Democracy! Whisky! Sexy!

Ah, remember the good old days back in 2003 when every right wing blog in the country was proudly reciting that phrase? There was Dean Esmay, and Instapundit, and I recall that even James Lileks was flaunting it on the sidebar to his web page. We had invaded Iraq, and we were victorious, and the cute adorable Iraqis loved America and were asking for all the things we loved in their charming broken English.

It made me wanna puke. It was patronizing colonialism all over again, with every chickenhawk proudly patting themselves on the back for a ‘victory’ gained in bloodshed and destruction.

They aren’t saying it so much any more.

It’s ten years later. The invasion failed to bring democracy or whisky to Iraq, and no, it certainly wasn’t sexy. It was damned expensive: almost 4500 US dead and 32,000 wounded, and so many dead Iraqi civilians, on the order of hundreds of thousands, that every time the topic comes up the right-wingers still start squealing that all the numbers are wrong, no matter what they are.

Eventually, the U.S. spent $60 billion to rebuild Iraq and the special inspector general estimated in its report that at least $8 billion of it might have been wasted. The Pentagon estimates that the long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq cost $728 billion.

It makes me sick every time I consider it, so just go read Charles Pierce’s commentary on the war.

This is the one event on which the country’s chronic historical amnesia cannot be allowed to bring itself into play. The country was lied into a war by a raft of criminals, greedheads, and geopolitical fantasts. These latter were enabled by a cowardly political opposition and a largely supine elite press. Hans Blix was right. Paul Wolfowitz was wrong. Robert Fisk was right. David Frum was wrong. The McClatchy guys were right. The late Tim Russert was wrong. Eric Shinseki was right, and Anthony Zinni was right, and Joe Wilson was right, and George Packer, Michael O’Hanlon, and Richard Perle were all wrong. George H.W. Bush was right (in 1989) and his useless son was stupid and wrong. There is no absolution available to any of the people who helped the country down into this epic political and military disaster no matter how lachrymose their apologies or how slick their arguments.

George W. Bush should spend the rest of his days dogged by regiments of wounded veterans. Richard Cheney should be afflicted at all hours by the howls of widows and of mothers who have lost sons and daughters. Colin Powell — and his pal, MSNBC star Lawrence Wilkerson — should shut the hell up about how sorry they are and go off to a monastery somewhere to do penance for what they didn’t have the balls to try and stop. This catastrophe killed more actual people than it killed the careers of the people who planned it and cheered it on. We should all be ashamed. And we’re not.

None of the people who perpetrated this long national nightmare have ever suffered any consequences for it. They still idle languidly in wealth and respect, drawing encomiums and hefty speaking fees from the extremist think tanks that all also promoted the war. George Bush paints pictures of dogs that he cheerily signs with his presidential number. Meanwhile, Bradley Manning is tortured for their sins.

Every one of those goddamned pro-war media pundits ought to be rounded up and stuffed in Manning’s cell, while he is released. The establishment politicians — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice — who lied us into this destructive debacle deserve worse, and it makes me question the wisdom of our Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, because every day they should be doused in buckets of blood and forced to walk a gauntlet of war widows throwing offal at them. Monsters, every one.

Democracy. Whisky. Sexy. That phrase should fill us with shame.

Apparently, I need to clarify myself

Melissa McEwan has written two more posts on misogyny in atheism. They’re both good and highly recommended, but I have to clarify something.

McEwan takes exception to something I wrote.

And then there were the atheist men, in most cases ostensibly sympathetic to my position, who piped up to let me know that I wasn’t talking about them, that they were one of the Good Ones. Even Myers linked to my list with the curious line: “Melissa McEwan has some Advice to Atheist Men. The long list sounds very good, but I do have one reservation: none of it is exclusive to atheists or men. I think it’s more Advice for Decent Human Beings.”

I’m not sure why my “long list” (of 18 suggestions) would engender reservations simply because it is not “exclusive to atheists or men,” unless one is keen to deflect accountability for being part of the group being urged to decency.

And one commenter interpreted that to a remarkably vicious degree.

