The "R" Word

So it seems there is a formal movement to outright ban the word "retard" from public discourse, and to shame anyone who does use it.  When the subject came up amongst some of my friends, I told them that I absolutely would not support such a measure, because while I agree tormenting some poor mentally disabled person with hate speech is wrong, people have the right to say things that you or I might find offensive.


In response, I was told that banning this word wouldn't really be censorship, because its not really about the word, its about respecting other people.  Its about not hurting other people.  Its about being decent people.  And, I was asked, why am I so in love with calling people retards, anyway?  Because apparently, no one could ever desire to just defend freedom of thought and expression without wanting to insult someone.


Obviously


As the saying goes, believing in freedom of thought and freedom of expression isn't just being able to believe as you like and saying things you want to say.  Its also standing and defending the right of someone else to think and say as they like, even if what they like to think and say makes your blood boil.


That's freedom.  That's true freedom.  The right to disagree is the entire fucking point of freedom of thought and expression.  And that includes some jack-hole's right to be an offensive dumbass.  That other thing?  Yeah, that's censorship.  Simple, traditional censorship, in which one group wants to tell another group what to think and what to say against the wishes of the other group.


Sorry, but fuck that.  I won't tolerate censorship, even when its against someone using hate-speech.  Even when what they say makes me want to lay into them with a 2x4, I won't stop them from talking.  Because I respect the rights of others.  Also, while it might be "about respect" to my friends, there are others out there who are behind this "ban the R word" thing for whom its all about the censorship, the political correctness, and the urge to punish people they don't like for the crime of existing.  I am not in the business of banning words to soothe the bruised emotions of other people.  And if you truly believe in free thought and free expression, then you shouldn't be, either.

"Its not about censorship, its about respect."  Horse shit.

I really get tired of people and their empty platitudes.

Yes, your intentions are good.  I've already acknowledged this.  But I've also already acknowledged that the worse offenses in history have always been committed in the name of "social justice".  That's why this "ban the R word" disturbs me so badly.  There is an entire section of our society who are quite willing to step all over other people if it means that they can be seen to be "doing good" about some social issue.  And they take to these causes with self-righteous fervor, especially when they can step on people en masse rather than one at a time.  And for some reason, this issue stinks of people doing just that.

What do I mean?

Ponder this question:  just what does banning the word "retard" from public discourse actually accomplish?  Is it going to end the vile behavior some people put the mentally handicapped through?  No.  Is it going to stop hate crimes against the mentally handicapped?  No.  Is it going to stop parents from abandoning their mentally handicapped children at orphanages?  No.  Will it stop such parents from abusing their mentally handicapped children?  No.

The only thing this will accomplish is allowing a bunch of self-righteous assholes to pat themselves on the back because they "made a difference" without actually doing anything important.  And then these same self-righteous assholes will go on to their next "noble cause" and the entire "R word" thing will be swept under the rug and no more will ever be mentioned, much less done, about improving the treatment of the mentally disabled.

The truth is, its all about context anyway.  You don't call mentally handicapped people "retards".  You call your friends retards when they are acting retarded. There is a difference between goofing around with your friends and intentionally hurting someone else with your words.  But even then, I don't think those words should be banned outright.  Doing so is the first step on the slipper slope that leads to having our freedom of speech rights taken away entirely.

The word "retard" isn't the issue.  Treating the mentally handicapped with human decency is.  Do something about that and you'll have my full cooperation.

Bad Comedy: Conservatives and Small Government, Part 2

In my earlier blog, "Bad Comedy:  Conservatives and Small Government", I restricted my thoughts on conservatives and big government to the corporate conservatives, the rich and powerful among us for whom greedily grabbing up as much cash as possible from as many sources of possible is a reason to exist.

But now let me turn to the other type of conservative who, even though they aren't overly-entitled and all about business, would like to severely limit the government's ability to protect the common people just as badly as the corporates.  I'm talking about the social conservatives.

It's weird, but the truth is that the social conservatives are mostly blind to the hijinks that their corporate colleagues are up to.  It's a case of the left hand having no idea what the right hand is up to.  The social conservatives assume, for some bizarre reason, that the billionaire wing of the conservative cause is filled with fellow social conservatives who just happen to be rich.  Not true, but there's no telling them that.  You see, the social conservatives are too busy concentrating on their own idea of government to worry about what the billionaire's are up to.

The social conservatives idea of government has a name.  That name is "theocracy."

What the social conservatives want is a government so "small" that it can sneak into your house through a keyhole, then float into your living room, your bedroom, your bathroom, your hospital room, your library, or wherever free thought and freedom of action might be hiding and kill it.  The social conservatives want the government to grab you by the scruff of your neck and lay down the law to you.  They want the government to tell each and every single one of you how to live your life.

