The Stalins And Maos Are The Republicans

Kevin Drums excerpts some words of stupidity from David Brooks, and I respond:

Brooks is probably just trying to get people scared that if it's the Democrats who are responsible for all this broad legislation, they are going to end up implementing some kind of ridiculous, socialist authoritarian command-economy bullshit.

People don't need to worry- that's not how policy is made in America at the federal level nowadays (at least, it's not how Democrats make honest efforts to solve real problems). Instead, federal law-makers can get help from all kinds of think tanks, experts, and academics who can make specific policy suggestions or who can even be retained in teams to study a problem for months and years and come up with the whole diagnosis of a problem and comprehensive suggestions for legislation themselves. It isn't like a bunch of idiots fiddling around with trying to control everything about the country.

If conservatives and underinformed types want to vex about what wen wrong in the Soviet Union, they shold consider that the Soviet Union's leaders were a bunch of idiots, bullies, and bumpkins, a lot more like putting Bush, Rove, and the like in charge of a command economy than like putting modern democrats and the academics they form policy with in absolute control of a nation. The USSR was a bunch of hostile, amateurish people trying to make decisions they weren't qualified to make, but got to make because they were politically loyal. That's 8- or 9/10 of why their country failed so badly, not their communal ideology. The Republicans are trying to do the same thing- award decision-making authority based on political loyalty, not professional qualification. In countries like the USSR, it was the scum and the bullies who rose to the top in everything, not the smart people- the only difference between the USSR then and the USA today being, now it's the scum and the bullies who are rising to the top of a capitalist, not a command, system.

A better analog to look to to see who is more like the communist leaders, Republicans or Democrats, is Iraq. Iraq is a place where the Republicans have had a chance to rebuild a country almost from the ground-up. Even not counting the problems related to violence there, the Republicans have failed miserably (and done a USSR-worthy job). Same with the Katrina rebuilding.

In many ways, too, the Republicans are making our country more and more like a command system all the time, which (at least with this kind of leaders) will produce results more and more like the USSR did over time.

UPDATE: If you want to know the reasons the USSR failed, these are them (and these aren't some kind of subtle, esoteric reasons that somehow caused a gigantic failure of a huge nation, and that you need some kind of special degree to be able to discern; rather all it takes is some knowledge):

1) The USSR was a country that underwent generations' worth of ideological purges (people being sent away from the regular economy and community to slave-labor camps or political prisons, often for political reasons, but most definitely often only on political pretenses but in actuality for arbitrary reasons- like personal dislike, or they stodd in the way of an official's ambitions) of thousands at a time. This means that lots and lots of people who thought for themselves, were capable, and just weren't powerful, selfish or savvy enough to protect themselves from the KGB and the like were basically done away with-- or, they were smart enough to successfully flee these dangers for the west. This is why Russia today is a cesspool of crime where 13 year old girls whore themselves on the streets on Moscow. Smart and capable people do things like discover technologies, solve problems, start cool projects and initiatives, and make things nice. When you take them away, the people you have left by themselves (the ones who can't read) pick up guns and start shooting each other in the head. The easiest modern example of this is Iraq. All the worthwhile people high-tailed it out of there or were assassinated. This is not to say Russia lost all its good, smart people. But the ones who were leftover were far more likely to be less-smart nerds (and therefore less offending, or less capable of fleeing) or evil nerds (less ideologically rebellious, but also less public-spirited in actuality, and therefore poorer contributors to the community).

(2) A somewhat-relate point to the first one: The procedures and norms governing advancement in various party/state organization in the USSR were such that people were able to advance in their jobs more easily by attacking their peers instead of by doing their jobs well.

(3) The USSR was oppressive (and this ruined people's morale as workers and turned them, at least in some respects, against their nation and countrymen).

(4) Oppression motivated capable and intelligent people to flee the USSR just like the ideological purges did.

(5) A command economy does not meet consumer demand as effectively and efficiently as does a limited capitalist economy.

