Skepticism and Sociopathy (on watching Law & Order reruns in the snow)

Last year, the Christian philosopher Dallas Willard died. In a lecture not long before his death, he discussed skepticism. The lecture was actually entitled What is Skepticism Good For? He opened the lecture by answering his own question with admirable brevity. Skepticism, Willard said, does two good and important things: (1) It undermines claims to illegitimate authority, and (2) it stimulates inquiry.

Gay Boy Scouts, or Macho Militarist Moralism is for Everyone

Well, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) have officially changed their policy prohibiting membership to openly gay boy scouts (which assumes, I suppose, that all boys between the ages of 10 1/2 years old and 18 years old have complete and final "sexual orientations").

I know this is being lauded by gay rights activists, and I am more than familiar with the rationale, given that I have closely followed the same struggle for full inclusion into the armed forces during and after a career in the Army. That's not what's on my mind today, however . . . the rationale for fighting for full entry into either the BSA or the United States Armed Forces. I'm more interested in what was "won" for those excluded and how that gets set aside from the advocacy for or opposition to full inclusion in both.

duck dudes, tolerance, and trip wires

Been away for a while, as all five of you who read this blog may have noted.

I'm writing a book. A kind-hearted publisher decided to give me a shot at a book on gender, war, and Christianity. I was so excited at the prospect that I made crazy promises, like the one to deliver a manuscript (which is running at around 600 pages - or 450 in real book pages) by the Ides of March 2014.  Nuts, I know, but sometimes deadline discipline is a Good Thing with someone who loves procrastination as much as I do. So that is where I've been . . . researching, writing, rewriting, re-researching, and when the neurons are fried, gazing blankly out at the bird feeders, reading crime novels, and watching television.

Sent a draft in to my editor a few days ago, and I've come up for air. When I came up, there was this media controversy about a really awful bit of "reality" TV (I know, I know . . . redundant!) called Duck Dynasty, which I only know anything about because our son made me watch it one night when we were visiting him in North Carolina like four months ago - way before the latest dust-up (which has consumed more ink and bandwidth than all that silliness about economic collapse, the surveillance state, climate change, mass extinction, and war).

Even then, the program was painfully stupid and offensive, though it hadn't yet hit the dual trip wire of homophobia and the hoary white Southern historical revision of race relations (of happy Negroes in the age of Jim Crow).

Believe me, I understand these trip wires, and I am grateful that they exist in the wake of decades long struggles by the victims of this bullshit to make them worthy of outrage. It means we have learned something as a culture, even if we haven't learned it all the way yet. The controversy demonstrates exactly this state of incomplete learning; but the good news is, these particular kinds of blanket dismissals of people who have had the hell beat out of them - figuratively and literally - are not Just Okay.

more on 9-11

Well, that last post touched a few nerves!  About conspiracy theories surrounding 9-11.  My point was not to debate the significance of various bits of evidence, some real some nonsense, that inevitably come up over the question of whether operatives in the US government planned the attacks.  That never goes anywhere except for some particularly passionate devotees of the US-responsibility hypothesis who - when anyone remains unconvinced - then flood you with internet articles written or heavily cited by other 9-11 conspiracists.

9-11 - a roaming reflection

Nothing comes from nothing.

Has it been 12 years?

I remember where I was when Kennedy was killed; and I remember where I was when I heard about the September 11, 2001 attacks.  I need to make confessions.

Reflections on Beck's "Unclean"

St. Catherine of Sienna, when she felt revulsion from the wounds she was tending bitterly reproached herself.  Sound hygiene was incompatible with charity, so she deliberatley drank a bowl of puss.

-Mary Douglas

Some years back, I was writing quite a lot about gendered power and something called "exterminism," a term I stole from Mark Jones, a Welsh socialist I befriended on the internet.  In looking at both of these topics, my editor for Sex & War, De Clarke, came up with the term "taint."  In association with gender, taint works in specific ways that reinforced the boundaries between men and women and the power gradient along that boundary - and this phenomenon could be seen throughout society and across time in other areas of endeavor as well.

Taint is that invisible pollution that attached to various things - fractal-like - at differing scales:  "cooties" on the playground, white women with black men (a biggie in the white South), plants that are "weeds," imaginary "germs," or even whole peoples (Jews compared to vermin by Nazis).  In each case, and especially in the grown-up cases, this state of pollution was irremediable, and the final solution (pun intended) was extermination.  Exterminate the germs, the bugs, the weeds, the vermin-people.  And exterminism is the willingness to accept mass extermination as a solution, which Mark used to call "the final stage of imperialism."

Penile Politics Redux

But Jesus immediately said to them: "Take courage! It is I. Don't be afraid."
  -Matthew 14:27

A few years ago I blogged a piece called "Penile Politics" on my old site, Feral Scholar.  Can't link it right now, because the site is trashed, but De Clarke is trying to rescue our old work there.

The rant was during the Bush era, and it was about all the ways that domination-masculinity (related to the weaponized phallus and "balls" as a synonym for courage) shows up in political discourse, and therefore in political decision-making, usually with really bad consequences.  Well... it's back.  No surprise there.  Modern patriarchy is more and more about who has the biggest gun.