Busy

Sorry about the scarcity of blog posts lately, but I've been busy picking strawberries, cherries, and gooseberries - and then sitting for hours in the evenings watching YouTube videos as I pick through the fruit and get it ready for the freezer.

As usual, I've got a million things to blog about, and I'm still reading and playing computer games, but... something's got to give.

I did pick the last of the strawberries today. (They're really in a mess, so it's going to take me awhile to cut out the bad spots.) But I'm still picking cherries, and I've got more gooseberries to pick, and now the raspberries are ripening, too. (Luckily, raspberries are no trouble at all to freeze, because I don't have to do anything to them first.)

You know, I shouldn't be so far behind, because I had an extra day this week. I went to get a haircut yesterday, and my barber said that she had the appointment scheduled for Friday. I said, "It's not Friday?"

What can I say? I'm retired. It sure felt like Friday. In fact, for the rest of the day, it still seemed like Friday. It was like I'd gained a day, but I went and had lunch, then picked up a book when I got home and... that was it. I spent the rest of the day reading. So much for my extra day, huh?

OK, I've got to get started on those strawberries. I'm not looking forward to it, but it's got to be done. And they'll definitely be welcome this winter.

Mess O'Potamia

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You know, our problem isn't so much that Republican Party leaders are ignorant, but that so many of the American people are ignorant enough to be taken in by these tactics.

These people were wrong about everything when it came to Iraq (and most everything else, too), but that apparently doesn't make any difference. The media never call them on it, and they've all still got a soapbox (and not just on Fox 'News,' either).

It was George W. Bush who invaded Iraq for no good reason. Yeah, now they claim that it was to 'plant the seeds of democracy,' but that's not what they said at the time. Now, they're simply trying to cover up the lies they did use to get us into Iraq.

And as Jon Stewart points out, it was George W. Bush who signed the agreement to leave Iraq without leaving troops behind. Republican leaders must know that. They're not that stupid.

But hey, if they can pass the blame to Barack Obama, that's not anything that will keep them up at night. Not if they've been able to live with everything else they've done. Whatever works, right?

But it's to our undying shame that this does work with so many Americans. For the most part, it's willful ignorance, too. And far too much apathy, as well.

Eric Cantor's legacy

(Mike Luckovich)

TPM said it best:

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

American politics took a Game of Thrones-worthy plot twist on Tuesday as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary by a 12-point margin to Dave Brat, an underfunded right-wing challenger. ...

From day one — literally, the night of President Obama’s first inauguration — Cantor was leading the charge to not just oppose Obama, but to delegitimize him — denying him the conciliatory, bipartisan policy style he campaigned on, and turning even policy successes into the kind of grueling partisan battles that voters dislike. It was a deeply cynical maneuver, but a successful one. Cantor helped unite the Republican caucus around this scorched-earth strategy, and played a major role in the 2010 campaign that leveraged the grim results of that strategy into a new majority.

In 2011, Cantor became Majority Leader thanks in part to the winning challengers he recruited and funded. In the midst of a still-sputtering economy, he introduced a three-word mantra that would define his now-abruptly-ended time as Majority Leader: “Cut and Grow.” ...

The “Cut and Grow” strategy worked like an anvil works as a life preserver. It dragged down an economy that desperately needed rescue. ...

The 2011 debt-ceiling standoff is the height of Cantorism, a perfect illustration of big angry talk and economically counterproductive results. Republicans began to describe the routine increase in the debt ceiling as a favor to Obama, for which they needed concessions in order to “give” it to him. The debt ceiling is an accounting formality that has catastrophic results if left undone, but in one of the great acts of political spin in the past few years, Cantor called it a “leverage moment” to make President Obama capitulate to the Republican ideological agenda.

The result was a miserable summer of collapsing consumer confidence and slowed job growth. Cantor wouldn’t even stay at the table for the negotiations he forced to happen with his debt-ceiling extortion.

After months of efforts to end the (completely optional) crisis, Congress passed and the President signed the Budget Control Act, which created the pointless “supercommittee” process and eventually led to sequestration, a blunt-instrument package of cuts, including cuts to programs like Head Start and Meals on Wheels. Sequestration was terrible policy - It was yet another drag on an economy - and, even after his strategy made it happen, Cantor still complained about the sequester and blamed Obama for it.

If you want to know Eric Cantor’s legacy, it’s not just about the forces that he encouraged and that backfired on him last night. It’s a political style and an ideology that actively set back the economy, time after time. His cynical advocacy of “Cut and Grow” has had real negative consequences.

He tried to ride the tiger into battle, and the tiger ate him. His loss is richly deserved and poetically just, but it comes too late.

