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The Essential Authoritarian: “Personal responsibility” is a fetish [Darleen Click]

Yes, really. Not only is it a fetish, but it absolutely reeks of Xtianity, too.

It’s that it introduces the concept of “sin” into a discussion about public health. I realize that Sam surely didn’t intend it that way. It’s telling that Christianity is so pervasive that its ideas even penetrate atheist circles. “Self-discipline” can’t really be extracted meaningfully in this debate from the concept of sin and punishment. […]

But if you reject this notion and instead view negative health effects of overeating as a public health problem to be solved, then the question of “self-discipline” becomes silly.

Certainly it does. In order to manage the herds, you must convince individuals they are not only hopelessly outmatched by their own impulses …

Self-control is neither a fixed quality nor completely under (oh irony) our control.

… but their problems exist outside themselves and can only be “solved” by the benevolent, wise Master who really does know how to better run your life than you do.

When you’re engaging in problem-solving, it’s best to start by looking at things you can control, and leave the discourse of sin and redemption to the wayside. […]

We can’t fix people’s impulse control, but we can fix their environments through collective action. […]

What I would like is for public health discourse to simply get over this fetish for “personal responsibility”. It’s a red herring. First of all, it’s not really a static quality you either have or you don’t. Second of all, it’s not something that’s responsive to scolding, which is the only solution people who love to trot out “personal responsibility” will accept. If we actually give a shit about people and their health, then we have to look at what we can do and what we can fix.

Don’t you just love that royal “we”? Especially when only a few of the anointed will be holding the whip.

This isn’t really about trying to find the best way to help those who need it, this is about precluding every way of helping that isn’t under Big Government auspices. Mandy asserts that Christianity’s only response to “sin” is “punishment” — dismissing the whole gamut of Christian (and Jewish) charity, large and small, that operate from the premise that all humans are sinners and it is individual duty to help fellow sinners to find it within themselves to transcend our nature.

Incidentally, the sexual health debate suffers from the same problem. Even if you accept (which I don’t) the premise that abstinence is inherently good, and that’s what people “should” do, I have the same response: So what? You can say “should” until you’re blue in the face, and people are still going to fuck. If you actually want to fix the problems of STD transmission and unintended pregnancy, you have to deal with people how they are, not how they “should” be.

The essential authoritarian must destroy individual initiative and responsibility in order to make The State the only god of the masses.

There is nothing innocent about it at all.

91 Replies to “The Essential Authoritarian: “Personal responsibility” is a fetish [Darleen Click]”

  1. cranky-d says:

    What I would like is for public health discourse to simply get over this fetish for “personal responsibility”

    I was just scanning, and saw that line, and thought, “This has to be St. Amanda of the bleeding whatever,” and I was right.

  2. BuddyPC says:

    “Ablism” is the new “racism.”
    Catch it! It’s not your fault.

  3. bh says:

    If we’re looking for causes we should maybe look beyond the breakdown of the family or rampant sex in the streets for the real root of our problems. It’s women’s suffrage.

    Maybe this isn’t what I’m supposed to be taking away from Marcotte’s deep thoughts but it does seem to be her basic, recurring thrust.

  4. happyfeet says:

    I think getting vaccinated against stuff is an excellent way to take personal responsibility for your health

    plus it helps if you avoid carbs

    also you shouldn’t fuck the poultry

  5. McGehee says:

    If Amanda believes she cannot be personally responsible for anything that happens to her, then she does not have free will. If she does not have free will, then she has no rights. If she has no rights, then she has no vote.

    Whaddaya wanna bet she won’t embrace the logical conclusion of her own argument by staying home on Election Day?

  6. bh says:

    Amanda: Hey, can I borrow your car?

    bh: If you’ll be careful.

    Amanda: That’s the wrong way to approach this topic. The environment dictates whether or not I’ll be careful. It has nothing to do with me.

    bh: Okay, I guess I’m the environment then. No, you can’t borrow my car.

    Amanda: Sexist.

    bh: Moron.

  7. sdferr says:

    Is this fair dealing with original sin doctrine, either from a specifically Christian point of view, or even from a Judaic point of view? That is, the human response isn’t the thing, is it? Or I don’t know, but it had seemed to me that the doctrine held that the punishment dealio was God’s response to human action, taken in human freedom (wrong doing, as it happened), and that this “punishment” is simply a condition of the world (our so called “suffering”) beyond any human control. But others will no doubt clear this up.

