Cats and quakes

I ran across two stories yesterday that fall squarely into the "You People Do Realize You Have Bigger Problems To Worry About, Right?" department.

In the first, we have a senior Saudi cleric who has issued a fatwa on people taking selfies with cats.  Well, not just with cats.  Also with wolves.  But since cat selfies are way more common than wolf selfies (more's the pity), I can see why he specifically mentioned the cats.

The subject came up because of a question asked at a talk that Sheikh Saleh Bin Fawzan Al-Fawzan was giving, in which someone asked about a "new trend of taking pictures with cats which has been spreading among people who want to be like westerners."  Al-Fazwan was aghast.

"What?" he asked.  "What do you mean, pictures with cats?"

Because that's evidently an ambiguous phrase, or something.  Maybe it has subtleties in Arabic I don't know about.

So the questioner clarified, and after he got over his outrage, Al-Fazwan gave his declaration.  "Taking pictures is prohibited," he said.  "The cats don't matter here."

Which is kind of odd, given that he was being filmed at the time.  But rationality has never been these people's strong suit.

"Taking pictures is prohibited if not for a necessity," Al-Fazwan went on to say.  "Not with cats, not with dogs, not with wolves, not with anything."

Wipe that smirk off your face, young lady.  Allah does not approve of you and Mr. Whiskers.

So alrighty, then.  Now that we've got that settled, let's turn to another thing a prominent Muslim cleric is worrying about, which is: gay sex.

Of course, gay sex seems to be on these people's minds a lot, and also on the minds of their siblings-under-the-skin the Christian evangelicals.  But this time, the cleric in question, Mallam Abass Mahmud of Ghana, has said that the practice is not only prohibited because it's naughty in Allah's sight (although it certainly is that as well), but because it causes...

... earthquakes.

"Allah gets annoyed when males engage in sexual encounter," Mahmud said in an interview, then went on to add, "Such disgusting encounter causes earthquakes."

As an example, he says that this is why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.  Although as I recall from my reading of Genesis chapter 19, it wasn't an earthquake in that case, but having "fire and brimstone rained down upon them... so that the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."  But I guess since gays are apparently the most powerful force of nature known, there's no reason why they couldn't also cause a volcanic eruption or something.

On the other hand, if two guys having sex is causing the ground to shake, they must really be enjoying themselves.  I don't know whether to feel scared or jealous.

What crosses my mind with all of this is that there are a few more urgent concerns in the Muslim world than worrying about cat selfies and guys making love.  Human rights, tribalism, poverty, wealth inequity, corruption, terrorism, radical insurgencies, drought.  To name a few.  You have to wonder if focusing their followers on nonsense is simply a way of keeping the hoi polloi from realizing what a horror much of the Middle East has become under the leadership of people like this.

And given the reactions they got -- which, as far as I can tell, were mostly nodding in agreement -- it appears to be working.  So if you go to Saudi Arabia or Ghana, just remember: no kitty selfies or gay sex.  Or, Allah forfend, you and your gay lover having sex then celebrating by taking a photograph of the two of you with your cat.  That'd probably just cause the Earth to explode or fall into the Sun or something.

************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Liar-in-chief

I have a basic rule I try to follow, which is: insofar as it is possible, tell the truth.

I'll be up front that I haven't always met this standard.  I'm human, fallible, and swayed by context, emotions, and fear, and those can lead you to commit acts of dubious morality.  But I do my best to follow it, and when I screw up, to admit it and make amends.

That standard should apply even more rigorously to public officials.  They have been elected or appointed to positions of trust, and as such, they should adhere to the truth -- and make their decisions based upon the truth.

Which brings me to Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Sanders, who is White House Press Secretary, has the unenviable position of making Donald Trump's decisions seem reasonable.  What this means is that she not only has to defend him, she has to persuade the press that Trump himself is being truthful.  And considering that a Washington Post analysis has counted 1,628 times the president has publicly lied since taking office a year ago, it's not an easy task.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What that means, of course, is that frequently Sanders herself has to lie.  Or to defend lying, as she did two days ago when there was a public outcry about Trump retweeting links from Britain First, an ultraright nationalist fringe group, including one showing what they claimed was "a Muslim boy beating a Dutch boy on crutches in the Netherlands."

Among the many problems with the president retweeting inflammatory rhetoric was the fact that it came to light pretty quickly that the original claim was wrong.  The video clip was not a fight between a Muslim and a non-Muslim Dutch boy; it was a fight between two Dutch teenagers, one of whom had dark hair and the other light hair.  So it was actually something that should only be relevant to the local police; a video of two teenagers having a fight.

But the fringe elements never miss a chance to mischaracterize something if it suits their ends, so Britain First claimed this an Evil Muslim Refugee attacking an innocent Dutch citizen.  And Trump, for whom "tweet first, think later" has become a mantra, passed it along to all of his 43.7 million followers.

This left Sanders in the position of trying to defend what Trump had done, which she did in a curious way; by admitting the video was fake, but saying the president's point was still valid:

I'm not talking about the nature of the video. I think you're focusing on the wrong thing.  The threat is real, and that's what the president is talking about, the need for national security and military spending, those are very real things, there's nothing fake about that.  The threat is real, the threat needs to be addressed, the threat has to be talked about, and that's what president is doing in bringing it up.

No, what the president is doing is passing along a lie that was deliberately designed to stir up ethnic hatred.  And, worse, not admitting it when he got caught.

The "deny-deflect-distract" strategy has worked well for him in the past.  It reminds me of the anti-evolution screeds by the inimitable Duane Gish, originator of the so-called "Gish Gallop."  Gish became famous for "winning" debates by inundating his opponents with questions, irrelevant tangents, and demands for minute details, leaving even the most talented and intelligent debaters foundering.  Here, Trump piles one lie on another so fast that we can't keep up with them, and shrieks "fake news" at anyone who dares to call him on it.  And, with Sarah Huckabee Sanders standing there and telling us that he didn't lie, but if he did lie it doesn't matter, and if it matters, well, too bad -- he's insulated from the impact of his complete disregard for the truth.

At least so far.  One has to wonder how long it'll be before the entire house of cards starts to collapse.  Because the lies are no longer just about evil immigrants and wicked, America-hating liberals; now he's lying about the outcome of his plans for tax and health care reform.  You have to wonder how his followers will look at him him when they realize that they elected a scam artist who has no more regard for the "little guy" or "middle-class workers" than Marie "Let Them Eat Cake" Antoinette did.  He operates out of two motives: (1) gain praise however he can, and (2) feather his own nest and those of his rich donors.  And the "tax reform" bill is a thinly-disguised giveaway to the very, very rich.

The bottom line here is that truth matters.  Lies are "alternative facts" in the same sense that my index finger is an "alternative gun."  People on both sides of the aisle who care about the truth need to be calling the president out on every lie, and demanding that our senators and representatives not give him a pass just because of partisan loyalty.  We cannot afford to have a liar-in-chief -- even if his toadies try to give those lies a coating of whitewash.

The price of free speech

It's been kind of a grim week here at Skeptophilia.  The news over the last few days has been seriously depressing, what with the current political situation, the attack in Orlando (and the chest-thumping by ideologues that followed), and the ongoing turmoil in so many parts of the world.  And much as I'd like to return to my happy world of making fun of people who believe in Bigfoot, aliens, and telepathy, I'm afraid we have (at least) one more rather dismal topic to cover.

