The level of not even wrong here is magnificent

My honey pointed this blog out to me. It is such a virulent piece of anti-gay propaganda that it cried out for a full-throated response.

http://infrequentatheist.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/the-homosexual-conspiracy-and-black-atheism/

Listen, homosexual friends, everything’s not okay. Don’t do that in the name of black atheism. If you are of African descent, then you accept the values, customs, and traditions of traditional African people, and homosexuality is not a traditional African custom. It is a European Graeco-Roman social custom. [That's how Europeans greet each other.] This is a historical fact. I’m not a bigot. This is not prejudice. Traditional African society prioritizes reproduction and protection of children.

No, IA, you are a bigot. What is more, you are a--wait for it--fascist. You are a fascist in the sense that you have a ‘blood and soil’ mentality. You essentials a genetic fact--that one has recent African ancestry--and make it into something that compels you to, as you put it, accept the values, customs and traditions of traditional African people. Now, you do not explain why it should be so that a particular pattern of genetics, based upon parentage, should compel you to accept the values, customs and traditions of people living in a completely different culture. What is more, you merge all sub-Saharan African people into a single cultural group when, in fact, they are not a monoculture. The cultures represented on the African continent are as varied as those spanning from Paris in the West and Beijing in the East. Could you talk about a single, monolithic culture running along the entire length of the Eurasian continent? Not hardly. In the same way you cannot speak of a monolithic culture in Africa, even if you confine yourself to the sub-Saharan part of the continent. When I call you a fascist, I am saying that because you believe that blood and the soil it is from, make an inescapable bond and that one *must* (you have no qualifiers in the statement above) obey the dictates of that blood and soil.

What is more, the argument you are making about Europeans does much the same thing. Yes, there is a civilization one could call Western European and yet, that civilization still manages to encompass places as diverse as Poland, Brazil, England, France, and Mexico, Chile and the United States. Again, not a monoculture by any stretch of the imagination. Yet you try to collapse all of that cultural diversity into one thing “European Graeco-Roman” entity that you can then dismiss as the source of homosexuality.


Homosexuality is a by-product of western individualism [like Broke Back Mountain?]. It’s me, me, me, me, me [unlike heterosexual relations, where we are selflessly thinking only of our partner's enjoyment]. I don’t believe in God because of scientific reasons. When the topic of homosexuality comes up, I always bring up the Law of Reproduction. [This is one of those inviolable Laws taught in every biology class.] You’re not born that way. To say you’re born that way violates the scientific Law of Reproduction. It has nothing to do with religion. We’re not anti-homosexual. If you’re European, if you’re white, that’s their thing. If you go to their history books, they’ll tell you, we’ve been doing it for years; for centuries; this is our custom. They’ll let you know they have sex with animals. [Actually, I had been trying to hide that. These guys are just too perceptive.]

There is no “Law of Reproduction”, sir. None. I am willing to bet my academic background in molecular genetics over what you think you’ve understood by reading Dawkins et. al. Yes, sexual reproduction happens but that does not make it a ‘law’ in the strict scientific sense--and you are claiming thins ‘law’ is taught in every biology class. However, sexual reproduction is not the *only* way living organisms propagate themselves. What is more, in the ape brain--humans are apes whether you like it or not--sex and reproduction are not *necessarily* connected. We don’t have sex to reproduce, we have sex for pleasure. That is nature’s way of encouraging us TO reproduce. However, that is our species. There is no ‘law of reproduction’ that applies to our species. In fact, this idea you appear to have--and your argument assumes this--is that all living things reproduce themselves. That is not the case nor is it something that would be workable if it were. The vast majority of all things that have ever lived will leave around no descendants--none. For humans, non-trivial numbers of males have left behind *no* descendants. That does not mean that these men did not have sex, but it does mean that they did not leave around any descendants. In fact, one of the axiomatic statements of evolution is that there is competition for mates and that some individuals lose that competition. Your ‘Law of Reproduction’ is repealed by Nature and Nature *always* has the last vote.

What’s more, you are as much a product of Western civilization as any homosexual. You are not ‘traditionally African’ unless you were born in Africa and grew up in that culture. If that is the case, you’re not in exactly the best position to tell black Americans who or what we are. Chances are, though, is that you did not grow up in Africa you grew up in the United States. You are a Westerner and any things you’ve picked up that you believe are ’traditionally African’ are no more authentic than the blonde haired, blue-eyed second or third generation Americans, whose grandparents came over from Norway at the end of WW II, and suddenly discover that they are 1/16th Cherokee and start styling themselves Running Wolfwater or some other such rot. Your argument is a Western-style anti-gay argument. Your attempt to back up your anti-gay bigotry--and you are, after all, a bigot--with a patina of scientific respectability is very much a Western rhetorical tactic. You are no more ‘traditionally African’ than I am and I have maintained, since I first started hearing this Afrocentrist tripe 30 years ago, that any meaningful cultural connection between blacks in America and blacks in Africa died when the last person, born in Africa and transplanted to America, died. After that, we were on our own.

What’s more, the giants--the real and true demigods of our intellectual tradition in the West--almost to a person through the 19th and most of the 20th centuries recognized that to look to Africa was folly. You are not an African, you are an American. If you are British or Canadian or Australian you are STILL not an African. If we drop you off with some tribe of !Kung you will enjoy the first week. Then you’ll start to miss your laptop, just like anyone else.

Fascism is a very ugly human ideology. One of the most ugly and deeply disturbing ideas ever conceived by the mind of humans and we have come up with some truly diabolical ideas! it reduces people to cardboard cutouts, not even extras just background scenery in our own personal movies. When you are talking about gay people, you aren’t talking about the tech support person you spoke to, or the phlebotomist who drew your blood, or the pilot who just landed your airplane. No, you were talking about this amorphous mass called ‘homosexuals’ and in just a few paragraphs try to tie homosexuals to both bestiality and child abuse--neither of which has any meaningful or causal connection and, in fact, do not even correlate with homosexuality! Yet, as you proclaimed yourself to not be a bigot, you made statements that if some Rush Limbaugh were to make those same statements about blacks you would be up in arms, calling for his firing and banning from the airwaves. You do the very same thing with Europeans. I won’t even speculate how many other groups you fool yourself into thinking you feel superior to.

As I said at the head of my response to you, you are a fascist. Since I’m reasonably certain that you will try to deny that you have anything in common, ideologically, with fascists you’ll forgive me if invoke a European, Umberto Eco, who has the benefit of knowing fascism when he sees it since he grew up in Mussolini’s Italy.

        1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
        7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism.
        12.        Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.
        14.        Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

Of the fourteen points, these are the seven I think most germane to this discussion. The whole thing can be found at http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf

It is from Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco.

