Fear of Education, with Side Order of Libertarianism

Twice in one day!  My smelling salts, Morty!

• Echidne of the Snakes links the acts of Boko Haram and the Oklahoma House Education Committee:

  I don't aim to compare the Islamic State with American conservatives by putting these news in one list (they are certainly not the same or comparable in horrible violence), but to point out the shared string in the violin concertos:
  
  What is taught to children matters very much to certain political and religious groups. Books are powerful! Books may need to be banned or burned! [...]
  
  Ignorance is a powerful weapon which makes education also a powerful weapon. Hierarchical systems fear the idea of widespread democratic education, and they are correct in that fear.

  Students in Denver protested against a similar attempt by a school board there.
  
• Oklahoma in particular is hiding from a murderous legacy of racism. (Orcinus.)

  An understanding of Oklahoma history would not be complete without at least some knowledge of these incidents, particularly because they loom so large in the history of race relations in America as a nation.
  
  It also would give young people a clearer and fuller picture of the scope and nature of how history has shaped modern race relations in America. At a bare minimum, it will prevent privileged and sheltered whites from asking ignorantly: "Why haven't blacks done any better since we ended slavery?" or asking: "Why do Native Americans insist on clinging to their reservations?"
  
  This and similar kinds of examinations of the darker chapters of American history actually do a great deal to shed light on our current dilemmas, particularly when it comes to issues of race, ethnicity, and religion, and particularly by white folks.

• Kevin Carson (Center for a Stateless Society) on libertarians, why

  Libertarianism is frequently perceived by the general public, not entirely without justice, as a movement of mostly white male 20- or 30-somethings, disproportionately from the tech industry or other white collar jobs, who see themselves as victims and everyone unlike themselves — women, LGBT people, people of color — as naturally collectivist barbarians.

  and how some of the Old Guard libertarians play directly into the stereotype. I have to say here that I have been encountering libertarian thought and ideas since the '70s (thankfully not in any sustained manner) and libertarians do not know what to do about people Not Them.  They invariably suggest individual actions and solutions.  Individual actions and solutions may work for some people some of the time.  But this means that every encounter with another person must be negotiated as though one is applying for sainthood (without reciprocation), and even if one attains local sainthood, strangers or relocation (people move in the US.  A lot of people forget that) mean having to start that dance all over again.  There are reasons for "collectivism," and one of them is that groups have more power to change situations otherwise detrimental to them (which is why there were unions and why there are two-day weekends, which you will lose if you do not fight for them now).  Mr. Carson also points out a streak of disguised conservatism and some parallels to Gamergate.  Found via Making Light.

Driftglass Hits a High Hard One, With "And What Would You Know About Love, Mr. Giuliani?" Sacrifice Fly

• Speeding up the game.  Uh-huh.  We'll see.
• Driftglass diagnoses Post Iraq Memory Pandemic among proponents of the war:

  Post Iraq Memory Pandemic -- or PIMP -- is a much more rarefied condition than PTSD, which seems to strike mostly well-fed, sanctimonious pundits, Iraq War architects, college Republicans and a whole warped menagerie of Conservatives bloggers who spent the war as far as humanly possible from any actual combat, while exhorting War, Inc. to continue shoveling the nation's blood and treasure down the rat-hole of their fantasies of empire.
  
  Like PTSD, PIMP destroys the capacity of the afflicted to perceive history and linear time, but in a much more selective and specific way. For example, those who mounted up on their Very High Horses to demand in the name of Patriotism that other people's children be sent off to fight and die for their failed imperial dreams now just...can't...seem...to...remember whole swaths of recent American history.
  
  They cannot remember what they wrote. What they said on the teevee.

