Vote for your life

I made a comment a couple of days ago on social media that American citizens should vote on Tuesday as if their lives depended on it -- "because they do."

One person who responded to this said, "Come on.  Stop with the alarmist talk, it doesn't help anything or anyone.  My life depends neither on whether I vote nor who I vote for."

My response is that privilege will do that to you.  But you'd have to be blind not to see that not all Americans are so fortunate, and making this claim implies that you don't give a rat's ass what happens to them.  What I said was neither hyperbole nor a ham-handed attempt to stir people up; it was simply a fact, if not for everyone, for a great number of people who are finding their rights curtailed and in some cases their identities legislated out of existence.

Let me give you just one example -- Representative Matt Shea, of Washington State, who is on the ballot for re-election on Tuesday.  Shea is a religious nut job who just published a four-page "manifesto" outlining what should be our approach to fighting wars on God's behalf.  The part that stands out is this:

Rules of War

• Avoid bloodshed if possible.
• Make an offer of peace before declaring war.
• Not a negotiation or compromise of righteousness.
• Must surrender on terms of justice and righteousness:
• Stop all abortions;
• No same-sex marriage;
• No idolatry or occultism;
• No communism;
• Must obey Biblical Law.
• If they yield, must pay share of work or taxes.
• If they do not yield -- kill all males.

Yes -- there is a man running for Congress, as an incumbent, who believes that I (as a male supporter of same-sex marriage, and someone who doesn't obey biblical law) should be killed.

Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, of Spokane County, has turned over the "manifesto" to the FBI.  As well he should.  It is a direct, specific threat against a (large) group of American citizens based on one thing and one thing only -- religion.  If someone can explain to me the difference between this and ISIS's continual cry of "kill all the infidels," I'd appreciate it.

Gustave Doré, Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (1877) [Image is in the Public Domain]

As for Shea, he said the comments were "taken out of context," making me wonder in what context they could possibly be put that would make them acceptable to any reasonable human being.  "First of all, it was a summary of a series of sermons on biblical war in the Old Testament as part of a larger discussion on the history of warfare," Shea said in a video.  "This document, in and of itself, was not a secret. I’ve actually talked about portions of this document publicly."

Which I'm calling bullshit on.  If you read the document, he is clearly not outlining, in some kind of academic way, the rules of holy warfare in Bronze-Age Israel.  He goes into some detail about the command structure of God's Army, using terms like "corporal," "sergeant," "captain," and so on.

Now, I'm no biblical scholar, so correct me if I'm wrong, but my sense is that these are not terms that were used by Joshua's soldiers at the Siege of Jericho.

Oh, and he says that to be part of God's Army, guys need to be circumcised.

Is it just me, or are these ultra-religious nutcakes really fascinated by guys' naughty bits?  I swear, people like Shea care more about what I do with my dick than I do.

The scariest part of this is that this is not some lone loony crying out in the wilderness; this guy is in a credible position of being re-elected.  Not surprising considering our leadership; Vice President Mike Pence is himself an evangelical hard-liner, to the point that after the shootings at the Pittsburgh synagogue last week, he couldn't even bring himself to get an actual Jewish rabbi to offer words of comfort.  The guy who did the speaking -- Loren Jacobs -- is a member of the "messianic Jews," sometimes called "Jews for Jesus," who believe that Jews in general are destined for hell, and will only be saved if they accept Jesus.  (The other upside, I guess, is that they get to keep their cultural Judaism, which is why people like Jacobs don't speak of this as an actual conversion.)

So yes, voting for one of these people is saying that you don't care if people in demonized groups live in peace or get murdered.  At least own up to it and stop trying to soft-pedal the truth.

In my fifty-odd years of being aware of politics, next week's election is far and away the one that is the most crucial.  It feels like we're at a crossroads between turning our nation around, reclaiming the tolerance and acceptance that have always been part of our national heart, or accelerating the slide into fascism.  So let me amend my statement in the previous paragraph; not only is voting for people like Shea accepting Trump's brutal, ultra-Christian, white nationalist view of what the U.S.A. should be, not voting is the same thing.  Because it's fucking well certain that the people who are on Shea's side -- and Trump's -- are not going to sit this one out.

So next Tuesday, vote.  Shed your complacency.  Find others who aren't sure if they want to make the effort, and give them a gentle nudge.  Offer to drive people to the polls.  If we can't do this, I fear that we are in for a very, very dark time ahead.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Rigged thinking

Skepticism often requires maneuvering your way through equal and opposite pitfalls.  As I frequently say to my classes, gullibility and cynicism are both signs of mental laziness -- it is as much of a cognitive error to disbelieve everything you hear as it is to believe everything.

