May Contain Nuts

So earlier this week, al-Qaeda apparently released another one of their bizarre anti-American videos. This one, notably, was in English, and had production levels not dissimilar to a news report filmed for a high school broadcasting class. It’s really ridiculous. This video prompted Rachel Maddow on Monday to say this:

I know al-Qaeda is al-Qaeda, right? But is it OK to point out that they‘re ridiculous, that their propaganda is inadvertently funny as in, “Ha-ha, I‘m laughing at you”? These guys are like the reject pile at talk radio tryouts.

My response: yes. It is absolutely OK to point out that they’re ridiculous. In fact, that’s perhaps the best thing that we and the media could possibly do. I’m not suggesting that our government not take them seriously as a threat, because they’ve proven themselves to be a lot deadlier in the battlefield than they are in front of a video camera. However, I think it gives al-Qaeda far more power than they actually have to continually portray them in public and in the media as some kind of superhuman fighting force the likes of which no man has ever seen; an existential threat to the very fabric of society unlike any the world has ever known, and against which all of our quaint notions of criminal justice and civil liberties are useless impediments to victory.

By all means, laugh at them. It takes the wind out of any asshole’s sails when you refuse to be intimidated by them, and this is doubly true of terrorists. Yeah, they destroyed the World Trade Center, made a good try at destroying the Pentagon, and could very well have been aiming to destroy the Capitol Building or the White House with United 93 on 9/11. They’ve killed thousands of American soldiers and native civilians in the countries of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

However, they also seem to have been getting increasingly desperate and incompetent in their attempts to launch assaults on foreign targets. There was the guy with explosives in his shoes who failed to blow up a plane in 2002 (thanks, asshole, for giving the TSA one more way to make it a pain in the ass to get through security). There were the guys who thought they could blow up JFK airport by igniting the pipe that fed jet fuel to the airport over a mile away (news flash: Mythbusters has shown us that jet fuel doesn’t burn especially readily. Also, you’re idiots). Back in October, someone apparently tried to blow up the Saudi royal family by stuffing a bomb up his own ass to sneak it past security (he only succeeded in blowing himself up, ass first of course, and not much else). More recently, there was the guy who stuffed explosives in his underwear to try and blow up a plane (I swear to god, if the TSA makes me take my pants off on my way to Mysterium, I’m going to go find that Nigerian punk myself and give him the biggest atomic wedgie in the history of mankind). And let’s not forget the moron who tried to blow up Times Square with an SUV full of unopened propane tanks and non-explosive fertilizer, left the keys to his getaway vehicle in said SUV, and had to call his landlord to let him back into his apartment when he finally made it home at 3:00 in the morning. Al-qaeda in Pakistan disowned that guy, he was such an embarrassment to their cause.

How do they expect us, the public they’re trying to scare the shit out of, to take them seriously when they’ve been so astonishingly bad at their primary objective of inciting terror since 9/11? It’s like watching an Austin Powers bad guy or something. Perhaps the thing that confuses me most is that there are so many people in this country still convinced that we can’t risk putting these people on trial after we catch them being complete dipshits because somehow they’ll execute some bizarre X-Men-type stunt of sucking all the iron out of the court bailiff’s blood, escape into the street, and become American citizens on the spot (as if this would incur some additional level of magical protection against being found guilty as fuck).

For god’s sake, laugh at them. The point of terrorism is to scare the shit out of you and make you do things you would otherwise not do in a rational state of mind, in an effort to drive you to your own brand of extremism in response to theirs, thus perpetuating a cycle of violence and destruction. Osama bin Laden’s own publicly stated goal was to draw the United States into an amorphous conflict it couldn’t win, thereby bleeding it dry and destroying it from within without expending anywhere near the same level of resources. If you refuse to actually be terrorized by their actions, however occasionally horrifying and devastating they may be, you undermine their goals and purpose far more successfully than any bomb or bullet ever could. Also, laughter is way cheaper than guns, tanks, ammo, bulletproof vests, and human lives.

