I approve this message: write in Jesus’ name for president in the November elections.
It’s the only principled choice you can make!
I suppose if you’re Catholic you could write the Pope’s name in. I have no problem with that, either. The Supreme Court would probably approve that, as well, given its current constitution.
My father-in-law was one of those quiet guys who had a secret. He had a box full of medals from World War II, which he didn’t display and didn’t brag about, but the grandkids could ask to see them and he’d let them look at them, and maybe say a few reluctant words about what they were for, if pressed. He was a Marine, and not one of those REMFs, either — he’d been one of the defenders on Midway atoll, and had been boots on the ground in the Iwo Jima landing, and had fought in the jungles of Guadalcanal. I may be a pacifist myself, but I had to respect the personal bravery of a guy who experienced some of the fiercest fighting in the war, and he earned every one of those medals.
So now the US military is considering awarding medals for heroism to goddamned drone pilots: people who sit in an air-conditioned bunker far from the frontlines, playing a video game that lets them turn distant human beings into bugsplats. There is no risk here, except maybe for carpal tunnel inflammation, and there is no sacrifice, no bravery, no struggle. They’ve done nothing to earn recognition for heroism.
Maybe it’s just as well the older generation is dying off. I would think it hard to attend a veteran’s meeting and compare your medal for storming a machine gun nest to the medal some guy got for flying a model airplane. Heroes just aren’t what they used to be.
You know, if I violated tax law and then flaunted the fact to the IRS, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I’ll get slammed down hard and fast. So why do churches get a free pass?
Since 2008, pastors of some churches have openly supported and advocated specific political candidates in sermons to members in early October in an event referred to as "Pulpit Freedom Sunday". According to Reuters, videos of these sermons are sent to the offices of the IRS.
According to section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, the provision of the tax code from which these churches derive their tax-exempt status, a compliant organization must not "participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of … any candidate for public office."
The IRS has failed to remove the tax-exempt status of these churches despite their violations of tax code. This must change, and the law must be applied equally to everyone.
Don’t you suspect that many of the officers obligated to enforce the law are also members of these same kinds of churches, and are motivated to neglect their duties by a conflict of interest?
Maybe there should be a requirement that all IRS agents be atheists. That would certainly improve the popularity of atheism!
Unbelievable. They don’t just reject science, they don’t just despise women, they don’t just want to silence labor, Republicans hate art.
Over the weekend, the governor, Nikki Haley, destroyed the South Carolina Commission for the Arts — the cut was such that the 20 people who work there cannot show up to work today, can’t even go into their building, because of liability issues. The arts in South Carolina brings in $9.2 billion and creates 78,000 jobs at a cost of 1.9 million to the Arts Commission. It’s a phenomenally stupid cut — our state has one of the two best arts in education programs in the country! We don’t do a lot well in South Carolina, but this is one of the few we really do. And now we’re about to be the only state in the country without a public arts agency.
Read the whole thing. There’s a contact form there, you can contact the responsible idiots and tell ’em off; you should do that especially if you’re from South Carolina, but I think a world-wide show of solidarity would also be good.
Tell the philistines what you think.
We do not have a rational drug policy. There are potent and dangerous drugs that are socially accepted because hey, we’ve always drunk alcohol and smoked cigarettes, while there are milder, far less dangerous drugs that are damned because they’re new and unfamiliar. And so we throw people in prison for long jail terms if they are caught with some marijuana, while people can go out every weekend and drink themselves into an abusive, obnoxious state, and we just tell them they’re cool.
It is possible to take an objective look at the effects of various drugs on individuals and society, and ask “where’s the harm?” Here’s an example, the dangers of an array of drugs characterized and ranked.
There’s lots of small print there, so you may have to click to embiggen, but I can tell you what the extremes are: alcohol is the worst, and psychoactive mushrooms are the least. Heroin and meth are bad, LSD and Ecstasy are among the least dangerous.
And there are good biological reasons for this ranking.
The particular type of neurotransmitters that a drug affects in the brain has a huge impact on the harms the drug can contribute to. A major similarity between the drugs that tops the list above is that these drugs, in addition to other areas in the brain (click here for a discussion), directly affect the dopaminergic “reward system” in the midbrain. This area has been shaped and “designed” by millions of years of natural selection in mammals to reward for adaptive behavior such as sex and the intake of nutritious food. When they are artificially stimulated by drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine they have adverse consequences for addiction and health (that is the reason why drugs such as nicotine and heroin have the characteristic addictive effects). Drugs at the bottom of the list, such as MDMA (ecstasy), mushrooms and LSD stimulate mainly serotonergic neurons (several places in the brain), and does not directly stimulate the mesolimbic reward systems (which is why they are not addictive).
