How big will the Reason Rally be?

I just booked two tickets for the Reason Rally bus and tickets were going fast.  There were only a few spaces left on the bus.  This may be a bigger turnout than I anticipated.

If you are a secular American and you’re tired of our government bowing to the religious who throw bronze age rules and regulations in your face, consider attending.  Richard Dawkins is going to speak as well as Adam Savage from Mythbusters, Greta Christina and many others.  The purpose of the rally is to demonstrate our numbers and that we can be a formidable voting bloc.  This voting bloc wants reason to prevail in the way we run our government, make our laws, educate our children and maintain our privacy.  You do not have to be a non-believer to attend this rally.  All that is required is a desire to protect the separation of church and state.

The attack on reason is gathering steam.  In addition to the new regulations on abortion and contraception sweeping the nation, Tennessee has just passed a Monkey Bill which will mandate that science classrooms teach that evolution and climate change are controversial subjects.  While reasonable people can debate the degree to which human activity contributes to global warming, there is nothing “controversial” about the subject of evolution.  It happened and continues to happen. I see it in the sequences I download and proteins I study every day.  There is no better evidence.  The only thing that is controversial about it is scientists’ opinion on why the religious right refuses to believe an incontrovertible truth.  Some say it’s stupidity, while people like me say it’s indoctrination.  It’s a controversy.  Can we discuss that in Tennessee classrooms?

And for those of you who just can’t get enough politics, here is a very informative video of Sean Faircloth, author of Attack of the Theocrats on the strategy for secular success.

Thursday: Glen’s righteous rant and then he loses the plot at the end. Sigh.

Not Your Sweetie pointed me to a righteous rant that Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report made about the left’s capitulation to Obama.  Glen thinks that Obama is not the lesser evil.  He is the evil.  But the problem remains that many voters on the left are quite willing to let him get away with murdering America because they are fixed on intentions.  I couldn’t say it any better so I will let Glen do the honors:

Who is the Effective Evil? I haven’t even gotten into his actual term as president, much less his expansion of the theaters of war, his unique assaults on International Law, and his massacre of Due Process of Law in the United States. But I want to pause right here, because piling up facts on Obama’s Most Effective Evils doesn’t seem to do any good if the prevailing conversation isn’t really about facts – but about intentions.

The prevailing assumption on the Left is that Obama has good intentions. Heintends to the Right Thing – or, at least, he intends to do better than the Republicans intend to do. It’s all supposed to be about intentions. Let’s be clear: There is absolutely no factual basis to believe he intends to do anything other than the same thing he has already done, whether Democrats control Congress or not, which is to serve Wall Street’s most fundamental interests.

But, the whole idea of debating Obama’s intentions is ridiculous. It’s psycho-babble, not analysis. No real Left would engage in it.

I have no doubt that New Gingrich and Republicans in general have worse intentions for the future of my people – of Black people – than Michelle Obama’s husband does. But, that doesn’t matter. Black people are not going to roll over for whatever nightmarish Apocalypse the sick mind of Newt Gingrich would like to bring about. But, they have already rolled over for Obama’s economic Apocalypse in Black America. There was been very little resistance. Which is just another way of saying that Obama has successfully blunted any retribution by organized African America against the corporate powers that have devastated and destabilized Black America in ways that have little precedence in modern times.

Obama has protected these Wall Streeters from what should be the most righteous wrath of Black folks. To take a riff from Shakespeare’s Othello, “Obama has done Wall Street a great service, and they know it.” He has proven to be fantastically effective at serving the Supremely Evil. Don’t you dare call him the Lesser.

He is the More Effective Evil because Black Folks – historically, the most progressive cohort in the United States – and Liberals, and even lots of folks that call themselves Marxists, let him get away murder! Yet, people still insist on calling him a Lesser Evil, while he drives a stake through Due Process of Law.

I have not spoken much about the second half of Obama’s first term in office. That is the period when the Left generally becomes disgusted with what they call his excessive “compromises” and “cave-ins” to Republicans. But that is a profoundly wrong reading of reality. Obama was simply continuing down his own Road to Austerity – the one he, himself, had initiated before even taking office. The only person caving in and compromising to the Republicans, was the Obama that many of YOU made up in your heads.

Yep, pretty much.  Obama never was that guy the left thought he was.  He left it all to the imagination and flattered his fan base and love bombed them.  What we need now is an intervention for the left to deprogram them.  This faith in Obama and the Democrats to somehow hold the line or make it right flies in the face of all of the evidence to the contrary.  This religion is bad for you.  You know it but you keep going to the altar and making sacrifices for it anyway.  Find a new church before you waste more of your life pining for a paradise that they promise but never intend to deliver.

So, Glen has all the stuff about who Obama really serves pretty much nailed down.  Then he pivots and starts catering to his base.  This one is anti-war.  This is where I despair.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m as anti-war as anyone on the left and always have been but I’m also a rational being.  Let me assure you that I have every reason to want the wars to end because my only brother is serving in Afghanistan.  So, the sooner we stabilize and pull out, the better.  But I don’t want to leave the region in worse shape than when we invaded.  Let’s put the blame for the terrible state of affairs where it belongs, with Bush/Cheney.  Destabilization was their goal, I think.  That guarantees that we will have to stay in central Asia for a long time.  And Pakistan is a nuclear powderkeg run by Islamacists who are just slightly more sane than their neighbors to the west.  Getting out of Afghanistan was never going to be easy in the best of circumstances.  Iraq is a different story.  Let’s just leave already.  Iran is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.  If Israel wants to go there against our warnings, let them do it on their own dime.  I’m sick of catering to Israel and their own extremist base.

But I am sickened by the response of the left to Syria.  Darfur got a lot of attention a few years back and everyone remembers what happened to Bosnia and Rwanda.  But there are children in Syria who are being maimed and are dying in pain without treatment, murdered by their own government who has turned its guns on civilians and I am watching the left cross its arms and tighten its lips and turn a cold shoulder to this suffering.  What would it take for them to want to call NATO airstrikes?  How many Syrians will have to die?  How many reporters and Syrian activists will have to die?  The uprising in Syria has taken its toll of foreign correspondents who die from lack of access to medical care as they sneak in and out of the country to cover events or are killed by those events.  And remember that the Syrian uprising is part of the Arab Spring.  Why would we want to curtail that?  I’m sorry, but people are people.  I don’t care what their political views are, butchering young human beings is morally wrong.  If it’s wrong for a soldier to go on a rampage against Afghanis, it’s just as wrong to leave Syrians to their fates unaided.

There is a point where anti-war activism makes no sense.  The lack of compassion is astonishing.  But even if they had a point about their complete, adamant, unmovable resistance to intervening on behalf of other human beings, they are going about it all wrong.  To end the wars, you must end the economic war in this country first.  That war is commanding all of our attention at this time.  There will not be a popular movement in this country to end the wars right this very minute until working people stop worrying about how they are going to keep a roof over their heads and feed their kids.  You don’t have to think back too many years to remember that the anti-war movement was much stronger and got better press back when the economy was stronger, before the financial collapse of 2008.  The collapse has sucked the oxygen out of the that fight.  Anti-war activists will not get the sympathy of the public if the average person thinks they are out of touch with when war is not a priority for them at the present time.

This is the Shock Doctrine in all its regalia.  Naomi Klein should be all over this.  Marshall your troops against the economy, re-establish control of your own government and then the wars will end and no sooner.

If you are truly anti-war, you are wasting your time attending meetings and drafting resolutions about how to end the wars over there.  Focus your attention at home on the economy and holding the Democratic party accountable.  It always was and always will be the economy stupid.