It was awfully nice of him not to demand my immediate arrest

R. Joseph Hoffmann really doesn’t get it. He’s written an article that is basically doing nothing but decrying blasphemy on some very strange grounds: that it’s stupid and pointless and cowardly. He also compares me and the desecration of a cracker with Terry Jones and the burning of a Koran that led to riots in Afghanistan, differentiating between the two of us in that I was just a petty grandstander, while Terry Jones’ intent was to purposely fire up Muslims into violence, and therefore Terry Jones “needs to be charged with and convicted of murder”.

Well. I guess the trial would be only a token formality if Hoffmann had his way — he’s calling for a conviction already.

I am put in a weird position. The purpose of his essay is to contrast Myers and Jones: I am merely a stupid, shallow showman, while Jones is an actively evil thug, and therefore, Myers can be dismissed while Jones must be arrested for murder. I suppose I should be grateful that I’m not going to have charges brought up against me, but again, Hoffmann misses the point.

Let us grant Mr Hoffmann the full weight of his characterization. Imagine (it’s easy if you try) that I’m some capering fool, posturing annoyingly from my remote, secure, isolated fastness in the godless fortress of Morris, Minnesota, surrounded by 5000 atheist fanatics (I shall call them…my athassins!). I am completely safe, since there isn’t a single religious person anywhere in Minnesota who has any clout with the university board of trustees or the local gun club, and I am free to give religion the raspberry, which I do. Let us also assume that Terry Jones is a brilliant evil mastermind who has devised a nefarious plan to destroy the entire Muslim world with an elaborate sympathetic magic ritual in Florida, inflaming the passions of devout Muslims far beyond anything mere Predator drones and bombs can do, and setting them to commit an orgy of violence which, so far, seems to mainly have led to the death of UN peacekeeping forces, rather than any Muslims.

So yes, let us assume that we are both, in different ways, malign feces-flinging subhumans, a clown and a monster.

In what way does this rationalize the Catholic and Muslim reactions? Hoffmann is straining mightily to turn all the focus on a jerk and a hate-monger, while neglecting the actual results of religion’s actions: that some people are so dedicated to their delusional superstitions that they will threaten or even commit violence at slight provocation. We live in a world where some Catholics will froth at the mouth and send death-threats and call for people to be fired over insults to a scrap of magic, holy bread; we live in a world where some Muslims will kill random people if someone insults their magic, holy book. That ought to be recognized as the real problem and a call for more criticism, not less, of religion, yet what is Hoffmann’s desired solution? Lock up the transgressor in Florida for the murders in Afghanistan.

I don’t much like Terry Jones — he’s just another religious fanatic — but it seems rather illiberal and self-destructive to start imprisoning critics of religion because ignorant mobs might indulge in religiously-motivated violence in response. Personally, Hoffmann has left me off the hook this time, but that could change: if an outraged Catholic had retaliated against my cracker offense by shooting a nearby Unitarian, Hoffmann-logic would make me guilty of murder. In a world ruled by Hoffmann-logic, martyrs for the faith would get a two-fer: kill an atheist, and then blame another atheist for incitement. And then, as a bonus, the killer’s actions would be excused as justifiable homicide.

Shades of gray

Sometimes, issues demand nuance. This is a complicated world and there are a great many subjects that simply aren’t reducible to binaries — we do a disservice to the subtleties when we discard them in favor of absolutes. And often I can agree that we need depth and breadth of understanding if we’re to navigate a difficult situation.

But sometimes the issues are black and white. Sometimes the answers are clear and absolute. And in those cases, attempts to bring out the watercolors and soften the story by blurring the edges do a disservice to reality. There are places where there are no ambiguities, and the only appropriate response is flat condemnation. And we witness them every day.

All around the world, people are killing and being killed; they are crossing the clearest, least arbitrary border we have. You don’t come back from death, and you can’t atone for extinguishing another life. There are no excuses. Life is not a video game, where your targets are smears of pixels with no history and no awareness. In the real world, those bodies are people, with 20 years or 30 years or 50 years or 70 years of stories and connections behind them, part of a web of humanity, and their every action tugs on the people around them. Dehumanizing them, as we often do, dehumanizes us. You are the killer, but you are also the killed.

  • …the enemy walks down the road, a distant figure in the sights of your rifle. You squeeze the trigger, there is a sharp report, and bam, the enemy is smashed backwards like a cheap tin target in the penny arcade, and a red mist slowly settles over his still form. You trot forward and look; a clean kill, the bullet went through the left eye and blew out the entire back of the skull, brains and blood are sprayed for yards behind the target, the face is a ghastly ruin of slumping flesh on the shattered armature of the skull.

