Culture Warriors category archive

It’s not an exaggeration, folks.

Eyes on Texas twits.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Laurie Essig tries to understand wannabe frat boy George Will’s decision to claim that rape isn’t.

In a related post at the same site, Jennifer Baker observes

Or maybe he (George Will–ed.) isn’t really putting himself in any one’s shoes because he can’t even identify with being a woman. Does that explain his callousness? Is imagining being a woman is some kind of total obstacle? He should imagine being raped in prison, perhaps, by someone he had met, been polite to, or knew. Then he might have more sympathy. My husband came up with this trick, and I’ve already seen it work on a few of his friends.

I’m old. I’m so old that I can remember when George Will could pass for someone who has a clue.

The Booman points out that, despite the pontifications of the punditocracy, Eric Cantor’s loss is not complicated at all.

You can poll the people of the 7th District all you want, but they just voted for the guy who ran on opposing the DREAM Act. That is not a moderate position, at all. That is the position of people who don’t like brown people. Period.

The Booman is not a Virginian. I am.

That’s why I know he’s correct. The opinion polls won’t show it, though, because most persons know that it’s no longer generally acceptable to be a public bigot.

Dick Polman wonders why suicide shooters are not described as terrorists. A nugget:

The losers dumped the dead cops on the floor, sprinkled them with Nazi swastikas, covered them with a replica 18th-century “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, and yelled “This is a revolution.” Yet this episode is typically being described, in the media, as just a random act of “antigovernment violence.” The NBC Nightly News devoted a lot of air time to the shootings, yet never once dared use the T-word.

Here’s a little test: What if the shooters hadn’t been white Americans (a married couple, “the Millers”)? What if, instead, the shooters had been extremist Muslims who covered the dead cops with an Al Qaeda flag and yelled “Allahu Akbar”? Rest assured, we’d all be invoking the T-word in a climate of national hysteria, with Fox News fulminating about the lone wolves roaming among us.

Pakistan has suicide bombers. We have suicide shooters.

Other than the choice of weaponry, there is no damn difference between the two.

Field expects more. A nugget:

We should get used to it, because I suspect that there is going to be a lot more of this type of deranged behavior coming from certain types of people in American society.

You can only foam at the mouth for so long over your computer keys, and shoot beer cans in your backyard before you want to act out on the hate that has been building up for years from listening to white right wing hate radio, and conspiracy nuts like Glen Beck and Alex Jones.

A word cannot be separated from its history.

Reg Henry traces the history of opposition to a humane social order. A nugget (emphasis added):

Those opposed to progressive social change have always invented horror stories that inevitably don’t come true. Get the kids out of the mines and they will become hopelessly spoiled. Let the women vote and they will have no judgment. Pass Social Security and the elderly will become idle in their golden years. Pass universal health care and the nation will be lost.

So much for all of that. So many horror stories, so little actual horror. . . . As it is, future generations will marvel that conservatism was here defined as denying some Americans basic rights.

Read the rest.

This is tough to get through because of a big steaming pile of Glenn Beck in the middle, but the message is worth it.

Excerpt:

Just because you don’t know something bad has happened to you doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.

Warning: Language

Michael Austin is professor of psychology and a professing Christian. The Christianity that he professes is the kind of Christianity that I grew up with, one that focuses on love and forgiveness, not on hate and vengeance.

At Psychology Today Blogs, he explores the essential hypocrisy behind the “Myth of the Bible Belt” by contrasting the Christ of the Bible with the Christ of the Bible Belt.

The South may be the most religious part of the United States if church attendance and a verbal profession of Christian belief are the sole criteria for religiosity. However, if we take a set of criteria from the New Testament, then this may be a myth. As far as I can tell, the central criteria in the New Testament for an authentic Christian faith begins with a profession of faith, but then essentially includes the following:

• love of God
• love of one’s neighbor (no matter their religious beliefs, or lack thereof)
• transformation of one’s character
• care for the “least of these” (i.e., the poor and marginalized) in society.1

If the criteria from the New Testament are applied to our behavior, then atheist high school students wouldn’t receive text messages that say “Hey, Satan.” And atheists wouldn’t lose their family and friends because of their lack of religious faith. To reject someone or cut them out of your life because they are an atheist is one of the least Christian things one can do.

Read the rest, then read Matthew 6:5.

Via AMERICAblog.

By their status updates shall ye know them.

All they can think about is sex (and war).

Addendum, the Next Day:

Speaking of war . . . .

These folks are deeply, deeply warped.

One of the aspects of privilege is the inability to realize that one is privileged.

To put it another way, it’s to accept privilege as one’s due, without question, just as, when I was a kid growing up under Jim Crow, I accepted without question that most black folks did not have nice houses as Just the Way Things Were Meant To Be.