Sour grapes from an Australian conservative

Hey, we successfully pharyngulated that Australian poll. Now Prime Minister Gillard is expected to answer the top 3 questions: a question on her opposition to gay marriage, that godless question on the state-supported chaplains, and a question about veteran’s pensions. Two wingnutty questions intended to cast doubt on addressing global warming did not make the cut, and the author of those two, right-wing wing columnist Andrew Bolt, is a bit peeved.

Blogger and News Ltd columnist Andrew Bolt, who drove a surge of votes for two climate questions last week, yesterday posted that the voting push from atheists was ‘‘most odd and suspicious’’, suggesting atheists had enlisted overseas networks to mobilise votes.

Mr Nicholls said he had circulated his question to Australian supporters but anyone could forward it on to others, and dismissed Bolt’s objections as “just because he’s not winning”.

‘‘This is the internet age. The comments (on my question) appear to be just Australians. I have no knowledge or control (over any foreign voting). I’d rather it just be Australians voting but you can imagine why America is interested,’’ he said.

On Bolt’s blog, he complained about us…that is, the Pharyngula readers who voted on the poll.

It seems the author has got US Internet forums to help.

…

Should blog readers fight fire with fire? It does seem odd having US readers demand answers from an Australian PM that they’ll almost certainly won’t hear about a program that doesn’t affect them in the slightest.

Nothing odd about this at all. Of course Americans have an interest in seeing good government in other countries, just as Australians are interested in seeing American not sliding back into tea-party barbarism. The question we voted in were suggested by Australians, and reflect Australian interests. And Pharyngula has a world-wide readership, so it’s kind of silly to claim that a link here just brought US interests to the table.

Also, should I point out that the previous post in Andrew Bolt’s blog was Bolt expressing his opinion of the American presidential elections?

Tennessee’s embarrassing tea party

Tennessee’s governor, Bill Haslam, recently appointed a well-qualified resident of the state to be the new international director of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. Her name is Samar Ali. And you can guess where this is going.

The state tea-partiers and Republicans are hysterical. SHE’S A MOOOSLIIIIM!

They bought ads in the newspaper decrying the hiring of Ali because she’s Muslim. Various county leaders are outraged and are passing resolutions condemning Haslam because he hired a Muslim. Oh, and as long as the bigots are emboldened, they’re also tossing in complaints about the fact that Haslam hasn’t fired enough homosexuals.

You know, this is why government is supposed to be secular. As long as the people doing the work of administration keep their religion out of their work, as long as they are responsible to everyone in their state, as long as they are competent, I don’t care whether they’re Christian or Muslim or atheist. Unfortunately, our privileged, selfish Christian conservatives have this mistaken notion that the purpose of government is to act as an arm of the Christian church, and that evangelical fervor is an adequate substitute for competence, and that is doing us great harm.

Not-so-pointless poll on Australian chaplains

The Atheist Foundation of Australia would like their prime minister to answer one simple question:

Dear Prime Minister. Against the strongly expressed concerns of mental health professionals, teacher unions and secular organisations, why do you allow the outrageous situation to continue where largely unqualified, religious evangelists have access to young children in public schools, in the form of the National School Chaplaincy Program?

She’s been dodging it, of course, and I suspect that if she were backed into a corner she’d be entertainingly frantic in her efforts to escape. So let’s corner her! And she has made the mistake of making that possible.

Dear members and supporters,

OurSay is giving us the opportunity to directly ask Prime Minister
Julia Gillard a question, and we have chosen to focus on the
outrageous taxpayer funded National School Chaplaincy Program.

This Saturday, Gillard will answer three of the most popular questions
as chosen through OurSay. One of these questions could be ours.

Please follow these simple steps to make sure that we have a seat at
the table:

1) Sign up for OurSay

2) Vote seven times for our question:

3) Recruit a friend to do exactly the same

Click here to get started: http://oursay.org/s/2ea

We only have until Thursday but, if we all came together – we could
make sure that this important issue is being heard by Prime Minister
Gillard and all of Australia that very Saturday.

Regards, David Nicholls

President – Atheist Foundation of Australia

PS. Make sure that you sign up and vote seven times to get an answer
from Gillard on Chaplaincy.

It’s a poll with some teeth. Let’s make Gillard dance!

An excellent suggestion for the Bible-believing Christians

I approve this message: write in Jesus’ name for president in the November elections.

It’s the only principled choice you can make!

I suppose if you’re Catholic you could write the Pope’s name in. I have no problem with that, either. The Supreme Court would probably approve that, as well, given its current constitution.

Modern bravery

My father-in-law was one of those quiet guys who had a secret. He had a box full of medals from World War II, which he didn’t display and didn’t brag about, but the grandkids could ask to see them and he’d let them look at them, and maybe say a few reluctant words about what they were for, if pressed. He was a Marine, and not one of those REMFs, either — he’d been one of the defenders on Midway atoll, and had been boots on the ground in the Iwo Jima landing, and had fought in the jungles of Guadalcanal. I may be a pacifist myself, but I had to respect the personal bravery of a guy who experienced some of the fiercest fighting in the war, and he earned every one of those medals.

