There was a time the word liberty actually meant “liberty.” Y’know, as in “the state or condition of people who are able to act and speak freely,” or “freedom from arbitrary or despotic control,” as it says in the dictionary. Between the baggers and the randbots, however, it now seems to refer to maintaining power over others, especially in the sense of being the despot in a despotic state or the privileged class in some feudal system.

For the dim, this new usage of liberty is, of course, a grand bait-and-switch. You might have heard of those guys in Germany several years back who called themselves the “national socialists” even though they hated socialism. Socialism was popular; co-opting the label was a good marketing strategy. Now liberty is the logo being used to package plutocracy, and it has been working pretty well.

Via Annie Laurie, see Homophobia, racism and the Kochs: San Francisco’s tech-libertarian “Reboot” conference is a cesspool by Mark Ames. Reboot is a tech-valley conference sponsored by the Koch boys, and Ames finds it remarkable that one of the keynote speakers is Cathy McMorris Rodgers.

Since coming to Congress, she co-sponsored a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, voted against bills that would protect the LGBT community from hate crimes and discrimination in the workplace, against the equal pay bill for women, against federal funding for Planned Parenthood, and she opposes legal abortions in the case of rape or incest (unless the mother’s life is in danger). The Pensacola Christian College grad did, however, co-author a bill “recognizing Christianity’s importance to Western civilization.”

By the old definition of the word, nothing at all in Rodgers’s background says “liberty.” Liberty, to the American founding fathers, was about empowering people to throw off the shackles of despotism, which is “a system of government in which a ruler has unlimited power.” Liberty in the Koch boy’s world, however, is the concentration of power in some dominant class, so that it freely may exploit everything and everyone else for its own enrichment.

Ames, for example, found some pretty nasty things lurking in old back issues of Reason:

And then there’s the uglier, darker side of the Kochs’ libertarianism on display in Reason’s archives: the fringe-right racism and fascism that the movement has tried to downplay in recent years to appeal to progressives and non-loonie techies. Throughout its first two decades, in the 1970s and 1980s, Reason supported apartheid South Africa, and attacked anti-apartheid protesters and sanctions right up to Nelson Mandela’s release, when they finally dropped it.

In May 1976, just before the Soweto Uprising when South African police slaughtered hundreds of black youths — Reason’s South African correspondent, Marc Swanepoel repeated a common theme in Reason’s pages: libertarianism and the white race are one and the same:

“Let the people who advocate immediate majority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia take note. It would be very nice to have a minimal libertarian government and that is what South African libertarians would like to achieve. But as long as the choice is between being governed by a relatively informed white minority and a Socialist black majority, ‘apartheid’ in South Africa will stay.”

Throughout the 1970s, Reason’s pages dripped with racist justifications for apartheid, on the racial-economic theory that whites stood for free market libertarianism and individual liberty, while blacks were genetically predisposed towards socialism and looting. Therefore, libertarians could not support majority rule, which was merely a trick to destroy libertarianism.

To be fair, it should be noted that many of the commenters accuse Ames of cherry picking and misrepresenting Reason. However …

There are different threads of libertarianism, of course. The Koch boys are mostly updated McKinley-era Gilded Agers. I’ve said before that Ron/Rand Paul libertarianism, or what might be thought of as the populist wing of the movement, was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. President Eisenhower’s sending of troops to enforce a school desegregation order pulled all kinds of triggers in people who were not just racists and segregationists. These were people who had grown up listening to Grandpappy expound Gone-with-the-Wind revisionist history of Reconstruction, when Ulysses S. Grant sent troops (including colored regisments!) into the South to force white people to eat radishes (out of the gardens they still owned) or starve. The hardened attitude that “government oppression” is something only the federal government can do, while rooted in old “states’ rights” theory, lives and breathes today mostly because of the post-Brown v. Board of Ed period. This I have seen myself.

And then there’s this (emphasis added):

For Reason’s libertarians and pro-apartheid whites, this was the great tragedy that loomed: the loss of their free-market paradise, their “liberty,” to black majority rule. Majority rule and socialism were one and the same; for Reason, apartheid was the only thing safeguarding “liberty.” The logic was insane; but it was accepted as a matter of faith in the pages of Reason.

It’s important to never forget that libertarianism is, ultimately, anti-democratic and opposed to representative government, which some of us think of as the foundation of liberty. As Erik Kain wrote awhile back:

I don’t want to live in Libertopia. And while libertarians may say they don’t want to live in my welfare state either, at least I can say “Then go vote against it.” In Libertopia no such option would exist. That doesn’t smell like freedom to me.

