We have seen evil, and it is us

Here is why we need Wikileaks — because when our soldiers carry out Collateral Murder, we should know about it. Good journalism should be exposing this stuff for us.

This is a video shot from an American helicopter gunship in Iraq. It shows real human beings being shot to death. I wish I could unwatch seeing it now, so be advised before you click on that play button…it is horrific.

A couple of Iraqi journalists working for Reuters are slaughtered in the above clip, gunned down from a distance by American troops who claim their cameras are weapons, that they’re walking around with AK-47s and RPGs…which I simply don’t see anywhere in the clip. I see a small group of civilians casually walking down a city street.

Perhaps the killers were merely mistaken, as happens in war. Perhaps they had better views of weaponry than can be seen in this video. But that doesn’t explain what happened next, when a van pulls up to help a wounded man and they open fire again, fully aware of what was going on below them, and fire several bursts into the people and into the van.

Maybe they could see weapons more clearly than I can. But then how did they fail to notice two small faces peering out of the passenger side window of the van? They shot journalists and children, all the while laughing and congratulating themselves on the ‘nice’ pile of bodies they had produced. And when they see soldiers on the ground rushing injured children to aid, they say, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”

I am ashamed. We are the storm troopers, the murderous invaders, the butchers of children, the laughing barbarians. We aren’t in Iraq to help those people, our troops are there to oppress them…when we aren’t gunning them down outright.

Oh, and go ahead, turn on your TV news. The top stories on CNN are the iPad, Jessica Alba planning to adopt a baby, and Tiger Woods. Doesn’t that fill you with confidence?

(via John Cole)

Now that’s what atheists look like

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I have something in common with these guys. That’s the Polish death metal band Behemoth, and you can see that they look like real atheists: cadaverous, lots of black leather and spikes, with nice metal jewelry in odd places on their clothing.

Uh, none of that is at all like me.

Here they are in performance. I rather like it, but be warned: it’s loud and harsh. See if you can spot the resemblance now:

Get it?

OK, I’ll explain, since I guess it isn’ quite so obvious. At the beginning of that clip, the lead singer, Nergal, is tearing up a Bible and throwing the pages out to the audience. Hey, I’ve done that in some of my talks!

Remind me, though, never to do that in Poland. Poland has a law on the books making it a crime to insult the Roman Catholic Church. Offend a Catholic priest, and they can throw you in jail for two years. It’s an even vaguer version of a blasphemy law, and it’s actually being used to silence a marginal and slightly weird critic of the church.

Oh, sure, Nergal looks scary and fits a certain stereotype. But he’s nowhere near as horrifying as this fellow:

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That’s Marcial Maciel, good buddy to Pope John Paul II and Pope Ratzi, leader of an obscenely rich conservative organization called the Legion of Christ, serial pedophile, and vile monster.

Nergal has been charged with insulting the Catholic church and faces a trial that could put him away in jail for a few years. If he dodges that, or when he gets out, I think he should change his act for safety’s sake. Instead of dressing like a refugee from hell and tearing up Bibles, he ought to put on a priest’s cassock and clerical collar and rape a child on stage. Not only would it be more frightening, but it’s behavior the Church does not find offensive. Unless you’re caught, of course.

More faith-based evil

Cults are all about control, and small children must be very hard to control.

The leader of a religious cult was “outraged” when a 1-year-old boy did not say “Amen” before a meal and ordered her followers to deprive him of food and water until he died, a Baltimore prosecutor told jurors Monday.

Another horrifying detail: the mother of the boy went along with the punishment and watched him waste away…all because she wanted to be accepted as a member of the cult.

Showing children God’s love… with a rubber hose!

I know from experience how hard it is to raise kids — they tend to be willful and are always trying to think for themselves, and you know we can’t have that. But now there’s an answer, a book titled To Train Up a Child, which provides all kinds of useful tips on how to bring up children respectful of the word of God, using “the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules”.

Doesn’t that line right there sell the technique to you?

It worked for Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, who applied “biblical discipline” to two of their children. Now one is very, very quiet and causes no trouble at all, while the other is positively angelic.

The Schatzes were arrested Saturday morning after their adopted daughter, Lydia, age 7, stopped breathing. She was subsequently pronounced dead.

Her 11-year-old sister, Zariah Schatz, remains in critical condition at a Sacramento children’s hospital, though she is showing some signs of recovery. The two were adopted at the same time with an infant girl, now 3, from the same African orphanage about three years ago.

Prosecutors allege the two victims were subjected to “hours” of corporal punishment by their parents on successive days last Thursday and Friday with a quarter-inch-wide length of rubber or plastic tubing, which police reportedly recovered from the parents’ bedroom.

Police allege that the younger girl was being disciplined for mis-pronouncing a word during a home-school reading lesson the day before she died.

The two young girls reportedly sustained deep bruising and multiple “whip-like” marks on their back, buttocks and legs, which authorities believe resulted in significant muscle tissue breakdown that impaired their kidneys and possibly other vital organs, said Ramsey.

She won’t be mispronouncing any more words, nosiree!

I wish I were a Christian. I think I’d discipline Kevin and Elizabeth with a rubber hose. But I’m not, so I’m going to have to settle for a humane and civilized response, like taking their children away for their own safety, and trying, and I would hope convicting, the two for torture and murder.

I also hope they don’t get a judge like Cherie Blair.

Tragedy at the University of Alabama Huntsville

Tenure reviews are extremely stressful: imagine a job evaluation in which you may be told that you’ve been doing a fine job, you’re doing interesting work, but you aren’t quite as dazzling as your employer would like…so you’re fired. And then, because academic jobs in your specialty are scattered very thin on the ground, you get to spend a year struggling to find a new position (with the same horror show finale possible), and pack up and move to a completely different part of the country, uprooting all your connections that you may have built up over the last 5 or 6 years. What makes it even worse is how much you lose, since if your tenure committee approves you, you get a secure job for the rest of your life.

The stresses do not excuse Amy Bishop, however, who attended her tenure review meeting and when it did not return a favorable result, pulled out a gun and murdered and wounded her colleagues. Three are hospitalized with injuries, one is in critical condition; these three are dead.

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Gopi Podila
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Maria Davis
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Adriel Johnson

I’m horrified. Good people with years of training and years of productivity ahead of them, with families and loved ones left behind, all wiped out in a flash of insanity, and leaving a body of students who are going to be scarred by this one awful event.

I’m also dismayed — I’ve been at meetings like that many times, where we walk in with trust in our colleagues that the worst we will face is a bitter intellectual argument. I’ve sat at tables with my fellow faculty lined up around them, and never before thought how easy we’d be as targets for one mad person to fire upon. The ease of access to handguns is a great social evil, one that too easily simplifies the conversion of disagreement into lethal combat.

Express your anger and grief here, or on Drugmonkey’s open thread.

Abel has more on her academic status — she seems to have had active grants and a foothold in industry.

And holy crap — Bishop shot and killed her brother in a shotgun accident in 1986! Or maybe not so much an accident — some reports say it was during an argument.

At least James Dobson will approve

Focus on the Patriarchy has always favored punishing children to teach them right from wrong, so I can’t imagine them being too upset at this news: a fellow’s 4-year-old daughter was having trouble memorizing her ABC’s, suggesting that she needed some extra incentives to excel. So Dad waterboarded her. How sweet that Daddy cared so much about the importance of her education.

I’m going back to teaching in the fall. Will this be considered a reasonable educational technique? I’m thinking of putting a rack in the lecture hall and carrying around some thumbscrews just to help my students learn better.

I detest these people

Why do so many of our political leaders support creationism? Here’s a disturbing glimpse of the way the neo-conservative elite thinks, discussing specifically Irving Kristol:

Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. “What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that ‘the truth will make men free.'” Kristol adds that “Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol’s] minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences.”

Kristol agrees with this view. “There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people,” he says in an interview. “There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

The masses must be kept ignorant and pacified. The ruling elite will keep the truth locked up, and dole out “truthiness” to the mob.

I think whenever you start talking about different “truths” for different people, you’re using the word incorrectly. There is a truth about the world, and what Kristol is actually suggesting is that there are lies, not truths, to be given to children, students, and those adults he does not fancy having in his privileged club of power.

