Americans registers at a 'non-significant, near-zero level.' The analysts further discovered that rich individuals and business-dominated interest groups dominate the policymaking process. The mass-based interest groups had minimal influence compared to the business-based interest groups."

More here.

This became achingly obvious to me back in the 90s and I've been saying so since then. A lot of people over the years have either simply and assuredly disagreed or just sort of nodded and looked at me like I'm a bit crazy. But what's been obvious but denied for so long is now getting some solid quantifiable evidence behind it: our republic can no longer be described as democratic; we are ruled by the very rich, and the Democrats and Republicans alike do their bidding, not ours. The real question now isn't whether this has happened, but rather what are we going to do about it.

So...what are we going to do about it?

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DON'T CALL IT RACISM!

From the New Republic:

White St. Louis Has Some Awful Things to Say About Ferguson

"'It's bullshit,' said one woman, who declined to give her name. When I asked her to clarify what, specifically, was bullshit, she said, 'All of it. I don't even know what they're fighting for.'

'It's just a lot of misplaced anger,' said one teenage boy, echoing his parents. He wasn't sure where the anger should be, just that there should be no anger at all, and definitely no stealing.

'Our opinion,' said the talkative one in a group of six women in their sixties sitting outside the Starbucks, 'is the media should just stay out of it because they're riling themselves up even more.'

'The protesters like seeing themselves on TV,' her friend added.

'It's just a small group of people making trouble,' said another.

'The kid wasn't really innocent,' chimed in a woman at the other end of the table (they all declined to give their names). 'He was struggling with the cop, and he's got a rap sheet already, so he's not that innocent.' (While the first point is in dispute, the second isn't: The police have said that Michael Brown had no criminal record.)"

More here.

Let's not call it racism, okay? Because the moment that word is used, the brains inside the heads of the people I'm talking about suddenly lose access to all logical and rational ability. So I won't say "racist." I will, however, say "delusional." A lot of white people in America are COMPLETELY DELUSIONAL when it comes to issues of race and oppression. We will never solve the numerous longstanding problems with race in this country until these white Americans decide to stop living in their fantasies about the way the world works.

Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

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"...with only a bare bones understanding of what it means to be alive..." THE COLLECTED SERIES

It's rambling and sprawling, yes, based on a massive facebook discussion, but it really gave me an opportunity to articulate my views about the crucial value of the humanities and critical thinking.  So I made a lot of effort to get it here on Real Art, and now I'm bundling it so it's all together and I can link the whole thing over in the Greatest Hits section to the left.

So go check it all out if you haven't yet done so.  It's a damned good discussion, if I do say so myself.

Part One.

Part Two.

Part Three.

Part Four.

Part Five.

Part Six.

Part Seven.

Excelsior!

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"...with only a bare bones understanding of what it means to be alive..." PART SEVEN

Here's the final part of the huge discussion which broke out on facebook after my post on the liberal arts (part two, part three, part four, part five, part six):

Matt Might be a problem with medium. You read the cartoon, processed it and then wrote an angry post in response. Your readers read an angry post, and then, maybe, read the cartoon. So I reacted to your words, not theirs. And I stand by my characterization of your words. Sorry. I think you overstate the wretched existence faced by someone who learns a trade and you overstate the blissful intellectual mental utopia enjoyed by anyone who studied the liberal arts. It might have been for contrast or it might have been because you were so torqued. Or both.

One assertion that I've made that you haven't addressed is that this is total troll bait. Somewhere Rush Limbaugh is sitting by the pool having his feet rubbed by pre-teen illegal immigrant girls and drinking baby blood chortling away at how made he made all the liberals this time. I don't think most people actually buy the premise here and this cartoon should be ignored.

I agree that the choice between college as job training and college as intellectual cultivation is important. Both are valid pursuits. Colleges seem to have embraced job training as a lucrative exercise and no one has done a good job of defining how the liberal part of the education should matter and in what measure. On the other hand, I think the academics in liberal arts sometimes do themselves a disservice by being isolated and out of touch. The value in a liberal education is to apply it to the world we live in not surround yourself with like-minds.

Your story of the moment when it came together for you is compelling. I'm not sure how broadly applicable it is. My story, likewise not necessarily common, is that my dad was a really rational guy and he read all the time. I grew up in a house full of books. Lots of history and science, lots of quality fiction. I like sci-fi and was exposed early to Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, etc. The 3 laws are a nice exercise in rationality. What I don't have that you got (despite having a Liberal Arts degree) was a hardcore, rigorous exercise in argument. I also feel my overall background is lacking. Probably should have traded in some sci-fi for some Plato or Aristotle or Pliny and son. But I like to think of myself as an open-minded rationalist.

So I see critical thinking first as a value - what I got from my Dad. And then a learned skill as you got in your film critique. I actually think most of my skill development in this area has come from my work. Frequent decision making, choice selection, value measurement done in the absence of complete information.

So, I guess what I'm asserting is there is a lot of critical thinking capability out there and it's acquired in lots of places. But people choose to not use it or to misuse it. For the WMD debate, there where lots who supported the argument simply as a convenient tool to get what they wanted. Critical thinking can also fail in the face of bad inputs - do you have wrong or flawed info? Have you REALLY looked for alternative viewpoints? It takes a lot of effort in time and in reading poorly constructed arguments from people you don't agree with! Which is no fun.

Alright, this self-trained critical thinker has constructed. Enough weak and poorly formed arguments for the moment. Have a nice Saturday, everyone!

Oh, one more - speaking of weak arguments, "I got more Likes"?!? Really. Mr. Critical Thinker? A popularity contest? Well, in that case, I delight in the fact that my argument was LESS popular proving that only the few enlightened Liberal Artists agreed with me, while your argument must have applied to all the dim existing proles!

Ron Or it might simply be that your comment was buried deeply down the thread and fewer people saw it and were unable to vote for it. But really, I was just trying to find a way to see how people were responding to the post.

