Prison Story, Part VI

I hate to provide fodder for conservatives, but here it is:  Not only do most prisoners support Democratic candidates and viewpoints, there is also a healthy dollop of far-left nuts locked up in the joint.  It’s nearly impossible to have a discussion about politics or current events without someone interrupting with one or more of the following:  George Bush is a murderer; America is an evil nation that bullies people and conquers land to steal their oil; America committed the worst crime in history by dropping atomic bombs on Japan; racist old white men run America; America and Israel are part of a movement to wipe out Muslims; the Jews control the media; 9/11 was an inside job to discredit Muslims; America commits terrorist acts all the time.

It’s amazing.  People like Rosie O’Donnell and Jeremiah Wright would fit right in.  Just the other day, I was drawn into a conversation with a couple of these guys, who seemed aghast that I would take up the position of defending America.  It’s shocking that they simply take all this nonsense as gospel and can’t cite the first bit of of a little something called “evidence.”

I ask them to provide one example of America or Israel participating in genocide, conquering a nation or stealing a nation’s oil since WWII.  Silence.  I ask them if they knew that conventional bombing had killed far more people in WWII than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did, or that such conventional bombing would have prolonged the war and resulted in even higher casualties.  Silence.  I ask them to name one instance of institutionalized racism by white politicians in modern America.  Silence.  I ask them to provide the slightest shred of evidence that 9/11 was an inside job – or counter the demonstrable evidence that it wasn’t.  Silence.

I remind them that America enriches nations by buying their oil, that we don’t get a dime of oil money from Iraq, that we don’t intentionally kill civilians, that we wouldn’t dream of making a political point by blowing up little kids and couples in cafes and filing clerks in high-rise buildings.  I remind them that the extremely few American soldiers who take part in atrocities are prosecuted by America.  I remind them that America gives more money to charities and foreign aid than any other nation on Earth.  I remind them that George Bush has put more effort and money into fighting AIDS in Africa than any president yet.  I remind them that America has freed millions of people from totalitarianism, that America defeated Nazism, that American innovation has improved the lives of people across the world, that American offers more freedom and opportunity to people than any other nation.  None of it matters.

The lack of evidence isn’t even the most stunning part.  Like most delusions, this one is self-feeding: Part of the fantasy is that they make it impossible for an outsider to prove it wrong.  For instance, I am told repeatedly that the reason I don’t hear the “truth” about America is that “the Jews run the media and cover it all up.”  Recently I told a guy who made this claim that this belief is no different from an Area-51 conspiracy.  He told me that he had evidence, that all I had to do was - this is dead serious – watch the credits of news programs and I would see that “they’re filled with Jewish names.”

My response was to ask him if an institution with a preponderance of surnames that begin with “Mc” and “Mac” indicates a Scottish conspiracy.  Or perhaps the reason why so many last names that end in “-son” are present in the sport of strength competition is because a secret cabal of Scandinavians is behind the scenes.

I try to look at the bigger picture in these situations.  No matter what the subject it, irrationality of this magnitude has a root cause.  If you honestly claim these types of things, you have a more pressing problem than being a jackass – you’re also incapable of using the tool of reason.

Why We Should be Proud of the Rich Getting Richer

Politicians (especially presidential nominees) are always promising to “make things fair for the working class Americans.”  Of course, rarely do things immediately and magically turn around after one of those politicians is elected.  Surprise, surprise.  Have working-class Americans ever noticed that they constitute most of America?  I mean, every politician has to appeal to them if they want votes.

Besides, I don’t mean to sound cold-hearted here, but is there something inherent in being a working-class American that requires help?  Are they at some sort of disadvantage?  Why?  Because the “rich are getting richer?”  So what?  Why do you care if the rich are getting richer?  If anything, shouldn’t you be proud that they’re investing and managing their money wisely?  Shouldn’t that inspire you?  Maybe you still don’t think it’s fair that some people have so much, but how does it help your position to complain about what someone else is doing?

