Handwriting analysis nearly destroyed my life.

The Joos are responible for all those things except the anal fissures. For those, we must blame the Amish.
God has punished the Joos for their refusal to do anal fissures, but won't let them be wiped out because they followed his will on all the other good stuff he has fun inflicting on us.
If you keep picking on Goldberg, anal fissures could become part of your life too. He (god) works in mysterious ways, as does in-his-image Goldberg.

What we can't do is end human suffering.

This is a bit too quick. In the dark ages, naturally- and institutionally-caused human suffering was significantly more pronounced than in the 21st century (think plagues, famines, genocides, serfdom, etc.). And while the capacity for violence among powerful (and ambitious) people remains the same today as back then, the ability of those people to act violently, either directly as a commander or by proxy through institutional structures, has been curtailed. That's something. Not long ago, the powerful simply went outside the political system and crushed opposition (eg, the Ludlow massacre). Now they use more subtle forms of coercion within the accepted political institutions instead.

good political movements cannot provide easy answers, or in most cases any answers at all

...because intelligent people understand that any institution - and political economy is definitionally institutional - can and often will be used by ambitious people for immoral but self-aggrandizing purposes. The best political movement we have is the one that (in theory) already exists: checks and balances in a three branch representative government which limits federal power and protects states and individual rights. Progressive political policies - the ones you are losing faith in - are merely attempts to require already existing institutions to behave morally/equitably/fairly (ie, constitutionally) while they are making money for themselves and others. More simply put, the point of these policies is to require adherence to the 'no harm' principle upon which our constitution was founded. It's just another instance of the classic struggle between centralized authority and the body politic over who gets to exercise what basic rights.

But irrationally speaking, we don't want to just suffer less, we want to stop suffering. And this is something honest movements can't offer.

Honest political movements cant offer this. But plenty of other movements can: Buddhism, Sufism, Zen, etc. The revolution your speaking about now is spiritual, not political.

OVERSIGHT, OVERSIGHT, OVERSIGHT, by as many people as possible. (its not how one ends suffering, but it IS how one's controls institutions)

I have two serious problems with this post.

First of all, logically, defeatism and surrender are not warranted until either all other options have been entirely exhausted, and/or the terms of surrender are more favorable than the effects of continuing to struggle. Since these preconditions are not met in current US society, defeatism by progressives makes no sense.

Second of, isolated religious fanatics and sundry crackpots do and always will exist in all societies, and are completely unrepresentative of anything whatsoever except for other fanatics and crackpots. So what? In fact, I'd say they're far more common in more progressive societies, where their right to live and believe as their conscience dictates is respected. They are certainly common in societies that have higher minimum wages and better health care programs than the United States. I strongly support Fortenberry's right to believe that demons cause anal fissures. Odds are that in China or Saudi Arabia, the government might well suppress his freedom of religious expression. That's not what I support. With only the caveat he must also respect the basic rights of his fellow human beings, I'll fight for his right to say and believe whatever he wants about demons.

harold: EXACTLY.

Great. Now all that's left is to obliterate either yourself or humanity.

Jonathan,

Now don't get a swelled head or anything but -- you are SO WISE. Seriously.

Jonathan -

I'm surprised that anyone feels that this isn't a real phenomenon (even if you disagree how severe a problem it might be).

There isn't a single response that denies the existence of religious fanatic crackpots. Nor, I'm sure, did anyone fail to find the post pretty damn entertaining.

However, your argument seems to be that the existence of the likes of Fortenberry indicates that further human progress, and in particular, political progress in the United States, is impossible or unlikely, to the extent that those who would want it should despair. I think that this is a very fair paraphrase of the general gist of the post.

In addition to arguing against defeatism in general, I made some specific arguments against that specific conclusion. I will reiterate, further clarify, and augment them.

1) Fanatics and crackpots are found in all countries, including the most progressive. Some countries have already achieved progressive goals beyond those achieved by the United States, despite having plenty of crackpots and fanatics. If there are fewer such people per capita in Canada and Australia, that would surprise me, for example. And I am a dual US-Canadian citizen who spent most of my childhood in Canada (born in US to a Canadian mother and American father).

2) In fact, the free expression of crackpottery is an expected result of progressive policies. Again, as I pointed out, if you want to get away from fanatics and crackpots, go to places where authoritarian governments deny freedom of expression.

3) Some dangerous authoritarian political leaders have had crackpot or fanatic-like traits on a personal level, e.g. Adolf Hitler (*this mention doesn't trigger any "laws" because I'm not remotely comparing anyone posting here to Hitler*). Many others, like Dick Cheney, have bland personal characteristics and are not overtly eccentric. Many, many fanatics claim to idealized social systems that would grossly deny human rights, but violent authoritarians are usually cunning sociopaths, not fanatics. Nuts like Fortenberry typically seem to get into trouble, if they get in trouble at all, for sexually exploiting their followers, or for doing things that aren't even morally wrong in my book, like gay sex or drug use, but that show them to be hypocrites. In other words, violent authoritarian political movements are dangerous because they're violent and authoritarian, not because they're associated with eccentric religious beliefs.