So now the US military is considering awarding medals for heroism to goddamned drone pilots: people who sit in an air-conditioned bunker far from the frontlines, playing a video game that lets them turn distant human beings into bugsplats. There is no risk here, except maybe for carpal tunnel inflammation, and there is no sacrifice, no bravery, no struggle. They’ve done nothing to earn recognition for heroism.

Maybe it’s just as well the older generation is dying off. I would think it hard to attend a veteran’s meeting and compare your medal for storming a machine gun nest to the medal some guy got for flying a model airplane. Heroes just aren’t what they used to be.

Sign this petition!

You know, if I violated tax law and then flaunted the fact to the IRS, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I’ll get slammed down hard and fast. So why do churches get a free pass?

Since 2008, pastors of some churches have openly supported and advocated specific political candidates in sermons to members in early October in an event referred to as "Pulpit Freedom Sunday". According to Reuters, videos of these sermons are sent to the offices of the IRS.

According to section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, the provision of the tax code from which these churches derive their tax-exempt status, a compliant organization must not "participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of … any candidate for public office."

The IRS has failed to remove the tax-exempt status of these churches despite their violations of tax code. This must change, and the law must be applied equally to everyone.

Don’t you suspect that many of the officers obligated to enforce the law are also members of these same kinds of churches, and are motivated to neglect their duties by a conflict of interest?

Maybe there should be a requirement that all IRS agents be atheists. That would certainly improve the popularity of atheism!

Republicans really do hate everything good and true

Unbelievable. They don’t just reject science, they don’t just despise women, they don’t just want to silence labor, Republicans hate art.

Over the weekend, the governor, Nikki Haley, destroyed the South Carolina Commission for the Arts — the cut was such that the 20 people who work there cannot show up to work today, can’t even go into their building, because of liability issues. The arts in South Carolina brings in $9.2 billion and creates 78,000 jobs at a cost of 1.9 million to the Arts Commission. It’s a phenomenally stupid cut — our state has one of the two best arts in education programs in the country! We don’t do a lot well in South Carolina, but this is one of the few we really do. And now we’re about to be the only state in the country without a public arts agency.

Read the whole thing. There’s a contact form there, you can contact the responsible idiots and tell ’em off; you should do that especially if you’re from South Carolina, but I think a world-wide show of solidarity would also be good.

Tell the philistines what you think.

Woo hoo! ‘Shrooms and acid party at my house tonight!

We do not have a rational drug policy. There are potent and dangerous drugs that are socially accepted because hey, we’ve always drunk alcohol and smoked cigarettes, while there are milder, far less dangerous drugs that are damned because they’re new and unfamiliar. And so we throw people in prison for long jail terms if they are caught with some marijuana, while people can go out every weekend and drink themselves into an abusive, obnoxious state, and we just tell them they’re cool.

It is possible to take an objective look at the effects of various drugs on individuals and society, and ask “where’s the harm?” Here’s an example, the dangers of an array of drugs characterized and ranked.

There’s lots of small print there, so you may have to click to embiggen, but I can tell you what the extremes are: alcohol is the worst, and psychoactive mushrooms are the least. Heroin and meth are bad, LSD and Ecstasy are among the least dangerous.

And there are good biological reasons for this ranking.

The particular type of neurotransmitters that a drug affects in the brain has a huge impact on the harms the drug can contribute to. A major similarity between the drugs that tops the list above is that these drugs, in addition to other areas in the brain (click here for a discussion), directly affect the dopaminergic “reward system” in the midbrain. This area has been shaped and “designed” by millions of years of natural selection in mammals to reward for adaptive behavior such as sex and the intake of nutritious food. When they are artificially stimulated by drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine they have adverse consequences for addiction and health (that is the reason why drugs such as nicotine and heroin have the characteristic addictive effects). Drugs at the bottom of the list, such as MDMA (ecstasy), mushrooms and LSD stimulate mainly serotonergic neurons (several places in the brain), and does not directly stimulate the mesolimbic reward systems (which is why they are not addictive).

Wouldn’t it be interesting if we had laws and penalties that were actually informed by science, rather than fear and naivete?

I will add, though, that there’s more to this than just biology: there are the sciences of sociology and pyschology that have to be taken into account. We’ve done the experiment of trying to criminalize alcohol in the same way we do heroin; it didn’t work.

Depressing stories about income inequity

Jon Ronson has an interesting take on American economic disparities: He interviews 6 people, each one with 5 times the income of the previous one, going from an immigrant dishwasher to a billionaire.

Each story is worth reading, but the overall take is bizarre: all the people at the bottom of the ladder rationalize their position, saying that they wouldn’t want the worries of the next person up, while pitying the one below them. Except the guy at the top: he’s just angry at all those slackers below him. You can see how the system maintains itself, and why nobody is getting outraged at the tax disparities in this country.

I also learned that Jon Ronson, who’s open about his income, makes more money than I do. A lot more. Next time I meet him, I’m going to have to break the pattern and rage furiously at him and demand that he give me some of his cash. IT ISN’T FAIR, you rich bastard! It’s just not fair!