There are only Muslim fundamentalists and madmen and dead people and a squirrel

Is what we will know in a couple of days from the media.

Yesterday, when the tragedy in Oslo happened, I was working, and then I was baking, and then I went out. So I only found out about it this morning, when the victim count had already reached 91.

This is why I missed out on the mainstream media’s most recent anti-Muslim scare: because, apparently,  an occurrence of a terrorist attack strongly implies there have to be some Muslims involved in it somewhere.

If you’re writing a news article about a terrorist attack, it’s also advisable to mention how the number of Muslim immigrants in Europe has been rising steadily, or, better yet, has risen abruptly, and the Muslim population doubled or tripled, or how the doubling or tripling or quadrupling are expected to be as well as done by 2020, or something like that.

Never give any numbers: numbers are the arch-nemesis of any good scare. Always say “tripled”, as in “the population of Muslims in my town has tripled” and never “Ms Nasri had twins, and she tentatively says she might want to raise them as Muslims”.

“Tripled” just has this special ring to it, OK?

I mean, I sort of do understand that you would want to speculate about fundamentalists when people are murdered: this is what fundamentalists do, it’s not unreasonable to suspect they would be involved, somewhere, pulling all the strings. I just don’t see how the adjective preceding “fundamentalists” should ever matter: they are all the same. Once the enemy is the enemy, once the enemy is the enemy of the Truth, once you start thinking, it’s OK to kill them, I’d be saving innocent souls, or, it’s OK to kill them, it’s not like they’re living human beings anyway, they’re just whores, once you think that way, it doesn’t matter at all whether the imaginary friend you kill or want to kill all those people for is called “Adad” or “God” or “Allah”, because he’s imaginary anyway, and people might die anyway. This is it.

But when you mention the doubling and tripling and quadrupling of brown-skinned people and when you mention things like “attack on the West”:

British security forces were immediately placed on alert amid fears that Norway’s worst terrorist outrage might be the first in a series of attacks on the West. The carnage followed repeated warnings that al-Qaeda was planning a Mumbai-style attack on countries involved in the war in Afghanistan, where Norway has about 500 troops.

I’m just more and more disinclined to be a part of that West with you anymore, OK? We’re incompatible, this was doomed to failure from the start.

But then, you might discover the terrorist attacks had nothing to do with Ms Nasri and her twins and her awful lawn that you hate so much, nothing to do with it at all, and all the doubleds and tripleds you researched so thoroughly were all a waste of effort, because the (as of yet: alleged) terrorist is white as snow and hates Ms. Nasri and her twins even more than you do, even though he’s probably never seen her lawn (so awful). Do not despair! This is only a temporary obstacle on your path towards greatness and a Pulitzer. You can still make it.

You might say that the alleged attacker might have well hated Muslims, but he was really inspired by Muslim fundamentalists. Alternative strategy is to downplay the terrorist factor: the attacker was not a Muslim fundamentalist, therefore he was not a fundamentalist at all. Christian fundamentalists simply don’t count. They’re not fundamentalists: they’re just “firm believers”. Or “really devout people”, or “people whose views I respect even though I disagree” or “people whom I really respect for voicing their opinions, even if they’re so controversial and politically incorrect”. Make sure that your readers are not reminded what the controversial views actually are, because if they know, they might be disgusted. They might remember that real, actual people, their family and friends and neighbours, are hurt by those opinions and people who hold them and the power they have.

Don’t call the attack “a terrorist attack”. “Terrorism” is such a strong word: a word that is not blue-eyed and blond. Call it a “killing spree”, “a massacre” might also be all right, if you want your readers to get all regretful and teary-eyed. Don’t worry, your readers will totally agree with you.

Remember: whatever you write, the victims are still dead, so you might as well write complete bullshit. It won’t bring the dead back to life, either, but it might make you feel better about yourself.

The alleged attacker is not a Muslim, and therefore not a terrorist, we’ve already covered that. Just go for “mentally ill” then, instead! After all, the world is full of mad, crazy, mentally ill people who kill other people all the time. It’s like, you open a newspaper, and bam, there it is, “depressed woman kills a whole village”, “social phobia guy burns a housing estate”, “OCD college student robs a bank”. Everyone knows that it’s the mental illness that makes mentally ill people do awful things, and it’s precisely the apt social commentary like that that’ll get you this bloody Pulitzer one day.

And anyway, it’s sort of indicative of a mental illness, when a terrorist dude has the gall not to be a Muslim. I mean, your entire article, 500 words of hard work and sweat and tears, could be completely wasted. It’s just not acceptable.

Do more of this apt social commentary thing. I mean, it’s totally the thing these days. Write something like “another defeat  of multiculturalism looms in Norway as white people fail to adapt to modern Western democratic values. The Prime Minister suggests a revaluation of the long-term policy might be in order”.

