I’m going to have to jump through a few hoops to vote, because I have an unexpected trip to Boston the same day, so I need to fit getting into the polling-spot before I make a 3+hr high-speed run to the airport.
[Warning: Mild Movie Spoilers]
This should be a strong sermon but it won’t – it’s going to meander a bit, because today I don’t feel strong.
Government (you can especially see this, nowadays, in the US) does not act as a unit. It’s too big to generally agree on all of the disparate agendas it contains at any given time. It’s not that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, it’s more like that the left foot and the right foot keep stepping on each other, deliberately.
What is a “conservative”, anyway? If you search around, you’ll find a variety of definitions, most of which seem to be incoherent ideological laundry lists.
When we’re arguing against religion, I suppose it’s tempting to try to identify a religion that is not a violent pack of lies, so we can point to other religions (that are) and tell them, “be more like those guys.”
Around 1994, I attended a small conference in Washington, DC; it was memorable because it was at that event that I really understood that the US imperial war faction intended to militarize cyberspace. At the time, I thought that was just their way of spending the “peace dividend.” Perhaps it was that, too.
The US empire was forged in Pittsburgh, and in Bethlehem, and Baltimore’s Sparrow’s Point. The plant at Bethlehem was huge; I spent a day wandering inside the year before it was finally torn down.
Blogging forces your own adequacy in your face, and if you’re a skeptical blogger, you wind up examining it closely to make sure your assessment of your own mediocrity is not too full of confirmation bias. Then, you turn to the list of things in your head that you want to write about, and wonder if you can do them justice.
Recent discussion in some comments brought up the nature/nurture question and Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate.
Now, when there is a mass shooting incident, a new strategy has begun to appear; it’s a form of “what about-ism” – delaying having to do anything by throwing up a barrage of problems with every possibility that anyone offers.