My understanding of it was that the sinner opts for Hell, not that God chooses to send the sinner there. God wants you to make a different choice, because He loves you.
I could attack a straw man and call that a "blame the victim" mentality. But it's probably more fair to look at it like Pinocchio choosing to be turned in to a donkey, lured there by the seductive but fraudulent promises of Pleasure Island and ignorant of the consequences of his choice.
It's a hint, not a full explanation. My hypotheses is that lots of people suffer from cognitive dissonance about the degree of attribution given to internet postings, or to put it another way, even though your name is on it, the fact that it's on the internet makes it somehow "not real."
I could give you dozens of examples of this from my legal practice -- people who get figuratively crucified by their own e-mails, instant messages, or facebook posts. Yesterday, it was my client getting stray remarks thrown against her, tomorrow it's going to be yours. Today, it's these people who posted about the WTC memorial dispute.
If they'd have been thoughtful about it, they would have realized that those posts could indeed be attributed back to them - but if they were being thoughtful about it, they wouldn't have made those posts in the first place. So by definition we're talking about people who didn't put much, if any, thought into what they were doing.
I knock at the door; it does not open. I knock again; still it does not open. I knock a third time to the same result. I seek, and yet I find not. I seek again, and still I find not.
At some point, I stop knocking, I cease searching.
I may "choose" when to give up searching or knocking, true. We might argue about whether that choice was made reasonably or not, sincerely or not.
But the fruitlessness of the search, the failure of the door to open -- the honest failure to find faith within oneself -- is not subject to conscious control.
Atheist: I was good to my spouse, a good parent, a good child, studious in my academics and diligent in my career, and I made life better for my fellow man through charity and my own labor. I wasn't perfect but on balance I lived my life very morally. Turns out I was wrong about You, though. But still, don't all my good works count for something?
God: Nope. You were supposed to walk by faith alone, bucko! There's the door downstairs, we've got a spot for you right next to Gandhi. Now git.
Mike at The Big Stick's comment seems to strike the closest to my point here, which is: faith (or its absence) is much more like emotion than it is like logic. It cannot be chosen any more than one's sexual preference or appetite for spicy food can be chosen.
You either have faith in the supernatural or you do not; the most you can change consciously is your outward behavior. I could start going to church again, saying all the prayers, genuflecting and crossing myself, eating the little wafer of stale bread and drinking the watery wine, reading the Bible every day. But it wouldn't change that deep down, I don't think any of the rituals or writings or preachings are about anything real.
It's similar to being heterosexual, enjoying jazz, or preferring your food spicy -- it's not a matter of conscious choice. Call it a "preference" if you must, but "preferences" happen at an unconscious, emotional, level of cognition, and are not effectively subject to self-intentional change.
Behaviors, of course, are subject to self-intentional change. But behaviors are not preferences; one can choose to behave other than one prefers. I can force myself go to church, but I can't make myself like it -- and for the same reason, I can't make myself believe what I'm told there.
It's not a choice at all. To the extent we talk about one's freedom to "choose" a faith, we are falling subject to a poverty of langauge, and it's a false poverty at that. One's beliefs simply exist; they might morph organically over time, but if so that is unlikely to be the result of any conscious decision on the part of the subject.
The posters ought to be ashamed of themselves, both for what they said and for painting their co-religionists in a very bad and unfair light. Some apologies and retractions are in order. If you doubt this, go back and read the actual facebook posts again, maybe substituting "Jews" for "atheists." Chilling.
Bear in mind, I didn't exonerate the demonstraters from criminal conduct. I exonerated them of violence, which is why the police in the video were acting unreasonably.
But obstructing business invitees from entering a building is a form of trespass (exercising dominion over real property without the right to do so). Obstructing access to public streets is, among other things, disturbance of the peace. Demonstrators doing these things are committing crimes and thus are legitimately subject to arrest and prosecution.
You'll notice that trained and coached union picketers will not play "Red Rover" with their picket lines. If you want to cross the picket line, you can. You'll have to endure taunts, name-calling, and other forms of "consumer education" while you're doing it, but if the union people are doing things legitimately, you can cross the line, should you be of a mind to do so.
In the video, the protestors are not engaged in any violent activity. I'd call that a "demonstration" rather than a riot and I don't think there's any real doubt that the Seattle PD was not justified in their use of force there.
But IIRC, there were two groups of protestors in Seattle 1999, one which nonviolently tried to prevent and disrupt the WTO meeting, and the other which involved a fair amount of property crime and attracted a lot of cameras. The second group I would characterize as rioters.
