For Southern Rights, Hurrah!

Will our Civil War never end?

Candice Hardwick, 15, said she wants to wear the Confederate emblem to pay tribute to an ancestor who fought for the South in the Civil War.

Latta High School officials say the symbol, which many people consider racially charged because its ties to the era of slavery, is disruptive in school, and that district policies allow principals to ban such clothing.

The teen said she has been forced to change clothes or turn her shirt inside-out. She said she has been suspended twice and threatened with being kicked off the track team.

On one hand, it seems ridiculous that the losing side of a war (the Confederate States of America, which our southern states, once formed) should be allowed to perpetuate an emblem of its insurrection. But on the other hand, it seems ridiculous that a nation as tolerant as ours should be bothered if current citizens want to memorialize their ancestors, who fought as bravely as and often at greater cost than their northern counterparts.

Furthermore, it is both irrational and historically inaccurate to automatically consider a Confederate flag “racially charged” because of the C.S.A.’s ties with slavery. The northern states may not have been slave states, but they were plenty racist, too. As well, there were admirable ideas behind the Confederacy, too. In fact, the idea that the state and local governments should have more power against the federal government was a major part of their movement, and still holds sway with many Americans of both formerly “Northern” and formerly “Southern” states.

More Americans should study their Civil War more carefully, without just buying the typical textbook version that the Northern States were the Good Guys, the Southern States were the Bad Guys, and the War was fought “to free the slaves.” It was a far more complicated affair and it clearly still reverberates throughout our society.

Don’t Pray for Me

Here is yet another study that says intercessory prayer doesn’t work. Better yet, the researchers found that when people knew they were being prayed for, they had a higher rate of complications after a coronary bypass operation.

Don’t expect that to stop people from praying, though. People who believe in prayer will never, ever be convinced by a scientific study:

“We don’t need studies like this,” says behavioural scientist Richard Sloan, an authority on prayer and medicine at Columbia University in New York City.

Prayer is highly valued by many people, says Sloan, and there is no need for scientists to empirically prove whether or not it works. “It’s demeaning of the religious experience.”

I wonder how you get to be an “authority on prayer” while resisting studies of its efficacy. Nor is it very logical or scientific to say that, since prayer is highly valued, there is no need to prove whether it works. Huh? Well then, let’s just say that since molesting innocent children is apparently highly valued by an alarming number of Catholic priests, then there is no need to prove whether it has a detrimental effect on anyone. The basic logic behind Sloan’s comment is this: If something is highly valued, there is no need to determine whether people’s reasons for valuing it are rooted in its objective value or in their subjective need to value it. Not only is that stupid, it’s dangerous, because it is exactly that kind of logic that gives religious people a blank check to do whatever they want, just because it is religiously meaningful or valuable to them.

How to Be a Stupid Annoying Customer

Come into the bookstore where I work and phrase your request in the negative: “You don’t have such-and-such book, do you?”

When I calmly say, “Sure, let me check,” you can be sure that in my head I’m thinking you need to be strangled for your impudence.

If you don’t want me to think you’re an arrogant jerk who doesn’t really want good service, then ask your question as it should be: “Do you have such-and-such book?”

Otherwise, bug off and go somewhere else.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Facts

Enjoy this crack reporting in the hometown paper. The secret to good religious reporting is to only interview one religious authority from one religion, right?

Sorry, one priest from one religion is not a fair representation, especially when he says things like, “The process of cremation was put into practice in the 1800s to deny the resurrection.” Uh, no.

Rosebud

This just in:

Based on a telephone survey of more than 2,000 households and in-depth interviews with more than 140 people, researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, homosexuals and other groups as “sharing their vision of American society.” Americans are also least willing to let their children marry atheists.

. . .

Those surveyed tended to view people who don’t believe in a god as the “ultimate self-interested actor who doesn’t care about anyone but themselves,” [associate professor of sociology and lead researcher in the study Penny] Edgell said.

Meanwhile, if people said they wouldn’t vote for a Christian they would be accused of persecution and people who said they wouldn’t vote for a Jew would be accused of antisemitism. But saying that an atheist is the “ultimate self-interested actor who doesn’t care about anyone but themselves” is perfectly acceptable in our society.

The only solution, of course, is for atheists to get together, take over both the Democratic and Republican parties, simultaneously get a candidate nominated by each party, and leave the nation with no choice but to put an atheist in the Oval Office. (Don’t worry about all those little third parties that actually care about and address the real issues; Americans don’t care about real issues; Americans only care about which party you came from.)

