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Monday, April 25, 2011

Why do they have such a need for hell?
Posted by Jill | 5:51 AM
Just in time for Easter to be over, Ross Douchebag over at the New York Times makes himself an almost-too-easy punching bag in an essay in which he laments the decline of belief in Hell.

In part, hell’s weakening grip on the religious imagination is a consequence of growing pluralism. Bell’s book begins with a provocative question: Are Christians required to believe that Gandhi is in hell for being Hindu? The mahatma is a distinctive case, but swap in “my Hindu/Jewish/Buddhist neighbor” for Gandhi, and you can see why many religious Americans find the idea of eternal punishment for wrong belief increasingly unpalatable.

But the more important factor in hell’s eclipse, perhaps, is a peculiar paradox of modernity. As our lives have grown longer and more comfortable, our sense of outrage at human suffering — its scope, and its apparent randomness — has grown sharper as well. The argument that a good deity couldn’t have made a world so rife with cruelty is a staple of atheist polemic, and every natural disaster inspires a round of soul-searching over how to reconcile with God’s omnipotence with human anguish.

These debates ensure that earthly infernos get all the press. Hell means the Holocaust, the suffering in Haiti, and all the ordinary “hellmouths” (in the novelist Norman Rush’s resonant phrase) that can open up beneath our feet. And if it’s hard for the modern mind to understand why a good God would allow such misery on a temporal scale, imagining one who allows eternal suffering seems not only offensive but absurd.

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

I understand the need to feel that there's a reward for the tribulations we experience in life. Without the promise of goodies at the end of it all, it would have been difficult to do things like convert slaves to Christianity, but it's Douchebag's insistence that there be a Hell to go with Heaven that is so emblematic of the conservative mind.

I'm not necessarily an atheist, but I sure as hell don't believe in some Great White Alpha Male in the sky who micromanages people's lives, knocked up a girl and then told his son "I'm going to let them kill you so that 51-year-old John Ensign can screw around with his best friend's wife and then ask his parents for money to keep said best friend quiet," and who told Abraham to sacrifice his son to him and then just as the latter was about to do it, said "Kidding! Just wanted to see if you'd do it! Hahahahaha!" But I have about as strong a moral code as anyone I know. I would cite the Incident of the Bell Pepper at the Grand Union as evidence. I once found a bell pepper wedged in my shopping cart when I took it out to the parking lot. I found myself with three choices:

1) Put the pepper in my bag and go home;
2) Leave the pepper in the shopping cart;
3) Take the pepper back into the store and put it back;
4) Take the pepper back into the store and pay for it.

Almost everyone would agree that Option 1 would be the wrong thing to do, except those who believe that as long as I believed that Jesus died for my sins and that I was saved and forgiven, I could have taken the pepper, gone home, and had a clear conscience. It's arguable that option 2 might be a moral choice, because I wouldn't be taking something I didn't pay for. But the pepper would be out in the hot sun and wouldn't be saleable, which from the viewpoint of the store (if it were, say, a mom 'n' pop shop instead of a supermarket) is the same. To me, Options 3 and 4 were the only moral choices, so I took the pepper back into the store and paid for it.

It wasn't God who made me do it. It wasn't some Jewish guy getting nailed to a tree that allowed me to do it. It's simply being able to tell what is right and what is wrong.

Douchebag's insistence that "If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either" may be the most profoundly twisted thing I've ever read. Are we simply infants who respond only to carrot or stick? Maybe Ross Douthat needs to have the threat of punishment hanging over his head to keep HIM on the straight and narrow (and given some of his columns, it wouldn't surprise me, as you can see from this Tbogg compendium of Doutiana), but some of us are capable of making moral choices on our own.

And that's what infuriates culture war conservatives, isn't it? This idea that someone might actually be able to navigate a path through life that involves honesty, hard work, fidelity, and truth, for its own sake rather than because of some punitive parent figure we conjure up who also offers unconditional forgiveness? What are we, five-year-olds?

It certainly explains their insistence on implementing laws to keep the rest of us on the straight and narrow -- because they can't do it without the threat of punishment, and the simply cannot understand how some of us can -- and do, every day.