  Remember that war is an intelligence test, and if people (I use that term loosely) who favor going to the proposed war do not in fact put their own bodies on the line, there is probably a con job going on, and going to war is a Bad Idea.
• Wayne Barrett (Rudy G's biographer) on Mr. Giuliani's latest attempt to impugn President Obama's patriotism.  (NY Daily News, via News From Me.)  That may play among ignorant Republicans, Mr. G, but New. Yorkers. remember. you.  [ETA:  I should have known: The Rude Pundit quotes Mr. Obama and has a few words for Mr. G.]

Also, GUNG HAY FAT CHOY!

In Memoriam

• Louis Jourdan, actor.
• ETA: Lesley Gore, singer/songwriter
• ETA: Sam Andrew, guitarist/founder of Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Busy Week

• The day designated as President's Day, which I still think of as Washington's Birthday.
• Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras (I must have cheap beads somewhere.  And perhaps I could make pancakes just this once).
• Ash Wednesday (for Christians) opens the Lenten season.
• Pitchers and Catchers Report begins the runup to baseball season.

Purim isn't for another couple weeks.  I'm thinking of hamentaschen.

A Musing

• One (although not the only) reason the more trollish some men react badly to perceived misandry ("perceived misandry" can be as little as side-eye or as much as Arlene Aileen Wuornos) is that they know in their bones that misandry is what they deserve.  Seriously, "society" goes to a great deal of trouble to condition women and girls not to loathe men and boys in spite of behavior few individuals would tolerate from other individuals.  Misogyny, on the other hand, is barely masked.  Try stating a simple distrust of men.  Go ahead.  I'll wait.  
• Department of Caring About Children, Our Most Precious Treasures (/sarcasm):
• Finnish mothers get a starter box from the government for babies including clothing and a small mattress.  (The BBC, via skippy.)
• Republican legislators want to remove maternity care from mandated health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (and also want to repeal Affordable Care Act, a/k/a Obamacare, primarily because Obamacare works) because only people with uteri get pregnant.  (Echidne of the Snakes.)
• I've seen a lot of Columbo episodes lately.  (Scratches scalp puzzledly.)

More Indignation

1. War and culpability:
   • Because I've wondered too:  Where is the antiwar movement we should be having?  I mean yes, it was noticed that that stuff worked last time.  Nevertheless.

     In the last six decades, the American national security state has succeeded strikingly at only one thing (other than turning itself into a growth industry): it freed itself of us and of Congress. In the years following the Vietnam War, the American people were effectively demobilized, shorn of that sense of service to country, while war was privatized and the citizen soldier replaced by an “all-volunteer” force and a host of paid contractors working for warrior corporations. Post-9/11, the citizenry was urged to pay as much attention as possible to “our troops,” or “warriors,” and next to none to the wars they were fighting. Today, the official role of a national security state, bigger and more powerful than in the Vietnam era, is to make Americans “safe” from terror. In a world of war-making that has disappeared into the shadows and a Washington in which just about all information is now classified and shrouded in secrecy, the only way to be “safe” and “secure” as a citizen is, by definition, to be ignorant, to know as little as possible about what “our” government is doing in our name. This helps explain why, in the Obama years, the only crime in official Washington is leaking or whistleblowing; that is, letting the public in on something that we, the people, aren’t supposed to know about the workings of “our” government.

     Tom Englehardt, TomDispatch, republished at AlterNet.  Note the last several paragraphs.
     
   • Deconstructing pastoral metaphors.

     We don’t prepare for war, because we want peace. We prepare for war, because war is exactly what we want. We don’t use violence because it solves problems. We do it even when it creates more problems than it could ever solve – as the most heavily armed nation in human history, whose population is still under threat from prehistoric imbeciles after 14 years of a global campaign of intervention and targeted killing, you’d think that would finally dawn on us. You’d think we’d finally realize that people like putting on uniforms and shooting each other and incinerating each other’s homes, and it’s because of some flaw in our character, some stupid neurological quirk that might have been useful when we stabbed elephants with sticks and worshipped the sun… but is pretty foolish now that we’re smart enough to hit every major population center with a nuclear warhead in the space of a busy afternoon.