And about that, I feel almost certain that most people's eyes look at pictures first and text second, which is what this all seems to come down to. But that's most people, not all people, which means that, in the end, if I ever encounter this situation again, I should think about that small percentage of the population looking at the text first.

Okay, this is just something I found on the internet to support my position, but the essay on web design I'm linking below seems to support my point of view:

"The image captures the eye’s initial gaze, and the caption is the next thing to be viewed, because of this fact, many journalists actively use this in their writing as well."

Actually, I bet if you dig enough you can find something that says the exact opposite.

http://blog.crazyegg.com/2012/08/22/website-design-mistakes/

Rush Limbaugh. Actually, I disagree on that. The notion that a liberal arts degree is useless predates his rise to prominence by at least ten or fifteen years. I know this because I remember the derisive references to studying "underwater basket weaving" when I was a kid in the 70s. That is, and I also know this because of the book I've just finished reading, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," this social bias against college study, or rather, study of something that is not perceived as having an immediate practical value, goes back centuries. It's embedded in the American cultural DNA. Limbaugh and his ilk may aggravate it, but they didn't invent it and only recently have contributed to sustaining it.

I mean, don't you recall our KHS lunch group referring to the brown-nosing types in our honors English classes as "liberal arts f**s"?

I don't think it was troll bait at all. I think it was expressing a very widely held bedrock view in this nation. One that I think needs to be decisively dismissed whenever it manifests. I mean, obviously.

Matt I certainly will not disagree that Rush Limbaugh is likely not the source for an original idea - but seems like the kind of thing he would offer to spin someone up. And I agree about the anti-intellectual trend - I would be interested what the book you just read said about the rise of this trend. Perhaps a brief synopsis is in order?

Ron What's great about the book, to me, is that it was published in 1962, but seems as though it is aimed at the current era.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life

Matt Well, that's interesting because it seems as if their are likely some legitimate roots of anti-intellectualism, hence the stereotypical scientist or liberal in movies, books, etc - remote, overconfident, overbearing. But since it became a political tool of the right, it's transformed into something else - it's moved from legitimate skepticism about experts (related to anti-authoritarianism) to derision of all things intellectual. Was '62 prior to mainstreaming of this trend by the politically minded?

Ron Actually, the Wikipedia blurb doesn't really answer your question directly. The two biggest factors affecting intellectualism in America were the frontier/pioneer rural nature for most Americans until the late nineteenth century or so, and the continuing hardcore nature of the Protestant Reformation, which was always trying to lessen the role of the church as an institution, with its emphasis on seminary and educated clergy, while increasing the role of the individual believer, which wedded with the American democratic spirit.

Actually, we see it in mainstream politics by the time Jefferson, an intellectual, was running for President. He was trashed as an elitist with all his book larnin'. We see the trend come to full fruition pretty quickly after that with the election of Jackson and his King Mob. Since then, politicians have routinely been criticized by opponents as being elitist snobs--there have been, of course, a few exceptions, Wilson, for one, FDR with his brain trust, and JFK with his best and brightest. But we've seen the same attacks recently, too, against John Kerry and Obama, in spite of the fact that most of these guys running for President are Harvard/Yale, anyway.

I mean, Bush, a Yalie, criticizing Kerry for going to Yale. We live in strange times. Romney did the same thing.

Matt Proves the point, doesn't it? Willful ignoring of pertinent facts. But we see lots of reasons for it as well - look at the terrible management of wars in our history - it's just one bad general after another killing men needlessly through incompetence. Neo-conservatism is an intellectual exercise - a bunch of college brainiacs explaining how this will all make our world better. Fail.

Ron Oh dude. You're so right. I do think that such knowledge in the hands of elites only, a class of intellectual "betters," is what leads to this kind of folly, which is why I would love seeing the population intellectually armed against manipulation by our "betters."

It's not simply the neo-cons, either. If you get some down time, I HIGHLY recommend this documentary about one of Kennedy's "best and brightest" Robert McNamara, who was unarguably brilliant, and who may have saved as many lives as he destroyed.

http://youtu.be/nwXF6UdkeI4

Also, it's got a Philip Glass soundtrack. Okay, now I've piqued your curiosity.

Okay, it definitely stings being called "arrogant and condescending," but I must admit that you inspired me to go all out in this discussion, and I think it has ended up being a pretty great one.

Matt Well, just to be clear, I was characterizing one thing you wrote. Sorry if it was overly strong or felt like a comment about you - I don't think that's you. Which is why it surprised me! But, yes, we ended up covering some interesting ground.

Ron Maybe you should call me arrogant more often.

Matt My pleasure!

'Nuff said.

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"...with only a bare bones understanding of what it means to be alive..." PART SIX

Here's the next part of the huge discussion which broke out on facebook after my post on the liberal arts (part two, part three, part four, part five):

Toni I'd like to say perhaps were not approaching this correctly? Sure we can pick on the lesbian gender studies major and his inability to get employment (there really is such a man, I met him), perhaps we should ask why employers shy away from those trained in critical thinking? I have found in my life that even when I have zero experience in an arena, I generally do alright, especially in the early stages. What we lack in experience we make up for in ingenuity.

Ron That's the thing, liberal arts majors do, indeed, know how to learn. That's the process. On the other hand, liberal arts majors, if they did it correctly, also ask questions. They point out what are perhaps better ways of doing things. They can be very threatening to their immediate superiors in this respect. At least that's my speculation.

I try not to ask too many questions at work, myself.

Matt Ok, I'm back at least for a few minutes. I'm at a conference and swamped so apologies if I have failed to generate sufficient word count and in a timely enough manner.

I stand by my assertion that YOUR OPENING LINE sounded arrogant and condescending. Why did I mention it? Because it is out of character for you to sound that way, unless it's for a laugh, and particularly directed at a working class individual. So I mentioned it to say, hey Ron, did you really mean to be this way or was it a miscommunication? Especially since the whole cartoon is a strawman argument that pits two stereotypes against each other so that a third stereotype, the right-wing elite who is using anti-intellectualism to divert attention from issues such as regulation, accumulation of wealth, environment, etc.

