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Category: politics (page 9 of 19)

Hungarian language police

10 December 2008 / / Comments Off on Hungarian language police

Another government tries in vain to stop language change.

Slovakia’s Ministry of Culture has proposed an amendment that would give it the right to impose fines of up to EUR 100 for poor use of the national language. The move has been prompted by a rise in bad grammar and the increasing number of English words in common use even when native alternatives exist.

‘Bad grammar’? What does that mean? Native speakers, being native speakers, have a perfect command of the grammar of their language. All right, so some dialects may deviate from the perceived standard. But why punish them? It’s going on all the time. Much of the syntax of a language goes on below the level of conscious awareness anyway.

How are they going to enforce this? Are they going to fine individuals? No, just like Iran’s recent attempt, it’s all going to fall onto the media and sign-makers.

Jozef Bednar, a spokesman for the ministry, confirmed that the proposed punishment would not apply to individuals who stumble over their language but would punish advertising copy, billboards and public signs. Representatives of the country’s large Hungarian minority have already condemned the proposal.

There’s the rub. This is an attempt to punish speakers of minority dialects, but dressed up in the guise of pedantry. Not a very attractive guise, but there you are.

Hungarian media: they’re coming down on you. You have the tools to fight back, if you want. It should be simple to find linguistic skeletons in the closets of the leaders responsible for this action. Surely some of them have used loanwords or less-desirable syntax in speeches before. To the archives! Find those quotes and demand that those leaders be fined.

Terrorism has no religion?

1 December 2008 / / 4 Comments

Here’s a meme to watch, and it’s been popping up pretty frequently lately: “Terrorism has no religion.” People mean different things by it, so let’s scan some news stories.

Meaning one: People in religions should not be persecuted for the actions of their most violent minorities.

This article is from 2002, and the quote is from Iqbal Sacranie, Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain, talking about 9/11.

For me and many of my colleagues in the MCB, there is no such thing as family life any more; we are under so much pressure. It cannot be right that an entire civilisation is tarnished because of the actions of a few. Terrorism has no religion. We must not fall into the trap of responding with anger and hate. Our emphasis should be on justice, not vengeance.

Okay, scapegoating sucks. And in many of the news stories that contain this phrase, they’re trying to tamp down religiously-motivated violence between Hindus and Muslims. A real nightmare scenario. I get that.

But here’s the other reading, and it’s this one I object to:

Meaning two: Extremists are not members of any religion.

Senior Congress leader B. Janardhan Poojary has said the terrorism has no religion and this has been revealed in the arrests of alleged Hindu extremists in connection with the Malegaon blast case.

Mr. Poojary condemned the Malegaon blasts by the Hindu community and said the “People who commit acts of aggression in the name of Hinduism are not Hindus. People who take to violence in the name of Islam are not Muslim.”

Does he mean they’re not good Hindus or Muslims? No, he’s saying they’re simply not Hindus or Muslims at all, which is untrue.


About one instant before 5 guys stopped being Muslims, protecting Islam from criticism.

Here’s another recent article on the same theme.

Bollywood star Aamir Khan wrote on his blog on Friday that politicians may try to use the Mumbai terror attack to their own advantage and stressed that terrorists have no religion.

“I dread to think of how various political parties are now going to try and use this tragedy to further their political careers. At least now they should learn to not divide people and instead become responsible leaders,” wrote Aamir on his blog.

“When will these politicians realise and admit that terrorists have no religion. Terrorists are not Hindu or Muslim or Christian. They are not people of religion or god. They are people who have gone totally sick in their head and have to be dealt with in that manner,” he added.

Does he mean that terrorism is not confined to one religion? No, he’s saying that a religious person in the midst of committing a terrorist act ceases to be a member of that religion.

This seems like an attempt to shield religions from criticism by performing ad hoc disavowals of anyone who commits a terrorist act. But this is irresponsible. You can’t raise someone in a faith, tell them the doctrines are literally true and must be obeyed, tell them that they must always be true to their faith, teach that they must sacrifice for the cause, and then cut them loose when they sacrifice their lives in a mistaken effort to promote their religious ends. Religions are responsible for the consequences of their doctrines.

I wish people in religions could honestly confront the possibility that they enable terrorism by promoting unquestioning faith as a virtue and holding out the hope of an eternal future of happiness if followers obey the commands of a god. But I suppose that’s too much to ask.

