What Would Durkheim Do?

Professor Krugman has more than made up for his minor error the other day with his latest column on education policy. The Republicans are hell bent on dragging the US into the third world (or the middle ages) — no public health care, no public education, religion instead of science, etc. etc. — and the Democrats have been entirely ineffective in stopping them, despite the fact that they control the federal government. (How sad is that, really?)

Speaking of infantile, check out the wingnut reaction to Obama winning the Nobel Prize.

Why do Republicans hate America so much?

(I personally don't think Obama should have won the award. The Nobel should never go to an American president who is currently prosecuting two wars. An obvious point, it seems to me. That Obama ran for office as "the anti-war" candidate makes his inaction in the name of peace all the more frustrating. Note, however, that the Republicans are complaining for the opposite reason, that Obama hasn't killed enough people.)

Professor Krugman says in his latest column, on the politics of spite:

So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

But he's wrong. Indeed, I'd say that he's just insulted bratty 13-year-olds everywhere.

No, the emotional maturity we're seeing from the GOP is strictly infantile.

Amanda at Pandagon has a good post about gender and religion. We always want to jump to essentialist explanations of gender differences, but the most likely account is sociological, not psychological. Go read the whole thing.

Zoom!

Zoo officials say an 8-year-old female cheetah named Sarah ran 100 meters in 6.16 seconds on Wednesday, breaking the old record of 6.19 seconds set in 2001 by a cheetah living in South Africa. Later, Sarah ran the course again and finished in an even faster 6.13 seconds.

I've returned from my trip to Lisbon for the ESA annual meeting. The conference was great, and the panel I chaired went well. Lots of interesting discussion about visual semiotics, visual literacy and narratives.

Here are a few of the hundreds of pictures I took on the trip. Lisbon is a remarkably beautiful city.

More pics under the fold.

Head over to Crooks & Liars to read about the latest explanation of our current political madness. Jon Perr has laid out the case for a diagnosis.

Make sure you're protected against this CTD.

So says Bill Moyers and he is absolutely right. Understanding this certainly makes it easier to explain the Democrats cowardice on health care reform.

The religious haters are proud of their hate; they see intolerance as a virtue. Don't believe me? Take a look at TPM's coverage of yet another preacher praying for Obama's death.

Prayer is, of course, a waste of time. But the fact that this douchebag and others like him wear their hatred as a badge of honor, and that they aren't immediately run out of town, suggests to me that civilization is missing from many places in the US.

When people believe that they have a right to do something because "God said so" they are the most dangerous people on the planet. If you want to see how this looks up close, read this chilling story in the Guardian about a group of Israeli settlers intent on building an new West Bank settlement.

Rory McCarthy lets one of the settler activists explain her motivation. She believes:

the land on which the Palestinian homes sit belongs by Biblical and historical right to the Jewish people and is, for now, "temporarily under Arab occupation".

In case you don't see the religious connection, the settlers are even more explicit about their motives:

"People like to present us like crazy lunatics," said Matar. "But one day these people in the West will see. The Muslims are taking over there too. You better be on our side for your sake, but you guys in Europe are not. Those who curse Israel will be cursed, and those who bless Israel will be blessed."

When you consider that there are similar fanatics among the Palestinians, it is easy to understand why the region has been steeped in violence for so long.

Religion will be the death of us all.

Jesse Taylor at Pandagon is on to something here:

It’s one of those grand bits of fuckeduppedness that makes you realize something else is at work when protesters show up at town halls bemoaning “government control of healthcare”. Down to the way we spend our money, the very basic “choices” we make (and the “choices” that these protesters are concerned with) are largely controlled by the profit-seeking motivations of the industries that govern said choices. The only reason that Americans even trust putting money in the bank is because the federal government insures our deposits; after that, we’re pretty much at the whim of the bank to honor that slip of paper we give them that says someone else is paying us for our work. Nothing in this realm of private regulation is a restriction on choice, ever. It’s just the marketplace at work, naturally doing that thing it does so well. There’s never room to argue with it, because you could always theoretically go to another option, even if the option doesn’t actually exist (try to find any national or even regional bank that doesn’t do the same thing with overdrafts).

If you show up at your Representative’s townhall screaming about Hitler and carrying your gun around as a message, you get on the national news and affect a national debate. If you do the same thing at your local bank or insurance agency, you find yourself in jail next to a guy who smells like Wild Turkey and old hot dogs.

We should be protesting that some corporations want to make a profit on sickness — as bad as war profiteering, if you ask me — but instead folks are out there demanding that the insurance and pharmaceutical industries' "right" to profit from sickness be protected. Talk about fucked up.

