Barack Obama has been president for barely a week, yet the religious right has already ramped up their rhetoric to hysterical levels. For this episode we examine their claim that Obama’s reversal of the "Global Gag Rule" on family planning funding represents an "assault on human life". Also we look to the New Testament and ask whether Christianity is more compatible with capitalism or socialism for another installment of the Skeptic’s Sunday School.Check out Focus On the Family's Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America
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4 comments:
hey, this is your neighbor John. Before I forget... I was really happy with the last show with Tom Clark. Nice to hear him again.
Anyway, regarding this Obamanation episode, unless you have a coherent (hopefully leftist) viewpoint about economic moral theory, you should keep your trap shut. You just make the Libertarian invisible-hand crowd look good.
I've probable said something like this before, a great place to start is right here:
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17472
[...]
Hating Markets
A third big factor in the emergence of Parecon, I think, was Robin's and my antipathy to markets.
We hated markets. But why did we hate them? What was it about markets that caused us to want them entirely gone?
The need to explain what we despised about markets forced Robin and I to examine allocation generally and markets specifically. We had to fully uncover how market role structures compelled anti social behavior and greed. We had to discern how markets distorted preferences. We had to see how markets established false prices that mis-accounted for ecology. We had to discover how markets produced coordinator class rule even when capitalists were absent.
In the process of all that, Robin and I became market abolitionists. We knew markets were going to be around for awhile, of course. But that didn't cause us to temper our rejection of them.
[...]
None of the above observations about the consequences of a market -- anti-social, bad prices, class rule -- have been rebutted by the marketeers. I doubt they can be. If nothing else, it is strong ground to start from in an economic argument. Rather than your I must say meally-mouthed "empirical" approach.
Economics is a moral philosophy, and simply totting up the suffering doesn't cut it.
My services in this regard are available.
Other than that, keep up the great work. The show sounds great and rarely ceases to entertain.
- John K. Fitzpatrick
whuh?
someone needs a subscription to reason magazine
Hey, great show. I'm working my way back in time ... going through your old shows, among others.
You mentioned in this episode the Pledge of Allegiance Salute in passing. Since I don't remember any corrections in later episodes, I felt like writing.
Yes, there was a salute. Google "pledge of allegiance salute" and click 'images'. What you see is going to shock you. Up until the 1930s, our school children saluted our flag with the German National Socialist Party (NAZI) salute!
Can you guess why we change to the hand-over-the-heart thing?
~ Don Birren
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