  8. bh says:

    It’s all gibberish, sdferr.

    Take this:

    “Self-discipline” can’t really be extracted meaningfully in this debate from the concept of sin and punishment.

    What twaddle.

    Eat all your cookies now and you won’t have any for later. Leave your toys outside in the rain because you’re lazy and they might get ruined. Riding your bike in the street is fun but you have to be careful around cars.

    Did I just quote scripture? Or did I repeat the sort of things you expect a 10 year old to know?

    She’s a moron.

    (Towards the original sin question I don’t know if we can logically impute any more meaning to her thinking than she’s willing to do.)

  9. McGehee says:

    All I know is, free will is the one thing I can think of that He could have given us to make us be “in His image.” I think He did it to see if we could surprise Him, and if we’re still around after all this time I guess we’ve shown we can, and not always in a bad way.

    And if I’m wrong and we don’t have free will, there’s no way for us to know that and no way usefully to change how we think and live based on that assumption.

    What He does to correct us in this life, is beyond my pay grade. I was taught He’s more interested in the spiritual toll than the material anyway and that’s not something we mortals can really see happening to anyone but ourselves, and even to ourselves not reliably.

  10. happyfeet says:

    we learned at Mr. Patterico’s this week that people can get very religious and culty about their diet but I bet you the bulk of this is on the left

    so when the government tries to tell people what to eat it’s likely that this is one of only a few things what can sensitize leftist statists to the obnoxious intrusiveness of their failshit government, and it makes for a teachable moment really

    that said I tend to think when the government intrudes into previously-unintruded-upon areas with respect to personal health, they’re mostly just trying to make jobs for their loser friends what they met at grad school

  11. dicentra says:

    also you shouldn’t fuck the poultry

    Or the swine. The really bad viruses jump off birds and onto pigs and then onto us.

    But others will no doubt clear this up.

    Yet others will muddy the waters. I don’t believe in the traditional concept of “original sin,” but I do believe that we’re fallen and we can’t get up without divine intervention.

    This crummy world isn’t “punishment”; it’s the practical lab/exam. The crummy conditions are a feature, not a bug, because we’re here for the express purpose of learning the lessons that only pain can teach us.

    I believe that we are engendered by God (not created), so being in his image comes from being his offspring, he having created seed after his own kind, the same way all reproducers do.

    Free will inheres in the nature of our species: it’s not “given” to us by God the same way you would insert a protocol card into an android. For that reason, you can’t say “God created me this way,” because he didn’t, any more than your parents created you in whatever way you are.

    Ergo, personal responsibility is also not “given” to us: it just is. God does not punish: we merely reap what we sow. He might warn you that you’ll burn yourself on that hot stove, or that the slow poison will eventually kill you, but the consequences arise by natural means, not through the punitive actions of a deity.

    He is, however, not averse to delivering the occasional smack upside the head to get us to stop and reevaluate the path we’re on, whether individually or collectively.

    But because we will become what/who we are on an individual basis, based on our own decisions and reactions and stuff, personal responsibility is like gravity: an inherent property of the thing, not an imposed condition.

  12. mc4ever59 says:

    What if God no longer believes in us?

  13. mc4ever59 says:

    A person cannot accomplish anything of value without self discipline, self control, and personal responsibility.
    For this person to attempt to argue otherwise is imbecilic.

  14. McGehee says:

    mc4ever59 says May 12, 2012 at 3:53 pm

    Inigo Montoya called. He wants to talk to you about the meaning of the word “person.”

    I had concluded that it wouldn’t be possible adequately to describe Marcotte without exhausting the vocabularies of a thousand generations of sailors.

  15. B Moe says:

    For this person to attempt to argue anything is imbecilic, because she is an imbecile.

    Literally.

    I am trying to figure out why I should care what she says.

  16. Gulermo says:

    My Dad used to say that it wasn’t important that you believed in GOD, only that He continued to believe in you.

  17. dicentra says:

    What if God no longer believes in us?

    Then the Matrix loses power and all the little pixels go away.

  18. dicentra says:

    I am trying to figure out why I should care what she says.

    You’re not suppose to care. You’re supposed to point and laugh.

  19. dicentra says:

    If we actually give a shit about people and their health, then we have to look at what we can do and what we can fix.

