Green Day just came out with a new album. Yay. I remember listening to them in middle school. Lots and lots of distortion, fast drum beats, people that looked my age but were actually in their late twenties-early thirties. Y'know - cool stuff. Their last album was mildly preachy, which is an interesting break from their earlier stuff, which interpreted punk rock to mean youthful rebellion. Now it means leftish political movements. Noam Chomsky is SO punk, apparently. Most of what they said on American Idiot was old hat. Like, forty-odd years old: Americans are naive, Christianity culture is the enemy of freedom, evangelical children become self-professedly messed-up anarchists, blah blah. One song that got my attention was Jesus of Suburbia, simply because they mention Jesus by name and identify him with an American subculture. They refer to "make believe" and a "hurricane" of lies, the loss of faith - things that represent a new sort of atheism whose demographic seems to be students, internet users, and Englishmen. It didn't really bother me because I did see that there is definitely an American evangelicalism that doesn't understand its own faith very well, and whose sincerity, due to its cultural prevalence, is at times questionable even on its own terms.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Green Day - Viva la Cliche
Posted by
Eddie Headpeddler
at
6:10 AM
0
comments
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Durban II, Henri-Levy, and Calvin
This is the most reasonable article in support of Israel that I have ever read. It outlines in just a couple of pages why we should be cautious in our denunciations of any human rights violations (without even mentioning the obvious target of philosophy), why the world is not taking much greater atrocities with the same "seriousness," and most surprisingly of all, defends a position first put forward (to my limited knowledge) by Slavoj Zizek, I believe in his book On Violence. That solution is inaction.
Posted by
Eddie Headpeddler
at
6:18 PM
0
comments
Thursday, February 12, 2009
It Wasn't Supposed to End This Way
As the New York Times gives us stories tracking the progress of Obama's administration, vaguely disappointed with the slowness of American politics (after a year of relentless coverage of every word of the campaign), it also gives us headline news - a top story on their site - about how nice it is for owners of old dogs to see Stump win the dog show. "It's absolutely a victory for older dogs," says Garrett Russo. Meanwhile, in the real world, modernity is ending in the strangulation of a new and horrible pharisaism.
Posted by
Eddie Headpeddler
at
6:11 AM
0
comments
Friday, January 30, 2009
BART Cop Shooting of Oscar Grant
I've recently been following the story unfolding in the shooting of Oscar Grant. From the live videos shot by passengers on the trains of San Fransisco (known as BART), it looks like an unprovoked assault and murder of an unarmed African American passenger. It just doesn't get a lot worse than that. The shooting was supposed to be a mistake, but I really think that makes very little difference, after viewing the video. Mr. Grant was clearly being abused no matter what the situation, and if he had been shot with a taser gun, Officer Mehserle should still be in jail. That our justice system has allowed him bail is atrocious. That the officer with his knee on Grant's neck was not charged is absurd and revolting. That any of this even began to happen shows that San Francisco police are not trained well and there are some who ought to be weeded out.
Posted by
Eddie Headpeddler
at
6:07 PM
0
comments
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Afghanistan is the Wrong Move
Posted by
Eddie Headpeddler
at
7:08 PM
0
comments
Saturday, January 24, 2009
A New Presidency, A New Playing Field
Barack Obama is now President of the United States. Yesterday, he overturned rules that made it illegal for USAID to give money to organization promoting abortions overseas. While this has been batted back and forth between Republican and Democrat demonstrations for three of his predecessors, it does not change the breathtaking implications for this move, and the huge moral burden it places communities in the third world that are attempting to promote sexual ethics, especially in countries with sky-high HIV rates. Sexual ethics are the cornerstone of the abortion debate, even though the left is not interested in actually debating this issue (Obama said so himself). To recap (briefly), choice is not a legal argument - it is a begging of the question, as it is the function of law to prevent certain choices from being made. Thus, the only question is the justice or injustice of the action, and as it is only in this perverse modern world that people debate what is a human and what is not (never, ever erring on the side of all candidates being human), it is a fairly straightforward issue. If we must speak of rights, the right to liberty does not usurp the right to life - that's very simple.
Posted by
Eddie Headpeddler
at
4:45 PM
0
comments
Monday, December 1, 2008
The New Evangelical Other
Brian Flemming recently came out with a new documentary called The God Who Wasn't There. I have not seen it. I don't want to see it. This post is dedicated to its marketing campaign. This ridiculous little flick is billed as an expose, a brutal truth-telling escapade, a revolutionary documentary, etc. etc. The tag-line is "Bowling for Columbine did it to the gun culture, Super Size Me did it to fast food, now The God Who Wasn't There does it to religion." Note the use of the word "religion." This movie is not talking about "religion." It has a great big picture of Jesus' supposed face on the cover. It raves about how it "pulls no punches" with Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. The trailer only mentions Jesus' name. It's talking about Christianity, which, in the modern west, is referred to as "religion" not because the arguments leveled against "religion" apply to all "religions" but as a semantic undermining reminder of the particularism of Christianity's truth-claims, and a subtle reaffirmation of the unfounded notion that to be an atheist or an agnostic is more open, cleverer, and less attached to dogma, which is nonsense to anyone who is willing to think about it.
Posted by
Eddie Headpeddler
at
4:46 PM
1 comments