The Rise of The TV Preacher and Evangelical Christianity Explains the Modern Right

Before the mid-20th century phenomenon of Evangelical TV Preacher brand of superficial Christianity, the norm in Europe and North America was sectarian division. Methodist vs Baptists vs Anglicans vs Catholics vs etc etc, if you will. Up till the late 1800's people killed others based on these divisions, and into the late 1900's people socialized based on these divisions. The founding fathers knew that a national religion would mean a bloodbath, a war between Protestant sects, or at least something like the Anabaptist persecutions in Europe.

My thesis extends to explain the rise of social conservative Right wing politics beginning with Reagan. Before 1970 sectarian divisiveness was the norm. After 1970 a new kind of superficiality rose in Protestant ranks: non-denominational evangelism. Throw in a superficial right wing view of American history and reason for existence, and boom you've got a new kind of solidarity that grows and is persistent because of its superficiality. It's strength is in its dumbness. The old time religious people read their Bibles and interpreted on an exacting precision, making them seem cranky and weirdly obsessed by today's standards. But this prevented them from bonding together into a political meme and force.

Off-topic a little, but this analogy helps see a deeper political/social construct. The Mongol Empire was a culmination of an early stage of peace and alliance between normally warring nomadic tribes. The lesson here is obvious: peace and cooperation between small militaristic bands results in a large militaristic group that can then go out and conquer weaker groups. Beware of peaceful resolution of a normally contentious people, for in their cooperative new mode they are in a better position to defeat...you.

Fox News, Tea Party, and the Joe Stack Suicide Bombing

( I posted a comment in reply to John Robb's blog entry: Rage Against the Machine -The Joe Stack Suicide Bombing, and reprint it below )

I agree people like Stack are the canaries in the coal mine. We can go down an infinity hole trying to parse if he was right wing, left wing, but it does seem that lack of economic success was the central component of this story and event.

Here is my folksy psych test: amongst my wife's network of friends, who are not fringe, radicals nor fans of a forum such as GG, one of them read Stack's letter and posted to Facebook how lucid and rational the letter was.

With a smirk I watch Fox News try to spin this suicide bombing as a crazy and a coward. Whateverz, dudez. You all (Fox) put a sheen of legitimacy and funding into some of the the key moments in the Tea Party phenomenon, and now the movement is your scariest nightmare: distributed, open source, and its least stable and most unhappy folks have small planes. I've lurked on some Tea Party forums, and was amazed at the intelligence (keep in mind I'm a hostile witness, I'm not conservative), and ability of its members to dissent from the top hierarchical players. This dissent only appeared in the comment threads, never in the main content of the webpage. The Tea Party, as it is described from the top, is nothing I'd respect, but down in its basement, there are independent thinkers who are not hemmed in by identity politics (e.g. they say progressive things, they don't endorse carte blanche funding for the Pentagon).

Someone needs to notify Rupert Murdoch, and tell him: "autopoiesis, its what's for dinner." While I'm cracking jokes, I'll add "Independence Day, oh wait, who needs an official day, oh wait, who needs an official."

Microsoft, Bing and Murdoch

Microsoft tries to buy the news.

All I see is a sick, dying, out-of-touch dinosaur declaring he's going to open up a can of whoop ass. I'll wait an hour, the dinosaur will have cockroaches eating its brain. The network was the computer decades ago, and Gates and Co somehow convinced the mentally weak all the power was at the desktop. Please die now.

While on the subject of Murdoch, I might as well promote my book, which specifically mentions the Rupert Murdoch archetype as a class to be eliminated in a future fictional scenario: TechnologyTexting KIDS: Subvert Primitive Ways, Invent Writing and Metal, and Delete Financiers like T Boone Pickens .