I can thank the Tea Party for one thing; it reminded me that I want to tithe. This slide on the Huffington Post slideshow was my reminder:
Gary Snow-Brine brought his family to Washington from Maine to participate in Tea Party protests, stopping at an event in Boston along the way. He brought with him a sign with the message: “God Only Requires 10%.”
Snow-Brine, a Baptist, said he always tithes 10 percent of his income to the church. And he said he’s always been annoyed that he has to pay more than that in federal taxes. He said he might have protested previous administrations if there had been a movement going on.
First of all, why does he tithe to the church? The tithe, which is traditionally ten percent, is a creation of the biblical (as opposed to modern) state of Israel. And yes, it went to the temple. But, at that point in history, the temple was a communal affair shared by everyone, and the temple didn’t keep the tithe. The tithe was only payed by those with excess income or produce, and if you were poor, instead of paying the tithe, you received the produce that the tithe made communal. So, Mr. Snow-Brine, why are you tithing to your church (as opposed to an entity that supports the entire community?
Second, in order to better understand why a tithe to a denominational church makes little sense, let’s consider the role of government. I’ve written about this before, and I will write again about the purpose and role of government. For better or for worse, in America we have a representational democracy (sort of), and the government – the representation of the collective – taxes us to pay for things we cannot provide ourselves, or that will improve the common welfare. Take, for example: defense, roads, education, farm subsidies, a common set of laws, set tariffs, and a whole host of other things. At one point (specifically, ancient Israel) the temple represented the common welfare and distributed tithe. Now that is the role of government.
Third, and thanks Gary Snow-Brine for allowing me to figure out where to write this, I’d like to make myself poorer by donating ten percent of my paycheck somewhere. That somewhere to me is not the government – they’ll get my taxes, if I ever work long enough in a year to have taxes to pay. I don’t need more defense, and if I tried to give my money to education it would just be swallowed up by paying for overhead lighting, or leaving the lights on all night long. I do want to give ten percent somewhere that will help the community. But, what do I mean by community? I DON’T KNOW. It could be Rohnert Park/Santa Rosa, it could be California, it could be the environmental community, it could be the whole world community. So, if you have suggestions of an organization that could use a few dollars to improve whichever community it’s trying to improve, let me know.
Please read the satire, which is what Borowitz does:
“Michele and me, that’s two horsemen right there,” Gov. Palin told the exuberant crowd. “You add two more horsemen into the mix and we’ll be good to go.”
While the two politicians were cagey about what the duties of the aforementioned horsemen would be, Rep. Bachmann said, “You can bet it will be a mission to end all missions….”
“It’s a long list,” the source said. “If you add up everyone on the list the number you get is 666.”
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a ‘joke’ on the Biblical Four Horsemen, managed to to provide a narrow reading of the constitution during the 1910’s, ’20s, and up to 1937. Their ideology of free market economics, without government intervention or regulation, helped create the Great Depression.
For Borowitz to call Palin and Bachmann two of the new Four Horsemen isn’t quite wrong. Let’s hope it doesn’t become any more right.
Play ball!
Happy first day of baseball to most MLB teams! There’s already some serious injuries
Let me wade into the deep end of foreign policy disagreement; Israel. Some will criticize whatever I write here as biased, for I am Jewish; that maybe true, but we are all biased, are we not? What I write here is opinion, based on evidence gathered, using the writings of others to attempt to make a point. The map (I am having trouble inserting it – follow the link) clearly shows that no region of Israel, as drawn there, is plurality-Jewish. Every area is in fact plurality-Palestinian (except Beersheba), some strikingly so.
The map is from Andrew Sullivan, which responded to a map, a post, and long series of threads. To all of this, a reader of Andrew’s responded,
Maybe people are so mad about your posting these maps because, well, the picture isn’t very pretty and when you see it as a picture, it’s hard to miss seeing something. When I was young I thought Israel was a fact, a friend to the US, a bulwark against Communism, & the Holocaust justified its existence. Looking at those maps makes clear the original problem in the American/European support of Israel’s creation — in your supposedly more Israel-friendly map, there is not a single region that you show where a plurality of the inhabits were Jewish — by what right did any Jewish state rise up to kick this many people out of their homes & claim this land?
European war crimes don’t justify this level of displacement of people who had nothing to do with the crimes. The older I get, the more I see the Palestinian point of view, even though the means by which the Palestinians push their point of view has grown more hateful & violent. Is there any intellectually honest map you could show that would not excite hostility? If not, then why would maps showing something that’s true make people mad?