This one comes up because of Newt Gingrich, who (according to informed sources) is currently hoping to be chosen as Donald Trump's running mate.  And in what looks like a bid to align himself with Trump's "'Murica!  Fuck Yeah!" platform, Gingrich has proposed recreating the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

You probably know that the original such committee was founded back in the 1930s, first to keep track of (and stop) any infiltration into the United States by the Nazis, and later to do the same thing with the communists.  The committee did nab a couple of Soviet spies -- notably Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers -- but in the process blacklisted hundreds of people whose only crime was attending communist party meetings (or even being friends with someone who had).  Eventually, criticizing the government was all it took (as folk singer Pete Seeger found out).  Careers and reputations were ruined, and the gains in terms of national security were debatable at best.

Now, of course, the target is different; Gingrich wants to go after people with Islamist leanings.  "We originally created the House Un-American Activities Committee to go after Nazis," Gingrich said during an appearance on Fox and Friends this week.  "We passed several laws in 1938 and 1939 to go after Nazis and we made it illegal to help the Nazis.  We're going to presently have to go take the similar steps here... We're going to ultimately declare a war on Islamic supremacists and we're going to say, if you pledge allegiance to ISIS, you are a traitor and you have lost your citizenship.  We're going to take much tougher positions."

Which sounds like a credible position at first.  I certainly have no reason to defend people who have dedicated themselves to ISIS, or whose political and religious beliefs impel them to come over here and harm American citizens.

But the problem is, how do you find out who those people are before they act?  The FBI already monitors people who are suspected Islamists, not that such efforts are foolproof.  But Gingrich seems to be proposing further measures, taking legal action against people who have committed no crime, who have only subscribed to the wrong ideology.

Me, I find this troubling.  It's a slide toward imprisoning people for thought crimes, and one step away from abrogating the right to free speech.

And lest you think I'm overreacting, here; just two days ago, Donald Trump revoked The Washington Post's press credentials because he objected to perceived criticism by the media.  "Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign," he said in a statement, "we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post."

The Post's executive editor, Marty Baron, replied:

Donald Trump's decision to revoke The Washington Post's press credentials is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press.  When coverage doesn't correspond to what the candidate wants it to be, then a news organization is banished. The Post will continue to cover Donald Trump as it has all along -- honorably, honestly, accurately, energetically, and unflinchingly.  We're proud of our coverage, and we're going to keep at it.

Which is it exactly.  If free speech means anything, it must involve allowing citizens to criticize the government.

So the whole thing is moving in a decidedly scary direction.  Look, it's not that I don't appreciate how hard it must be to craft policies that will protect American citizens, insofar as it is possible, from outside threats.  I can't imagine being tasked with monitoring anyone who is suspicious, and making the right call with respect to when to move in and make arrests -- especially given the backlash either way if you're wrong.

But I do know that restricting the right to free speech, muzzling the media, and harassing Americans for perceived "un-American activities," is not the way to go.  We tried it once before, and it didn't work out so well.  The price of free speech is risk -- but it's a cost that is well worth what you gain.

Complexity, uncertainty, and motives

Humans are complex beasts.

I know, it doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure that out.  (Fortunately for me, since I don't have one.)  But I was thinking about this today with regards to Omar Seddique Mateen, the perpetrator of Sunday's slaughter of 49 men and women in an Orlando nightclub.  Mateen himself was killed in the incident, leading to speculation about his motives for committing such a horrific act.

Immediately after he was identified, his obviously Middle Eastern name fueled talk that he was acting on anti-LGBT beliefs that came from Islam.  This idea was bolstered by the revelation that in a 911 call he made in which he pledged himself and his actions to ISIS.

Then his father came forward, and said that his son had committed the crime because he was "angered over seeing two men kissing."  So for a time, it seemed like the origin of his violent acts was clear enough.

But the father added a comment that made a lot of us frown in puzzlement: he said that his son's actions "had nothing to do with religion."  Really?  If so, why would he be angry over two guys kissing?  It's not like rational secularism would give you the impetus to be so furious over gay guys showing affection that you'd shoot up a nightclub.

Shortly after that, Mateen's ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, came forward and said that Mateen had been physically and verbally abusive to her.  In her statement, Mateen comes across as not just angry, but mentally unstable.  "He was two totally different people," Yusufiy said.  "He would turn and abuse me, out of nowhere, when I was sleeping...  He was not a stable person.  He beat me.  He would come home and start beating me because the laundry wasn't finished, or something like that."  As far as his religious ideology, she said he was religious, but had never expressed sympathy with ISIS, terrorist organizations, or extremists.  "He wasn't very devout," Yusufiy said.  "He liked working out at the gym more."

Then things got even murkier when it was revealed that Mateen himself was a "regular" at Pulse himself, and "used gay dating apps."  This put yet another spin on things -- that Mateen was gay and leading a double life, pretending to be straight to keep the peace with his conservative father.  The image developed of Mateen as a tortured young man, steeped in self-loathing, who used the attack as a way of atoning for his own "sinfulness" through jihad against homosexuals.

Here's the problem, though.  It's always a losing proposition trying to parse the thoughts and motives of someone who died without leaving any hard evidence about what he was thinking at the time.  And even if he had -- left a note, called a friend, whatever -- there's still the problem that we'd only have his own words from which to draw a conclusion.

It's frustrating to say, "We don't know, and almost certainly will never know."  After a tragedy, we want to know the reason, to understand how such appalling things could happen.  Somehow, if we could just pin the cause on one thing -- Islam, availability of guns, mental instability, his anguish over being a closeted gay man, growing up in a narrow, judgmental household -- we could attain closure.

But in this case, it doesn't seem to be possible.  His motives could be any or all of the above, or something else we haven't even considered.  People seldom do anything based on one straightforward, clear reason, much as it'd make life simpler if that were so.  At this point, it's probably pointless to engage in further speculation; we need to be putting our thoughts and efforts into helping the survivors and the families of the victims, and -- most importantly -- taking steps to build a society in which such horrific acts never happen again.

Cats and quakes

I ran across two stories yesterday that fall squarely into the "You People Do Realize You Have Bigger Problems To Worry About, Right?" department.

In the first, we have a senior Saudi cleric who has issued a fatwa on people taking selfies with cats.  Well, not just with cats.  Also with wolves.  But since cat selfies are way more common than wolf selfies (more's the pity), I can see why he specifically mentioned the cats.

The subject came up because of a question asked at a talk that Sheikh Saleh Bin Fawzan Al-Fawzan was giving, in which someone asked about a "new trend of taking pictures with cats which has been spreading among people who want to be like westerners."  Al-Fazwan was aghast.

"What?" he asked.  "What do you mean, pictures with cats?"

Because that's evidently an ambiguous phrase, or something.  Maybe it has subtleties in Arabic I don't know about.

So the questioner clarified, and after he got over his outrage, Al-Fazwan gave his declaration.  "Taking pictures is prohibited," he said.  "The cats don't matter here."

Which is kind of odd, given that he was being filmed at the time.  But rationality has never been these people's strong suit.

"Taking pictures is prohibited if not for a necessity," Al-Fazwan went on to say.  "Not with cats, not with dogs, not with wolves, not with anything."

Wipe that smirk off your face, young lady.  Allah does not approve of you and Mr. Whiskers.

So alrighty, then.  Now that we've got that settled, let's turn to another thing we had a prominent Muslim cleric worrying about, which was: gay sex.

Of course, gay sex seems to be on these people's minds a lot, and also on the minds of their siblings-under-the-skin the Christian evangelicals.  But this time, the cleric in question, Mallam Abass Mahmud of Ghana, has said that the practice is not only prohibited because it's naughty in Allah's sight (although it certainly is that as well), but because it causes...