The McCarthy gene

30 November 2008 / / Comments Off on The McCarthy gene

An amazing read in the L.A. Times this morning about the genealogy of modern conservatism. It’s not about Goldwater; it’s about McCarthy.

In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn’t run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn’t likely to be expunged any time soon.
…
McCarthyism is usually considered a virulent form of Red-baiting and character assassination. But it is much more than that. As historian Richard Hofstadter described it in his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” McCarthyism is a way to build support by playing on the anxieties of Americans, actively convincing them of danger and conspiracy even where these don’t exist.

So for McCarthy, it was ‘Commies!’ For Nixon, it was ‘Hippies!’ Or perhaps ‘Hippie commies!’ And at various times the scapegoat group has been blacks (Willie Horton and others), gays (destroying the family), women (uppity), and of course liberals liberals liberals. Demonisation has turned out to be a very successful electoral strategy, which is why the GOP is having such a tough time reeling in its McCarthyish habits.

Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That’s why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama’s relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.

Read the rest.

Would they rather win elections or go to heaven?

19 November 2008 / / 1 Comment

Can you throw God under a bus so big that he can’t lift it?

Giving Up on God

By Kathleen Parker

Wednesday, November 19, 2008; 12:00 AM

As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

I’m bathing in holy water as I type.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth — as long as we’re setting ourselves free — is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

I think she’s figured it out. I don’t envy her email inbox though. It will soon be scorched with the rantings of the True Believers, who really seem to think that overreach is impossible if it’s in the service of the Sky Fairy.

Since the 80s, the GOP has angled for the votes of the Christian Right, and now they’re having trouble separating themselves from the delusion-prone. It’s a lose-lose for them.

Option 1: Continue to play to the Christianist right, and alienate even more moderate voters and intellectual conservatives until the Republican Party really is a tiny regional faction, or

Option 2: Cut the Christianists loose in an effort to move center-ward. They won’t be happy about that, and they don’t have to stay with the GOP. Watch as some of them move ever farther into extremist country. The Constitution Party (or worse) will experience an influx, and the Republican Party will shrink.

Too bad for them that the trouble centers around an all-powerful being whose will must be guessed at. That makes this conflict both high-stakes and unresolvable. An explosive combination.

Kerry’s 2004 loss: Not all bad

17 November 2008 / / Comments Off on Kerry’s 2004 loss: Not all bad

I’ve been thinking this for a while now:

After the 2004 presidential election Democrats were crushed. Four more years of George W. Bush seemed unthinkable, disastrous. But now that the Obama era is beginning, Democrats should view John Kerry’s defeat as something else entirely: the luckiest break the party has caught since at least the 1964 election

Yes, the nation and its people suffered mightily under Bush. People died as a result (Iraq, Katrina). But imagine the alternative. Kerry wins, and If anything then goes wrong, for the next 20 years we have to hear about how everything’s Kerry’s fault. We coulda won Iraq if it wernt fer Kerry. Economic meltdown? Kerry’s fault. Yadda yadda. (Okay, so they’ll still blame some Democrat. But now they have to go all the way back to Clinton, which is obviously reaching.) As it happened, the Republicans had to fully own the mess, and it’s destroyed the brand. Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.

Perhaps Prop 8 could be seen the same way. (No, I’m not even close to done with that issue.) The theocrats overreached, and people are now horrified. They’re realising that godbots can do some real damage to freedoms we enjoy, and they’re increasingly standing with gay people. Like the 2004 election, it really stung. But we won’t forget that sting, and we’ll make sure that Prop 8 and the like were the last victories of their kind.

How things look from Wingnuttia

10 November 2008 / / 2 Comments

I’m a liberal, so I try to see things from the other guy’s perspective. (I know, it’s probably not fixable. Useful anyway.) But even I’m having trouble digging down to the mindset that would enable a rational human to think the things they’re thinking in Rightistan these days.

They think Sarah’s tops.

They really don’t think she was a drag on the ticket at all.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Republican voters say Alaska Governor Sarah Palin helped John McCain’s bid for the presidency, even as news reports surface that some McCain staffers think she was a liability.

Only 20% of GOP voters say Palin hurt the party’s ticket, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Six percent (6%) say she had no impact, and five percent (5%) are undecided.

Lots of chatter about Palin running in 2012, too. Man, I hope that works out for her. She’d be popular with the know-nothing Christian base, and precisely no one else. It could be the opportunity to extinguish the Republican Party for good.

