Theocrat hornet's nest stirred

Remember when I was all "So this is just a trap and we can expect a huge flood of letters (especially in conjunction with tomorrow's "black mass") in the coming days coming to the defense of Christianity" regarding that "No unicorns, no god" letter a few days ago?

Don't say I didn't warn you!

• "Wiser and safer way to live" (Lame Pascal's Wager bit)
• "He conquered the grave and death" (First off, since "the grave" is just a metonym for "death" isn't that phrase redundant? It's like saying "Wall Street and huge finance firms ruined the economy!" Anyhow, this letter is just grade school apologetics-- there has to be a cause = Christian god!)
• "Love can't be measured" (More sophomoric apologetics, somehow saying that since we can't measure emotions (!) but emotions exist, then ipso facto the Christian god is 100% real. Or something. Also, since medicine doesn't always work, we believing in science is flawed. Finally, Pascal's Wager.)
• "We can't know what we don't know" (Again with the can't-measure-love line. But a least a sensible send-off acknowledging that at least in the US someone can actually voice anti-Christian sentiment and not be killed.)
• "God has revealed himself with hundreds of fulfilled prophecies" (Plugs some easily-refuted Christian apologetics books (I mean, Lee Strobel? Really?? Somehow, for Christians, the atheist-turned-Christian thing is compelling proof of god even if the far-more-common Christian-turned-atheist thing is just an example of people rejecting god. So stupid.), and then the Since-I-don't-know-science-it-must-be-god! argument. Including fucking thermodynamics-- grade school arguments.)

So there it is-- fucking five letters as the theocratic pushback. And I'd wager (with Pascal?) that this isn't even it. But that's the point: the Oklahoman didn't run Robert K. Sock's letter because it represented a common voice from Oklahoma (as the letters section claims to do). They ran it for this very reason: to rile up their theocratic base. Hell, we even got to see some of the usual suspects, as the author of the hundreds-of-prophecies letter wrote in earlier to defend Creationism.

It's a cheap ploy that no real newspaper would engage it. But the Oklahoman is just a propaganda machine for the plutocrat/theocrat alliance so this is all par for the course.

Boring insults

Here we go again. At this point, there isn't much to do but mock the stupidity of these writers, and lament that the Oklahoman is such a shitty newspaper. So with an eye roll, we get this piece of crap from Bob Fassio of Choctaw:

Regarding “AG’s speech celebrates Constitution” (News, Sept. 18): Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt spoke to a government and politics class at Southeast High School about the writing of the U.S. Constitution.

Let's start here-- and this isn't Mr Fassio's issue, but holy fucking shit. Try to search the Oklahoman on-line and find the title "AG's speech celebrates Constitution" anywhere. You can't. Just link to the article. Link to it! Even if you hit the paywall, link to it! It's not hard.

Anyhow, so we have the set-up: Oklahoma's Attorney General spoke at some school about the Constitution. That's cool. It was "Constitution Day" or whatever. Then we get this:

It’s regrettable that no one thought to send an invitation to Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. If ever anyone needed to be brought up to speed on its contents, they’re certainly the first people to come to mind. They’ve done more than their part to trash the Constitution.

Jesus fucking fuck. Is this for real? Here's my guess, Bob: you know a fraction of what the other four people mentioned in this letter know. AG Pruitt studied constitutional law at Tulsa. Obama graduates magna cum laude from this place called Harvard. Then he taught-- get this-- constitutional law at a place called the University of Chicago. Pelosi got a degree in political science and has been in the House since 1987. Harry Reid got a degree in political science and history and then when to this place call Georgetown where he got a law degree. He's been in Congress since 1983. Both Pelosi and Reid have probably had more discussions about constitutional law last week than Mr Fassio has his entire pathetic life.

So where does Mr Fassio get the idea that these three politicians have gone about to "trash" the Constitution? Well, no doubt from ridiculous, propagandistic news outlets like Fox News and the Oklahoman. We've already dealt with stuff like this, where some willfully ignorant Oklahoman rants about Obama wanting to "pick and choose" whatever parts of a law he wants to enforce-- even if, in fact, his actions are not only legal but totally normal.

So what else? Like, what else is Nancy Pelosi doing that Mr Fassio can point to that truly unconstitutional? And that's the beauty of the Pravda-on-the-North-Canadian-- running letters like that that just throw out accusations that their own thralls already want to be true is all they need. Obama impeachment talk is rampant among right-wing politicians, and this sort of They are trashing the Constitution! talk just feeds the frenzy among the thralls. Mr Fassio can't name a single instance of a Democratic politician who is "trash[ing]" the Constitution. Nevertheless we get this grade-school "zinger" from Bob:  

Perhaps we can get Pruitt to go to Washington and conduct a special class for them.

Yeah. I bet the guy who edited the Harvard Law Review and two politicians who have held national office since the 80's need pointers on the Constitution from a guy who can't even get elected to state office.

What sort of paper runs these sorts of low brow, childishly insulting letters?

Theocrat hornet's nets

Holy shit. That's about the best way to start a post about today's letter from Robert K. Stock of El Reno. When you see the headline "No unicorns, no God" you just know the Oklahoman is stirring up a hornet's nest to rile up its theocratic base.

The letter isn't worth repeating here because it makes some pretty basic atheist arguments about the existence of god, even invoking the classic pink unicorn (technically he's supposed to be invisible, but that might have been too much). One might critique the tone of the letter, as the way it's written the author falls into the stereotype of bring the obnoxious, I'm-smarter-than-you atheist. But otherwise, the letter doesn't add much new to the discussion (for anyone who is familiar with it) and its relationship to a topical event (the much-discussed "black mass" to be held on Sept 21 (that's tomorrow)).