But my solution depends on atheists actually organizing and that will never happen. Put two atheists in the room with each other and they’ll start looking for ways to distinguish themselves from each other. They’re even worse than Christians at agreeing on things.

Permit All Books

Michael Schiavo has a new book out: Terri: The Truth. Already there’s an entertaining and disturbing non-review at Amazon.com. This is from somebody calling itself “Me“:

I would not permit this book in my home. Out thoughts and prayers are with Terri’s birth family.

How much will the “loving husband” and his attorney make from this little venture?

Good job, “Me.” That’s the way to be a responsible citizen; keep books out of your home if they might offend you. Also, make sure you decide whether they might offend you not by actually reading them and finding out what’s inside, but by whose name is on the cover.

Freedom means all ideas and views are permitted. Freedom means you have to tolerate precisely those views that you find offensive, because if you only permit the views that are friendly to your own then you do not really believe in freedom; you believe in oppression and censorship.

Better Dead than Red

Today, you can go online and look up the names, pictures, and crimes of people who have already done their time in prison so you can picket outside their houses, make their lives a living hell, and otherwise invade their privacy, just because they’ve been labeled “sex offenders.”

But now we have this fascist wag up in Sacramento who wants to chip away at the privacy of citizens in another area. Here’s the idea: if you’re twice convicted of drunk driving, we give you a red license plate.

Listen, politicians and anti-crime nuts: the way to stop drunk driving or any other crime is not to remove privacy and start making people wear scarlet letters — er, uh, I mean scarlet license plates — because they’ve done something wrong. The potential for shame may deter a few people, but listen, and here’s the important part: people who repeatedly drive drunk are already clearly not thinking about consequences. Did you get that? Shame is not a deterrent!

Who does this Ray Haynes fellow think he is, anyway? Did he read 1984? Did he read The Scarlet Letter? Did he read Les Miserables? Does he have any idea how far this idea of shame and the invasion of privacy as a deterrent has already been explored by civilized culture and found abhorrent again and again and again? But he’s lucky, because none of his rabid anti-criminal, anti-liberty constituents are aware of this either.

See, it goes in small steps. First we get used to the idea of legislators criminalizing and regulating things in the name of some vague social good (when really they’re all just competing to look good for their constituents — “Look! Look what I did! Now re-elect me and I’ll do it again! This time with no hands!” — infantile slaves to power that they are). We’re all quite used to that by now and our legislators can regulate and criminalize to their hearts’ content while the electorate hardly blinks. It’s great that they regulate and criminalize everything, because we the people are too stupid to think for ourselves and be responsible! Tell us what to do, O Great and Powerful Legislators!

But then comes the really insidious thing where we get used to the idea of giving offenders some kind of public mark that they can’t escape. Now we’ve ceded all authority and social responsibility to our legislators, trusting that whatever is left to do that is still legal will be precisely those things that are favorable to the greater social interest, and we’re ready to give our government the ability to publicly mark people so we know which ones to avoid. (“No dear, we can’t live here — there’s a sex offender next door and a repeat drunk driver across the street!”) This is how you establish castes and ghettoes.

So what’s next? Tattoos on people’s foreheads elucidating the crimes of which they have been convicted? (The Greeks and Romans did it, why shouldn’t we?)

Funny thing, this Ray Haynes fellow also seems to be one of those Christian Republicans (or at least one of those Republicans who pretends to be a Christian to get the evangelical vote). So, Mr. Haynes. What happened to that forgiveness stuff? You clearly don’t think people are capable of change or repentance; otherwise, you wouldn’t favor publicly marking them for their sins. That doesn’t fit very well with the teachings of the “Judeo-Christian heritage,” at least so far as I (or these people) understand them.

If you live in California, contact your representative in the State Assembly and share your concerns.

The Problem of Education

I recently picked up my copy of John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2003; revised edition) to have a second look — I read the whole thing last year. Gatto’s writing tends toward disorganization and invective, but there are lucid bits that bear extended quotation. Here is one I re-encountered this afternoon, from page 382:

Experts have consistently misdiagnosed and misdefined the problem of schooling. The problem is not that children don’t learn to read, write and do arithmetic well — the problem is that kids hardly learn at all from the way schools insist on teaching. Schools desperately need a vision of their own purpose. It was never factually true that all young people learn to read or do arithmetic by being “taught” these things — though for many decades that has been the masquerade.

When children are stripped of a primary experience base as confinement schooling must do to justify its existence, the natural sequence of learning is destroyed, a sequence which puts experience first. Only much later, after a long bath in experience, does the thin gruel of abstraction mean very much. We haven’t “forgotten” this; there is just no profit in remembering it for the businesses and people who make their bread and butter from monopoly schooling.