    …you are walking down the road, anxious to be home since there are reports of the enemy lurking in the neighborhood, but still thinking ahead to mundane concerns, like what you’ll have for dinner or what the family has been doing while you were away, when…nothing. You suddenly cease to exist, without warning, without awareness, just abruptly, you are no more.

    Hours later, friends find your body and carry it home, and stretch it out on the table. On the wall above it is your wedding portrait. Your partner clutches your rigid hand, the flesh like cold clay, and looks at the portrait, and looks at the wreckage of your beloved face, and knows there will be nightmares, and that every happy memory will always be overlaid with the horror of this moment.

  • …you watch the crowd fill the streets, and when the numbers seem adequate, you tap the numbers into your cell phone, and instantly the car blooms into a flare of fire, and as you watch the bodies fly and flail away from it, you hear the rumbling thud of the detonation. You rush forward with everyone else — it wouldn’t do to be spotted guiltily scuttling away — and you see one of the enemy lying in the road, eyes blinking in shock, staring at the sky. You watch the lips move, but no sound emerges — you know the shock wave of the explosion would have pulped lungs that now lie in sodden useless tatters in the chest. The target tries to cough, spasms, blood gushes from mouth and nose, and then the feeble movements end, and the eyes glaze, seeing nothing ever again.

    …you join friends as you walk to the market, when a great hand lifts you and flings you against a wall and bounces you into the street. You can’t hear anything but an overwhelming ringing; you feel disoriented and confused; something is wrong with your body, it feels weak and helpless. You look up at the sky, it’s clear and blue and beautiful, and you dream that your mother will come and pick you up and all will be well, so you try to call out to her, but you can’t catch your breath, and all you feel is a vast welling bubble of pain rising up and up and breaking…and then darkness.

    Your mother arrives later, with people from all around the neighborhood. They file through the makeshift morgue, sorting through the bloody clothing and the shattered body parts, trudging through a charnel house to identify their loved ones, or fragments of them. One of the attendants has washed the blood and dust from your face and, unlike so many others, you look like one sleeping — your mother hopefully puts a hand to your cheek, feels the chilled motionlessness, and knows there is no hope ever again, and feels a shadow of that rising bubble of anguish herself.

  • …the enemy walks into the shop, and from your hiding place, you paint the wall of the building with your laser. Your headset whispers; the pilot of the plane flying invisibly distant, far above you, acknowledges the signal and calmly informs you that the package is inbound. Moments later, there is a streak of light from the sky and a thunderclap of sound and fire and dust and smoke, and the building vanishes, becoming a shallow hole in the ground surrounded by a corona of rubble.

    …you open the door and walk into the room, greeting your friends, when, in an instant, you are vaporized, your flesh so thoroughly churned in the violence of the explosion that all that will remain are small clumps of blood and dust sown across the landscape. No recognizable trace will ever be recovered.

    All your children will know is that one day their parent left them, abandoned them, disappeared somehow in the diffuse chaos and instability that is their life. They shall inherit anger and a sense of betrayal, but remember little else about you.

  • …you are part of the mob. How dare they insult your people! Your fury rages, and together you grab sticks and stones and knives and you surge to their home, where the guards stand surprised and frightened by the spontaneous rush of howling people. You overwhelm them. You stand over one, stomp on an exposed arm, and see it bend and break; you pick up a rock, kneel down, and see the enemy’s face, hear the screams of pain and terror, smell the shit and blood as the enemy’s guts are spilled on the dirt, and raise that rock and smash and smash and smash. The body is dead, but everyone continues to tear at it, ripping scraps of smeared clothing and even souvenirs of flesh and passing them back to the crowd behind them, where they are waved like bloody flags.

    …you stand momentarily as the mob charges, torn between duty and fear, and then you try to break and run …but too late. There are too many to fight, they batter you everywhere, you can’t think — all you know is agony and horror and you feel fingers tearing at your eyes and your limbs breaking and the sharp tearing of knives and finally numbing, crushing blows to the skull, and then you’re dead. But the mob doesn’t stop, and continues to rend and mutilate.

    Your body is sent home in a sealed coffin. There is a decorous funeral, the words are solemnly said, the family weeps. In the somber procession, though, suddenly your father drops to his knees, broken. He remembers the laughing child he carried on his shoulders, and he can’t reconcile that moment with this one. He wants to know what happened, but he can’t know. He wants to have helped, but he is helpless. And there is no way to overcome this grief.

I know what it is like to lose someone you love, and it’s a pain so great that I can’t imagine reaching out to cause that pain in anyone else; what killers must do is blind themselves to the enormity of their act and wall themselves off from the empathy that all human beings should have. They also must bury that portion of their mind that can sympathize with their victims in an avalanche of pretexts, these excuses that later apologists will call “nuance”, or “shades of gray”, or “complications”. And they will dredge up the familiar roll call of empty ghosts to water down the evil of what is done. They will call it God. Country. Honor. Justice. Revenge. The priests and the mullahs and the politicians and the generals are experts at softening the contrast and blurring the edges and persuading one person that that other person over there, so much like you in every way that matters, deserves to have everything important extinguished and brutalized and disregarded.

