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Spongy

As I was reading the article in my previous post, I noticed an ad for John Spong’s website. Reading “The last stand for intolerance” with a newspaper clip entitled “First Gay Bishop, Church Divided,” I had to check it out to get a glimpse of what the heretic is saying. Although the real meat of the site is hidden behind a subscription form, the front page pretty much sums it up. “The Authoritative Voice for Believers in Exile” would only be true if he wasn’t pandering to the mainstream, pseudoreligious members of the Episcopalian Church. Under praise, we have this:

“…Spong provides enlightened reading for people who no longer believe in the God of Sunday school and are looking for something else to give their lives meaning.”
– The San Francisco Chronicle
If you don’t believe in the God of Sunday school, what does that say about the teaching? What did Sunday school teach that is so wrong about God, and why were they permitted to continue teaching it? Unless, of course, the Sunday school was teaching about a God that promoted and maintained absolutes, such sin and right vs. wrong, good vs. evil. It would be much better to teach “the uncertainty of not knowing” (Living in Sin by Spong), than any kind of absolutes.

I also take issue with the way the site characterizes Spong’s writing and views. Can you see the problem with this statement?

… incisive, unabashed, invigorating, original and true insight …
How about “true”? Doesn’t that imply some kind of “Absolute,” that Spong can know and disseminate “the truth,” and everything else is wrong? Maybe he should “embrace the uncertainty of not knowing.”

The whole “A New Christianity for a New World” thing is just too big for me to address. I need to go to sleep in order to purge my brain of this inane belief system that he promotes.

Tags: Stupid people by uruloki
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Who’s a Liar?

Jack Shafer wrote an article for Slate yesterday in which he claims that leftists appropriated “a rhetorical trick from conservatives.” The trick is to call your opponents “liars.” Unfortunately, while Mr Shafer is correct in that both sides of the political debate use name-calling, he mistakes who exactly is calling who liars, and has been from the beginning.

Over the past decade, conservative TV and radio personalities—Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, et al.—have used variations on the liar-liar-pants-on-fire technique whenever they run into trouble or out of imagination to unhinge their ideological opponents. So, too, has fellow-traveler Bill O’Reilly, who dodges the conservative label. Liar-liar works magnificently against the TV rookie, the minor-league humanities professor blinking into the camera from a remote studio in the Midwest. But it can also give an emotional seizure to the media-savvy third-term congressman sitting in the studio with the host.
The problem is that conservatives don’t have to label their opponents liars, they do it to themselves. When confronted by hard facts, usually attached to a label such as Communist, they cannot do much more than sputter and try to dance around the issues. Anytime data appears to contradict their beliefs, they cannot refute the data and are reduced to attacking the purveyers of the message (latest example: global warming).
Mr. Shafer attempts to point out the truth in the left’s own books on lying (I will not link to those).
Franken, Conason, and Corn aren’t just ginning it up. They accurately document the right’s most egregious lies and acts of hypocrisy. They uncover Coulter’s loony untruths, dissect President Bush’s tax cut claims, and rebuke him for his insincere promise to lead a more decorous political debate. If you ever doubted the GOP’s fondness for “crony capitalism” or its pork-barrel duplicity, you’ll find the complete story here. And so on.
Probably the biggest issue I have with that is the GOP is only relatively conservative. Both political parties only survive on their “pork-barrel duplicity,” if they attempted anything else, their constituients wouldn’t vote for them. As an acquaintence I had said, “I voted for Hillary because I know she will get the most money from the Federal government for my state.” Mr. Shafer does have one point that I do agree on:
The popularity of liar-liar TV and publishing indicates a deepening interest in politics, but only for a political conversation that’s narrow enough to entertain simple-minded viewers and readers, many of whom regard politics as one of their hobbies, like clogging or license-plate collecting, or worse yet, as their secular religion. To dismiss the liar-lair books as preaching to the choir misses the whole point: The devout demand a Sunday sermon, and the last thing they want to hear is an open-minded lecture about atheism.
Unfortunately, the political conversation is necessarily addressed to the lowest common denominator, in order to reach the greatest possible audience. However, I disagree with him when he says ”[l]iberal scriveners may improve their team’s political lot by matching the conservative investment in liar-liar stock, but it will come at the expense of their credibility.” I don’t happen to believe that they have a whole lot of credibility in the first place.
[Listening to: Dangerous Game – 3 Doors Down – Away from the Sun]

Tags: Politics by uruloki
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Coming home

This is awesome. When Otter comes home, it will be about the same. I am glad our time apart is as short as it is, but it is all tough. Yet another excellent redirect from an excellent blog.

Tags: Life by uruloki
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Whose deepest principles?

Doing my mandatory daily reading, came across this note. The Boston Globe article that is referenced makes a very good case for why liberals (“progressives” in the article) should be enjoying the Bush presidency. However, it completely misrepresents the goals of “progressives” in the US.

But the portrait of President Bush as a fiend bent on destroying all that progressives hold dear is a partisan caricature. It prevents them from recognizing that Bush’s priorities differ from theirs not because he rejects their deepest principles–individual freedom and equality before the law–but because he espouses a conservative interpretation of them.
“Individual freedom and equality before the law”? When have they cared about either of those principles?

Individual freedom: Let’s go with the junior Senator from New York and liberalism’s post girl, Hillary Clinton.