The Ames article is a Part I, and the Part II promises to be more about whether Koch-style libertarianism and Silicon Valley libertarianism really are that close of a match.

But while I’m on the subject …

I’m sure I complained about it at the time, but one of the most surreal things I ever found in Reason was a 2010 article titled The Truth About Tibetan Buddhism. If one did not know the real truth about Tibetan Buddhism one might think the author, Brendan O’Neill, had a point. Basically, O’Neill went to Lhasa and noted that Tibetans there didn’t seem happy, and assume this was because of Buddhism, not Chinese oppression.

He recounted an interview with a monk without noting that the monk would have been supplied by the local Communist Party. The interview couldn’t have happened otherwise. Indeed, any monk who was not a good Party member was rounded up and shipped out of Lhasa back in 2008. The monk repeats standard Chinese Communist Party revisionism about the role of the Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism, which O’Neill accepts at face value.

He describes the temples in Lhasa as “golden Buddhas surrounded by wads of cash,” without mentioning that the these days the temples essentially are run by the Party as tourist attractions, and the monks are employees who run the temples under Party direction and live on stipends from the Party. (For the real truth about Tibetan Buddhism, see “The Disneyfication of Tibet” by Pearl Sydenstricker.)

For something like this to be in the allegedly anti-Communist Reason is, as I said, surreal. What’s actually going on in Tibet is big-government oppression on steroids, yet the words “China” or “Communist” did not appear in the piece at all. If Tibetans are being oppressed, it is only Buddhism oppressing them, O’Neill says.

Granted, O’Neill is a professional troll who writes really stupid things. But Reason published this. Reason allowed itself to be a conduit of Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Is this because they are so insulated from real oppression they no longer recognize it? Or is it because in their hierarchy of causes, weird Asian religions are worse than a totalitarian government that has been pretty good at making money in recent years, after all …

Since About.com shut down the blog section of my Buddhism site, and since I have a book to promote, I’ve started a new Rethinking Religion blog to focus on religious issues. I’ll still be ranting about politics here, of course. I’m cross-posting today because I thought you might like this one:

If you’ve read my book Rethinking Religion, you know how much I want reactionary Christians to stop trying to force the rest of us to bow to their tribal totems. If it were up to me, there’d be no Ten Commandments monuments or Nativity scenes on pubic property. No store clerk would ever be harassed for saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” There’s be no special legal favors for “Christian” corporations, no proselytizing anywhere, and separation of church and state would be global policy.

Although achieving this happily tolerant state won’t be easy and won’t happen in my lifetime, I think it could happen some day. But there’s a smart way to work toward a religiously tolerant world, and there’s the stupid way.

Buy My Book at Amazon

For examples of stupid, see 5 atheist and Muslim billboards that drove the Christian right nuts at Salon. One is a large billboard with a picture of Santa Claus, captioned “Keep the MERRY.” Under that is Christ on the Cross, captioned “Dump the MYTH.” Another billboard reads “Who Needs Christ During Christmas? Nobody!” The name “Christ” is crossed out. These billboards were both sponsored by the group American Atheists.

The Salon article quotes American Atheist president David Silverman: ““We all love this time of year…Christianity has been trying to claim ownership of the season for hundreds of years. But the winter solstice came first and so did its traditions. The season belongs to everybody.” I agree. I also think that’s what they should have said on their billboards — The season belongs to everybody. Ridiculing Jesus was unnecessary.

Seriously, atheist dudes, the Christian Right is not Jesus’ fault. The CR may have adopted Jesus as its team mascot, but it’s ignored his teachings for years. And seeing Jesus ridiculed is as jarring to Christians — including the tolerant, progressive ones — as watching their mothers being publicly humiliated.

This is not a way to win hearts and minds; it’s just a cheap self-indulgence.

Before buying any more billboard space, I suggest that American Atheists sit down and have a good, long think about what they are trying to accomplish. And then they should take a look at current research in cognitive science and social psychology to craft a smarter way to achieve their goals.

For example, is the goal (a) to wean humankind from religion completely? Or is it (b) to foster a society in which religion is respected as a private matter and not something we’re perpetually hassling each other about?

