Autochthon

Christian Causes

2005-06-28T11:27:00.000-07:00

Reading a brilliant article in the New Yorker today, and came upon this phrase:

a lawyer and minister who has worked for Christian causes for decades.

And it occurred to me: what are Christian causes? There is one, ultimate Christian cause: the salvation of one's soul, and presumably others'. But in order to reconcile the kinds of causes we're meant to think of within the term Christian causes with this, we're going to have to do some extension.

Christian causes probably includes things like government affirmation of Christianity, use of prayer and religious symbols in official spaces and business, the abolition of abortion, the substitution of evolution in schools, and the rollback of civil rights legislation for homosexuals.

More on the fringe, and probably not universally understood as Christian causes are more theocratic things, like the remolding of American jurisprudence in Biblical dies, affirmation of the illegitimacy of other religions, the abolition of birth control, or the abolition of democracy. Some of these ideas have little support even among the rightest minds; though I think that all of them are abhorrent to moderates or leftists. I list them partly for inflammatory effect.

As for the others—let's talk.

The business with evolution is all about the inerrancy of the Bible. I can't understand how this is a Christian cause, since many Christians don't believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. A billion Catholics, for instance, nominally. This is more like a fundamentalist Christian cause.
Public symbols seems to be about winning special treatment for Christianity. This could more reasonably be called a Christian cause. Still, ask the Anglican church in England how well a faith fares once it's been big-E Established for a few centuries. Moreover, in America all faiths already technically have no barriers to practice or to proselytization; special treatment for Christianity (which will always exist to some extent as long as a vast majority of Americans identify as Christian) will not break down any hindrances to the salvation of souls, but simply make it easier to do.
Abortion is a thing that hangs not on Christianity per se, but upon a certain philosophical view of life adhered to by many—and typically right-wing—Christians. When does Life begin? is in many ways a stupid question, because it's never ended in the first place. An embryo constitutes life. A fetus constitutes life. Shed cells from my inner cheek constitute life. Cancer constitutes life. A foreskin constitutes life. The questions are what is meaningful life, and what kinds of life do we have a moral obligation to protect. Except for perhaps third-trimester abortions, when the fetus is potentially viable, I can't see how abortion is necessarily a Christian cause, though it certainly is a conflict between philosophies.
The gays seem to be a particular bugaboo for conservative Christians. But there are gay Christians. There are Christian groups that not only admit homosexuals, but ordain them. This isn't a Christian cause, and never was.

Some people believe that government

2005-06-14T07:31:00.000-07:00

cannot reliably be trusted on issues of speech, gun control, or even administering social welfare or foster parent systems.

Another group of people believe that the expansion of government police powers is vital to keeping America safe from various nasty elements, including terrorists.

What isn't altogether surprising is that there's substantial overlap between the two groups. But then again, I'm an old cynical bastard.

Manipulation

2005-06-02T07:11:00.000-07:00

I've now heard this one several times:

America now discriminates against Christians, by not allowing school prayer, not allowing Ten Commandments monuments, and not allowing religious music programs.

This is logically absurd. To the extent that religions can have rights—which they can't—no other religion has the right to push public prayers in public schools, nor do any other religions have the right to inscribe their scriptures on huge monuments and place them like spiritual sentinels along the paths to our civic buildings.

So, insofar as Christians have lost any rights at all, it has only been to destroy the privilege it has held, getting away with things no other religion should or could.

I think it's awfully specious to claim to be discriminated against, or specially oppressed, when all that's been done is to remove the special treatment given one ahead of all others. Especially since Christianity still is—and most likely for a long time will be—the dominant faith of the United States, with up to 70-80% of the population adherent. Due to the raucousness of the evangelicals, church pews will not soon be emptied. No action of the Supreme Court is going to dissuade people from Christ—though in fact, the removal of Christian privilege is likely to inflame the otherwise lukewarm faith of many. Nor should we presume that a religion that did depend on special privilege to thrive should be catered to, should be preserved artificially by the inequity of government tolerance.

Christian privilege has become nasty for the United States, because it has lured many otherwise right-thinking people into silliness. It has convinced people that de facto the United States is a Christian nation, and a Christian republic, which trailhead blazes straight into a dangerous jungle I don't want to explore. The intent of many conservative evangelicals is not now to sever any oppressive force, nor even especially to get new members, except as such gives them more power. Their goal is the subversion of American pluralist democracy, and the founding of a theocratic state.

That they share their goal with all sorts of politically deluded people around the world shows that the theocratic imperative is not a simple relic or atavism of Christianity; that in fact, Christianity—despite the protestations of evangelicals about Christian privilege—is no better than any other religion.

