Say no to RFK

So far, rumors of the first two appointments by Obama leave me worried. Rahm? No, please — after campaigning on a slogan of “change”, buying into one of the most deeply imbedded beltway insiders is not encouraging. Maybe there’s some virtue in working with the Democratic establishment, so I can forgive one concession to the status quo, but let’s see some innovative thinking, too.

More worrisome is the idea that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could get a prominent appointment. Orac has torn that one apart, and I agree: we do not need another irrational purveyor of woo and fluffy substanceless hysteria contributing to this country’s administration.

One thing you can do is contact the transition team and voice your disapproval. Demand rigor in the people running our government!

Salon has an illuminating perspective on Rahm: he’s Obama’s designated asshole. Yeah, that works.

What is an “atheist community”?

Slate has an article by Paul Bloom on why religious people are nice and atheists are mean. As you might guess, I have some difficulty with the premise of the article — in my experience, atheists have been far friendlier, while the religious have been downright vicious — but it does make some interesting points (and, of course, it cites me as “prominent”, which is very flattering).

In particular, his main argument, which I entirely agree with, is that if religion has any virtue, it is not in the belief itself, but in the community that forms around it.

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I had no idea I was so fluent in German

I was interviewed by humanistischer pressedienst about the New Atheism and American politics and religion. I am amazingly erudite auf Deutsch, so much so that I can only read what I said with considerable effort.

OK, I confess—the interview was in English, and it’s the fluency of the interviewer we ought to praise. I’ve put the original text below the fold for those of us who’d rather not read slowly with the aid of a dictionary.

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Purple America

Here’s a graphic illustration of how the presidential election turned out. These are the results by county, with color reflecting the percentage that voted Republican (red) and Democrat (blue).

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Here’s what it looks like when the counties are scaled by population size; the smear of reds is greatly diminished.

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It’s striking how the emptiest places in the country are enriched with fervent conservatives. People are always fretting over how conservatives are outbreeding liberals, but it seems to me that that actually works in liberals’ favor — as communities become larger and more interdependent, as people grow up aware of social support systems, as their numbers create richer opportunities for education, there’s a trend towards embracing liberal values. There are, of course, historical contingencies that can counter that pattern — Utah has been growing, but isn’t becoming more Democratic, for instance — but it’s interesting that fast-growing urban areas in even the reddest states somehow end up favoring the Democrats. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Quiverful movement, that strange idea on the religious right that women ought to bear swarms of children, was a policy that would simply breed new generations of liberals?

Of course, there is the alternative explanation: this distribution is an indirect measure of prosperity. People tend to move towards areas with more upward mobility and better economic prospects, so population is only a proxy for opportunity—and it’s broadly distributed wealth that produces more liberals. Then it would be the case that pumping out a dozen babies that you can’t afford to educate properly would still produce more minions of the Republicans…by impoverishing the region. I’m sure the religious right would find that notion reassuring, since it also seems to be one of their goals to wreck the political and economic health of the nation.

Whatever the explanation is, I want more blue in these maps. There are more election cartograms to peruse.

Oh, no! Nightmares!

Yikes, this is an image to spark nightmares. Remember the little fly squeaking, “help me, help me” at the end of the horror movie, The Fly (the original, not the remake)? And it’s Palin!

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I just have to reassure myself…this time, the flies wrested the swatter out of her hands, and shooed her back to Alaska.

Bad timing

I just looked up all bleary-eyed from staring at papers all day to notice that we suddenly have an inch or so of snow piled up on the ground. I was wondering why my wife was so late getting home from work — she’s probably creeping along on slushy roads trying to make it home safely.

And—oh, no—I have to drive to Minneapolis tomorrow!

God and sex: two potent ideas that never get along well together

Imagine yourself in this situation. A young girl is accused of a heinous crime — use your imagination here, too, and think of the most horrible thing a person can do — and she is trapped in front of you, helpless. You have a rock in your hands. People around you are urging you to kill her; they say that you are justified in taking her life. What would you do?

Let’s say you don’t have a rock, but are just part of the large crowd of spectators, witnessing a small group of men killing this girl. What would you do then?

Be honest now.

I wouldn’t be able to do kill anyone, and I would try to stop the killers. She could be an unrepentant mass murderer, and I couldn’t be an executioner — I wouldn’t want to sink to her level, and I think killing is an easy ‘solution’ that solves nothing. At the same time, it reduces the humanity of the killers, and diminishes the quality of our culture. I may not be the target myself, but such acts harm me.

That makes this story of a 13 year old girl stoned to death for adultery in Somalia incomprehensible to me. I know that people do evil all the time, but this was a mob of a thousand people watching 50 thugs murder someone in a particularly brutal fashion. Couldn’t just a few have raised a voice in protest, couldn’t some small fraction of that thousand intervened? Are the killers so divorced from empathy and morality that they would gladly snuff out the life of someone who can do them no harm?

What’s especially appalling is that the murderers weren’t driven by a fundamental human need — they didn’t kill her because they were defending themselves, or because they were starving, or because she had some real power that could harm them. She was killed because she offended their sense of sexual propriety. Because they perceived her as sexually potent, she challenged their own insecure, mouselike manhood. This is outrageously vile.

And even at that, she was an innocent. She was a 13 year old girl who had been raped by three men, and for this she was dragged out, begging for her life, buried up to her neck, and then stoned to death by weak, blustering men who let their machismo overwhelm their humanity.

And of course, this was driven by Islamist delusions. Religion is excellent at elevating intangible, untestable lies to a higher plane of moral significance than something as real and as simple as the life of a child.

I should also add, before everyone condemns this as simply the act of a primitive society, that the same impulse is at work right here in America. Those people who voted yes on Proposition 8 in California were simply performing a slightly more civilized version of casting a stone at those who offend their moral and religious sense of propriety.