Who's to Blame? Not U.S.!

So Rush and his ilk, responding to the International Red Cross's work investigating what happened at Abu Ghraib have decided that -- who was to blame?

The International Committee for the Red Cross, of course.

Why is the ICRC to blame for what happened at Abu Ghraib?

Because they pointed out that Americans were torturing people, and this (pointing it out, not the actual torture) was a bad thing.

Obviously exposing the torture must mean they (a) hate America and are (b) therefore a leftist organization.

I mean, if you are engaged in Winger-think, that is.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/outrage?pid=2054

Okay, See...

Right, then.

No sooner do I post that below then I get an email from my intrepid reporter in the field (you know who you are), the one who keeps me updated on the activities of the local fundies -- and she's got another fine story: a traumatized young girl who came to her in tears because her brother the fundie preacher has told her that her dog (oh yes, her dog) is going to go to hell when he dies.

Dogs go to hell, says this guy.

Because they don't have souls, that's why.

So of course they can't be saved by OUR LORD. Amen brother.

So of course it's straight into the burning lake of fire for all eternity.

Can I get a save me Jesus!

Yes, that dawg is gonna burn!

And unless you wanna burn with him, sistah --!

He tells this to his kid sister.

Ai.

He also tells her, by the way, that it's in the Bible that black people and white people can't get married. Bet I know what verse he cited for that one.

Do you see what I'm talking about here?

I mean, I'm trying to love the fundies here in Arkansas. I swear I am...

Thinking About Us

Anti-Christian? Me?

Some comments lately have caused me to have a look at my site as a whole, and I can see how people could gain the impression that I’m anti-Christian.

I’m not – let me say that, just for clarity.

I like Christians – actual Christians*. I spend a lot of time lurking on Christian websites, for instance. And I’m a big fan of Jesus himself, his philosophy and his teachings. The Sermon on the Mount is one of my favorite pieces of wisdom literature.

What I’m opposed to is hatred and ignorance.

Frequently those do attach to religion – not always the Christian religion, of course. There are ignorant and hateful Jews, ignorant and hateful Muslims, ignorant and hateful (I suppose – I haven’t actually met any) Unitarians out there. I just happen to live in an area of the country where I am surrounded by a large number of ignorant and hateful fundamentalist Christians.

And, thanks to the recent election, lots of ignorant and hateful Right-Wing Christians are putting their opinions forth into public view – attempting to force the rest of the country to adhere to their ignorant and frequently hateful worldviews.

I don’t see it as anti-Christian for me to object to that. I see it as anti-hate, and anti-ignorance.

Specifically, for instance, when some fundamentalist Christian says that because he or she believes that God created the world in seven days six thousand years ago therefore the public school system that my tax dollars pay for should teach an ignorant “alternative” theory called “intelligent design,” I don’t see it as anti-Christian to object to that. I see it as anti-ignorance.

When some fundamentalist Christian says she needs to persecute a seven-year-old child because her backwater religion teaches her that gay people are evil, I don’t see it as anti-Christian to object to that. I see it as anti-hate.

I suppose I should seek more balance on the site. I would, if people would start doing more intelligent and kind things.

What's up with people, anyway?






*The Christians I know and like, btw, the ones I admit I think of as “real” Christians, aren’t hanging around obsessing over gay people and evolution and who’s having abortions or using what kind of birth control or saying “damn” too often. The real Christians are too busy making a difference in the world to fiddle with trivia like that.

Maybe I should post about some of them.

Bad Words! Bad!

I'm not sure what the point of this news story is -- since it's called "weird news," I can only assume that the writer of the story think it's weird that these words should be included in the OED. That tells me that the writer of the story has no idea what the OED is or what it's for.