We should be careful how we use the word evangelical, as well, because it is not exclusive to the ignorant folks we wish to illuminate. With great apologies to those evangelicals with God truly in their hearts, and the twofold commandment of love in their minds, our use of the term in this post denotes only those shrewd manipulators who wish to subvert the Messiah and set up their own thousand-year reign of God on Earth—who are not content waiting for the divine son—who deign to pretend to know God's will through and through, mere vessels whom the fullness of God's wisdom and love would overflow a thousand times over.

The greatest crime of these hungry evangelicals is their pride. It insulates them from empathy and from compassion. It prevents them from thinking of the well-being, or even disliking the torture of anyone the least unlike them. In some unfortunate cases, it has even led to their public downfall. That doesn't surprise me at all. Hypocrisy is elastic; it may be twisted, stretched, and pulled all manner of ways. But it does have a limit, and once the proud have wrapped their hypocrisy one loop too tight around the throats of their enemies, it will rupture. The proud, manipulative evangelical is exposed, and his place is momentarily cooled for the next hothead.

I also find fault with any argument that claims secular humanism is a religion. Mind you, Buddhism has proven that a religion needs no Gods, and what's more, secular humanists have proven that you need not be an atheist to be one. But I would have thought the word secular—even though it's not of the relevant people's invention, but more of a smear invented by manipulative evangelicals for the snickering delight of their co-religionists—I say, the word secular should itself alienate any suspicion of it being a religion at all.

It's hard to describe what religion is, particularly so when some narrow minds construe true religion to merely describe the niche sect they have built and nestled like a pigeon in a cranny of an antique roof. But I think we can all agree on some salient descriptive features common to anything one would reasonably call religion. And I think one relevant feature to this discussion is sanctity or holiness. To ascribe to religiosity there must be a separation of the sacred and the profane. Churches, temples, altars, prayers, idols, dances, rituals, amulets, relics, mosques, scrolls, scriptures, collars, hats, mitres, sacrifice: these are all signs of a separate area of life from the mundane, markers of an area in one's mind and heart that has been segregated from everything else, from bills-paying and parking-space-finding, from teeth-brushing and even voting, civic service. Even Buddhists have their sacred and their profane. Those who describe themselves, or whom are described as secular, it seems that to render the description truthful should lack sanctity, should lack the holy altogether, and is not therefore a religion.

As I am more convinced the label secular humanist is more an artifact of evangelical thinking than a valid description of reality, I am not at all surprised by the conclusion. Those who seek to fortify a separation between Church and State comprise no monophyletic group. There are people within the bloc with even widely disparate reasons for supporting separation: some to preserve the holiness of their own, still-thought-privileged religion, and others to preserve the function of their civic institutions from what they regard as the polluting and ignorance-causing agency of faith.

The stereotyping of this group is part of an effort of manipulative evangelicals—perhaps not even fully conscious—to discredit the ideas they have all come to by different paths, in order to preserve the special trail they have been macheteing into a dark, swarming wood.

Though we fear that copse, we are familiar with it. Other countries have led their people through its trees and crunched their bones upon the humus. We cannot let this happen here.

Am Struck by the Utter Hilarity

2005-05-21T06:49:00.000-07:00

of Conservative humor. Besides bashing liberal excesses, what is there? Upholding time-honored traditions is not funny. Sticking up for authority and the establishment is not funny. You never hear such a punchline:

So I said to the police officer, `Of course you can search my car—I've got nothing to hide!'

Obeying all the rules is not funny. Praying to God—unless it's some really outlandish prayer—is certainly not funny. Gay-bashing can be really funny, but you have to use words like ass and felch and many conservative audiences don't like that. Or if you're in front of one of those crass conservative audiences, one of those NASCAR audiences, why then it can be very funny but soon it feels very unseemly and ugly.

Jokes about traditional family values are really only funny if you're the dad. No one else finds it all that funny.

When the First Lady delivered her routine at the Press Club dinner a month or two ago, you'll notice it wasn't really conservative humor. It was just short of blue. She implied actions that would get her kicked out of any discerning sewing circle. What's funny is that she or her husband should do them, considering how conservative they are. In this way, comedy tends to be liberal.

The metaphorical problem in the United States

2005-05-20T08:16:00.000-07:00

is not about a lack of meaning, it's actually a preponderance. Take for example the recent Newsweek incident. The rag published a story reporting that American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had used the Quran to get to prisoners there. Not by citing it. Flushing it.

Blah blah blah—lots of people get pissed off—you know the story. Newsweek retracts, because their source isn't sure if he knows this fact from one report or the other.

Now here's where the thesis comes in: if you want to make a point about anonymous sources, then fine, okay. We can talk about that. But the meaning behind this whole fiasco hasn't been about anonymous sources. It's been about the scoop. It's been about irresponsible journalists. It's been about a much-maligned administration finally delivering some comeuppance to long comedownanced fourth estatists.