I’m so tired of hearing people whine about America not being “fair,” and hearing politicians promise them that they’ll make it so.  Didn’t their parents ever tell them, when they were sniveling little children, that life isn’t fair?  That they’re going to have to work their asses off from adulthood on?  That sometimes they’re going to make bad choices and suffer the consequences?

Making things “fair” in American rings kind of hollow for me.  Don’t get me wrong – there should be fair opportunity for everyone, absolutely.  How about we start with tax cuts for everything?  Wouldn’t a flat tax be the very definition of “fair?”  How about we get rid of all government subsidies?  How about we let everyone compete in the free market equally?

But some Americans don’t want fair opportunity; they want their subjective idea of fairness enforced by legislature.  They think wealthy Americans should be taxed more heavily and have to follow different rules.  For some reason, they’ve decided that people should have the right to pursue success, wealth, and happiness – but only up to a certain arbitrary point chosen by them.  For some reason, they just don’t think it’s fair that others are earning a lot of money and they’re not.

I don’t think the definition of “fair” is to take other people’s money and redistribute it.  Furthermore, “fair” doesn’t seem like a very respectable goal to me.  Why settle for fair, when everyone can have the opportunity to go as far as they want?  These people have a rather defeatist view: Rather than attempt to elevate themselves, they want to lower others.

Why is it that people who complain about the wealth distribution in this country always think the solution is to steal from the prosperous, rather than urge everyone to become prosperous?  Do they have such low opinions of themselves and humanity in general?  Do they think these people they want to “help” are incapable of helping themselves?  How about none of us settle for being handed “fair” and instead strive to earn excellence?

Why the First Four Commandments are Inadequate

No other gods, no idols, no blasphemy, keep the Sabbath holy.  That is how the ten commandments – the supposed basis for all morality in the Western world – begin.  With instructions to be obedient that smack of very humanlike insecurity.

The ten commandments are what they are, but it’s simply an evident truth that the first four have absolutely nothing to do with morality.  They don’t teach people to act generously, they don’t offer any lesson about how to treat your fellow human beings, they say nothing about the nature of good and evil and what they mean to humanity.  They are simply warnings to be servile.

Is the First Amendment of the United States Constitution a moral document, a good law for altruistic people to follow?  Because it clearly contradicts the first three commandments.  God certainly didn’t give us freedom of religion (see commandment number one), freedom of expression (see commandment number two) and freedom of speech (see commandment number three).  So, who’s right?

Isn’t secular law inevitable for any good, decent society?  Aren’t freedom of religion, speech, and expression good, moral things – despite what any sacred book says.

The fourth commandment, an order to follow a ridiculous and puerile ritual of veneration, is the low point of the ten commandments.  How do you honor a being who instructs you on how to go about honoring Him?  Did Abraham Lincoln demand that we all wear tophats on his birthday to pay homage to him?  Did Martin Luther King Jr. even ask for a holiday?

Obedience is not morality.  If Abraham’s God wanted to ensure that we follow his laws, why not demonstrate that those laws are good, moral things to do because they help people, because they make life better for everyone?  Why would He stipulate that servility is a part of the moral code that all human beings must follow?  And why would He do it in such a way that makes Him appear to be a petulant dictator trying to frighten us?

And why did God need four commandments to impart this message?  Don’t the second and third commandments follow logically from the first, anyway?  Could not God have made His point about obedience in one simple commandment, therefore freeing up a few slots for some rather pertinent moral advice such as, “thou shalt not rape,” “thou shalt not own slaves,” “thou shalt not sell your daughters,” and “thou shalt not defile the earth at the expense of future generations?”

Prison Story, Part VI

Sitting in prison, I’ve accumulated a certain amount of cynicism.  For example, I now refuse to listen to my peers who complain about how little the jobs pay, how bad the food is, how lacking the commissary is, the fees we have to pay for various services, etc.  This is for two reasons: 1) I committed a crime and so I deserve to be here, so everything unsavory I have to deal with is my own fault, and 2) I live off taxpayer money, receive free health care, and never have to pay a bill.

They cynicism comes in when I see some of my peers who refuse to get a job in here and instead rely on the friends and family members to send them in money (to buy junk food, coffee, rent a TV, and so on).  They even complain when these checks are late.  They make statements like, “I’m not working in the kitchen for the State,” as if they’re above scrubbing pots, but have no problem robbing some innocent person and buying Sudafed to make meth.

