“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).” — Ayn Rand
I’m watching one of my favorite movies, and I ran across one of my favorite movie monologues:
“Criminals aren’t complicated. We just have to figure out what he’s after.”
“With respect, Master Wayne, perhaps this is a man *you* don’t fully understand, either. A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for the local government — they were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in the forest by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months we never met anyone who ever traded with him.
“One day, I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.”
“So why steal them?”
“Because he thought it was good sport, because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
When you run across people like Pastor Numbnuts who wants to imprison gay people for being gay, or Rush Pillhead who is a walking, breathing advertisement for misogynistic hatred, or anyone who uses the Qu’ran or the Bible to forward messages of hate as if they were immutable truths, think about how likely it might be that those people just want to watch the world burn.
“In the United States last week there were people who wouldn’t let boys play a baseball championship final because a girlwas on the opposing team. She’d already had to sit out two games because of their demands. Why? Did she, a competitive athlete and a member of her team, chose to? Was she being good and respectful when she acceded to their demands? Why were they not asked to forfeit their games? What messages were sent to her and her teammates? This is not complicated. It sent the wrong messages. Confusing messages. Incoherent messages. You need to know that she should have been allowed to play and not have had to sit out two games. These people, and others like them, all over the world, led exclusively by religious men, are scared of you and will not let you be.”
and
“…whereas [not playing a baseball game because there is a girl playing for the opposition] is a type of daily, seemingly harmless micro-aggression and the other [honor killings] is a lethal macro-aggression they share the same roots. The basis of both, and escalating actions in between, is the same: To teach you, and all girls subject to these men and their authority, a lesson: “Know your place.”
This author, Soraya Chemaly, really really does get it. She sees the connections, both large and small, that make the Patriarchy such a pervasive, corrupting influence on women. Almost everything she says also applies to minorities. And LGBT folk. And anyone who isn’t a middle-aged well-to-do white male.
Read this article. Pay attention to it. Like so many other injustices and unpleasantries in this world, you must start fighting them at your local level, one-on-one.
As my brother John commented: “I’ve always known this. Why isn’t it more apparent?”
Nick Hanauer
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Here’s the thought from Nick Hanauer that resonated most strongly for me:
“The extraordinary differential between the 15% tax rate that capitalists pay on carried interest, dividends, and capital gains, and the 35% top marginal rates on work that ordinary Americans pay, is kind of hard to justify without a touch of deification.”
Samuel Clemens is one of my greatest heroes. I love his works, I admire the man for his stances, and I laugh at how often he deflated the self-important and lampooned the pompous.
Here is one of my favorite quotes of Mr. Twain’s, from the first volume of his Autobiography, published 100 years after his death (finally!):
“There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory as it is–in our country particularly and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree–it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime–the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled.”
(The format of his official autobiography is a rambling collection of anecdotes and observations — my favorite form of reading.)
Why was this such an unpleasant surprise to wackaloon neocons?
Oh, wait! The same bunch were also taken aback in 1964…
…and 1948…
…and 1919…
…and 1868.
Why are there always people out there who use religion/culture/tradition as a smokescreen to hide the abject terror invoked by the thought of extending full civil rights to those who don’t have it?
Who invented and popularized AC electricity (overridden by Thomas “Whole-Hearted Thief” Edison and stolen from by George Westinghouse)?
Who invented and explored X-rays (credit taken by William Roentgen)?
Who invented radio and radar (credit for radio taken by Marconi, and radar for the Navy blocked by Edison)?
Who investigated the effect of cryogenic temperatures on electronics (a precursor to superconductivity)?
Who invented an earthquake machine that really worked?
Who invented neon lighting, and the modern induction electric motor, the spark plug, the remote control, and developed the fundamentals of radio astronomy?
“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).”
The fine folks in North Carolina (and Mississippi and Tennessee and Missouri and all the other states who have enacted Jim Crow anti-gay marriage constitutional amendments) should take this to heart, think back to the bad old days where mixed-race marriage was not allowed and women could not legally vote, and ponder on what it took to throw off those levels of bigotry.
