Josh

Vermouth. The dry variety that's used in martinis.

Which is why I never got to like martini's, even though I can find sipping straight vodka very enjoyable.

Knee pain that doesn't go away easily. I think I might have to see someone about it....

The fact that I have money to burn and none of the correct drugs to help with that problem. I'm so sick of taking pills, I love the immediate gratification of inhaling fumes and exhaling danger. Yes, I'm too old for that shit, but right now, I don't care. If I don't get some excitement soon, I'm going to go downtown and start spray painting "cock" on every expensive sports car I see. Oh,, and huff the paint. Wheee!

 

shit.

You live in San Francisco, man! How the hell are you not able to buy any drug you want?

Or you really, ulp, in Paradise, California now?

I understand that Fox News will be taking Sarah Palin on as a somewhat frequent contributor, though she won't be on often enough to have her own show.

Or?

She won't have a show so she can be very well paid for a very light load of appearances that will give her plenty of time for other political activities.

The fact that management seems to naturally draw suckheads to it.

Nasty beery shit-farts, the kind you smell at bars, and just about nowhere else, thankfully. They are so disgusting that they can adhere to the individual who laid them and follow along as they are walking. :mong:

And have you noticed how people who've just laid beery shit-farts always look like morons, and never like they're intelligent?

Spilled beer at a bar, on the floor to grow stale and make the place smell rank, on a bench seat so you can sit in it accidentally, or on the bar itself, so you can lay your arm down on it, especially if you're wearing a long-sleeved shirt.

Idiots who knock over beer bottles so they spill on the bar or a bench seat. I know I'm supposed to give them a pass because they've been drinking/are drunk, which always makes everything okay, at least in a bar, but I'm sorry, they're still fucking idiots.

But on the scale of immediate unpleasantness, beery shit-farts are the worst.

The trouble at Keenspot:

http://www.fleen.com/archives/2009/12/22/some-days-i-feel-like-a-real-goddamn-journalist/

Ah, the holiday season:

http://devilspanties.keenspot.com/d/20100106.html

Matt, I hope that after another look you can see how, well, ridiculous that statement is.

 

I mean, no definition because Wikipedia doesn't show one???

Well, there may be a word for what you're describing, but if there is, it isn't in current widespread usage (as defined by its appearance on Wikipedia).

No, it isn't. But our modern times are kind of an idiocracy [not the term I'm looking for ] which has lost or forgotten much which was understood just 45 years ago, so our possibly diminished and certainly less intelligent collection of commonly used words and phrases shouldn't be relied on for much except as a measure of how bad things have gotten.

Given that our species has a lot of highly specific words for political things (for instance the similar but distinct "revanchism" and "irredentism"), I expect that it would not have left the (in my view) yawning definitional gap that I'm trying to find the fitting term for.

So you might as well make up a new one.

My guess is that the word of phrase I'm looking for exists within the formal discipline of political science.

So the next move, if I ever get around to it, is to get down to the library and look through some political science books.

But in the meantime, what would work? Theo-something, right? Theolegocracy? (Maybe I'm mixing Latin and Greek roots here?) Hmmm, theonationalism (as in Christian/Moslem/Hindu/Whatever Nation)? Theopolity? Oooh, theo-imperium! Theo-imperialism.

I dunno, theonationalism perhaps applies more aptly to efforts to define members of a particular religion as a nationality under classic European-style Nationalism, the one example of which I can think of is Zionism. Though it's such a bad idea (imho) that I can't imagine others not wanting to implement it as well, if they haven't already.

Though it occurs to me that even some existing secularly run religious regimes might be doing similar things to what Israel is, giving members of different religions different degrees of citizenship rights. Hmmm.

Theolegalism. Though would that work for governments where there is rule by decree, or government regulations that aren't strictly speaking laws (even if they are every bit as binding)?

Probably a lot of governments past and present could be considered partially theolegalist, many more than could be considered highly or fully theolegalist.

Anyway....

Again, my question has not been answered. Basically, it is this: what is the name for a government that creates and enforces religion-based laws but is run by secular officials, not religious ones?

It would depend on who wields power, really, and on what basis. If you have a democracy where the majority votes for religiously based parties (christian conservatives, for example), who then institute some laws based in religious doctrines, it's still basically a democracy.

There actually is a term for this: theodemocracy. It sounds lame but it's defined in my venerable (pub. 1965) but excellent Webster's Third International Dictionary.

But I'm looking for a broader term, one that would include theodemocracies and secular authoritarian regimes that enact and enforce religious measures.

