Owner: So Soon No More URL:http:sosoonnomore.blogspot.com Join Date: Sun, 06 Apr 2008 20:47:34 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: World and American politics, religion and alternate history. Come for the politics, stay for the history lesson! Site statistics:Click here
There is no liberal Great Awakening 2008-04-06 13:28:00 Over at Reason, there is an article called "The New Age of Reason" that has the small undertitle "Is the Fourth Great
Awakening finally coming to a close?"The short answer, from the article and reality, is yes. Great Awakenings are periods of religious ferment, when faith becomes far more popular an prevalent. While historians only truly recognize the first three, the Fourth is the one in which our current political climate is being formed. The Fourth started with the re-emergence of the Christian Right, reached its greatest political popularity with President Reagan and its greatest political power with President George W. Bush. What I mean by this is that Reagan was elected with the help of the Christian Right, Bush was elected by the Christian Right.McCain's selection as the republi
Someone else cares about alternate history! 2008-04-05 11:26:00 For once, alternate
history goes mainstream and isn't about the Civil War or WWII. This time, the Nazis don't win, the Confederates don't win. Mexico wins: (Courtesy of poor targeted advertising)Sure, it's an ad for vodka, but it's also got a map, and I love maps. Now I know next to nothing about the Mexican-American war, where the US gained the land that makes up its current boundaries. I can't point to some specific thing that could have been changed in 1848 to tip the balance in favor of Mexico.There's only one thing that I do know. Within the US, the Democratic party of the time supported the jingoistic war with Mexico and the opposition Whigs, generally more anti-slave, were split over support. When the US won, anti-war Whigs fell out of favor. Among these were Abraham Lincoln Read more:Someone else
Some politicians are done #2 2008-04-04 13:13:00 Hillary Clinton has lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama.No it's not official yet, but the media and the politicos have registered their tiredness with Hillary. The math, whether you go by delegates or states, is against her. Obama is closing in in Pennsylvania, where Hillary needed a 12-point win to really stay in it. She's now up by 6, or down by 2. Either way, her lead isn't big enough.The Bosnia story hurt her. I do not know why someone would invent such a story. I'm not truly convinced she even knew she was lying. I have often remembered events that did not happen in such-and-such a way. What makes me wonder is how her staff let her repeat it. Did they check the facts? If so, why let her lie? If not, they should be fired for negligence.Obama didn't implode over th Read more:politicians
Some politicians are done #1 2008-04-04 12:46:00 A bit ago, I said:If there were real elections in Zimbabwe, my cynical side tells meMugabe and ZANU-PF would still win, since the average Zimbabweandoesn't have much basis for comparison. Mugabe did indeed end Westerncontrol of the country. He does have popular support. Forcing him notto propagandize a couple months before an election wouldn't undo thepervasive effects of his twenty-five years of propaganda. But theopposition party, the MDC, would probably get quite a few seats - a lotmore than Mugabe would like. It would set itself up as a realopposition party, waiting for the elderly Mugabe to kick the bucket.Zimbabwe is not, and has never been, a real democracy. But I hold outhope that sometimes soon, it may join the club. [Important section highlighted]Why was I wrong? I was indeed wr Read more:politicians
Too much democracy? What's the point? 2008-04-03 18:54:00 Over at the Volokh Conspiracy (an unbelievably smart clan of politically astute lawyers) there is a growing series of posts about a recent UN Human Rights Council resolution. The resolution is being condemned by all commentators there for being...against human rights.Which, in fact, it is.The resolution urges the member states of the UN (not just the ones who voted for this measure) to use legislative and police means to prevent any incitement of hatred or violence against a race or religion. This provision in and of itself would not likely be abused too badly by strong democracies. In the US, the government may act against hateful speech if it seems likely to cause actual violence. A legitimate threat enables the government to go against free speech to preserve the more fundamental ri Read more:democracy
, point
Why is Islam so old? 2008-04-01 13:37:00 In various articles on various news services (especially the BBC) I have noticed a group of stories about Turkish religious academics trying to recontextualize Islam
for the modern era. Turkey is a special case in the Muslim world, independent for long enough to be stable but not Arabic-speaking. This lets the country develop in a looser way - it's not held in place by various Arabic ways of governance but is instead free to explore various ideas.What does the academic recontextualization mean? If it were Christian academics revamping Christian theology, I wouldn't expect that much. Any major change would be shouted down as elitism, much the same way that American Evangelicals discount the recent theology of liberal Protestants as something imposed from above on an unwilling population
