Somehow, I’ve manage to avoid learning that Sikhs are required by their religion to carry a dagger:
The kirpan, one of five items baptized Sikhs are required to wear, is meant as a reminder of the duty to uphold justice. The others are reminders of other things: the kesh, or Sikhs’ uncut hair, to live as God created you; kanga, a wooden comb, to remain neat; kara, a bracelet, to do good deeds; and kachera, or large underwear, to remain chaste and faithful sexually.
The story is about Homeland Security maybe being a little less asshole-ish to one particular group of brown folk, but I’m more excited about a whole group of people being required to pack a blade!
So, it looks like the Blues (Have the parties always been denoted by the same colors, or is this a recent, TV-news-map-on-the-wall-influenced thing?) managed to waltz in to control both the House and Senate after voters told the nation, “Hey! These people suck! I’m voting against them!!” Is this a “national referendum” of some sort? Does it signal a major shift in the political landscape of the nation?
Hardly.
As Steven Colbert so adeptly points out, the only thing this signals is a shift in who gets to blame whom for all of our problems. Even if the Dems actually wanted to “cut & run” (the Neo-Cons have great PR and marketing minds working for them, you have to admit) in Iraq, it’s next to impossible. So, come 2008, who’s going to be out there saying “Look at this effed up war we’re in, people!” while pointing fingers? Likely both sides. We’ll see who it actually makes it work for them, I guess.
I’d say the best news to come out of this election is the fact that “santorum” will soon be nothing more than a nasty slang word.
Unfortunately, my home state tacked up a big “No Queers Allowed” sign… It boggles me, but at least I did my part.
This month’s issue of Wired (to which I have recently (re)subscribed for almost entirely different reasons than I did in the 90s) has a cover story by Gary Wolf called Battle of the New Atheism. The so-called “New Atheism” is, in particular, the brand of atheism espoused by Richard Dawkins whose latest book is called The God Delusion. Dawkins is extremem in his atheism — to the point of anti-theism. He thinks tolerating the good that religion does is as evil as tolerating the evil religion does. It’s an extreme view, but one many people are adopting, it seems.
“I’m quite keen on the politics of persuading people of the virtues of atheism,” Dawkins says, after we get settled in one of the high-ceilinged, ground-floor rooms. He asks me to keep an eye on his bike, which sits just behind him, on the other side of a window overlooking the street. “The number of nonreligious people in the U.S. is something nearer to 30 million than 20 million,” he says. “That’s more than all the Jews in the world put together. I think we’re in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that’s the case with atheists. They are more numerous than anybody realizes.”
Dawkins looks forward to the day when the first U.S. politician is honest about being an atheist. “Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists,” he says. “Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. It just doesn’t add up. Either they’re stupid, or they’re lying. And have they got a motive for lying? Of course they’ve got a motive! Everybody knows that an atheist can’t get elected.”
That “Smart people are atheists, and I’m wicked smart, so I hate your ‘God’!” attitude is largely what turns me off when I read or hear something from Dawkins.
Continue reading ‘Deus ex Point/Counterpoint’
Is it better to struggle to make a living in a major metropolitan area with a lot of previously established ethnic diversity, or to try to make a homestead in more easily affordable small communities where the population is more homogenous and potentially ignorant?
It’s a quandary illustrated by the case of a white guy in Maine rolling a frozen pig’s head through a Somali mosque.
While they admit the act was the work of one man, it has heightened simmering tensions in this overwhelmingly white, working-class city of 35,000, where Somali refugees started flocking about five years ago, after first settling in more urban areas of the United States. Many said they came here because housing was inexpensive and Lewiston seemed a safe place to raise their families.
OK, so this incident was just a dumbass who is racist by default because he doesn’t know any better playing a “joke” on the dark-skinned people that just happened to turn out to have the worst possible consequences for all concerned. Can we say the same for the open letter the then-Mayor of the town wrote in 2002?
Hussein Ahmed, 31, said the mosque incident came as Somalis here felt that they had finally started to move on from a 2002 open letter written by Laurier Raymond, then the mayor, which asked them to stop other Somalis from coming to the city. Mr. Raymond contended in his letter that the city was “maxed-out financially, physically and emotionally.�
Overall, though, it seems like the people of Lewiston, ME are good and accepting people. It’s good to see.
Bruce Schneier: What the Terrorists Want
I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.
The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.
And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.
What a ridiculously good post!
Latest Comments
RSS