Whither the American Spring?

An online acquaintance asked me a very troubling and penetrating question yesterday in email. My initial response, which I still stand by, was not much more than a skeleton while the question has quite a bit of muscle, sinew and flesh to add to the bones. This blog post will attempt to explore why there has been no general uprising in America. In Greece, Ireland, England, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Libya and Syria there have been general uprisings against either governmental corruption or harsh austerity measures. Now, while the “Arab Spring” uprisings have been of one character--people rising up against dictators who have oppressed their people, the outpourings in the Western nations have all been about draconian cutbacks to the social safety net. And what of America? There seems to be some signs of life in Wisconsin and Ohio, a little in Michigan but not a widespread expression of dismay at the dismantling of the middle-class or sweetheart deals given to corporations that then use their legions of lawyers to write legislation and battalions of accountants to use every tax dodge possible.

Even as our infrastructure disintegrates to such a degree that it becomes impossible to even maintain the illusion that we have the best, the biggest, the fastest, the newest and the shiniest things of any nation, Americans passivity deserves some scrutiny. We are caught between essentially four different political factions all of them some degree of bad.

They are:

• The Democratic party -- timid to the point where mere cowardice looks like Spartan heroism in comparison.
• The Republican party -- enthralled to a meme they are no longer capable of even evaluating. They have placed themselves beyond considerations of evidence, beyond reason. They have one agenda--the destruction of the Democratic party. If that means burning the country to the ground in order to achieve their Ayn Rand dreams, so be it.
• The Tea Party -- the zombie spawn of pure Ayn Rand economic libertarianism mixed in with a generous measure of Christian theocracy.
• The Green Party -- They have a political program, of a sort, but it is not a program that has anything to do with this nation or this species. Instead of social democracy, they pursue socialism even though there should be no doubt that socialism qua socialism does not turn out well.

Only one of those parties, the Democratic party, has enough actual grown ups to be allowed to rule. The GOP, the Tea Party and the Greens are in no position to rule. The last one because their ideas simply are not workable in any nation that can still call itself free. The next to last because, well, they simply do not believe in governance. That’s right, the Tea Party while talking about ‘local control’ has no interest in governance. They view government as a very limited exercise in, essentially, protecting the propertied and moneyed classes from the democratic impulse. If they would just be old-style aristocratic Tories that would at least have the virtue of honesty. The GOP cannot be allowed to rule as long as they are in sway to the Tea Party’s memes and the Democratic party can be trusted to rule, just so long as no one expects them to stand up for what they believe in.

So why no revolution? Some of the reason is that the Right has no need of one as they are on the side of the oligarchs and the plutocrats while masquerading, quite well thank-you-very-much, as populists. That isn’t really the interesting question, though. The really interesting question is why the Left hasn’t stepped forward. Here there is a quartet of problems, all of them due to very pernicious memes. The problem for the Left, is that we have no program other than a vague Marxism that no one wants to follow. To add insult to political injury we also lack do not believe anything. I understand that we think we do but, in reality, we don’t. I say this because of the corrosive effect strong cultural and epistemological relativism has had on the Left. If the Left believes anything at all (and it is questionable if they do) it is that all cultures are equally valid, all descriptions of the world are equally valid, and that the United States is the single biggest bad actor ever to have its moment upon the world stage. The Left has spent most of the last two decades in thrall to the meme of identity politics which makes effective political action (as opposed to political theatre) well nigh impossible. Lastly, American culture as whole is in the grips of the ‘self-help’ meme of ‘The Secret’ which is just a warmed over, slightly more multicultural

The Marxist problem is two-fold. Firstly, the Marxist project failed and failed in a definitive manner. This means that the Left that advocates a Marxist program is pushing forward a program that almost every nation that actually experienced Communist rule abandoned as the curtain rang down on the twentieth century. Secondly, the insistence that we need a Marxist solution to the problems in the USA makes the Left look pathetically out-of-touch. It could be no more deserving of pity if it were a Japanese soldier who came off some island in the Pacific only to discover that his nation lost the war sixty five years before. What’s more, it causes those of us on the Left to have to distance ourselves from the Old Left which not only failed to put sufficient daylight between itself and the Stalinist regime in the USSR or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or Mao in China, and it makes all claims of that, for instance, health care is a human right (an argument that I think has some meat on its bones) empty. No movement prepared to make excuses for Pol Pot, Stalin or Mao (not to mention Hugo Chavez) is in any kind of position to make any claims about human rights that won’t risk the audience collapsing in peals of laughter. It is bad comedy almost to the point of giving offense so monstrous were the crimes of the three major Marxist regimes.

Not that we need worry overly much about the modern American Left making any claims about human rights as human rights. Not because the Left doesn’t use the phrase, it is used in abundance. It is that the Left no longer believes human rights exist! Human rights is just a buzzword, a meaningless and empty phrase with no more weight than hydrogen holding it to the ground. Human rights implies that these apply in all places and in all times to all people under most any circumstances. The Left has abandoned this language as a project and it is now a mere rhetorical vehicle. Rights, as the Left now construes them in both the high-theoretical and popular senses, adhere to groups. As a black lesbian I have rights that adhere to me as a woman, as a member of a racial minority and as a member of sexual minority. I do not have rights that adhere to me simply because I am a human being that navigated the dark passages of my mother’s birth canal. Those don’t exist. The reason they have become rhetorical devices and not limits upon governmental, ecclesiastical and commercial power which cannot be violated is that the former does not compel the Left to condemn or even notice the crimes of, say, a Hugo Chavez. The latter is not a negotiable position--the crime of female genital mutilation is wrong whether it happens in suburban Detroit or in the heart of Riyadh. But that is a terribly inconvenient position to take. It might require us to learn something about a culture and then make a judgment upon that culture. This we must never do because to do so is to embrace racism and advocate imperialism. So we abandon human rights and talk about group rights instead. We have elevated cultures to a place where they now stand above any given individual who might be subject to that culture.

This is a problematic stance, to say the least. While it would superficially appear to put the Left on the side of the angels these are more like angels as portrayed by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Kevin Smith’s beautiful (if vulgar) sermon Dogma. These are not gentle angels. They are violent and callous angels, concerned primarily for their own well-being. It is also a rather humorous instance where the faction that speaks of privilege to the point of numbness shows its own privilege. If you can pick up and leave the culture of, say, the American South then it may seem that cultures are not that oppressive. Viewed through the eyes of someone who, in her lifetime, may never travel any further distance from her home at once than I do in a single week of commuting to and from work, the tyranny of culture can look like a prison so inescapable that it might as well be in orbit.