Eric Cantor will be fine — he’ll get a lobbying job, board-of-director seats, “visiting fellow” offers at think tanks, Wall Street Journal op-eds, and of course a full Congressional pension. If only the thousands of people whose unemployment came from his policy choices could be so lucky.

(Mike Peters)

The real origins of the religious right

"They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation."

It might not be clear enough to non-Americans how much the issue of race has affected our country - and still affects us in many, many ways.

Even to white Americans, that might not be evident. We rarely think of race when it comes to ourselves, because white is just... the default. It takes a deliberate act to think of things from someone else's perspective.

I've talked about this before. I keep bringing up the Republican Party's notorious 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists, because that explains so much about how and why the GOP has gone completely off the rails - and how they've gotten the political power to cause disaster after disaster for our country in recent decades.

But there's far more to the story than that. This article, for example, explains about the real origins of the religious right:

One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.

This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. ...

But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.

That whole article, by Randall Balmer at Politico Magazine, is superb, and it backs up this claim with detailed evidence. I'll excerpt some of it here, to give my readers the general idea, but I really can't do it justice. I highly recommend reading the article yourself.

Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. ...

So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.

In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.

The issue was taxes. White Southerners were free to abandon the public school system - and, thus, free to let the public schools crumble through lack of funding and support - but neither the IRS nor the federal court system would give segregated schools tax-exempt status.

Yeah, you could put your kid in an all-white private school, but you couldn't get any tax benefits from that.

Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.

In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes. ...

But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. ...

The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders, especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”

One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.

Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation.

Sound familiar? Republicans are still doing this. They might be fighting against birth control, health care, or the separation of church and state, but they claim it's about "religious freedom" - even when they're attacking the religious freedom of non-Christians.

And note that Bob Jones University had the perfect right to discriminate, it that's what they wanted to do. No one was attempting to close down the school or anything like that. The First Amendment protects even bigots.

No, what they were really angry about was the possible loss of their tax-exempt status. Even more than race, this was about money. But your own financial benefit doesn't make a very persuasive political argument to other people.

Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.

But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale. ...

By 1980, even though Carter had sought, both as governor of Georgia and as president, to reduce the incidence of abortion, his refusal to seek a constitutional amendment outlawing it was viewed by politically conservative evangelicals as an unpardonable sin. Never mind the fact that his Republican opponent that year, Ronald Reagan, had signed into law, as governor of California in 1967, the most liberal abortion bill in the country. When Reagan addressed a rally of 10,000 evangelicals at Reunion Arena in Dallas in August 1980, he excoriated the “unconstitutional regulatory agenda” directed by the IRS “against independent schools,” but he made no mention of abortion. Nevertheless, leaders of the religious right hammered away at the issue, persuading many evangelicals to make support for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion a litmus test for their votes.

Interesting, isn't it? As the article concludes, "Although abortion had emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the real roots of the religious right lie not in the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation."

They do the same thing today. Right-wing activists use people to get what they really want.

Balmer adds an interesting postscript to the story:

The Bob Jones University case merits a postscript. When the school’s appeal finally reached the Supreme Court in 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it planned to argue in defense of Bob Jones University and its racial policies. A public outcry forced the administration to reconsider; Reagan backpedaled by saying that the legislature should determine such matters, not the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in the case, handed down on May 24, 1983, ruled against Bob Jones University in an 8-to-1 decision. Three years later Reagan elevated the sole dissenter, William Rehnquist, to chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Today, five of our nine Supreme Court justices are right-wing political activists (every one a Catholic, interestingly enough). That 8-to-1 decision in 1983? We can only be thankful the same case hasn't come before this court.

That was the power the Republican Party's 'Southern strategy' gave them. It might be waning now, with increasing numbers of minority voters and with younger people being less racist than their elders, but that's just making the right-wing more and more extreme.

They may not have the power to pass legislation, but they certainly have the power to block it - to block everything, pretty much. And they still control the Supreme Court. They can still do a lot of damage to our country even if they don't retake the White House in 2016.

___
Note: My thanks to Jim Harris for the link.

Sye Ten Bruggencate

This is The Refining Reason Debate between Sye Ten Bruggencate, a Christian apologist, and Matt Dillahunty of the Atheist Experience TV show, held May 31st in Memphis. (Note that I'm going to use first names here, in the interest of readability.)

Don't worry, I don't expect you to watch the whole thing. Heck, it's almost two hours long (including the question-and-answer period). But I did watch it - twice - and I'm still flabbergasted that anyone takes Sye Ten Bruggencate seriously.

Sye is a presuppositional apologist. He just assumes that the Christian God exists and that the Bible is true, and then claims that logic and reason can't even exist under any other worldview. But he never demonstrates any of that. It's really bizarre.

