Misanthropic Californian

Bill O'Reilly pretty much always refers to Media Matters as a "left-wing smear site." Granted, I don't take his accusations seriously -- and I highly doubt he'd be having similar complaints if there's a right-wing site that posted up things said by Keith Olberman and Michael Moore -- but I do take it with a grain of salt nonethless. That what you have to do with any source of information these days.

Nonetheless, I took notice of this article about Rush Limbaugh. MM's headline is "Service Men Who Support Withdrawal Are 'Phony Soldiers.'" Depending on who you believe that comment could have been taken out of context. The part that bugs me, which I don't think could have been taken out of context, came well before it in the transcript. You can read it for yourself if you're so inclined, but a caller said:

CALLER 1: Good. Why is it that you always just accuse the Democrats of being against the war and suggest that there are absolutely no Republicans that could possibly be against the war?

The caller goes on to explain how he's a Republican yet he's against the war, and Rush just can't handle the idea. (I overcame the temptation to type that last bit in all caps, barely).

 

LIMBAUGH: Mike, you can't possibly be a Republican.

CALLER 1: I am.

LIMBAUGH: You are -- you are --

CALLER 1: I am definitely a Republican.

LIMBAUGH: You can't be a Republican. You are --

CALLER 1: Oh, I am definitely a Republican.

LIMBAUGH: You are tarnishing the reputation, 'cause you sound just like a Democrat.

So, this is what I'm always going on about in terms of divisive politics and tainted discourse. In Rush's world everyone who wants to call themselves a Republican has to support the war in Iraq, and by extension everyone who wants to withdraw even remotely soon must therefore be a Democrat. The whole spectrum of possible opinions on the matter, reduced to red vs blue. I'm not saying that liberals never do this kind of thing, just that, god dammit, here's an egregious example right in front of my face. Not only are people allowed to believe what they want on the issue, but there are a zillion other issues to talk about that matter at least as much to everyone. Is it really that hard to believe that an intelligent human being, after examining the available information, might come to the conclusion that we should leave (or stay in) Iraq, regardless of that person's stated political affiliation?

I am so totally not a people person, but I've been seeing news that makes me inclined to have a little more faith in humanity. But a lot less faith in governments.

Something like 80% of the population of Iran supposedly wants democracy and friendly relations with the U.S. Despite that, they're stuck with a government that likes to bring Sharia to bear, and leaders that insist on "Death to America" chants, regardless of whether there's any real emotion behind them.

There's also this article, based on a study that concludes that more than 80% of the American combatants in WWII refused to fire on the enemy. Normal people are instinctively reluctant to kill other people, and it's only through careful conditioning that the military has managed to push the percentage of "battlefield conscientious objectors" down to less than 10%. And according to the article it is conditioning in an almost Pavlovian sense; soldiers drill in shooting man-shaped targets while in full gear, so that when a real battle happens they can methodically repeat the same learned behavior while barely thinking about the act of shooting another person. I don't blame the military for taking these steps per se -- soldiers are more likely to be able to do their job and live to tell the tale that way -- but I think it's another example of why well-trained volunteers are better than all the involuntary conscripts in the world. 

So, while people will no doubt continue to find ways to be awful to each other, it seems that governments have a whole hell of a lot more difficulty getting along with each other than actual human beings. Average people want to not kill other people and get along, or at least leave each other alone, while crazy government leaders find ways to start wars.

The other day I came across this article about NBC's "To Catch a Predator" thing, and I think it articulates a lot of the reasons why I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. Whenever the show comes up on Digg or Reddit, people inevitably complain that there are issues with the show, and other people accuse those who take issue with it of supporting pedophiles. So, again, discourse is getting muddled. I can disagree with their methods while still agreeing that pursuing and prosecuting child predators is necessary.

Pedophilia is almost universally reviled, and in a very black-and-white kind of way. While I'm willing to go with the idea that an adult having sex with a minor is a bad thing, there ought to be a big difference in degree between a man seducing a high school girl (ephebophilia) and a man doing things to an elementary school boy, even if we definitely agree that both should be considered immoral and illegal. As things stand, merely being accused of such a thing can ruin a person's life, and (according to the article) half of all who wind up registered as sex offenders for pedophilia are subject to harrassment and violence. It's a serious crime -- I wouldn't even contemplate pretending otherwise -- and that's all the more reason to protect our notions of "innocent until proven guilty." A guilty verdict isn't just saying "you did this crime and you'll go to jail for it." It's saying, "you're going to be marked and despised for the rest of your life." Maybe they do deserve that, but considering the stakes we'd better be damn sure.

