Imagine the most intense men’s cocktail in existence; a heady mixture of testosterone, adrenalin, and blood. Mix in a liberal amount of noise, money, and sweat and you may be getting close to the experience of a Balinese cockfight. I had been to a little village cockfight, but I had to leave due to the presence of my friend, who is American (As the inhabitants of the United States somewhat erroneously call themselves) and female. Women, at least all the women I know, do not do well at cockfights. They do not understand the religious reason for a cockfight, which is that in Bali, just like everywhere else in the world, the Gods demand blood. Oh, you think ‘western’ religions are immune to this? You obviously don’t know history very well, or perhaps you simply choose to ignore it, as many Americans do.
May 22, 2009 archive
May 22 2009
The Presumption of Innocence, and other Quaint Ideals
The Presumption of Innocence, and other Quaint Ideals
Presumption of Innocence
(Innocent until proven guilty)
A principle that requires the government to prove the guilt of a criminal defendant and relieves the defendant of any burden to prove his or her innocence.
The presumption of innocence, an ancient tenet of Criminal Law, is actually a misnomer. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the presumption of the innocence of a criminal defendant is best described as an assumption of innocence that is indulged in the absence of contrary evidence
[…]
the presumption of innocence is essential to the criminal process. The mere mention of the phrase presumed innocent keeps judges and juries focused on the ultimate issue at hand in a criminal case: whether the prosecution has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the alleged acts. The people of the United States have rejected the alternative to a presumption of innocence-a presumption of guilt-as being inquisitorial and contrary to the principles of a free society.
May 22 2009
The British Are Coming!! The British Are Coming!!
Nothing stirred then, nor still stirs us as Americans, as hearing Paul Revere yell, “The British are coming, the British are coming!”
And with those words, I’m going to take another look at “history”…
May 22 2009
A Blight On Humanity
Paul Krugman has a short but withering post about the fraud that was American conservatism. Riffing off a link to Crooked Timber, which has Richard Posner becoming the latest conservative to jump the movement’s ship, Krugman writes:
And yet – why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? I mean, anyone who actually listened to what Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were saying in 1994, let alone what passed for thought in the Bush administration, should have realized long ago that if there ever was an intellectual basis for modern conservatism, it was long gone.
Why, indeed, would anyone pretend there is any shred of credibility in anyone who found the Gingrich and Bush eras credible? But Krugman gets to the real point in the next paragraph:
And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back – and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.
They fought civil rights, and voting rights, and the creation of Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. They fought the environmental movement. They fought science and education and basic human decency. They launched wars that shouldn’t have been launched, they supported terrorists and terrorist regimes all around the globe, and countless millions suffered and died for their greed, hypocrisy and plain old murderous evil. They were and are, in every way that matters, morally degenerate.
There was no golden era of the conservative movement. It held political power for many years, and if we are not vigilant, it could, yet again. Because there is literally nothing its dwindling band of deranged supporters won’t try, to regain power. But it’s time to stop acting as if it was a serious intellectual enterprise, or that its methods and ideals were even worth debating. It was sick. It was demented. It represented the very worst of humanity. It’s time to stop pretending that it was deserving of respect or legitimacy. It wasn’t. It was a blight on humanity, the human spirit, and the entire planet. It should be treated as such and remembered as such.