Back to GoogleWorld

For most of the last three years, I’ve been using .Mac/MobileMe as the nexus of my online life. Now that MobileMe is going away in favor of iCloud I’m moving back to the Google-verse. That said, I’m pretty impressed with Google Reader. I think the thing that really did it for me was Google+ which is Facebook without being, well, Facebook.

The Pakistan killings are not about blasphemy

The difference between Islamism and the rest is that liberals are happy to denounce white extremists, while covering up militant Islam with the wet blanket of political correctness. They do not confine themselves to saying that, of course, society must protect people from being murdered for their religion, as Slobodan Milosevic murdered the Bosnian Muslims, and punish employers who refuse jobs to members of creeds they dislike, as Protestant employers in Northern Ireland once refused to hire Catholics. They maintain it is illicit to criticise religious ideas. Thus, along with the admittedly faint fear of violence, western writers who want to provide arguments against religious misogyny, homophobia, racism and censorship must also live with the fear that their contemporaries will accuse them of orientalism or Islamophobia.
The world may pay a price for the monumental blunder of treating religious ideologies – which are beliefs that men and women ought to be free to accept or reject – as if they were ethnicities, which no man or woman can change. Not the smallest reason why the Arab revolution is such an optimistic event is that al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood have been left as gawping bystanders. Their isolation cannot last. Eventually, if Arab states move towards democracy, there will be a confrontation with political Islam. Arab liberals, like Pakistani liberals, will search the net for guidance. They will discover that far from offering strategies that might help, timorous western liberals have convinced themselves that it is "racist" to criticise raging fanatics who no longer even bother to pretend that they are anything other than liberalism's mortal enemies.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/06/nick-cohen-blasphemy-laws-liberals-islam

Yes, we very well may pay that price sooner rather than later in the United States

Incoherent thinking and political impotency

My vote for the most condescending sentence in the English language would be “that’s true for you”. One can almost feel the pat on the head when someone says it. It’s a way of saying “well, I think what you’re saying is bloody silly but if you want to believe in such foolishness, more power to you”. Since we’ve decided--particularly on the American Left--that the key to civility is simply never to disagree with someone, we’ve adopted this stance that anything anyone believes to be true actually is true--for them. This is a deeply incoherent position. To see why one need look no further than the “Birther” conspiracy theory.

There are people who believe, with all sincerity, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Now, if we grant that this is 'true for them' then, for them, a person is in the White House who is NOT the legitimate POTUS. Not simply 'not the person I voted for' but someone whose very presence does violence to the Constitution of the United States. If it is 'true for them' the national priority should be to remove that person from office, by any means available up to and including a coup d'etat. However, Barack Obama wasn't born in Kenya he was born in the United States. It is simply incoherent to say "oh, you believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore not the legitimate POTUS? Well, I guess that is true for you." If it is *actually* true, then we should treat Mr. Obama's Presidency the way we would if, at the height of the Cold War, Nikita Kruschev had declared himself the POTUS. Do you believe that it is possible for Barack Obama to have been born in more than one place? In other words, do you think it is possible that he was born in Hawaii AND in Kenya? If not, then how can it possibly be 'true' for someone to believe that he was? If he was born in Hawaii (and he was) then he can't have been born in Kenya. What would it even mean for it to 'be true' for someone that he was born some thousands of miles from his actual birthplace? As ridiculous as the 'Birther' conspiracy is, we cannot and should not dismiss it lightly. Almost a third of one of the two major parties believe something that is false--I'm sorry, I cannot dignify obviously false beliefs as being 'true for someone'.

This refusal to dignify false beliefs as being ‘true for someone’ puts me at odds on the Left. Many, perhaps even most, of my fellow liberals have completely swallowed a meme that there are different truths for different people. What is so deeply hypocritical about this is that they are entirely inconsistent about it. If a person is a political conservative--of almost any stripe, social or fiscal--then that’s person’s reality is not ‘true for them’. Global warming deniers don’t have a ‘truth’. Anti-gay activists don’t have a ‘truth’. Racists don’t get a ‘truth’. Those who harbor anti-Muslim sentiments don’t get a ‘truth’. Hell, those who believe that there are such a thing as standards (it used to be universal standards now it is standards period) don’t get a ‘truth’. Yet, many Liberals behave as if they behaved--if not believed--as if these boogeymen of the Left did get their own truth. The problem is that our inability to actually take a stand on the Left has made us completely ineffective.

Imagine two teams meeting on a soccer field. One team has a lean and hungry look. They want to win. The other team isn’t really into it. The minute that they realize they’re going to have to run up and down the field, half decide that’s too much work to be fun and head for the sideline. Would you place a bet against the lean and hungry players? This is where American Liberals find themselves. We, as a group, just don’t believe we’re right. We may know, at some abstract level, that the science is clear that anthropogenic climate change is happening. Not about to happen but is happening now. Yet, I think that if you were to ask a random conservative climate-change denier and a random Liberal that you would find that the conservative knows that climate-change isn’t happening and is willing to go to the mat over her beliefs while the liberal will be more likely to hem and haw.

If you only half-ass believe what you’re spouting you will lose to the person who believes with their whole and complete being. It is as certain as the tides or the changing of seasons. Yet this is where we are on the Left.

When Left met Right at the UnSchool

I’m a Liberal. I’m a social democrat. Hell, I will go so far as to call myself a creature of the Left. This means I care about what people on the Left are saying and pushing forward because I also believe in grassroots movements. Memes move both vertically and horizontally and so it’s interesting to keep something of an eye on what elites are telling one another and what grassroots people are telling one another. Here is something that is being told on the Left about education:




The first thing to note is that instead of a critique of why we have a society where young women are being encouraged toward self-loathing the schools are to blame. If it were not for the schools, it seems, we wouldn’t see young women with body issues. There is no consideration of a need to reform the culture of schools, simply removing students from the public school system will be enough.



Several things leap to mind here. Firstly, there is a studied ignoring of the fact that mathematics, the hard sciences and engineering take a lot of specialized training as do medicine and law. If one is going to be an artist or a naturopath or a musician then yes, one can ignore higher education and the rigors of it. However, if one wants to be a neurosurgeon or study, say, quantum field theory one is going to need to have some practice in rigorous study, some of which one might not have the greatest enthusiasm for to put it mildly. What’s more, there is this unspoken--but present nevertheless--Rousseauian assumption about the nature of the child that, I think bears deeper scrutiny. I think that the crux of the above quote, however, is the last sentence. Why learn something that you do not need to do what you want to do. Not what need be done in order to be a good citizen or prepare for a job but what one wants to do. That is the most Rousseauian statement and the wellspring from which the philosophy springs.