But, we managed to stumble on an interesting argument, which is the idea that a Liberal Arts education is necessary (not always but mostly) to be a critical thinker. And i don't agree. I think a Liberal Arts ed can do much to develop critical thinking by exposing you to the worker of other critical thinkers, to develop practices, etc. But, the critical thinkers I know had it before they got to college and you, Ron Reeder, are a great example of that. You have been a critical thinker since I met you in 6th grade. College was a great way for you to hone that but you picked it up earlier. So did I and many of the other wonderful folks we knew before college that we bonded with way back when. So from where does this come from, I don't know. And it's not just an academic questions for me - we're trying to figure out the best way to nurture what appears to be a capacity and thirst for this type of exploration in our 8 year old.

As for why Liberal arts grads don't get hired? I can't speak for retail, food service,etc. But having hired new college grads, they fall into two buckets - those who have an immediately applicable skill and those who do not. Degrees like Engineering, Finance have obvious applications. Some, like English actually do too - if I need a writer, this is a difference maker. All the rest (including both my degrees) fall into the "should go to grad school" category. If you want a white collar job and you don't have a skill degree, you're best bet is sales. I know, yuck. Sounds horrible. That was my first job and I did not love it. But it exposed me to the area I was interested in and good at and got me on my way. Once you have a couple years of work experience, college degrees mean nothing to me.

So if you didn't get a job because they are afraid of critical thinkers, be glad you got away - that place will suck to work. In my (admittedly unusual high-tech) world, critical thinking is a plus. Business is all about problem solving and innovation, especially in tech, so that style of thinking is appreciated.

Ok, got to go but rest assured I'm not abandoning the thread!

Wait, one more! I like your examples but I think the Obama thing is sort of counter to your assertion - wouldn't you think that many folks who voted for him were the liberal arts educated types?

Ron Okay, Matt, I'm gonna hit these comments quickly. I hope. Probably not quickly.

Anyway, no apologies necessary for a lower word count. As you know, I can get verbose, especially if I feel like I'm defending myself from an unfair accusation. So, I'm glad you're still hanging in there with this.

Okay, so I was right in my speculation that it was the opening line that you found to be "arrogant and condescending." Good to know. For starters, thank you for trying to help me out. I appreciate that. I've been blogging for twelve years now, and, even though I feel like over a decade's experience with struggling every day both to formulate and articulate my views on numerous issues has made me a decent essayist, I also know that I'm certainly nowhere near perfect, and it's highly probable that I'm going to write things that aren't crystal clear from time to time. Any help is appreciated, especially from a guy as intelligent and reflective as you. So thanks.

Now, having said that, I feel like we've gotten into some super ultra subjective territory here. That is, I think the only possible way to interpret that opening sentence as "arrogant and condescending" is to completely take it out of the context in which it is presented.

Let's take a look at that context, at least, as I see it.

First and foremost, the most eye-catching aspect of the post, is the cartoon, which presents an option between studying the liberal arts and going to trade school, with the liberal arts option clearly presented as something only for a "loser." Yes, yes, the liberal arts student is the one saying "loser," but the idea is to create a sense of judgmental irony; he's the real loser in this depiction, not the trade school student, who is presented as just a regular guy trying to live his life, not trying to lord it over others like the a-hole liberal arts student does. The message is completely clear: don't study the liberal arts because it's for losers; instead, learn a trade because you'll have a much better life.

And that's the crux with this. What makes the better life? Why, making good money, of course. Don't concern yourself with the great questions about existence. That stuff is for losers. Just make good money and you'll be fine.

Obviously, I TOTALLY disagree with that, which brings us to the next feature of the post, the text I included. There are a total of six sentences, which include "Hmmm" and "Screw them for eternity." Not a lot to digest, but clearly to be considered in light of the accompanying cartoon, presumably the first thing to which the reader's eye goes.

My opening line, or, at least, what I'm trying to do with the opening line, starkly portrays the false option offered by the cartoon below: dim reality with a good job versus life of the mind with a bad job. I mean, that's what I get out of the cartoon--don't worry about all that fancy book stuff; it's not nearly as important as good money. So I pull the subtext up and make it clear. This is what the cartoonist is telling us. And if that's the option, I'll take less money because having a really good understanding of the world is far more important to me.

In the second paragraph, I become more direct. I reject the false option: trade school and college are not the same thing. I then attack the cartoonist and his ilk pushing this non-equivalency--when you make college and job training the same thing, you're necessarily telling people not to concern themselves with a deep study of what it means to be a human being. So screw them.

So that's what I was trying to do, and that's how it continues to read to me. In order to assume that I'm attacking the guy who goes to trade school, it seems to me, you have to ignore everything else going on in the post, the cartoon and its message, the second paragraph, in which there actually is an attack, at the cartoonist, as well as the overall context of what I post most every day on facebook.

I think I should also add, even though it's ultimately hard to know for sure, that the post has gotten fifteen "likes" so far. So, if what I wrote reads as an attack on working people, then it's easy to assume that all fifteen of those people liking the post are totally down with that. I mean, like I said, it's hard to tell why anybody "likes" a particular post on facebook, but like I also said, we're in super ultra subjective territory with this exercise in parsing how the meaning of this post is perceived. Personally, I think those fifteen people fully understood my intended meaning.

On the other hand, you've got four "likes" on your comment first calling me arrogant and condescending, so who knows? Of course, I've been getting that here and there for my entire life, so maybe it was just time to call Ron out for his arrogance and condescension, regardless of the post's clarity.

Super ultra subjective territory, indeed.

But that's how I see it. I think you've seized upon one sentence, really only half of a sentence, and disregarded everything else going on with the post to arrive at your conclusion. So I think it's an unfair and totally subjective judgment. On the other hand, I don't think you're being insincere with this, and think of you as a deeply reflective person, so it's something for me to think about in future writing, for which I again thank you.

