There's an interesting piece in the New York Times about Islam that might shed some light on this issue. Wright argues that members of each religion need to pick and choose which parts of their texts to follow and the need for interpretation. For example he points out that the Bible and Torah also have passages that explicitly call for violence:

"So too with people who see in the Bible a loving and infinitely good God. They can maintain that view only by ignoring or downplaying parts of their scripture.

For example, there are those passages where God hands out the death sentence to infidels. In Deuteronomy, the Israelites are told to commit genocide — to destroy nearby peoples who worship the wrong Gods, and to make sure to kill all men, women and children. (“You must not let anything that breathes remain alive.”)"

Dali was fascist scum.

http://www.counterpunch.org/navarro12062003.html

The Jackboot of Dada

Salvador Dali, Fascist

By VICENTE NAVARRO

The year 2004, the centenary of Dali's birth, has been proclaimed "the year of Dali" in many countries. Led by the Spanish establishment, with the King at the helm, there has been an international mobilization in the artistic community to pay homage to Dali. But this movement has been silent on a rather crucial item of Dali's biography: his active and belligerent support for Spain's fascist regime, one of the most repressive dictatorial regimes in Europe during the twentieth century.

For every political assassination carried out by Mussolini's fascist regime, there were 10,000 such assassinations by the Franco regime. More than 200,000 people were killed or died in concentration camps between 1939 (when Franco defeated the Spanish Republic, with the military assistance of Hitler and Mussolini) and 1945 (the end of World War II, an anti-fascist war, in Europe). And 30,000 people remain desaparecidos in Spain; no one knows where their bodies are. The Aznar government (Bush's strongest ally in continental Europe) has ignored the instructions of the U.N. Human Rights Agency to help families find the bodies of their loved ones. And the Spanish Supreme Court, appointed by the Aznar government, has even refused to change the legal status of those who, assassinated by the Franco regime because of their struggle for liberty and freedom, remain "criminals."

Now the Spanish establishment, with the assistance of the Catalan establishment, wants to mobilize international support for their painter, Dali, portraying him as a "rebel," an "anti-establishment figure" who stood up to the dominant forces of art. They compare Dali with Picasso. A minor literary figure in Catalonia, Baltasar Porcel (chairman of the Dali year commission), has even said that if Picasso, "who was a Stalinist" (Porcel's term), can receive international acclaim, then Dali, who admittedly supported fascism in Spain, should receive his own homage." Drawing this equivalency between Dali and Picasso is profoundly offensive to all those who remember Picasso's active support for the democratic forces of Spain and who regard his "Guernica" (painted at the request of the Spanish republican government) as an international symbol of the fight against fascism and the Franco regime.

Dali supported the fascist coup by Franco; he applauded the brutal repression by that regime, to the point of congratulating the dictator for his actions aimed "at clearing Spain of destructive forces" (Dali's words). He sent telegrams to Franco, praising him for signing death warrants for political prisoners. The brutality of Franco's regime lasted to his last day. The year he died, 1975, he signed the death sentences of four political prisoners. Dali sent Franco a telegram congratulating him. He had to leave his refuge in Port Lligat because the local people wanted to lynch him. He declared himself an admirer of the founder of the fascist party, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera. He used fascist terminology and discourse, presenting himself as a devout servant of the Spanish Church and its teaching--which at that time was celebrating Queen Isabella for having the foresight to expel the Jews from Spain and which had explicitly referred to Hitler's program to exterminate the Jews as the best solution to the Jewish question. Fully aware of the fate of those who were persecuted by Franco's Gestapo, Dali denounced Bunuel and many others, causing them enormous pain and suffering.

None of these events are recorded in the official Dali biography and few people outside Spain know of them. It is difficult to find a more despicable person than Dali. He never changed his opinions. Only when the dictatorship was ending, collapsing under the weight of its enormous corruption, did he become an ardent defender of the monarchy. And when things did not come out in this way, he died.

Dali also visited the U.S. frequently. He referred to Cardinal Spellman as one of the greatest Americans. And while in the U.S., he named names to the FBI of all the friends he had betrayed. In 1942, he used all his influence to have Buñuel fired from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Buñuel worked after having to leave Spain following Franco's victory. Dali denounced Buñuel as a communist and an atheist, and it seems that under pressure from the Archbishop of New York, Buñuel had to leave for Mexico, where he remained for most of his life. In his frequent visits to New York, Dali made a point of praying in St. Patrick's Cathedral for the health of Franco, announcing at many press conferences his unconditional loyalty to Franco's regime.