As Stephen Pinker observes in “The Blank State”, Rousseau argued that “Children are noble savages, and their upbringing and education can either allow their essential nature to blossom or can saddle them with the corrupt baggage of civilization.” A large swath of the argument in favor of Un-schooling is predicated on this belief.



Something else that seems to be overlooked is the function of the public school system as a means of civic bonding and the creation of citizens. At some point the Left--and my parochial concern here is with what is being promoted in the name of core liberal values--seems to have abandoned the idea that we are citizens. In doing so we have lost the ability to speak to people who may not have our privileged perspective on things. Noble as the sentiment is that we are people of the world--and I consider myself aspiring to be a woman of the world--we are also citizens of localities. On the Left we like to say “think globally, act locally”--acting locally means being a citizen. As citizens of the United States of America, we are inheritors of a history, a tradition and an ideal. In fact, it is the loss of the goal of attaining that ideal that concerns me here. One of the geniuses of the public school system is that it is a place where young Americans come together to learn to be, well, Americans. Our first exposure to the Constitution is in public schools. Most of our education in civics that we will ever have and large swaths of American history will come from our experiences in the public schools. If we are ever going to be exposed to the great books, the place that most people will meet Shakespeare or Melville or Austen or any of a number of authors will be in public schools.

It is ironic that at the outer reaches of the Left and the Right, they meet a point of agreement. Now, they end up sounding as if they are saying different things but if you really listen closely you hear them singing in harmony. Someone from the Left might look at my saying that people should be exposed to Shakespeare, Austen and Melville and point out that all three of them are white. Where are the ‘third world’ authors, they will cry. Someone from the right might look at that same list and consider it elitist that I think that there are books or authors that people should be exposed to. However, both are substantially agreeing with one another--that the idea of a canon of books or authors that should be taught in school is fundamentally elitist and wrong is something they both espouse. The issue is where the emphasis lies not with whether it should be done.

My concern, however, is for the Left because that is where I live and where my political sympathies lie. We have abandoned the language of freedom and citizenship to the Right. We no longer speak of it and because of that we make ourselves irrelevant. We have abandoned the commitment to integration because we now believe--or say we do--that people of color are such different creatures that the idea that they could or even desire to assimilate is wrong-headed. We have abandoned the public schools as the great leveler of society.

Evening commute

I really need to remember that my commute is made considerably easier if I simply lock my bike up when I hang it on a peg. That way I have a wider range of choices as to seating.

Morning musings 9 Dec

Our iPhones were delivered yesterday. I'm very pleased with it! Picked up a bike computer app and am using it to see how much exercise I'm getting.

Right now I'm listening to The Third Reich in Power. Certain parallels between then and now present themselves.

Tonight I have QRC advisory board.

Test post

See if posting works now

Stupid Email Scams

So here’s the latest Malware scam:

ADOBE PDF READER SOFTWARE UPGRADE NOTIFICATION

This is to remind that a new version of Adobe Acrobat Reader with enhanced features for viewing, creating, editing, printing and internet-sharing PDF documents has been released.

To upgrade your application:

+ Go to http://www.adobe-2011-download.com
+ Get your options, download and upgrade.

Thanks and best regards,
John Watt
Adobe Acrobat Reader Support

Copy rights Adobe 2010 © All rights reserved

Don’t follow the link! Adobe products are available from www.adobe.com and will, generally, tell you when they need updating.

When the going gets weird, the weird get bizarre

A Christian minister in Minnesota said on his radio program that the nation's first Muslim member of Congress was soliciting the support of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community to implement Sharia law. Follow his logic with us, wouldn't you?

Bradlee Dean of the religious ministry You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International said on his radio program that Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) is only supporting LGBT rights as part of a strategy to bring Sharia law to the United States, the Minnesota Independent reported.

"I said time and time again that there is a correlation between the Muslims and the homosexual agenda, and we have a couple of fools in the state of Minnesota that are putting a rope around their neck and they just don't realize it," Dean said on a radio. "Here, let me give it to you this way: Keith Ellison is a Muslim."

Dear reasoned that Ellison's support of protections for the LGBT community (like the Matthew Shepard Act) and for same-sex marriage is part of a plot to overthrow the Constitution and put Sharia law in its place.

"Why is he so adamant about overthrowing the Constitution as it is right now? Because if you pay attention to the plow he's planting the seed," Dean said. "He's trying to come through with Sharee [sic] law."

Because, ya know, every Muslim-Majority nation is a paradise on Earth for queer people.

Whole article in all its strangeness here.

Congrats Democratic party, you screwed yourselves!

the Democrats did this to themselves! Both the elected Dems and every Democratic voter who didn't vote. In the former case, imagine how different this election would have turned out if the following were true:

1) Gitmo went back to being a Marine base and not a detention center.

2) Medicare-for-all had passed

3) Glass-Steagal had been resurrected and Wall Street once again had rules-of-the-road.

4) Warrantless wiretaps had been discontinued.

5) There had been a REAL jobs-program WPA-style.

Would the Republicans have still picked up seats? Probably. But they would have been facing a Democratic electorate that felt that too much had been achieved to let it be rolled back. What's more, the Tea Party/Republicans would have done PRECISELY what they did anyway. If Obama had actually staked out some position so far to the Right that he made Joe Miller or Sarah Palin look like full-on Marxists, the Tea Party/Republicans would have STILL called him a Marxist, they'd STILL call him a socialist, they'd STILL say he wasn't born in the United States and they'd STILL say he was in league with terrorists. There is NOTHING that man could do that would please the Tea Party. The same applies generally to the Democratic party. If the Dems eliminated every single social program, repealed the Voting rights act, passed a law making Islam illegal, repealed the Civil Rights Act and did away with the income tax (or just put it all on the backs of the poor), the estate tax and the capital gains tax, the Republicans would still insist that Democrats were un-American, tax-and-spend liberals who hate America and want the terrorists to win. If the Democrats voted to bomb every square inch of land in an arc from Istanbul to Jakarta the Republicans would still say that the Democrats were 'soft' and 'unwilling to fight'.

So what, precisely, did all of these misguided attempts at bipartisanship get them? Nothing. What did all these compromises get them? It got them beat like a red-headed stepchild that stole something, that's what.

When I was in grade school, I got bullied mercilessly. I got bullied for being black. I got bullied for being gender non-conforming. I got bullied for being a geek. I got bullied because the sun shone light upon my face. I learned, really early on, that you cannot show weakness to bullies. You cannot let bullies know you *care* what they say about you. IF you do, you hand them encouragement and ammunition. The Dems, in deciding that they would care what a party that made it clear that their ONLY real agenda was the defeat of the Democratic party--and if the country has to burn or that to happen, so be it--thought they doomed themselves.