      Paul Bibeau, Goblinbooks.  (The comment objected rightly [as do I] to the "prehistoric imbeciles," but the rest of the paragraph is good.)
   • The "right" wing wants you stirred up.

     As Atrios and plenty of others like to remind us, a lot of what Right Wingers say they say just to piss liberals off. But there’s something else at work, as well. They’re trying to piss each other off as well. More to the point, their pundits, their talking heads, many of their politicians, their halfway intelligent bloggers, all following Rush Limbaugh’s lead, are trying to piss off the conservative base. It’s a strategy. Make the yokels boiling mad and keep them mad at those Others and they’ll be too worked up to think about who’s really been screwing them over.
     
     This is an inherent evil of the American Right, an evil it perpetrates upon itself as much as upon the rest of us: its divisiveness.
     
     And this is not an effect of its rhetoric or its politics. It is the intent.

     Lance Mannion on his blog. 
2. On the pro-science front:
   • Libertarian Fail (people who do not know that handwashing, Pontius Pilate notwithstanding, cuts way down on disease transmission [this has been proved with childbed fever and contagious diseases, although because it was not "discovered" in the last ten years, perhaps Mr. Tillis has not run across this information.  Or any other.] should not be allowed to legislate their ignorance).

     See, this is what’s wrong with Libertarians. They think that the glorious unfettered magical free hand of the market makes everything wonderful when all it really does is burden the general public. You know what? I have a life. I don’t want to have to research every fucking restaurant in town to determine if they’re opting out of certain health regulations or not. I’d much rather have a health department fully staffed with health inspectors who enforce our health laws. If we truly did make our restaurant health regulations optional, I’d never eat out again. Because if you’re going to skirt one, you’ll no doubt skirt all the others.

      Southern Beale for the win.
   • Republic of T has a general roundup along with facts:

     Measles, on the other hand, leads to nasty complications, and kills.
     

     • It’s one of the most infectious diseases around.
     • Ninety percent of those exposed to it will get it, if they’re susceptible.
     • It can remain airborne for hours, exposing everyone in the vicinity.
     • Every person who gets it can spread it to 12 to 18 people.
     • For every vaccinated person who gets it (resulting in a mild case), between 40 to 80 people are exposed.
     • Measles is transmissible and virtually undetectable for several days before the red, painful rash gives its presence away.
     • It’s early symptoms — high fever, cough, and muscle ache — so closely resemble the flu that it’s often initially misdiagnosed.
     • One in 1,000 people with measles will get pneumonia. Between one and three in 1,000 will die of pneumonia, brain swelling, or other complications.

     The US declared measles eradicated in 2000. Now it’s back, along with other diseases, because the anti-vaccination movement has grown. A recent survey showed that 30 percent of Americans — especially young people — agree with Chris Christie on vaccinations.

   • Legionseagle at Dreamwidth, warning against demonizing anti-vaxxers. (I've had to catch myself about that.)
3. The New Yorker offers a podcast on Islamic extremism.

There are reasons holing up in a cave looks good.

IMMUNIZE 'EM!

• Measles has reached Marin  and San Mateo Counties.  Parents in Marin are allowed to send their children to school without required inoculations. 
• Measles is highly contagious.
• New Jersey Governor Chris Christie suggests that parents should have a choice in whether to immunize their children.
• Roald Dahl lost a child to measles, and wrote a letter begging parents to immunize their children.
• The Rude Pundit also urges vaccination, and is not at all polite about it.
• P.S.  That "research" alleging a link between MMR vaccine and autism?  Fraud.

Breaking Belated B.A.D.

Because I didn't do it last year.  I'm sorry.  I got into Chauncey DeVega and Goblinbooks and such and moved more cherished blogs into the Archives.  Several folks stopped updating (or died) in the last three years.  I haven't been posting nearly as much and am hereby threatening to change that.

