By now everyone who pays attention has heard about Bill O’Reilly’s quick mea culpa on his blustery condemnation of the MOW 50th anniversary events not inviting Republicans to speak. Of course they were invited to speak, lots of them. They all declined. O’Reilly, as usual spoke, loudly, without doing research. The apology was unusual, but good on him for that. Bad on him for not immediately guessing the truth and trying to use a lie to condemn the wrong side.

Hosts of Republican leaders and the lone black Republican in the Senate, Tim Scott (R-SC) were invited and none attended. They saw the entire commemoration as a Democratic event, which says all you need to know about their attitudes towards minorities, civil rights, and how the parties have evolved since 1963. This was sadly typical of recent years where Republicans have made declining invitations to join Democrats on social or symbolic occasions a regular thing. Republican officials and citizens have turned down invites to the White House to have dinner or watch movies or even to be honored there in the case of members of the undefeated 1972 Dolphins football team. Who does that? Turning down WH invites over political differences? When did that start?

When the Obamas held a reception for new members of Congress in January 2011, after the “shellacking” Democrats took in the 2010 election, 37 Republicans showed up. More than two-thirds of the freshman senators and House members swept in with the GOP tide stayed away.

It’s emblematic of how the GOP rolls today to note these behaviors. It’s not about political differences that can be discussed and compromised anymore. For the new GOP it’s personal, not political. Three decades plus of anti-Democratic, anti-liberal, anti-progressive propaganda has devolved the arguments from nuanced political stances into black and white, good and evil dichotomies.

We’re not just on differing sides of an argument today (who could agree on other days), no. The other side isn’t just wrong, they’re evil, possibly satanically inspired, and trying to destroy our civilization for shits and giggles.

Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t want to have cocktails with that creature either.

When the GOP was taken over by fundamentalists who have internalized all that anti-liberal propaganda and see every issue as “you’re either with us or against us” manichean arguments, this abdication of reason and comity was inevitable.

P.S. Cynthia Tucker’s piece explains what that means for the GOP’s internal politics. The Grand Old Party of Nihilists and Cranks

Fact: Did you know that until an Australian urologist examined the clitoris of corpses donated for research in 1998, nobody had ever done so for the purposes of a medical journal? That year again was 1998! Every damn other organ had been examined, charted, studied and put in jars all over the world, but not the clitoris.

Despite the plethora of pornography and sex advice available 24/7, more people are spectacularly ignorant of the clitoris than virtually anything else in the world that there are that many of (over 4 billion not very well served). 

Huff Po helps to get the word out about artist Sophia Wallace’s Cliteracy effort through her installation for the Museum of Sex in NY to help demystify and educate about the clitoris.  

“I wanted to talk about female genitals in a way that I felt wasn’t really being talked about,” Wallace said. “For me, this word ‘cliteracy’ perfectly breaks down the idea of the project. It’s this pithy, wonderful little word that encapsulates so much so quickly and so simply. It illuminates this idea of total illiteracy and incompetence when it comes to the female body.”

Wallace created Cliteracy, 100 Natural Laws as part of her Cliteracy Project. Phrases like:

• “The Clitoris is not a button it is an iceberg”
• “A Man would never be expected to get off through sex acts that ignored his primary sexual organ”
• “Freedom in society can be measured by the distribution of orgasms””

Check out Ms Wallace’s Tumblr for more enlightening clitoral fun.

Where are the ideas to bring back fairness, equality and a vibrant middle class? This question came up at a dinner party recently and the answer is not all that inspiring but it’s true – the ideas are the ones that were dominant from the beginning of the New Deal until the election of Reagan. They’re not new ideas. They’re the old ideas that worked and still would.

They’re the ideas that were quietly reviled by the malefactors of great wealth who organized over decades, under the radar, to erode the practice of those ideas. They openly propagandized against the ideas and when these corporatist forces had the strength to do so, they legislated them out of existence.

Part of the propaganda campaign is to say ideas like progressive taxation, minimum wages, unions, and public spending on infrastructure and education were created for a different world and can’t work anymore. They urge you to discard those ideas (which is their overall goal) and then they create a strawman by demanding new ideas from the left, when they are not necessary.