Go for it, just go for it.  Baby, I know you can do it.

***

The squirrel run off. It just couldn’t bear it anymore.

***

Thanks to Veln for the sentence about multiculturalism, I totally stole it <3<3<3, and on a non-sarcastic note, I hate humanity, and why do you always disappoint why

Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

A book I have read some time ago, so we’ll have to rely on tiny scrapes of paper with my notes <3 Obviously, I can’t write reviews, and I dislike writing reviews(1), so there will only be list.

The good things about the book:

1) Buruma actually did talk to actual Muslim people from Netherlands, people from different backgrounds, with different opinions on Islam and its role (if any) in their lives and so on. Compared to typical drivel that is usually written in cases like that by self-proclaimed experts (I’m looking at you, Oriana “Nomen Omen” Fallaci) who just list their racist prejudices in alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order; the reverse alphabetical part being the only variety; this is a huge improvement.

2) Buruma’s criticism of Hirsi Ali as fighting her own made up version of “one true Islam” is spot on.

3) His account of anti-Semitism in Netherlands is… well. I think the stadium scene with people hissing is one of the most disgusting things I read about.

The bad things about the book:

1) Is it really really necessary to call Ayan Hirsi Ali “exotic beauty” or “African beauty” everywhere, all the time? Because, honestly, it’s sexist, racist, and also quite repetitive. If I had an electronic version of the book I’d calculate the frequency per 10 000 words at least, but I don’t and also really, really? It’s the 21st century FFS. Buruma, stop being a creepy stalkerish idiot.

2) Throughout the book, Buruma uses the words “fanatical”, “orthodox” and “fundamentalist” pretty much interchangeably. Well, the problem is, they don’t mean the same thing at all. A look at his bibliography confirms that he used mostly books and articles written by other journalists, but not stuff written by people who, for instance, research fundamentalism as a sociological phenomenon. It’s a great pity; Buruma’s argument would have been much clearer if his narration about fundamentalism versus orthodoxy versus fanaticism had been coherent.

3) Buruma’s insistence on defending van Gogh’s hateful diatribes is a bit disturbing. I mean, of course, no matter how hateful, one should not just be murdered, but on the other hand, why make excuses for everything van Gogh said? “It’s the Dutch tradition” — imagine someone saying this about some group of Muslims, the outrage it would surely cause. Also, it was clear from Buruma’s narration that van Gogh’s hateful tirades were mostly directed against people who are already silenced or oppressed in the mainstream discourse, and not against people who had actual power.

Or maybe, I might be a victim of severe culture shock: in Eastern Europe, it is only to be so vile when one bemoans one’s woeful life, which one is forced to live despite the trials and tribulations one undergoes on a daily basis, look at this shop assistant, he was rude to me on purpose, look at this guy there, he’s looking at me funny, look at that kid, she’s gonna spill that juice isn’t she, and so on.

But I digress.

Anyway, I think the book is definitely worth reading, even if it’s far from perfect. It certainly contains a lot of interesting information, and if one just closes one’s eyes every time Ayan Hirsi Ali is called “the exotic African beauty” everything should be OK.

(1) My theory of reviews is based on stuff written by Kyougoku Natsuhiko, who is otherwise an author of boring pretentious horrors interspersed with pretentious preachy bits about his views on virtually everything which I for some reason keep reading, and looks like that: there are four main types of review-like texts:

1) information: there’s a book, it was written by XY who also wrote ABC, and you can buy here and here

2) ad: you should totally read XY’s new book, it’s awesome

3) account of personal idiosyncrasy: I read XY’s new book and I totally loved it because (…)

4) structural (etc) analysis: I read XY’s new book and it’s made from tropes A, B, C

of which 1) and 2) are rather worthless, and 3) is only interesting to read if you care about the author’s personal tastes and idiosyncrasies, because you’re for instance friends with them. Otherwise it’s boring and useless. 4) requires spoilers and a reader who doesn’t care about spoilers, and we can’t have that here so.

Yes, I actually think about stuff like that. It’s really sad.

When he was playing video games he got points for killing people, POINTS. Meanwhile in Real Life—

Hi guys! Meet Bryan Fischer! By now most of you must have heard about him and his… something.

(I have to confess, internets, I have trouble with labeling this properly. I mean, sure, it’s written stuff, so I should theoretically be able to call this “an editorial”, but IDK, internets. It might be because I’m not a native speaker, but I’m sort of used to editorials having, I don’t know, some actual content that is not 100% bullshit? I mean, it is AFA we’re talking about, and one should not set one’s expectations too high; in fact one should be resign oneself to coming across some very disturbing imagery — and why isn’t it rated R or something? I mean, I’m old and cynical, but I still (insert a hideous grimace) — and complete bullshit, and one has to brace oneself properly in order to face it without recoiling in disgust –and can I get a medal for that? — but still, I could not possibly call this “an editorial”. Let’s just call it “Bryan Fischer’s Thing“)

But, first things first! Like many of you, right after I finished snickering over Bryan Fischer’s Thing, I immediately asked myself ~who the fuck is Bryan Fischer~??? Because much as I pride myself in knowing about the barbarian hordes of rabid fundamentalists and the inanities and absurdities they typically bring forth, I am, after all, only human. Some arseholes will always be overlooked.

