My Thoughts on Tuscon...

A week has now passed since the highly publicized shooting rampage in Tuscon, Arizona that claimed the lives of six people and left a dozen others wounded, including congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The story itself has been covered ad infinitum by the media, so I won't bother with rehashing the events in any detail here, but I would like to devote a few paragraphs to the questions of blame that have been bandied about in the press so much in the last few days.

I've intentionally avoided posting anything on the subject until now, not only because the facts are still emerging but because my initial reaction to the incident (as anyone following my Twitter feed knows) was not exactly cool and measured. You'll note that I brought up former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and unsuccessful GOP senatorial candidate Sharron Angle by name in the hours after the shooting, rather angrily calling to mind some of the violent rhetoric and revolutionary imagery that those two (and others) seemed to revel in during the 2010 election cycle. Now that the dust has begun to settle somewhat, I'd like to clarify my thoughts and discuss the issue at greater length.

Before the blood had even stopped flowing last Saturday, the internet was ablaze with blog posts, tweets, and articles reminding the American public of the rather grisly thread of revolutionary rhetoric and bellicose language that, while always present at the fringes of American society, has recently seemed to grow in volume. Many folks, myself included, speculated that Jared Lee Loughner, the Tuscon shooter, may have been spurred on by some of this rhetoric. Of particular interest were comments made by Angle over the summer regarding "Second Amendment remedies" to our nation's political problems and a political action map on one of Sarah Palin's websites that showed certain congressional seats targeted by crosshairs. Some even went on to blame conservatives and TEA Party groups for violence outright. (I'm happy to say that I didn't go quite that far, though it's mostly because I recused myself from the keyboard for a few days.)

Meanwhile, folks on the political right (I'm looking at you, Cal Thomas) were quick to claim that, in fact, the shootings in Tuscon happened only because the perpetrator was "evil". No need for nuanced explanations or soul-searching, Loughner's just evil. End of story. In the article linked above, Cal Thomas calls that particular non-explanation "moral clarity". Others noted that there's no proof that the gunman was motivated by any specific political statements on either side of spectrum (which is true) and in any event, because Loughner's MySpace page listed The Communist Maniefsto as one of his favorite books, he must be a liberal (which is asinine).

In sum, we got page after page and hour after hour of "whoever is responsible, it wasn't our side - in fact it was probably those other guys". How constructive.

The fact of the matter is that, judging by all of Loughner's quasi-lucid Youtube rants (Collected here, although I make no claims that this is actually his personal Youtube channel as is stated in the profile.) he was probably at least borderline schizophrenic. His videos make precious little sense and I personally get nothing out of them save for a splash of anti-government paranoia and a big heaping dollop of persecution fantasies informed by the occasional use of the sorts of political babble you find in POLS 101 essays. Depending on how you want to label the guy, I imagine it would be fairly easy to brand him either a left-wing anarchist or a "right-wing Sovereign Citizens nutjob", a phrase I believe I used on Twitter last Saturday and now somewhat regret. In the case of a man as incoherent and seemingly disturbed as Loughner, I'm not sure such labels are particularly illustrative.

It is also the case that ultimate responsibility for the killings lies with Loughner. I don't want to get into any discussion of whether or not he was so disturbed that he lack the personal agency necessary to be in control of his actions. At this point we don't yet know his mental status, and it was his finger on the trigger regardless. That said, it may or may not prove to be the case that he was influenced in some meaningful way by the heated political climate in this country. We don't have any real reason to think that at this point. It now seems that Rep. Giffords had been on his radar for some time, as one of his acquaintances claims that Loughner had once spoken to her at a political event and felt slighted by their exchange, so this may have been the product of some kind of long-held grudge. It could also have been a semi-random act in which Loughner was lashing out at a representative (any representative) of the government he felt was out to get him.

It seems likely to me, and keep in mind that I'm engaging in bald-faced speculation here, that any messages Loughner was receiving from the current political discourse were refracted through the prism of his own mind and informed by his own paranoid fantasies about "government mind control" to such an extent that the end product would have very little to do with reality. Again, at this point we don't know what was going through his head in the days and hours leading up to the killings, and I'm not sure that even Loughner could explain his actions in any sensical way. For the time being, I don't think there's much more we can say about Jared Lee Loughner.¹

All that said, I also think it's true that the violent political rhetoric being spewed by the extreme fringe of the political right these day is supremely unhelpful. I'm also disturbed that, during the last couple of election cycles, certain mainstream politicians have reached out to this fringe in an attempt to mobilize what they seem to think is their base. I'm all for erring on the side of more free speech, and the use of militaristic terminology in politics is neither new nor inherently bad. We rhetorically "go to war" and "fight battles" for various causes all the time, sometimes "falling on our swords" when things go poorly. There's no harm in that sort of language. That said, when a woman running as a major party for the U.S. Senate called for "Second Amendment remedies" to deal with her political opponents, I think we're right cry foul. There aren't many ways to interpret such a statement, and all of them are unsavory. Thinly veiled jokes about assassination probably shouldn't be a regular part of top-level political discourse.²

To sum up, Loughner is, kindly put, a nutjob and his motives are likely to remain inscrutable to those of us who actually choose to live in the real world. While he may or may not have been spurred on by the bile being belched forth by some of the politicians in this country (and at this point we have no real reason to assume that he was), ultimately he is the only one culpable for the crimes that he committed. Regardless, it'd probably be better if politicians refrained from talking about killing their political rivals, skulling legislators with baseball bats, or overthrowing the government. After all, the vast majority of us are rational adults...right?

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1.) There is, in truth, quite a bit more to discuss regarding Jared Loughner, such as asking how a man who in hindsight seems so disturbed was able to legally purchase a gun, or how he seems to have avoided receiving any kind of mental health treatment, but those are discussions for another day. None of that absolves Loughner of his responsibility for the murders, but those issues are certainly well worth discussing.

2.) I'm using Angle's quote as a modern example, but I'm well aware that vitriolic, frankly dangerous, rhetoric is by no means limited historically to the political right. Segregation-era Democrats, especially here in the South, spewed some of the foulest, most despicable nonsense you can imagine. Be that as it may, in recent years such talk has been more the realm of the fringe right than the fringe left. During George W. Bush's presidency, there were lots of shrill calls by the extreme left to impeach the president, but as far as I'm aware, no Democratic political candidate suggested that he be dealt with by way of the Second Amendment.

More Ridiculous Kentucky Politics

Kentucky politics tend to be pretty freakin' embarrassing, as my post earlier in the month illustrates. Well, believe it or not, things are getting even stupider ¹ around here as election day looms. Jack Conway, the state attorney general and senatorial candidate, is floundering in the polls against Tea Party whackaloon Rand Paul and is now trying to rally the religious vote to his cause. In addition to the nonsense we discussed a couple of weeks ago, he's now spewing out ads like this:



Don't get me wrong - I've no love of Rand Paul and there's plenty of reasons not to vote for him, but what the hell kind of political ad is that? The clear message is that anyone who isn't a jumping-up-and-down, bible-in-each-hand Christian isn't fit for office. It may as well just say "don't vote for this guy, he might not be Christian". Frankly, that's an unwritten rule here in Kentucky anyway, but to actually hear it spoken aloud on the TV ad endorsed by the candidate himself boggles the mind.

