Shame

Is there...has there ever been?...a more nauseating politician on the national scene than Joseph Lieberman?

I doubt it.

Men like this are the catalysts behind the decline and fall of the country where I was born.

Shame on this man.

Shame.

History outdoes parody

So in the end, it would appear that the Honduran "business class" (the euphemism most commonly used in the corporate press) has succeeded in simply removing an inconvenient president - inconvenient because he had an attack of scruples and social solidarity. Granted, it wasn't like the good old days, when such a leader would simply be killed, but effective in the long run. Send the military to carry the man out of the country in his pajamas, refuse to seriously negotiate with him or his representatives, a bit of the old "mano duro" applied to his supporters, and then a sham election that supposedly "brings back democracy". Impressive.

More impressive still was the Obama administration's (and State Department's) handling of the issue. Not heavy-handedly pro-coup as in the past...no, now we are supposedly in a new epoch. But even with mild pressure from Washington, the coup organizers would have had to yield. The Administration's utterly disingenuous response? - "you call the US imperialistic all these years, and now you want us to intervene in the internal politics of a sovereign nation...this is a problem for the Hondurans".

Right. For one of the first times in history, Washington has a chance to truly and effectively apply pressure to "defend democracy" in Latin America, and they are suddenly overwhelmed with concern for a nation's sovereignty.

And so does history once again outdo parody. The great "defender of democracy", the country that cynically and falsely employed that rationale for decades in support of tyranny, suddenly loses its taste for democracy-defending when the use of such a term could legitimately be applied. And this under Obama.

¡Hay que joderse!

A few years have passed now since the wave of anti-religious books written by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, et. al. appeared. Those works were guaranteed to stir up a sizable reaction - and indeed they have. In fact, the media is now trending towards the religious faith defenders - most of whom, curiously, do not seem to be conservative religious reactionaries. In general, rather, they seem to fall into the politically moderate-to-progressive camp, and may range from left-wing Christians to "tolerant" agnostics. All seem to conclude that Dawkins and the others offer simple, reductionist arguments, and many seem to be miffed by the atheists' apparent disrespect for people of faith. Given that "respect for people's faith" is a well-embedded part of what is considered to be "acceptable discourse" (except when that faith leads people to take out tall buildings), the media are naturally drawn to these "defenders of faith".

Now it is time for people of reason to respond. I would like to go into this in more detail in the future. For now, I'd like to quote a fellow named Troy Jollimore, from a book review on Truthdig: "In her more radical mode, Armstrong wants to preserve religious talk from questions of truth—in our ordinary sense of “truth”—by draining them of content. But when we lose content we do not only lose truth, we lose meaning as well. The apophatic retort to the skeptic, then, seems to reduce to: “You don’t know what you’re talking about—indeed, I don’t even know what I’m talking about. So how dare you contradict me!”

Here he is referring to the tired argument that religious concepts are simply beyond our understanding - humans cannot grasp the ways of God - that faith defenders offer when confronting reasonable challenges to the inconsistencies and absurdities abounding in all the major faiths. Thus, Dawkins etc. are "simplifying" the issue by ignoring the ineffable nature of the subject. One cannot deny what one cannot understand.

One is tempted to bang one's head against the wall when confronting such claims. That's why I find Jollimore's words so enjoyable...