Early Council of Trent 2008-03-31 16:26:00 By the early 1500s, the Catholic Church (hereafter CC) was in trouble. It was in many places corrupt and was stepping over certain boundary lines of power. While the average European was more fervently and popularly religious than at most other times in Christian history, the Church was seen by a large contingent as failing in certain areas. This is the reason someone like Martin Luther could write against the CC and manage to break it apart. He began critiquing in 1516 until his death; the CC did not issue a total response until the Council
of Trent
in 1563. This council reformed the CC and corrected many of the injustices that Protestants had complained about. It was too late, however, and German regionalism and a dislike of papal taxation kept the various Protestant movements aliv Read more:Early
Could an eccentric billionaire have prevented the Civil War? 2008-03-30 22:04:00 In his book For the Glory of God, Rodney Stark asserts that Christianity ended the slave trade. He makes a convincing argument that the Marxist accounts of slavery's end - that it wasn't profitable, that it was becoming outmoded - are wrong. At the time that Britain unilaterally ended the transatlantic trade, slavery was more profitable than ever, and getting even more so. But ending the trade didn't end the institution of holding slaves in the US. While the practice could not be maintained on the Caribbean islands, where conditions usually killed the slaves, the US South had conditions conducive to a sustainable slave population.Stark also argues that people don't cause changes: organizations do. He points especially to the Quakers in leading the charge against the trade first and th Read more:Civil
Democratic Backsliding 2008-03-30 10:50:00 Elections are coming up again in Zimbabwe, my favorite train wreck of a country. The place has nearly as much potential as South Africa, but seems determined not to live up to it. This election will most likely be a sham again. Opposition candidates are arrested or beaten. Regions likely to vote against the ruling ZANU-PF party are threatened. Yet elections are still held, again and again. They are never free or fair, and never will be as long as Robert Mugabe is alive.This made me think about democracy: some countries have been democratic and somehow transitioned out of it. The most important example is Germany, which really did elect the Nazis at one point. The failed democracies in Russia under Yeltsin and China in the early 1900s are also examples, but neither had any kind of r Read more:Democratic
Theories of History 2008-03-29 14:59:00 Why do events happen the way they do? Why not something else? At a very micro level, we can ask if one assassination or birth could change things. At the largest level, observing hundreds of years of history at once, these micro changes seem to give way to material explanations. This, at least, is my opinion. So now I'm taking sides in the huge debate between materialists as nonmaterialists. For example, Marx was a certain kind of materialist when he spoke about history. He said that culture or great people did not drive history (I agree) but that resources and geography (I agree) created systems that competed and over time evolved towards the final utopian stage of Communism (I do not agree). There are actually a huge number of nonmaterialist arguments in popular media today, but Read more:Theories
, History
Alternate History #3.1: A weak Russia in the East 2008-03-28 10:46:00 Nazi Germany is the master of Eastern Europe, slowly industrializing the various lands. Russia
has all but given up on being a large empire again, and has retreated to the highest-population areas to counteract overextension and famine. France and England can't manage to get popular support for an anti-Nazi war. Italy is the facism sidekick of Germany. The US has no reason to awake from European isolationism. It's 1946 and WWII has not happened, mainly because of Nazi advisers managing to keep Hitler from trying to do everything at once, instead expanding into the vacuum left by the lack of the USSR.But how did Asia turn out? Asian Russia and Central Asia are scattered places, not unlike a less-divisive Afghanistan in 2005. No legitimate central authority, many different power-bases Read more:History
Alternate History #3: Soviet Russia strangled in the cradle 2008-03-27 14:30:00 At the end of WWII, the Soviet
Union became a world power by fully utilizing the combined forces scattered about Eastern Europe, uniting the region under one relatively unified political ideology. But the USSR had nearly been killed just three years earlier, when the Nazi forces had almost taken the western half of Russia
. This was not the first time the Soviets had been saved from near-death.What happened: In 1921, US President Warren G Harding had put an embargo on the newly-communist Russia in an attempt to force a regime turnover. A famine came upon the country, and Lenin was horribly worried that some new peasant revolution would overwhelm his government. At the last possible moment, Harding's Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, sent food aid to starving peasants in Russia in a Read more:History