Sulu and Chekov fall in love and get married. (George Takei plays Sulu's father in the ceremony.) The happy newlyweds take some shore leave as their honeymoon on an exotic planet that looks suspiciously like a convenient filming location. But then they stumble upon The Secret Romulan Plot To Take Over, and the rest of the Enterprise crew has to rescue them and foil the Romulans' evil plot.
This may be correct in an intellectual sense, but the nature of the laws broken in a demonstration are fundamentally different from the nature of the laws broken in a riot.
All I can say to the concerns raised by Michael Drew and wardsmith are that we lawyers actually have a good deal less control over the facts that juries hear than we would prefer, and a good deal less control over who hears those facts than we would prefer. Rare indeed is the case in which sufficient amounts of time, money, and manpower can be devoted to the sorts of jury manipulation techniques that you see depicted in movies; rarer yet (in my experience) is the judge who is weak enough to allow those sorts of tools to overrule her sense of appropriate procedure. Nor have I ever seen the lawyer yet who suborned perjury. (I have seen lawyers willing to allow their clients to deceive juries by omission, but not by comission.)
Which is not to say that these are invalid critiques of my point. But as between lawyers dealing with what we smugly call "bad facts" and politicians, lawyers will at least address the facts in some fashion -- perhaps to suggest that they can be readily dismissed or ignored, but they will be acknowledged in some way.
Politicians will just make shit up. When you point to the truth, they'll call you the liar.
I've failed completely to understand the preciousness of viewing the Presidency as a platform for storytelling. Perhaps that's because I dissociate the phrase "storytelling" from things like fairy tales read to children at bedtime. That's one kind of storytelling, but so is Anna Karenina. Fact is, we tell stories to one another; that is how we relate to the world. When you go home tonight to your spouse or S.O., you will tell him or her stories about your day.
So what's wrong with Obama as a storyteller? Erik hit the point in the OP -- he lost the initiative:
During his campaign, Obama did craft a narrative. But it was quickly captured by the Tea Party and by Obama’s political opponents in congress once he took office. Along with the lost narrative, Obama and the Democrats time and again came to the bargaining table with policies so far to the right they were often leftovers from past Republican congresses... [Emphases added]
I think Erik's second operative verb more accurately describes what happened than the first. The Tea Party narrative was very different than the Campaign Obama narrative. To the Campaign Obama narrative, government is a benevolent, assisting, assuring protector, one which could be made to intervene in the economy to save it from itself and to make America a more prosperous place. Happy days are here again.
To the Tea Party, government intervention in the economy is socialism standing up and revealing its ugly, statist face; Obama's political appeals are a sinister siren's call to free citizens to unwittingly forfeit their rights, liberty, and autonomy; and only Tea Party Republicans have the guts to see things for what they are and prevent the transformation of our country into a new Soviet Union.
Well, I'm a guy who tells stories for a living, and I do it in the face of adversaries who tell stories at least as diametrically opposed to mine as the Team Obama story is diametrically opposed to the Tea Party story. I use actual facts in my stories, of course, and when they are good, so do my adversaries. Political narratives are free from the requirement that they actually relate themselves to objectively verifiable facts.
Facts are primarily useful to the competitive storyteller as weapons with which to poke holes in the other guy's story and to demonstrate why he can't possibly be right. But you can't spend all your time doing that. The more time you spend on the other guy's story, the more times that story gets told to the audience (or the jury, or the electorate, as the case may be). What you want is to get them on your side. That means you have to tell your story, one that is both emotionally compelling and at least harmonious with the facts.
If Obama wants to get back in the driver's seat, he has all the tools of the Presidency at his disposal with which to re-seize the initiative. But as the recent budget deal made clear, the initiative rests with those politicians who are pitching themselves to the Tea Party crowd and not with America's Prime Minister.
A suggestion that Gore would have been a wise, prudent, peaceful President is based on faith and specualtion. Just because the man is personally intelligent (so was Bush) does not mean he would not have made a significant miscalculation. And Gore ran a centrist campaign, too, nor was he coming out of a White House that distinguished itself by pushing hard for progressive policies, so there is ample reason to believe that President Gore would have been as big a disappointment to progressives then as Obama turns out to be today.
Discussions about a Gore Presidency in 2000 are counterfactual history, and as discussed recently on these very pages, of limited utility -- such speculations illustrate more about the speculator than they do about the subject.
There was a prominent abolitionist movement that provided a large part of the steam powering the Republican political machine of the 1850's and 1860's. Most of the non-abolitionist Republicans were Free Soilers -- Free Soil being a political platform which would have condemned slave states to eventually become a political minority in the Senate. And Lincoln's hesitation to emancipate slaves in the border states was aimed at keeping those states loyal to the Union; by 1863, Lincoln had become an abolitionist personally, compromising his principles only for the purpose of keeping the Union whole.
