Airlines and orthodoxy

There are times when my desire to be a live-and-let-live, tolerant, kind human being runs smack into my general annoyance at people whose adherence to superstitious nonsense makes them act irrationally.

The whole thing comes up because of the recent disruption of several flights (most commonly from New York to Israel) by ultra-Orthodox Jewish men who believe that that their religion forbids them to sit next to a woman they're not married to.  According to a piece on the issue in the New York Times:

“The ultra-Orthodox have increasingly seen gender separation as a kind of litmus test of Orthodoxy — it wasn’t always that way, but it has become that way,” said Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at Queens College.  “There is an ongoing culture war between these people and the rest of the modern world, and because the modern world has increasingly sought to become gender neutral, that has added to the desire to say, ‘We’re not like that.’”

While many rabbis counsel that there's nothing wrong with a man sitting next to a woman on public transportation unless he's trying to get sexual gratification out of their proximity -- and it's hard to imagine that being likely on an airplane, although people do weird things sometimes -- there are Jewish men who will make an issue of it.  And hold up the entire flight until someone accommodates their request.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, despite being an atheist, I'm generally of the opinion that you can believe whatever you like, unless that belief involves coercing other people to adopt those beliefs, or passing laws mandating that your beliefs be taught in public schools.  But increasingly, it seems that a lot of people on the more extreme fringe of various religions have been using their own peculiar worldviews to reshape what other people do, demanding that everyone around them fall into line with whatever weird thing their religion demands.

I was having a discussion with a buddy of mine about the No-Gurlz-Allowed attitude of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, and my initial thought was that demanding that the Jewish men cave in and do something that they thought was immoral might be discriminatory:

Enforcing company policies (mixed male/female seating, for example) could easily be claimed as discrimination.  Their religious practices make a demand on them that is impossible to meet unless airlines change their practices.  How is this different from saying that an evangelical Christian has to serve gays?

My friend responded thusly:

There's no discrimination.  The airline sells you a seat.  There's no guarantee if you will be seated next to a man, woman, Muslim, homosexual, transsexual, etc. If this bothers you, it is incumbent upon you to buy two seats so you can guarantee that no one who bothers you will be seated next to you.  Or, you have to hope that you can switch seats with someone else.  But you have no right to hold up a flight if you can't find anyone willing to do that.

And, of course, he's right.  You buy a plane ticket, you know ahead of time that you're going to get at most a single package of stale pretzels to eat on the entire flight, that the person next to you is going to immediately recline his seat so that his head is nearly in your lap... and that you could be seated next to anyone.  If your religion demands that you never sit next to a woman, you have to find an alternate means of transportation.

After all, you're the one who has accepted a belief system that significantly restricts what you can do. It's not the airline's fault you bought in.

An even more interesting question, though, is how far I'd go to accommodate such beliefs, should I be asked to switch seats.  My friend said the following:

Now, would I trade seats with the ultra-Orthodox Jew? If it is an even swap -- aisle for aisle or window for window -- sure. I may even do an aisle for window or vice versa. But I would not swap a window or aisle seat for a middle seat just to be nice to him.

I dunno.  I'd be a little more peevish in that situation, I think.  I'd want an upgrade.  "You want to make demands that everyone in the world meet your needs?  Fine.  You can sit in the middle seat between two space hogs who wear too much cologne and insist on claiming both armrests.  I'll take your nice window seat.  Thanks ever so."

But that's just me.  Like I said, I try to be nice, most of the time, but sometimes the Intolerant Asshole side of me comes out on top.

Fly the toxic skies

I remember when I was a kid, looking up at jet contrails, white against the deep blue sky.  Where were the planes going?  What would it be like to be up there in a jet, flying at hundreds of miles per hour?  The contrails would widen and fade, drift, and finally dissipate, only to be replaced by another, tracking a different direction.

Little did I realize that I should have been wearing a gas mask and protective eyewear.

One of the more bizarre conspiracy theories out there is the "chemtrail" idea, which nevertheless finds broad appeal amongst people whose sole hobby is picking at the straps of their straitjackets with their teeth.  The idea is that the government adds stuff to jet fuel, so that when the jet fuel passes through the engine the stuff is vaporized, to waft downwards and be inhaled by unsuspecting people.  The stuff can include:

• mind-altering drugs
• chemicals that can affect the weather
• chemicals that cause allergies, asthma, and other respiratory illnesses
• cancer-causing agents

People who buy this particular conspiracy theory cite the rise in allergies and asthma as "proof."  Evidence to the contrary is just part of the government's cunning plan for hoodwinking the people.  Take a look at this site, from AboveTopSecret.com, amusingly titled "How Jet Trails Block Out the Sunshine."  My favorite part is the paragraph informing readers, "This is a chemtrail thread for believers but other are welcomed. Please only post positive comment towards posters and do not discredit them. No need to be negative."

In other words:  You can disagree with our conspiracy theory, as long as you (1) keep your mouth shut, and (2) don't mind being a deluded, credulous sheep.

The thing I've never understood about the chemtrail idea is, do these people really think that putting LSD in jet fuel would work?  Besides the fact that a lot of the chemicals that they think are being spread around this way are complex organics that would break down during the combustion process, even if you assume that some of the chemicals made their way through the engine and out the exhaust, how could anyone actually inhale enough of the stuff to accomplish anything?  Between wind currents and just general dilution in the atmosphere, it's not like it's the most efficient chemical distribution method I can think of.

And then, of course, there's the rather painful lack of actual results.  No one I know seems to act any odder than usual when a jet flies over; the weather is still as messy and unpredictable as ever; I don't get the sniffles when I'm near an airport; and cancer rates aren't any higher than they ever have been.  But the conspiracy theorists, of course, have a quick response to those criticisms:

• the mind-altering chemicals act to make you submissive and unsuspicious;
• the weather-influencing chemicals are why the weather is messy and unpredictable;
• the government is suppressing information about rises in the incidence of allergies, asthma, and cancer;
• and Skeptophilia is clearly a tool of The Shadow Government's Disinformation Strategy.

Which, I must admit, is a pretty powerful argument.

Interestingly, the whole thing seems to have gotten off the ground (rimshot) because of a guy named Bill Nichols, from my home state of Louisiana, back in 2007.  Nichols, a Shreveport resident, suddenly noticed one day that there seemed to be an unusual number of contrails in the sky.  "It seemed like some mornings it was just criss-crossing the whole sky.  It was just like a giant checkerboard," he told reporters, adding that he had observed "unusual clouds" that began as ordinary jet contrails, but unlike normal contrails, "did not fade away."  He said that the vapor from the contrail "would drop to the ground in a haze" and collect on the ground and in water he had sitting in bowls.  Myself, I've never seen a contrail "drop to the ground" in sufficient quantities to "collect in a bowl" -- but even so, KSLA News of Shreveport took him seriously enough to sample the water at a lab and initially reported a high level of barium, 6.8 parts per million, more than three times the toxic level set by the EPA.

This caused an uproar, as you might imagine.  A couple of weeks later, it was revealed that the KSLA reporter had misread the reading, which was actually 68 parts per billion, well within expected ranges, and the station retracted the story.  But conspiracy theorists are never going to be dissuaded by numbers being off by a factor of a thousand, or, in fact, actual data in any form, and so the whole chemtrail idea was off and running.

Anyhow, I'd better wind this up.  For one thing, you can see where this is going: the usual "no data + no logic = my theory" pattern that is typical of conspiracy theorists.  Also, because we have a thunderstorm coming in, probably due to weather-altering chemicals, and I need to shut the computer down.