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The Middle East: a short shout of despair

One guy fainted at the sight of blood, and a woman threw up. It’s par for the course, but I’ve never understood why the trippers go on Danger Tours to Jerusalem if they hate seeing people killed.

My tour group left the militarized Zone, the gunshots faded, different flags flew together again, and the tourists recovered enough to ask questions.

“Why?” “Why do they do it?” “Why?”

I answered them for the jillionth time.

“People fought over the Zone for thousands of years. Nobody could stop it. Then we decided to stop trying. They could fight inside the Zone. Whoever won it would win the whole thing. Nobody would interfere, so long as they stayed inside the Zone. Fighters flocked in from everywhere, we fenced it, and now everyone’s happy. They shoot and we live.

Next, gentlefolk, the Millenium 3000 Exhibition….”

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Cynicism caused by Jon Stewart! Not politics!

Oh, puh-leeeze. Jon Stewart, Enemy of Democracy? says the overheated title. Seems people who watch The Daily Show are–gasp–cynical about politics.

There is, of course, absolutely nothing to be cynical about. People are supposed to die in wars for the PR stunts of overblown egos. The government is supposed to be for sale to the highest bidder. The Bill of Rights is supposed to be shredded. It’s written on paper, isn’t it? What else is paper for?

There’s an old joke: if you can keep your head when everybody else is losing theirs, you don’t know what’s going on. Modern update: if you’re a Perky Pollyanna when you’re drowning in a cesspool, you’re an idiot.

(via memeorandum)

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Sex and evil

A schism without a name runs through the world. People are supposed to be divided by race, class, gender, religion, education, or wealth, but the biggest division cuts across all those. A fundamentally different sense of good and evil is the biggest rift. It’s been there a long time, but technology is making it huge.

The realization that a different concept of evil exists first struck me when I was reading an article by George Packer about post-occupation Baghdad. A well-educated doctor doing the best job he could under impossible circumstances was showing the journalist around the hospital and the morgue. “An entire subspecialty of forensic medicine deals with virginity,” Packer notes, and before the war there was an examination room at the hospital that did nothing but perform female virginity tests. “These days, the morgue overflows, but the examination room down the hall is usually empty.” The doctor “was appalled by this inversion of the normal order. In his view, a fragile moral relationship existed between the two sections of the Medico-Legal Institute—as if the social control of virginity offered a defense against the anarchy that led to murder.” (Caught in the Crossfire, New Yorker, May 17, 2004.)

And yet, absurd as it sounds, on some fundamental level that is precisely what that doctor and like-minded people think. Looked at from a different perspective, it is not absurd so long as you feel that sex is evil. If sex is the thing that makes the center lose its hold, that corrupts society, and that has the potential to destroy everything you hold dear, then virginity tests really are vitally important.

I’m obviously in the other camp, the one that thinks damaging others constitutes evil, because the doctor’s world view struck me as new and bizarre. That’s one of the biggest problems when bridging world views, which is that it can’t be done. The closest approach is to gain some intellectual insight, but on the level of actual understanding or empathy, the other viewpoint will always feel insane.

Take one example: the vaccine for cervical cancer. The incidence of that cancer increases with the number of sexual partners. For me, that’s irrelevant. But if sex is the source of evil, increasing the amount of sex in the world will have horrible downstream consequences, and guarding against that by scaring women away from sex with the fear of cancer is a small price to pay for goodness. People in this camp can’t understand how I can be so blind to the destructive forces I’m unleashing on civilized society. I can’t understand how they can think that sex should warrant the death penalty.

Take another example: violence and sex on US television. Children can, apparently, watch any amount of violence without warping their minds. Nudity, on the other hand, or worse yet a visible erection, would cause perversion. Likewise, guns are sold under clear glass in general stores, whereas sex toys are sold wrapped in plain paper in their own part of town. This makes sense only if sex is the prime source of evil, and damaging others is a distant second.

It’s vitally important to see how large a gap in understanding separates the two sides because we expend vast time and effort trying to convince each other to be reasonable, while not even realizing that neither side understands a word the other is saying. We can’t hope to reach any mutual peace–nor can we avoid or implement manipulation–unless we have some clue where they’re coming from.

A tangential point here is how women fit into the sex-is-evil world view. The tangle at the core of that view is that you can’t live with sex, but you also can’t live without it. The party line is generally to tolerate sex only for essential reproductive purposes, which, theoretically, applies to men as well as women. However, it’s a drag to fight your hormones your entire adult life, so the tedious enforcement function gets laid on the less-powerful gender. The sex-is-evil crowd do not, in their own minds, see themselves as anti-women. It just happens to work out that way.

The difference between being anti-women and anti-sex may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it is a significant aspect of the other worldview. It explains, among other things, how so many women can hold that view even while it’s doing its best to cripple them. It also explains why gays are consistently hated by that group. If the attitude was primarily anti-female, gay males, at least, ought to be getting a free pass. Instead they get killed. If, on the other hand, the attitude is primarily anti-sex, then gay sex is about as unnecessary as you can get. Add to that the potential “ickiness” factor of any biological function you’re not personally involved in, and you have a truly toxic mix.

I mentioned that technology is enlarging the gap between the two world views. The separation of sex and reproduction is the main factor. When sex leads to children, uncontrolled sex can cause harm to others, and there is some overlap between the two concepts of evil. When sex is just sex, it becomes much harder to make the case that it’s hurting anyone–unless, of course, you set up social rules to make sure that it does. The anti-sex folks reject technologies that make sex easier or less dangerous. Since a lack of control of reproduction is the linchpin on which this definition of evil hangs, any technologies that increase control over reproduction are also bad. Abortion, cloning, and stem cells all become targets. (Note that other technologies are acceptable. Anti-sex advocates are happy to use medicine, satellite dishes, guns, and computers.)

Being anti-sex is a minority stance in Western nations, so the people who feel sex is bad don’t always label themselves as such. They talk about “family values” or “pro-life” issues instead, but they’re easy enough to spot because the only effects of their policies are to make sex a more fraught experience. “Family values,” oddly enough, are coupled with opposition to parental leave or actual aid to real children. “Pro-life” attitudes tend to be found with pro-gun, pro-death penalty, and pro-war politics.

