The narcissism of Small Differences

Another day, another triumph for malignant stupidity. I have a filter on my e-mail program that deletes most anything that mentions the President. Odds are it's more crap about finding proof that Obama is a Muslim, whether it's in goat entrails, the arrangement of the stars, some spliced together video or some total fabrication by one of Fox's Friends.

I may add filters for the words Mosque, Muslim and Islam as well because like the voices in the madman's head, mad America sees Muslims everywhere and hates them: in any curved line -- even in NASA mission patches and most of all in buildings with Domes. You know those round arches found at St. Peters, on many Orthodox basilicas and even that cathedral of Democracy, the US Capitol building. If it curves like the new moon, like the orbit of an electron, the path of a rocket: if it has a dome, it's Muslim and it's evil.

Take The Light of the World multidenominational church outside Phoenix, Arizona. All truth, decency and sanity notwithstanding the mad morons of America want you to think it's a mosque and for no other reason that it's domed. Looks to the Demented Idiots of Arizona like a Mosque - must be a center of America-hating Islamic Jihad.

In response, there's a banner now waving at the construction site:

"If you think we are different you are wrong, we are building a Christian house of prayer."

Isn't that part of the problem? Are Muslims "Different?" What about Jews, Mormons, Secular Humanists, Buddhists, Hindus, Unitarians, Freemasons? DIFFERENT! BE AFRAID!

Oklahoma is OK

Says the tautological and largely meaningless slogan on their license plates. No, Oklahoma isn't an Apache word for xenophobia, but it may well become an English metaphor, and it certainly isn't OK with regard to having a clue about the consequences of their actions.

Yes, the strict Constitutionalist Nativists of the Southwest would love to be able to pick and choose what part of that document they feel comfortable with and ignore other parts that suggest that Oklahoma cannot set requirements for US citizenship all by itself nor can neighboring Arizona forbid certain kinds of employment to those with an accent that doesn't suggest Aryan "Abstammung," even though they did.

They're apparently also stupid enough to fear that Oklahoma judges will decide to opt out of Federal, State and local law and enforce Sharia, or Islamic law, since so many of them are Islamic fundamentalists in disguise or likely to spontaneously become one. You know, like some people just burst into flames or get abducted by aliens. You really can't trust any judge not to decide to enforce Liechtenstein law or that of France or Andorra, you know, and so they voted for the Save Our State amendment.

It may just work. It may save Oklahoma's free thinkers, Buddhists, Hindus and adherents to Native religions from being beat over the head with selected Jewish laws in the name of being a Christian nation. Sorry Tea folk, when you ban the courts from referencing "laws of another nation" that didn't apply in the first place, you ban the Ten Commandments as well as the other 603 Biblical laws you're not literate enough to know about. Mount Sinai wasn't just outside Muskogee, you know and Israel remains a foreign country.

Just as Sharia is binding only on Muslims, Jewish Mitzvot are only binding on Jews and if any are enforced in the courts, it's coincidental. Muslims have laws against murder and theft too, you know and some of theirs seem more liberal than ours. Sometimes ignorance opens the door to enlightenment.

Of course these landlocked Okies have forgotten that treaties the US Government enters into with foreign entities do have the force of law ( unless those treaties were made with the various Indian tribes without the slightest intention of good faith ) and so refusing to enforce them is unconstitutional and not good for international business, if there is any in Oklahoma.

Just can't win, can ya? So thanks for standing up for the first amendment, cowboy -- maybe you really are OK.

Democrats and the Art of the Impossible: Mosques and Morons

RE Sam Stein's article "Harry Reid: Mosque Should Be Built Somewhere Else" 

See, this is why it's sometimes hard to respect Democrats, even if you are one as I am, and you're trying so hard to respect them that you're burning lean muscle, not just fat.  I thought the President's remarks on the near-Ground Zero mosque issue were acceptable -- after all, it isn't his job to pronounce sentence on the "wisdom" of building any kind of house of worship anywhere.  There's a good constitutional basis for the attitude he's struck up.  But I can't be that generous about Harry Reid's remarks -- I rather like old Harry Reid and the word "moron" in my post title doesn't refer to him but rather to mosque-haters, but to me, the statement cited in the article just sounds like caving in to idiocy and xenophobia. 