In any event, the Conway ad started run about a week or so ago. Rand Paul's campaign complained about it publicly, arguing that the claims in the ad were specious to begin with and substantially meaningless in any event. After all, why should a candidate's personal religious convictions be a factor in a political campaign? For about two days I wondered if Paul would actually manage to articulate some kind of message other than the "government action and oversight bad, unregulated markets good" quasi-libertarianism that he's been campaigning on for the last year. Maybe, just maybe, he's show himself to be something more than a conservative-in-libertarian's-clothing. Perhaps he'd have a modicum of nuance somewhere in his political style.

Nope.



Wow. I have a feeling that before this race is over Paul and Conway will get into a fistfight over who gets to bow down and kiss Al Mohler's feet.²

The worst part is how seriously the local media seems to be taking all of this. It's been all over the TV news and the Courier-Journal for days. Paul's reaction to (and Conway's defense of) the Aqua Buddha ad even dominated most of the coverage of their recent debate. How did this become so important? What kind of bizarro world are we living in?

Let's step back and think about this. We're in the midst of a crucial midterm election cycle that may help to decide the role and scope of the federal government for years to come...and these two are having a slap fight over who's the most Christian. That's freakin' fantastic. What role should the government have in healthcare? How about in the regulation of the financial system? What, if any, regulation is the federal government likely to enact in order to deal with greenhouse gas emissions?

Apparently none of that matters, because all these two nimrods seem to want to talk about is how religious they are. I'll be at the polls to cast my ballot on election day, but I'm sure as hell not voting for either of these guys.

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1.) Wow, apparently "stupider" is actually a word.

2.) Al Mohler is the leader of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He's a super hardcore fundagelical who recently made the national news for decrying yoga as "dangerous to Christians".

Nigeria's Complex Internal Woes...

Back in school I took a course on international conflicts in which Africa's future was projected to be, and I'm quoting directly, "kind of like that movie Mad Max." That is, if they continue on their current trajectories, many countries in Africa may end up as failed states possessing only notional governments and rocked by nearly perpetual conflicts over resources. States like Somalia have pretty much already degenerated to this point, while others, most notably Kenya¹ seem to be defying these grim expectations.

Nigeria falls somewhere in the middle: Despite the fact that it's an oil-rich country with the 33rd highest GDP in the world, its inadequate infrastructure and penchant internal instability also mean it has the 9th highest death rate in the world. The median life expectancy in Nigeria is less than 47 years, meaning that it ranks 216th out of 224 countries according to the CIA World Factbook.² These troubling lifespan figures stem in part from high rates of AIDS and other serious diseases, but they're also influenced by frequent spates of internal violence. Therefore, despite recent positive press regarding government reform and fairly rosy expectations for the Nigerian economy, the violence that has recently erupted in and around the Nigerian city of Jos isn't entirely unexpected.

In case you've been living in a cave for the last few days, roving bands of machete-wielding rioters embarked on a rampage through Jos over the weekend, hacking to death up to 500 people. A huge proportion of the victims were members of Nigeria's (large) Christian minority, and the attacks are assumed to be at least partly in retaliation for similar anti-Muslim riots that claimed around 300 lives in the same city back in January.³ The media at large has been quick to draw attention to the religious divisions evident in the violence, but it's worth taking a deeper look. All politics are local, and while their is undeniably a religious dimension to the recent atrocities in Jos, there are also non-religious issues at play.

The Jos Plateau, on which the city of Jos lies, is the only temperate region in all of Nigeria. While it hasn't historically been subject to the same levels of resource-related strife as the Niger Delta to the south, there's considerable rivalry among various local groups for control of the precious, and scarce, fertile land in the area. Because the Jos Plateau lies along the border between Nigeria's mostly Muslim north and largely Christian south, this resource anxiety often manifests itself along religious lines, but it's not explicitly religious in nature.

For example, in 2001 the Jos region experienced even more widespread Muslim/Christian fighting that killed more than 1,000 people. Is this yet another shocking example of religious violence? Not exactly: The riots weren't sparked by any particular doctrinal issues but instead stemmed from the appointment of a Muslim to an a locally powerful anti-poverty program. It wasn't a case of "we have to fight the heretics", it was a case of "one of them is in charge of something we want a part of". It was classic "in group" vs. "out group" fighting that simply happened to organize along religious lines.

Admittedly the recent violence doesn't have such an obviously secular catalyst⁴, but it's certainly worth noting that the apparent Muslim/Christian violence could just as easily be characterized as Hausa vs. Yoruba violence: These two ethnic groups jockey for resources in the Jos Plateau and it just so happens that in recent times the Hausa have largely adopted Islam while the Yoruba populations contain large numbers of Christians. I'd argue that it's fair to say that both ethnic and religious enmity catalyzed underlying resource-related tensions and sparked the current bloodshed. Simply calling it religious violence oversimplifies the situation, as does simply calling it ethnic violence. The circumstances "on the ground" in Nigeria are complicated, and we do ourselves (and the people who've lost their lives to the fighting) a disservice if all we don't take this into account.

There's always a temptation to look for magic bullets - simple, easy to understand causes for complex events. Unfortunately, our tendency to look for quick and easy answers often results in us coming up with bad answers. When we look at outbreaks of ethnic and religious violence like the strife going in Nigeria, it's important to take in the entire situation rather than succumb to the urge to reduce it to nothing more than factoids and caricatures. Otherwise the only lesson we'll come away with is the useless old trope of "us vs. them".

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1.) With the notable exception of the widespread violence that followed the 2007 presidential elections there, Kenya has long been considered an island of stability in Africa.

2.) All the figures in this paragraph come from the CIA World Factbook, an indispensable (and free) online reference for anyone interested in getting the skinny on foreign states.

3.) Christians comprise around 40% of the Nigerian population, while Muslims account for something like 50% according to the CIA World Factbook.

4.) Reports from Jos as to the exact circumstances surrounding the current eruption of violence vary so widely that at this point I think it's fair to say that for the time being we don't know exactly what the flashpoint was.

A Proud Day...Sort Of...

Remember last year when people finally noticed that the law establishing the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security included language which claimed that the state was dependent on God for its safety? (If the state of Kentucky depends on God for security, why even bother having an Office of Homeland Security?) Well, Franklin Circuit Court Judge Thomas Wingate smote that down yesterday, finding in favor of American Atheists in a lawsuit that sought to remove the religious language from the law.

I'd say that this is a glorious day for Kentucky...except that no less a personage than Jack Conway, our state's Attorney General, argued in court in favor of the law. In essence he claimed that by failing to allow blatantly religious wording in legal documents we run the risk of turning into a "secular society". Apparently he's forgotten that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment demands that we have a secular government. I guess it's asking too much to expect the state Attorney General to have basic working knowledge of the Constitution...

How Far Right is Wrong?

On an amusing note, I just noticed an article on World Nut Daily that lambastes Fox News anchor Shepard Smith for comments he made about domestic terrorist James Von Brunn and his unease about ultra-right wing groups in the United States. Among other things, Smith noted all the whackjobs out there who...