So what do we do? Is there a point to understanding these blighters? To be honest, I’m not really sure, except that we can stop wasting energy on reasoning with them. Changing concepts of good and evil are realignments of the soul, and reason justifies them after the fact. It doesn’t create them. They happen only on an individual level, they can’t be legislated, and they can’t be bridged. There is no way for the two to live side by side. Tolerance breaks down because it’s a logical impossibility. To take one example, there is no way to simultaneously legislate both against harm to others and for honor killings. The struggle can end only with annihilation of one side or apartheid. The latter solution has already been (semi?)-facetiously suggested in a post-election map that shows the states voting for Bush in a new country called Jesusland, while the two coasts and some of the north Midwest are happily part of the United States of Canada. All I want to know is where do I sign up?

Separation of beliefs and state offers a partial solution. “They” would have to stop trying to control anyone’s sex life except their own. “We” would have to make it easy for them to avoid sexuality they feel is offensive. It would take a real willingness to let other people live by their beliefs for that solution to work, which is why it’s only a partial solution. It is (almost?) impossible to let other people live by beliefs that one is convinced unleash evil on the world.

If we were sensible, we’d avoid murdering each other, wait for the changing of the gods to end, and then the struggle would be over. But what are the chances of that?

Postscript: I can’t stop myself from looking at the whole thing as a biologist’s joke. Label the two viewpoints using the conventions of fruit fly geneticists. On one hand you have harmless–or is it Mostly Harmless? On the other hand is sexless. The only interaction between the two seems to be that they can’t coexist. Expression of one silences the activity of the other.

Technorati tags: sex, evil, culture wars, morality, pro-life, family values, morality

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On bureaucracy

It may sound laughable after a lifetime of filling out forms, but bureaucracies are a step up compared to what came before. However, even though desk jockeys are better than barbarians, they’re not exactly a force for progress. We can’t go back and we can’t go forward because they’re the only way we know to organize anything, whether it’s a democracy or a dictatorship, a government or a corporation, an army or a university. Somehow we have to find a way to stop stasis from becoming rigor mortis.

The first stumbling block when thinking about bureaucracy is the desire to run off and do something more interesting, like pick bubble gum off an old pair of shoes. Nobody wants to be remembered for designing the perfect committee when what we need are cures for poverty and war. And yet, I think we’re making a mistake by ignoring the small stuff. We’re like people trying to build a house, but we’re too busy to find hammers so we’re pounding in the nails with soup spoons.

Boring inventions can be essential to major social advances. Double entry bookkeeping enabled capitalism, which unleashed a torrent of energy compared to feudalism. Padlocks enable secret ballots, and hence democracy, which releases the energy that’s buried under the Big Man model of government. I suspect that structuring bureaucracies to facilitate work rather than obstruct it will unleash a similar quantum leap in human energy. That’s why this boring question is important.

At least one step can be skipped when pondering bureaucracy. There’s no need to detail the symptoms. We know them by now. Anyone who’s managed to sleepwalk through their own life can read Scott Adams’ Dilbert for reminders. It’s all there.

The question is what to do about it. And that depends on where the real source of the trouble lies.

The answer, it seems to me, is staring us in the face. To find a culprit, ask the old policeman’s question: who benefits? The people in control have the leverage to arrange things to suit themselves, and what suits them is the same thing that suits everyone else: job security, followed by increased wealth, power and prestige. Nothing too startling there. Nothing too startling in the insight that size confers prestige. Therefore there is nothing mysterious in the way bureaucracies everywhere always grow.

The people in control want to stay in control. The old, dictatorial methods of management squelched innovation and ended in bankruptcy, but that doesn’t mean newer, gentler methods lead to any actual improvement. They just lead to committee meetings.

If the issue of power is faced squarely, then maybe we can figure out how to bring the controllers under control. Maybe we can arrange things so that people can actually get their work done instead of spending most of their time on the care and feeding of the boss.

The first task is to tame growth. Even when that is an explicit goal, I think we go about it the wrong way. The limits are externally imposed, either as freezes on hiring or budget reductions, or they consist of after-the-fact consequences. The incentives that lead to the growth in the first place are never touched.

To really tame growth, the people who control the rate of growth need to have negative personal consequnces when they go beyond the optimum. The two big mysteries are what, exactly, is the optimum in any given situation, and which disincentives at which level work to maintain that optimum. One of the hallmarks of any solution that works is that it will be unpopular with bosses because it works. Maybe the solutions are already out there, but judging by the current state of bureaucracies, it’s going to take some research and field testing to find them. And then will come the really hard part, mustering enough will to force their application against the vested interests of the few people who stand to lose by them.

Finding solutions is unlikely to be easy. For instance, if each new hire led to a cut in pay for the head, that would definitely make him or her think twice before hiring, but self-interest would probably lead to no hiring, even when it was necessary. Technology might help matters by making it easier to get honest and anonymous feedback about how well an office was doing its job, but then it would still be necessary to figure out how to bring that information to bear directly on the person running the place. The real point I’m trying to make is not to dictate what the solutions should be, but to stress that whatever they are in any given situation, they have to affect the decision-maker personally, directly, and at the same time as the behavior that needs modifying.

The second task is to tame meetings. The original idea behind them was a good one, as is so often the case. It’s supposed to work like it does on Star Trek, where the loyal officers waste no time, present all the facts, give each other the benefit of their varied perspectives, and the best decision emerges.

Real meetings are not about facts. They’re about power. So it’s unsurprising that the powerless rarely speak up independently (when they do, they’re generally soon looking for other work), and that facts take a back seat to whatever the powers-that-be wanted in the first place. Rubber-stamping foregone conclusions saps the time and energy of workers, but it does achieve distributed responsibility. From the bosses’ point of view, this is even better than a dictatorship. They not only get their way, but when it goes wrong it’s the committee’s fault.

None of this is good. Decision-making by committee has to be scrapped. Single individuals must always be identifiably responsible for decisions, and they must always be the same people who actually made the decisions. They can and must get input and criticism (more on this below), but the destructive freedom to shirk responsibility has got to stop.

Reducing the time wasted in meetings would mean there’s more time for another essential ingredient of productive work that’s increasingly missing. People need “alone time” to get work done. Workers need time to actually work rather than interact. Meetings are far from the only culprits here, since all the various forms of mailing, messaging, and talking take time. There are so many of them that offices these days need anti-meetings instead of meetings. Some portion of each work day, such as half, should be understood as time when others can’t be reached. Imagine if a three hour time limit on interaction, with no overtime allowed, actually forced people to limit themselves to those communications necessary to get work done.