So, here’s Bryan Fischer’s bio. It has a lot of words like “values” and “Christian”, which make me all cross-eyed and squinchy-faced, so I almost didn’t read it. Almost.

What we can find out from the bio is:

– Bryan Fischer’s had very little fun in his miserable life

– Bryan Fischer likes to present himself as a moral and principled person. However, all the principles he stans for can only be defended at the expense of many other people, none of whom are Bryan Fischer

– Bryan Fischer has devoted his life to the very manly idea of being a professional fundamentalist

Altogether not very interesting. However if one googles some, as one does, one will find out that:

– Bryan Fischer believes that Hitler was gay and his gayness somehow made him so bloodthirsty that he started WWII and the Holocaust. Therefore gay people should not be allowed to serve in the military lest they become the next Hitler:

Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews. Gays in the military is an experiment that has been tried and found disastrously and tragically wanting. Maybe it’s time for Congress to learn a lesson from history (source).

– Bryan Fischer believes that all Muslim people are hellbent on killing all non-Muslim people, and therefore should not be allowed to serve in the military. It is not clear whether being Muslim played any role in Hitler’s upbringing:

It is time, I suggest, to stop the practice of allowing Muslims to serve in the U.S. military. The reason is simple: the more devout a Muslim is, the more of a threat he is to national security (source).

– Bryan Fischer is no homophobe, he merely argues for a more free market than just a free market. The connection between Hitler and the free market remains unclear:

Special rights for homosexuals in the workplace: problem solved. No employer should be forced to hire admitted felons to work for him. End of the threat to freedom of religion and freedom of association in the marketplace (source).

– Bryan Fischer really hates bears, the curse upon the land. Hitler couldn’t be reached for a comment:

One human being is worth more than an infinite number of grizzly bears. Another way to put it is that there is no number of live grizzlies worth one dead human being. If it’s a choice between grizzlies and humans, the grizzlies have to go. And it’s time.

(…)

God makes it clear in Scripture that deaths of people and livestock at the hands of savage beasts is a sign that the land is under a curse. The tragic thing here is that we are bringing this curse upon ourselves (source).

That sure puts Ficher’s Thing into perspective. Also, possible diagnosis of heavy military fetishism?

Anyway! As a typical European defeatist pacifist feminist commie, I don’t actually like people who make a living by killing other people when they’re told to, i.e. the military. However, it’s nice when they do something nice, like helping people affected by natural disasters, saving kittens, saving people from being victims of genocide or not doing their job, i.e., not killing people.

Alas! Bryan Fischer just thinks that when soldiers don’t kill as many people as possible they’re just sissies:

But I have noticed a disturbing trend in the awarding of these medals, which few others seem to have recognized.

We have feminized the Medal of Honor (source).

Note the gratuitous misogyny.

According to Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, every Medal of Honor awarded during these two conflicts has been awarded for saving life. Not one has been awarded for inflicting casualties on the enemy. Not one (same source).

The horror. It should be obvious that one plans a war having a complete annihilation of the enemy in mind, and not, like, you know, achieving a particular goal. The more carnage the better. The public likes nothing more than seeing mutilated bodies of the enemy soldiers and civilians on the news, especially if they’re children.

(The public is manly that way)

In fact, somebody got a Nobel Peace Prize for that some time ago. Really.

When we think of heroism in battle, we used the think of our boys storming the beaches of Normandy under withering fire, climbing the cliffs of Pointe do Hoc while enemy soldiers fired straight down on them, and tossing grenades into pill boxes to take out gun emplacements (same source).

Aw, what a pretty sight!

Note that the only thing Fischer could have possibly ~*storm*~ was his local branch of Dunkin’ Donuts.

Incidentally, how difficult it is to grasp that even during WWII the objective was not to kill as many Nazis soldiers as possible, but maybe to end the war in such a way that the ally losses are as little as possible as soon as possible? This is not Halo, FFS.

I would suggest our culture has become so feminized that we have become squeamish at the thought of the valor that is expressed in killing enemy soldiers through acts of bravery (same source).

How is throwing a grenade a brave act? How is it courageous to bomb a city? What’s so brave about using an automatic weapon to shoot people?

(Or bears, we should add, bearing in mind who we’re talking about, people or bears)

We know instinctively that we should honor courage, but shy away from honoring courage if it results in the taking of life rather than in just the saving of life (same source).

