Bloody news today. The best response I’ve seen in a long day of online chatter, via seelix aka Emily:
Widespread gun ownership does not make us safer. It just makes guns more common.
Category Archives: politics
… what about the idea of loving our enemies?
Kathryn Schulz interviews a evangelical Christian ex-soldier Josh Stieber about his decision to become a conscientious objector. What he was asked to do on the ground in Iraq didn’t square with what he’d been told about that Christ fellow:
It wasn’t too uncommon to abuse prisoners, but I didn’t feel like it was right, so I asked my friend about the American ideals that we grew up hearing about. I said, “Why would you do that to this guy? Isn’t one of the values that we were raised with is that somebody’s innocent until proven guilty?” My friend said, “No, this guy is Iraqi, he’s part of the problem, he’s guilty, and here’s what I want to do to him.” …
I thought back to all the stuff I’d heard sitting next to this guy in church, and I asked him, “Well, even if he is guilty, what about the idea of loving our enemies and returning evil with good and turning the other cheek? How do you reconcile all those teachings?” My friend said, “I think that Jesus would have turned his cheek once or twice but he never would have let anyone punk him around.” Hearing him say it that way just made it sound so ridiculous. Here we supposedly had faith in this guy who very clearly was punked around, and ended up living and dying with sacrificial love.
Stieber also took inspiration from Gandhi. Go now and read the whole thing.
Close the Washington Monument
Security expert Bruce Schneier thinks that we should close the Washington Monument. The most distinctive part of the D.C. skyline has been a challenge to secure, but that’s not Schneier’s reason.
An empty Washington Monument would serve as a constant reminder to those on Capitol Hill that they are afraid of the terrorists and what they could do. They’re afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism — or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity — they will be branded as “soft on terror.” And they’re afraid that Americans would vote them out of office if another attack occurred. Perhaps they’re right, but what has happened to leaders who aren’t afraid? What has happened to “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”?
An empty Washington Monument would symbolize our lawmakers’ inability to take that kind of stand — and their inability to truly lead.
Photo by Scott Ableman.Election night
With all due respect to Mr. Stewart, the Python lads nailed election night coverage to the wall decades ago.
If you haven’t already done so, fellow U.S. citizens, please hurry up and find your fucking polling location so you can vote for the Sensible candidate. Need help remembering what the fuck a Sensible government did for you in the last two years? There is also a site for that—more detail, with less swearing, is here.
Re: Haldane vs. Lysenko
In the comments on my epic post about J.B.S. Haldane, somebody else named Jeremy (not me, I swear) links to a fantastic video of Haldane’s scientific colleague (and fellow former British Communist) John Maynard Smith, discussing Haldane’s opposition to Lysenkoism. Specifically, what Haldane said in private within Communist circles, versus what he didn’t say in the broader public.
I think it’s quite clear that Haldane should have objected to the politicization of Lysenko’s bunk science much earlier and more forcefully than he did. Whether it would’ve made a difference behind the Iron Curtain is less certain.
J.B.S. Haldane and the case of the revivified head
Here’s a nicely gruesome image for the week of All Hallows’ Eve.
“I dreamed I was in a dark room,” said Jane, “with queer smells in it and a sort of low humming noise. Then the light came on … I thought I saw a face floating in front of me. … What it really was, was a head (the rest of a head) which had had the top part of the skull taken off and then … as if something inside had boiled over. … Even in my fright I remember thinking, ‘Oh, kill it, kill it. Put it out of its pain.’ … It was green looking and the mouth was wide open and quite dry. … And soon I saw that it wasn’t exactly floating. It was fixed up on some kind of bracket, or shelf, or pedestal—I don’t know quite what, and there were things hanging from it. From the neck, I mean. Yes, it had a neck and a sort of collar thing round it, but nothing below the collar; no shoulders or body. Only these hanging things. … Little rubber tubes and bulbs and little metal things too.”
—Jane describes the disembodied Head in That Hideous Strength
Before he started The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis tried his hand at science fiction. Lewis’s Space Trilogy—Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength—is like H.G. Wells dunked in (by modern American standards) gentle British Christianity. As in Narnia, Lewis wrote the Space Trilogy with a thesis in mind. The villains of Lewis’s imagined universe are materialistic scientists. In the first two books, the protagonist fights the scientists to preserve prelapsarian conditions among the intelligent inhabitants of Mars and Venus, respectively. The third book returns to Earth, where the evil scientists are plotting to take over the planet in the service of a demon-possessed disembodied head kept alive by technology that would’ve put Frankenstein off his lunch.
J.B.S. Haldane. Photo via limjunying.
Lewis derived the scientists’ ideology, and one of the evil scientist characters in particular, from the writings and person of the evolutionary geneticist J.B.S. Haldane—which is not surprising, since Haldane was something of the Richard Dawkins of his day, a visible public advocate for the scientific worldview. What is surprising, though, is that Lewis may have had a perfectly good reason to connect Haldane to an artificially resurrected head: five years before the publication of That Hideous Strength, Haldane had narrated a film depicting just such an experiment.
Preach it!
