4 May 2005

Volume Two

One month later, I've finally gotten around to setting up "volume two" of the "God's ex-Boyfriend" site. From now on, all new entries in this category will go there.

Whose Ten Commandments?

With all the Christian legislators, judges, and busybodies trying to get the Ten Commandments of Moses into permanent public displays at places of government, I thought a review of them would be in order. After all, they're supposedly an important part of our cultural heritage and the basis of our legal code.

So let's check them out one by one, to see if they're something I really agree with, and if they're really the basis for U.S. laws:

1: "I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

OK, we're already in trouble here. For one thing, he's not my God. I'm not Hebrew, so my people were never in bondage in Egypt. And that bit about other gods stands in direct contradiction to the anti-establishment clause of the First Amendment. So we've got a conflict with my my own personal values, and the law of the land.

2: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain."

Again, he's not my God, so the commandment is meaningless to me. And this one conflicts with the free-speech clause of the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to say things like "God this cheeseburger is heavenly!"

3: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them."

Taken literally, this forbids making any kind of respresentational sculptures or even illustrations, which is definitely not consistent with my own beliefs. I'm a practising likeness-maker. I'm not the sort to bown down to these things, but I'm not going to stand in the way of anyone who wants to. And it's pretty clearly inconsistent with the free-expression-of-religion clause of the First Amendment, because it says that idol worshippers... can't.

4: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy."

No day of the week is holy to me. Not even Fridays. Although there are laws on the books that try to enforce such a thing (like those prohibiting the sale of alcohol between 2am and noon on Sunday), they really are nothing more than thinly-disguised attempts to establish a particular religion.

5: "Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long."

OK, finally here's one I'm OK with, personally. I'm all for treating one's parents with respect. But there's precious little in U.S. law that actually reflects this principle. Once a person reaches adulthood, they're free to disobey and disrespect their parents all they want.

6: "Thou shalt not kill."

Another I agree with. And our laws are pretty solidly behind it as well (albeit with exceptions for circumstances). But the notion that this is where civil laws against killing came from is pretty ludicrous, because there were laws against killing in civilisations that pre-date the time of Moses.

7: "Thou shalt not commit adultery."

They're starting to lose me again. I agree with the principle that if someone pledges not to have sex with anyone else, he should live up to that. But I'm really not that keen on monogamy, for myself personally. And I think any broken promises of fidelity are a matter between the two people involved, not the state. Nonetheless, there's a long tradition of prohibiting adultery in our legal system. But of course it too goes back to sources other than Moses.

8: "Thou shalt not steal."

See "Thou shalt not kill."

9: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour."

I'd say that's a good rule. (Especially since it doesn't say "Thou shalt not lie", which would be a whole different kettle of fish.) And since perjury can result in someone going to jail or receiving some other legal penalty, I'd say it's appropriate for the law to enforce this rule, as it does.

10: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's. "

I'll covet my neighbour's ass all I want. Seriously, while coveting isn't exactly the most admirable thing to do, and I generally avoid it myself, I don't see any great harm coming from it. Interestingly this one is at complete odds with our society, in which coveting the Joneses' house and car and other possessions is the engine of our economy. There certainly aren't any laws against coveting.

So there we have it: Only 4 out of 10 (# 5,6,8,9) are things that match my own personal beliefs. Only 4 out of 10 (# 6,7,8,9) are actually consistent with the laws of the United States. And the three that actually stand up to both tests are the no-brainer commandments against killing, stealing, and perjury. Like anybody really needed those handed to them on stone tablets.

All of which goes to shows that: A) Promoting the Ten Commandments is shoving a religion I don't believe in down my throat. And: B) They're very thoroughly un-American.

Of course a huge majority of Americans favor putting these commandments on display in government buildings. Because they happen to believe in them. But that's whole damn point of putting protections in the Constitution for religious freedom: to protect the minority from the tyrrany of the majority. And the majority who want to override that are welcome to go fuck off and establish their theocratic dictatorship somewhere else.

The Irony of Product Liability

Today a co-worker sent me one of those ha-ha-snicker e-mails that get passed around the 'net like the sniffles. It was a list of warning labels and disclaimers found on various products, the point being to show how stupidly obvious some of them are. Things like a package of peanut brittle saying "contains nuts".