4) Some extremely destructive wars have been caused directly by religious conflict, most notably in sixteenth and early seventeenth century Europe, and during the early military expansion of Islam in the seventh century. Some conflicts in the current middle east may be caused of exacerbated by religious differences. However, wide-scale conflicts actually tend to occur when a long-established, mainstream, highly formalized "official" religion is disrupted by a "reform" movement (in the examples above, Catholicism by early Protestantism; traditional religions of the middle east, including Christianity, by Islam). However, such changes in "official" religion of a society have also often occurred without widespread military conflict. Is humanity "doomed" to have further wide-scale religious conflicts? I don't know. Maybe. On the other hand, in much of the world, we have completely eradicated human sacrifice and witch burning. So behaviors that were once common can be eliminated.

5) Of course, humanity might destroy itself, either by making the natural environment incompatible for human life with industrial pollution, or through nuclear war. Either is possible. This could happen soon, or it could happen at any time in the future. Or never. Also, western democracy and respect for human rights could be lost as a trend. Humanity might someday be ruled entirely by brutal authoritarians. Or not. All of this stuff is possible. Anything is possible.

6) Finally, I think I "get" what you are trying to say, and I think at one level I agree with it. What you really mean to say is that Fortenberry is a particularly good illustration of the fact that humans are not entirely rational, but are driven as much by instincts, emotions, and magical thinking as by logic. With that I agree entirely. However, that's just reality. We're animals, not robots. It doesn't mean that the US can never have a decent health care system.

7) However, having said that, it does seem that on the occasions when I disagree with something here, the disagreement is somehow related to a tone of fatalism or defeatism. "It doesn't matter what you do" stuff. I can't believe that you manage to be more fatalistic and cynical than I am, but you do manage sometimes :-)

But, y'know, there's something to be said for the little-appreciated fact that science and reason and subtle statecraft and democracy have something going for them that the clear-eyed certitude of the fanatic doesn't, and that's that they work.

Damn, why didn't I just say that?

I'm surprised that anyone feels that this isn't a real phenomenon

Yes, it is real. But it doesn't deliver, it _never_ delivers, and the vast majority of people see that, and simply refuse to go along, because who wants to enforce a pile of bullshit on themselves when it obviously doesn't deliver anything of value?

That being said, if liberalism / progressivism / leftism wants to distinguish itself from snake oil, people on the left have to deliver. Actually making an impact, and being practically-minded, and _fighting_ for results has to become a priority in a way that it usually has not since 1945. As long as the progressive movement remains a purity contest on the one hand and a talking shop on the other, it's indistunguishable in peoples' eyes from snake oil... but deliver results, and the whole equation changes.

"science and reason and subtle statecraft and democracy"
They work generally, and over the long term, and promise to work generally over the even longer term. Morphine, crack etc. however. Purely illusory chemistry, but that sense of well-being or burning competence can be powerful in the immediate.
Delusions also sustain the traumatized immediately far better than cold rationality can.
Viz. the rubble and carnage of some conflict aftermath. Or in the awful silence of a plague-decimated village. Or a hundred other dark gates to the future through which pass only those still able to function under unbearable conditions. This probably explains the presence in the genome of various forms of mental illness, because in the rare circumstances they work to aid survival, they work better than the alternative.
"We're fucked" is not making a good banner to rally around.
Which is not to champion delusion and institutionalized madness. Just that back in the long ago days of '02 and '03, as the power of fundamentalist political intervention was making itself felt, the most the active-discourse left seemed to be capable of was ridicule for the obvious logical errors in their professions of faith and the absurd corollaries etc.
My point then was hey, this isn't school. The right answers to the big questions will work better over time for the agreed-upon goal of the survival of the better and brighter, it's just that for those aren't that doesn't have a lot of appeal.
The acrimonious debates around evolution weren't just smart people v. the dummies, they were an actual demonstration of human evolutionary process, and the academically-trained had so internalized the automatic fitness of right answers they missed the real world facts: Delusional psychos fight harder.
Being wrong about important things isn't an immediate source of shame when everyone's afraid of you.

I can see the point of the title though. The Dems were handed the election on a silver platter, but they seem to be desperate to hand it back.

What really knocks the shit out of me is how people pretend this is a debate between "science and reason" and "religion". Fuck, no. Taibi makes that absolutely clear: this is a manipulation of people's emotional vulnerability. Cults are bottom-feeders, as are fascistic political movements. They succeed by preying on the people who are worst off, and taking fears and failures and turning them to their own advantage.

But, that was Jesus's big mistake: the poor will NOT always be with us; the poor are a consequence of economics. You can't catch everyone, but you can certainly do much, much better than we are doing, which severely reduces the ability of cults or fascists to draw on that base of ruined humanity. That's the European perspective - ensure the health of the down-and-out, and you won't have trouble.

An anarchist friend of mine once told me how in the poor working-class areas of Massachusetts where he grew up, racist skinheads were making a lot of inroads these days. He attributed this to a failure of leftists - when you don't step in to give people a way to better their situation, someone else will give them a false one. People have power - people ALWAYS have power, even when they've got nothing. Sometimes they have even more power then. The trick is where that power gets turned.