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Draw Muhammad Day

May 20th, 2010 No comments

Long story short, in response to the South Park-Muhammad-Bear-Suit thing, secular groups at several universities, including here in town at UW-Madison, started drawing Muhammad in chalk. When campus Islamic groups reacted unfavorably, someone came up with the idea of ‘Draw Muhammad Day’ for May 20th. (I found out about it from the Friendly Atheist site)

I completely forgot about this all day, but fortunately, talent is not required, so I now present to the world my own personal drawing of Muhammad for Draw Muhammad Day.

IMG_0261

I apologize to fans of dinosaur art everywhere. Heck, I even apologize to dinosaurs – they’ve been dead 65 million years and never did anything to deserve my scribbling.

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The Fundamental Inanity of Rand Paul

May 20th, 2010 No comments

So Rand Paul has stepped in it over his libertarian ideology, for a time refusing in interviews to support nasty government intrusion like the Civil Rights Act. He has since clarified that, at least on that point, he doesn’t actively support *repealing* it. No word on whether he would have been in favor of its initial passage.

At the heart of all the hubbub here is, as one might expect from a man named Rand, the idiotic pseudo-philosophy of Libertarianism, the half-witted political descendent of his namesake Ayn’s ideas.

First, the cowardly tap-dancing on racism thing actually makes sense in light of Randian thought; Ayn Rand herself hated racism… in that she thought it was kind of the same thing as communism. Thus, it could be cured, as could all social ills, by laissez-faire capitalism.

No, really. Rand, for what it’s worth, saw racism as a flawed way of judging people based on innate characteristics beyond their control and irrelevant to their moral stature. On the other hand, she really hated gay people, because being gay is a completely voluntary choice and also icky. So go figure.

Of course, Ayn Rand’s prescription for everything was pure, almost entirely unregulated capitalism, so she’d have opposed the Civil Rights Act. The magic of the free market would desegregate lunch counters on its own. Her namesake’s pathetic dancing around the question gets to the heart of the flaw in both Libertarianism as a political philosophy and as a movement: it is childish, small-minded and thoroughly unprepared for the complexity of the real world.

Take Rand Paul’s ‘example’ of a restaurant owner being menaced by the big, bad government:

If you decide that restaurants are publicly owned and not privately owned, then do you say that you should have the right to bring your gun into a restaurant even though the owner of the restaurant says ‘well no, we don’t want to have guns in here’ the bar says ‘we don’t want to have guns in here because people might drink and start fighting and shoot each-other.’ Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant? Or does the government own his restaurant?”

See, for Rand and others like him, rights aren’t a complicated proposition dependent on the social fabric, they’re binary; you either have complete freedom, or you’re a kind of slave.

I’m reminded of something I was taught during an undergrad class for my POLS degree in a class on rights: namely, that every right carries with it at least one corresponding duty (as well as the inverse, a duty you’re obliged to perform relates in some way to another entity’s rights). An easy example is free speech: if a person has the right to speak his mind, then you have a matching duty not to knock his front teeth out in response to speech that offends you. Right, duty. In the Libertarian, aka Randian, worldview, only the right exists, and the necessary duties to enforce or enable it are often regarded as tyranny.

Randians claim the government exists to prevent violence and fraud, and thusly things like the police and the military are necessary and proper government functions, but they rarely extend the logic beyond this extremely simple perspective.

Take the hypothetical restaurant Paul talks about. It’s wrong for the government to intrude into the operations of a restaurant… yet it needs to protect its citizens against fraud or theft or violence. So, let’s say you own this restaurant: how is the government going to protect you from fraud? Well, I suppose for a start, it will have to produce a uniform currency, so that when you get paid, you have a reasonable expectation it’s real money. This could be paper, metal, or chickens, so long as everyone can agree on the value of the currency. Then it will have to police that currency, so add some more cops, counterfeiting experts and the like; in the case of chicken money, we’ll need chicken inspectors.

Now you want to buy meat for your restaurant (other than chickens, which are for spending); guess we’d better set up the USDA, hire some inspectors to make sure it really is beef that your supplier is selling and not stray dogs ground into a fine paste. (It’s hard to test the meat AFTER it’s been consumed for trace of Fido) Come to think of it, might want to get some testing done on microbes, make sure it’s actually fresh and safe to eat, even if it is a cow, so nobody sells you spoiled product. Oooh, but that means we have to set up laboratories, hire doctors and biologists, come up with standards for all of that, and then inspect them and enforce THOSE standards too. Tricky. We might as well do the same for the lettuce your restaurant buys, the flour, oil, butter, milk, etc.