Of course the real purpose of these warnings is for businesses to avoid any and all legal liability, but more often they're the result of stupid executives listening to stupid/dishonest lawyers scaring them with outlandish tales of how dangerous civil courts are. After all, nobody's really that stupid... are they?

Public opinion polls - on topics like stem cell research, economics, cloning, foreign policy, and anything else that requires some critical thinking skills and general thoughtfulness - tend to indicate that, yes: many people really are that stupid. Just look at the 2004 election results.

The irony is that it's mostly the Republican party that's trying to use these examples of liability-gone-amok to loosen regulations on corporations. That's ironic because, if these warning labels disappear, the first to die will be the epsilon semi-morons who - in addition to, say, buying "peanut brittle" despite severe peanut allergies - are most likely to vote Republican. The commerce-worshipping troglodytes in Congress are working to drain and fill in the neanderthal gene pool that they depend upon to stay in office.

Which is why I've decided to fully support the removal of product liability disclaimers on packaging. Yes, we'll lose some good-hearted mentally-challenged people along the way, but in the long run the collective intelligence of the species will go up enough that the Republican party will lose its electoral power base, and we can get a little smarts percolating up into Congress and the White House.

Legal Kiddie Porn

You hear a lot of talk about kiddie porn on the internet. It seems that every legislator on the planet is trying to eradicate it. It's the one category of material that no one on the internet permits; read the terms of service for web hosting services, and if they give specific examples of material they won't permit, child pornography and pirated copyrighted material are the two items always forbidden... but since nearly every music lover in the post-industrial world downloads tunez, it's apparent that only one of those is really universally condemned: kiddie porn.

Except that it's just as obviously not universally condemned. A review of my site logs (as I was just doing) shows that.

Think about it: the reason kiddie porn is such a hot item on law-makers' and law-enforcers' agendas is that it's popular. This isn't just a handful of nutcases with a rare psychosis. Child pornography is something that lots of people out there are looking for. By a wide margin, the single most-hit page on this blog is one in which I prominently mentioned "kiddie porn" (in the context of snuff films, hate crimes, and other targets of recent legislation). That phrase is also the most-common search-engine key showing up in my referrer logs, despite the fact that I've written lots more about a lot of different topics. If I'm getting hundreds of instances of that phrase every month, imagine what Google is getting. And the fact that people are risking prosecution to sell it shows that it's popular enough to be rather profitable.

That raises the question of what this says about our society. The obvious response is that we're heading to hell in a handbasket, we've abandoned morality, etc. I don't buy that.

The modern obession with pornography in general isn't anything new. The only thing that the inventions of photography, motion pictures, video recorders, and the internet, have done over the past century or so, is to make porn easier to produce and distribute. People have always been attracted to images of people in the nude and especially having sex. Any student of art history can tell you that. I see no reason to assume that interest in seeing young people like that is new, either. All you have to do is look at the millennia-old traditions of adult men taking girls in their early teens as wives to confirm that pedophilia - or at least ephebophilia (the attraction to pubescents and adolescents) - has been around for a very long time. Evidently it's a part of human nature.

So what this contemporary hullaballoo over kiddie porn really says about our society is that our society is in conflict with itself. One of the most popular search subjects is also one of the most banned subjects.

I'm not trying to argue that just because it's popular, that makes it right. I understand that spouse-beating and pre-emptive invasions both have long and popular histories, but I'm definitely not advocating either of them. But by the same token, the fact that something's illegal doesn't necessarily make it pernicious, as demonstrated by the prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. in the 1920s, or laws against consensual homosexual activity. You have to look at it objectively, on its own.

The one thing that nearly everyone does agree on regarding child pornography is that abusing children to produce it is wrong. Of course there's some considerable difference opinion about what exactly constitutes "abuse", but there are also some pretty clear "wrong" areas and "right" areas. For example, if a child is physically harmed, that's obviously "wrong". If there are no actual children involved, that seems rather harmless.