Where the HELL does Meyers get off asking for advice and then saying “oh, well that doesn’t apply to me.” Uh yeah. It does.

So let me clarify. I was not saying I disagreed with the list in any way. I was not saying that McEwan was not talking about us ‘good atheists’. I was not trying to deflect accountability away from atheists. Most importantly, I was not saying it doesn’t apply to me — a bizarre charge, since I most certainly aspire to belong to the category of decent human beings, and I would hope that being decent human beings would be one of the goals of all atheists.

It was a reservation that wasn’t really a reservation — it was an appreciation of the universality of the suggestions, and a comment that the title of McEwan’s post was not adequate to describe the usefulness of the content.

I would definitely hope that more atheists would pay attention to her work.

Why I am a happy atheist

One reason is that we’re winning. Christian web sites are full of articles complaining about how young people are leaving the church; Ken Ham even wrote a whole book about it. Here’s an example of the genre from someone called Marc5Solas.

The statistics are jaw-droppingly horrific: 70% of youth stop attending church when they graduate from High School. Nearly a decade later, about half return to church.

Half.

Let that sink in.

There’s no easy way to say this: The American Evangelical church has lost, is losing, and will almost certainly continue to lose OUR YOUTH.

I let it sink in, and for some reason I just can’t stop grinning — a nice wicked devilish grin. Yes, yes, yes, the church is increasingly archaic, and it even helps when people make lists of everything that is wrong with the church, because they aren’t seeing beyond the problems. It’s lovely. Just keep hemmoraging, godly institutions, I’m happy to stand back and watch you bleed out…although I wish you’d stop thrashing about, you’re doing some damage in your death throes.

10. The Church is “Relevant”:

He’s actually complaining that the church tries hard to adapt to modern culture — it’s a typical conservative view that the old ways were better. It ignores the fact that religion always changes: the 19th century Catholic and Baptist religions were different than the 20th. But that wouldn’t fit with their pretense of holding eternal truths.

But hey, churchies, please do insist on locking yourselves into antique dogmas. I’m all for it!

9. They never attended church to begin with:

This one is related to #10. All them newfangled singalongs and pizza parties and hep cat stuff are distracting — make the kids sit and listen to a sermon for two hours, that’ll root ’em in the church.

8. They get smart:

My favorite! It’s those atheists who treat kids as intelligent questioning people that suck them in. Yay us! I mean, damn us. How dare we.

7. You sent them out unarmed:

To counter those atheists, the church has to get back to theological basics. Yeah, right. One problem there: that’s exactly what drove me away from the church, was learning what kind of bullshit I was expected to believe.

6. You gave them hand-me-downs

We’re back to the old-time religion whine. Kids are told to express their feelings, but those are lousy evangelical tools. Teach them the traditional stuff.

Please. Please do.

5. Community

Another complaint about the fuzzy wuzzy touchy feely modern church. Jeez, this guy really hates anything that deviates from his specific version of the faith.

4. They found better feelings:

More complaints about subjective faith over the virtues of dogma. I think he’s really padding his list of 10…so far it’s really about 2.

3. They got tired of pretending:

Christ, I’m so bored. It’s more of the same.

2. They know the truth:

More. Of. The. Same. Jebus. Now he’s complaining that kids taught this “god is love” stuff don’t have a proper appreciation of the fact that ‘god is law.’

1. They don’t need it:

Has he ever considered that maybe kids leave the church because the yahoos running it are boring as fuck? Yet again he’s complaining that an alternative liberal church let’s people find their way out of the rigid trap he thinks they ought to build.

Now you see why we atheists should be happy. Not only are young people abandoning that stupid mess of nonsense called church, but the priests are crankily sawing off the branch they’re standing on. May the whole rotten mess collapse soon.

Prayer poll

Not another one of these — all over the country, towns open their council meetings with pointless prayers, and when someone points out that that is unconstitutional and stupid, they go whining to their local paper or radio station and make an appeal to the Christian sheep in their region. So this is just one out of a multitude, but go ahead, try to wake up the parochial little pissants in Rowlett, Texas.