... earthquakes.

"Allah gets annoyed when males engage in sexual encounter," Mahmud said in an interview, then went on to add, "Such disgusting encounter causes earthquakes."

As an example, he says that this is why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.  Although as I recall from my reading of Genesis chapter 19, it wasn't an earthquake in that case, but having "fire and brimstone rained down upon them... so that the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."  But I guess since gays are apparently the most powerful force of nature known, there's no reason why they couldn't also cause a volcanic eruption or something.

On the other hand, if gays having sex is causing the ground to shake, they must really be enjoying themselves.  I don't know whether to feel scared or jealous.

What crosses my mind with all of this is that there are a few more urgent concerns in the Muslim world than worrying about cat selfies and two guys making love.  Human rights, tribalism, poverty, wealth inequity, corruption, terrorism, radical insurgencies, drought.  To name a few.  You have to wonder if focusing their followers on nonsense is simply a way of keeping the hoi polloi from realizing what a horror much of the Middle East has become under the leadership of people like this.

And given the reactions they got -- which, as far as I can tell, was mostly nodding in agreement -- it appears to be working.  So if you go to Saudi Arabia or Ghana, just remember: no kitty selfies or gay sex.  Or, Allah forfend, you and your gay lover having sex then celebrating by taking a photograph of the two of you with your cat.  That'd probably just cause the Earth to explode or fall into the Sun or something.

Cat-and-mouse game

What is it with people and cartoons?

We've had people claiming that the Cat in the Hat is a coded symbol for the takeover of the world by the Illuminati.  A Saudi imam issued a fatwa against Mickey Mouse because "the mouse is one of Satan's soldiers."  The Vatican looked gave a serious look into whether or not the Simpsons are Catholic.  A French academic published a paper making the claim that The Smurfs is communist propaganda.  There was an outcry by the seal-the-borders cadre here in the United States when it was revealed that Dora the Explorer might be an illegal immigrant.

And because all of that wasn't ridiculous enough, Salah Abdel Sadek, head of Egypt's State Information Service, has made the claim that violent extremism in the Middle East is due to...

... Tom & Jerry.

Yes, Tom & Jerry, the iconic cat-and-mouse duo whose goofy hijinks have delighted Saturday morning cartoon watchers for decades.  But their shenanigans may not be so innocent, Sadek claims:

[Tom & Jerry] portrays the violence in a funny manner and sends the message that, yes, I can hit him … and I can blow him up with explosives.  It becomes set in [the viewer’s] mind that this is natural...   The cartoon conveys negative habits like smoking and drinking alcohol, teaches children that stealing is normal, distorts the concept of justice, and helps children invent sinister plans using sharp instruments such as chainsaws.

Okay, can we just get one thing straight right from the outset?

Cartoon characters are not real.  Because of this, I do not expect the world to be like an episode of Scooby Doo.  Although I have to admit that it would be easier in a lot of ways if it did.  Then all we'd have to do is to pull the masks off of the Koch brothers, and it'd turn out that they were actually the carnival owners, and they'd have gotten away with taking over the government if it hadn't been for You Crazy Kids and Your Flea-Bitten Mutt.

Also, most children are perfectly capable of telling cartoons from real life.  I grew up watching Looney Tunes, and I never once thought it'd be a clever idea to drop an actual anvil on anyone.  I was aware right from the outset that if you shoot a gun in someone's face, it doesn't simply blow their nose around to the other side of their head.  I knew that I couldn't paint a picture of a tunnel onto a wall, and then run down it like it was real.

Further, I understood that if you step off a cliff, you will fall right away, not wait until you notice that you're in mid-air.

In other words, I got that there's a difference between cartoons and real life, a distinction that seems to have escaped Salah Abdel Sadek.

Of course, there's another reason that he's making the claim.  Blaming the problems in the Middle East on a pair of (Western) cartoon characters makes it easy to ignore the more troubling reality -- that extremism isn't going to be as easy to fix as telling your children to turn off the television.  In order to do anything substantive about extremism, you have to acknowledge the role of poverty, sectarianism, and the preaching of religious intolerance, all three of which the Egyptian government is reluctant to address.  That would require doing something difficult, such as addressing wealth inequity, legislating equal treatment under the law for all races and religions, and squelching the Muslim clerics who shriek about jihad against those who are "insulting Islam" by virtue of holding other beliefs.

Easier to blame a fictional cat and mouse, isn't it?

So there you have it.  All this time and money and effort, and to end the violence all we had to do was cut subscriptions to The Cartoon Network.  It'd be nice, wouldn't it?  Just shutting something off makes it go away.

Unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way.  I know.  I've been trying that with Ann Coulter for years, to no avail.

The price of silence

I'm going to make a bold statement here: in any modern society, the single most critical thing for fostering intellectual advancement is freedom of speech.  Nothing else -- whether the country is run by liberals or conservatives, whether it is predominantly religious or secular, whether it's a democracy or monarchy or some other form of government -- really matters.

Freedom of speech also trumps considerations of politeness and offense.  I'm all for being compassionate and kind, and think that "don't be a dick" is a pretty good starting point for morality.  That said, it is more important that you be allowed to say what you think than it is for me to be happy about it.

It's like the Charlie Hebdo massacre.  My general opinion was that as satire goes, Charlie Hebdo was juvenile and not particularly funny.  Their crude lampooning of... well, everything... didn't even reach Mad magazine standards for humor.  But you know what?  That is entirely irrelevant.  The fact that I, or anyone else, might be offended by what they publish leaves us the easy option of not reading it.

[Nota bene:  I'm not considering true hate speech, here -- when someone makes credible material threats against someone else based on ethnic origin, nationality, sexual orientation, or religion.  But I think the distinction is clear enough that the point hardly needed to be made.]

The whole topic comes up because of the deaths in the past months of eight Bangladeshi bloggers, journalists, and writers, hacked to death with machetes because they had, in the minds of conservative Muslims, "insulted Islam."  The government has been reluctant to pursue the attackers, because this puts them in the awkward position of supporting people who are being critical of the state religion -- or who are simply outspoken atheists.

It would be unsurprising if this had the effect of silencing the remaining secular writers in the country.  Who could blame people for going into hiding if there's a very real danger that they'll be butchered if they keep speaking out?  Amazingly, there are three bloggers who have refused to be intimidated.  They were asked to make a statement to CNN, and offered the possibility of anonymity.

All three gave statements, and refused to do so anonymously.

Their statements are profiles in courage.  I want you to go back and read the original post (linked above), but the words they wrote are so inspiring, and so germane to what I discuss here on a daily basis, that I have to excerpt them.

From Imran H. Sarker, founder of the Bangladeshi Bloggers and Online Activist Network:

With the killing of one blogger after another, we seem to be heading towards total oblivion. As the world progresses under the banner of freedom of expression, we seem to be hurtling backwards. Our freedom is being silenced by the serial murder of bloggers and publishers.

From Maruf Rosul, writer for the Mukto-Mona human rights blog:

Freedom of expression in my country is dying...   Right now, our beloved Bangladesh is bleeding ceaselessly.  The land is torn asunder by the fanatics.  There is no way to disagree with the establishment or to ask questions about anything, even though freedom of speech is our constitutional right.

From Arif Jebtik, secular blogger and writer:

As they continue to tally their votes in order to hold power and influence, our mainstream politicians are the ones who are creating the debacles our country is currently facing right now. It is they who are silently broadening the path for radicalized murderers and extremists.

