Guns, Penises and Revenge

American culture seems obsessed with revenge, guns and dicks. Masculinity is increasingly tied to packing a gun (substitute penis) and the bigger the better, of course. One of the most prolific and politically active arms of the military industry are gun manufacturers. Decades of lobbying and ads and cultural manipulation have led to more guns sold than ever, despite the decrease in the overall crime rate gun owners supposedly need protection from. Hell, everyone from Mother Jones to CNN has the ad from the Bushmaster rifle the shooter in Conecticut had:

Lovely, right? Aside from the sexism, this ad is a blatant promotion of the violent revenge fantasies played out in every action movie and television show. Americans want to be the vigilante, avenging perceived wrongs. Most won't act on them, but I don't think the ones who do are all that different from the ones who don't. Maybe they just got pushed a little too far, were a little to isolated or were a little on edge from life events. Think how many regular office employees with no history of violence get laid off and show up armed.

But we as a culture cannot face our own demons. When a white gunman kills 20 children in a school his mother worked at, we call him "crazy" and a "lone nut." We stigmatize mental illness and then blame it. Now the man in question may or may not have had some diagnosed disorder, but it is statistically irrelevant. The rate of violence among the "crazies" is the same as the "normal" people. It is just an excuse, a dodge from actually examining our gun laws and violence obsessed culture. We have spent too long building arms and worshipping war and revenge to simply fix it, but it would be nice to at least talk about it. A little introspection goes a long way.

Instead we have Fox claiming that it is too early to talk about gun control, then five seconds later saying guns couldn't be to blame because crazy people and because other ways to die exist. They bring up various bombers and such while ignoring the rarity of such incidents. We always fall back on absolutism. If something doesn't work 100% of the time then it may as well never work, right?

There has been a lot of examination on why blaming mental illness is a terrible thing, on why we call out white terrorists as "lone nuts" while simultaneously calling non white terrorists what they are. But at its heart, the problem really lies in our inability to talk about the problem itself. Any way to otherise the violence and defensively fall back to our culture of gun worship we will take. We have problems. And they are very closely tied together. The same military complex that gave us the cold war, the Iraq war, the missile buildup and gun culture gave us these shootings. It gave us our religiosity and fundamental fear of science and distaste for environmentalism and feminism and every other positive ism. It leads even self identified skeptics to be irrational and in the end, it prevents us from introspection. It all ties to that. We cannot look inwards.

Logic Priest

Edit: Read the hell outta this.

The Debate Narrative

The media and democrats underestimate normal people. I don't think very highly of the average person but I do at least know that everyone has been in an argument. Everyone can see when one party is rude and obnoxious and patronizing. The media, however, doesn't believe this. They think the average person wouldn't see Romney's yelling and awkward style as losing so the headlines today will be "early victory for Romney" or "Obama slammed in first debate."

While Romney supporters will take loud and interrupting asshole as a win, they don't matter. They are authoritarian morons and count just being able to breathe a win. If moderates and undecided voters actually watched the debate they would see one calm, adult man debating a petulant, sneering asshole. People aren't that stupid. They are, however, stupid enough to not check the story behind the headlines. Most didn't see the actual debate so their only look is the headlines. Most won't even read the articles. Had they watched or if the media would report honestly as if their audience were adults then the whole narrative would change drastically.

Good headlines would read "Romney interrupts moderator, flip flops on key issues, avoids answering questions" and "Obama defends obamacare, tax plan, economy." Instead they will declare a winner based entirely on how little they think of Americans. They will declare victory because they don't realize that people can tell when someone is an asshole, when they are just being loud because they have no points. People aren't very good at fact checking or logical analysis, but they are good at socialization, they are familiar with arguments. The only ones who think Romney won are either blinded by being on his side or too arrogant to think other people notice the BS. Maybe if the media didn't treat the undecided voters as dib children they would show a greater interest in the campaign.

Not that it matters much anyway. Undecideds didn't watch and won't make a decision based on a debate or policy, but entirely on their feelings about a candidate. Had they watched their feelings might have been influenced, seeing Obama be calm and mature would boost confidence in him, but they will only see the patronizing headlines.

Logic Priest

Antiquated Crime and Punishment

As time goes on we all like to imagine some progress or other, and one of the biggest segments of society we love to wave over the heads of "backwards" cultures like the Islamic theocracies popping up around the world is how we treat and define crime. Things which don't hurt other people are gradually decriminalized and punishments become less harsh. Supposedly we have moved from punishment towards rehabilitation, and we have tried to remove punishments for behaviors which hurt no one.

This is obviously all bullshit. We may not execute people for blasphemy but in the US we have used the prison system as an institutionalized club to keep separate black and latino populations from the working class. From the arrests to the courts to the harsher prison sentences, black and latino men and women are singled out by a system claiming to be built around justice.