And no, we're not talking about telling you to put on a seat belt while driving, or to not drink until you're 21 or how you have to install wheelchair ramps at your business.  This is nothing so harmless or benign as the so-called "nanny state."

No, this is closer to the "ayatollah state."

This is the big stuff.

These conservatives want to force you to follow their particular brand of religion, their particular brand of patriotism, their particular political ideals, and their particular concept of conformity.  They want to tell you which books you can and cannot read.  They want to tell you which movies and television shows you can watch.  They want to tell you which music you can listen to.  They want to tell you who you can and cannot have sex with (and in some cases, they want to tell you what actions and techniques you're allowed to use while having sex, not to mention whether or not you are allowed to use birth control).

Naturally, doing this sort of dogmatic control over society requires a very big government.

Theocratic America would, effectively, be a police state.  And this is fitting, seeing how much social conservatives absolutely love a huge military, plus lots of police officers, sheriff's deputies, marshals, border guards, FBI agents, and even Texas Rangers.  They think that its never a bad idea to have a posse waiting just off-stage, ready to chase down a n'er-do-well at a moment's notice.  After all, you never know when some of those godless non-conformists might get uppity.  Which is why most social conservatives support the Patriot Act, which allows spying on American citizens without a warrant, and holding suspects for months without charge (and if they are "terror suspects", holding suspects indefinitely not only without charge, but without aid of counsel, either).  These civil rights violations are all perfectly legitimate in the minds of social conservatives.

Similarly, social conservatives are really huge when it comes to the idea of punishment.  They are almost hoping you do something that breaks the code of conformity so they can call down the full force of law on you and force you back into the tiny little mold they have prepared for you.  These conservatives want the government to poke and pry and intervene in the most private aspects of your life, and then lower the boom if they find anything that even hints at you not following their rules.

They believe that their morality should be the state morality.  They believe that they -- and only they -- should have the power to determine whether it is legal or illegal for you to enter the country, stay in the country, get a job, vote, build a church (if you follow the same religion as they do, okay; if you don't, forget it), wear a head scarf, smoke pot, learn about science (especially evolution), make the art you're inspired to create, allow your brain-dead family member to die with peace and dignity, allow yourself to die with peace and dignity in the face of a painful and terminal illness, have an abortion, or get married.

And if you do anything they deem illegal, you're dragged to the courthouse where a judge sits in front of a huge representation of the Ten Commandments will oversee your case.  If you're a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Sikh, a Shinto, an aboriginal or tribal, an agnostic, or worst of all an atheist, you shouldn't hold your breath when it comes to getting a fair and impartial trial in this theocratic police state.

That is the wet dream of the social conservatives.  And it would be impossible without big government.  The wars waged by social conservatives on immigration, women' rights in general and specific, abortion, science, civil rights for minorities, the LGBT community, the atheist community, artists, actors, writers, musicians, video game manufacturers, and anyone else they don't like are the most visible symptoms of what kind of big government the social conservatives want to impose.

They want big government to put big restrictions on all of these, and they want those restrictions written into law.  Preferably, they want them written into the US Constitution and forever after enforced by the great big theocratic police state.

Let me tell you a story that reveals, in my opinion, a perfect insight into the true agenda of the social conservatives.  It is a stunning portrayal of the social conservative's notions of "small government" in action.  This is the story of Michael Schiavo and his wife, Terri.

Terri Schiavo collapsed with a heart attack on February 25th, 1990, while she was in her Saint Petersberg, Florida, home.  She was not discovered immediately, and unfortunately suffered massive brain damage due to lack of oxygen to her brain.  She spent two and a half months in a coma, and was then diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state.  The doctors did everything they could to rehabilitate Mrs. Schiavo, but were unable to change her condition.

In 1998, Michael Schiavo, her husband, petitioned the Sixth Circuit Court of Florida to remove Terri's feeding tube persuant to Florida law, allowing the body of his wife to pass away rather than linger as it was.  He was opposed by Terri Schiavo's parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, who argued that Mrs. Schiavo was actually conscious and responsive (despite doctors' statements to the contrary).  The court determined that Terri Schiavo had left instructions saying that she would not want to continue living under such circumstances, and her feeding tube was removed on April 24, 2001.

But then in swooped the conservatives, led by professional shit-stirrer Randal Terry.

Terry's hand-picked "experts" argued that Mrs. Schiavo's case might not be so helpless.  They insisted that they had a right to butt into this most painful and intimate family decision on behalf of Mrs. Schiavo's parents.  They talked about how Michael Schiavo had "betrayed" Terri by moving on with his life, and thus had no right to make such decisions (despite the fact that, under the law, he was the only person empowered to make such decisions).