The idea of working alone as a Good Thing flies in the face of received wisdom about the value of many heads as opposed to one. Well, the received wisdom is just plain wrong about this. Many heads are notoriously poor at accomplishing anything, and they’re even worse at original or creative work.

But there is some truth in the value of group thinking. It is good at presenting different perspectives that allow problems to be identified much more easily. Furthermore, differing perspectives can often see problems before they occur, which is much the best way to see them.

Unfortunately, the useful, critical function of many-headed thought usually runs smack into power politics. Very few people want to speak up at the cost of losing their job, so people don’t speak up. Criticism is essential, but it’s not going to happen unless the critics have nothing to fear, and the only way to guarantee that is to guarantee anonymity. In effect, that’s the bureaucratic equivalent of the secret ballot. Bureacracies desperately need mechanisms for anonymous input from a broad enough pool of knowledgeable people.

That need for “knowledgeable people” is also a sticking point. Informed input depends on information, and that’s another way the current system fails. Not only are the critics identifiable, but the most important facts behind a decision are generally concealed. In the military, in hospitals, and in airplane cockpits, people have made a study of how to be sure that necessary information reaches the right people, and that their input is heard. Lives depend on correct decisions in those cases, and yet even they still have lots of room for improvement in information flow and feedback. However, at least they’ve made a start on the problem, and the lessons learned now and in the future need to be applied everywhere, not just in those places where people will be instantly killed by the ignorance at the top.

So the quintessential bureaucratic function, the meeting, is terrible at generating new ideas, evaluating old ones, or coming to rational decisions, but that doesn’t mean meetings should be scrapped. They do have a useful social function. People see each other. They talk. They feel more comfortable. Those functions can be far more effectively achieved when they’re the purpose of the meeting, not some unspoken contraband to sneak in around the edges of the “real” purpose.

The British have the great institution of tea time. The whole office, from the lowest to the highest, gathers in a common room for twenty minutes and swills tea (or coffee, for the backsliders). It doesn’t take up a whole lunch hour, and an astonishing amount of both social and work-related communication takes place in a relaxed environment. It’s like the proverbial water cooler or coffee machine, but raised to a more useful level. TGIFs can work the same way.

Unfortunately, the useful functions of meetings run smack into the Protestant work ethic. Socializing is defined as “fun,” fun is not “work,” therefore any socializing is not work. That is another piece of obvious nonsense that has got to stop. Office Christmas parties are very much work, and should either happen during work hours or be banned. Socializing that happens during work, within reason, is not some kind of rip-off. It needs to be supported. (Within reason, of course. I’m not talking about catered pastries.)

The bureaucratic landscape would look rather different if ways were found to implement the points above. Higher-ups would be affected by their own decisions in ways directly related to what they did to those lower down. Decisions would be made by identifiable individuals, not committees. Bosses would not be able to avoid criticism from their workers. Immediate feedback loops would bring home to the decision-maker any bad consequences of ignoring criticism.

The principle of making sure that the consequences of decisions affect those who make them could also help solve an array of issues tangential to the effectiveness of bureaucracies. I think I remember hearing that the French once had a rule that factory owners had to live next to their factories. It was, not surprisingly, effective by the standards of the time at preventing the worst sorts of pollution from those factories. Similarly, Hawaii had (has?) laws on the books requiring State legislators to send their children to public schools. It didn’t affect school choice for private citizens, and kept public schools well-funded and focused on learning.

Imagine laws that require everyone in an organization to be given the same benefits as the people who decide on benefits for others. Taken to its logical conclusion, that means that when Congress votes to have good medical coverage for federal employees like themselves, they have to give the taxpayers the same sort of single-payer, hassle-free insurance. Imagine laws that say any increase in compensation for the higher ups has to be mirrored proportionately to the lower downs. The downside, of course, is that CEOs couldn’t be quite as free with stock options as they have been. One of many upsides is that the growth of income disparity would slow down.

Throughout, at all levels, the important point is that the individuals who actually make decisions should feel enough personal impact to align their interests with the real functions of their offices and with those of the workers they control. The idea that the responsible party should, in fact, be responsible and therefore accountable, is not exactly new. Implementing the rather obvious idea of feedback loops, however, is always a struggle for the same reason that replacing tyrannies with democracies is a struggle. People will always fight any change that reduces their personal benefits. But when their benefits are everyone else’s detriments, it’s way past time to get them off their thrones.

Technorati tags: bureaucracy, management

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Election 2004: Blinded by disbelief

I feel better now. The 2004 presidential election was stolen. I thought this country had enough jerks to elect supporters of torture, illegal detention, warmongering, and profiteering. I thought there was no hope. But most people are neither evil nor crazy nor stupid. Democracy would have worked. The election was stolen.

The evidence summarized in Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Rolling Stone article overwhelmingly points to that conclusion. In the article, Ron Baiman, vice president of the National Election Data Archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, is quoted as follows: ”’No rigorous statistical explanation” can explain the ”completely nonrandom” disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ”completely consistent with election fraud — specifically vote shifting.”’

“>Read more!
–>

The whole (long!) article is more than worth reading. It’s essential. As an example, I want to mention just one of an avalanche of facts presented. Exit polls these days err by less than one percent. Less than one half of one percent error is common. The pattern is consistent enough that exit polls are used to check for fraud in Third World countries. The difference between exit polls and actual results was 6.7% in Ohio, 6.5% in Pennsylvania, and 4.9% in Florida. All three discrepancies (among many more such discrepancies) favored Bush. The odds that all three of these states would have huge discrepancies, all on the same side, are one in 660,000, according to Steven Freeman, a lecturer in business methods and research methodology (i.e. including statistics) at the University of Pennsylvania.

Just for comparison, one in 660,000 is the same order of risk as that the only sizable asteroid being tracked (300 meter Apophis) which could hit Earth might do so over thirty years from now. You’re likelier to be hit by lightening. Expressed as percent, 1:660,000 is a 0.00015% chance. You can see why Baiman calls the result “completely nonrandom.”