Democrats do that a lot -- they never seem to learn that when you compromise with utter knaves and raving imbeciles, there's no arriving at a middle ground that makes you look like a practitioner of the fine art of the possible that is politics.  You end up tumbling down the rabbit hole and into the abyss, where your only consolation will be to recollect ad infinitum Sam Johnson's wonderful line, "Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation."  If I didn't enjoy reading the Inestimable Dr. Johnson so much, I'd say that's pretty poor consolation.

Another final solution?

During WW II the Germans were the bad guys and the French were the good guys, right? Well, some of them certainly were and some of them certainly still are, but if we're looking for another example of the banality -- and universality -- of the hidden but still present nastiness in apparently civilized nations, the examples are everywhere. Examples of the kinds of sentiments that brought us the persecutions, deportations and atrocities my parents' generation went to war over.

No, I'm not talking about the increasingly hostile attitude toward non-aryan immigrants in the American South, but about France and the European Union of which it's part. The Nazis ( and the Inquisition in its time) were less successful in eliminating the Roma, or the Gypsies as it was once more common to call them, then they were in eliminating the Jews or Europe.

Now that travel within the EU has been made so much easier; a basic right of European citizens, France has many Romani camps and that bothers many Frenchmen who are eager to attribute all kinds of mayhem in good old Lou Dobbs fashion. French President Nicolas Sarkozy seems happy to raise his poor ratings by pandering to that good old European Family Value of racism and ethnic prejudice. He plans to break up some 300 camps in the near future and send the Roma back to Romania because of "security problems." As yet, I haven't heard talk about re-establishing them in their ancient homeland in Rajasthan, but maybe that's still too touchy a subject just now.

France isn't the first to expel this wandering group who have appeared as bogey men in a thousand years of European folk lore. Germany Denmark and Italy, for example are instituting similar policies of attributing selected offenses to a group and punishing that group with expulsion rather than individuals actually accused and found guilty. It's doubly disturbing because, of course, Romanian citizens are normally free to reside in EU countries, or so I'm told.

Perhaps enough time has passed that the embarrassment of being caught at the same old Collective Guilt by Ethnicity game isn't enough to make EU member countries circumspect. Certainly that's true in the US where most citizens can't clearly remember as far back as the Bush administration, but equally certain is that looking for ethnic scapegoats in times of economic trouble is not something that died in a Berlin bunker in 1945.

Absolute statements and American Values

I'm sorry I haven't posted here of late... I think I'm just more of a debater than a writer of original material. This piece did come out pretty well though, if I do say so myself... It's adapted from a comment I wrote in reply to an observation someone made about me, and I think it's good enough to share, here... Sorry if it comes off preachy, but sometimes I am just that kinda person...
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It's probably the liberal in me, but I don't go in much for the whole black/white, good/evil, with us/with the terrorists kinda thinkin'. I don't believe there are all that many absolutes, and I reject statements that speak in absolute terms. Just about all saints have sinned, and most sinners have performed good acts, too. All Americans (or Muslims) are not good. All Muslims (or Americans) are not evil. Not everyone who claims to be a faithful _______ (place religion/denomination of choice there) acts like one.

Just about anytime a person speaks of a whole group of people, whether chosen & denoted by their religion, their ethnicity, their country of origin, or any other factor, and speaks of them as though they are all one kinda person (whether all good, or all evil), one is almost certainly going to end up being factually incorrect in what one is saying about them. To group people together based on ethnicity, religion or country of origin, and then treat them all as one monolithic entity is the very definition of bigotry.

