Category: | index pages:
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Jon Tevlin | ||
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Star Tribune, June 15, 2011 |
Politics used to be the art of compromise, but it has become the art of taking an opponents argument out of context. | Topic: |
text checked (see note) June 2011 |
Ahmed Tharwat | ||
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Shouting fire in the global theater
published in the Star Tribune September 20, 2012 |
In the Muslim world, when people get angry at America, they burn American flags and attack embassies. But when Americans get angry with Muslims, they burn Qurans and attack mosques which tells you that Americans are more religiously fundamentalist than Muslims. There are more attacks on mosques in America alone than attacks on American embassies around the globe. | Compare to: |
But to put the angry Muslim reaction in perspective: In the light of the freedom-of-expression issue that the West is holding as an axe over Muslims heads, what about the freedom of expression of an Arab to wear Arabic Muslims frustration is increased by the fact that they believe in and respect Christian and Jewish prophets, while their prophet doesnt get the same respect. They cant retaliate with just an insulting film. | ||
text checked (see note) Oct 2012 |
Tom Toles
additional category: politics | ||
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May 9, 2003
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Politicians! Losing sleep? It could be all that lobbyist money stuffed in your mattress! Increased reliance on old-fashioned hard money can create pressure points that can misalign your spine. But new lower-court-recommended unlimited soft money can help your spine to disappear altogether! And here come the donors to get into bed with you. | Topic: |
David R. Weiss | ||
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Star Tribune, | In good Lutheran fashion we see sin as broken relationship, whether with God, our fellow humans or the world. Our understanding of what specifically constitutes sin has changed in every era. Ninety years ago at a good Lutheran elementary school my grandfathers left arm was literally tied to his desk to keep him from sinning by writing with the devils hand. There are a lot of specific behaviors that used to be seen as sins, but which we now realize dont break relationship with God or anyone else. We may not all agree on that list, but its a cheap shot to say that weve dismissed the whole notion of sin. | Topic: |
text checked (see note) Nov 2009 |
Brian Wernicke California Institute of Technology geologist (quoted) | |||
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from Grand Canyon, as old as dinosaurs?
by Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times |
published in the Star Tribune
| Science is a succession of funerals for ideas that have been proven wrong. | Topic: |
text checked (see note) Dec 2012 |
George Will | ||
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Civic life is looking a whole lot less civil,
from the Washington Post, |
Life has been called a series of habits disturbed by a few thoughts. Civil society is kept civil by certain habits of restraint. Inflammatory political ideas can overturn habits, sometimes for the better, usually not. But no discernible ideas, at least none that are more than appetites tarted up as ideas, account for the vandalism by political over-reachers of both parties. Each vandal seems to think that his or her passions are their own excuse for existing. As Santayana said, such thinking is the defining trait of barbarians. | Topic: |
text below checked (see note) when added | ||
Woodwards book is hardly a revelation,
from the Washington Post, | Actually, government is people, and not a random slice of the population. Those at governments pinnacle generally are strong-willed, ambitious, competitive, opinionated and have agendas about which they care deeply. That is why they are there. And why almost any administration, carefully scrutinized, looks much like a teaspoon of pond water viewed under a microscope a teeming, disorderly maelstrom of sometimes rival life forms. | Topic: |
You cant just throw money at your problems,
from the Washington Post, |
Sins can be such fun. Of the seven supposedly deadly ones, only envy does not give the sinner at least momentary pleasure. And an eighth, schadenfreude enjoyment of other persons misfortunes is almost the national pastime. Speaking of baseball [...] | Topic: |
Central Park Five: Not wilding bewildering
from the Washington Post, |
Journalism, like almost every other profession relevant to this case, did not earn any honors. Until now. The only solace to be derived from this sad story is that it now is a story memorably told. A societys justice system can improve as a result of lurches into officially administered injustice. The dialectic of injustice, then revulsion, then reform often requires the presentation of sympathetic victims to a large audience, which The Central Park Five does. Finally, this recounting of a multifaceted but, fortunately, not fatal failure of the criminal-justice system buttresses the conservative case against the death penalty: Its finality leaves no room for rectifying mistakes, but it is a government program, so ... | Topics: |
Stephen B. Young | ||
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The mosque near ground zero: A judgment call,
Star Tribune [one of a pair of articles under that title] |
The imam is Feisal Abdul Rauf. His book is Whats Right with Islam is Whats Right with America. | |