The big question is how. How was the election stolen? Who did it? How were they coordinated? Surely, thousands of people would have had to participate. Surely, someone would have been caught by now. It seems so impossible that it’s hard to believe the facts shouting at us. I think this explains the media silence on the topic. It’s not some conscious cabal trying to throw the election to Bu$hCo (although there could be an element of that). It’s thousands of reporters and editors who don’t want to sound like they’re receiving instructions via the fillings in their teeth. Without proof, it’s just an accusation, and without any conceivable way of committing the crime, there’s no case. The media aren’t the only ones blinded by disbelief; so are (or were) most other citizens, including me. It can’t happen here, right? It just can’t.

So it’s worth thinking about how the election could have been stolen. Then we can take on board what has actually happened, and we can act against it in the future.

I think the hardest part about all this is how thousands, or at least hundreds, of people could work together without central instructions. In some cases there are clear indications of coordination, but there are also lots of cases where stuff just seemed to happen. Those are the ones that cause the disbelief problem.

But think about it. Thousands of people do the same things without central direction all the time. If they didn’t, advertising would be useless. If they didn’t, discrimination wouldn’t be a problem. All that’s needed for concerted action is a shared frame of reference.

Well, the Republican party recently has morphed into the party of winners. Winning is everything. Anything goes. Smear oppenents with hideous lies, invent wars at the right time for a “new brand” to pump up election year fervor, sell the whole government–not just measly individual congresscritters working on their own–to the highest bidder. The list goes on forever. From the top, we have an outlaw government. People take their tone from the folks at the top. So, if anything goes, and winning is everything, how hard is it to see that committed lineworkers might all bend the rules in the same direction?

They’d think that ballots needed to be “fixed” because they couldn’t have been filled out right. Or they needed to be disqualified because poor people, black people, college people, and smelly liberals are well-known hotbeds of dishonesty. Or those people needed to be checked very carefully, because they’re just the type to vote when they had no right to. And so on, across thousands of precincts. That could skew results. Without any problem.

What can be done about something so amorphous as a shared frame of reference? The U.S. was founded on the idea that if people had the facts, they’d vote intelligently, and the Founders seem to have gotten a lot of stuff right. The evidence–not just optimism, but events themselves–suggest that most people are neither evil nor crazy nor stupid. So, if they got good information, that could make a big dent in the problem. If not, there’s mounting evidence about just how effectively ignorance can be spread. Jamison Foser wrote an excellent article detailing media bias and how it shapes perception. Peter Daou has written several outstanding analyses of the problem. For instance Ignoring Colbert: A Small Taste of the Media’s Power to Choose the News, and Dynamic of a Bush Scandal.

That suggests three things to me. If we ever manage to get our government back, the first priority should be to change the media rules. There needs to be a truth in talk edict similar to truth in advertising. There needs to be a new and better way to implement the old requirement that one-sided coverage had to provide time for opposition response. And last, but not least, we need to put some muscle behind the prohibitions against hate speech. Demagogic talk shows, whether they happen in mosques or churches, television or radio, should not be given the huge bullhorn of taxpayer-financed airwaves, satellites, or fiberoptic cable. Yes, I’m aware that hate speech is so widespread that some of the most popular shows would be shut down. That’s exactly why they have to be shut down. Hate speech is a drug that democracy can’t afford.

Whatever the cure for the fix we’re in, finding and applying it is not optional. Without it, we’re not going to have government for the greatest good of the greatest number, but government for the greatest good of the greatest gangsters.

Update a couple of hours later: Wikipedia, “2004 U.S. presidential election controversy and irregularities”, as usual, is all over it. That article began right after the 2004 election, and has grown into something truly encyclopedic. The latest update was today.

Technorati tags: 2004 election stolen, Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., election fraud

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Iran, yellow stars, and dress codes

One point is getting lost in the discussion about the Iran “jewish” star sham.

Background: A law passed by the Iranian parliament was initially reported as enforcing a dress code that would mark the various religions (Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian). In the “reporting,” this morphed into making Persian Jews wear yellow stars. Horror shot round the world.

Then it turned out that: (from an article in Jewish Week)

Indeed, the law’s text and parliamentary debate, available in English from the BBC Service, discloses no provision mandating that any Iranians will have to wear any kind of prescribed dress. It instead focuses on promoting traditional clothing designs using Iranian and Islamic patterns, by Iran’s domestic fashion industry and preventing “the import of clothes incompatible with cultural Islamic and national values.”

The law is meant to develop and protect Iran’s clothing industry, Javedanfar said.

Note that: “no provision … that any Iranians will have to wear any kind of prescribed dress.”

A recent headline from The Guardian, April 20, 2006
Police in Tehran ordered to arrest women in ‘un-Islamic’ dress

Hello? Earth to progressive blogosphere? Maybe the reason the stuff about yellow stars found so many willing believers is because that nonsense is so similar to the actual nonsense perpetrated by the Islamists?

But the dress code doesn’t apply to Jews. Or “Iranians.” Only to women.

That’s all right then.

Update, June 1
It seems there is some controversy about whether one should criticise things also criticized by illiberals, just in case anyone lumps you into the company of fools. The issue isn’t argument in the forum of ideas, and changing your mind if you’re wrong. The issue is saying anything similar to what comes out of Malkin, to take an example at random.

Laura Rozen’s mentions the

“Iranian American human rights activist Ramin Ahmadi, up at Yale, who wonders why liberals like himself who opposed apartheid South Africa, dictatorships in Latin America, etc. have for the most part abandoned the Iran human rights issue, and not just during the Bush administration.”

Keven Drum says

“And yet, I know perfectly well that criticism of Iran is not just criticism of Iran. Whether I want it to or not, it also provides support for the Bush administration’s determined and deliberate effort to whip up enthusiasm for a military strike. Only a naif would view criticism of Iran in a vacuum, without also seeing the way it will be used by an administration that has demonstrated time and again that it can’t be trusted to act wisely. So what to do? For the most part, I end up saying very little.”

Call me naive, but that is not the same thing as stupid. The problem with the Bush Administration is that they don’t care about the truth. Among many other symptoms of that, they think a statement can be discredited because of who says it. (“Who said there are problems in Iraq? A Democrat? Well, there you are. It’s obvious nonsense.”)

Fighting that by abandoning our view of truth makes us the same as them. When we start pretending it’s not the truth that matters, but how fools will take it, we’ve decided to join them because we can’t beat them.

To hell with that. Do not go gentle into that good night.

Technorati tags: Iran, yellow star, Iranian badge, dress code

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Rove’s indictment: part of The Plan?