All sorts of vehicles have been fixed to this otherwise droll tenor. All but the most rational. For the fundamental story that Newsweek reported, assuming the source is not lying, has not changed. If anything, the retraction is based on what lots of commentators in the context of unfavorable court decisions have called a technicality. Which government report told of the Quranic expurgations is in doubt. Not the expurgations themselves.

Partial corroboration in the name of the Red Cross now shows the crux of the story—that American interrogators did not treat the Quran with the utmost respect at Guantanamo—is correct. The conversation we need to have about the moral worth of Guantanamo still needs to happen. The essential anger of Muslims toward America, triggered by Newsweek, is still within their sphere justified.

The story here is not about the Quran, which is just a book. Nor is it about people rioting and dying over the story—although that is a hugely unfortunate if silly overreaction. The story is about the United States government's continual overreaching of proper authority and proper standards of conduct in the perpetration of its war on terror.

In Response to a History Prof

2005-05-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

talking about something he doesn't know much about.

I feel intensely awkward even advancing a humble corrective to a PhD, though the domain of what I believe to be his error is, by his own admission, not his expertise. The more so because, though I am much closer to the biological sciences than Professor William Rubinstein, it is not my area of expertise either, but an adjunct to my professional studies, which are in medicine.

Still, though one acquainted with modern evolutionary biology might find more reason to quibble with Prof. Rubinstein, I find the most troubling aspect of his short essay to be a certain disingenuous strain: though he confesses he has "no reason to suppose that the accepted scientific chronology of the earth's history and the emergence of life is not entirely correct," and also asseverates that he has "as much common sense as the next man and probably more in the way of an independent viewpoint than most," his points against the plausibility of evolution seem to belie a decidedly negative and persuasive opinion.

Scientists do not (nor should) have control over the popular press, so if in fact Prof. Rubinstein's myriad misconceptions about modern biological evolution stem from popular mischaracterizations, I hope this will not be laid at the feet of the thousands of evo-devo researchers who every day carry out meticulous work based on not the plausibility of evolution but the near-certainty of its occurrence.

The idea that evolution occurs in the manner Prof. Rubinstein implies, i.e., that a cat should have a litter of non-cat kittens, should be dispelled by any decent high school or college-level biology textbook. His claim that no "missing link" exists in the fossil record is archaic as well as incorrect; transitional forms pollinate the whole of the geological column.

Most egregious, however, is his claim regarding the uselessness of non-fully-formed organs. I agree that to one without a good introduction to biology, this may seem an intractible problem; and it is true that Darwin viewed the eye in particular as a difficulty--though it must be said both that a great deal of research and understanding, including the elucidation of genetics and embryology has occurred since Darwin's time, and that Darwin himself was confident that the eye could be explained. What I find especially troubling, however, is that this claim is taken nearly verbatim from the fringe academics who maintain the impossibility of common descent. Again, this is likely simply the result of a well-intentioned but non-expert man being exposed to popular mischaracterizations, as the efforts of the aforementioned fringe academics (particularly Dr. Behe, Dr. Dembski, and Mr. Johnson, Esq.) are more disproportionately spent in the popular media than in scholarly circles.

But it makes me curious--exactly what was the point of Prof. Rubinstein's essay? If he truly possesses "at least a desultory interest in many fields beyond [his] own narrow specialty, including the mysteries of science," I might expect him to have consulted a textbook or even a mainstream publication on evolution, or in place of that, airing the intellectual difficulties such as to solicit good, informed opinion to allay whatever problems may be allayed, in such deference as he should expect of those without a deep and formal understanding of history. The tone of essay, however, strikes the reader as less petitioning and more controversial. I can only, in the absence of a response from Prof. Rubinstein, defer these impressions to my lack of expertise in rhetoric, and my lack of understanding written argument, although I am very curious to learn of Prof. Rubinstein's purpose for the essay, and in any case if he should deign to converse with me, or seek more informed opinion on biological science through my intermediation, I should be happy to accept.

In conclusion, while I still possess enough nerve, I would like to enumerate a few of the findings that, to those familiar with them, confer a very high degree of plausibility to the idea of common descent. These include the cellular nature of all life; the universality of the genetic code; the commonality of biochemical pathways; the genetic similarity of different organism, proportional to the distance from their presumed common ancestor; the universal use of DNA as an information store; the exclusive use of the same twenty amino acids in all organisms; the embryological similarity of similar species; the arrangement of the geological column; the occurrence of atavisms; the occurrence of homologous structures; the differential prevalence of genes for sickle-cell and glucose-6-phosphatase traits among African and Mediterranean peoples (they confer resistance to Plasmodium falciparum malaria); and the reuse of similar proteins for similar tasks, such as bacterial and human rhodopsin, which are both involved in light sensing.

I have taken up far too much of your time already, and I shall end

Respectfully,

Even people with wacky ideas can have journals.

