Prometheus Unbound

He’s still a Tory conservative, but he’s given up on American “movement conservatism”. Here’s some of the reasons that he gave today (from a longer list that you can see here):

I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.

I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.

I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.

I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.

I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.

I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.

I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.

Does this make me a “radical leftist” as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.

To paraphrase Reagan, I didn’t leave the conservative movement. It left me.

And increasingly, I’m not alone.

They see themselves as innocent and sincere, and she’s one of them, so they perceive her as innocent and sincere. Who’s in the family, who’s not? Politics is often less about formal platforms and policies and more about cultural signals and cultural style, isn’t it?

This evening I watched an extraordinary documentary titled A Crude Awakening (which can be found at Amazon here), and in the film three numbers jumped out at me:

• 25
• 5
• 2

And what do these numbers represent?

• 25 is the percentage of the world’s annual oil production that Americans consume
• 5 is the US percentage of the world’s population (actually, it’s even less than that; 1 out of every 22 people on Earth is a US citizen) 
• 2 is the estimated percentage of the world’s remaining oil reserves to be found beneath US soil.

Given theses numbers, and the rapid rise of China and India in the global economy, it doesn’t take an economist or petroleum geologist to tell you that our country’s consumption of fossil fuels is completely unsustainable (even if global oil production was not peaking, which it clearly is). Here are those numbers again:

• 25% (US consumption of annual global oil production)
• 5% (US population as a percentage of total global population)
• 2% (US share of estimated global oil reserves)

Let those numbers sink in. Political and economic turmoil, cultural upheaval, wars, and rumors of wars are in those numbers. Here’s a segment from the A Crude Awakening  documentary:

Of course not. Glenn Beck is not seriously trying to have a dialogue about the subject. He’s not having an exchange. He’s communicating to a base audience in racial code. He won’t even attempt a dialogue on “white culture” with, say, Katie Couric, because that’s not what his use of the phrase is about.

A sociologist or a liberal who might be studying “white culture” in college (with nuance and careful to make distinctions between, say, Italian Americans in Jersey and Norwegian Americans in Minnesota) is fine. But that’s not at all how the category “white culture” functions with Glenn Beck. Rather, it functions as code for a string of anti-black stereotypes. In other words, the right’s use of the phrase “white culture” sets African Americans into the position of being a shadow to idealized post-WWII Protestant norms (think Ozzie and Harriet ). It functions as a racist category, and a locus for prejudice. That’s why Beck won’t define it above because it becomes the inverse of whatever stereotypes some whites habitually set upon blacks.

As for Glenn Beck being “aw shucks” innocent of his own uses of language, that too is bullshit. Beck is not dumb. He’s Iago deliberately pouring poison into Othello ear. He knows exactly what kind of crap he’s putting into the public square, and, like Iago in Shakespeare’s play, he’s hoping that the poison he’s whispering around will end in the undoing of a black man (Barack Obama).

To put it bluntly: He hates the Moor.

Let’s not pretend that Beck’s schtick (or Limbaugh’s, or any of these other haters stoking white fright of Obama) is innocent, or the product of a sincere, emotionally and intellectually vulnerable, inquiry. Instead, it is a thinly veiled, and perhaps even murderous, hostility towards our first African American president, and it is impervious to dialogue or serious engagement. It is a psychologically authoritarian and racist phenomenon, and if we can’t call it what it is, then we will be unable to think clearly about it.

When you are hearing Limbaugh or Beck, you’re not hearing from a mature, vulnerable person. You’re hearing from an emotionally armored person hell bent on casting doubt upon, and trying to destroy (without any serious regard for truth) the reputation of another human being.

To counter Beck’s yucky karma, I offer this:

Below, more far right President Obama hatred. By the way, death threats directed toward the president have gone up 400% since his election, and the number of death threats dwarfs those received by previous presidents. The teabaggers are keeping the Secret Service busy. And now Wolf Automotive in Denver has just put up a sign equating Jihadis with Barack Obama, saying, “Wake up America! Remember Ft. Hood!” But if President Obama is a terrorist, and dangerous in the way that the Ft. Hood shooter was dangerous, then obviously President Obama needs to be physically restrained by “patriots”, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it?

A boycott of the car dealership is promoted here.