While there's certainly a place for ordinary people to step in to protect their community, I'm leery of letting untrained citizens do jobs normally reserved for trained law enforcement professionals. I wouldn't hire some guy off the street to do marketing or surgery, and law enforcement does involve life and death situations at times. If Rolling Stone's statements about Perverted Justice are true, I just plain don't trust them, however important their work might be. Von Erck responded to one critic by basically doing everything in his power to destroy the man's life, which suggest he's more interested in humiliating and harming those he percieves as the bad guys than in helping the innocent kids. It may be necessary, but I'd be much more comfortable if the effort was helmed by someone who could respond to criticism with reasoned dialogue rather than petty vengeance that reads like something out of an Operation Clambake article.

And of course, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that you could go to jail for propositioning a fictional 14-year-old. I know that that's how the laws work (at least in most states) and that there are reasons for it, but still. It hurts my head.

And then there's the issue of turning the whole thing into entertainment. As I said, you'd better be damn sure before you destroy someone's life, and in my opinion the media ought to strive to be responsible in that regard every bit as much as the justice system. Fortunately NBC and the public have limits, and the show is on its way to being canceled.

Lately I've been seeing a good amount of stories about what amounts to women's reproductive rights. More often than not reading about this kind of thing gets me at least a little irritated. However, I'm of the opinion that my opinions on the matter, like those of people of the male persuasion in general, shouldn't count for much here. If I were a woman, I might go beyond irritation and be sorely tempted to start writing hatemail to, say, the guys saying that a woman shouldn't be able to get an abortion even if she's been raped. So, while I think anyone reading this should be listening to the opinions of women instead, I'll write a bit more anyway.

I wouldn't call an abortion a "good" thing by any means, but it's asking an awful lot of a woman to tell her to take an unwanted pregnancy to term. Nine months is a long time, and from what I remember of my mother being pregnant with my youngest sister, a big chunk of that 2/3 of a year is hell. And there are considerable after-effects even after the baby is born to boot. Needless to say I think no one should be so stupid as to think of abortions as a form of birth control -- I figure women should have the choice, but if they're smart they'll consider it a last resort -- but the idea that the child's life begins at conception is a bit much to swallow.

The thing that really gets my goat (yeah, I used it) is the whole thing about pharmacists -- and doctors -- refusing to provide certain kinds of medication or treatment on "religious" grounds. As others have pointed out in Reddit's comments multiple times, if your religion is going to interfere with your line of work, then you shouldn't be in that line of work. If you can't handle the idea of women having access to birth control or the morning after pill, don't become a doctor, or if you do, become say a pediatrician, podiatrist, surgeon, endocrinologist, or any of the zillions of specialties that aren't gynecology and don't involve being put into that kind of situation. Instances of this kind of thing are fortunately pretty rare from what I've heard, but a doctor who refuses to prescribe the morning-after pill to a rape victim has, for that moment at least, failed as a doctor in my opinion. Pharmacists are even worse since they're specifically not supposed to have that kind of oversight. They get to double-check prescriptions in case, say, the doctor accidentally wrote the wrong number of zeroes, but anything more than that is overstepping their authority. All of this is doubly true when it takes place in a small town, where refusing treatment can mean that you're in effect not only telling the patient that you're putting your religion ahead of their health and free will, but can mean forcing them to drive 3+ hours to get any kind of alternative.

It gets twice as idiotic when doctors use their authority to find ways to prevent people from adopting. One woman went in for what amounted to a routine physical in order to be certified to adopt a child. When it turned out that she was single, the doctor refused to sign the paper. Never mind that she was indeed physically sound in all the ways the adoption people wanted, as would ultimately be proven when she went to another less bigoted doctor. As I've said before, it may well be that having a mother and father is the best route to a healthy child, but these days kids can and often do have much worse than a loving single parent or a lesbian couple. This doesn't even have a basis in religion as far as I can tell; it appears to be just a mixture of 1950s Leave It To Beaver ideals of family life backed up with a smattering of pop psychology. Not that discriminating against someone on the basis of your own religion is okay.

Ultimately, a lot of this seems to stem from the Christian notion that sex outside of wedlock is sinful. People want sinners to face consequences for their actions (as though being tortured in hell forever after death would somehow not be enough), even when we have the means to remove those consequences, or when the sin never had any tangible consequences to begin with. All of this ignores the basic fact that human biology, like that of animals, doesn't line up with anyone's religious ideals. Even in the animal kingdom, where it would seem to serve no purpose, there are instances of recreational sex (dolphins), and homosexual activity (too many to count). The Bush administration was very, very quiet about the study showing that the abstinance education programs they were so proud of had zero impact on whether teens were having sex and whether or not they did so with protection. To paraphrase a stand-up comedian whose name I can't remember, people view contraception as a license to have sex, but if people are going to be driving anyway I'd much rather they did so with a license.