The relentless rationalization of the school world has left the modern student a prisoner of low-grade vocational activities. He lives in a disenchanted world without meaning. Our cultural dilemma here in the United States has little to do with children who don’t read, but lies instead in finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life. Any system of values that accepts the transformation of the world into machinery and the construction of pens for the young called schools, necessarily rejects this search for meaning.

Schools at present are the occupation of children; children have become employees, pensioners of the government at an early age. But government jobs are frequently not really jobs at all — that certainly is the case in the matter of being a schoolchild. There is nothing or very little to do in school, but one thing is demanded — that children must attend, condemned to hours of desperation, pretending to do a job that doesn’t exist. At the end of the day, tired, fed up, full of aggression, their families feel the accumulated tedium of their pinched lives. Government jobs for children have broken the spirit of our people. They don’t know their own history, nor would they care to.

In a short time such a system becomes addictive. Even when efforts are made to find real work for children to do, they often drift back to meaningless busywork. Anyone who has ever tried to lead students into generating lines of meaning in their own lives will have felt the resistance, the hostility even, with which broken children fight to be left alone. They prefer the illness they have become accustomed to. As the school day and year enlarge, students may be seen as people forbidden to leave their offices, as people hemmed in by an invisible fence, complaining but timid. Schools thus consume most of the people they incarcerate.

If that interests you or enrages you, I suggest you read the whole book (which is available entirely online, or you can buy a hard copy).

One caveat, however: On some issues, particularly concerning religion and secularism, I think Gatto is way off base. He fatally misreads both Christianity and secularism and appears to think that no good can come of secularism, no matter how good the intentions, and no evil can come from Christianity, so long as it is practiced correctly; that bipolar characterization establishes two Pure Good and Pure Evil ideals that have little relation to reality.

Blind Allegiance to Authority

My brother says political posts are not his forte but he has hit the nail on the head. One of his coworkers commented, “I mean, if the cops arrested them, then they must be guilty.” My brother responds:

I’m angry but not surprised. Blind allegiance to authority. Well, she’s wearing a uniform, and she’s got a gun on her hip, she wouldn’t ever make a mistake and arrest the wrong person. He drives that patrol car with a light bar on top and carries handcuffs and keeps a shotgun within reach, he can tell who the guilty are just by lookin’ at ‘em. Pardon me while I grind my teeth.

Hmmmm…thinking, thinking. There must be some historical evidence of blind allegiance to authority and the outcomes. Crusades? Probably not. Maybe the Spanish Inquisition? Naaah. Ooh ooh, Abu Ghraib? Remember that one? No, no blind following there. What was it Bush said? “Trust me.”

Read his full account here, join the discussion, and spread it around.

I shall close with a passage from Henry George:

It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve.

The Future of Children

A man has decided to stand up against the idea that only women should have complete control over reproduction. Read the sad story here. A lot of it just makes me angry at people who live irresponsibly both in their own relationships and in the use of their reproductive organs.

But I can also see the seeds of legal arguments that may give traction to the idea of removing reproduction from the hands of individuals, where it always requires the cooperation of two people who, in our increasingly atomized and individualistic culture, are more likely than not to have conflicting goals and prerogatives. The birth and raising of a child is a singular end, which, when performed by two people as parents, requires by definition a division of labor and a coordination of vision. But so long as people continue to convince themselves that divisions of labor are intrinsically inequitable (along similar lines as the racial desegregation “separate but unequal” idea) and that the First Amendment gives them freedom from the compromise of their personal vision and goals, and therefore freedom from cooperation, then the social and legal incentives to two-parent homes will continue to erode.

If both the mother and the father, both of whom are still required to contribute gametes for successful reproduction, either by the enjoyable old-fashioned way or the only-enjoyable-for-lab-chemists test-tube way, have no incentive or desire to take responsibility for the fruits of their reproduction, the argument only strengthens that this function be taken from them. It will get even stronger as the universal pre-school movement progresses and the two eventually meet up and create a continuous, state-mandated and state-controlled child-production facility. (I know that sounds crazy, but just keep watching. The historical trend has been going for over 150 years now; we’re closer to the end than the beginning.)

Anyway, all of this makes me angry. I just want to have a family the old fashioned way, with one mommy, one daddy, a few kids, and a dog, with as little government interference as possible. No absent parent, no child-support payments, no pre-school, no public school, no state-funded after school programs. Just interesting people who care about each other.