Now, was any of that an excuse to stay home? No. It wasn't. Anyone who thinks that there is no substantive difference between the agenda of the Democratic party and the agenda of the Republican party isn't paying attention to either party platform. The Republican party appears to believe that even if you are raped by your own father, you should be forced to have the baby. The Democratic party doesn't. The Republican party appears to believe that America should be *actively* hostile to homosexuals. The Democratic party does not. The Republican party appears to mean that 'freedom of religion means the freedom to practice whatever brand of Christianity suits your fancy'. The Democratic party believes freedom of religion means just that--the religion of your choice or no religion at all. The Republican party believes that if you just cut taxes enough, you'll increase tax revenues. The Democratic party seems to have some nominal grasp on mathematics.

To paraphrase the Bard; the fault, dear Democrats, is not in the stars but in ourselves.

My ultimate jacket

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted a WW II bomber jacket. Well, yesterday I got one!

Can’t Keep a Bad Idea Down - NYTimes.com

I don’t often agree with Thomas Friedman but here is one where he’s clearly gotten things right.

A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers. (Thomas Friedman)



Can’t Keep a Bad Idea Down - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/opinion/27friedman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

The fault is in ourselves

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

(William Shakespeare -- Julius Caesar)

                When I came out in the late 80’s/early 90’s and first encountered where Left-thought was headed due to the influence of post-modernism I was concerned but felt, at the time, that I lacked the intellectual chops to rail against it intelligently. Here I was, a high school graduate and former soldier, just starting my academic career and I was being taught by people who had imbibed fully the teachings of Foucalt and Baudrillard. I was trying to wade through post-modernist thinkers, struck by how truly awful much of their writing was and that which I could understand seemed to have very little to do with life on this planet with our species even though it was nominally a critique of how we build and enforce culture. So I picked up my keyboard and moved over to the world of the hard sciences where, at least, there was still an acknowledgement that such a thing as ‘facts’ existed in the world and one could be on some kind of firmer intellectual ground. That was two decades ago. My eyes have drank in countless words since then and they have percolated in my brain all this time. I have learned the art of intellectual discipline and no longer see myself as a hopeless rube with a mind that is still ‘colonized’ by the ‘hegemonic’. We on the Left screwed up. We blew it and we do so spectacularly. While I’m not going to let the Right-wing off the hook--this mess is as much theirs as it is ours--they are not my primary concern except that as a Liberal I need to ready and able to counter-balance Conservatives. As Liberals or Progressives or what-have-you, we have not been at all effective at doing so.

        We made two errors and they are entwined together. One is more philosophical although it has had a negative impact on our strategy and one is more strategic although its underpinnings are certainly philosophical. The former is epistemic relativism and the latter is identity politics. Before this post is finished I hope to demonstrate that these two memes form a double-helix which has served to direct the development of Left-leaning thought to its detriment. Epistemic relativism has given the Left moral blinders and caused us to turn away from most of what is noblest about Liberalism. What’s more, it has created a trap that Conservatives--who went to the same schools as Liberals until recently--have exploited; to wit, the idea that if you believe something to be true then it is True and so any reality that anyone believes must be ‘respected’. Identity politics has turned us into ideologically-driven blowfish, ready to puff up at a moment’s notice over even the most trivial of slights or slips. One result of this is that we are ready to call racism on a hair-trigger which has allowed racists to become immune to the accusation and, as the 2010 Republican primary showed, a badge of honor. Another is that in making being a woman, or a queer, or a person of color a matter of essence we have managed to meet racism and sexism coming the other way! Things in America specifically and the West generally have gotten serious. Deadly serious. More than at any time in the last half-century, America needs a strong and intellectually powerful Left to counter the forces of plutocracy, fascism and theocracy that are converging on the body politic. Political and intellectual movements cannot, by necessity, turn on a dime but if we are to be effective in countering what appears to be coming down the track we must try to change the memes we use--first in speaking to one another and, more importantly, speaking to the general public.

        I’ll take identity politics first. It is the more pernicious and the more ambiguous of the cases. I say that because while epistemic relativism has very little to recommend it, identity politics does make some sense. Identity actually matters. It would be entirely foolish of me to suggest that my experience of America, as a black, butch lesbian, is identical to the experience of my buddy, Ogre, who is a big bear of a straight, white man. The problem with identity politics was put very trenchantly by Nick Cohen in his book “What’s Left” when he wrote;

        To generalize, the idea that a homosexual black woman should have the same rights as a heterosexual white man was replaced by a relativism which took the original and hopeful challenge of the early feminist, gay and anti-racist movements and flipped it over. Homosexuality, blackness and womanhood became separate cultures that couldn’t be criticized or understood by outsiders applying universal criteria. Nor, by extension, could any other culture even if it was the culture of fascism, religious tyranny, wife burning or suicide bombing.

        Later, Cohen states that the Left--in breaking with our Enlightenment ancestors--adopted the position of the Ancien Regime which was that ‘ men and women have the ability to transcend their circumstances and culture.’ Think about that for a moment. The position of conservatism, certainly in America, is that women are women and, as such, are constrained by gender from being proficient at certain kinds of tasks; blacks are blacks and, as such, have certain kinds of talents (sports, entertainment) while lacking certain other kinds of talents (logic, rationality, mathematics). While conservatism must give a nod to the idea of individualism, it views those of us who are black or women who defy the stereotype as the exception that proves the general rule. To the degree that conservatism concerns itself overly much with issues of equality, its concern is for the exceptions and not for the general population that fall under the same stereotype. It was once the case that part of what separated liberals from conservatives was that liberals had a belief that bordered on religious that one’s gender, race, or other circumstances of background did not define what one’s capacities were and that if society leveled the playing field, the talents of those considered inferior would be loosed to the benefit of all. No longer. Now I am supposed to bring certain talents and skills to the table as a black woman but they are constrained by those two adjectives. We might, for good measure, add that my being a butch lesbian brings two more sets of expectations but those four adjectives pretty much define the axis around which my talents and skills can be located. So when people find out that I’m a physical science (biomedical informatics) major they are genuinely surprised. When they find out that my worldview is entirely naturalistic they are shocked. My commitment to rationality and reason upset the apple cart of their expectations of what a black woman ‘should’ be. Keep in mind I am talking about liberals and other people ostensibly of the Left.

