Tell me more about me

Debbie Wasserman Schultz joining the Hillary Clinton campaign came off as a slap in the face to Bernie Sanders’ supporters and bewildered her base. Why would Secretary Clinton compound her party’s scandal with such a controversy right before the convention? The optics are terrible and impossible to ignore. 

Whether it’s Bernie Sanders previously calling for Wasserman Schultz’s resignation as recently as May, the West Virginia Democrats unanimously passing a resolution for her resignation or firing last month, or even MSNBC co-hosts excoriating her on morning shows, there have been no shortage of calls for her ouster. It’s obvious, in many progressives minds, that she has had at least an affinity towards a Hillary Clinton nomination if not an outright bias. Wasserman Schultz has simply ignored demands for her resignation or cooly dismissed them, insisting over and again that she has no bias and the Democratic Party is one run by rules of fair play. 

 
That coyness has been dashed to pieces with the WikiLeaks scandal. Bernie Sanders was unsurprised but insistent that the chairwoman resign. As she did, the twist emerged of Hillary Clinton providing Wasserman Schultz a seat at her table. With the political savvy reserved for a Clinton, these diametrically opposed events will advance her plow toward the presidency. 

 
The bargain Hillary Clinton brokers is simple: her otherwise stubborn, loyal foot soldier vacates her seat, a tourniquet that reduces the amount of negative and sensational press around the deep-rooted, messy scandal. A byproduct of Wasserman Schultz’s resignation is that Clinton placates Bernie Sanders’ supporters, vindicated by the resignation. Bernie doesn’t have to spend time wrangling in his particularly feisty constituency who are always ready for a fight.

 
Bernie’s playing his part best if he can direct the votes of his supporters to the Democratic ticket without distraction. To Bernie, there truly is one mission left, keep Trump out of the White House. With Wasserman Schultz’s ouster, Bernie has to feel his campaign has accomplished all but an inauguration. He’s brought income inequality, climate change, and Black Lives Matter to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. He’s pushed Secretary Clinton further to the left of, or seen her reverse, several of her critical positions. And now, just fourteen months after announcing his candidacy, the Democratic National Committee will have new leadership, not to mention an ideological facelift with the Sanders’ appointments of Dr. Cornel West, a pro-Palestinian activist, and a sitting Muslim congressman. 

 
The presidential and vice-presidential debates should make for bombastic television, if not also completely intellectually lopsided discourse, but the trick will be to energize the progressive voter base over the next four months. Without the down ballot, Secretary Clinton may finally have her presidency, only to see it become four more years of gridlock with an obstructionist Congress still run by Republicans who only hate one Democrat more than President Obama.

Where does reason go wrong in confronting faith? We have to identify not why the liberal and the progressive get off on attacking religion, this is tilled soil, but why spirituality is incompatible with the human condition. We have to ask if, among all of the obvious evil perpetrated in the name of, for example, Christianity or Islam throughout the millennia, good and devout people are an indictment as well?

I think the answer from a narrow, rational liberal, one who demands accountability and who uses only the cumulative definitive science and reason to this point in history, is that it does not matter. One narrative is that progress has been brought forth by those castigated and ostracized, those scientists and those anti-authoritarians that dared to resist dogma. Indeed, a liberal adhering to this narrative might say something like our successes as a civilization have been in spite of religion and authority and only by continuing to do so can civilization advance further.

But I think this kind of narrow, rational mind is well equipped to understand some essential tenants about what faith and spirituality have to do with this world and the state we find it in. For faith in society has as much to do with engineering and social welfare, even today, as any atheist scientist or agnostic public servant. In fact, would we even be in the position to challenge the dogma that religion has finally revealed itself to be after the sheen of inspiration has fallen away now that we can define natural awe more for ourselves with each day?  Basically, if we have anyone to thank for the ability to scorn spirituality, among them are pious scholars, leaders, and writers whom advanced the sciences, philosophy, and the humanities. These are people who wrestled with God’s creation for centuries to try and make sense of it. Often, they expounded beyond the realm of the literature of their faith or presented a previously unheard of idea and this would trouble the institution. But their works made it clear they were acting inspired by god and creation. As a narrow, rational liberal, how can we not be thankful for that conflicted thinker?