After all, we let movie studios use special effects to simulate murder, dangerous stunts, animal abuse, and other things that would be horrible to allow in real life. If a video game showing a virtual soldier blasting the living fuck out of other virtual people isn't a threat to society (the only thing we question is whether children should have access to them), why is a movie showing a virtual 15-year-old masturbating? (I don't mind saying that I personally find the former a lot more disturbing.)

Out of curiosity, I did some research about this. It may surprise you (it surprised me) that the U.S. Supreme Court has said pretty much the same thing, at least as it applies to the question of "obscenity". They ruled that material that was produced without any actual minors - such as illustrations from imagination, or virtual porn - is not "child pornography" and therefore isn't automatically "obscene". (It can still be ruled obscene if it lacks artistic merit and so forth, just like any other sexually explicit material.) Which would be a relief to John Singer Sargent, who painted the accompanying image. On the other hand, other countries have taken the opposite position, and created legal concepts such as an "indecent pseudophotograph of a child", which are outlawed on the grounds that such things would promote child abuse.

If Prohibition, the so-called war on drugs, and the utter failure of efforts to get rid of sex in popular entertainment have shown us anything, it's that where there's an interest in something, you can't just legislate it away. If - as with alcohol, drugs, and porn - there are potentials for abuse and for people to get hurt, then the most reasonable course of action is to let them be... with regulation to limit their harmfulness. So why not let the NAMBLA guys draw their naughty pictures, let dirty old men make virtual-school-girl movies, and so forth... and put the hurt of the law on anyone who abuses actual boys or girls?

I'm not saying, "If you can't beat them, give up". I'm saying, "If you can't beat them... maybe you're playing the wrong game."

Health Insurance Should Not Be A Benefit

Nearby Kalamazoo Valley Community College has instituted a policy that they won't hire people for full-time positions if they smoke cigarettes. Predictably, it's all over the headlines.

The main reaction I've seen is from smokers and civil libertarians who argue that this is unfair.

They're right.

What you do in your own time is none of your employer's business unless it impacts how you do your job. It shouldn't matter if you smoke, drink, shoot heroin, collect assault weapons, attend anime conventions dressed in Sailor Moon costumes, worship Satan, sleep with your sister, or even vote Republican. All your employer should care about is whether you do your job as expected.

The KVCC administrators are coming at from an entirely different angle. They don't seem to actually care about the morals or ethics of smoking. It isn't that they don't want you to smoke; it's that they don't want to have to pay the increased cost of your healthcare because of it. That's why the rule only applies to full-timers: KVCC gives those people health insurance as part of their standard benefits package.

They're right as well.

The only reason this is an issue is because we have this bizarre notion that employers should provide healthcare to their employees. If they didn't have to, employers like KVCC wouldn't have any reason for this policy.

Employers didn't use to pay for people's healthcare. They started offering it as an enticement to potential employees back when the government had instituted wage controls, and they were already paying the maximum wage allowed. So they conceived of "benefits", a form of compensation that wasn't wages.

Wage controls are gone now, but the workforce has become so dependent on these standard benefit packages that employers can't drop them without losing all their best employees. Even if they adjusted their wages way up to compensate, the employees would be screwed, because it's nearly impossible for individuals to get good, affordable insurance on their own. If you ask any business executive, he'll tell you that the cost of providing health insurance is one of the key things driving layoffs, off-shore outsourcing, and generally poor profitability.

The obvious solution is to free businesses of this horrible burden. Not by eliminating health insurance (which is what seems to be happening to the lower working class), but by putting that burden where it belongs: on the government. The whole insurance system is based on "pooled risk", spreading the costs of caring for really sick people among healthy people whose healthcare costs are trivial. The larger and more varied the pool, the better it works. A "pool" of over a quarter billion U.S. citizens of all ages and races and genders and lifestyles seems like a pretty good one to me.

This is the point were small-government ideologues start wailing about "socialised medicine" and how horrible that is for patients. But the current system, in which patients are increasingly going without insurance altogether, is even worse.