        If conservatives were less likely to be ruthlessly and gleefully Machiavellian in their approach to politics, then perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad. However, American conservatives have taken ruthless politics to whole (and wholly terrifying) new levels. At the very moment where the Left needs to be able to stand tall and say that “this will not happen, not on our watch” we have lost the language of moral outrage and lost the courage of our convictions. We can stand up and call Bush a Nazi, but we don’t really mean it because Bush wasn’t really a Nazi. We can say chant “2, 4, 6, 8, we say no to racist hate!” but we should not mistake this for actually standing up against racism. We can write, read and discuss articles about ‘unpacking the knapsack’ until the cows come home, but this does not actually move us back to the idea that each of us are individuals who should be judged upon our actions and not simply representative members of some sociologically significant group or another.

        I have talked to many a liberal or progressive who, when asked about how this kinder, gentler, softer, ‘everyone’s reality is true if they believe it’ stance works when confronted with a Fred Phelps stammer and then quickly change the subject. Why? Because they know, deep in their heart-of-hearts, that if the only thing that we can stand on is that we don’t like what Phelps says or represents instead of what he says being actually wrong then, the tender mercies of their hearts notwithstanding, there is no good reason for someone on the sidelines to pick a pro-gay rights stance over an anti-gay stance.

        One cannot effectively fight a ruthless opponent if one does not believe--with a surety--that one’s cause is a righteous one. I think that we have theorized ourselves into a place where we believe our cause is the one we should prefer, but not that it is actually a righteous cause.

        

A bit more about voting and bigotry

TPM (Talking points Memo) has obtained emailsthat were sent to a voter registration group in Texas. These emails lay bare how racially significant the voter intimidation tactics launched across the country are. This got me to thinking about voter apathy, staying home from the polls and why doing so plays into hands of the corporate plutocrats (in both parties), the GOP and the Tea Party. Before I explain, a little bit of history about why I think the vote is so important and why we, as citizens, should exercise the franchise.

My parents were born in 1922. On paper, both of my parents had the right to vote but, in reality, they had no such right that any official in their home states of Alabama and Louisiana were bound to respect. During WW II, my father served in the US Army, serving with distinction in Patton’s Third Army with the storied 761st Tank Battalion while my mother worked for Boeing building airplanes as a riveter. When the war ended, my father returned to the States and my mother returned to the Deep South. They would try to vote and each time be turned away either by a poll tax or a literacy test. In one quasi-humorous incident, some officials in Tuscaloosa, AL tried to administer a literacy test to my father. Of course, starting with something in English--not a problem at all. Then they handed him something in French--which he read, wrote and spoke fluently. Then they handed him something in German which he’d picked up just enough to muddle through. Finally, they got him on something written in Japanese which he could not read at all. One wonders if any of the men could read what was written on those pages. At any rate, the practical upshot of this is that a genuine war hero (Purple Heart and Bronze Star) did not cast a vote in the country of his birth until nearly a quarter century after he returned home from the War. A woman who had gone up north to work long days building bombers for her country was not considered citizen enough to exercise her right to vote until a quarter century later. The first national election my parents ever voted in was 1968--the first President they ever voted for was Humphrey. They were both 46 years old, three years older than I am now.

I vote because my parents could not vote for the same number of years that I have been voting. I vote because my grandparents could not vote. As a black woman I believe I owe it to the memory of my parents and grandparents to exercise the right they were, quite literally, willing to be (and were) beaten up over, threatened over, had a cross burnt on their lawn because of their civil rights activities and were eventually driven from the South because they refused to buy into the idea that they were neither human beings or citizens.

I understand the sentiment that “voting just encourages them” and, perhaps, in other times and in other nations that sentiment might be justified. However in this time and in this nation, given our history--and history that, remember, is not all that far removed from now--apathy is a luxury that we cannot afford. Regardless of our race, we cannot afford apathy but for black and brown people to indulge in apathy is to walk onto the freeway in the middle of the night, wearing black from head to toe and standing in the path of an oncoming truck. It might make you feel brave and empowered, right up to the point that tens of thousands of pounds slams into you at 60MPH. As I said in my earlier post, the GOP and the Tea Party want non-whites and queers to stay home from the ballot box. The dominant Washington narrative is that we will because we do not see any stake in this election for us. But we have a stake. If you are queer, your ability to marry, to keep your job if you are in the military (or a teacher in many states) are on the line. If you are black or brown, your stakes are too many to list but as a start look at who is fighting our wars--largely the enlisted people are black and brown and overwhelmingly poor.

Lastly, I hate to see bullies win and the Tea Party is chock full of bullies who celebrate ignorance. If you listen to the Beltway punditocracy, the Tea Party is “speaking for the American people” but are they? Are they speaking for you? Do you think that Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Carl Paladino, Joe Miller, Sarah Palin, Ken Buck, Marco Rubio or any other candidate with Tea Party blessing is speaking about YOUR concerns? They aren’t and you know they aren’t. They can win but only if we let them do so by staying away from the ballot box.

A Citizen's Plea

This blog post is going to go against the “Latinos for Reform” add and ask people TO vote. If you are black or Latina or queer--or if you know someone who is--please VOTE! The reason I ask--no, I beg--you to do so is quite simple: the Beltway media wants you to stay home. The GOP wants you to stay home. Why else would there already be voter suppression efforts underway in Texas and Illinois? Why would Latinos for Reform, run by a long-time GOP hack, put out an ad urging Latinos not to vote? (I’ll get to why queers should vote this time around in a bit.)

Look at the what has happened in just the last few months: In Virginia, a county GOP chair sent a racist emailshowing how is dog could get on welfare trading on every racist stereotype of blacks. In Illinois, operating under the cover of ‘voter integrity’ squads, GOP candidate Mark Kirk is sending lawyers into ‘vulnerable’ (read predominantly black or Hispanic) neighborhoods on Election Day to “insure the integrity of the vote”. In Nevada, Sharon Angle aired an ad showing three angry-faced Latinos sneaking through a hole in a fence. When challenged by some Latino students at a high school, she responded that they “looked Asian to her”. In Texas, the DOJ is investigating another organization for vote suppression. On Rachel Meadows’ show of 19 October, she detailed what is going on with race and how statements that should have ended people’s political careers now are not.

