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How to Fight Terrorism

From Skeptic Ink:

In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, many are asking how we should fight terrorism. I think this is an important question and I have a really good answer for it.

First, let us be clear here. While obviously not all Muslims are terrorists, the fact is that the terrorists that attacked Paris were Muslims and when we think about terrorism around the world today, most people are thinking about Muslim terrorists (i.e. terrorists claiming to be inspired my the religion of Islam). Republicans and hawkish Democrats want to wage war on the Arab world. The conventional wisdom is to use drone strikes, train foreign fighters, put boots on the ground, and create no-fly zones. Some have even promoted the idea of torturing Muslims for information (Dick Cheney, I’m looking at you).

I think all of those things are bad ideas. They are strategies that have proven not only ineffective, but counter-productive. Those courses of action have only created more extremists and have pushed moderates into joining the cause of extremism. These are the very strategies that created the Islamic State (ISIS) and have allowed them to recruit less extremists to their extremist cause.

What I am suggesting is to take the gloves off. I don’t mean that we should let loose with military might, but instead to let loose with the might of logic and reason. We can’t be afraid to spread the reality that Allah is imaginary and that Mohammad was not a prophet. Instead of dropping bombs, we should be dropping facts about reality. We should be out there pointing out the scientific and logical problems with the Muslim religion.

But we can’t do that because if we point out the absurdity of the Muslim religion, we would also be pointing out the absurdity of the Christian and Jewish religions. I’m fine with that, but most of the people in our country are not. As a result, we are forced to wear kid gloves and not offend our own population. This prevents us from using our best weapon against terrorism.

The fact is that terrorists around the world would be far less likely to be terrorists if they were no longer religious. In fact, atheism is the cure not just for terrorism, but for a lot of social problems here in America too. There would be far less homophobia and bigotry in America if Christians stopped being Christian. Issues like Climate Change, women’s rights, etc. are all propagated by religion. We could drastically reduce the opposition to these issues if we just got religious believers to stop believing in religion.

So here we have a cure not only for many of society’s problems but also the current wave of terrorism around the globe. All we have to do is convince people that their deity of choice is imaginary and that their ancient superstitions don’t match up with reality. Unfortunately, because of the superstitious beliefs of many in our own country, we are prevented from even trying.

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Susie Bright on the Sex-Obsessed Paris ISIS Manifesto

From Towleroad (emphasis mine):

Voila, the “manifesto” of the Paris suicide bombers, in their own words.

Their obsession with sexual revenge, the revenge of the sexually rejected, is intense: They referred to the Bataclan nightclub as a place where where hundreds of “apostates” had gathered in a “profligate prostitution party”—that means a rock concert.

Bohemian Paris is on top of ISIS’ target list because it is the country of “obscenity and perversity.” Again, it’s Paris’ mythic reputation for the libertine, for free sexual exchange, for romance and unashamed ecstasy.

This “faith army,” this death cult built on sexual repression masked as religious purity—has a detailed manual about how to run a sex-slave market of their war captives, including rules of inheritance. Essentially, you can’t be a soldier in their army unless you buy into the faith that beautiful women everywhere are taunting and rejecting you, but you will teach them all a lesson by enslaving and raping them all day long—same with young boys. Everything “depraved” is holy when you’re inflicting it upon a slave—makes perfect sense, right?

At some point your Grand Wizard arranges a marriage with an appointed virgin your parents picked out for her dowry. She is of no erotic interest; she is a nonperson except as your baby-receptacle and income source. Siring sons is her husbandry.

Meanwhile, you monitor all the women’s menstrual cycles and the puberty of the young boys and girls in your slave pen so you can be sure to rape the right person on the most advantageous day, repeatedly shouting God’s name when you come.

VOMIT. Vomit. Vomit.

Every fundamentalist religion today is running on the fumes of sexual psychosis. They are huffing and huffing and huffing until they annihilate everything including themselves.

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Terrorism Works

From Gawker:

Terrorism persists because terrorism works. Terrorism works because we let it.

It takes a great deal of violence to wipe out an army. But it only takes a tiny bit of violence to instill a sense of fear in a population. Terrorism is not meant to conquer through force; it is meant to conquer through fear.

How did you feel when you heard that men with machine guns had murdered a dozen people at a French newspaper because they did not like its political content? Angry. Afraid. Those of us in the media felt these twin emotions most of all. “I am shaking with rage at the attack on Charlie Hebdo,” wrote the New York Times‘ Roger Cohen. “It’s an attack on the free world. The entire free world should respond, ruthlessly.”