It's very easy, over here in the United States, to feel nothing but helpless rage at the murderers who are trying to squelch free speech.  What can we do, other than stand by and watch as secular writers are intimidated, injured, or killed?

First, visit their websites (linked above).  Show them support.  If it's possible, contribute financially.  The extremists' goal is not only directly to harm secular bloggers, but to fragment and intimidate their allies.  These people are continuing to speak out, at the risk of their lives, in order to maintain the standard of free speech that is the hallmark of civilized society.

On a personal note, as a blogger who often writes on controversial topics, I can't imagine being in that situation myself.  Would I have the courage to do what Sarker, Rosul, and Jebtik are doing, knowing that I could be ambushed and murdered in the street simply for voicing my opinion?  I don't know.  I'd like to think I would, but am profoundly grateful that I don't have to live with that threat.  However, one thing is certain: there is nothing to be gained by silence.  The price of silence is the loss of one of the most important freedoms we have.  If the extremists stop the dissenting voices, they will truly have won.

An appeal to conservatives

Can I ask my readers who are conservative to stop for a moment, take a deep breath, and listen to what the leaders in the race for the Republican nomination for president are actually saying?

And I'm not talking about the usual issues over which Democrats and Republicans spar -- raising or lowering taxes, increasing or decreasing government spending, more or less involvement of the federal government in the day-to-day lives of American citizens.  Those issues we can talk about, even if we may not all end up agreeing.  I'm talking about stuff that is taking a relatively apolitical guy like myself and shaking me up to the point that I'm wondering if I should be making sure my passport is in order before next November.

Yes, I know, we're all sick unto death of hearing about Trump.  But each time the reasonable amongst us -- liberal and conservative -- have predicted that he'd crossed some kind of moral and ethical line, and that surely his campaign would flare out, his poll numbers have risen.  It's as if some sort of groundswell of lunatic xenophobia and paranoia had been there in the United States this whole time, waiting for its chosen messiah to arrive.

[image courtesy of photographer Michael Vadon and the Wikimedia Commons]

And in the latest salvo, he's saying that we should cut off access to the internet -- that too much freedom of speech is a bad thing.

I had to read this article twice, and listen to the video clip, to convince myself that this wasn't some kind of spoof from The Onion.  But no, he really did say the following:

We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet.  We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening.  We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways.   

Somebody will say, "Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’"

These are foolish people.

And the conservatives were concerned that Obama was going to flout the Constitution?

Oh, but that's just Trump, people are saying.  There's no way he'll win the nomination.

You know what?  There are two problems with this statement.  The first is that it's almost certainly wrong.  I think he has a damn good chance of winning enough delegates in the Republican primary to take the nomination -- unless the delegates, urged on by the Republican National Committee, try to create some kind of end run around the nomination process to block him, which will result in (at the very least) the GOP tearing itself apart from the inside out.

But the second problem is that the alternatives aren't much better.  Ted Cruz is in the news today, too, for... being unwilling to criticize Trump:

I do not believe that the world needs my voice added to the chorus of critics [of Trump].  And listen, I commend Donald Trump for standing up and focusing America’s attention on the need to secure our borders... I continue to like and respect Donald Trump.  While other candidates in this race have gone out of their way to throw rocks at him, to insult him, I have consistently declined to do so and I have no intention of changing that now.

It's easy enough to say that Cruz is saying this out of political expediency -- that he is still hoping to create an upsurge in support as the reasonable alternative to Trump, or (perhaps) make a case for his being a choice for vice president should Trump take the nomination.  Either way, it's disingenuous at best, and downright scary at worst.

Because you know what?  Everywhere Trump goes, he is met with crowds of supporters who are willing to sieg heil to what at least Lindsey Graham has the balls to say is a "race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot who doesn’t represent my party."  Here we have a guy who is basically trying to reintroduce the requirement that people of a certain religion be barred from entering the country even if they're US citizens, and go around wearing identification tags sewn onto their clothing, and there is a substantial fraction of Americans who are shouting, "Hell yes!"

Look, I am no apologist for Islam.  I think that it (1) is an incorrect view of the universe, (2) has encouraged misogyny, violence, and repression of basic human freedoms, and (3) is largely responsible for the morass of misery in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.  (I am in no way trying to minimize other contributors to the problems of the Middle East, least of all American meddling, but the contribution to the overall awfulness by Islam is not inconsequential.)

But to demonize 1.6 billion people -- 20% of the world's population -- as wanting to destroy our country is terrifyingly like the sort of anti-Jewish propaganda that was rife in Germany before World War II.

I have a lot of conservative friends, and a good many liberal ones as well, and despite our differences we pretty much get along.  My own attitude toward politics is usually one of vague bafflement; to me, most political questions boil down either to things that are blitheringly obvious (like whether climate change is happening, or if LGBT individuals should be allowed to marry) or else are such an intractable mess that there probably is no real solution (like how to balance the federal budget and fix the oversight of the American health care system).

But for cryin' in the sink, can we all just step back for a moment, and forget our favorite political labels, and look at what these people are saying?  Because it's leading our country down a very scary path, and one that's been trodden before.  Where it leads is, to put it simply, hell on earth.

And if the unthinkable happens, and a fascist ideologue like Donald Trump ends up being elected president, my wife and I are going to have to give some very serious thought about whether life as expats might actually be the best overall choice.

I was a stranger, and you took me in

In troubled times, people forget that one of our core values is compassion.

Despite what you might have heard, it's not unique to Western society, nor to Christianity.  Christianity has its version, yes, but it shows up over and over, in every culture, every religion:

• From the Gospel According to Matthew: Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
• From Confucius's Doctrine of the Mean:  Tse-kung asked, 'Is there one word that can serve as a principle of conduct for life?'  Confucius replied, 'It is the word 'shu' -- reciprocity.  Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.
• From Islam's Forty Hadiths:  None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.
• From Shayast-Na-Shayast, one of the holy books of Zoroastrianism:  Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others.
• From the Tao te Ching: To those who are good to me, I am good; to those who are not good to me, I am also good. Thus I act rightly, and all receive good.
• From the Talmud: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man.  This is the law: all the rest is commentary.
• From the Mahabharata: This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you.

You will notice that nowhere does it say, "This above all: make sure that you keep your own ass safe, warm, and well-fed, and to hell with everyone else, especially if they don't look like you."

A child in a Syrian refugee camp [image courtesy of photographer Mstyslav Chernov and the Wikimedia Commons]

It's why I find myself reluctant to go on social media in the last few days.  The posture that I see taken by some people I consider friends, and by many of our elected leaders, is so profoundly repulsive that I leave every single time feeling nauseated.  Contrast the above lines with some of the things I've seen posted lately:

• Taking in Syrian refugees is welcoming terrorist attacks into the heartland of the USA.
• Any government leader who lets these people into our country is guilty of treason.  Send the fucking politicians to Syria, along with the refugees!
• We put French flags all over Facebook, then turn around and invite the terrorists in.  I don't know what the hell is wrong with this country.
• Until every homeless veteran and hungry child is housed and fed, we should not allow one Syrian refugee into the US.  Not ONE.

I think it's this last one that makes me the most angry, because the person who posted this is a staunch Republican, and has more than once screamed bloody murder about the "welfare state" and "government giveaways," and supports a party that has in the past five years been responsible for killing five separate bills that would have provided aid to veterans.  What's the logic?  "We need to help veterans, before we help anyone else!  So let's not help anyone!"

