The worst part about seeing fnords is that almost no one else does, so I find myself in conversations or making observations that not many people understand. I find this frustrating so I shut up more often than I should. What's the point of saying something when no one listens?
Anyway, here's the bit about Ferguson. I'm not sure to what extent it is fair to take a specific incident and turn it into a referendum about broad social policy. While I understand the legitimate issues at stake in Ferguson, I find this specific incident far less touching and significant than the general trend that I don't think many people understand. Here it is:
We have all been tricked by the "war on crime". It has never been about crime. Every other industrialized nation in the world has crime rates similar to the US without our crazy obsession with crime and punishment (and they all have a small fraction of our murders, due to the fairly strict gun control laws in every other country worth living in). This very strongly suggests that crime rates in the US have been dropping due to outside factors (such as the fact we're a generally richer nation than we've ever been, leaving fewer people in utterly desperate straits). No, no, the war on crime has never been about crime but about race.
As the social movements of the Sixties changed the attitude of Americans, it became unacceptable to perpetrate violence on minority communities merely because they were minorities. Cops couldn't just go in to beat and kill minorities to satisfy the racist bloodlust. Yet, all of these police departments and justice systems were top-heavy with brutally vicious racist assholes. The cops and judges that came into power in the 60s were raised in the undeconstructed racism of the 50s and earlier.
It is likewise important to realize that this continuity extends forward - the cops and judges in power now arise directly from those people in the 70s. It is very important to remember that there is direct continuity of personnel between then and now - that the people in charge of law and punishment are the chosen heirs to the people who played the trick I'm going to reveal.
The people in power of the justice systems in the US weren't cured of their racism simply because some hippies made it harder to bash in black people's heads. So they invented the war on crime, which distributed the bulk of law enforcement assets in crime ridden areas. Well, those crime ridden areas were poor and non-white neighborhoods, they were defined as crime ridden by those undeconstructed racist cops. A bunch of laws and procedures were invented to rationalize this (and I'll talk about a couple of the specifics below) but the important thing to remember is that when you police a given neighborhood (even taking away stuff like racism, which was definitely a big player, but this is true even if you take that way), the neighborhood that is more policed will seem to have more crime.
This is easy to figure, right? You take two identical neighborhoods and you put twice as many cops into one as the other, the one with more cops will tend to find more crime - because that's one of the key duties of the police!
In turn, this rationalizes even more police coverage of those neighborhoods in a vicious circle. All the did was create the conditions through which the same behavior was permitted, merely changing the rational for that behavior to something that appeared less racist. It also allowed police to characterize non-white communities as being inherently criminal, even though it was a condition they created in the first place.
I said I'd give a couple of examples. They racists who set up this system consistently overplay their hand, but they aren't called on it because the more attenuated an argument becomes the less likely people are to pay attention to it in the first place. It's easy to understand that cops beating and killing black people because they're black is wrong. It's harder to understand that a bunch of racist people created a system to justify continued racist abuses under layers of statistically skullduggery. Most people don't bother to penetrate the more complex argument and/or assume the people proposing the more complex argument "have a point" so they give violent racist assholes a pass.
Still, examples. Both of them come from the major campaign of the war on crime, the war on drugs.
The first is that black people account for about 12% of the US population and about 13% of drug users and drug peddlers (the difference is due to wealth, by the way - poor people use more drugs and black people get paid about 3/5ths what white people do in another part of the complex and persistent pattern of racism in the US). However, over half of the people arrested on drug related offenses are black. This is what happens when you send your cops into black neighborhoods to look for drug dealers while ignoring the ones in white neighborhoods. It is the natural consequence and it is racist, hidden under statistical skullduggery. And it creates vicious stereotypes of black drug dealers and black drug users when the truth is that drug sales and use is almost perfectly evenly distributed by race.
(The sentences between black and white people for similar crimes is also greatly different. In all, black people spend about eight times longer in prison than white people for drug related offenses. Hella racist.)
The second clear and obvious example is crack cocaine. Until very recently, 1 gram of crack cocaine (which tends to be sold in poor, black neighborhoods) was treated as 100 grams of powder cocaine (which tends to be sold in rich, white neighborhoods). Now 1 gram of crack is as bad as 18 grams as cocaine.
The rationale behind this is that crack is some sort of superdrug. It isn't. The bioavailability of crack cocaine is about 15% more than snorted cocaine. That's it. It produces a short but intense high, but as with all narcotics how high you get is primarily a product of how much you take. If you've got enough money, you can put as much coke up your nose to give you the same intensity of high as crack - and it'll last longer. Likewise, if you don't have a lot of crack, you might smoke less, producing a less intense high. Since the metabolites of crack are identical with powdered cocaine, there is no particular difference in the character of the high - it's the same high. You just get it a little faster with smoking, per unit, though the high is shorter in duration.
Which is part of the reason why black people spend eight times as much time in prison vis-a-vis white people - when 1 gram of your drug is worth 100 times its weight in sentencing, you're going to be staying in the big house for a loooooooong time.
This isn't subtle, people! But the essential trick is that the when blatant, overt racism became less permissible in the 1960s it wasn't like the cops stopped being racist. They found a way to keep doing the same stuff, but buried under somewhat complex arguments.
Which is why it is vital to remember that the justice system of today is run by the hand picked successors to the guys who have always been running the show. It is being run with the same eye towards permitting the overt racism of the 50s and earlier but with the new lingo. They've had generations to tighten it up, to create the vacuous procedural bullshit that we've seen all over America, to solidify their "reasons" and cover up their racism with charts and shit. But it's shit. They're just racist thugs.
So, I very strongly feel for the people who have been trapped by the war on drugs. But when I hear people talking about this specific indictment, well, Betty Bowers summed it up pretty well when she said, "Whether Ferguson and racism or 9-11 and terrorism, Americans always fixate on the theater of results rather than the drudgery of causation." But the drudgery of causation is the important part! Without discussion of that causation, no amount of riots over specific police actions is going to mean very much.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Monday, November 17, 2014
NaNoWriMo and the writerly culture of self-abuse - and a call to arms to stop it!
NaNoWriMo has been a very positive experience for me. It's my first year of doing it and I'm very glad I have - it has been wonderful. Still, I guess I'm just a critical person because there's one thing that vexes me: the extent to which wrimos are critical of their own work. There is a persistent culture in NaNoWriMo that says to its participants that their novel will stink, that writing swiftly is somehow inferior to writing patiently, but there's no reason to think that's . . . true. That's right. My criticism is that you people think you suck when you don't!