Is it reasonable to believe that God exists? That's the topic of the debate, and in his opening statement, Sye answers, "Yes, because it's true."

That's it. He never bothers to back that up. That's the last he even mentions it, because he claims that everyone in the world already knows that God - the Christian God, specifically - exists.

Yes, everyone. Even newborn infants know that the Christian God exists,... according to Sye Ten Bruggencate. Atheists don't disbelieve in God. We just love our sin. 70% of the world population is non-Christian, but according to Sye, they all know that the Christian God exists, too.

So why do most people worship different gods? Apparently, they really want to be tortured forever in Hell.

Make no mistake, Sye has nothing but contempt for most Christians, too, since most Christians disagree with his interpretation of the Bible. You see, he knows that he's right, and everyone else knows that he's right, too. We just don't want to admit it. (It's amazing that he can know exactly what's in your mind, isn't it?)

That was pretty much the end of the debate, though it went on for almost two more hours. Sye spent the rest of his opening statement showing brief excerpts - very brief, not even full sentences - of Matt Dillahunty on the Atheist Experience TV show, and then arguing against the straw man Sye had created, rather than the man sitting on the other side of the stage from him. At best, it was strange; at worst, dishonest.

Sye 'knows' that the Bible is true, but he wouldn't answer any questions about it. (His excuse? He doesn't do 'Bible study' with nonbelievers.) It wasn't just the Bible, though. He avoided questions and simply made nothing but unsupported claims.

"You can't know that anything is true unless you start with God. Everyone here knows that God exists."

"Evidence presupposes truth. Truth presupposes God."

"It requires God to doubt the existence of God. ... Doubt presupposes the existence of God."

Yeah, OK, that's what he claims, but where's the logic behind it? Where's his evidence? Well, he can't do that, because presenting evidence would make the audience the judge of God. (Um, no, they'd be judging you, Sye. You're the one making those claims, after all.)

At the very end, replying to a question, he claims that he can't be wrong about what he knows by definition: "Knowledge is defined as true. ... By definition, knowledge is true."

Can he be serious? OK, knowledge might have to be true in order to be actual "knowledge," but Sye hasn't demonstrated that he 'knows' anything at all. He's just claiming knowledge. It's the exact same thing as just claiming that he's right.

In a debate, that's what you have to demonstrate. But Sye never does. Towards the end, he just starts preaching at everyone. After all, why debate? According to him, everyone already knows that he's right. So he's just there to remind everyone that Hell is bad (as if, somehow, everyone else had overlooked that little detail).

It's just completely batshit crazy. There wasn't even one tiny bit that made any sense. I mean, I've heard a lot of arguments from Christian apologists, but this was the craziest thing I've ever heard.

But it wasn't all that entertaining to watch, because it was all about philosophy. Matt Dillahunty was well prepared - and he enjoys philosophical arguments - but he really couldn't get Sye to say anything much at all, so he was mostly arguing against the rhetorical tricks of presuppositional apologetics in general.

It was frustrating to watch. Sye said he accepted Matt's definition of truth - "Truth is that which corresponds to reality" - but then he'd start talking about different perceptions of reality - "my reality," "your reality," etc.

Obviously, those are different concepts. As Matt noted, Sye was confusing the map for the place. We might all perceive reality differently, but it's the underlying objective reality which matters when it comes to truth claims, not our subjective perceptions of it.

Sye tried to argue that Matt couldn't 'know' anything, which Matt readily admitted,... if you're talking about 'absolute' knowledge (i.e. with no possible chance that you could be wrong). But just because Sye claims absolute knowledge, that's no reason to take such a claim seriously, especially absent evidence or logic.

These might be useful - or, at least, fun - debates among philosophers, but in the real world, I've got to think they're pretty useless. But these days, Christian apologetics increasingly comes down to this kind of thing, probably because it sounds impressive to believers who don't have a clue what any of it means (and because it can trip up skeptics who aren't prepared for such tricks, too).

The one thing you can't get from a presuppositional apologist is an answer to a question. IMHO, that makes debates with these people absolutely worthless. Matt was prepared for that, but it was still frustrating.

___
PS. If two hours of this isn't enough for you, there was a Dogma Debate livecast immediately afterward (another hour and a half). First, host David Smalley talks to David Silverman of American Atheists and Sarah Morehead of Recovering from Religion. (Those two groups hosted the debate.)

Then he interviews Sye Ten Bruggencate and Eric Hovind, another presuppositional apologist who was in the audience for the debate. (Yes, Eric Hovind, which is your clue about just how crazy and how dishonest presuppositional apologetics really is.)

