For the Record

Pre-election weekend linky post

• A cheering reflection on the cultural underpinnings of the left blogosphere political movement. Especially cheering when read as a sort of "happy face" take on the value of bricolage in response to Thomas Frank's depressing doctrine of the context of cool. Also most excellently proceeding from the core Lennon-ist exhortation to "try something new".
• Vids: good natured people and one fucking psycho. (Though I note that Big Time manifests a bit of stung-ness in response to a huge dis from his long time bud Ken Adelman.)
• Ramsey Clark, former USAG and Saddam's lawyer, worries about "victor's justice".
• There's a good deal to read on the incredibly hilarious "101st fighting keyboarders fuckup" reported by the Times over the weekend; most cheering is that Bush considered it a pet project and even engaged in a bit of sympathetic interpretative prediction of the reaction of the sweet cherries that the 101st would pluck from his document treasure trove: "Bush extended his arms in exasperation and worried aloud that people who see the documents in 10 years will wonder why they weren't released sooner. "If I knew then what I know now," Bush said in the voice of a war skeptic, "I would have been more supportive of the war." " Note that this anecdote is from last March's Weekly Standard! [Backstory; more: apparently Laurie Mylroie and some other crazies, worried about the evaporating WMD justification for the Iraq invastion, enlisted PowerLine's moronic "Big Trunk" Mirengoff and others in pressuring a pair of congressmen to pressure Bush to pressure Bush's third CIA boss, Negroponte, to release 2 million pages of captured Iraqi docs on line. Or something like that. The goal was for an "army of Davids" -- in InstaIgnorance's asinine phrase -- to open-source translate them out of Arabic to provide the retrospective propaganda that would induce the war critics to shut up. Because we know how the right wing blogosphere is so knowledgeable about other cultures and so public spirited. For months, the IAEA was warning the Cheney Admin to take the docs down since they tell you in detail in Arabic how to build a nuke, info that the IAEA suppressed from the public until last March. Needless to say, they paid no attn until the NYT broke the story over the weekend. The national security party at work. I've been rotflmao all weekend!]
• A very cool formula to predict the outcome of a given congressional race without polls.
• The Clinton folk wargamed an Iraq takeover in 1999 and predicted that even with 400K troops, the likely outcome would be chaos. Rummy's New Model Army tried to do it with a third of that. Result? Chaos! (Incidentally, I've never seen a decent explanation of just why Rummy digs the light military so much. Maybe his thought is just as straightforward as this: with the same manpower a light military can fuck up a lot more places than a heavy military.)
   

Linky post

• Talk about reaction formation! This story is a real treat for lovers of one of Brian's favorite concepts. Apparently Ted Haggard, one of the fathers of the contemporary American Taliban, and the major player behind the theocratization of the USAF (his megachurch is right across from the Air Force Academy), has been involved in a sexual relationship with a male prostitute for the last three years, apparently also engaging in "p&p" or enhancing the experience by smoking crystal. Dude, stay off the crystal, that stuff will make your teeth fall out.
• Why is Stanford University, my alma mater, the lying right-wing propagandist Thomas Sowell -- who has recently lied about the anti-terrorism positions of a leading member of California's congressional delegation? Answer, Sowell a "fellow" -- translation, on a sinecure post -- at the Hoover Institution. Hoover certainly performs some worthwhile services -- eg their archives are tremendous. Still, providing Sowell and the even more odious and stupid Dinesh D'Souza with the sheen of a Stanford association damages Stanford's good name, as well as blurring the line in the public mind between serious scholarship and propaganda. (Incidentally, if you haven't yet read James Wolcott's devastating D'Souza dis, do so: it's archived here.) Financial pressure obviously won't do anything to get SU to disgorge this pair of goons: Hoover is self-funding -- or rather owned by the corporate and elite paymasters that benefit from its propaganda (ADM "supermarket to the world"; big oil and their auto buddies; big war; big FIRE; assorted individual plutocrats). Still, maybe moral pressure would induce Stanford, if not to pressure Hoover to get rid of these jerks, at least to issue a strong statement deploring their lies and distinguishing what they do from what Stanford is supposed to do. Maybe after the election ...
• US determined to be an "extensive surveillance socieity", with privacy protections just above those of China, Russia, and Malaysia.
• Last night I got round to reading Matt Taibbi's terrifying Rolling Stone piece on the historically dreadful 109th congress. If you haven't read it yet, please do. I found I learned a great deal about legislative mechanics -- also, in grueling detail, how the Republican party has utterly destroyed this central system in US democracy.
   