My boss had a difficult time getting approval to create my job. The higher-ups said it was too much money for the amount of work she'd be getting out of it, so she had to scale back the request for a 32-hour/week position instead of full-time. That made it much harder for her to fill the job; she got lucky, with me being a bit desperate, and the extra cost of paying for my own insurance is making it difficult for me to stick with the job. But just think of how many jobs could be created if employers didn't have to include insurance in the cost, because their applicants already got it elsewhere!

Of course the money to pay for health care is going to have to come from somewhere else. To some extent, employers would raise wages, since they could afford to. Then employees could buy their own, and with the whole workforce doing that the cost per person would be lower than it is now. But it would be more effective and far more fair to go back to the "pooled risk" idea and just spread the cost across the whole population. Yeah, with taxes.

This suggestion always sends the anti-tax zealots into a frenzy, but it you look at it rationally, it's not like it's going to be a huge burden on Joe Citizen. He'll almost certainly be making more money, as his employer will be able to afford paying him more. On average, he'll probably come out even.

So if it comes out even, what's the point? The point is that it frees employers from having the administer people's medical expenses. It permits employers to create jobs more freely and flexibly, in particular to do so right when they need someone, not months too late when the business is already suffering from being understaffed. It spreads the cost burden more widely and more fairly among those paying for it. It gives employees more freedom to change jobs without having to change insurance companies and change doctors. It gives a parent more freedom to drop out of the workforce to have and care for children. It frees doctors and hospitals from hiring (or becoming) collection agencies, trying to squeeze payment for services rendered out of impoverished patients and/or reluctant insurer/employers.

These would all be good things for society, for individuals, for businesses, for the medical industry... Of course the insurance industry finds the whole idea of the government filling their role unacceptable. There's just so damn much inertia in the current system. And the anti-government ideologues keep shrieking "socialized medicine". Which is why it may never happen.

Person of the Year

OK, so Time magazine has picked George W. Bush to be "Person of the Year" again this year. At first I was disgusted with the choice, making the common mistake of thinking of that designation as an honor. But it's not. The idea is to identify the person who had the most impact on the year's events.

I'm sure GWB and his worshippers are looking at it as an honor. The way Time wussed out and named the suddenly heroic Rudy Giuliani "Person of the Year" for 2001 instead of the more deserving, villainous Osama bin Laden, makes it easy to look at it that way. The news coverage of Time's choice this year (yes, a newsmagazine is being covered by newspapers) makes it sound that way as well, for example pointing out the esteemed company he's in (several popular presidents) for having been chosen twice.

But I'd like to put him in context of some other "Persons of the Year":
* Pierre Laval (French prime minister, collaborated with the Nazis)
* Adolf Hitler (Nazi führer, you know the story)
* Josef Stalin (Soviet dictator, a lot like Hitler just within his own country)
* Mohammed Mossaddegh (Iranian prime minister, took over oil operations and allied with radical Muslims)
* Nikita Khrushchev (Soviet premier, told U.S. "We will bury you.")
* Richard Nixon (U.S. president, resigned in disgrace)
* Faisal bin Abdul Aziz (Saudi king, created the 1970's oil crisis)
* Ruhollah Khomeni (Iranian ayatollah, held the U.S. embassy hostage)

There are other folks on the list, such as Deng Xiaoping, Gen. William Westmoreland, Henry Kissinger, Newt Gingrich, and Kenneth Starr, who aren't quite world-class exemplars of evil, but not exactly heroic role models, either.

The first time GWB was named was for 2000, the year in which his sole accomplishment was to get himself appointed to the presidency. This year that's his chief accomplishment again with even more divisiveness than before, with the added "bonus" of his occupation of Iraq going badly. He truly does stomp across the world stage like a microcephalic brontosaur, and his misdeeds currently dwarf those of any other player on that stage, including bin Laden. "Person of the Year"? Damn right.

Fascism Already on the March in Michigan

This week just keeps getting worse.

The Michigan state Senate has just passed a bill that would require pubic school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. They did this during a quickie lame-duck session this week, without any advance notice. The Republican party has a majority, of course, so they can do that.