The full video segment from Rachel’s show is after the break.

Read more…?

I’ve been contemplating writing something like this for a while now, and watching the unedited tape of Jon Stewart’s interview Tuesday night on The Daily Show has finally motivated me to speak my peace (piece? stupid English…). (Incidentally, why is Stewart one of the only people in the media actually calling this shit out for what it truly is and saying, unequivocally, that it’s wrong?)

I’ve been frankly flabbergasted at the framing and tone of the debate being made in the US media about the efficacy of torture. That there are people in this country, in America, who think that torturing people is acceptable (let alone useful), honestly makes my blood boil.

Now, I am hardly what I think most people would define as patriotic; I don’t pray – for our country, its leaders, or in general. I don’t even own an American flag anymore (and before that, the only ones I had were a desk flag and the flag on my Boy Scout uniform). I don’t have bumper stickers expressing my love for my country. I don’t go around telling other people how great this country is. I live here. I think it’s a pretty nice place to live, for all its faults (and perhaps most telling of my “lack of patriotism”, I’m willing to admit that this country has its faults and its dark chapters of history). I don’t put a whole lot of thought into how lucky I am to be living here, or how much worse off I could/would be by being born somewhere else. I am, frankly, one of those assholes who takes this country and my freedom somewhat for granted.

Perhaps the fact that I take for granted the freedoms that we enjoy in this country is precisely why I have been so dumbstruck by the arguments being made in defense of torture lately. The fact that anyone in this country could even contemplate doing something so unfathomably contrary to everything I’ve ever been taught that this nation stands for is so incomprehensible to me that I’ve had considerable difficulty in expressing my confusion, frustration, and outright outrage at what’s been going on and what was done in our names. It runs completely contrary to common sense and logic, and I can’t imagine how the people getting on TV and defending what was done over the past eight years can even stand to look themselves in the mirror every day (obviously, Cheney doesn’t have that problem, because he’s a fucking vampire).

This nation was founded on the principles of freedom, equality, justice, fairness, and mercy. It has not always lived up to those principles, even from day one. But we keep getting better. “We can do better than this” seems to be the mantra of this country as it continues a steady march towards those ideal principles upon which it was founded.

Torturing people is something which fundamentally undermines these principles. I don’t care who you’re torturing; doing it to anyone is a debasement of the person doing the torture just as much as it is a dehumanization of the person being tortured. We destroy our moral standing, our moral credibility, and our moral authority by engaging in the same tactics we have so long criticized and even prosecuted other people both at home and abroad for in the past. We also endanger not only our troops but our citizens abroad, who could easily be subjected to the same practices by the governments of other countries, and at that point, all they have to do is point the finger back at us and say “you guys do this too, what’s the big deal?”. What would be the response then, I wonder?

Before I go any farther, I do want to note that I am in no way seeking to condone what the people we tortured did to the citizens of this nation. Being outraged at the fact that we tortured them does not in any way mean that I do not want to see them prosecuted for their crimes, or that I don’t want to find out anything they might know about future attacks. The people who make this false comparison are being disingenuous and dishonest, and are attempting to polarize the discussion in their favor by putting those with a reasoned and rational approach to the situation on the wrong side of human emotion. As human beings, we want to do whatever it takes to get information out of people. When those people have also either confessed to or been implicated in the worst terrorist attack on our soil in American history, the urge to exact retribution or revenge on these people for their actions is all the more potent, and all the more capable of pulling us off the road to the fulfillment of the ideals that this nation was built on.

We don’t torture American citizens who have committed heinous crimes, like rape, child molestation, or murder, though. We don’t subject kidnappers to torture to find out where they’re hiding their victims (no matter what Without a Trace or CSI might have you believe). We prosecuted and even executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded allied forces in WWII. We prosecuted a Texas sheriff for waterboarding people when Ronald Regan was president. Even George W. Freaking Bush said in 2003 that torture is inexcusable, and that anyone who did it would be prosecuted for war crimes (he was talking about Iraqis at the time, though, so hooray for double standards!). Despite the fact that more than one person I know would personally like to castrate child molesters and shove their *ahem* down their throats until they choked to death, they also realize that such behavior is against the law and that they would be rightly subject to prosecution themselves for doing so.