Oo, this is fun

Watch Clinton pulverize Fox News scum here.

Third parties in the US

This post (from a few months ago) contains excellent analysis of the nature of political parties in the US, explaining very convincingly why there will never be a viable third party, also entailing pointers for those who hope to move one of the parties in their direction.

Solitary, Poor, Nasty, and Brutish

A familiar story from psychologists tells us that right-wingers are (a) likely to accept inequality and (b) authoritarian. Recently, some sociologists have teased apart these two features: two independent and highly predictive dimensions of political personality are a scale measuring degree of concern about fulfillment/survival (with acceptance of inequality reflecting survival-orientation), and a scale measuring degree of authoritarianism/individualism. On the familiar story, right-wingers are <survivalist, authoritarian>, left-wingers are <fulfillmentist, individualist>.

Strangely (and worryingly) enough, a growing quadrant in the US is oriented toward <survivalism, individualism>:

 

Citation

Where Democracy Corps found voters unable to hear economic appeals through the noise of cultural ones, Environics’ research suggested an even more profound interrelationship between materialist concerns and a community’s broader beliefs. They found economic changes driving changes in social values, and those, in turn, driving political preferences. Using data from Environics’ in-home consumer survey in the United States, Nordhaus and Shellenberger were able to tease apart changes in the thinking of voters since 1992 on 117 different “social values trends.” These values, such as “time stress,” “joy of consumption,” and “acceptance of violence,” are not what people normally think of as “values” -- abortion, gay marriage, or other hot-button social issues. Nordhaus and Shellenberger were looking at something more fine-tuned: the attitudes, biases, and normative beliefs that undergird people’s stances toward politics, life, and policy. They were, in short, trying to elucidate the measurable components of worldviews.

“None of the polling I was looking at really had much ability to explain what was happening in the country socially and politically,” says Nordhaus, the more voluble of the pair, with close-cropped sandy brown hair and slick rectangular glasses framed by hip-for-D.C. charcoal plastic. The data the corporate world was using were “vastly more sophisticated than the methods I was using as a pollster, which were, respectively, quite crude.”

Looking at the data from 1992 to 2004, Shellenberger and Nordhaus found a country whose citizens are increasingly authoritarian while at the same time feeling evermore adrift, isolated, and nihilistic. They found a society at once more libertine and more puritanical than in the past, a society where solidarity among citizens was deteriorating, and, most worrisomely to them, a progressive clock that seemed to be unwinding backward on broad questions of social equity. Between 1992 and 2004, for example, the percentage of people who said they agree that “the father of the family must be the master in his own house” increased ten points, from 42 to 52 percent, in the 2,500-person Environics survey. The percentage agreeing that “men are naturally superior to women” increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the fraction that said they discussed local problems with people they knew plummeted from 66 percent to 39 percent. Survey respondents were also increasingly accepting of the value that “violence is a normal part of life” -- and that figure had doubled even before the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.

