Tag: heresy

#rsrh Big Labor Watch: Jon Geenen’s timid heresy.

Saw this posted over at RedState by LaborUnionReport (who lives and breathes union issues; compared to him, I’m a rank amateur and dilettante): Jon Geenen, (current) International Vice President of United Steelworkers has belatedly come to the realization that these awful free-market libertarian Koch brothers* happen to somehow also manage to create jobs.  Good jobs.  Good union jobs.  Good union jobs in America.  This leads to a somewhat equivocal pushback against his own side’s message:

This presents a dilemma and a paradox. While the Koch brothers are credited with advocating an agenda and groups that are clearly hostile to labor and labor’s agenda, the brothers’ company in practice and in general has positive and productive collective bargaining relationships with its unions.

It’s not a paradox – dilemma, I will grant (if one of Big Labor’s own making), but not a paradox.  The Koch brothers and other practical libertarian types are generally hostile towards labor leadership, to be sure… because labor leadership is generally hostile to them, and their basic operating philosophy.  Individual workers, or even individual private sector unions, may be (and often are) different stories.  It is a particularly pernicious myth among the Left that industrialists and manufacturers wish nothing less than to reduce the American working class to the status of neo-peasantry; that this supposedly policy goal flies in the face of the self-evident truth that prosperous people buy more stuff is never adequately explained, mostly because the people who maintain the Left’s shared ideology take Karl Marx far too seriously**.

Geenen himself never comes close to facing that issue, and while I suppose he gets some credit for even timidly bringing up the subject he picked a fairly obscure venue in which to lapse into heresy.  If he really wants to get the message out then I suggest he try calling up Fox, CNN, ABC, the Washington Post, the New York Times… heck, even a fringe network like MSNBC would have him on in a heartbeat.  I suggest this – but I’m not holding my breath that he will.

Moe Lane

*Whose political contributions are, by the way, dwarfed by the political contributions of Big Labor.  I mention this because Geenen was lading out the anti-Citizen’s United porn again.

**Note that I am not calling them Marxists themselves, only that they take his basic arguments far too seriously.  Because remember, folks: Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people.

 

Elizabeth Moon learns a valuable life lesson.

If you’re a Lefty, you have to be a Lefty all the way.  You don’t get to be heretical* on things like the 9/11 Mosque and expect to keep your GoH status at a major feminist SF convention. You just don’t.  And it doesn’t matter how much you qualify your statements**, either: once you’re past the heresy line, that’s it.

Well, live and learn, right?  It’s not like many of those people read military science fiction, anyway.

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

*Although having to call that position ‘heretical’ is a insult to Giordano Bruno.

**Or going for crowd-pleasing by sneering at the Right.  Notice which side’s more sympathetic to her on this?  Yup, the Tea Partiers and the libertarians.

Charlie Rangel (D, NY-15) is a Gnostic Cainite!

And he reveals this on Holy Thursday, too.

This is EXCITING! I needn’t remind any of you that the Cainites were fourth century Gnostics who honored both Cain (as the first human to rebel against the Demiurge*) and Judas Iscariot (as the agent who – with Christ’s permission – acted as the agent of Christ’s sacrifice, and was thus rewarded with secret esoteric knowledge**). This particular heresy was long thought to have died out with most other contemporary Gnostic sects; but it must have gone underground, and survived. And now Charlie Rangel, of all people (I assume that he’s a high-level initiate), has given their presence away with his claim that Judas Iscariot later became a saint! The things that we can learn!

Of course, there’s always the alternative: Charlie Rangel’s knowledge of Christianity approaches that of a battered parakeet’s.

Moe Lane

PS: It’s 2010, people: the GOP has been doing its recruiting. I gather that Rev. Michel Faulkner (Baptist minister, community leader, former NY Jet) is looking like he’ll be the eventual Republican candidate.

*As you know, the Demiurge was believed by Gnostics to be the true creator of the physical universe; as the Gnostics were of course mystics who hated the material world, that meant that they equate the Demiurge with both the Old Testament God and Satan. The early Church went to some trouble to, ah, dissuade that interpretation of Scripture…

**Which they just happened to have, in the ‘Gospel of Judas.’

Crossposted to RedState.

Speaker Pelosi to meet with Pope Benedict XVI.

Oh, to be a fly on that wall.

It’s always exciting when a notorious heretic meets the Pope. Particularly this Pope, who is quietly gearing the Church up for a long-delayed showdown with American Catholics over abortion:

Pope Benedict to meet Pelosi

In a move likely to stoke more controversy about whether Catholic politicians who support abortion rights are in line with the church, Pope Benedict XVI has granted an audience to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The Catholic News Agency confirmed Monday that Pelosi (D-Calif.) is to meet Wednesday with Pope Benedict XVI, who has said supporters of abortion rights should not receive Communion.

Pelosi, a staunch supporter of abortion rights, is on an official trip to Italy. The news agency said there have been contradictory reports about whether the Pope would receive her. The agency said the Vatican’s press office confirmed today that the audience would take place Wednesday. The Vatican reportedly made clear that the Pope is meeting with her as a head of state, since she is third in line to the presidency.

Continue reading Speaker Pelosi to meet with Pope Benedict XVI.