They are so damned good at it that they can stir up the killing frenzy over anything at all. A gang of fanatics, driven by superstition and ethnic bigotry, kill thousands in a terrorist attack in one country. So zealots stir up their own froth of superstition and ethnic bigotry, and convince the targeted country to attack and kill people of yet another country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack. What a waste of lives, yet everyone on both sides is smug and confident that the deaths on the other side were warranted.

Or even more ridiculously remote: one side takes such extreme offense at the lack of reverence shown by a few people on the other side towards some copy of a sacred object, that they then slaughter unrelated targets.

Stirred up by three angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at a Florida church, thousands of protesters on Friday overran the compound of the United Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said.

…

Unable to find Americans on whom to vent their anger, the mob turned instead on the next-best symbol of Western intrusion — the nearby United Nations headquarters. “Some of our colleagues were just hunted down,” said a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Kieran Dwyer, in confirming the attack.

These twelve people were human beings, reduced to a statistic in a newspaper article, and dehumanized and exterminated by a mindless mob, inflamed by religious fanatics. Similarly, the hundred thousand or more killed in Iraq, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, all of these are also genuine, thinking, feeling human beings, wiped out in a cold-hearted calculus of delusion and greed. There is no justification sufficient for these acts.

Yet somehow we get lost in the wrong questions. Do we have the right to burn the Koran? Is it unreasonable to think that Afghans might have cause to be angry? Should we not defend the right of fascist politicians to live, and perhaps it is OK to grant a limited license to murder to certain people if they are of the correct political stripe or the appropriate faith? Shall we weigh the sins of a Florida preacher against those of three Afghan clerics, and come up with a number that will tell us which is the greater offender, and by how much?

I’m an extremist in this debate, I will freely confess. I hold an absolute view that no killing is ever justified, that individuals have the necessity to defend themselves against assailants, but that even that does not grant moral approval to snuffing out the life of another. Don’t even try to pull out a scale and toss a copy of the Koran on one side and the life of a single human being on the other — the comparison is obscene. Do not try to tell me that some people are ‘moderates’ when they tolerate or even support and applaud war and death and murder for any cause, whether it is oil, or getting even, or defending the honor of wood pulp and ink.

The bone is bleached white. The flesh is burnt black. The blood splashes scarlet. You can’t render it in grays and pastels without losing sight of the truth.

So pregnancy means a total surrender of autonomy?

This is how to handle a depressed person:

On December 23, 2010, Shuai, a 34-year-old pregnant woman who was suffering from a major depressive disorder, attempted to take her own life. Friends found her in time and persuaded her to get help. Six days later, Shuai underwent cesarean surgery and delivered a premature newborn girl who, tragically, died four days later.


On March 14, 2011, Shuai was arrested, jailed, and charged with murder and attempted feticide.

Don’t get pregnant, ladies! It means that every risk you might take becomes a criminal offense! I always thought it was a joke to criminalize suicide, too, but here’s a case where they’re actually prosecuting a woman for the crime.

Next up: every time you kick a man in the balls, you are a mass-murderer.

Who believes Governor Jan Brewer actually wants to help non-whites?

I don’t think I do — her history of policies in the state just screams racist. But she has suddenly become a concerned egalitarian, signing a law to protect minorities and women. She says. The law is actually designed to increase control of the reproductive rights of women and minorities — it criminalizes abortion if it is done for certain reasons.

Under the new Arizona statute, doctors and other medical professionals would face felony charges if they could be shown to have performed abortions for the purposes of helping parents select their offspring on the basis of gender or race.

First, is this a real problem? Are there very many white women demanding abortions because, to their great surprise, the father might have been black or brown? Are there many Hispanic women clamoring to get that pale-skinned mutant out of their uteruses?

Second, it’s a peculiar approach: abortion is legal. It is invasive and irrelevant to intrude on a woman’s personal decision in these matters, yet they plan to arrest people for their reasoning? Weird.

Third, look who’s being punished: the doctors. So a woman may be referred to a specialist ob-gyn who, with an appropriate evaluation of the patient’s health and emotional stability, carries out a legal medical procedure…and then later the doctor can be arrested if the patient makes a racist or sexist remark about the aborted fetus? That makes no sense.

This isn’t a bill to defend minorities. It’s a bill to make the position of abortion doctors even more precarious and difficult, and to give the state a pretext to lock them up in jail. It’s nothing but intimidation.

The Tea Party isn’t racist, no sir.

This email from Tea Party Nation clearly shows their true egalitarian nature.

