Fascist Dictatorship Imminent !!!

With Obama, fear of a totalitarian regime is running hot! Paranoid, right-wing alarmists are sounding the clarion:

"We are seeing the biggest power grab by politicians in American history... the potential to basically create the equivalent of a dictatorship... Look, it absolutely moves it towards a political dictatorship."

Echos can be heard right here...

"...the process to turn the U.S. into a totalitarian state is accelerating under our new comrade Obama..."

The new world order needs "boots on the ground" and "dirty hands" to carry out its dirty work! Who will be the storm troopers of the new regime? Vegans? Greens? Naw...

From CNN:

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The religious group most likely to say torture is never justified was Protestant denominations -- such as Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians -- categorized as "mainline" Protestants, in contrast to evangelicals. Just over three in 10 of them said torture is never justified. A quarter of the religiously unaffiliated said the same, compared with two in 10 white non-Hispanic Catholics and one in eight evangelicals.

Kevin Drum gets it and succinctly presents it:

When the subject has anything to do with sex, the right in America is the party of moral absolutes. We know what's right, we know what's wrong, and even if there's a price to pay we can't shirk our responsibility to set a proper example and do the right thing.

But when the subject is torture, suddenly it's all about carefully weighing the costs and benefits. Having an honest debate about how far we should go to protect ourselves. Understanding the context of what happened. It's just not possible to flatly say that waterboarding and sleep deprivation and stress positions are barbarisms unfit for use by a civilized country. It's much more complex than that.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

The religious right, paranoid about the Obama Nation, but ambivalent about torture, are the perfect storm troopers - they constitute one of the strongest demographics amongst the "authoritarian followers" personality type.

Dr. Bob Altemeyer, in his on-line book The Authoritarians, identifies two personality types: the more or less docile, passive authoritarian follower and the more or less outgoing, aggressive authoritarian leader. These two are very distinct and separate personalities, but were meant for each other. The follower type, individually a rather nice guy or gal, has a strong need to become absorbed into a group identity and to serve the group with unquestioning loyalty. The leader type tends to be a sociopath who has a strong need for power and dominance regardless what it takes to achieve it . A marriage made in heaven!

And heaven has something to do with it. In America there is a very strong correlation between the authoritarian follower personality type and fundamentalist religious ideology. This is not a necessary relationship, since the same personality dynamic can find expression in extremist left-wing, secular ideologies also. But here in America, at this time, it tends to be expressed in the phenomenon of right-wing fundamentalist political activism.

Is it really Obama we have to fear? Or is it the fear-mongers themselves?

http://notes-from-offcenter.com/2009/04/23/neo-conservative-absurdity/
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/30/religion.torture/index.html
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/04/moral-relativism
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

Free Market Fakes End Looting, Illegal Trafficking

Illegal trafficking in looted cultural artifacts is a serious problem - if you are an archeologist. Even if the artifact ends up in a museum where it is displayed and can be studied, looted artifacts basically loose all of their scientific value simply by being removed from the site. In situ they can be related to their physical and cultural context, and increase our understanding and appreciation for our common human origins. Ripped off, each is an isolated aesthetic object of no great scientific or cultural value - just home decor.

The motive for looting is profit. Archaeologists are understandably against this "free market" activity. Every issue of Archaeology magazine contains one or more articles educating the public about the harm illegal trafficking in looted artifacts does to our cultural heritage and advocating for stricter laws and greater enforcement.

Since this is a "free market" activity, the emergence of cheep, popular, transnational electronic commerce such as eBay was experienced by the archaeological community as a "collective nightmare", according to Charles Stanish, writing in Archaeology. Like drug smuggling, the middle men, who take the legal risk, have the connections, and put together the deal makes the profit. The looter, like the coca farmer, is at subsistence level. Each step along the line adds huge costs. While this trade was raveled by archeologist, for practical purposes it was confined largely to a few very high-end items or to low-end and localized flee markets.

But with the advent of eBay, the fear was that the middle man would be eliminated, looting would become more profitable for the actual looter, and the race would be on to hunt down and strip cultural sites of their artifacts - and their meaning and value to us all.

But the law of unintended consequences - or in this case, unforeseen consequences - took over. The looters found it a lot easier to market the crappy home made junk they had been selling to eco-tourists outside the cultural sites for years than to go out into the night looking for the real thing. Like the rube who buys a "hot" "gold" necklace on the street in New York, the eBay suckers snap up the fakes thinking they are getting the real, and illegal, deal. Since they are ripping off the touristas, not their fellow citizens, the authorities don't have the time to go after them, making it safe.The market for "truthy" artifacts not only keeps the looters from going after the real thing, they make more money and they are able to employ far more of their friends and relatives.

The unforeseen consequences don't stop there! Just as bad money drives out good, fake artifacts overwhelm the genuine articles. The few buyers who are discerning enough to identify and want the real thing now have a harder time figuring out what is real and what is not. Just as trust between buyer and seller is established by regulation in the legitimate marketplace, trust is impossible in the rapidly expanding, unregulated gray market. It is no longer possible for anyone other than an expert to tell what is and what isn't real, and it is no longer profitable for experts to help the collector out.

Yes, the dishonesty and deception of the free, unregulated market can serve a useful social purpose! My idea for the perfect archeological fake: Precolumbian Bongs! What a concept! See you on e-bay.

From the report Forging Ahead, or how I learned to stop worrying and love eBay by Charles Stanish published in Archaeology, May/June 2009.

The Death of a Dysfunctional Dogma

Alan Wolfe maintains, in The Future of Liberalism, that Hurricane Katrina has exposed the antistatism advocated by conservatives (and, need I add, libertarians) is a dysfunctional dogma. It tested the thesis, one of antistatism's central tenets, that private charities and small scale local action are best suited to delivering relief and supporting communities.

The disaster of conservatism's disaster response should be "viewed as a decisive event in the history of political philosophy," he writes. After Katrina, the relevant question is no longer whether or not we need strong government institutions, but how to best and most effectively utilize their power wisely.

In contratast to this dysfunctioanl dogma, Liberalism rejects ideology and may be thought of as "a set of dispositions" which include a strong preference for liberty and equality, and a realism that relies on rational deliberation and actual governance. By denying the reality of its abject failure, by clinging to dogma and ideology, conservatives have consigned themselves to long-term irrelevance, the proverbial dust-bin of history. The future belongs to liberalism.

Sayonara conservatism. Hasta la vista, baby.

From a review by Theo Anderson of Alan Wolfe's The Future of Liberalism, Knopf, 325 pp, $25.95. Review published in The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2009, p 110

View The Future of Libralism on Amazon.com