I will be adding We Are Respectable Negroes to the blogroll sometime this week.  I will also be adding Daisy's tumblr,  Nothing left to do but smile smile smile..., which is an interesting combination of photos and feminism.  And Norman Spinrad At Large will definitely be entered as Time Insensitive, because he doesn't post that often, but his essays are always worthwhile.

Explanation of the history of Blogroll Amnesty Day and why it's an important tradition.

In Memoriam

•  Colleen McCullough, novelist.  NYTimes obit avoids the pitfalls of the work cited herein.
• Suzette Haden Elgin, author, poet, linguist. (I have The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense somewhere in the apartment.)
• Rod McKuen, poet/songwriter/singer.  Ne me quittez pas.  (And translated Jacques Brel.)

In Memoriam

• Bill Monbouquette, pitcher (when I was ten, I thought his name was Mambo Cat)
• Charles H. Townes, developer of lasers

Some of these Games Go Back a Long Way...

Republic of T compiles statistics on legal and extra-legal murders of African Americans.  And it gets ugly quickly.

Hanging Up the Keyboard

(or whatever)  Andrew Sullivan retires from blogging.

Which means that Driftglass will be retiring that lovely Reagan Stomp graphic, at least for now.

Oh well.

In Memoriam

Joe Franklin, talk show host for many years; mostly interviews.

"Let's Play Two."

Ernie Banks.  Mr. Cub.

Diogenes is Still Seeking

Via skippy:  Forward Progressives reports on Politifact's assessment of the truth of statements made on CNN, MSNBC/NBC, and Fox "News."

While the first two networks don't exactly ooze candor, Fox "News" is much more prone likely to go with half-true, mostly false, outright lies.

Just so you know.

In Memoriam

Peggy Charren, activist for children's television.

A Little Late (Because I Thought I'd Published It. Oooops.)

• Item 1:  Fort Lauderdale, FL, which may for all I know still be famous for spring break shenanigans, has criminalized feeding the homeless in public.  (Also has arrested a 90-year-old who has been feeding the poor for 20 years.)

  In less than two years, 21 cities have passed legislation restricting food-sharing, according to a survey published last month by the National Coalition for the Homeless. More than 10 other cities are reported to be doing the same.

• Item 2:  Overview of the plight of the homeless.

  But these regulations aren’t about maintaining “quality of life” for the local community’s residents: the laws are simply about colonising the commons to make it safe for the rich, typically to the exclusion of others. Their proponents are using the allure of social harmony to paper over the shame of massive inequality.

Hollow Laughter of the Day

But again, it's not for us to judge. The rough men are doing that violence to protect us. It's not like they invaded a random country that never did us any harm under a ridiculous pretext and then launched a near decade-long nation-building project led by incompetent civilians and generals who sucked up to the administration, along with a shadowy global campaign of permanent war whose nature is almost completely unknown to us, and about which our leaders have a proven track record of deceit. It's not as if we accepted all this, and then supported a feel-good action film about a guy just because he was the best at blowing people's heads off in the middle of this kind of brutal and unnecessary nonsense.

From, of course, Goblinbooks.  And that is why I will not be seeing American Sniper.

Oh, and read the rest.

Oh, And...

Editors with relationships to financial powers-that-be might not like to publish information counter to the prevalent mythology.

Just saying.

(Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith reprinting an article by Eric L. Prentis.)

As Appropriate

• A high school history club in Alabama prevented from seeing Selma.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid, who is Not Convinced that "profanity" is the reason.)
• Reminder:  Regime change is only permitted when the regime is "leftist."  "Rightist" regimes are our friends.  Sometimes people find this out too late. 
• Final (!) Freedom Train runs San Jose to San Francisco.

50th Anniversary.  I just lost track.

In Memoriam

Tony Verna, instant replay.