(6) A command economy does not provide as much of a spur to innovation in technology (nor to other kinds of achievement) as does a limited capitalist economy.

(7) Organized labor was not really powerful in the Soviet Union as it was in the Soviets’ promises to their people and to the world; it was more rhetoric than reality. The democratic balance organized labor could have played to the state and communist party leadership organizations did not really exist.

(8) The rest of the world was not so interested in spending money on going to the USSR as tourists, perhaps partly because of Soviet rule. Also, there was no hugely popular USSR-export, like something on the scale of Hollywood movies.

(9) The USSR faced opposition from the West. This is the usual hard-lefty's excuse for why many things suck / sucked in the communist nations, but it's just not a realistic explanation by itself for all the problems those countries had.

The conservatives usually focus on (3) and (4) and talk as if these were the only reasons communism failed (they might throw in (2) to give themselves some credibility in a liberal's eyes, but they really do not refer to it to much, and the reason is that they are not per se against oppression, and would like to do it to the extent they can get away with it themselves) however, as you can see, there are plenty of other reasons why that nation came apart.

An inspiring story

The following is an excerpt from an interesting book I am reading, Stasi, by John O. Koehler, about how the communist government of East Germany politically-policed and otherwise oppressed the people of that country.

As you read it, please keep in mind that the people of these Eastern Block communist countries knew that their political beliefs were being strictly monitored and controlled by the communist governments that were then in power, that they were constantly spied on by secret police forces and by their own neighbors, friends, and relatives, and that they were often spirited away to be interrogated (and ultimately even to be sent to hard-labor camps and prisons) on the merest suspicion of being critical of the government or desiring to flee the country (also the people of these countries were oppressed in many other ways):

[O]n May 5, [1953,] the SED [the communist organization that then ruled East Germany] celebrated the 135th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx by increasing work quotas for industrial plants. The city of Chemnitz was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt and the Order of Karl Marx was created as [East Germany’s] highest award. The party seemed to be enjoying a period of unity and political tranquility. It lasted [only two weeks]. Mielke [a high-ranking leader of the Stasi-- East Germany’s Gestapo-like secret political police force] had been reporting secretly that a group of [communist] party officials were plotting against the leadership. This resulted in more expulsions from [high-ranking leadership organizations].

Discontent among the [industrial] workers over increased work norms without corresponding wage hikes reached the breaking point June 16, 1953, at Stalinallee in Berlin. Probably encouraged by Stalin’s death [a few months earlier], nearly a hundred workers gathered for a protest meeting before starting work. Word spread rapidly to other nearby construction sites, and soon several hundred men and women marched to the House of Ministries, the government [building] that once housed Hermann Göring’s Nazi aviation [department]. They chanted in protest for five hours until [an official] decided to speak to them. His cajoling was met with jeers, and he retreated into the heavily guarded building. People’s police riot units were called out of their barracks but made no move to break up the demonstrations. The protesters returned to Stalinallee, and a general strike [that is, a strike of all workers no matter what industry they belonged to] was called. the following day, some 100,000 protesters marched through East Berlin; about 400,000 took to the streets in other towns. Their demands were everywhere the same: free and secret elections.

The American radio station in West Berlin (RIAS) and several West German stations reported the protest marches and the plans for a general strike. These broadcasts were picked up throughout the Soviet zone, and 267,000 workers of major state-owned plants in 304 cities and towns spontaneously went on strike. In 24 towns, [enraged townspeople] stormed prisons and freed between 2,000 and 3,000 inmates [the communist governments imprisoned a lot of people for alleged political disloyalty, so perhaps these townspeople were trying to free friends and relatives they felt were basically kidnapped, rather than just trying to free ordinary criminals].