The really funny thing comes at the end of the livecast, when Smalley gets the two of them to admit that they disagree in at least one fundamental way about their God that they absolutely know all about.

Yes, like religious fanatics everywhere, they all know they're right. They just can't agree on what that is.

When Johnny comes marching home...

(Tim Eagan)

Do Republicans really hate Barack Obama that much? Or is it just another example of cynical politics by the all-time masters of cynicism?

Certainly, they immediately switched from yelling about getting Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl back from the Taliban to yelling about... getting him back from the Taliban. Of course, Fox 'News' is leading the way:

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Stephen Colbert did a number on this, too:

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I don't know how Bowe Bergdahl got captured, and I don't know what he thought five years ago (or what he thinks now). I also don't know what we're supposed to do with the Gitmo detainees who haven't been convicted of anything in a court of law, especially now that we're planning to leave Afghanistan.

I don't have a knee-jerk reaction to any of this, though I think the last good option we had was not to invade Afghanistan in the first place. But it's too late for that now.

Meanwhile, when Bergdahl comes home, he'll face our own homegrown terrorists who - surprise, surprise - aren't Muslim at all:

Richard Carrier: The case against Christianity

This is an excerpt from a longer interview by Scott Burdick (here).

The book Richard Carrier is talking about is Why I Am Not a Christian. For a summary of his argument, check out his essay of the same title, from 2006. Here's a sample:

1. God is Silent

If God wants something from me, he would tell me. He wouldn't leave someone else to do this, as if an infinite being were short on time. And he would certainly not leave fallible, sinful humans to deliver an endless plethora of confused and contradictory messages. God would deliver the message himself, directly, to each and every one of us, and with such clarity as the most brilliant being in the universe could accomplish. We would all hear him out and shout "Eureka!" So obvious and well-demonstrated would his message be. It would be spoken to each of us in exactly those terms we would understand. And we would all agree on what that message was. Even if we rejected it, we would all at least admit to each other, "Yes, that's what this God fellow told me."[2]

Excuses don't fly. The Christian proposes that a supremely powerful being exists who wants us to set things right, and therefore doesn't want us to get things even more wrong. This is an intelligible hypothesis, which predicts there should be no more confusion about which religion or doctrine is true than there is about the fundamentals of medicine, engineering, physics, chemistry, or even meteorology. It should be indisputably clear what God wants us to do, and what he doesn't want us to do. Any disputes that might still arise about that would be as easily and decisively resolved as any dispute between two doctors, chemists, or engineers as to the right course to follow in curing a patient, identifying a chemical, or designing a bridge. Yet this is not what we observe. Instead, we observe exactly the opposite: unresolvable disagreement and confusion. That is clearly a failed prediction. A failed prediction means a false theory. Therefore, Christianity is false. ...

Right from the start, it fails to explain why believers disagree. The fact that believers can't agree on the content of God's message or desires also refutes the theory that he wants us to be clear on these things. This failed prediction cannot be explained away by any appeal to free will--for these people have chosen to hear God, and not only to hear him, but to accept Jesus Christ as the shepherd of their very soul. So no one can claim these people chose not to hear God. Therefore, either God is telling them different things, or there is no God. Even if there is a God, but he is deliberately sowing confusion, this contradicts what Christianity predicts to be God's desire, which entails Christianity is the wrong religion. Either way, Christianity is false.

Guns make us safer

Guns sure make us safer, don't they? From TPM:

A man accidentally shot and killed himself while driving Wednesday afternoon down a Tennessee highway, Chattanooga TV station WTVC reported.

James Anthony McKenzie, 49, shot himself in the thigh with a .45 caliber handgun as he drove, Meigs County Detective Scott Wiggins said. A call came in for deputies to respond to a seizure, he said, but when they arrived McKenzie had apparently bled to death from the wound in his thigh.

The man was in the car alone, according to WTVC, and deputies were trying to determine how the gun discharged. McKenzie held a valid permit for the firearm.

Meanwhile:

When a lone gunman armed with a shotgun at a small Seattle university stopped firing at students to reload, another student pepper-sprayed him and subdued him with the help of others and prevented more deaths, police said.

The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with... oh, just pepper spray and courage, huh?

I'm just guessing here, but it's probably hard to kill yourself - or someone else - through an accidental discharge of pepper spray.

JAG in Space

(cover image from Amazon.com)

John G. Hemry also writes under the pen name Jack Campbell, and I've been enjoying his Lost Fleet series - and the sequels - so much that I wanted to try the books published under his real name. His very first series, starting with Stark's War (2000), didn't sound appealing, so I went with JAG in Space.