On critical thinking and a liberal arts education:

I think I'm defining critical thinking differently from how you are, Matt. I don't really date my ability as a critical thinker until some time during the early 90s when I was studying RTF at UT. I was writing essay after essay after essay, having to consider film and television from multiple perspectives, Marxist, feminist, Freudian, anthropological, art/auteur, semiotics, and on and on and on. It was in trying to reconcile what are sometimes profoundly different viewpoints into something coherent that it all clicked. Suddenly I was seeing arguments and underlying assumptions in ways I never had before. Suddenly I was questioning stuff, in a solidly academic way, about my entire life, about existence in America, as a man, as a white person, as a citizen, as an artist, and so on. That is, this is when I became able to generalize critical thinking to all areas of existence, and not just within limited subject areas.

I used to think I understood argumentation up until that point. But I didn't. I mean, sure, I think I approached life with a sort of critical spirit, a willingness to question everything, but it was unfocused, and usually coupled with an inability to look at assumptions and ideas that aren't explicitly stated.

I never would have come to that point if I hadn't studied the liberal arts. So sure, I think a person can do this on his own. It's not impossible and I'm sure it happens. But I, personally, would have never done it outside the context of college study. I'm kind of lazy unless I'm really into something, and at that point it was film.

I thought I was there to learn how to make movies. Instead, I opened my eyes for the first time. Kind of an accident, really.

Finally, Matt, you wrote "I like your examples but I think the Obama thing is sort of counter to your assertion - wouldn't you think that many folks who voted for him were the liberal arts educated types?"

Yes, one would think that.

Of course, critical thinking is something for which one must make an effort, even when trained in critical thinking. And advertising, which is essentially what modern presidential campaigning has become, is damnably effective in getting people to think irrationally. Not to mention the fact that the entire American political discourse rarely rises to the level of critical thinking.

This all adds up to a completely different, but related, discussion about what a society might look like if EVERYONE were trained in critical thinking. But for today, suffice it to say that liberals piss me off almost as much as conservatives.

Part seven, the final installment, tomorrow!

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Two of my facebook features exported to Real Art.


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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Special Canine Edition: Little Lola's Death Stare

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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OUR LITTLE GAZA or RETRO ALABAMA SHIT, 2014

Look, we need the police. As a social institution, they're vitally necessary. And the vast majority of them serve with bravery and distinction in one of the hardest and most dangerous jobs in which an individual can work. But there is brutal truth in the NWA classic song linked below. Brutal truth we're currently seeing played out in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri.

It's a damned shame this remains an ongoing aspect of American life twenty five years after the song was released.

And the point here for me isn't about any single event in Ferguson. It's the whole thing. It's the community's reaction. It's the police reaction. It's the socioeconomic situation. It's race. It's that we're seeing yet another one of these uprisings. We can point out small faults and blames all over the place all day long. But we're having another race riot, and, as usual, there's legitimate motivation driving many aspects of it. Why can't we get it together as a society such that this doesn't happen anymore?

Also, I hope everybody is able to make the connection between Gaza and Ferguson. Massive over-the-top military response against a legitimately aggrieved population with very little to lose. It's a national shame that the US supports what Israel is doing to Palestine, just as it is a national shame that we're having this retro Alabama shit in 2014.

Hopefully the arrival of Missouri state troopers will professionalize the situation.



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"...with only a bare bones understanding of what it means to be alive..." PART FIVE

Here's the next part of the huge discussion which broke out on facebook after my post on the liberal arts (part two, part three,part four):

Matt Ron, just to be clear, I don't think you meant what i'm saying I heard, because it doesn't sound like you. My point is that I think you're attacking the wrong target. I'm not agreeing with the premise of the cartoon. Its excellent troll bait and it seems to have hit home on you. It plays to a stereotype and delights in it's anti-intellectualism. But I felt your original post took a shot, not at that troll, but towards a person who for whatever reason has pursued a trade degree. So I'm not saying don't be made, I'm just saying be mad at the actual bad guy here. And I also think that you are suggesting that college is the only place to learn the humanities, which I don't think is accurate. An appreciation for arts and the humanities is a mindset and it used to be much more well regarded in this country.

Ron Okay, sorry if I left you with that impression. I still feel like, at face value, I was clearly responding to the cartoon itself, and the anti-intellectual false option it offered. But also I feel like anybody who's read my stuff would take what I said in the overall context of what I usually write about, which is to say, I have an extraordinarily high regard for people who work for a living, but certainly not for people who tell us that working people should ONLY be working people, which is what I think the subtext for the cartoon is.

Indeed, I'm still confused as to how you ended up taking it that way, how you assumed I'm attacking a cartoon welder. I'm still confused about how you would call me arrogant based on even an isolated non-context reading of what I wrote. I mean, at which point was I attacking the welder guy? Where was the attack? I'm also confused as to how you would decide that I'm saying that one should only study the humanities in college. I certainly didn't say that, or even imply that. Personally, I think you're reading a great deal into what I wrote. You're attributing assertions to me that I never made or intended to make. That is, you're arguing with some guy who's not me, and who said things I didn't say.

Also, I continue to love you and think you're great. Please don't mistake the passion of my response for anything but passion. That cartoon is straight up offensive, to intellectuals and working people alike.

Tim Poking the bear...

http://education.yahoo.net/articles/degrees_that_could_hurt_your_kids_job_prospects.htm?kid=1O2HQ

Kim I went to a Career Services conference last week where a reoccurring theme was the need to track graduates and their employment rates/salary rate. There is a big push to qualify the cost of education against average first year salary (or at 5 yrs & 10 year.) Which is understandable with university costs going through the roof. However, here's where it gets scary. How is this data going to be used? Will it eventually be used to influence student loans? "You want a loan for an Engineering degree? Sure! 0% interest." "You want a loan for a philosophy degree? Ok, but 25 % interest." "Theater degree? Sorry. No loan."