Mielke was nowhere to be seen in public, but his secret police agents and the Vopo [another communist police force in East Germany] were out en masse, and bloody street battles erupted. Hundreds of policemen defected to the side of the workers, police stations were overrun, and government offices were sacked. The leadership had already retreated to its residences in the heavily guarded compound in the Pankow district of East Berlin. At 1 P.M. the Soviet commandant for Berlin, Major P. K. Dibrova, a sixty-year-old [secret political policeman] who had never seen wartime combat, declared martial law. Stasi agents and people’s policemen opened fire. Drumhead courts handed down death sentences that were carried out on the spot. The rioting continued, and by late afternoon Soviet tanks accompanied by infantry and MVD troops had rolled into East Berlin and other major cities in the Soviet zone. This made the people even angrier. At Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, which bordered the American sector, [angry] protesters ignored machine gun fire and the menacing barrels of tank guns. They ripped cobblestones from the streets and hurled them at the tanks.

The [] use of Soviet power—two armored divisions—against the protesters in 121 major cities and small towns broke the back of the revolt within twenty-four hours. By nightfall June 18, relative calm had been restored in the Soviet zone, and Stasi flying squads swept through the cities. Provisional prison camps were set up to hold the thousands of Stasi victims. Nearly 1,500 persons were sentenced in secret trials to long prison terms.

On June 24, Mielke issued a terse announcement that one Stasi officer, nineteen demonstrators, and two bystanders had been killed during the uprising. He did not say how many were victims of official lynching. The numbers of wounded were given as 191 policemen, 126 demonstrators, and 61 bystanders. [But it is conceivable that the officially-released number of dead and wounded inflated the numbers of killed and wounded bystanders and demonstrators, and under-reported the numbers of killed and wounded Stasi agents and police officers in order to persuade the demonstrators to believe they had not accomplished much damage by their uprising.]”

The edits in brackets were made by me primarily because the author used a little too much scholarly-sounding language for the passage to be easy for most people to read as an excerpt.

This passage is very inspiring to me (as I hope it is to all of you) especially as to what kind of courage people can show and what people can accomplish even when very elaborate and far-reaching methods have been employed to control their opinions and behavior. When people have learned the lessons of people-power, it is very hard for any kind of fascists- even those disguised as populists- to totally oppress the people without more or less having a rough ride of it. And we don’t have to wait for people to set up camps to house political prisoners or to make thinking for yourself a crime in order to start exercising our people-power and to show that we want real freedom, and not just an impostor of it, in this country. It doesn’t take tearing up paving-stones and demonstrating in the street to do it, although I’d say those are definitely the right things to do in certain situations. There is an infinite array of actions that can effectively fight the kind of oppression we don’t want to see in our country and must always be on guard against.

Solidarity!

A Final Word on MK ULTRA

Referring to my earlier post:

Since the CIA in the '50s, '60s and '70s must have known about science, their actions in MK ULTRA are, if we give them the benefit of the doubt, puzzling. Why didn't they just rely solely on reputable scientists in relevant fields who were vetted, sworn to secrecy, and left to research the drugs in a manner they determined would be best and most efficient, with CIA approval and oversight?

When we think about it, there can only be a couple of explanations for the CIA's scuzzy conduct in MK ULTRA, and they are fairly straightforward:

(1) The CIA was disdainful of science, and was hesitant to consult scientists;

(2) The CIA agents wanted to go through a fantasy over and over again (maybe inspired by spy movies and TV shows) of picking people out, lowering their guard, surreptitiously slipping them a disabling drug like James Bond does, and then messing with them. Basically they were playing spy and picking on people. Certainly the motives of the shoddy, strange scientists the CIA did eventually pick out to help them seem about as bad.

Keep on rockin' in the free world

(This is something I wrote in a comment on something else, but I'm going to put it here as its own post because it's important to say on its own):