Much, much thanks to Mr. Gaiman for asking, and to the New Yorker Magazine for making the comic below available. It was drawn by Sendak and Art Spiegelman (of Maus fame), and has been made available to the public:
The ultimate task for the people is to remain vigilant and aware ~ that the government, their government is out of control, and this moment, this opportunity, must not be forsaken, must not escape us, for we shall not have any coarse but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November
The real treat, though, is to see at just what level of ignorance the source comes from.
Click to enbiggen
I just thought I’d throw in a few helpful hints on grammar, spelling, syntax, legibility, and sentence construction. (The rest of the newsletter is in about the same shape — but then, I’m sure that comes as no surprise to anyone.)
How the hell are we supposed to take anything these wackaloons say at any serious level?
Yesterday North Carolina travelled back in time to 1875, and here is the state constitutional amendment that was added:
As ThinkProgress points out, 137 years later North Carolina passed its next amendment dealing with marriage, with just as little foresight and just as much fear and hate.
An old acquaintance reminded Facebook readers last night of Plato’s comment: “Ignorance: the root and stem of all evil.”
Just so you all know just where the Jews have fitted into the world picture:
This is what happens when religious wackaloons like Australia’s Archbishop George Pell start winging it during a debate:
Cardinal George Pell said ‘the little Jewish people’ were shepherds who lacked intellectual development during a debate with atheist Richard Dawkins. He went on to claim that Germans had suffered more than the Jews during the horrors of the holocaust in the Second World War.
The remarks came during a televised debate with Dawkins on Australian TV in which the pair became locked in a heated discussion on religion and evolution.
Here is the entire debate (about an hour in length):
If I may, let me call “bullshit” on George:
out of 850 Nobel Prize laureates, 170 are/were Jewish (less than 1% of all people are Jewish) — not to mention the preponderance of Jews in the rolls of winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony, and the Oscar
On the other hand, the Catholic Church (among many other Christian denominations, and Islam) has a long history of actively fighting against progressive movements, in particular the areas of women’s rights.
Melinda Gates and the Gates Foundation have announced a new initiative, and it’s one that might just bring a little mist to the eyes:
(The video is long, but like most TED talks it is well worth getting through.)
The Gates Foundation is working toward two new goals:
Make contraception available to anyone in the world who desires it
Instigate research into new forms of contraception, preferably methods that do not involve use of hormones
Indeed, the latter goal is something that has gone by the research wayside over the last 50 years. There has been no serious scientific work on new contraceptive methods since the advent of the birth control pill in the ’50s and ’60s.
Gates makes telling points in her speech:
Controlled studies beginning in the 1960s in the Matlob district of Bangladesh have shown that villages that had regular access to contraception had healthier, longer-lived, and better educated children, and the villages were more resource-rich (arable land, livestock, and savings).
Anti-contraception groups (such as the Catholic Church) attempt to attach the issues of abortion and draconian population control onto efforts at making contraception available to women in third-world countries, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and China. Gates states that those efforts highlight side issues that detract from the important ones. (Gates has also stated that she does not approve of abortion.)
The “miracle” of Asian economic development in the 1980s was greatly fueled by the cultural shift in most of the affected countries to have smaller families.
The most effective method to bring about the best conditions for children is to work on contraception as voluntary population control from the bottom up (at the family level) rather than mandatory efforts from the top down (government dictates and legislation).
[She] believes that by focusing on the lives of women and children, and by making it clear that the agenda is neither coercive population control nor abortion, the controversy over international family-planning programs can be defused. Right now, she points out, 100,000 women annually die in childbirth after unintended pregnancies. Six hundred thousand babies born to women who didn’t want to be pregnant die in the first month of life.
and
Part of what Gates hopes to do is to re-create the former broad-based consensus behind global family planning, but in a way that’s focused on women’s needs rather than on demographics. “This is about empowering women to be educated and to make a choice that they want to make,” she says. “And if you look at what happens demographically because of that choice, you then get some of these outcomes that people were hoping to get worldwide.”
It was so nice to hear some good news about someone who has the power and resources to make things happen.
And that is one of those “every good things”.
And also, lest anyone get the idea that wingnuts might consider the notion that voluntarily controlling the size of one’s family might be a good idea…think again:
There’s a lollipop for anyone who can find a promotion of abortion or an attack upon Catholics in her speech.
(A bear hug and a warm soft kiss to The Spouse for bringing this one to my attention.)
I’m watching one of my favorite movies, and I ran across one of my favorite movie monologues:
