Is that border magical?

What strange transformation occurs within humanity as we trace the population northward, from the United States to Canada? A recent survey of Canadians (especially the Quebecois variety) revealed something:

Buried away in the survey was a single question that caught my eye immediately: Personally, do you consider yourself to be a religious person? A minuscule 22% answered yes. Presumeably, a whopping 78% of Quebecers do not consider themselves religious.

Across the whole of Canada, 36% answered yes, which is a little worse…but still, where has the United States of America gone wrong?

Them Southerners and their backward ways

You know what Southerners are all like? They’re all

  • Rural,

  • poor and lazy,

  • stupid,

  • red-necked conservatives, and

  • all the same.

Wait a moment…you mean those aren’t all true? If you think they are, maybe you need to read this article on Southern stereotypes.

I have not spent much time in the South (wait…maybe the stereotype is true, because y’all haven’t been smart enough to invite me to come on down and give a fire-eating atheist talk), but one thing that has persuaded me that pinning blame on Southerners is a huge mistake is that I live in rural Minnesota, about as Northern as you can get without turning inside out over the top of the swing and becoming Canadian, and those stereotypes could be equally well applied here. People are people everywhere, and the entire goddamned country is afflicted with god-fearing tea-partyin’ Jebus-fellatin’ racist warmongering American exceptionalists who hate edumacation and gays. You can’t give Alabama the dirty squink-eye without doing the same to Pennsylvania and Arizona and Idaho and yes, even Massachusetts and Minnesota. It’s a huge mistake to focus our concern on geography rather than uneducated social attitudes.

Besides, I want to see the South become a bastion of liberal progressiveness, like say, Austin or Chapel Hill. I’m not interested in seeing it turned into a convenient ghetto for bigotry.

Obama is a secularist just like he’s a socialist

Mitt Romney is arguing that Obama is fighting for secularism.

I think there is in this country a war on religion. I think there is a desire to establish a religion in America known as secularism.

They gave it a lot of thought and they decided to say that in this country that a church — in this case, the Catholic Church — would be required to violate its principles and its conscience and be required to provide contraceptives, sterilization and morning after pills to the employees of the church. … We are now all Catholics. Those of us who are people of faith recognize this is — an attack on one religion is an attack on all religion.

I’m an atheist fighting against religion. If it were me running for office, Romney could legitimately make that case. But Obama is openly Christian, he has expanded support for faith-based charities, he ends speeches with “god bless”, he attends prayer breakfast and praises faith. He is no ally of mine in this cause, even if he’s willing to acknowledge the existence of atheists now and then.

To argue that religious organizations, in their dealings with the profane material world in payroll and insurance and taxes (and in getting financial support from our secular government), ought to also abide by the laws in those dealings, is not an attack on religion. Romney is apparently one of those people who wants to bestow all kinds of special privileges on the churches…but then, that’s his whole life, privilege.

I have a new favorite insult!

I shouldn’t be this petty, given the ghastliness of these recently disclosed documents from the National Organization for Marriage. NOM is openly linking up with the Catholic Church, which is providing millions of dollars for campaigns to poison people into hating gays. They’re talking about fomenting hatred: they want to “interrupt the process of assimilation” of Hispanics into the wider culture by making gay marriage a sticking point; they say “The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks – two key Democratic constituencies.”

This is despicable. They’re targeting minorities to train them to find a new reason to hate, an artificial reason that widens the gulf without addressing the real problems of discrimination.

That isn’t funny. Their methods aren’t funny, either: they have lots of money, and they’re throwing it into hate-mongering ads, just like the Mormon church did with Proposition 8. But one of their proposed tactics did tickle my warped sense of humor:

"Hollywood with its cultural biases is far bigger than we can hope to be. We recognize this. But we also recognize the opportunity – the disproportionate potential impact of proactively seeking to gather and connect a community of artists, athletes, writers, beauty queens and other glamorous non-cognitive elites across national boundaries."

Yeah, they’re going to recruit famous dumbasses who can fall for their lies and toxic message…because don’t you know how effective Victoria Jackson has been as a spokesperson for tea-party insanity? But I do love how they openly admit that they have to recruit stupid people…ahem, I mean “non-cognitive” people… to their cause.

Let’s help NOM out and make a list of non-cognitive elites they can recruit. I’ll start.

Victoria Jackson
Pat Boone
Chuck Norris
…

Yes! Glamor and inanity go so well together!

Who else hates the Transportation Security Administration?

You can’t imagine how much I detest TSA. OK, maybe you can; I think my contempt is widely shared. It’s the arbitrary rules, the immediate awkward responses to last week’s threat, the implicit understanding that the overbearing security theater is going to continue forever without end, with ever-escalating nonsense, and the fact that you do not dare voice that outrage to the TSA, or they can and will make your travel unpleasant or even impossible. They are anti-free speech and anti-reason.

You know one little thing that just annoys the heck out of me? When I travel abroad, other countries don’t make me take my shoes off to go through security. Are they seriously at greater risk than we are? Or is this just random rules-tossing that we are obligated to suffer through?

One guy who has been fighting back is the security expert, Bruce Schneier. Right now, this week, he’s in a debate on The Economist with Kip Hawley, former head of the TSA, defending the claim that “changes to airport security since 9/11 have done more harm than good“. Schneier is cleaning Hawley’s clock. It’s one of the more entertaining and informative online debates that I’ve ever read.

Of course, it really helps that Hawley’s opening statement is this exercise in absurdity:

More than 6 billion consecutive safe arrivals of airline passengers since the 9/11 attacks mean that whatever the annoying and seemingly obtuse airport-security measures may have been, they have been ultimately successful.

You have got to be kidding me. Seriously? That’s your opening salvo? You know, I’ve got this lucky coin in my pocket that scares away tigers. Here’s the proof: I haven’t been eaten by tigers yet.

Schneier, on the other hand, punches hard. I like that in a guy.

Kip Hawley doesn’t argue with the specifics of my criticisms, but instead provides anecdotes and asks us to trust that airport security—and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in particular—knows what it’s doing.

He wants us to trust that a 400-ml bottle of liquid is dangerous, but transferring it to four 100-ml bottles magically makes it safe. He wants us to trust that the butter knives given to first-class passengers are nevertheless too dangerous to be taken through a security checkpoint. He wants us to trust the no-fly list: 21,000 people so dangerous they’re not allowed to fly, yet so innocent they can’t be arrested. He wants us to trust that the deployment of expensive full-body scanners has nothing to do with the fact that the former secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, lobbies for one of the companies that makes them. He wants us to trust that there’s a reason to confiscate a cupcake (Las Vegas), a 3-inch plastic toy gun (London Gatwick), a purse with an embroidered gun on it (Norfolk, VA), a T-shirt with a picture of a gun on it (London Heathrow) and a plastic lightsaber that’s really a flashlight with a long cone on top (Dallas/Fort Worth).

If you’d like to learn more about Schneier, here’s an entertaining account of how he taught a journalist to circumvent airport security. There’s one thing you need to know: TSA is a collection of ineffectual buffoons who are keeping themselves lucratively employed by inventing ever more elaborate, clownish schemes that don’t touch the real security issues.

Can America get any more racist?

My flight home yesterday wasn’t great. I was generally feeling exhausted, and then in the airport, I made the mistake of watching the giant televisions they mount all over the waiting areas. You know, the giant televisions that apparently represent American political thought to every person on the planet who happens to travel through one of our airports. And the news was all about Trayvon Martin. Not about the injustice of a young black man being killed in the prime of his life; not about ghastly gun laws that justify murder; not about the bigotry of the police, who saw a dead black man and a vigilante standing over him, and shrugged their shoulders and let the vigilante walk away; no, different concerns engaged our brilliant news media.

Trayvon Martin had been discovered with an empty baggie that once contained marijuana. Uh, what? Does that matter? Are we now going to declare that past trivial legal offenses justify the death penalty now? If I gunned down that odious racist Dan Riehl, I think I could trust that a little digging would discover that perhaps he had a parking ticket somewhere in his sordid past, or perhaps he shaved the truth on his tax returns. I don’t know of any such crimes, but I’m confident that we could find something ex post facto to slime his reputation and rationalize anything I might do to him. That is, if I thought I was commissioned to act as an executioner for crimes that have not been tried, with the right to deliver the Maximum Penalty for even the pettiest of crimes.

It’s all very Judge Dredd.

And that’s not all! Maybe you’ve seen the usual photo of Trayvon Martin as a smiling young kid in a t-shirt; that’s a sneaky effort used by “hysterical race baiters” to portray him as a normal human being, which he isn’t, because he’s black. So they’ve ginned up photos of random black teenagers (they all look the same, you know) in sagging pants and posturing rudely, all to show how the real Martin conforms to their stereotypes. Or they show other photos of Martin when he’s wearing a hoodie and not smiling…because the sullen black man is dangerous. He better be smiling, and even prancing and singing, or apparently he deserves to be shot.

This seems to be the new strategy of the racist right: if they can show that Trayvon Martin wasn’t like Beaver Cleaver, then they can justify the murder. Trayvon Martin’s crime was not being white enough. They’re going to use this incident to put the whole of black culture — every bit of that diverse group that doesn’t conform to the mandatory Dick and Jane universe — on trial. Black Americans, you better practice smiling real big; you better put away that Wu-Tang Clan stuff and learn to love 1001 Strings and Pat Boone.

That was my ten minutes of outrage in the airport. It made me wonder whether black people might feel a little bit estranged when they step into a giant building like that with huge screens everywhere blaring racist apologetics.

I tuned it out before I ripped the armrest off my chair and started smashing expensive electronics everywhere, and turned to my iPad and the soothing rationality of the internet.

Then I read Jezebel.

Oh, fuck.

OK, people, did you really think pointing me to Crommunist’s post would make me feel better?

Doctor with a conscience

It’s good to see someone standing up against Republican idiocy. What we’ve been seeing lately is right-wing theocrats using doctors as a cudgel to batter women (oh, excuse me: sluts and whores) without stopping to think that maybe doctors could refuse to be their tools.

Come to think of it, doctors get far more training in ethics than politicians do, and it shows.

The obvious first step

Rick Santorum has promised a “war on porn if elected.

“Current federal ‘obscenity’ laws prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier,” Santorum wrote in the statement, adding that these laws should be “vigorously enforced.”

We’re going to have to define porn and obscenity for this to work. As a first step, I propose using use of the filthy word “Santorum” as an unambiguous indicator of pure smut.