2005-05-09T14:26:00.000-07:00

From the Journal of the Family research Institute, 17:4 (2002):

At a high level of abstraction, homosexuality and heterosexuality might seem similar. So similar, in fact, that psychiatry and the media would have us believe that the only difference is in one's choice of sex partners. Otherwise, homosexuals are "just like you and me." They work, dine, go to movies; they bleed, have ambitions, feelings, etc. But despite this message, in the "real world," there are enormous differences between what homosexuals and heterosexuals do.

Not just psychiatry, but psychology, too. Medical science in general. They would have us believe the innocuousness of homosexuality because it is innocuous.

There are differences—the enormity of those differences is suspect. Homosexuals need not even have sex, technically—it would suffice to be attracted to members of the same sex, just as virgin teenagers may still be called heterosexual if their yearnings stretch to the “correct” set of genitals.

There is no way to sugarcoat this reality. In fact, it is extremely distasteful. But if reality is skipped "out of decency," high flying abstractions tend to prevail. For men, what homosexuality really comes down to is getting the penises of other men—often strangers or near-strangers—into their rectums or mouths, or putting their penis into the mouths or rectums of other men. This reality is avoided at our intellectual peril.

Strangers or near-strangers? That’s a bit inflammatory, as well as a big smelly pile of irrelevant. Heterosexuals have anonymous dalliances, too. Even if we concede homosexuals (at least, homosexual men) have them more frequently, it becomes a distinction only of degree. Not enormity.

What homosexuality really comes down to is people wanting to have sex with the people they’re attracted to. They make the best of the equipment they’ve got. Some people may find this disgusting—but some people find many heterosexual acts disgusting. I regularly engage in cunnilingus. Why is it so bad if a woman does it instead of a man? (Besides the usual litany).

Furthermore, the differences between what "homosexuals" and heterosexuals do show that homosexuality is about more than just sex—it is about rebelling against and trying to corrupt society, even as heterosexuality is about, for the most part, having and raising children. Homosexuality is also about coloring the world with SEX, regardless of the consequences. Its most prominent attitude is selfishness—getting what's mine, what I deserve; getting back at all those who have hurt me, etc.

Straight people have oral and anal sex, too. Homosexuals can’t really rebel against a sexual culture (even if delitescent) that already not only condones but eagerly outdoes them in sheer numbers of acts.

Even before the pill, heterosexual sex was not about having children. Other than in individual minds, it never was. It’s about many things, no number of which is minimally legitimizing: reproduction, pleasure, social obligation, profession, appeasement of deities, etc.

I personally have never had sex because I wanted children. I know few people who do it for children any but a few times in their whole lives, and I know primarily heterosexuals. The attitude of people such as write this is more attuned to selfishness, since they wish to restrict normal sexual outlet to a specific group of people, doing a specific set of acts. Homosexuals for the most part only want equality.

Of course, those with homosexual proclivities generally do everything in their power not to admit these truths. In fact, they often become enraged if accused of being either promiscuous or fundamentally self-centered. And their rage is usually effective. Most people just "back off," not wanting a confrontation. Others decide that their anger must be justified—that homosexuals must not really be so selfish or obsessed with sex. For why else would they get so upset?

In the absence of informed psychiatric or psychological opinion, the knowledge of the article-writers of homosexuals’ true minds is remarkably suspect.

Truths pronounced as such should be either demonstrated or self-evident. Neither standard is provided by this article.

My first real troll

2005-05-08T06:59:00.000-07:00

responded to an earlier post. He wrote

Your liberty was paid for by the blood of U.S. veterans.

Which is true. But why I fail to see the intended point of this observation is that I take it as not only an invalidation but a betrayal of the sacrifices of those veterans, from Lexington to Mosul, to accept arbitrary limitations on the liberty they fought so hard to ensure. Because if it turned out they were actually fighting to ensure the hegemony of reactionary, ignorant oligarchs and the suppression of dissent, then I'd ask them quite politely to stop fucking fighting, thank you very much.

Humans do things

2005-05-06T21:25:00.000-07:00

they think will make them happy. It's ample evidence of Intelligent Design to note that figuring out what actually makes them happy is just about the worst skill human beings possess. Below unpowered flight and teleportation. No surprise, the myriad proclivities of humankind: drugs, politics, television, fatty foods. Politics and smoking are probably the most alike in obnoxiousness, since their effects drift further than the junkie, and often spoil an otherwise enjoyable meal.

It's no astounding thought that a group of shared political assumptions among a group might go far in reducing political discord. Nation-states have been upholstered on that foam hump for centuries. It's simply confounding how far many people seem to have drifted from said treasured shared assumptions, even while superficially making mad, patriotic love to them.