"...want to pretend [Obama's] not a citizen of the United States, who want to pretend that his religion is something they see as in some way troublesome to them and all of us."

I suspect that it was that little bit that pushed people's buttons over at WND, since "where's [President Obama's] birth certificate" has become their battle cry in recent months, despite the fact that a World Net Daily "investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic." These days they choose to ignore that article and keep pushing new and evermore elaborate conspiracy theories instead. I guess that kind of stuff is easier than formulating policy-related arguments against the current administration.

In any event, this just goes to show that even though Fox News tends to be fairly right of center, it's still not far enough to the right for the real nutjobs out there.

Human Decency is Hardly Wishful Thinking...

Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and has written numerous commentaries on security issues. As can be expected of a former military man, Lt. Col. Peters is rather hawkish in his outlook, though I rather suspect he regards himself as a realist. In any event, he recently wrote this article for The Journal of International Security Affairs in which he attempts to argue for "moral clarity" and "an end to wishful thinking" in the ongoing military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. His central argument is that the United States has lost it's appetite for bloodshed and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been unnecessarily lengthened by the failure to commit large numbers of troops in the early stages of the conflict, as well as the failure of officials to recognize that "[T]he point of [warfare] is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty."

He goes on to state that collateral damages and civilian causalities are unavoidable in war, which is true, but his implicit statement is that nothing should be done to attempt to mitigate them. Indeed, given that the first several pages of his argument are full of bloviating tirades about how the United States has become "seduced...with a false-messiah catechism of bloodless war" thanks to "think tank scholars" and a "white-collar suburban society" with no "sense of grit in daily life", it's hard not to characterize Peters as a sort of cartoon character macho man. He talks extensively about how "think tank astrologers" wish to "constantly [narrow] the parameters of what is permissible in warfare" and complains that in the fight against Islamic terrorists "[t]hey pray to their god for help in cutting out throats, and we want to chat."

I'm not sure where to begin addressing his mischaracterizations of the issue except to refer the reader to the full article and note that Peters seems at all times to be talking about the current conflict with Islamic fundamentalists as if it were simply World War II with the bad guys in different costumes. This is bizarre, because he's correct to note that Islamic terrorists of the Al-Qaeda vein are not the same as "secular groups groups fighting for power or wealth". He spends nearly two entire pages discussing the contrast between of religiously-motivated terrorists and secular foes, and yet he somehow seems not to notice that that these differences, well, make a difference.

Indeed, it seems very much as if he only mentions Islam as another attempt to jab at what he sees as a weak society in which

We have oversold ourselves on the notion of respect for all religions (except, of course, for Christianity and Judaism) that we insist that faith cannot be a cause of atrocious violence. The notion of killing to please a deity and further his perceived agenda is so unpleasant to us that we simply pretend it away...

...A paralyzing problem...is that our religious class has been educated out of religious fervor...[They] no longer comprehend the life-shaking power of revelation...Emotional displays of faith make the functional agnostic or social atheist nervous; he or she reacts with elitist disdain. Thus we insist, for our own comfort, that our enemies do not really mean what they profess...

Here Peters' has twisted real suggestions that perhaps some Al-Qaeda leaders are using religious rhetoric to motivate their henchman to fight for their own otherwise esoteric or distant political ends into a non-existent claim that no Islamic terrorists are actually religiously motivated. I don't think I've ever heard that claim. Indeed, Al-Qaeda foot soldiers and their ilk are religiously motivated to the core, regardless of whether or not their leaders are sincere in their own professed beliefs. No, this is just Mr. Peters spewing bile. Still, he's correct that religiously-motivated foes are unusual in that they possess a dangerous martyr mentality not present in secular foes- "Where", he notes, "are the atheist suicide bombers?"

Unfortunately it seems that Peters wishes to match fervor with fervor (I don't think I'm being unfair to say that I can see some lionized Christianity between the lines in this article) and that he sees no answers to the problem of Islamic extremism that do not lie on the battlefield:

The essence of warfar never changes - it will always be about killing the enemy until he acquiesces to our desires or is exterminated...

But how can that work against foes enamored with the idea of a glorious martyr's death? This is not World War II. The United States is not engaged with an enemy state that can be beaten on the battlefield until it's leaders submit under the threat of the annihilation of their country. Indeed the state-to-state phases of these conflicts (the ousting of the Taliban government in Afghanistan and the defeat of the Hussein regime in Iraq) have become in a sense only minor prologues to the ongoing operations in the region. Defeating the state militaries of Iraq and Afghanistan could almost be called relatively straightforward tasks, but subduing the irregular insurgents and extremist forces in the region has proven far more complicated and slow-going. The current foe (or rather, aggregation of foes) is a stateless, decentralized organization able to recruit young, desperate men and fill their heads with religious nonsense and send them off to die. It's leaders don't care in any real way about battlefield losses, the destruction of infrastructure, or the deaths of civilians - all of these things are recruitment tools for the Jihadists. Peters is fond of using the of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an example of "fighting dirty to win", but Bin Laden and his cronies would be delighted to see such catastrophic civilian bloodshed in Iraq or Afghanistan - After all, they have no state to protect per se, and such bloodshed would only help to legitimize their cause in the eyes of their potential recruits.

I studied terrorism under Dr. Okbazghi Yohannes, a man who was involved for years in the struggle to break away from Ethiopia and establish the state of Eritrea. One thing that was drilled into my head repeatedly is that terrorist (or "resistance") organizations can only be successful if they can convince a meaningful portion of the population that their goals are legitimate. Bin Laden recruits his cannon fodder by filling their heads with tales of a hostile, callous United States that wants to wipe Islam from the face of the earth. Say what you will about the evil lunatic, but he's got a good recruiting strategy - And the war of attrition that Peters is advocating feeds right into it.

This is obviously not to say that the United States should not respond with force against terrorist threats from extremist organizations like Al-Qaeda, nor is to to somehow imply that I don't understand that civilian casualties are a part of any conflict. The issue is rather that Peter seems to think we are still engaged in 20th-century state-oriented combat in which strategies of attrition and total war can actually work. That is not the case here. If civilian casualties become too much of a part of the current conflict, the U.S. will simply generate outrage among the Arab world that will lead more and more young Arabs into the clutches of the Jihadists. Peters, I suspect, would respond with something along the lines of "kill those new recruits too, then the ones after that, until there's no one left to recruit." (Or perhaps I'm being uncharitable.) That's perhaps technically possible, but it can also be avoided by a strategy that centers around de-legitimizing and marginalizing the extremists.

If the United States can effectively define its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan as something along the lines of a temporary provider of security - one that can effectively provide protection to civilians while helping their own officials to facilitate a return to normal day-to-day and an improved standard of living - then the extremist's cries of American hostility, colonialism, and a new Crusade will begin to ring false to the people of the region and the numbers of young men enticed to join the the Jihadist cause will begin to dwindle. Religious extremism of all stripes thrives in times of hardship and fear.* Absent these conditions, the appeal of a martyr's death and posthumous paradise begins to dull and the most dangerous religious extremists are left lonely and ranting at the walls in their mosques, synagogues and churches. The cure for most of the extremism in the Middle East may lie in helping people live their lives comfortably and without the shadow of violence hanging over them. Certainly combat missions have a role in the process, but they are only part of the process.