Alternate History #2: Wendish Paganism and Cathars gone wild! 2008-03-26 21:29:00 The most successful Crusades, in terms of setting up hardcore Catholic states and holding them, were not in the Middle East but rather in Europe itself. The most successful of these was the Albigensian Crusade, in which the exceedingly popular dualist/Christian Cathars were, over the course of twenty years, totally wiped out.Fifty years earlier, the Wends, whose paganism was apparently becoming highly organized and resistant to conversion, had been dealt a blow by an earlier Crusade.What happened: The Wends, unable to pull themselves together enough, were beaten badly and their lands destroyed. They did not present a serious threat again. Half a century later, Cathars took over southern France. They looked in good position to hold it, and their religion was percolating into the general Read more:History
, gone wild
Why all this establishment? 2008-03-26 20:44:00 In almost every confrontation between an organized religion and an 'indigenous' one, the organized one has succeeded in converting the natives - or enough of them that the old system is fatally undone. This happened again and again, in vastly different times and places:The Turkic peoples of Central Asia took on Islam and moved away from their traditional shamanismThe various African religions and tribal idea systems were absorbed, broadly, into either Christianity or IslamThe Americas were Christianized over hundreds of yearsEurope, after the fall of Rome, was Christianized out of scattered pagan, polytheistic, druidic and shamanistic faithsEast Asia was thoroughly taken over by a combination of Buddhist and Confucianist ideas which replaced ancestor worship, Korean shamanism, scattered C
Unitary States and Federal States 2008-03-12 20:34:00 There are, broadly, two kinds of states in the modern world: Unitary and Federal
ones. I live in the USA, a federal state. Ever since discovering the two opposing concepts of state organization, I wondered which I would prefer. Eventually I settled on a federal state, since I was already living in one. Now I've had an opportunity to rethink that idea.To explain: In a federal state, the subdivisions of a country (US states, Swiss cantons, Russian federated republics) have some measure of inherent authority - something the central government cannot take away. Federal states often emerged historically from the union of smaller groups either by assent or loose cultural/military conquest. Some federal states include Russia, the US, Germany, India - as well as some lesser lights - Sudan, E Read more:States
Alternate History #1.1 2008-03-09 20:08:00 Continuing from the scenario in which Russian possession of Alaska sparks a North American Amerind revolt, I realized that there is a horrible ending for this line of history. In the last sentence of the post, I wrote a tossed-off line:Assuming this crisis escalates quickly, the US could find itselfneeding to put down reservation secessions by 1950. This is just fiveyears after the last of the Japanese internment camps closed, and it'snot totally out of the question that they could be reopened once morefor another US minority.Now here's a thought. In real life, the validity of internment has never been repudiated. There were several Supreme Court cases about whether such a scheme was valid or constitutional, and none of them ended with a definitive verdict against internment. The most Read more:History
Ethnic Nationalism and State Borders 2008-03-06 13:14:00 What I've been wondering for some time is to what extent national borders should coincide with ethnic or religious groups. The lack of a reasonable ethnic division in Africa, for example, has probably caused or exacerbated many conflicts in the post-colonial era. But what would another way of doing it have been?Had the English or French decided to carve up their empires in a reasonably ethnic manner (as Woodrow Wilson generally believed that borders and ethnicities are meant to coincide) that would have left Africa with something like 800 tiny states. Some ethnic groups have 100,000 members. Others have 500. The ability of a state of 100,000 to simply overwhelm the tiny ethnic state might have created more instability. With ratios that skewed, you just need one twentyeth of one perce Read more:Nationalism
, State
, Borders
Alternate History #1 2008-03-05 14:33:00 The concept of alternate history is something I am absolutely in love with. There are full-fledged novels based on some good alternate history concepts but I prefer to take a more academic look at the long range effects of certain events. Obviously, in changing any event you must determine what would happen as a result. This is easy to do when you are close in time to the divergence, or when the change is not very large. For longer effects, you obviously need a theory or supposition about why history happens the way it does. Why, for example, did Japan and China, both more sophisticated in guns and ships respectively than Europe until very recently, both abandon their great technologies? Originally I thought that the abandonment was the choice of a single ruler. Had that ruler Read more:History