Yeah, the series title is terrible, and it's not even particularly accurate. But I'll get to that in a minute. This is military science fiction with significant differences from what you might expect. Indeed, it's quite unusual, and if I wonder about the setting - which I do - I can't complain about the results.

I've enjoyed both of the books I've read so far. In A Just Determination (2003), we're introduced to Paul Sinclair just before he boards the USS Michaelson. He's a grass-green ensign on his very first deployment after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy

In the second, Burden of Proof (2004), Sinclair has just been promoted to lieutenant jg, but he still functions as the ship's collateral duty legal officer, thanks to a one-month course he was assigned just to fill in a gap in his schedule.

Sinclair is a line officer in the U.S. space navy. He's not a lawyer and has no desire to be a lawyer. But in each book, he gets involved in a court martial proceeding against a fellow officer from his own ship. Thus the "JAG in Space," I guess.

(cover image from Amazon.com)

For science fiction - certainly for military science fiction - this is set in a very odd time. Sinclair is an officer in the U.S. Navy, and their ships patrol some undefined part of the solar system which is claimed by the United States of America.

There doesn't seem to be anything there, not anything worth the claiming. They're just patrolling in order to maintain their claim to that particular part of space. Why they'd even want it? Who knows?

This doesn't seem to be too far in the future, and it's never explained why America spends that much money for no apparent reason. There's no hint of FTL flight, nor even of colonizing other planets within our own solar system. (Then again, we learn almost nothing of civilian society and see nothing but the inside of a space ship and a tiny bit of a naval space station.)

All in all, the setting doesn't seem to make much sense. America isn't even at war - this is a peacetime navy - although there's apparently the potential for a violent confrontation with the South Asian Alliance. But it's certainly unique, at least in my experience. After all, there's plenty of military science fiction set aboard starships in the far distant future.

Most of those seem to follow the pattern of Horatio Hornblower, C. S. Forester's great series set during the Napoleonic Wars. In that pattern - copied by countless authors since, both those writing military fiction set on Earth and science fiction authors, too - you follow the officers and crew of a military ship, getting to know them, until finishing with a climactic battle against overwhelming odds.

These two books do the first part of that - indeed, Hemry makes military life aboard a space ship seem very realistic - but they end, not with a battle, but with a trial. It's still a desperate situation for the accused, I guess, but the real drama is more about the courage of Paul Sinclair in risking his career to see justice done.

It's unusual, but it works. And it probably works mostly because Hemry's characters are superb. We like Sinclair right from the start, and most of the other characters are appealing, too. But all of the characters seem realistic, and they're all individuals.

This is character-based fiction which presents an interesting and very plausible view of both military law and life on board a military ship in space. It's a combination I've never seen before (a blurb on the back cover of A Just Determination calls it "The Caine Mutiny in space"), but it's as entertaining as it is unusual.

There are two more books in the series, and I've already got them on order. So far, the series has stuck to a very distinct path, and I just don't know if it stays that way in the next two books or not. I'd like to learn more about their society in general, but I have real doubts that he could make it seem plausible.

So maybe he'd be wise to stick with "The Caine Mutiny in space" for every book? I really don't know. Again, the characters are great, so at this point, I'm pretty confident that I'll enjoy the rest of the series, anyway.

___
Note: All of my book reviews can be found here.

Science denial... on the left

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Yes, the Republican Party has become the anti-science party, the party of scientific ignorance and denial, the "stupid party," as one of their own politicians put it. The Republican war on reason has almost completely driven scientists away.

But, sadly, they're not alone. Leftists have their own anti-science idiocies (not just vaccines, but GMO foods and 'alternative' medicine, among others).

Now, please note that the Democratic Party is pretty good at accepting science, though far from perfect. In general, this anti-vaccine idiocy is not promoted by the Democratic Party. But it's always easy to see the mote in someone else's eye, while ignoring the beam in your own.

If you don't accept an overwhelming scientific consensus when you don't want to believe it, that makes you no different than the faith-based crazies you despise on the other side of the aisle. It doesn't matter if you think that your denial is justified. (They think the same thing, of course.)

If you understand science, the only rational position for us laymen is to accept every scientific consensus, where there is one (tentatively, of course, as all science is tentative, but no less firmly, for that). If you pick and choose which consensus you want to believe, that's not evidence-based thinking.

After all, science is evidence-based. The scientific method has procedures to combat natural human biases, and there would not be a consensus unless the evidence is firm. (If there's no consensus, then just reserve judgment. Of course, sometimes we must act on the best available knowledge, even if there isn't a consensus. If so, we shouldn't expect to agree.)

A consensus is not absolute - science is never absolute - but scientists will be the first to discover a problem with the scientific consensus, if there is a problem, not you. You know this, I know you do,... when it's some idiot on the other side.