The law exists to protect ourselves and those around us from our baser nature, even if those being protected are fully deserving of our most inhuman retribution, because the risk of subjecting even one innocent person to those actions is, we’ve deemed, a greater risk than the potential harm a guilty person may do in their absence. We are a nation that prides (or maybe prided, it’s getting hard to tell sometimes) itself on the presumption of innocence, speedy and fair trial by jury, and the ethical treatment of prisoners, both civilian and military. It is sad, frustrating, and more than a bit depressing that a single attack on our country has undone so much because of the frightened, rash, and erratic reactions of our leaders at the time that we are now actually engaged in a debate over whether the United States of America should torture people, simply because it might work.

Benjamin Franklin, one of the venerated Founding Fathers, said that “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”. I know it’s a quote that’s been used a lot by the Left over the past eight years, but it’s appropriate (I would re-phrase it in this situation to replace “liberty” with “humanity”, though). It also applies not just to our own citizens, but to everyone in the world. Yes, there are incredibly horrible people in the world who would probably kill us as soon as look at us. But to treat everyone like they may be one of those people, or to treat one of those people like they are less than human because of their actions, destroys our moral commitment to fair and equal treatment for all people. Torture is wrong not only for this reason, but because in conjunction with the other rulings and behaviors of the Bush administration, it became incredibly easy to round up innocent people and subject them to the same sort of treatment. Torture has no place in a free society, based in the rule of law and dedicated to the protection of freedom for all at the expense of absolute security. We can do better than this.

And I would rather die as a result of that statement being upheld than live knowing that the values this nation claims to hold so dear have been violated for my safety.

The same-sex marriage ban in Iowa has been declared unconstitutional by a unanimous ruling of the Iowa supreme court. (PDF link)

No wonder it’s snowing… Hell froze over. I can only imagine what would happen if Arkansas overturned their bullshit marriage and adoption bans. The Sun might go out altogether.

Y’know, I realize that the White House blog isn’t actually written by President Obama, and I realize that putting something on the White House blog isn’t any more indicative of the President’s priorities or interests than a State of the Union address (where are those billions of dollars of incentives for alternative energy and hydrogen-powered cars, or an increase in NASA’s budget to enable them to actually pull off the manned missions to Mars you promised us after the Columbia disaster, Mr. Bush?), but after the aura of anti-science that permeated the White House over the past 8 years, it’s at least nice to see that the White House and its staff are interested enough in what NASA is doing to post shuttle launch updates on the White House blog.

The $1 billion in stimulus funds to pay for climate observation and other exploration projects at NASA is also a rather substantial gesture, as is the $20 million to promote the benefits of astronomy, and the executive order overturning the ban on embryonic stem cell research.

Okay, while this is cool and all, I don’t think I’d want to (or even be able to) surf this new interplanetary internet. Can’t we make with the particle-entangled communications arrays yet?

(For those who may not know, entangled particles are a pair of particles that reflect changes made to each other instantaneously, regardless of distance. Forget subspace, Quantum Mechanics makes science fiction more awesome every day.)

For some unknown reason I have actually reloaded this site no less than a half-dozen times today after discovering it through Engadget.  I find myself simultaneously frustrated and relieved that the site’s status hasn’t changed in 4 hours.

As was suggested by a co-worker, they really need some sort of notification service you can sign up for in the event that it ever does change.  Given that the LHC has someone familiar with such scenarios on-staff, I’m somewhat more conerned than I might be otherwise.

(I jest)

Evidently, for just $100,000 (or more), we could register the .dni domain name.

Or maybe .myst; I’ll take either .

Can’t say anything registered as .dni or .myst would be even remotely as clever as Marten’s Rel.to, but what’re ya gonna do?

