1. While I remain convinced that there’s much to be derided about "choice feminism," since clearly not every choice a person might make ends up being feminist, I’m not ready to write it off. Isn’t believing that you have the right to choose what kind of life you might lead pretty damn revolutionary? It seems to me that that impulse is so strong that, regardless of what women might choose at first, a seed of an idea has been planted.
2. The Professor gets very frustrated when she sees people deciding something about someone and then holding that person accountable for failing to live up to it. For instance, if you all decided that I was the voice of feminism in Middle Tennessee and then sat around and wrote comments and posts about what a crappy voice of feminism I am. It’s ascribing power to someone and then berating them for not wielding that power well.
I don’t have any more profound thoughts about it, just that it makes me go "hmm."
3. I hate George Bush* and I think it’s hilarious… no… is there some word beyond hilarious? I think it’s HI-larious that that faith-based guy is out shilling his book based on the idea that no one in Washington is that concerned about the Christian Right, indeed finds them goofy and weird, and only throws them a bone every once in a while so that they’ll continue to vote Republican. Shoot, Christian Right, well, duh! If that shocks you, wait until you learn that rich people and folks in the government will continue to find ways for their daughters to have abortions even if you outright ban them in every state in the union.
But, I must say that when Lesley Stahl got on 60 Minutes and acted like it was shocking, nay SHOCKING, that the President uses phrases from the Bible and old hymns in his speeches, it was all I could do to keep from crying.
America, are we a bunch of morons or what? I suppose you will be surprised to learn that Lincoln did not invent the turn of phrase "a house divided" but instead took it from Jesus**.
I know! Call 60 Minutes! The shock is so great!
I grew up in rural Illinois, kept for most of the time in a hermetically sealed tube and let out only to attend piddly public schools taught, in some cases, by people who could not do the things they were teaching. And yet, I learned this shit.
I’d like to believe that I know this stuff and other people don’t because I’m a genius, but actually, I suspect that it’s just that most people believe that their brains are best left untroubled by new knowledge.
*Is it safe to say that shit in the wake of yesterday’s crap? I’m probably going to get hauled off to some detention center now. My only comfort is that S-Town Mike will be being tortured in the cell next to mine and so when we’re both laying on the concrete floor in a puddle of our own piss, we can keep each other company telling stories about the Bicentennial fountain.
**Assuming, of course, that you know Lincoln, the "House Divided" speech, and who Jesus is.
Tiny Cat Pants 
What crap happened yesterday to get you and Mike dragged off to a detention center? Did I miss something?
Yesterday, Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act, which lets him declare anyone he wants, including U.S. citizens, enemy combatants and strip them of their habeas corpus rights and "detain" them indefinitely.Mike and I both have our concerns about what kinds of U.S. citizens might find themselves detained.
I’m honestly hoping that as time goes on, we will be joined by others who become increasingly aware of the real threat the government presents to our freedoms. I’m praying that they’re just too distracted right now by "Heroes" and "Dancing with the Stars." In the meantime, I’ve started re-reading Bonhoeffer and the crisis theologians, because we are coming into a real crisis; a moral and legitimation crisis that is shaking our system to the foundations. I cannot just go along with it.
That’s interesting. I, too, just picked up my copy of The Cost of Discipleship again as a means of intellectually grappling with what I see as the problem of a runaway state.
I’m so depressed about this latest that I can’t even blog about it. I’ll be glad when the noise of blogging at NiT dies down enough for me to get my thoughts organised and on ASCII.
The worst part is that when you read things like this:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/027141.php#027141over at Balko’s place, how can you be surprised when Congress chucks the Constitution down the toilet? I wonder how many of them are even familiar with it.All the threats we’ve faced over 225 or so years and they chuck the Constitution over this? I’m really deeply ashamed.