My initial draft of this post included a lot of historical stuff about 19th century writers like Dumas and Tolstoy who have written enduring classics of literature on very tight schedules. It is true. Many of the finest novelists who have ever lived wrote in ways similar to wrimos. My initial post included additional historical details about how this kind of writing fell out of favor due to changes in publishing that made centralized publishing houses more economically profitable and not because of the preference of the audience, and how that centralization lead to those publishing houses putting a premium on shorter works due to the cost of paper, glue and ink. Yeah, that's right, all that "stay focused, write concise" stuff is primarily due to publishers wanting to save money on paper, ink and glue - it was never an artistic choice! It was never a popular choice! (Which is part of the reason why almost everyone who reads this will have their favorite works in some giant series like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones or whatever. Most readers don't want their favorite novels to end!) I ended up saying that modern comic book writers also write in a fashion similar to wrimos and they have created many of the most enduring cultural icons of the past hundred years. In short, I talked a fair bit about why writing quickly, as wrimos do, does not lead to inferior art and a brief history behind the often cruel modern editing practices that have more to do with the cost of physical books than anything artistic.
But that was long and boring, so I just summarized it and am going to move on to what I think is the more trenchant argument:
The odd of you failing to suck are in your favor - you're probably an average writer. There, I said it. Your book doesn't suck, it's probably average. Some will suck, but the odds of your book being truly bad are about the same as it being truly great. And for most of you? Your book is somewhere in the middle.
But here's the thing - being an "average" writer is pretty goddamn incredible. Just like the "average" of any other artist! In any other artistic field, people are quick to point out that their local music scene, art scene produces things that are lacking only big budgets of major distributors and are more in sync with the local attitudes and culture! Local artists rock. You are a local artist. This means you rock.
I don't understand why wrimos attack each other like this. If this was musicians instead of writers, we'd be pretty goddamn awesome. I assure you that musicians don't stay around their local scene talking about how much they suck! They instead talk about the conformity and banality created by the big labels, they revel in their idiosyncratic nature and local culture. And people would come from far away to listen to the products of that local musical culture.
What I'm saying here is we should adopt that mindset. We would find that the "average" of unpublished writers is about the same "average" for published writers, just as it is for musicians who aren't signed by big labels, or indie filmmakers, or pretty much anyone in the visual arts who doesn't have a studio in Manhattan. Because, let me tell you, I don't think a bunch of rich white people in New York City are any better at determining what's good for the three-hundred and fifty million people in the United States any more than a tiny group of rich white people in LA are very good at deciding what we should all listen to or make into movies. (And, of course, this doesn't even count everyone outside of the United States!) Most of us live in a huge country with incredible diversity and it is ill-served, I think, by the New York City centered publishing industry. We should break free of the strange notion that a small group of people far away from us in terms of culture, education, needs and wants should determine what defines good writing! I'm saying we're as good as the local artists in every other field, who are very good artists.
I think we should adopt that mindset. We are good artists. We are making good art. As good as all those other local artists out there that we thing are good.
My initial draft of this post included a lot of historical stuff about 19th century writers like Dumas and Tolstoy who have written enduring classics of literature on very tight schedules. It is true. Many of the finest novelists who have ever lived wrote in ways similar to wrimos. My initial post included additional historical details about how this kind of writing fell out of favor due to changes in publishing that made centralized publishing houses more economically profitable and not because of the preference of the audience, and how that centralization lead to those publishing houses putting a premium on shorter works due to the cost of paper, glue and ink. Yeah, that's right, all that "stay focused, write concise" stuff is primarily due to publishers wanting to save money on paper, ink and glue - it was never an artistic choice! It was never a popular choice! (Which is part of the reason why almost everyone who reads this will have their favorite works in some giant series like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones or whatever. Most readers don't want their favorite novels to end!) I ended up saying that modern comic book writers also write in a fashion similar to wrimos and they have created many of the most enduring cultural icons of the past hundred years. In short, I talked a fair bit about why writing quickly, as wrimos do, does not lead to inferior art and a brief history behind the often cruel modern editing practices that have more to do with the cost of physical books than anything artistic.
But that was long and boring, so I just summarized it and am going to move on to what I think is the more trenchant argument:
The odd of you failing to suck are in your favor - you're probably an average writer. There, I said it. Your book doesn't suck, it's probably average. Some will suck, but the odds of your book being truly bad are about the same as it being truly great. And for most of you? Your book is somewhere in the middle.
But here's the thing - being an "average" writer is pretty goddamn incredible. Just like the "average" of any other artist! In any other artistic field, people are quick to point out that their local music scene, art scene produces things that are lacking only big budgets of major distributors and are more in sync with the local attitudes and culture! Local artists rock. You are a local artist. This means you rock.
I don't understand why wrimos attack each other like this. If this was musicians instead of writers, we'd be pretty goddamn awesome. I assure you that musicians don't stay around their local scene talking about how much they suck! They instead talk about the conformity and banality created by the big labels, they revel in their idiosyncratic nature and local culture. And people would come from far away to listen to the products of that local musical culture.
What I'm saying here is we should adopt that mindset. We would find that the "average" of unpublished writers is about the same "average" for published writers, just as it is for musicians who aren't signed by big labels, or indie filmmakers, or pretty much anyone in the visual arts who doesn't have a studio in Manhattan. Because, let me tell you, I don't think a bunch of rich white people in New York City are any better at determining what's good for the three-hundred and fifty million people in the United States any more than a tiny group of rich white people in LA are very good at deciding what we should all listen to or make into movies. (And, of course, this doesn't even count everyone outside of the United States!) Most of us live in a huge country with incredible diversity and it is ill-served, I think, by the New York City centered publishing industry. We should break free of the strange notion that a small group of people far away from us in terms of culture, education, needs and wants should determine what defines good writing! I'm saying we're as good as the local artists in every other field, who are very good artists.
I think we should adopt that mindset. We are good artists. We are making good art. As good as all those other local artists out there that we thing are good.
Monday, November 3, 2014
Lena Dunham is the liberal Paris Hilton
I wasn't going to write this but when Luke O'Neil called me a liar, I decided that I had to talk about Lena fucking Dunham.
Here's the scoop, if you ain't heard. Lena Dunham was a really creepy seven year old. She was the kind of seven year old who peeked inside her sister's vagina, who bribed her with candy for kisses and masturbated next to her - when her sister was a year old.
Some right wing women-hating assholes saw this and said, "Holy shit, that's sexual abuse!" Some of the brighter ones said, "Her parents were abusive in allowing that kind of behavior."
This made Dunham flip out even though, let's face it, the whole point of her various stories is that she was a not normal child. Indeed, her entire career is predicated on saying shocking things. Banal, yes, but often shocking. (Shock material is almost always banal, anyway, so this isn't weird in the slightest.) She wrote these stories that were creepy about her creepy shit when she was a kid and is somehow freaked out when people find her creepy shit creepy.
