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Category: politics (page 13 of 19)

Elderly men show an interest in gay marriage

26 June 2008 / / 5 Comments

Absolutely outrageous.

Even though the LDS Church’s own scripture forbids it to meddle in political affairs, the First Presidency is directly asking Latter-day Saints to vote against gay marriage in California.

A statement called “Preserving Traditional Marriage and Strengthening Families” (PDF) will be read in LDS sacrament meetings. It says, in part:

We ask that you do all you can to support the proposed constitutional amendment [to overturn marriage for everyone] by donating of your means and time to assure that marriage in California is legally defined as being between a man and a woman.

This is abominable. For a church to promote any kind of inequality is wrong. For a church to promote discrimination is wrong. The LDS Church has already given over a million dollars of its funds to defeat gay-marriage laws in Hawai’i and Alaska, which may have come from the tithing donated by its membership.

And all this energy and rhetoric expended in the mistaken (in my view) belief that this will somehow harm straight marriages and children.

You know what this reminds me of? Galileo.

Galileo?

Galileo.

For the Catholic Church, it was such a big deal that the sun went around the earth. They burned Bruno at the stake, and put Galileo under house arrest for espousing the Copernican model. And yet, the earth moved.

And now it doesn’t seem such a big deal. Today we wonder what the fuss was about. Religious dogma, wrong once again, had to give way. The church decided that maybe the whole earth-thing was a non-core belief, and life went on.

I feel embarrassed for Monson et al because they’re just going to have to backtrack that much farther when gay marriage turns out not to be the nation-destroying plague they’re envisioning.

I also feel bad for liberal Mormons who rightly deplore this hateful edict from their leadership. This is exactly the conflict I would have had in my believing days: wanting to support equality, but believing that church leaders were inspired and good. Rationalism has certainly saved me from that conflict.

He’ll bollix up everything, given the chance.

14 June 2008 / / 2 Comments

Did John McCain make a reference to testicles in a recent speech?

As a matter of fact, he did.

The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.
…
So now what are we going to do. We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate, because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases.

Astute readers might have noticed that ‘bollix’ appears to be a variant of ‘bollocks’, which indeed it is.

The Online Etymological Dictionary (that’s the other OED) says it’s a

respelling (euphemistic?) of bollocks, pl. of bollock “testicle,” from O.E. beallucas “testicles,”

As to the content, McCain is arguing that the rule of law shouldn’t be followed because it’s too time-consuming. Much better to just throw people in jail forever because you just know in your heart that they’re guilty.

To which I say, bollocks.

Obama thread

5 June 2008 / / 6 Comments

I am proud to be an American this day.

The Democratic nominee for president is by all appearances an intelligent and capable person who seems able to deal with the opposition in a forthright manner.

And the fact that he’s African-American is tremendously important to me as a symbol of how things have changed.

If Hillary had been the candidate, I would have been equally proud. I’m glad it’s not Hillary though.

Now. To the election. There’s a long way before November, but some wildly optimistic and perhaps inaccurate predictions are in order.

I predict that Obama will beat McCain in a landslide on the order of Reagan/Mondale. Junior has damaged the brand irreparably, and McCain’s cranky old man schtick will play unfavourably against Obama’s charisma and knowledge.

I say Obama gets 521 electoral votes to McCain’s 17. (The seventeen votes will come from Utah, Oklahoma, and Nebraska.)

Obama will get 52% of the popular vote, to McCain’s 42%.

Your predictions for posterity in comments. Both the electoral votes and the popular vote, if you please. Or just wax rhapsodic about your favourite candidate.

Gay marriage and the slippery slope

31 May 2008 / / 1 Comment

My conservative religious family thinks I’m nuts for my stand on gay marriage: I think it’s fine. Wait, that sounded normal. At least, normal to an increasing number of people. There’s been nearly four years of gay marriage already, California just became the latest state to allow it, and what with society not collapsing, fire not raining down from heaven, and more pressing problems to deal with, it seems the issue just isn’t getting the traction it used to get, as detailed in this article in the Prospect.

In 2004, there were ballot initiatives outlawing gay marriage in 11 states. All succeeded easily. In 2006, there were eight more. But this time, one of them –Arizona’s — actually failed (despite John McCain’s efforts). There is still time for initiatives to be put on the 2008 ballot, but they will likely have a much more difficult time.

With each passing year, straight Americans become more and more comfortable with gay Americans. This doesn’t mean their opinions on marriage are going to be transformed overnight, but it does mean that they will be less susceptible to scare tactics.