It occurs to me that there are even more ideas that are so long discarded, so antithetical to the 1%, that nobody even considers them anymore. But they once were considered essential and effective in guarding against the inequality we now suffer from.

From the beginnings of state commercial codes through the mid 20th century many states had laws either prohibiting chain stores (limiting how many stores one person or family could own performing a similar service) or taxing them more than independent stores. You may not have had a WalMart or McDonalds under these laws and there was a good solid economic reason to discourage them. 

Imagine that every new WalMart built displaces an average of 50 small businesses. 50 families have their middle class income, derived from ownership, transferred to that 1 family in Bentonville, AR. Multiply that over 1,000 stores and 50,000 families have funneled their modest wealth to 1 fabulously wealthy family in Arkansas!

Consider that today the most accepted way to get rich other than through winning the American Idol or NBA draft lottery is to franchise an idea. It’s not about the one or handful of stores that can make you a good living, it’s about instant wealth by having hundreds or thousands of stores. Many of the early lawmakers saw that as a means of taking wealth out of communities and creating large interests when small local interests were thought best.

When did it become a better idea to maximize the wealth for an individual at the cost of what was best for a community? On its face it’s clear, it never did become a better idea. But it sure became acceptable morally and ethically, and in fact, it became a legal matter that those laws that safeguarded the local community were sloughed off as old fashioned and anti-business.

But it wasn’t even so long ago really. At the turn of the 20th century there were about 50 chains in retailing.  Today there are about 50,000.  This editorial by the National Association of Retail Druggists Journal appeared in a 1936 volume: 

The selfishness of those who would control the money power of the nation, if their greed is allowed to develop unchecked . . . [would leave] masses of Americans wholly at the mercy of the despotic power of a monopolistic class.—National Association of Retail Druggists Journal

Paul Ingram of Columbia University and Hayagreeva Rao of Northwestern reprinted this editorial in Store Wars: the Enactment and Repeal of Anti-Chain-Store Legislation in America.  They write:

Before the chains, the independent retailer was a deeply institutionalized element of American economic and social life, ingrained in the prevailing concept of community, and a key link in the opportunity structure that was then seen as a foundation of American democracy.

Chains rose after WWI, multiplying in the 20s like never before. From the Corporate Research Project:

At the start of that decade, the 20 leading chains had fewer than 10,000 stores. By the end of the decade, they had more than 37,000. A&P, the leader in the grocery segment, jumped from about 4,500 to more than 15,000. In apparel, J.C. Penney went from about 300 to more than 1,400. And in the drugstore sector, Walgreen’s leaped from 23 to 440. The impact in market share terms was most dramatic in groceries. By 1929, A&P and competitors such as Kroger and Safeway had captured nearly 40 percent of the market.

In this light, there was a clamor for anti-chain store legislation. Much like today’s anti-WalMart activists, independent retailers and community activists urged people to keep money in the community by not shopping at chain stores. Many states enacted taxes on chain stores to discourage them. a form of “protectionism” for the local independent retailer. 

But the deeper pockets of the pro-chain store forces fought back and reversed the laws.

If the people of the United States like our stores so little that they are willing to tax us out of business, that is their affair. We will shut up shop.—president of the Atlantic & Pacific Stores, the largest chain  in the U.S. in 1939

Sounds familiar, huh? If we don’t get our way we’ll close up and take the jobs with us. They formed lobbies of their own including the National Chain Store Association, tasked with spreading good chain store public relations.  A&P alone bought extensive space in newspapers and sent speakers to civic organizations to proselytize on their behalf. 

Obviously, we know who ultimately won this battle. 1937 was the high point of anti-chain store legislation and popular opinion. The protectionists lost to the free traders of unfettered capitalism. The question remains though: should they have? Would we have been better off if we’d taken a stand in the 20s and 30s so that WalMart and its ilk would have never grown into the wealth siphoning malignancies they are today?

Can we take up the idea of incentivizing small business in real economic terms?

You knew Labor Day was about workers and unions didn’t ya? Not just barbecuing, bargains on unclaimed airline luggage, mattress sales and the Jerry Lewis Telethon (starring Ryan Seacrest)?  John Logan of San Francisco State University notes reasons for optimism in The Hill including positive trends on overall popularity and the recent actions by workers at WalMart and fast food outlets. Also, for the first time in years an actually functioning National Labor Relations Board.

