Yesterday, Friday the 26th of February, suddenly a lot more people started viewing my web sites. Not a tidal wave, but about 10x my normal rate. Looking at my web statistics, I found the site that had been sending people to my sites.
It turns out my essay America: Republic or Democracy? had been linked to from the Alpine School District web site in Utah. "Educating All Students to Ensure the Future of Our Democracy," a staff member had added the link in response to parents who have been influenced by the radical right-wing view that democracy is a bad thing.
An angry parent who does not think his children are smart enough to stand being exposed to ideas other than his own attacked the district, and the controversy went to a school board meeting. Rather than summarize that second hand, I'll let you read "District Parents Parents Angry Over Radical Web Link" at the Utah Valley Daily Herald.
The angry parents, or their leader anyway, had navigated from my www.williampmeyers.org site where the essay in question is posted, to www.iiipublishing.com. As regular readers know, III Publishing began as a publisher of satire. And there is still a great deal of satire at this site. As the home page says, "This site includes a mix of serious, carefully researched factual matter, fiction, satire, and opinion, just like the major news sources." He lied to the other parents and school board (lying is a classic when the truth leans against you) saying the districts site linked directly to where I advocate "radical socialism, limiting families to two children, abortion to term, homosexuality, worshipping the sun instead of a 'dead Jesus,' saying that Mary was just an unwed pregnant teenager, and many other socialist political views." I think he must feel I advocate homosexuality because I did take a position in favor of marriage rights for gay couples, back in 2004 when that was more controversial even in California.
Since I myself served on a public school board, I know what it is like to be in a room with a potential lynch mob. Probably the board had more important things to do (like teaching kids to read, write, do math, and think critically) than spend the next year defending my essay to a lunatic who believes that Jesus rose from the dead, that God wrote the U.S. Constitution, and that democracy is a bad thing. The link had already been removed, and the Board said it had been a mistake all along. Since I am a critic of religion, they could have said (had they done some research, and been capable of critical thinking themselves) that the link violated the separation of church and state. That would have probably have put angry leader in a bit of a bind.
The story might have gotten lost, but a scientist blogger picked it up and defended me. He has a similar last name, PZ Myers, and his blog is called Pharyngula. The actual entry is I am offended! There are lots of good comments to the blog entry.
I think America: Democracy or Republic? stands up to criticism pretty well. That is why American fascists hate it. It does take a pro-democracy position, but the framework is factual. I think conservatives are correct in saying that the U.S. Constitution established an undemocratic republic. What is scary about a tiny-but-vocal minority of conservatives is that they advocate returning to a republic where only people owning substantial amounts of property (and even then not women or non-Europeans) would be allowed to vote.
There is always a danger when you use irony or write satire that you will be mistaken for the nut case, rather than the guy who is illustrating the nuttiness of other people. I accept that. Vampires or Gods? is written in the style of a serious, non-fiction book, which is why it is such a good satire.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
Bundling Immigration, the Economy, and the Environment
A few personal notes before getting onto the topic of the day:
I am now getting abusive email from a neo-Nazi who objects to my America: Republic or Democracy? essay. He favors republics over democracies. And presumably dictatorships over republics. I am sure conservatives who prefer a republic with minority rule by the rich are really glad to have neo-Nazi protection of their flanks on this issue.
Volunteers collected enough signatures to put me on the ballot for the state assembly race as the Green Party candidate (1st Assembly District, California), but not enough that I could be on without paying a filing fee, and not as many as I said I would require to show that it was worth running. The incumbent Democratic Party guy raises hundreds of thousands of dollars every cycle. If I had governed California as bad as he had I would fall on my sword, but this guy just has staff members collect his signatures and pay his filing fee. Even if I coughed up the filing fee, the expense (time and energy as well as money) of running a campaign is not the best use of me this year. On the other hand I have until March 12 to make a final decision.
My spring garden is well underway. Fava bean plants are about 4 inches high, radish sprouts are visible, and the earliest apple and plum trees have already started blooming. My tea plants were devastated by a rabbit or other rodent a few weeks ago, so I put wire cages around them and am hoping for a recovery.
I did a lot of good thinking about an Assembly campaign. How would I answer a question on immigration? Immigration is a great example of bundling issues, and the problems that causes.
The left, including the centrists who call themselves liberals, like to be pro-immigrant. The right is mainly anti-immigrant.
But the left also tends to be environmentalist, and most environmentalists will admit that we have an unsustainable global population. The population of the U.S. is too large too. My district is traditionally forested, so we could probably convert more forests to food production and sustain a larger local population, but lefty environmentalists are against that. You would think environmentalists would be against immigration, even legal immigration. It not only raises the population (and stress on the environment) in the short run, but immigrants tend to have a lot of children, so it leads to even more stress in the long run.