We have criminalized free speech if it crosses a corporate copyright, or if it comes from someone with an islamic sounding name. We have criminalized drugs that non white communities tend to use and we send rich white kids to "rehabilitation" while we send poor black and latino kids to jail for the first offense. Three strike laws turn smoking pot in your own home three times equivalent to rape. Judges and juries and prosecutors overwhelmingly single out black men and women, regardless of actual guilt.

The prison system itself seems to still be built around dark ages ideals. We throw people into chaotic private prisons with abusive guards and slave labor. Pot heads and petty thieves are thrown in with hardened rapists, murderers and career criminals leaving them little choice but to become violent themselves to survive. When they do get out after long terms of isolation from society with no actual rehabilitating therapy or job training, they then must convince employers to hire them over white people with no criminal record. When this fails, they turn back to crime and end up back in the slave labor and abuse built privatizing penal system.

Most states in fact still have executions. State sanctioned murder still exists in the US, even as we mock the third world for barbarism. We have made distributing a copy of a work over a century old a crime that can land you in the same prisons as the violent criminals, let loose in the jungle of gangs and abusive guards. We execute mentally ill and damaged individuals for crimes they didn't even know they committed. We still electrocute people, a punishment which sometimes results in death after minutes of screaming agony. We as a people know the numbers, the facts about racial makeup and the criminalization of actions which hurt no one, but we ignore and allow it because it only affects "others," that is non whites. A rich lawyer in California can run over and kill a man and never be charged, while an inner city high school student can be sent to jail for a decade for being caught with marijuana.

The entire prison system shifts towards longer sentences for increasingly harmless "crimes" under the watch of for-profit corporations using the inmate populations as slaves while barely caring for them. Approaching two centuries out from the end of slaver in the US we have found a way to bring it back. Nothing is more important than the profits of the gentry.

Mittens, Fox and the "Otherness" of the Moochers

My favorite part of Mitt Romney and Fox's 47-49% of so called moochers are predominantly white, Republican voters but when Fox and Mitt complain about the welfare queens and those on government assistance they imagine non white people, inner city people who don't work, yankees and west cost elites, rather than themselves. They can be mocked to their faces and not see it.

The break down of those receiving government money by population are mostly the elderly and those working 40+ hours at bad jobs. Broken down by amount of money, it is mostly agriculture related people and large corporations. And if you include the tax cuts inherent in the pro-investor tax code and
"incentives" given to highly profitable companies. Red states receive the most aid, republican voters do as well. The shear dissonance is painful yet hilarious, or it would be if it didn't affect the rest of us.

At least Romney finally realized how much he fucked up though. In his post video release press conference he looked more terrified than Nixon did when questioned about his tapes. He couldn't find words, he was sweating and not at all composed. His normal cocky rich asshole demeanor was gone and shear terror took its place. It was brilliant to see. Even moderates will notice the issues at hand, as shown by a nice margin between Mittens and Obama among likely voters. It is just sad that the hard core republicans, at least 40% of people, will vote for him anyways. They will believe whatever Fox and the GOP sell them.

Logic Priest

Mitt may just be stupid

So at first I thought he was amoral and out of touch but that he was banking on winning the conservatives and was merely overestimating their numbers. Then I thought he was appealing to the whole white "real" American thing, trying to sway the older vote. Then he started avoiding any and all social issues, then he picked Paul Ryan. It was then and their I started to doubt. He speaks as if he is smart, but that is probably little more than his high education and wealth talking. He looks smart, by dressing in ten thousand dollar suits, by getting three hundred dollar hair cuts. But more and more I doubt that he is as intelligent as he claims.

Supposedly Mittens had been a savvy businessman. Supposedly he was good with economic policy. Then he picked one of the stupidest people in congress to be his VP. Someone associated with one of the most damaging potential budgets living memory. A man associated with hyper conservative social causes, all while Mitt was trying to distance himself from such social issues to win the moderates. After running a campaign reinventing himself as "severely" conservative, Romney now was trying to stay away from that label, but he picked the worst running mate possible for that.

Now he has said pretty dumb things but I had marked it down to a disconnect, at first. Then this happened. It started to become clear. He wasn't saying stupid shit because he was slippery, though he is amoral as hell, but because he didn't understand cause and effect. He is rich, spoiled and genuinely unintelligent. Mitt does not understand that when you say something in an age of digital recordings everywhere, where everyone has a camera phone, everything goes online, that the things he says are actually listened to. We have tape of him supporting choice, then being against it four years later. We have tape of him and his self absorbed wife talking down to and about the 99% of Americans, claiming that the rest of us aren't real Americans, are moochers and lazy slackers. In the linked article they highlight him using the same language used by the damaged psychopath Ayn Rand, a hero of his and Ryan's. He seems to think in the internet age he can say anything and deny it later.