Lumping specific survey statements like these together into related groups, Nordhaus and Shellenberger arrived at what they call “social values trends,” such as “sexism,” “patriotism,” or “acceptance of flexible families.” But the real meaning of those trends was revealed only by plugging them into the “values matrix” -- a four-quadrant plot with plenty of curving arrows to show direction, which is then overlaid onto voting data. The quadrants represent different worldviews. On the top lies authority, an orientation that values traditional family, religiosity, emotional control, and obedience. On the bottom, the individuality orientation encompasses risk-taking, “anomie-aimlessness,” and the acceptance of flexible families and personal choice. On the right side of the scale are values that celebrate fulfillment, such as civic engagement, ecological concern, and empathy. On the left, there’s a cluster of values representing the sense that life is a struggle for survival: acceptance of violence, a conviction that people get what they deserve in life, and civic apathy. These quadrants are not random: Shellenberger and Nordaus developed them based on an assessment of how likely it was that holders of certain values also held other values, or “self-clustered.”

Over the past dozen years, the arrows have started to point away from the fulfillment side of the scale, home to such values as gender parity and personal expression, to the survival quadrant, home to illiberal values such as sexism, fatalism, and a focus on “every man for himself.” Despite the increasing political power of the religious right, Environics found social values moving away from the authority end of the scale, with its emphasis on responsibility, duty, and tradition, to a more atomized, rage-filled outlook that values consumption, sexual permissiveness, and xenophobia. The trend was toward values in the individuality quadrant.

Any reader remotely familiar with American popular culture will immediately recognize the truth of this analysis. Ariel Levy recently grappled with one aspect of it in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, writing about a hypersexualized culture that encourages its young women to be Girls Gone Wild and its young men to be piggish voyeurs. She describes a new anti-feminist vision of “liberation” that eschews both traditional constraints and any concern for gender equality. “Despite the rising power of Evangelical Christianity and the political right in the United States, this trend has only grown more extreme and more pervasive,” notes Levy. Indeed, the coarse, brawny, self-centered new philosophy could take as its exemplar television personality Bill O’Reilly, a man who, it was alleged in a sexual harassment lawsuit, is as interpersonally crude as he is politically rough and bullying. Americans, writes Environics founder Michael Adams in his 2005 book American Backlash: The Untold Story of Social Change in the United States, increasingly reject traditionalism and progressivism alike.

“While American politics becomes increasingly committed to a brand of conservatism that favors traditionalism, religiosity, and authority,” Adams writes, “the culture at large [is] becoming ever more attached to hedonism, thrill-seeking, and a ruthless, Darwinist understanding of human competition.” This behavior is particularly prevalent among the vast segment of American society that is not politically or civically engaged, and which usually fails to even vote. This has created what must be understood at the electoral level as a politics of backlash on the part of both Republican and Democratic voters: Voters of both parties, Environics data show, have developed an increasingly moralistic politics as a reaction to the new cultural order.

Americans seem to see themselves as in a Hobbesian state of nature. That's frightening if true, of course, because everyone knows what kind of regime people in that condition go in for.

A familiar story from psychologists tells us that right-wingers are (a) likely to accept inequality and (b) authoritarian. Recently, some sociologists have teased apart these two features: two independent and highly predictive dimensions of political personality are a scale measuring degree of concern about fulfillment/survival (with acceptance of inequality reflecting survival-orientation), and a scale measuring degree of authoritarianism/individualism. On the familiar story, right-wingers are <survivalist, authoritarian>, left-wingers are <fulfillmentist, individualist>.

Strangely (and worryingly) enough, a growing quadrant in the US is oriented toward <survivalism, individualism>:

 

Citation

Where Democracy Corps found voters unable to hear economic appeals through the noise of cultural ones, Environics’ research suggested an even more profound interrelationship between materialist concerns and a community’s broader beliefs. They found economic changes driving changes in social values, and those, in turn, driving political preferences. Using data from Environics’ in-home consumer survey in the United States, Nordhaus and Shellenberger were able to tease apart changes in the thinking of voters since 1992 on 117 different “social values trends.” These values, such as “time stress,” “joy of consumption,” and “acceptance of violence,” are not what people normally think of as “values” -- abortion, gay marriage, or other hot-button social issues. Nordhaus and Shellenberger were looking at something more fine-tuned: the attitudes, biases, and normative beliefs that undergird people’s stances toward politics, life, and policy. They were, in short, trying to elucidate the measurable components of worldviews.