Ron Roar!

Actually, Tim, I have no beef at all with making the observation that some degrees are much more employable than others. It's the commodification of the college degree that disturbs me. Three quarters of a century ago people went to college for its own sake. Tuition, at state supported universities, was either free or so dirt cheap as to not matter. But as states incrementally withdrew support from their colleges and universities, a trend which has been going on our entire lives and still continues, the cost of tuition skyrocketed. And that may very well be why people now look at higher education as an investment, rather than something with its own innate value.

And as society increasingly treats college as an investment, the innate value disappears. It truly saddens and horrifies me.

Ron Okay, it looks as though Matt  is done with this thread, but, after thinking about this for nearly twenty four hours, I feel like I need to address a bit more specifically his charges of condescension and arrogance.

Matt accused me of "attacking" the guy in the cartoon studying welding, and then, because I flat out reject this characterization of my words, I asked him what, exactly, the attack was. Without a response, I can only speculate about this: my assumption is that the "attack" was my description of an understanding of life without a study of the liberal arts as being "bare bones."

There are a lot of directions I could go with this, but I'm going to narrow it down to what I believe is probably the biggest payoff one receives from studying the humanities: critical thinking. If you don't study the liberal arts, it is HIGHLY UNLIKELY that you will ever master critical thinking in a way that can be generalized to all areas of life.

I'm not saying it's impossible or that nobody does it on their own. But usually, one has to be trained to think in this way, and the humanities is essentially the only field that does this. I mean, high schools, god bless them, try really hard, and often give students a good start, albeit with specific subject areas, but as testing mania and "accountability" become more and more pervasive within the public schools, abstract thinking takes a back seat to objective tests. That is, we're heading away from this being a holy grail for high schools and towards something else entirely.

So the most likely people to master critical thinking skills are the students who study the liberal arts.

Here's the crux. If you don't have the ability to think critically about numerous subjects and areas of interest, then you are effectively out of the game. You don't really know what's going on in the world, and are greatly vulnerable to demagoguery, propaganda, and social manipulation. You're very likely not going to see what's going on outside the game board you're considering. You're very likely to accept what things appear to be, instead of digging deeply to see if "the way the world works" is actually the way the world works.

Or, worse, you may very well be in the game, but you're probably messing it up really badly.

In the last decade or so, two extraordinarily disturbing events illustrate this point very nicely. In 2003, we invaded Iraq, a nation ruled by a brutal dictator, yes, but also a relatively defenseless nation, one which could in no way be considered a threat to the United States. But Americans' post 9/11 fears were adroitly manipulated by the Bush administration and their propagandist-cheerleaders. What if Iraq hands over its weapons of mass destruction to the terrorists? The Bush people pounded away at this over and over. "We just don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice. And some ninety percent of the country was convinced that we had to invade Iraq.

But it was preposterous to suggest that Saddam Hussein, a secular leader, would arm Islamist extremists who wanted him dead almost as much as they wanted Americans dead. And this was obvious at the time to anybody who was unwilling to take what they're told at face value. Even more preposterous was the notion that Iraq had WMD. There was absolutely no evidence of their existence. Just none. And, again, this was achingly obvious to anybody willing to critically analyze White House press releases. So there was no need to go to war. It was all bullshit, but most Americans believed it, anyway. And now, hundreds of billions of dollars later, tens of thousands of deaths later, well, we just don't talk about it too much these days, do we?

This is what happens when you have a nation full of people who have not been trained in critical thinking. They are incapable of performing their vital role as citizens in a democracy. And disaster is the necessary result.

The second event is less earth-shaking, but no less disturbing to me because it deals with the failure of American liberals to think critically. In 2008, President Obama managed to hoodwink the American left into thinking he was one of them, using the inspirational but vacant rhetoric of "hope and change." Of course, all you had to do was go to his campaign website and look at his actual positions, and you'd know that he's conservative on most economic issues, and a hawk, not a dove, on foreign policy--I mean, not a hawk like Bush was, but certainly no peacenik. It's been amusing and satisfying these last six years watching disillusioned Obama liberals slowly come to the conclusion I did back in '08 when I simply read his platform online, but I would have greatly preferred my liberal comrades understood what was going on in the first place.

The bottom line here is that critical thinking MATTERS. It matters A LOT. It matters in terms of hundreds of billions of dollars. It matters in terms of loss of life, and pain, and suffering. It matters in terms of understanding the difference between right and wrong. And we now have so few Americans trained in critical thinking that we are seeing the consequences. Indeed, illusion is now our dominant national paradigm, whether we admit it or not.

All of this necessarily brings me back to Matt's accusation that I was attacking the welding student guy, that I was being "arrogant" and "condescending" because I described not studying the liberal arts as being the same as possessing a "bare bones" understanding of life. It might not be pretty, but it's definitely the truth. Especially these days.

And scolding someone for speaking the truth about this does nothing but perpetuate the pervasive American attitude which says that living in a state of diminished intellectual ability is good and acceptable. I just can't possibly sign up for that. Now, more than ever, we simply MUST have a national population with the ability to think critically.

And that's just ONE of the benefits one can gain from studying the liberal arts. It's a big one, to be sure, but there are many, many more.

Still more to come!!!

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FAREWELL, ROBIN WILLIAMS

I'm usually unfazed by celebrity deaths, but this one hurts. And it's not just that Robin Williams is dead, which is bad enough. It's that he killed himself. I mean, if a guy like Robin Williams gives up on existence, we must necessarily revisit that old, old question: why do we bother to continue?

But that's the thing. I don't think this final message he sent out to the world is really who he was or what he was about. He was a man clearly dedicated to making the human race happy, and his accomplishments in that area, his life's work, are far too numerous even to start mentioning here--it just goes on and on and on; even when he had me bawling my eyes out with What Dreams May Come, I was ultimately happier for having had the experience.