Republicans lost because they weren’t conservative enough.

Please, let this meme take.

Moderates to blame for GOP losses, conservative leader says

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council told CNN that conservatives need to take back control of the GOP if the party is to return to its winning ways.

Normally as a campaign goes on, you need to play to the center to attract the moderate voters. The 2004 elections were a bit anomalous, in my view. It was the one time when playing to the base was more successful than playing to the center, probably because the uncertainty of the Iraq war kept enough voters holding to the status quo. McCain’s campaign team apparently thought this was going to be a pattern, but no. People like Perkins either don’t realise this, or they’re just trying to grab some power within their party. It’s not a good long-term strategy.

The gay marriage issue is a winner

Given the success of Prop 8, I can see where this is coming from:

GOP leader: Rebuild party based on ‘sanctity of marriage’

When asked by Chris Wallace what “conservative solutions” the GOP would bring to their current minority-party status, Pence said social issues like “the sanctity of marriage” will remain the backbone of the Republican platform.

“You build those conservative solutions, Chris, on the same time-honored principles of limited government, a belief in free markets, in the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage,” Pence said.

The Indiana representative cited the ballot measures against gay marriage that passed on Election Day as evidence of the continuing presence of conservative values.

Okay, short-term I can understand this. Long-term, it’s got no future. It will look worse and worse as younger voters with more liberal social values come down the pike. Obama’s win in the election happened in spite of the GOP throwing up all this culture war stuff. That kind of stuff is so 90’s. (Or else the economy took precedence, and the culture war b.s. will work again when things improve. I hope the former.)

Evolutionarily, this is an interesting time for right-wing watching. They’re generating memes at a furious rate, and it’ll be interesting to see whose version of the Republican future will win. But these memes are losers. If they settle on them, Democratic leadership will likely continue uninterrupted.

The Fundy Club

8 November 2008 / / 1 Comment

Alarik from comments raised an issue I’ve been thinking about quite a bit.

The cynic in me thinks that this was less about the Church defending its principles and more about convincing the rest of the religious right that we’re on their team.

I’ve been hearing this from quite a number of people, both members and non. Also frequently heard: “Evangelical Christians can’t stand the Mormons, so why are the Mormons knocking themselves out for their approval?”

I must admit, this is the way it comes off. But on reflection, I’m taking an ever-so-slightly different view. I don’t think the LDS Church is itching to get into the Fundy Club. I think they’re going to the wall on the gay thing mostly because they want to, and less because they think the Talebangelicals want them to.

I think they’ve seen what American evangelical Christians have been able to do in American politics, and they’d like a little of that action themselves. (The priest class always wants to expand their power, remember.) I think they’re willing to engage in temporary ad hoc alliances toward that end. But I think they’d be just as happy to have the power without having to deal with other Christian groups at all.

Fundies have no love for the Mormons? That’s true, but then again that feeling is mutual. Doctrinally the LDS Church couldn’t care less about impressing them. The Mormons view themselves as the embodiment of the Lord’s will in (these) the latter-days, and they’re equally certain that the evangelical Christians are Not. However, the Religious Right has really shown the Mormons the way — emboldened them, you could say. The Mormons are happy to pull techniques from their playbook, but they’re not looking for a long-term political merger.

So I’m thinking this is less about joining the Fundy Club, and more about getting political power on their own terms, plus making the kinds of changes they want to have happen. If they have to deal with other Christians, they will, but I don’t see it as a priority.

This is just my opinion from way over here. I’m only basing it on my subjective impressions of Mormon ideas about the other Christian churches. Anybody got better instincts than I do?

Proposition 8: Just getting started

7 November 2008 / / 7 Comments

Before the elections, a group called the Courage Campaign Issues Committee ran this ad against California’s Proposition 8.

It copped a bit of flack. Some god-soaked loon jumped up and down, said it was an example of ‘religious bigotry and intolerance’, and so on. I don’t know — I liked the ad, maybe a bit over the top.

But now, after the passage of Prop 8, can anyone tell me that that isn’t exactly what happened? A religion pumped money into an effort to strip rights from a group of people, and it worked. Why wouldn’t they try it? It was a win-win for the LDS Church. Prop 8 passes, they get what they want. Prop 8 loses, they get to pretend it’s the end of days, the world’s getting wickeder, and the fambly’s under attack, which brings in the easily frightened.

