In an older article at Bush Greenwatch, word is we have a root cause for why the Greens in America are losing to the Bush Brigade: Political and social change often comes down to a war of words. And according to a prominent cognitive linguist from California, anti-environmental forces have been winning that war because progressives don’t know how to talk about issues. So it’s not because the American public is largely pig-ignorant enough to believe that Darwinian evolution is “just a theory” or, worse, “false”? It’s not just because activity on both sides of the partisan political divide is …

One of the things that fascinates me about conspiracy theories is how the idea of mass false consciousness is all cool and wonderful when it’s in a movie or a book, when it encompasses a huge magical, mystical, or hypertechnological organization or force that nobody knows about. But of course, when you present someone with arguably real cases of false consciousness, the standard reaction is annoyance, backlash, and insistence on the rational, sensible wisdom of the consumer. People will defend freedom of choice even when the choices are more limited, more demonstrably unhealthy that other alternatives, and more costly than …

One of the things I’ve occasionally wondered about myself has finally turned up in an article on gay marriage. Actually, no, it’s in a review of a same-sex wedding planner book. The issue is this: Maybe we only think we want same-sex marriage. Perhaps all we really want are same-sex weddings. I don’t necessarily fault gays in North America for accepting the essentially right-wing value system that governs social relationships in that society: after, I’m not anti-marriage, and I don’t think gays necessarily would have to be either. But it does signal that gay culture is vying to escape the …

Today in the office it came up, though I can’t at the moment remember how, that I happened to be in broad—though qualified—agreement with an idea that is apparently considered common sense among a certain faction of liberals in America: that sports generally serve as a distraction from things that matter in one’s life. Chomsky has outright said this (stated it, for example, in an interview included in the documentary Manufacturing Consent), but of course Chomsky is one of those people I both admire and have issues with. In any case, I knew in stating my belief that there is some …

I came back to the office to find the web browser opened to this article, so I went on ahead and read it. Anyone who actually believes that Bush & co. are humanitarians is on more drugs than your average touring funk band, if you’ll pardon a theft from a dead comedian. (Sorry, Bill Hicks.) Pitching a little against AIDS—and it is a little, when you’re still protecting drug companies’ profits—doesn’t undo one’s explicit lying in order to start a war in a country basically unrelated to the faction that attacked you. If you’re a lying, profiteering warmonger, you’re unable …

Well, thank God at least that the 2004 election was free from bullshit and fraud and fuckups. You know, if you can put people on the moon, you can certainly pay people to design a voting machine that will work. If democracy were a sacred value in America, then it’d be far beyond states’ rights, it’d be beyond the petty infighting between parties. You’d have temples to democracy all over the country where people would go for elections. You’d have vote-tabulation machines running software that were free from the kinds of errors that undergrad software-design courses teach even mediocre students …

As almost everyone must know by the time he or she arrives at this lowly website, Bush is in for another 4 years. The only good news I could find looking at the election was that it can only be 4 years, possible coups aside. My friend Marvin has more to say about that in terms of good news and bad news, though, and his words are at least encouraging to those of us who can’t understand how the nascent fascism of all things Bush didn’t irk the hell out of America. (And on that, another interesting recent post by …

These comments are now here very late, in repsonse to a post from September. Backlogs are like that. I’ve been reading the blog Katolik Shinja, by a Catholic fellow named Joshua who, like me, is living in Korea. Well, he’s often writing about all kinds of Catholic topics and I think he’s the most conservative Catholic I’ve ever come across, save one substitute teacher I met in high school. Well, recently he posted about gay marriage and “the Catholic perspective”, and I commented on his post and some of the comments he added to the post in response to some …