Meta, fsvo Meta

• From AlterNet, an excerpt from Karen Armstrong's book Fields of Blood, about "religion," war, evolution, and reverence toward life.  Many things have changed...
• Louis Gossett, Jr., makes some points.  (CBC Radio transcript.)  (The Oscar nominations have garnered some controversy this year.)

Housekeeping Update

I've added Popehat to the Time Insensitive blogroll; I kept running across references to them and not quite getting around to reading the site (skimming is my friend, says the soupmaker).  I'm sure I'll be offended very soon.

Meanwhile, how lack of fact-and-source-checking impacts The News Media and therefore the news we get.  Particularly note the updates.  The latest one brings in Kirby Delauter.

That Joke Won't Hunt

• Senator Barbara Boxer has announced that she will not run in 2016.  Which means that the primaries are going to be interesting, and the campaigns will be running a full year ahead of schedule.  Which means lots of lying ads on the radio.  Crap.
• Via a comment at Making Light:  The Cemetery Angel.  Have tissues handy.

In Memoriam

• Andrae Crouch, gospel singer/songwriter and pastor
• Rod Taylor, actor (The Time Machine, et al.)

Also, yahrzeit.

Twofer Thursday

• A Christian gives another point of view on #BlackLivesMatter.
• A Voltairean Evelyn Beatrice Hallian discussion of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

And yes, I'm crossposting.

The Satirists & Surrealists Union Issues a Statement and Weeps

1. Politician:  You shall not take my name in vain.  Newspaper:  You're not God, Kirby Delauter.  Oh, yes.  Yanno, Mr. Kirby Delauter, there are easier ways to get your name in the papers.  Additionally, the rules about the appearances in media of ladies (at one's debut in society, one's wedding, and one's funeral) do not apply to politicians public officials [Thanks, Avedon!].  What do they teach in schools these days?  (ETA:  Lance Mannion goes further.)
2. Three terrorists of alleged Islamist stripe attacked the offices of the French satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed l2 people.  (The equivalent crime on this side of the puddle would be three Tea Partyists firing on the offices of The Onion.)  Obviously, cowards; the way one fights satire is with words.  Smarter and better words.  I hope the murderers are caught soon.  On behalf of the 12 victims, Je suis Charlie.  (Also, Islamists, if you're expecting that killing people will make others respect you;  have you looked at your stereotype lately?)

In Memoriam

• Edward Brooke, former U.S. Senator from Massachusetts.  Mentioned here.  You might notice that the current crop of black Republicans seems to have forgotten about him.  It's that scary tag "liberal."  (He was supposed to be working on a book; I hope it was finished and will be published soon.)
• Stuart Scott, sportscaster.
• Edward Herrmann, actor.  No, I don't know why the headline still says "reportedly."  It's been a few days now.

Still Evil

• Slavery in South Korea:  disabled workers harvesting sea salt.
• The movie version should be interesting:  Chinese double agent and political party fundraiser and donor.  Via Mercury Rising, 
• At Friends of Justice, via The Slacktivist, a Christian's response to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture.

  More troubling is the substitution of a “conservative” position for a Christian position. American evangelicals, by and large, are conservatives first and Christians second. They forget that their Savior was born in a manger who became an illegal alien in Egypt in order to flee the legal violence of Empire. Finally, our Lord was tortured mercilessly by the Imperial guard before being nailed to a Roman cross.
  
  If you don’t see Jesus on the water boarding table; if you don’t get that it’s Jesus standing for hours in a dark room on a broken leg; if you don’t realize that it’s Jesus dying of hypothermia on a cold, urine-soaked floor, and if you don’t understand the ultimate target of the anal probe, you don’t grasp what happened on Good Friday and, just as significantly, you haven’t reckoned with our complicity in the extra judicial crucifixions outlined in the Senate Committee’s report.

  See, I've been muttering for a while now that people who identify as Christian should be identifying with Christ in that narrative; a lot of Americans seem to be identifying with the Roman soldiers.

Happy New Year

Now go back to sleep.