    This is actually the core of her argument, more than the sin/punishment thing. She is justified in her desire to coerce because she cares, dammit!

    However, if I were to force her to be baptized in my church because I cared about her soul, I’d be waaaaay outta line.

  20. motionview says:

    Something happened with Dan Collins and Twitchy

  21. B Moe says:

    What the hell is Twitchy?

    Man. Every time I think I am about caught up I get all lost again.

  22. Diana says:

    Twitchy is another platform of Malkin’s. Edgy or something.

  23. Pablo says:

    If we actually give a shit about people and their health, then we have to look at what we can do and what we can fix.

    If you like your health, you’ll not worry about mine.

  24. motionview says:

    Six weeks late – I project I’ll be up to real-time about the same time we balance the budget.

  25. mc4ever59 says:

    Dicentra at 4:23 PM;
    All prog ‘arguments’ are based in hypocrisy 101.

  26. McGehee says:

    Dan, it’s their loss.

  27. motionview says:

    I follow SurveyUSA in a RSS reader; there are 8 – 10 stories in the cache with them going after Google consumer surveys. This line caught my attention

    At first, we thought the ad on the left was for Coke, with the many different red and silver cylinders, and the ad on the right was for new Lesbian Coke

  28. Dale Price says:

    I am trying to figure out why I should care what she says.

    Objectively, there’s no reason you should, given the dismal quality of her thought and writing ability respectively. She’d have to become vastly more competent in both to earn the “Jane, you ignorant slut” rebuttal.

    The only reason to pay attention to her is that a non-negligible number of people nod along to her totalitarian stylings and cooter talk.

    And in point of strict fact, this little turdlet of hers reveals her to be a full-on totalitarian, not a mere authoritarian.

  29. Dale Price says:

    It really isn’t a question of sin, original or otherwise. At all. That part isn’t even worth responding to, it’s so stupid and revelatory of nothing but her endless anti-Christian hate-on.

    But Mandy invariably lets her pseud show when she writes.

    Self-control is essential to study, exercise, hobbies and the like–none of which have squat to do with sin. That Mandy can’t recognize a simple fact like that again demonstrates what a tedious dunce she is.

  30. Alec Leamas says:

    For this person to attempt to argue otherwise is imbecilic.

    For her to admit what we all know would cause a catastrophic implosion of her worldview.

  31. leigh says:

    If we’re looking for causes we should maybe look beyond the breakdown of the family or rampant sex in the streets for the real root of our problems.

    Hoo boy. I made the mistake a number of years ago of making pretty much the same statement in a roomful of libs, forgetting for that moment that libs are incapable of understanding irony. I was lucky to get away from the tolerance for differences in opinion in one piece.

  32. Ryan C. says:

    Personal responsibility in matters of food and sex is simply a more sophisticated application of the “responsibility” that prevents you from doing any number of unwise things, like trying to breathe underwater like a fish or touching the pretty flames on the stove. Most of us have the basic concept down by age five, so that’s plenty of time to take it one level higher by early adulthood. One doesn’t need to believe in God or be exposed to the concept of God to figure out what to cook for dinner.

  33. leigh says:

    Ergo, personal responsibility is also not “given” to us: it just is. God does not punish: we merely reap what we sow.

    Quite so, di. The state of Washington (D-Crunchy Granola) is experiencing a terrible outbreak of pertussis or whooping cough this year with over 1000 cases reported so far. The NYT is blaming the outbreak on our niggardly government for not supplying enough vaccine to the clinics so the freegan hippies can get their tots vaccinated against what can certainly be a deadly bacteria, although there have yet to be any deaths reported. The crack investigative reporters at NYT have failed to take into account that the hippies are big time anti-vaxers who think all vaccines were ginned up by Big Pharma for the filthy lucre and not for public health concerns.

    Now, kids are making scary whooping coughs and crowding hospital emergency rooms. Rather than think back to when the child should have been having routine vaccinations, the hippies are looking to blame.

  34. geoffb says:

    Motionview,

    They can’t determine what OXY and Clean&Clear are?

  35. TRHein says:

    I do not remember what decade it was but I do remember there being a war against skinny that was formulated as sexism against fat women. If one does a google search on sexism and fat women there are pages upon pages of points of view. The one that caught my eye was a post by a black woman stating that large was what black women and their men want.

    I wonder what reaction this particular post by Marcotte will draw from the black community given the thrust of the argument. Likely none.