Next time a USian plane accidentally bombs an Afghani village, by all means do tell me how honorable and courageous it was.

Certainly more ~*manly*~ than ~*just*~ saving a life.

(By the way, how many lives, people’s or bears’, did Bryan Fischer save that he can talk about it in such a flippant way? I’d go with none, but what do I know)

The significance of the cross is not just that Jesus laid down his life for us, but that he defeated the enemy of our souls in the process. It was on the cross that he crushed the head of the serpent. It was on the cross that “he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15) (same source).

That’s very vivid.  Was Jesus a member of a military, though?

I don’t think so. Fortunately, there’s always this:

 

Well, back to reading now <3

Let’s call it Outrageous Quotes Week!

In 1884 J.W. Burgon says about the radical idea that women should be admited to universities:

Will none of you have the generosity of the candour to tell [Woman] what a very disagreeable creature, in Man’s account, she will inevitably become? If she is to compete successfully with men for ‘honours’, you must needs put the classic writers of antiquity unreservedly in her hands – in order words, must introduce her to the obscenities of Greek and Roman literature. Can you seriously intend it? … I take leave of the subject with a short Allocution addressed to the other sex … Inferior to us God made you: and our inferiors to the end of time you will remain.”

(Quoted in Manguel, A History of Reading, after Jan Morris, ed., The Oxford Book of Oxford)

126 years later, if there’s one thing I can vouch for, it’s that I have become the disagreeable creature — so disagreeable in fact that she demands to be called “human”, not “creature” — Burgon seemed to be so afraid of; and also, it was not Suetonius’ fault.

Not even Cicero’s, or Caesar’s.

I’ll take the whole responsibility for that. Disagreeably. Hah.

So, about that cross ^^J (I thought we had a secular country medley)

At first, I decided against writing anything about That Fucking Cross, but this morning, as I was racking my brain for new and shiny things to do while procrastinating, I thought to myself, oh well, self.

Alors, on to the news from the land of cold, drizzling and unholy:

The most unfortunate of you might have had heard about the fairly recent fundie meltdown in Poland. Directly connected to the plane crash in which the president and a bunch of officials died, it’s a bastard child of misbegotten spin doctors, power-hungry politicians eager to exploit the alienated, the mentally ill and the marginalised for their own political agenda, and a bunch of creepy and/or mentally ill hate-mongers who actually believe in the bullshit they’re spouting.

In short, after the crash the Catholic scouts(1) put a cross in front of the presidential palace. Nobody minded(2) then because people were leaving all sorts of things in front of the presidential palace then: flowers, votive candles, and journalists. However, after everything went back to normal(3), a certain feeling of WTFery began to set in the cold little hearts of the Polish people, as they watched their telly and thought:

What the fucking fuck is this fucking cross doing in front of the fucking presidential palace? For fuck’s sake(4).

Or even the dreaded:

What the fuck, I thought this was a fucking secular fucking country? Fuck(4).

As a result of various considerations of this and similar nature, the local authorities decided they have to remove the cross from where the scouts had so thoughtlessly left it(5), and mow it down with a steamroller, and stab it several times for good measure, and maybe even stake it so Jesus never rises from the dead again.

Actually, no. They wanted to move it to a church, and they even had a procession of priests and scouts(6) eager to accompany it, but this is not what happened at all.

(Really, watch it. It has an old lady who tied herself to the cross. Seriously)

What happened is that the entire fucking state is apparently completely powerless when faced with the completely unmanageable rage of ~*a few dozen old ladies*~ (well, and maybe a couple of Neo-Nazis, too).

The cross is still standing, the completely crazy fundies cum Holocaust deniers cum NWO conspiracy theorists have been swarming around it day and night for several weeks.

This has caused several things:

1) on average, the Polish are crankier than usual; this is strongly correlated with the increased use of the word “fuck”, which is frequently triggered by the sight of crossroads, crosswords, cross-stitching and cross-examination,

2) on average, the Polish are more angry at the government than usual,

3) on average, internet memes are finding this environment to be very easy to flourish in.

On Monday, a crowd of reportedly 5000 anti-cross activists (sceptics, hipsters, anti-theists, pro separation of church and state, and trolls) who had been gathering on Facebook in the course of a few days went to make fun of the fundies. Photos!

signs: 1) Moscow pays me, 2) Demolish the presidential palace, it's blocking out the cross

They started at 23:00 AFAIR:

Lots of angry hipsters:

Hipster footage

They’re screaming:

– remove the presidential palace

– back to church

– take the cross back to church

– remove the cross

Another:

(The guy with the megaphone says that the law in Poland is being broken right in front of the presidential palace, which makes the whole country an international laughingstock(8). They are demonstrating, the guy says, to make fun of the fundies who are appropriating the public space. At roughly 1:53 a guy in a pope custume appears on a balcony FTW)

Hipster remix, apparently played in some clubs already (lyrics = “where’s the cross”)

One flash game parody, two flash game parodies.