Peters is correct on another point: There will always be religious extremists, just as there will always be factions who wish to do violence to others for a panoply other reasons. That being said, the answer to violence isn't always "kill the enemy until he acquiesces". It's not "wishful thinking" to look for a way to resolve conflicts without resorting to out and out barbarism, nor is it somehow effete to view military force as something to be used sparingly and with an eye to minimizing the suffering of innocents. In the end I'm afraid that the "reality" that Lt. Col. Peters wants us to face exists only in his own mind.

*Peters even notes this, and implicitly laments that increasing standards of living and a decreased perception of danger has led to a weakening religious fervor in the U.S. Why then can he not see how it applies to the situation in the Middle East?

This Again? Already...?

I watched the inauguration of Barack Obama yesterday with both intense interest and a feeling of satisfaction, though the entire thing was rather marred by Rick Warren's trite rantings beforehand. That being said, I took Warren to be a bit of a sideshow, an appeasement to the country's religious folks and an attempt at bipartisanship. I wouldn't call his presence a good thing, nor am I satisfied that it's proper to have a Christian prayer before the inauguration of the president, but Warren's invocation was far from the most important thing that happened yesterday. On the other hand, I just had occasion to turn on MSNBC for a few minutes and, rather than discussing something of actual importance such as President Obama's order to halt the military trials at Guantanamo, the hosts were breathlessly theorizing about what church the new president will be attending while in office.

The president actually has real work to do, and while I'm not among those who think of his as some sort of superhuman uber-statesman who's going to completely alter the course of the nation, both the president and we the citizens have better things to worry about that what witch doctor he's going to see every Sunday morning.

A Familiar Sounding Name...

Alaska's finally finished counting the ballots for its Senate race, and it appears that incumbent (and convicted felon) Ted Stevens is out of a job. Replacing him in the Senate will be Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage. Wait a second...Begich...Begich...where have I heard that name before...?

Oh yeah! Mayor Begich is the younger brother of "doctor" Nick Begich, who readers may remember as one of the chief architects of the crazy conspiracy theories about the HAARP. I don't want to get into another HAARP discussion on here because I've honestly had my fill of that particular subject for the rest of the foreseeable future, but I'll remind readers that the crazy elder Begich brother has claimed the title of "doctor"for himself because of his time at the Open International University for Complementary Medicines. The OIUC is* located in Sir Lanka, will confer "knighthood" upon its students for a $400 fee, and is so shady that it is eschewed even by chiropractors. He also thinks that HAARP, which is used to study the ionosphere, is actually a secret government plot to cause natural disasters and.or control people's minds - suggestions that are so bizarre that they're not even wrong.

Let's hope the younger Begich has a better head on his shoulders.

*Or "was". Their site doesn't seem to have been updated for several years.

Keeping Up With The Journals...

I don't know if any of my readers keep abreast of The Journal of International Security Affairs, but the Fall 2008 issue (which is on news stands now) is completely devoted to Middle East policy and contains a pair of very interesting discussions on issues pertaining to Israel. Israel is a subject on which many Americans have very strong (and equally ill-informed) opinions, and these opinions tend to be polarized into stark black and white interpretations of the situation. In the U.S. at large Israel is considered to be an angelic, underdog state that's fighting to survive in a hostile "neighborhood", whereas when I was in university the opposite view prevailed - The vast majority of the Poli-Sci student body at U of L viewed Israel as something bordering on a terror state presiding over an ill-gotten territory and abusing the rights of the displaced Palestinians.

Reality, of course, is rather grayer than either of those views, and in the interest of that line of discussion I urge readers to have a look at these two articles by David Wurmser and Caroline Glick. Seriously, click those links - They're more than worth your time.

Shock: Skinhead Morons Hate Obama...

Well, I can't say I'm really surprised at this one: MSNBC is reporting that the Feds have broken up a plot by a pair of neo-nazi mouth-breathers to assassinate Barack Obama. Basically Dan Cowart and Paul Schlesselman wanted to kill 88 black folks and then murder Obama by...riding at him in a car while shooting out of the windows and wearing white tuxedos and tophats...

You know...since Barack Obama always just stands out in the middle of the road...

Anyway, these dingleshits made just enough noise to get themselves arrested. (They got caught planning a robbery to finance the attack - A robbery which, depsite their repeated vows to "die trying" in their "mission", was thwarted when they saw a dog nearby and fled to Cowart's Grandma's house.) Said one law enforcement official:

We take this very, very seriously but we see no evidence these guys have the ability or the wherewithal to pull off what they say they wanted to do.

Fucking morons.

*By the way, some my link to Encyclopedia Dramatica goes to a page that uses dirty words...Can't imagine why anyone reading this blog would care, but you've been warned.

Skippy's Stumped by Stump Speeches...

I spent the majority of yesterday afternoon at a rally for the Obama/Biden ticket in Jeffersonville, Indiana, mostly because Joe Biden was going to be around (and partly because the rally was a block from where I work and I was parked in anyway). I remain rather enthusiastic about the prospect of an Obama presidency, but attending the rally reminded me of why it's anathema for political scientists to unreservedly support candidates. My years of college, combined with my time as a skeptic, has left me with a profound love of citations. I like to know where quotes and figures come from, if only because I've been mortified more than once to learn that I've quoted as fact something that turned out not to be true because I had heard it, without proper citations, from a source that I trusted. Perhaps that's why I was rather put off by Biden's speech. I wanted some nuance, but all I got was "Them bad! We good!".

Maybe I just don't get the whole political rally thing. I desperately want people who make a claim to then back it up with some sort of verifiable source, while a political rally seems to be more of a call-and-response sort of event. It's not entirely different from a professional wrestler heckling the crowd. For example, Biden made the claim that the McCain tax plan would tax as income the value of an individual's employer-provided health insurance. That's true - it's part of McCain's plan to encourage people to privately buy their health insurance and was discussed extensively back in May. However, it appears to be the case that this plan would only appreciably increase taxes for the handful of workers with extremely swank health insurance through their employers (and, to be fair, people in areas of the country where health coverage is the most expensive.) (Source.)

While the plan would result in higher per-check taxes for most employees, McCain would try to offset this at tax time by offering relatively high refundable tax credits. Unfortunately, that's not how it was sold at the rally - At the rally it was sold as an across-the-board rise in taxes for everyone and no mention was made of the credit program. Keep in mind that I'm not sold on the plan, but I'm troubled by the way it was presented. (There's also a more recent op-ed piece on the plan here by a dude that looks like a zombie.) I suppose stump speeches aren't the place for long discussions of tax policy, but I also know that for most voters attending a stump speech is the most intimately they'll ever follow any part of the campaign. It's disheartening to me to think about how many people will be casting their votes in November based on a sound byte claim that they never bothered to investigate further.

