Hate politics

Just once you think politics can't get any more disgusting, someone goes and kills a bear and staples Obama signs on it, then dumps it on a NC campus.

A dead bear was found dumped this morning on the Western Carolina University campus, draped with a pair of Obama campaign signs, university police said.
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Maintenance workers reported about 7:45 a.m. finding a 75-pound bear cub dumped at the roundabout near the Catamount statute at the entrance to campus, said Tom Johnson, chief of university police.

“It looked like it had been shot in the head as best we can tell. A couple of Obama campaign signs had been stapled together and stuck over its head,” Johnson said.

This is just disgusting. I honestly cannot believe how vile people can be. What's the message even supposed to be? I'm guessing along the lines of the sick bastards saying things like "kill him!" at McCain campaign rallies (there is just no way Obama supporters did this).

How about this doozie:

Leroy C. McLaughlin finished his workday on Friday and was cooking dinner when a family member phoned.

The 4-foot-by-8-foot Barack Obama campaign sign that McLaughlin had posted in the front yard of his Chesterfield County home was gone.

A Confederate flag hung in its place.

Simply unbelievable.

15-year-old Sex Offender?

If you've read this blog for a while, you'll know that the ridiculous misapplication of sex laws to minors doing things to themselves/with other minors is something that infuriates me. So this story got my blood pressure up.

A 15-year-old girl is accused of distributing nude photos of herself to other minors, and one state legislator is questioning whether she should be labeled a sex offender.
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The Licking Valley High School student was arrested Friday after school officials discovered the materials and brought in the school's resource officer for a police investigation.

After spending the weekend incarcerated, she pleaded deny Monday to both charges: illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material, a second-degree felony; and possession of criminal tools, a fifth-degree felony.

Look, I'm not going to defend what she did, kids shouldn't be doing that crap. But expecting them not to is absurd, given our culture (I'm not complaining about it, but it's a reality people have to face). What we should do in these cases is give a strong reprimand, make the parents know that they need to be in charge of their children, and leave it be. Punish repeat offenders, but even then be lenient. I just cannot fathom why these people think labeling some poor 15-year-old a sex offender and charging her with felonies is in any way productive. It's not, and ANY reasonable person will agree.

The good news is that it seems like she won't get that life-destroying label, but I still think that holding her over the weekend was a ridiculous overreaction. Best of luck to her (and all like her), they'll need it dealing with our fucked-up legal system.

I think they found step 2

This is simply brilliant. So brilliant I won't even quote it, he deserves the pageviews.

It's about the ADF's Freedom Pulpit (or whatever the crap the stupid scam was called) yesterday, and how it's just a giant stunt for them to get tons of money, whether or not they win.

If it's true, and that's how they actually think, I have to say they're damn clever. Much more so than I would have guessed, given that they're the ADF. But thinking about them in the business of scaring stupid gullible Christians into giving up their money, it's very elucidating. Maybe they don't believe their rhetoric, maybe they know it's a scam...

It would certainly restore some of my faith in humanity. (Restore it because I'd rather people exploit others than actually be idiots.)

Prayer poster

I just moved into my new dorm, and today coming back from work (research, more on that later) I noticed a couple of white sheets of paper on the door across the hall from me. It said something to the effect of:

Prayer list.

Put the things you'd like [myself and my roommate] to pray for, and we'll pray for them. Leave your name or be anonymous, God knows who you are.

I just don't know how to react. A part of me wants to do something destructive to it, but that's just counterproductive. A much bigger part of me wants to write something incredibly mean/offensive on it, something along the lines of, "Pray for you two to get some brains and realize that your religion is a fairy tail." Although I'd probably go for something more ironic, "Pray for a world without the institutionalized evil that is religion." (And really, who doesn't love irony?)

I'll probably just end up doing nothing (believe it or not, I don't actually like starting conflicts), but I'll definitely watch what people put up, I wouldn't be too surprised to see something like my comments, although frankly I'd put money on nothing serious being put up at all. My experience here says that very, very few people are religious. But who knows? My experience also says they tend to be clustered, last year I lived around a bunch of people who regularly went to church, whereas I'd known one in the previous two years. So maybe there will be a bunch of asinine, selfish prayer requests combined with the few "noble" gestures ("world peace!!!11 lol"), because, after all, we're concerned about people other than ourselves, right?

Right?

(As a PS, I wonder what would happen if I put something up on my door that was quite offensive to religious people. I'm thinking along the lines of "university personnel start to harass me". I bet that I would be targeted, while I'm doing nothing that they weren't. Yeah, seeing the stupid thing made me angry, but guess what, it's their right to put up stupid things that make me angry. Just an idle thought.)

Am I back again?

I don't know if this new flurry of posting will last, but I am tired of writing about politics (every idiot is doing it, I have nothing new to say about anything), so now I'm getting ideas about other things, and I suppose I'll keep it up as long as it lasts. I'm just not fantastic at this whole blogging thing. But news posts coming, one immediately after this one.

Sharia courts in Britain now have binding power

Holy freaking crap:

ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.

That's absolutely unbelievable. Is this really what Britain has come to?

I don't think I can actually comment cogently on this. It's just too absurd, too shocking, too ridiculous. All I can say is that I can't even fathom something like it happening in the US, at least for the time being.

Absolutely unbelievable.

Sexual Harasser acted "gallantly", gotta love Russia

This is priceless:

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.

That's pretty unbelievable. Imagine the furor if that happened in this country. Although, if we had a declining population, who knows what madness would ensue.

The Banality of Evil

Read this. It's about the motivation for keeping the spying program alive and detainees in prison despite their almost certain uselessness and innocence (respectively). I'll wait.

All done? Noam's comment:

I mean, it's just fricking grotesque. You're tempted to call it Bond villain-esque, except in this case Cheney's evil seems more banal than Bond-ian.

reminded me of Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect. One of the key takeaways from that book was the notion of "the banality of evil", that normal people placed in terrible conditions can do terrible, evil things despite being utterly mundane, completely boring, and banal. We think that it takes some great evil power to do great evil, but in reality it just takes a bunch of normal guys in an absurd situation.

Although in this case it was self-made. I'm currently reading The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, (buy it, buy it now), and I just finished the part about how the paranoia and fear infected the administration after 9/11, and how a few guys hijacked the national security agenda and made it into a tool for torture, just because they were convinced it was Necessary. It's all so bureaucratic, so inane, so banal, that it's infuriating. It's like watching Generation Kill (which, by the way, you should also be doing), at times it makes you gasp with horror, and it makes your blood boil. But knowing the whole infuriating story is absolutely essential, lest we repeat this descent into madness.

The Legend of a Heretic

Here's a great piece on Robert Ingersoll from a NYT blog. The piece gives an overview of his life, and talks briefly about faith in public life. It is quite amazing to me that Ingersoll could be so prominent in politics while holding those views. The idea of the Republican party consulting Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or PZ Myers is pretty laughable.

Which is too bad.