So we sit here, smug in our comfortable houses and eating three meals a day, and turn away thousands of people whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  People who are fleeing ISIS, the extremist sect we ourselves are fighting against.  People who have nowhere to go home to.

These are not terrorists.  These are the victims of terrorists.

Governor Chris Christie said that he wouldn't allow Syrian refugees into New Jersey, "not even orphans under the age of five."  Apparently his conservative family values include the idea that a human being's rights begin at conception and end at birth.

And if you're not swayed by compassion, there's a purely pragmatic reason to take in the refugees.  The way to combat extremism is to put a human face on the target.  The terrorists who are responsible for the Paris and Beirut attacks and other atrocities have their followers brainwashed to think of their victims as evil, barely human, deserving of death.  It's far harder for that message to sell if those same people welcomed you into their homes, fed you and clothed you when you had nothing.  If we send these people back, the ones who are lucky enough to survive the ordeal will have every reason to hate us.

Our actions might just as well be a recruitment drive for ISIS.

Some of you might be saying, "But it's not safe!"   No, it's not.  It's possible that there might be ISIS members embedded in the ranks of the refugees.  Welcoming in the refugees might result in danger to ourselves; it certainly would result in inconvenience, difficulty, hard work.  But wherever did you come up with the idea that the prime goal of life is to be safe?  We just celebrated a federal holiday -- Veteran's Day -- wherein we laud the people who put themselves in harm's way to help others.  I would think that the hypocrisy of following that up with an outcry against putting ourselves in harm's way to help others would be obvious, but apparently it isn't.

And speaking of holidays, we've got two others coming up, remember?  One celebrates a legend in which the natives of a land welcomed settlers in and fed them, even though they looked different, had a different language, and practiced a different religion.  The other is about an event in which a poor Middle Eastern couple was turned away from shelter over and over again, until the woman was forced to give birth in a stable for animals.

Even the parallels there seem to escape people.

We have an opportunity.  We can give into fear, nationalism, and hatred, or we can show the world that the values we brag about and claim are so powerful actually mean something, and are not just a lot of empty, self-congratulatory talk.

It's been a temptation to unfriend or unfollow the people I'm connected to who post repugnant things. If I haven't, it's because that tendency turns social media into even more of an echo chamber, where we're surrounded only by people who shout the same empty slogans as we do, and never are challenged to think differently.  So as much as I would like to disconnect myself from the fear and rage talk I'm seeing, I won't do that.  

If I can get one person to reconsider the duty of compassion that comes along with the privileges we enjoy, it will be worth it.

Paris attacks redux

There's a fundamental rule I follow: if I make a statement, and people I trust take exception to it, I try to listen.

That happened today.  My earlier post (which I will take down as soon as this is posted) resulted in so many people whose opinions I respect taking exception that I have spent most of the day re-analyzing my thoughts regarding the terrorist attacks on Paris, who is responsible, and what our attitude should be toward Islam, ISIS, and the Middle East.

First:  I was beyond angry this morning.  I don't get that way often.  This is not meant as an excuse, merely a statement of fact.  In the grip of high emotion, it's all too easy to let yourself be carried away, to let logic, rationality, and compassion be swept off in a red haze of rage against people who could perpetrate such acts.

But on reading what people have written, both as comments on my blog, on Facebook, and in personal emails, here are a few things I have gleaned.

1. Blaming an ideology for the actions of a few is lazy thinking to the point where it is indistinguishable from being wrong.  No adherent to a religion, or any other belief system, follows it 100%.  If there are immoral commands in the ideology, and a person follows them, it is the person who is making the immoral choice, and theirs is the responsibility.
2. The situation in the Middle East is far too complex to place root causes for ISIS (or anything else) on one thing.  I should know better; I teach the Single-Cause Fallacy in my Critical Thinking classes.  The Middle East wouldn't be the miasma of poverty and oppression it currently is if it weren't for multiple causes -- not only fundamentalist Islam, but western colonialism, greed for oil, greed on the parts of the rich people in the Middle East itself who are desperate to quell dissent and stay in power (yes, I'm referring to the Saudi royal family here).  To lay it all at the feet of Islam is simplistic.  Once again, i.e., wrong.
3. It is probably impossible to do what I set out to do -- to tease apart the belief system from its adherents.  In leveling blame against Islam, I was coming dangerously close to aiming blame at all 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, law-abiding and lawless alike.  I object like hell when someone does that sort of thing to me -- "all liberals believe X, aren't they stupid?" -- and here I was doing it myself.  What's the biblical quote about casting the beam out of your own eye before trying to remove the splinter from someone else's?
4. Shutting down the rights of Muslims who are already peaceful residents (and/or citizens) of the United States, or any other secular democracy, is the road to becoming the same kind of oppressive dictatorship we rail against.  
5. I really shouldn't write blog posts when I'm furious.

I'm left with questions.  How do we stop the transmission of the ideology of hatred?  How can we eradicate such blind, senseless violence from the world, without becoming blindly violent ourselves? How can we criticize beliefs and ideas without it sliding into denying the freedom of speech and religious observance to the believers?

I wish I knew the answers.  Hell, if I did, I'd run for president.

In any case: thank you to all who took the time to respond thoughtfully, even those who were angered by what I said.  To be a true skeptic means to be willing to admit when you're wrong -- or at least, when you have cause for serious uncertainty.  And about the Paris attacks, at the moment I have no answers, just a deep sense of grief that such things could happen in the world.

The perils of indoctrination

Can I clarify something here?

Learning about something is not the same as learning to believe in it.

As an example, in an introductory political science class, I would undoubtedly study communism.  I might even read Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.  This does not mean that I now have no choice but to become a raving communist, ready to leave behind capitalism and go to North Korea to join in the worship of Dear Leader.  In fact, it could well have the opposite effect; my reading of those books might leave me thinking, "This is all bullshit."

Or I might decide that it sounds right.  It could go either way.  The point is, having been exposed to the communist school of thought means I have the choice of making up my own mind -- provided I have been given enough tools of rational evaluation to decide what makes the best sense.

This is a point that has evidently escaped Fox News commentator Todd Starnes and evangelical pastor Greg Locke, both of whom have gone public in the last couple of days with statements that any inclusion of material about Islam in public school curricula amounts to "indoctrination."  Locke went even further, saying that Christian parents need to see to it that their children completely refuse to participate.

"You need to tell your kids, ‘Take an F for the class,’ Locke said.  "Because I’d rather fail in man’s class and get an A+ in God’s class.  And we need to have some kids that have some character, that stand up.  Because we do not serve the god of the nation is Islam [sic].  We do not serve Allah."

Starnes said parents are up in arms, too. 

"'I am not pleased that my 12-year-old was taught the Islamic conversion prayer,' parent Brandee Porterfield told me," Starnes wrote in an op-ed piece.  "Joy Ellis was a bit fired up, too.  She discovered the Islamic lessons after examining her daughter’s class work.  'I was very angry that my child, my Christian child, was made to profess that Allah was the only God,' she told me."

"Could you imagine the outcry from liberal activists if the students had been forced to write 'Jesus is Lord'?" Starnes went on to say.

Starnes gives the impression that the state standards include Islam only, and ignore Christianity completely, a claim that is outright false -- the curriculum guidelines in Tennessee (the state in question) list nearly equal numbers of concepts from Christianity and Islam, and in fact, the sixth grade standards include zero references to Islam, but the following about Christianity:

[Students will be able to ] describe the origins and central features of Christianity... 