The story states, with no commentary, that a "prestigious dictionary," to wit, the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, has added more "than 2,000 new and revised word entries," and then goes on to tell us that some of these entries included words from what the writer calls "hip-hop," such as "crack ho" and "thugged out."

http://www.ncbuy.com/news/2004-12-15/1011323.html

I'm assuming the writer expects us to be scandalized by this. How dare a "prestigious dictionary" include, well, words used by black people in it! Doesn't a "prestigious dictionary" know that black people's words aren't real words?

The writer is ignorant, obviously, of the purpose of this particular prestigious dictionary, which is and always has been to record and define every word in use in the English language -- yes, even those used by African-American people. Heavens.

Sisyphus is a Happy Man

I’m grading final exams this week, always a depressing experience.

Teaching is a Sisyphean experience at best: each semester, there we are at the bottom of the hill in the grim dark underworld, and we labor to shove that rock upwards. Each semester, that sucker careens back down again, despite all we can do. Camus says Sisyphus is a happy man, and mostly, you know, we are, we professors. It’s deeply engaging, deeply hopeless work, and we really love it.

Only not so much during exam week, when we see how badly we have failed.

I made the mistake of asking my American Lit students to define Worldview Conflict on their exams. I knew it was a mistake when I did it, too.

We all have worldview conflicts, as I’m sure you all know: these occur when we believe two mutually exclusive things. Which we all do.

American Christians, for instance, to take a fairly obvious example, believe both that they should not worship wealth (because it says so right there in the Bible: You cannot serve both God and Mammon; and a rich man cannot enter the kingdom of heaven; and so forth); and that they should be capitalists, who do worship wealth.

American Christians have no problem living with this worldview conflict – they have no trouble driving their Hummers to church on Sunday, as I have often observed.

Or – to use the example we noted in class – American Quakers, back in the early 19th century, had no problem both believing that slavery was wrong and that they should sell slaves. That was a worldview conflict, but one they had no trouble dealing with. Worldview one: slavery is wrong. Worldview two: It is right to make a profit, and slavery is profitable.

Anyway, I ask the students, on these exams, to define the terms and to give examples.

They absolutely refuse to define worldview conflict as “holding two conflicting worldviews at the same time.” No: they insist upon defining it as “when someone goes against what he believes.”

So it’s not the guy believes X and he believes Y at the same time and those things conflict; no, it’s the guy believes X but then he goes ahead and does Y.

Even though this is manifestly not the case in the examples we have studied, or in the examples they then go ahead and give me.

Why? Because that would be to admit that such a thing is possible – that people could think two ways at once. And these students, at least half of them, don’t want that to be true.

Why does this bother them?

I’ve been trying to figure that one out for a while now. I think it’s attached to their love of code ethics, and their desire for simplicity.

Which makes sense, when we look at the rhetoric of the Red-Staters. (And the students who refuse to define the term correctly are, in fact, the conservative students in the class.) They want this Simple Worldview. They adhere to the Nuance-is-for-Girls way of thinking. They love the code-ethic way of dealing with situations.

It doesn’t match reality, true – but that is, apparently, a price they are willing to live with.

Reality not being, after all, a commodity they are much interested in dealing with.

An excellent Point

Brandon over at bad christian makes a really good point:

He's arguing it's not that we want the Rightest (heh, I like that mispelling, think I'll leave it) it's not that we want the Right-Wing/Fundie Christians to actually secede to Alabama the way they keep threatening to -- which, you know, I don't.

http://blog.badchristian.com/blogs/index.php/2004/12/14/what_progressives_want#comments

I don't agree with a lot of the things these fundies believe. It puzzles me that anyone who's been awake and aware could believe some of them -- that wives should submit (by which, at least here in Arkie, we seem to mean "give up your own free will") to their husbands, for instance, and that any sane God would think that was a good idea.

But, on the other hand, I don't want to put them in camps, or blow them up, or send them straight to a burning lake of fire for all eternity because they think these things. I don't even particularly want them to go away. It's sort of nice, sometimes, that they're around to tell my six year old she's going to burn in hell if she goes Trick-or-Treating, because then, you know, we get to have a Teaching Moment.

