Church and State should be separate in the body politic, but never in individuals.
From a comment on Mark’s blog:
I don’t remember who said this, but recently I read something interesting about business
mom and pop kind of business, do what they want and offer it to you. (meaning if you like it, they will have your business, if you don’t like it, they won’t. but they do what they want.)
big business machine, do a lot of research and offer what their customer really want.
That’s a nice maxim if it wasn’t for the fact that it is complete bullshit.
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
When John Dvorak visited my workplace, I was introduced as “the Mac guy.”—the split second double-take on his part was funny. But he was amused that a coworker had programmed an old Apple //c we had lying around to generate ASCII art so it’s all good. He did tell me to read his blog.
I can’t keep up with him. He’s the Steven King of the tech world. But every so often I click on a random entry from him to see what is interesting out there.
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Mark Shields honors this day, eloquently.
The news have been covering the fallout of a Newsweek article about the descration of copies of the Koran. Today over lunch, I was involved in an argument about this, and have decided to separate out what I know from what I can infer.
The impulse that led conservatives to intervene in a family’s bitter debate over a feeding tube is the same one that makes them turn a debate over a Senate rule on filibusters into a litmus test of spiritual correctness. Surely no holier-than-thou Hollywood pontificator could be harder to take than the sanctimonious Bill Frist, who, unlike Barbra Streisand, can’t even sing.
—Frank Rich, The New York Times
That’s the first time I’ve heard the word “spiritual correctness” and I was shocked at the force of the term. Could liberals have gotten their act together and finally adopted Lakoff’s theory of framing the debate?
But a simple network search shows that the term is most used during the heyday of political correctness as either applying political correct terminology to spiritual issues (such as saying, “the reason I’m dieting is for health reasons, not to look better” or implying that all spirituality is equal.
And yet, “spiritual correctness” defines exactly how I feel right now about the right-wing frames: “culture of life,” “fiscally liberal, socially conservative,” “family values,” and “partial-birth abortions.”
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People are right to be rattled. But at the same time, they want to pick the person who will go after the bad guys. I think in a way that’s the Bush campaign slogan:“Maybe we’re a little crazy, maybe we went to war with the wrong country, but you know we’re going to get some bad guys.”
—Maureen Dowd (Rolling Stone, October 28, 2004)
When I read that even Maureen Dowd had bought into the “Freedom Fries” trap, I was a little shocked. Even though I was for the war I thought most of us were above the whole don’t-buy-French thing. But Ms. Dowd is a left-of-center columnist for the New York Times—part of that “liberal media conspiracy” the right-wing keeps complaining about.
I heard during a dinner discussion that the French economy suffered a hit because of the anti-French thing. Not in french fries, mind you, but in wine and cheese and other french-related products that someone like Ms. Dowd buys. After reading Dowd’s confession that really hit home about both the economic size of the American market and the power of a slight shift in purchasing attitudes of the many.
I wonder if ketchups marketed by right-wingers actually affected the bottom line of Heinz? It would be a tad ironic if it did, if highly unlikely—ask any Pittsburgher: you can’t beat Heinz Ketchup.
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