By the way, where are the “no apologies,” never-bow-to-foreign-heads-of-state folks when Israel treats us poorly? Why isn’t it weak of Obama not to stand up to Israel?
before which, Andrew wrote:
Like America’s founding, [Israel’s] was not immaculate, and its survival has been a brutal struggle in which Israel has not been as innocent as some want to believe, but whose enemies’ anti-Semitism and hatred is tangible and omnipresent and despicable.
But that was scarcely the point of the post, and we can go on for ever on the subject. But some specific charges:
The intent of this propaganda map is to suggest that an Arab country called “Palestine” existed in 1946 and was driven from existence by Jewish imperialists. Not only was there no such country as “Palestine” in 1946, there has never been a country called Palestine.
Of course not. But there was a place called Palestine (among other things) under mostly Ottoman or British rule for a very long time before Israel came into existence. Wikipedia tells us that in 1850, for example, the population of the area comprised roughly 85% Muslims, 11% Christians and 4% Jews. In 1920, the League of Nations reported that
Four-fifths of the whole population are Moslems. A small proportion of these are Bedouin Arabs; the remainder, although they speak Arabic and are termed Arabs, are largely of mixed race. Some 77,000 of the population are Christians, in large majority belonging to the Orthodox Church, and speaking Arabic. The Jewish element of the population numbers 76,000.
By the end of the British mandate, and an influx of Jewish refugees and Zionists, the proportions were roughly 70 percent Muslims and 30 percent Jews. Jews were concentrated in urban areas along the coast but, as the first map shows, some were indeed in the West Bank, although as a tiny minority.
This isn’t propaganda; it’s fact.
The maps show what has happened since – in sixty years in terms of growing sovereignty and accelerating Israeli control. The Muslim population is expanding as the geographic extent of their political self-government keeps diminishing. While Jerusalem was once in the center of Palestinian territory – and the Israelis agreed to this, while the Arabs refused – it is now not only in Israel but all of it will soon be under sole Israeli control, as Netanyahu continues, despite pleas from his American benefactors and allies, merely to freeze them.
The point of the illustration was to provide some background to the now-unavoidable fact that Israel has every intention of expanding its sovereignty to the Jordan river for ever, to segregate Palestinians into walled enclaves within, and to station large numbers of Israeli troops on the Eastern border. I notice that Goldberg has time to splutter against this blog but, until yesterday, no time to refer to the Israeli government’s contemptuous treatment of the US vice-president in his visit, a subject that has dominated the Israeli press but contradicts Goldberg’s view that my notion that the new Israeli that I have worried about this past year is real and is dangerous – to itself, the region, the world and, above all, the United States.
You can go to the original article for all the extra links and conversation that this topic generated. But let me use what Andrew wrote to get to my point (which is, again, an opinion). … The founding of Israel was not immaculate. True; that rarely happens. Even the best examples that come to mind, the unification of Italy or Germany, involved some degradation in standard of living and some military dominance. (See, for the case of Israel, Nakbah, which is all that needs to be said to show that the creation of the state was nothing glorious. And true, there was no, and has never been any, country called Palestine. It was an arbitrarily created region while the British held the land as a protectorate, although the name dates to Roman times. But Palestinians exist. Does Israel (the state) have a right to control – dictate – the fate of the Palestinians (including those who live in land surrounded by Israel that Israel has not yet claimed)? … I. Don’t. Know.
Does [the United States of] America have a right to exist; should the U.S. exist? It is interesting to entertain the notion that no state has a right to exist, because the land that they claim was taken by force. That’s a very interesting argument. … But, if the United States, England, Germany, Japan, France, Italy, China, and other countries have a right to exist, doesn’t Israel? They all (almost every country, with a few variations on the theme) claim that they exist and have a right to exist, although they took the land they claim by force.
The response to Andrew recounts the memory of a single older American, which is the memory thousands of them have. That memory says that Israel is a friend to the U.S., our ally against Communism, and justified by the Holocaust. And that mind is realizing that Israeli war crimes cannot be justified by the Holocaust.
Does Israel have a right to exist? By international norms, which accept that countries conquer other countries, it does. At the same time, Palestine (and the Palestinians) have a right to exist, too. To what social law is all of this conflict beholden to?
Video games, according to cracked.
Well, we humans play games because there is a basic satisfaction in mastering a skill, even if it’s a pointless one in terms of our overall life goals. It helps us develop our brains (especially as children) and to test ourselves without serious consequences if we fail. This is why our brains reward us with the sensation we call “fun” when we do it. Hell, even dolphins do it.
As shocking as this sounds, a whole lot of the “guy who failed all of his classes because he was playing WoW all the time” horror stories are really just about a dude who simply didn’t like his classes very much. This was never some dystopian mind control scheme by Blizzard. The games just filled a void.
Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to everything expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don’t even have two of them:
Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day);
Complexity (so it’s not mind-numbing repetition);
Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).
Reward me if you’d like to.
UPDATE: oh, yes: read the whole article, if you’d like. Link above.
And we seem be to be in Iraq forever. I have great hope in my president, but not in the bureaucracy that controls him.
My guess is that Ricks’ view will prevail. The military has invested epic quantities of money and blood in Iraq, and U.S. commanders don’t want it to be in vain. Plus, an Iraqi civil war that sucked in its neighbors—as civil wars often do—would be horrendous. Although the Democratic base wants out of Iraq, the lesson of Afghanistan is that the military’s view matters more. “When push comes to shove,” notes Biddle, the Obama administration will “vote for not losing a war.”
It all sounds very sensible, until you remember that the United States is nearly bankrupt. Defense spending, which has grown 9 percent per year over the last decade, now comprises well over 50 percent of U.S. discretionary spending. Unless some president reins that in, there’s no real chance of getting U.S. debt under control, let alone making the domestic investments necessary to compete with China.
Just another problem to hand to the next generation to solve (?)
In which I predict a glorious future. This should not be taken in jest; nonetheless, I cannot give you even a vague idea of a timeline.
I’m going to predict that the “three major religions,” the Judeo-Christian-Muslim world, is going to unite to take on … all other religions. There will be internecine strife, but beside that there will be some grand (albeit very bad, much unwanted when it happens) unification.
Let me run through 2000 years of history.
1st-5th centuries: Christianity hates Judiasm, and the other way around, and Christianity helps create the Jewish Diaspora.
6th-10th centuries: Jews are wandering around Europe aimlessly, sometimes protected, sometime not. (See also Septimania, which was once recognized as the a Jewish Kingdom with a King of the Jews, according to Holy Blood, Holy Grail.) Islam comes into existence and dominates Turkey to the Persia, and west to Morocco. Christianity dominates Europe, and there are the “Dark Ages” because the Church suppressed and burned almost all information that didn’t agree with it.
11th-14th centuries: The Crusades! Muslims and Christians battle for control of the Holy land. Jews either stay out of the battle or engage in crazy mercantile activity. Referencing the same book, Jews slowly gain rights in Europe, especially in England and (oddly) Italy.
15th-18th centuries: America is ‘discovered’ and Christianized. Jews become a norm in Europe, and sometimes people aren’t scared out of their wits by Jews. Muslims have control of most of Serbia, and there were some fairly interesting battles in Austria that could have changed your religion forever. There are, despite Christians and Jews mostly getting along (see especially Jews in England, Denmark, and liberal German states in the 17th century), religious wars.
Let me reemphasize that. From the first century until past the 18th century, most of history is marked by religious wars. While lots of other things happened, those things don’t make it into history textbooks. And, for the moment, the point I wish to make is entirely about religion.
19th century: except for Germany of the 1840’s, where Marx engaged in a philosophical battle with his comrades, Jews and Christians learned to get along in Europe and America. This left them nothing better to do than to emigrate to the Holy Land and continue a thirteen-century-old religious war. Muslims retained good control over everything listed before – from the Magreb to Turkey. The Jews and Christians that lived in the Caliphate mostly did very well.
20th century: after a great bloodbath that ended the Caliphate and devolved the Middle East into a great number of arbitrarily-drawn states emigration – mostly of Jews (who, despite the not complete intolerance in Europe, were seen as a ‘problem’) to Jerusalem increased, so did support of European countries to send settlers there. While this didn’t go unsuccessfully, from the point of view of the settlers, the 1930’s and ’40s saw the death of fifty million Europeans. World War II could be considered a religious war. Indeed, WWII so decimated the Jews, and all of Europe, that not only did it lead to the creation of a Jewish state, but the Christian West has wholeheartedly supported that state. So, sometime after 1948 there was a great unification of Christians and Jews, and America saw the rise of the neocon right, many of whom are Jews. And Muslims?
This unification of Christians and Jews, which took nineteen hundred years to reach, appears some what solid. While there is anti-Semitism, there is not state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the West. The conflict now appears to be between the Judeo-Christian ‘world’ and the Muslim ‘world.’ Now, I have made a prediction about the future, and all that history was necessary to explain my prediction. I didn’t include any theology, assuming that you (my reader) would know that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all look to the same God (by a different name) and revere the same past. So, now we have come to a great unification of Jews and Christians.
I cannot tell you how or when, but I say that there will be a great triumvirate of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. And there shall be nothing worth fighting against.