• monotheism 

• the belief in Jesus as the Messiah and God’s Son 

• the concept of resurrection 

• the concept of salvation 

• belief in the Old and New Testaments 

• the lives, teachings and contributions of Jesus and Paul 

• the relationship of early Christians to officials of the Roman Empire 

I wonder what credence these people would give to an Islamic family who complained about the sixth-grade curriculum and claimed it was "Christian indoctrination?"

Locke then followed Starnes into the Unintentional Irony Zone with the following statement:

[Teaching about Islam] is nothing more than absolute brainwashing of religion.  And so, I’m telling our folks, don’t take the test.  Keep your kids home from school...  [T]hey have to learn about Islam and Mohammed and how it all came about and about the Holy Koran and the Five Pillars of Islam and how they pray and when they pray and where they pray and why they pray and about pilgrimages and all of this!  That’s a bunch of bunk, we do not serve the same God.

So not only are Starnes and Locke lying about the facts, what they're saying is untrue on a deeper level.  Learning what the Islamic conversion prayer says is not the same as declaring that it represents the truth.  In a good social studies curriculum, children are taught about a great many political, social, and religious systems, and they grow to see how those institutions have shaped human history.  The point isn't conversion, the point is broadening of the mind.

And really, how likely is it that one unit of a forty minute social studies class in elementary school is going to profoundly alter a child's religious beliefs?  Consider how many students have been exposed to Greek mythology -- Zeus, Hera, Athena, and the rest of the lot -- during their school careers.

How many of these students then went on to spend the rest of their lives sacrificing goats to Apollo in their back yards?

Once again, you have to wonder what they're so afraid of.  Are their children so weak in their beliefs that even learning about Islam is sufficient to make the whole house of cards come crashing down in ruin?  Or do they fear that Islam is, at its heart, more attractive than Christianity?  Or that any opening of the mind provides a gap through which Satan might leap?

Whichever it is, their demands that schoolchildren not be exposed to other cultures and other belief systems comes at a cost.  Deprived of any knowledge of beliefs outside of their own will result in another generation of narrow-minded, paranoid bigots, living in a little circle of their own fearful certainty, not even wanting to admit that any ideas different from their own might be worth knowing.

And that, honestly, might be what Starnes and Locke are really trying to accomplish.

Acts of god

On Friday, September 11, an enormous crane collapsed in the Grand Mosque in the city of Mecca, killing 107 people and injuring 87.

The Grand Mosque of Mecca [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The more prosaic amongst us attribute the collapse to the wind from a violent thunderstorm.  Others, however, have called this an "Act of God" in retribution for the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001.

A writer who goes by the handle Dom the Conservative, and bills herself as "a Christian conservative, mother, and wife" whose purpose for writing "is to inform, anger, and unite 'We the People'" had the following to say:

(A) devastating attack of a seemingly supernatural kind has taken place in the Grand Mosque of Mecca, the largest mosque in the world and the same location to which Muslims make their hajj pilgrimage each year...  Whether you believe in God, Allah, or any supernatural force, the symbolism is eerily sinister, especially on the day that true Islam, the Islam of the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad, reared its ugly head in West.

The people commenting on her post were not nearly so circumspect.  Unsurprisingly, "God works in mysterious ways" was said more than once.  When a commenter suggested that the victims were innocent people, he was immediately mauled by a string of vitriolic comments like "What do you think the people killed in the WTC were guilty of, asshole?" and "No Muslim is innocent.  They all want to kill us" and "If they hadn't been in their mosque worshiping Satan, they wouldn't have died."

None of which is very surprising, honestly.  The attacks of 9/11 are still raw for most Americans.  I know more than one friend who took a few days' vacation from social media so they wouldn't have to be bombarded by reminders of the horrific events of that day and the days following.

But still.  It appalls me that there are people who honestly think that a divine being would work that way.  Do people really believe that the deity that at other times they call "all-loving" and "the prince of peace" would look down at a group of people, none of whom had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, and say, "Ha!  If I smash a bunch of them, that will teach the rest of 'em a lesson!"

Apparently, the answer is "yes."  But you have to wonder why anyone would think that such a god would be deserving of worship.  If there is justice in the world, it does not come in the form of killing random people to avenge the unjust deaths of a bunch of other random people.

But then I realized; that is exactly how the god of the bible operates.  I recall being vaguely unsettled by this even in my churchgoing days, and actively avoided reading the parts of the bible like the following:

• God killing 14,700 people in a plague, because there was too much complaining about how many people god had killed (Numbers 16:41-49)
• God killing 50,070 people for peeking into the Ark of the Covenant (1 Samuel 6:19)
• God sending two bears to maul 42 children to death for teasing the prophet Elisha about his bald head (2 Kings 2:23-24)
• God sending divine fire to kill 51 men for no particularly obvious reason (2 Kings 1:9-10)
• God killing a man and his wife for not donating enough money to the church (Acts 5:1-11)

And so forth and so on.  And that's not even counting the most famous instances -- the slaughter of the firstborn children in Exodus, and the horrific drowning of nearly every living thing on Earth in Genesis.

To me, a god like this doesn't sound like anything I'd be even slightly inclined to worship, even if I believed he existed, which I don't.  I'm more inclined to agree with Richard Dawkins:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

So it's not to be wondered at that people who take the bible seriously think that the collapse of the crane in Mecca, and resulting deaths of 107 innocent people, is the hand of god at work.  That's precisely how the god of the bible does work.

Funny, isn't it, how many of these same people question atheists' basis for morality, when their own moral code is based on the behavior of a deity who evidently considers such an action just?  But that, of course, is far from the only morally questionable stance you find in this belief system:

I'm not trying to be offensive, here, it just really strikes me as baffling.  I'll leave you with another quote, this one from the Greek philosopher Epicurus: "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?  Then he is not omnipotent.  Is he able, but not willing?  Then he is malevolent.  Is he both able and willing? Then why does evil exist?  Is he neither able nor willing?  Then why call him God?"

Allahu akbar!... or maybe not.

Once again, the fervently religious of our world have shown themselves capable of following the Red Queen's dictum of holding several contradictory thoughts in their heads at once.  In this case, it's Egyptian Muslims, who have jailed yet another person for "blasphemy" and "criticizing Islam."

The radical Muslim element in Egypt has been quick to speak out against the sentence.  It was too lenient, they say -- the man should have been executed.

It's a little perplexing how these folks, and their spiritual brethren the Fundamentalist Christians, can't see the contradiction implicit in their stance.  On the one hand, they are continuously chanting, singing, and shouting from the rooftops about how God is Great and All-Powerful and Omnipotent and Omniscient and Omnipresent and Omni-Various-Other-Stuff, and on the other hand they are so terrified that a brief passage written by a guy on Facebook will destroy Allah's kingdom on earth that they are ready to hang him from the nearest flagpole.

[image courtesy of photographer David Lisbona and the Wikimedia Commons]

The same was true of the witch-hunters in the 17th century, who seemed to believe that the unshakable, self-evident, rock-solid truth of god's word was under serious threat from illiterate, eccentric little old ladies.

Come on, people.  You can't have it both ways.  Either god is powerful, or he's not.  If he's powerful, you have no reason to persecute people for bad-mouthing him; presumably god is capable of handling his own battles, and doesn't need patriarchal, humorless, puritanical bastards like the Shari'a judges to deal with his enemies.  If he's not so powerful -- if, in fact, his revealed truth could be demolished by a couple of paragraphs of mild criticism -- then I have to wonder why you think he's worthy of worship.  Either way, both can't be true simultaneously.

