one man, one vote

The Christian Right is trying to spin the legalization of gay marriage in Vermont by saying it was done “by one vote!” Oh my God, a single person compelled the people of Vermont to accept gay marriage! Such power should not be vested in the hands of a single human being!

Of course, the Christian Right’s spin is not quite accurate. That “one vote” was actually part of a veto override, which required a two-thirds majority of legislators to pass. So it was more like 123 votes to 54. Of course, that doesn’t work up the loons who frequent One News Now and Wingnutdaily well enough, and the Christian Right wouldn’t know how to react if they couldn’t lie about it.

What the Christian Right doesn’t mention, though, is that the state legislature originally passed this legislation by an overwhelming majority. It was the Republican governor of Vermont, Jim Douglas, who attempted to strike it down with a veto. Gosh, that’s almost like a single vote. A single person, overwhelming the will of the majority! Such power should not be vested in the hands of a single human being!

Well, not unless he’s on our side, anyway.

let's try this thing again

If you've been following the soap opera of my blogging life, then you know that the past six months or so have been a rollercoaster ride. I've tried starting over again in new homes, but I just can't get into them. I have felt lost.

The great thing about aop was that it never had any purpose or direction. When I did try to impose such on it, it started to go awry, but always seemed to right itself eventually. I could write about anything, from the most profound problems of the contemporary world, to the relative minutiae of life. My attempts to "move on" after I declared the death of aop failed, because each of those attempts implied a purpose that constrained me. Those attempts felt impersonal.

I am going to try writing here again. Now, this blog does need some work; the template is screwed up, for instance. You may notice two comment links below every post; that needs to go, but I haven't figured out what is causing it. I don't know what else is lurking in the code, so I'll probably have to reset the whole thing and start over. Meh - a little work for maybe a lot of gain.

strategy

Let’s talk some more about things I don’t like about Return of the Jedi.

In the mid-nineties, Sci-Fi Universe magazine published an article entitled “50 Reasons Why Return of the Jedi Sucks”. The article was blasphemy to Star Wars fans, but it was also right. One after another, the author identified every reason why ROTJ had failed to excite my imagination the same way that A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back had done.

But it was also incomplete. Last time I merely added to something the original author had brought up in his discussion of the Ewoks; that would be the merchandising-first attitude toward the script. Here is something that the author missed.

The second half of ROTJ is devoted to an assault on the second Death Star. The main characters divide into two groups: Lando pilots the Millennium Falcon during the space battle, while the other characters conduct a ground assault on Death Star 2’s shield generator.

Right there is the problem.

Following his stint as a carbonite slab, Han Solo is inexplicably promoted to General. There is no way that the Rebel Alliance would allow him to lead a ground assault; he would be placed in a strategic role running the battle. Chewbacca would be able to fill that role more than adequately except for his inability to speak human language; however, I would not question his presence in a support role. Luke accompanies the ground force because he wants to ensure a meeting with Darth Vader that will lead to a confrontation with the Emperor, so his presence is understandable on a personal level if not a strategic one. C-3PO is useless as a member of an assault force; sure, he inexplicably translates the Ewok language, but that could have been avoided by leaving out the damn Ewoks in the first place! As for R2-D2, well, they are in a forest, and this is before George Lucas decided that R2 could fly; the astromech droid would be able to roll about five feet before he got permanently stuck on a tree root.

Finally, there is Leia, one of the primary architects of the Rebellion. There is absolutely no way in hell that the Rebels would allow her anywhere near the battle! Her loss would deal a critical blow to the Rebellion, if only by its effect on morale. Leia’s talents would be better utilized in a strategic sense anyway, as when she helped coordinate the Battle of Yavin at the end of ANH.

In A New Hope, the characters’ coming together was either purely coincidental, or the machinations of the Force. The same would be true for TESB, though now the characters’ feelings of mutual loyalty would ensure they would come to each others’ aid. Keeping them together in ROTJ is simply lazy scriptwriting. The characters could have been assigned their logical military roles, and then they could have abandoned those roles to assist each other in dramatic and immeasurably more satisfying form. Imagine Han abandoning the post he has been begrudgingly assigned to in order to rescue Chewbacca, or Leia refusing to play nice and joining the battle on her own. C-3PO and R2-D2 could have wound up on Endor by mistake, which would have offered plenty of comic relief from the cowardly protocol droid.