I really hope this means we’re seeing the end of the Culture Wars. What an awful time.

My Dad, for his part, used to shake his head when it came to acceptance of Teh Ghey. He loved to quote this poem from Pope:

Vice is a monster so frightful mien, As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

It made sense — we do get more used to things. Isn’t that the way it goes? First it’s allowing them to live. Next, they’re on TV, and soon you might actually know one. Terrible.

But I never thought to ask him: why does it only apply to acceptance of gay people? Why not the reverse? I could just as well say that hatred against gay people could gradually become accepted. First you deny them marriage rights, then the right to own property, and before you know it, it’ll be okay to kill them (as is the case in Saudi Arabia). Why not use this argument against itself? A slope can be slippery both ways.

I recently noticed this truly awful story from India:

Two married women, who allegedly shared a lesbian relationship, committed suicide by setting themselves ablaze after their families tried to separate them. The police recovered the charred bodies of the women, who died hugging each other, from the residence of one of the women at Sathangadu, near Thiruvotriyur, on Saturday.

It’s hard for me to understand what made them take such an awful end to their lives. But I guess I am a straight guy in a tolerant country.

That’s why I take the stand that I do. I want to work toward a world where this kind of treatment of people is not okay. Society has a lot to make up for.

Republicans are on record against mothers

10 May 2008 / / 1 Comment

I was amused by this:

Republicans Vote Against Moms; No Word Yet on Puppies, Kittens

Congressional Republicans force a revote on a resolution for Mothers’ Day in order to snarl the workings of government, but inexplicably end up voting against the uncontroversial and symbolic resolution. I’d love for the Democrats to hang this around their necks in the fall, and ask them why they came out against moms.

But at least they’re not beholden to Big Parents.

Tip for Nixon’s grave: dance first, then piss.

3 May 2008 / / Comments Off on Tip for Nixon’s grave: dance first, then piss.

Oh, crap. I missed Nixon’s death day celebrations. About fourteen years ago, the mean little man from Yorba Linda went to his infernal reward, and made the world a better place. But he never paid for his crimes, and so neither will any American president, ever again.

Better make up for lost time with a reading from Hunter Thompson, written just after the corpse turned cold.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

The tragic American postscript to this eulogy is that Bush the Younger makes Nixon look good. History may excuse viciousness, dishonesty, and lack of conscience when combined with competence. Bush has none, and throws in ignorance and arrogance besides.

McCain = Bush, part 2

3 May 2008 / / Comments Off on McCain = Bush, part 2

Can you tell the difference between Bush and McCain? Can anyone?

Not me; I scored 2 out of 5 on the Bush-McCain Challenge, and here I thought I was doing so well. Maybe you’ll do better.

Hillary v Obama: a machine learning task

26 April 2008 / / Comments Off on Hillary v Obama: a machine learning task

If you want to organise lots of data in an understandable format (and predict the future besides), you can’t beat decision trees. (Except with Bayesian networks, artificial neural networks, case-based reasoning, or transformation-based learning.) You can throw tons of data at a decision tree algorithm, and it’ll present it as an easy-to-read chart.

Here’s an interesting decision tree about Hillary v Obama in Pennsylvania. The most discriminating features (ones that provide the most information) appear at the top of the tree. The way this one turned out, it appears that Obama wins in counties that are better educated and/or have a higher concentration of black voters.

A moment of quiet appreciation

17 April 2008 / / 1 Comment

Let’s all take a second and appreciate how nice it’s been on the Net now that Ron Paul has dropped out of the presidential race. It’s been weeks since I’ve had to scroll through pages of cut-and-pasted laudatory screeds about how RP was going to save us from ourselves and the coming monetary/constitutional collapse/invasion of the zombies from Neptune, if only we’d listen to the Truth. I don’t know or care where the PaulBotTards have all gone, but hasn’t it been nice?

I mention this because right now is the Golden Age of the Net. We’re post-Ron Paul, but pre-election. See, once a Democrat is elected president, all those militias that we haven’t heard a peep out of during the Bush years will come roaring back and every comment thread will be black helicopters and jackboots. It’ll be so ’90s, you’ll think you were listening to EMF and wearing Girbaud jeans.

Man, that is going to suck.

McCain = Bush

16 April 2008 / / 1 Comment

They say if you want a dog to stop killing chickens, hang the dead chicken around the dog’s neck until it can’t stand the smell anymore.

So I’m pleased about this ad by Progressive Media USA. We should never stop tying Mr McCain to Mr Popular.

Repeat this message until even Republicans can’t stand the stench.

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