I’ll also note that their cynical strategy does not work. Cultivating ignorance in the people in the belief that a cunning elite will be better able to manage them leads to situations like we’re facing now: where the ignorant and stupid are encouraged to thrive and take power, and where the Bushes and Becks and Palins rise to the demagogic top and find the mob malleable and easy to push into extremism and insanity. I suspect that an “intellectual aristocrat” would be appalled at the unintended consequences of his wretched plan…

American pious irrationality expands worldwide

I tend to think that most religious people are not interested in flying planes into buildings or making themselves a belt out of dynamite, but that doesn’t excuse them: they still make irrational decisions with evil consequences, they are simply a bit more remote and indirect. The same people who would be horrified at the idea of personally lynching someone for blasphemy have no problem with praying that someone else will do the job for them, as we all saw in the reaction to that little cracker incident last year. One of the most revolting examples of this principle at work is the recent attempts to create a legal justification for imprisoning and killing homosexuals in Uganda, a situation which, as it turns out, was fomented by American evangelical homophobes. This is not to excuse Ugandans, who were apparently primed to commit violence against gays already, but it was our preachers who sparked the flame.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

That’s pretty much standard anti-gay rhetoric here in the US; we’re inured to it, and unless you’re a victim of it, it’s fairly easy to ignore it — which is why the evangelical haters are still allowed to babble on the news. These wretched liars for Jesus have their audience that loves to hear their nonsense about gays as predators on young boys, being evil and hating heterosexual marriage, and all that other dishonest crap, including their bizarre touting of ‘cures’, but at least we in the US also have vocal proponents of equality and civil liberties. We just need more of them.

In Uganda, though, that rhetoric and false assumption of authority led to horrid abuses of civil rights, like the anti-homosexuality bill. At least now, though, we can get specific and name names for the people responsible for inciting hatred of gays in Africa.

The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.

I’m sure they are trying to get away from the guilt…but the thing is, if you read the anti-gay literature here, that’s the direction they want to go in: the criminalization of sexual acts that they find repugnant, the encouragement of loathing of people who don’t love the people they approve. They want homosexuals to be despised, second-class citizens who don’t have all the rights of good Christian heterosexuals. The only reason they are running from it now is that it happened far faster in Uganda than they expected, and they’re suddenly standing their with a smoking gun and blood on their hands, rather than at a safe remove with the apparatus of the state peeling away the rights from people, one by one.

And look who else is involved, President Obama’s friend:

Uganda has also become a magnet for American evangelical groups. Some of the best known Christian personalities have recently passed through here, often bringing with them anti-homosexuality messages, including the Rev. Rick Warren, who visited in 2008 and has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. (Mr. Warren recently condemned the anti-homosexuality bill, seeking to correct what he called “lies and errors and false reports” that he played a role in it.)

First you associate them with evil, then you disenfranchise them, and only when they’re sufficiently dehumanized do you get to kill them. America’s Christian evangelists are on step one, and working hard on step two; Uganda’s problem is that they moved on to step three a little prematurely.

Danish cartoonists proven wrong!

Oh, yeah, but they screwed up. Probably the best known of the inflammatory anti-Islam Danish cartoons was the work of Kurt Westergaard, who drew the prophet Mohammed with a bomb for a turban. It was a very misleading portrayal of a Muslim, which was demonstrated lately when a Somali fanatic tried to break into his home and kill him while yelling “revenge!” and “blood!” …with a knife and an axe, not a bomb!

I’m sure Westergaard will be publishing an apology and retraction now. Or maybe he’ll just have to admit his error and redraw Mohammed with more personal nasty weapons of death and destruction bristling from his turban.

The poor oppressed Muslim man was shot and received some minor wounds, and has been arrested. Westergaard is fine; for some mysterious reason, he had security alarms all over his house and a safe room where he and his 5 year old granddaughter, who has probably learned something from this encounter, could hide. All signs of a guilty conscience, no doubt.

(Danish source, and horrible google translation, if you’re interested.)

There ought to be a qualifying exam for parenthood

It’s another of those cases where people unfit to be parents abuse their children. Samuel McGehee is accused of murdering his youngest son, suffocating him to death because he wouldn’t take a nap. That’s horrible, but the next question I have to ask is why this guy was allowed in the same room with small children after what he did last year.

A detective testified that in March 2008, McGehee, concerned about the family’s financial state, decided to circumcise his other son at home, using a filet knife.

“There was severe damage to the shaft of the penis,” Detective Shawn Jenkins said. “There was a lot of skin removed.”

The 3-month-old’s scrotum was also lacerated during the procedure, Jenkins said. The child has subsequently endured extensive reconstructive surgeries, and more are expected.

What is it with these religious kooks and their children’s penises? I’m the father of two boys, and aside from assistance with basic hygiene when they were very small, I pretty much left their business alone…and the idea of taking a knife to them was unthinkable. I really wonder what crazy fundagelical church this man went to that made circumcision such a priority.

If the law had taken this lunatic aside when he’d committed such a stupid crime and told him that his parenting rights were immediately suspended, there’s another little boy who might still be alive today.