All I want is what Brandon wants: these folk to admit that this is our country too. We have a right to our worldview and our belief system, and to go about our living our lives without constant harassment from them and theirs; we have a right to a school system that actually teaches actual knowledge, and not their propaganda -- not history classes, for instance, that lie about what happened in early America, or science classes that pretend Intelligent Design is a viable theory. We have a right to espouse our moral values without being constantly told we're evil for having those values -- for instance, my daughter shouldn't have to lie about whether she went trick-or-treating to avoid being hassled at school.

Yeah, and world peace. I'm with Brandon on wanting that one too.

Fundies on the March

Well, they told us they would. So it’s not a shock.

They’ve got a bill to ban all abortions in SD in the works, except those where the mother’s life is in danger “or she might suffer irreparable harm” – apparently a little repairable harm is no big deal – and they’ve been dumbing down sex ed for years now and now they’re going after evolution in both Kansas and Missouri. Because, you know, Fundamentalist Christians want it that way.

And, after all, this is their country, right? The rest of us can just shut up and sit down.

In 1999, the Kansas board voted to erase any mention of evolution from the state science curriculum, opening the door for the teaching of creationism. That was reversed in 2001, after three board members who supported the move were defeated in a Republican primary. Kathy Martin, a newly elected member of the board who favors teaching alternatives to evolution, said the board would probably take a different route this time, like introducing the teaching of "intelligent design," a theory that holds that the development of the universe and earth was guided at each step by an "intelligent agent."

(snip)

State Representative Cynthia Davis of Missouri prefiled two bills for the next session of the Legislature that she said "reflect what people want." One would remove the state's requirement that all forms of contraception and their potential health effects be taught in schools, leaving the focus on abstinence. Another would require publishers that sell biology textbooks to Missouri to include at least one chapter with alternative theories to evolution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/national/13states.html?oref=login&oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

Not gonna be happy, the Fundies, until they’ve turned this into a theocracy.

And anyone who thinks that’s not their plan isn’t paying attention.

He's not a racist

He’s not a racist – he just dresses like one!

So down there in Louisiana, where I spent most of my childhood and adolescence, land where it’s too hot to care, and folks are proud to elect former Nazis to public positions, we have a judge, Timothy Ellender, who showed up for a Halloween party in “blackface makeup to complement his orange prison jumpsuit, handcuffs and afro wig.”

This was all fun and games, mind you – a little joke! Because his wife was dressed as a police officer! Get it now? It’s just meant to be funny! What’s wrong with you people?

And, as the dissenting judge in the guy’s case, Judge Jeffery Victory, said, it’s not like this guy’s an actual racist or anything – c’mon!

"A review of Judge Ellender's record on the bench turned up absolutely no evidence of racial bias in his decisions; in fact, the review showed that, if anything, he was more lenient toward African-American defendants," Victory wrote. "Nothing suggests that Judge Ellender abused his office in order to further his personal desires. Finally, Judge Ellender apologized for his actions both publicly and in private meetings with local leaders of the black community."

I absolutely promise you that half – oh, come on, three-quarters – of Louisiana agrees with Judge Victory.

They, too, see nothing wrong with a sitting judge who thinks its funny to dress up as a prisoner in an afro and blackface for a Halloween party. And they too don’t think it’s racist to either find that funny or to see nothing wrong with Ellender’s behavior.

It’s just those black folk being touchy again. Can’t they take a joke?

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-2/1103007452127580.xml

What the Fundies are Afraid of

This is from the end of Philip Pullman's trilogy -- in one respect, it's the whole point to his Dark Materials trilogy (which is a very fine piece of work, BTW -- I highly recommend it):

Lyra and Will have just done away with, or helped God die -- it's not really clear which, and it's not God anyway in Pullman's theology, but a angel who was pretending to be God and messing up the universe for the rest of us, and then got himself in deep trouble trying to maintain the illusion -- but anyway, they've just done that, and now Will is thinking about what his father said before he died, and what it meant:

"He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished. We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place."