Oh, wait, perhaps there's a third option?  Maybe all of this stuff was made up by power-hungry patriarchs to keep the power structure intact, the money flowing in, and the women in line, and in actuality there is no god!  Gotta wonder.

In any case, you also have to wonder why so few people are willing to stand up and say this. Lots of folks are willing to address the human rights aspects (torturing and executing people isn't nice) but very few people are willing to deal with the larger issue, which is that these people are morally bankrupt.  A religion or a system of ethics which is based upon coercion (mental or physical), is simply an excuse for the powerful to remain powerful.  It isn't true, it isn't worthy of respect, and it isn't a reflection of the divine.  It is simply an embodiment of all that is bad about human nature -- the desire to dominate solely because we're in a position where we can.

It's the same with a lot of the issues between the Christians and politicians these days, isn't it?  You hear from people who aren't happy that the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage that heterosexual marriage is "under attack".  The ranting you hear from the pulpits seems to claim that now that gay marriage is legal, all of these straight people are going to run right out and tie the knot with someone of the same sex, and that will open the door for heaven knows what.  In a year or two we'll probably have people marrying various marine invertebrates.  You know, if you think that sexual preference is really that fluid, you have to question why your god would have made it that way.  Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that if your worldview is based upon fear, then any amount of rationality won't get in the way of your adopting moronic stances to shore up your beliefs.

Of course, some people believe that there's god's evil twin, Satan or Lucifer or whatever, who is actively trying to corrupt people by using others to spread wrong belief.  Even if you think that's true, however, isn't it still supposedly the case that god is stronger than Satan, and correct beliefs are inherently more attractive and virtuous than incorrect ones?  If so, then once again, what the hell are you so worried about?

So once more, we have the devoutly religious of the world adopting a stance which is so patently ridiculous that if it were fiction, no one would believe it was plausible; and most of the world's political leaders doing nothing but tsk-tsking in their direction for "not being nice."  It would be wonderful if one, just one, of them would stand up and say, "You know what, Egyptian leaders?  We are no longer in the Middle Ages.  We stopped burning witches three hundred years ago.  That's because doing that sort of thing was based upon stupid, backward superstition.  Grow up, you idiotic bastards, and join the 21st century.  If criticism is really such a threat to your beliefs, it probably means that your beliefs are simply wrong."

But no one will, of course.

Moral sleight of hand

Magicians excel at misdirection and sleight of hand.  They can seemingly do the impossible, when in fact their shtick is simply a combination of manual dexterity and the ability to get you to look somewhere else besides the place where the actual trickery is happening.  No criticism intended; to be an excellent magician takes years of practice.  But the whole thing boils down to drawing your attention away from where you should be looking.

There are a lot of religious leaders who excel at the same thing.

We're seeing it in bucket loads at the moment, due to the Ashley Madison hack, wherein a site dedicated to finding married people partners to cheat with was broken into, and thousands of names and addresses made public.  The ones who hit the news were, of course, the public figures, but the hypocrisy factor made the religious ones stand out even more.  To no one's particular surprise, alleged pedophile and general lowlife Josh Duggar had an Ashley Madison account, and he and his family are now scrambling to do damage control despite his having a reputation by this point that is probably past salvaging.  

But no sidestepping was quite as comical as the dance done by British Islamist leader Hamza Tzortzis, whose name was also released in the leak.  Confronted by his having a paid subscription to the infidelity site despite his constantly preaching about the evils of sexual immorality, Tzortzis had what may be the weakest defense I've ever seen.

Tzortzis was lambasted by a follower on his Facebook page who wrote, "So Hamza, you are claiming that some guy knew all of your private information and wanted to screw with you so he created a fake account on Ashley Madison.  This guy then paid hundreds of dollars to maintain the account for 9 months.  This account was then used to make transactions at locations where you were also present at the time.  Then the ultimate plan was to hack the Ashley Madison database and release 40 million users so you could be exposed.  Am I getting this right?"

And Tzortzis replied, in toto, "You’re an idiot. Read the post before you write.  The amount was 15 pounds a month, not hundreds."

So okay, maybe not all of 'em are skilled at misdirection.

But not all of the sleight of hand has to do with infidelity.  Recently Mehmet Görmez, the head of the Diyanet (the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs), called on Islamic religious authorities throughout the Middle East to unite to fight ISIS.

Such a move, of course, would be deeply controversial in a region where sect loyalty and arguments about the interpretation of religious texts routinely lead to violence.  So in response to Görmez's statement, Bilal Yorulmaz, professor of religion at Marmara University, said that what the Islamic world really needs to be worried about is...

... the Jedi.

"Jediism … is spreading today in Christian societies," Yorulmaz said.  "Around 70,000 people in Australia and 390,000 people in England currently define themselves as Jedis."

He then went on to describe how Hollywood is the real problem, presumably because the movie industry so frequently blows up priceless archeological sites and beheads researchers who are trying to protect them.

Okay, I know confronting your personal failings isn't easy, and it must be even more devastating to own up to the evils committed in the name of your deeply-held ideology.  But setting up straw men as a way of deflecting blame only makes your own culpability in things that much clearer.

You have to wonder, however, how long people will go on defending a position that is, at its basis, indefensible.  Are they hoping that sooner or later, the short attention span of their followers will kick in, and all will be forgiven and/or forgotten?  Hell, it worked for Jimmy Swaggart and Ted Haggard --  both of whom were caught in ongoing infidelity despite their continual harping on sexual purity.  Haggard, in fact, was not only caught cheating, but caught cheating with a male prostitute.  And both are now back to preaching the gospel to standing-room-only crowds, and making money hand over fist doing it.

Funny what time and pious misdirection can do.

I've always felt that honesty and integrity were about the most important character traits out there, so the whole thing is pretty repulsive.  To be able to stand up in front of a crowd and make utterances that are deliberately designed to steer people away from your own failings, indiscretions, and immorality is as dishonest as simply lying about it.

The sad thing is that for some reason, it works.  Just like with stage magic, people get fooled, again and again.  But far from entertaining, this sleight of hand just leaves me feeling a little sick.

The demolition of Palmyra

Something that conquerors have understood throughout history is that if you want to destroy a culture, you don't have to kill all of its people; all you need to do is to destroy its languages and its artifacts.  Time and the limitations of human memory will do the rest.

When the Spanish conquered Peru in the 16th century, they did exactly that.  Kill the leaders; wipe out the traces of the existing culture; mandate the use of Spanish and the conversion of the natives to Christianity.  By the time the last Inca king, Túpac Amaru, was beheaded by Francisco de Toledo's men in Cuzco, the downfall of the culture was already a done deal.  There are still traces left -- the Spanish never were able to completely eradicate the Quechua language, for example, and there are still about nine million speakers today, mostly in Peru and Bolivia.  But their actions broke the back of the rich culture that had existed, and the destruction of priceless artifacts -- such as almost all of the quipus, or "talking knots," a computational or archival system that no one now can decipher -- was so thorough we really know relatively little about the day-to-day life of the people who lived there only five hundred years ago.

So it goes.  The suppression of the Bretons by the French, the Basques by the Spanish, the Irish, Welsh, and Scots by the English, and damn near all the minority groups in mainland eastern Asia by the Han Chinese, have all been followed by eradication of native languages and artifacts, and the subsequent cultural amnesia that follows.

I find the whole thing horribly tragic.  Our cultural history is what makes us who we are; language and symbol define us as a people.  And conquerors understand that.  To bring a people to its knees, you destroy those pieces of the culture that are most representative of the conquered group, then let time do away with the rest.

Which brings me to ISIS.