But here's the thing - those conservatives? They have a point. Let me put it to you another way: what conversation would we be having if George Bush, when he was seven years old, shoved his fingers up inside a one year old girl's pussy?
The idea that some people are going to find Dunham's behavior akin to sexual abuse is pretty goddamn obvious. What is wrong for adults is usually wrong when children do it, too, after all. Sure, we often don't treat them the same way we treat adults who have done wrong, but if you're the kind of person who figures that it's wrong when an adult masturbates next to a toddler, you're probably going to think that it's wrong when a seven year old does it.
Then, Dunham is so . . . incredibly privileged that she doesn't see this is what disturbs me. Just the same way that her and her family are responding with the stock language of abused-but-in-denial people everywhere - that in their family it wasn't like that, don't be crazy, it made me the person I am today, all of that. Almost no one who engages in abuse realizes that they're abusers; many abused people think that the abuse is "normal".
To a certain extent, then, so what that the people who brought this to our attention were conservatives? Sure, it is not possible to ignore the sexist context of their behavior and beliefs, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a point. It is possible to be both a sexist and right, after all, if only by chance.
While the people who come to Dunham's defense, like Luke O'Neil, who called me a liar because I entertain thoughts that Dunham isn't really innocent, start off saying that, y'know, hey, let's ignore the really incredible privilege that Dunham has. She has what, then? A bad case of affluenza? She's been raised in such a morally challenged environment that the normal rules of human behavior somehow don't apply to her? Because I think that's the case, definitely. She doesn't come off like a human because she's not much of one, she's just the liberal Paris Hilton. She's never lived in the world, so she doesn't understand it at all - but that's okay because she will never have to live in the world. So she can just put on this "gee whiz" look and act like her behavior wasn't inappropriate, regardless of age.
Seriously. Just imagine if George Bush had, even as a young child, admitted to masturbating next to his one year old sister - where that would go. Seriously. The more he tried to say that it was okay and shit, the guiltier he would sound. The more disturbed we would get because he wouldn't seem to understand that - despite it being absurd to hold a seven year old responsible in the same way one holds an adult responsible in that situation - that it's actually pretty creepy, that it actually is a whole lot like molestation, even if it is absurd to hold a seven year old morally culpable as we would hold an adult morally culpable.
So while it's true that conservatives are using Dunham's rather shocking revelations as a mask for their sexism, it is equally true that her defenders are using her gender to mask their equally vile classism. When this fucked up woman does something between genuinely, legitimate criticism of her actions are forbidden because she's a woman. That's as wrong as condemning her on false pretexts, if you ask me.
So, Luke O'Neil, fuck you. You're giving cover to your rich masters because you're too much of a fucking coward to criticize wealth and privilege when it happens to be a liberal woman doing disturbing, fucked-up things.
Here's the scoop, if you ain't heard. Lena Dunham was a really creepy seven year old. She was the kind of seven year old who peeked inside her sister's vagina, who bribed her with candy for kisses and masturbated next to her - when her sister was a year old.
Some right wing women-hating assholes saw this and said, "Holy shit, that's sexual abuse!" Some of the brighter ones said, "Her parents were abusive in allowing that kind of behavior."
This made Dunham flip out even though, let's face it, the whole point of her various stories is that she was a not normal child. Indeed, her entire career is predicated on saying shocking things. Banal, yes, but often shocking. (Shock material is almost always banal, anyway, so this isn't weird in the slightest.) She wrote these stories that were creepy about her creepy shit when she was a kid and is somehow freaked out when people find her creepy shit creepy.
But here's the thing - those conservatives? They have a point. Let me put it to you another way: what conversation would we be having if George Bush, when he was seven years old, shoved his fingers up inside a one year old girl's pussy?
The idea that some people are going to find Dunham's behavior akin to sexual abuse is pretty goddamn obvious. What is wrong for adults is usually wrong when children do it, too, after all. Sure, we often don't treat them the same way we treat adults who have done wrong, but if you're the kind of person who figures that it's wrong when an adult masturbates next to a toddler, you're probably going to think that it's wrong when a seven year old does it.
Then, Dunham is so . . . incredibly privileged that she doesn't see this is what disturbs me. Just the same way that her and her family are responding with the stock language of abused-but-in-denial people everywhere - that in their family it wasn't like that, don't be crazy, it made me the person I am today, all of that. Almost no one who engages in abuse realizes that they're abusers; many abused people think that the abuse is "normal".
To a certain extent, then, so what that the people who brought this to our attention were conservatives? Sure, it is not possible to ignore the sexist context of their behavior and beliefs, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a point. It is possible to be both a sexist and right, after all, if only by chance.
While the people who come to Dunham's defense, like Luke O'Neil, who called me a liar because I entertain thoughts that Dunham isn't really innocent, start off saying that, y'know, hey, let's ignore the really incredible privilege that Dunham has. She has what, then? A bad case of affluenza? She's been raised in such a morally challenged environment that the normal rules of human behavior somehow don't apply to her? Because I think that's the case, definitely. She doesn't come off like a human because she's not much of one, she's just the liberal Paris Hilton. She's never lived in the world, so she doesn't understand it at all - but that's okay because she will never have to live in the world. So she can just put on this "gee whiz" look and act like her behavior wasn't inappropriate, regardless of age.
Seriously. Just imagine if George Bush had, even as a young child, admitted to masturbating next to his one year old sister - where that would go. Seriously. The more he tried to say that it was okay and shit, the guiltier he would sound. The more disturbed we would get because he wouldn't seem to understand that - despite it being absurd to hold a seven year old responsible in the same way one holds an adult responsible in that situation - that it's actually pretty creepy, that it actually is a whole lot like molestation, even if it is absurd to hold a seven year old morally culpable as we would hold an adult morally culpable.
So while it's true that conservatives are using Dunham's rather shocking revelations as a mask for their sexism, it is equally true that her defenders are using her gender to mask their equally vile classism. When this fucked up woman does something between genuinely, legitimate criticism of her actions are forbidden because she's a woman. That's as wrong as condemning her on false pretexts, if you ask me.
So, Luke O'Neil, fuck you. You're giving cover to your rich masters because you're too much of a fucking coward to criticize wealth and privilege when it happens to be a liberal woman doing disturbing, fucked-up things.
Thursday, October 23, 2014
South Home Air in Dayton, Ohio, tried to rob me
I had my first scam artist experience here in Ohio! It involves a company called South Home Air.