And Lyra agrees, agrees that this life matters, and agrees moreover that the two of them need to split up and go to their own separate worlds, to work in their own separate world. She says: "We have to be all those different things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we've got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we'll build . . ."

All the different bells of the city chimed, once each, this one high, that one low, some close by . . . In that other Oxford where she and Will had kissed goodbye, the bells would be chiming, too, and a nightingale would be singing, and a little breeze would be stirring in the leaves in the Botanic Garden.

"And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?"

"The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra.

This (along with the whole God-isn't-God-and-it's-right-to-kill-him bit) is what has the Fundies so upset: the point of this trilogy is that we should shift our focus from some heaven off there -- some Kingdom of Heaven we'll be moving to after death -- to a Republic of Heaven, here and now.

The point of this trilogy is that we should mend the world.

And we know how fundies feel about that.

More Right Wing Lies

Here's another bit of Winger hysteria: it's an oldie but goodie. Goes like this: those Leftists on the ACLU, those radicals and atheists, they want to DESTROY Christmas, they can't take the peace and love of the Christmas season because they're such evil people, yap yap yap, so they can't let our sweet school children sing a few Christman carols in peace, mmm mmm mmm.

Bill O'Reilly and no doubt Rush too (I haven't been up to listening to Rush lately, as loony as he's gotten) has been going on about this lately -- how the school systems are UNDER SEIGE and OUR KIDS CAN'T EVEN SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS (sorry, but Bill does tend to shout) and how those stores in New York are saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, like all Good Americans would, and how that Mayor of New York won't call it a Christmas tree amd other bits of whiny hysteria which are meant to show you how the Jews and the Muslims are just ruining this great country for us all.

Media Matters ( http://mediamatters.org/items/200412100006) has a good page on what has actually been going on in all these cases. In case you're interested. And -- big shock here -- Bill's got just about every single fact wrong.

So my question is -- why do Wingers believe this nonsense?

Well, I know the answer. It reinforces their worldview. They like to believe that the evil Jews and Muslims and atheists are out to get them and destroy their country. Without the evil Other (yep, that would be me, sitting here at my keyboard) that's out to get them, what do they have?

Certainly not peace and love and feeding the hungry and taking care of the poor and visiting prisoners and loving their enemies. God, no. No room for that in their nifty little religion.

Quotation for the day

"... I am not afraid of priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering. I have contemplated their order from the Magi of the East to the Saints of the West and I have found no difference of character, but of more or less caution, in proportion to their information or ignorance on whom their interested duperies were to be played off. Their sway in New England is indeed formidable. No mind beyond mediocrity dares there to develop itself."

Thomas Jefferson

Right-Wing Lies

I’m sure you probably know something about the Stevens Creek Elementary School lawsuit and the Winger hysteria, but eRiposte has an excellent page on it if you’re looking for complete data and details.

You’ll remember this is the story our hysterical buddy Drudge and his friends Rush and the rest broke right before Thanksgiving, claiming those terrorists in the school system had gone too far now, how “they” were banning the Declaration of Independence in Our Schools because it had the word God in it, yap yap yap yap.

When, of course, what actually was happening was a Far Right Christian teacher was attempting to proselytize in the classroom, a parent complained, and the principal asked the teacher to submit his materials for review.

When the principal saw what the teacher had been asking his grammar school students to do, she pulled some of the assignments – the ones that were clearly Christian propaganda. At which point a Far Christian Right organization, the ADF, sued the school system.

eRiposte has details, including copies of the assignments that were pulled:

(http://www.eriposte.com/philosophy/fundamentalism/stevenscreek.htm)

Let me pose a question: Can you imagine the fuss Fundamenalist Christian parents would raise if a teacher of any sort were giving their kids "assignments" of this nature about the Jewish religion, the Muslim religion, the Wiccan religion, the Deist religion? Would they be thinking it would be okay to have God in school then? Because, you know, it was a part of history and all?

