What was that about his Catholicism again?

William Oddie, the Catholic writer for the Catholic Herald who writes about Catholic concerns, is very irate. It seems a popular celebrity recently died, and the newspapers were fulsome in their obituaries, praising his charitable works and his lifelong generosity, but almost none of them mentioned that he was a devout Catholic who attended Mass several times a week, and that he even had a papal knighthood.

But why not mention that an important part of his life was attending daily Mass? There’s a deep dedication in the life of a man who gives away 90 per cent of everything he earns and so tirelessly does all the other things he did. You’d think that an obituarist would want to ask a simple question: where did all that come from? It’s almost as though they couldn’t bear to accept that the answer was his Catholicism: even that Catholicism itself could ever be the source of actual human goodness.

There must be an anti-Catholic conspiracy in the media!

Unfortunately, the celebrity was Jimmy Savile, the fellow who was revealed to have been raping children for decades, “one of the most prolific sex offenders” in Britain.

I have to ask a simple question: where did all that come from? It’s almost as though Oddie couldn’t bear to accept that the answer was his Catholicism: even that Catholicism itself could ever be the source of actual human evil.

And say, doesn’t the careful omission of his religious background therefore represent a pro-Catholic bias in the media?

The death of Aaron Swartz

Many of you already know that Aaron Swartz, an online activist, committed suicide earlier this week. I didn’t know much about him, but now I’ve learned two things.

One, he was a victim of depression. I’ve never experienced this personally — at worst I can say I’ve been sad and stressed at time — but let’s be clear about something: depression is something altogether different. Swartz wrote about his depression, and got across a little bit about what it actually feels like. This is good communication.

Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it’s worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak – the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.

At best, you tell yourself that your thinking is irrational, that it is simply a mood disorder, that you should get on with your life. But sometimes that is worse. You feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none.

Two, I’m outraged at the criminal abuse by the justice system that exacerbated his problems. The man was hounded to death, threatened with long prison terms by MIT and JSTOR, the journal archive service.

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

You might be wondering what awful crime he committed that justified arresting him and confronting him with a 50 year prison sentence: he downloaded scientific research articles and then made them available to others (Wait…apparently, he didn’t even share them, but just downloaded them via MIT’s protocols). Uh-oh. I’ve done this…just not on the scale of Swartz’s efforts. Swartz was committed to Open Access.

This is the problem: not that Swartz opened the door to scientific research, but that we’re laboring under an antiquated system of scientific information storage that privileges profit-making over open access to the results of publicly-funded research.

Every man thinks he’s Clint Eastwood

Sam Harris has really done it now. He’s stepped into the gun control debate with The Riddle of the Gun, and he’s taking the side of Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. And he’s also making a series of logic-defying assertions that have no credibility at all. I’m not even going to try to work through them all; this subject is clearly a bit of an obsession with him. But throughout, he takes a very personal and rather paranoid view of the world and makes it a justification for individual self-defense, which I think is his big mistake. For instance,

…if a person enters your home for the purpose of harming you, you cannot reasonably expect the police to arrive in time to stop him. This is not the fault of the police—it is a problem of physics.

Hmmm. If I’m on a crowded street, and the person behind me pulls a knife, I can’t expect the police to stop him in time, either — it is a problem of physics.

If the guy in the house across the street has a sniper rifle aimed at my bedroom window, waiting for my silhouette to cross his scope, I can’t expect the police to stop the bullet in time — it is a problem of physics.

If a disgruntled student rolls up to my front door in a tank, I can’t expect the SWAT team from Minneapolis to get all the way here in time — it is a problem of physics.

What I see over and over again in Harris and rabid defenders of gun ownership is something other than just merely seeing guns as a tool: it’s the cult of the rugged individual, the lone cowboy on his own in hostile territory, where the only recourse is to be quick on the draw. What’s the answer to any trouble? Why, you take care of it yourself, usually by killing the troublemaker. It’s a simple, quick solution that doesn’t require any thinking at all.

He takes a complicated problem — that an individual wants to do him great harm (something I have no trouble believing) — and reduces it to a simplistic scenario — the hostile bad guy is in his house, with a gun! — that can only be resolved by his personal decisiveness and training in firing right back at him.