If you have an authoritarian secular state (fascism, for instance), which institutes laws based in religious doctrine, I'd still call it just a fascist state,

I'm looking for a more fine-grained definition than that.

By the way, I have a hard time with the idea of a truly fascist government that's also implements a great deal of religious law inspired by non-fascist religion. From what I've seen of fascism, it's too subversive of pre-existing religion to implement a whole body of law based on it.

(This is an aside: I don't accept the sloppy-to-the-point-of-uselessness definition of fascism as rightist authoritarianism or any tendency toward that type of government or thinking, or worse yet, authoritarianism of ANY type. I think Communist and similar analyses and definitions of fascism are almost the only useful ones, and they are much more specific and exacting than the modern tendency to label any restriction on anyone "fascism".)

unless they actually give legislative or executive or judicial power to the clergy, in which case you're moving towards some kind of theocracy.

And away from what I'm seeking the definition of.

This would really be helped out if you explained what state you're talking about, as some people have said.

What first caused me to think of this wasn't an existing polity but one that a powerful movement would like to see: the United States run as a Christian Nation by secular government officials.

But if you want an existing example, Saudi Arabia would serve. Or any other country that is run under some version of "Sharia law" by non-religious officials.

Being sick through what one was hoping was going to be a fun time (like say a New Years weekend starting with a New Years Eve Thursday and every weekend night a full mooner).

Temporarily disfiguring cold sores during what one was hoping would be a fun time.

Again, insomnia. More specifically right now, the inability to get to bed when I'd like to.

Ireland leaps from the new millennium back into the dark ages.

 

http://blasphemy.ie/2010/01/01/atheist-ireland-publishes-25-blasphemous-quotes/

So how was this even possible? Are there THAT many ordinary people in Ireland who are in favor of blasphemy laws that was possible to get bill passed with that kind of language in it? If so, what the hell else does that at least substantial minority of Irish citizens think about other "moral" and religious issues?

Interpol was taken over by the Nazis when they took over Austria, and the Final Solution planning meeting took place in Interpol offices. To what degree Interpol has gotten out from under its Nazi past, I don't know.

Maybe there is some special harm if Interpol gets diplomatic immunity on American soil, again, I don't know. But the CIA, NSA, the DIA and its constituent parts from each major branch of the U.S. Armed Forces already have functional if not official immunity, and the least of them is probably more dangerous to Americans and everyone else than Interpol is.

I'm no truster of anything that abrogates ANY country's sovereignty, whether the actions of another country (most often my own, unfortunately), or those of regional or global governments or alliances. That very much includes economic globalism and globalizing organizations (WTO) and agreements.

In general I oppose communitarianism, on the civil or international level. The communitarians think in some punitive and paternalistic way that individual people and countries are being selfish and anti-social by insisting on our/their sovereignty, but personal and national sovereignty are pretty much the way people and polities protect their rights these days, and I see fewer and not more protections under any communitarian scheme at the societal or international level. And "a moratorium on the manufacture of new rights"? I don't fucking think so.

Even those media that don't like the Tea Party movement have to admit that it's big now and can't just be derided away.

Here's a sane, thoughtful article from Alternet (which they got from another site, which might explain its quality) on one aspect of this new rightist movement:

Just How Racist Is the Tea Party Movement?

 

By Bill Berkowitz, IPS News. Posted December 28, 2009.

 

Are the openly-racist elements within the Tea Party movement an aberration, or are they more firmly entrenched than tea partiers would care to admit?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forms_of_government

Hm, I don't see anything in there that answers my question.

 

 

 

So unless I'm missing something, my question hasn't yet been answered.

Sometimes the lack of an answer is an answer in itself, in this instance then there is no concise term for the form of government you describe.

Matt, I hope that after another look you can see how, well, ridiculous that statement is.

I mean, no definition because Wikipedia doesn't show one???

Again, my question has not been answered. Basically, it is this: what is the name for a government that creates and enforces religion-based laws but is run by secular officials, not religious ones?

It seems as though this whole year has been unusually cold here in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as the last one or three months of '08. Not brutally, but notably.

This could be true for the whole West Coast for all I know.

At least it appears he's not fooling anyone any more.

 

Obama and the Fat Cats

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

 

Did this clown really say on national television that “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street”?

 

Really, Barack? So, my question is: Then why did you help out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street? Why did you surround yourself with nothing but Robert Rubin proteges in all the key economic positions in your government? Why did you allow them to open a Washington branch of Goldman Sachs in the West Wing? Why have your policies been tailored to helping Wall Street bankers, rather than the other 300 million of us, who just happen to be suffering badly right now?

He will not be re-elected, I'm almost certain.