Rage and fear. These are the twin goals of terrorists. And terrorism is wonderfully effective at achieving these goals. All of our rhetoric about bravery and freedom and honor and Settled Determination to Push Forward After This Tragedy rarely adds up to anything more than rage and fear. Our responses to terrorism are based on rage and fear. Because of this, terrorism works.

The attacks of September 11 were a spectacular success. Is there any other honest interpretation? They were a success not because of the Americans they killed that day, but because we chose to spend the next decade mired in hopeless, counterproductive global wars that cost us trillions of dollars and killed thousands more Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Terrorists wanted to show the world that we were brutal and unjust, and we did our best to help them do that. Terrorists wanted a war, and we gave them one. And we lost. We lost by giving them the stupid, fearful, angry response that they wanted.

Two men with a rifle paralyze Washington, DC for weeks. Two men with a couple of homemade bombs paralyze Boston for days. One man on a plane witha dud bomb packed inside his boots has an entire nation taking off its shoes at the airport for years to come. A small group of religious zealots send three U.S. presidential administrations down a nightmarish rabbithole of drone war, torture, and total surveillance of the citizenry.

Terrorism works. Against us, terrorism works very, very well. Our collective insistence on treating terrorist acts as something categorically different than crime—as something harder to understand, something scarier, something perpetrated not by humans but by monsters—feeds the ultimate goals of terrorists. It makes us dumb. It makes us primitive. It is our boogeyman, and no amount of rational talk will drive it out of our minds.

Terrorists who despise freedom of speech shoot up a satirical magazine. How do we respond? We respond with fear, by censoring ourselves and refusing to showthe very images that prompted the attack in the first place. (Nothing new about that—the free press has demonstrated its cowardice on this issue for years now.) We respond with rage, by condemning all of Islam and instinctively calling for a response violent enough to dwarf the violence of the initial attack. We cower in fear and cry for war. We countenance any countermeasure as long as it will keep us safe. We let the ideal we once proclaimed so strongly sink into a pool of terror, and drown.

Sound familiar? It is always the way. We are richer, and mightier, and far more deadly than any of our terrorist foes could dream of being. And yet we happily play into their hands. We declare a “War on Terror” of our own making, an absurd construct with no possible victory. We overreact so harshly to every injury that our reputation as bullies and savages is confirmed. We allowourselves to be cowed by fear. We allow ourselves to be rendered senseless by rage. The terrorist lays the bait, and we give him the terror he seeks. The terrorist may be the criminal, but we are the hapless suckers who make his act worthwhile.

Terrorism works. But it does not have to. Terrorism reduces us to the sort of society that we claim to despise. But it does not have to. The ideals we espouse when times are calm—justice, understanding, rationality, proportionality, a love of peace—are the ones that we must cling to most tightly when things get scary. If we discard them, we have lost the game from the start.

We cannot control the terrorist. We can only control our response. Let that response be just, and wise, and proportional. Let that response embody the best of who we are, and not the worst. Terror is momentary. A loss of our ideals can last forever.

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Advice to My 20 Year Old Self

A meme I’ve noticed making the rounds recently is “Things I Would Tell My Younger Self.”

As fascinating as this little thought experiment might be, I long ago realized that alerting my younger self to any of the myriad major things I might wish to warn him about—assuming he would even listen—would ultimately fundamentally change the course of my life, and as much as I bitch and complain about aspects of it at times, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

So to prevent any major life alterations—as much as I might want to tell him to buy a thousand dollars worth of Apple stock in July 1982 and hold onto it no matter what, if I had to offer up advice, I’d ask him to only do three things:

  • Do not toss out the notebooks of classic audio gear brochures he collected in the late 1970s, because he’ll want them someday to remind himself that audio equipment wasn’t always black plastic crap—and if nothing else, they’ll be worth a lot of money.
  • Do not toss out any of his architectural drawings. I know they’re a pain in the ass to move, but trust me…he’ll want them someday to remind himself that he actually once knew how a house went together.
  • Do not give the notebooks of Hallcraft floor plans and renderings he collected into Dad’s care. He’ll just throw them out, and someday he’ll will want them to scan and post on a website. Never mind he doesn’t understand what those words mean. He will soon enough.

Because in the area of things, these are the only items he will regret no longer possessing.