Should prayer continue before Rowlett City Council meetings?

Yes 69%
No 31%

So what else is new?

In a classic bit of strange understatement, Gizmodo reports that HeLa cells are weird.

Recent genomic sequencing on the popular "Kyoto" HeLa line reveals known errors common to cancer cells like extra copies of certain chromosomes, but also shows unexpected mutations like strong expression of certain genes and segment reshuffling on many chromosomes.

Uh, “recent”? HeLa cells were isolated from a cancer. Cancer cells have these common features, like genomic instability, aneuploidies, and loss of cell cycle control that we all know about. These particular cells were selected for properties that differ from healthy undisrupted human cells.

I also don’t know anyone studying them as models for humans (although I have heard animal rights people claim they’re adequate substitutes for mice, which is just as ridiculous).

So no surprises, and no understanding of cell culture research. We’re done!

Around FtB

This may be redundant — you all cruise every blog on the site already, right?

  • Ed is asking for donations, and exploring ideas to get an ad-free site. Give him your input!

  • The Digital Cuttlefish thinks God is a misogynist. I think he’s right.

  • Greta has a guest post — it seems that being a member of atheist and gay groups is grounds for suspicion.

  • Stephanie can recognize a reasonable dialogue when she sees it.

  • Jen is unimpressed with the paleo diet fad.

  • Ian’s reputation as a stud is forever demolished.

  • Maryam discovers that the Muslim Brotherhood is opposed to a UN resolution against violence against women. She doesn’t seem surprised.

  • Taslima is optimistic about the future for Muslims — that they’ll grow out of Islam.

  • Brianne talks about rape.

  • Ashley talks about rapists.

  • Miri talks about rape and justice.

    Steubenville seems to have stirred up a theme.

  • Avicenna deconstructs a bad Thunderf00t video. It seems he thinks a short clip of a girl video game character punching a guy in the crotch invalidates everything Anita Sarkeesian says.

An object lesson for those who doubted

About 48 hours ago I posted a link to the Twitter feed of the egregious Michael Crook, who had used that fine microblogging service to share loathsome, horrible, explicitly pro-rape opinions regarding Steubenville.

Within minutes, this clown — in the very first comment on the thread — objected, saying that my calling attention to Crook was “feeding a troll.” Twenty minutes after that first comment, this other clown chimed in.

Both claimed that by calling out an egregious “troll” — not a rape advocate, but a “troll” — I had played right into Crook’s game of trollish 12-dimensional chess. Given him “what he wanted.” etc.

That’s manifestly not true, as it turns out. I don’t know what percentage of the attention Crook got came from my link. Perhaps it was a large amount, given the Pharyngula Phyrehose. Perhaps it was just a couple of percentage points. But Crook got a lot of unfavorable attention from all over the feminist and anti-rape sections of the Webonets. Should have made him utterly gleeful, right? As a ‘troll.”

Crook’s Twitter feed is gone. His website seems to be down. Is it reasonable to conclude that he decided there was too much attention being paid to him? Seems so to me. Though perhaps both Twitter and his web host decided to take him down against his will. Which seems less likely, given that the stuff Crook was saying was merely among the most egregious of the hundreds of rape supporters opining on Steubenville, most of whom seem not to have been censored.

I’m guessing he found the public response unpleasant.

Yes, forestalling further trollish objection, Crook is indeed entitled to freedom of speech. And so are we. It would seem sentiments like Crook’s in favor of rape don’t stand up to actual discussion. If people had decided not to “feed the troll,” Crook would very likely still be spreading his pro-rape views online at the moment. But enough people used their own rights to freedom of speech to let him know they found his views repugnant. If he’d been out to troll, he’d have relished that. If he’d had the courage of his convictions, he’d still be arguing.

But instead, that fearless defender of rapists seems to have shut the fuck up for the moment.

That tiny minority of commenters on that thread who scolded those of us who wanted to call Crook’s garbage out publicly: if we’d all listened to you, the world would be a slightly worse place than it is now. I suggest you go to your rooms and think about what you did.

And for those of you who think your voice doesn’t matter? It does. And thank you.