Dispatches from Nowhere 12.07.05

I know. I'm late. I'm sorry. I'm a bad person. Can we still be friends?

When did it become ok to joke about having a pace maker blow out? Is it considered nice, and loving, and accepting, even liberal, to wish death on a fellow human being because we happen to disagree with their political views?

Sorry kids, what ever you’re selling – I ain’t buying.

My definition of liberal remembers compassion and tolerance are virtues. But then again, so does my definition of conservative. Cracking jokes and openly wishing for major political figures to keel over and die isn’t in my definitions.

I really wish that before people would make comparisons between our current administration and the Nazi’s they would read some history. To do less, cheapens those that perished at the hands of that particular genocidal regime. Do some fucking research and skip the hyperbole. You might actually contribute something worthwhile to the debate. Instead, you continually chose to reduce the entire discourse to little more than schoolyard name calling.

My three year old is more civil than this.

In other news,

I saw this reported on my friend-list in the last day or so. Instead of arbitrarily linking to someone I don’t know and I am not sure if he wants the attention, I’ll go to the source.

I’m not one for supporting or teaching Intelligent Design. I don’t buy it, nor do I particularly care. However I do firmly believe that if you are going to freak out about some one wanting to teach ID, then you should also be upset when a small group of hindu nationalists succeeds in having textbooks rewritten to support their propaganda worldview over the objections of historians and linguists.

I’ll quote two of the more pertinent passages here:

Hindu nationalists have a few beliefs outside the mainstream of academic thought, including one view that science can prove human civilization has been around for 1,900 million years. They believe Hinduism originated in India and that Aryan culture traveled to Iran from India rather than vice-versa. They also believe Sanskrit is the mother language of every language in the world, including that of Native Americans. These unorthodox views are disputed by most historians and linguists who believe that the Vedic religion and Indo-Aryan Languages came from Central Asia along with the Aryans around 3500 years ago.

And,

The lobbying prompted Harvard Indologist Michael Witzel to write a letter to the California Board of Education which said, in part:

The agenda of the groups proposing these changes is familiar to all specialists on Indian history, who have recently won a long battle to prevent exactly these kinds of changes from finding a permanent place in the history textbooks in India. The proposed revisions are not of a scholarly but of a religious-political nature, and are primarily promoted by Hindutva supporters and non-specialist academics writing about issues far outside their area of expertise.

(emphasis mine)

Well, so much for our vaunted scientific impartiality. We complain about I.D. being taught in schools, but we let this slide in the name of …. What? Evil Western Christianity oppressing all view points but their own? Religious Tolerance?

Come on guys, if we are (as we say we are) for separation of church and state, then we should be up in arms about this as well.

Yeah. Right. That’s gonna happen.