The imam believes that the Quran teaches that God has only two requests of us: to love only God with all our heart and soul and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. | Topic: | |
Looking back on Muslim history, the imam writes (page 31) that practices such as loss of the rule of law and an independent judiciary, punishing apostasy with death, slavery, and the mistreatment and oppression of women come from a pre-Islamic Arab polytheistic culture called jahili under the Umayyad family of rulers after the death of the Prophet Mohammed. The imam holds that Mohammeds core teachings are to freely choose to obey Gods will; to seek Gods truth with your mind, and to love God above all else (page 47). How is this un-American? | ||
Survival of the fittest: The evolution of an idea
Star Tribune |
Social Darwinism never won much acclaim in England. But in the United States, after the Civil War, Spencers thought merged with American Calvinism, adding religious zeal and the doctrine of predestination to a secular program of limited government and maximum market freedom. By 1900, Social Darwinism had become a powerful cultural and political force in the United States. It was the comforting social vision of the Gilded Age of robber barons and great inequality of wealth, touted famously by Andrew Carnegie. In 1883 Yale Professor William Graham Sumner popularized Spencers thinking. [...] Sumner thundered that meddlesome government is only a scheme for making injustice prevail in human society by reversing the distribution of rewards and punishments between those who have done their duty and those who have not. From the post-Civil War American Calvinist perspective, winners were seen as the chosen of God and losers were those whom God had forsaken for their sin and weak character. Since a just God was believed to control destiny, one could win or lose only depending to the degree one had received Gods grace and favors. | Topic: |
There was also an ethnic/racial side to Social Darwinism that must not be forgotten, a side perhaps not intended by Spencer but a logical extension of his thought nevertheless. This ethnic discrimination presumed a perpetual struggle for survival among ethnic groups and peoples. Just as there was to be a hierarchy of winners among individuals to enjoy Gods favors, so too were some races destined to be superior to others thanks to their intelligence, discipline, resolve and hard work and closeness to the Protestant Christian God. | Topic: | |
Nanny state
Star Tribune |
Neither the nanny state nor social Darwinism had anything to do with the American founding. Neither is in our Constitution. Each is a late arrival to our politics. | |
Rousseau sought to explain why most people belong to what we might call the 99 percent and not the 1 percent. His answer was: Its not our fault. They did it to us! [...] Rousseau wrote on behalf of those dependent on the great and the powerful, those who were marginal, despised, weak, different, vulnerable all those who were in chains. He recommended two strategies to free shackled humanity: First, he claimed that private property was at the root of all social constraints. Therefore, we need to loosen the claims of property. As capitalist industrialization grew during the opening decades of the 19th century, concerns spread about those not well-served the workers in the early factories. The application of Rousseau to capitalism produced the Old Left of socialists, communists, and the free trade union movement, all focused on helping workers break their free-market economic fetters. | ||
Second, Rousseau argued forcefully that human beings in their original unsocialized, uncivilized state are natural paragons who become corrupted by social conventions. These should be discarded so that we can become our best free of cultural repression. [...] Asserting that each of us naturally is entitled to a portion of justice in life, Russeau gave birth to entitlement politics. He created a new category of rights, what legal scholars call negative rights. Rousseaus negative rights are claims on outcomes that our own powers and abilities are insufficient to secure for us. Rights to education, health care, a living wage, retirement income, vacations, parental leave, etc., are thus negative rights. It is the responsibility of others to provide them for us. Its life as free lunch. For all his vivid imagination, Rousseau failed to foresee two negative consequences: encouraging free riding on what other provide for us, and increasing the costs to society of personal irresponsibility (precisely because its private cost to the feckless individual has been reduced). Rousseau imagined into being the nanny state. | ||
In 1972, the Democratic Party under George McGovern decisively became the party of inclusive causes, of taking care of those who were (or felt) marginalized, of recognizing negative rights the party of bigger government and higher taxes, opposed to social Darwinism in any form. Feeling culturally threatened by all this, Calvinist evangelicals and fundamentalists then entered politics through the Republican Party, which was simultaneously reaching out to white Southerners who had their own prejudices to protect now that official segregation was over and done with. Thus, soical Darwinism renewed its march to national power as America split more and more into antagonistic tribes the militant right and the self-righteous left. We have now lost the comprehensive vision of our founders, and no one has yet appeared who can save us from our self-indulgent divisiveness. | ||
text checked (see note) Aug 2010; Jul 2012 |
Background graphic copyright © 2003 by Hal Keen