I also have trouble understanding people who revere symbols more than the things they symbolize. They are insensitive to the lack of subtlety of the juxtaposition of the First Amendment with the Hypothetical Flag-Desecration Amendment.

Among the many ills of humankind is a general lack of respect for subtlety, engendered by an unpracticed incompetence with it, itself conceived by the incestuous union of Ignorance and Ignorance's hermaphroditic offspring, Cable TV.

At some level, politics is reducible to science. There are a set of policies which will work, long-term, for most stable societies, given the correct permutations. Because they must deal with large populations, they are necessarily diplomatic. Because they are diplomatic, they countermand every instinctual behavior of people, who seek three revenges for every slight and an acre for every lost bushel.

I still have hope. Even the healthiest of people may be prostrated by disease. Our republic has been stricken by a long half-century of maladies all calculated to inhibit her ability to control infection. America is at her lowest: febrile, delirious, unable to distinguish friends from phantoms—but the virus will pass. The body underlying is healthy. The virus will do its damage and then be scrounged. America will grow again; will smile and laugh with her neighbors again. Break the fever and you will see.

"Hitler would be a card-carrying ACLU member. So would Stalin."

2005-03-05T12:03:00.000-08:00

The above is straight from Bill O'Reilly's mouth. The good Mr. Loofah has decided that the ACLU is not only a "terrorist group," but the second most-dangerous threat to the United States behind Al Qaeda.

Of course, the actual greatest threat to the United States is stupidity and overreaction—but as you may be able to tell, America having hitherto made tiny steps to get waist-deep in that frigid pool, is now about to dive straight in.

At the risk of rehashing in political terms the ghastly "Differences between men and women" comedic commonplace so many modern stand-ups butter their bread with, I'd like to point out that the conception of a nation as a cohesive, efficient, machine-built whole is a conservative one. It mirrors the desire of many conservatives to see life, among other things, as divinely designed and implemented, a perfect machine that is the sum of all its synergistic parts.

Nations, those of us who are intelligent know, are not so clean. Life is messy—you have some enzymes working toward one extreme, other enzymes working toward another, huge wastes of energy reserves and DNA, competing individuals, adaptation of species—the magic and the wonder of life is that, absent of conscious design, a huge set of competing and completely antagonistic chemical processes has produced complex life forms. The keyword is dynamic equilibrium. Nations, too, exist in dynamic equilibrium, as political forces of all stripes compete.

It's when one pathway becomes too favored that complex systems are prone to failure; when the feedback loops are unsprung and scattered like salt. Cancer is the result of some cells not receiving the push-back they should; like bullies they keep pushing and pushing until the organism is dead.

Conservatism likes to push. I'm also sorry to say that we have been dirty, stinkin' liberals have been way too reticent to push back. Despite our penchant for nonviolence, we've got to show the bully who's boss, after all.

So when O'Reilly complains that everything the government does to help win the war on terrorism is countered by the ACLU, he betrays his cancerous thinking. He doesn't want there to be countercurrents in America—he doesn't want there to be voices of opposition, but just one big, enormous symphonic voice.

The privileging of the state over the individual—the very thing O'Reilly is asking for—is one of the prime characteristics of fascism. Not to say that O'Reilly is a fascist—he's simply a fucktard. But before one accuses an organization that only has the best intentions as far as American freedom is concerned of being fascist for trying to stop the government's intrusive actions, one had better be sure to pick up the loofah and wipe off any fascist grease from his last screaming match.

I mean—swear to God—the ACLU does not have executive or legislative, nor even judicial power. It has no Duce; it is not in favor of censorship; it would rather relax than toughen a whole number of frightful laws. And O'Reilly has the cerebral peduncles to call them fascists? Holy fuck! What is going on, here? One really does strain to find the locus of such stupidity. And there can really only be a few different explanations. Either O'Reilly really is an idiot and doesn't know what fascism is, or he's unbelievably cynical and thinks just waving around a swastika's going to spook everyone into unquestioning opposition, or he's unbelievably intelligent, but exponentially more so devious and sociopathic, and is smack-dab in the midst of a plot to systematically undermine the meaning of the word for his own twisted ends.

And what can be the ends of people like Bill O'Reilly?

I, for one, am naïve, and grant that fucktards like O'Reilly do sincerely have the safety of America at heart. But theirs is a specific America that must be protected from change of any kind, not simply from terrorist actions. They view America like an overprotective father sees his sixteen year-old daughter. Despite the budding breasts, the growing cacophany of boys, the germinal opinions marking the beginning of independence in thought, all they are able to see is the six year-old girl who sat on his lap and watched Little House on the Prairie reruns with him. They are constitutionally unable to accept that things change, and that often they do so for the better.

But no—rather than let his daughter date, that kind of asshole will lock her in his home, listen in on her phone calls, invade her computer to read her instant messages. He will become more intrusive than he ever was, in the interest of keeping his sixteen year-old daughter six years old, pure and without besmirch, forever.