    My point being that (as was pointed out up thread) since this is all about control and nothing else it will not affect the “protected” groups. It would be interesting to see what the break out is for which group has the largest proportion of people of large proportions.

  36. Pablo says:

    Rather than think back to when the child should have been having routine vaccinations, the hippies are looking to blame.

    It can’t possibly be their fault, can it? They’re so pure.

    Feckin’ morons.

  37. motionview says:

    Not when their business model demands that the new competing Google product is crap.
    Magical thinking. Soothing you since time immemorial.

  38. bour3 says:

    I mean no offense to fat people if you happen to be fat, bless you, once this autopsy guy told my brother he prefers fat people because they’re usually more healthy, the dead ones are, and their bodies show all these nice clearly defined layers when they’re cut open, but that’s my brother for you, he’s macabre that way sometimes, and always looking for a good side. The thing is I do see a lot of truly fat guys marrying women who could toss me around like a cat, no not a cat, like a sack of laundry, no maybe like, I guess I’m not a good analogy maker, but big women and then they have these great big kids. I do see that a lot. And seeing it makes me think they really could use some help with their dietary planning because this situation looming so largely right smack in front of me is intergenerational and it all has to do with initial choices and the bewildering availability for landing on bad choices. Eewy-gooey delicious bad choices. I look at those families when they’re together like at Sam’s Club where everything is large and I think to myself the kids and then their kids are all doomed.

  39. bh says:

    In another twenty years there will be a pill you can buy over the counter that will bring you to a perfect weight without any negative side effects. Then in another 40 years we’ll live until the local energy death of our section of the universe because nanobots will slowly replace our neurons until we have robust non-dying brains. By that point, we’ll all be banging robots anyways but many of them won’t have our exotic origin stories and they’ll think it’s boring the way we keep talking about the old “flesh times”. I learn these things from reading Instapundit.

    Also, there will be a pill that will feel just like eating a blueberry pie but that one will cause occasional side effects. I’d avoid it.

  40. bh says:

    I think it’d be funny to custom order a novelty fat robot body to carry you around. Maybe use it for Halloween parties or something.

  41. bh says:

    People probably won’t get the joke though. They’ll think you’re going as an engineering mistake and you’ll have to explain that back when we had bodies — never-organics will “roll” their visual sensors — there once was an earlier time when you couldn’t choose your weight independent of diet and exercise. And that’s when you’ll have embarrassingly aged yourself because most everyone died died back then and you’re a lucky one indeed to have hung on long enough to get one of the first nanobot injections.

    And by the time you’re done explaining your fat robot body all of the other robots will have made a note to not have robot sex with you later that evening because you’re old and creepy.

    (This has all been on topic. I’m sure of it.)

  42. bh says:

    Btw, if any of you live until the brain replacing nanobot injections I hope you’ll be kind enough to tell your robot friends that I coined “never-organics” way back in 2012.

  43. McGehee says:

    I’m less worried about hereditary obesity than about hereditary stupidity. A fat person can always wear a T-shirt — XXXXXXL, of course — that says, “You’re stupid, and I can always go on a diet.”

  44. bh says:

    Another link on that research.* Interestingly enough we find some evidence for a possibility that I often mention but people sometimes contend is impossible:

    The fourth and final experiment was the only one with ambiguous results. The first three studies had shown direct causal evidence of religion on self-control—and downstream effects on enduring discomfort, delaying rewards, and exerting patience. But is it possible that the religious priming might have activated something else—moral intuition, or death-related concerns? In order to rule out these possibilities, the scientists used a completely secular self-control task, one with no moral overlay: the so-called Stroop task. This is the task where one must rapidly identify the ink that words are printed in, rather than read the words. It’s very difficult, requiring mental exertion and self-control.

    The scientists primed some with religious words as usual, but others were primed with moral words—virtue, righteous—and still others with words related to mortality—deadly, grave, and so forth. Then all the volunteers attempted the Stroop task on a computer, which measured accuracy and reaction time. The results, as reported in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, showed that religiously primed volunteers had much more self-control than did controls or those primed to think about mortality. But those with religion on their minds were statistically no different than those with morality on their minds. This was an unexpected finding, and it suggests that activating an implicit moral sensibility may have some of the same effects as religion.

    *I don’t know if it was good research.