And what of Luke? By this point in the film, it is unclear if Luke still retains his role as a Rebel pilot, or if he has resigned his commission in order to pursue becoming a Jedi Knight. If he is still a pilot, then it would be much more satisfying if he had to defy orders to seek out his father; if not, then he should not have been allowed to take part in the assault, and would have had to find another way into a quarantined zone.

True, everything about ROTJ screams laziness, from basing the story around a second Death Star to placing the action in the fucking woods. The movie is a prime example of wasted cinematic opportunities, and provides our first taste of something that would come across much more obviously in the prequels: George Lucas has no concept of strategy, or even how the military works – a strange deficit given the fact that he based his saga around military actions.

TAGS: Star Wars Saga, Return of the Jedi

uniforms

There are a number of things I don’t like about Return of the Jedi. Here is one of them.

In Star Wars – that is, A New Hope – all the Rebel pilots wore the same orange flight suits, no matter whether they flew X-Wings or Y-Wings. The same orange flight suits returned in The Empires Strikes Back, albeit in winterized form. This makes sense for three reasons.

First, orange is the most visible color to the human eye. That’s why workmen wear orange vests, and why traffic cones are orange. Think of your own examples; it’ll be fun. If a pilot were floating in space, or lost in the snowfields of Hoth, orange would be the color of choice for making them stand out.

Second, the Rebels are strapped for cash. Although this is mainly discussed in the Expanded Universe materials, the sense of it comes across in the first two movies. The Rebels simply can’t afford too many different uniforms, and would make as much use as possible out of whatever they could scrounge up.

Third, it’s a uniform. As in, military uniform. They’re all supposed to look the same.

In Return of the Jedi, X-Wing pilots still wear the orange flight suits, but now Y-Wing pilots wear a light blue, A-Wing pilots wear a dark greenish gray, and B-Wing pilots wear a different shade of gray. There are also a few pilots in red flight suits, though I can’t remember what ships they flew (Lando’s co-pilot aboard the Millennium Falcon wears one, for example).

Somehow, the Rebels came into some money, and decided that, instead of spending it on something useful like weapons, fuel, or more starships, they’d coordinate.

What bugs me most about this is that the decision to include different uniforms was based solely on marketing considerations. ANH and TESB made an enormous amount of movie at the box office, but they made even more from the merchandising. Just the toy lines brought in more than the ticket sales. This did not go unnoticed by George Lucas, who apparently wrote ROTJ with merchandising in mind from the start (*cough*Ewoks*cough*).

So if all the Rebel pilots wore one logically orange flight suit, that’s one action figure sale. But if they wear five different flight suits, that five action figure sales. You do the math. Go on; I’ll wait.

The irony is that the merchandising-first mentality that went into putting ROTJ together may have been its undoing. The toy lines for ANH and TESB went through multiple release phases – I know; I bought them all – whereas the one for ROTJ barely lasted one. I don’t think I even bought all the action figures for that movie, and I was an action figure junkie.

So why did Lucas get it right the first two times, and get it so wrong the third. It is almost like there were two Lucases. The first one had an eye for background detail, understanding that it was the little things that made the movie come alive; he was then replaced by an evil clone, who directed the final film in the trilogy (and later made the prequels, which were all about evil clones – coincidence?).

A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back had a vitality that ensured they would live in the mind even after the credits rolled. Return of the Jedi died on the screen. Too many uniforms weren’t the cause, but they were one of the symptoms.

TAGS: Star Wars, Return of the Jedi, Geek stuff

pfft

I remember what it was like to have a brand new blog and wonder if I would ever get any readers. More established atheist bloggers helped me get going, and I've always valued the opportunity to help others when I can. When I find a new blog that offers something different and that I think is worth a look, I like to mention it here.

Vjack at Atheist Revolution wrote the above lines in this post, where he publicizes a blog called Theist’s Anonymous. At the time he wrote the post, Theist’s Anonymous was home to a grand total of five posts; as of this date, it has six. To be honest, none of them are particularly special, leaving me to wonder what it was about Theist’s Anonymous that attracted vjack’s attention.

Regardless, what vjack wrote above is patently untrue. The part about his helping others, that is. His self-congratulatory tone is unwarranted. This is a shame, because Atheist Revolution is one of the most popular atheist blogs. It is the second result from a Google search for “atheist blog”. Yet Atheist Revolution, like all the other most popular atheist blogs, remains insular, linking over and over again to the same blogs while ignoring the others.