Well fuck that.

America was once young. She owned slaves and hit women; lynched blacks and beat immigrants. She used to fix elections and bowl over whole forests, start fights at school and beat the hell out of whomever she liked.

But she's beginning to grow now. Time was you could rub out "fags" as easily as cigarette butts—but that's not what she wants now. She's growing, and growing her own tastes and opinions, and she's not the country you knew before.

No, it's not okay to single out people for suspicion because they checked out a book at the library that not everyone checks out. It's not okay to hover over every dark-skinned person that comes in on an airplane. It's not okay to listen in on any conversation unless you have a damn good reason.

Are you listening, Mr. O'Reilly? Are you getting this, yet?

It's not okay to throw people into a dungeon and torture them for years without trial.

It's not okay to invade countries that pose no immediate threat.

It's not okay to sit and read My Pet Goat like a fucking moron for seven minutes while American citizens burn to death in the definitive American terrorist attack.

And while I'll defend to the death your right to say it, Mr. O'Reilly, I do have to say it's not okay at all to flap your mouth like an unbelievably obtuse shithead about things you imperfectly understand using words you at best can barely misspell.

Hitler and Stalin, card-carrying ACLU members...Jesus H. Christ, go read a fucking book, you retarded hack!

Draft Encyclopedia Entry: Zero-Tolerance

2005-03-03T11:40:00.000-08:00

Zero-tolerance refers to any policy which refutes, trivializes, or batters justice in order to give the appearance of dealing effectively with an often rare, if spectacular problem.

Questions are Un-American

2005-03-02T06:40:00.000-08:00

From Pharyngula: a student who, during a talk by David Horowitz at Saint John's University in Minnesota, stood up to say that opposing the Iraqi expedition is "un-American."

David Horowitz is another fucktard. Before I knew more about him, I was kind of surprised and gratified that he was able to make a case against modern slavery reparations—but it seems he was just picking one of the few scabs we have in common.

Right now, his hobby horse is collegiate political diversity. While standing on a dais before a packed house of people, many of whom thought opposing the Iraq war is tantamount to being a greasy, traitorous, malodorous foreigner, he had the nerve to say that conservative voices are denied access on college campuses today.

No, no—it took more than nerve. Horowitz had:

Gall.
Cojones.
Dementia and/or delirium.
Paranoia.
Hubris.
Silliness.
Disregard for irony.
Disregard for intellectual things.
A huge, privately-funded stick in his anal canal.

Readers of Autochthon are already aware why college professors skew left—because college professors, unlike presidents, modern journalists, and apparently some students at Saint John's University, have to think.

Thinking is one of the last vestiges of liberalism not to come under attack, and like a good virus conservatism is now vectoring toward the delicate organ. The rest of the body politic, all cancerous and necrotic, wants nothing to do with this "questioning" of things.

A survey (PDF) of high school students released by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation finds over a third of them thinks First Amendment guarantees go "too far" in this country. How the fuck does that jibe with Horowitz's claim that education is indoctrinating the young in this country?

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

You know what? Socrates was given a really, really bad drink because his questioning of things—though admittedly annoying—was taken as corruption of the young. Fucktards like David Horowitz would have us all drink the hemlock, and turn Académe into a jack-boot recruiting ground.

Well fuck that.

The minute it becomes truly unacceptable to question in this country, the Revolution has failed. I don't know how anyone can stand up and pretend to be a red-blooded American who thinks that expressing reservations about what your country does is bad. What if more people had been able to do that in 1930s Germany? In the 1920s USSR? In 1960s and 1970s Iraq?

Oh, there's fascism afoot, people, and it's not that Islamo- kind. Why conservative commentators are so eager to affix a label denoting blind allegiance to the state and unquestioning loyalty to a group of people who by their very nature and definition question authority and owe no unconditional loyalty is a discombobulating intellectual exercise akin to turning your whole rectum inside out through your mouth and wearing it for a bow-tie. Unbelievable.

It's—you gotta understand, folks, it isn't easy for a writer, given such a bald and blatant fraud as a subject, to properly put it in perspective. Normally, what we have to do is magnify and contrast—normal writers have tiny, subtle issues that are worth exploring, and they sit at their desks like tincturists from the B&W photo days painstakingly bringing out relevant details in their application of color. Not this, though—it's as if half the population of America has succumbed to some strange colorblindness, such that no matter how flamboyantly I lay on the ugly pigment—and I'm Rothkoing here, people, I'm just putting down pure tones, there's simply no room for gradients among fascisti—no matter how many inches of paint I plaster on the canvas, they're not going to see it. They'll think it's a pretty picture of some fucking baseball players eating apple pie at Grandma's! With their goddamned Cub Scout nephews! I'm like a fucking Cassandra with a paint brush, people!