Will he be indicted? Won’t he be indicted? That is not the question. Let’s keep our eye on the ball.

1) Forget, for the moment, all the legal minutiae. If these guys, right up to the Shrub himself, are not all guilty as sin of outing a CIA agent for political purposes, I’m a blue hippo.

2) That being the case, their only ultimate certainty to stay out of jail is presidential pardon power.

3) Nobody can afford to piss off (or on) the Shrub.

4) The Shrub is a petulant frat boy who holds grudges forever.

5) So, up at Rove’s and Cheney’s level, they have to hang together, or they’ll hang separately. (Lower down, at Scooter’s level, where the Shrub has probably already forgotten his name, handing evidence to Fitzgerald would make sense.)

6) Okay. Now switch gears. The Republicans are in massive trouble with the voters. It would be handy to have a scapegoat for their anger.

7) Cheney can’t run for Prez. Nobody else is going to ask him to be Vice. He’s already wildly unpopular. Perfect scapegoat.

8 ) After much struggle, Fitzgerald uncovers that Cheney was the ringleader. Shrub was the “nice” guy who was out of it. Note that in this scenario when Rove rats out Cheney, it serves multiple purposes. Rove’s schemes generally work that way.

9) With much fanfare, around August, September, or October, Cheney resigns out of the goodness of that thing that keeps his blood moving. This is purely to spare Dear Leader all the dreadful partisan distractions. (Or for his health, of course.)

10) A new Vice is appointed, one whom (some) voters love, possibly one who could be heir apparent in 2008. Shrub’s popularity gains 5% or 10%. Republicans everywhere who are running for Congress talk about how decisive this Administration is and how well they’ve cleaned house. You never saw the Democrats doing that kind of thing, now, did you?

(Parenthetically: 11) Would that appointee be Condi? Not impossible. The drive-by media would love it. It would certainly work as a distraction and a boost this November, but I can’t see the bigoted Rethugs voting for a black female for President, no matter what. And I can’t see any progressives voting for a war-enabling Bush-licker, either.)

12) After the November elections, Shrub pardons Cheney. He pardons Rove, if events make it necessary. Congress may go tut-tut, but of course nobody would want to do anything as partisan as impeach a President for shredding the Constitution, so the Shrub retires peacefully to Crawford, and builds a presidential library bigger than his dad’s. It has a large central display area full of trophy blocks of wood from his brush-clearing activities.

Conclusion: wild-eyed conspiracy theory? Yes. Horribly plausible? Also yes.

Update, June 23, 2006: Good as my imagination may be, it’s obviously not good enough for reality. I never thought Rove would simply walk. Unbelievable. So much for the courts being the one branch of government that still retains some independence from this Administration.

Now all Bu$hCo needs to do is bring enough thousands of troops home to generate happy TV coverage, have a gradual crescendo of terrorist news (which seems to be starting right on cue), keep the stock market from crashing, stop gas prices from rising, and make sure voting machines don’t have paper audit trails.

Truthout (quoted below, since Truthout’s servers seem to be suffering the equivalent of a denial of service attack. Will be removed once the bitstorm has passed.)Update, May 31, 2006, link now working, copy removed.Talkleft (current news on the indictment, plus all the history)

Technorati tags: Rove, indictment, Fitzgerald investigation, Truthout, midterm elections, 2006 elections, Valerie Plame Leak, Luskin, Corallo, Jason Leopold

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The world as we don’t know it

Not spaceships. Not aliens.

Models of biological molecules at the Chimera Image Gallery.

Powers of Ten looks at Everything, including Life and the Universe. An astonishing animation in barely forty frames.

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The death penalty is lethal

With the Moussaoui verdict, talk of the death penalty is again contributing to global warming. I can’t resist adding my two cents’ worth.

There are two reasons to apply capital punishment: the hope that it will stop others from committing similar crimes, and the desire to get the slimeballs.

The death penalty has been around since humans formed societies. Studies of its effect have been around since the scientific method was invented a few centuries ago. There is no support for the hope that it prevents any crimes. People keep trying, because it seems like it ought to, but it doesn’t. It just plain doesn’t. I think there’s a very simple reason for that. People who commit crimes aren’t planning on being caught. It takes a rather law-abiding citizen to get hung up on “what might happen.”

So, how about revenge? Does it at least work for that?

Well, yes. You have revenge. Then there’s this flat feeling. The pain that caused the hatred hasn’t gone away, and the intelligent person realizes that revenge is not all it’s cracked up to be. The less intelligent starts screaming for more revenge, and better, faster, and cheaper revenge. That’s about as effective as you might expect of something that didn’t work the first few hundred times it was tried. So capital punishment gives revenge, but that doesn’t actually do you any good. On this level, it’s a colossal waste of resources to scratch an itch.

There is, however, another level that I don’t see discussed often enough. The issue is not how well the death penalty is applied, the guilt or innocence of the accused, bias in sentencing, or the gruesomeness of the procedure. All of those are important issues, but arguing about them implies that capital punishment would be useful in a perfect judicial system.

Let’s say that we have a perfect system. In that case, what does it say when a criminal is killed by the authority of the State? It says that the most powerful entity in our world thinks that killing bad people solves something.

Think about that. The highest authority has said that killing is a solution. Admittedly, there are footnotes about which crimes deserve it, due process, and so on. But the essence of a criminal is that they’re a law unto themselves. They’re not reading the footnotes. They’re just absorbing the part of the message they want to hear, which is that it’s morally acceptable to kill your enemies. The biggest guns in the world say so.

The other important point is that people take their tone from those in power. If the CEO steals, the office boy doesn’t take too long to catch on. If the State can kill, then killing is okay.

That is the real problem with the death penalty. By defining killing as morally acceptable, it helps create the climate for the very crimes it is supposed to stop.

Technorati tags: death penalty, capital punishment, Moussaoui, moral authority

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Thank you, Stephen Colbert

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Transcript here. And a web site to add your thanks for his wonderful blast of fresh air here.

Watch the whole thing:
update, May 5: can take a lo-ong time to load. I think everyone is watching it. Also: scuttlebutt via Boingboing that YouTube no longer has the clip due to some copyright nonsense. Last I looked, it was still displaying. If not, Google video is supposed to have it.