Robin Williams killed himself in a moment of weakness. Reports are saying that he was struggling with depression, which can bring you to your knees, cut you off from the human race, make you blind to beauty, make you hate yourself and the world, deaden you to love. Depression robs its victims of all inner strength.

But depression is not what Robin Williams was; it's what took him from us. Instead, what Robin Williams was, at least to me, is the guy who ended up doing this video with Bobby McFerrin. This is how I will remember him and the marvelous gifts he kept giving us over and over.

Farewell.



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"...with only a bare bones understanding of what it means to be alive..." PART FOUR

Here's the next part of the huge discussion which broke out on facebook after my post on the liberal arts (part two, part three):

Matt Ron, as developed in the comments, I grudgingly admit some kinship with your point. But your opening line is really arrogant and condescending - sounds like what the guy on the right would say. I consider myself to be knowledgeable and a student of the world (intellectual is too strong a word) and I have a liberal arts degree (as well as business) but I don't credit my college education with broadening my horizons. I got that from my parents, especially my Dad (engineering degree) and all the books around my house. I think assuming that one needs to study liberal arts in college is way to narrow a way to get to the effect you're talking about. And I'd just as soon those people get exposed to more science, trades, etc.

Ron Matt, c'mon, arrogant? I was responding to a really HARSH assertion, one totally devaluing not only my own life and outlook, but, as I've written, what I believe ought to be the outlook for our entire nation. I didn't fire the first shot on this, and that cartoon really is nothing but taking pot shots at the entire concept of intellectualism and enlightenment. When someone slaps me in the face, I slap back. You should take my comments in context if you want to be fair.

I stand beside what I said, will say it again, and make no apologies for it. It was not arrogant. At all.

Also, what you've described, about yourself and your father, is exactly the kind of nation I'd like to see. Also, I'd bet that your father took more than a few liberal arts courses when he was studying engineering, and very likely took them seriously. No, it doesn't HAVE to be college, but college really ought to push the humanities FAR more than they do today. Also, I reassert, college is not job training, and anybody who asserts it is simply doesn't understand college.

Also, Matt, did you even read the cartoon to which I was responding? The more I think about your accusation of arrogance, the more it seems you didn't look at what had prompted me to make those statements in the first place. I mean, arrogant? I don't even understand your point.

One more thing. This is a very old, old schism in American culture. This is not the first time a defender of intellectualism and enlightenment, as desirable and good for the nation, has been branded "arrogant." We see this kind of rhetoric going back to before the founding of the republic. Really, it's more of an oddity of history that our founding fathers were all intellectuals, a sort of cultural understanding that wealthy property owners were to be well cultivated individuals, but within a decade or two of the Constitution's ratification, politicians were being excoriated by their opponents for all their book larnin'.

What good is poetry on the frontier? Seminary learning isn't necessary when all you need is the Bible. Men of letters are too weak to do the real work of killing Indians and building a nation. All this is embedded in our cultural DNA. It's why Teddy Roosevelt, an intellectual himself, created his Rough Rider unit. It's why Hemingway hunted exotic game and fought in the Spanish Civil War. Intellectuals have been hounded by this notion of their arrogant uselessness in North America for three hundred years.

Matt I did read the cartoon. But your response came across as an attack on the other party in the cartoon (the tradesperson) versus the snobby anti-intellectual that wrote the cartoon. And I would expect a good liberal to be defending that person versus attacking them!  Or at least uniting with them in a grassroots kind of way to stick it to The Man.

Ron Matt, I'm not sure what you think I'm saying. I was responding to a cartoon that pitted the liberal arts as an area of study against trade school, with the obvious conclusion that studying the liberal arts is a waste of time, money, and life. I don't know why you think I oppose trade school. I don't and I didn't say that. What I oppose, and I think I've been crystal clear on this, is the traditional American devaluation of anything perceived as impractical, or without commercial benefit.

I just don't see how you've come to the conclusions you have about what I'm saying.

I again assert that life without a deep and meaningful study of the humanities is, in fact, dark and dim. This isn't about class. This is about anti-intellectual and anti-art attitudes.

Amy jeez. We need more trade schools and more arts. Why can't we all just get along?

Ron Exactly. I don't think these are mutually exclusive things, as the cartoon asserted. We can get the job done, and have a deep understanding of what American existence is about at the same time. I don't understand why a defense of the liberal arts is so often dismissed as snobbish elitism.

Or rather, I DO understand: study of the humanities as useless arrogance is part of our cultural DNA. I'm resisting something that is very essentially American.

Timothy Art will happen whether we like/support it or not. It's an element of mankind that cannot be separated from the rest of ones being. Some are more inclined to pursue it than others, based on skill/talent and desire.

I think you're being too sensitive to this critique, Ron. The hyperbolic critique here is that the "intellectual" in the cartoon is looking upon the "tradesman" as a "loser" when the "tradesman" has more earning potential, AND that the "intellectual" will be up to his ears in college debt with less of a way to pay it back. While this IS hyperbole, I've read and listened a number of recent news reports stating that college is becoming too expensive, but what is often the case is that those complaining "bought" a degree that has very limited earning potential.

As previously stated, one need not be a formal student of arts and humanities to appreciate and create art.

Ron Okay, but Tim, having the word "loser" coming out of the liberal arts grad's mouth paints him as an arrogant asshole. The argument STARTS with an unfounded and totally unfair attack on studying the liberal arts at all! So it's not simply making an economic calculation: it's also dismissing the humanities as worthy of study while at the same time branding such students as elitist jerks, which, like I keep saying, is fairly typical for this country.

In this respect, I find great irony in calling me arrogant for rejecting the cartoon's message. It's also a totally unfair charge--I mean, if I really was given the choice presented in the cartoon above, I really would choose to have a life of the mind over simply having a better job. But then I reject that false option, anyway, and I keep saying so here in comments, and essentially said so in the OP when I observed that college isn't supposed to be job training.