But just remember that it applies to your cherished beliefs, too.

___
Edit: Oops! Did I say that anti-vaccine idiocy was science denial on the left? My mistake:

All adult citizens should have the legal right to conscientiously choose which vaccines are administered to themselves, or their minor children, without penalty for refusing a vaccine. We oppose any effort by any authority to mandate such vaccines or any medical database that would contain personal records of citizens without their consent.

Not quite the same thing, perhaps, but trust Republicans to jump on any anti-science bandwagon.

And now, back to the news

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This is very similar to that Onion piece I posted Sunday, isn't it? But this clip also demonstrates the complicity of our 'news' media.

Of course, our corporate media are businesses. They're not in it for their health. And the lowest common denominator is apparently where the money is. Television isn't a vast wasteland for no reason.

And face it, we're not going to do anything, anyway. We might focus on each mass murder incident as it happens, but that's only because we're ghoulish. It's the same reason we slow down to peer at horrific accidents on the highway. But we certainly don't intend to change anything.

Heck, if we didn't do anything after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, we're certainly not going to do anything now. Oh, did I say that we didn't do anything? That's not quite true. Gun-loving politicians actually voted to loosen regulation.

So, yeah, another incident of mass murder in America... Ho, hum.

Global warming? Or Jebus?

Do we believe what highly educated scientists worldwide, working within their own field of expertise, believe? Or do we believe what primitive goat-herders believed, long before human beings had even discovered science, back when "magic" was accepted as a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything?

"So we have a decision to make. Do we believe what an environmentalist group says and choose to live in a world where we're attempting to make everything as clean in the air as possible?" What? OMG! Who would want to live in a world with clean air?

All these weather effects are just a sign that Jesus is returning - any day now - just like all those other Christians have thought for the past 2,000 years. They, too, thought that the end of the world was imminent. Heck, Jesus promised to return within the lifetime of his disciples. (Clearly, he's overslept a bit.) All those other Christians were wrong, but Hagee believes that he's right because he believes that he's right. Can't argue with that, huh?

Matthew Hagee says he believes in the Bible because he believes in the Bible. He believes that the Bible is true, because he believes that the Bible is true. And he believes that his own interpretation of the Bible is correct, despite the tens of thousands of different Christians sects who can't even agree among themselves, because he believes that his own interpretation is correct.

That's it. That's his entire argument. He believes it because he believes it.

It's a shame, but...

Sometimes, The Onion hits things right on the head, doesn't it?

ISLA VISTA, CA—In the days following a violent rampage in southern California in which a lone attacker killed seven individuals, including himself, and seriously injured over a dozen others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

Helpless, because we want to keep our eyes firmly closed.

Learn to speak Benghazi

An atheist reads Ray Comfort

Steve Shives has a whole series of these. He'll read and comment on a book of Christian apologetics from his (and my) atheist perspective.

He's done The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig, The Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren, and lots more. They've been very interesting.

But this time, he's reading Ray Comfort -  two separate books: You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think, which is the book he's starting with here, and God Doesn't Believe in Atheists.

The funny thing is - as you might guess from those titles - Ray Comfort is so ignorant, so deceitful, and so incredibly boneheaded that there's just nothing there. Steve Shives is hilarious as he tries to keep it together, despite the inane stuff he's chosen to read.

I'm not saying those previous books were works of brilliance, certainly not. Christian apologetics isn't exactly rocket science, and logically, their arguments have all been full of holes big enough to drive the proverbial truck through. Often, they've been maddening - and frequently laughable.

But Ray Comfort sets a new low. Ray Comfort seems to be so dumb he doesn't even understand his own arguments, let alone those of atheists - certainly not in the first chapter, which is all Shives covers here. So the whole thing ends up just hilarious.

You won't learn anything new here, but it's funny as hell!

Boys will be boys

(AP Photo)

This is really sick, but it needs publicity.

Two teenage sisters in rural India were raped and killed by attackers who hung their bodies from a mango tree, which became the scene of a silent protest by villagers angry about alleged police inaction in the case. Two of the four men arrested so far are police officers.

Villagers found the girls' bodies hanging from the tree early Wednesday, hours after they disappeared from fields near their home in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh state, police Superintendent Atul Saxena said. The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into the fields because there was no toilet in their home.

Hundreds of angry villagers stayed next to the tree throughout Wednesday, silently protesting the police response. Indian TV footage showed the villagers sitting under the girls' bodies as they swung in the wind, and preventing authorities from taking them down until the suspects were arrested.

Police arrested two police officers and two men from the village later Wednesday and were searching for three more suspects. ...

The family belongs to the Dalit community, also called "untouchables" and considered the lowest rung in India's age-old caste system.