I speculate that had the civil war been much shorter, the Democrats would have had to have held on to much more political power than they were then capable of doing to forestall an eventual doom to slavery on the field of political battle -- although it would have been a longer and more partisan fight than it was. But, you never know; clever politicians might have figured out a way to preserve slavery in a minority of states, perhaps by constitutional amendment as part of a horse trade of some other concession to the free states.
As you say, a counterfactual is too speculative to be of much use historically.
If the robber confessed his crime, then he was also confessing a sin, which means that the communications are privileged since the cleric was rendering spiritual succor to a penitent sinner. Every state and the federal rules all allow for that privilege in their evidence codes.
Otherwise, what you describe would be the crime of obstruction of justice.
Alabama's law is different in that the duty to report is triggered as soon as the caregiver reasonably suspects that the person is an undocumented alien. There is no confession going on here, so the clergy-penitent communication privilege is not in play.
Hard to say if you're being whimsical or sour here.
Were you to have been serious, I would question the sincerity of this religious belief. You're going to have difficulty meeting the first prong of the Sherbert test.
The state will probably do pretty well on its part of the test also, if you ever manage to shift the burden in the first place.
That's a fair cop, Scott. His comment isn't the original post, but I agree that comment is not calculated to intellectually engage on the subject.
I think the overall record shows E.D. shaped up as the situation developed and maybe the sting of something that got to him on an emotional level faded. And others jumped in to flesh things out in a more intelleectual fashion too.
I've been guilty of typing first and thinking later myself so I've got some sympathy for E.D. there. He's only human.
On “A Little Atheism for Y’all”
My understanding of it was that the sinner opts for Hell, not that God chooses to send the sinner there. God wants you to make a different choice, because He loves you.
I could attack a straw man and call that a "blame the victim" mentality. But it's probably more fair to look at it like Pinocchio choosing to be turned in to a donkey, lured there by the seductive but fraudulent promises of Pleasure Island and ignorant of the consequences of his choice.
"
It's a hint, not a full explanation. My hypotheses is that lots of people suffer from cognitive dissonance about the degree of attribution given to internet postings, or to put it another way, even though your name is on it, the fact that it's on the internet makes it somehow "not real."
I could give you dozens of examples of this from my legal practice -- people who get figuratively crucified by their own e-mails, instant messages, or facebook posts. Yesterday, it was my client getting stray remarks thrown against her, tomorrow it's going to be yours. Today, it's these people who posted about the WTC memorial dispute.
If they'd have been thoughtful about it, they would have realized that those posts could indeed be attributed back to them - but if they were being thoughtful about it, they wouldn't have made those posts in the first place. So by definition we're talking about people who didn't put much, if any, thought into what they were doing.
"
You confuse open-mindedness with experience.
I knock at the door; it does not open. I knock again; still it does not open. I knock a third time to the same result. I seek, and yet I find not. I seek again, and still I find not.
At some point, I stop knocking, I cease searching.
I may "choose" when to give up searching or knocking, true. We might argue about whether that choice was made reasonably or not, sincerely or not.
But the fruitlessness of the search, the failure of the door to open -- the honest failure to find faith within oneself -- is not subject to conscious control.
"
I envisioned it as this:
Atheist: I was good to my spouse, a good parent, a good child, studious in my academics and diligent in my career, and I made life better for my fellow man through charity and my own labor. I wasn't perfect but on balance I lived my life very morally. Turns out I was wrong about You, though. But still, don't all my good works count for something?
God: Nope. You were supposed to walk by faith alone, bucko! There's the door downstairs, we've got a spot for you right next to Gandhi. Now git.
"
Mike at The Big Stick's comment seems to strike the closest to my point here, which is: faith (or its absence) is much more like emotion than it is like logic. It cannot be chosen any more than one's sexual preference or appetite for spicy food can be chosen.
You either have faith in the supernatural or you do not; the most you can change consciously is your outward behavior. I could start going to church again, saying all the prayers, genuflecting and crossing myself, eating the little wafer of stale bread and drinking the watery wine, reading the Bible every day. But it wouldn't change that deep down, I don't think any of the rituals or writings or preachings are about anything real.
It's similar to being heterosexual, enjoying jazz, or preferring your food spicy -- it's not a matter of conscious choice. Call it a "preference" if you must, but "preferences" happen at an unconscious, emotional, level of cognition, and are not effectively subject to self-intentional change.
Behaviors, of course, are subject to self-intentional change. But behaviors are not preferences; one can choose to behave other than one prefers. I can force myself go to church, but I can't make myself like it -- and for the same reason, I can't make myself believe what I'm told there.