You probably need a way to cook your food, come to think of it, so we’ll need to have a system set up so that you can fairly purchase electricity and/or natural gas, oil, etc, to do so. Darn though, we wouldn’t want your business to get ripped off doing that, so hire on some more inspectors, bureaucrats, and so forth. Since this whole prospect has gotten pretty complicated and expensive, we’re going to need a Treasury, accountants, and some system to pay for it all, aka taxation, so slap on some more government there. Can’t rob the government workers of *their* time after all; that’d be theft too.

Now the building your restaurant is in is a complicated thing. You have to be able to buy or rent the land, buy or build a structure on said land, stock, staff and occupy it, all without fear of being ripped off or robbed. So you’ll need the land surveyed at some point, plots drawn up, documents filed, heck, an entire office of land records and deeds is probably a good idea, better hire some guys to do that. To make sure you’re getting the building you thought you were paying for with your government regulated chickens, you might want some building codes, people to inspect them; it might be more straightforward to require certain training and licenses of builders and contractors beforehand, just to be sure. Now you need to get things like equipment, from stoves to napkin dispensers, and somebody needs to watch your back on all of that, so add in a ton of additional regulations, especially safety; nobody likes lead in their cookware these days. Messy.

I could go on, but the point is clear by now; the simple ‘right’ to own a restaurant is in fact an incredibly complicated proposition entwining public and private enterprises. One right to property on the behalf of someone who wants to sell burgers for a tidy profit creates a slew of duties and responsibilities for others, ranging from the obvious (don’t rob said burger store) to the less obvious (whether a slaughterhouse three states away can or can not slaughter a particular cow, for fear it might have Mad Cow disease). It isn’t all about the brave burger magnate, standing astride the food service industry like a god, creating value out of nothing. It is, in fact, a process, and it is both necessary and proper that, in exchange for all the benefits a government provides listed above, it ask for corresponding payments, aka duties, in return.

What about the specific example Paul brings up, the issue of guns? Well, what about it? Let’s say the government decides that, in fact, it doesn’t want guns taken into privately-owned restaurants. It turns out a lot of shootings are happening when people get drunk, and so restaurant revenue is down, as nobody really wants their kids dodging ordinance on the way to the condiment stand. That’s bad for government, in the form of increased outlay for cops and coroners, and bad for restaurants as a whole; on the other hand, let’s say we live in a fantasy world where there’s been some kind of alien invasion, and we need a well-armed populace to fight off Kang and Kodos at all times. Perhaps then the math would work out differently, and we would have to *require* restaurants to allow private citizens to carry guns for the public good (I’m really reaching for any sort of hypothetically plausible reason the government might dictate that you have to allow firearms in your burger joint, outside of NRA campaign money).

Of course the real issue Rand Paul is trying to duck here is that Libertarianism, despite its prophetess condemning racism, really has no answer to the problem of people being asshats. Human beings are not rational, no matter how much Ayn might have wanted it to be so, and they persist in acting irrationally and hatefully down through the generations. (And that doesn’t even start to address the fact that racism can be highly lucrative, and thus a rational path to great wealth). Though an individual, hateful burger joint owner might not like serving a particular ethnic minority, the fact remains that said minority pays into the same system that inspects his meat, patrols the streets outside his shop and protects him in the event of a fire, that hauls away his garbage and makes sure his sewage ends up somewhere far away and not right back in his own tap water. They’re citizens, and they have a right to their piece of the pie, a pie they helped pay for. So when your idealized, small-minded entrepreneur takes all the innumerable benefits of our civilized society, our police, our firefighters, our streets and electricity, inspections on our food, courts to settle our disputes, when they take value out of that system, and then refuse to pay out their obligation according to the law to the same individuals who support them in a hundred direct and indirect ways, they’re not being brave iconoclasts.

They’re thieves. The very worst kind of people, supposedly, to a property-minded small government type like Mr. Paul. They’re robbing people of their government’s time, and therefore of their tax dollars, by refusing to treat them like any other citizen, despite having been the direct beneficiary of so much aid from the government they claim to abhor.

So if they don’t like it, they’re free to go try and open a burger stand in Somalia. In the meantime, desegregating lunch counters is a small price to pay, an inconsequential duty to trade for your rights.

A small price, unless you’re Rand Paul.

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Being an Atheist on the National Day of Prayer

May 6th, 2010 No comments

I learn today through my compulsive news feed monitoring that May 6th, 2010 is the ‘National Day of Prayer’ here in the United States. I also learn that it may be the last. Hopefully.

My first inclination was naturally enough to ignore the whole thing. After all, I have chores to do, books to read, and a pleasant walk to the grocery store to make (because I forgot to buy onions last weekend). Why worry about the government poking the non-believer population with a rhetorical stick? Not like it’s the first time.

