Sick Transit

Sorry for the post title; I couldn’t help myself. But I’m getting really annoyed by seeing Robertson’s ill-advised remarks about assassinating Chavez called a ‘fatwa’. When DFA did it, I just dismissed it as their usual rhetoric; but now Timothy Noah has actually gone and called it a “Khomeini-style fatwa”.

Let’s have a little perspective here, people. According to m-w, a fatwa is “a legal opinion or decree handed down by an Islamic religious leader.” Every time an Imam shoots his mouth off–or even preaches a sermon–it does not constitute a fatwa. A fatwa is a formal, carefully considered judicial decree. Protestantism does not have any equivalent to the fatwa; the closest Catholic equivalent might be a papal bull or council decision.

If Robertson had published an article making a scriptural/moral argument that it was the duty of Christians to assassinate Chavez, that might be comparable to a fatwa. But an off-hand remark about what might constitute prudent American policy is not even a remote resemblance.

Remember the unlucky homeowners of Kelo? Well just to add insult to injury, the city is now trying to charge them back rent for the five years the case was in court.

I suppose it’s a fair request–if the city will give them five years’ compound interest on the price of the houses, and pay them contract-labor rates for all the time they’ve spent maintaining or improving the homes in the last five years.

(link via Marginal Revolution)

I’m not a full-out egalitarian, but I still have to call a bad argument when I see one:

The answer, of course, is that transferring a degree from one person to another does not transfer the knowledge and experience that the degree signifies. Transferring money, however, does transfer the value it represents.

If Ms. Galt were not so consumed by her own cleverness, this rather common-sense point would undoubtedly be obvious to her.

I don’t want to be anti-union. The good people at TPMCafe have been doing their darnedest over the last few months to convince people like me–liberal urban professionals–that unions are an important part of the progressive coalition.

And then I read about the striking NorthWest mechanics:

$40,000 a year for a custodian? No company can survive by paying wages that inflated.

I want to meet the Church Whipper! (Warning: not work safe.)

I don’t regularly read Savage Love (really, I don’t; although now I’m thinking I should), but I had to link to this hilarious column where Dan makes clear that he cares about personal responsibility, too.

(Warning: very adult content. But that goes without saying, right?)

I enjoy trying new foods. But I’m afraid I draw the line at eating them live.

Am I the only one who’s reminded of gagh?

(Link via the Long one.)

I thought I’d already posted about the wingnuts at the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, but I can’t seem to find it in my archives. Today, Pandagon posted a link to a Methodist scholar’s review (PDF) of the NCBCPS’s proposed curriculum. Not only does it explicitly promote a Protestant, inerrantist interpretation of the Bible, but it’s a shoddy piece of work–full of factual inaccuracies, copy-editing errors, and rank plagiarism–that would get an F if it were submitted as a high-school project. Some of the quotes from the review are just priceless:

The scary part is that NCBCPS claims that the curriculum is in use at over 300 school districts, and has been studied by 175,000 students. We can only hope that these numbers are wildly inflated.

Obviously, the Christians can do better. There are plenty of conservative Christians with accredited degrees, and who are capable of doing basic proof-reading, fact-checking, and writing two pages without plagiarizing from the web. Just as creationism started as a wingnut movement and gradually transformed into the more ‘respectable’ Intelligent Design, I wonder if the same will occur with the Bible-in-schools movement. I hope not.

Via Yglesias, this rather good question: why do we vote on Tuesday?

The organization Why Tuesday (it’s not immediately clear to me who’s behind it) is proposing that elections be moved from Tuesday to the weekend (with polls open on both Saturday and Sunday, presumably to avoid issues with Jewish or Christian Sabbath observance). Mark Kleiman also suggests moving it a month forward to avoid crappy November weather.

My first thought is that if timing is really such an issue for people, why don’t they just get an absentee ballot? In practice, however, voting seems to be an impulse action for many people.

Granted, these same people are likely to be the least informed voters. Still, I think that encouraging greater participation is going to be a net positive. So by all means, bring on weekend voting.

Jon Stewart injects some welcome secularism into the story of the plane struck by lightning. (WMV file)