Quite a record, yet mostly unknown or ignored by his many fans in the art world.

Vicente Navarro is the author of The Political Economy of Social Inequalities: Consequences for Health and Quality of Life and Dangerous to Your Health. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at navarro@counterpunch.org.

This is my last response to you, it's quite obvious you're clinging to your attitude that laws are there for no reason, and that the government is just out for your money.

I never said any of that. And there's no need to be immature about it. It's just the internet, dude.

Find me a statistic that shows how jaywalking kills thousands annually

I read a statistic claiming 3% of people are killed by jaywalking. Is it true, who knows? But there you go.

However, I guess I should've seen your selfishness coming.

Are the ad hominem attacks really necessary?

...it will once again be something completely unrelated, and you'll be trying to make a point about something once again completely irrelevant.

I wouldn't say anything I've said is irrelevant. Maybe unpopular, but not irrelevant. If you're referring to the jaywalking death sentence, I was being extreme in light of your 'just because you disagree with the punishment, doesn't mean the law shouldn't be there" comment. Don't argue in spite of one small comment in the face of many larger cogent ones. Don't use misdirection.

If you let 1.2 million drivers on the road, the odds of some of them having an accident, sober or not, is increased. Putting 1.2 million drivers on the road who ARE inebriated, so their reaction times are slower, they're not seeing straight, and probably swerving on the road, puts them at a substantially higher statistic to have an accident, that's common sense.

Argumentum ad populum. Driving puts you in a substantially higher statistical rate to have an accident than not driving. Walking on sidewalks puts you in a substantially higher statistical rate to be hit by a car than staying at home. Where does this circular logic end? The point is, you can argue in favor of any type of behavior leading to higher fatality statistics, but that doesn't make it sound reasoning for creating a preemptive law.

And not everyone who is over .08 is inebriated. And their reaction times, sight and driving abilities may not be affected any more than you driving when you slept only five hours instead of eight. It's arbitrary.

And, no one is "putting" anyone on the roads. The people are "choosing" to be there whether sober or otherwise.

Dali was fascist scum. http://www.counterpunch.org/navarro12062003.html

The Jackboot of Dada

Salvador Dali, Fascist

By VICENTE NAVARRO

The year 2004, the centenary of Dali's birth, has been proclaimed "the year of Dali" in many countries. Led by the Spanish establishment, with the King at the helm, there has been an international mobilization in the artistic community to pay homage to Dali. But this movement has been silent on a rather crucial item of Dali's biography: his active and belligerent support for Spain's fascist regime, one of the most repressive dictatorial regimes in Europe during the twentieth century.

For every political assassination carried out by Mussolini's fascist regime, there were 10,000 such assassinations by the Franco regime. More than 200,000 people were killed or died in concentration camps between 1939 (when Franco defeated the Spanish Republic, with the military assistance of Hitler and Mussolini) and 1945 (the end of World War II, an anti-fascist war, in Europe). And 30,000 people remain desaparecidos in Spain; no one knows where their bodies are. The Aznar government (Bush's strongest ally in continental Europe) has ignored the instructions of the U.N. Human Rights Agency to help families find the bodies of their loved ones. And the Spanish Supreme Court, appointed by the Aznar government, has even refused to change the legal status of those who, assassinated by the Franco regime because of their struggle for liberty and freedom, remain "criminals."

Now the Spanish establishment, with the assistance of the Catalan establishment, wants to mobilize international support for their painter, Dali, portraying him as a "rebel," an "anti-establishment figure" who stood up to the dominant forces of art. They compare Dali with Picasso. A minor literary figure in Catalonia, Baltasar Porcel (chairman of the Dali year commission), has even said that if Picasso, "who was a Stalinist" (Porcel's term), can receive international acclaim, then Dali, who admittedly supported fascism in Spain, should receive his own homage." Drawing this equivalency between Dali and Picasso is profoundly offensive to all those who remember Picasso's active support for the democratic forces of Spain and who regard his "Guernica" (painted at the request of the Spanish republican government) as an international symbol of the fight against fascism and the Franco regime.