Certainly I’ve asked my friends and family for help before, but I’ve always worked, and I don’t see any excuse why others shouldn’t.  I have very little sympathy when they relegate themselves to the level of a dependent.

But the other day, I called up a couple of my relatives and asked them for twenty-five thousand dollars.  Needless to say from the preceding paragraphs, it was difficult.  I even rehearsed saying the words beforehand, and my heart started to pound when it came time to ask.  For sure, this goes quite beyond a grown man sitting in the joint and asking his mom to send him a couple hundred bucks to buy a TV.

In my case, twenty-five thousand happens to be a rough estimate of how much I’ll need to complete a four-year degree through correspondence.  My relatives (who are by no means wealthy) need time to deal with something like that, of course, so it will be a couple weeks before I find out.

I wouldn’t have taken this route if there was any other way: Student loans or grants are not possible for inmates, and the amount I could contribute from my own institution checks is fairly inconsequential.  I also have to be honest and admit that there’s no way I can guarantee the ability to pay back such an amount with reasonable alacrity – I won’t even be able to really begin paying for eight years, when I’m released.

Twelve years after graduating from high school, I finally want to go to college, and I’m asking my parents for the money.  I can’t help but feel a bit infantilized because of it.

Mr. Incredible’s Incredibly Irrational Views

Lately I’ve been getting comments from a Mr. Incredible, the breadth of which I don’t have the time or space to try to explain (they can be read on several of my posts; almost all of them are random biblical quotes).  Basically, his every response to any question about Christianity is an appeal to authority: The Bible says this or the Bible says that.  The equivalent would be me stating, “Evolution is real because Darwin says so.”  I’d have to slap myself if I ever stooped to such an intellectual low.

Not to impugn Mr. Incredible here.  I realize that he’s made an a priori assumption that the Bible is the Word of God, literally true, and the ultimate authority on everything.  So he’s just doing what he does.  I think a view like this is the height of irrationality – before we treat anything as an authority, we need to establish its veracity.  In other words, show me some evidence that the Bible is what you claim it to be, Mr. Incredible.  Show me some evidence that a deity even exists in the first place, let alone your anthropocentric interventionist deity.  Show me some evidence why Christianity should be given any more empirical weight than say, Greek Mythology.  No offense, but I don’t think you can.  And please, please, for the sake of my sanity, don’t say, “Christianity is true because the Bible says so.”

I have to respond to one of the last things Mr. Incredible said about Darwin and evolution, since it’s one of my favorite topics.  He pulled a quote from Darwin’s The Descent of Man that stated something about men being superior to women, rightfully bashed that view, and then said: “Thus, if Darwin is wrong on this, we may so very seriously doubt his other conclusions on natural selection.”

Everyone pay attention:  This is how intelligence dies.

This is a textbook example of an ad hominem attack.  It’s obvious to most of us, but for Mr. Incredible’s benefit, who cares if Darwin was a sexist pig?  Darwin could have been a child molester – it wouldn’t make his theory wrong.  Hitler was a world-class piece of shit, but that doesn’t mean he would be wrong if said that two plus two equals four.

Me personally, I could care less about Darwin’s views on women.  Like most everyone else’s of that era, they were parochial.  They also have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the issue.  Honestly, Mr. Incredible, your argument is this: Darwin was a jerk, so therefore evolution is false.  Can you not see how that’s ridiculous?  The theory of evolution stands or falls on the evidence.  That’s what you need to defeat.  I’d love to hear you – or anyone else – try.

Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, and Sex Crimes

I heard that Katy Perry suggested she would like to kiss Miley Cyrus on TV, in emulation of Madonna’s infamous kiss with Britney Spears several years ago.  The first thing I thought was, “Isn’t Miley Cyrus a kid?”

But the guys around me were talking about it with wide eyes and hushed voices, like it was the hottest idea to ever grace their brains.  This struck me as amazing, because I live in an environment where sex acts with minors are not highly regarded at all.  For my part, my opinion was that a woman kissing another woman is erotic, but a woman kissing an underage girl is not.