“None of the polling I was looking at really had much ability to explain what was happening in the country socially and politically,” says Nordhaus, the more voluble of the pair, with close-cropped sandy brown hair and slick rectangular glasses framed by hip-for-D.C. charcoal plastic. The data the corporate world was using were “vastly more sophisticated than the methods I was using as a pollster, which were, respectively, quite crude.”

Looking at the data from 1992 to 2004, Shellenberger and Nordhaus found a country whose citizens are increasingly authoritarian while at the same time feeling evermore adrift, isolated, and nihilistic. They found a society at once more libertine and more puritanical than in the past, a society where solidarity among citizens was deteriorating, and, most worrisomely to them, a progressive clock that seemed to be unwinding backward on broad questions of social equity. Between 1992 and 2004, for example, the percentage of people who said they agree that “the father of the family must be the master in his own house” increased ten points, from 42 to 52 percent, in the 2,500-person Environics survey. The percentage agreeing that “men are naturally superior to women” increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the fraction that said they discussed local problems with people they knew plummeted from 66 percent to 39 percent. Survey respondents were also increasingly accepting of the value that “violence is a normal part of life” -- and that figure had doubled even before the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.

Lumping specific survey statements like these together into related groups, Nordhaus and Shellenberger arrived at what they call “social values trends,” such as “sexism,” “patriotism,” or “acceptance of flexible families.” But the real meaning of those trends was revealed only by plugging them into the “values matrix” -- a four-quadrant plot with plenty of curving arrows to show direction, which is then overlaid onto voting data. The quadrants represent different worldviews. On the top lies authority, an orientation that values traditional family, religiosity, emotional control, and obedience. On the bottom, the individuality orientation encompasses risk-taking, “anomie-aimlessness,” and the acceptance of flexible families and personal choice. On the right side of the scale are values that celebrate fulfillment, such as civic engagement, ecological concern, and empathy. On the left, there’s a cluster of values representing the sense that life is a struggle for survival: acceptance of violence, a conviction that people get what they deserve in life, and civic apathy. These quadrants are not random: Shellenberger and Nordaus developed them based on an assessment of how likely it was that holders of certain values also held other values, or “self-clustered.”

Over the past dozen years, the arrows have started to point away from the fulfillment side of the scale, home to such values as gender parity and personal expression, to the survival quadrant, home to illiberal values such as sexism, fatalism, and a focus on “every man for himself.” Despite the increasing political power of the religious right, Environics found social values moving away from the authority end of the scale, with its emphasis on responsibility, duty, and tradition, to a more atomized, rage-filled outlook that values consumption, sexual permissiveness, and xenophobia. The trend was toward values in the individuality quadrant.

Any reader remotely familiar with American popular culture will immediately recognize the truth of this analysis. Ariel Levy recently grappled with one aspect of it in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, writing about a hypersexualized culture that encourages its young women to be Girls Gone Wild and its young men to be piggish voyeurs. She describes a new anti-feminist vision of “liberation” that eschews both traditional constraints and any concern for gender equality. “Despite the rising power of Evangelical Christianity and the political right in the United States, this trend has only grown more extreme and more pervasive,” notes Levy. Indeed, the coarse, brawny, self-centered new philosophy could take as its exemplar television personality Bill O’Reilly, a man who, it was alleged in a sexual harassment lawsuit, is as interpersonally crude as he is politically rough and bullying. Americans, writes Environics founder Michael Adams in his 2005 book American Backlash: The Untold Story of Social Change in the United States, increasingly reject traditionalism and progressivism alike.

“While American politics becomes increasingly committed to a brand of conservatism that favors traditionalism, religiosity, and authority,” Adams writes, “the culture at large [is] becoming ever more attached to hedonism, thrill-seeking, and a ruthless, Darwinist understanding of human competition.” This behavior is particularly prevalent among the vast segment of American society that is not politically or civically engaged, and which usually fails to even vote. This has created what must be understood at the electoral level as a politics of backlash on the part of both Republican and Democratic voters: Voters of both parties, Environics data show, have developed an increasingly moralistic politics as a reaction to the new cultural order.