The conservative-controlled Florida legislature quickly passed the so-called "Terri's Law," that allowed then-Governor Jeb Bush (younger brother of then-President George W. Bush) to intervene directly in the case.  He ordered Mrs. Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted and sent state troopers to remove Terri Schiavo from her husband's guardianship.

A judge quickly struck down "Terri's Law" as unconstitutional.  The conservatives appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, where once again it was struck down.  Conservatives around the United States were absolutely outraged.  Not at this blatant case of big government interfering in the private life of a family, but by "activist judges" who wouldn't let the conservatives butt in.

(These activist judges were, by the way, just following the law.)

The affair went up the conservative chain of command, all the way to the Republican-controlled Congress and then-President George W. Bush.  Both Michael Schiavo and his wife, the persistently vegetative Terri Schiavo, were subpoenaed to testify before Congress!  Republican congressmen and senators had a grandstand-a-palooza, demanding the ability -- no, not the ability, the right -- to take control of the case out of the hands of the State of Florida and into their own.

So much for states rights, which is usually a standard fallback position for social conservatives when they can't get their way nationally, all the way back to when they refused to give up their ownership of slaves.  Congress passed a bill usurping Florida's jurisdiction, and George W. Bush flew back from vacation just to sign it.  So this was twice in this single case that social conservatives changed or created brand new laws giving them unprecedented power in order to pursue their need to impose their own sense of morality and justice on other people.

It was at this juncture that a private yet amazingly explosive memo was leaked to the press in which the leadership of the Republican party suggested that the Schiavo case offered "a great political issue" and that the Republican party could use it to "stick it to" the Florida Democrats.  Suddenly sympathy for those on the side of keeping the brain-dead Mrs. Schiavo alive seemed to fall off.  After "Terri's Law" was struck down and the US Supreme Court quite intelligently refused to get involved in the whole mess (unlike when they decided unilaterally who won the 2000 presidential election), again Jeb Bush ordered Florida state troopers to take Mrs. Schiavo from her husband's custody with the intention of spiriting her out of state.

No one has ever actually revealed where they were planning on kidnapping her to, but personally I suspect that she would have surfaced somewhere in Texas, a state where the Bush family has a metric fuck-ton of political power.

The Florida Supreme Court instructed the state police to stand down and ordered Governor Bush to shut up or be held in contempt.  Bush reluctantly, and with much gnashing of teeth, complied, though there was enormous pressure from conservatives in the state and elsewhere on him to just defy the law already and damn the consequences.

Shortly thereafter, Terri Schiavo was mercifully allowed to die, and the whole sordid affair came to a conclusion.

An autopsy later revealed that Terri Schiavo's brain was way too damaged and atrophied for any possible consciousness to have ever existed.  She really had been in a vegetative state all along.  The whole hullaballoo had been unnecessary and cruel.  And not only had the conservatives been shown to be wrong -- again -- they revealed precisely the lengths they would go to in order to stick their faces into other people's very personal, very private affairs.  They pulled every nasty trick in the book, hurriedly writing and passing new law and plucking the highest strings of government, from the president to the Supreme Court, in order to impose their very small version of morality upon a single innocent family.

This example should flash a warning to anyone who believes that social conservatives really want a "small government."  Because it is clear that their compulsion to govern the most private and personal aspects of our lives shows up in their beliefs concerning abortion, gay and lesbian rights, religious freedoms, science and art, and many other facets of our lives.  And the irony is that apparently social conservatives can't see how contradictory their own belief system is.

Recall that these same people are the ones who chirp the loudest about freedom and the rights of the individual and self-determination when it comes to their own affairs.  When its them, they want Big Government to keep its damned hands off.  But that goes out the window when they find out someone else isn't conforming to their narrow-minded views regarding proper behavior.  When that happens, they want Big Government to step in and shut that shit down.

Hypocrisy writ large.  Its sort of crazy, when you think of it.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

There is a persistent myth going around in the United States.

This myth states that conservatives are the "better guardians" of the US economy.  Everyone knows that its the "Tax and Spend Liberals" who generate recessions and debt, after all.  Everybody knows this.  This so-called "fact" is so well known that even most liberals don't question it.

Problem is, its false.  Not true.  A lie.  A bunch of hot air.  A load of bullshit, in other words.

If you take a close look at the usual conservative strategies when it comes to economic policy in this country, you find out pretty quickly that there are two problems with this myth that make it almost impossible for it to be true.


Those two problems are:

1. Conservatives are greedy.
2. Conservatives are amoral.

Thus, putting conservatives in charge of the economy is like going into business with the Mafia.  If you're part of the Mafia, you're probably going to come out with your pockets stuffed with cash, sitting pretty on top of the world.  If you're not a part of the Mafia, sooner or later you're going to get shanked and left to rot in some alley.