Health issues, jobs, friends, and love affairs…just let them unfold on their own. Own the scars. Each and every one of them will put him on the course that will ultimately lead him into Ben’s arms, and when that time comes, he wouldn’t want to change that for the world.

 

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Well That’s Unfortunate


I took Anderson into the MINI dealer yesterday to have some recall work done (the passenger seat air bag sensor that’s been wonky for the last six years). While the recall repair didn’t cost me a dime, I got the car back with a multi-page list of recommended repairs. Thankfully, none of them were critical, and all the major mechanical systems were in good shape. But still, the total (should I win the lottery and decide to have the work done) for all the recommended repairs came to a whopping $3400. Even if I were working, this would still have given me pause.

Curiosity drove me over to the Edmunds Blue Book site to see what the car was actually worth at this point, and I came away severely disillusioned; it came in at $164 less than the cost of repairs.

Before I left the dealer, I asked the Service Manager about two cosmetic items that didn’t appear on the estimate: the passenger headlight lens and the driver’s side seat cover.  The passenger headlight lens has gotten severely oxidized over the last two years. I tried buffing it out myself with one of those $25 kits a little over a year ago, but the results were…disappointing. But yes, the dealer had some voodoo magic capable of bringing it back to like new for a meager $40-60. The other item was the rapidly disintegrating edge of the driver’s side seat cover. Because of the way I get into and out of the vehicle, this has been an issue with every car I’ve owned; the difference being the damage is much more extensive this time because of the mileage I’ve racked up on Anderson. I paid a premium for leather seats in the last couple cars I’ve owned, erroneously believing that the leather would handle the abuse a bit better. (Hint: it doesn’t.)

The Service Manager suggested getting the seat cover done through a local upholstery shop, since because of the age of the car MINI probably wouldn’t have any more in stock and would have to custom fabricate one anyway, making it hella expensive (well over $1000 just for the cover itself, not including installation).

I’m not averse to getting a new MINI as an alternative to shelling out that chunk of change (plus an additional $1600 down the line for a new clutch in about 20K miles) once I’m gainfully employed again—but I’ve enjoyed not having car payments these past couple years, and frankly it’s not going to be easy to say goodbye to lil’ Anderson in any case. We’ve had some grand adventures, and I’ve can honestly say I’ve never bonded with a car the way I have with this one.

So yeah.

All this has done is contribute to what I can only describe as a sense of melancholy that has overtaken me of late. Between this, my recent aborted employment adventure that I had so hoped would be “the one,” some ongoing problems Ben is having with one of his students, the general level of stupidity screeching from a certain portion of the population, and the fact I’m pretty much sleeping like crap every. single.night, I’m feeling drained.

I think Ben and I are both also feeling a little disappointed that our return to Phoenix hasn’t been full of sparkle unicorns shooting rainbows out their asses as we’d hoped. When I start feeling that way however, I have to remind myself that it usually takes a year or so for me to get into the groove of a new place after a move. While Phoenix isn’t “new” to me per se, relocation is still considered a major life change and stress producer.

At least it’s finally cooled down and we can turn off the air conditioning for the year.

How’s that for a non-sequiteur?

 

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Adults Are Assholes

Kids are not stupid. They know that finding the kind of person who leaves out candy for you to take without monitoring what you take is a rare deal. Most kids will try not to mess up a sweet gig like that, unless of course they’ve been taught by their parents that it’s OK to ruin a perfect world for everyone if some sugar is at stake. That’s what YouTuber InternetLasers learned when a trip out of town on Halloween meant they wouldn’t be able to hand out candy. Not wanting to disappoint the local children, InternetLasers put out full-sized candy bars on a table outside their home with the note “Help yourself, but be considerate!” A hidden camera captured who actually followed this instruction:

First of all, there is a bright side to this video: the kids are alright. Literally dozens of kids pass the test before the violator shows up. Even the Edward Scissorhands kid who jokes about making off with an armful of candy bars puts them back. Then the worst fairy princess ever shows up, and it even looks like she argues with that same Scissorhands kid before teaching her own son an important lesson: when you’re faced with something as pure and innocent as a table of free candy, you better ruin it before someone else does.

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Ghosts

A curious and unexpected effect of being back in Phoenix has been the appearance of ghosts. Not the horror movie variety, but rather memories of persons, places and things long gone. I’m not talking about memories of my life in Phoenix post San Francisco and pre Denver, but stuff from my 20s!