Vjack actually has the audacity to bemoan the lack of atheist activism when he is part of the problem. Given his prominence, vjack could use his blog as an effective means of building a community; when I suggested just this thing in the comments to that post, I was criticized, insulted, and then ignored.

Like all the rest, vjack does nothing more than skim the top of the Atheist Blogroll. That blogroll is useless for publicizing your blog or building an atheist community. There are no criteria for inclusion other than being an atheist or writing from an atheistic point of view, so good blogs sink in a sea of dreck. Yet big name atheist bloggers have come to the defense of the Atheist Blogroll, almost as if questioning its benefits were somehow, well, blasphemous?

I have thought about the above while contemplating the fate of my blog. My posting has been light recently, and, honestly, I don’t know if it is going to get any better. The Event left me disillusioned, as it exposed the vapidity masquerading as substance within the online atheist community. I am still feeling its effects.

When I started adventures of ponzo, I had high hopes. I lacked a real-world avenue for expressing myself at the time, and I hoped that I would be able to do so on the internet. A year and a half later, with one reader, I called it quits. The Event brought another blogger unwarranted attention from probably the biggest atheist in the blogosphere, and increased the traffic for his site. I never engaged in any cheap stunts myself, but tried to publish well-written, thoroughly researched, and ultimately meaningful posts; I remained unnoticed.

I thought starting over again with Open Threat might reenergize me, and it did at first. That didn’t last, though, because I began to miss my old blog, to which I had devoted so much effort. I revamped adventures of ponzo and relaunched it under its original title, but I just can’t seem to get started. Every time I think about writing something, I remember that it will go unnoticed, except possibly by Deb, and that makes me pause.

I remain an atheist; only a massive blow to the head and the resulting mental confusion might change that. Yet I no longer feel any desire to be a member of the “online atheist community”. That community simply does not exist, and that makes me very sad. However, it has confirmed that it is not necessary to write from an atheistic point of view, but from a rational one, because those are one and the same. While my would-be fellows preoccupy themselves crashing fundamentalists’ online polls, I feel that, if I am to find my place, I must move on. My news reader has shrunk quite a bit recently, as I started paying attention to the ratio of quality versus mere quantity; I gave Atheist Revolution a bit more time, but I deleted it today. No loss.

Today is the first day of the tenth month of the two thousand and eighth year of the Common Era. If there is any synchronicity to this date, it is merely that it is the first day of my favorite month of the year. This may be the last post I write, or it may be the beginning of a new adventure. Regardless, I am deeply depressed right now. I feel abandoned all over again – ditched, perhaps. Maybe that will lighten the load, and leave me free to explore places that I’d not see otherwise. Or maybe – well, it’s hard to go on all alone.

Very hard.

abortions for everybody!

If gays are allowed to marry, then straight people will stop having children. Gay marriage will open the floodgates: suddenly, everyone will get married to someone of his or her same sex, and there will be no children to populate the future.

As stupid as that argument is, there are a lot of people who seem to believe it. These are the same people who believe that, if abortion is legal, then the government will force people to have abortions regardless of whether they want to or not. They are also the same people who believe that even minimal exposure to evolutionary theory will undermine people’s sense of right and wrong, because, if we are nothing but animals, then we have no choice but to act like animals.

These are examples of all-or-nothing thinking, and this type of mentality is symptomatic of religious fundamentalism. The fundamentalist is unable to understand that not everyone has to live according to the same set of rules; that people can make their own choices in personal matters, and society will not collapse. That is because fundamentalism is about enforcing the beliefs of its adherents on the whole of society. The fundamentalist necessarily sees others as wanting to force their own beliefs on the fundamentalist, because that is what the fundamentalist wants to do to them.

Fundamentalists – fundies, from here on – are stuck in an unenviable psychological dilemma. They are bundles of anxiety, afraid of the world around them. They are unable to deal with social change or with individual freedom – that is, liberalism. Thus, they worry about the gay agenda, or the atheist agenda, or liberal agenda, or even the “Satanic” agenda. All the while, of course, they are members of the only social movement with a real agenda, in the sense that, for them, it truly is all or nothing: agree with them and live by their rules, or – well, there is no “or”.

Take school prayer, for instance. There are no laws prohibiting children from praying in school, whenever or however they want to. Yet fundies are constantly claiming that liberals are trying to prevent Christians from exercising their religious rights in school. What they mean is that they do not want their own children to be able to pray as they want to; they want everyone to pray their way. They want Christian prayer to be mandated and official. To them, that is “religious freedom” – the freedom to believe the way they do.