Of course, what happens when everybody in society decides it IS job training? Well, it means that college is no longer what it once was, a place in which to better understand self, others, and the world, which is what it was for centuries before.

Also, the liberal arts encompass far more than the arts. Government, history, anthropology, archaeology, psychology, economics, film, and on and on.

Timothy I concur that it's a false option. The welder could wind up using his skills to be a sculptor of metal. The "intellectual" could study economics and wind up working in business. The point here is that the "intellectual" is being considered arrogant by looking down on the "tradesman", when the "tradesman" will have better earning potential earlier.

Still more tomorrow!!!

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"...with only a bare bones understanding of what it means to be alive..." PART THREE

Here's the next part of the huge discussion which broke out on facebook after my post on the liberal arts (part two here):

Timothy Ron, there are thousand of college graduates that are drowning in college debt because they got an interesting, yet unmarketable degree. One can appreciate the arts and humanities and have an engineering, business, or science degree. One can also be a student of arts and humanities without being enrolled in courses for those disciplines, or having a degree in them.

Ron Tim, I fully agree, which is why I think tuition ought to be free for all state supported universities. And, actually, this isn't pie-in-the-sky: a recent study found that if we took all federal college aid currently existing, and instead used it simply to pay tuition for everybody, we'd end up actually SAVING a few million dollars.

Otherwise, like I keep saying, studying the so-called STEM fields isn't a bad thing; quite the contrary, that's the stuff that makes society function. It's just that we have dampened so much human potential with our American cult of practicality. Further, you're definitely right in that this doesn't have to be a college thing. But then, who's going to just do this on their own? People have bills to pay, rent to make, etc.

It would be nice if we hit the humanities harder in high school.

Timothy I think you might be surprised how appreciative those not formally educated in liberal arts and fine arts really are. Plenty of people without the opportunity or impulse to seek post-secondary education explore various humanities. Some do it with the intent to make it a living. Others do it because they decide that's something they'd like to do for recreation. I have no illusions about being able to make a living singing and playing a guitar, but that didn't stop me from stepping on stage a number of times for the Open Mic Night at Pappy and Harriet's in Pioneertown, CA. Plenty of others did, too.

BTW, if you ever get a chance to go there, some truly talented acts play there, even on the Open Mic Nights. One usually thinks of an open mic as a step above karaoke, but I've seen acts at the Ted Quinn's Reality Show at Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace get people dancing. Dancing...at an open mic.

For instance, my father, who earned a BS in Petroleum and Chemical Engineering from LSU in 1956 decided around 1972 that he'd like to learn pottery, so he took a pottery course at Fullerton Community College in Fullerton, CA. He did macrame, too. He didn't do it to pay the bills, and he wasn't going to quit his job at Standard Oil of California, move us all to Joshua Tree, and make and sell pots and macrame to the tourists. He did it because he thought he might enjoy it, and to my knowledge, he did.

Ron Tim, I'm in the midst of a thriving small theater scene here in Houston, where the vast majority of people involved receive no or very little pay for their work, doing it just because they love it, and creating some excellent art. Personally, I think Americans are hungry for art, literature, poetry, discussion of civics and economics, psychology, anthropology, etc., but simply don't know where to start, or have the time to do it, or even the understanding of what it is for which they hunger. But this great potential is dampened by the contradictory embrace of the cult of practicality. That is, people want a higher appreciation and understanding of American existence, but they're also a bit ashamed of their desire, and don't follow through for that reason, let alone encourage society to focus more on the humanities.

Timothy Yet we are inundated with Kardashians to fill the void. It's bad karma to wish ill to others, but I would bask in the Schadenfruede if something befell them...like the earth opening up beneath their feet and swallowing them. How's THAT for poetic?

Ron It's good stuff. 

More tomorrow.

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FRANK ZAPPA FRIDAY AND 70S POP MONDAY ON SATURDAY

Two of my facebook features exported to Real Art.



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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Stella

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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"...with only a bare bones understanding of what it means to be alive..." PART TWO

Here's the first third or so of the huge discussion which broke out on facebook after my post on the liberal arts:

Toni Doesn't have to be that way. One can learn a trade and still be an intellectual

Joshua For shame, Ron! Someone who welds isn't as human as someone who cold calls? Though I do agree with your general sentiment.

Ron Agreed, Toni. I wait tables, myself. But the point is how so many Americans just TRASH the liberal arts. They have no idea how stupid they're being.

Josh, someone who hasn't studied the liberal arts necessarily has less of an understanding of the human condition than one who has.  This isn't about class. This is about American anti-intellectualism.

Joshua Ron, again, I agree with your general sentiment, but how could you possibility believe that? A College Education is a fine thing, and CAN expand your horizons, but think about some of the great writers and thinkers who never had one.

Ron Right. They would have had better lives and been better writers if they had studied the liberal arts. And, actually, they probably did, albeit on their own. Lincoln read by candle light.

Joshua Well, that's the thing. If you respect home study than I 100% agree with you.

Ron As an abstract principle, home study can be far superior to primary and secondary education. Of course, it greatly depends on the parents doing the home schooling, and a lot of them are anti-intellectual fundamentalists. Theory versus practice.

Joshua Yes, I didn't mean home schooling in the modern sense, which is just as much guided by socialization and politics as the most insufferable faculty lounge, but something that a guy like Lincoln would have done. He learned military strategy, medicine, all sorts of science, land development, etc etc, while in the office of the presidency.

Ron It's that spirit that a very strong current of American culture runs against, the thirst for knowledge and understanding. It's all good and well to understand pragmatic things. Indeed, we absolutely NEED that. But life cannot stop there, satisfied enough with itself to sit on its laurels.

As the character John Keating says in Dead Poets Society:

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

It agonizes me that this is not understood as a truism by the American people.