I had to run out to my new employer’s occupational health office to get screened and vaccinated prior to starting work several times over the past couple weeks, and the route takes me past the locations of three of my favorite gay bars from the late 70s and early 80s: Bullwinkle, The Forum, and Hotbods. Of course, none of those places are still in business, but the mere act of driving past conjures up so many good memories of the evenings I spent in them. Driving past The Forum, I am reminded of meeting friends Mike and Michael (and running into an acquaintance from high school whom I previously hadn’t a clue that we played on the same team), and the DJ George, who I often bumped into at lunch at the McDonalds (that used to be on the northeast corner of 16th Street and Camelback vs. its current location on the southeast) where we’d discuss the week’s latest disco releases over our fries and Big Macs. The Forum was where—to the strains of St. Tropez’s Violation,  I first slow-danced with another man.

Bullwinkle, and later Hotbods were where my friend Steve worked. I remember many evenings spent at the latter venue in the DJ booth with him (at least until the pharmaceuticals he’s taken started flowing). It was the place where Dennis (my first partner) and I would drive two hours from Tucson to spend a Saturday night dancing—and then turn around and drive two hours back home after they turned the lights up.

Ah, youth.

Then there are the two audio equipment stores where I used to hang out: Jerry’s and Bruce’s—neither of which are still open, and in fact haven’t been in years—but nonetheless elicit memories of my first major purchase on credit and where I went every six months to get my stylus examined under a microscope for signs of wear. (No, not that stylus, you bitches!)

There are plenty of other examples of these 30 year old memories being dredged up, but I won’t bore you. The question I have to ask however is why? Why here, why now? I don’t remember this happening when I moved back from San Francisco in ’02…

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A Curious Phenomenon

From my old blog, courtesy The Wayback Machine:

I have been blogging for close to two years now. What I’ve noticed during that time is while I’ve made new friends through the endeavor, several of my long-time fellow travelers in life’s journey have drifted away. One of whom in particular—a guy I’ve known nearly a quarter century—has all but vanished, and I’m starting to wonder if it’s because of something I’ve written along the way. Blogging’s semi-anonymity has allowed me to voice thoughts that even my closest confidants may not have known I was mulling.

This raises a fundamental question. Isn’t it better to have people love you for who you really are, other than for who they think you are?

While not nearly as political as I am, I know my buddy has no love for George Bush, so I doubt that’s the source of his withdrawl. The only other thing that may have caused this apparent chilling of our friendship are the writings about my increasing agnosticism. He’s not a religious guy, but a very spiritually oriented one; something that initially drew us together and that we’d shared these many years. I still respect his New Age beliefs, but at this point in my life I’m just finding it impossible to ascribe to a philosophy that’s become as rigid and entrenched as any other faith-based doctrine and offers no more proof of its validity than the fairy tales of traditional organized religion.

Before I started blogging, we’d chat or email each other several times a week, and I always felt welcome visiting. But over the last year or so (along with my posts examining my crumbling faith in New Age thought), all my emails seem to vanish into a black hole, never to be answered. (His excuse is that he gets so much spam he doesn’t even bother opening his email, despite my attempts to show him how to filter it out at his ISP before it ever reaches Outlook). So I’ve just given up emailing him altogether. At some point you just reach the point where you think, “Why bother?”

I no longer feel like I can just call and come down for the weekend like I’d been doing for years. It seems he always has houseguests, or previous plans, or the planets aren’t in proper alignment. The last time I was in the neighborhood, the ex and I just dropped in on him (we did call first), and neither of us exactly got the warm fuzzies while we were there. And don’t get me started on him coming here. It’s been over a year and a half since he’s been up to Phoenix. His excuse is that his back bothers him. It’s not like going to San Francisco, for Chrissake.

So I’m kind of at a loss. I have a feeling he’s dealing with some demons of his own, but he hasn’t shared any of it with me, and when I’ve asked if everything was okay he said it was. I’m not losing sleep over it, but it concerns me that a friendship I thought I would take to the grave with me may be coming to an end after having survived and flourished nearly twenty-five years.

Amazingly, nothing has changed with this particular friend since I wrote this eight years ago. During the years Ben and I were in Denver, my friend and I spoke once on the phone—and I was the one who initiated the call.

Still, I’ve kept him up to date via a change of address card regarding our return to Phoenix, and have thought many times about calling him, but as I wrote initially, I’m really starting to wonder, “Why bother?”

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