Wouldn’t it be interesting if we had laws and penalties that were actually informed by science, rather than fear and naivete?
I will add, though, that there’s more to this than just biology: there are the sciences of sociology and pyschology that have to be taken into account. We’ve done the experiment of trying to criminalize alcohol in the same way we do heroin; it didn’t work.
Jon Ronson has an interesting take on American economic disparities: He interviews 6 people, each one with 5 times the income of the previous one, going from an immigrant dishwasher to a billionaire.
Each story is worth reading, but the overall take is bizarre: all the people at the bottom of the ladder rationalize their position, saying that they wouldn’t want the worries of the next person up, while pitying the one below them. Except the guy at the top: he’s just angry at all those slackers below him. You can see how the system maintains itself, and why nobody is getting outraged at the tax disparities in this country.
I also learned that Jon Ronson, who’s open about his income, makes more money than I do. A lot more. Next time I meet him, I’m going to have to break the pattern and rage furiously at him and demand that he give me some of his cash. IT ISN’T FAIR, you rich bastard! It’s just not fair!
Good news: our hobbled, rudimentary effort at providing reasonable health care to the Republic — “Obamacare” — was supported by the Supreme Court. Somebody must have stuffed Scalia in the closet for this one.
It’s truly lovely. How can anyone support the Republican Party after reading the Texas platform? It’s a national embarrassment.
I heard about the Texas Republican Party platform on the Atheist Experience last night, and today Zinnia Jones has a post about it. Have you seen this thing? The Texas Freedom Network has a breakdown of its contents.
Declares separation of church and state is a “myth” and calls for Congress to withdraw federal court jurisdiction over cases involving religious freedom and the Bill of Rights
Calls for teaching creationist arguments in public school science classrooms
Opposes the sale and use of emergency contraception and backs the Legislature’s war on women’s health programs
Rejects “any sex education other than abstinence until marriage” in public schools
Adopts a radical position that would essentially bar abortion even in cases of rape, of incest or to save a woman’s life
Advocates for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act, minimum wage laws and the Endangered Species Act as well as the abolishment of the Environmental Protection Agency
Attacks LGBT Texans as a threat to families and objects to laws that would protect them from job discrimination and hate crimes
Calls for further funding cuts for public schools following draconian cuts by lawmakers in 2011
Seeks to change the 14th Amendment to limit citizenship by birth only to those born to a U.S. citizen
Threatens federal judges with impeachment if they don’t toe the far right’s line in controversial court cases
It also says we should end the Social Security program, arm college students, requiring presidential candidates to submit a birth certificate, and a return to the gold standard.
You know, though, this is just the Texas Republican’s idea of a better nation. These party platforms at the state level are hammered out by the ideological extremists of the party; when it gets to the national level, the rough edges and spiky knifey bits will be smoothed out and puttied over by apparatchiks who know they have to win over a majority of the country, so most of this will go away or be buried in cryptic language and dog-whistles.
But the thing about these state platforms is that they expose the primal id of the party. I’ve been to local Democratic caucuses, for instance, and I see the extremists of that party at work — and also most of their ideas get pared away at the state and national level, too, smoothed out to a blander, more conservative muddle. You can see better where the party faithful want us to go, while the party leadership always steers a more middling course.
At the Democratic caucuses, you see people exposing the real dreams of their group. And at Democratic events, they want things like: free education for everyone; free healthcare for everyone; more open immigration policies and education and healthcare for immigrant children, legal or otherwise; an end to all wars; reduction of the defense budget; more support for labor unions; protection for endangered species; more environmental restoration; full civil rights for gay people; closing Guantanomo Bay; and just generally making the universe a friendlier place. They’ll also toss in some nonsense about organic herbal medicine or increasing subsidies for corn ethanol production, so they aren’t perfect, but one thing they are is idealistic.
Contrast that with what the dedicated Republicans propose. Sure, Democratic dreams are too often impractical, but they at least value human beings, every one of them, and want all of us to live safely and securely, with hope for personal improvement. The Republicans always sound so sour and stupid, dedicated to shutting down everyone who isn’t a white heterosexual male; it’s an “I got mine” attitude that seeks to influence the state to enhance their privileges.
This is why, even when we’re saddled with a moderate conservative jerk for a president, I have to hold my nose in November and pull the lever for the asshole with a (D) after his name. I don’t like him, I think he betrays our values at every turn, but I like the people of the Democratic party far more than I do the people of the Republican party. I’m not going to vote for Obama, ever; I’m going to vote for that guy at the Minnesota caucus who suggested that we cut the defense budget in half and spend the money on universal health care instead, and I’m going to vote against the guy in the Texas caucuses who thinks our most pressing concern is preventing gay couples from having a happy life.