Hard to know without seeing the field of Republican candidates, and without having had the history of at least the first two years of his administration. The Repubs may be seen by then as truly loathsome by a lot of Americans. They will have played their part in healthcare and jobs programs as well by that time. They too will have a record during these new economic times for people to scrutinize. And if you look at the polls, the GOP still comes off poorly in comparison to the Democratic party in general, and I don't see that there's any GOP leader out there that most people both know about and like.

They are of course banking on Obama taking the heat for what goes on during what look to be four BAD economic years, just as the GOP's person would if s/he held the White House. But whether the GOP's congresspeople will turn out ot have done anything positive for people, beyond fighting to hold down NON-MILITARY and non-financial-industry-bailout government costs (which doesn't DIRECTLY help anybody) is anybody's guess.

They seem to think that they just have to make Obama look bad, or let the times make him look bad as he tries to deal with them, and everyone will love their neo-Reaganite shit, especially their neo-Reaganomics (Reagan was never quite the "Reaganite" he is so fondly mis-remembered as being by modern Republicans). I don't know for sure, given how stupid Americans can be about a fair number of things, but I find it a little hard to believe that the majority wants mean-spirited cost-cutting in these bad times. Especially since things will get worse for "The People" as unemployment and foreclosures increase.

Updated December 20, 2009

McCain Brushes Off Palin Cap Flap

 

FOXNews.com

 

Sen. John McCain brushed off the semi-controversy over his former running mate's visor Sunday, attributing the blog and talk show chatter about Sarah Palin's vacation attire to "hysterical attacks" from the left.

 

Sen. John McCain brushed off the semi-controversy over his former running mate's visor Sunday, attributing the blog and talk show chatter about Sarah Palin's vacation attire to "hysterical attacks" from the left.

 

The former Alaska governor was photographed wearing a "McCain-Palin" visor with McCain's name crossed out while she was on vacation in Hawaii. She claimed she was just trying to go "incognito," but reportedly cut her vacation short.

And no, I didn't make a mistake as I was excerpting the first three paragraphs of this article.

Try http://www.powells.com/ and http://www.alibris.com/

I just picked up Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy by Peter Schweitzer, author of The Bushes and Reagan's War. He's with the Hoover Institution, the rightwing outfit that's quite notorious in and around Stanford University, just 40 miles south of me. Among many others he thanks Cap Weinberger and Newt Gingrich for their support and encouragement, so clearly this is a part of whole big Republican propaganda machine, more specifically its vaunted "Republican attack machine". (According to ex-conservative author and journalist David Brock, Newt Gingrich is very important to the modern GOP movement being what it is today, and has had much greater power and influence than most people realize.)

This book is intended as an attempt to counteract the very effective attacks on the hypocrisies of so many big-name GOP conservatives that keep people on the left so entertained these days. How effective it will be is anyone's guess, but the author goes talks about a lot of things people on the left wouldn't be happy about in most of these people.

The people whose background Schweitzer goes into are Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Al Franken, Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Ralph Nader, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros, Barbara Streisand, Gloria Steinem and Cornel West. I got the book because I thought it would be entertaining, not because I was horrified that it might go after anyone that I worshipped -- because I have little respect for most of these people, and don't know very much about the rest. To be honest, even though Chomsky isn't exactly a liberal, I was chuckling at the stuff Schweitzer wrote about him, some of which I dug up decades ago, though Schweitzer has apparently done a more thorough job than I did. Soros deserves to be shown up for what he is ("Inside Trader, Economic Globalist, Corrupting Financial Influence"), Michael Moore is a piece of shit (though the author doesn't seem to be aware that everyone left of center knows that, even if they like some of what he's done), Steinem was (and probably still is) CIA, though somehow THAT doesn't seem to have shown up in the book, if I can trust the book's index on this (though such an omission isn't remarkable in a Hoover Institute guy, if you know what I'm saying); and Clinton, Nader, Pelosi, Streisand, who fucking cares? Whatever good he'd done, Kennedy is known by pretty much everyone to have been no moral paragon. Franken the right seems to have hated ever since he came out with Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, and they hate him even more now that he's the last addition to the current U.S. Senate, bring it very close to veto-proof on party line votes. Who knows, Schweitzer's claims ("Habitual Liar, Mean-Spirited Partisan [hypocrisy, Mr. Schweitzer?] and Racial Discriminator") might have some traction. Cornel West I had the impression was also a socialist, not a liberal, and it looks like Schweitzer can't help "getting him back for being black" ("Segregationist...") as well as tagging on him for his capitalistic tendencies ("...Commodity Fetishist, Capitalist Interest-Maximizer").

