Kuttner succumbs to hysteria

There is a fair amount of interesting reading in today’s Boston Globe. More actually than I have time to write about at the moment.

First, Kuttner succumbs to hysteria over Bush having 4 more years and envisions theocracy. Here are the choicest bits:

In the United States, meanwhile, reason is on the defensive as we head backward toward creationism and religious absolutism. This is one of those moments when people all over the world, threatened by cultural and economic assaults far beyond their local control, are turning to fundamentalisms. Author Ben Barber sums it up in three words: Jihad vs. McWorld.

What is uniquely alarming in the United States today, among all the democracies and in our own history, is that a president of the United States is explicitly on the side of antimodernism. Never before has an American chief executive worked deliberately to foment a fundamentalist absolutism that is ultimately tribal, theocratic, antiscientific, and incompatible with pluralist democracy.

Scott Lehigh has an amusing story of bureaucratic suppression of speech at UNH which has a happy ending, at least for the “perp”.

Even Eileen McNamara has an interesting bash of Channel 5 refusing to broadcast “Saving Private Ryan”.

Finally, a sad story about a Beacon Hill hack (sorry…state legislator) who is being asked to give up her high-visibility service in her local Catholic church due to her voting record on Beacon Hill.

Again, I would like to say more about all these stories, but time does not permit. I recommend Kuttner’s piece the most as an example of liberal-academic panic. I wonder if Bobby K has ever heard of Martin Luther? He says:

"For millennia, faith and reason have co-existed uneasily. They skirmished as far back as the Middle Ages, when Christian theologians nervously contemplated the rediscovery of Aristotle, and later when Galileo was condemned as a heretic. But in most of the West, reason won."