Finally, Logan writes:

Finally, as demonstrated by next week’s “open convention,” the AFL-CIO and its affiliates are more flexible, imaginative, and inclusive than ever before. They have embraced the struggles of domestic workers, carwash workers, Wal-Mart workers, fast food workers and others. They have formed deep alliances with the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, Sierra Club, religious organizations, and other groups that support basic justice for American workers. And they have played a key role in lobbying for federal legislation that benefits all workers – healthcare reform, equal pay legislation, immigration reform, an increase in the minimum wage and paid sick leave.

Unions have recognized that they need public relations remediation and allies, and have sought to find common ground with other organizations to join forces against the GOP and Chamber of Commerce. 

It can never be said enough: the middle class built America and unions built the middle class. Policies that benefit union membership, benefit the overall economy by increasing wages and demand.

Sarah Kliff at Wonkblog took the tongue in cheek approach to a study by researchers from the Univ. of Illinois and Univ. of Pennsylvania printed in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (I love their swimsuit issue) called Evidence for a Dispositional Attitude, its Measurement, and its Consequences in which the researchers tried to determine if some people are just more inclined to hate things, anything. 

They wanted to figure out if people tended to like or dislike things in general. This was dubbed the individual’s dispositional attitude or, more simply put, checked for whether they were a hater who pretty much hates on everything that comes across their path.

Haven’t we all met people like that? People that are just negative. We joke about someone being negative by calling them the “Russian judge” harking back to the Olympics and the Russian tendency to downgrade the performance of anybody not Russian (to be fair, they did at least like Russians). Saying someone has a “dispositional attitude” is the proper way of calling them the “Russian judge” or more commonly, “a disagreeable fuckwit.” The stereotype is the sour old person, or in other words – the Tea Party. But I’ve met young people too that are just difficult and negative (often depressive too, but that’s a different, although not unrelated thing). I don’t think it’s really surprising that the study showed that yeah, some people tend to be more likely to like and some to dislike. That they’re not objective about it, literally, whatever they’re being asked to judge, they tend to be Russian about it.

The study comprised asking groups of people their feelings about different unrelated things, including made up stuff.

To test out this theory, a team of psychologists asked study participants how they felt about a number of mundane and unrelated subjects that included (but was not limited to) architecture, health care, crossword puzzles, taxidermy and Japan.

With the hater test verified and known haters identified, researchers asked their participants to read about the “Monahan LPI-800 Compact 2/3-Cubic-Foot 700-Watt Microwave Oven.” This not a real microwave but one dreamt up by researchers to test how much people would hate it.

The haters, perhaps unsurprisingly, were much less enthused than those who had more positive attitudes about camping, Japan and the like. This was also true in a question about vaccines, where the likers were more likely to have a positive opinion about getting vaccine shots then the haters.

The concluding remarks of the study: 

The present research introduced the concept of the dispositional attitude – an individual’s general tendency to like versus dislike stimuli. A corollary of dispositional attitudes is that an individual’s attitudes toward independent, ostensibly unrelated stimuli will be positively related. This pattern is surprising to the extent that prevailing attitude theories emphasize attitudes being determined by properties of the stimuli under evaluation and not the properties of the people evaluating the stimuli. The present research demonstrated that some people tend to like things, whereas others tend to dislike things, and a more thorough understanding of this tendency will lead to a more thorough understanding of the psychology of attitudes.

Isn’t it called prejudice? Some people are just prejudiced against, whatever – other people, things, ideas. If the prevailing understanding in psychological research is that people are fair and judge things fairly, based on objectivity, with an open mind and are just as likely to to like or dislike based on the stimuli, I could have saved them the grant money. 

Some people are just difficult fuckwits, and they tend to be your parents.

Just some thoughts that made me go hmmmm:

The same people who decry food stamps, welfare and unemployment and think everyone’s abusing these programs in an effort to keep from working also don’t want to increase the minimum wage, which would be an incentive to work. (I guess that’s how you know they’re full of shit.)

___________________

NSA workers, presumed to be working in good faith, violated the privacy of American citizens 2,776 times. That’s 2,776 OOPS! when they were trying to be good. What if they weren’t trying to be good?

