I recently discovered that Twitter has... some utility. I'm not sure yet what that utility is. But it does give my information addicted brain another source of possible links and stories to pass through. What I have discovered is that using it, primarily to link to this blog or to my reading list of the day, results in a motley group of people who will try to link to you. Perhaps some of them are spambots, maybe most. And some are more or less link repositories themselves. A few however are actual human beings somewhere (I think). I've mostly been getting people who appear to think "libertarian" means something like "quasi-conservative", and then blocking or otherwise removing their attentions while they post links to the Corner or complain about immigration. But yesterday I finally encountered the dark side of the Ron Paul-esque corridor of political support that libertarians are supposedly occupying: Neo-Nazis and racists. It is rather discomforting. I had no illusions back during his insurgent campaign in '08 or during the various media defamation over the Tea Party folks that there were somehow all good decent Americans here. I've seen my share of racists right here in Ohio who magically became involved in politics more because "that black guy from Kenya was about to take over the country". Still it gets annoying that a political philosophy which has its roots in classical liberalism and the extension of freedom in as many ways as possible to as many people as possible gets tied up with these nutcases who think the Jews are behind everything and health care is a secret reparations bill or whatever. I have...some interest in listening to the rantings of the elderly who are afraid the government is going to take away their Medicare (that they subtly ignore was provided by that same government) or the confused philosophy of conservative and religious fundamentalists who think Christianity involved a doctrine of free market capitalism (which wasn't my reading on Jesus. I'm pretty close to a "biblical free marketeer" as far as Americans are concerned, I'd think having the religious cover would be a useful deception and I don't see one to be had), but I have no time whatsoever to listen to modern forms of Nazi propaganda and racist sentiments. There is not much as it is to learn from the previous two groups. There is nothing to be gained except a rising sense of rage and anger that there are human beings who have trained themselves to believe such things in dealing with the last group. The only recourse is to repel oneself away as quickly as possible and not to be drawn in by the attraction-repulsion dynamics of hideous things (sort of like torture porn type movies).
The trouble is that these are the same folks who surface publicly and in the media whenever there's an apparent resurgence in "anti-government" or "libertarian" leanings in the general public. We get the Wacos and the McVeighs and the Stormfronts and this then tars the "don't tread on me" flag with some sort of radical and racist language. Free speech absolutism I have, a tolerance for the existence of these people I have. But a tolerance for proscribing active and violent hatred of others I don't. We don't need to put up with it. Cultural and social pressures have conspired to put racial epithets in the place of reviled language once occupied solely by the infamous "7 words you can't say on Television", with a special sort of penalty held in reserve beyond that still for people who cross racial boundaries to say them in public, a form of social and public suicide. This must be continued and extended. No daylight should be held up for these antiquated notions of racial supremacy and hate.
There are lots of strategic and political problems within the cohesion and messages of those Tea Party people. I guess they figured out that teabaggers was a "profane" reference. That was progress. They still haven't figured out what needs to be cut from the budget and told us how they would do it. They still seem to like anti-intellectualism from Palin and Bush. And they, despite a great deal of self-assessment bias, still have some racially motivated assholes in the mix. Now there's not much I think can be done about the folks who claim to want fiscal discipline and somehow think Palin or Bush provided such things. I guess eventually someone will have to come up with a platform of policies informing us of what they want to cut in order to save us from fiscal oblivion, but that won't happen if they continue to operate as an independent wing of the Republican party anyway. What they can do is tell the racists to shut the fuck up and stay home so that it does not allow a narrative to form which tars their politics as potentially harboring racist motivations. Ron Paul has not done this affirmatively enough which, along with his fetish for the gold standard, is pretty much why I was looking for anybody else resembling a libertarian to vote for back in '08 (there wasn't much out there since the LP nominated a guy who had voted for the Iraq War and was still basically a conservative Republican even after leaving Congress and that party) and why I'm rather settled on "somebody else" for '12. Among other factors (two I listed above, and the fact they're still much too supportive of Republicans/Conservativism rather than a true third party like the Perot vote was reflective of), it's a big reason why I'm not all that impressed with the Tea Party as a meaningful movement.
The Math on Mass Deportation Doesn't Add Up
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What happened to you on twitter? Start over? Can no longer find you, though I suppose that may well be on purpose ;-p.
You're still following me on there so far as I can tell. I have been pretty vigilant about removing people who follow me who I have no interest in following, for the most part.
But all two or three of you following me there that are otherwise associated with me in real life, not much of a problem.
Tolerance is the connection between Christianity and free market capitalism. Christians are to be tolerant and capitalists live by it, "I will buy, sell, swap, trade, loan, or borrow with anyone ignoring faith, creed, race, gender, age, or peculiarities in eating artichokes."
I go with onions personally as the peculiarities. Artichokes are fine.
As far as tolerance, I'm not sure that has much to do with either Christianity in particular (as opposed to any random moral system as required to make trade operate and/or any other religious sect) or with free markets as the method of trade somehow being Christian in character.
Still, if that's the tie-in, it is not the one being used by the people pushing that mantra and busying themselves re-writing a conservative Bible. Those are the folks I'm most worried about.
Bible re-writes always concern me. I just think it's those commies and their concealed agenda. If Christians have the truth in our Bible, we should not need to re-write/re-translate it in/into a PC language.
To tell the truth, I have a hard time separating atheist from communist, as so often, those who claim atheism are communists. I have as hard a time with it as separating socialist from communist. in fact that is my working definition of Communist: A Socialist who is an Atheist. My deepest apologies, if this offends, as whatever you are you are not a Socialist.