For many conservatives the bottom line is not "unborn babies," but the economy. That is why taxes are so important to them. They want economic expansion, the environment be damned. Low taxes are a priority. So you would think they would favor unlimited immigration, at least for middle-class to rich immigrants. Think how fast housing stock would be dried up if anyone who would buy a house would be allowed to immigrate legally and immediately.
So why is pro-immigration sentiment bundled with contradictory leftist views, and anti-immigrant sentiment bundled with contradictory rightist views?
Emotionally leftists can identify with immigrants; conservatives see immigrants are foreign in a scary way. Other issues feed into these basic emotions. Liberals and conservatives both say they care about human rights, but the rights they care about differ in subtle ways. I think the liberal-left feeling is that you really need to treat all individuals equally, so if someone is physically present in the U.S., even after illegal entry, they should be treated like citizens, who are citizens precisely because they are phyiscally present.
Conservatives feel no similar obligation. Human rights are largely property rights, and property rights have a history for each individual. To the extent citizenship is a property right, you can't just get it by standing on American soil. You need to establish title.
Would it be possible to change the bundling? I have seen it tried several times. I have seen environmentalists argue against illegal immigration (trying to get large organization like the Siera Club to take a sensible position). They get screamed at as being racist neo-nazis for even trying to discuss the subject. On the other hand I have seen many attempts by Republican business men to try to get fellow Republicans to show some sense about the business benefits of immigration. Even former President George W. Bush tried to make this argument. The only result was that Republican politicians learned to keep any pro-business, pro-immigration ideas out of their campaign rhetoric. The rank-and-file will not stand for it.
Locally (Humboldt County and Mendocino County, California) the talk is usually in terms of development. Liberals and environmentalists are usually anti-development but pro-immigrant, which is contradictory. Conservative are pro-development and anti-immigrant. Also contradictory.
I would like to see the immigration issue unbundled from the liberal v. conservative fight so that we can talk about it rationally. There are economic benefits to high level of immigration, and there are environmental consequences to immigration. There are also legitimate human rights issues involved.
I am now getting abusive email from a neo-Nazi who objects to my America: Republic or Democracy? essay. He favors republics over democracies. And presumably dictatorships over republics. I am sure conservatives who prefer a republic with minority rule by the rich are really glad to have neo-Nazi protection of their flanks on this issue.
Volunteers collected enough signatures to put me on the ballot for the state assembly race as the Green Party candidate (1st Assembly District, California), but not enough that I could be on without paying a filing fee, and not as many as I said I would require to show that it was worth running. The incumbent Democratic Party guy raises hundreds of thousands of dollars every cycle. If I had governed California as bad as he had I would fall on my sword, but this guy just has staff members collect his signatures and pay his filing fee. Even if I coughed up the filing fee, the expense (time and energy as well as money) of running a campaign is not the best use of me this year. On the other hand I have until March 12 to make a final decision.
My spring garden is well underway. Fava bean plants are about 4 inches high, radish sprouts are visible, and the earliest apple and plum trees have already started blooming. My tea plants were devastated by a rabbit or other rodent a few weeks ago, so I put wire cages around them and am hoping for a recovery.
I did a lot of good thinking about an Assembly campaign. How would I answer a question on immigration? Immigration is a great example of bundling issues, and the problems that causes.
The left, including the centrists who call themselves liberals, like to be pro-immigrant. The right is mainly anti-immigrant.
But the left also tends to be environmentalist, and most environmentalists will admit that we have an unsustainable global population. The population of the U.S. is too large too. My district is traditionally forested, so we could probably convert more forests to food production and sustain a larger local population, but lefty environmentalists are against that. You would think environmentalists would be against immigration, even legal immigration. It not only raises the population (and stress on the environment) in the short run, but immigrants tend to have a lot of children, so it leads to even more stress in the long run.
For many conservatives the bottom line is not "unborn babies," but the economy. That is why taxes are so important to them. They want economic expansion, the environment be damned. Low taxes are a priority. So you would think they would favor unlimited immigration, at least for middle-class to rich immigrants. Think how fast housing stock would be dried up if anyone who would buy a house would be allowed to immigrate legally and immediately.
So why is pro-immigration sentiment bundled with contradictory leftist views, and anti-immigrant sentiment bundled with contradictory rightist views?