I can't say how accurate Schweitzer's material is altogether, but it looks like he's made least a few interesting claims that might be worth checking out.

I did pick up How the Left Swiftboated America: the Liberal Media Conspiracy to Make You Think George Bush was the Worst President in History by John Gibson, "author of Hating America and The War on Christmas". I don't plan to spend too much time on this one given that its table of contents suggest that it will be as bad as the title and front cover author info (above) indicate, but it will probably be good for a few laughs.

I also got two books on male sex roles: The Myth of Masculinity by Joseph K. Pleck and Stiffed: the Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi. Pleck is an academic who quite early (1981) takes on many of the dubious and false assumptions on which many previous studies of men had been based or interpreted, including the supposed greater criminality and more active sexuality of XYY chromosome-bearing so-called "supermales". Faludi published Stiffed in 1999, something like 7 years after she wrote the award-winning Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women, and like Backlash, Stiffed is written for a popular audience.

Also I'm enjoying Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi by Troy Denning and The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury.

Too bad the Quakers aren't a larger proportion of religious people (and everyone altogether):

Survey: Support for terror suspect torture differs among the faithful

 

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forms_of_government

Hm, I don't see anything in there that answers my question.

So unless I'm missing something, my question hasn't yet been answered.

Is there a specific term for a government that is run by secular officials but that enforces religious principles? One that separates it from classical theocracies run by religious officials?

There seem to be far, far more governments of the former type than the latter type, especially in modern times. And even the American religious right wants a government enforcing laws derived from their kinds of Christianity, without any necessity that those officials be clergy or theologians (and in fact the USRR is probably a lot more comfortable with the idea of government officials being mostly or all secular officials, because none of them trust the next denomination's people as far as they could throw a church building).

I see the terms theocracy and theocrat thrown around in discussions about the RR but somehow they don't seem quite correct or at least quite definitive enough.

So does this look like a good holiday read to you, and should I put in a reserve on a copy at my local library?

http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780061792892/LC.JPG&client=sfpl&type=hw7&showCaptionBelow=t

http://sflib1.sfpl.org/search~/a?SORT=D&searchscope=1&searchtype=X&searcharg=How+the+Left+Swiftboated+America&SORT=D&x=0&y=0

And that's so true that some Republicans, if not yet the most rabid ones, are saying Obama's not so bad....

Are Americans a Broken People?

 

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them?

 

Yes. It is called the "abuse syndrome." How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims' faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker. So the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.

I read this a while back and had strong mixed feelings about it. Part of me says YES! in response to the author's question, however, that appearance in a political population can be exceedingly temporary if the right set of "wrong" events really set people off. However, people do seem defeated, by things they hate continuing to happen politically that shouldn't, and by government generally and corporate economic rule. Many (most?) people don't even try to use the opportunities that the system offers them, which certainly go beyond voting. And people feel they can't go against the corporations, that they have to pay the ridiculously high prices HERE, for stuff they know is made very cheaply, and can't be bothered to cross to street to check THERE for a possibly lower price, that they have no real bargaining power in the modern marketplace as consumers, and so aren't willing to exercise their opportunities to refuse to buy when they have a choice and when a price seems just too fucking high.

Now there have been changes, voting machine reforms (and efforts to counter some of those reforms) as unacknowledged responses to the widespread belief that the GOP stole the 2000, 2004 and possible the 2002 elections. And poll watching and alertness for voter participation reduction scams increased greatly on the part of political active local citizens and the media nationwide, which I think is what basically forced the GOP to do relatively little vote scamming in 2006 and 2008 and basically allowed two more or less clean elections, those last two elections where the Republicans hemorrhaged congressional seats first to lose Congress and then to almost lose the ability to filibuster. So it can't be said that nothing was done.

And I do wonder to what degree the news has been served up to us a certain way, to make it look as though these things (Bush, basically, up to 2006) keep happening, and the people lie supine, when there actually IS activism, but the media are predisposed NOT to tell us about most of it, at very least because the media are elite institutions and as such don't like to make grassroots activism look effective. So they don't tell us about what all we're really doing in response to all the wearying things the elites and their rant-squads are doing to us, and then out of at least one side of their mouth they tell us how weak and helpless we are because we obviously haven't done anything in response to all the awful things being done to us -- in their version of things, anyway.

But I do think a lot of people are just tired, from everything in their lives altogether, overwork, worry, hurrying around to do too many things in a day, getting too little sleep, and then all this political stuff on top of all that, as though it's not integral to their lives but something that's dumped on them from the outside and that they wish would just go away, or at least would stop coming at them for a while.

I think the comments section after the article gets into this, and a lot more.