When Republicans were in control of the federal government, the left protested. There was lots of invective and demonstrations. But we never showed up to public events armed, talking about "watering the tree of liberty with blood."

To simplify: the left = political opposition, participatory democracy. The right = flirting with political violence and hooliganism.

Josh Marshall at TPM has a fuller consideration. He notes:

But let's be honest about what this is about. The right -- the modern American right -- has a very troubled history with political violence. The ideological pattern is clear going back at least thirty years and arguably far longer. A simple review of the 1990s, particularly 1993, 1994, culminating in many respects in the tragic 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal building in April 1995 tells the tale. Mix in the militias, the thankfully inept attempt on President Clinton's life a few months before Oklahoma City (see Francisco Duran) and it's all really not a pretty picture.

Once again, the right wing is mainstreaming political extremism.

Rick Perlstein, writing in the Washington Post, reminds us that the right-wing in America has always been crazy. He boils it down:

America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

If the corporate elites and their Republican toadies succeed, it will be due to this collective hysteria. I think there are enough rational people to keep them from taking over, but the irrationality of the mob can spread unexpectedly. We are always on the verge. Fascism in America is the blooming of the crazy tree.

This guy.

Also, this.

Barbara Ehrenreich has a great op-ed in the Times about disturbing trend toward criminalizing poverty in the US.

She concludes:

Maybe we can’t afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America’s growing poverty — affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and so forth. I would argue otherwise, but for now I’d be content with a consensus that, if we can’t afford to truly help the poor, neither can we afford to go on tormenting them.

This is what people mean by the "Reagan revolution." No laws for the world's owners and a nasty criminal justice system for everyone else.

Go read the whole thing.

The use of violence (and the threat of violence) as a domestic political strategy is a tell-tale sign. Sara at Orcinus has a thoughtful analysis of the direction we're heading. Mixing greedy corporate interests (and the windbags who shill for them) and the far-right racist fringe is contraindicated for any democratic polity.

It isn't fun to think about how this might end. The politics of resentment contributes nothing positive to our civic life.

What can progressives do to stop the slide?

The base of the Republican party seems to be animated entirely the politics of resentment of southern, white men. The old forms of power have changed somewhat — we still live in a white patriarchy, of course — and the resentment of those who now feel threatened by myriad "others" is the only reason that the GOP still exists.

This resentment is easily exploited by the corporate class, which explains the thuggish opposition to health care reform.

It also explains the persistence of the birther lunacy.

I'm just back from the IVSA annual meeting, held this year in Carlisle, Cumbria, UK. It was a great conference with lots of interesting panels. I spent a few days in Manchester before and after the meeting — Manchester is a major city with an international airport, and a lovely cosmopolitan urban culture.

Here are a few images from my wanderings around the city. The John Rylands Library was the highlight of the trip. A cathedral to books! (Much better than the other kind of cathedral.) There was a protest for democracy in Iran in Picadilly Garden while I was there.

More photos under the fold.

Professor Krugman explains what Goldman Sachs record profits mean:

First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away.

Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.

Is it any surprise that the Obama administration is doing nothing to reduce the power of the finance corporations? No, it isn't. Both parties are wholly owned by corporate power. Anyone who believes that the Democrats are America's labor party deserves a kick in the shins.

Those that made fortunes ruining the economy will make fortunes "fixing" it — that is, making it look good until the next crisis — and even the Democrats, supposedly the party of the non-elites, are eager to enable them.

Matt Taibbi has another great essay on the subject. I like his metaphor:

This isn't really commerce, but much more like organized crime: it was a gigantic fraud perpetrated on the economy that wouldn't have been possible without accomplices in the ratings agencies and regulators willing to turn a blind eye. Imagine a meat company that bred ten billion rats, fattened them on trash and sewage, ground their bodies into chuck, and then sold it all as grade-A ground beef to McDonald's and Burger King, right under the noses of the USDA: this is exactly the same thing, only with debt instead of food. We're eating it, they're counting the money.

Capitalism is a form of organized crime. It has always been such, and Taibbi's analysis of the culpability of Goldman Sachs and others leaves no doubt. We continue to let them rob us because we continue to believe that their crimes are in our best interest. Wake up!

He continues:

Any way you slice it, Goldman was responsible for putting tens of billions of toxic mortgages on the market, resulting in mass foreclosures, mass depletion of retirement funds, and a monstrously over-leveraged financial system that we will now all be bailing out for the next half-century or so. All of this so that Goldman could make a few billion bucks acting as the middleman in all of these deadly transactions.

They'll keep stealing from us as long as we let them. Let's stop pretending that Obama, or any Democrat, wants to stop them, let alone would be able to anyway.