Emotionally leftists can identify with immigrants; conservatives see immigrants are foreign in a scary way. Other issues feed into these basic emotions. Liberals and conservatives both say they care about human rights, but the rights they care about differ in subtle ways. I think the liberal-left feeling is that you really need to treat all individuals equally, so if someone is physically present in the U.S., even after illegal entry, they should be treated like citizens, who are citizens precisely because they are phyiscally present.
Conservatives feel no similar obligation. Human rights are largely property rights, and property rights have a history for each individual. To the extent citizenship is a property right, you can't just get it by standing on American soil. You need to establish title.
Would it be possible to change the bundling? I have seen it tried several times. I have seen environmentalists argue against illegal immigration (trying to get large organization like the Siera Club to take a sensible position). They get screamed at as being racist neo-nazis for even trying to discuss the subject. On the other hand I have seen many attempts by Republican business men to try to get fellow Republicans to show some sense about the business benefits of immigration. Even former President George W. Bush tried to make this argument. The only result was that Republican politicians learned to keep any pro-business, pro-immigration ideas out of their campaign rhetoric. The rank-and-file will not stand for it.
Locally (Humboldt County and Mendocino County, California) the talk is usually in terms of development. Liberals and environmentalists are usually anti-development but pro-immigrant, which is contradictory. Conservative are pro-development and anti-immigrant. Also contradictory.
I would like to see the immigration issue unbundled from the liberal v. conservative fight so that we can talk about it rationally. There are economic benefits to high level of immigration, and there are environmental consequences to immigration. There are also legitimate human rights issues involved.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Dating a Religion
Suppose you have a woman friend, Ann, who is dating. She meets a guy who is handsome and has money and pays attention to her; he sweet talks her. Let's call him Adam.
But you know Adam's history. You know he has three former girlfriends or wives, abandoned with children, who talk of how cruel a man he was, after those first few sweet dates.
Being a good friend, you decide you have to rat out Adam. You tell Ann about Adam's exes.
You know what happens next. Most of the time Adam gets the girl. Why? Because Ann having already made a decision in favor of Adam, the new information gets rationalized away. Plus Adam is skilled in subjugating women.
You can understand a lot about the spread of religion from understanding this fact of human nature (and it is a gender-neutral fact, as far as I can tell). Once people commit to a religion, for whatever reason, new information seldom causes them to change their minds.
In the United States of America, we know that people change their religious affiliations relatively often compared to other cultures. But the number of conversions is limited. At the end of each generation, so far anyway, most people who are religious are in the same religion they were born in. The overall religious statistics of 2000 are not much different from those of 1900.
History is filled with examples of mass religious conversions. Most were forced by governments, as when most people in the lands around the Mediterranean Sea became Christian Orthodox in the Fourth Century A.D. under advisement from the Roman Emperors. These last couple of days I started reading Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan
by Francis L. Hawks, which looked tedious but so far has turned out to be a delightful travelogue of the Marco Polo sort. This reminded me to look up histories of Sumatra (part of Indonesia) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), as part of my studies for my work-in-progress The U.S. War Against Asia. But the history of changes in religious affiliations on those islands reminded me I have wanted to try writing a Dating a Religion essay. This is the first draft.
When a missionary or local proselytizer dates a potential convert, they don't usual start with a history lesson. In my experience, they don't even know the true history of their own religion. They start with a well-worked-out line. They treat you as if you are important to them. They tell you things that amount to spiritual flattery: you are immortal. Your life will improve if you join our community. They may use the stick, too: convert or go to hell.
The history of Christianity in Japan and of Japanese brands of Buddhism in the U.S informs the story well. The first Christians in Japan were Catholics from Portugal. The Portuguese were major league pirates and imperialists in that era (the 1500's), but the Catholic missionaries did not mention that. They converted quite a few people at first. As the Japanese rulers started worrying about being conquered by the Portuguese, they also learned about other imperialists powers and other versions of the Christian religion. The Catholic missionaries presented their religion as one of peace, but the real world facts did not match that fantasy (see, for instance the Thirty Years' War). That rulers of Japan decided to expel the missionaries and ban Christianity. That goes against our modern, American, tolerate-all-religions and hope they all calm down ethic. But it makes sense if you consider that the Christians were lying. The ruler of Japan were simply excluding a new brand of liars from their kingdom.
Buddhism (which with Shinto, was one of the two major religions of Japan) was known and even admired by some European, and later American, intellectuals, at least as early as the 18th century. But the big invasion of Japanese Buddhist sects into the U.S. started during the 1950s. Americans like Alan Watts and the Beatniks got a lot of people started in Buddhism. Later, specific sects from Japan saw the economic opportunities in setting up churches (usually called centers) in the U.S.