Photo source: ProgressNowColorado.org

In Spiegel today, Christian Schwägerl takes after President Obama and America in their tag team foot dragging on climate change (rightfully so, I think):

For most Americans, the world beyond the US’s borders is nothing more than an irritating nuisance. Hence arguments based on appeals about drowning Bangladeshis, starving Africans and flooded islands in Indonesia have little effect. In Hollywood, the United States has an industry that continually pushes the materialistic ideal of Western prosperity to billions of people around the world, while at the same time bombarding them with apocalyptic visions in the form of disaster movies. Many Americans clearly also believe that real climate change is just something dreamt up by the entertainment industry. Obama has proven himself to be unable to put an end to the lies that modern American society is based on. He is unable to overcome the entrenched lobbyists of the oil and coal industries and make the reality clear to his compatriots: They are the worst energy wasters on the planet — and are thus indirectly a major threat to world peace in the 21st century. Although they do not enjoy a higher quality of life than Europeans, Americans consume twice as much fossil fuel per capita. Their cars are too big, their homes are not energy efficient and they have yet to focus their talents for innovation away from trivial entertainment gadgets and toward renewable energy technologies.

And:

American CO2 emissions per capita are about twice as high as those in comparable industrialized nations and many times greater than those of the developing world. The climate change bill that is currently making its way through Congress does not go nearly far enough — and that is Obama’s fault. The bill proposed reducing CO2 emissions by a ridiculous 4 percent relative to 1990 levels, by 2020. Climate researchers believe that reductions of 40 percent or more are required.

Andrew Sullivan on watching Sean Hannity:

It’s like listening to Hugh Hewitt. Or reading Pravda in the old Soviet Union. But somehow watching a human being so brainwashed and engaging in conscious brain-washing makes it worse. Hannity is a pathological level of propagandist, because his entire reality, his entire mindset is programmed for ideology and partisanship. There is no world for him but politics; and no perspective within politics except conflict and warfare. He greets views that do not comport with the opportunistic ideology of the moment as threats to be extinguished, not ideas to be engaged. Whatever else this toxic, shallow and brutal perspective is, it is not now and never will be conservative – unless that word has now been so corrupted it has no meaning at all.

Here.

Know hope.

A brilliant idea, and revealing:

A man asks another man to marry him during a city council hearing!:

My response:

What is the South smoking? Are they even tracking the same person?

Daily Kos today displayed this telling statistic: Barack Obama has strong favorability numbers everywhere in the United States—except in the South. So extreme is the contrast, that the South essentially mirrors (in the negative) the numbers that Obama tracks (on average) in the rest of the country:

Make way.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones makes a prediction:

I’ll stick with 2025 for now.  There may be small local papers around for longer than that, but no big city dailies.  New York will be the last to go, but in fifteen years newspapers will be a thing of the past even there.

If you’re a lay person, I don’t know how much more clearly the case for getting your seasonal flu, swine flu, and pneumonia shots can be made than this: a compelling statistical correlation and quotes from two leading experts. Here’s the statistical correlation (which appeared in a recent Atlantic Monthly article for November 2009):

[R]esearchers studying the impact of flu vaccination typically look at deaths from all causes during flu season, and compare the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. Such comparisons have shown a dramatic difference in mortality between these two groups: study after study has found that people who get a flu shot in the fall are about half as likely to die that winter—from any cause—as people who do not. Get your flu shot each year, the literature suggests, and you will dramatically reduce your chance of dying during flu season.

And here, in the same article, are quotes from two leading experts on virology who advise flu vaccination:

Nancy Cox, the CDC’s influenza division chief, says flatly, “The flu vaccine is the best way to protect against flu.” Anthony Fauci, a physician and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, where much of the basic science of flu vaccination has been worked out, says, “I have no doubt that it is effective in conferring some degree of protection. To say otherwise is a minority view.”

You’re certainly free to ignore such a powerful statistical correlation and majority medical opinion on the importance of getting flu vaccinations, but why, if you’re not an expert in the field of virology, would you do so?

———-

Both quotes above come from “Shots in the Dark”, an article that appeared in the November 2009 edition of Atlantic Monthly.

The anti-science anti-vaccination hysteria circulating in the United States is having real and serious consequences to public health. Wired magazine has an interesting article on this latest example of young Earth creationism-like mass stupidity spreading across America here.

Money quote:

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. . . . Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard. Before smallpox was eradicated with a vaccine, it killed an estimated 500 million people. And just 60 years ago, polio paralyzed 16,000 Americans every year, while rubella caused birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 newborns. Measles infected 4 million children, killing 3,000 annually, and a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b caused Hib meningitis in more than 15,000 children, leaving many with permanent brain damage.

But the author of the book does not call Rand a “conservative” because Rand was an atheist!

Hmm.

Jennifer Burns is a University of Virginia historian, and her book on Ayn Rand is titled Goddess of the Market. Here is part 1 of 7 of a talk that she gave on Rand at Kepler’s Book Store: