|
|
|
« That Unpossible! | Main | The Price of Credibility » February 13, 2007It's the End of the World As We Know ItIt's a vital issue. There is no compromise, no way of cutting a deal that is acceptable to our side. If we don't act, catastrophe will result. Evil is ascendant, and we are all doomed if we do not act now. Iraq? No. Iran? No. Amanda Marcotte's resignation from the Edwards campaign. "How long will it be before they use this power to deny anyone suspected of being an atheist, or the 'wrong' religion, the right to work in a given field, or even to speak?" I'll go out on a limb here and suggest quite some time. Indeed, I'd say that the odds of this prediction coming true are somewhat lower than the chances Saddam Hussein was going to strike at the United States with WMD-equipped remotely piloted vehicles. But this is an all-too human mentality. We all want to believe that we are caught up in causes greater than ourselves, although not all of us choose to sign on to apocalyptic beliefs. For those who do, the specifics may vary from person to person, but the theme is the same. There's a great threat to us out there. Among our own nation there are evil people who deny the threat. It is up to our small group of committed believers to save the world by acting now. Are there real threats out there? Absolutely. But they are nowhere near as prevalent as a lot of us would like to believe. And trying to make them so only encourages people to inappropriate and extreme measures, because they think the situation is so much more dire than it truly is. Posted at February 13, 2007 03:54 PM
Comment policyI apologize for only allowing authenticated commenters, but comment spam overwhelms the site if I don't use those measures to prevent it. I reserve the right to delete any comment, although generally comments will only be deleted due to use of profanity or personal attacks on people. I have no objection to vigorous argument, but when name-calling begins, I'm putting a stop to it. In the immortal words of Eugene Levy, "People, people, let's stop this before somebody says something untrue!" If you want to call people names, I recommend you get your own blog. Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsLife will go on for bloggers; you're absolutely correct about this. I'm less certain about the Edwards campaign. My theory is that we'll be looking for Non-Bush in 08, since we're all generals fighting our last war. (Cf., choosing the honest J. Carter in the post-Nixon wake). An unusually high premium will be placed on competence. Edwards mishandled Marcotte, both in terms of the vetting failure and the subsequent fumbling after her hiring. It makes him look incompetent early on, and may be a fatal blow to his aspirations. Posted by: ckreiz The "threats" may indeed not be as "prevalent" as the apocalyptic commentators implies; you're right about that. But I'd be interested in your response to the sampling of the hate mail that Amanda provides when you try to access Pandagon (which is still down). Are you sure this is nothing to worry about? Posted by: dr ngo I have not seen the hate mail, so I cannot comment on it. I have little doubt it's vile; there are a disturbing number of nasty people out there. And it is possible that Ms. Marcotte does have something to worry about, although I certainly hope not. But I think we can agree that there is a pretty big difference between 'something someone should worry about' and 'a massive conspiracy to shut atheists out of all public discourse.' Posted by: Andrew Actually, I think Downey's reaction (at least, the "everything is at stake!" part) is pretty rare. Kos and MyDD, where one might expect it, regret it, and don't have a lot of nice things to say about the loathsome Donohue, but there's not much end-of-the-world-ism. Fwiw. Posted by: Hilary Bok There's surely an interesting discussion to be had on the extent to which self-professed atheists are disadvantaged in the public sphere, but the Marcotte flap doesn't have much to do with it. If anything, Marcotte herself has hurt the cause of "atheist rights", by reinforcing the stereotype of the atheist as contemptuous of religious people. Posted by: kenb Oh -- and now Melissa has resigned as well. Posted by: Hilary Bok I keep thinking of a rough analogy with airline travel. There are 19,000 domestic flights daily- and if a single plane goes down, we quickly focus on it and forget about the others. Marcotte crashed and burned, living by the sword and dying by it- to mix metaphors. We quickly forget about the innumerable others who are unfazeed by the laser-like focus. Posted by: ckreiz Hilary, My point was merely that people like to blow things out of proportion. Consider similar rhetoric used to justify the Iraq war, and currently being used to justify attacking Iran. Posted by: Andrew Post a commentThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |
![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://andrewolmsted.com/nav-commenters.gif)