Jun 05 2008
A hearty and sincere congratulations to Barack Obama and all of his supporters. The only other thing I have to say about that is to ask you to please reach out to our brothers and sisters in the HRC camp, many of whom have been abused in this process. We are all Democrats, we are all progressives, and we all have a lot of work to do in fixing our sadly and badly broken country.
Oct 29 2007
If Nancy Pelosi were poor and sleeping on my sidewalk, she’d be arrested for loitering. But because she has $125 million bucks in the bank, and a sign on the door of her office reading “Speaker of the House,” it’s called “government.”
–Compound F
Nancy Pelosi’s statement about war protestors being arrested for loitering exhibited frustration at her base’s desire to end the evil in Iraq and also struck a rather authoritarian chord. While she voted against funding, she is obviously deeply conflicted about her commitments to the Constitution, oversight, and basic ethics. The same can be said of Congress as a whole. I hope we can agree that lying one’s way into an aggressive war in which a million people have been killed for the purposes of resource theft can be easily categorized as “evil.”
Evil is a loaded concept, so let me pare it down. Evil is not “out there” as a mythic, religious, or supernatural force. While I insist on looking inward to find evil, I also don’t care for the “empirical” notion that Good and Evil can be adequately represented by a continuum of pleasure and pain. I prefer the more philosophical or moral version in which evil is related to the intent to do harm.