You can put a cross on your website here.

And finally, today a random guy decided that he will sue the government because of the clear violation of the separation of church and state laws(9).

The thing is, this is not going to change anything at all. Not only the most conservative politicians, but usually even the self-proclaimed left-wing ones are coddling and accommodating the fundies no matter what crazy thing they decide to do, even though they’re an obvious (if loud and crazy) minority. The fundies are appropriating the public and symbolic space, bit after bit, and the public discourse, with the result that anybody who opposes them or criticizes them in any way is presented as a public enemy, traitor and possibly also a member of one (or more) of the many conspiracies the fundies believe in. The worst thing is that this sort of thinking has been slowly sneaking into mainstream media; most people will preface their criticisms of not even religion but religious fundamentalism with “I’M A CATHOLIC BUT” or “CATHOLIC VALUES ARE VERY IMPORTANT BUT”, and so on.

It’s cool that there’s a bit of rage, finally, instead of  the usual apathy, and hopefully in ten-twenty years, this rage might actually accomplish something. Meanwhile, as ever, the fundies can do what they wanna.

(1) There are also the regular, non-Catholic scouts so.

(2) I would have, but I’m observing this stuff from a safe distance, you see.

(3) It would perhaps be useful to point out that the Polish “normal” might be vastly different from what you’ve grown accustomed to classify as “normal”, JSYK.

(4) The Polish people like to swear a lot to show the sincerity and depth of their feelings. Also, in Polish the above sentences would display much more variation of profanity, respectively:

Co do kurwy nędzy robi kurwa pierdolony krzyż przed jebany pałacem kurwa prezydenckim? Żesz kurwa jego pierdolona.

Do kurwy nędzy, świeckie kurwa państwo.

Guys, I turned the diacritics on just for you. This is serious stuff.

(5) I think the time has come to finally say it: fucking scouts.

(6) Fucking scouts.

(7) Fucking scouts.

(8) Fucking late to be self-conscious now.

(9) Constitutional lawyers say he will most likely lose, because Polish law sucks like that, so it’s mostly about making a gesture.

Fundamentalism, literalism and selectivity

Fundamentalists from religions that place an emphasis on the correct interpretation of a revelation in the form of a holy text tend to claim not only that their interpretation is the only correct one – but that their interpretation is the correct one because it’s literal, doesn’t involve any metaphorical readings and sophistry(1).

Very often those claims of literalism are taken at face value in the discourse about religion, usually not by scholars, by but activists, journalists and atheist bloggers.

This uncritical reception of facts provided by parties who are by no means objective, neutral participants in the discourse about religion – namely, the fundamentalists themselves – constitutes a deeply flawed approach to understanding the phenomenon of fundamentalism, and to fighting it.

1) Fudamentalists are selecting the parts of their holy texts they want to interpret “literally”; those parts usually support their anti-modern, absolutist, Manicheist, xenophobic stance. Have you ever heard of a Christian fundamentalist sect that chose to interpret Matthew 22, 37 literally?:

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

There is no such fundamentalist sect. Quite the opposite, the fundamentalist sects will engage in all sorts of spurious sophistry to metaphorically explain this bit of the Bible away so that it doesn’t seem to be in contradiction with their plans of eliminating sexual minorities and subjugating women.

2) Fudamentalists’ literal interpretations are completely decontextualised and in fact false

Let’s consider the common stance of various fundamentalist Christian sects on homosexuality, namely that it is a sin, and that the Bible explicitly states that it is so. However, the Bible cannot possibly explicitly state anything at all about homosexuality, because it has no word for homosexuality in any of its many books. Even if there are some words that might or might not refer to homosexuality in the New Testament, there are describing a completely different phenomenon than the one we understand as “homosexuality” today. What the Bible says about homosexuality is:

(Leviticus 18:22) “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.”

What it means in more modern terms is more or less this:

Two men having an anal intercourse is a bad thing, because if a man is penetrated by a penis that makes him a woman. A man becoming a woman, who is less of a human than a man, is a bad thing and a violation of a natural order. The natural order of things was established by God – therefore, anal intercourse between two men is an act of disobedience against God, and a sin.

Because women are unimportant, women having sex with each other are never mentioned. This isn’t because when the Bible says “man” it means “human”. Any such claims are ridiculous: in antiquity “man” meant “a non-foreigner who is male and who is not a slave”.

As in the example I provided, the process of constructing a typical “literal” fundamentalist interpretation looks more or less like that:

A. Picking the parts of modern ideology fundamentalists disagree with and want to fight against; this will be the things that they consider to be the biggest threat to the traditional, idealised way of life.