It's also easy to get sucked into the us vs. them mentality of modern American politics, and in all honesty I'm guilty as charged on that count as much as anyone else. That being said, the rally I attended brought all that into focus for me in a troubling way. There's just something fundamentally bothersome to me about standing in the midst of what is nominally a political discussion and hearing the crowd erupt into a chorus of boos at the mere mention of one candidate's name while cheering wildly every time the other candidate is so much as brought to mind. Much to my disappointment, there was no small amount of that going on yesterday. It was doubly embarrassing because I complained loudly to my friends during the RNC because the crowd was catcalling wildly whenever Obama was mentioned at all by the Republican speakers - clearly a liberal audience would be better behaved than that - but there I stood yesterday watching exactly the same obnoxious behavior from my Democratic Hoosier neighbors.

All this has convinced me that the political process is better followed from a distance, so as to lessen the power of emotional responses and help avoid the oft-underestimated influence of crowd synergy that has a way of growing to absolutely leviathan proportions at rallies and similar events. Alas, most people on either side of the political spectrum have neither the interest nor the time to follow the election season properly. Much to my chagrin, it will almost certainly be stump speeches and sound byte politics that decide the outcome of the elections, and regardless of who wins the country will be a little worse off because intelligent discussion will once again have been trumped by sloganeering.

Some readers may find it interesting to check out a website called Politifact that is devoted to examining, in some depth, the claims made by the various candidates in their advertising campaigns.

Kim Jong-Il: Dead or Alive?

I'm swapping out my skeptic hat for my political scientist one to bring up an interesting note from North Korea: Kim Jong-Il didn't make an appearance at the big Founder's Day military parade today. In fact, he hasn't been around for a couple of weeks now. Why's that important? Well, Kim Jong-Il has been the "dear leader" of North Korea ever since his daddy kicked in 1994, and since he's the head of basically every state apparatus he usually doesn't keep a low profile. Missing the gigantic military parade on his country's equivalent of Independence Day is totally unlike him.

So what does that mean?

Kim Jong-Il, shown here trying to eat an entire pack of Shock Tarts at once.

Well, the U.S. intelligence community is currently pursuing rumors that Kim Jong-Il has had some kind of catastrophic health event, possibly a stroke, at some point in the last few weeks. It may even be the case that he is no longer functionally in control of the government - Anyone who follows international politics will no doubt have noticed that North Korea recently reversed itself on the dismantling of the Yongbyon nuclear reactor. Given that North Korea's military higher-ups were generally opposed to the six-party talks about North Korea's nuclear disarmament*, there's a fair amount of circumstantial evidence to suggest that perhaps Kim Jong-Il is out of action and some of his generals are at least temporarily running the show. (This is somewhat bolstered by the fact that his two eldest sons are apparently utter smacktards. Since the People's Army is the most powerful political entity in the country, if Kim Jong-Il's successor isn't family, it will almost certainly be someone within the armed forces.)

This is an interesting and potentially troubling situation, since if Kim Jong-Il is really dead or dying, the power vacuum caused by his passing could cause a struggle for control within the People's Army that could potentially destabilize the state. Not only would such a situation have adverse effects on both South Korea and China (mostly in the form of a potential tide of refugees), but it could also mean that North Korea's nuclear resources might very literally be up for grabs.

Keep watching the news on this one, folks. Something important may be happening.

*Some North Korean History Cliff Notes: North Korea's economy sucked to begin with and was utterly devastated by a series of natural disasters in the 1990s that left the country unable to support itself. China has spent the last couple of decades propping up the regime as, essentially, a buffer state between themselves and the U.S. forces in South Korea (and because a mass migration of North Koreans into China in the event of the collapse of the North Korean state would be a pain in the ass for the Chinese) but has increasingly come to view that arrangement as something of an albatross. There's some talk among international observers that North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons may have been something along the lines of an attempt to bully food aid out of other countries - Basically a weird attempt at backhanded begging while still salvaging national pride. It is apparently the case that certain honchos in the People's Army are unable with this arrangement and have been pushing for a more legitimately hawkish approach to be taken.

Ken Ham's Worried About Sarah Palin...

Ken Ham, of Answers in Genesis fame, is concerned about the new GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. I'm also concerned about Mrs. Palin, so could it possibly be the case that Ken Ham and I actually agree on something? That'd be the day.

Still, you have to admit that she has her fair share of worrisome blemishes. Heck, she belongs to a Christian Dominionist church with ties to Joel's Army, a group of super fundie Christians that spend most of their time hoping for the end of the world.* Plus she's also a longtime supporter of a bizarre Alaskan secessionist group call the Alaskan Independence Party that wants to break away from the United States and establish Alaska as its own sovereign nation. (To be fair, she never actually joined the AIP. Her husband was a member, they attended the group's conventions, and as governor of Alaska she filmed a video address for the AIP's 2008 convention, but she was never a member. You know, in much the same way Bill Clinton never inhaled.) She's also a creationist who wants religious explanations of life origins taught in science classes...oh, and she's completely opposed to any legal access to abortion for any reason...and she's trying to sell herself as an anti-pork reformer even though she sought $27 million in earmarks for a town less than half the size of the University of Louisville.

I could go on, but I think I've made the point. There are plenty of reasons for folks of my particular political bent to be concerned about Sarah Palin. On the other hand, she seems kind of like Ken Ham's cup of tea. What could he possibly be concerned about? Did her hypocrisy about pork-barrel politics get to him? Is he bothered by the fact that she's currently in the midst of an ethics investigation for the alleged revenge firing of a state official? Have his Christian values led him to have doubts about the human cost of the war in Iraq?

Nope.

Ham is concerned that she's not creationist enough. While he's glad that she's pretty creationist, he's concerned that she advocates the teaching of "scientific creationism, as opposed to biblical creationism" (Emphasis his. Also of note: there's no such thing as scientific creationism- it's all biblical.) and thus promises to "continue to seek out additional comments from Gov. Palin regarding her beliefs on creation/evolution" in order to warn his supporters if it becomes apparent that she's ever read a biology textbook.

Once again I'm reminded that True Believers™ live in a very different world from the rest of us.

*The recently disgraced, and always disgraceful, faith-healed Todd Bentley is also closely associated with this group.

Waterboarding Christopher Hitchens...

This has already been up on Pharyngula all day, but I thought it would be worth posting here. Christopher Hitchens, of course, is a prominent atheist commentator who also happens to have rightist political leanings that sometimes put him at odds with much of the rest of the secular community. Among other things, Hitchens supports the Iraq war as a means of achieving a secular democratic government in Iraq, regardless of whether some of the reasons the U.S. public was given for the war were bogus. Nonetheless, Hitchens volunteered to be waterboarded in order to determined for himself whether or not it constitutes torture. His article is here and the video is embedded below for anyone who's interested in seeing a prominent atheist undergo torture.



I would much rather this sort of thing be something that we here in the U.S. hear about other countries doing rather than something that our military is doing to other people. Barbarism is barbarism, no matter what well-intentioned ends one may have in mind.

A Strange Beast...

The National Organization for Marriage exists to stop people from getting married. Isn't that weird? You'd think it would be concerned with stuff like the enormous divorce rates in this country, since something like 25% of U.S. adults have been divorced at least once.* Or maybe they could deal with issues like preparing young people for marriage so they don't, as is the habit in my particular state, marry the first person willing to have sex with them, pop out half a dozen kids, then get divorced and let the state sort it out. Maybe they could even have an outreach arm like the Family Preservation Unit at the organization where I work, helping families under pressure stay together and, failing that, help to maintain the most stable possible environment for the children involved.