The Effect of the Party Primaries 2008-03-05 10:54:00 The two American political parties have different ways of racking up delegates in their primaries, and it explains why John McCain will get to sit back and watch Hillary and Obama beat one another senseless for some time yet.Observe:Republican primaries are almost all Winner-take-all. If Candidate A gets one single vote more than B, A takes every single delegate. This means that someone who is popular in the first few states can end up with a huge chunk of delegate even before his opponents get more than a handful, even if this candidate will do horribly in the later primaries. Unless two opposing candidates both have regional power bases - one in the Midwest, another in the Deep South, the contest will be decided relatively early. The reason no clear winner emerged earlier this time a Read more:Party
A revolutionary feminist theology in Genesis 3:16 2008-04-07 20:59:00 Everyone knows the Adam and Eve story. Eve temps Adam to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and he does, and so God curses them and expels them from the garden. God curses Adam and Eve differently, giving Eve pain in childbirth and forcing Adam to toil for his food.But the verse in which Eve is cursed, Gen 3:16, holds a possibly revolutionary idea. From the King James Version:Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thyconception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desireshall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.This an many other verses elsewhere in the Bible combine to create a theological idea of female submission to rightful male dominance domestically and politically. The highlighted portion especially is used, since it is God' Read more:feminist
, theology
, Genesis
10 things to know about McCain 2008-04-07 11:57:00 I received an email today titled "10 things
to know about McCain
(but probably don't)." It originated from MoveOn.org, a liberal/progressive organization that always goes Democrat. It lists ten things about McCain that it wishes to warn people of. But are these really such revelations?No, not really. The list mentions standard Republican platforms and facts about McCain that were already well known. I'll go through them one by one. There's not a thing in here that's a surprise.1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has "evolved," yet he's continued to oppose key civil rights laws.Maybe McCain just didn't want another holiday. Of course you can say he 'opposes civil rights laws' but without saying
Blacks and Abortion 2008-04-08 21:35:00 I found this little something-or-other via Real Clear Politics under the title "How Obama lets us down on abortion" or somesuch. The real name of the article is "The Impact of Abortion on African Americans". It is, quite simply, a black-solidarity call to oppose abortion. Unabashedly pro-life, it does not descent into moralistic shouting which means that the statements made in it can be legitimately critiqued.A quote will give a bit of the tenor of the article:Although African Americans make up 12.4 percent of the U.S. population we make up 35% of the abortionsNote the 'we'. The article has black solidarity and unity running constantly through it. The reasons given to oppose abortion are not conservative or morality-based, though I do detect a certain abortion-is-murder mentality to t Read more:Blacks
FP Passport Cares about Absolut History 2008-04-08 14:36:00 Despite being totally uninfluenced by my previous post, FP Passport
has a new post today about the Reconquista-based vodka ad. This happens on the internet, as a bunch of blogs hover around the same material, picking at it like vultures on a decaying carcass. Also, I had previously referred to third-party hypercandidate Ross Perot as "batshit". I do not hold a negative opinion of Perot, and probably should have called him "hilariously unpredictable, like unto a distant relative who married into your family." Read more:Cares
, Absolut
, History
Alternate History #4: There is no viet nam but Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh is its President 2008-04-11 12:52:00 When I read William Duiker's amazing Ho Chi Minh: A Life, I was not only adding to my collection of communist leader biographies, I was also constantly looking for alternate histories. Duiker's work, the best English biography of Ho, and the first to use Vietnam
ese-language sources that aren't full of suspicious propaganda, portrayed Ho in a way that most Americans would not be familiar with.He wasn't a communist radical, but he was a communist. He wrote to expand Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory. He was very important in the 1920s in getting the Vietnamese communist movement off the ground, but his school of thought fell out of favor. It was only a very lucky change of theory by the Communist International that catapulted Ho Chi Minh to the leadership of the 1940s resistance agai Read more:History
, President