If you follow mainstream media and politics (like, for example, if you read the Media Matters website) then you'll be familiar with the fact that we are turning into a nation with a controlled media. Plenty of news stories don't make it to the biggest news outlets, hosts who interview guests on TV talk shows are on a mission to illegitimately discredit the liberal/Democratic guests, the nationally televised presidential debates are rigged (so that the questions that get asked are stupid and focus on personal trivia about candidates that give people petty reasons to vote against Democrats instead of focusing on policy questions that will inform the public and let them see that voting for Democrats is in their best interest), talk show panels regularly get stacked with conservative guests instead of liberals and Democrats, etc. These are all standard practices of almost every nationally syndicated TV program with some news content (Keith Olbermann, 60 Minutes, and the Comedy Central comedies are the exceptions, but I believe they are all somewhat effected by the problem as well). So the mainstream media has very clearly been blackmailed, intimidated, bought off, or infiltrated (my guess if that there is a lot of conservative infiltration, and that the other factors (especially intimidation) are present to a smaller extent), and in that case it's not unlikely or unreasonable at all to think that The New Yorker printed a racist cover intending to hurt Barack.

Of course, the mainstream media does not report on the fact that its content (especially its news content) is currently right on the brink of the most prejudiced and biased that content can possibly be towards the right-wing point of view without everyone in the public openly realizing that we have a controlled media.

This shouldn't have happened

Fire that cartoonist!

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archiv … 014079.php

You'll notice that Michelle Obama is depicted with a big Afro, wearing a bandolier of bullets and an assault rifle, camo pants and army boots. The scene is the Oval Office, where a portrait of Osama bin Laden (or some other traditionally-dressed Middle Eastern man) is hanging up, and an American flag is burning in a fire-place.

The cartoonist is claiming that this is an attempt to satire all the racism against Barack amd show it up. I'd say someone should tell this guy that you don't criticize racism by giving it a huge billboard, but I expect he already knows that. What the cover really looks like is the image one would expect to find on a racist t-shirt.

Is it a satire of racism to put a statue of a mamie or whatever on your lawn?

Anyway, the South Park style of satire is far from what The New Yorker usually does with its covers. I don't follow the magazine closely, but I used to subscribe and I've seen it enough to notice the covers are usually much more tame and sedate. There's something not normal about this new cover.

Let's assume it's legitimate satire: Then can we always criticize racism by this method now? Instead of criticizing racism against Obama in particular, can I criticize racism in the society in general by drawing a cartoon of a bunch of tall black guys holding down a white teenaged girl on her bed, with a basketball sitting next to the bed-- the idea being that it's making fun of what racists fantasize if you depict it? Frankly, if people went walking around with the image from the New Yorker cover (or the hypothetical image I described) on a t-shirt, I think people would have very good reason to think it's a racist image and to be angry with the person wearing the shirt. Calling the New Yorker cartoon legit satire of racism is tantamount to saying that a cartoon like the one I described would be legitimate satire of racism.

I just can't see how what was racist speech yesterday is now all of a sudden anti-racist speech just because this guy is claiming it is. I think considering how screwed-up the media has become (Tim Russert eulogized for a week and a half non-stop?! Come on!) we have reason to be concerned about something like this-- not the opposite.

What if The New Yorker did a cover depicting John McCain smiling and wearing a black SS uniform, sitting on top of a pile of corpses of combat-uniformed American soldiers, with a couple of barrels of oil on either side of the pile, and some green dollars sticking out of McCain's pockets? People would have no trouble saying that editorialism / partisanship to that degree is inappropriate for the cover of the magazine.

If this cartoon was legitimate satire it was way too close to the line of what should be considered legitimate satire (especially because of the context of the times and venue for distribution / audience of the magazine cover, and everything).

I'm still disturbed by the fact that if you just look at the magazine cover for what it obviously looks like (w/o anyone's "explanation"), then what it obviously looks like is a smearing, juvenile racist image about our Democratic presidential candidate got put on the cover of a widely distributed, famous magazine that will appear on newstands all over the country for 1 month. No cartoon in that venue and that could effect a presidential election should require an explanation from the cartoonist in order for people to "get it" instead of very possibly taking a racist message away from it.

If just some kid in a high school drew that for, say, an art class project, students and parents would be rightly offended. Or if it just showed up on a billboard, ditto. Some guy makes ridiculous pretensions to high-mindedness and avant garde art, though, and people are ready to let him get away with putting racist caricatures on the cover of a major magazine.