B. Re-defining them in modern terms and decontextualisation: they’re taking a stance against modernity not by ignoring or rejecting it but by actively opposing it; this paradoxically makes it necessary that modern terminology and vocabulary be included, at least as a point of reference.

C. Making a list of the things selected in B; this will be the list of fundamentals, the things that are especially important and interpreted “literally”, according to the members of the fundamentalist religion. As mentioned above, parts of the holy text that could be considered a threat to the literal interpretation of the fundamentals will be interpreted metaphorically, often with the help of seemingly sophisticated theology, which however will in the end be only the tool in the hands of a above-all anti-modern movement.

It’s extremely irritating to see atheist activists and sceptics being deceived by the claims fundamentalists make about their interpretations being literal. It’s quite certain that many of them sincerely believe that this is the case, this however, is not a sufficient reason to take them at face value; in fact, any sort of self-report, or claim about ideology someone is invested in should undergo a thorough scrutiny.

ETA: fixed typos ^^;;;;;;;;;;;

(1) Obviously, I will be only writing about the fundamentalisms that have holy text that are considered to be the word of the relevant god, and important because of it. However, it should be clear that not for all fundamentalisms, just for religions, the existence of such a holy text is necessary: a good example would be the Buddhist fundamentalism in Sri Lanka, or various Hindu fundamentalisms (this of course doesn’t mean they’re not using any texts at all, only that those texts are not considered to be the word of god(s) and consequently their interpretation and analysis is not accorded such a great importance as in the case of, for instance, Christianity or Islam).

Your regularly scheduled programming will return shortly! LINKS

I can’t make up my mind what’s actually a bigger news, in a way. Anyway:

1. Apparently, a bunch of Teabagger trolls on Digg has been suppressing non-teabagger (as in, not extremely right wing, not denying artificial climate change, not denying evolution, not denying that assorted social problems are problems, not denying that the social justice discourse is important, etc, etc) news and articles for years.

This is completely batshit insane, if only for the reason that there are actually people perfectly willing to waste sizeable chunks of their (free?) time on creating multiple accounts, circumventing bans, and so on, only so that they can collectively remove articles that say Obama is not a Kenyan Muslim terrorist or something.

And a good waste of life to you too, sir(1)!

2. Prop 8 is temporarily overturned, and everybody is quite rightly in a jubilant and festive mood, but! Not all! I know, I know, the Maddow video is awesome and stuff, but let’s focus on something not a lot of people is focusing about because of their jubilant and festive mood, namely, right-wing gnashing of teeth, bawwing and wailing(2).

Maggie Gallagher!

Judge Walker has added insult to injury by suggesting that support for marriage is somehow irrational bigotry, akin to racial animus. The majority of Americans are not bigots or haters for supporting the commonsense view that marriage is the union of husband and wife, because children need moms and dads.

(…)

Parents will find that, almost Soviet-style, their own children will be re-educated using their own tax dollars to disrespect their parents’ views and values.

Cry me a river of crystalline tears, with your sapphire orbs! (I’ll even donate some money for the Soviet style re-education camps, if a donation drive is ever undertaken by the fellow Marxists hurr durr derp)

Worldnut Daily!

He seeks to deconstruct (and then reconstruct) the definition of traditional marriage by describing its constituent elements and showing how those elements can be applied equally to heterosexual marriage and same-sex marriage, thus concluding there is no difference between the concepts. It’s as if he compared my DNA with any of yours and concluded that because 99.9 percent of human DNA is the same in everyone, you and I are the same person.

Guys, the Fans of proof by analogy(3) group on Facebook has a new member (guys, we need an international version now, too) hurr hurr derp derp derrrrrrp.

AFA!

Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling yesterday, in which he trampled on the will of seven million Californians, is a monstrous, egregious, reprehensible expression of judicial activism and tyranny.

TYRANNY! TYRANNY! It’s when someone doesn’t allow the state you live in to support your  treatment of human beings as if they were subhuman. Clearly.

Although almost no other organizations other than the American Family Association are making an issue of this, Judge Walker should have recused himself from this case since he is a practicing homosexual. This created a clear conflict of interest, and he had no business issuing a ruling on a matter on which he had such a huge personal and private interest.

I’m sorry, I had to guffaw here.

He is Exhibit A as to why homosexuals should be disqualified from public office. Character is an important qualification for public service, and what an individual does in his private sexual life is a critical component of character.

Catholics: first, they come for the gays. Next, the Protestants(4).

I would watch out for the Catholics if I were a Protestant.

Coffee time now.

