Letters to the Editor
SanePerson
Published Letters: 47 Editor's Choice: 8
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Liberals Can't Win for Losing
[Read the article: Relax, liberals. You've already won]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The counterrevolution is over? Liberals have won? This has to be one of the silliest articles I've read in Salon since I stopped clicking on the trash Camille Paglia writes.
• Both Democrats and Republicans campaign on a platform of upgrading the military - a military on which Americans already spend more than the rest of the planet combined. Candidates who suggest that this is unsustainable are on the "far-left" fringe - yeah, some liberal victory.
• The press that enabled the Bush administration to distort and fabricate intelligence to start the Iraq war is falling over itself telling itself that even when a former Bush administration mouthpiece calls them a pack of cowering supplicants, it just isn't true! Liberal media, huh?
• The corporate consolidation of the media that led to it's current emasculation continues apace - and we are still told it is "liberal". The article gives not a single example that supports the notion that corporate power in the US has been curtailed at all - and it is the corruption of government by corporate power that has financed the "counterrevolution" that Mr. Lind says is over. This is victory?
• As John McCain hires on some of the same thugs, idiots, and crooks (e.g., Michael Goldfarb, Phil Gramm, Charlie Black) that led us into our current mess, he is still branded a "moderate". With proven scumbags like these in highly visible positions, it seems that John McCain isn't too worried about the victorious liberals.
• As the nation moves into a demographic mine-field, its population aging and retiring - the right has spent 20 of the past 28 years doubling the federal debt, neglecting the nation's infrastructure and souring our economic future. Social Security payments will be cut to a fraction of what it would have been with responsible government tax policies - health care seems headed for more corporate giveaways. This is victory?
The failure of (neo)conservatism does not mean that liberals have won, Mr. Lind. Indeed, the records of repeated and dramatic failure of neoconservatives like William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and David Frum should have so destroyed their credibility that they couldn't get an interview on Wayne's World. And yet, when the mainstream media conducted their five-year retrospectives on Iraq, people who had opposed the war from the beginning were invisible while the neocons were well represented.
Your mistake, Mr. Lind, is in the assumption that modern conservatives were ever primarily interested winning over the majority of Americans to their views - not at all. If they can shut the majority out by shutting them up, encouraging their cynicism so they'll drop out, exploiting their prejudices, and stealing their futures - that will suit their purposes just fine.
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What reason and logic have torn asunder, let no man bring together
[Read the article: Can't Darwin and God get along?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If all Christians were as amenable to reason as Giberson, atheists like Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett might never have bothered with their books. Nevertheless, Giberson is still all wet. Consider this passage:
Evolution has so much of its data missing in history that to look at the whole thing and say we know for sure that despite all the stuff we can't find, and have never seen, has purely naturalistic causes -- and we know this with such certainty that we insist the knowledgeable buy into this idea -- goes way too far.
After having already disposed of “God the tinkerer”, Giberson can quite part with him altogether. Things either have naturalistic causes or they don’t. Dawkins and Gould don’t insist on it, they simply recognize that when you are doing science and you don’t insist on your explanations being naturalistic, you fall into the murky and ultimately defeatist swamp of surrendering to ignorance. Neil deGrasse Tyson (http://research.amnh.org/~tyson/18magazines_perimeter.php) gives a wonderful exposition of how this worked for Newton, who when frustrated by his inability to deal with a problem in celestial mechanics (unstable orbits):
…at the border between what he could explain and what he could only honor—the causes he could identify and those he could not—Newton rapturously invokes God:
Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; . . . he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. . . . We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion
… Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton's dilemma of unstable orbits head-on… To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces. According to [a]… probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to …Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played … "Sire," Laplace replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis."
Then comes this passage near the end,
The central idea has been that God is responsible for the fact that creation simply exists. … God sustains the universe. God holds it continuously in existence. And that's the centerpiece -- not that God originated it once upon a time, either 10,000 or 10 billion years ago. Or that God tinkers in it constantly but that God holds it steadily in existence. In that sense, yes, the natural order does need God in order to continue to exist.
Never mind that “God” as something distinguishable from the universe itself has not been demonstrated. Never mind that this God is the product of a bald assertion, unsupported by evidence, and providing no explanation as to how or why God holds the “universe steadily in existence” or what holds God in existence. I.D. proponents offer a God who is transparently silly because he jumps in to set biology right now and then (like Newton’s God, before perturbation theory in celestial mechanics) – the I.D. God is small and trivial. Giberson’s God is grandiose but just as unsatisfying.