Hopefully this country has not become so weird over the past few years that some person can get away with this racist characterization of Barack Obama just by throwing out a paper-thin excuse.

In case you haven't heard

It turns out that the CIA project to research “mind control” you may have heard about isn’t an urban legend, a hoax or a rumor-- they actually did do a lot of work trying to figure out how to control people's minds with drugs. I can't remember where exactly, but I read recently in at least one place (seems like it was more though) "Oh, those silly rumors about the CIA MK ULTRA project, which we all know is just an urban legend..." or some words to that effect. Since I read a lot of political blogs, could be some conservative moron-- who feels it's his mission in life to make every kind of cop, Western empire, unscrupulous person, etc., that ever existed look as good as possible-- was just trying to make people out there think it was a bunch of poop it they ever happen to hear the name of the op in conversation, or glance it in a piece of writing.

You used to (prior to 9/11) hear a lot of nasty things about the CIA. Since 9/11, they've got a considerable whitewashing (by which I mean the media refuses to say a single bad thing about them, except the leaking of some evidence that a couple of people died during interrogations they conducted-- everything else they do is portrayed from a shallow & uncritical "you can see the arguments on both sides" perspective).

But anyway, this old project fits the old image of the CIA you used to hear about (probably more truly reflecting them), that they're a bunch of jerkwad hacks. For MK ULTRA, they secured a bunch of money they had zero accountability for, and they conducted a bunch of totally unscientific field experiments on often unwilling and unknowing subjects, including plenty of American civilians (these were not intelligence targets, just random schmoes the CIA decided to mess around with since they were big and bad CIA agents and the people were just regular old innocent U.S. citizens). The results of their ridiculous caper (besides killing some people and permanently ruining some people’s lives) were finding out the drugs they investigated (mostly LSD) wouldn’t make people controllable the way the CIA was looking for.

There is a bunch of substantiation at the Wikipedia page, including citations to Senate-floor remarks from Sen. Ted Kennedy and a Supreme Court opinion related to the program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA

Despite the totally legitimate documentation of this, it still seems kept quiet. When was the last time you saw the words "MK ULTRA" in a mainstream source? The documentation is out there, but TV, the newspapers, and Hollywood don't want to talk about it. Which isn't good, since a bunch of idiots shouldn't be, you know, left to their own devices to do things like this to people. Maybe if people had mentioned MK ULTRA a little more during this whole so-called "War on Terror" thing, people would have realized "Oh, these CIA jerks are just a bunch of used-car salesmen and deluded assholes" and wouldn't have depended on praise from President Bush, the fiction TV show 24, and appearances on TV news programming by "ex-"CIA agents for their low-down on the CIA.

If the documentation was well-known, people should have been saying "MK ULTRA" non-stop during all this bidness about the interrogations and Abu Ghraib and whatnot. I assume it is well-known to a few people, but those people don't seem to have done a good job of explaining what it is in newspapers, TV shows, the blogs, etc., besides perhaps just mentioning the name and omitting the important details.

It seems like everyone got so scared after 9/11, even a lot of liberals forgot to mention that the CIA are a bunch of jackoffs and started eating up the line that the CIA are a bunch of expert, nice, bipartisan guys out to help us all. As too often turns out to be the case with intelligence agencies, it seems they've become more like the goons that lawmakers think we can't get rid of, or are too afraid to try. Really, what's your remedy against the CIA? Sub-departments or even the whole agency could be amassing all sorts of power and we wouldn't know it, and maybe the Senate and the President wouldn't even know it. They could be intensely ideological and we wouldn't know it.

Tony Snow no longer working as propagandist-- sounds good to me

And I don't mind much that he died, either.

Should we have expressed sympathy to Goebbels' family when he died? Probably not, right?

What if Goebbels had died just prior to WWII? One year prior? Two years prior?

I think we're better off without Tony Snow, and in light of all that the Bush administration has done to Americans, I think what is impolite is expressing any regret over Snow's death.