When getting our dishwasher installed, the installation man noticed that our boiler was leaking. So we turned it off and called up someone to take a look. The first guys who came are a local company called South Home Air, Inc. The guys came down for a look and decided that we needed at least $1000 worth of work, but to be safe, we should replace the boiler, which had a crack in the heat exchanger. That would be over $6000 but . . . well, if the boiler has a crack, it might be worth it, right?
I said I'd think about it. That evening, I got two calls from the guys trying to pressure me into deciding. This started to vex me because I generally mean it when I say, "I'll call you when I decide what to do."
We have a home warranty but we don't actually like the company. But if the job was going to be somewhere between a grand and six grand, well, we decided it was worth the hassle to get them involved. So I put in a service request.
This morning, South Home Air called again - despite having been told THREE TIMES NOW that I'll call them when I'm good and ready. I told them that someone else was going to look at the unit. They said I owed them seventy bucks. I said that I don't like to pay for estimates so I don't want to do business with them.
A few minutes later, I got another call from different people at South Home Air. At first, I thought there was simply a mix-up and they thought I wouldn't pay them the seventy dollars. I told the guy on the phone that, sure, if they bill us, we'll pay, but we're not going to work with people who charge for estimates. (The bigger problem is that I didn't KNOW they were going to charge for an estimate. It appears the industry is in a bit of transition and contractors have started to charge for estimates, which sounds really shady to me. It's like having someone charge you to tell you how much something costs, which I would prefer not to do.) The guy continued to try to sell me, saying that the seventy dollar fee would be waived if we paid them a thousand or six thousand dollars. At some point I used the word "goddamn" and he was, like, "Don't talk to me like that." I told him, "You called me, you fucking thief, and I'll swear when I like!" He objected to being called a thief and we argued for a bit.
After a couple of minutes, I said, "Look, it doesn't matter if it's a service call or an estimate or whatever - we're yelling at each other. Clearly we shouldn't work together." Then he insulted my intelligence ("I thought I was talking with an intelligent person!") and then I said I didn't want to work with him, then he gave me an insulting apology ("I'm sorry that you don't understand how this business works!") and then I hung up.
It gets worse! Today, another guy came over to look at the boiler. His findings? "This pressure release valve doesn't work, so I can't tell if there are leaks in other places."
I asked about repiping. He said that the pipes were old but in good condition and there was no sign of leakage. I asked about the broken heat exchanger. He said he didn't see anything broken but he couldn't be sure until they could build the pressure in the pipes. I asked why someone would then suggest a new water heater. He did not know. He said that our model of boiler is "like a tank" and regaled me with a story of the sixty year old one he'd dealt with in the past. He said that the new ones are more efficient, sure, and they'd happily install a new unit if we wanted a smaller, more efficient unit but that's not what the South Home Air guys said.
The upshot - South Home Air tried to rob me and my wife. Fuck those guys.
When getting our dishwasher installed, the installation man noticed that our boiler was leaking. So we turned it off and called up someone to take a look. The first guys who came are a local company called South Home Air, Inc. The guys came down for a look and decided that we needed at least $1000 worth of work, but to be safe, we should replace the boiler, which had a crack in the heat exchanger. That would be over $6000 but . . . well, if the boiler has a crack, it might be worth it, right?
I said I'd think about it. That evening, I got two calls from the guys trying to pressure me into deciding. This started to vex me because I generally mean it when I say, "I'll call you when I decide what to do."
We have a home warranty but we don't actually like the company. But if the job was going to be somewhere between a grand and six grand, well, we decided it was worth the hassle to get them involved. So I put in a service request.
This morning, South Home Air called again - despite having been told THREE TIMES NOW that I'll call them when I'm good and ready. I told them that someone else was going to look at the unit. They said I owed them seventy bucks. I said that I don't like to pay for estimates so I don't want to do business with them.
A few minutes later, I got another call from different people at South Home Air. At first, I thought there was simply a mix-up and they thought I wouldn't pay them the seventy dollars. I told the guy on the phone that, sure, if they bill us, we'll pay, but we're not going to work with people who charge for estimates. (The bigger problem is that I didn't KNOW they were going to charge for an estimate. It appears the industry is in a bit of transition and contractors have started to charge for estimates, which sounds really shady to me. It's like having someone charge you to tell you how much something costs, which I would prefer not to do.) The guy continued to try to sell me, saying that the seventy dollar fee would be waived if we paid them a thousand or six thousand dollars. At some point I used the word "goddamn" and he was, like, "Don't talk to me like that." I told him, "You called me, you fucking thief, and I'll swear when I like!" He objected to being called a thief and we argued for a bit.
After a couple of minutes, I said, "Look, it doesn't matter if it's a service call or an estimate or whatever - we're yelling at each other. Clearly we shouldn't work together." Then he insulted my intelligence ("I thought I was talking with an intelligent person!") and then I said I didn't want to work with him, then he gave me an insulting apology ("I'm sorry that you don't understand how this business works!") and then I hung up.
It gets worse! Today, another guy came over to look at the boiler. His findings? "This pressure release valve doesn't work, so I can't tell if there are leaks in other places."
I asked about repiping. He said that the pipes were old but in good condition and there was no sign of leakage. I asked about the broken heat exchanger. He said he didn't see anything broken but he couldn't be sure until they could build the pressure in the pipes. I asked why someone would then suggest a new water heater. He did not know. He said that our model of boiler is "like a tank" and regaled me with a story of the sixty year old one he'd dealt with in the past. He said that the new ones are more efficient, sure, and they'd happily install a new unit if we wanted a smaller, more efficient unit but that's not what the South Home Air guys said.
The upshot - South Home Air tried to rob me and my wife. Fuck those guys.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Why Sam Harris is a racist asshole
Sam Harris is another atheist racist asshole. Who knew? Recently, on Bill Maher's show - I've known Maher to be a toad for a while now, pretty much the distilled essence of everything I loathe about liberalism in America - Harris got into it with Ben Affleck about Muslims. One of the things Harris said is that you can blame all Muslims, more or less, because they support the radicals who support the terrorist.
He said imagine a series of concentric circles. (He's used this "argument" a number of times.) In the innermost circle, you've got terrorists. In the second circle, you've got radicals who give intellectual, material and moral support to terrorists. In the third circle, you've got run of the mill Muslims who give intellectual, material and moral support to the radicals - and through them, to the terrorists. THEREFORE, it's okay to hate all Muslims.
Okay, I'm going to mention, first, that in that second circle you've got to include the US government. The US government gives tremendous, incredible support to the Wahabbist absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia. In turn, Wahabbists give tremendous support to terrorists (including the 9/11 terrorists, I should add). In turn, that puts American citizens in the third circle, since we give support (through taxes, if not ideologically) to the US government that supports the regime in Saudi Arabia! (Further, in the past, we have directly supported guys like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Really, the US government is in Harris's second circle and we are in the third!)
