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avivajazz  jazzaviva

White House Seeks Kagan Defenders | Liberals Think She'll Be Too Accomodationist - 0 views

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    "No one claims that Kagan is an outright conservative--only that she seems too accomodationist to them.
avivajazz  jazzaviva

Glenn Greenwald: Why Elena Kagan Would Be a Dangerous Pick For the Supreme Court | Civi... - 0 views

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    While we know relatively little about the frontrunner in the nomination race, she is a darling of conservatives, aligns with Sen. Lindsey Graham, and loves executive power.
avivajazz  jazzaviva

Glenn Greenwald: Why Elena Kagan Would Be a Dangerous Pick For the Supreme Court | Civi... - 0 views

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    "While we know relatively little about the frontrunner in the nomination race, she is a darling of conservatives, aligns with Sen. Lindsey Graham, and loves executive power. "
avivajazz  jazzaviva

Regulation of Oil Drilling? Ha! Too Busy Smoking Pot, Humping Prostitutes, with BP Exec... - 0 views

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    Conservatives have dubbed the spill "Obama's Katrina." But the roots of the disaster, which could potentially have been prevented by enhanced safety measures, stretch back to the George W. Bush years. During that era, Interior became a revolving door haven for industry lobbyists. MMS developed a hands-off approach to regulation and was known for its deference to the companies it was supposed to be policing.
avivajazz  jazzaviva

Shifting to the Right: USA 1950 to Present - 0 views

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    "Political migration to the right has resulted in a weakening of individuals' rights and transferred political, economic and legislative power to multi-national corporations and the upper class."
ken meece

Think Again: God - By Karen Armstrong | Foreign Policy - 1 views

  • An inadequate understanding of God that reduces “him” to an idol in our own image who gives our likes and dislikes sacred sanction is the worst form of spiritual tyranny. Such arrogance has led to atrocities like the Crusades. The rise of secularism in government was meant to check this tendency, but secularism itself has created new demons now inflicting themselves on the world.
  • In the West, secularism has been a success, essential to the modern economy and political system, but it was achieved gradually over the course of nearly 300 years, allowing new ideas of governance time to filter down to all levels of society. But in other parts of the world, secularization has occurred far too rapidly and has been resented by large sectors of the population,
  • Shiism had for centuries separated religion from politics as a matter of sacred principle, and Khomeini’s insistence that a cleric should become head of state was an extraordinary innovation.
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  • In the same spirit, Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, began his movement by translating the social message of the Koran into a modern idiom, founding clinics, hospitals, trade unions, schools, and factories that gave workers insurance, holidays, and good working conditions. In other words, he aimed to bring the masses to modernity in an Islamic setting. The Brotherhood’s resulting popularity was threatening to Egypt’s secular government, which could not provide these services.
  • John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama have invoked faith as a shared experience that binds the country together -- an approach that recognizes the communal power of spirituality without making any pretense to divine right.
  • it is not God or religion but violence itself -- inherent in human nature -- that breeds violence. As a species, we survived by killing and eating other animals; we also murder our own kind. So pervasive is this violence that it leaks into most scriptures, though these aggressive passages have always been balanced and held in check by other texts that promote a compassionate ethic based on the Golden Rule
  • "religious" wars, no matter how modern the tools, always begin as political ones.
  • In recent Gallup polling conducted in 35 Muslim countries, only 7 percent of those questioned thought that the September 11 attacks were justified. Their reasons were entirely political.
  • Fundamentalism is not conservative. Rather, it is highly innovative -- even heretical -- because it always develops in response to a perceived crisis. In their anxiety, some fundamentalists distort the tradition they are trying to defend.
  • All fundamentalism -- whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim -- is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation.
  • The Bible and the Koran may have prohibited usury, but over the centuries Jews, Christians, and Muslims all found ways of getting around this restriction and produced thriving economies. It is one of the great ironies of religious history that Christianity, whose founder taught that it was impossible to serve both God and mammon, should have produced the cultural environment that, as Max Weber suggested in his 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was integral to modern capitalism.
  • the religious critique of excessive greed is far from irrelevant. Although not opposed to business, the major faith traditions have tried to counterbalance some of the abuses of capitalism. Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, by means of yoga and other disciplines, try to moderate the aggressive acquisitiveness of the human psyche. The three monotheistic faiths have inveighed against the injustice of unevenly distributed wealth
  • Religion is not simply a matter of subscribing to a set of obligatory beliefs; it is hard work, requiring a ceaseless effort to get beyond the selfishness that prevents us from achieving a more humane humanity.
  • in their rebellion against the modern ethos, fundamentalists tend to overemphasize traditional gender roles. Unfortunately, frontal assaults on this patriarchal trend have often proven counterproductive.
  • But their reading of scripture is unprecedentedly literal. Before the modern period, few understood the first chapter of Genesis as an exact account of the origins of life; until the 17th century, theologians insisted that if a biblical text contradicted science, it must be interpreted allegorically.
  • Ironically, it was the empirical emphasis of modern science that encouraged many to regard God and religious language as fact rather than symbol, thus forcing religion into an overly rational, dogmatic, and alien literalism.
  • What has alienated many Muslims from the democratic ideal is not their religion but Western governments’ support of autocratic rulers, such as the Iranian shahs, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak, who have denied people basic human and democratic rights.
  • a 2006 Gallup poll revealed that 46 percent of Americans believe that God should be the source of legislation.
  • A fatwa is not universally binding like a papal edict; rather, it simply expresses the opinion of the mufti who issues it. Muslims can choose which fatwas they adopt and thus participate in a flexible free market of religious thought, just as Americans can choose which church they attend.
  • Religion should be studied with the same academic impartiality and accuracy as the economy, politics, and social customs of a region, so that we learn how religion interacts with political tension, what is counterproductive, and how to avoid giving unnecessary offense.
  • In the Middle East, overly aggressive secularization has sometimes backfired, making the religious establishment more conservative, or even radical.
Anne Hulthen