Most elementary school students already recite the pledge every morning. But so far, despite plenty of pressure on kids to say it - whether they mean it or not (hell, whether they understand it or not) - they've always had the right not to. There are some people who consider the recitation of an allegiance oath like that to violate their religious beliefs, which require them to give allegiance only to God. They may consider a pledge to a flag to be a form of idolatry. Then there are those who object to the "under God" bit in there, because it contradicts their belief that there is no such thing. (Ironically, one of the arguments for keeping "under God" in the pledge has been that no one's forced to say it. Until this.)

The principle of "free speech" includes the ability not to speak. It has to. Without that, you're just coercing people to say things they may not believe in. We have the right to remain silent, after all. Requiring someone to put his hand on his heart and say "I pledge allegiance..." when they don't mean it, is requiring them to perjure themselves, a form of self-incrimination. It's the Fifth Amendment being spat on along with the First.

The bill's primary sponsor is Sen. Patty Birkholz, a Republican and evidently a banner-saluting fascist. But she had plenty of company in voting for it. One more piece of evidence that the people we elect to our government either have no understanding of the principles this country was founded on, or they just don't give a damn. They should be recalled. They should be impeached for willfully failing to uphold the Constitution. Instead, they're going to stroked and fondled by their equally freedom-hating, flag-worshiping constituents. And this is in one of the states that Bush failed to win.

Dividing Up the States

With all this talk on the web lately of the Northeast, the West Coast, or even the upper Midwest seceding from the Union, I have to point out that I suggested this months ago. I actually think it would be a good idea in the long run, not just for electoral politics and maintaining cultural distinctiveness, but in terms of representation and good government (smaller districts and legislatures). The world could certainly use one less "superpower". Here's the gist of it:

The Pacific: These states share a common lean toward the left (except for Alaska) as well as cultural and economic ties to their Pacific counterparts in Asia. California would probably have to be split into two or three states to avoid it dominating the others... which is something many Californians want to do anyways. San Francisco would make a nice capital for Pacifica. (Top-level country domain: .PC)

The South: The membership of this nation doesn't match up exactly with the original Confederacy (I omitted Texas, and added the then-disputed border states of Kentucky and Maryland, and yes even the District of Columbia) but it captures "the South". Overall very socially conservative. I think they even have a flag ready. Although the city of Washington would be part of this nation, it might be best to dissolve the District of Columbia into Maryland, and put the capital in Atlanta (rather than Montgomery or Richmond) to establish that the Dixie Confederation isn't your great-grand-pappy's confederacy. (Top-level country domain: .DX)

Note that I carefully avoided using red or blue for any of the states. {smile}

There was a bit of debate in the comments of that article about whether to include Maryland and DC in New America or the Dixie Confederation. I changed my mind, but I'm thinking now that my first instinct was correct, and they should go with the Northeast. Maybe we'd get more cohesive results by redrawing some state lines as well. And I skipped the whole question of whether certain states with a history of independence (e.g. Hawaii, Texas) should revert to that. But I think the basic concept is good. Another four years of the current "culture wars" and another electoral disaster in 2008, and maybe it could happen. I think it should.

Traumatic Stress

Did you notice that the Terror-alert level went down right after the elections? For most of the country it was "yellow", but for New York City and D.C. it was orange. Not enough to send people into a panic and blame the president for them feeling unsafe, but just enough to make them nervous... about changing presidents.

Of course the Bush administration will claim that they lowered it because we successfully got through the election without a terror attack. But what they really mean is that the alert is no longer needed. It helped get George re-elected, and now they want to lower it so people will feel more relaxed and euphoric about his election.

It hasn't worked for me. I've been horribly stressed out the last couple days. I haven't been sleeping well, my gut's been irritated, and (probably the direct cause of much of that) I've drunk enough since Election Day to match what I usually drink in a week. Which, to be honest, is a substantial amount.

One thing that's helped is having the Virtual Canadian web site to work on. It's now a proper-looking web page, and I've set up an online store to sell t-shirts and mugs, as a way for people to spread the word about escaping their U.S. identity and becoming virtual Canadians.

I've done some blatant whoring about on the blogosphere mentioning it wherever I can find people talking (seriously or not) about moving to Canada. It seems to be catching a little buzz, and I'm getting some registrations from others who want to escape the states (even if just in their heart), which is kind of exciting. Time will tell whether it becomes The Next Big Thing, a little sizzle in the pan, or what.