Fifty years ago I could understand this. TV was new for most of the country and recordings uncommon. Even if something did get recorded, one of 3 networks would have to air it for anyone to see it. But blogs have been big for a decade now. Online news is fast destroying traditional news. He cannot rely on Fox to spin this anymore. His conservative base, who are also stupid in the authoritarian-believe-anything they are told sense, will beleive he is talking about them, despite the fact that conservative leaning states are by far the greatest recipients of the federal aid Romney bashes and plans on cutting. They are by far the majority in the group Romney whines about who "don't pay income taxes." But they would vote for a literal mannequin if told to do so by Fox and Friends. The moderates, who may not be good at rational thinking, are at least smart enough to know when a candidate openly hates them. When someone as stupid as Mitt Romney says he hates them out loud. They may vote with their guts instead of brains, but even guts can see such blatant bile and dismissiveness from a robotic and out of touch candidate.

Mitt's only possible chance with moderates was claiming the economy could be fixed by his non intervention (ya doesn't makes sense to me either) but he really isn't smart enough to sell that. He can't avoid the social issues and his own problems with money and tax dodging, and he isn't charismatic or intelligent enough to fake it. So there it is, Mitt Romney isn't just amoral, out of touch, selfish and corrupt. He is a stupid, stupid man.

Logic Priest

Rights versus Stupidity

There seems to be a pretty major misunderstanding in the US about the definition of a "right." Especially when it comes to the ones outlined in the Bill of Rights. I'm sure it is some extension of privilege in general, but it still amazes me how fast some people come up with new ways to completely ignore the actual meaning of a given right.

Jezebel has an article about how yet another business owned by evangelicals mistakes their "right" to the free practice of religion to be the right to impose said religion on their employees. Employers around the country have jumped on this one, thinking that somehow being forced to pay for medical related fees such as birth control is infringing on their right to believe in magical sky fairies. The logical process is right out of your standard privileged dumbass handbook, like when white folks complain that PoCs can now like, get jobs and stuff they must be infringing on said white folks rights - to be better than the PoCs. I am against even blatantly church related jobs being exempt, like preachers and nuns, but the general consensus in law is that employers and schools and others cannot deny some right to their employees or students because they feel like they don't have to. The same way tax dodgers don't get off because they feel like they don't owe taxes, religious people and institutions can't discriminate because they want to. If we could ignore the law or other people's rights because we felt like it then no one would actually have rights.

Another favorite of mine is free speech. Poke around the internet for a bit and you can find comments sections and Facebook posts where someone says something stupid, offensive or just plain awful and someone else corrects or bans them. Cue complaints about free speech and violations thereof. It is as if they don't know the difference between a blog and a government. Or that they don't have some right to be free from critique. Not only is it the critics right to free speech being exercised when they blast a moron, it is a forum owner or blog writer's free speech to ban a commenter. No one has a right to be published in any arena they feel like and once again the right doesn't only apply to the whiniest people.

These privileged idiots love to blather about their first, and second, amendment rights all while ignoring other people's same claim to the rights. They love to pretend a right is absolute to the point of infringing on other's rights. They love their privilege and think getting their way is a right. I have gotten to the point where I just want to slap them with a dictionary, a big heavy one like the OED or something. I doubt it would do much, though, since they already live in their own little world.

Logic Priest

Misdirection

So on this year's 9/11 there was a string of assaults on US embassies. Many missed the date based significance and odd coordination of efforts and took at face value the claim that the assaults were over some obscure, racist video on the internet. It feeds into our view of Muslims as violent, and while the number of violent acts in response to "offensive" religious imagery by Muslims is certainly far greater in recent years (see the Onion article) than the equivalents by other religions, it seems like an obvious misdirect in this case.

Perhaps there were some who showed up in those crowds because of the video, but the outrage was manufactured. Someone was deliberately making some point, using violence. It would be a massive coincidence if after a relatively calm period in the countries in question, many of which had their own far bigger problems to deal with like Libya and Egypt, for all of these attacks to happen on the same day. A day which happened to have its own significance as well. Even my gut reaction was one of anti Islamic sentiment, but looking again it seemed to be less a generalized Muslim cultural issue and more of a last ditch effort by a dying islamist group.

Not much else, just thoughts on not trusting your gut all the time.

Logic Priest

Lazy People

Only lazy non whites take in welfare. Because when it is "hardworking" white people it isn't welfare, just government aid. When Exxon pays negative money in taxes after making record profits, it isn't welfare just "incentives." When the red states in the union receive far more in federal aid than the taxes they pay it isn't welfare it is... actually I am lost on that one. The only explanation is the "otherness" of the people conservatives imagine to be getting welfare.

Now intelligent and rational people know that the economic imbalance in the US doesn't stem from the lower classes working less or being lazy, but from a combination of luck and occasionally some ability. Mitt Romney, for example, was born into wealth and used it to make more. He now holds no job and makes millions a year. Millions of people work 40 or more hours per week and make at most $50,000 a year. Is this because they are lazy? Obviously not. The point of government aid was never to help the lazy but to provide a slightly better playing field and more importantly as a safety net. When the millionaires and billionaires inevitably crash the economy they lay off workers. Now hard working middle and working class families and individuals need a way to live, to feed themselves. Yes they don't have jobs but not due to laziness, rather a lack of opportunity. An ideal government would open as much opportunity to as many people as possible.