But put that aside for the next bit of reasoning, which is: it's possible to use this technique in a lot of different ways.
So, let's imagine those same three concentric circles. In the first circle are "people who engage in illegal military actions" - the US government. The second circle is, then, "people who give material, intellectual and moral support to those illegal military actions". Let's call them the politicians, businesses, writers and such who have supported illegal military action abroad. Sam Harris, for instance, falls in this group. The third circle is everyone who gives support by association to the second circle - which would be pretty much everyone in the United States as well as the citizens of countries like Great Britain and Denmark.
Some Americans who object to the war might also object to being in the third circle. They might go, "Hey, I'm against these illegal wars and bombing campaigns!" Absolutely, sure. But Harris's reasoning doesn't allow for that from Muslims, so why should anyone allow it for you? That you're an American of principled conscious is utterly irrelevant to why people should hate you!
Some people might also go, "Chris, those categories seem awful arbitrary and really broad." Again, true, but so what? If you accept Harris's reasoning, then you accept arbitrary creation of sweeping categories for the purpose of condemning people.
Another person might also go, "Why stop there? Draw more circles! In Harris's diagram, add a fourth circle where religious people support religious expression and say kill all religious people, too! Draw a fifth circle for agnostics and atheists who support Christmas give material support to religion and kill them, too!"
Harris's reasoning (insofar as one might call it that) is deeply, profoundly specious. I mean, from his tete-a-tete with Affleck, at one point he said that 78% percent of British Muslims thought that the guys in Denmark who published those racist cartoons should be prosecuted. Harris goes on, in the same breath, to suggest that 78% of British Muslims therefore support terrorism! I think it is important to point out, here, that both GB and Denmark have anti-hate speech laws. So in Harris's mind, British Muslims who objected to the racist caricature of Islam and considered it hate speech THEREFORE support terrorism. This is intensely silly reasoning. It's so silly that it baffles me how an intelligent person could say it in public, excepting racism. When you add in racism, it makes perfect fucking sense.
So then this same dude goes on to create these broad, ignorant categories as if they were some kind of PROOF, objective proof, that people should discriminate against Muslims. And this isn't racist because . . . he drew a chart?
(At one point, he also said Affleck didn't understand his reasoning. Well, duh. Ben's a bright, not racist, principled man. Harris's reasoning makes no fucking sense so of course Affleck didn't understand it! I'm sure it would have been much clearer if Affleck spoke racist.)
But this guy, who thinks that 78% of British Muslims support terrorism because they were offended by racist cartoons, is making these arbitrary categories, ignoring how he participates in the very categories he draws, for the purpose of further discrimination and military action against Muslims. He equally stops drawing those arbitrary circles when they might effect him is simply icing on his racist cake - they are drawn and interpreted to keep his own hands clean!
What I'm saying here is that Harris full of shit and a racist asshole.
He said imagine a series of concentric circles. (He's used this "argument" a number of times.) In the innermost circle, you've got terrorists. In the second circle, you've got radicals who give intellectual, material and moral support to terrorists. In the third circle, you've got run of the mill Muslims who give intellectual, material and moral support to the radicals - and through them, to the terrorists. THEREFORE, it's okay to hate all Muslims.
Okay, I'm going to mention, first, that in that second circle you've got to include the US government. The US government gives tremendous, incredible support to the Wahabbist absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia. In turn, Wahabbists give tremendous support to terrorists (including the 9/11 terrorists, I should add). In turn, that puts American citizens in the third circle, since we give support (through taxes, if not ideologically) to the US government that supports the regime in Saudi Arabia! (Further, in the past, we have directly supported guys like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Really, the US government is in Harris's second circle and we are in the third!)
But put that aside for the next bit of reasoning, which is: it's possible to use this technique in a lot of different ways.
So, let's imagine those same three concentric circles. In the first circle are "people who engage in illegal military actions" - the US government. The second circle is, then, "people who give material, intellectual and moral support to those illegal military actions". Let's call them the politicians, businesses, writers and such who have supported illegal military action abroad. Sam Harris, for instance, falls in this group. The third circle is everyone who gives support by association to the second circle - which would be pretty much everyone in the United States as well as the citizens of countries like Great Britain and Denmark.
Some Americans who object to the war might also object to being in the third circle. They might go, "Hey, I'm against these illegal wars and bombing campaigns!" Absolutely, sure. But Harris's reasoning doesn't allow for that from Muslims, so why should anyone allow it for you? That you're an American of principled conscious is utterly irrelevant to why people should hate you!
Some people might also go, "Chris, those categories seem awful arbitrary and really broad." Again, true, but so what? If you accept Harris's reasoning, then you accept arbitrary creation of sweeping categories for the purpose of condemning people.
Another person might also go, "Why stop there? Draw more circles! In Harris's diagram, add a fourth circle where religious people support religious expression and say kill all religious people, too! Draw a fifth circle for agnostics and atheists who support Christmas give material support to religion and kill them, too!"
Harris's reasoning (insofar as one might call it that) is deeply, profoundly specious. I mean, from his tete-a-tete with Affleck, at one point he said that 78% percent of British Muslims thought that the guys in Denmark who published those racist cartoons should be prosecuted. Harris goes on, in the same breath, to suggest that 78% of British Muslims therefore support terrorism! I think it is important to point out, here, that both GB and Denmark have anti-hate speech laws. So in Harris's mind, British Muslims who objected to the racist caricature of Islam and considered it hate speech THEREFORE support terrorism. This is intensely silly reasoning. It's so silly that it baffles me how an intelligent person could say it in public, excepting racism. When you add in racism, it makes perfect fucking sense.
So then this same dude goes on to create these broad, ignorant categories as if they were some kind of PROOF, objective proof, that people should discriminate against Muslims. And this isn't racist because . . . he drew a chart?
(At one point, he also said Affleck didn't understand his reasoning. Well, duh. Ben's a bright, not racist, principled man. Harris's reasoning makes no fucking sense so of course Affleck didn't understand it! I'm sure it would have been much clearer if Affleck spoke racist.)
But this guy, who thinks that 78% of British Muslims support terrorism because they were offended by racist cartoons, is making these arbitrary categories, ignoring how he participates in the very categories he draws, for the purpose of further discrimination and military action against Muslims. He equally stops drawing those arbitrary circles when they might effect him is simply icing on his racist cake - they are drawn and interpreted to keep his own hands clean!