That's one less guy who got us into Iraq for Cheney's oil, and then worked to keep us there, without a single sincere regret.

It's not worth mourning the likes of him, not in this day and age and considering what our country has gone through. If his kind had been less successful harming our country, maybe I'd be sucker enough to express some token regret over this guy's death (but even if all the extraordinarily bad things that have happened to our country after 9/11 hadn't happened, Tony Snow would probably just have been sticking up for Republican vote-stealing tactics, or the Rovian slime machine, or something similarly sinister, anyway). I see no reason to kiss the ass of someone who abuses us like this just because he died (a perfectly natural thing that inevitably happens to everybody, good and bad alike).

Good riddance.

Civilian Hummers: a very bad historical accident

The funniest thing about this is that a commenter in Matt's comments section suggests that maybe the reason people buy big SUVs is that they think they will be better-protected by them in an accident.

Maybe, and maybe they are safe vehicles (not that I've heard of, though) but if all those people were so interested in safety, why didn't we see a huge trend of people buying little Volvos? Those are the safest cars by a longshot, as far as I've ever heard. Seems to me people who buy SUVs are more like selfish jackass types, and having a big car gives them a power trip-- so it's probably more about hoping you make other drivers on the road feel like the Hummer would do a lot of damage to their cars in a collision, than it is about guaranteeing your life. Why don't all the macho and neanderthal-sized drivers the WaPo writer references duck into safe, fuel-efficient European cars all the time? Probably the look of those cars doesn't aid the self-delusions that they use to make up for their personal failings and deficiencies enough.

Here's what I wrote in Matt's comments:

What is he saying? You need to be a certain height to drive a certain car? Doesn't make sense to me. You'd have to be pretty short to have a lot of trouble stepping into an SUV.

Why doesn't he think the 6' 4" guy is driving it to boost his self-esteem-- like maybe because the 6' 4" guy is stupid and driving a big car is the only way to make himself feel like he's an impressive, successful person?

People as big as Arnold Schwarzenegger seem to be for the most part less smart, and examples who become wildly successful (like Arnold and Jesse Ventura) seem to be the very few exceptions.

Sorry, the Hummer isn't any different a status symbol than any other expensive car-- except that it's a ridiculous waste of money / gas, so that when the decision to buy a status-symbol type car is a bad one for a particular person to make, if it's a Hummer that's bought, it's extra bad.

Obama Wants To Expand The Peace Corps

Link.

I think Barack is saying a lot of really disappointing things lately, from a liberal point of view. The Peace Corps is a good thing in the abstract in a few ways, but I feel like conservatives like it because it takes liberal young people out of the country (who would otherwise be advocating for liberal politics here in America). It basically decreases our ranks to win political victories and take things away from the Republicans.

Think about the '60s and all the important social movements and legislation that were going on then, or have their origins in 1960s liberal activism. How much of that really would have taken-off if tens of thousands of people who had the guts and compassion it takes to go suffer in a dangerous foreign country for several years in the Peace Corps had joined up with them instead of being student activists on college campuses? (I know the Peace Corps began in the '60, but what if it had been bigger and more successfully recruited volunteers). And how many of the second-stringers as far as personality and intelligence would have made the student organizations and activism in general as successful at college campuses across the country as the most talented student leaders did? Remember, we have to do all this in the face of Republican attempts at disruption and misinformation. We're not served in this endeavor by having any of our best people drop out from participating at least in some capacity to do something else (that takes them entirely away from American political advocacy).

Right now what we most need is to decisively win at politics in America, to defend against the Republicans. We no more need liberal college-age and graduate-school aged people who are brave, motivated and dynamic joining the Peace Corps than we need them going over to fight in Iraq.

Let Europe-- or some other First World nation that isn't struggling with the Bushies, who currently command the world's strongest military and greatest economy-- do what the Peace Corps does. What Barack is suggesting runs counter to what should be basic Democratic strategy right now. You know young Karl Roves, Frank Luntzes and Sean Hannitys aren't going to join the Peace Corps, or at least not in anything like the relative numbers to the whole number of their activists that young liberals will.