So I cannot say it enough, people, and so for the benefit of a wider audience, I shall render the message multilingually:

David Horowitz is a fucktard.
David Horowitz ist fucktard.
David Horowitz es fucktard.
David Horowitz est fucktard.
デイヰドホロヰイツわハクタアドですよ.
DAVID HOROVVITZ FVCKTARD EST.
Δαυιδ Ὀρουιτζ ἑνάς φυκκταρδ

If you can't say it enough, say it differently each time.

Will anyone spew this shit for free?

2005-02-06T13:13:00.000-08:00

Apparently not. At least three conservative propagandists have been caught recently taking money from the administration to scatter their obnoxious ideological seed all over the country.

Things like this remind me of a frat-boy I knew in undergrad named Dennehy, who originally made a name for himself lighting his pubic hair on fire. The first time he did this, he was drunk and presumably bored at a party. But from then on, he was invited to party after party, plied with drink and girls, term papers and exam answers, just to do this silly stunt. In the end, I don't think Dennehy even cared to light his pubic hair on fire anymore—at the very least, the carbonaceous scrabble in his nether regions didn't look very comfortable. But because of the benefits, the attention, the free alcohol, the sailing through school, he continued to do it until he almost burnt his weenie off.

Which leads me to believe that the wingnuts maybe don't actually believe in the crap they spew. I mean—who actually could? What human being could be so heartless as to accuse ordinary men and women of being cruel sinners merely because of their choice of life partner? What idiot really thinks that progressive taxation is a bad idea? What moron thinks he can just toss a wrench into the intricate workings of Social Security to lubricate it?

It seems like, for at least some wingnuts, the pleasure of being batshit crazy just isn't enough. The delights of screaming down progressives on shrill cable TV outlets just doesn't cut it anymore. Maybe, like heroin junkies, they simply grow tolerant to the effects of ignorance. But for whatever reason, the fun has apparently gone out of propaganda, because now they're being paid to poop it out.

And I know, people—I know—in a measure, this is progressives' fault. The one consistent progressive thing in the Democratic party lately has been stupidity. But we'll get through this. It's like a brain-fart—a lapse—or more likely, we all disabused ourselves of the notion that there are politically gap-toothed imbeciles out there who, long after we've received our chess sets and bicycles, are still banging on that goddamn baby drum of conservatism. Likely because it's soothing.

Now is the time to put away childish things. Now is the time to progress from the selfishness of two year-olds to maturity, from the ear-splitting screams of pathetic neediness to thoughtful conversation.

I'm not saying we need to get rid of conservative wingnuts—I'm not going to sink to that abhorrent intellectual level. But we need them to grow up, and right quick. We need to tell the fundies to dig their noses out of their damn books and smell the fucking coffee. We have to cut the puppet strings the warmongers have been twiddling and give them a good Iraqi frat-prank spanking. And we need to do this now.

And all I can think about is that you don't call a dog with arguments and common sense. You have to wave a piece of meat in front of him and draw him near. The pay-per-lie scam in this country just shows you the wingnut journalists are like dogs, and maybe the only way near-term we can take back our country is to throw them a friggin' biscuit.

George W. Bush is a fucktard.

2005-01-26T20:32:00.000-08:00

Look, we've been through this before.

Remember Ford? If you wanted to keep him busy all day, you shoved him in the Oval Office and told him to stand in the corner.

Remember Reagan? Well, of course you do; the wingnuts have taken to renaming anything with a phallic symbol after the demented cowboy. Last I heard, you could ride Reagan from airport to hotel to butterknife at the Denny's downtown.

Well but anyway—Reagan came like a tsunami. Reagan rushed in and bowled over our country, and bogged it down with so much deep-sea crud and bullshit we were still pulling crabs out of our couch cushions under the Clinton administration. But we weathered; and he passed. Like all charismatic megalomaniacs, he up and evaporated.

Remember Nixon? Remember when we still had journalists on our side? Yeah, he got fixed. If only we'd had Nixon to kick around a little more, I would've put on my steel-toed boots.

And so but we've been there. Markets have corrections, and so do democracies. After seventy years of progressive politics, we're experiencing a little hiccup—which, unfortunately, at this scale, means we've driven all the intelligence out of Washington and left a huge vacuum which just sucks in every conceivable bad idea—and worse, every conceivable combination of bad ideas.

Isn't it nice that Americans have a social safety net? "Well hey, George, you know what? It's so exciting in the circus when they work without a net, let's pull it out from under Americans while they're still working on the tightwire!"

"Fantastic!"

Isn't it nice the Americans haven't fought a war of aggression, ever? "I'll bet if we really wanted to, we could make it happen."

"Yeah, totally."