Digital History - 0 views

    • Anne Hulthen
       
      What was the burden of proof previous? Multiple witnesses, artifacts? It seems like witchcraft is so incorporeal an activity and crime that it would be difficult, if not impossible to prove. Was that the point?
  • The Salem witch scare had complex social roots. It drew upon preexisting rivalries and disputes within the rapidly-growing Massachusetts port town: between urban and rural residents; between wealthier commercially-oriented merchants and subsistence-oriented farmers; and between Congregationalists and other religious denominations: Anglicans, Baptists, and Quakers.
    • Anne Hulthen
       
      I think in many ways the red scare too was caused by a tension between the new glorified culture "Hollywood" and the old, less taboo culture. The freedom and easiness of the Hollywood life terrified many of the leading politicians who still placed the same value on patriotism, nationalism, and conservative traditions, ideas that the Hollywood and artistic society of the 1950s scoffed at.
  • salem" means peace, and the town's founders had hoped that Salem would be a village of peace. Further, they had drawn the word salem from Jerusalem,
    • Anne Hulthen
       
      This is similar in many ways to the puritan dream in general, that of creating a Mecca, a new holy land drawing the devout to live together in harmony. However religious fervor, however well intentioned has the tendency to create an atmosphere of intolerance.
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  • hoping that this new village would serve as a foundation for a new Jerusalem.
  • "In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and dungeon, though the lights, the music, the revelry above us may lead us to forget their existence, and the...prisoners whom they hide."
  • The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the devil's territories.
  • The devil is now making one attempt more upon us; an attempt more difficult, more surprising, more snarled with unintelligible circumstances than any that we have hitherto encountered; an attempt so critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon enjoy halcyon days, with all the vultures of hell trodden under our feet. He has wanted his incarnate legions to persecute us, as the people of God have in the other hemisphere been persecuted;
  • An army of devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the center, and after a sort, the firstborn of our English settlements.
  • just suspicion that the demons might impose the shapes of innocent persons in their spectral exhibitions upon the sufferers
  • yea that at prodigious witch meetings the wretches have proceeded so far as to concert and consult the methods of rooting out the Christian religion from this country, and setting up instead of it perhaps a more gross diabolism than ever the world saw before. And yet it will be a thing little short of miracle if, in so spread a business as this, the devil should not get in some of his juggles to confound the discovery of the rest.
avivajazz  jazzaviva

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter, Harper's Magazine, Novembe... - 0 views

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    ...the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
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