Beer Me

Matthew Yglesias really doesn't understand how the world let alone education works. In two posts of remarkable incoherence, Yglesias seeks to show that if you favor choice in one thing you must favor choice in all things and, whatismore, if you favor unions you have to favor crap beer because some major league makers of crap beer are unionized therefore unionization causes crap beer. Consequently, if you like non-unionized micro beer, you must support charter schools.  Others have pointed out the silliness of the argument.

Leaving aside the issue of how Carter's deregulation of beer making for private consumption led to increases in craft brewing for sale, I think it's worth pointing out that the only way this works is if charter school improve educational outcomes, they don't. Here, of course, his mindless commitment to failed ideological project blinds him to the fact that effective reform is driven by what works and what doesn't in the world as it is actually constituted rather than what ought to work if the world as it actually is conformed to a discredited ideological cosngtruct.

Ross Douthat: Boy Theologian

Recently Ross Douthat weighs in on the issue of hell. Not surprisingly, he's for it. I'll leave it to others to debunk the biblical warrant for hell. Instead, there is this:

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

This is sadistic and sadism is a sign of imperfection. If God assures that salvation is within the grasp of anyone who does as Christ wanted, caring for the least among us, etc, regardless of doctrinal orientation, it does not follow that everyone obtains salvation because some, like Conservatives, are actively violating these principles. The punishment is death everlasting while life everlasting is the reward. Beyond this God needn't go unless, of course, you think God is a sadistic bastard, in which case I'd say buy a nice coffin you'll be there a while.