One of the guys argued with me that since Miley Cyrus is sixteen or seventeen (I don’t know which and I don’t care) and the legal age of consent is sixteen in some states, it would be okay.  I asked him what the legal age of consent was in this state – his home – and he didn’t know.  I then asked him that if it were eighteen, would he feel okay about taking a sixteen-year-old girl to a hotel across state lines and screwing her.  To take it to a further extreme, perhaps I should have asked him what he thought about places in the world where he can go and legally fuck a thirteen-year-old prostitute.

I tend to be of the opinion that when we’re talking about sex between adults and kids, we should err on the side of caution.  Take the issue of these “attractive” female teachers having sex with their male students.  First of all, that the media would even call them attractive is repulsive; there’s nothing attractive about a sex offender.  Secondly, imagine someone in the media reporting about a male teacher having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl and referring to the teacher as a handsome man.  I don’t want to delve too deeply into the double-standard issue here, but the implication would be that the girl was lucky to snag such a hot guy.

To be honest, as a teenage boy, I would have loved it.  I wouldn’t have hesitated.  But that doesn’t make it okay.  When I was a kid I also thought things like smoking and drugs (and worse) were cool.  I was underage, and those teachers are child molesters.

One of the guys I was talking to asked me, “So are you saying that doing that would make Katy Perry a child molester?”  I said, “No, just a statutory rapist.”  I was saying that to get on his nerves – I don’t really care about this particular issue.  The point is just an interesting one to me, because I always want to know how and where people draw their lines.

Me personally, I believe that there should be age-of-consent laws, but that doesn’t mean I put much stock in those laws.  I don’t refrain from screwing kids because of a law.  I also don’t think that as soon as a girl turns eighteen, she’s fair game, as if some magical frontier of maturity has been crossed.  The very fact that the boundary is titillating to so many men (witness the ads for the “Finally Eighteen” Girls Gone Wild video) is disturbing to me.  Oftentimes there’s a “You’re all mine to despoil now” mentality that seems no different from the victimization of a child.

This is about holding ourselves to a certain standard.  If your idea of right and wrong is “I do exactly as much as the law allows,” that’s hardly any different from saying, “I do as much as I can get away with.”  I think we can all do better than that.

The Left-Wing Propaganda Machine

A couple weeks ago when Rick Warren asked John McCain how he would define “rich” (for the purpose of tax policy), the senator replied with a joke: “I don’t know, how about $5 million?”  It elicited a laugh from the audience, and McCain went on to say that people would surely take such a statement out of context.

Last night I got the new issue of Rolling Stone in the mail, and they mocked John McCain.  Next to a picture of him holding fistfuls of cash was this: “John McCain, when asked to define what makes someone rich: ‘How about $5 million?’”

Now I’m pretty sure the Rolling Stone editors knew exactly the context of that quote.  Jesus Christ, McCain even said that people like this would take it out of context, and Rolling Stone did it anyway!  I can just imagine all the kids who read this magazine that might not ever know what McCain really said.  I know Rolling Stone is an admitted left-wing publication, but this is dishonest and unfair.  That representation was a flat-out lie.

How about Rolling Stone print how John McCain actually responded to that question: “I don’t want to take anyone’s money; I want everyone to be rich.”

Jon Stewart is another example.  He created a cute little montage that showed Bill O’Reilly taking it easy on the Palin family about Bristol’s pregnancy and saying that it should be private business, then played a clip of O’Reilly calling the Spears family pinheads (when news of Jaime Lynn Spears’s pregnancy came out).  Stewart’s audience laughed and cheered at this display, thinking it evidence of O’Reilly’s hypocrisy and right-wing bias.  But this was completely disingenuous.  As O’Reilly himself pointed out, Stewart took him out of context eight times.

O’Reilly was calling the Spears family pinheads because of a general lack of parental supervision in the household, not just because of the teenage pregnancy.  Lynn Spears sold pictures of her teenage daughter’s baby for cash and press.  We should all be calling her a freaking pinhead.  I think everyone can agree Sarah Palin is not Lynn Spears.  And unless Stewart wants to claim that the level of responsibility and supervision in the Palin household and Spears household are equal, then O’Reilly wasn’t guilty of hypocrisy or bias.