There was a time when I was young that I thought Buddhism was way better than Christianity. But now I realize that I was being fed a Zen pablum specially designed to attract Americans. Like Christian history, Buddhist history is filled with violence. The theology is different, but like Christianity it is a mixture of good observations that can be kept as folk wisdom, and ridiculous metaphysical speculations.
Once the hook is in the fish, the fish starts rationalizing it. I have met serial converters, but most people only change once in their life, perhaps twice. The most common oscillation to note is when those raised without religion decide they need one, and when those raised in a religion decide that rather than switching to another, they will just drop the matter.
I hope the development of a more coherent, reality-based philosophy and system of ethics will supplant the old faiths. In the mean time, the best I can do is urge those who are dating religions to look at their histories.
Histories are better predictors of future behavior that the sweet lies of courtship.
But you know Adam's history. You know he has three former girlfriends or wives, abandoned with children, who talk of how cruel a man he was, after those first few sweet dates.
Being a good friend, you decide you have to rat out Adam. You tell Ann about Adam's exes.
You know what happens next. Most of the time Adam gets the girl. Why? Because Ann having already made a decision in favor of Adam, the new information gets rationalized away. Plus Adam is skilled in subjugating women.
You can understand a lot about the spread of religion from understanding this fact of human nature (and it is a gender-neutral fact, as far as I can tell). Once people commit to a religion, for whatever reason, new information seldom causes them to change their minds.
In the United States of America, we know that people change their religious affiliations relatively often compared to other cultures. But the number of conversions is limited. At the end of each generation, so far anyway, most people who are religious are in the same religion they were born in. The overall religious statistics of 2000 are not much different from those of 1900.
History is filled with examples of mass religious conversions. Most were forced by governments, as when most people in the lands around the Mediterranean Sea became Christian Orthodox in the Fourth Century A.D. under advisement from the Roman Emperors. These last couple of days I started reading Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan
by Francis L. Hawks, which looked tedious but so far has turned out to be a delightful travelogue of the Marco Polo sort. This reminded me to look up histories of Sumatra (part of Indonesia) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), as part of my studies for my work-in-progress The U.S. War Against Asia. But the history of changes in religious affiliations on those islands reminded me I have wanted to try writing a Dating a Religion essay. This is the first draft.
When a missionary or local proselytizer dates a potential convert, they don't usual start with a history lesson. In my experience, they don't even know the true history of their own religion. They start with a well-worked-out line. They treat you as if you are important to them. They tell you things that amount to spiritual flattery: you are immortal. Your life will improve if you join our community. They may use the stick, too: convert or go to hell.
The history of Christianity in Japan and of Japanese brands of Buddhism in the U.S informs the story well. The first Christians in Japan were Catholics from Portugal. The Portuguese were major league pirates and imperialists in that era (the 1500's), but the Catholic missionaries did not mention that. They converted quite a few people at first. As the Japanese rulers started worrying about being conquered by the Portuguese, they also learned about other imperialists powers and other versions of the Christian religion. The Catholic missionaries presented their religion as one of peace, but the real world facts did not match that fantasy (see, for instance the Thirty Years' War). That rulers of Japan decided to expel the missionaries and ban Christianity. That goes against our modern, American, tolerate-all-religions and hope they all calm down ethic. But it makes sense if you consider that the Christians were lying. The ruler of Japan were simply excluding a new brand of liars from their kingdom.
Buddhism (which with Shinto, was one of the two major religions of Japan) was known and even admired by some European, and later American, intellectuals, at least as early as the 18th century. But the big invasion of Japanese Buddhist sects into the U.S. started during the 1950s. Americans like Alan Watts and the Beatniks got a lot of people started in Buddhism. Later, specific sects from Japan saw the economic opportunities in setting up churches (usually called centers) in the U.S.
There was a time when I was young that I thought Buddhism was way better than Christianity. But now I realize that I was being fed a Zen pablum specially designed to attract Americans. Like Christian history, Buddhist history is filled with violence. The theology is different, but like Christianity it is a mixture of good observations that can be kept as folk wisdom, and ridiculous metaphysical speculations.
Once the hook is in the fish, the fish starts rationalizing it. I have met serial converters, but most people only change once in their life, perhaps twice. The most common oscillation to note is when those raised without religion decide they need one, and when those raised in a religion decide that rather than switching to another, they will just drop the matter.
I hope the development of a more coherent, reality-based philosophy and system of ethics will supplant the old faiths. In the mean time, the best I can do is urge those who are dating religions to look at their histories.
Histories are better predictors of future behavior that the sweet lies of courtship.
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