So apparently, James Dobson won’t be voting if Giuliani is the Republican Presidential candidate. While I can at least appreciate his beliefs and his reasons for having them which would ostensibly keep him from voting, this raises an interesting question about the role of religion in politics…

The former NYC mayor is apparently on record (according to CNN) as personally despising the practice of abortion (around which half of Dobson’s issue apparently revolves), but is committed to a woman’s right to have one. While his personal views on homosexuality aren’t spelled out in the CNN article, it seems to indicate that he is also an advocate of equal rights for said individuals. I think that there’s an important point to be made here, and it’s this:

In the realm of politics, your personal religious beliefs do not necessarily reflect the best direction for public policy. There are plenty more people in this country than Christians, and the law needs to encompass all of those people, providing a legal framework for support and behavioral regulations that favor no one group over another. This is obviously a hard thing to do, and when you get into the supposedly moral gray areas of things like homosexuality and abortion, it becomes even harder. Obviously, groups opposed to such practices (and I use that word knowing that it applies better to abortion than to homosexuality, but I’m going with it because I don’t feel like using a thesaurus) wish to see them outlawed in their country of origin (if not everywhere…). Yet other groups find nothing wrong with these practices, and believe that it is morally wrong to legislate against them on the basis of religious belief alone.

I don’t want to get too deep into the whys and wherefores of these issues, because they’re whole papers unto themselves (I know, I wrote one on the subject of gay marriage in school), and there are obviously exceptions to the notion I’m about to put forward, both in these issues and in others, but on the whole, I think it’s a good rule of thumb, and I’m likely to support any candidate on either “side” of the aisle that adopts it as general course. The government should not be required to legislate morality to its citizens (nor do I think it’s appropriate for it to do so). That’s the role of religion, and if religion is doing the job it’s supposed to, then citizens will make “right” choices based upon it. The government’s job is to ensure the safety and security of its citizens, as ordained in the Constitution (oh noes, I’ve invoked the C word!):

[...] in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity [...]

To that end, it must encompass all of its citizens in the approach it takes to legislation, regardless of the personal beliefs of a segment of those citizens or the lawmakers themselves.

Now, if Giuliani is just intentionally waffling in an effort to garner support on both sides of an issue, first off, he’s not as smart as I would have liked to give him credit for… in this era of 24-hour news, anything you say gets re-processed about a billion times and played right next to other comments you’ve made… and if the press doesn’t like you very much, those comparisons may not be very favorable. Any discrepancies in your comments will get torn to shreds, so if he’s waffling and not expecting that to happen, he’s lost some serious points in my book. On the other hand, if he’s really serious about his personal beliefs versus his public stance on these issues, I’m willing to grant him more than a few bonus points for being honest about it, plus a few more for putting the country ahead of himself. Realistically, I think he falls somewhere in the middle of these two possibilities; I don’t think even the most starry-eyed politician is idealistic enough to think that the sort of idealistic notion of the role of government I proposed is going to get them elected. Everyone panders and doublespeaks… it’s just a measure of degree these days.

Lawmaker wants to prohibit Muslim from using Quran during swearing-in at Congress

At the risk of sounding like an angry liberal whiner, I’d like to draw people’s attention to something I read in this CNN article on the possible advancement and passage of some liberal rights laws in the new Congress next year.

Another conservative leader, the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, asserted that the gay-rights bills likely to advance next year will infringe on the rights of those who condemn homosexuality.

“All Americans must be prepared to endure serious threats to their freedom of speech, their right to make employment decisions as business owners and their religious freedom in the business world,” Sheldon said.

I simply can’t help but think that this is the same sort of rhetoric that was thrown about in the past during the movement for equal rights for Blacks (sorry, African-Americans… have to keep up the liberal Pee Cee-ness ;P) in the 50’s.

I was going to say something else, but the more I stare at this guy’s comment, the more I think it speaks for itself. So, I’ll just end on this: What the HELL is wrong with people?