The left always whines about right-wing propaganda, but here are clear examples of the opposite.  I’m as socially liberal as anyone; I can’t believe that I have to take the position of defending John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Bill O’Reilly.  No, I take that back – I’m not defending them.  I like to think that I’m defending rationality.  Reason.  Honesty.  The truth has intrinsic value, regardless of political partisanship.

Why Ann Coulter Thinks Evolution is False, Part VI

“Natural selection is a tautology.”

For those who don’t understand Ms. Coulter’s tactic of pointing out the tautological nature of a phrase like “survival of the fittest,” it is this: Natural selection is a pointless repetition that collapses upon itself.  It becomes a truism that can’t be falsified, which means it is not science.  It’s like saying, “The fittest organisms are the ones that pass on their genes, and they are passing on their genes because they are the fittest.”  It says nothing about the world, it’s meaningless.  You might as well say the color red is red because it has the properties of being red.

Upon first hearing this nonsens you might frown and ask, “So what?”  This is a foolish word game, a smirking bit of charlatanry, a philosophical trick to divert attention from the fact that the creationist has no empirical data to present.

All of us – including Ms. Coulter – know that natural selection works.  Even the staunchest creationists don’t deny that it can at least make small changes like alter the shape of a bird’s beak, or bring the sickle-cell trait to humans in malaria-ridden parts of the world.  Indeed, creationists often hijack natural selection to try to add scientific legitimacy to their Great Flood myth.  In order to get around the logistical problems of fitting so many animals on a ship, they say that Noah took only one “kind” of each animal.  For instance, only one feline pair was aboard the Ark, and after the flood was over, every modern feline, from tigers to tabbies, “adapted” from that one founding pair.

The only problem creationists have with natural selection is that they can’t accept it can make bigalterations, like changing one species into another.  They admit natural selection works, they just imagine some evanescent roadblock that prevents many small changes adding up to bigger ones.  In Ms. Coulter’s book Godless, she makes her position clear by demoting natural selection to only being able to make small changes within a species.

You can call evolution a theory, you can call it a fact, you can say natural selection is tautology – none of that matters.  The manner in which human beings label something doesn’t alter reality.  There is empirical evidence that natural selection is a real force that works changes in the real world.  You can go look at it.  There’s nothing esoteric about it, and no amount of creationist word-finagling is going to change the fact that we can all watch it happen with our own eyes.

Regardless, if Ms. Coulter wants to play this game, I can accommodate her.  Yes, it is a fact that every creature in nature cannot survive and pass on its genes.  There is a struggles for resources and mates.  Some creatures die while others live on.  This is a truism, but it’s not a tautology.  If, for instance, every creature was identical, loved for the same length of time, and asexually reproduced one identical offspring, then Darwinism would be wrong.  It could not be applies to the real world.

Evolutionary theory makes testable predictions about adaptations, about group selection, about sexual selection, and even about whether certain traits are adaptations at all.  Natural selection, or “survival of the fittest,” is not a tautology at all.  It is testable scientific theory – which means it can be falsified.

I suggest an actual tautology for Ms. Coulter to consider, the creationist staple knows as the cosmological argument for the existence of God: “There must be a first cause because everything has a cause.”

How Sean Hannity Convinces Himself that God Exists

On Hannity & Colmes, I’ve heard Sean Hannity mention a particular argument more than once.  This is the belief that all of existence is “perfect” and was therefore designed for human beings by a benevolent, omnipotent deity.  It is usually accompanied with some mention of how the laws of physics are all fine-tuned to make life possible for humans.

The only point this argument makes is that humans exist in a place where it’s possible for humans to exist.  Are we supposed to be shocked by this fact?  I’m not sure if Mr. Hannity could discuss the difference between the strong and weak versions of the anthropic principle, but perhaps he can at least admit that the universe must be capable of supporting us whether there is a designer or not.