How much of this is sexism, religious dogma, or legitimate concern for human life is hard to say. As usual, it's a complex question for which people are demanding simple answers. Personally, I think that a living breathing woman should get priority over a collection of cells that could become a human being some day, but my opinion shouldn't count for all that much. If a bunch of women went around saying that men must or shouldn't get vasectomies, I'm betting men would be every bit as offended, but that isn't going to happen.

Finally, here's a thought (from someone else): Why aren't the people who bomb abortion clinics called terrorists? As far as I know they fit the bill in every way possible. They're thankfully far fewer in number than the Islamic extremists we hear so much about in the news, but the fact remains they're using cowardly methods to murder people on the basis of ideology.

This morning BoingBoing posted this, a fun game called "Hitler or Fallwell," where you look at quotes and try to figure out which of these two men said them. I don't even know what to make of the guy, because he was just that out there. He was like a culmination of all of the worst kinds of bigotry and hate ever perpetrated in the name of American Christianity. The Wikiquote page on him has plenty of icky quotes.

Also, yesterday at Borders I made the mistake of looking at the new releases section (a mistake in that there are lots of political books mixed in with the rest), and I saw a book called "Freedmnomics." The book presents itself as a rebuttal to Freakanomics. I thought "fair enough," but then the bullet points inside the book's jacket were ALL standard Republican talking points, except for "Why the controversial assertions made in the trendy book Freakonomics are almost entirely wrong." Lott's main specialty has been putting together research (which many, including the authors of Freakonomics have questioned) that indicates that higher gun ownership leads to less crime. (Though according to this blogger, Freakonomics' citations of such aren't quite right). The fact that Freedomnomics came out after his lawsuit against Levitt makes it even more suspect. The real problem, however, is that it's part of a huge genre of books that are written to be read only by people who are firmly at one side or the other of the political spectrum. I know these books make money, so the problem is not so much the books themselves as the cultural factors that allow them to exist, but either way it's a problem, and the profitability of publishing these books leads to more and more of them coming out.

This blog post, which includes a clip from 20/20 about a girl who was ostracized, harassed, and falsely accused of all sorts of things just for publicly being an atheist, helped me articulate something I've been trying to put into words for a while now.

A comment by shalimar says "I, for one, do not know how atheists are not sad, depressed horrible people." This comes back to what I mentioned before about how the idea that some Christians can't conceive of morality without religion scares the hell out of me.

The second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative says: "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means." Human morality is based on the idea that human beings have an inherent value, and as a human being I have no problem agreeing with that statement. If enough people act this way, everyone benefits. This principle exists independent of god, and works from one god to the next. (Except for the ones with which it doesn't work at all, but those are best avoided).

In Buddhism, the Eightfold Path includes "Right Action" and "Right Intention." In the Buddhist view, virtuous behavior is a means to becoming a better person -- part of the path of self-refinement that leads to enlightenment and cessation of suffering. (Buddhism has a specific meaning for "suffering," which is a very rough translation of a term from Pali). However, the Buddha was clear that it wasn't enough to merely act in a moral fashion. Being good just because it would provide you with some reward in your next reincarnation (he was also critical of the Hindu notion of reincarnation, but didn't discard reincarnation outright) is not enough.

So, my views on morality in the absence of divinity:

1. Moral behavior is inherently beneficial to mankind.
2. Virtuous behavior is an end in itself, both for oneself and others.

What constitutes moral behavior is probably going to be the hard part.

Think of this post as four very short posts in one. 

As cynical as I am at times, the upcoming election is shaping up to be very interesting, to say the least. In the primaries at least, we're actually seeing (1) things that aren't as cut-and-dry as Red Vs. Blue, and (2) the internet being a tool to empower average people. Mike Gravel and Ron Paul are both manifestations of this. These two men were catapulted from obscurity into the debates for their respective parties in part by their online supporters demanding it. Moreover, both of them are standing for what they believe in rather than simply touting the party line. I don't know how they'd stack up against the other candidates in terms of being a good president, but they're still a refreshing change. When everyone else was playing nice, Mike Gravel had the stones to straight out say, "These people scare me!" Ron Paul styles himself as an old-school Republican, so much so that he advocates non-intervention in world affairs. (I don't know that I'd agree, but at least it would make the two candidates easier to tell apart).