Americans seem to see themselves as in a Hobbesian state of nature. That's frightening if true, of course, because everyone knows what kind of regime people in that condition go in for.

The chances of change

At this point Benj and I have been paying fairly close attention to political goings-on for the last 5 years.  I know that's lame -- we should have been paying attention long ago.    But anyway, given  all that has been going on, 5 years is long enough to track a disturbing trend; namely, that no amount of awareness of Republican lies, corruption, and criminality seems to be making a bit of difference to anything.

I know that we weren't alone in thinking, each time some new outrage blossomed in the blogosphere, that surely this would bring the administration down.  Just to hit the high points: in five short years we've witnessed the Republicans orchestrate and get away with two stolen elections, a war based on lies, public policy directed nearly exclusively toward filling the coffers of the corporate elite, stupendously brazen cronyism and political corruption, astonishing and murderous negligence during the Katrina disaster, the tragic blatant disregard of the Geneva conventions, and violation of the U.S. constitution in widespread unauthorized spying on U.S. citizens.  But nothing ever changes.  Correct that: nothing every changes, except to get worse.

I think it's time to make an inductive generalization.  The present concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the Greedy Few, and the concomitant influence on the politicians and press that the Greedy Few effectively own and operate, has basically ensured that no outrage will be percieved as outrageous enough to throw the bums out and replace them with people who will govern with sanity, decency, and humanity.

Indeed, from the perspective of the Greedy Few, their corporate embodiments, and their countless willing minions (amazing how easily people are separated from their scruples), the outrages above are not outrageous, but rather are fabulous godsends.  The stolen elections -- a windfall for Republicans and hence, the Greedy Few whose every bidding Republicans scurry to carry out.  The invasion and occupation of Iraq -- a hundreds-of-billions windfall for the Greedy Few and their corporate military-industrial extensions.  Public policy that decimates workers rights and environmental and health protections, and that attempts to turn every social good and safety net into a privatized commodity -- a massive windfall for the Greedy Few and their corporations.    Corporate and political corruption -- all to the benefit of the Greedy Few.  The murderous negligence in the face of Katrina -- a windfall of reconstruction contracts and plus, no more of those pesky underspending blacks!  Disregarding the Geneva convention and spying on Americans -- acceptable collateral damage of keeping the U.S. populace hyped up and eyes averted from the fact that the "war on terror" [sic] is the biggest money-laundering scheme of all time.

Meanwhile, T.V. and radio stations and newspapers, nearly all owned by (and even when not, indirectly financed via advertising by) the Greedy Few, are hardly bothering to hide the fact that the Greedy Few are dictating content, both via the usual stenography and presentation of Republican photo ops and talking points as news -- Judith Miller's trumpeting of WH WMD lies being the most egregious example -- and by holding back critical stories -- as per the NYT acquiesting, a year ago, in the WH request to withhold the story about WH authorization for illegal surveillance -- a move that was arguably instrumental in helping Bush get "reelected".  Indeed, the publisher and owner of the so-called "newspaper of record" can't even be bothered to answer the Public Editor's questions about why the story was held, especially given the possible consequences for the election.

None of this is going to change unless there is a massive populist uprising.  That ain't gonna happen: U.S.ers are as gullible and domesticated as the grossly mistreated cows they love to scarf down at McDonald's.

So, for the New Year, I predict more of the same -- or worse.

Even the Vatican ...

Rejects "Intelligent Design":

"The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim," he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that "the universe didn't make itself and had a creator".

This idea was part of theology, Cardinal Poupard emphasised, while the precise details of how creation and the development of the species came about belonged to a different realm - science. Cardinal Poupard said that it was important for Catholic believers to know how science saw things so as to "understand things better".