You can't do that!

From a story on the BBC website:

The director and screenwriter of the film adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials is to remove references to God and the church in the movie.

Chris Weitz, director of About a Boy, said the changes were being made after film studio New Line expressed concern.

The award-winning trilogy - Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass - tell the story of Oxford girl Lyra Belacqua.

She is drawn into an epic struggle against the Church, which has been carrying out experiments on children in an attempt to remove original sin.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4077987.stm


The Christians don’t like these books. These books attack Christians – or anyway, Christians feel attacked by these books. And if Christians feel attacked, well then, Christians are being attacked. Right?

So what are those liberals out there in Hollywood doing?

Caving. Censoring themselves. Changing the text to make the Christians happy.

How do you like George W's America so far?

And --

Why should we care?

Here's why. Why do books get published? Why do movies get made? What's media for?

All of it is to make money, obviously. But if we have the people who control the money convinced that the Far Right Christians need to be appeased at all costs -- and apparently right now Bushco and Dobson and his pack do indeed have the money people convinced of that -- then things that might make those Christians whiny are less likely to be published.

This matters because those Christians, being all faith-based, are opposed to certain aspects of the culture that matter.

Parts that criticize dangerous aspects of their church, for instance.

Parts that deal with critical thinking, for another.

Parts that don't match their worldview: feminism, ethical relativism, evolution, environmentalism, and just the weirdest things. Who knew that Christians were opposed to little girls in shorts, for instance?

So -- anyway --

First they went after Harry. Now they're going after Lyra. When will they be happy? When we're all sitting around in church reading Sunday school bulletins?

(Ha. When none of us can read at all. That's when they'll be happy.)

Rumsfield Talks to the Troops

So Rumsfield meets with some soldiers, who want to know why they aren’t getting the tools they need to fight the war in Iraq, and his reply? “Just tough it out, guys.” “Thems the breaks, guys.” “Do the best you can with what you got, guys.” Oh, and my favorite: “Don’t listen to those whiners who say you can’t win. I say you can!”

“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?" Wilson asked [Rumsfield}. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense.

Rumsfeld replied that troops should make the best of the conditions they face.
Rumsfeld stressed that soldiers who are heading to Iraq should not believe those who say the insurgents cannot be defeated or who otherwise doubt the will of the military to win.
"They say we can't prevail. I see that violence and say we must win," Rumsfeld said.

Who’s that we, Rummy? Oh, were you planning to get in that tank with the insufficient armor? Sorry, I must have missed that press conference.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&ncid=736&e=3&u=/ap/20041208/ap_on_re_mi_ea/rumsfeld

Festival of Lights

It's the first night of Hannukah. The kid is all excited. We're having a party, which we do every year, so all our friends who aren't Jews can also eat greasy foods and watch us light the candles. The kid is more excited about the party -- she loves parties -- than the present, since, as you know, Hannukah presents are not such a big deal. (Though she is not getting the traditional pair of socks or pencil set.)

What a strange holiday Hannukah is, when you think about it, or try to explain it -- We rented The Hebrew Hammer from Netflix last week. (The kid was entranced to find, afterwards, when I was reading her the bit from the Jewish Book O' Holidays Explained, that there actually had been a Hebrew Hammer, and that Hannukah sort of had something to do with him.) The Hammer and his sidekick, near the end, kind of/sort of try to explain what Hannukah is all about.

The thing is, it's sort of about the whole oil miracle. And it's sort of about the violent victory of Judah Maccabee over the Syrians. And it's sort of about the survivals of the Jews through all these centuries despite overwhelming odds. And it's sort of about light shining in the darkness even though it ought not, even though the odds really are against it: life existing, happiness existing, life existing, where life has no right to keep on existing.

With fried potato pancakes and jelly donuts and candles and presents.

See? Perfectly simple.