  45. bh says:

    For the record, I wouldn’t have considered that an unexpected finding. I’d have been all, “Yep, that’s about what I thought.” Which would then make me wonder about my experimental methodology and whether or not I was just finding what I wanted to find.

    So I’d try another set where I used religiously- and morally- neutral words for what I was trying to prime for like “strong”, “tenacious”, or “tough”. Then when I found the same result as I once again expected I’d realize that I’d just re-discovered that you can prime people which everyone already knew and I probably wasn’t going to get any more funding for this research unless I burned the results from that last test.

  46. bh says:

    Unless it happened in the distant future. Then I’d be tempted to just reprogram them into better robots like the old fleshy cult leaders used to do.

  47. bh says:

    Okay, time for a serious comment.

    When I observe people pondering the connection between morality and religion I notice three groups emerge.

    1) Those whose religious beliefs inform them that morality springs from religious convictions. To editorialize a little bit here I think this comes from a good place because they don’t only care about whether or not someone is moral because that would be selfish, they’d also like others to find salvation. As in: a non-religious person acting morally is a net positive for society but still doesn’t do anything to get that person to heaven. With religion as the path to morality you get a two-fer where someone is both a good neighbor and they get benefits from a relationship with God. This isn’t my stance but it comes from a very well-meaning place and… they might be right. Something all non-believers should consider once in awhile.

    2) Those who want to link religion and morality because they’ve already rejected religion and they want to steal a base by pretending that the next logical step is to then reject morality. Hey, if one springs from the other, this is a two-fer for them as well. You can get people to both reject God and then think it’s logical to also reject morality. These people are malevolent assholes. Literally the worst sort of sophists.

    3) Those who think religion and morality are inherently linked for the religious but find plenty of positive benefits from morality itself regardless so morality is a self-proven good for all. They can construct explanations from kin-supporting altruism mechanisms working in unexpected ways to Adam Smith’s theory of sympathetic emotions or they can simply be good men who, like Abe Lincoln, feel good when they do good and feel bad when they do bad.

    For myself, I consider groups 1 and 3 to be natural allies and they should treat each other as such.

    And group 2 is composed of the stupid and evil.

  48. happyfeet says:

    National Soros Radio’s top story right now?

    Culture Matters, Romney Tells Liberty Grads

    and how do they pimp it?

    Mitt Romney barely mentioned his Mormon faith at an evangelical Christian university Saturday.

  49. bh says:

    NPR hires lots and lots of people from group 2.

  50. bh says:

    Same with the Lakers.

  51. cranky-d says:

    I’m one of those wacky Christians who believes that people in group 3 may end up saved anyway. We don’t know how G-d will sort everyone out.

    As an aside, kids, it’s Xians, not Xtians, okay? Get it together!

    Religion and morality are tied together strongly mostly because until fairly recently (in the U.S. anyway) nigh near everyone professed a belief in a higher power, and also because Judeo-Christian texts provided the moral guidance. There are people still living who remember the notion of religion and morality being firmly intertwined as being accepted doctrine.

    It’s obvious to me that one can be moral without a Judeo-Christian religion, but that idea has not been lived with long enough by enough people to be accepted in general. Since morality itself is in a state of flux, it may ultimately be a moot point.

  52. cranky-d says:

    In other words, the point might be moo.

  53. Yackums says:

    I’m one of those wacky Christians

    You’re one o’ them “early prototypes,” right? You darn near took the words outta my mouth regarding Group 3.

  54. Mike LaRoche says:

    Same with the Lakers.

    Heh, indeed. God, I hate that team.

  55. mc4ever59 says:

    Pills for this, injections for that.
    Everybody sing !! And a 1, and a 2…
    “In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive they may fiiiiind..”
    Heh. Zager and Evans were waaaay ahead of their time.

  56. Dale Price says:

    God does not punish: we merely reap what we sow.

    I disagree with this in part, but not enough to make an issue of it at present.

    In the spirit of agreement, I will note Catholic biblical scholar Scott Hahn says on the subject:

    “The nature of God’s justice and wrath is that He gives us what we want; He gives us what we choose; until we wake up and realize that we really desire what He calls us to choose.”

  57. Dale Price says:

    bh says May 12, 2012 at 11:45 pm

    For myself, I consider groups 1 and 3 to be natural allies and they should treat each other as such.

    And group 2 is composed of the stupid and evil.

    Preach it, brother! ;)

    No, really, that sums it up quite well.

