Religion and Politics

I like this quote from Atrios:

"I suppose what's driven me nuts all of these years is the fact that my opposition to the religion creep in political rhetoric has probably been much more motivated by my concern that bringing the God Wars into the public square would be bad for religion than concerns about it being somehow bad for politics or policy. I don't much care if people are religious or not, but without religious freedom, which really encompasses much more than who you pray to, you don't have freedom in any meaningful sense at all."

I'm not sure I'd agree entirely with this formulation, but I've long had similar concerns about how damaging the politicizing of religion can be to religion.

What's wrong with economics?

Atrios explains it quite well here. A sample:

"My problem with economists is that even many of the smart ones tend to instinctively equate the social welfare of a country with its per capita GDP. This is absurd, and it isn't as if they don't actually know this, but nonetheless it tends to be how people operate."

Of course there are a whole bunch of rich and powerful people in any country who are quite pleased to see that this is adopted as orthodoxy. So long as the overall economy grows, they can damn anyone who points out that the share of the wealthiest one percent may be growing faster than the total GDP (i.e.: everyone else's share is shrinking). That those in the media elite from the owners to the top-tier anchors to the commentators-at-large are almost all in the top bracket only serves to reinforce the big GDP = good mentality.

Pay no attention to the man behind the shrubbery

I found this image on Atrios' site. I'm not sure what to make of it, did Dick Cheney not realize he was in the shot?

You could write a whole novel about this image. There's Bush at the podium, trying to salvage the last shreds of his presidency, while over there in the middle distance, Cheney looks on.

What is that look? Is it the envy of the balding, heart-disease-riddled man with the permanent sneer who knows how unelectable he is?

Fiddling while the Industry Burns

Atrios has a pair of posts on how badly the music industry has been doing over the past couple of years. His analysis:

"Instead of exploiting the desire of people on the internet to promote their stuff for free, they're obsessed with royalties and DRM. It's bizarre to me that an industry notorious for its payola scandals - paying radio stations to pay their crap so that people can hear it for free - simultaneously obsesses about the possibility that people might actually throw up a song on the internet so that people can hear it for free."

I'd never thought of music sharing in the context of payola, but it's a hell of a contradiction, isn't it? Besides, these days so much of radio is repression by boredom - but maybe that's what the industry wants. There's no reason to embed this video here: