The NCSE has a list of recent creationist legislation, and you’ve all been up to no good. I hope you are all chastened now and will strive to throw the inane rascals out of your legislatures at the earliest possible opportunity.
Perhaps you have no idea who Jack Cashill is — he’s not a person of great consequence, but he is representative of the deranged right. I first ran across him as a creationist activist, which tells you right there that he’s a few bushels short of a hogshead. He was featured on A Flock of Dodos as the fervent but somehow, supposedly, reasonable political voice of creationism. He didn’t have two heads, he didn’t tie anyone to a stake and set them on fire, so by golly, he must not be that bad a fellow…which is an interesting phenomenon, that we so readily set aside significant intellectual differences when we humanize our opponents.
But Jack Cashill has gone on to grander and ever more insane things. He’s a regular contributor to Wingnut Daily, that awful online rag of credulous far right wing pseudojournalism, and he authors the kinds of dishonest hackwork that Teabaggers drool over. His latest effort is penning paranoid conspiracy theory books about Obama, and he’s in the news right now for an absurdly bad photoshop job: he or his sources edited a photo of Obama with his grandparents, snipping Obama out of the picture and then claiming that the photo of the three of them had been the real photoshop job. Too bad their hackwork was so awful that they managed to leave Obama’s knee in their so-called ‘original’ photo.
And now, hilariously, Joseph Farah, the kook who publishes WND, has openly admitted that they “publish some misinformation by columnists”, referring to Cashill.
I knew he was bad from the start. It ought to be a gigantic red flag on anyone’s credibility when they are peddling the kind of intellectual dishonesty that we see in creationism, and it’s no surprise when liars of that sort metastasize into politics.
Brace yourselves for a new onslaught of ridiculous Republican anti-woman bills. Alabama is working on bills to declare fetuses ‘persons’ by fiat — they’ll just legally redefine humanity to be a fertilized ovum and all derivatives thereof. They’ll probably get it passed, too.
I suppose if we could get enough dumbass legislators together to declare that vegetables are persons, we’d have to start treating carrots as if they were real people, like laborers and single mothers and college students and Mexicans and all those others the Republicans hold sacred. It won’t make them so, though, not that it makes much difference.
And just to show another tack they’re willing to take, Idaho wants to make all abortions illegal, no exemptions for rape or incest. It doesn’t matter how you got knocked up, lady, you’re having that baby…well, unless you’re the daughter of one of those Republican legislators, in which case you’ll get a ride in daddy’s SUV to that liberal hotbed of sin and perversion, Seattle, where you can get taken care of in a nice clean clinic with caring professionals.
The logic behind this decision is predictable.
“Is not the child of that rape or incest also a victim?” asked Rep. Shannon McMillan, R-Silverton. “It didn’t ask to be here. It was here under violent circumstances perhaps, but that was through no fault of its own.”[…]
The Idaho bill’s House sponsor, state Rep. Brent Crane, R-Nampa, told legislators that the “hand of the Almighty” was at work. “His ways are higher than our ways,” Crane said. “He has the ability to take difficult, tragic, horrific circumstances and then turn them into wonderful examples.”
God is so powerful, he also has the ability to take simple, manageable situations and turn them into tragic, horrific, oppressive circumstances in which the devil’s whores, i.e. all women, can suffer and feel guilt.
By the way, Brent Crane is no more of an authority on this god’s ways than I am, and what he’s really saying is that he can’t think of a rational justification for his evil law, so he’ll just take a shortcut straight to his god the psychopathic joker.
Bryan Fischer (if you know the name, you know lunacy will soon follow) has a plan.
Allowing Muslims to immigrate into the United States, a Christian nation by origin, history and tradition, without insisting that they drop their allegiance to Allah, Muhammad, the Qur’an, and sharia law, is to commit cultural suicide. We believe in freedom of religion for Muslims like we do for everybody else. But if they insist on clinging to their religion, they will need to exercise their freedom of religion in a Muslim country which shares their values: death for those who leave Islam, the beating of wives by their husbands, and the labeling of Jews as apes and pigs.
It’s a very incomplete plan, though, and I have a few questions.
What about those who convert to Islam once they’re in America, or those Muslims who already reside here? And what about those of us who are non-Christians? Will we have an American Expulsion?
I understand Mr Fischer isn’t asking for the death penalty for those who leave Christianity (yet). I will assume he isn’t going to regard apostasy as a crime, then. If a majority of Americans leave Christianity — something that could happen in our lifetimes — will this still be a Christian nation?
It’s nice to take a stand against wife-beating and racism. Say, have you noticed that a lot of Christians do both?
Mike Huckabee recently suggested that every young American ought to be required to listen to every David Barton (you know, the liar and fraud who makes up stories of American history) speech at gunpoint. Have you considered, as an intermediate step, simply requiring listening to 24 hours of continuous David Barton fabulisms, at gunpoint, for all immigrants to this country? It would probably scare all of them away.
On the Venn diagram of politics, the intersection of Mississippi and Republican is a very ugly place.
The world doesn’t always suck! Two tidbits to brighten your day:
Glenn Beck is leaving Fox News, in a move that is claimed to be amicable but is probably more due to the fact that his show loses money for the network.
In one of those very important elections, the race between liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg and conservative ass David Prosser for the Wisconsin supreme court is currently too close to call, but Kloppenburg leads. This would have been no contest a month or so ago, but it’s now widely viewed as a referendum on the union-bustin’ Governor Walker.
If you’ve been following the wars in Africa, you already know that there’s at least one other powderkeg besides Libya — Côte d’Ivoire, which is struggling with a disputed succession and roving gangs of angry young men with guns. The Nation has an excellent summary of the problems in Côte d’Ivoire, and unfortunately it’s all about chocolate. Also unfortunately, although American bombs have been involved in the Libyan conflict, Côte d’Ivoire has also been afflicted with American intervention — in this case, by the corporate power of agribusiness, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).
At the moment, the world cocoa price in London is high, roughly 1,600 West African francs per kilo. But the small farmers here laugh bitterly at that figure; they are lucky if they get half of it for their sacks of beans. Cargill, ADM and a big Swiss concern, Barry Callebaut, are some of the biggest buyers; during the harvest season that ended last fall their Ivorian agents fanned out across the southern part of the country, offering much less than the world price. Then Gbagbo’s corrupt government took a big bite in “official” taxes. Finally, the small farmers paid bribes at the police roadblocks that regularly cut the highway down to the port at Abidjan.
So if you want to know what’s really causing the civil war, it’s poverty and uncertainty driven by gigantic business interests that willingly gouge every franc they can out of a country that doesn’t have the economic clout to fight back. And we contribute by supporting exploiters.
Côte d’Ivoire may seem away, and exotic. But every time those in the more prosperous parts of the world buy chocolate, we are exploiting the people who produce it. As long as we continue to tolerate this injustice, there will be no peace in Côte d’Ivoire.
Is there anything like the Fair Trade option for coffee that has also been applied to chocolate? What we need is a mechanism to bypass the corporate leviathans and invest directly in the farmers who do the work.
The slimy weasels of congress are now on the case, muttering about somehow silencing the terrible people who endanger our country by inflaming the mad Muslim hordes, and Greenwald calls them out.
Harry Reid and Lindsey Graham yesterday both suggested that Congress take unspecified though formal action against the Koran-burning by Florida preacher Terry Jones, which triggered days of violence this week by angry Muslims in Afghanistan. Graham in particular — using the “but” that is the hallmark of all enemies of the First Amendment — said: “Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war.” He claimed that “during World War II, we had limits on what you could say if it would inspire the enemy” (I think he was thinking of World War I, when Woodrow Wilson succeeded in all but criminalizing war opposition, including passage of the dangerously broad Espionage Act: the statute Dianne Feinstein and others now want to exploit to prosecute WikiLeaks).
“but we’re in a war” might be a mollifying modifier if there were any prospect of someday not being in a war, or if Reid and Graham weren’t hawkish jerks who’d like to keep us in a perennial state of combat.
Greenwald also tellingly points out that if you want to find a really potent symbol for American tyranny, don’t look to some small time preacher burning books in Florida…look a little further south, to Guantanamo Bay. But I suppose Reid and Graham would just argue that Gitmo is necessary “because we’re in a war.”
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.
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.
