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When the Spaniards threw out their conservative government after the March 2004 bombings in Madrid and replaced it with a left-of-center one that was promising, among other things, to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, they were roundly denounced by U.S. hawks as “appeasers” (for some American pundits it’s always Munich in 1938). Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias reports that two years later the Spanish seem to be doing okay.

Surely the merits of a certain course of action are independent of whether it’ll be perceived as “appeasement.” Just because Osama bin Laden wants U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia, or Iraq, or wants us to stop supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands doesn’t necessarily mean that those are all bad ideas. In fact, it seems to me that you shouldn’t let your avowed enemy dictate your course of action. Should the U.S.A. continue to bleed itself in the deserts of Iraq just to spite Osama bin Laden?

This story is a bit sketchy about the actual content of a recently published translation of the so-called Gospel of Judas. The document was discovered by looters in the ’70s, but was just released yesterday by the National Geographic Society after having been authenticated. Previously it seems that it was only known through St. Irenaeus’ discussion in Against Heresies.

It appears to engage in a bit of Judas revisionism, suggesting that he and Jesus were in cahoots (not unlike the way Judas is portrayed – by a horribly miscast Harvey Keitel – in The Last Temptation of Christ, actually). Otherwise it sounds like it hits the usual gnostic notes: the body is bad, free your spirit, etc.

Pastor Clint Schnekloth of the blog Lutheran Confessions has a good article in the Journal of Lutheran Ethics on a Christian ethic of eating. He discusses issues like justice and equity for those who raise and process our food, the ethics of enjoying and sharing our food as a gift, and vegetarianism as an option for Christians. He suggests a renewed attentiveness toward our practices of eating in order to be more intentional about the choices we make.

An overview of various groups who might fall under this umbrella term by Steve Waldman at Slate.

It seems to me a lot of where you end up on the political spectrum may have less to do with having a particular political ideology than it does with what issues are the most important to you. For instance, many people end up on the Right by default because their overwhelming concern is with, say, abortion, even if they may not share the conservative view about tort reform or the Second Amendment.

Likewise, someone may identify with the Left because their top priority is healthcare or the environment, even if they don’t toe the liberal line on other issues. If nothing else, most of us aren’t intensely interested in more than a few issues, much less do we have the time to become well informed about them all. That frequently seems to result in our more or less uncritically adopting the position of whatever “our side” is.

I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing, though. Given the limits on our time and resources, maybe it makes the most sense to let whatever issues we find ourselves particularly passionate about guide our political behavior. Of course, it’s incumbent upon Christians to align their priorities with what they believe God’s priorities to be. Which, of course, is always a matter for debate. Which means we’ll probably always have a religious Right and Left.

From The Onion’s AV Club, Seven Songs with Factual or Logical Mistakes in Their Lyrics, featuring such gems as:

2. Young MC, “Bust A Move”

Though Young MC is completely logical throughout most of this song––he’s absolutely right, in most situations, you should bust a move––things get a little confusing in the last verse. He raps: “Your best friend Harry / has a brother Larry / in five days from now he’s gonna marry / he’s hopin’ you can make it there if you can / ’cause in the ceremony you’ll be the best man.” Now, why would your best friend’s brother choose you as best man over his own flesh and blood? Is Harry just going to be a run-of-the-mill usher at his brother’s wedding while you’re toasting and keeping track of the rings? Also, why would Larry inform you of his family-shaking decision a mere five days before the wedding? It doesn’t make sense. Fortunately, Young MC totally compensates for any logical gaps in the next line, when he rhymes “neato” and “libido.”

and

6. Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, Huey Lewis, Steve Perry, Dan Aykroyd, and others, “We Are The World”

“We Are The World” was a very important song, both to starving Ethiopians and to comedy writers looking for an easy parody. But when the song tries to hammer home the preachiness, it ends up misquoting the Bible. Willie Nelson sings, “As God has shown us by turning stones to bread…” Biblically speaking, that never happened. In Matthew 4, the devil tries to get Jesus to turn some stones into bread, but Jesus refuses, saying, “One does not live on bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.” So the bread/stone miracle never happened. Also, in spite of what the song says, we are not the world.

I’ve seen this quote attributed to St. John Chrysostom, mostly on various libertarian-leaning political sites. But I’ve never actually seen it in context.

Does anyone know if a) St. Chyrsostom actually said this and b) what he meant by it? It certainly sounds cool, but I’m not sure I really know what it means.

Here’s an interesting series of maps breaking down the concentration of religious groups in the U.S., via Camassia.

Unsurprisingly, our impending move to New England isn’t exactly taking us into the heart of Lutheran country.

Massachusetts is getting ready to implement a plan with a novel approach aimed at providing universal health care:

“This is probably about as close as you can get to universal,” said Paul Ginsburg, an economist who is president of the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington. “It’s definitely going to be inspiring to other states about how there was this compromise. They found a way to get to a major expansion of coverage that people could agree on. For a conservative Republican, this is individual responsibility. For a Democrat, this is government helping those that need help.”

The bill, which resulted after months of wrangling between legislators and the governor, requires all Massachusetts residents to obtain health coverage by July 1, 2007.

Individuals who can afford private insurance will be penalized on their state income taxes if they do not buy it. Government subsidies to private insurance plans will enable more of the working poor to be able to afford insurance and will expand the number of children who are eligible for free coverage. And businesses with more than 10 workers that do not provide insurance will be assessed a fee of up to $295 per employee per year.

All told, the plan is projected to cover 515,000 uninsured people within three years, about 95 percent of the state’s uninsured population, legislators said.

“It is not a typical Massachusetts-Taxachusetts, oh just crazy liberal plan,” said Stuart H. Altman, dean of the Heller Graduate School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. “It isn’t that at all. It is a pretty moderate approach and that’s what’s impressive about it. It tried to borrow and blend a lot of different pieces.”

If this goes well it’ll obviously be a major feather in Gov. Romney’s cap when he runs for president in 2008. He clearly wants to present himself as a non-ideological pragmatist who can work with the other side to get things done (um, sort of like what George W. Bush said about himself when he ran for president the first time, but anyway…).

Just cuz I feel like it…

I see that Kevin Carson‘s book Studies in Mutualist Political Economy is the subject of an entire symposium issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. Kevin runs the very interesting Mutualist blog and has even been known to comment here from time to time.

I haven’t read Kevin’s book, but from what I’ve been able to glean from his blog, following in the tradition of certain radical libertarians, he believes that capitalist exploitation is the result of the absence of a free market rather than its consequence, as mainstream socialists believe. In his view, most of what people think of as the ills of an “unfettered market” are actually caused by state-granted privileges and would thus vanish in a genuinely free market. Thus the slogan “free market anti-capitalism.” It appears, on the other hand, that many of Kevin’s JLS critics have a sunnier view of “actually existing” capitalism, as do most mainstream libertarians.