O Canada

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

Since it looks like Bush is going to be re-elected, it's time to look at the handwriting on the wall. It says that the United States is no place I want to live.

The political system itself and the principles it represnts have a lot to say for them, but what the voters themselves are saying through that system... I find contrary to my own values and to common sense. The arrogant foreign policy disgusts me. The embrace of intolerance frightens me. And the sheer fearful irrationality of the voters astonishes me.

My nation has again chosen a Republican executive, legislature, and judiciary. This time even more so than last. It gave Bush an actual majority (not just a plurality) of the popular vote. Let that sink in a moment; it doesn't usually happen. It has thrown out the Democratic leader in the Senate, and elected a handful of far-right-wing Republicans to replace occasionally moderate Democrats in the South. Kentucky re-elected a Republican who's obviously suffering from dementia. My state (along with 10 others) has voted overwhelmingly to make me constitutionally a second-class citizen without the right to marry. (This issue seems to be a major factor in the right-wing turn-out in the king-maker state of Ohio.) Even my county commission district (representing my supposedly lefty neighborhood) has elected a Republican.

There are bits of good news here and there (Obama beat his token challenger, and a Democrat beat one of the Coors clan in Colorado), but they're not enough. I want out.

I'm too settled in my house and my job to pull up stakes and move, so instead I'm declaring that my home is now part of Canada. Ontario, to be specific (since it's closest). I'll be doing this through VirtualCanadian.org, a just-created web site providing a means for disaffected U.S. citizens to declare themselves Canadians... of a sort.

This will allow me to travel abroad without being abused for my nationality. It will entitle me to health care, though I suppose I'll continue using my Michigan-based insurance, since Windsor's pretty far to go for a check-up, and would take too long to reach in an emergency. I still won't get to marry, but at least I won't be singled out in the constitution.

Getting legal recognition of all this will be impossible, of course. It'll only be true in my head. But at this point I'd rather live in a deluded state of denial, than in the United States of America.

No, Don't Vote for Nader Anywhere

Four years ago there was a fairly large coordinated effort to match up Gore supporters in "safely Democratic" states or "safely Republican" states with Nader supporters in "battleground" states, so they could agree to vote for the other guy's candidate, giving Gore the support he'd need to win the electoral college, but also giving Nader some popular vote to help promote the Greens or alternative parties in general. I was a strong supporter of it.

There's a similar program going on this year, but I think it's a bad idea, considering the circumstances. There's a very good chance that Bush is going to win the electoral college again. If he does, he's going to take it as "mandate" for everything he's been wanting to do, and he'll be able to. He's also pining for the validation of winning without the taint of having to go to the Supreme Court to decide it. Because he knows he lost the popular vote.

In the event that he does take the electors, the only thing that'll hold him back and give the opposition an excuse for saying "no" to him, is if people can point to the fact that he lost the popular vote again. It dragged him back for several months in 2001 (before 9/11 gave him a blank check of "loyalty"), and it could do the same in 2005 and beyond. But not if Nader does well. If Nader gets 3% of the vote, Bush could get 49% and Kerry only 48%, and it'd still come across that Bush "won" this time. But if those 3% swing to Kerry, he'd have 51% and rob Bush of his popular legitimacy. (And maybe give more momentum to the electoral college reform.)

I strongly believe that America needs additional parties. But what it needs in 2004 is a coalition opposition, one that puts aside its differences and unites to form a new government. Because one thing Democrats, indy progressives, Greens, and even Libertarians should agree upon is that Bush has to go. I know that I'd hold my nose and vote for Badnarik (the Libertarian) if he was the best chance to accomplish that. To some extent that's what I'm doing voting for Kerry. He wasn't my first choice, after all. I hope that Nader's supporters, and even devout Greens and Libertarians would do the same, rallying behind Kerry. Not because he's the lesser of two evils, but because he's the center of a coalition.

So, Californians, and Utahites, and New Yorkers, and Dakotans... your vote really could matter this year, even if it doesn't change who gets the electoral votes from your state.

Please vote Kerry, and just maybe... save us all.