Now, what do all of these things have in common? The racism that has been deployed to fantastic electoral success by the GOP for forty years is once again on full display. What’s more, they’re not even trying to be subtle about it any longer. The things is, the GOP and the Beltway media think that people of color--particularly blacks and Hispanics--are stupid. They think that we can’t see racism when it’s clearly present. However, at the same time, they know something about black and brown people at the polls--more than any other group except rich whites--it is exceedingly difficult to trick us into voting against our own self-interest. While the GOP’s strategy of loving Jesus more than the next guy has worked wonders with whites across the economic spectrum, it has been far less effective with blacks and with Hispanics. The GOP and the Beltway punditocracy expect Latinos to stay away from the ballot this term--what’s more they want you to because that reinforces the dominant narrative that the Democrats have blown it irredeemably. These same people expect blacks to stay away from the polls because we just aren’t interested unless there is a high profile of one of ‘us’ running. I exhort you, I plead with you, I beg you, to upset their narrative. Go out and vote. Take someone with you. Asks your family and friends to vote and ask them to make sure that someone goes with them as well. Depending upon where you are, there may be people who try to intimidate you away from voting--don’t let them! The cops are not going to be arresting people who are going into or out of the polling place. If you have an overdue parking ticket, you won’t be hauled away by the police. The most radically right-wing group of candidates are running for office, the media has already counted the votes and decided that the Democrats deserve to lose and will do so horribly. We black and brown people can swing this election and upset the dominant cultural narrative--but we have to get out there and VOTE!

Now, on to my queer brothers and sisters. Has Obama followed through on his promises? NO! Am I disappointed and angry? YES! However, we know--because they’ve told us--what the Tea Partiers would do if they had their way. Three state GOP platforms (Texas, Maine and Montana) have as planks making homosexuality illegal. Needless to say, gay marriage would be still born and DADT, on its last legs, will be revived with a Republican/Tea Party controlled Congress. I know all the arguments in favor of not voting but our nation cannot afford us sitting this out. I am not given to wild hyperbole nor am I given to indulging conspiracy theories. I’m not one who pulls out ‘fascist’ whenever I see someone with whom I disagree with. However, this movement of hyper conservatives is deeply scary and if we sit this out, they will have themselves a Congress. If they get themselves a Congress they can get themselves a Presidency in 2012.

If that happens, the corporate donors behind the Tea Party will get what they want--more outsourcing and that will lead to more economic distress. How long do you think it takes before the GOP/Tea Party decides that there are three pillars to the problems of America--Latinos, Muslims and Queers and decide to pass laws to do something about it? You’re already seeing this happen to two of those three groups. As queers, can we really afford to presume that we aren’t next in line?

Please, for whatever it is that you love, VOTE!

Christine O'Donnell loves the Constitution so much...

...that she has no idea what’s actually in the document. It’s like ‘love at first sight’ on steroids. It’s ‘love without sight at all’. Last night in her debate with Chris Coons who is running against her for Senate, the subject of the First Amendment came up. Ms. O’Donnell apparently loves the Constitution and wants to preserve it so much that she doesn’t even feel the need to know what’s in it! It seems that she was unaware that the words “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...” wasn’t actually in the Constitution or, perhaps, was in some liberal bastardization of the document. Anyway, the video is just TOO perfect.

The good part starts at about 2:37 but the whole thing is worth watching for the train wreck.

Seven is larger than Zero

I was saddened and frustrated with your comments regarding people of faith and their perpetuation of bullying. As someone who loves the Lord and does not support gay marriage, I can honestly say I was heartbroken to hear about the young man who took his own life.
If your message is that we should not judge people based on their sexual preference, how do you justify judging entire groups of people for any other reason (including their faith)? There is no part of me that took any pleasure in what happened to that young man, and I know for a fact that is true of many other people who disagree with your viewpoint.

October 13, 2010 : Savage Love | The A.V. Club
http://www.avclub.com/articles/october-13-2010,46294/?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=feeds&utm_source=type_savage-love

The above quote was posted on the Savage Love blog. My partner brought this to my attention and I immediately asked “to your knowledge, how many Christians have committed suicide in the last, say, 30 days because some queer person said something harsh about Christians?” Her response was, “None that I can recall.” In the last month, however, seven queer young people have killed themselves because they were queer. They killed themselves because they live in a society where people think it is perfectly acceptable to put homosexuals in the same category as rapists, murderers, pedophiles or practitioners of bestiality. They killed themselves because either their churches or churches in their communities teach that homosexuals are less-than, less-worthy, that our relationships are not real relationships and that our love is not actually love. They killed themselves because they grew up in a society where the dominant religion teaches that God hates them. Seven to zero. Now, I’ll admit that I have not gotten better than a “B” in math since I was in elementary school but I’m reasonably certain that seven is larger than zero. Seven queer suicides because of the teachings of Christianity and the actions of Christians and zero Christian suicides because of the actions of queers.

Now, I understand that as a West Coast liberal, I’m supposed to be ‘nice’ about this. I’m supposed to either dance around the issue and pretend that it isn’t the teachings that these poor, dead kids heard in the church pew that contributed to their deaths or I’m supposed to chalk it up to an unnamed and ill-defined ‘worldview’. But I’m not going to do that. Of course, it should (but won’t) go without saying that I’m not submitting the butcher’s bill to every Christian on the planet. I’m not saying that all Christians hate gays and I’m certain that a lot of Christians believe that homosexuality is morally wrong but still have queer friends. I know that because I have friends who are Christians and who believe homosexuality is wrong.

However, it would be dishonest to pretend that religion had nothing to do with this or to pretend that I have no idea what these kids went through. I’m generally loath to talk about my deep personal experiences on this blog because I think that my thoughts on matters are more interesting to others than my emotional states. However, this situation demands an exception and for me to step out of my comfort zone.

Three times between the ages of 15 and 22, I walked right up to the door of suicide, knocked and for different reasons each time, turned back at the last minute. The first time, I was 15, and was on a medicine that contained belladonna to settle my stomach because I had stressed myself out so much that my stomach was overproducing acid--at fifteen. I did some research, found out what belladonna was, realized that the remaining fifteen pills would probably be enough to do me in, and so I laid my pills out in a row on my chest-of-drawers that also served as my nightstand with a glass of water, turned out the lights and, because I was fascinated by the code of bushido at the time, prepared myself to die. I fell asleep. It was the first time I could remember falling immediately asleep in years (normally it took me between one and three hours every night to fall asleep). The second time, I had just gotten divorced, at this point I was really wrestling with my sexuality. I went up on the roof of the office I worked at, got on the ledge, and then was staring down at this beautiful blue Mustang which was what I was going to impact when I jumped. One of the security guards passed underneath my shadow, he called his opposite number inside, who called the cops who came and took me to the hospital which let me go home. The last time it was near the end of the year, the first one since the divorce and the last one I had in the closet. I was alone in my apartment and I sat down in front of the oven with my Zippo lighter in one hand, the phone cradled against my shoulder and my other hand on the knob of the stove talking with this wonderful young man named Peter at suicide prevention. He asked me if I could think of a single reason NOT to turn the knob and blow myself to kingdom come. The only thing I could come up with was that Christmas had just happened and my little 8 unit apartment building was old and wood-framed. It would’ve gone up like a stack of tissue paper. I told Peter that none of my neighbors had done anything to deserve losing all their stuff and their Christmas presents and being thrown out on the street in the coldest winter in 20 years. Peter told me that if I could see how my actions would affect others even in the midst of pain so great I was willing to die to make it stop, I was a compassionate human being and that the world could use more compassion. That was enough. It caused me to turn around and walk away from death one more time.

