Richard Dawkins sure does a fine job of placing sticks of dynamite under people’s chairs and blowing them up. I’ve been out of town and I haven’t even had net access for the past day, so nobody can blame me for this latest round of anti-atheist outrage going on in these parts.
Wilkins is wondering when the real criminals will be punished—he’s talking about the abuses of power by the current Republican administration, ranging from the evisceration of civil liberties in our own country to criminal and unjustified foreign wars, with the concomitant loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. I think I can answer that one.
Never.
Bush will leave office with the praise of his sycophants ringing in his ears, and that will include the national media. He will go off to a happy retirement, smirking all the way, and will only ever appear at voluntary events hosted by other criminals who will be anxious to continue applauding him. Personally, I think that at every public event at which he shows his face from now on, people ought to spit on him…and he and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and the whole rotten gang ought to be shipped off to an international war crimes trial today. It won’t happen.
One reason is the remarkably timid complacency of the citizenry. We have a president who signs away our liberties, and the people just yawn. This is a nation of sheep, bred to follow authority, no matter how odious or insane. It’s frightening how much reverence for authority people will grant to piddling wankers like Bush, or televangelists, or media figures—these people can do anything, and the public will rush to hush anyone who criticizes.
Another reason is historical. Read this account of what the United States has done in the past—along with the sheep, we are a nation of monsters. John Milton Chivington would have been an exemplary soldier in the War on Terror. But, you see, we don’t learn from history: our kids do not learn about the Sand Creek Massacre in school, and they will not learn about Abu Ghraib and habeas corpus in the future.
Our kids don’t even learn about Nixon, except that he was a president; if they are particularly diligent, they might discover some of the press hagiography about him. That’s it.
There’s a fantasy of America the rich and wise and powerful and gracious and self-sacrificing that has a powerful resonance in this country. Unfortunately, we’ve learned that we can close our eyes and wallow in the myth, and we don’t actually have to try and live up to it…and we haven’t. Ever.
Why is it that I, nasty ol’ atheist who is completely ignorant of theology and religious history, can see the parallels in the execution of Hussein, but our theocracy-sympathizing leaders bumble along, failing to see the damning errors of their position? Glenn Greenwald’s post on the ineptitude of the lynching is chilling.
One participant described the meeting this way: “The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, ‘Who is going to execute him, anyway, you or us?’ The Americans replied by saying that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the Iraqis said, ‘This is our problem and we will handle the consequences. If there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.'”
You know, foreign occupying power, powerful religious group agitating for the execution of a hated, charismatic competitor, promises of who will bear the guilt for the deed, metaphorical washing of the hands…jebus, if I know what a counterproductive PR disaster that was for the Pharisees and the Romans, what’s the matter with the American leadership in Iraq? Don’t they read the bibles they thump? Add to that that they’ve apparently done the execution at a time when it is “religiously unacceptable”, and we’ve got a situation that makes Pontius Pilate look good.
I know. They must all be hardcore atheists over there.
The declining scientific content expressed by the National Park Service has been an issue for years; the latest complaints (that I wrote about, and that Wesley Elsberry has now brought up) are just recent flareups of awareness. The National Park Service seems determined to strip out anything intellectually challenging from the experiences in their parks — the ideal seems to be Chevy Chase’s reaction from the movie Vacation (if you don’t know what I mean, here’s a short homage). Pete Dunkelberg has brought a letter in Science from 28 October 2005 to my attention — it accuses the Park Service of dumbing down the interpretive material and turning it into a purely aesthetic experience.
Read the account of Saddam Hussein’s last moments—it’s a strange thing. Hussein was an evil man, but still, he carried himself at the end with strength and courage and a good amount of anger. The whole scene sounds like it was tawdry and crude; the US continues to reinforce its growing reputation for cheap barbarity. And the unseemly guards, with their chanting and sneering at a man about to die…that’s who is going to run that country after we leave? I have no confidence.
I don’t think our country did itself any favors with this act, and Hussein went out of this world a bit more impressively than he had lived in it.
Saddam Hussein has been killed.
He was a venal little monster, but I don’t see that we’ve gained anything by stooping to the level of a third-world thug, and the unseemly haste with which an irreversible act was committed makes it even more sordid and sleazy.
He said that celebrations broke out after Hussein was dead, and that there was “dancing around the body.”