The same is true of me & politics. As a Green, I seldom agree with Conservative or Republican thought. (And contrary to what some have said about me, I'm generally not a big fan of Democratic thought, either.) Still, it's mighty rare to find me saying "Conservatives are evil" (or anything else, either), because I just don't think that way... Whatever issues and disagreements I have with individual conservatives or Republicans, wherever I may find them, they do not prove anything about ALL Conservatives, or Republicans, (or about any other groups to which such Conservatives or Republicans may belong, like "college professors," or "guys with hats," for instance...) Good or bad, whatever I'm saying about you, I'm saying it about you, alone.

I try to treat the people I meet as individuals, not as representatives of the groups they were either born into or chose to affiliate themselves with... Call me naive or crazy if you must, but I believe the more folks treat others as individuals, the better our personal & global relations with each other will be...

If you want (or want me) to condemn or praise individual people and / or individual acts, that's one thing... But chances are slim you'll ever get me to say all ________ are ____________, and I encourage everyone reading these words to give it a lot of thought before doing so yourselves. To my way of thinkin', it's neither intellectually or morally right to do so.

Yes, there is evil in the world, but it isn't "the Muslims," or "the conservatives," or "the non-believing nihilists" that are the cause of it. It's individual men & women murdering others, raping others, and treating others with disrespect and derision in a myriad of other ways large and small, that is at the heart of evil.

That's what I think, anyway...

The original version of this piece, and the comment to which I was replying, appear here, in case anyone's interested. I also posted this version to my blog, Wingnuts & Moonbats (link in the list to the right, somewhere), 'cause I haven't been doing enough posting there of late, either, and saw no reason not to kill lots of birds with the same single stone... 8>)

THE NEW LEPER COLONY: FOR WOMEN ONLY

(O)CT(O)PUS is not done inking the aquarium this week.  I did a post-mortem follow-up and found this comment posted by the same author who inspired my last ink-the-aquarium tirade:

[Were] pregnant teenagers allowed in school when you were a student?  I know they were not.  I don't believe in that, because it tells other girls that it's okay to get pregnant. I don't know how you feel about that, but I disagree with it. It's not okay for teenage girls to get pregnant, and I feel fortunate that I was able to teach my girls the difference between right and wrong.  Unfortunately there are far too many parents who don't realize what's going on in our public school system, and there are many others who simply don't care.  As to teenage girls who get pregnant, I believe they should homeschool [sic]. Gayle | Homepage | 01.03.09 - 11:18 am

A few questions: Why should pregnant teenaged girls be banned from public schools but not the little dicks who caused their pregnancies?  Why should young women always bear the brunt of ridicule and social ostracism for the crime of two-to-tango but not their co-conspirators in passion?  Will parents of pregnant teenaged girls get a school tax rebate after their daughters are banned from public school?  After all, those parents will no longer receive value for money.

In other news, I congratulate the Palin family on the birth of their new grandson, Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, 7 pounds 4 ounces, born on December 28, 2009.  Dragon Lady has decreed: Bristol Palin, daughter of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, may now return to school.

In other news, I found these stories:

Taleban threaten to blow up girls’ schools if they refuse to close
The Taleban have ordered the closure of all girls’ schools in the war-ravaged Swat district and warned parents and teachers of dire consequences if the ban is flouted.
In an announcement made in mosques and broadcast on radio, the militant group set a deadline of January 15 for its order to be obeyed or it would blow up school buildings and attack schoolgirls. It also told women not to set foot outside their homes without being fully covered.

“Female education is against Islamic teachings and spreads vulgarity in society,” Shah Dauran, leader of a group that has established control over a large part of Swat district in the North West Frontier Province, declared this week.

Disembowelled, then torn apart: The price of daring to teach girls
The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy.  The 46-year-old schoolteacher tried to reassure his family that he would return safely.  But his life was over, he was part-disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes, the remains put on display as a warning to others against defying Taliban orders to stop educating girls.