Anti-gay rights California legislator Roy Ashburn told local news,
“I am gay. And so, those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long,” Ashburn told radio host Inga Banks on her show on the KERN station in Bakersfield.
And my first thought was, Good For Him. Yes, really, good for him. He said something difficult to say, about himself. He fought against his own identity his entire career.
SF Gate – the news in general – claims that, “he defended his voting record, saying he cast votes that his constituents wanted. Ashburn represents the 18th Senate District, which covers a huge swath of the central and southern part of the state.”
And so, again, good for him. The idea of a representative democracy is to have legislators who act on behalf of the needs their constituents, insofar as those needs can be understood. And so if Ashburn votes against his self-interest because he is voting for the views of his constituents, good for him.
I would very much like to see our government, with all its chest-thumping, we-are-the-best-nation-on-Earthing, attitude to have many more legislators who act as representatives.
The first time I read Oakeshott was the first time I realized that conservatism did not equal Rush Limbaugh.
It seems that conservatism, as the media portrays it (now), has for the past ten to thirty years (take your pick) has been equivalent to what we used to call fascism. Make no mistake; the media does not call conservatism by the name of fascism, but that’s just in an effort to be fair and balanced.
But conservatism isn’t really a bad thing – and I mean conservatism, not the just-mentioned but usually not-uttered fascism. Take, for instance, Andrew Sullivan, who calls himself a conservative. I sometimes have my doubts about that, but perhaps that is due to the corruption of conservatism he discusses:
From the green shoots of Hayek and Oakeshott and Friedman to the final blooming of Thatcher and Reagan, this regenerated conservatism really did restore the balance between state and society toward society and away from the state. It harnessed traditional impulses – nationalism in Britain, evangelicalism in America – but it never fully gave into them. Its pragmatism remained in the Reagan tax hikes, Thatcher’s retention of socialized medicine, their mutual outreach to Gorbachev, and Thatcher’s insistence on international law. In some ways, I believe, the pinnacle of this conservative achievement came in the presidency of George H W Bush and the premiership of John Major.
I have never been convinced of the goodness of Reagan. Then again, I haven’t liked almost any policy since the creation of the National Security state. However, if you want to look for conservatism in government, I suppose Reagan is your best choice. A good article on conservatism, by Freddie DeBoer, said,
In any event, the slow-change conservative is dismissed as an out-of-touch dissident, and the slow-change conservative movement is no more. What we have, instead, is the People’s Revolutionary Party of Conservatism. The temperate conservative victory of the second Clinton administration, restraining a president and Congress somewhat inclined towards broader and deeper change than they achieved, has been replaced as a basic template for success by the large-scale conquests (both attempted and achieved) of the Bush years. That these large measures seem to have led to short-term disaster for the Republican party is generally regarded as a consequence of Bushism, and not symptomatic of the drastic but unheralded changes in the right’s tactical regime. Lurching from fight to fight and election to election, the Republican Party is not always sure of where it wants to go, but it is certainly in a hurry to get there. This is part of what makes internecine battles within the American right so shockingly angry; decisions made within the policy apparatus no longer lead to small steps and modest goals but rather to the vast expenditure of money, political capital and man hours. Conservatism is on the march.
I cannot join call myself a conservative, but I can understand that the idea is not a bad idea. Oakeshott, Burke, and all classical conservatives will tell you that it is the desire to keep things as they are – or to not change to the unknown – is the central tenet of conservatism’s ideology.
With that, I can take philosophical issue. And I do.
I remember, sometime around the age of twelve – I know it was before I moved away from home at fourteen – a conversation ’round the dinner table. My dad, in a fatherly sort of way, gave me advice. He said to me, said he, that he expected me to be a better man than him. Not an idle challenge, to a young child! It is not bad to wish one generation to exceed another; indeed, we must leave this place better than we found it, or there seems to be some failure.
But to command a child to better his father? And what a father! How shall I exceed you, sir? You, you of the proudest of families, and the best-educated. You, you were among the first of the Green Beret. You, you gave your career to public service, and though you may have thought otherwise many-a-time, still you did your duty as best befit you. What! What shall I better? I cannot exceed your knowledge, for you may as easily assemble a car engine as you may build a house as you may mitigate the fate of some character in the court of law. Shall I better that? At present, I cannot.
You did right. A father should never tell his son, ‘son, be worse at things than me.’ But what do I better you at? What do I pursue to make your many-rounded abilities something which I can equal? You did not tell me that. You enjoin me to do one, and not the other. Well then … you mistake me, for I am your son, and my style of comprehension is frighteningly close to yours, minus a generation.
And you shall exceed me always, and I bear no grudge for that.
The Dole Blog 