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Immigrants in these United States

I am an immigrant. I grew up bilingual. My grandmother learned English in her fifties, and always spoke with one of those formidable accents that you hear in the movies. So I can’t get too worked up about people who don’t speak English, or who came over on the boat. I came over on a boat, and I still remember walking down the gangway, clutching my teddy bear. I was nearly six at the time.

Immigrants come here to survive, to make a living, or to make a fortune. I never met anyone who came over purely because they admired the Bill of Rights. This doesn’t make immigrants a particularly mercenary lot, but there are those who say that foreigners who don’t share our “values” should just go home. I don’t know about that. It might be hard to keep the country running with the few people who would be left.

If we start litmus tests for admiration of the Constitution, everyone except ethnic Amerindians should have to pass it, since we’re all rather recent immigrants. The outlook is not promising. Consider, for instance, a National Constitution Center poll done about ten years ago that found one in six Americans believe the Constitution establishes the US as a Christian nation. Freedom of religion was the whole original point of the country, and this is what we’ve come to. That was only one of a long string of depressing results, and things have not improved since. Recently there was a poll finding that 20% of Americans (one in five!) believe the Constitution guarantees the right to keep pets and drive cars. No doubt, the Bill of Rights refers only to the standard transmission cars available in the late 1700s.

I think the evidence shows that immigrants do share American values. Like most people, they’re not thinking too much about the Bill of Rights and they’re doing their best to get by.

I think the real objection to immigrants’ values is their inability to see the special value of Americans. Immigrants know other countries in a way that many Americans don’t, and they know that Americans are just folks. When you have grown up feeling that you’re one of God’s chosen, uniquely gifted to bring goodness to the world, it’s depressing to have people around whose very homesickness says that the US isn’t everything.

Immigrants are also supposed to be depressing because they take jobs away from citizens. Well, they do. Without an adequate social safety net in the US, there are plenty of citizens who would work at any jobs they could get. But they could also demand minimum wages. They could demand compliance with safety, health, and environmental regulations. They could, God forbid, unionize. This is not what (most? all?) employers want. Employers want voiceless, exploitable illegals. The job that “Americans won’t do” is hiring workers who can demand their rights.

While I’m on that topic, let’s talk specifically about the subset of immigrants who are illegal. The Immigration Reform bill currently stuck in Congress–the one that planned to turn illegals into felons, but ran into trouble because people noticed–will do almost nothing to allow illegals to become citizens. For illegals who’ve been here over five years (and I’d be willing to bet that means continuous residency, without any secret trips home over the long years to see family), they can get in line for permanent residency. So far, so good, but long-term residents are not the seething mass of border-crossers we’re supposed to be afraid of.

People who’ve been here between two to five years can go back to their home countries and apply for permanent residency there. I’m sure lots of migrant fruit pickers have the savings to travel home and then sit on their hands for several years in a country they left because they couldn’t make a living. It takes years to get permanent residency. This isn’t like going to the DMV and getting your driver’s license. It also takes unbelievable quantities of paperwork. My university-educated mother struggled with it, and it boggles my imagination to think of farmworkers having to deal with it.

Illegals who’ve been here less than two years could get temporary guest worker status. That would create a permanent class of workers who could not vote. They would have no recourse–none, zip, zilch–against exploitation. If they made any waves, like say asking for an extra bathroom break, they could be fired and sent home. Citizens wouldn’t care because it didn’t affect them. But soon, citizens who wanted better-than-slave labor conditions would find themselves replaced by guest workers. Guess who would benefit hugely from this. Guess who’s the biggest supporter of the “Immigration Reform.”

As BottleofBlog puts it so well:

That’s the ugly hilarity of Republicans proposing an immigration bill. It’s that simple. … These are people who get their jobs from scaring the bejesus out of you about open borders, when what they really want to do is pave a giant highway across the border. And these are people who earn a living by whipping up your ugliest emotions at people who are getting something on your dime, when really, you’re getting something on their dime–cheap food, cheap service, cheap whatever.

And the cost is spread out to all of us.

My take on the economics of illegal immigrants is that the sense of being ripped off is way overblown. Kids in schools and people in emergency rooms are easy notice. People forget what stuff would cost if illegals weren’t there to work for next to nothing, and to depress other menial wages. (In my books, the latter is not a benefit, but we’re talking about people who don’t want anyone to cost them anything.) It’s also hard to put a price on how much more our foreign affairs would cost if billions of dollars in remittances were not sent home, were not keeping whole populations out of desperation, and weren’t helping to prevent the resulting (expensive-to-Americans) revolutions, wars, sabotage, attacks, nationalizations of businesses, mass refugee movements, and all the rest.

Besides, if illegals require taxpayer-funded services, whose fault is that? If you, as a US citizen, have an employer who doesn’t pay the outrageous cost of health insurance, you too are one of the millions of citizens using emergency rooms. Would you be depending on charity if you had coverage? Of course not. So, is the situation your fault for getting ill? Or the employer’s for sloughing off costs this society expects them to shoulder? What we’re really complaining about is that illegals aren’t being paid a living wage and that some of them don’t pay taxes. They’d be happy to do both. Ask them, if you doubt me.

Moving on to arguments that might seem to have validity, what about the fact that illegal immigrants are, in fact, illegal? They broke the law. They shouldn’t break the law.

That is true. Nobody should break the law. This includes the US itself. As MaxSpeak notes, the US has made such a mess of Central and South America that hosting hardworking people is the least we can do. Not all of the mess we made was “illegal,” but some of it was legal only in the sense that slavery was once legal. Words were written on paper to sponsor criminality. That doesn’t make it legal in any real sense of the word. Look at US actions, including recent ones like the Nafta legislation that flooded Mexico with enough cheap agribusiness corn to kill whole corn-growing regions. Then look at immigrants who are crossing the border because they’d rather not starve to death. I just cannot get worked up about the criminality of the immigrants.

The other problem with sending all the illegals home is that it is impossible. The Amerindians did not issue visas. If the first settlers were illegals, so is everyone they brought in after them. (That is the current logic, I believe. The children of illegals are not supposed to have a right to citizenship.) So, the rest of us should just go “home”? And where would that be? On the other hand, if hanging on long enough somehow makes it okay, who’s to define what is “long enough”? It’s a bit convenient if long enough means I’m okay, but you’re not.

Another bugbear is security. After all, anyone could be among those undocumented millions flooding across the border.