Do I need to point out that in his scenario, he has already lost, no matter how well-trained he is with a firearm? He is having a gunfight in his home, with his family around him. Imagine yourself in your bedroom, pulling a pistol out of a bedside drawer, loading it, and calmly taking a few shots in the direction of the hallway, without the presence of an intruder to complicate and make even more dangerous the situation. This is not an action without consequences and without risk. But this is the preferred nightmare of the gun fanatics.

I prefer a multi-layered defense that relies on the cooperation of a community. I don’t want a gun put in my hands, because by the time the gun would be useful there have been multiple catastrophic failures of the whole system. An intruder should not be in my house. How about better locks, a security system, and regular police patrols in my neighborhood? An intruder should not be heavily armed. How about serious gun control that limits access to guns and monitors those who do have them? The intruder should not be vengefully gloating about the glory of shooting someone. How about changing the culture to stop worshipping gun violence, to stop thinking that killing an enemy resolves a problem rather than amplifying it?

I know already what response that will get: that it’s a starry-eyed optimistic dream. But what they won’t care about is that Harris’s dream of battling an evil-doer to the death with his well-practiced expertise in firing a gun is just as pie-in-the-sky, and that even in its most benign outcome, is still a horror and a nightmare.

This is my dismissal of the whole gun debate: that the answers the gun advocates propose all amplify the problem. The problem is the ready availability of guns and the willingness of self-righteous people (because, really, even the people gunning down school children are steadfast in their confidence that what they are doing is both right and necessary, as much so as the homeowner defending himself against a burglar) to resort to violent action to resolve conflicts. But they don’t bother to recognize that by the time deadly force is needed, it’s too late.

I promised I wouldn’t get sucked into a line-by-line dissection of Harris’s post. Fortunately, Eric MacDonald has exposed many of the logical fallacies in his argument, and Sean Faircloth has the facts and numbers that show his rationale is bogus.

I just want to emphasize that it’s a huge mistake to make the debate about the physics of the ultimate confrontation. The debate should be about how to make those gun-on-gun confrontations less likely.

Kent Hovind has been honored

Hovind has been inducted into the Creation Science Hall of Fame, which is nothing but a website run by a crank. It seems a fitting honor.

I was amused that half the write-up about him had to consist of making excuses for the fact that he’s a jailbird, though.

The Creation Science Hall of Fame believes that Kent is in jail out of principle, and not deceit as per our discovery.

Kent Hovind is a tax protester. His is only one of many tax protests that Americans, from time to time, have lodged in the federal courts. Did Kent make mistakes during his attempt to prove his point? Yes, and he admits to them. None of us are perfect.

What the judicial system calls “tax crimes” was an attempt to invalidate the tax structure. In America at least, the simplest way to get standing to invalidate a law as unconstitutional is to break said law and suffer punishment for said breach. Kent Hovind gambled that he would find a righteous judge. He lost. And his experience bears witness to us all that our entire national judiciary is willing to accept disagreements on principle as illegal acts worthy of punishment. This is why the Creation Science Hall of Fame believes that Dr. Kent Hovind is in jail out of principle and not deceit and that he should be honored, especially among the Christians who believe in a super natural creation as described in Genesis by God.

He cheated on his taxes and lied about it; he made efforts to conceal his income by, for instance, making multiple bank withdrawals of less than $10,000 in order to avoid automatic reporting, and he also paid employees under the table to avoid having to pay taxes on that. He was not standing up for a principle, he was doing his damnedest to avoid getting caught lining his own greedy pockets.

(via Robert Baty)

Eric Hovind has shown up in the comments to claim that none of my allegations are true. However, the wikipedia summary of the charges is clear.

On July 11, 2006, Hovind was charged in the District Court in Northern Florida in Pensacola with twelve counts of willful failure to collect, account for, and pay over federal income taxes and FICA taxes, forty-five counts of knowingly structuring transactions in federally insured financial institutions to evade reporting requirements, and one count of corruptly endeavoring to obstruct and impede the administration of the internal revenue laws. Twelve of the charges were for failing to pay employee-related taxes, totaling $473,818, and 45 of the charges were for evading reporting requirements by making multiple cash withdrawals just under the $10,000 reporting requirement (a technique known as “smurfing”). The withdrawals, totaling $430,500, were made in 2001 and 2002. Jo Delia Hovind, his wife, faced 44 charges.

He and his wife were found guilty on all charges. Every one.

