Cognitive Dissonance

I am having a difficult time reconciling Krauthammer's claim that there is no bigoted Christian redneck with the fact that Alabama still refuses to eliminate segregationist wording from its state constitution.

Play something sad.

The punchline here in this story about a violinist being made to play at a checkpoint is that the outrage here is for denigrating the symbol of the Holocaust. I think there is a lesson here about human nature, perhaps about the priority that self-perception takes over inhumanity towards others in accounting for our moral motivations. There is another lesson in the TalkBack beneath the article which blames most of the buzz around the story on feminists, but I'm clueless about what that lesson is.

There Are No Words to Describe Them

Get ready to say goodbye to polar bears. Due to global warming, creatures unknown to the Arctic are migrating up from the south.

Moral Rebellion With a New Face

I've encountered the phrase "deliberate childlessness" in a few places now. It's becoming a bit of a buzzword, though admittedly still a marginal one.

Arrested For Mouthing the Word "No"

The lesson to be learned here is that civil liberties are no longer a party-neutral issue.

T-Shirt Ideas

One wonders if the scapegoating of homosexuals serves the same kind of electoral purpose that segregation served in mobilizing poor White Southerners into a political coalition half a century ago. That is, politics has its Machiavellian schemers (Karl Rove, who probably doesn't care much about the gay marriage issue personally, I'd bet) and its earnest cultural practitioners (the high school kids who are swindled by this talk into creating for themselves anti-gay identities). When something is done as a political expedient (putting divisive propositions on local ballots), I always wonder if it is meant by those who cynically manipulate public perceptions to have such far-flung cultural consequences, or if they'd actually rather it weren't taken too seriously.

Did I actually just read that there are Christians who want to wear these shirts? The notion of an article of clothing as a means of public censure has a Scarlet Letterish zeal to it.

This is sad.

It's perhaps partially reassuring that some soldiers were sufficiently disturbed by an order to kill three-year olds that they spoke to newspapers about this. That deploying an army inevitably loosens psychopaths with guns on an innocent world needs to be reckoned among costs of military action. In the first reports, the speechless victim is always victimized. In this case, we might have been led to think that this girl had to be shot because she may have been carrying explosives. No, it turns out she was running away. And she was carrying schoolbooks. In real life, unlike in literature where writers are encouraged to practice restraint, the irony's mawkish.

Schisms

Here are the beginnings of the inevitable ideological schisms that ought to take a bite out of Republican party unity, as a consequence of their electoral windfall. Both among neoconservatives
(and it's interesting to note that the objection here is that the ideological vanguard suffers from the same "immunity to disconfirmation" of Bush backers as a whole) and then among the Republican majority over abortion. In some ways, the party's fantastic unity may have been a consequence of its being in the minority for so long as much as its being a representation of the single largest cultural bloc. Perhaps it's comforting that nothing tears a political party in half quite like ascendancy. If gridlock means government inaction, it's something conservatives can support.

I wonder if Kerry could have focused his criticism of the war and appealed to conservative intuitions if he described it with phrases like "social engineering", "nation-building", and "utopianism".