Experiments in Woolgathering

I finally read an article that explains the social ills and history which lead up to the riots that are spreading across France.

To say the least, it was very eye opening. I think many people here, me included, have western Europe on a bit of a pedestal (and, as it turns there are still people in other countries do this with the US – our recent foreign policy notwithstanding). It’s not like I didn’t France has poverty and disenfranchisement, at some level this is unavoidable, I just never guessed it existed on the scale described in that article. Just as I have heard foreigners amazed that New Orleans had so many people that were so poor they had no means to leave the city. Though who can blame them? Apparently our own government was unaware of this as well.

What’s worse still is that it apparently takes large scale rioting or natural disasters to get our governments heads out of their asses to notice these problems. Will they stay out long enough to actually do something though?

I was talking to friend Ester from Iceland this morning and she told me that she and the other women were walking off the job at 2:08.

My first two thoughts were that it was just at her workplace and why 2:08?? The first was wrong, it’s nationwide Women’s Day Off, and the reason for the second is that the average wage difference between men and women is so large that at 2:08 they will have worked enough to earn the same amount as a man. Do the math, yes, women only make 64.15% of what men do.

I was floored by this. That’s bordering on crimminal in a westernized nation. Hell, they should walk about a lot more often if you ask me.

I very curious to know how many men show up to protest alongside them. Have to remember to ask.

Update

Some pictures from the march can be seen here (the article is in Icelandic, sorry).

Iceland, Discrimination, Feminism, sexism

Last night we got a call from R’s mother. One of her cousins, Bryce, was in a bad car accident yesterday morning. Apparently an oncoming car swerved to avoid something and ran head on into him. He’s alive, but not breathing on his own and in a medically induced coma while the swelling in his brain goes down. There were two people in the other car, one of whom is dead and the other apparently not expected to make it. Bryce was alone in his car. (more…)

I’ve been trying to be optimistic about the continuing debacle (at least from a progressive point of view) that is the Bush presidency. It’s been alternately easy and difficult.

Easy because I’ve been so busy, I can sort of forget about. Also, like many things, these things go in cycles and eventually (I hope) the country will swing back around. Additionally, he’s out after this term, and hopefully he’s done enough damage that enough people will vote for some other party that we can at least get a moderate Democrat as president. (I’ve no illusions about actually getting someone progressive in; I’m optimistic, not delusional.)

Hard because everytime I turn around it seems like I’m hearing about thinly veiled religious groups trying to introduce junk-science into our science class rooms, our president claiming his God is on our side (as if God takes sides, I would assume you choose to be on his side, or not), his administration is commiting another foreign policy debacle or assault on the environment; a book is being banned from some school because it ‘promotes’ paganism/occultism/homosexuality/swearing (usually means mention, and typically in the context of how deal it). As an aside, if someone is worried about books promoting sweating in high school. they are seriously barking up the wrong tree. The swearing is there already, quite a bit of it in fact.

Anyhow, you get the idea.

Then I read this article, Welcome to Doomsday, by Bill Moyers. (Go read it, this post will still be here when you’re done.) If you didn’t google for the “Rapture Index” here’s the page to which he’s referring.

Now, granted Moyers gives us a few slivers of hope, but all-in-all that’s a pretty depressing and scary summation of the state of things in this country. Also, I’ll certainly grant that Moyers is liberal, but I think he tends to be an honest journalist. (Unlike, say Michael Moore, who, despite so much verifiably true material on the subjects of his documentaries still can’t resist overstating and misrepresenting.)

While personally I think this Rapture business is a bunch of fucking bullshit and any god that would inflict this on a world is a sadistic asshole, I will allow for possibility, however slim that the Rapture is just around the corner and what we do as far as the environment doesn’t matter for beans. But guess what? Maybe we shouldn’t bet the farm on this. ‘Cause, you know what, if you’re wrong and we have to clean this mess up, the price tag is only going up. Not to mention that in the meanwhile, we have to deal with and suffer through all the pollution driven problems that already exist.

How did we come to this delusional justification of our irresponsibility? I mean, really. 33% of the world is Christian and only a fraction of them buy into this – and really this seems to be a very tiny fraction outside of the US. It’s a very dangerous state of affairs. Because the US, which is still the most influential and polluting country in the world and because, given the currently political landscape here clearly are able influence things a great deal, here we are. The country most able to do harm or help is tipped to the side of “screw it, it won’t matter anyhow”. How depressing.

Doomsday indeed.

Lots of people bitch about Christian fundamentalists or Muslim fundamentalists, but really, most fundamentalists of all stripes are a pretty lame lot.

The irony of most fundamentalist movements is that they are rarely about the fundamentals, they’re about control over others, and imposing their views and beliefs on non-believers (and this is not limited to religion of course).

Anyhow, this deplorable behavior aside, frequently fundamentalists have some rather strange ideas compared to the mainstream.