(Hat tip to wulfhere.) This seems to me to be exactly what theists should believe. (Of course they should also stop being theists, but holding theism fixed . . . .) (To get in depth in the philosophy here, Peter Van Inwagen, a theist, argues this point persuasively in "Genesis and Evolution", collected in his God, Knowledge, and Mystery.)

On effective and ineffective strategies of resistance

One of the most disturbing things about the last 5 years has been the lack of any effective resistance to Bush and his fellow gang members' patently corrupt and unsound agendas, both with respect to these being carried out and with respect to anyone being held responsible once the agendas wreak their expected harvest of human, cultural, and environmental destruction.  Record-breaking protests and petitions, the ongoing deluge of well-documented evidence of administration criminality, the unprecedented level of on-line tracking of the political state of the nation---all these efforts, while extremely compelling in the abstract, have had almost no concrete impact on the actual course of U.S. political events. The massive worldwide protests probably did play a role in so few countries lending support for the invasion of Iraq, but here in the U.S. sensible domestic and foreign policy has been completely steamrollered by stupidity on nearly all points.

What explains these failures?  Of course it's hard, for all kinds of reasons, to derail or hold responsible those in power---they're powerful, for one!  But still it seems that the usual strategies of resistance aren't working in even the limited fashion that they used to do.  The contrast with the comparative peccadillos leading to Nixon's resigning and Clinton's being impeached is sharp, and needs explanation, if we are to have any hope of figuring out how in hell to marshall more effective resistance in the future. 

An initial suggestion (as per a friend of mine) points to the fact that the Republicans control all three branches of government; hence the institutional means for resistance have been lacking. Notwithstanding that various aspects of Bush's agenda grossly depart in crucial fashions from the conservative and libertarian strands of Republicanism, pragmatic considerations of "my team, right or wrong" surely explain, in part, why so many Republicans have given Bush and his gang a pass, at the irretrievable expense of their integrity.  On the other hand, party loyalty doesn't explain why so many Democrats turned against Clinton, on grounds either of his Oval Office escapades,  or (more righteously), on grounds of his betraying traditional Democratic values in decimating the social services safety net and advancing NAFTA and other so-called "free trade" agreements. Perhaps the deeper reason that Republicans haven't turned against the madman who is acting in their name reflects the psychology of political conservativism:

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Need for cognitive closure
• Terror management

Ironically, given the conservative fear of change, it takes them a long time to switch horses---even when the horse stops being politically conservative!  So people of common sense can't count on Republicans to rein in their crazies, and this failure provides a serious counter-force to effective resistance. 

Relatedly, as an unfortunate psychological fact to which most people are subject (conservatives in greater measure, as per the above study) is the tendency to go along with the agendas of persons in a position of relative authority (alternatively: go along with the majority). This isn't necessarily a bad trait---as an epistemological strategy it's often wise to listen to and learn from people who are supposed to be in a position to know better (or to think that, if many people believe X, then that is generally good reason for us to believe it too).  But the strategy goes terribly awry when those at the top  get it wrong.  And we've been seeing this departure from the rational over and over again, as "good soldiers" like Colin Powell implement obviously unsound policies, against what should have been their better judgment.

The operation of these sorts of psychological situational factors provides one large and underappreciated part of the explanation of why resistance to Bush's agendas has been so futile.  This resistance has tended to involve bringing argumentation to bear that shows these agendas to be unsound---to be motivated by false premises, or such as to predictably or actually lead to bad consequences.  Attention to argumentative details is well and good, and must be a core part of any strategy of effective (rational) resistance.  But in itself it is insufficient unto the task, for those in power who are situated in the present hierarchical framework are frequently operating at the level of syntax rather than semantics: they implement agenda X not because they believe in it (though to be sure, as part of the process of psychological accommodation they will rationalize their endorsement) but because their circumstances are such that they are psychologically predisposed to believe X, for any X, as part of occupying their relative position in the hierarchy.   And of course this paradigm is also explanatory of how all sorts of corrupt and unsound agendas---unregulated corporate capitalism, for one---are currently being implemented, all over the world.