Barbarians.
At this point, it’s safe to say the National Park Service is stonewalling. There is a book called The Grand Canyon: A Different View, written from a young earth creationist perspective, which the NPS has approved for sale in its bookstores. It is a truly appalling piece of crap; I wrote about in in July of 2004, and you can read excerpts from it online. One might argue that the appearance of the book is simply due to a lack of discrimination by the Park Service, which just shovels the gimcracks and gewgaws into their stores to make money, but apparently they try to exercise some due consideration in product placement.
Records released to PEER show that during 2003, Grand Canyon officials rejected 22 books and other products for bookstore placement while approving only one new sale item — the creationist book.
The book is clearly in violation of the standards the Park Service sets for itself; this excellent letter from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility cites the explicit directive from the director of the agency that lays out the criteria.
Historical and Scientific Research. Superintendents, historians, scientists,
and interpretive staff are responsible for ensuring that park interpretive and
educational programs and media are accurate and reflect current
scholarship…Questions often arise round the presentation of geological,
biological, and evolutionary processes. The interpretive and educational treatment
used to explain the natural processes and history of the Earth must be based on
the best scientific evidence available, as found in scholarly sources that have
stood the test of scientific peer review and criticism.
This is a no-brainer. The book should not have been approved in the first place. It should be removed from their catalog immediately. The Park Service should approve and implement training for their staff (which should hardly be necessary; they shouldn’t hire idiots in the first place) to make sure that they are presenting accurate geological information to the public.
“No comment” is not good enough. This disgraceful controversy has been stewing long enough that the continued inaction of the Park Service administration constitutes an implied endorsement of anti-scientific nonsense.
This country is thoroughly screwed up. Compare these two stories.
A man was found guilty of a $2 robbery, released on parole, then sentenced to life in prison after he tested positive for marijuana. It was in Texas, and the sentence has been commuted (after he’d served 16 years for smoking pot), but still, that’s insane.
ExxonMobil was fined $5 billion for their negligence in the Exxon Valdez tanker accident, which they haven’t paid and probably plan on never paying. They just got a friendly judge to cut the penalty in half.
Both sentences occurred at about the same time. Tyrone Brown got to sit in jail for half his life for a petty crime. Lee Raymond got to grow fat and obscenely rich after poisoning the environment, and his company lawyers get to play games with the law.
That’s America.
Thanks to Hilzoy, I’ve learned that our dearly beloved president has enunciated an important principle.
Bush said that despite declarations of piety from Muslim radicals now fighting the United States, he doubted that they believed in God.
“‘Terrorists’ can’t be God-believing people,'” Richard Joel, president of Yeshiva University, quoted Bush as saying.
Before you run off and dismiss this as the ravings of an incompetent, deluded boob, think it through. It means that if someone does something wicked, we get to declare that they must not really believe in God — true faith only belongs to saints. All those angry people in the Middle East? Atheists. People who push buttons to launch cruise missiles? Atheists. People who order people to launch cruise missiles? Atheists. People who set policies that drag us into wars that require people to order other people to kill people? Atheists. Personally, I think people who extort the elderly into mailing them substantial portions of their social security checks are also atheists. People who are wicked enough to try and teach creationism must also be atheists. Only an atheist can do bad things.
Since saints are a negligible minority, it’s now safe to say that America is an atheist country.
Now comes the hard part, though. We have to get all those atheists in America to stop lying and calling themselves Christian, and we have to get all those atheists in the Middle East to stop lying and calling themselves Moslems. I’m not sure how we’re going to get them to confess.
Torture, maybe?
Despite the fact that the scientific evidence supports their innocence, the kangaroo court in Libya has found the six medical workers guilty of intentionally infecting children with AIDS. The mob, at least, is happy.
“For the second time, justice has spoken out with a ruling against those criminals and the punishment they deserve, because they violated their obligations and sold their consciences to the devil,” Abdullah Maghrebi, the father of one infected child, told the BBC.
I can sympathize with a father with a sick child, but in this case, may he continue to live in his devil-haunted world, and may no modern medical care ever come again to his entire pariah nation. No medicine, no vaccinations, no surgeons—leeches and lancets and the usual contrivances of the pre-eighteenth century world should be all they get. That is my curse on Libya. The sad thing is that many of these deluded fools would consider it a blessing.