Yet somehow the myth persists with conservatives, especially those who receive aid, bitching about how welfare recipients need to stop being lazy. No one, liberal or not feels that we don't need to work. In fact the biggest issue most liberals have with the rich is the fact they receive what amounts to tax breaks and welfare by being rich. They work the least and make the most. Then these rich people use racially charged language to convince working and middle class white people to imagine lazy non whites taking all their money, causing the government debt. In reality the massive wars and too low tax rates on the wealthy cause the debt. I keep hearing about largest peace time expenditure while we are in the middle of two wars.

Rich corporations get welfare they don't deserve. Rich people get tax breaks they don't need. Liberals don't want to "punish success" they merely want conservatives to shut the fuck up about lazy poor people and look at the abuse they receive from lucky rich people. Hell, most of the wealthy who started poor and middle class are liberals. It seems to me the rich folks whining about persecution and hard work "earned" their wealth by being born to the right parents. Mitt Romney was born rich, he is a Republican. Bill Gates admits he got a lucky break, worked hard to build his wealth, and is a liberal.

The next time someone whines about poor people taking their hard earned cash, remind them the difference between a welfare check and the literally billions of dollars of "incentives" that oil companies, coal companies, and red states receive from the federal government. Remind them that most welfare recipients are either working part time jobs or can't find jobs because the rich people fired them all. Remind them that the mean income for the middle class hasn't gone up in decades while the top one percent has exponentially grown. Remind them they are fucking racist assholes.

Logic Priest

STABBY (On false neutrality)

It is really, really irritating to listen to Republicans. Not the heads of the party, but the little guys on the street. They buy anything said heads sell them, no questions asked. When told that repeating the policies that caused the recession will fix things, they buy it wholesale. When told Obama hates business because of one really out of context quote, they convince themselves that is what Obama said. When told the Obama didn't pass any budgets in his recent two years, they forget it was because of the GOP dominated house blocking everything. When their party breaks shit and blames Obama, no matter how obvious, they buy it.

What is interesting is that Democrats, the little guys, don't seem to buy their own party's bullshit as quickly. This isn't to go on about the supposed intellectual differences between the GOP and DNC, but it is interesting how self identified liberals question their own leaders while self identified conservatives refuse to ever admit one of theirs could be wrong. At this point the cognitive dissonance of pinning the blame for things that happened in 2008 must be painful. Any time a fact check points out a GOP inaccuracy (read: lie) they claim the media is biased and full of shit. When the same fact checkers point out a DNC lie they jump all over it as absolute truth, which is interesting because sometimes in the interest of appearing neutral people like politifact and CNN apply a higher standard of truth to the DNC claims than the GOP ones.

Politifact and CNN are the worst ones about that. They are so desperate to appear in the middle they forget the truth has nothing to do with the middle. The truth is independent of any ideology and as Stephen Colbert said, reality has a well known liberal bias. Both parties lie and misrepresent facts, but the GOP is far, far worse about it because their own base will believe anything they tell them. The Democratic party cannot lie as much because their own party members will call them on it and the media spends a lot more time on it.

Really there isn't much to be done about the deliberate ignorance of conservative voters, they spend their whole lives deluding themselves with gods and alternate pasts. But I really dislike the imaginary version of neutrality the media is attempting. If you hold the DNC responsible for misstatements or slight inaccuracies then hold the fucking GOP accountable to that level as well. Take the time to make it very clear to liberal and moderate voters that the GOP rarely, if ever, speaks the truth. Point out lies from both, but hold them to the same standards. Pointing out the higher volume of GOP lies doesn't make you biased, it just means the GOP lies more. This universal media attachment to the golden mean fallacy is bad for the system, bad for democracy in general. Media should focus on the truth, not the opinion of an unappeasable conservative base. No amount of pretend neutrality will ever make Fox News watchers admit they are wrong. They watch Fox News for fuck's sake, where anything to the left of fascism is a filthy communist.

Logic Priest

RNC Convention

So aside from the blatant lies by pretty much every speaker, aside from the hilarious Clint Eastwood rambling where he blamed invisible Obama for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there was a distinct lack of any information at all. Ryan, a supposed policy genius, failed to tell us how he and Romney planned on doing anything at all. He promised 12 million jobs using what I can only assume must be black magic, considering the insanity of such claims and the lack of any methods to do it. Romney's wife, Ann, told horrible, awkward rich white people jokes but gave us no reason to like her husband. Romney himself didn't even make the vague promises Ryan did, so much as attack Obama's imaginary sins (while ignoring the real ones) and promising his business experience would help him turn the country around.

The main issue, of course, is that they want us to forget that Romney/Ryan want to implement identical or worse policies to the ones that caused the recession. They claim the government can't fix things, that only the private sector can, and that they, in the government, will fix things. They want us to ignore Romney's business experience at Bain and the Olympics while he touts them as proof he can fix things. They want us to ignore his experience as a governor, while touting it as reason to believe he can be an executive.