Now, for the sake of fairness I should say that when I talk about conservatives and how they mess up the economy I am not talking about social conservatives.  Social conservatives are the ones who want to restrict a woman's rights regarding birth control, and want to make sure that homosexuals are punished for the crime of existing, and who want to make sure that English is the only language spoken in this country.  Things like that.  I'm not talking about those conservatives right now.

I'm talking about the "professional" conservatives.  The corporate conservatives who represent the real wealth and power of the Republican party.  When it comes to the economy, the social conservatives are passengers just along for the ride.  And its a really bumpy, bumpy ride.

The most important thing to remember about corporate conservatives is this:  they want all governmental economic policy aimed at aiding the richest people in America become even richer.  They want the government to basically be at the beck and call of the corporations so that they can line their pockets with ever-increasing amounts of money.  Now, compare this to liberal economic policy, which is aimed at helping Joe Middle-Class thrive.

That last paragraph is American economics in a nutshell, by the way.

The conservative ideal of coddling the rich is called "supply-side economics."  Its also known as "trickle-down economics" (and, humorously, was once called "Voodoo economics" by then presidential candidate George H. Bush back in 1980 when he was running against Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination).  The core of this philosophy is low, low, low taxes for the rich and the corporations, and utter deregulation of commerce and the markets.

Historically, this policy generates cycles of boom and bust.  Its an "economic bubble" generator that produces no lasting stability and no lasting prosperity.  It gave us the Gilded Age and the economic panic of the 1890s.  It gave us the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression.  And most recently, it produced the Reagan-Bush and Clinton-Bush serial bubbles, the Savings and Loan disaster, the 2008 Bank Bailout, and then of course the Great Recession that the American economy is still very much mired in.

"Trickle down" works great if you start off at the top, but not so great if you're in the middle or, heaven help you, at the bottom.  The famous "trickle down" flood that Ronald Reagan promised would "float all boats" never seens to quite materialize, even as the people at the top of the economic pile, and the corporations they run and own, record record profits.

The liberal economic philosophy based on supporting the Middle Class is called "demand-side economics."  Its also known as Keynesian economics, after its creator and chief promoter, John Maynard Keynes.  Keynes work was adopted by Franklin Roosevent, and his policies created a relative calm in the American economy that lasted for nearly fifty years.  That calm created the largest expansion of the Middle Class in the history of the world.

Remember that "Golden Age" that Republicans are so nostalgic about, when a Middle Class family with only the father working could afford a decent house, a new car every few years, braces and piano lessons for little Susie, and everyone's covered by adequate health insurance and a decent pension was all but guaranteed?  When many companies cared enough about their employees that they paid them a living wage and considered them family and not just replaceable cogs in the machine?  When unions were strong, taxes on the rich and the corporations, not to mention regulation of business practices, were much tighter than today, and yet everyone was thriving economically?

Yeah, all that was created by the liberal economic policies of John Maynard Keynes.

The moral of this story is that the corporate conservative emphasis on making sure that the rich and powerful are taken care of first is compeletely backward if what you want to do is create a strong economy.  It doesn't matter how much "supply" you have, if there's no "demand" for it, you aren't going to sell it and your economy is going to fail spectacularly.  It takes demand to fuel an economy, and it takes a strong Middle Class to create demand.

Bottom line:  when the Middle Class is thriving , so is everyone else!

Think about it for just a moment, please.

• If you are poor, but the Middle Class is doing well, there's a good chance if you work hard and cover your bases that you'll find yourself suddenly a member of the Middle Class.  Economic improvement.
• If you're Middle Class and doing well, there's every chance that you'll suddenly find yourself climbing into the upper ranges of the Middle Class, or who knows, maybe into the Upper Class.
• And if you're already Upper Class, when the people who work for you are doing well, they're spending more on the companies you've invested in, which means you get richer too!

This was the situation enjoyed in America right after World War II:  the economy was humming along like a well-oiled machine, there was butt-loads of upward mobility to be had, and pretty much everyone was doing better than they had been before the War.

On the other hand, when the Middle Class is getting constantly hammered, like they have been since the 1980s, the only mobility is downward.  Middle Class people get laid off and become poor people, and poor people are so poor that they're stuck there with no chance of improving their condition at all.

Of course, no matter what, the rich do just fine, but then they're rich.  They would be prospering even if every non-rich person in America was reduced to economic serfdom.  As the saying goes, its easy to get to home plate when you start out on third base.  But when the only people thriving are the folks who are already thriving, and none of them are willing to share with the less fortunate, you're courting disaster.  Thus, the booms, busts, panics, crashes, depressions, recessions, and bail outs.

