restatement

Liberals are stupid. Conservatives are evil. The pattern holds true.

Liberal stupidity plays glaringly in the delusion that there is anything like a convicted, stable Middle to be picked up. Were such a thing true, the conservative ploy of stepping further to the right every time would never work. It has worked very well. Therefore, there is no vast unrepresented Middle committed to centrist or moderate positions. There is a vast biconceptual majority who can be persuaded to think more liberally on some issues and more conservatively on other issues, and who will side with the better persuader, not the most centrist position-player.

twobarswhamyagottacross

I don't think there is any being in charge of the whole universe. I also have not been inclined to align with the organization American Atheists. This does not prove to be an exception.

Jon Stewart Mocking American Atheists for Opposing Cross at 9/11 Memorial

If someone were specifically constructing and installing a cross to "represent the faith of the people here," that would definitely be a First Amendment violation, using a public memorial to grant favorable status to a particular religion. In this case, it's a found object among the ruins, which some people have taken as meaningful. It's an emergent part of the narrative. If you go to many monuments or National Parks here around the West, you'll find Native American sites or religious artifacts, as well as historic churches or artifacts of settlers, displayed or pointed out on hiking/driving maps, because they're a significant part of what's there in the story of the area. I don't see that as violation of the First Amendment so long as it's not emphasized in a way to privilege a particular religion or culture in the story.
It's a question of how it's displayed, not whether it's displayed.

communitynotdeity

You've probably heard, every couple months or so, of some town in the U.S. with atheist-themed billboards or bus signs, and angry people reacting with protest, stonewalling, or vandalism. Nontheists tend to see this reaction in terms of "see, they're so crazy even a completely inoffensive sign that we exist sets them off."

Here's another way to see it. If you've told anyone about a regular nontheist meeting or group somewhere, someone's probably asked "What do atheists need group meetings for, isn't that just like church?" In a way it can be; a competing community.

We often get ourselves into unproductive arguments about how much good or harm religion and atheism do. I think that community is the good religion does, the only real good it does, and that the realization that it's not an exclusively religious good but a general human good provokes defensiveness.

If people can fit you into their comfortable worldview, they won't have a problem with your existence even if they don't like you. Unbelievers as iconoclasts offering criticism and overenthusiastic blasphemy fits fine with a conservative religious community's collective worldview. Cold bitter intellectuals writing letters to the editor and occasionally filing lawsuits with the hated ACLU are no threat to them. The question "why are atheists so angry?" is not a simple misunderstanding of your nice intent, but a defensive reactionary attempt to fit you into a category that's comfortable.

But friendly neighbors who invite people to meet and feel welcome, organize charity work, and plan outings with their children, that's a potential replacement. It poses an existential question to a religion, whether the mystic and supernatural part of their religion is as essential as they've assumed. There are communities not specifically religious, but they can tell themselves it's a core of religiosity in people that makes such communities possible. A community that by is core constituency denies the relevance of devotion to the supernatural forces an expansion of their idea of what the community is.

pure

Of course, an interest in heritage, culture, even ethnicity, is neither racist nor fascist. However, an interest in the purity of that heritage or culture or ethnicity, a desire to keep it from dilution and free of anything foreign to it, is the very substance of racism and fascism.
Purity is a corrosive antimoral value that reliably leads people to evil conclusions. Whether in matters sexual or spiritual or cultural, unless you're talking about refining chemicals and ores, purity is not a value or goal worth having.

I'm thinking of two otherwise unrelated things here. One, wishing an easy way to navigate the musically compelling but politically volatile pagan- folk- and black-metal scenes. Another, clashes over the immigration issue. At that debate (three months ago) between United for Social Justice and Utah Minutemen, the assertion there's no American identity to mold oneself to (sorry, forget the exact words) struck me as a good one. Of course one of the Minutemen vocally disagreed. I'm sure they think themselves just normal people wanting what's right (that's what's so insidious about cognitive frames), but their idea of what it is to be American is arbitrarily limited. I align more with Naomi Wolf who identifies being "American" with the attitude of speaking truth to power and willing to free all people from authorities and systems of control. By her account Americans need not have ever trod the soil of this continent beneath their sandalled feet, and probably not even lived while the place bears that name. It's an excessively idealistic, slightly sappy notion, argued specifically to lure those with narrow views of America to expand their horizons, but it's a desirable one that manages to embrace a broader humanity.

kantyousee

Logical corollary to the categorical imperative: Anything you try to justify doing to anyone else, you implicitly grant everyone in the universe permission to do to you. Your only refuge is in highly specific circumstances or in confessing to having chosen to do ill.

absenceofleaders

Haymarket Affair, May 4

"Anarchist" is a term that was generally adopted with some sense of irony. Apologists for status quo hierarchic government and business domains, sincere or self-serving, generally attacked any attempt to improve the lives and restore the rights of underclasses as bringing on "anarchy" in the chaos-brutality-and-riotous-destruction sense. If bringing about genuine freedom, opportunity, voice, and participation for laborers, women, ethnic outsiders, and the poor is "anarchy," many people reasoned, then let us be for anarchy. If institutional power of the wealthiest few dominating the impoverished many is civilization, then let civilization burn. "Anarchist" has acquired a long list of hyphenated adjectives, as visions of just how to build up a better civilization vary, but what many anarchists have actually envisioned is a very loose federalism, built up of otherwise independent local community organizations and labor unions.

I'm about as (un)comfortable with the label anarchist as I am with liberal, socialist, libertarian, or progressive. In some contexts, I even count as conservative. I also am dubious of the value and virtue of violent revolution. I like to place a bit of hope (not faith) in the Arab Spring, and also in open communication, strikes, building occupations, mass demonstrations that block ordinary business of government and trade, and other instances of badass pacifism.

(The last is a TVtropes link; hope you've got three hours to kill if you click on it.)

coolbeans

Imagine you're looking at a normal jar of jelly beans of assorted flavors and colors. Then someone less clever than they think they are tells you it couldn't possibly have just shaken out that way, that getting that exact arrangement of colors and shapes must have taken a greater-than-mortal power carefully planning and sorting to get that exact jar of jelly beans.

definition of 'order' = arbitrary
analogy = weak

antihumanagenda

In the 80s and 90s, one of the right's rallying hate-ons was "secular humanism." It probably still is, for all I know. I used to think they just didn't understand the deep roots of humanism in our civilization, going back to Renaissance, going back to Greece. I now fear they do know, and intend to unwrite all of our civilization's history and moral progress to root out the philosophical roots of humanism.

Humanism is the notion that humans have moral worth for themselves rather than as servants to lord and Lord. Labor movements, which go back at least a hundred years before Marx, stem from humanistic ideals. Women's rights as they have been hard-won in struggles over decades and centuries, depend on understanding the worth of each person's experience, rather than their fitting into an ordained social role. Racial integration and religious tolerance, scientific inquiry, freedom of conscience, freedom itself, depend on philosophical humanism.

noteconomicallyevolved

In our perfected system, the more aggressive (and not discernably wiser) monkeys are encouraged to beat down their comrades to ascend the slats of a small ladder, earning an advantageous position for flinging poo, and the privilege of imagining they are growing nearly as tall as their keepers.

It's messy, but at least it's free of any trace of godless queer European-style socialism.

*****
Many classic texts explaining capitalism and advocating for total laissez-faire with no regulation, democratic feedback, or social responsibility beyond stockholder value make analogies to evolution. The above has exactly as much to do with evolution as does any economist's argument.