Making a Life Change

Well, I’ve not been around for a while.  Real Life, as they say, has gotten in the way of blogging.  If anyone’s missed the running commentary, I’m sorry ‘bout that and I promise to try to do better in the coming weeks.  Although that may not always be easy.

I’m trying something new these days, and it is gripping and exciting and very, very different than anything I’ve done before with my adult life, but it is also demanding quite a bit of my time, so blogging may be a bit sporadic until I get more of a routine down.  I’ll tell you about it, but let me first back into it by telling you a bit more about me and how I came to be where I am today . . .

The GOP’s Mythic Quest for Purity

Just an open question, throwing it out there for others to ponder, but what is it about the Conservative mindset that drives them to such extremes?  Is it a need for intellectual simplicity, a basic unwillingness to grapple with the complexity of the world around them?  Is it a desire to reduce all issues to a single Manichean moral vision, with a clear distinction always and easily drawn between good/bad, right/wrong?  Is it fundamentally an authoritarian drive, a need to identify an “other, an ideologically impure group” against which they can rally themselves as members of the “true faith”? 

I’ve begun thinking the modern GOP’s radicalism is systemic in nature.  That is, Conservatives seem to think it a virtue to take extremist positions solely for the sake of taking extremist positions.  As George Bush famously said, they “don’t do nuance.”  For modern Conservatives extremism is a feature, not a bug.

And so in the last GOP presidential debate Herman Cain was asked about his recent statement that he would consider negotiating with terrorists if necessary to win back captured American soldiers.  Almost the entirety of the field jumped all over him for this, because as everyone knows “you don’t negotiate with terrorists” – and there cannot possibly be any exceptions to this rule or any extraneous circumstances in which it might not apply.  

And then Ron Paul delighted many of us watching when he asked if that didn’t mean Ronald Reagan was wrong when he sold arms to Iran in part to secure the release of American hostages?  The rest of the field was fairly well gobsmacked as to how to respond.  

More below the fold.

Hell: Perspective and Eternity

Well, I'm a bit late getting to this topic, but it is one I have spent some time thinking about and it was discussed a bit over last Easter Weekend, so I thought I'd spend a little time opining. On the episode that aired Friday before Easter, Chris Matthew's Hardball apparently convened a roundtable to discuss whether or not "Hell" exists. As Digby pointed out over at her blog, this is an extremely silly topic for a "news program" to spend time debating, but there you are.

Then, on Easter Sunday, The New York Times ran a column by Ross Douthat arguing - as I understood it -- not only that Hell exists, but that Hell must exist because if there were no possibility of error, no potential for humans to be punished for making the wrong choices, then human endeavor would have less meaning: "If there's no possibility of saying no to Paradise then none of our no's have any real meaning either. They're like home runs or strikeouts in a children's game where nobody's keeping score."

This type of reasoning underscores how difficult it is for us humans to tell ourselves narratives that are not inherently solipsistic. We have virtually no capacity to view Life, the Universe, or Anything other than on our limited scale, and that leads to some pretty skewed thinking.