So, what you have to do is ask yourself a simple question:  which economic policy works out best for you and your family?  If you're a so-called "one percenter," then obviously trickle-down works much, much better for you.  But if you're in the vast population of people who aren't in the one percent, why the hell would you ever consider voting for people who want to continue keeping you in the poor house?  Seriously, are you insane?

But wait!  There's more!

It turns out that corporate conservatives are lying to you about more than just the effects of trickle-down economics.  Corporate conservatives spend a lot of their time telling you how evil the government is, and how government spending is a sin and how it must be stopped when they're asking you for your vote.  But have you ever noticed that when they're in power, they don't actually do anything about it?

Oh sure, they promise to cut government spending, but once in office they actually do the exact opposite.  They lied to you to gain your trust and to get elected, but they never once had any intention of cutting government spending.  All those platitudes about "shrinking big government" were just that:  platitudes.  Conservatives simply love deficit spending and big government.  The bigger the better, in fact, because it allows them to manipulate things for their own benefit all around the world.

A look at the facts prove that conservatives are the worst money managers and the most profligate spenders of all.  The comparison between conservative spending and liberal spending isn't even close.  Conservatives accuse liberals of being "tax and spenders," but the truth is, conservatives are "charge and spenders," which is much, much worse.  They put everyone on the national credit card without any clue as to how things will be paid for.

"Tax and spend" is a caricature of liberals, just another way conservatives lie, but at least taxing and spending provides some means to pay for what is being spent.  If a conservative ran your personal economy in the same way they manage the national economy, you'd be up to your ears in overwhelming debt within hours of you handing your checkbook to them.

Corporate conservatives continually bleat about this myth of a "small government," as if in the modern world there could even really be such a thing.  Its all a big web of lies.  Conservatives are liars.  They say one thing, and do the exact opposite.

You know which two presidents were the biggest promoters of the idea of small government in the history of the United States?  If you guessed Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, give yourself a cookie.  Now, can you guess which two presidents were the two biggest expanders of the federal government in the history of the United States?  If you once-again guessed Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, you get another cookie.

Even worse than putting everything on credit is the truth about what all that money was spent on.  Rather than spending it on our crumbling national infrastructure, or on health care, or on education, or maybe on cleaning up the environment, it was mostly given away to the rich and the corporations.  And when it wasn't handed out to people who were already sitting on huge stacks of cash, it was being spent on useless and meaningless military adventurism.  We the People... got almost nothing from Conservative largess.

Tax cuts for the rich and a policy of allowing corporations to wriggle out of their fair share of the tax burden are the primary reasons why our government operates under an astronomical amount of debt.  Ronald Reagan went hog-wild on military spending as part of a plan to "kill" the already-dying Soviet Union by way of the arms race.  But that was just a warm-up to George W. Bush's squandering of $3 trillion, most of which ended up in the pockets of his friends and his father's friends.  That $3 trillion includes at least $19 billion that simply vanished.  Oops!  Its gone!  The money vanished and we don't know where it is!  Sorry about that, heh heh heh...

Can you imagine the Republican reaction if someone in the Obama administration managed to just misplace $19 billion?

And then there's the tens of billions that we know -- that we can absolutely fucking prove -- were slid across the metaphorical table and into the pockets of Haliburton, KBR, and Blackwater.  All of which corporations were owned and operated, it must be noted, by friends and family members of both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

That's the conservative economic management style.  "Grab as much cash as you can for you and your friends and fuck everyone else."  And they're not even going to buy you dinner first.

Most corporate conservatives know damn well that trickle-down economics just doesn't work.  They know its a lie.  Worse, they know its effectively theft.  But they like getting rich and have no moral center at all, so they stick to propaganda about cutting spending, lowering taxes, shrinking the government, and protecting the so-called "job creators."  The irony is, they are also not doing anything illegal.  They're rigged the system so that it only benefits them, which as I noted isn't illegal.  Its just utterly corrupt and immoral.  Of course, like the horde of bloody-minded pirates they are, they don't care about morals either.

Each time a new election comes around, the conservatives trot out the same old bullshit.  The Republican Lie Machine is currently (as I write this) trying to pin everything bad that's going on with the economy on Barack Obama.  They promise to cut government spending and usher in "small government", ignoring the fact that government spending is the lowest its been since Lyndon Johnson was in office.  We've heard this bullshit before:  Reagan, George H. Bush, George W. Bush... even John McCain and Mitt Romney.  Every single conservative running for office uses this same playbook.  "Let's get government out of the way, and everyone will prosper."

DO NOT FOR ONE MOMENT BELIEVE A WORD OF IT!

Once in power, they won't keep their word, and if they ever actually tried, the crushing weight of economic debt would be borne by the Middle Class and the poor, while the ultra-rich and the corporations -- who caused and then greatly benefited from that same debt -- would continue sucking up all the available wealth they could, and would do so with a smile on their face.