Dan Savage has had it with moderate Christians who complain about his emphasis on the bigotry of the fundamentalists.
I’m sick of tolerant, accepting Christians whispering to me that “we’re not all like that.” If you want to change the growing perception that “good Christian” means “anti-gay”—a perception that is leading many people to stop identifying themselves as Christian because they don’t want to be lumped in with the haters—stop whispering to me and start screaming at them. Until there are moderate and “welcoming” Christian groups that are just as big, well-funded, aggressive, and loud as the conservative Christian organizations, “welcoming” Christians are in no position to complain about the perception that all Christians are anti-gay. Your co-religionists have invested decades and millions of dollars in creating that perception. You let it happen.
Barack Obama’s (lack of) moral leadership
My Sunday morning reading includes a trenchant essay by Jacob Weisberg at Slate, which gathers together President Obama’s disappointing performances on immigration, freedom of religion, and gay marriage under the rubric of moral cowardice:
Obama has had numerous occasions to assert leadership on values issues this summer: Arizona’s crude anti-immigrant law, the battle over Prop 8 and gay marriage, and the backlash against what Fox News persists in calling the “Ground Zero mosque.” These battles raise fundamental questions of national identity, liberty, and individual rights. When Lindsey Graham argues for rewriting the Constitution to eliminate the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, or Newt Gingrich proposes a Saudi standard for the free exercise of religion, they’re taking positions at odds with America’s basic ideals. But Obama’s instinctive caution has steered him away from casting these questions as moral or civil rights issues. On none of them has he shown anything resembling courage. [links sic]
To Weisberg’s list, I’d also add the need for comprehensive, carbon-limiting energy legislation. Treating undocumented immigrants like human beings, Muslim and gay Americans like citizens, climate change as a genuine impending human-created disaster—these are all inherently moral positions. Liberals have long been sick of watching that morality overruled by the weird, selfish, other-hating morality of contemporary American conservatism. I voted for Barack Obama (and I think lots of us did) because he seemed likely to articulate liberal beliefs in explicitly moral language, and do it with conviction.
Remember his campaign speech on race? With his feet to the media fire over his apparently scandalous association with Jeremiah Wright, Obama acknowledged the subtleties and complications of our national racial history, without losing sight of basic principles of right and wrong:
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country—a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old—is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.
That’s the Barack Obama I wanted to be President. I could’ve sworn I voted for that one. But it doesn’t seem to be the guy who ended up in office.
Candidate Obama at a rally in Pittsburgh, 21 April 2008. Photo by BarackObama.com.Thomas Jefferson Adams: Reason
Major, embarrassing update, 2010.09.20: So it turns out that the Slate article from which I learned that Jefferson was the FAITH portrait was pretty much dead wrong. In fact the image is of Samuel Adams, and the source is the same painting in the Adams Wikipedia article. (Although, Shepard Fairey-ized, he still looks like Jefferson to me.) Jefferson makes so little sense for a portrait of FAITH that not even Glenn Beck is stupid enough to try and make him one. I’ve pulled the image from Flickr to prevent propagation of a false meme. Oy.
So there’s this guy who’s really popular with folks who hold political opinions mostly in opposition to mine. It’s come to my attention (probably late, I know) that he’s been waving around images of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin, à la Shepard Fairey’s Obama posters, with the words “Faith,” “Hope,” and “Charity” appended to each, respectively.
Now, I might quibble with “Hope” for Washington (what about “Courage?”) and “Charity” for Franklin (I’m sure Ben would’ve preferred “Thrift”), but I really take issue with assigning “Faith” to Jefferson. If you don’t know why this is both silly and (for a non-faith-inclined person such as myself) irritating, I have two words for you: Jefferson Bible.
So, with a little help from the wonderful open-source image software Inkscape, I fixed it.
Image created by jby.That’s much better. It’s on my Flickr, and CC licensed, so download away for all your reason-based uses.
On Independence Day
Ask not … Photo by bacondit.I’m acutely uncomfortable with the militarism, overt and implied, that accompanies Independence Day. I do, however, have faith—in the sense of being sure of what I hope for—in government by the people, in freedom of speech and of the press, in the separation of Church and State, in not quartering soldiers in any house without the consent of the Owner. In the ugliest moments of U.S. politics, I worry that my fellow Americans don’t care much for our shared history, or even some of the basic principles that underlie our democracy. Yet we’re still muddling through, and I’d rather do what I can to make this a better, more just, more civil society than just throw up my hands and move to Canada.*
In that spirit, here’s a few lines from one of my favorite figures of American history, Abraham Lincoln, on the occasion of his second Inauguration. It seems appropriate for a nation divided, even if not by actual battle lines:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
The image accompanying this post is part of the winning entry for Studio 360’s Independence Day redesign challenge, and I really like it—it responds to John F. Kennedy’s famous imperative by suggesting things you can do for your country, and it includes teachers and judges alongside the more stereotypical soldier and policeman. It’s not often enough we’re reminded that you needn’t carry a weapon to serve your nation.
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*This statement is subject to revision in the event that I get a job offer from a Canadian university.