Fundamentalism is inherently a theocratic movement. Its reaction to social change is not to adapt, but to take control of society and force it to conform to its way of thinking, such as it is. Its only mechanism of ensuring this outcome is organizational control, starting with local school boards and ending with the federal government itself.

Fundies cannot live and let live. They cannot learn to live and let live. The only way that they can do so is by abandoning their theocratic straitjacket.

TAGS: fundamentalism, religion, christianity

faith vs. anxiety

PalMD at denialism blog asks a great question: Why is the faith of creationists so weak?

The very concept of faith is that an individual can endure in his belief no matter the lack of empirical evidence or the attitudes of his neighbors. The individual in question is capable of considering ideas with which he disagrees, though he does so through his lens of faith and will not necessarily agree with them. That is to be wholly respected, because it represents commitment as well as open-mindedness.

The goal of creationists, however, is not to live their lives in commitment to their personal faith. Their goal is to impose their beliefs – not their faith – on others. This stems both from an obvious desire for social control, but, on a more basic matter, on a deep psychological unease. It is symptomatic of fundamentalism, no matter what specific form it takes or from what religion it derives.

Fundamentalism arises in a traditionalist culture when that culture undergoes extraordinary change that dramatically alters its social status. The culture, due to its blind adherence to tradition, is unable to adapt to changing conditions, and turns inward. Its adherents seem to think, “We tried to do God’s will, but God abandoned us. This cannot mean that we were wrong, but that we were insufficiently devoted to the dogma of our religion. The only obvious response is to become even more dogmatic and extreme in our beliefs, and impose them on society to prevent further change and draw back the change that has occurred.”

The world has seen a modern example of this in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which was the product of both European colonialism and its downfall, and social liberalism. The Taliban perfectly epitomize fundamentalism in their extremist beliefs and practices; they also epitomize the dead end that fundamentalism represents, because imposing God’s will on the world turned their adopted homeland, Afghanistan, into a sub-Medieval nightmare.

Christian fundamentalism emerged in the American south following the Civil War. It was a direct response to the south’s defeat in that war and, in particular, the abolition of slavery as a legal institution in the United States. Southern society had been based on slavery to such an extent that it was no longer an economic institution, but a cultural one. Christian leaders, particularly in the south, had played a direct role in this by rushing to the defense of slavery at every opportunity; the Southern Baptist Convention itself arose solely over a dispute over abolitionism (it was on the anti-abolitionist side). Slavery was regarded effectively as a tenet of Christianity, and opposing slavery was seen as opposing God’s will.

Creationism is not distinct from Christian fundamentalism, and shares the same origin in racial hatred: the core purpose of creationist ideology was to reject the implications of biological racial equality inherent in Darwinian theory.

Having lost their racially biased social system, which they believed had been ordained by God, the emerging fundamentalists believed that they had failed to be sufficiently devoted to the dogma of their religion, and reacted by forming a movement that would impose their beliefs on the world to halt or reverse the spread of civil rights legislation. Fundamentalism and creationism have remained rooted in this racist ideology ever since, even though the public pronouncements of adherents have changed over time to avoid unwelcome social stigma – to hide their true motives from outsiders.

Fundamentalism is therefore never about faith, but about anxiety over the insufficiency of faith. The fundamentalist is at the most basic level a bundle of Freudian defense mechanisms: denial, projection, reaction formation, etc. Like any individual experiencing such anxiety, the fundamentalist’s primary option is to avoid or stamp out the things that cause him anxiety. As a movement, this involves removing evolutionary theory from science classrooms, barring homosexuals from legal marriage, opposing immigration reform, using any method available to undermine reproductive rights, etc. All the central issues of the modern fundamentalist movement in America are civil rights issues, in that they reflect the fundamentalist’s – or creationist’s – attitude toward the valuation of individuals and their social interactions.

Of course, not every member of the fundamentalist movement is a confirmed racist, homophobe, or misogynist. Their leaders are, however, and, by using the mechanisms of religion, they have deluded their followers by appealing to the ever more irrelevant concept of “faith”. These leaders, and their deluded followers, continue to engage in a program that is designed not to deal with the real world, but to block it out so that they can live in a world of fantasy. On a social level, they are enacting the very same behaviors that an individual experiencing extreme anxiety would enact.

TAGS: creationism, fundamentalism, christianity, racism