Likewise, this New York Times article was a refreshing thing to read. We've all gotten used to thinking of conservatives in general as being anti-evolution and dead-set against stem cell research, regardless of the benefits for real living human beings. In the Republican presidential debate three out of the ten candidates said they didn't believe in evolution. Apparently some conservatives understand that disparaging evolution makes them appear to be blatantly anti-intellectual. Still if only 3 out of 10 presidential candidates are anti-evolution, why do we currently have to put up with a White House that's evidently 100% for intelligent design?

On a similar note, Bill Maher said basically what I was thinking but couldn't articulate half as eloquently about France. The country is far from perfect and not without its issues, but amongst other things it has an excellent health care system, and its presidential candidates' personal lives are regarded as irrelevant to whether they'd make good leaders. Next to that, not supporting the Iraq war isn't exactly much of a strike against the country. Of course, it helps that all the French people I've ever met (admittedly not many, and all people who'd been living in the U.S. for a while) have been pretty cool. That may not be the best way to judge things, but at this point I suspect I've met more actual French people in real life than Bill O'Reilly has.

Lastly, the online news sites I frequent have been showing a lot of articles about people advocating impeachment of Bush and/or Cheney. I have no idea whether or not this is a good idea, or even a feasible one. One thing that I agree with though is that what Bush is doing with signing statements is questionable to say the least. There are about a dozen examples of bills intended to protect individual rights and maintain government transparentcy where he added a statement that more or less said "Unless the president wants/doesn't want to to protect us from the terrorists." I heard somewhere that he's made more signing statements that ALL of the other U.S. presidents put together, more than 750 of them. I was of the impression that that's not how it's supposed to work. When it comes to bills from congress, the president either signs or vetos them, and signing statements are commentaries and opinions with no legal force behind them per se.

Lately I've been seeing lots of articles on atheism on the news aggregator sites I frequent. I'm not an atheist myself, but I've been leaning closer to it lately, and I have atheist friends as well. They are among the most decent human beings I know. The army officially considers prejudice against atheists to be okay, and the President thinks that atheists can't be patriots. These arguments always annoy the hell out of me, and they tend to be obfuscated by the existence of examples of profoundly bad behavior by supposed representatives of either side. Not a few anti-atheists like to cite the regimes of Stalin and Hitler as examples of atheism being the basis of tyrrany and slaughter. This to me is intellectually dishonest, on par with equating Christianity with Fred Phelps. The influential atheists today are at least as compassionate as any Christian you'd care to name, and I think it's safe to say a distate for religion is the only thing they have in common with those historical villains. I wouldn't hold a Dawkins-style atheist accountable for the actions of oppressive communist governnents any more than I'd hold a modern-day Lutheran responsible for the crusades (or abortion clinic bombings). This analysis of statistics of nonbelief in various countries draws a very sharp distinction between "coercive atheism" of a totalitarian regime and atheism that has emerged naturally in a democratic post-industrial nation.

Atheists are distrusted by most Americans, and at times are even targets of bigotry. My personal experience has been that how far you can trust a given person has absolutely nothing to do with their states faith or lack thereof. Whether we're talking about theists or atheists, there are people who are jerks about the contrast between their beliefs and those of others, as though the world that already holds more than 6 billion people is somehow too small to hold multiple philosophical views. I for one base how much I trust someone on their actual conduct.

I've been wondering why it is that theism of one sort or another is basically the default. People have reasons for their faith and even incentives (the role of a church is far more social than people seem to realize, for one thing), but there is no proof per se. When Christians argue against atheism they seem to either beg the question or try to pick apart the opposition (which for them usually means evolution) rather than doing anything to substantially prop up their own views.

While I don't know if I'll ever stop being agnostic, so far the religion that makes the most sense to me is Buddhism. While there may well be some part of the world where you can find a Buddhist yelling at people that they need to accept the Four Noble Truths, it has a (percieved) lack of shouty jerks in its favor. It also plays nice with science better than any other religion I know of. Buddhist views of the nature of existence ("emptiness") and self (as an aggregate of processes) are very compatible with our modern understanding of how the cosmos works, and the Buddha himself largely regarded "supernatural" matters to be secondary to the pursuit of enlightenment/happiness in the here and now. And, incidentally, morality ("right action," "right intention," "compassion for all beings") are of paramount importance in Buddhism.

Why can't we all just get along? Seriously, why the fuck not?

