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It feels nice to be vindicated. About a month ago, I commented that: …Once the national debate has moved away from health care to financial regulation, job creation, and energy policy, Scott Brown will remain a Republican in a very Blue state. He will face largely the same dilemma that Landrieu, Nelson and Lincoln [...] A word to Keith Olbermann: Keith, I like you. I really enjoy your show. I think it’s a great shot-in-the-arm of liberal attitude and I think it’s necessary. Most nights, I’m pretty much right there with you. Tuesday night was different. Barack Obama, in order to improve the environment, wants to, among other things, build new nuclear power plants here in the United States. To that, I say, “Huzzah!” Excellent. Thank you. I don’t quite understand the “We won’t store it in Yucca Mountain which was designed for exactly that purpose,” bit of the policy, but okay, fine. But Keith, you you ridicule the idea. You seem scared of the idea. And for no good reason. This is one area where I have never understood the environmentalist position. You pointed to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but did you take the time to think about and research those two events. I don’t think you did. Continue reading… What is chalkblocking, you ask? Well, Rachel Maddow on Friday called for ideas for new terminology to replace the stiflingly boring “filibuster”. She has billed it as an effort to reinvigorate the somnambulant national conversation over the Senate’s inability to pass legislation: February 13th, 2010 | Tags: chalkblock, chalkblockers, filibuster, Lieberman, McConnell, Rachel Maddow, Senate, Snow, supermajority | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment It’s been a while since I really delved into purely philosophical waters here on Radical Rationalist and when that happens I start to get very self-conscious about using the adjective ‘radical’. Today I feel like the best way to remedy the feeling is to set out one of the two most radical (I think) philosophical positions I hold: that religion, in any guise, is innately immoral. There are several issues I want to deal with right at the start. The first is that in making this argument I refuse to use specific individuals or historical events. Too often, people in my position point to these kinds of specific examples in an effort to demonstrate the larger point. This approach is pointless and self-defeating. Pointless because specific examples are just that. They can easily be dismissed as the misapplication of whatever teaching that the event is being used to refute. Plus, under the best circumstances, it would only function to demonstrate the immorality of one specific doctrine, rather than the idea of religious faith as a whole. The tendency is self-defeating because any sufficiently large group of people or sufficiently long period of history will contain examples of people behaving badly. If I should point to the Crusades, my opponent could point to the French Revolution. If I point to Osama bin Laden, they can point to the Unabomber. That kind of back-and-forth bickering doesn’t move the debate at all, in any direction. Continue reading… |
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