The GOP should now be called the Republican Brotherhood

Has anyone noticed how the Republican Party--in Texas & elsewhere--has come to resemble the Muslim Brotherhood more & more?

Of course neither a Muslim Brother nor a Republican Brother would recognize this. But what the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt did the moment it gained power & what the GOP is doing in Texas & other states it controls are similar on the process level: that is, gain power by demagoguery & promises of moral & economic reform; then, when in power, ignore economic reform while focusing on (1) rigging the game to consolidate their power & (2) enacting the rigid rules of Shariah Law, one by one.

The Christianist version of Shariah Law starts with abortion, which Christianists regard as murder--even when the mother's life is at stake, even in cases of rape, even in cases of incest when the mother is, say, a 12 year old girl.

Of course if abortion is murder, then any woman who gets an abortion is guilty of capital murder--a death penalty offense in Texas. Along with any woman who gets in vitro fertilization in a desperate effort to have a child, since it always involves discarding many fertilized embryos.

So every time a Christianist talks about abortion as murder, ask them what they're doing about making it capital murder to have an abortion? After all, if it's murder the doctor performing the abortion is just the hired gun. The murderer is the pregnant woman...or girl.

The only justification a Christianist Republican could have for not making it a death penalty offense to get an abortion is if they regard wimmen as incapable of informed consent--like the Muslim Brotherhood does.

Democrats need to flush the Republican Brotherhood out in the open. Make them campaign to make getting an abortion a capital offense--which it most certainly is IF it's "murder." Or to admit that they're lying demagogues when they use that kind of language--unless they believe women should be equated with children in the eyes of the law...

Killer explosions: West, Texas vs. Boston

When that West, Texas fertilizer plant blew up it killed more people than the vicious Boston terrorist bombers did. It wounded more people. And it destroyed more property.

Now if this accident were just that--an unavoidable accident--then it doesn't make sense to compare them. But what if--as seems already to be the case--the West, Texas owners and management turn out to be as guilty of criminal negligence as the owner of the 8 story building in Dacca, Bangladesh, that collapsed yesterday with 2,000 people in it? (The building in Dacca was erected without regard to even Bangladeshi building codes, and it started cracking the day before, but the bosses ignored the warning signs. As was easy for them to do, since nothing will happen to them.)

If your wife is killed by a terrorist who wanted to kill her, or is killed by a fertilizer plant owner whose desire for profit outweighed any concern for your wife's safety--why should the penalties for each crime be different? In each case your wife is just as dead--and dead as a result of human wickedness.

Overpopulation is a hoax, say the head-in-sand-folks

From a comment thread in an article not about overpopulation:

"Over population is a hoax. You can fit all 6.9 billion in the state of Texas at a lower density rate the 50 most populous cities."

I've seen this trope more than a few times. If you know anyone stupid enough to say this seriously, here's the answer:

"You're right. We'd all fit. Until someone had to use the bathroom, get a drink of water, or eat something. 

"Each person needs 2.5 acres of farmland to have plenty of food, or as little as one acre to live like someone in a poor third world country. Texas has about 130 million acres of farmland. So theoretically it could support 130 million very lean people as long as they all lived in non-farmland areas of Texas (most American suburbs are built on farmland). 

"That leaves you 6,870,000,000 acres short of being able to support the entire human race in Texas."

Teaching American history, Texas Style: the Confederate persepective

Anyone with a few hours to kill can read the actual curriculum—showing all the revisions, deletions, and additions with color coding, here.

This curriculum will seem perfectly “fair and balanced” if you believe the following things:

1. The Republican Party is, was, and always will be, almost entirely right about everything.

2. The Democratic Party is a fringe party whose ideas, history, and leaders aren’t generally relevant to a high school social studies curriculum, except as negative examples.

3. Joe McCarthy was right—government was infested with Commie spies, and McCarthy’s an American Hero.

4. Ronald Reagan single-handedly ended the Cold War and defeated the Soviet Union.

5. This is a Christian nation, founded by Christians, using Christian governing documents
(never mind that the Constitution never mentions God or any religion except to forbid establishing one, or that many of the most important Founding Fathers weren’t Christians, or that the Pledge of Allegiance didn’t mention “under God” until it was added during the McCarthy Witch Hunt Era).

6. America is the greatest nation on Earth, Americans are the greatest people on Earth, and we should generally avoid teaching students anything that might deviate from this mantra; that is, they are to be indoctrinated more than to be taught actual critical thinking.

7. Scientific discoveries are made to meet actual needs—there’s no such thing as pure research (I wouldn’t have believed this if I hadn’t read it).

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I realize that leftists have done their darndest to make high school social studies curricula the exact opposite of all this—aiming, just like these Texas Republicans, to indoctrinate rather than to actually teach critical thinking skills and a warts-and-all exploration of American culture and history.

For example, I oppose illegal immigration—including amnesty--along with around half of registered Democrats. But this is a topic with a substantial minority who favor amnesty. Social studies curricula should discuss the issue taking all of this into account, not turn it into pablum, or simply ignore the other side.

My conclusion, after reading the actual source document, and adding that I have a degree in sociology and am a political centrist: this new Texas curriculum is a giant leap backwards. No competent, politically non-ideological social scientist would endorse it.

Some critics of the Texas school board's right wing majority have accused them of substituting indoctrination for education, as I did above myself. But I should make clear that I don't think they think this.

You see, their model of education is Sunday School.

In Sunday School, what happens is education, but it's the worshipful study of the subject matter. The goal is what a nonreligious person would call indoctrination, and that's true, but for the faithful it's simply the transmission of the great truths of existence from one generation to the next.

The Texas Republicans who did this to Texas see analytic education from that worshipful perspective--i.e., there is only indoctrination. So if it's not indoctrination in what you might call Americanism, it's indoctrination in Com-yew-nism or some such.

So for them the Democrats on the board and those of us who criticize them are simply enemy indoctrinators who lost this fight.

And if you look at the innumerable comments on this thread supporting the Texas Republican Indoctrinators, you'll see that this is their model too.

That's probably part and parcel of some of them posting the same comments over and over. Just in case we didn't get it the first time and the second and the third etc.