S-TownMike and Aunt B, Though you may be deserving of such a fate, don’t worry that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 will facilitate it. Take a deep breath and read this. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YWNlMjg3YWRlNmNjMTk0NDc1NzE0ZWI2YzBlOGRlNzU=
Ned, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to go with the libertarians on this one. As David Boaz so rightly points out, the basis of our society is the idea that rights are inherent and belong to the individual. The Declaration says that they’re granted to us by our Creator, which we could quibble about, but the point is that we have rights because we are human, outside of our coming under the jurisdiction of any particular government.The government may enumerate certain rights or restrict other rights for the well-being of everyone, but the government does not grant us rights.So, I’m sorry, but regardless of how astute McCarthy’s reading of the law might be, it’s based on such a flawed misunderstanding of where rights come from that it’s impossible for me to trust the rest of what he’s saying.
1. =============================I think it’s a symptom of either being labeled or even labeling yourself. I think gun rights are important, so people often times think I believe that my 7 year old should have a machine gun for school. That’s silly. A nice semi-automatic would be just fine. I’m not a radical or anything. LOL!=============================2. The Professor gets very frustrated when she sees people deciding something about someone and then holding that person accountable for failing to live up to it.=============================Christians get this all the time for continuing to sin. The really IDIOTIC thing is that being a Christian means that you understand that you’ll STILL sin. You just recognize that it’s bad, and you need to both seek forgiveness and strength not to sin.Same thing goes for any other "classification" we assign ourselves or get assigned by others.=============================3. I hate George Bush* and I think it’s hilarious… no… is there some word beyond hilarious? I think it’s HI-larious that that faith-based guy is out shilling his book based on the idea that no one in Washington is that concerned about the Christian Right, indeed finds them goofy and weird, and only throws them a bone every once in a while so that they’ll continue to vote Republican. Shoot, Christian Right, well, duh! If that shocks you, wait until you learn that rich people and folks in the government will continue to find ways for their daughters to have abortions even if you outright ban them in every state in the union.=============================It’s ALMOST as hilarious as thinking that either Bush or the Christian Right "representatives" in Washington are the only ones capable of such levels of humor. Bush DEFINITELY has some strikes against him, but I think it’s even funnier that his political opponents really haven’t offered America anything better, you know? It all goes back to the "two guys jump out of an airplane" story.=============================I’d like to believe that I know this stuff and other people don’t because I’m a genius, but actually, I suspect that it’s just that most people believe that their brains are best left untroubled by new knowledge.=============================Most people want to go to work, come home, drink a beer, watch Desperate Housewives/Monday Night Football, and go to bed. They have one activity that they LIVE FOR (beer, porn, new shoes) and as long as the world doesn’t screw with that, they could care less.It’s not that people are dumb or uncaring. It’s that most of them are simple OR they’re dedicated to something other than political reform.
No, Ed. It’s that they’ve grown up Americans. They’ve grown up in the comfort of freedom from sea to shining sea. The thought that their freedom is eroding is so foreign they don’t even want to conceptualise it. Ironically, our total freedom may cause us to lose our total freedom.
Possibly. I think that sounds good, but I’m not 100% on board. I think it’s DEFINITELY a contributor, but I think there’s more to it.I’ve got a 7 year old son in public schools, and I’m AMAZED at the rules. They have a dress code that rivals the military. EVERYTHING is checked and rechecked for anything resembling violence. I mean, if a little boy draws a tank or a fighter plane, they look twice.And EVERYWHERE throughout the school are constant reminders that YOU WILL BE SEARCHED ANYTIME WE GET READY!!!! YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS HERE!!! ALL WILL OBEY!!!!Does anyone find it ironic that we suspend most of our Constitutional rights once we enter the main place we actually teach our citizens what the Constitution is all about. It’s like going to a church where you’re taught about the Bible and taught that being a Christian to the world is important BUT the rules say you can’t pray or worship IN the church. All that Bible stuff starts OUTSIDE the doors. LOL!It’s almost like we’re bringing our kids up to expect to be given direction and orders and to have NO expectation free will or rights. That bothers me sometimes.