That is also true. But recent terrorist attacks by foreigners in the US were all the work of legal foreigners. They were on student visas, or tourist visas, or otherwise quite well known to the INS. Terrorists need to have enough money to commit their terrorisms. They aren’t going to be paying some smuggler a couple of thousand dollars for the privilege of walking across a lethal desert for a week or two. They fly in. And they don’t pick fruit. Sealing the Mexican border to prevent terrorism is like searching Granny’s jogging shoes while letting whole container ships offload without inspection.

I’m not saying that countries have no right to control their borders. On the contrary, I think the current inhabitants of a country do have the right to object to mass immigration that would change their world into something else. Ethnic Tibetans have a right to object to the land grab by the Han Chinese. Ethnic Fijians have a right to find some way to preserve their culture despite the enormous number of Indians brought in by the British to work the plantations. (And, yes, I realize that gets into very thorny issues like the Palestinians and Israeli Jews, or the Dutch and citizens of their former colonies. I have thoughts on that, too, but that’s a topic for another post.) Cultures, especially endangered ones, have a right to preservation, even if it is not yet written into law.

The US, however, is one of the few countries with almost no claim to this right. It’s a nation of immigrants. US culture is mainly about doing your own thing. At the highest levels, that includes the Bill of Rights and it really is a contribution to the human story on our planet. However, that isn’t pegged to any single ethnic group or to any race. In the US, talk about loss of our “culture” by invading hordes from across the border isn’t really about culture. It’s about richer immigrants who want the poorer ones to shut up and work.


(Other links: Krugman. Brad Plumer: a series of good posts at the end of March-beginning of April with excellent links to the economics of the issue.)

Technorati tags: immigrants, immigration reform, illegal aliens, HR 4437

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I knew it

You knew it.

Now (April 18) The Guardian has figured it out:

“Bloggers and blog-readers are ‘influentials’ – the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles.”

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Get the Fashion Police out of politics!

I’m Caucasian, I’d never even heard of Cynthia McKinney until a few days ago, and I’m not a big fan of her chip-on-shoulder politics. I’m also disgusted by some of the discussion now swirling around her.

Some background: she’s the first black Congresswoman from somewhere in Georgia. Congressfolks don’t have to pass through metal detectors, and the Capitol Hill police recognize them as they beetle on by. Except in McKinney’s case, one didn’t recognize her, grabbed her arm, coming up from behind I believe, and she swung round and hit him on the chest. Major flap instead of just apologies all around.

That was El Stupido reaction #1.

Then the Capitol Hill police start talking about charges for assault, or something. El Stupido reaction #2.

The flap builds. McKinney apologizes for her part in it from the House floor. A good idea. Better late than never.

Then I see a news report somewhere (Scripps?) with a headline that it’s time for her to go. She should resign her seat and go back to Georgia, or something. Hello? This is the same Congress that has members like Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Duke Cunningham, and so on and on and on. But this is the first time I’ve bumped into a call for resignation almost as soon as the flap broke out. This is the same Congress that is selling the Constitution to make toilet paper, and the worst thing that has ever happened is an aggressive reaction on the part of a person caught by surprise. Give me a break.

Now–and this is what made me write this–I see a piece in the Washington Post examining . . . what? A history of similar incidents and people’s reactions? How the Capitol Hill Police have started “Recognize Your Congresspeople” classes? Why there was such an over-reaction to one person’s testiness? No.

The article is about how bad her hairstyle is.

Cynthia McKinney has appeared at a news conference with her “hair standing all over her head.” (Robin Givhan, Washington Post) McKinney’s spokesman was asked the penetrating question of whether the style had been done by a professional or the Congresswoman herself. “[D]ismissing queries about it seems a bit disingenuous, since so much of her public persona … has been based on her hair,” says the reporter.

(Yes, I’m sure. People in Georgia voted for her because they said, “Oh, wow, she has trouble with her hair too. Just like me. Send her to Congress.” Admittedly, people are supposed to have voted for Bush because he mangles words like a “regular guy,” so maybe there’s something in this.)

Apparently, McKinney changed her hairstyle and therefore the policeman didn’t recognize her.

Right. And all those black people look so much alike, y’know, I mean, how could you expect him to?

No larger issues here. Nothing to see. Move along. Talk about hair and clothes.

No wonder the Constitution is being shredded into waste paper.

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Of Cosmic Significance

I mean it.

1) Neutrinos have mass. This means we may have found a significant chunk (not all, but some) of that missing “dark matter” you were worried about. (Minos experiment at Fermilab by Dr. Lisa Falk Harris and others. Understandable explanation and links to the research at the BBC.)

2) A new fundamental particle may exist. Axions. These are sort of like photons with a tiny bit of mass, if I understand the gist, which I probably don’t. (Somewhat understandable explanation and links at physicsweb.)

3) The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, launched in 1972 and 1973, are not where they should be according to the known laws of physics. Something is holding them back. “Each year, they fall behind in their projected travel by about 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles)” (Pioneer Anomaly, Planetary Society). Given that they’re out at the edge of the solar system where it meets interstellar space, and that they travel tens of millions of miles a year, the discrepancy is tiny. But it’s there. And it shouldn’t be.

4) Gravitons may have–finally!–been detected. Tajmar and DeMatos (European Space Agency) detected an effect around spinning superconductors that they say provides the first empirical evidence for a gravitomagnetic field. The size of the gravitomagnetic field that was induced can be explained if the (theoretical) gravitons are assumed to be much heavier than predicted by theory. The really neat thing about this is that empirical evidence of gravitons could ensue, and then actual study of the beasts. And then, at long last, we (well, pointy-headed physicists) could start to understand gravity.

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New Orleans, post-Katrina update

I used to live there, still have friends there, and even I didn’t know most of this stuff. Poppy Z. Brite provides a much-needed update. She’s an author, who writes wonderfully weird tales, so check out her site, while you’re at it.

The following quotes the blogpost:

WHY NEW ORLEANS IS NOT OK, SEVEN MONTHS ON

Occasionally I’m asked by friends Not From Here, “New Orleans is better now, right? You had Mardi Gras!” or “Are you doing OK?” or some variation. Sometimes, particularly if they’re contemplating a visit, I even try to reassure them: it’s very possible to have a good, safe time here; the French Quarter is fine; lots of restaurants and bars are open. In truth, though, New Orleans and most of its inhabitants are very much Not OK. I present to you a baker’s dozen facts about life in the city seven months after the storm. Some are large, some small. I think many of them will surprise you.