Yeah, all that would make sense for something called the National Organization for Marriage. Instead they exist solely for the purpose of keeping gay people from getting married. They're currently all in a tiff about the California state supreme court's ruling on Thursday that overturned the state's ban on homosexual marriage. This is it for California - the U.S. Supreme Court has no say over state laws on this issue, so barring a state constitutional amendment, gay marriage is in California to stay. Boy are the conservative groups upset. Obviously, of course, if gay folks can get married, the government will soon afterwards invalidate all heterosexual marriages and then pair us all with randomly matched same-sex partners. One in five of us will instead be paired with a random zoo animal.

No, wait, that's not right...

Oh, oh, now I remember! If gays folks can get married it doesn't affect the rest of us for squat. I've been reading NOM's website all morning, and I've read all three variants of their arguments against gay marriage (The NOM is multilingual- they speak Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish!), and I've yet to really see any justification for their position other than "we're uncomfortable with it on religious grounds", which is a legitimate feeling but not necessarily the best way to set national policy. Their answer to the question "Will same-sex marriage hurt your marriage" is as follows:

Same-sex marriage advocates want to force everyone to dramatically and permanently alter our definition of marriage and family. The great, historic cross-cultural understanding of marriage as the union of husband and wife will be called bigotry in the public square. The law will teach your children and grandchildren that there is nothing special about mothers and fathers raising children together, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a bigot.

Now, let's look at this. They're afraid that the government will make them think nice things about married homosexuals. That's a pretty pallid argument, not to mention the fact that they're already successfully resisting the aggregate weight of the entirety of modernity on other social issues, so what's a little government compared to that? Maybe if this statement were about something that the light of modernity has already shone brightly upon it would help us think about this more clearly:

Anti-slavery advocates want to force everyone to dramatically and permanently alter our definition of what constitutes a human being. The great, historic cross-cultural understanding of humanity as consisting only of the European races will be called bigotry in the public square. The law will teach your children and grandchildren that there is nothing special about people of European ancestry raising children together, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a bigot.

I'm aware that that comparison is a bit of hyperbole, but there's often something to be learned from exaggeration. The fact of the matter is that civil rights for minorities are very often opposed by the majority. Societal inertia in favor of a particular situation does not necessarily make the situation an equitable one. This is an issue of people have a rabid ideological opposition to something that won't effect them in the least.

Now, I don't care if churches don't want to perform homosexual marriages. No one is saying that they have to, and it would be an abhorrent breach of the the First Amendment for the government to legislate religious practices that way anyway. However, if a homosexual couple wants to be married by either a liberal church or by an agent of the state, I can see no legitimate reason to oppose that. What adults do with other willing adults is a matter of their own consciences about which the state should have no say.


*Ironically, the divorce rates sits somewhat higher among self-described "born-again" Christians, Baptists in particular, and is the lowest nationally among self-described atheists/agnostics and Catholics.

Wild Anti-Atheist Tirade From Illinois Legislator...

I'm a couple of a days late on this one (There's only so much time in the day and I had zombies to shoot.), but Illinois State Rep Monique Davis (a Dem, to my mild surprise), shouted down an atheist activist during a community discussion about the legitimacy of appropriating a million dollars in state funds to a Baptist church. Davis became irate during comments made by atheist Rob Sherman, telling him that his ideas were dangerous to children and then ordering him from his seat as though she somehow had that authority.

The church issue is a complicated matter - Apparently the governor had promised a Baptist church a sizable amount of money from the state to rebuild after a fire. There was some sort of controversy because the money was directed to the school by way of an enormous grant to a private school that operated on property rented from the church. The school itself was in a bind with state officials over a substantial amount of unpaid taxes, and there are rumblings in the community that the grant was directed to the school to deflect criticisms about the state funneling money directly into a church - the whole thing was a big mess, in other words. I'm not really familiar enough with this particular case to venture an opinion on it*, but the idea of a state legislator ordering a member of the community to leave his seat at a meeting because of his religious (non)affiliation is just plain amazing to me.

Davis caught a large amount of flak for her outburst, both from local news men and national news programs like Countdown, and ultimately issued an apology, claiming that she was simply on edge during the meeting because she recently learned of a school shooting in her district. Fair enough, but imagine, just for a second, the political fate of any politician who shouted down, say, a Baptist during a hearing because of his or her beliefs. I almost guarantee that it would be the end of their career.

Here's the audio from the tirade, as found on Chicago Tribune contributor Eric Zorn's blog Change of Subject.

*We recently had a similar controversy here in Kentucky. The University of the Cumberlands, a religious university in Williamsburg, has for years had a policy of kicking out gay students if their lifestyle came to the attention of school officials. The university maintained that because it's a private university it can set any standards for enrollment that it sees fit, even if they are direct defiance of the policies of state universities. That's technically true of universities that don't draw state funding. Of course, despite its fierce opposition to state standards, the university was more than happen to take $11 million in taxpayer money from the state in the form of scholarship funds and a new pharmacy school. The Kentucky Fairness Alliance ultimately defeated that funding proposal in court, much to the wailing and gnashing of teeth of many of the school's co-religionists.

Bones of Contention...

Outspoken atheists are occasionally accused of “jamming atheism down other people’s throats”. The sheer fact that we aren’t cowering in the shadows, afraid to stand up to the all the righteous religious folk running around out there, just sticks in some people’s craw. We stand accused of “intellectual snobbery”, “dogmatic naturalism”, and, of course, all kinds of throat-jamming. There’s a certain irony to all this that isn’t lost on us, but it quickly becomes tiresome and the specific accusations need to be addressed.

A commenter recently left a rather long post elsewhere on this blog regarding the “Out Campaign” logo in my sidebar. The Out Campaign is a campaign being run by Richard Dawkins to help atheists find the courage to publicly acknowledge their rejection of religion. Would that there had been such a campaign when I was in high school, to give me a bit of moral support in the face of the jeers of my classmates. (I caught a lot of flak in school for being an atheist. I won’t pretend that it was from everyone, or even from a majority of people, but there was a large handful of folks who took every opportunity to give me a hard time about it.)

To quote the Out Campaign site, it’s all about

“[allowing] individuals to let others know they are not alone. It can also be a nice way of opening a conversation and help to demolish the negative stereotypes of atheists. Let the world know that we are not about to go away and that we are not going to allow those that would condemn us to push us into the shadows.”

Naturally this is considered throat-jamming of the highest order. There’s some beautiful irony to this as our dear commenter is Garret from over on Ray’s blog. Ray, as you’ll recall, is all about street preaching, evangelizing, and blindsiding random folks with threats of hell if they don’t pray to his fearsome God Yahweh. I know of no atheist equivalent to this. I have never, nor has, to my knowledge, anyone else, set upon a believer on the street, harshly admonishing him that his religion isn’t real and that no he won’t go to hell when he dies ("There'll be no hellfire for you, and you'd better learn to accept that, damn it!") . That being said, I’m more than willing to do such things, with what I hope is a bit more nuance, on internet discussion boards – after all, if people didn’t want to discuss things they wouldn’t be there.