The same is true of reliance on authority.  It certainly is inadvisable to believe without question anything an authority says (or believe it simply because (s)he is an authority); but dismissing everything is also pretty ridiculous.  Stephen Hawking, for example, is a world-renowned authority on physics.  If I refused to believe what he has to say on (for example) black holes I would be foolish -- and very likely wrong.

So categorical thinking tends to get us into trouble.  It's an excuse to avoid the hard work of research and analysis.  It is also, unfortunately, extremely common.

Which brings us to "everything the government tells you is a lie."

Distrust of the government is in vogue these days.  "The government says..." is a fine way to start a sentence that you're expecting everyone to scoff at, especially if the piece of the government in question belongs to a different political party than you do.  That spokespeople for the government have lied on occasion -- that they have, sometimes, engaged in disinformation campaigns -- is hardly at issue.  But to decide that everything a government agency does or says is deliberately dishonest is sloppy thinking, not to mention simply untrue.

It also has another nasty side effect, though, which is to convince people that they are powerless.  If the Big Evil Government is going to do whatever they damn well please regardless of what voters want, it leads people to believe that they're being bamboozled every time they vote.  And powerless, angry, frustrated people tend to do stupid, violent things.

Which is why the whole "the election is rigged" bullshit that Donald Trump is trumpeting every chance he gets is so dangerous.  For fuck's sake, the election hasn't even happened yet; one very much gets the impression that this reaction is much like a toddler's temper tantrum when he doesn't get the piece of candy he wants.  Trump can't conceive of the fact that he could compete for something he wants and lose fair and square; so if he loses (and it very much looks like he's going to), the election must be rife with fraud.

Scariest of all was his suggestion in last night's presidential debate that he might not concede the election if Clinton wins.  As CNN senior political analyst David Gergen put it:

More importantly, many in the press, as well as others (I am among them) were horrified that Trump refused to say he would accept the verdict of voters on November 8.  No other candidate has ever taken the outrageous position that "if I win, that's legitimate but if I lose, the system must be rigged."  It is bad enough that Trump puts himself before party; now he is putting self before country.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In fact, actual voter fraud in the United States is so rare as to be insignificant with respect to the outcome of elections.  A comprehensive study by Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar and professor of law at Loyola University, found 31 cases of credible voter fraud out of one billion ballots cast in the past sixteen years.  A separate study by Lorraine Minnite, professor of political science at Rutgers, came to the same conclusion.  Further, she found that irregularities in elections were almost always due to innocent human error rather than a deliberate attempt to throw the election.  Here are four examples Minnite cites:

• In the contested 2004 Washington state gubernatorial election, a Superior Court judge ruled invalid just 25 ballots, constituting 0.0009 percent of the 2,812,675 cast. Many were absentee ballots mailed as double votes or in the names of deceased people, but the judge did not find all were fraudulently cast. When King County prosecutors charged seven defendants, the lawyer for one 83-year old woman said his client “simply did not know what to do with the absentee ballot after her husband of 63 years, Earl, passed away” just before the election, so she signed his name and mailed the ballot. 
• A leaked report from the Milwaukee Police Department found that data entry errors, typographical errors, procedural missteps, misapplication of the rules, and the like accounted for almost all reported problems during the 2004 presidential election. 
• When the South Carolina State Election Commission investigated a list of 207 allegedly fraudulent votes in the 2010 election, it found simple human errors in 95 percent of the cases the state’s highest law enforcement official had reported as fraud. 
• A study by the Northeast Ohio Media Group of 625 reported voting irregularities in Ohio during the 2012 election found that nearly all cases forwarded to county prosecutors were caused by voter confusion or errors by poll workers.

It's easy to say "the system is designed to screw voters!" or "the election is rigged!"  It's not so easy to answer the questions, "What evidence do you have that this happens?" and "How would you actually go about rigging a national election if you wanted to?"  (If you want an excellent summary of the argument that the risk of hackers or other miscreants affecting the outcome of an election in the United States is extremely small, check out the CNN article on the subject that just came out yesterday.)

So what we have here is one more example of baseless partisan rhetoric, which has as the unsettling side effect making people on the losing side feel like they've been cheated.  Which, I think, is why we're seeing a serious uptick in threats of violence by people who don't like the way the election seems to be going -- from the woman at a Trump rally who cited "rampant voter fraud" and said, "For me personally, if Hillary Clinton gets in, I myself am ready for a revolution" to Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke who tweeted, "our institutions of gov, WH, Congress, DOJ, and big media are corrupt & all we do is bitch. Pitchforks and torches time."

To reiterate what I said at the beginning; it's not that I condone, agree with, or like everything government has done.  Nor do I think that government officials (or whole agencies) are above doing some pretty screwed up stuff.  But to say "government sucks" and forthwith stop thinking -- or, worse still, threaten violence because of that simplistic view of the world -- is not just wrong, it's dangerous.