"It'd just be like that game my nephew plays where he goes through and blows up brown-skinned people. Except he can't play it anymore because his mom's afraid he'll go shooting up his school."

Oh my fucking God, people....

The wingnuts in this country, with their theocratic agenda, with their hatred for all things American and their sanctimonious bullshit—these people are trying something. They are literally saboteurs in our midst. They are the little people who sneak into the factory during wartime and throw wrenches and bits of metal into the machinery to slow the state down. They are as close to evil as you can get.

They like to tell a good story, I'll give 'em that. Love to tell a good story. Sit down with a wingnut, and he'll ring your ear off talking about how much he loves his country—but then you'll start to hear certain "tells."

If there should ever be doubt about whether a person is a wingnut or not, you have to sit them down in like a coffee shop and look for some tells. Like in poker, tells. The first thing will be when the waiter leans over to pour some coffee and the guy stares at him afterwards and turns to you and asks if you think he's a little, you know, "light in the wrist." He'll ask you if you think the waiter was coming on to him. Because wingnuts seem to think that gay people are everywhere, and that they're part of some conspiracy to turn the entire world into sodomites. Jesus Christ, I'm telling the truth.

But so after that you start listening. After he tells you how patriotic he is, and how he salutes his flag every day and says the pledge of allegiance and leads boy scout troops on hikes into national parks—why then you start listening, and you hear things. Like how "loyal" he is. How blind obedience is somehow more American than the most American of things, dissent. How he's disgusted when people whisper and talk when something goes wrong. He's convinced when America's military screws up and blows up a civilian airliner, for instance, good Americans should rally around and tell them, "Nice shot, though, Henry—if they were terrorists, you would've gotten 'em good, fuckin' splat."

He'll tell you how proud he is that some government officials are trying to change the fabric of the United States government to fit with some hare-brained concocted ideas about how the Bible wants it to be. Even though he'll foam at the mouth about Bill Clinton's zero indictments, he will lick the boot-drippings from the likes of Roy Moore, who seems to think the Bill of Rights includes things like "Don't covet your neighbor's shit," and "Take a day off per week," and who not only did something as preposterous as sneak in a five thousand pound rock into a government building, but then refuse on pain of removal from office to move it.

You'll sit there and look at your friend, who you notice ordered just plain coffee, nothing foofoo; who eschewed lunch at all; who drives a beater and lives in a mobile home; who no longer has health insurance because his employer of ten years transformed him into a subcontractor—and he'll demonstrate psychic powers. He will literally, in the coffee shape, channel the soul of Adam Smith. He will spout words related to supply-side economic theory he doesn't even know the initial letters of. He'll tell you to your face he thinks the rich have it too hard in this country, and when he gets sick in a month and has to declare bankruptcy because of the hospital costs, he'll consider it the oft cruel but wise hand of God at work.

That, and Fox News is always on at his house. WorldNetDaily is on his bookmarks list. The man's last tangible contact with biological science was twenty years ago—he got a C—and yet he considers himself a fucking expert on the deficiencies of evolutionary theory.

These are what you must look out for. Go, my children, smoke out the wingnuts, quietly unscrew them, and replace them with something a bit more sturdier to tie together the frame of America.

Homosexual tolerance

2005-01-26T20:19:00.000-08:00

What the fuck is so wrong with tolerating the existence of gay people? For the James Dobsons of the world, who go up raising stinks akin to poison mustard-gas bean-fart clouds of chemical weapons grade about the innocuous use of cartoon characters in public service announcements designed to get kids to hate gay people less, doing so is one page of the Little Red Book away from the complete accession of the liberal-homosexual-atheistico-communist agenda.

Give me a break.

People like these are not real Americans. They try real hard; they get up and they yell histrionically and they try and bully people around, but they're not real Americans. They hate people for stupid reasons and they try to get others to do so as well. They're like cultural viruses. They come in and infect the cultural life of our country and try like Hell to spread the sickness far and wide.

Well, you know what? I think what we need is a good anti-viral medication. Better yet, we need a good, hard vaccine, to wipe people like James Dobson off the face of the Earth. Then maybe America's body politic can begin to overcome her fever and get well again.

To reiterate, though, I'll ask: what is so goddamn wrong with coexisting with gay people? How are the James Dobsons, the Jerry Falwells of the world, who probably masturbated furiously to scrapped pages of lingerie catalogues when they were younger, qualified to judge the sexual escapades of fully-consenting adults? When was the last time they even had heterosexual relations? Do they know how sex works?

Maybe it's that book they keep waving about. Maybe they like to think that they're the new popes and that they can dictate which passages of Holy Scripture are most binding. Maybe they think the American people can't think for themselves about the most important messages of Christianity, and have to be led by the hand past all the Love-thy-neighbor crap into the crowded line for gay-baiting!

Well fuck them.