If you have the time---or even if you think you don’t---to read a 26 page article in the New Yorker, please spend it reading this one about Paul Haggis and the Church of Scientology.  It’s a real argument for the beauty of long form journalism, and came very close to convincing me to adding the New Yorker into my already-growing pile of magazine subscriptions.  (Between those, books, and blogs, I’m perpetually overwhelmed.)

It’s not only fascinating, but important, too.  I’m usually not one to bash Scientology especially.  Oh, I bash it, but I also have, in the past, defended it on the grounds that its claims are no wackier than the claims made by most religions.  I’m usually skeptical of religious people attacking other religions, because I smell a whiff of, “My bullshit is less bullshit because I can compare it positively to some other bullshit!” I’m also unconvinced by arguments that point to how Scientology started off as a cult.  Most religions do, after all.  I’m definitely not convinced Scientology screws people up more than, say, Catholicism.  The money exchanging hands has always been the most worrisome aspect of the faith, but I always figured it was just a little more direct than the tithing expected of believers in Christian churches. 

But this article made me realize that the problem with Scientology is that it’s getting more cult-like as it ages, and that’s incredibly worrisome.  There’s physical abuse, alarming reports of peole disappearing, mind control and brainwashing, and the amount of money they’re prying from people is incredibly high, way into the cult levels.  Plus, there’s the worst marker of a cult, which is insisting that adherents cut off contact with anyone in their lives who is skeptical of Scientology, which is a clear sign they’re afraid that anyone asking questions will pull people from the church.  I’m more sympathetic now towards those who treat Scientology like it’s a cult instead of a religion; the difference is really spelled out in the article.

That said, the best and most interesting aspect is that the journalist Lawrence Wright is actually sympathetic to why someone might be drawn to Scientology.  He doesn’t dismiss L. Ron Hubbard as quickly as some do, and he gets Paul Haggis and others to explain what it was that they actually got out of the religion, and it’s really convincing. (Plus, for Hollywood types, there’s a lot of professional connections created.) I felt that it has a lot in common with modern day evangelical Christianity.  Both religions have moved towards embracing self-help and psychology as models of what they do, instead of former models where personal assistance was part of the faith, but definitely took a backseat to community and theological questions.  Nowadays, evangelical Christianity is pushed as a very individualistic thing, like a “Be A Better You Through Jesus!” kind of thing.  Rick Warren is the master of this, and the blog Stuff Christian Culture Likes is an excellent examination of how this mentality creates a conformist, rules-obsessed culture where actual community is more an illusion than a reality.  Scientology does all this and adds a bunch of New Age mumbo-jumbo that makes it feel very modern.  I can definitely see the appeal now, though it’s absolutely a scary cult. 

It’ll be interesting seeing how this battle plays out. As Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon today suggests, the only real consistent line throughout conservative reaction to the Egyptian protests has been a need to be loud and insistent that this is all about America without doing anything so quaint as educating yourself about the issues, but beyond that it’s been a struggle between the natural conservative inclination to support oppressive dictators and the occasional pro-democracy pose conservatives take to justify themselves to themselves (and their desire to wear tricorn hats).  Plus, there’s the ugly fact of the matter that we don’t actually have any real idea how this is going to turn out, and that loss of control is somehting that’s hard for most Americans to accept, but especially for conservatives. 

Egypt may be unpredictable, but I feel somewhat assured I can predict who is going to win in the battle between Team Beckian Paranoids and Team Let’s Not Sound Like We’re Stark Raving Mad, M’kay? My money’s on Beck, definitely.  Sure, his theory that the protesters are in league with liberal America and the mainstream media to promote a sort of socialist hedonistic fundamentalist theocracy that features free abortions and orgies in the streets but also mandatory burquas and prayer five times a day sounds like the sort of thing that shouldn’t really catch on in the marketplace of ideas.  But is it really more crazy than a lot of the crap that Beck and the rest of the right wing noise machine pumps out day in and day out?  No, not really.  The people who are complaining about Beck now were and are only too happy to lie the vast majority of the time for political gain.  Bill Kristol, for instance, isn’t one to talk, since he backed every single paranoid lie imaginable to get us into war with Iraq.  Plus, as Media Matters demonstrates, even some people complaining about Beck, such as John Fund, are too in love with the “sharia law” paranoia to give it up completely.  They simply have the very silly, childish belief that they can lie and spread paranoia to keep their base fearful and voting as instructed, but that they can keep that paranoia under control once it’s been unleashed.  And I don’t think you can do that.