There's a lot to this, no doubt - caste and misogyny and a patriarchal mindset, certainly. The article goes on to talk about "an entrenched culture of tolerance for sexual violence" in India. These girls were only 14 and 15, and they weren't even safe from the police officers who were supposed to protect them!

Do you wonder why I post about rape, about misogyny, about angry self-pitying douchebags? But the people who piss me off the most are those who shrug off these issues. Yeah, you may not be raping and murdering any teenagers yourself, but you can't stand those feminists who keep making a big deal about nothing, right?

India tightened its anti-rape laws last year, making gang rape punishable by the death penalty, even when the victim survives. The new laws came after the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on a bus in New Delhi that triggered nationwide protests. ...

Last month, the head of Uttar Pradesh state's governing party, the regionally prominent Samajwadi Party, told an election rally that the party was opposed to the law calling for gang rapists to be executed.

"Boys will be boys," Mulayam Singh Yadav said. "They make mistakes."

Really, is this such a problem? Why are you always blaming men? After all, boys will be boys.

___
Edit: This gets more infuriating all the time:

Uttar Pradesh officials initially appeared caught off guard by the reaction to the attack on the two girls, and [Chief Minister Akhilesh] Yadav on Friday mocked journalists for asking about it.

"You're not facing any danger, are you?" he said in Lucknow, the state capital. "Then why are you worried? What's it to you?"

The monster that we've created

I don't normally blog about these incidents of mass murder. They're just too depressing, and they tend to get all the wrong kinds of attention, anyway - ghoulish fascination, but with no will to actually change anything.

But I still thought that these two videos were worth posting - for completely different reasons. Laci Green focuses on misogyny and the violence that all too often results from that.

I'm not going to comment on her video, because... well, what else could I say? I certainly don't have any solutions. Just... watch it and think about what she says.

The father of one of the victims - as devastated as you might imagine - spoke out briefly, too. He blamed the NRA and the cowards in Congress who refuse to do anything to help prevent these recurring tragedies.

Fox 'News' cut out that part of his comments:



Note how I mentioned ghoulish fascination, with no will to actually do anything? The perfect example of that is this Fox 'News' clip showing security footage from within the store where the boy was murdered, but cutting everything specific from his father's heart-rending response.

Others in the right-wing bubble are actually attacking Martinez himself. How dare he mention guns! (Warning: Don't read the rest of this unless you have a strong stomach.)

So here's brave Todd Kincannon, chairman of the Election Commission of Simpsonville, South Carolina [and, formerly, executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party], stepping up in 140 characters, to defend his freedom against the onslaught of grieving parents. ...

No idea how my son will die, but I know it won't be cowering like a bitch at UC Santa Barbara. Any son of mine would have been shooting back.

Sick, isn't it? But we've created this monster - and monsters like Todd Kincannon, too. (Naturally, Kincannon is another Republican chickenhawk. He never served in the military when he actually had a chance to "shoot back." He's nothing but mouth.)

What makes it rape?

Here's a great post by Amanda Marcotte at TPM:

Having a glass of wine (or three) on a date and then retiring to the bedroom for some consensual sexing is not unknown in the liberal, feminist circles long-derided by the conservative media. So imagine my confusion when I read National Review writer and self-appointed expert on what “feminists” think, A.J. Delgado, argue that feminists “define rape as including any sexual activity in which the woman is not sober, claiming that consent is never truly given if one has had a few drinks.”

So sure is she of this assertion that she fails to cite any of the “prominent scholars and activists” that have offered this definition. I want to know who they are, so I can avoid drinking with them.

Nice start, huh? But she continues:

It is true that “radical feminists” such as the Department of Justice have argued that rapists often use drugs and alcohol to facilitate rape. Partially, they believe this because rapists themselves admit to it. Delgado seems to assume that there’s a lot of drunken sex that the man believes was consensual, but is later told that he’s being charged with rape. But researcher David Lisak found the opposite was true: Rapists deliberately seek out very drunk women or deliberately get women very drunk in order to rape them.

Surveying over 2,000 men on college campuses about their sexual history, Lisak found that about 1 in 16 of them admitted to raping someone (so long as you didn’t call it rape). Most of the admitted rapists said yes to this question: “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?” (Emphasis mine.)

In other words, it’s not the drugs or alcohol that made it rape. It’s the lack of consent. Women aren’t being brainwashed into thinking they were raped. They are being educated about the fact that the guy who forced himself on them while they were too drunk to fight back really meant it.