DNC next week woot.

Logic Priest

Interesting Hypothesis

And a gob of evidence supporting it right in the comments.

The link, via Rational Wiki. 

Logic Priest

A Little Research Goes a Long Way

My boss keeps recommending some book I hadn't heard of The Amateur, by Edward Klein. So before I pay money for some critical of Obama book I look up the author. He was once an editor at the NY Times magazine and had previously written Some Kennedy books and pseudo novels about Obama. A bit off already, but he had journalistic standing at some point. So I read the NY Times review of his book. They note a glaring vagueness and lack of evidence for his supposed over 200 interviews and the occasionally suspiciously similar to already existing quotes usage. If that previous sentence made sense.

Klein brought up a lot of unnamed sources claiming to be close to the president or his campaigns, but little evidence and even sometimes contradictions, as with his Bill Clinton quotes, lead me to believe he wrote what he wanted rather than found out. On top of trying to paint an incredibly centrist politician as some sort of radical anti-capitalist Israel hating self obsessed monster, Klein wants us to believe Obama is somehow less qualified than the alternatives.

As the title of the post says, a little research goes a long way. He wrote an article version for a known birther and UN conspiracy site, the American Thinker. He quotes unverifiable sources with no evidence. Klein is obviously just pushing his personal agenda over anything else, and this is pretty consistent with political books. I never buy or read them unless I see some reason to believe they actually back up their claims, that they aren't simply vague political points designed to be read and consumed by others who already agree. Most of these books claiming to be some great exposé tend to be little more than a Bill O'reilly or Rush Limbaugh rants about this or that liberal destroying the universe. Conspiracy theories do not journalism make.

I research authors and sources before I bother to read them. Unless they are open about being political treatises rather than pretending to espouse fact, they are worthless without good sources. Honest philosophical books are ok, they just need to be up front about having no proof. While a history of well researched and honest books is no guarantee a given author's next book will be the same, it is a good indicator. Each statement and source must be taken on its own merit, but it is not worth looking for a single good idea in the work of a political opportunist. It costs too much time and money otherwise.

Logic Priest

Letter to the Worst Generation

Dear baby boomers,

As you may guess from the title of this post, I kind of hate you. It isn't from some sense of rebelliousness or anger that you outnumber us and will force us to work twice as hard as you to keep you alive well into your 80s. It isn't because you constantly deride my generation as weak or selfish or shallow. I have a lot of complex reasons for hating you, and it is with much thought that I declare the baby boomers the worst generation of the last century. In order to illustrate as clearly and simply as possible, I will give you a list of reasons you have destroyed the world.

Regressive social values: Everyone loves to talk about how the hippies, a group of rich, entitled and self important baby boomers somehow affected the social change that brought things like the civil rights act and the end of segregation. Aside from the gross historical inaccuracy and offensive nature of claiming a bunch of upper middle class white kids high on every drug they could find somehow caused social and legal changes by showing up places and being high, it misses the generation who actually affected change. There was a lot of social inertia moving against desegregation and the sexual revolution, but the ones who actually began to change were the war generations. A general who had served in both world wars desegregated the military. A WWII veteran pushed the civil rights act. A man barely too young to have served in the same war was one of the most influential rights activists in history (MLK Jr, in case you were wondering). The Warren court expanded constitutional protections more than any court before or since, and every person on the Supreme Court then was around for both world wars. The generation that the hippies thought they were rebelling against was the one affecting social change and it is really annoying that the same stoner assholes who grew up to be neoconservative sociopathic business people can try to claim those battles.

In fact, in the era the baby boomers have had power, from the late 80s onwards, we have moved backwards with civil rights. We now have those former hippies pushing to overturn Roe V Wade, force religion down the throats of the people who had benefited from the previous era's secularization, and found a way to continue the red scare into a new racist version against brown people. The baby boomer's parents were awful in so many ways, with violent racism and nationalistic witch hunts, but they are the generation who had the guts to look inwards and change the rules. They didn't go far enough, but they took steps in the right direction. Steps that their children have spent 30 years trying to undo.

Selfish and shortsighted economic practices: Somehow the baby boomers made more money for the top percent or so than ever before while managing to not grow the middle class their parents worked so hard to build. As soon as the baby boomers took over the average wages for those under the top percent stagnated, having barely grown since the 1980s. Where the generation coming out of the wars had learned from the Great Depression and had developed a set of ethics for business, the baby boomers spent all their energy paying bonuses to the ones who cut wages and bankrupted smaller firms. The entire economic crisis is traceable to the deregulation and inevitable orgy of unethical business practices. Three decades of increasingly short sighted practices led to faster and harsher boom bust cycles, until it finally caught up with us in 2008. Developing countries offered a haven for their money and labor, but eventually international ethical regulations will crash their insane power run.