As the members of the "Islamic State" sweep across the Middle East, they are doing precisely what the Spanish conquistadores did; they are killing the leaders and destroying the culture.  And now, they have taken the Syrian city of Palmyra -- a treasure-house of ancient relics, some dating back to the second century B.C.E., declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1958 -- and are systematically destroying its artifacts.

The Roman-era Grand Colonnade of Palmyra [image courtesy of photographer Jerzy Strzelecki and the Wikimedia Commons]

They have already publicly demolished statues and temples, declaring such things "unholy." The razing of the land has not spared pieces just because they're unique, beautiful or irreplaceable.  In fact, they seem to be targeting these relics first.  For example, they announced this week that they have shattered the "Allat Statue," which was a huge and nearly intact statue of a Roman-era god, shown with a lion and a deer between his feet.

"ISIS terrorists have destroyed one of the most important unearthed statues in Syria in terms of quality and weight," Ma'moun Abdul-Karim, Syrian Director of Museums and Anquities, said.  "It was discovered in 1977 and dates back to the second century A.D."

While these acts have been characterized as the wanton acts of ignorant savages, Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, got it right.  "Violent extremists don't destroy heritage as a collateral damage," she said.  "They target systematically monuments and sites to strike societies at their core."

I know that the loss of things, however beautiful, cannot be compared to the loss of human life.  The depredations that the vicious evil of ISIS is visiting on the people they conquer -- the beheadings, rapes, beatings, and selling of women and children into slavery -- outweigh the destruction of stone and ceramic relics.  But still, just reading about the destruction of Palmyra, and before it the destruction of priceless artifacts in every city ISIS has sacked, makes my heart ache.

And the worst part is that it's not over.  ISIS is still pulling in new recruits, making headway, taking over village after village.  Here we sit, in the 21st century, watching a group of people who take their directives from a book written in the 7th century sweep across the Middle East, and we are largely powerless to stop it.  We are watching a huge geographical area that has, in less than a decade, been been plunged back into the Dark Ages by the adherents of a violent and disgusting interpretation of a medieval religious text.

I'm no expert in geopolitics.  I have no idea what, if anything, the West should do to intervene, to try to stem this tide of religious extremism.  All I can do is sit here, helpless, as irreplaceable archeological history that had survived for two thousand years is demolished.

And hope against hope that reason and sanity will eventually prevail against the horrible ideology of conquest and destruction that these people represent.

Naked tectonics

Sometimes I think I don't understand my fellow humans very well.

I try my hardest -- in fact, you might think of this blog as a five-year experiment in parsing how people think.  And sometimes, I think I've got it, that I have Homo sapiens pretty much figured out,

But then, something will happen, and I'm back to wondering if I might not be some kind of changeling.  Because a lot of the stuff people do is just flat-out weird.

Let's start with an incident that happened on May 30 in the Malaysian province of Sabah.  Some tourists, who appear to have been from Canada and various European countries, had climbed with a guide to the top of Mount Kinabalu.  And once they got to the top, they decided to take off all their clothes for a naked group-shot.

Now, so far, I have nothing particular to criticize here.  When the weather gets hot, I tend to wear the legally-prescribed minimum amount of clothing, and back in my reckless 20s I would have been an odds-on contender for the Olympic Co-ed Skinnydipping Team.  That said, it bears reminding that we're talking Malaysia here, a country known for its conservative attitudes toward showing skin.  When I was in Malaysia two summers ago, I noticed some scantily-clad tourists in Taman Negara National Park getting the stink-eye from the locals, so I decided to keep my shirt on -- despite the fact that it was 95 F and so humid that you could just about drink the air.  I probably would have gotten away with it, but I figured that I had no special need to offend local custom, so I did what the natives did and kept all my clothes on.

But Mount Kinabalu is remote, and the only ones up there at the time were the guides and the tourists, so the ten tourists stripped down to the skin.  One of the guides objected, and he was told to "go to hell."

That would have been that, except for the fact that five days later there was an earthquake near Mount Kinabalu that killed eleven people.  And you guessed it -- a local government official has said that the earthquake was due to the naked tourists having offended the mountain.

The Deputy Chief Minister of Sabah, Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan, said, "To me, when something like this happens, it is a clear connection of the incident to the earthquake that has brought about so much damage and loss of lives...  There is almost certainly a connection.  We have to take this as a reminder that local beliefs and customs are not to be disrespected...  It is a sacred mountain and you cannot take it lightly."

Right.  Because earthquakes have nothing to do with plate tectonics, or anything.  They are caused by naked people.  Which makes you wonder how the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America, the Anchorage earthquake of March 1964, happened, because I find it highly unlikely that there were many naked people outside in Alaska in March.  

But anyway, Deputy Chief Minister Kitingan said he vowed to have the tourists brought to justice, and was trying to find ways to prevent them from leaving Sabah.  And to further illustrate how serious he was, he mentioned that he'd known something bad was going to happen that day, because he and his wife saw a flock of swallows that morning.  

"At first I didn’t think anything of it, but after it went on for more than half an hour I knew something was not well," Kitingan said.  "I brought it up with my wife and we both agreed that something bad was going to happen."

So we have the beginnings of a scientific formula here, something like "swallows + naked people = bad."

But the story's not over yet.  Because in another weird filigree, one of the tourists, Canadian Emil Kaminski, decided to post one of the photos on his Facebook page.  Here's a screengrab, with the naughty bits blurred out in case (1) Deputy Chief Minister Kitingan reads this blog, or (2) the upstate New York hill gods are considering having an earthquake, or (3) there are any suspicious-looking flocks of swallows near my house:

Kaminski added, "It is not based in logic, but superstition.  I utterly do not care for superstition.  If local religion prohibits certain actions, then local believers of that religion should not engage in it, but they cannot expect everyone to obey their archaic and idiotic rules."

When someone responded that Kaminski and the others should respect local culture, he responded, "Fuck your culture."

Which is an attitude I can't really get behind.  I mean, I like being naked as much as the next guy, but if you go to another country, deliberately setting out to give offense seems like bad policy. 

On the other hand, I have to agree with Kaminski that the Deputy Chief Minister's statement is patently ridiculous.  When I read what Kitingan had to say, I said, "What century are we in, again?"  But then I remembered what Glenn Beck said last week -- that the torrential downpours in Texas were due to Governor Rick Perry's request that the devout pray that god end the devastating drought that the state had been suffering through.  And really, how is that any more sensible than what Kitingan said?

If the Texas storms were god's will, though, you have to wonder what kind of twisted sense of humor the guy has.  Because the rains and subsequent flooding have caused millions of dollars in damage, and killed at least 23 people.  "You want the drought to end?" god seems to have said, grinning in a nasty sort of way.  "I'll end your drought for you."

Be that as it may, I don't see the difference between Deputy Chief Minister Kitingan's claim that a bunch of tourists taking off their clothes on a mountain top caused an earthquake, and Glenn Beck's claim that a bunch of people praying caused a catastrophic flood.  What's next?  Major world figures deciding that thunder is caused by Zeus and Hera having a bowling tournament?

Oh, and in unrelated developments: senior Islamic clerics working with ISIS in Syria and Iraq have outlawed pigeon breeding as a hobby because "the sight of the birds' genitals as they fly overhead is offensive to Islam."  Violators of the ban will be fined and publicly flogged.

All of which returns me to my initial point, which is that I don't really understand people at all.  Because if the members of my species really think it's logical to think that naked people cause earthquakes, and naked birds are offensive, then I'm back to wondering if I might be some sort of changeling.