I hope this haunts Michael Nodianos for the rest of his life

A 16 year old girl was reportedly drugged and gang-raped by football players in Steubenville, Ohio, and two people, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, have been arrested for it. And now a video has emerged of other players joking about the rape and helpless, unconscious state of the girl. Warning: the video is appalling, not only that they so demean another human being, but that the whole crowd thinks the “jokes” are funny.

This was done by football players. So of course, many people in town are rushing to defend the rapists, including coaches on their football team.

“The rape was just an excuse, I think,” said the 27-year-old Hubbard, who is No. 2 on the Big Red’s career rushing list.

“What else are you going to tell your parents when you come home drunk like that and after a night like that?” said Hubbard, who is one of the team’s 19 coaches. “She had to make up something. Now people are trying to blow up our football program because of it.

I spit on football culture. What should be just a fun game has become a focus for misogyny and abuse in far too many communities.

And I dare anyone who denies that rape culture thrives in the US to watch that video.

Good grief, the girl was unconscious and unresponsive, people were joking that she was dead, and onlookers couldn’t figure out that this was rape. She didn’t say “no,” after all.

Don’t Tell Women What to Wear, Tell Men not to Rape

There have been some horrific stories coming out of India — a place where rape and molestation are considered perfectly normal acts by many men. The latest terrible event was a young woman, raped with a metal rod that shredded her internal organs and resulted in her death, all for the ‘crime’ of being out after 10pm — an outcome excused by ‘experts’ because she resisted.

The promising sign, at least, is that people are marching in the streets to protest Indian rape culture. Avicenna was there, taking pictures; you should be following that guy, don’t you think?

Never forget

Today is the 23rd anniversary of the Montreal Massacre.

The killer, 25-year-old Marc Lépine, was armed with a legally obtained Mini-14 rifle and a hunting knife: he had earlier told a shopkeeper he was going after "small game". Lépine had previously been denied admission to the École Polytechnique and had been upset, it later transpired, about women working in positions traditionally occupied by men. Before he opened fire, Lépine shouted: "You’re all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists!" One student, Nathalie Provost, protested: "I’m not feminist, I have never fought against men." Lépine shot her anyway.

The gunman then moved through the college corridors, the cafeteria, and another classroom, specifically targeting women to shoot. By the time Lépine turned the gun on himself, 14 women were dead and another 10 were injured. Four men were hurt unintentionally in the crossfire.

I remember following the events of that day intently, horrified that there are people who will kill women simply because they are women. And these anonymous monsters on the internet who shriek affrontedly about women and feminists and moan that any feminist allies are ‘manginas’ — to me, every one of them has the name Marc Lépine, and is just hiding it in shame and fear and hatred and cowardice.

Since it was mentioned in the comments, here are the names of the murdered women:

Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

It’s a good idea. It’s depressing that it’s necessary.

There’s a funding campaign going on to raise money for DrinkSavvy. It’s a clever idea to address a dismal problem.

What it is is a simple plan to sell drinking straws and cups that contain a material that responds with a color change to the presence of GHB, ketamine, or rohypnol — date rape drugs. I wish I lived in a world where that wasn’t necessary (well, actually, I do live in a world where it isn’t really necessary for my personal safety; I understand though that some of you live in that dangerous world where people might try to drug you to nullify your lack of consent.)

You know, the existence of this product is evidence for the validity of the Schrödinger’s Rapist argument.

Shining a light on cockroaches

Australia is doing the right thing and launching a royal commission into child abuse. It is clearly motivated by recent revelations that the Catholic church (of course!) has been covering up instances of child rape, but the commission will rightly look at “all religious organisations, state care providers, not-for-profit bodies as well as the responses of child service agencies and the police”.

But don’t get too excited yet. Governments sometimes use the formation of a committee as an excuse to avoid doing something more substantial. The proof will be in what they accomplish, not whether the committee exists and holds meetings.

Also, George Pell has announced his approval of the commission, which would be suspicious if Pell weren’t so goddamned stupid. He thinks it will vindicate the church. I don’t think so.

  • 400 known victims of child sexual abuse by clergy

  • 11 clergy charged and convicted since 1995

  • 6 Catholic teachers convicted since 1995

  • 3 priests currently on trial

  • First priest charged this year with concealing the crimes of another

  • 12 priests involved in substantial compensation claims

  • Highest known compensation payout to a victim – $3 million

The facts are no friend to the Catholic church. Let’s just hope the commission exposes those facts.