Self righteousness: On top of regressing the economic and social efforts of their parents, the baby boomers love to claim they did it all. Then they rub it in the X and Y generations faces. They call us lazy and aimless, they whine that we don't work as hard and they had it harder, they complain we don't finish college like they did. This one is the one that makes all the other failings so much worse. After promising us college and jobs, they increased school prices enough to force us to take out loans we will be paying off for 40 years. They gave us an economy with no growth or jobs. They complain about the fate of education and accuse us of being shallow all while killing our school systems their parents built and picking only the worst people to represent us. My generation is NOT the Jersey Shore. We are not Taylor Swift or Michael Bay or American Idol. These are shows and stars created by baby boomers, picking the worst of my generation and then shoving them down our throats. My generation has no way to escape the control of content, economy and culture you try to take from us. Don't break something and blame us for not having it. Don't get upset when we download songs or surf the web when you gave us no other choice. Don't accuse of of being unoriginal or uncreative when you lock the entirety of ideas into corporate hand. Don't get upset when we decide not to support you in your old age, when you abused us and the world around us. Don't whine when you force a Christian revival on us and we respond with hostile atheism. Just go. Let us try to run things before you destroy the world with industrialization and worker abuse. Let us try to fix your mess without accusing us of being ineffective. We are the most politically active group, the most discontent, the angriest. You think your crowds of teabaggers are angry, take a look at your kids. We have traitors in our own generation because you trapped them at home with nothing but ancient fairy tales. When you keep buying the bullshit you sell yourselves, don't complain when we ignore you and move away from you. In fact, baby boomers, either support us or shut the fuck up.

Logic Priest

It's Out in the Open Now

Take a look at this lovely quote from none other than Willard Mitt(end) Romney himself:

"I love being home in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born," Romney said on Friday. "Ann was born at Henry Ford hospital, I was born at Harper hospital. No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised."

There we go. He knows he can't win liberal voters, he knows he can't win intelligent voters, so he is left with mobilizing the insane, racist religious right. Next up? Muslim jokes I assume. He is going to do what McCain at least avoided in public, capitalize on the "otherness" of Obama. Make Obama out to be some foreign, scary black man to frighten the old moderates that he plans to screw over in social program cuts. Convince the poor, southern states who receive the most federal aid per capita to vote against federal aid so it doesn't go to "other" people. Dark people. Non "Anglo Saxon" people. It can't be accidental anymore. People were trying to excuse the Anglo- Saxon bullshit, and now they are running around trying to excuse the birther bullshit. But when Mittens keeps doing it it seems a bit deliberate. The GOP has finally stopped any attempt at subtlety.

Logic Priest

The "Why" in Political Atheism

This is why. This is a surprisingly even handed and moving piece about a former evangelical preacher man from Louisiana who took one stop past liberalizing his faith.

I know people who went to a more liberal kind of Christianity and were happy with that. The problem is, for me, there was a process involved in moving from Pentecostalism to a more liberal theology, like Grace Church. What makes me different is that process didn’t stop, and it took me all the way. In the end, I couldn’t help feeling that all religion, even the most loving kind, is just a speed bump in the progress of the human race. (emphasis mine).

Many modern, liberal americans detach gradually from their beliefs until they hit a sort of ritualistic deism, but they recoil at the logical conclusion. For the modern mind deism is a feat of self deception, creating an answer where no question exists, a solution with no problem, a god with no creation. The worst part of this ritualistic deism is that these liberal Christians still take pride in faith over reason, at least in certain instances, and they excuse the "faithful" of their transgressions against civilization.

Which brings me to one of my favorite people, Neil Degrasse Tyson. I love him to death and I'm really excited about his upcoming Cosmos series, but he is idealistically scientific. One area he tries to stay clear of is politics, outside of his pro science and education work, and in that fails to fulfill Sagan's legacy. He says here that he dislikes the label atheist due to its political nature, but in this he is very naive. He pretends there is some way out. While true that atheism literally is just a conclusion, joking about how non golf players have no political name, he ignores the trouble caused by religion. If golf oppressed or actively worked against the science and education he pushes then it would be important to be known as agolfist.

Part of Sagan's legacy is his willingness to face politics head on. While Tyson is close, in that he has to some extent spoken against warmongering and anti-science in broad terms, we need the politics of the outspoken atheists and humanists. Tyson has the potential to jump in, to really speak for science and education by tackling the specific barriers in the way, rather than generalized pro education and science activism. He is a brilliant speaker and scientist, and will be great in the new Cosmos, but he is ignoring the reasons atheists are political. The former preacher above is part of that. Someone who lost his job, wife and friends because he came to the logical conclusion modern people should. Obviously Neil Degrasse Tyson is an atheist by definition, but he should grasp the label willingly. Instead of begin afraid to be labeled, to which he has valid criticisms, he should create a definition of the label.

