Titanic Post

A review of The Intellectuals and the Flag, by Todd Gitlin

This article appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

This short, loosely organized collection of occasional essays makes for a surprisingly interesting and valuable book, well worth reading and pondering. Sociologist and radical activist Todd Gitlin, who has been a figure in the American Left since his Vietnam-era days in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), has made a serious effort to reflect on the failures of the American Left since the 1960s. The criticisms he puts forward here, which are inevitably self-criticisms in part, are unsparing and penetrating, made all the more memorable by his unacademic, direct, and often epigrammatic style.

(more…)

By Ken Nicholson

The ten steps are:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens’ groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law

Have a nice day!

Brain study finds political divide

Researchers show that liberals and conservatives approach everyday decisions differently.

By Denise Gellene
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

11:07 AM PDT, September 9, 2007

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

Scientists at New York University and UCLA showed through a simple experiment to be reported Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information. (more…)

Pocket Paradigm

About the most important job of a democracy — next to serving its people — is to make sure it stays a democracy. Forms of government don’t have tenure, and governments that rely on the consent of the governed — rather than, say, on tanks and prisons — particularly require constant tending. As things now stand, we could easily become the
first people in history to lose democracy and its constitutional freedoms simply because we have forgotten what they are about.

Today, almost every principle upon which this country was founded is being turned on its head. Instead of liberty we are being taught to prefer order, instead of democracy we are taught to be follow directions, instead of debate we are inundated with propaganda. Most profoundly, American citizens are no longer considered by their elites to be members or even worker drones of society, but rather as targets - targets of opportunity by corporations and of suspicion and control by government.

~ Sam Smith, Progressive Review

Published on Thursday, March 22, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
A Time For Anger, A Call To Action
by Bill Moyers

The following is a transcript of a speech given on February 7, 2007 at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

I am grateful to you for this opportunity and to President Prager for the hospitality of this evening, to Diana Akiyama, Director of the Office for Religious and Spiritual Life, whose idea it was to invite me and with whom you can have an accounting after I’ve left. And to the Lilly Endowment for funding the Values and Vocations project to encourage students at Occidental to explore how their beliefs and values shape their choices in life, how to make choices for meaningful work and how to make a contribution to the common good. It’s a recognition of a unique venture: to demonstrate that the life of the mind and the longing of the spirit are mirror images of the human organism. I’m grateful to be here under their auspices.

I have come across the continent to talk to you about two subjects close to my heart. I care about them as a journalist, a citizen and a grandfather who looks at the pictures next to my computer of my five young grandchildren who do not have a vote, a lobbyist in Washington, or the means to contribute to a presidential candidate. If I don’t act in their behalf, who will? (more…)

Perceive the difference between religion and the cant of religion; piety and the pretense of piety; a humble reverence for the great truths of Scripture and an audacious and offensive obtrusion of its letter and not its spirit in the commonest dissensions and meanest affairs of life. . . It is never out of season to protest against that coarse familiarity with sacred things which is busy on the lip and idle in the heart, or the confounding of Christianity with any class of persons who. . . have just enough religion to make them hate, and not enough to make them love, one another.

~ Charles Dickens, Preface to The First Cheap Edition, The Pickwick Papers, 1847