There are a number of fearsome stereotypes about atheists. We’re called amoral monsters, depraved sex fiends, and minions of the devil. The current president has even gone so far as to say that atheists should be considered neither citizens nor patriots. And most of all, whenever we contest these claims, whenever we talk about our atheism without apologizing for it, we’re accused of jamming atheism down everyone’s throats.

One thing that is of particular concern to me is that a lot of Christians who feel threatened by organized atheism seem to confuse the two concepts of secularism and atheism. I don’t know that this is the case with Garret, but it crops up enough that I’ll address it here anyway. When atheists such as myself talk about things like removing “in God we trust” from our currency (added 1865 for coins, 1957 for bills), deleting the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance (added 1954), or teaching empirically based rather than religiously based science in public schools, we aren’t talking about an atheist state, we’re talking about a secular state.

A secular government exists to, among other things, secure the freedom of conscience of all of its constituents. Specific endorsements of Christianity (in the United States) or any other religion (Islam in Iran, for example) undermine that principle. Recall, for example that the only mention of religion in our Constitution (I keep a copy in my jacket at all times) is Article VI, section 3 and explicitly states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust.” It may also be worth noting that the addition of God to the Pledge has, very literally, divided “one nation, indivisible”. A secular government provides for “equal separation”*, wherein neither the religious or the nonreligious are favored over the other. The desire here is for everyone to be protected equally, rather than having some folks held up as "more equal than others". There is no desire to place the religious at a disadvantage, but there is considerable desire on the part of atheists to pull religion down from its privileged place and put it on equal footing with the rest of us.

In any event, Garret’s two main concerns are not really so much about the Out Campaign itself but assumptions that he feels it unfairly makes. I will quote him in full and address each in turn:

“The claim to intellectual superiority because of rejection of supernatural claims such as miracles. This is an entirely metaphysical, philosophical construct, a BELIEF that is based on a "lack of evidence", and is a representation of what exactly constitutes knowledge, and how we come to know things.
This is not the only possible legitimate metaphysical reality, though it is presented as such. As an educated person, I realize that I COULD be deluded - that in fact (atheists) might have it right. This should always be an option on the table, for civility to remain. The claim to all logic, reason and knowledge fall within multiple worldviews and philosophies, and is a debatable reality. To not acknowledge this is intellectual snobbery, and intellectual suicide. One can claim that they are right, but to add that they are intellectually superior is another thing altogether.”

As usual, there’s an extent of course to which Garret is right. As the old canard goes, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Arguments from silence are never definitive. However, when it comes to the issue of the supernatural, this argument from silence becomes somewhat stronger because the silence is just deafening! Ghosts, miracles, the afterlife – to accept these things leads to assumptions about the world that can be empirically tested. Are there ghosts? Then we should be able to measure, interact with, or detect them. Is there an afterlife? Then NDE reports shouldn’t correspond so neatly with the physiological reactions of the brain to oxygen deprivation with occasional details of the individual’s religion training (regardless of what religion it is) shoe-horned in. Miracles? Should there not be miracles in modern times, measurable by modern means and flying in the face of understood natural mechanisms? What of “miracles” experienced by members of other religions (recall that Garret is speaking for Evangelical Christianity, not just general theism)?

It is not that people are not looking for evidence of these things – they are. Some people dedicate their entire professional lives to the search for ghosts or the verification of miracles. Yet always they fail. There is specific evidence that we would expect to find if such supernatural claims are true, but we do not. That is a powerful argument from silence. Sure, at some point in the future some supernatural phenomenon may be verified – something that so defies the current understanding of science that it forces a radical restructuring of our view of the world. When and if that day comes, I will be forced to seriously reevaluate my position on a lot of things.

That being said, those of us who prefer an experience-based worldview simply don’t have the evidence in front of us to decide in the way that our friend Garret has decided for himself. He, I can only imagine, would not buy into the contention that there is a magical purple unicorn flying invisibly around the solar system just outside of Pluto’s orbit. It's a patently ludicrous statement, but it cannot be disproved. Someone making that assertion would cause him, at the most, the slightest moment of pause. Why then, should we be compelled by his purple unicorn?

As for claims of “intellectual superiority”, I would note that it is a methodologically materialist worldview that yields useful results. As many of you know, I live in Louisville, Kentucky. One of the greatest sources of pride for my city is that it was the site of the country’s first hand transplant. A man named Matthew Scott lost his left hand to an M80 firecracker in 1985. 14 years later he received a transplanted hand from a cadaver and now has a functional left hand. Pictures of Mr. Scott at his 8-year check up are available here. It was methodologically materialistic science that gave this man a new hand, not metaphysics, spirituality, or miracles. In terms of real world results, it is naturalism that works, not supernaturalism. Another example, one that I am quick to point out, is that of Francis Collins, project leader of the Human Genome Project. Collins is an Evangelical Christian and devout believer in Yahweh (He is very impressed by the anthropic argument.), but his considerable contributions to the field of human genetics come entirely from his use of methodologically naturalist research strategies.

No one, to my knowledge, makes the claim that atheists are smarter than theists simply because we are atheists. (There is statistical correlation between level of education and non-belief in deities, but both of these things primarily correspond to socioeconomic class. That is to say that they often occur together because they both share an underlying factor, but they do not necessarily flow from one another.) Indeed, some theists, such as Dr. Collins, are eminent members of their fields. To pretend that religiosity is tantamount to stupidity is, in itself, asinine. We sometimes speak, however, of the irrationality of religious belief. Though he would disagree with that choice of terms, I suspect Garret would agree in spirit to what that means.

He believes, he has faith, in his deity despite the lack of concrete evidence. His god either lurks behind the natural laws that run the universe or dwells entirely outside them, never to be quantified by empirical methods. Nonetheless, he believes, not through evidence, but through faith. It sounds almost noble in some strange way, and it is something that most religions ask of their followers. Yet when we aren’t talking about religion, when we’re talking about purple unicorns and Sasquatch and faeries (or even science-ish things like orgone energy, n-rays, and Velikovskian cosmologyl), such claims of “faith” are quickly seen as irrational. Faith is inherently irrational. There’s an extent to which that’s the point.

His second concern is this:

“The claim that Christianity is illogical. It is perfectly logical IF the claims of supernatural in it are true, then Christianity logically follows from it! It is logical within itself and its own metaphysic, as it were. Even if one were to disagree- if you understand it properly and are able to understand the metaphysical concept that undergirds it, then you can see its logic.”

I understand what he’s saying here: Christianity makes perfect sense if the supernatural claims upon which it is based turn out to be true. Well…yeah. He’s 100% right on that one. He was, however, quite right in capitalizing his “if”. It’s an enormous if. There’s also an issue here that he doesn’t confront. I assume that it’s obvious to him and he simply left it out for the sake of brevity, but I’ll go ahead and state it here: ANY religion is logical if the supernatural claims under-girding it are true. That goes for Christianity. It goes for Judaism. It goes for Islam, Hinduism, Paganism, the Cult of Cthulhu, and Dungeons and Dragons. He’s right to say that “if it’s right, it’s right”, but there’s a limit to how far that logic can take us in a discussion.