(1) I haven’t been using Digg, so, I’m not actually invested or anything. I’d love to hear about that from someone who did. Did the users notice suspicious patterns in the articles being buried? I mean, someone obviously did, duh, or there wouldn’t have been an investigation and stuff, but how common was this noticing? Did people think that the burying patterns actually reflect people’s opinions accurately, and lost faith in humanity in general, and joined VHEMT? I wanna know.

(2) Oh, the sweet taste of suffering and misery! *Sendai-in-her-festive-and-jubilant-mood*

(3) Where by analogy obviously a false one is meant.

(4) Yeah, I know that the term “Protestant” is polemical and therefore problematic. I couldn’t think of another word for “mostly all Christians who are not Catholic”, though.

What Is Fundamentalism? (1)

A couple of days ago, I saw Dan’s post of a Ayaan Hirsi Ali video, in which she was explaining that the willingness of fundamentalists to kill people cannot be only blamed on their destitute situation (for two reasons: 1. not all of the fundamentalists who become terrorists are poor, 2. not all poor people become terrorists).

My immediate reaction was that of scoffing ‘well of course she’s right’, but actually I was  being overly dismissive again. Because that bad economic situation contributes to radicalization of many people’s political or religious beliefs is an intuition many people have, and one I would have had not so long ago.

(Fun fact: I feel I cannot any longer deny that I’m a learning machine. I tend to forget things like:

– paperwork,

– wallet,

– where I left the keys,

but I usually remember things like:

– when firefighting was nationalised in the UK (1865)

– where the wife of Salomon Maimon finally caught up with him, after he, to all intents and purposes, abandoned her with a child (Breslau)

– why a word with short vowels receives plene writing in Akkadian poetry sometimes (because it’s the accented part of a question).

I have a great memory, but my priorities are wrong, all wrong.

Another thing is: after learning a new thing I tend to immediately forget that there was a time I didn’t know it. A “new” information only stays “new” for a couple of hours or so.  Which is why everything always seems obvious-old-news all the time to me. Whence the dismissiveness.)

Anyway.

The intuition that “poverty causes people to become terrorists” is a bit true in that poverty may indeed spur a poor Pakistani political science graduate to join a fundamentalist organisation like Jamaat-e-Islami (it is now a more respectable political party) in hopes that it will lead to a creation of a just Islamic state, in which he or she would no longer be poor. The problem is that he or she has to believe in the just Islamic state and its power to make all wrongs right in the first place.

It is the quite obvious that poverty is not what causes fundamentalist movements to form. What happens instead is the following:

A  religion that was heretofore taken for granted is confronted with another (foreign, new, reformed) religion. As a result, the religion that to its believers appeared simply obvious and natural becomes the object of intense reflection  and deliberation, and is for the first time questioned. Eventually, the religion that was before natural and obvious, is defined, standardised and juxtaposed with the new or other or foreign religion.

This is in fact not just a religious phenomenon, it’s perfectly observable in culture and language (standardisation, anyone?). This is in fact  how people adapt to modernity or westernization.

Of course, many different concepts and definitions arise as the result of the reflection and deliberation process. Unless there is such a dominant power involved that could easily impose its own definitions, multiple definitions are allowed to exist. Some of them turn out to be fundamentalism.

If the new, or foreign, or other religion becomes, to put it succinctly, the evil twin of the newly-developed-old religion, we get fundamentalism.

A close observation of numerous movements allowed to create a definition of fundamentalism as having the following characteristics:

1. Moral absolutism

2. Manichaeism, understood as the belief that there is a continuous struggle of good and evil

3. Nativism (not always, propagated for instance in Sri Lanka, the belief that only a Buddhist Sinhalese is the real Sinhalese)

4. The sort of millenarism that presupposes that the believers will actively seek the overthrowing of the existing order, being fundamentally opposed to it (see moral absolutism). If a secular state can be  tolerated, we will only have a conservative, not fundamentalist movement. Often, the overthrowing of existing order is seen by fundamentalists as a restoration of mythical golden age.

5.  Claims of being the only true, pure version of a religion, other, more liberal versions being “tainted” by modernity, the Western influence, etc

6. But above all, the Enemy.  An  Enemy is something without which no fundamentalist movement can exist, because the enemy defines the fundamentalist movement and its goals by being everything it negates, despises and seeks to destroy. It’s the modernity, the secular society that tolerates multiple truths (see 1). Because the Enemy represents the absolute evil (1 and 2), it is all right to dehumanize the members enemy groups.  Fundamentalists from religions as traditionally pacifist as Buddhism advocate violence against their opponents (like Phra Kitthivuddho from Thailand, who argued that killing communists does not violate the Buddhist prohibition against killing sentient beings, because the communists are less than human).

The enemy must be eliminated; waiting for the respective higher power to mete out divine punishment and restore justice is not enough. A fundamentalists must actively strive to establish the divine order on earth.