What I'm saying here is that Harris full of shit and a racist asshole.
Monday, October 6, 2014
Short critique of modern atheism
I was recently asked to write a critique of atheism, so here it is. This post applies to atheism in the Anglophone world. I don't think I have enough understanding of global atheism to say anything meaningful about it.
There are two major problems with atheism in the English-speaking world that I can see - the first is that it is a club run for and by middle-class white people, mostly men, who are wedded to a very trivial view of scientific reductionism and the second is that there isn't much of a difference in attitude and action between atheists and religious people.
That atheism is a club for middle class white boys is almost transparently obvious. Almost all the big shot atheist writers - Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens - are well-to-do white men. When I was in Miami, almost all of the people who belonged to the atheist group I briefly attended were white men - and that's really saying something in Miami - and I saw a grand total of zero non-white people in the seven events I attended in Freethought Dayton. In Freethought Dayton, seven of the eight board members were white men with one white woman. It is my understanding this is pretty generally true.
And why not! All the "serious" atheist thinkers from Diderot forward are well-to-do white men! It is a culture that was created and has been fostered by the most privileged sector of humans that has ever existed! While there are other brands of atheism - Marx springs to mind - it is the atheism of white prestige and privilege that is the foundation of modern atheism, I think.
They don't generally think this. They give lip service to various liberal platitudes, but they are about as serious as the dudes who wrote The Bell Curve. They are almost entirely wedded to a culture of material acquisition that is shocking in its breadth - but that's the well-to-do white person thing, right? It's no different than any other group of rich white people from college frats to the World Bank, regardless of religious affiliation.
They also have a kind of profound love of scientific reductionism that rationalizes everything they say and do. So, in Freethought Dayton, when they were initially writing their statement about inclusion, it was littered with phrases like, "Scientific research shows that racism isn't real" and "Current scientific understanding about gender issues . . ." I'm pretty sure that kind of language would have made it into the final draft if I hadn't said that I would be against racism even if a bunch of scientists were for it, and ditto discrimination on gender issues. I also pointed out that scientific racism is totally a thing.
The last meeting I was at in a Freethought Dayton group, likewise, included a long and grueling conversation where people were really digging into me saying "science says this" and "science says that", which seems to me to ignore two of the things about "science" - first is that science does not often speak with one voice. So what a quantum physicist says about gravity is currently totally different than what an astrophysicist says about gravity. And what an environmentalist says about the world has little to do with anything either of those other dudes say. Science is a rambling, often chaotic enterprise and while there is sometimes a unified theory within a field to guide it, often there is not, and there is little to no unification of theories between fields. No one can really speak for "science" and the field is so vast that I would seriously question anyone's qualifications for doing so. Yet it is my experience that atheists are very quick to say what "science" says.
Second in this regard is that science speaks about matters of science alone. Science tells us very little about ethics or beauty, though both are very important to us. Many very important fields - government and law, for example - are not scientific. Attempts to jam these fields into scientific reasoning exhibits a faith in science I find frankly religious in dimensions. It is just as bizarre, to me, as when Bible-believing Christians say that the answers to all questions are found in a book compiled 1600 years ago. I think that science is a highly productive epistemology, but it doesn't even try to answer all questions and to believe it does is where the religious canard that "science is like religion" becomes true.
(As I have said elsewhere, science isn't much like religion, but I'm not talking about science, here, but the crazy way many atheists believe in science.)
The second big problem with religion is that the attitudes and believes of atheists aren't different than religious people of their race and class, really. There is this atheist saw: the difference between an atheist and a Christian is that the atheist believes in one fewer god than the Christian. Yes. Exactly. It isn't much of a difference at all!
So the behavior of atheists is almost identical to that of rich white men. Part of this - and you see it all the time with assholes like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris - is that they feel very free to attack in grotesque terms the same people that Christians in their society attack in the same ways.
So Richard Dawkins is this sexist pig. Sam Harris can go on a TV show and say, seriously, that Muslims are extra special kinds of murderers and liberals need to really crack down on them. This gets reflected on down, so at Freethought Dayton they were equally comfortable saying grotesque, racist crap about Muslims - they only study technology to murder Americans, they stopped thinking after 1500, stuff like that. And going hand-in-hand with the first point, the only thing that mattered was their developments in science and technology. I can find this kind of talk in after church social in America.
I contend that atheist culture is broadly like this. They might have rejected the existence of supernatural entities like gods and devils, but their attitudes about many, many things are the exact same as religious people and driven by our culture of religion. If the only thing you've abandoned is the belief in a supernatural god, that isn't such a big deal if you continue to perpetrate the patterns of thought and behavior created by religion. I contend that atheists do precisely that. They don't hate Muslims, all Muslims, for any reason - it is easy to tear apart the idea that Muslims are somehow more irrationally violent than people in the West, as I've done again and again on this very blog - but because people in the Christian West have hated Muslims for 1400 years. As a result, they do precisely what Christians do - rather than trying to build bridges between the West and the Middle East, they attack them as backwards and needing a brutal lesson in violence for their own good.
Specifically on terms of race, atheists merely perpetrate the cultural misconceptions of our society, and from the same religious sources. So, for instance, almost all atheists believe in a radical kind of free will - that we are absolutely free. This isn't scientific. Almost no one in psychiatry, psychology or neurology believes in a strong free will - many don't believe in free will at all. Yet, I have met blessed few atheists that don't believe in an extreme form of free will - which has its origins in Christian dogma. Christianity requires an extreme definition of free will in order to rationalize their beliefs about sin, heaven and hell. I could go on about this, but I hope to have made my point - much of what atheists believe derives almost entirely from religion.
I also think that atheists who are in groups and sitting next to atheists who say these things are no different than Christians or Muslims who sit next to their coreligionists and tolerate their racist, sexist bullshit in church. I understand the need to belong to something is very strong, but you're doing exactly what Christopher Hitchens said that moderate Christians do when they don't stand up to their racist and sexist peers - they give tacit support and approval to the atheists who do think and say such things.
One of the net results of this is it makes it very hard for religious people, particularly if they're not rich or white, to take atheism seriously. If I'm a poor black person and I'm listening to that racist fuckwit Sam Harris talk about how liberals need to attack Muslims more, and I'm looking down at the local mosque and how they spend a bunch of their time improving the self-image of black people, doing community service and creating a safe space for black culture to flourish, I'm not likely to be very impressed. Wearing a headscarf doesn't seem so unreasonable in the face of all that empowerment. Harris is going to sound a whole lot like another self-indulgent rich white racist telling non-white people how they should act and behave . . . which is precisely what he is! So I guess that's okay!