Wait until you get a load of how they teach kids about the Constitution. My daughter (7-year-old) came home last week with a Scholastic magazine devoted to the Constitution. Goody, I think (because I do colonial and revolutionary history and like to start them young)! But then I read what the authors wrote.Things like"The Constitution contains the laws of our country." (Uhhh…no.)"We still use the Constitution as it was originally written in 1787." (Without any reference to amendments anywhere…yep, no Bill of Rights in the Scholastic universe.)The authors managed to convey a powerful lot of misinformation about the Constitution in a very short space, not ever addressing in even a boiled down and second grade way the reasons for its adoption, that it was and remains a controversial document, that citizens across the nation actively argued the document into being and were instrumental in its creation and amendment (rather than just a handful of gentlemen) and so forth. One could emerge from reading the Scholastic without even learning what the hell why we think a Constitution is important and worth knowing about. I am not too worried about my kid learning about the Constitution — she was the one who pointed out some of the deficiencies in interpretation, she’s actually been to Washington with me to look at and read the Constitution, etc — but not everyone has parents who are as committed to teaching their children civic fundamentals. Why not teach kids accurate and interesting stuff about the Constitution rather than half-truths, fallacies, and boring crap?
Is that the same Scholastic magazine that was going to put out a whole issue about that great teaching tool, the "docudrama" about the September 11 attacks? What has happened to it? Didn’t it used to be good?
Is that the old "Weekly Reader" we used to get back in the 70’s?
It’s the same general concept as the Weekly Reader, which I think is the news magazine for slightly older kids. It’s run by the Scholastic Books people, one of the throwaway pubs that teachers use for current events/social studies teaching. I don’t know what’s happened to it, but it’s now nearly content-free even when it tries to teach something like Columbus. Basically, the Columbus issue was (if I remember right) a basic map of the Atlantic and a dotted line, about a paragraph on the names of his ships, and a bar graph to complete to represent distance from Seville to Hispaniola. In short, nothing that a real kid would find remotely interesting but something that fulfills some aspect of the NCLB National History Standards and can be assessed by some idiotic test.I suspect it’s the Texas textbook problem writ small. In k-12 texts, producers have to cater to the Texas B.O.E’s notoriously uncomplicated views on American history as a continuous triumphal story of democratic progress and civic uplift. The "California" version is more complicated, with a larger role for social history and a little less high politics (though high politics is probably the easiest version for underprepared social studies teachers to teach). Kids with the Texas books get a very red state view of the past. Kids with the California version go blue. (There’s a near 1:1 correspondence in voting as well…the connection is so robust that I am half-convinced that it might be the most important thing in determining how the states go in national elections.)Anyhow, I’m betting that the Scholastic writers have been instructed to not piss off Texas. So they timidly bore the students to death or try to make complicated things so simple that they just wind up incorrect.
Aunt B,First-degree murderers (who are sentenced to death) lose their "right to life."The "natural rights" of enemy combatants likewise are modified by the nature of their actions. We don’t give due process to enemies on the battlefield before shootin’ em. The level of due process rights being given to enemy combatants in this legislation are generous, I think.
Yes, but Ned, come now! First, we strip murderers of their right to life after a lengthy legal process. Second, we don’t give due process to enemies on the battlefield because they mean us immediate harm. If you burst into my house with a gun, I would have every right to shoot you, without waiting to see if you were planning on shooting me. A battle is much the same–soldiers shoot in order to lessen their own chances of being killed.But we’re picking guys up off the street who aren’t shooting at us and we’re saying that because they intend to harm us, they must be not just detained in their own country (or in ours, if they’re picked up in, say, Detroit), but captured by us and spirited off to secretive detention camps.That’s really different than an enemy combatant. An enemy combantant ought to be engaged in combat with you, by definition, and can be killed or captured as one does when one’s fighting a war. A bad guy who’s plotting against you is also your enemy, but if you’re using police tactics to discover and capture him… Well, that’s a different beast. Timothy McVeigh was a bad guy with a bone to pick with the government. He still fit within the confines of our legal system. There’s no reason other people being imprisoned by the United States government can’t as well.