___________________ 

A very young America enacted tariffs in order to protect its new industries against the British manufacturing behemoth. Which made sense in order to get young industries off the ground. Theoretically, when those industries mature and can compete, you then drop tariffs and advocate free trade.

But because of the power of those industries in D.C., even when American industry started to dominate the world, the tariffs never went away and the resulting trade imbalance in our favor helped to cause the 1929 crash.

The last 30 years, as Walmart and other purchasers bought Chinese products and Made in the USA became a sad, pathetic cry for help, we should have enacted tariffs and protected American manufactures. But again, powerful business lobbies made “protectionism” a curse word and now virtually nothing is made here and a huge trade imbalance helped bring about the 2008 melt down.

When are we gonna get this right?

___________________

“The true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it … I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.”

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1936

 

The Hamiltonians won. They did. The view that we would need manufacturing, cities, corporations and government policies that promoted them, won. It’s who we are as a nation, as a civilization!  The idea that we could thrive, no less be a world power, in Jefferson’s vision of an individualistic society of agrarian gentleman farmers, has been laughable for around 200 years.

But conservatives in 2013 still can’t grasp that and ask that we go back to economic policies that haven’t been successful, couldn’t be successful, couldn’t be at all in the 21st century. The country they claim we should be did not evolve because it couldn’t. We were going to have internal improvements, an income tax, central banking, paper money, etc. You might as well be advocating a unicorn in every pot to think we weren’t.

Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute lays out how Conservatives don’t get that some problems are public, and its hurting them. “Hurting their ability to handle the challenges of the 21st century.” Lets stipulate that the conservatives that did get it (and there were many) did just fine in the 20th century, but the guys running the conservative movement today would have struggled in the 19th. Republican President Herbert Hoover said “In our individualism we have long since abandoned the laissez faire of the 18th Century – the notion that it is ‘every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.'” He got it. Everybody in public service got it. We can’t go very far every man for himself, we have to recognize we’re in it together. The ones who didn’t were the crazy fringes of conservatism, the loopy uncle you avoided at Thanksgiving – he now runs the movement and the GOP.

Konczal notes that William F. Buckley, one of the intellectuals of the conservative movement (if that’s not an oxymoron), fought a jihad against Keynesian economic textbooks on college campuses, especially the very popular textbooks by economist Paul Samuelson (my college economics textbook author).

So what upset Buckley about the book? Buckley didn’t like the various policy suggestions, like the support of inheritance taxes or an emphasis on checking monopoly power… But what really upset him was the idea that the economy was now a public issue. As Buckley emphasizes in his own paraphrase of Samuelson, “economics has become a matter of public policy, not individual action…Let us bear in mind that unemployment is a public problem” (italics in original) because “the individual firm, the individual himself, is powerless to cope with the complexities in times of stress.”

But the truth was that even conservative economic heroes like Milton Friedman and the Chicago School didn’t argue that the economy didn’t need a steering wheel to help steer it for the public good. They only argued about how to steer it, what policies were best to steer it.

This stabilization could be monetary or fiscal, discretionary or rules-based, but the fact that the government was undertaking it meant that the overall state of the economy was a public problem.

One can spend an entire lifetime debating the distinction between “public” and “private,” but for this post let’s use an approach from John Dewey. In “The Public and Its Problems” (1927), Dewey argued that the public is involved wherever an action between two people has consequences “that extend beyond the two directly concerned.” Given “that they affect the welfare of many others, the act acquires a public capacity.” And as such needs a public response. And conservatives reject this.

Buckley, an elite intellectual, and today’s Tea Party (anti-elitist, anti intellectual) agree that government shouldn’t be steering anything. Maybe local governments can do some steering but the federal government should be really limited. Defense is the only item you can get pretty much 100% agreement on from conservatives. After that it’s hard to get consensus that the federal government should do much else. Maybe the FBI. Maybe the safety net. And what would such a radical retrenchment of the government achieve? Um, a depression. But it would be worth it.

When it comes to the safety net, libertarian populist Tim Carney argues that the federal government is way too big, and should only focus on defense and “maybe the safety net.” Maybe? The current safety net provided through the federal government, in his mind, is better provided by private, civic “voluntary organizations.” Even though this change would involve “huge disruptions” it’s worth it to remove the public role in the safety net.