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Monday, March 07, 2011

Ross Douthat's obsession with the sex lives of American teenagers
Posted by Jill | 5:25 AM
There are days when I wake up and read something, and I'm about to write about it, but it pisses me off to such a degree that I just can't. Today, Ross Douchebag writes about how young people aren't having sex because they are developing a strong moral code. In Douchebag world, it has nothing to do about the slut/whore rhetoric coming out of the Republican Party, the churches, and right-wing pundits like Douchebag that keeps the double standard alive. It has nothing to do with the right-wing war on contraception that makes birth control less available to young women. It has nothing to do with a judgmental climate that allows David Vitter and John Ensign to remain Senators while casting judgments on girls who won't keep their legs closed. Nor does it have anything to do with the fact that they're tending to live with their parents longer because they can't find jobs and it's icky to have sex in mom 'n' dad's house. In Douchebag-world, it's all about finally embracing what is inevitable: that the only way a woman can be moral is to not have sex.

I'm quite sure Amanda will have something more cogent to say about this, but for now I'm going to leave it to TBogg, who is always my first source for concise Douchebag analysis and translation:
Shorter Ross Douthat:
If Chunky Reese Witherspoon was a teenager today, she probably wouldn’t want to fuck me. I mean for reasons besides the most obvious ones. This gives me great comfort.


Don't forget to click the link embedded in that quote. And also be sure to click TBogg's name for some serious graphic fun.

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Monday, January 03, 2011

Ross Douthat wants a "Handmaid's Tale" world
Posted by Jill | 6:14 AM
For those who haven't read A Handmaid's Tale (or seen the movie), it takes place in the United States after the government is overthrown and replaced with theocrats. Not so far-fetched, eh? In this world, fertile women are captured and become the property of infertile couples, particularly of the men in such couples, for the sole purpose of conceiving children for them. The story is told from the viewpoint of one such woman, Offred (because such women are only recognized by to whom they belong, in this case "of Fred"). A fuller symopsis is offered at the novel's Wikipedia entry.




In the movie, Offred is portrayed heartbreakingly (doubly so now) by the late Natasha Richardson, and the couple by a creepy Robert Duvall and equally creepy Faye Dunaway, who keeps a lovely upper-class home and spends her days clipping lovely flowers in her garden. The movie provides a somewhat more upbeat conclusion than the book, but the story still resonates with women like me who are old enough to remember when girls in junior high and high school would "go to visit grandma for a while" after putting on some weight and then come back slimmer and usually quieter and sadder. These girls didn't have abortions. These girls were sent away to have their babies out of sight of their parents' friends and of their classmates, and to hand those babies off to strangers. Because before Roe v. Wade, that's what young girls did who became pregnant and whose parents didn't know any doctors who would perform a then-illegal abortion.

Access to abortion has become more limited in the last decade, as American terrorists continue to kill doctors who perform them and state legislatures continue to enact laws to restrict access. A meme persists on the so-called "pro-life" right (which cares little or nothing about babies who are born, unless they are white and handed off to affluent white families) that teenaged girls AND adult women decide to have an abortion as easily as they decide to get their nails done or get a latte at Starbucks.

This segment from an MTV program which aired December 28 would give lie to that notion in a sane world:

But we do not live in a sane world. The Handmaid's Tale is a work of fiction. But in the insane world in which we live, Ross Douchebag at the New York Times feels free to articulate the notion right out of that novel that young women with unwanted pregnancies have a moral obligation to carry their babies to term so that affluent, infertile women can have children to raise:
In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.


Or as TBogg so succinctly says:

Shorter Ross Douthat:

Poor uneducated pregnant women should waste not so that upper middle-class women will want not.


I wonder if I'm the only one who finds it creepy that so many adult conservative males are so utterly obsessed with the reproductive functioning and the sex lives of teenagers.

UPDATE: Because Douchebag's utopian vision of a Nation of Breeders is so mindbogglingly fucked-up, here's more from:


  • Amanda
  • Melissa (despite her irritating habit of insisting that everything come with a "trigger warning", as if all feminists were fragile flowers who might be pushed off the deep end at the slightest provocation)
  • Jill (no, the other one)


(more as I find them)

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Monday, November 29, 2010

When Ruth Marcus is your idea of "the liberal commentariat", you're living in the DC bubble
Posted by Jill | 5:13 AM
Every time I bring myself to read Ross Douthat in the New York Times, I wonder how someone so mind-bogglingly stupid can possibly even dress himself in the morning. Here he is today, opining about how the ENTIRE "liberal commentariat" is defending the Obama Administration's expansion of x-ray scanners at airports:
Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been president when the Transportation Security Administration decided to let Thanksgiving travelers choose between exposing their nether regions to a body scanner or enduring a private security massage. Democrats would have been outraged at yet another Bush-era assault on civil liberties. Liberal pundits would have outdone one another comparing the T.S.A. to this or that police state. (“In an outrage worthy of Enver Hoxha’s Albania ...”) And Republicans would have leaped to the Bush administration’s defense, while accusing liberals of going soft on terrorism.

