Author: Aaron Weber

Church, State

Say it with me folks. Church, State. Not the same thing at all. Keep them distinct. Mixing them is harmful to both. I see an article like the one yesterday about the Catholic Church’s opposition to gay marriage and I think, well, of course they oppose it, but that’s all the more reason to allow it! Think about it: they oppose gay marriage because their religion opposes gay marriage. There isn’t a civil or secular rationale that would oppose it at all.

Time to write more strongly-worded letters to my government officials.

Dissident Patriot

Been thinking about the concepts of “loyal opposition” and “dissident patriots,” and having just seen his Columbine movie, I quite liked Dissent Magazine’s take on Michael Moore’s failures. He’s really emblematic of the left, to me, and the article has a much more nuanced feel for what I have been groping for when I said “most protestors are idiots” or whatever.

Getting arrested isn’t a powerful symbol anymore. Conflict and protest don’t win hearts and minds the way they did in 1960 when it suddenly became apparent that the police were turning dogs on unarmed protestors. It was certainly something when everyone knew that Nice Kids did not get arrested, that an arrest, even without conviction, barred you from Good employment, and so forth. But now, not so much. Now, it’s not really a big deal to rack up that symbolic arrest. The police have a whole procedure for putting you in jail for an afternoon and letting you out with a small fine that covers the cost of disposable plastic handcuffs and gas for the paddy-wagon.

I do feel the frustration of not being able to convince people of the obvious truths before them: Our Leader is turning this nation into a kleptocracy, and our rights are malleable and disappearing fast.

Them Democrats better get their asses in gear and start promoting fiscal responsibility and exposing Bush for the puppet he is. I just wish the citizenry were more economically and mathematically astute– they’d see through this a lot easier.

Well, at least there’s some positive news on the horizon: new research says video games are good for hand-eye coordination.

More on Man and Nature

I’ve been getting a lot of comments on the Shell/Economist Essay Contest, mostly involving the fact that, the distinction between humanity and nature is pretty arbitrary. Now, I should point out, to be fair, that the essay isn’t actually supposed to answer the question “do we need natur?” The idea is to explore the relationship of interdependence between human beings and the natural world around them, and especially to discuss the idea of balancing immediate human needs with the longer-term health of the planet.

Nonetheless, I’m tempted to open with the famous words of C. Montgomery Burns:

“Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favour? Well, maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys. Nature started the fight for survival and she wants to quit because she’s losing? Well, I say hard cheese!”

Cityscape

This weekend I saw Metropolis, the 1927 version. Naive and over-the-top, and of course the standard silent-film overacting. But nonetheless, pretty neat. Now I’ll have to watch the 2002 anime version. You could pair Metropolis with urban dystopia pics like Blade Runner, or industrial-wasteland movies like Eraserhead or Modern Times, or of course union movies like Matewan. But for some reason I ended up watching it right after I’d seen L.I.E., which still forms neat parallels: suburban rather than urban wasteland, and the corruption of privilege, semi-innocent kids discovering parental malfeasance, male bonding, etc. etc.

Morally Reprehensible Human Beings

So, I more or less lost a friend earlier this week when I went from disagreeing with her politics to attacking her personally for holding particular beliefs. It wasn’t a polite thing to do, but I sort of got away from myself, and I just kept punching.
It resonates with the recent discussion about whether Libertarian and Republican politics (for the most part) are just variations on the theme of greedy-greedy-greedy. (Not to say that Democratic politics aren’t frequently the same thing, mind you– lobbies have their own greed, even the lobbies of the left.)

More on hypocrisy, and tending toward lies, discussed by Brad DeLong. Brings up for me the thought that the tax cut business is being pushed just like the war.

Compare: the war was pursued for less than honest and coherent reasons (WMDs being the most obvious fabrication), and it is not a glorious liberation (the looting and the unguarded nuclear waste has if anything made the Middle East more dangerous). So, too, nobody of any account (Mallard Fillmore? Rush Limbaugh?) believes the line that Bush is feeding us about the tax cut– even the conservative journalists say it’s an illogical, sop to the rich and that it’s the sort of thing which could wreck an economy. The Financial Times and the Economist are the sort of publications you’d expect to support the Party of Business. Alan Greenspan says it’s a bad idea. The party rank-and-file disagree with it but are afraid of the backlash from the Bush cronies– they won’t go on the record, because everyone who disagrees with Bush is punished, and punished harshly.

It’s not just a sop to the rich, it’s not just a stupid mistake. It’s a deliberate plan to bankrupt the federal government and forcing it to eliminate its social programs.

And when it’s all over I guess I’ll just have to say I told you so, since I don’t know how to make it stop. Everybody knows the fight was fixed, the poor stay poor and the rich get rich, that’s how it goes, and everybody knows….

Heart of Darkness

I’ve been listening to Sparklehorse and reading Tim O’Brien and Joseph Conrad, and let me tell you, it’s crushing. They’re all about the human capacity for evil, about the barely-contained darkness coiled up in your gut waiting to escape, the capacity of love to turn into anger and resentment and fear and violence. I spent a lot of time last night lying in bed staring at the ceiling and looking into the darkness in myself and just sinking.