A strain of conservatives today are more likely to conflate a fully activist responsible government with the moral breakdown of society – the failure of individuals to live right, as it were. Again, like it’s our moral weakness as a people that lets us lean on the government and not insist on merely relying on our own gumption. Single parents, food stamps, drugs, violence etc. are all contributing to poverty, not symptoms of it. Because we know that when there was no intercourse outside of marriage and everyone was a pious Church-going soul, there was no poverty. And government was always small until Obama. If people took care of their own private business, we wouldn’t need any public action. In fact, there just shouldn’t be any public action and then things would just straighten out, magically

Charles Murray, in his recent book “Coming Apart” (2012), argues that a private solution of elites shaming the poor is better than any government response to the trials faced by working-class whites. Conservatives define equality of opportunity as simply equality before the law, meaning that equality of opportunity is presumed unless the government messes it up.

Rick Santorum argues that even referencing the “middle-class” is “Marxism talk,” and goes on to argue that the weak economy is because of people who “have all sorts of issues that they have to overcome to be successful.”

The failure of individuals are killing the economy. Which may be true if you mean the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, etc. But I don’t think that’s what Santorum and his followers mean.

Back in the 2012 election, Mitt Romney attacked the President for discussing inequality in his campaign rally, because those conversations belong in “quiet rooms.” These are examples of Presidential candidates taking important economic issues and placing them squarely in the private sphere.

This quote from the 2012 GOP presidential nominee was telling. Romney was saying that If there are problems in society, they should be dealt with privately by elites who have the moral authority and intelligence to discuss them rationally. This is an idea that goes back to the pre-democratic days of the Republic when it was assumed that the only people who should vote and hold office were landholding white males – they had the education and wisdom to discuss and make policy. These are ideas that we abandoned in the first quarter of the 19th century when the Madisonian Democratic-Republicans vanquished the Federalists by advocating the spread of democracy and the franchise – ironically, trusting the individual! Trusting the individual even if they were of meager holdings or education. This is where the Jeffersonians won.

Then and now, conservatives show that it isn’t really about the “individual” – the romanticized American idyll – that they blather on about, it’s actually about the “worthy individual.” And all those unworthies ruin it for everybody. The unworthies borrowed too much money for houses they couldn’t afford. Of course, they borrowed it from the worthies who then bundled their sub-prime loan into derivative investment packages which were overrated by the ratings agencies and sold like corn dogs at a county fair to everyone with an account, while the worthies were hedging, shorting and leveraging that unworthy mortgage to a point where when the housing bubble broke we all felt the blowback.

But then the worthies got bailed out while the unworthies were on their own. Profits remain individual, but losses are conveniently public, illustrating the hypocrisy of  a lot of the anti-public conservatives.

Which brings us to the true believers.  Romney and the usual conservative suspects had their chance to convince the public, both worthy and unworthy alike (the so-called “47%”) to let them call the shots.  They failed massively. So conservatives went looking for new voices and found Rand Paul and the “libertarian populists.” Paul, like his father and Ted Cruz are not hypocrites on this, they are against helping worthy and unworthy alike.

In so much as the economy and inequality is a public problem, the recent move to libertarianism among GOP insiders won’t advance them much here. To build on Matt Steinglass’ point, a lot of recent arguments for “libertarian populism” present corporate welfare and efforts to boost the situation of working people or combat inequality through public means as two sides of the same coin. If there’s no public, then the only thing the government can do is cause problems for individuals.

Republican Conservative Herbert Hoover again: “Our mass of regulation of public utilities and trade is the monument to our intent to preserve an equality of opportunity. This regulation is itself proof that we have gone a long way toward the abandonment of the ‘capitalism’ of Adam Smith.”

Mike Konczal:

The argument coming out of the Great Depression, and it is a radical argument, that the economy as a whole needs public steering rather than an “invisible hand” still manages to confound many conservatives, who’d prefer to eliminate any notion of the public from their ideology.

Exactly right Mike. Even Republicans used to understand that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market was no answer for a government responsible for and to their citizens. To preserve equality of opportunity itself, a bedrock American value, we need an activist government and an activist regulatory scheme – working to level the playing field. An umpire calling balls and strikes and tossing the pitcher scuffing the ball with sandpaper.