I wonder if Hannity ever contemplates how the “perfection” of our solar system accounts for the deterioration of the moon’s orbit, the slowing of the Earth’s rotation due to tidal friction, the fact that the sun will eventually broil our planet to a cinder, or the mathematical certainty of a life-threatening asteroid eventually striking the Earth.  Has he considered the blatant waste in nature?  Ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever existed on Earth are extinct, our DNA contains vast amounts of junk, species have vestigial limbs and organs, and so on.  Those like Hannity evoke the teleological argument as Paley’s analogy of the obvious design of a watch.  But what watchmaker creates a watch with parts that are nonfunctional, parts that have prominent imperfections, and parts that seem to have once been used in simpler watches but are no longer needed?  What is “fine-tuned” about the appendix and wisdom teeth?

We are surrounded by a hundred billion galaxies, each with a couple hundred billion stars.  Much of the universe is empty space, and much of what is not is still inimical to human life.  Further, for most of the universe’s fourteen-billion-year history, humans have not been around.  Mr. Hannity would better serve the truth by saying: “Here on this obscure arm of an ordinary spiral galaxy among billions, revolving around one of billions of planets, in a tiny zone between freezing space and melting core – human being have managed to be part of a fragile balancing act with other carbon-based life for the last 0.00001 percent of the universe’s existence.”

Perhaps if cyanobacteria could think, they would beleive that their deity created humans and other animals for the purpose of breathing in the deadly gas oxygen that they emit as a waste product. 

The universe seems perfectly designed for human beings only when one assumes beforehand that we are special, that a place and a purpose were reserved for us.  This is a comforting and even understandable thought, but that does not make it true.

The Tactful Christian Response to Homosexuality, Part IV

Sometimes I get passionate about topics and use invective to underscore what I see as irrationality.  I try to stay away from ad hominem attacks and insults of any kind – but I generally have no problem calling someone’s argument ridiculous if that’s what I think.  But that’s an attack on their argument, not them.  I think the difference is important.

So it does with this latest attempt by Christians to be “reasonable” in their labeling of homosexuality as a sin.  The main thrust of the proposition is 1) Homosexuality leads to psychological problems like drug use, domestic violence, and unhappy personal relationships, etc., and 2) Since this is risky, self-defeating behavior, it is a sin.

The first point is nothing but an a priori assumption.  The main indicators of things like drug use, domestic violence and unhappy personal relationships are socioeconomic.  They cut across gender, racial, and cultural lines – they certainly cut across sexual lines.

Of course, this point also assumes that being gay is a choice, like one might choose to date irresponsible jerks or alcoholics.  As if gay people should simply refrain from pursuing same-sex relationships because the Christians warn that it might be correlated with risk factors.  Is that supposed to make them lead happier, more successful, less-risky lives?  Repudiate who they’re sexually attracted to?  Ignore who they wish to share intimacy with?  Or are Christians going to hold the position that they’re all delusional, and their “true” sexual orientation just needs to be brought out?

The second point is best summed up in a quote from someone I’ve been arguing with: “Risky behavior which isn’t necessary for greater good is indeed a major category of sin.”

I think a statement like that is ludicrous.  Are people supposed to weigh every risk they take in their lives to see if it coincides with the goal of the “greater good”?  Choosing some dangerous careers aren’t necessary for a greater good.  Skydiving or climbing Mount Everest isn’t necessary for a greater good.  Driving on a busy freeway at rush hour isn’t necessary for a greater good.  Eating butter with your meal every day isn’t necessary for a greater good.  By this rationale, people who do these risky things (all of which are much riskier than being a homosexual) are sinning.  A couple hundred people die every year from fires caused by Christmas lights – am I reaching to call putting up Christmas lights a risk that isn’t necessary for the greater good?

Besides, how do you define the “greater good”?  Are we talking about what is best for society at large?  If so the only two tenents we need be concerned with are: Don’t Victimize Anyone and Be Productive.  That’s it.  Granted, it’s a generalization, but that’s all that’s required for a healthy, stable society.   As long as you’re following those two rules, you’re contributing to the “greater good.”  At the very least, you’re certainly not harming it.