  58. McGehee says:

    We don’t know how G-d will sort everyone out.

    This.

    I think when people speak of the Sin of Pride™, it’s the assumption some people seem to make that somehow they’ve figured out God’s mind, His plan and His intent.

    But as I said up thread, we mere mortals aren’t even any good at seeing His work in our own lives, much less our neighbors’ or, you know, the universe.

  59. mc4ever59 says:

    Mcgehee at 7:31 AM;

    That’s the thing; we don’t know. The conversation is endless and fascinating, with no end to the possibilities.
    I have a suspicion that God isn’t at all interested in 99.9% of our shenanigans. He just keeps feeding us rope, and waits to see if we do something useful with it.
    Or hang ourselves with it.

  60. leigh says:

    McGehee, the sin of which you speak is also known as “The Shoebox God”; the God who is only as big or small, as we can imagine Him to be. Many times people who are new to faith will try to cram their ideas and assumptions about God into that shoebox, which is only as big as their own faith and understanding of God.

    Bh, I’m kind of rushed this morning, but I look forward to reading the psych study you linked. It’s time shrinks began to examine faith and mental health again without the confirmation bias that many bring to the table that presumes that any and all judgement is bad. I would personally like to find Carl Rogers and kick his inner child square in the ass.

  61. motionview says:

    HotAir has the Sunday shows.

    ABC’s “This Week” — Reps. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.; Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition; Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen.
    George Stephanopolous: For those of you who didn’t make the strategy session at Comedy Central, I get the straight man material directly from Axelrod & Plouffe, then I feed it into the news cycle both directly and through the new journolist; then all of the MFM uses that material to control the narrative, set the tone, and most importantly: set up the People’s Ridicule Brigade for all those Magic Underwear jokes.

    NBC’s “Meet the Press” — Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.; Reince Priebus, Republican National Committee chairman; Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.
    GE: We might have been a little mypoic in our cronyism, we need to light a fire under our allies to get the makers producing again for us takers. If the Dem Establishment can’t do that, the Rep Establishment is itching for their turn passing out Other People’s Money.

    CBS’ “Face the Nation” — Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich.; Gov. Deval Patrick, D-Mass.; Evan Wolfson, president of Freedom to Marry; former Solicitor General Ted Olson; Republican strategist Mark McKinnon; singer Clay Aiken; Reed.
    Bob Schieffer: Lindsey and McLame were busy today; turns out there are other currently elected Republicans in Washington, one of whom is our mark today. Let’s find two former Republicans who are definitely pro-ghey-marriage, throw in a non-threatening poofter and get in the game. Dan Savage? Are you mad, we have strict guidance – no air-time for him, can’t let the undecideds see that venomGo Obama . Go equal rights!

    CNN’s “State of the Union” — Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.; Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y; Gov. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo.; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Gary Bauer, president of American Values.
    Wolf Blitzer: Since everyone else has moved on from “gutsy call” to “look at the whackadoodle h8rs” so have we, and we have a lot of dead air to cover. A lot.

    “Fox News Sunday” — Sens. John Thune, R-S.D., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
    Chris Wallace: No one will come on my show. And I can and do tongue-bathe the Establishment just as well as Schieffer, it’s just the damn Fox News brand.

  62. jdw says:

    McGehee, pride does come before a fall. And this little Republic is afixed way, way up there; atheists and other termites have destroyed her strong foundations, so expect the coming toppling to be dramatic.

    We are the new, exemplar Sodom and Gomorrah.

  63. Pablo says:

    Speaking of fetishes, Andrew Sullivan’s turns hilarious. Undoubtedly, he thinks he’s helping.

  64. B Moe says:

    Authoritarianism probably wouldn’t be quite as bad if we could just find some reasonably intelligent authorities.

    http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/this-is-not-a-joke-government-issues-study-of-a-study-about-studies/

  65. Darleen says:

    Pablo

    “He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family,” Sullivan writes

    Sully really went there?

  66. mc4ever59 says:

    I sometimes wonder if Sully isn’t putting everybody on.
    The alternative is that he’s completely insane.

  67. Libby says:

    So which way is better, the “Christian” way, where everyone is responsible for controlling their own urges, or the “Islamic” way, where the entire community is designed to prevent the possibility of urges – burkas, segregation by sex, no alcohol, etc.? That’s the path they want to go down, making “bad” foods, cigarettes & alcohol limited (if not banned), right?