We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society.
Yep, that pretty much sums up the Left’s ideas on individual freedoms and how dear they are. Who else thought that way? Well, only the Nazis and the Communists did, but they didn’t do anything that the Left thinks is wrong anyways, so they are in good company.

Equality before the law: Two words – affirmative action. When your primary program for promoting “equality before the law” is racial discrimination, you sure are doing a great job in that area. In fact, when that program isn’t upheld by any laws but by judicial fiat that completely ignores the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it would seem that there is a great opposition to doing anything within the law.

There’s more, lots more. However, the basic point has been made: liberals/progressives in the country do not have individual rights and equality before the law as “their deepest principles.”

Tags: Politics by uruloki
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Politics & the “Blackout of 2003″

Even though the investigators have not managed to track the root cause of the blackout, the politicians sure know whose fault it is. Its all President Bush’s. The biggest issue is apparently the deregulation of the electric industry.

I think that we have a lot of unanswered questions about where we’re heading in this deregulated, privatized energy world.
The problem is, they only ever deregulated the ownership of the energy companies. What they didn’t do is relax the regulations on the construction of additional capacity. The biggest problem in the CA brownouts? The folks where the companies wanted to build the additional capacity said, “Not in our backyard!” That, combined with the dedicated enviromental movement in California, combined to create a completely avoidable situation. So now, they want to bring back the regulations:
In fact, several of us tried to support an amendment last year that would have put some federal dollars and federal muscle behind trying to put in some safeguards, more reliability into the system, and were unsuccessful. So I hope that this is a wake up call to the administration and to others that in addition to looking at how we need to get more supply, we’ve got to do a better job with our transmission system and we also have to have some, you know, federal muscle and some back up in the federal energy regulatory scheme.
What the socialists will never understand is that any successful company, by definition, has as its first priority its customers. The customers of a company are where it derives the bottom line from, without a customer the company has no market and therefore it won’t exist. However, there must be a balance between the costs of new construction with the anticipated growth in profits in the future. When the activists are fighting to shut down current capacity, what incentive is there to try to create more? It doesn’t help that potheads are still protesting one of the cleanest, longest lasting sources of power we have.

Tags: Politics by uruloki
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The Console Wars

This is hilarious. The rest of the site is pretty funny too, although I suppose you need my juvenile sense humour to fully appreciate it…

Tags: Entertainment by uruloki
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Shrugging

I just finished Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and found myself very much in agreement with the argument against the “looters,” especially with the continued socialization of the upper echelons of the US government. I was just about to do some more research on Randian philosophy, when I was catching up on my blog-reading and read this entry on the various types of “Obectivists” as Randians are apparently named. It provided some insights and some potential directions to research in, so we will see how far I pursue this. I especially want to read Anthem since Otter read it some years ago and says that it had quite an impact. A ver.

Edit: I think I am a hybrid in the Beastiary, leaning towards Protractor. Hybrids seem to abound in the comments on the post.

Tags: Life by uruloki
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Northwest Airlines

I broke another promise to myself today. I said that I would never fly Northwestern again, and here I am, sitting in Detroit. It started off promising, with one of the best experiences I have ever had in dealing with a self check-in. Okay, I admit it, it was the best experience with the machines that I have ever had. American needs to check out what they are doing, since their machines are just a complete pain in the butt to use.

Unfortunately, that was the best part of the whole deal. We were promptly thirty minutes late leaving the airport, which created problems for pretty much the entire aircraft except myself, since I got a three hour layover. 7P’s in action, especially since I have had so much experience with them… I did manage to pull off dinner at the airport Chili’s while I was waiting, so dinner was all taken care of.

Another litte item that I noticed was that they have tried to semi-duplicate the walkway experience in Chicago-O’Hare. [They just told us that we have a gate change, just before boarding is scheduled to begin. I love Northwest.] There are colored lights and music playing as you stroll down the moving walkway. The difference is that is O’Hare, it’s done for the artistic effect while I think this was done try and calm NW’s passengers as they moved between terminals. The lights are a shifting mix of light blue and white, with etching on the covers which accentuate the aqua feeling. Soft music that is very reminiscent of the shore is playing, so overall it should be a tranquil effect. Unfortunately, this effect was spoiled at the end when the white portions of the light changed to red, with light blue remaining the mixing color. With the previous atmosphere placing my visulization in the water, the only thing I could think of was blood in the water. Oops, so much for the relaxing effect.

[Listening to: I Am the Highway – Audioslave – Audioslave]

Edit: Not only did we manage to leave Detroit a half hour late, the pilot managed to have to do a go-around when we were coming into the field. How do you manage to that in an aircraft that can land itself? There is almost no reason to have to do a go-around due to being above the glide path when the ILS would tell you your situation 50 miles out.

Tags: Life by uruloki
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Food

Menu for the past week: PopTarts for bfast, ham and cheese sandwich for lunch, Subway (roast beef on Italian Herbs and Cheese). Cheap, covers almost all the food groups (not as well as I should) and low calorie. Good for fattys, I say.

[Watching: The Usual Suspects]

Tags: Life by uruloki
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Redesigning, Part six million

The redesign of the site is proceeding. Now, to complete the same makeover on the subdomain, we’ll see if they ever use it at all. They never showed interest in expanding what I had, so we will see. Check out the library, which I just finished. The next step for that portion of the site is to provide more information on the books. Sure, like I’ll ever get off my butt and do it…

[Listening to: You Are – Pearl Jam – Riot Act]

Tags: Web site by uruloki
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