Variations on the theme also provide some explanation of why the U.S. mainstream media has been so astonishingly lax in tracking the crimes of Bush et al. (I'll mention another in a minute.)   Though not themselves part of the political hierarchy per se, journalists' access to those in the hierarchy has, in this administration, been very directly pegged to positive press; this reflects an important difference with previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic.   There are the few heroic exceptions---e.g., Helen Thomas---who have the guts and the tenure to stand up to Bush, Scotty, and the rest of the snotty, dismissive liars.  But it's time we all faced up to the fact that journalists aren't, in general, watchdogs of the public trust, but evidently would rather keep their byline and insider party invitations than expose the inconvenient truth.  And when the fallout from bad policy lands on the heads of Iraqi children or U.S. soldiers or the multitudes of impoverished and uninsured poor, what reporter is going to rush to report: Oops, I was duped?  And the coverups and rationalizations continue.

So, point one: until everyone and their sister is made perfectly aware of how psychological hierarchical influences proceed and affect the course of public policy, we will continue to see bad policies implemented and rationalized, no matter how good the arguments against them.

Another reason for the failure of resistance to Bush's agendas is not so much psychological as material, and has to do with the utter triumph of effectively unregulated corporate capitalism in the U.S. The connections here are obvious, both in respect of public policy makers being puppets of global corporate interests, and in respect of main-stream journalists all working for these same interests (you know the stats --- only 5 corporations control approximately 90% of the mainstream media).  Is it any surprise, given such influence, that politicians now mainly implement policies whose only genuine imperative is to safeguard the world for corporate profit, and that main-stream journalists are restricted to writing press releases?  Of course it's not.

But oddly enough, the multitude of those condemning Bush's policies almost never mention the corporate capitalist elephant in the room. So, point two: until we directly address the profound inappropriateness of capitalism as a generator of appropriate public policy, and---somehow!---manage to put the beast back in its cage, we can expect more of the countless human, cultural, and environmental tragedies that ineluctably result from public policies that are of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.

The Non-Christian Coalition

From Chris Bowers:

So you think we need to reach values voters, otherwise known as white evangelicals, do you? Well, consider these facts:

• Non-Christians are the fastest growing demographic in America. In fact, 75% of the increase in the adult population of the United States from 1990 to 2001 came from non-Christians (source). Overall, in these eleven years the group almost exactly doubled in size, from 24.2 million people to 48.5 million.
• Those without religion have the highest retention rate of any religious group. Not only are they big, they are not going away. From 1990 to 2001, only 5% of those who said they had no religion found religion. No other religious group, except "non-denominational," had a single-digit drop out rate. (source)
• Non-Christians have a large electoral voice. In 2000, 22.9% of Gore voters were non-Christians. In 2004, 29.4% of Kerry voters were non-Christians. (source)
• Non-Christians are the fastest growing segment of the Democratic coalition. 70% of Kerry's eight million increase on Gore's vote total came from non-Christians. (source)
• Democrats are clobbering Republicans among the new non-Christian voters. Of the 6.5 million non-Christians who voted in 2004 but not in 2000, Kerry won 86% of the vote. (source)

Read this data again and tell me whose faith Democrats need to speak to. Read this data gain and tell me whether white evangelicals or non-Christians will have more influence over national politics in 2012 and beyond.

Only 5% of atheists converted to theism -- yeah baby. -- Benj

Yglesias on intellectual property

Right on:

Protecting intellectual property is not a proper goal of intellectual property law. Rather, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution gives the congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Protecting innovation is the only legitimate goal of intellectual property law. [...]

The idea that intellectual property law should have the protection of intellectual property as its purpose rather than as the means used toward the end of overall social betterment is a serious error that the content industry has been remarkably successful at inducing in American society. Needless to say, one way in which this has come about is that we all need to get the vast majority of our information about the world from subsidiaries of the content industry itself.

--Benj