Stuff worth reading
August 21st, 2009 by ReinderGuest Post: Why the Austrian, Keynesian, Marxist, Monetarist, and Neo-Liberal Economists Are All Wrong at Naked Capitalism. Worth it just for this quote:
The ugly truth is that economics is a science in the way that medicine was a profession while it still used leeches to balance a person's vapours. Yes, some are always better than others, and certainly more entertaining, but they all tended to kill their patients.
which is what I for one have believed for years.
An officer's experience in our Christian military at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. This is what oppression looks like in a nominally democratic country: at no time does the writer gets told to Fuck Off And Die You Stinkin' Jew -though the assertion that ""the Army is not in the business of catering to people like you" comes close - instead, conformity gets imposed and dissidents weeded out through going to the regular channels, which collude in the oppression, and through dressing up the oppression as benign concern for the dissident's health - see the way the letter writer's refusal to eat pork gets him referred to councelling for anorexic behaviour.
August 21st, 2009 at 9:12 am
And oddly enough, there are court cases that say just the opposite: The Military is in the business of catering to all authorized personnel, in terms of facillitating religious observances/freedoms.
What Weinstein and others experience is generally the ignorance of mid level command, and sometimes genuine bigotry from higher ups who actually do know better.
Of course not letting James Dobson Dittobots onto a post, to proselytize to the troops, while manipulating senior enlisted and ranking officers in plain view would help as well.