It's not a choice at all. To the extent we talk about one's freedom to "choose" a faith, we are falling subject to a poverty of langauge, and it's a false poverty at that. One's beliefs simply exist; they might morph organically over time, but if so that is unlikely to be the result of any conscious decision on the part of the subject.
"
The the Bible vague about hell? I suppose.
Is it contradictory? Hell, yes.
Your God, Mike, sounds like a more interesting Creator than Jehovah.
"
This atheist, like Jason, does not believe for a moment that those posts represent anything like how Christians really think or behave. Something went haywire psychologically here, and we already have a pretty good hint to get us started on figuring out how that happened.
The posters ought to be ashamed of themselves, both for what they said and for painting their co-religionists in a very bad and unfair light. Some apologies and retractions are in order. If you doubt this, go back and read the actual facebook posts again, maybe substituting "Jews" for "atheists." Chilling.
On “Class Warfare in London”
Bear in mind, I didn't exonerate the demonstraters from criminal conduct. I exonerated them of violence, which is why the police in the video were acting unreasonably.
But obstructing business invitees from entering a building is a form of trespass (exercising dominion over real property without the right to do so). Obstructing access to public streets is, among other things, disturbance of the peace. Demonstrators doing these things are committing crimes and thus are legitimately subject to arrest and prosecution.
You'll notice that trained and coached union picketers will not play "Red Rover" with their picket lines. If you want to cross the picket line, you can. You'll have to endure taunts, name-calling, and other forms of "consumer education" while you're doing it, but if the union people are doing things legitimately, you can cross the line, should you be of a mind to do so.
"
In the video, the protestors are not engaged in any violent activity. I'd call that a "demonstration" rather than a riot and I don't think there's any real doubt that the Seattle PD was not justified in their use of force there.
But IIRC, there were two groups of protestors in Seattle 1999, one which nonviolently tried to prevent and disrupt the WTO meeting, and the other which involved a fair amount of property crime and attracted a lot of cameras. The second group I would characterize as rioters.
On “To Boldly Go Where No Two Men Have Gone Together Before”
Come on, stuff like this isn't that hard.
Sulu and Chekov fall in love and get married. (George Takei plays Sulu's father in the ceremony.) The happy newlyweds take some shore leave as their honeymoon on an exotic planet that looks suspiciously like a convenient filming location. But then they stumble upon The Secret Romulan Plot To Take Over, and the rest of the Enterprise crew has to rescue them and foil the Romulans' evil plot.
On “Class Warfare in London”
The difference I see here is that there is not even the pretense of justice concerning Billy Joel.
"
This may be correct in an intellectual sense, but the nature of the laws broken in a demonstration are fundamentally different from the nature of the laws broken in a riot.
To be clear, this is a demonstration. Compare that to an actual riot.
"
Riots, yes.
Demonstrations, no.
How to tell the difference: violence, vandalism, and theft.
On “Storytelling & Politics”
All I can say to the concerns raised by Michael Drew and wardsmith are that we lawyers actually have a good deal less control over the facts that juries hear than we would prefer, and a good deal less control over who hears those facts than we would prefer. Rare indeed is the case in which sufficient amounts of time, money, and manpower can be devoted to the sorts of jury manipulation techniques that you see depicted in movies; rarer yet (in my experience) is the judge who is weak enough to allow those sorts of tools to overrule her sense of appropriate procedure. Nor have I ever seen the lawyer yet who suborned perjury. (I have seen lawyers willing to allow their clients to deceive juries by omission, but not by comission.)
Which is not to say that these are invalid critiques of my point. But as between lawyers dealing with what we smugly call "bad facts" and politicians, lawyers will at least address the facts in some fashion -- perhaps to suggest that they can be readily dismissed or ignored, but they will be acknowledged in some way.
Politicians will just make shit up. When you point to the truth, they'll call you the liar.
"
I've failed completely to understand the preciousness of viewing the Presidency as a platform for storytelling. Perhaps that's because I dissociate the phrase "storytelling" from things like fairy tales read to children at bedtime. That's one kind of storytelling, but so is Anna Karenina. Fact is, we tell stories to one another; that is how we relate to the world. When you go home tonight to your spouse or S.O., you will tell him or her stories about your day.
So what's wrong with Obama as a storyteller? Erik hit the point in the OP -- he lost the initiative:
I think Erik's second operative verb more accurately describes what happened than the first. The Tea Party narrative was very different than the Campaign Obama narrative. To the Campaign Obama narrative, government is a benevolent, assisting, assuring protector, one which could be made to intervene in the economy to save it from itself and to make America a more prosperous place. Happy days are here again.