Consider, for just a moment, the absolute mean-spirited hate that drove the most recent (as I write this) Republican-created government shut-down.  Conservatives had absolutely no problem whatsoever with throwing millions of people out of work, cutting off Social Security benefits, shutting down desperately needed government survives, torpedoing the financial markets, and even risking defaulting on our national debt in a childish attempt to force the liberals to give them what they wanted.

Prosecutors call this sort of thing "extortion," and its usually considered a felony.

The conservatives who did this were thumbing their noses in contempt at the very concept of democracy.  They didn't like the fact that the other side of the political aisle won the election, so they threw a temper tantrum.  Problem is, this sort of action is nothing short of economic terrorism.  Never once have the liberals ever come close to doing this to their own nation!  Yet conservatives seem to be embracing such immoral and dangerous acts as a part of their standard economic strategy.  When you don't win, or if a law is passed that you don't like, just throw a temper tantrum and threaten to flush the country's economy down the toilet unless you're given your way.

Al-Queda couldn't have dreamed of a better ally than Congressional conservatives.

My Thoughts on "Patriarchal Theory"

First, a definition.

According to the fine people at Princeton University, patriarchy is (and I quote) "a multi-dimensional condition of power and status."  Further, in 1978, a comprehensive study was undertaken that exemined fifty-two "indicators of patriarchy" that corresponded to ten relatively independent factors.

Those factors were:

• a lack of property control by women
• a lack of power of women in kinship contexts
• low value placed on the lives of women
• low value placed on the labor of women
• lack of domestic authority of women
• absence of ritualized female solidarity
• absence of control over women't marital and sexual lives
• absence of ritualized fear of women
• lack of male-female joint participation in warfare, work, and community decision making
• lack of women's indirect influence on decision making

There are, undeniably, some societies in the world today that are patriarchies.  The first that comes to mind is Saudi Arabia.  Also, there are patriarchal institutions like the Catholic Church in which women are not entirely excluded (i.e., nuns) but are kept from positions of real power (i.e., the priesthood and the papacy).

However, when you look at the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and most of the rest of the so-called "First World", what you find is that...

• women can and do easily gain control of property.  They can rent apartments, buy real estate own businesses, and inherit property from and/or will their own property to others.
• there are plent of stay-at-home moms out there, but in general women are expected to find a job outside of the house and work for a living in the same way men are expected to do, and there is no meaningful wage gap between male and female workers.
• women often have more domestic authority than men; for example, they have more control of their family’s disposable income and are far more likely to get custody of their children in case of a divorce.
• there is no lack of "absence of ritualized female solidarity", and in fact the entire reason why anyone's ever heard of so-called "patriarchy" is directly because of the statements and actions of organized groups based in female solidarity.
• while several states have made abortion difficult to obtain, even in these states women retain control their own bodies and sexuality, and aside from where it is an issue of LGBT+ equality, women have the power to marry (and divorce) whom they choose, when they choose.
• Many industries (and most corporate offices) are relatively evenly balanced between men and women. As for "community decision making," statistics show that women are actually more likely to vote than men, and thus have more of a say regarding who gets elected in the first place.

Now, I realize I only refuted six of the ten points, but the truth is, I don't have to refute all of them, and you all know it.

Women in the so-called "First World" have the choice to wear what they like, can vote for whomever they like, pursue whatever hobbies they choose, engage freely in political debate and (if they so choose) even run for public office, can live where and with whom they want, have children or not, get married or not, have sex with whomever they choose, and so on.

Now, occasionally a woman might get called out or criticized by other people who believe she is making incorrect, mistaken, or even immoral choices, no patriarchal authority is going to prevent her from making them, and as long as the choices she makes are legal, no one's going to try and punish her for making them either.

Simply put?

There is no patriarchy.  There is no patriarchy at all.

At least not here.

Are there vestiges of a patriarchal system here?  I don't know, maybe.  But are women here really victims of some tyrannical male overlordship seeking to punish them for making their own choices?

What are you, insane?  Of course not.

Seriously, those people (be they men or women) who cry "patriarchy" every time they get criticized for doing or saying something stupid should ask the older generation of women who were around prior to the birth control pill and Roe v. Wade and the ending of coverture laws what it was really like living under a patriarchy.

They should ask women living in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Indonesia what its really like living under a patriarchy.

Because then they might actually have something to complain about.

Then maybe they’ll have something worth actually complaining about.

On Utilitarianism, the Greater Good, Moral Choices, and Whistle Blowers

In modern America, the prevailing ethical philosophy has always seemed to be utilitarianism, where our decisions are based on the best possible outcome for the most possible people.  Or at least, its supposed to be.  And I also supposed that this is probably the best guiding principle for a truly democratic society.  But I think there are limitations to that philosophy.