Dali supported the fascist coup by Franco; he applauded the brutal repression by that regime, to the point of congratulating the dictator for his actions aimed "at clearing Spain of destructive forces" (Dali's words). He sent telegrams to Franco, praising him for signing death warrants for political prisoners. The brutality of Franco's regime lasted to his last day. The year he died, 1975, he signed the death sentences of four political prisoners. Dali sent Franco a telegram congratulating him. He had to leave his refuge in Port Lligat because the local people wanted to lynch him. He declared himself an admirer of the founder of the fascist party, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera. He used fascist terminology and discourse, presenting himself as a devout servant of the Spanish Church and its teaching--which at that time was celebrating Queen Isabella for having the foresight to expel the Jews from Spain and which had explicitly referred to Hitler's program to exterminate the Jews as the best solution to the Jewish question. Fully aware of the fate of those who were persecuted by Franco's Gestapo, Dali denounced Bunuel and many others, causing them enormous pain and suffering.

None of these events are recorded in the official Dali biography and few people outside Spain know of them. It is difficult to find a more despicable person than Dali. He never changed his opinions. Only when the dictatorship was ending, collapsing under the weight of its enormous corruption, did he become an ardent defender of the monarchy. And when things did not come out in this way, he died.

Dali also visited the U.S. frequently. He referred to Cardinal Spellman as one of the greatest Americans. And while in the U.S., he named names to the FBI of all the friends he had betrayed. In 1942, he used all his influence to have Buñuel fired from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Buñuel worked after having to leave Spain following Franco's victory. Dali denounced Buñuel as a communist and an atheist, and it seems that under pressure from the Archbishop of New York, Buñuel had to leave for Mexico, where he remained for most of his life. In his frequent visits to New York, Dali made a point of praying in St. Patrick's Cathedral for the health of Franco, announcing at many press conferences his unconditional loyalty to Franco's regime.

Quite a record, yet mostly unknown or ignored by his many fans in the art world.

Vicente Navarro is the author of The Political Economy of Social Inequalities: Consequences for Health and Quality of Life and Dangerous to Your Health. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at navarro@counterpunch.org.

I have a wide range of interests but little time. usually I end up with 30 sometimes 40 open tabs, bookmarking them is a death sentence.
This might be a great tool for me.

>> ^blankfist:
You still didn't give me a better system.

I've got a better system than you -- a regulated market. FDA to keep an eye on food and drugs, OSHA to keep an eye on labor conditions, EPA to monitor environmental impacts, an SEC and FTC to keep an eye on finance and market competition, etc.

Better still, I have a welfare state to make sure that economic failure isn't a death sentence, with unemployment insurance, food stamps, universal health care, social security, disability, etc.

Zillions of times better than anything you've ever talked about wanting.

A completely new system that's totally different from capitalism? I'm not sure what that would look like. I do think we need a sort of redesign of economics around actual human behavior, and not 18th century presumptions about human behavior. I don't think individual monetary gain is the only or even the best motivator of people, and I'm definitely skeptical that the bulk of the resources of the human race should be at the command of people who've accumulated it through sheer ambitious drive to acquire material resources for themselves.

I'm not going to be the revolutionary philosopher-economist who invents what comes next, but I think we're deluding ourselves if we think that everything we ever needed to know about how to form a human society was worked out by the classical economists.

I think you are wrong. The concept of you break it you buy it applies. The US is still in their country killing people. Period. That is all that matters. You lost the ability to say the soldiers were doing their job, in fear for their life.. That doesn't apply when you are still occupying a country and killing citizens daily.

Imagine you lived in Anchorage, how many years of living under Soviet occupation would you tolerate? How many dead Americans would you put up with, every day being murdered by some Soviet occupying force?


I think the only solution is the karmic one. The sons and daughters of these soldiers should be forced to watch this video every year on the anniversary of the murder of these innocent people. If you are still only considering the reuters folks and the van... You need to watch the whole video where they launch rockets into buildings and murder people for another "i saw something in his hand" type death sentence.

I'm sorry. You do not have the luxury to make "it looked like a gun" mistakes when you are raining down death from a mile away in the air. Why not get actual video or real footage? Like from a drone or fly in closer and take a look?

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
"Public" health care is nothing but a power grab where government is using propoganda, fear, and class envy to trick the public into willingly enslaving itself.

Not surprising you would feel this way since if everyone in the country could have Medicare, speaking out against Medicare would become a political death sentence. It's a bit naive to boil it down to a "power grab." Perhaps it's meant to actually people who need it! Inconceivable!