All the world is politics, whether we want it to be or not. In a perfect world science and education should be obvious investments, faith would be an obvious weakness of character and war would exist only in history books, but we don't live there. Politics is a struggle, and part of that struggle is dealing with labels, with self defining those labels. If people listened to arguments well, we would not need politics, but people are weighed down by millions of years of evolutionary baggage making reason hard to achieve. Atheism is political because it has to be. Atheism is more than a rejection of god, it is a rejection of religion and the politics of faith based reasoning. Atheism is political because it helps those who stop believing in a world where logic is a sin. Political atheism is growing as a backlash to out of control religion and faith. Atheism isn't just a rejection of god and faith, it is a rejection of authoritarian ways of thinking, of clinging to the old ways. Atheism is political because every struggle is political, and there is no way out of it.

Who Let the Paulbots Off their Leashes?

Now this one tickles me in a way that if... anyways. This woman seems to genuinely believe Ron Paul can win not just the GOP nomination with almost no delegates, but that he could then win in a general election. Despite his continuous losses, despite a lack of delegates, despite the fact that outside of Paulbots and the people they harass (read: the atheist community for some reason) they have a negligible chance of winning votes. Most people don't even know who he is, people with money refuse to be associated with him, and aside from his unchanged but rabid base no one likes him. Libertarians don't like him because he is an evangelical Christian. Republicans don't like him because he claims to challenge the centralized power both the GOP and DNC support. Other evangelicals don't like him because he is anti-war. In fact, aside from a select group of privileged white people and the occasional confused stoner college kid, no one likes him.

Ron Paul has been connected to white supremacists, anarchists, libertarians, evangelical conservatives, pro marijuana protestors, anti war protestors and in general too many eclectic groups to present a solid face. His supporters of course go on about him being the best/only choice, they claim that using magic he will both eliminated debt AND taxes. He wants to slash social spending more than Ryan does, and is an open fan of Ayn Rand, despite his evangelism. College liberals occassionaly think they like him because he voted against the invasion of Iraq and thinks the federal government shouldn't illegalize drugs, but they either realize he is a social nutcase who does want the fed to control women's bodies or they grow up and support someone mainstream. Other young people support him because they see his anti federal stance as close to anarchy, failing to realize he wants the power to go into the hands of private corporations.

Ron Paul's actual policies, as a refresher, would eliminate all but social laws from the federal level. He would outlaw abortion and gay marriage federally, despite his claims of wanting a non invasive fed. The real point, however, is that he isn't against someone controlling your life, he just wants it to be private corporations. He espouses a belief that you are absolutely free in an absolute free market, ignoring the inevitable consequences like indentured servitude, corporate interference in your private life and a total police state controlled by said corporation. Just in case anyone was considering liking him. Ron Paul is the ultimate stopped clock. By virtue of his absolute freedom (for corporations) belief structure he is anti war and federal drug control so young people sometime flock to him. This of course ignores private wars and employee drug testing, which he is all for since you are an "at will" employee. The only people who can support his real policies are Objectivists, always heroes in their own minds. People born to privilege love him because he tell them they earned it via a free market and no one has any right to touch that. Except those with more privilege.

But my favorite thing is the rabid support Ron Paul receives from his Paulbots. They are gifted at lying to themselves. They already convinced themselves they are privileged due to their own labors, despite being universally white and middle class and above. It was only a small step past that to delude themselves, every time into thinking Ron Paul would somehow, with no financial or popular support, take the GOP nomination. Every time they claim the GOP fears him but will somehow support him. Every time they claim his technical but unimpressive wins early in the primaries means he will magically come out on top. It is objectivism at its finest. Convince yourself you earned everything as some sort of microcosm of awesome. Convince yourself that you are the hero, the winner, and that you would come out on top in an anarchy. Then convince yourself the rest of the world fears and needs you so that you must triumph. They must be the best mental gymnasts in the world to reconcile their confidence before the nomination each election with the reality afterwards.

Logic Priest

"Only Rape"

Rape is a serious subject. It is touchy by nature and even bringing it up upsets many people, but like any other violence it cannot be ignored. We cannot pretend it doesn't happen or won't happen to those we love, we cannot pretend our culture doesn't justify and accept it, and we cannot excuse it when someone "good" does it. Rape is a type of incredibly invasive assault. It is not "lesser" when someone you know or have slept with before does it, it is not lesser when a rich white man does it compared to a poor black "hoodlum" and it certainly isn't justifiable because the victim was drunk, acting "slutty" or scantily clad. We live in a culture that justifies and excuses rapists and pretends there is some wide ranging issue of false rape accusations. We live in a culture that imagines dark alleys as the only place you can be "legitimately" raped, to paraphrase GOPer Akin.

In the news now is Ryan and Romney distancing themselves from Akin's comment about legitimate rape, but not long ago Ryan co-sponsered a bill with Akin which would have redefined types of rape, such as "forceful" rape, whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean. Ryan doesn't believe differently than Akin, although who knows what Romney believes, he just needed to distance himself from an unpopular statement. The new GOP backed by the various tea parties wants to control women completely. They push medieval myths like Akins rape victims magically don't get pregnant and social norms like blaming the victim.