1. Most of the city is still officially uninhabitable. We and most other current New Orleanians live in what is sometimes known as The Sliver By The River, a section between the Mississippi River and St. Charles Avenue that didn’t flood, as well as in the French Quarter and part of the Faubourg Marigny. In the “uninhabitable sections,” there are hundreds of people living clandestinely in their homes with no lights, power, or (in many cases) drinkable water. They cannot afford generators or the gasoline it takes to run them, or if they have generators, they can only run them for part of the day. They cook on camp stoves and light their homes with candles or oil lamps at night.

2. There is a minimal police presence, and most of it is concentrated in the Sliver. Homes in other parts of the city are still being looted, vandalized, and burned.

3. Many parts of the city have had no trash pickup — either FEMA or municipal — for weeks. Things improved for a while, but now there are nearly as many piles of debris and stinking garbage as there were right after the storm.

4. There are no street lights in many of the “uninhabited” sections, which makes for very dark nights for their residents.

5. Many of the stoplights, including some at large, busy intersections, still don’t work. They have become four-way stops (with small, hard-to-see stop signs propped up near the ground) and there are countless wrecks.

6. There is hardly any medical care in the city. As far as I know, only two hospitals and an emergency facility in the convention center are currently operating. Emergency room patients, even those having serious symptoms like chest pains, routinely wait eight hours or more to be seen by a doctor. We have, I believe, 600 hospital beds in a city whose population is approaching (and may have surpassed) 250,000.

7. Most grocery stores, many drugstores, and countless other important retail establishments are only open until 5, 6, or at best 8:00 PM because of the lack of staffing. This is only an inconvenience for me, a freelancer, but it’s crippling for people who work “normal” hours.

8. The city’s recycling program has been suspended indefinitely. We talk about restoring the wetlands that could buffer us from another storm surge, but every day we throw away tons of recyclables that will end up in the landfills that help poison our wetlands.

9. Cadaver dogs and youth volunteers gutting houses are still finding bodies in the Lower Ninth Ward. Of course these corpses are just skeletons by now — the other day they found a six-year-old girl with an older person, possibly a grandmother, located near her — and they may never be identified. The bodies are hidden under debris piles and collapsed houses. This is in the same section of town that some of the politicians are aching to bulldoze.

10. Thousands of people who lived in public housing were forcibly removed from their homes. It is now being suggested by much of the current power structure, including our very liberal Councilman at Large Oliver Thomas, that they not be allowed back into these homes unless they can prove they had jobs before the storm or are willing to sign up for job training. (Many of you may agree with this, and I did too, sort of, until I really thought about it. Hadn’t they already qualified for the housing? What about the ones who had jobs that don’t exist anymore? How can they find jobs in New Orleans if they don’t live here?)

11. There are still flooded, wrecked, and abandoned cars all over the streets, parked in the neutral grounds, and in many cases partly submerged in the canals out East. Now that it’s campaign time, Mayor Nagin is trying to come up with a solution for this, but he thinks maybe we should wait for FEMA to do it (!!!!!) and he claims the best removal offer he’s gotten so far was “written on the back of a napkin.”

12. Many of the FEMA trailers — you know, the ones costing taxpayers $70,000 each — have been delivered to homeless New Orleanians but cannot be lived in because the city doesn’t have enough people to come out and do electrical inspections, and the trailers need a separate hookup instead of being hooked into the house’s power supply, and a dozen other damn fool things. While these trailers sit empty, there is an easily constructed, far more attractive structure called a “Katrina cottage” that could easily be built all over south Louisiana. It costs about $25,000 less than the flimsy, uncomfortable trailers. FEMA refuses to use it because they’re not allowed to provide permanent housing.

13. A large percentage — I’ve heard figures ranging from 60 to 75% — of current New Orleanians are on some form of antidepressant or anti-anxiety drug. The lines at the pharmacy windows have become a running joke. When a visiting “expert” gave a Power Point presentation on post-traumatic stress disorder recently, the entire audience dissolved into hysterical laughter.

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God is no excuse

I’ve had it with being bullied by bigots hiding behind cutouts of gods made in their own image. Enough already.

Burn witches for God. Kill heathens for God. Let people die of Aids for God. And so on and on and on and on. The latest was that God is so huffy about having his picture taken, it was worth killing people over it.

Enough with pretending that these so-called religions pre-empt every other value, from free speech to life itself. To hell with them. Let them go back where they came from.

God is no excuse for killing people. Anyone who pretends so, is not religious. God is no excuse for destroying women. Or for throwing acid in their faces, or for pretending they’re half-human. God is no excuse for letting children starve, while forcing women to produce starving children. God is no excuse for ANY suffering inflicted by one human being on another.

Enough with the rest of us losing all our fight the moment someone pulls out a God-shaped facsimile. The Vatican didn’t condemn the genocide of the Jews when it happened, and it took them damn decades to mumble an apology. Don’t tell me that’s not a shame on all Catholicism. Don’t tell me something is a religion when its leaders would rather protect their priests than condemn sex crimes against children. We’re told that Islam doesn’t actually have anything against women, that all the anti-women sentiment in Islamic countries is cultural. Fine. Then condemn the people who use the religion to justify their “honor” killings and all their hate crimes. Make women judges and imams (and, for the Catholics, priests). Until then, don’t make excuses for hatred.

God is no excuse for spewing hate speech, not even in a sermon. Especially not in a sermon. God is no excuse for spewing lies. If the facts don’t agree with your particular god-story, then tough. God is no excuse to shout down the facts. Especially since God is supposed to have made them.

The irony is that hiding bigotry under a flag full of God is idolatry, in the real meaning of the word. That would be funny, if it didn’t cause oceans of suffering.

People talk of culture wars and clashes of civilizations. Damn right there’s a clash. It’s between people of good faith, with or without a religion, and theocrats dictating how others should live.

It’s time we stopped letting them get away with it. Stop dignifying the theocrats’ excuses with the name of religion. They may be weird cultural practices, or cults, or delusions, or power grabs. People who advocate hurting other people don’t worship God, and we have to stop letting them pretend they do. God is no excuse for the things they do.

Technorati tags: freedom, democracy, human rights, theocrats, fairness, Islamism, literalismfundamentalism, totalitarianismCharlie Hebdo

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