Really, if you expect your own ideas ever to be taken seriously, you've got to give up on being so cynical and absolute. Otherwise, when you try and get some more rights for gun owners, people will look at your proposal and say "oh, look at this power grab propaganda, etc." I'm sure you wouldn't want that, but you'll wait for that day to come before you even consider the word "civility."

It is this kind of comment that explains to me exactly how lunatics like Pelosi get elected in some districts. This kind of ignorance is a pretty alarming comment at just how bad our nation is at teaching basic civics and economics. To think, that there are people who actually BELIEVE that government is 'non-profit'... Sigh. And even putting that aside - to think that there are people who actually BELIEVE that power and money are better off in the hands of government than in the hands of private citizens... Double sigh.

Excuse me, Professor... could you actually teach us something if you insist on lecturing? Don't just tell us what you think, tell us why you're right. Anyone that's been here for awhile knows to look up the right wing talking points to know what you think, so you're wasting our time repeating them. Bring us the proof.

Or are you factually challenged?

>> ^Unaccommodated:
ARG! You guys have a misunderstanding of what biological "fitness" really is. "Fitness" is a individuals ability to pass on its genes, differential reproductive success. Not every one makes it to pass on their genes. This man's reproductive fitness is nil, because he won't be able to reproduce. So his "fitness" doesnt need to be called to attention.
The point is still valid that he wouldn't survive in a traditional hunter-gatherer community. And it does bother me that hes sitting in the lap of luxury while the rest of work for a living, and help pay for his being. Now if he was able to partake in society in some valid way, I wouldn't care so much. I mean Hawking has been resigned to a wheelchair for a while now, and he refused to let that stop him. The report never mentioned what this man did for a living, which required him to have home-care.


You seem to have misunderstood the nature of my statement. I was referring to the fact that humans have evolved a technological means which separates themselves from the dangers day to day journey that other species have. Humans do not have to worry about the cost to risk ratio of chasing and killing prey, or running from predators. That is because we can defend ourselves, or control our predators with cages and weapons.

Than again I do not remember ever mentioning anything about the mans Fitness, only that all humans are exempt from the harshest reality of evolution in all its terrible glory.

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>> ^MaxWilder:

---
I am not willing to give up the human compassion that makes this possible, but I do wonder if we are harming ourselves as a species by struggling for adequate welfare and universal health care.


Give it 500 years or so. By then we'll have either gained the ability to control and modify our bodies enough for congenital defects and diseases to not matter, or we'll have messed up somehow and will have lost what we now know about medicine. Either way, I don't think it's likely we'll stay at this current level of medical technology long enough for it to make a huge difference genetically on the species as a whole.

>> ^Xax:
I'm curious about the dog comment. Does the writer really view these people as sub-human, or was it meant to be metaphorical in some way? Even if it were the latter, you'd think anyone with half a brain would be conscientious enough to not use such disrespectful and callous terminology, even internally.


My best guess for this is that "dog" in this context is an allusion to the BCG matrix, which is a way of categorizing investments. If they're talking about the fact that they're not making any money off of that particular group of plans, it would follow that that group of plans would be called "dogs," as opposed to stars, cash cows or question marks.

http://www.netmba.com/strategy/matrix/bcg/

A broader definition of "dog" in that context is any investment which isn't worth its price, which a $1 million a year plan in exchange for a few hundred bucks a month certainly is, from a bottom-line standpoint only.

As for the callous terminology, there was a Bill Moyers interview on the sift somewhere with a former insurance company executive that really highlighted how far removed these people can be from the real impact their decisions can have on people. They aren't in the habit of thinking of plans as they relate to people, only as they relate to dollars. It's not because they're monsters, exactly, but more because they're oblivious.

>> ^Unaccommodated:
The point is still valid that he wouldn't survive in a traditional hunter-gatherer community.


But we don't live in a traditional hunter-gatherer community. Last time I checked, humanity mostly progressed from that starting 10,000 years ago.

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>> ^Drax:
We treat ourselves differently because we're self aware. A human mind has a whole different level of understanding of itself and the world then any animal. If you put down a lame horse, it's not begging for mercy thinking of all it has to loose, and knows that it's about to die and fears what may lie beyond it's own death.
If we do overcome physical defects, then the genes that have passed down will benefit from diversity, I think. Help everyone best we can, I say.


Humanity does not experience survival of the fittest like other species on this planet.