poukledden

A book I desperately want to read is Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. Here's the short documentary that summarizes the key idea. She put it together with none other than Alfonso Cuaron.


Sweet Jesus, but Milton Friedman was a vile, evil toad.

Your car gets defaced in an ugly, juvenile hate crime. How to react?

Run with it, baby. And thus the Fagbug was born. Hemant Mehta has the details at the Friendly Atheist. The new paint job on the car? Sweeeeeet.

Over at the Friendly Atheist, Mike Clawson points to the memoir of Krista Tippet, the host of Speaking of Faith on NPR. Sounds like an excellent read. Clawson mostly points out an interview with Martin Marty. Based on Clawson's entry, it sounds like a cool discussion, and if you follow that link you can listen to the whole interview. I haven't had a chance to do so yet, but I'm gonna download the mp3 right now.

I love this bit that Clawson quotes from the book:

In the end, Martin Marty doesn’t divide the world into conservative and liberal. He divides it into “mean and non-mean.” Billy Graham, who ushered in a gentler, earlier tradition of evangelical religious influence in politics, was not mean. Some of his descendants are, and so are some liberals. As the specter of the fundamentalist religious identity of Al Qaeda has come to overshadow international affairs and identities, Marty has this advice for policymakers and citizens that echoes everything I learn in my life of conversation: Don’t lump the faithful and fundamentalists together in any tradition. Don’t demonize any group of religious people as an enemy. There is great diversity whenever large numbers of human beings are involved. Do all that you can to help them show their varieties and make it easier for them to be diverse. Make it easier for moderates in all of these movements to be moderates. Marty helps me better understand an important side effect of the work I do. Speaking of Faith is among a growing number of spaces in our culture for intelligent, innovative, and moderate religious voices to in fact serve as moderators within their traditions and our culture - to be seen and heard and to act. Marty himself only speaks of religious movements in the plural - as Protestantisms and evangelicalisms and fundamentalisms. In the simple act of pluralizing these broad categories of faith, he defies their use as ideological boxes, wedges, and bludgeons.

I'm having one of those days where I'm unable to deal with a society where the pursuit of money, more and more money, is deemed by many to be the chief occupation of life.

This puts me in an awkward spot, to say the least.

Suffice to say that if I never hear another sentence's worth of Libertarian Economic Theory, it will be too soon.

(Libertarian Economic Theory = Theology for Mammonists. Discuss amongst yourselves)

On a related note, I'm sick of idiot-simplistic discussions of Rights that translates "rights" to mean "I can do anything I want.." It's this notion that leads, among other things, to foodies crying Nazism when someone suggests that forcefeeding geese to deliberately sicken their livers might, you know, *just* qualify as cruel. "You don't want people to have fun!" they cry back.

I feel, eternally, like the outsider

Journalist Bites Reality.

A nice reality check that everyone should read. There's a reason I really don't watch the news anymore.