The False False Flag: Why I never paid much attention to the 9/11 Truth movement 2008-04-13 14:41:00 Q&O has a small article making fun of Richard Falk, just chosen by the UN to talk about human rights in the Israel-Palestine conflict. What the post points out is that Prof. Falk is also sympathetic to/involved in the 9/11 Truthmovement
. It argues, and I agree, that this makes him a suspicious and not very good choice to investigate the human rights mess he's been assigned.9/11 Truthers believe one of a number of things. Either the Twin Towers were blown up by the government or someone working for them, or the hijacking plan was known but not stopped to further certain interests. These are the two most moderate theories. There are others, like the idea that lasers from either aliens or satellites destroyed the Towers, or that the Towers were 'transported' away and not destroyed.A Read more:attention
Laicite versus Separation 2008-04-14 16:17:00 The United States has a political philosophy of separation of church and state. The US government (specifically congress) may make "no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". This is from the First Amendment, probably the most important for preserving rights in America, and a personal favorite of mine. This doctrine has been interpreted to mean that the US takes no sides in religious disputes, that it does not legislate something because it is religious (though debate over legislating semi-religious morality is ongoing) and does not ever ever EVER promote a religion of inhibit another. Of course, the US often fails in the these goals, but they are an idea to live up to not a template from which the US will be docked points. Despite ahist Read more:versus
, Separation
McCain hasn't spoken yet...to his benefit right now 2008-04-15 21:29:00 McCain is either leaded or close behind Obama or Clinton in head-to-head polls. Over the past number of weeks, the margins between him and the Dems have fluctuated, but I noticed something important: they only move based on what the Democrats do.When Clinton looks down, she loses ground versus McCain. When Obama says something dumb, he moves down versus McCain. Nothing McCain has done or said has effected the polls one way or the other. That's because he's not done anything of note since becoming the nominee except some small foreign policy gaffes that most Americans didn't hear about and don't care about. Right now, McCain looks like he's tried to portray himself - a maverick, centrist Republican who's not afraid to stand up to his party. The fact is that, as much as he has stood up Read more:McCain
, benefit
Tibet, and more on childish China 2008-04-17 20:39:00 Ah, Facebook. That place where everyone under 25 spends at least twice as much time as they want to. It's the place where you can find the most unintelligent debate on any subject. Girls asking if, as a Catholic, she can call herself a Christian. People asking if Obama is a secret Muslim who prays to idols and shouts 'Allahu Akbar!'And then we get to the Tibet
groups. There is the obvious Free Tibet group. There is the Tibet IS China
group. But last of all, there is the most interesting. It is the group called "Tibet WAS, IS AND WILL ALWAYS BE a part of China." It has some 23,000 members. It is the most virulent pit of childishness and petty attacks that I have seen (save a few groups directed against Bush and a few against abortion). Now I know that what's said on facebook is e
China whines, "Why can't we force people to like us?!" 2008-04-16 19:31:00 This whole long mess over Tibet and human rights abuses, brought to a head by the Olympics, demonstrates one important thing: China
is an economic power, but not a mature country.What I mean by this is that Chinese citizens and politicians and diplomats and businessmen have been isolated from the world for so long that they have absolutely no idea how to respond to people
disliking them. Of all the expressions of nationalism I have seen, China's is the most hair-raisingly unthinking. The Chinese people have not developed a cultural system to deal with being criticized by other countries.France floated ideas about a boycott over the Tibet violence, and Chinese citizens reacted by trying to organize a total boycott of French goods. Now, you might point out that French opposition to the Ir
Refining my ideas on China, with thanks to xiaoyong 2008-04-18 17:00:00 A commenter here named xiaoyong has said some interesting things about my posts on China
, the wider world, and Tibet. I know nothing about this person except that they are Chinese and that English is not their first language. They made some good points, though sometimes I couldn't understand what they were trying to say.When they made their first comment, I wanted to write something snarky like, "someone responds to posts about China overreacting by...overreacting." But there are some good points in there: China did raise the standard of living for many of its citizens. Tibet was a backwater before China took over. These things are true, but we need to have a discussion over whether the human rights violations required to obtain them were worth it.I may have been overly harsh in chara Read more:Refining
, ideas
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