Now I think it’s fine for a religion to require or prohibit certain behaviours for its membership — that is, for adults who have chosen to belong to that religion, and I do not include children in this group. But when they try to force non-members to live by their rules, they’ve overstepped. And that’s what’s happened in California.

The argument from the religious right — not that they ever had a coherent argument against gay marriage — was that gay marriage would affect straight marriage. Make it worth less, devalue it somehow. That argument was a furphy, of course, but strange to say, the converse actually seems true. I heard a saying once: When one is not free, I am not free. I don’t know about that, but today it feels like: if someone’s relationship is devalued, mine is devalued. It’s strange, but it feels like my relationship with Ms Perfect is somehow the lesser for Prop 8’s passage. Maybe someday we’ll get married, but that’s only an option because we’re straight. Then again, maybe some religious group will intervene to stop us and enough voters will agree. That’s the world we live in now.

That’s why I think the last line of the ad is the most telling: “What shall we ban next?” Anything that conflicts with their delicate sensibilities, that’s what. Abortions? Why not go all the way and make it birth control? Or alcohol? Hey, what about Asian restaurants? You never did like Asian food, did you, Elder?

2008 election thread

5 November 2008 / / 16 Comments

It’s tomorrow in Australia, so I don’t need to stay up late for an election live-blog.

10:43 am
What’s up with Virginia?
What’s up with North Carolina? the other way?

10:45 am
When you listen to electoral coverage, and someone says that America needs ‘a new direction’, I think it’s funny to imagine that they’re saying ‘a nude erection’. Try it.

11:00 am
More polls closing.
Exciting to watch the blue states coming up.
North Dakota for McCain. There goes my prediction. I thought it would hold some surprises, but no.
But they’re not projecting Arizona! Would Arizona too much to ask?

11:15 am
Pennsylvania: I heart u.
Okay, Virginia’s coming back.
Indiana’s doing interesting things.

11:17 am
The Australian TV analysts are being far more candid than the US anchors are willing to be (or ought to be). Here they’re calling it a done deal for Obama.

11:27 am
Ohio is called for Obama. I’d say that’s a done deal. I just want Florida to go for Obama, just to get the trifecta.

11:27 am
Man, Virginia’s close, but it’s coming along. I wish Missouri’d do a flip.

12:51 pm
Florida’s looking great! At this point, it’s all about crushing their spirits.

12:55 pm
Could the Australian TV people please stop calling it the Democrat Party, kthxbai.

1:00 pm
I seriously have tears in my eyes watching everyone in Grant Park. Everyone’s so happy. The long nightmare is almost over. This is history, and it’s happening right now, and I’m so proud to be an American this day.

1:12 pm
At this point, it’s all cleanup. Arizona’s not going to go blue. Missouri probably not either. Less than I was hoping, but a win’s a win.

1:19 pm
If I never hear McCain say “My friends” again…

I thought only speakers of British English said “an historic occasion”.

1:23 pm
McCain’s giving a nice speech. Sounds like he’s having trouble controlling the crowd, which isn’t surprising given the hysterical hyping up he gave them the last four weeks. It doesn’t help that he’s a bit tone-deaf on the applause lines. But this can’t be an easy speech to give, and he’s striking the right notes.

Sarah Palin’s an ‘impressive new voice’ in the GOP? No, she’s the voice of the Christian Right, which we’ve been hearing for 20 years. And we’re not rid of them yet.

Now McCain has to live with what he became during this campaign.

1:29 pm
No on Arizona, no on Missouri, but look at Indiana. That’d be a nice cherry on the cake.

1:33 pm
Nervous about North Carolina. I really want that to go over the line.

Now I’m looking at the Senate races. And Prop 8 is being counted now.

1:37 pm
Oh, man. Franken’s ahead just a whisker.

1:42 pm
This is a day for dancing on couches. That’s what I did in ’92 when Clinton won. Couch dance. What a feeling.

1:44 pm
What about Montana? It’s early, but I’d love to see it happen.

2:05
Obama just exudes this aura of cool. Isn’t he suave up there on stage?
You have to hand it to the campaign team. They called it all the way along.

Not a lot gets by them.

31 October 2008 / / Comments Off on Not a lot gets by them.

You know why I read the New York Times? For the interesting little-known facts they dig up.

The survey suggested that Mr. Obama’s candidacy — if elected, he would be the first black president — has changed some perceptions of race in America.

Huh. Izzat right. How bout that.

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