I can tell you right now (a) is not going to happen in your lifetimes. Or this century. Likely not in this millennia. Something that has been part of civilization since there has been civilization doesn’t disappear that easily. I’m not even going to try to persuade you that (a) wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing, although I don’t think it would be. I’m saying it’s a fool’s errand to even try.

If (b), now we’re talking. That is more do-able. And a lot of religious people, like me, would happily join you in the effort. Even then it won’t be easy, but I think enough people are getting fed up with the antics of religious extremists that a smartly run campaign might actually work.

“Smartly run” brings us to the cognitive science and social psychology. Google “motivated reasoning” and read up on it. Rmuse at Politics USA explains,

What results of the several studies demonstrate is that once a partisan is confronted with unwelcome facts about their beliefs, the centers of their brain associated with emotional distress light up and remain active until their defective brains “rationalize away the unwanted information.” According to one of the scientists conducting the studies, when conservatives and Christian zealots rationalize away unwanted information, the centers of their brains associated with positive feelings turn on and “overlap substantially with those activated when drug addicts get their ‘fix.’”

The studies also prove that despite showing conservatives, Republicans, gun fanatics, and evangelical special interests facts, scriptures, and even video evidence that their strongly held beliefs are pure fantasy or absolutely wrong, conservative (and some liberal) brains automatically reject facts because they refute their personal beliefs. Research teams at Yale and Dartmouth discovered, for example, that highly skilled mathematicians will, more often than not, deliberately reach an incorrect answer if data leads to a conclusion that is contrary to their political worldview. There are myriad examples of conservatives and evangelical fanatics disputing hard data, the Constitution, and the Christian bible because they are programmed by conservatives’ buzzwords, memes, and outright lies into believing their errant conclusions and faith are fact.

I doubt that surprises anyone, but do re-read the first paragraph of the excerpt. If your message is one that triggers a negative emotional reaction in most folks, including those who might be persuadable, you are hurting your cause more than helping it.

Negative attack ads work in elections — usually, anyway — because they can whip up enough low-information voters to vote against the guy the ads are attacking. Especially in a close election, just a few hundred voters can change the outcome.

But, dear atheists, you aren’t trying to be elected to a county commission. You’re trying to change society itself. That’s a whole ‘nother thing. And your “target audience,” the people whose minds you are trying to change, are not the hard-right religious extremists, because their minds will not change.

Your audience is everybody else, religious and not-religious.

Take a cue from same-sex marriage advocates. They are winning public opinion by engendering public sympathy. They are changing minds by presenting a positive image of themselves as loving, responsible and family oriented, not by bashing their opposition.

Years ago I formulated a basic rule for successful demonstrating that I call the “Bigger Asshole” rule. The job of public protesters is not to change the minds of the powerful people they are opposing, but to gain public sympathy for their cause. Especially in politics, the powerful won’t change until they are compelled to do so by a sufficient critical mass of public opinion saying they must.

So the job of protesters and demonstrators is to make the people they are protesting look like bigger assholes than they are. But if the protesters come across as bigger assholes than the protestees, the public will side with the establishment. And I assure you that, in terms of the Bigger Asshole rule, ridiculing Jesus is a losing strategy.

LGBT activists are winning public opinion by making gay-bashers look like the bigger assholes. And considering there’s a lot of overlap between homophobes and religious extremists, atheists ought to be able to do the same thing.

Jon Stewart was particularly brilliant last night —

You must not miss this story about an Arizona Republican who was nearly weeping about the poor immmigrant being bused to a shelter — this is not compassion, he said — when he was informed that the bus was actually carrying local kids going to a YMCA camp. D’oh! But, y’know, I wish he’d been pressed to explain what would be compassionate, considering the children are here. Making them re-cross the Rio Grande under gunfire? The wingnuts weep crocodile tears for these children but coming up with no response but “deport them.”

And I must say I’m disappointed with Gov.Martin O’Malley, who doesn’t want children sent to a facility in Maryland, but I appreciate his reasons:

O’Malley told Muñoz not to send any of the children to the facility in Westminster, Md., that the White House was looking at. It’s a conservative part of the state, he warned. The children were at risk of getting harassed, or worse, he said.

Gov. O’Malley’s aides say he’s looking for another facility that would be more suitable.

Republicans are nearly gleeful that they’ve finally found “Obama’s Katrina.” I’m not sure most Americans fully understand what’s going on, but I don’t think most Americas are yet so depraved they would throw refugee children into a meatgrinder to score political points. In time this could backfire on the GOP.