Talk on Why Atheism is Winning

I will be giving a talk on this topic on Wednesday, March 16 at 7:00 pm in the 1914 Lounge in Thwing student center on the CWRU campus. It is free and open to the public and free food is provided to compensate you for having to listen to me. The talk is sponsored by the Center for Inquiry.

In my talks, in addition to the tradition Q&A and discussion at the end, I also encourage people to question and comment during the presentation, so come along with your ideas.

Playing for keeps

While deficits and a large national debt are not good things in the long run, it is not the case that it is the greatest problem right now. What is clear is that they are being used as weapons by the oligarchy to strip people of their basic rights and benefits and destroy public services in order to further enrich the few obscenely wealthy people in this country.

Paul Craig Roberts looks at the numbers and argues that we are witnessing a great rip-off.

Rachel Maddow explains what is happening in Michigan as emblematic of what is going on nationwide, which is the wholesale assault on democracy itself. (Thanks to reader Norm.)

As is often the case, what I see happening in the US has precursors in Sri Lanka a few decades ago. In Sri Lanka, elections used to swing back and forth between left-of-center and right of-center political parties, with the range being much greater than in the US. As a result, the government’s economic and social policies would change every few years. Since we had a British parliamentary system, governments would sometimes get a landslide, which would later be reversed.

In 1977, the right-of-center party won by a huge landslide. Its autocratic leader decided that he wanted to play for keeps and create a new system that would entrench his party in power indefinitely so that his policies would not be reversed. Using his huge majority, he forced through major changes in the constitution and government and elections and the judiciary system to make it hard for another pendulum swing to occur and reverse his policies, and that even the judiciary would not be able to rein in the anti-democratic measures.

It worked, at least for a while. But eventually people got tired of the government and its corruption and voted in the opposition, despite the rigged system. And now the other party is using those very same powers to entrench itself and its cronies in power. But because of the weakened democratic system and the removal of safeguards, corruption is now endemic and political thuggery and intimidation commonplace.

The lesson in this? It is that we are entering a new phase in politics in the US. The people who are attacking unions and undermining the public sector and the watchdog role of government are playing for keeps. They too want to change the rules of the game so the oligarchy has total freedom to do what it likes and that there will be no going back. They are using the ignorant tea partiers as a wedge to claim popular legitimacy but the tea partiers will be tossed aside once they have served their purpose. The tea partiers will realize only too late that they vociferously cheered on the very people who will turn around and destroy them.

The Democratic Party is too feckless to vigorously fight this assault on democracy, because they are also, with a few rare exceptions, part of the oligarchy. The Democratic Party will only do the right thing if they are forced to do so by an angry public. This is why the mass demonstrations of ordinary people occurring around the country are so important. In the March 2011 issue of Z Magazine, Paul Street quotes the late, great historian Howard Zinn:

There’s hardly anything more important that people can learn than the fact that the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in – in the streets, in the cafeteria, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating – those are the things that determine what happens.

Street also quotes C. Derber in his book Hidden Power (2005):

The leading agents of significant policy change in U. S. history have not been parties glued to the next election, but social movements that operate on the scale of decades rather than two- and four-year electoral cycles. Political parties have historically become agents of democratic change only when movements infuse the parties with their own long-term vision, moral conviction, and resources.

We have to support the demonstrations in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan and elsewhere that are opposing this attempt to radically reshape the democratic structure to allow total control by the oligarchy.

P. J. Crowley fired

Commenter Matt alerts me to the fact that State Department spokesperson P. J. Crowley has been forced to resign following his criticism of Bradley Manning’s treatment.

Although I have strongly criticized Crowley in the past, I find it odd the reasons why people in high positions in government are fired. You can brazenly lie and torture and even kill people and yet escape punishment and even be commended as long as you faithfully espouse the party line. But say what you feel in an unguarded moment, even to a small group and in a private capacity like Crowley did, and you are done for.

In Crowley’s case, I wrote a few months ago that I wondered whether he ever looked in the mirror and wondered how he could have sunk so low. It looks like he did.

The abusive treatment of Manning is becoming a bigger and bigger millstone around Obama’s neck.

UPDATE: As I expected, Glenn Greenwald weighs in on the Crowley case.

Computers more likely to replace white collar workers

We tend to think that computers and automation will threaten only low-skilled workers. Paul Krugman argues that the opposite may be true, that the low-skill jobs that could be replaced have already been replaced, and that it is the high-skilled ones that are now at risk of elimination. It is actually harder to design computers to clean your house or take care of your garden than it is to do legal analysis.

Those middle-class people who have been misled into working against their own interests and supporting the oligarchy’s assault on the social safety net and public services because they think it affects only other people may want to think carefully about that.

The Overton window

The new atheists are considered ‘bad’ atheists because of their clearly stated belief that all beliefs about god are without any foundation. They have been criticized by ‘good’ atheists (i.e., atheist accommodationists) for being too extreme.

I have said before that the accommodationists should actually thank the new atheists because few people like to be on the extremes of a public debate and the new atheists have greatly broadened the range of the views and made accommodationism part of the center and thus acceptable the religious community. In fact, religious moderates seem to just love accommodationists.

Randy Pelton, president of the Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry, tells me that this phenomenon of the range of acceptable views being limited and the ways to expand it actually has been studied by the political science community and has the name of the Overton window. The Wikipedia article gives a passage from Anthony Trollope’s novel Phineas Finn which captures the idea:

“Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult. And so in time it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among the things probable;–and so at last it will be ranged in the list of those few measures which the country requires as being absolutely needed. That is the way in which public opinion is made.”

“It is no loss of time,” said Phineas, “to have taken the first great step in making it.”

“The first great step was taken long ago,” said Mr. Monk,–”taken by men who were looked upon as revolutionary demagogues, almost as traitors, because they took it. But it is a great thing to take any step that leads us onwards.”

Oddly enough, it appears that Glenn Beck has written a novel with that title. I have no idea what it is about.

Cue the religious nutters

We have had two natural disasters in quick succession that have killed and injured a lot of people and inflicted considerable damage: The earthquake in New Zealand and the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan.

I am wondering how long it will take before the religious nutters (and I am looking at you Pat Robertson) come out and say that this must be because god is angry with us about something. I am not sure what god could be angry about in these cases but you can be sure that it contravened something in the book of Leviticus or some surah in the Koran.

Since god tends to use very blunt instruments as punishments, indulging in mass killings and wanton destruction that destroy men, women, children, and the elderly indiscriminately, what ticked him off in these cases need not be due to anything that happened in those countries. It could well be that he was angry that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was repealed in the US, but didn’t want to hurt people here because as his chosen people and country, we are special in his eyes.