This year’s different though, and for whatever reason, there’s finally some real resistance to the most powerful government in the world leaning on its citizens to pray.

First, a Federal judge in Wisconsin is filling my transplanted heart with pride, having ruled that the government setting aside a day and telling its citizens to pray flies in the face of the First Amendment, which was supposed to leave such matters up to the individual:

In her ruling, Judge Crabb said that the NDP “serves no purpose but to encourage a religious exercise, making it difficult for a reasonable observer to see the statute as anything other than a religious endorsement.” Judge Crabb also wrote: “It bears emphasizing that a conclusion that the establishment clause prohibits the government from endorsing a religious exercise is not a judgment on the value of prayer or the millions of Americans who believe in its power. No one can doubt the important role that prayer plays in the spiritual life of a believer. . . . However, recognizing the importance of prayer to many people does not mean that the government may enact a statute in support of it, any more than the government may encourage citizens to fast during the month of Ramadan, attend a synagogue, purify themselves in a sweat lodge or practice rune magic.”

Judge Crabb also ruled that the law “does not have a secular purpose or effect” and does not “survive scrutiny under Lemon and the endorsement test. . . . The statute does not use prayer to further a secular purpose; it endorses prayer for its own sake.”

Interestingly enough, none of the mainstream press mentions I found about this controversy mention *why* it came to a head here in Wisconsin: as it turns out, this is the result of a longstanding lawsuit against the White House from the Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation. It started out suing Bush and Dana Perino, and has since moved on to targeting President Obama, Robert Gibbs and others. (The reason it names the press secretary is because their office issues the annual proclamation)

The FFRF is controversial even here in ultra-liberal Madison, and can come off a bit bristly, but I’d like to offer them a hearty congratulations on this victory.

Second, beyond issues of the appropriateness of government endorsed prayer, the rather seedy nature of the people who run the National Day of Prayer has come to light. First, one of the Graham clan of creepy bible thumpers had to be disinvited to lead an NDP event at the Pentagon after objections over some of his less tolerant positions:

The Army recently rescinded its invitation to Graham to participate in the Pentagon’s Day of Prayer event after he made controversial remarks about Islam.

“True Islam cannot be practiced in this country,” he told CNN’s Campbell Brown in December. “You can’t beat your wife. You cannot murder your children if you think they’ve committed adultery or something like that, which they do practice in these other countries.”

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Graham — son of famed evangelist Billy Graham — called Islam a “very evil and wicked religion.”

Whoever could have guessed that mixing the state and religion would lead to a struggle for religious dominance of the state, and fighting amongst the believing population? I’m shocked, shocked!

Well, not that shocked.

In all seriousness, this was especially predictable considering that the people running most of the NDP are a bunch of Grade A Whackjobs:

Yet the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a nonprofit organization founded in 1988 and led by Shirley Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, limits its events to people of “Judeo-Christian” heritage. Only Christians are allowed as state coordinators.

Christians say anyone is free to organize a prayer event outside the task force’s purview.

Yes, that’s right; the National Day of Prayer is effectively a Focus on the Family/Dobson bible-thumping clan production… with an annual press release put out on White House letterhead.

Feel squicky yet?

What this ultimately boils down to is a debate over the role of government, not just in religion, but in all matters of personal conscience. Do you really want the government setting aside days for particular belief systems, then handing over its bully pulpit and microphone to whatever crazy/adherent happens to scream the loudest for attention that year? Do you think that the government of a nuclear superpower should ever be used for directly religious ends?

It is therefore also about the gradual infiltration and dismantling of a largely secular government in favor of something very different. Jeft Sharlet has written extensively on this subject, and how seemingly innocuous entanglements of church and state are in fact the vanguard for some truly unsettling movements. (The National Prayer Breakfast, for example, is run by the secretive cult known as ‘The Family’) Meanwhile, Dominionist factions work to subvert the military from within (particularly the Air Force) and turn it into a tool suitable for spreading a grand Christian empire. A recent post on FDL discussed the difficulties of rational decision making under such influences.

Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is another example of the trend, having both his own infamous mercenary army and ties to Timothy LeHaye (of Left Behind fame), James Dobson, the Family Research Council and of course the GOP.

So here we are, on May 6th, 2010, debating the merit of a National Day of Prayer. On one side you have a tiny activist group looking out for the rights of atheists and agnostics in a country that, and let’s not mince words, hates us. On the other you have, at least for the moment, the Obama Administration backing the Grahams and the Dobsons of the world, who would like nothing better than to turn the United States into a theocracy once and for all.

But who knows; maybe next year the first Thursday in May will go without the state sharing a stage with religion.

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