But Barack Obama is our president instead, so the body-scanner debate played out rather differently. True, some conservatives invoked 9/11 to defend the T.S.A., and some liberals denounced the measures as an affront to American liberties. Such ideological consistency, though, was the exception; mostly, the Bush-era script was read in reverse. It was the populist right that raged against body scans, and the Republican Party that moved briskly to exploit the furor. It was a Democratic administration that labored to justify the intrusive procedures, and the liberal commentariat that leaped to their defense.

This role reversal is a case study in the awesome power of the partisan mindset. Up to a point, American politics reflects abiding philosophical divisions. But people who follow politics closely — whether voters, activists or pundits — are often partisans first and ideologues second. Instead of assessing every policy on the merits, we tend to reverse-engineer the arguments required to justify whatever our own side happens to be doing. Our ideological convictions may be real enough, but our deepest conviction is often that the other guys can’t be trusted.

The online version of this piece links to a Ruth Marcus column in the Washington Post.

Ruth Marcus? THIS is Douthat's idea of the "liberal commentariat"? A WaPo hack of a quarter-century's duration? Does anyone even READ Ruth Marcus, let alone take her seriously?

Forget about little blogs like this one, which have been all over this TSA nonsense like flies on horseshit. What are the Big Boiz doing? Yes, Josh Marshall seems far more willing to give the Obama Administration and the entire process the benefit of the doubt than I am. But Digby has been noting the absurdity of it all. HuffPo has had a slew of articles which can hardly be said to defending the TSA. Over at the Great Orange Satan, there's hardly a rush to defend the Obama Administration. The Big Blue Smurf, as is his wont, has his customary series of one-sentence posts, mostly about nonsense, but since this is nothing new for him, it hardly qualifies as a defense of, or even silence about, Obama's TSA.

Here's JUST ONE of the many segments Keith Olbermann has done on the subject:




Rachel Maddow, understandably, is focusing on DADT. But Chris Hayes, subbing on the 22nd, talked about the whole TSA foofarah, and while hardly defending the Obama administration, did point out that a certain amount of the TSA-outrage pot is being stirred by libertarian activists (including John Tyner, the "Don't touch my junk" guy) and others who are exploiting the whole mess to advocate for privatizing the TSA -- as if that would make a difference. But this is hardly a defense of the proliferation of scanning and pat-downs:




Karoli over at Crooks and Liars cites a much-publicized (and much maligned in the progressive blogosphere, which shows that we are far more willing to criticize our own than the right is) article in The Nation which pointed out Tyner's role as a libertarian activist and accused him of being a shill for the Koch brothers. The C&L piece cites other commentary on the Nation article, commentary which blasted it as a smear -- which it is.

What NO ONE on the left is doing is defending the use of x-ray equipment and genital-groping as a means of "keeping us safe" -- not even Ruth Marcus, who seems to feel that this system may be crap but it's all we've got. This is far more skepticism than we ever got from the right, which marched in lockstep to the notion that "If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about" in the context of the Bush Adminstration's appalling record on Constitutional protections.

And this is the difference between the so-called "liberal commentariat" -- at least the commentariat you get if you stick your nose outside the beltway. On the left, we are having a conversation among many minds. On the right, we get only one theme: Republican Good. Obama Bad.

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Monday, July 19, 2010

The stupidest (sic) fucking man on the planet says....
Posted by Jill | 5:50 AM
...that the roots of anxiety, of the rage emanating from the flyover states, is because not enough white males from their ranks are getting into Harvard. Because i2in the South and the Midwest, the very same people who decry Eastern liberal elites and send their kids to schools where they teach that God created everything in six days, really, really, really secretly want their kids to go to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

Funny, too, how that resentment doesn't extend to lazy, shiftless legacies like George W. Bush.

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