What is keeping America’s fertility rate up are immigrants – both legal and illegal. There are those in America who are continuously attacking the family, bent on redefining marriage and have established anti-family government programs. This has led to downward pressure on our national total fertility rate. All of these actions are done in the name of various causes such as: reducing unwanted pregnancies, delaying child bearing to further career goals and even promoting childlessness and promoting adoption as a better option. Child bearing has become something distasteful to many women, an unwanted and painful experience to be avoided rather than embraced. All of these programs, ideals and ideologies are doing one thing and one thing only – reducing America core TFR to the point of no return. The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population in America is headed for extinction and with it our economy, well-being and survival as a uniquely America culture. This county is dying not because it is aging, it is dying because of infertility as public policy.

See? It’s just that white people are the only ones who can be truly American.

I have a suggestion to help fix those problems: those reluctant upper-class white parents already farm out the housekeeping and childcare to illegal aliens, we just have to push back the responsibilities a little further, and make little brown foreigners use their uteruses to carry little white children, letting them do the ‘distasteful’ work. Manuring the landscaping, slaughtering chickens, harvesting the fruit, and now plopping out the babies…same difference, just another dirty job.

NIO is doomed now

The animal rights kooks were crowing about their ‘victory’ in intimidating one student, but that’s no victory at all. Alena Rodriguez is a real person who was targeted with an intense campaign of harassment and threats, and who was made to fear for her life; all they accomplished, though, was to reveal their hand and show what kind of contemptible terrorist tactics they will use. They’ve engaged in a little consciousness-raising of their own, but it’s all going to work against them.

Speaking of Research has a new article on their opponents’ recently invigorated embrace of terrorism, and all it has accomplished is to strengthen researchers’ resolve.

Though NIO may refer to students as the “Soft bellied target of the vivisection complex” who “can be shut down with relative ease,” they should study their history. In the winter of 2005, the ALF launched a campaign that targeted students at Oxford University in the UK, declaring them to be “legitimate targets”. Did the students bow to the threats and arson attacks on their facilities? Not a chance! The students responded by launching the Pro-Test movement in support of animal research, and gave the ALF a drubbing which helped to turn the tide against AR extremism in the UK. The hate and lies of the ALF were simply no match for the solidarity shown by students and scientists at Oxford.

Similarly, the extremists at NIO may claim one victory, but they fail to see how much dedication they create at the exact same time.

At UCLA, faculty and students alike have been the target of a heinous and criminal campaign of violence and harassment. How many students have quit animal research and/or changed their careers? To our knowledge: none. Indeed, students at institutions like UCLA have become some of the most passionate and committed defenders of animal-based research.

At NIO, they see victories in stories like these. We say those victories are hollow and pathetic. If you share our view, leave a comment below showing support for Alena and other students like her. The scientists of tomorrow need to hear our voices.

What?

Newt Gingrich is thinking about running for president, and has predicted the future:

I have two grandchildren: Maggie is 11; Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.

The next election is going to be hilarious, except for the painful face-palming.

Hi, Joe!

William Cronon is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and he recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that placed the recent labor troubles in Wisconsin in historical context — he explained how many of the progressive policies in that state were actually the product of Republican lawmakers, that the state has long been a battleground between the progressive and conservative wings of the Republican party, and that a good part of the liberalism in the state is due to a reaction against the autocratic hand of Joe McCarthy, who violated the traditions of the state and its people and basically inspired a lot of revulsion. And it concludes by pointing out that Governor Walker is making the same mistakes as McCarthy, forgetting the lessons of good government.

It’s a great essay, even-handed and informed, and reminded me that yes, once upon a time, Republicans weren’t the party of insane corporate tools who got their instructions direct from god, and that there are common principles of good government that liberals and conservatives could agree on.

The response has been interesting (in the sense of the Chinese curse) for Cronon. The Wisconsin Republican party is dunning him with an open records request demanding all emails that he has received mentioning any of the players in the recent labor conflicts in Wisconsin. Why? Because they’re planning a witch hunt with Cronon as the prey, and they want to find any damning connection that will allow them to claim that Cronon is an apparatchik and propagandist, rather than an independent historian with a serious scholarly focus. Cronon himself has put together an analysis of the request — it’s an effort to silence a critic with intimidation.

Well, hello there, Joe McCarthy! How nice of the Rethuglicans to confirm the comparison in his op-ed for him.

You should read Cronon’s own discussion, but also, Gary Farber has assembled a thorough discussion of the tangled path from history professor to stage-prop villain. His greatest crime may have been exposing to the light of day a quiet organization, ALEC, that has been drafting the most conservative legislation for our government in collaboration with the wealthiest corporations in the country.

You just knew there was going to be a connection to greed and big money in there, didn’t you?