Delgado proudly explains that she is not an outsider to the world of either sex or alcohol, smugly writing, “I am fairly certain that a statistically significant amount of sex — including very enjoyable sex — happens under the influence of alcohol.” As a hands-on expert, then, she should know that there’s a big difference between having had a few and being too wasted to express yourself, fight back, or even understand what’s going on. (It’s not just rapists either. Other criminals, such as muggers, know drunk people make easy marks because they can’t fight back.)

Yes, it's not drugs or alcohol - or even violence - that makes it rape. It's the lack of consent. Furthermore, the woman doesn't have to say no. It's the not-saying-yes part that makes it rape.

Not long ago, I read about a teacher who discovered, to her astonishment, that her high school students didn't understand that. It wasn't just the boys, but the girls, too, who thought that it couldn't be rape if the woman was unconscious, because she couldn't say no.

Is that "No is No" campaign really so confusing? No is no, but no isn't required. It's yes that's required. It's the lack of consent which makes it rape, and you can't give your consent if you're unconscious or otherwise incapacitated.

That doesn't mean you have to be stone cold sober. Of course not! But you don't have to fight off an attacker. The onus isn't on you to stop someone else's advances. That's blaming the victim, and it's turning the whole thing around. It's the lack of consent that makes it rape.

The GOP dating game

I know I keep asking this, but how clueless can Republicans get? In an attempt to woo female voters, three Republican men hold a debate about "Women and Colorado's Future," where the moderator invites the "ladies" on stage because they're "ornamental," as they play the theme music from The Dating Game.

From ThinkProgress:

At the start of the “Women and Colorado’s Future” debate, the moderator explained that it would be like a dating game, where a panel of four women could interview the three “bachelors” — former Congressman Bob Beauprez, former state Senate Minority Leader Mike Kopp, and Secretary of State Scott Gessler. The fourth candidate, ex-congressman Tom Tancredo, did not attend.

The moderator invited the women to join the stage, saying, “It’s so much more ornamental if the four of you would be on the stage with the four of us.” Theme music from The Dating Game TV show played as the panelists took their seats.

Still, you have to give them credit for acknowledging women's issues even in this clumsy and clueless way, right? Hardly. Here's The Colorado Independent:

But the three candidates ... had no specific policy proposals regarding women’s issues and barely mentioned women, a voting bloc that has come to decide statewide elections over the years and one that increasingly has turned away from the Republican Party. ...

The event was titled “Women and Colorado’s Future.” But in the hour and a half the event ran — commercial breaks featured “swinging 1960s” theme music for the “Dating Game” television show — the candidates treated the debate as if there were no particular theme they were expected to address.

Moderator John Andrews, a former state senate president and the director of the university’s conservative Centennial Institute, and four conservative women panelists asked few of the kinds of questions that will dominate debate in the general election.

There was nothing of note said about the heated subject of women’s health — about efforts in Washington and state capitols around the country including in Denver to shutter reproductive health and abortion clinics, to defund Planned Parenthood, to restrict access to contraception at state clinics, about the hardline anti-abortion “personhood” proposal likely to land on Colorado voter ballots this year — nothing on domestic violence policies and protections, university campus sexual harassment and assault, equal opportunities at school and in the workplace, discriminatory insurance policies, affordable day care, or even in any depth gender disparities in pay — the subject this week of national headlines after the firing of New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson. ...

Asked who they would name as a women in history they most respected (“other than your wife or your mother”) the candidates’ answers fell flat.

Beauprez talked about one of his bank employees. Kopp talked about a woman who supports his campaign. And Gessler said he admired Helen Keller and Susan B. Anthony, which had the ring of a school-room response but from a student who may not have done all the homework. He said Helen Keller overcame hardship but never played the victim. He didn’t mention that the progressive-era American icon worked to win expanded voter rights, that she was an ardent socialist, a staunch supporter of worker rights, a fervent pacifist and a champion of birth control.

The answer suggested the ideological bind at work in the effort to court the women’s vote. The voting record in Colorado demonstrates that most women don’t take the position championed by Kafer at the debate. They embrace the role policymakers can play in bettering their lives in gender specific, even biologically inflected, ways. ...

In Hellen Keller’s day, women couldn’t vote. No amount of tax breaks or reduced fees on businesses would have granted them equal representation.

Republican candidates are trying to appeal to women for the same reason they're trying to appeal to racial minorities: to get elected. But in both cases, they're not willing to make their policies more appealing, so everything they do is just window-dressing.

And they seem to be so clueless about both groups that it's just laughable, isn't it? Is this really what Republicans think women would like?

The case for naturalism

This clip is from another debate, this one with Sean Carroll and Michael Shermer vs Dinesh D'Souza and Ian Hutchinson, which took place in 2012. (The full debate can be found here.)

This is Dr. Sean Carroll's opening statement. (He's a theoretical physicist at Cal Tech.)