  68. Darleen says:

    where the entire community is designed to prevent the possibility of urges

    Is it any wonder why Leftists make excuses for Islamists? Oh, they’d change a few end points, but they love the means.

  69. mc4ever59 says:

    Libby, I don’t really consider Islam to be a religion.
    I think they use religion as a mask and a shield, so they can advance their true agenda without nearly as much resistance.

  70. Libby says:

    Well, regardless of whether you’re looking at it as a religion or form of government, when it comes to sin, they seem to put more emphasis on the source of the sin instead of the sinner. Such as, he couldn’t help but rape her, she was wearing a short skirt, or she was out without a male escort, etc. You can even sort of see this thinking in some of the punishment, such as cutting off a hand for stealing. Yes, it’s very literal – an eye for an eye – but it’s also like “Bad, hand! You stole that wallet”, instead of dealing with the choice the person made to steal.

  71. TRHein says:

    Libby, your comment does not make sense, the emphasis is never on the the source, those are excuses and no reasonable person would accept your examples.

    We do not cut off hands for stealing wallets, you’ll have to take that up with the religous authorities in the countries that do.

  72. cranky-d says:

    Reading comprehension is not just for academics, it’s for everyone!

  73. deadrody says:

    The really annoying thing about this is that the solution to the “obesity epidemic” such as it does exist (if at all) is simple and twofold:

    1) Government completely stop meddling in the free market for food stuffs. No more subsidies for anything, least of all crap like high fructose corn syrup

    2) Government completely stop pretending they know a fucking thing about nutrition. Stop trying to tell people what is and is not healthy.

    Simple. Unfortunately, it is unlikely stopping the things they started doing some 40-50 years ago can undo the carnage they have caused in those 40-50 years.

  74. leigh says:

    Heh. deadrody, read this about how M’chelle made cracks about how fat Oprah is.

  75. Ruby Lennox says:

    My Xtiananity does not allow me to hate anyone, for any reason.

    That said, I sin terribly, because I really, really hate Amanda Marcotte, and I’d be truly glad if she choked to death on a chicken bone and shut her yap for evermore.

    I’ve never seen a person so septic with hate, evil, bitterness, idiocy, frequent incoherence and utter ideological hideboundness have a public platform like she does. I loathe her and everything she says and stands for, and I am 100% convinced she is literally in thrall to the devil, whether she is aware of it or not.

    I admire those with the intestinal fortitude to read the sewage that she issues forth and comment on it, because I do not.

  76. geoffb says:

    No obesity for Tombstone AZ. No water either.

  77. cranky-d says:

    Please, everyone, it’s not “Xtian,” it’s “Xian.”

  78. cranky-d says:

    I have issues, okay?

  79. B Moe says:

    Fire engulfed a large part of the eastern portion of the Huachuca Mountains. Record-breaking monsoon rains followed. With no vegetation to absorb the runoff, huge mudslides forced boulders to tumble down the mountain sides…

    Which means this area looks about like the moon right now, there literally is no “environment” to protect.

  80. SDN says:

    Personal responsibility in matters of food and sex is simply a more sophisticated application of the “responsibility” that prevents you from doing any number of unwise things, like trying to breathe underwater like a fish or touching the pretty flames on the stove.

    Ryan C., I can’t resist the urge to Kipple:

    As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
    There are only four things certain since Social Progress began —
    That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
    And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire —
    And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
    When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins
    As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn
    The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

  81. mc4ever59 says:

    SDN, this was Kipling in 1919?
    It appears he had more than a little Nostradamus in him.

  82. leigh says:

    Cranky is correct about the spelling of Xian. Me, I plan to be diligent about that particular spelling.

  83. Ernst Schreiber says:

    The social imagination in action.

    Arbeit macht Fettesfrei, Dicker.

  84. On occasion, I pull out an observation about the necessity of maintaining the relationship between responsibility and authority and how so many things go wrong when someone has one without the other. Once the Left can convince you that you aren’t responsible for yourself, it becomes a very short step to you also forfeit the authority over yourself.

    So, what else is new?

  85. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Amanda Marcotte isn’t a real human being. She’s a character written by Melvin Udall.

  86. mc4ever59 says:

    Is Amanda the one with the ‘big cock’ ?

  87. leigh says:

    That’s her. What a tool.

  88. Ernst Schreiber says:

    If only she knew how to use it.

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