I wanted to kill myself because I was queer and because my culture and my church told me that being queer was just about the worst thing one could be. It was a sin before God and a betrayal of the black community (because I wouldn’t be making strong, black babies). I wanted to kill myself because at school I was teased mercilessly for being different--even though I was not out to myself, I was sufficiently gender non-conforming to be targeted for the full treatment. I wanted to die because I thought it was the only way of preventing God from hating me for being queer.

Now, it’s been two decades since that last, long winter’s night but I recall the whys of my mental state with clarity. One does not spend a decade suicidal and not recall why. To say that religion had no part to do with what I endured would be to lie--religion had everything to do with it. I understand that some of you Gentle Readers may find this uncomfortable--so be it--it does not change the facts on the ground in any significant fashion. It was religion that drove me to the brink of suicide and rational thought that brought me to wholeness.

I understand that the really virulently anti-gay people don’t want to be labeled as bigots. I get that. However, the segregationists didn’t think they were bigots either and yet they were bigots.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Asher Brown, Justin Aaberg, Billy Lucas, Cody Barker, Seth Walsh, Raymond Chase, and Aiyisha Hassan. None of them lived to see 25.

Stay rational.

Emotions of mass distraction

When we believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, and of fairly weighing the evidence. There is a great danger to society here, not just in believing the wrong things, but by losing the habit of testing things, and hence to sink back into savagery by becoming a credulous society.
 (John W. Loftus)

I begin with this epigraph because I think that it points directly at the syndrome I’m going to talk about. While normally this blog is more about science and American politics than it is about things that happen in community forums, in this instance there is enough cross-over that I think it deserves its own post. This has to do with an ongoing issue with ButchFemmePlanet.com where I am a moderator. The moderation team banned a user late last week because she had taken financial advantage of a couple of users. What is more, when it was clear that the jig was up for this person she fell back on what she has used time and time again--“I’m dying of cancer!” In fact, to bolster the story she posted a picture of herself hooked up to an IV drip in the hospital. When the picture was removed, she then reported a picture of another person who was using a vampire photo dripping blood as their avatar. She claimed that this was ‘triggering’ to her. When the hammer finally came down, she went on Facebook and began claiming that the moderation team at BFP--and two people in particular--had banned a woman with cancer for no apparent reason implying, in fact, that she was banned because she allegedly has cancer. It is this kind of emotional manipulation and the fact that it is sadly effective that I want to address in this post.

While Samuel Johnson said that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels’, I would submit to you, gentle reader (all three or four of you) that emotional manipulation and emotional hostage taking is a sanctuary for the scoundrel and that it will welcome her into its bosom and hold it close through the harsh nights as the wolves of fact howl outside the doors. It works because it forces any person who would not be clinically diagnosed as a sociopath to stop and question themselves to make sure that they are not being heartless or cruel. It is a fantastic way to get people to flock to one’s side, particularly if there is some clouds and fog swirling around the issue, making it hard to see the large picture. In such a gloom the emotionally manipulative statement is like a lighthouse to mariners except that when they get close to what they believe is safe harbor, they find--usually too late--that it is an illusion cast by sirens who sit upon the rocks waiting for the ship to ground. It is a fantastically effective strategy made even more so by certain dynamics holding sway in online queer spaces where we are encouraged and exhorted to be supportive at any and all costs. Supportive, in this connotation, means being unquestioning and putting one’s critical thinking facilities in neutral or, better yet, tossing them out the window entirely.

If one can invoke some disease--particularly one that can be played out for a while, then one is in the cat-bird seat. Cancer is fantastic for this kind of thing because there are so many different types of cancer, people are justifiably terrified of them and the disease can run so many different courses. For some, they are diagnosed and are dead a year later. For others, they are diagnosed and the cancer goes into remission only to spring back with a vengeance. You can milk sympathy for quite some time with this. Contrast this with, say, Hepatitis C which does not have the emotional cache of cancer. We view cancer has something that happens to people, we think of Hep C as something people bring on themselves. So if one wants to gain sympathy for one’s illness, and one has a disease that does not give one much in the way of emotional mojo, it is awfully tempting to invoke a disease that garners more sympathy.

However, whatever the disease it does not actually excuse behavior. The argument that the banned woman is attempting to make is that she should not have been banned because she has cancer regardless of what her actual behavior may or may not have been. But is that actually the case? Is it true that having a terminal condition excuses people’s behavior? We must answer, with conviction, that the answer is no because every human being alive was born with a terminal condition called life. You will die, I will die, and from the moment of your conception you are on a one-way journey toward the end of your life. Just because some people know that their end will come sooner rather than later does not and should not exempt them from behaving like a decent human being or facing the consequences if they choose not to do so. However, the emotionally manipulative tactic being deployed in this sorry little drama seems to be designed to short-circuit people’s intuitions about this. Somehow, for reasons left unexplained, we are supposed to suspend all critical thinking, all rationality and all the other mental tools we use in order to determine if someone is trying to pull the wool over our eyes the minute someone says that they have this or that terminal disease.

Now, some reading this might try to argue that I’m minimizing having a terminal illness--I’m not. I’m merely arguing that having a terminal illness is not a ‘get out of jail free’ card. The rest of us are not obliged to believe any given statement X that one might make just because one has, say, MS anymore than anyone is obliged to believe what I say just because I have hypertension.

Something I’ve learned in my twenty years online is this; when standing on the sidelines of an argument, attempting to determine which side might be correct, watch the behavior of partisans on each side. The side that can only resort to jerking your emotional chain is almost certainly the party that is in the wrong. One group of partisans has compared this sorry incident to what the Nazi’s did (it isn’t) and a lynching (it isn’t and as the niece of a man who WAS lynched I find that comparison insulting) and the other group of partisans has tried to be restrained in their descriptions and/or rebuttals and hewed as close to the facts as is possible. Putting aside that one of the partisans is (allegedly) terminally ill, which side sounds like it’s just trying to deal with the situation and which side sounds like it is trying to win by jerking people’s emotional chains?

The good news is that all of us have the ability to resist attacks on our common sense from emotions of mass distraction, we need only step back and look at the issues and at the behaviors with a critical eye.

Stay Rational