Islam teaches no tolerance - convert or die. And countries ensnared in that religion do not understand free markets. Communism, again, is opposed to tolerance and causes a country to revert to serf mentalities, with no property rights and thereby no understanding of free market capitalism by the people. (The government bureaucracies of Communist countries still understand and use capitalism, though they attempt to dissolve free markets.)
Islam actually does teach tolerance. It has volumes of fatwas and text on how to conduct the governance over a diverse society and to allow non-Muslims to live amongst Muslims. Their problem is that they never bothered to look for a way for Muslims to live among non-Muslims. This is still being learned. In Canada and the US they seem to be doing reasonably well at it, for being about where Christendom was 500 years ago in grappling with the level of control over social institutions held by the church. In Europe, Europeans seem to be making a go of making it impossible.
It does not help that the common American perception of Islam is shaped, as I commented on here some weeks ago, by a singular view of what constitutes the bulk of Islam being drawn from the most obscure and radical portions of Muslim societies. Much as atheists are prone to subject Christianity to a view that delegates all Christians to the views of young-Earth creationists or some such. It's convenient, much as "Indians" was a common trait shared by vastly different tribal associations across the Western frontier in the 19th century. But it's not accurate.
Turkey is actually a pretty free country economically (the governing party there bares a considerable resemblance to the Republicans, theocratic and complete with market platitudes), and especially the countries of Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Albania, Malaysia, and UAE are very free markets (at least above average by comparison to the world at large). Other countries like Bosnia and Indonesia which are overwhelmingly Muslim have been moving toward "liberal" free markets as well over the past several years. Islam was founded and spread more or less by merchants and nomads. It would be absurd to believe that its distinguishing character was socialistic as a result. There are Islamic countries, like Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran or even American allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which have more socialistic or tyrannical behaviors, but these are not universal traits. Nor are they the same thing.
Besides which, this ignores states like Cuba or Venezuela (in fact most of Central and South America other than Chile), which are profoundly Christian and communist or socialist in nature. The distinguishing economic feature isn't the religiousity or type of religious bent of a nation. It is the respect for private property rights and the subsequent level of government corruption (and taxation) that typically defines market economies. That ultimately has very little to do with any religious observances. For example, a reason Islamic states might have less market freedom typically has to do with the relative weakness or strength of their state and the institutions therein. A state which is too weak or corrupted cannot enforce the property and contract laws which are vital for businesses to grow and thrive. That is hardly a problem limited to Islamic nations (most of Africa or Latin America for example).
And I find Christianity, at least when I had read the new testament, to be far more communistic than atheists. The difference in the latter is there is not an orthodoxy to compare it to, no common textual bible as it were, to reference and so there's a bunch of famous communists who happen to be atheists, and not much else for the rest of the world to draw observation from.
You are probably left with the common Christian impression that all atheism is comparable to say, Maoism or Marxism, philosophies which were aided by the extermination or suppression of religious views, but are hardly atheist in their own views (they simply replaced god with the state. Or, more commonly, themselves). That is not to say that there are not Socialists and atheists or even that this may not be a dominating view of atheist's economic views. PZ Myers is constantly poking fun at libertarians who apparently annoy him for example. But I would be surprised if the common view of all the world's atheists was taken to be to practice communism.
This is more or less a conservative hoax that studying Darwin and thus (somehow or other) becoming an atheist will automatically make you a communist to boot. Humanistic values such as many atheists share are actually pretty common to most religions and don't necessarily point in any economic directions. They ask questions which economics must attend to, but it is a soft science and does not give us any clarity about the scientific path of which way to aid and comfort others (markets or socialism). In point of fact, since one of the principle humanistic values is liberalism (in its classical sense), I would be greatly confused if socialism was a common trait as a result. I know there are plenty of academics and such who view it favorably or at least who hold capitalistic enterprises in contempt. But I've not met this as a universal trait, nor have I seen that this is not mixed in within a range of religious views, atheism, Buddhism, new age whatever, and Christians.
Perhaps the problem I am having incorporating this view of Christianity as a free market religion is that MOST people are much less market "orthodox" than I am (and most of them are, in addition, woefully misinformed or hold a grab bag of ideas about what a "free market" means that don't come close to the textbook or theoretical world of actual economics. Hell even I get chastised when I rub up against a Rothbardian conception of anarcho-capitalism). And most people I'm liable to come into contact with in the USA are...Christians.
But since I also read the original source materials of these religious folks, I doubt this is the case. My guess is that there's just an awful lot of people who are deluded and didn't read their own source materials with a frame of reference that included something of basic classical liberal economics like Adam Smith.
Put it this way. This is the modern guy I most associated with what I perceived as the tenets of Christianity.
"When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9lder_C%C3%A2mara
Now he may not be that much of a communist either (we were great at tagging people in Central America as communists during the Cold War)...but he's hardly practicing market economics.
So...in conclusion, I wouldn't worry about offending me, or some other atheist, with that definition.
But you probably offended plenty of socialists and/or communists by so confounding the distinctions between them as to make the only distinction one of religious belief. I glide over the distinctions between the beliefs of Baptists and Catholics or Shi'a and Sunni because they're sort of trivial metaphysical problems that don't exist in the real world (other than in the minds and actions of involved parties, where they are often all too real).
Communists and Socialists use very different political economies and systems of government to distribute resources even though they both use central planning heavily. They may both occupy some leftward economic arena on the political scales, but they don't generally share a totalitarian outlook on everything else. This is why Hitler and Stalin hated each other.
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