Most fundamentalist movements appear in times of rapid societal change. This is not a coincidence: fundamentalism cannot exist without the Other.

I might write some more about different fundamentalisms in a couple of countries, later, if I have the time.

But I wouldn’t be very optimistic :<

ETA:

(While I didn’t use any specific book while writing this post, I should mention that I’ve been reading a lot of stuff from the Fundamentalism Project, which you can find here, though I mostly focused on Fundamentalism Observed (while a bit obsolete, it is nonetheless a valuable resource). One of the first people who noticed the extent of puzzling similarities between various fundamentalisms is Martin Riesebrodt, especially in his book “Fundamentalismus als patriarchalische Protestbewegung. Amerikanische Protestanten (1910-1928) und iranische Schiiten (1961-1979) im Vergleich” aka Pious Passion: The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran).

Links! (Victorian sex survey, Assyrian tablets, Constance McMillen prom)

1) Victorian sex survey:

“I opened it up and there were these questionnaires”— questionnaires upon which dozens of women, most born before 1870, had inscribed their most intimate thoughts.

In other words, it was a sex survey. A Victorian sex survey. It is the earliest known study of its type, long preceding, for example, the 1947 and 1953 Kinsey Reports, whose oldest female respondents were born in the 1890s.

2) What can happen to an absolutely priceless artefact during WWII:

Within a few years, he’d pawned the tablet, along with rare coins, to purchase the liquor store, the attorney said. But he soon paid back the pawn broker and reclaimed the coins and tablet.

3) Constance McMillen thing. By now everybody surely must know what happened, so I’ll just point to the account of her school mate about the school mate’s trials and tribulations at the hands of the omnipotent attention-whoring Gay Mafia, pulled straight from the comment the cross-burning ignorant hick’s left at another blog (her name was later pulled from her public Facebook profile, and how stupid you have to be to have a public profile when there’s a bunch of data-hungry lawyers prowling the internet in search of damning evidence? The lawyers who, I hope, do have the Screengrap app). Gee, it’s JUST LIKE In the Grove:

What people are failing to realize is that much of the fault of this whole stink lies with Constance, not her mistreatment by the school district, but her crazy-reckless need for attention. It sounds mean and horrible and like we planned it all specifically to embarrass Constance, but we didn’t. We let her have her prom with her girlfriend and her tuxedo and we went to party it up in the “boondocks” not because we wanted her rights violated, but so we could salvage what has turned into a total fiasco

Well. I can think of someone who’s failing to realize things; it’s not “the people” (whoever they might be).

Also, there are some photos from the no gay, disabled,  and otherwise different folks allowed prom here (again, pulled from Facebook accounts of those involved, and  again, not very smart, I’d say. Good for Constance though).

The most spectacularly failtastic bit of fail comes with this, though:

So, I guess it’s OK for two girls to kiss, as long as they aren’t real lesbians? Very cunning. Also, a girl in the other photo is wearing JEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANS.

I mean, jeans. This is hardcore stuff, guys. Like, a step away from fully fledged lesbianism or something. I’d pray for that girl, just in case.

As usual in cases like that, a plucky internet detective uncovered the Facebook groups those people (that is Itawamba blahblah  Highschool students) belong to and unsurprisingly:

And, if you look at the facebook profiles for the “secret prom” attendees you see the same pages recurring in their profiles:

Greenville Christian School
The Charleston Baptist Congregation
Little Creek Baptist Church
“I’m Proud To Be Christian” by Aaron Chavez Religious Center
Prayer In School Religious Center
I Love Jesus Religious Center
Freedom Rally 2010 “A call to Revival”
Dedicated to Christ
Going to Church Religious Center
God id Love Religious Organization
Jesus Daily Religious Organization
I’m a Christian & I’m Proud Religious Organization
The Resolve Tour Religious Organization
ChristBuild Inc Religious Organization
Christ In Action Non-Profit

CUTE. Clearly, what they need is moar Jesus in their lives OH WAIT-

Also, I personally agree with the following comment made about the latest developments in the Constance McMillen’s prom case:

If they [people who organised the no-;esbians-allowed prom — Sendai] keep digging that hole, they’ll soon be swimming in magma.

…

Dig faster.

I hope the original commenter will forgive me for quoting her verbatim, but I believe the comment i’s indicative of the attitude a sane person ought to preserve in face of the fail exhibited repeatedly by the Itawamba Highschool students, their parents and teachers, may a concert piano fall on their bigoted heads.

4) (I’m thinking about having a book-by-book reading orgy progress report on Twitter. Hmmm)

Women = livestock. Pie is good.

It seems a bill that will make ~*MISCARRIAGE A CRIME*~(1) is a signature away from being actual real law in Utah.

Wow. And they said Handmaid’s Tale was, like, feminist dystopian fiction.

(1) This actually needs a glittery background.