Toni Ahem...*in your opinion*, they would have had better lives

Ron I have to leave soon to attend my Shakespeare class. But I'm willing to argue that it's a FACT, until I'm blue in the face, that a rich study of the liberal arts makes for a better life, in all instances.

Also, You're the full package, Toni.

Toni Blue collar intellectualism is where it's at.

Ron That's actually kind of a dream I have for the country.

Parts three and four coming on Sunday and Monday.


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"...with only a bare bones understanding of what it means to be alive..."

Science fiction writer David Gerrold recently posted the political cartoon below with the accompanying statement:

Bullshit.

This assumes that liberal arts majors are a) intellectually shallow, and b) arrogant.

I call bullshit.

People go into the arts because they are passionate, because they care, and because they want to explore what's possible in life.

People who do sculpture have to learn all kinds of things about how to turn the physical world into art -- including welding.

People who paint have to learn chemistry. People who write have to learn about language and its power, and psychology as well.

The idea that liberal arts is a shallow dead end is a right-wing lie and I call bullshit.

Here's the picture:

 

And here's what I wrote when I shared the picture:

More money but living in a dim reality with only a bare bones understanding of what it means to be alive versus less money but with a deep and rich intellectual life of the mind. Hmmm. I'll take less money every single time.

A college degree is not job training, or, at least, it shouldn't be. The people pushing this crap not only don't understand education, but they also don't understand what it means to be a human being. Screw them for eternity.

And then some conservative friends showed up to brand me an elitist.  It got interesting fast.  More on that tomorrow.

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"ALL THE LAZY BLACK WELFARE MOOCHERS"

I posted this on a facebook thread a while back about Cliven Bundy, nut rancher, and his remarks about black people no longer learning to pick cotton, and the presumed trouble that's gotten them into.

All my life I've been hearing about all the lazy welfare moochers. I've been hearing what a big deal it all is, how the black people don't want to work, how welfare creates an incentive not to work, to stay at home doing drugs and having babies in order to get more welfare. And for many years I accepted this "conventional wisdom" about the lazy ghetto culture of welfare mooching black people.

Then, in the mid 90s, with the help of "liberal" President Clinton, the Republican Congress did away with Aid to Families with Dependent Children, you know, welfare, the big bogey monster of direct cash payments to the poor. The end of "welfare as we know it." Welfare rolls, which became limited to two years, and required recipients to have a job in order to collect, became DRAMATICALLY reduced, leaving only a relative few people getting it. All that was left was rental assistance, food aid, and Medicaid for the very poor. But no more welfare as we understood it back in the 70s and 80s. It totally changed the game.

Nonetheless, the mythology about how we created this massive dependent class with screwed up psychologies continued as though nothing changed. And that got me thinking. What do I really know about the very poor? About the ghettos? The information is out there, lots of studies and statistics about how the very poor actually behave in real life, but I have very little knowledge of it, and what I do have is probably more than the general population--for instance, I know that multiple studies have shown that the rate of welfare fraud is less than five percent.

But here's one thing I do know. People talk about this stuff as though they're certain of what they're talking about, even though the entire game changed twenty years ago. This means people who talk this way HAVE NO IDEA what they're talking about.

So if you really want to engage me in any discussion about all the lazy black welfare moochers, your folk tales and mythology and conventional wisdom which "everybody knows" aren't going to cut it. You're going to have to show me that you really do know what you're talking about. Until then, you're just repeating what are probably racist ideas about black people being lazy moochers, so I feel completely justified in totally dismissing your assertions.

Excelsior!

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No Wrongdoing By White House in Benghazi According To GOP Led House Intelligence Committee

From Liberals Unite:

The SFGate reports that the panel voted on Thursday to declassify their latest report, “the result of two years of investigation by the committee.” The report will not be release until U.S. intelligence organizations approve releasing the report to the general public.

Thompson, the second-ranking Democrat on the committee, said the report “confirms that no one was deliberately misled, no military assets were withheld and no stand-down order (to U.S. forces) was given.”

More here.

Of course, we've known all this, more or less, for a relatively long time now: no coverup, no stand-down orders, etc. In short, no scandal. I mean, obviously, the whole thing was just awful, and was rightfully investigated, as should all such events, if only to give us a better understanding of how to prevent these things in the future. But was this ever scandal worthy? Hell no! Never. There was just never anything even to suggest it. Rather, it was crazed Republicans in search of a scandal, certainly as something that could hurt Hilliary Clinton, the presumed Democratic presidential frontrunner, but also maybe for something they could use to impeach Obama, just because they irrationally hate him.

But, as they say, there's just no "there" there. So too bad, GOP.

I continue to tell crazed Republicans that they've already got everything they need to draw up impeachment articles, what with drones and an out-of-control NSA, but they just don't want to hear me. Probably because they like drones and an out-of-control NSA. But one can never be too sure.

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Obama: "We Tortured Some Folks"

From Mother Jones:

This isn't the first time Obama has said that the US tortured people but the usage of "folks" immediately set tongues wagging. Presumably it's because "folks" is far more humanizing than "detainees" or "enemy combatants".  The US did torture people (real flesh-and-blood human people) after 9/11, and it's good that Obama says so—even if he was just trying to get off the topic of his CIA admitting to spying on Congress.

For a long time it was incredibly controversial to call "enhanced interrogation" torture. It's a sign of progress that no one batted an eye at the "torture" bit and instead focused on the "folks" part. 

More here.

Okay, this is a good start. But really, we'll have this deep, deep immorality hanging around our necks until the people responsible, and I'm definitely not talking about the ground level soldiers and operatives who were ORDERED to torture, are behind bars for a very long time. That is, torture is an atrocity. True Americans do not support its use in any instance ever. Because torture is evil, and supporting it makes you evil, too. Indeed, supporting torture as official American policy necessarily makes your support for this country severely problematic.

That is, if you're fine with all this, go back to Russia or North Korea or Iran or wherever it is you get your understanding of morals and civics. Real Americans don't want you here. You make us look evil.

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