And if I'm some poor white person, it's the same thing! Rich white people don't give a damn about the social and culture aspects of religion - how when people like Sam Harris either contemptuously dismiss or flatly ignore the poor, it's often the churches that are there to pick up the slack. A sermon seems a small price to pay for the kind of cultural interconnectedness that churches in poor communities bring!
This isn't me saying that religion is good, broadly speaking. I think there are a lot of problems with religion. That teaching children that they'll go to hell unless they behave a certain way is psychological abuse, that religion teaches an inability to correctly determine what is true and what is not that has multifaceted and serious consequences for everyone, everywhere (climate change deniers are at the top of this list). I think religion normalizes racism and sexism, it creates an us-against-them attitude that is unhealthy for the body politic and a bunch of stuff besides. Unfortunately, atheists have inherited a lot of that, often wedded to the arrogant superiority of rich white people looking down at everyone else.
None of this is structural in believing there are no gods. There are plenty of skeptical traditions from antiquity to the modern day that have little or no overlap with modern Anglophone atheism. I think one of the reasons I'm relatively sympathetic to critique of atheism, for instance, is that I got into it through Marx. To me, criticism of religion is inextricably bound up with that of class - and the bigger problem is and always has been that a certain group of people have cheated, lied and killed in order to command other people. To me, that's atheism. Most Anglophone atheists are far more in tune with Ayn Rand and Adam Smith than Karl Marx, though. Still, that's where I think this comes from, even though I no longer regard myself as a socialist. Religion is a way that a certain segment of the ruling class keeps everyone else in line; modern Anglophone atheists are almost uniformly from that class, they just think that neo-liberal capitalist democracy and a scientific bureaucracy are better at it than religion.
I give the caveats that I am not condemning everyone who is an atheist or religious. Many atheists are good people; so are many religious people. But insofar as I'm talking about broad cultural trends, I think what I've said is true.
For my own part, while I do not believe in god, I am finding it increasingly hard to call myself an atheist because it identifies me with a social movement I find increasing abhorrent. And not just some of the talking heads on TV, but that the whole movement - in my experience - does reflect those values. I prefer secular humanist, these days, with an emphasis on the humanist. In the end, I'd rather spend time with a Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or whatever that believes in reducing the misery in the world with an bunch of fucking sexist, racist assholes who happen to agree with me that gods don't exist.
There are two major problems with atheism in the English-speaking world that I can see - the first is that it is a club run for and by middle-class white people, mostly men, who are wedded to a very trivial view of scientific reductionism and the second is that there isn't much of a difference in attitude and action between atheists and religious people.
That atheism is a club for middle class white boys is almost transparently obvious. Almost all the big shot atheist writers - Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens - are well-to-do white men. When I was in Miami, almost all of the people who belonged to the atheist group I briefly attended were white men - and that's really saying something in Miami - and I saw a grand total of zero non-white people in the seven events I attended in Freethought Dayton. In Freethought Dayton, seven of the eight board members were white men with one white woman. It is my understanding this is pretty generally true.
And why not! All the "serious" atheist thinkers from Diderot forward are well-to-do white men! It is a culture that was created and has been fostered by the most privileged sector of humans that has ever existed! While there are other brands of atheism - Marx springs to mind - it is the atheism of white prestige and privilege that is the foundation of modern atheism, I think.
They don't generally think this. They give lip service to various liberal platitudes, but they are about as serious as the dudes who wrote The Bell Curve. They are almost entirely wedded to a culture of material acquisition that is shocking in its breadth - but that's the well-to-do white person thing, right? It's no different than any other group of rich white people from college frats to the World Bank, regardless of religious affiliation.
They also have a kind of profound love of scientific reductionism that rationalizes everything they say and do. So, in Freethought Dayton, when they were initially writing their statement about inclusion, it was littered with phrases like, "Scientific research shows that racism isn't real" and "Current scientific understanding about gender issues . . ." I'm pretty sure that kind of language would have made it into the final draft if I hadn't said that I would be against racism even if a bunch of scientists were for it, and ditto discrimination on gender issues. I also pointed out that scientific racism is totally a thing.
The last meeting I was at in a Freethought Dayton group, likewise, included a long and grueling conversation where people were really digging into me saying "science says this" and "science says that", which seems to me to ignore two of the things about "science" - first is that science does not often speak with one voice. So what a quantum physicist says about gravity is currently totally different than what an astrophysicist says about gravity. And what an environmentalist says about the world has little to do with anything either of those other dudes say. Science is a rambling, often chaotic enterprise and while there is sometimes a unified theory within a field to guide it, often there is not, and there is little to no unification of theories between fields. No one can really speak for "science" and the field is so vast that I would seriously question anyone's qualifications for doing so. Yet it is my experience that atheists are very quick to say what "science" says.
Second in this regard is that science speaks about matters of science alone. Science tells us very little about ethics or beauty, though both are very important to us. Many very important fields - government and law, for example - are not scientific. Attempts to jam these fields into scientific reasoning exhibits a faith in science I find frankly religious in dimensions. It is just as bizarre, to me, as when Bible-believing Christians say that the answers to all questions are found in a book compiled 1600 years ago. I think that science is a highly productive epistemology, but it doesn't even try to answer all questions and to believe it does is where the religious canard that "science is like religion" becomes true.
(As I have said elsewhere, science isn't much like religion, but I'm not talking about science, here, but the crazy way many atheists believe in science.)
The second big problem with religion is that the attitudes and believes of atheists aren't different than religious people of their race and class, really. There is this atheist saw: the difference between an atheist and a Christian is that the atheist believes in one fewer god than the Christian. Yes. Exactly. It isn't much of a difference at all!
So the behavior of atheists is almost identical to that of rich white men. Part of this - and you see it all the time with assholes like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris - is that they feel very free to attack in grotesque terms the same people that Christians in their society attack in the same ways.
So Richard Dawkins is this sexist pig. Sam Harris can go on a TV show and say, seriously, that Muslims are extra special kinds of murderers and liberals need to really crack down on them. This gets reflected on down, so at Freethought Dayton they were equally comfortable saying grotesque, racist crap about Muslims - they only study technology to murder Americans, they stopped thinking after 1500, stuff like that. And going hand-in-hand with the first point, the only thing that mattered was their developments in science and technology. I can find this kind of talk in after church social in America.
