The world consists of many very distinct groups which are all interested in maintaining their own purity or integrity… be it religious or ethnic. It would be wonderful if they could get along together, but many of them are somewhat “predatory” to say the least. They either want to convert others to their ways, or destroy the heathens as being “sub par” for some reason.

[clip]

This is not working out as hoped, because of the predatory nature of some groups. Gays, for example are thought of as blasphemers and so on by the Xtian right.

I don’t see this getting better, I see more entrenchment and hardening and return to fundamentalism in all groups.

Come up to Vancouver some time. We usually manage to avoid killing each other.

I frankly think that the real poison is nationalism/patriotism, which remains thankfully rather muted in Canada (partly because any too vulgar a display makes you look like an American). You can’t have a harmonious pluralistic society if you are going to worship a state that has any more function and “meaning” than quietly making life better for everyone in it. Instead, you do stupid things like swear oaths to pieces of cloth, or become hysterical if someone decides their religion demands they cover their face or their head (this last example from France; the problem isn’t limited to the US).

Frankly, I think that if you think you “love” your country, you’re part of the problem. Countries are entirely human constructions that must be approached with reason, not emotion. Love has a notorious tendency to paper over faults and to excite the emotions. It’s a tricky enough emotion to handle on an individual level. On a mass level, it’s usually nothing more than an excuse for stupidity and blindness.

There are good, solid, pragmatic reasons to support society and work to improve it without indulging in the drug of “love.” Seriously, too, how do you love something as abstract and multifaceted as a country? Whenever one sees an American trying to explain why he or she “loves” his or her country, it usually consists of a highly selective listing of good things that are by no means unique to America, coated with emotion like treacle. If the speaker is doing something to make his or her society better, the display is superfluous; if he or she is not, it is pointless and (usually deliberately) dishonest. Either way, it is dispensable.

Save your love for your partners and children. Your country doesn’t need it, or deserve it. All it does is set you up to be suckered. With a country, it’s performance that counts — if it isn’t performing to your satisfaction, fix it, put up with it, or leave it, but in all cases follow reason, not emotion.

Thanks for the link to the CD. It is hauntingly beautiful. I would not have normally found this CD. I ordered it. Thanks again!

oddmommy @ 184

So PB — to make sure I understand what you are saying — is it that we shouldn’t attack Rice for being a hypocrite and an enabler of the anti-gay agenda because no one would bother to attack her for that if she was a white gay man?

I am saying that it looks like a double standard here. And yes, I’m thinking if she were exactly the same only white & male (hell, just male), this likely wouldn’t be coming up at all.

In every case, in the males that I cited, their behavior went on until something criminal emerged and couldn’t be stuffed back down.

I tend to get annoyed at double standards.

Closeted gay male white Republicans are betraying gay men. Condi’s betraying gays, women and blacks by working for people who’ve come to political power largely by attacking those three groups.

Can you give me your recipe for making and freezing pesto……hopefully with fairly specific quantities of ingredients?

Have four plants in pots and no idea whether that will produce anywhere near enough leaves.

Also, any nut possibilities other than pinenuts or walnuts?

This past Tuesday was primary day for the mayoral race in Akron OH. 200 absentee ballots failed to arrive in time to be counted, reportedly “due to a mixup in the U.S. Postal Service.”…

The Ohio Secy of State’s Office has “instructed the Summit County Board of Elections not to count those ballots that were delivered late through no fault of the voters.”…

The Postal Service “has apologized for the mishap. Some of the ballots were postmarked before Tuesday (primary election day), and some were not postmarked at all.

“Nearly all of the ballots were mailed over the weekend or Monday and failed to be processed through the main Akron post office”…

http://www.ohio.com/news/9797752.html

We’re still not there, folks.
Keep marching…

Ed*ard Teller @ 221

It isn’t a new term. There have been others protesting the Iraq Wars, and protesting last summer’s Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

I have only been to protests, marches and memorials. Never to a die-in.

Here’s where the term came from

The ‘Human Be-In’ was a happening in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the afternoon and evening of January 14, 1967. It was a prelude to San Francisco’s Summer of Love, which made the Haight-Ashbury district a household word as the center of an American counterculture and introduced the word ‘psychedelic’ to suburbia.

Poster advertising the ‘Human Be-In’.The ‘Human Be-In’ focused the key ideas of the 1960s counterculture: personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological awareness, higher consciousness (often achieved with the aid of psychedelic drugs), and liberal political consciousness. The hippie movement developed out of disaffected student communities around Stanford and Berkeley and in San Francisco’s ‘Beat Generation’ poets and jazz hipsters, who also combined a search for intuitive spontaneity with a rejection of ‘middle-class morality.’ Allen Ginsberg personified the transition between the Beat and hippie generations.

The ‘Human Be-In’ took its name from a chance remark that one of the creators of the San Francisco Oracle, which first hit the streets in September 1966, made at the Love Pageant Rally; the playful name combined humanist values with the scores of sit-ins that had been reforming college and university practices and eroding the last vestiges of entrenched segregation, starting with the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in of 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The first major teach-in had been organized by Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Michigan, 24-25 March 1965.[1]