On the other hand (and I run the risk of becoming snarky here), it must be admitted that there are doctrines of Christianity that, on their face, are quite paradoxical. The Triune Godhead, for instance. God is Yahweh, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and all of these are simultaneously parts of a whole and yet also distinct. (Like Voltron.) This is a strange act of mental gymnastics – preserving monotheism while still claiming full divinity for Jesus and making reference to an autonomous “Holy Spirit” that acts in hearts of the people. Clearly it is understandable that proto-orthodox Christians endured long periods of controversy over just how many gods there were and do what extent Jesus was divine. Likewise the very idea of the Passion of Christ as redemption for humanity’s sins makes little sense on its face, given the Triune Godhead. Jesus is simultaneously both God and God’s son, ergo God sent Himself to earth to suffer horribly in order to redeem humanity in His own eyes and move Himself to mercifully stay His own hand…? I could go on – theodicy, free will, and numerous other issues have confounded theologians since antiquity. The internal logic of Christianity is therefore obviously not self-evident even to people who spend their entire lives discoursing on it.

Again, Garret is right that if it’s all true, Christianity makes sense, but that “if” is enormous.

Well, I think I've said I need all I have to say at the moment. I suspect my friend will have numerous objections to the issues I've addressed here. Notably I anticipate that he will claim that he does indeed have solid evidence for the veracity of Christian doctrine, though I would be quick to remind him that the approx. 3.9 billion non-Christians on the planet, the vast majority of them belonging to some other religion, also feel that their faith is fully justified, and he needs to address their contentions as well as my own.

* See this excellent book by the late Dr. Paul J. Weber, one of my mentors. We didn't agree theologically - he was a believer and former Jesuit - but his Constitutional analysis of church-state separation is tight.

IFOs Part III - The Fallout

Last night, backdropped coolly against the total lunar eclipse, the USS Lake Erie successfully shot down USA-193, a disabled spy satellite that was crashing back into the Earth carrying with it half a ton of toxic hydrazine fuel. The missile, a Standard-3 originally intended to intercept ballistic missiles, was propelled, without a warhead, into the satellite and to all appearances has broken it up sufficiently to alleviate any danger it may have posed.

So what now?

Well, China and Russia are not happy campers. President Bush has, as we all know, shown a renewed interest in missile defense over the years and has actively campaigned in both Europe and Japan to establish a grid of overlapping counter-missile launchers to reduce what he perceives as a threat to the U.S. and its allies from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). This resurrection of Cold War era strategizing has rankled the Chinese and the Russians because they're the only two states left that are both on somewhat shaky terms with the U.S. and possess significant numbers of ICBMs.

Theoretically this missile defense system would be more of a method of keeping in line nuclear states with relatively small arsenals - states like North Korea or a potentially nuclear Iran. In the event of a nuclear attack, states like Russia and China could put too many missiles into the air at once for even a fairly grandiose defense grid to mean much, but a state with only one or two ICBMs available could conceivably be deterred by such a system. The intention is for this to not only neutralize such states but also to create a "chilling effect" whereby non-nuclear states might deterred from seeking military nuclear technology because they would, even for several years after its development, remain vulnerable to reprisals from the U.S. without being able to bring their nuclear weapons to bear.

In any event, Russia and China also see this as an attempt to neutralize their nuclear arsenals, and thus tensions have been running somewhat high for a while now. It seems to some as if the old arms race might be starting to roll again. Eyes have slanted on all sides and the three players here are looking at one another suspiciously.

All of this tension resulted in a stern rebuke of China by the United States last year when the Chinese successfully tested an anti-satellite missile by shooting down an old weather satellite. Like the missile launched from the Lake Erie last night, the Chinese weapon was not armed with a warhead, but unlike the U.S. SM-3 it was apparently designed specifically for targeting satellites. Naturally there was concern in the U.S. that this weapon could be used to target U.S. equipment in space.

Because of the criticism it received from the U.S. and others, China has been quick to accuse the USS Lake Erie operation of being a ploy for the U.S. to perform its own anti-satellite missile test. I'm actually inclined to put a little bit of stock in this. While the satellite posed some threat to people on the ground, it honestly was never really all that dangerous. While I don't have much reason to suspect that the entire issue with USA-193 was falsified, I think the decision to shoot it down probably did have something to do with testing the capacity of the United States to pull off such a feat. It was, as they say, a matter of opportunity.

It remains to be seen what the specific fallout of this situation will be. Russia is still disgruntled about the whole ballistic missile shield project, and China is of course angry about what they see as duplicity on the part of the U.S. on these matters. China and Russia are also two of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the others being Great Britain, France, and the United States), so there's a possibility that they may try and introduce a resolution formally rebuking the U.S. Such a resolution would, however, almost certainly be vetoed.

Regardless of the motivation behind it, the Lake Erie operation was a triumph of technology and it has been incredibly interesting to follow. Congratulations to the crew of the USS Lake Erie for a job well done.

On an interesting side note, it might interest some to know that storing weapons of mass destruction either on satellites, the moon, or any other "celestial body" is illegal due to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, so theoretically none of these anti-satellite operations have anything to do with nuclear deterrence. Nonetheless, missile technology has become one of the key ways in which opposing states try to show, as it were, whose is bigger.

Can't resist this one...

Okay, so this has long since been on Pharyngula AND Bay of Fundie, but I just have to have it embedded on here too. This is probably the most cringe-worthy religious/political diatribe I've heard this election season. I'm just going to show the video without commenting any more on it, except to say that these folks could use a visit to Snopes.

Slow news day in Japan...

Well, it's good to know that the Japanese really do have a plan for dealing with aliens and Godzilla. Giant monsters and zombies are two subjects that have spawned more elaborate planning from myself and my friends than almost anything else, and it's good, in kind of a sad way, to know that foreign heads of government have similar concerns.

FYI, the reason there's any question at all as to whether or not the Japanese could preemptively fire upon Godzilla is the good ol' postwar MacArthur Constitution, which abolished Japan's military and replaced it with a "self-defense force". (That's why when you watch Godzilla movies all the tanks say JSDF on them.) War is, in all seriousness, unconstitutional in Japan, and the country is prohibited from taking aggressive action on the battlefield. Even Japanese forces deployed in foreign lands as part of UN peacekeeping groups can only fight to protect themselves, allied forces, civilians, and Red Cross personnel. However, this could be circumvented in the case of Godzilla by declaring him to be a "natural disaster", as Minister of Defense Shigeru Ishida explained to, I assume, a dumbstruck crowd of journalists over the weekend. If Godzilla were, to borrow a phrase, classified as an "enemy combatant", it would technically be illegal for the Japanese to attack him should he be, for example, simply hanging offshore near the nation's coastline but not actually attempting to come ashore or eat ships full of Red Cross volunteers.

There's actually been some talk in the Japanese Parliament lately about getting rid of the JSDF and replacing it with a proper army, mostly in response to concerns about North Koreas's nuclear ambitions. It remains to be seen if the Japanese have a contingency plan prepared in case Godzilla should attack the Korean Peninsula in search of radioactive fuel to power his nuclear metabolism.