I contend that atheist culture is broadly like this. They might have rejected the existence of supernatural entities like gods and devils, but their attitudes about many, many things are the exact same as religious people and driven by our culture of religion. If the only thing you've abandoned is the belief in a supernatural god, that isn't such a big deal if you continue to perpetrate the patterns of thought and behavior created by religion. I contend that atheists do precisely that. They don't hate Muslims, all Muslims, for any reason - it is easy to tear apart the idea that Muslims are somehow more irrationally violent than people in the West, as I've done again and again on this very blog - but because people in the Christian West have hated Muslims for 1400 years. As a result, they do precisely what Christians do - rather than trying to build bridges between the West and the Middle East, they attack them as backwards and needing a brutal lesson in violence for their own good.
Specifically on terms of race, atheists merely perpetrate the cultural misconceptions of our society, and from the same religious sources. So, for instance, almost all atheists believe in a radical kind of free will - that we are absolutely free. This isn't scientific. Almost no one in psychiatry, psychology or neurology believes in a strong free will - many don't believe in free will at all. Yet, I have met blessed few atheists that don't believe in an extreme form of free will - which has its origins in Christian dogma. Christianity requires an extreme definition of free will in order to rationalize their beliefs about sin, heaven and hell. I could go on about this, but I hope to have made my point - much of what atheists believe derives almost entirely from religion.
I also think that atheists who are in groups and sitting next to atheists who say these things are no different than Christians or Muslims who sit next to their coreligionists and tolerate their racist, sexist bullshit in church. I understand the need to belong to something is very strong, but you're doing exactly what Christopher Hitchens said that moderate Christians do when they don't stand up to their racist and sexist peers - they give tacit support and approval to the atheists who do think and say such things.
One of the net results of this is it makes it very hard for religious people, particularly if they're not rich or white, to take atheism seriously. If I'm a poor black person and I'm listening to that racist fuckwit Sam Harris talk about how liberals need to attack Muslims more, and I'm looking down at the local mosque and how they spend a bunch of their time improving the self-image of black people, doing community service and creating a safe space for black culture to flourish, I'm not likely to be very impressed. Wearing a headscarf doesn't seem so unreasonable in the face of all that empowerment. Harris is going to sound a whole lot like another self-indulgent rich white racist telling non-white people how they should act and behave . . . which is precisely what he is! So I guess that's okay!
And if I'm some poor white person, it's the same thing! Rich white people don't give a damn about the social and culture aspects of religion - how when people like Sam Harris either contemptuously dismiss or flatly ignore the poor, it's often the churches that are there to pick up the slack. A sermon seems a small price to pay for the kind of cultural interconnectedness that churches in poor communities bring!
This isn't me saying that religion is good, broadly speaking. I think there are a lot of problems with religion. That teaching children that they'll go to hell unless they behave a certain way is psychological abuse, that religion teaches an inability to correctly determine what is true and what is not that has multifaceted and serious consequences for everyone, everywhere (climate change deniers are at the top of this list). I think religion normalizes racism and sexism, it creates an us-against-them attitude that is unhealthy for the body politic and a bunch of stuff besides. Unfortunately, atheists have inherited a lot of that, often wedded to the arrogant superiority of rich white people looking down at everyone else.
None of this is structural in believing there are no gods. There are plenty of skeptical traditions from antiquity to the modern day that have little or no overlap with modern Anglophone atheism. I think one of the reasons I'm relatively sympathetic to critique of atheism, for instance, is that I got into it through Marx. To me, criticism of religion is inextricably bound up with that of class - and the bigger problem is and always has been that a certain group of people have cheated, lied and killed in order to command other people. To me, that's atheism. Most Anglophone atheists are far more in tune with Ayn Rand and Adam Smith than Karl Marx, though. Still, that's where I think this comes from, even though I no longer regard myself as a socialist. Religion is a way that a certain segment of the ruling class keeps everyone else in line; modern Anglophone atheists are almost uniformly from that class, they just think that neo-liberal capitalist democracy and a scientific bureaucracy are better at it than religion.
I give the caveats that I am not condemning everyone who is an atheist or religious. Many atheists are good people; so are many religious people. But insofar as I'm talking about broad cultural trends, I think what I've said is true.
For my own part, while I do not believe in god, I am finding it increasingly hard to call myself an atheist because it identifies me with a social movement I find increasing abhorrent. And not just some of the talking heads on TV, but that the whole movement - in my experience - does reflect those values. I prefer secular humanist, these days, with an emphasis on the humanist. In the end, I'd rather spend time with a Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or whatever that believes in reducing the misery in the world with an bunch of fucking sexist, racist assholes who happen to agree with me that gods don't exist.
Sunday, October 5, 2014
Ben Affleck is okay, Sam Harris and Bill Maher more atheist assholes
A lot of people have given Ben Affleck hassle over the years and I've never really understood why. Because he made bad movies? What actor in Hollywood hasn't? He's also made some good ones. Honestly, I think it is because he was in a lot interracial relationship with a pop star. I think that most of the hostility towards him is because he dared to be in love with Jennifer Lopez.
Anyway, he's really the kind of guy I like. He's a comic book geek and he's actually got principles. Which is why he was the only person on Bill Maher's show to defend Islam, with nasty atheist racist asshole Sam Harris there.
They brought up the old saws about how Muslims like to kill people who don't believe as they do. This is really just so . . . childish that I can't believe that any intelligent people believe it. While it is true that some Muslims kill people who disagree with them, it's also true of some Christians. And in the US, those Christians who believe in killing for their beliefs tend to reside in the White House and vote in the Senate.
Of course 9/11 was a tragedy, but the US military killed between 66,081 (as per a Wikileaks document by the US military) and an Opinion Research Business poll that has the number at over a million civilians.
Sixty-six thousand is the low number! Mind you, this isn't even combat casualties - these are civilian casualties! Between 66,000 and 1,000,000!
But, y'know, Muslims kill people who disagree with them!
This is in no way a defense of murderers of any religion. But, fuck, two wrongs do not make a right STILL.
Anyway, he's really the kind of guy I like. He's a comic book geek and he's actually got principles. Which is why he was the only person on Bill Maher's show to defend Islam, with nasty atheist racist asshole Sam Harris there.
They brought up the old saws about how Muslims like to kill people who don't believe as they do. This is really just so . . . childish that I can't believe that any intelligent people believe it. While it is true that some Muslims kill people who disagree with them, it's also true of some Christians. And in the US, those Christians who believe in killing for their beliefs tend to reside in the White House and vote in the Senate.
Of course 9/11 was a tragedy, but the US military killed between 66,081 (as per a Wikileaks document by the US military) and an Opinion Research Business poll that has the number at over a million civilians.
Sixty-six thousand is the low number! Mind you, this isn't even combat casualties - these are civilian casualties! Between 66,000 and 1,000,000!
But, y'know, Muslims kill people who disagree with them!
This is in no way a defense of murderers of any religion. But, fuck, two wrongs do not make a right STILL.
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