One might ask: if you aren't going to comment on it, why mention it at all? The answer to that is because we know exactly why this letter ran, as the Oklahoman does this all the time. The readership of the paper is slanted far to the right (thanks, in part, to the paper itself!), and the percentage of letters it gets from atheists decrying the ever-growing creep of Christianity into government, etc., is vanishingly small. In fact, the paper even says, "Sometimes letters will heavily favor one side of an issue over another. Those who hold opposing views might not submit letters in the same quantity," implying that you don't see more progressive views printed because they don't get that many letters expressing progressive views.

Thus, the real question is this: why run this letter? And the answer is clear. The paper loves to rile up its theocratic base. When everything is going well, and everyone agrees with you, you get complacent. So to stop people from being complacent, the paper periodically runs letters saying things like "evolution is real" or, in this case, "there is no god." Then, the editors can sit back and wait for the flood of pro-Christian letters to flood in from tons of old white people who get really afraid that someone might be different from them.

So this is just a trap and we can expect a huge flood of letters (especially in conjunction with tomorrow's "black mass") in the coming days coming to the defense of Christianity.

Socialism ad nauseam ad hominem

It's been a few months, so we were certainly due for more Mike Jones. Even without reading it, you know what you're going to get: a history lesson, some pro-Christian cheerleading, and a rant against socialism. This is EVERY FUCKING LETTER he writes.

As our Founding Fathers tried to write a constitution, disagreements were so strong that the convention almost broke up. Members took a break and met to pray for God’s guidance. When they came back, the difference was extraordinary, and they designed a government that acknowledged the Bible’s revelation that man’s basic nature was not good but was self-centered.

I guess I should have put history lesson in scare quotes, because nothing he ever relates is actual history. So, the history of the formation of the Constitution is long and complex, with various political leaders proposing their own ideas for how the government of the new nation should look. But when you read the history, you never find some time where people literally "met to pray for God's guidance" at all. Indeed, as noted, "With the oratory degenerating into threats and accusations, Benjamin Franklin appealed for daily prayers... Franklin's appeal for prayers was never fulfilled; the convention, as Hugh Williamson noted, had no funds to pay a preacher."

There is no record of some sort of revelation moment where everyone just decided to get along thanks to prayer. Unless, perhaps, counting slaves as 3/5ths of a person was part of God's plan? I don't know.

What we do know is that Jones' theology is pretty clear that humans are not inherently good, but are self-centered. He trashed Anne Frank for thinking otherwise, after all, and says so here, too. It's odd that a man who so hates government and regulation in favor of free markets also admits that humans are just selfish assholes. Without regulations, a truly free market allows people to engaged in that selfishness and pursue riches at the expense of everyone else-- polluting, swindling, cheating, and harming others to get to the top. It's an odd set of beliefs to hold onto.

Anyhow...

They therefore inserted 'checks and balances' so none of the three branches could gain control of the people. By limiting the power of government, the Founders provided citizens with freedoms that 95 percent of the world’s peoples had never known.

Odd phrasing-- "so none of the three branches could gain control of the people." Mike Jones truly has a warped sense of what "governance" is. And where is this "95%" thing from? I would bet a good sum of money that he just made it up.

In 1831, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States and was so impressed with the unity and prosperity of the young country that he began researching for the causes. He immediately noticed two: The people fervently practiced Christianity and they had tremendous freedoms. The government had kept itself out of the affairs of the people except for a few constitutionally defined areas.

This is a pretty shitty summary of de Tocqueville's assessment. Yes, he saw a lot of value in the whole "Puritan" thing, but he also saw that its strength was that it was separated from government. Thus, Jones' whole dream of a giant Christian Theocracy is NOT what de Tocqueville had in mind-- he sort of hated the whole connection of (Catholic) church and state in France. And let's be clear it's 1831. It's not like the government could really do much to insert itself into the affairs of people. Record-keeping was difficult and thus kept to a minimum by nature. The notion that workers might need protections hadn't emerged yet (we know that Jones prefers Sam Seller to Wally Worker), and things like cars, electricity, airplanes, efficacious medicine, indoor plumbing, and the like weren't a regular part of the American experience. So what's there to regular in 1831? Weights and measures, I guess. Currency? Maybe. It's pretty weak to dream about the good ol' days of 1831 and imagine the world is anywhere near the same almost 200 years later.

America continued to increase in prosperity until the 1930s when the economically naive Franklin Roosevelt tried Socialism, which turned a temporary recession into the Great Depression. Who are the culprits today?

HAHAHAHAHA! This has to be the most revisionist history piece of shit Mike Jones has ever written-- and that's saying something!! Jones is clearly following the Friedman "monetarist" school of thought here, even though there are serious arguments against it. To state so frankly a statement that is questionable at best and outright false at worst is totally irresponsible. But that's par for the course with the Oklahoman. And worse still is that Roosevelt's ideas of "Socialism" have nothing to do with the what the Milton Friedman crowd say spurred on the Great Depression.

And, for the record, the Keynesian crowd was right and Roosevelt's biggest problem was not spending enough on public works programs. So Mike Jones and suck it.

Which takes us to his final, very predictable point:

This 1944 quote from Socialist Norman Thomas is pretty plain. "The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment … I no longer need to run as a presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democrat Party has adopted our platform."

HAHAHA! So, use a made-up quote, attribute it to a "socialist" and try to paint the Democratic Party as socialists. How totally irresponsible! And how totally Oklahoman! What a shitty newspaper we have.