Today’s GOP says the batter and the pitcher live and die by their own mettle. Whatever you can get away with to be successful is a-ok. The umpire is a fascist, or a socialist, or something. Unless he’s keeping the pitcher and batter from getting same-sex married – then he’s doing God’s work.

Whether you refer to him as “The Luckiest Man in America” or “Mr. Warmth”, Chris Christie is a completely typical right wing Republican gas bag and out of control ego. His popularity is a media created fantasy because his so-called bigger than life personality and redfaced feistiness are great copy for them. So when he confounds his fellow GOPers they love it. When he confounds their media narrative of him being a “different kind of Republican” they sit on that.

The reality for Mr. Warmth’s headquarters today is that they have to deal with polls showing a 10 point drop in his campaign to be re-elected by acclamation and be named the most popular governor in the world! (geez, Christie must have had a lonely childhood to be so needy). And by the way, wasn’t Sarah Palin once the most popular governor in the world? How’d that work out?

Christie’s support among Democratic voters has slipped since Monmouth’s June poll. Thirty-six percent of Democrats said they supported him in June, while only 21 percent gave their support in the newest poll. Buono’s support among Democrats has increased from 59 to 71 percent. She has focused this summer on a fairly progressive agenda, including hammering Christie’s record on women’s health and marriage equality.

So Christie dropped from 61-31 to 56-36 as of a poll released today, before his endorsement of the excessively nutty Steve Lonegan for senate. The drop is mostly because of Democrats coming home to a Democrat, which should continue after the campaign gets really serious post-Labor Day. Especially if Barbara Buono hammers Christie on the inconsistencies between his legend and his reality. Like endorsing the humongously wacky tea partier Steve Lonegan. 

Lonegan has called social security a ponzi scheme. He’s in bed with the Koch Bros. Americans for Prosperity.  He denies climate science as “silly hysteria.” He began his political career by campaigning about McDonald’s putting up signs in Spanish. He opposes same-sex marriage, gun reform, the Dept. of Education and women’s choice. He’s a perfect right wing talk radio candidate, full of 19th century prejudices and 21st century fact free.

And Christie endorsed him. Not a very moderate, reasonable, rational or different kind of Republican thing to do. So if you Google search Christie endorsement of Lonegan you get 0 hits. I know Rachel and Lawrence covered it last night. I bet they were the only news media that did.

There are so many sad stories everyday that you can shake your head at or even ignore because we become inured to the cruelty and stupidity.  But this story about an Australian young man murdered in Oklahoma made me hang my head for a few minutes. 

Steve Clemons who usually writes about foreign affairs and politics was likewise affected.

I have been greatly affected by sad news from Oklahoma today, another case of a victim of gun violence that deserves as much attention and public concern as the more grisly mass slayings we have heard so much about and which still have not produced progress on gun control.

In the latest incident, Australian student Christopher Lane was killed while visiting his girlfriend in Duncan, Oklahoma. The young college baseball player, studying in the United States at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, was allegedly shot and killed by three juveniles, one of whom confessed to the police, saying, “We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.”

Clemens connects this tragedy to the ongoing lack of real progress on guns. You can’t fix crazy and you can’t fix stupid, but you can keep the crazy and stupid from getting such remarkably easy access to guns.

Last week, I was in Bartlesville and Tulsa, Oklahoma. I saw signs everywhere for a coming major gun show and was reminded by one of Tom Coburn’s friends that “his best friend in Oklahoma” owns those gun shows and is rabidly opposed to any form of gun constraints, even anything as innocuous and as sensible as background checks.

Tom Coburn should step up. He has the capacity to do so. This killing of a young man in Oklahoma deserves his response. Other teens in the state who have easy access to guns should learn from Coburn and hopefully Inhofe that this incident harms them, harms the state, and harms America in the eyes of not only Australians but many others around the world.

Indeed, if people like Senators Coburn and Inhofe care about the reputation of their state they could do something about it.

It’s not a bad time to add that throwing the word “evil” around in response to heinous acts like this is just an abdication of society’s responsibility for taking action. Evil is an irrational biblical concept that believers adopt to explain acts that are too uncomfortable to explain in rational terms. There’s no room for it in a rational society, it helps not one iota to mark something up to evil and walk away.