I have been thinking about this because I recently read an article about the use of torture on terror suspects and the fact that they (the government, that is) have discovered that some of the "terror suspects" that they've tortured (and let's not use any euphamisms like "agressive interrogation techniques"; let's call a spade a spade here:  it was torture) were innocent people caught up in a wide net and assumed guilty because they were so caught.

Under the utilitarianism philosophy, torturing a few innocent people is acceptable if it results in saving the lives of many more innocent people.  "The greater good" and all that.  If torturing terror suspects gets us information that prevents further attacks, then the cost (that we're intentionally injuring people who have done nothing wrong and do not deserve to be tortured at all... assuming that there are people who do deserve to be tortured) is acceptable.

The problem, as I see it, is that I think we as a society have fallen to the trap of believing that just because torturing people meets the basic standards of our utilitarianist framework, the decision to accept that we will torture people was the right one to make.  We have forgotten that there are some things that are wrong, regardless of the benefits.  Regardless of how many lives a particular action saves, committing that action absolutely, and without question, the wrong thing to do.

We have to be willing to take a stand.  We have to be willing to say, "No, this is wrong by definition and we will have no part in it regardless of any other considerations."  We must draw a line in the sand and say, "this far and no further."

I do recognize that such moral purity is subject to just as much abuse as any other philosophical position. But overall, I prefer to live in a world where someone is willing to stand up and say, "This is wrong!" and mean it.  Especially when we have somehow managed to convince ourselves that it is somehow acceptable to torture people, rationalizing it away with the morally dubious notion that it is justified as being for "the greater good."

I don’t like "slippery slope" arguments, but if we accept torture as an unpleasant necessity,  what else will we accept?  Will we accept the intentional death, the sacrifice if you will, of an innocent child?

This is a horrible choice, but the truth is, we've already seen that under some circumstances, our society has in the past said "Yes" to this very question.  In some cases, the sacrifice of a child, who has no idea why it is being sacrificed and who has committed no wrong we can name, has been judged an acceptable price to pay for the greater good.

So what about two children?

Or how about ten?

Or a hundred?

How about a thousand?  You willing to murder a thousand innocent children if it means the rest of our society is untroubled?  If it serves the "greater good"?

More?

Tell me, people, where do we draw the line?  Where do we stop?

No.  We as a society need to uphold basic standards.  We need to be willing to take a stand on principle against those people who would continue such blatant wrongs and point out that they have lost their way.

As for those people already doing this, you don't have to agree with them, but I think you must respect them.  Because we need such people in our society.  We need to hear them.  Personally, I'd hate to live in a world where such dissent is suppressed so that we can all pretend that everything is hunky dory, while behind the scenes our collective soul is eroded piece by piece due to our choosing "the greater good" over basic morality.

The United States: Not a Christian Nation

The United States is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, a Christian nation.

Period.

Even if the Fundamentalists get their way and manage to not only take over but manage to install a theocratic Christian government, it wouldn't be the United States of America.   It would be a zombified imposter pretending at the name.

There is no Christian ideology (or even Biblical ideology) to be found in America's founding ideals.  None of it, not the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the subsequent Amendments to the Constitution, the laws that have been generated since then, and our system of government derived therefrom has anything to do with Christianity or the Bible.  If anything, the American system is a radical and emphatic rejection of Biblical ideas regarding laws and government.

The Bible, in case you missed it, promotes the so-called "Divine Right of Kings" and theocratic dictatorship.  These two ideals are at the core of the Abrahamic governmental tradition, and America just isn't about that sort of thing.

Diametrically opposed to the idea of a God-appointed King and a set of laws that commands you to revere one particular religion (thankfully), the legal system of the United States of America was instead based on English common law, as established primarily by the Magna Carta in 1215, the British Constitution of 1657, the Habeus Corpus Act of 1679, and the English Bill of Rights of 1689.

None of these drew from Biblical government philosophy, either.

Instead, they were based on a pair of pagan legal philosophies:  Greek  democracy (which promoted the idea that citizens got a say in how the government did things) and Roman civil law (that promoted the idea that the law treated everyone under it in the same non-prejudicial way).  Other important inspirations for the American system of government were obtained from philosophers of the Enlightenment Period, principle among them John Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.  There is also some evidence that Benjamin Franklin brought ideas from the Iroquois Confederacy's form of democracy into the mix, particularly the idea that each state would be an autonomous unit bound to a larger federal whole.

If the founding fathers had intended the United States to be a Christian nation, you'd think they might have included the words "Jesus," "Christ," "Bible," or "Christian" somewhere in the Declaration or the Constitution.  But they didn't.  What, do you think they did that accidentally?  No, not at all.  On the contrary, they intentionally left religion out, and did so for some very, very, very good reasons.