It seems to me that societies, for a very long time, used faith as their one tool in lieu of a complete understanding about the world. To an early group of people, God created the beauty of the nautilus shell, in the next organized society man recognized its interesting, consistent pattern, and put a set of observable rules to it, and today we realize a significant order to that pattern that is utilized throughout nature to wide effect. Correlated with countless other scientific discoveries, we have incremented our understanding of the world we diligently document. I imagine a tipping point in this accrual of knowledge whereby God was the explanation of the world for most of us until Nature became obviously so for some of us. On the latter, that knowledge and exposure is the privilege upon which we exercise our cynicism for faith and spirituality. 

But there are at least two foils to the narrow, rational liberal. The first is that we aren’t all granted the privilege of education and exposure. According to humanium.org, 72 million primary-school aged children are not in school and over 750 million adults can’t read, write, and therefore cannot improve the lives of their family members. Most affected are those in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and Eastern Asia. Given the lack of privilege, given the historical record as to what stands in for education, what do you think makes sense of the world to this many hundreds of millions of people? The simplest answer is whatever impresses upon a person the most sense of their world. Sometimes that’s family, sometimes that is a trustworthy leader, sometimes that is a religious authority that has its own interpretation of what the book says.

The second foil is that faith is not bad. Faith is inspiration and a powerful coping mechanism. It is enveloped in something unassailable, what one believes. To challenge a faith is to deny one’s essence, that is why I believe the Pope said last week faith is off limits. Obviously he doesn’t condone the Hebdo attacks, but he is getting to the heart of a matter that, ironically, people of faith can more clearly see than narrow, rational liberals. The narrow, rational liberal comes to a point very quickly when they practice adherence to principals of science and complete reason. The world is an unbelievably cruel and unpredictable place and it is more than likely to leave us unhappy and unsatisfied. Moreover, the narrow, rational liberal still has to contend with an incomplete science - “so there’s a big bang, how did it start? oh, there’s a theory of a multiverse? how did THAT start?” - but with the complications of love, etc. What’s the science of love if all that we know that’s in it for nature is procreation? The narrow, rational liberal has a lot of explaining to do. 

So as we talk about all religions being “bad” and humanity needing to protect against the latest violent uprising of a primitive faith this strikes me as such narrow, (granted) rational liberalism. Yes, as liberals we believe in our agency but must that come at the sacrifice of humanity? Liberals lately seem to put extra emphasis on removing gray area by any distillation and oversimplification necessary to better adjudicate. How about just getting more thoughtful? 

There’s nothing that can ease the cruel deaths of people because they exercised rights we believe intrinsic and important. But there is something to be said for our ability to understand. We have a canon of literature to understand motivations, we even have the perpetrators words, but we also insist on categorically denigrating and delegitimizing something so essential nearly all of us at least subconsciously subscribe to it. If you have any questions in your mind about the world that haven’t been already unequivocally resolved by science, then you are among the faithful. Read: you are not the narrow, rational liberal you think you are. And that doesn’t make you a killer of innocent people nor does it make you guilty by association.

I find it most interesting that, of the billions of faithful in the world, narrow, rational liberals are overwhelmed at the thought of a tiny fraction of a percentage point of those faithful who commit violent acts in the name of their faith. I find it interesting because it is statistically probable that this kind of death will occur. But that’s not even the most interesting thing: I find it most interesting that these narrow, rational people expect this utopia despite the fact that it is, by all we know through the continued study of nature, impossible. That expectation despite knowledge of the overwhelming odds to the contrary might make them the most faithful people on Earth.

wilwheaton:

heroic-stiles:

i love her so much

I never want to share photos of celebrities that are clearly taken by the pieces of shit who invade their privacy like this, but bravo to Jennifer Lawrence for carrying this umbrella.

I really want to meet her someday, and I hope that we could be friends, because she seems like a really awesome person.

(via wilwheaton)

kaseysellingseashells:

queerwashing:

if you give me a task with no deadline i will literally never do it but if you give me a deadline i will get it done exactly 1 hour before the deadline even if the deadline is in six years

“did you mean…”

(via heath17-uswnt)