To the Tea Party, government intervention in the economy is socialism standing up and revealing its ugly, statist face; Obama's political appeals are a sinister siren's call to free citizens to unwittingly forfeit their rights, liberty, and autonomy; and only Tea Party Republicans have the guts to see things for what they are and prevent the transformation of our country into a new Soviet Union.
Well, I'm a guy who tells stories for a living, and I do it in the face of adversaries who tell stories at least as diametrically opposed to mine as the Team Obama story is diametrically opposed to the Tea Party story. I use actual facts in my stories, of course, and when they are good, so do my adversaries. Political narratives are free from the requirement that they actually relate themselves to objectively verifiable facts.
Facts are primarily useful to the competitive storyteller as weapons with which to poke holes in the other guy's story and to demonstrate why he can't possibly be right. But you can't spend all your time doing that. The more time you spend on the other guy's story, the more times that story gets told to the audience (or the jury, or the electorate, as the case may be). What you want is to get them on your side. That means you have to tell your story, one that is both emotionally compelling and at least harmonious with the facts.
If Obama wants to get back in the driver's seat, he has all the tools of the Presidency at his disposal with which to re-seize the initiative. But as the recent budget deal made clear, the initiative rests with those politicians who are pitching themselves to the Tea Party crowd and not with America's Prime Minister.
On “Obama, the left, and the two-party system”
A suggestion that Gore would have been a wise, prudent, peaceful President is based on faith and specualtion. Just because the man is personally intelligent (so was Bush) does not mean he would not have made a significant miscalculation. And Gore ran a centrist campaign, too, nor was he coming out of a White House that distinguished itself by pushing hard for progressive policies, so there is ample reason to believe that President Gore would have been as big a disappointment to progressives then as Obama turns out to be today.
Discussions about a Gore Presidency in 2000 are counterfactual history, and as discussed recently on these very pages, of limited utility -- such speculations illustrate more about the speculator than they do about the subject.
On “(Civil) War and Tragedy, Cont’d”
There was a prominent abolitionist movement that provided a large part of the steam powering the Republican political machine of the 1850's and 1860's. Most of the non-abolitionist Republicans were Free Soilers -- Free Soil being a political platform which would have condemned slave states to eventually become a political minority in the Senate. And Lincoln's hesitation to emancipate slaves in the border states was aimed at keeping those states loyal to the Union; by 1863, Lincoln had become an abolitionist personally, compromising his principles only for the purpose of keeping the Union whole.
I speculate that had the civil war been much shorter, the Democrats would have had to have held on to much more political power than they were then capable of doing to forestall an eventual doom to slavery on the field of political battle -- although it would have been a longer and more partisan fight than it was. But, you never know; clever politicians might have figured out a way to preserve slavery in a minority of states, perhaps by constitutional amendment as part of a horse trade of some other concession to the free states.
As you say, a counterfactual is too speculative to be of much use historically.
On “Friday Jukebox”
Thanks for this, Rufus. I think I'm now in love with her.
The good news keep on rolling in -- at least as of 2010, she's still actively performing.
On “Fine Art for Dorks”
Game, set, match.
On ““Yuck” a Duck”
I see what you did there, Jason.
On “We are all neoliberals now”
You mean like George W. Bush did during his last year in office?
On ““Yuck” a Duck”
Ultimately, of course, we are all Africans. And by the time Jim Crow was in full flower, there was ample evidence of that.
On “Charity, Religion, Immigration, and Federalism”
If the robber confessed his crime, then he was also confessing a sin, which means that the communications are privileged since the cleric was rendering spiritual succor to a penitent sinner. Every state and the federal rules all allow for that privilege in their evidence codes.
Otherwise, what you describe would be the crime of obstruction of justice.
Alabama's law is different in that the duty to report is triggered as soon as the caregiver reasonably suspects that the person is an undocumented alien. There is no confession going on here, so the clergy-penitent communication privilege is not in play.
"
Hard to say if you're being whimsical or sour here.
Were you to have been serious, I would question the sincerity of this religious belief. You're going to have difficulty meeting the first prong of the Sherbert test.
The state will probably do pretty well on its part of the test also, if you ever manage to shift the burden in the first place.
On “Picture of the day”
That's a fair cop, Scott. His comment isn't the original post, but I agree that comment is not calculated to intellectually engage on the subject.
I think the overall record shows E.D. shaped up as the situation developed and maybe the sting of something that got to him on an emotional level faded. And others jumped in to flesh things out in a more intelleectual fashion too.
I've been guilty of typing first and thinking later myself so I've got some sympathy for E.D. there. He's only human.