The first reason was that a lot of the founding fathers simply were not Christian.  Along with other great thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment, people like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Adams, James Monroe, and many others were rethinking long-held ideas regarding religious doctrine, religious dogma, and religious "tradition" and were finding much of it contrary to their sense of justice, morality, and spirituality.  They found that some of the most widely-held religious dogma stood in direct opposition to the ideals of freedom and equality for all.  The rise of modern scientific thought had begun to undermine the Bible's simplistic (and utterly incorrect) teachings regarding how the world worked, and as a result these learned men began questioning.  If the Bible was wrong about so many things, what else was it wrong about?  Thomas Jefferson went so far as to publish his own version of the Bible, one that left out everything he personally disagreed with.  It ended up being a comparatively short, rather compact volume.

Many of the founding fathers identified themselves as Deists.  Not Christians.  Not even theists.  But Deists.  They still believed in a god, but refused to believe that god would break his own laws of nature to interfere in human affairs.

The second reason was that the founding fathers were very aware of the disasters caused when religion and government mixed, as had occurred in England and throughout the rest of Europe, as well as in the early American colonies where, for example, being a Quaker in Massachusetts was to court being tried for "heresy" and put to death by hanging.  The founders had absolutely no intention of adhering to "traditional Christian values" of treating those who you disagreed with in a brutal, bloody, and barbaric manner.  They could look at the history of Christian vs. Christian violence that had ravaged Britain and Ireland and Europe during the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, and the continual "Troubles."  Now would they countenance anything like a government-sponsored religious crusade against "infidels" like the heathen Cherokee or the Catholic French.

As such, the founding fathers made the extremely wise choice to wholly and utterly exclude religion from the government.  Any religion could flourish freely, and hopefully peacefully, in co-existance with all other religions, but would lack any sort of public support or institution.  In the United States, you could be an Anglican or a Quaker or a Catholic or a Muslim or a Hindu or even an Atheist and not be compelled into obedience of anyone else.  It was a brand new concept called "freedom of religion,", though it could easily enough also be called "freedom from religion."  Any way you want to look at it, this freedom is one of the central pillars of our society and is one of the most important building blocks in our collective awareness of what freedom means.

Not only is the idea that the United States is Christian a false one, the idea that we used to be more religious than we are now is also false.  At this time, about 60% of the population of the United States self-identifies as religious (and that's counting all religions).  Religious affiliation as a percentage of the population actually peaked in the 1980s.  In 1800, that figure was only 9%.  During the Civil War, the number of people who identified themselves as religious was only about 20%.  And today its nearly 60%.  So no, we weren't more religiuous in the past.  For the record, the percentage of people who identified as religious has been dropping steadily every year since 1983.  People who do not go to church and who identify with no religion at all are the fastest growing segment of the population.  The number of non-believers currently stands at 20% of the population.  Last year it was 14%.  If things keep going the way they're going, next year it might be 35%.  Pretty soon we'll be right back at the 9% religious population of the founding fathers.

Obviously, a "Christian America" never existed, nor was it ever intended to be created.

But for the sake of argument, let's play a game of "Let's Pretend."

Let's suspend all common sense and fantasize for a moment that America really was supposed to be a Christian nation.  Let's ask ourselves just what exactly that would mean?

What precisely is a "Christian nation?"

What other nations can we hold up as examples of such a government?  Byzanium under Constantine?  Italy during the Renaissance?  Jean d'Arc's France?  Henry VIII's England?  Martin Luther's Germany?  The Denmark portrayed in William Shakespeare's Hamlet?

Which version of Christianity are we going to base our "Christian nation" on?  There are hundreds of distinct variations of Christianity, and some of them hate each other with a rage that burns as hot and bright as a supernova.  Will our Christian nation be Catholic?  Orthodox?  Anglican?  Evangelical?  Episcopalian?  Mormon?  Pentecostal?  Quaker?  Or maybe something really obscure like Milleritism or Cooneyitism?

Would our Christian nation be based on the love, forgiveness, and pacifism of Jesus Christ?  Or on the bloody violent crusader mentality that came along later?

And who gets to choose all these things?  Would we vote on which kind of Christianity we followed every four years, in the same years we voted for a new president?  Might we swing from the "love thy neighbor as thyself, feed the poor, turn the other cheek" kindly Christianity to the "kill them all for God will know their own" bloody violent Christianity overnight when the Christian-Republicans win out over the Christian-Democrats?  Would we be open and accepting of other religions, or would be lynch the unbeliever and heretic from the nearest lamp-post as a warning to the devil-worshipping heathens that their ways will not be tolerated?

Its all very vague.  Just like the real meaning of the phrase "Traditional Christian Values."