The Peace Corps would be good at another time. It would certainly redound to our nation's benefit if we didn't have more pressing needs for their personnel, because it could increase stability in the world. But right now doing better at American domestic politics should be a priority that trumps the Peace Corp's need for volunteers.

Religious Organizations

Atrios says this: "I don't actually have a problem with money going to church-linked organizations as long as they aren't exempt from oversight or anti-discrimination laws and don't proselytize."

I don't think any public money should go to religious organizations. They already get an exemption from (some?) taxes.

If someone wants to believe in a higher power as a hobby, fine. If they benefit from some of the beliefs or claimed "knowledge" of a religion, fine as well. But religions discourage people from believing in things like science and the moral worth of their neighbors, despite the nicer versions of religions that are out there. We don't need to be funding ideological missions that actually run against the grain of (what should be) our public policy.

We should just feed the poor in another way. They should be helped through government assist / training programs and private funding of religion. Religion shouldn't receive any megaphone from the state, nor should it have any kind of foothold or voice in state functions.

Why can't poor people be given public works jobs that require little or no training (things like cleaning up the streets of trash, erasing the more tasteless pieces of graffiti, and doing the most menial and simple tasks in state-highway construction projects)? People who can't work because of something like mental illness can be given appropriate and meaningful assistance instead-- like new state homes for the mentally ill that are staffed by, say, college students (encouraging work + consumer spending further by creating more new jobs) and that do not degrade them, dissimilar to the old state-run mental institutions that were staffed by screwed-up people and people from bad neighborhoods.

Why should public money be spent to fund groups that create conservative voters and encourage conservative propaganda?

Religions make men more disrespectful of women (and I don't just mean that women should be able to get abortions). Even if liberals were to give up abortion as a concession to the conservatives, having decided that unwanted pregnancies and physical dangers to the mother of pregnancy are no longer what they once were, lots of males from certain religions think it’s their right to push women around and to give them orders. I think human civilizations need leadership and deference (hierarchies) at this point in some form like we have them already, but in this day and age, there are much better bases for leadership and deference than male or female physiology (and everything that goes with them). The idea that men should always control women is a destructive impulse that runs counter to a lot of institutions in our society and would take away a lot of prosperity that has probably been achieved because of increased equality for women. Some conservative religious types would probably say that I have it backwards, and that they respect women more because they oppose things like pornography more than we liberals do, but I'd have to say that they can't read our minds- that is, they don't really know how much looking at pornography has or doesn't have to do with disrespecting or objectifying women in general for every man who looks at it- and that, while some of those criticisms of things like pornography and legalization of prostitution seem to at least have some merit, secularists can adopt those criticisms too. But still, conservative religion's misogyny won't be enough to justify its more pernicious parts that are left-over in the balance (that is to say, even if all liberals and all religious people agreed on something like a ban of pornography, religions would still be misogynistic enough in other beliefs-- beliefs that we liberals don't agree with-- for us to be able to see that giving aid to the religions' promoting their points of view on those issues isn't worth it).

In fact, I think conservative religious people, rather than being so concerned with the wlefare of women, more tend to use their criticisms about pornography as an excuse to bash liberals and/or people who don't believe in religion, when they should actually know better (i.e., it should be plain to them that everyone who isn't in favor of banning pornography doesn't look down on women). So it's not only a flawed argument, it's a specious and dishonest one.

Religions do promote a lot of social training / social functions that I think almost all of us can agree with, like some degree of sexual morality and public-spiritedness or love for our fellow humans. But those kinds of values can be taught (and in a less arbitrary, 4,000-year-old-book-related way) by secular persons and programs. And perhaps people would even become better, more engaged parents (and more moral in general) if they realized they had to think about and focus on teaching their kids the right things to do and the right way to think, and that they can't just drop the kid off at Sunday school or Temple and hope that everything will turn out ok with how the kid sees right and wrong.

All of this is more reason to limit state spending on religion as a general public policy.