Jack Thompson is in the news again, rather a lot lately.  When it comes to the debate on video game violence, I think there are a couple of things that are clouding the issue:

Videogames are new. A certain amount of this unquestionably comes from the fact that video games are a new medium. Plays, books, the waltz, movies, jazz, rock 'n roll, etc. have all been regarded as a corrupting influence on the youth of the time. It's hard to separate out how much of this is legitimate, and how much of it is old people's predilection for objecting to new things. It's telling that there is a big hue and cry over kids being able to buy M rated video games, but no outrage all over the fact that it even easier for kids to walk into the Borders and by R-rated movies on DVD or books with mature content. People complain about the ESRB's rating system, yet the problems with the MPAA's rating system -- illuminated at length in This Film Is Not yet Rated -- are virtually ignored. Of course, as anyone who's ever worked in a videogame store can tell you, a lot of parents are staggeringly, devastatingly ignorant about video games. Some parents just can't wrap their heads around the idea that a videogame might not be appropriate for children, and some just don't seem to care. (Not to mention the parents who doggedly insist that there are Mario games available on Xbox, and other unfounded misconceptions).

Jack Thompson himself is the kind of figure whose absence from the debate would benefit both sides. Keeping mature content out of the hands of kids, and giving parents the tools to do so, is a worthy and legitimate cause. Considering that the notion that kids aren't mature enough to handle violent videogames is at the heart of this issue, it's ironic and unfortunate that Thompson has a way of coming off like a flailing man-child at times. He insists on calling violent videogames "murder simulators," accuses anyone who disagrees with him of being in the industry's pocket, and had no qualms about calling the head of the IGDA an "idiot" and "jackass" on national television. This does not speak well of his desire to have legitimate debate on the issue, and indeed it's very much his style to repeat whatever he's decided is the truth over and over. I really do wish that gamers wouldn't threaten him with violence though. Real-life violence doesn't solve anything.

Of course, Thompson can't seem to comprehend why it is that he gets those kinds of threats and people like Leeland Yee and Hillary Clinton don't. Of those involved, no one else has so consistently threatened to sue their critics, no other major public figure has behaved like a common troll in public forums (GamePolitics had to ban him from commenting multiple times), and I'm pretty sure no one else has ever had the gall to compare the release of a game developed in Scotland on a Japanese-made a game console in the United States to the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the latter case I'm not even sure who's being insulted more, and yet when questioned about this he resolutely insisted that he was justified in saying so. The latest on him is that he is filing a civil suit against the Florida Bar, as well as Kotaku and others. This time he managed to include a "liberal conspiracy theory," and he managed to display incompetence at being a lawyer.

I have no idea why Jack Thompson fascinates us so, but it probably needs to stop. This is an important issue for a lot of people, and his side deserves one better than him to represent it.

People's attitudes towards homosexuality are often a great source of things for me to get all indignant about (attitudes towards atheism are another). I have two members of my immediate, nuclear family who are of alternative sexual orientations, so it's very difficult for me to justify getting upset over the whole thing. In fact, I'm not even sure where to begin an attack on prejudice against gays.

It's the kind of prejudice that is so lacking in any sort of rational basis that there isn't a lot to argue against. Most people can't seem to muster anything beyond "the Bible says so" or "it's icky" to back up their position, and the opposing viewpoint is "these people are human beings; let's treat them as such." When people try to come up with more logical reasons, they seemed to inevitably wind up resorting to crazy, spurious logic. Granted, a child probably is better off by a well-adjusted man and woman, but there are entirely too many children who don't have that privilege. I for one would much rather see a child raised by a loving gay couple than a single parent who has to work multiple jobs, one or more abusive parents, an alcoholic, or any number of other bad situations that crop up entirely too often. Gay couples don't exactly have a lot of unplanned pregnancies after all. More importantly, the presence of a gay couple next door has absolutely nothing to do with how well one's own affairs are going. Heterosexuals have an amazing talent for screwing up their own marriages without any intervention whatsoever from gays. Alternative lifestyles aren't anywhere near as big a problem as people not taking marriage seriously as a long-term commitment. That, to my mind, is a much greater threat to the "sanctity of marriage."

The thing about gay people that people constantly seem to miss is that they are first and foremost people. Apart from preferring partners of the same gender, they tend to be surprisingly like everyone else -- surprisingly so because we're used to seeing images of homosexuals portrayed as freaks. Knowing this, hate towards gays is doubly ridiculous, but then most forms of hate seemed to be stupid and irrational in the first place. Sure, there's that weird guy and the pride parade, but they're also gay guys who look like average football fans with beer guts -- because that's what they are.

I don't really know what to do about all of this, since solving the problem the way I want would require making people less stupid. As for gay marriage, I would make "civil unions" the norm for everyone regardless of sexual orientation, and make "marriage" a quaint religious practice with the same legal authority as a bar mitzvah. The cynic in me doubt that will happen during my lifetime though.