To be fair, though, opposing abortion even in cases of rape is more consistent, if still vile. If a fetus is a life, then why should some measure of the woman's inconvenience matter, even if that inconvenience is actually trauma. They have shown no care for trauma to begin with, why start now? But the point stands that if a fetus is a sacred life then why do they get to draw the arbitrary line for the level of inconvenience that is appropriate to abort? That merely shows the truth, that it is about social control of women rather than "life." If they can draw a line somewhere why not just allow the woman to decide their personal line of acceptable inconvenience and trauma.

By typing rape these politicians only seek to exacerbate rape culture, which already differentiates between how bad they perceive rapes to be, so that while most rapes are by people the victim knows, often involving prior consent or drugs and alcohol, somehow they are lesser by cultural definitions, even while the violation and trauma are equal if not worse than stranger rape, considering the violation of trust involved as well. The victims are shamed, the rapists excused, all while imaginary plagues of false rape accusations abound and politicians seek to moderate rape types. Even still, rape is only defined federally and in most states to involve penetration, even if by an object. Sexual assault is sexual assault, regardless of penetration, but this is still part of a violent rape culture. The rape culture in turn is connected to the generally violent nature of American culture, where we see men threaten rape to silence dissenting women, the GOP threatening violent rebellion if they lose fairly in the democratic process this november and gun deaths exploding all over the country.

Bottom line, stop excusing rape, any type. Stop trying to weasel out of what constitutes rape, or how much the victim is blamed. If someone beats a woman then she is a victim, if he violates her sexually she is suddenly either out for attention or a slut. They are both acts of violence, of assault, but it only counts if the bruises are visible?

Logic Priest

Honesty in the GOP?

To steal a quote from Firefly "I appreciate the honesty. Not, you know, a lot but..." With the Pennsylvania rep openly admitting the voting ID law was to "win Pennsylvania for Mitt Romney" and now this.

I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban -- read African-American -- voter-turnout machine...

Holy fuck. This man feels comfortable saying, out loud, that he doesn't feel like the disenfranchisement of a class of Americans is important. Ohio and Pennsylvania, along with Florida are some of a few Republican dominated states at the local level but swing states in federal elections. As such they are doing anything they can to ensure Romney wins. This is even worse than the 2000 Supreme Court fiasco where judges appointed by Bush Sr chose Bush Jr to win the election. The GOP has no qualms about cheating but the fact that they do it so blatantly makes me feel like I live in a single party dictatorship. The GOP has dropped all pretense of cooperating with the Democrats unless it is in the expansion of federal power to spy on and incarcerate US citizens. They demonize Dems not just as wrong, but as "anti-American" and unpatriotic and socialist/communist/Muslim/atheists. If they want to play this game the rest of us should be ready to tear the GOP down and stomp it into dust. The Democratic party betrays us constantly but occasionally gets things right, while the GOP openly wants an oligarchy run by rich and powerful men built on exploiting the middle and working classes. While this isn't sustainable in the long run and would hurt them too, eventually, I would like to skip the really miserable interim where the economy collapses and millions starve to death.

Logic Priest

A Step in the Right Direction

Jen's followup to the other post I linked to. Not a bad idea, although for me overly centered on the atheism. But rebranding to cause a nice self selected schism from the misogynists and assholes in the greater whole of atheism and skepticism is definitely the right beginning. Branding, however, is an easy change. The main purpose is to separate, to get away from the supposed allies with only one, tangential relation to those of us who wish to apply skeptical thought to ourselves as much as to deities and psychic healers.

For my part I think next wave atheism shouldn't just include feminism et al, but should rebrand to something where even the name is non negative in its definition. Atheism is literally just not-theism. A+ is better, but for me still not proactive enough. A new identity centered on reason, skeptical thought and science applied to all aspects of life, with a purpose of helping humanity as a whole would be fantastic, but everything takes steps in between.

Logic Priest

New Wave Atheism

Jen at Freethoughtblogs spells it out wonderfully:

I don’t want good causes like secularism and skepticism to die because they’re infested with people who see issues of equality as mission drift. I want Deep Rifts. I want to be able to truthfully say that I feel safe in this movement. I want the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and downright trolls out of the movement for the same reason I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner or to play Mario Kart: because they’re not good people. We throw up billboards claiming we’re Good Without God, but how are we proving that as a movement? Litter clean-ups and blood drives can only say so much when you’re simultaneously threatening your fellow activists with rape and death.

 I arrived at this conclusion, and so have many over at FTB, many among the atheistic feminists, many among atheists who happen to not be white males. It is inevitible, really. We started with philosophers, then strong but reactionary public faces like Dawkins and Hitchens, now we need to define a movement not as what it differs from, theism, but what it is. We need a movement that is defined by what it stands for, what it hopes to gain. Holding one correct belief, there is no god, is not enough to move us into the future. We need not just correct beliefs, but justifiable ones. We need a construction, similar to science, to correct and form beliefs and causes.

Logic Priest