For example, take people who object to the teaching of evolution in science classes. The Pope has stated that the teaching of evolution is not damaging to religion. Now, differences between Catholicism and various Protestant sects aside, I’m going to state that the Pope is way more qualified to speak on what is damaging to religion than most other people. What the Pope realizes here is that, regardless of how the present state of the universe came to be (God, aliens, spiritually sterile Big Big+evolution) the 150 year history and refinement of evolutionary science has demonstrated countless times that experientially, this is how the world works. And thus, because God seemingly intended it this way/the Aliens designed it/it just worked out this way we are required to work with in this framework if we really want to advance human understanding, and do things like cure cancer, or AIDS, or the common cold.

Now, I don’t want to pick on just one group of fundamentalists (Christian ones are primarily responsible for the assault on science in the science classroom). Therefore I present excepts from The Ayatollah’s Book Of Etiquette (come to us by way of Bookslut).

Just remember ladies, if your period starts while you’re praying, you have to start over. The Ayatollah says so.

This is a non-book review because I haven’t read this book. Skimmed parts, read several reviews of, but that’s it. That said, what Crichton did here was, if you ask me, unethical, and frankly, with this book I’ve pretty much had it with his ‘science bad’ schtick. (more…)

Recently several school boards here in the US have started requiring that Intelligent Design (if you aren’t up on what ID is and want to read the rest of this post and not be confused, read the stuff at this link) be taught in biology classes. Their reasoning for this is that because there are aspects of the development of life on Earth that the Theory of Evolution can’t explain we have no recourse but to fall back on some supernatural entity to fill in the gaps.

I see this as akin to humans thousands of years ago trying to appease deities to which they’d accredited the causation of natural phenomenon in order to stave off the next drought or to induce a milder winter or to keep them safe from lightning. They have no rational explanation (yet), and so they throw up their hands and don’t try.

(This also gives me visions of the Barbie doll that used to say ‘math is hard’ or something similarly implicitly demeaning toward women, although this is perhaps less relevant.)

Now, first of all, pretty much all theories have or have had gaps and these gaps are steadily filled through research and experimentation (and history bears this out again and again and again and again – you get the idea). Can you imagine where we’d be if Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch had just thrown up their hands and attributed the causation of disease to intelligent design just because biology and medicine didn’t yet have a theory to explain the communicability of disease? Hurrah for 18th century medicine and sepsis!

Are we to explain the timing of earthquakes by appealing to Poseidon’s (and you thought he was just in charge of the oceans, hah) irritation with us because geologists haven’t figured out how to predict them?

What reveals their agenda to some extent is that they don’t attack other theories, some of which are much less solid than evolution. This agenda, of course, is to promote religion in public schools. And ‘they’ are mainly the neo-conservatives and religious right – the overwhelming majority of scientists feel that introducing ID into the classroom is a very bad idea.

What’s funny is that it’s really a false dichotomy if you ask me. Maybe there really is an intelligent designer. Maybe the Christian God did create the world 6K years ago and just set up everything to make it look like it all kicked off 15 billion years ago with a huge explosion. How do we tell the difference?

Even if there is an ID, we can not deny that modern scientific research and methodogy has been a successful mechanism for discovery and learning for hundreds of years. Now, I’m not going to try to argue that science is some sort of holy grail (sic) – we’ve done some pretty horrible things with the tools science has given us, as well as some truly great things I’m just saying that clearly it works, whether because we live in a theistically vacuous universe or because the ID set it up to work the way it does.

Either way, it seems to that we have an obligation to keep pecking away at the truth. To figure out how to predict earthquakes, to find a cure for cancer, to develop renewable energy sources. Maybe somewhere in our explorations we’ll discover real evidence of ID. Even if we never do, it doesn’t rule out matters of faith. By definition, it can’t. If it turns out that the ID is omnipotent/omniscience and its existence really is a matter of faith then so be it, we’re never going to find the evidence, but there still seems worth in advancing human understanding!

I have a couple other basic issues with the ID agenda. First, the main idea behind the separation of church and state is to protect everyone’s religious freedom. If the IDers succeed in getting their creationist toe in the door, what next? How do we decide who’s brand of creationism to teach? To say we’re a Christian nation (which makes my teeth itch, btw) and leave it at that is ridiculously naive. Christians span a huge range of creationist scenarios: young earth, old earth, biblically literal, biblically metaphorical, and so on. Not to mention the fact that there are Christians who are evolutionists! Keep subjective religious matters out of the objective scientific classroom, for all our sakes.

Second, by promoting the ID agenda, these people are in essence admitting that they need scientific proof – i.e. denying the role of faith. Now, obviously this isn’t the case for all religions, but most (all?) Judeo-Christian sects(and lets face it, that’s who makes up the religious right in this country) state that belief in God is a matter of faith, not proof. Can’t they see they’re taking a huge risk here?

What happens if we do finally come up with a seamless theory of evolution? By hitching their religion, their ‘faith’, to a formerly incomplete scientific theory they’ve done the truly faithful a monstrous disservice and left the ones who bought into their crazy scheme out in the cold.

Here’s a link to start exploring this who ID/evolution this. It’s anti-ID in the classroom, but there are links that will get you to the pro-ID in the classroom stuff. And here’s a link that explains the over all argument, albeit from the anti-ID-in-schools side as well.

Yeah.. the election.

Where to start? (more…)