See, Glenn Beck gets it. And, to an extent, he has a different motivation than a lot of conservative pundits who see themselves mainly as shills for the GOP and the right wing agenda.  Beck’s down with that motivation, but making money and accumulating popularity matters more to him, and if the goals clash, he’ll pick money and popularity over shilling for the conservative agenda every time.  Plus, he can shape the conservative agenda to fit his goals at this point.  And he knows his audience isn’t interested in niceties like nuance or imagining that Egyptians are human beings who deserve to be listened to.  He understands on a gut level that the images of a bunch of Egyptians in the street looking angry inspires fear in his audience, regardless of the context, and he’s going to stoke it, because fearful followers spend more and are more obedient.  See, Kristol and Fund and company see racism as something that can be manipulated depending on their needs.  Beck grasps that racism doesn’t respond to that kind of nuance, and chooses instead to feed it on the assumption that it will pay dividends down the road.  Same story with paranoia.  Beck grasps that balls-out paranoia is much better for him than moderated paranoia.  Once you start telling people, “Hey, it’s cool to be paranoid, but don’t get all crazy about it,” you’ve already conceded that most of the shit you say is irrational.  But if you’re paranoid all the time, you can make a clean break with reality.  It ceases to be a reference point anymore, and the seed of an idea that one shouldn’t be a paranoid nut job won’t be planted.  And that’s where he needs his audience: completely disconnected, constantly fearful, with no relationship to the real world outside of their homes. 

Ta-Nehisi has a good post up about the lack of female editors on Wikipedia, and refreshingly, he avoids doing what you see a lot of people do when women fail to step up in certain circumstances as much as men do.  He doesn’t blame women for being weak, but instead looks at environment.

It seems to me that is not just a Wikipedia problem, but a societal problem likely extending out from families and schools. Defending your words strikes me as a really good thing. Dissuading women from doing that strikes me as just the opposite.

That said, I’m not convinced that there’s nothing that can be done. For whatever reason, I think Internet sites that allow trolling and aimless idiocy to run roughshod have a disproportionate effect on women. (Terri Oda hints at exactly that here.) I don’t know if that’s because trolls and idiots are more likely to say something sexist or what. But I don’t think the problem is aggressive argumentation, so much as its weak people saying these behind a cloak of anonymity which they’d never say publicly.

He then references the many online situations where racism runs rampant, and how this ugly reality makes him not want to go in those spaces.  And that’s exactly it; even the idea of going on to Wikipedia and trying to edit stuff and getting into fights with dudes makes me too weary to even think about it.  I spend enough of my life dealing with pompous men who didn’t get the memo that their penises don’t automatically make them smarter or more mature than any random woman.  I don’t even have to go onto Wikipedia to tell you that it’s probably like that, on steroids, since, as Justine Cassell notes, on Wikipedia you can actually delete people’s actual words.  Women spend huge chunks of our lives trying to get our voices heard. Why go into a space where men can actually erase you?

A lot of the time when dealing with this issue, it’s hard to talk to men about it, even if they don’t mansplain or get pompous, because men literally don’t see how much abuse women take online.  When they’re put in the position to see it, they invariably register intense shock, in my experience, such as when Jesse had to deal with the overwhelming amount of bullshit that happened in this space when I joined, or the men I’ve spoken to that end up having to moderate comments for female writers, particularly those who make feminist points.  Women get used to it, but it does wear you down, and you find yourself picking your battles before it even begins. 

Which is why I was glad to see this article describing a new website called Fat, Ugly or Slutty, which is dedicated to chronicling the abuse female gamers receive because they have the audacity to think they deserve to play online games just like guys do.  FUS is just the latest in a number of sites I’m seeing that just simply put the bullshit up for all to see, hoping to give the reader a small taste of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of this crap.  It’s a great trend, because all you have to do when someone doubts that you, as a member of a group who gets certain kinds of abuse, are accurately reporting your experiences, is to point them to the website so they can absorb it.  It’s a funny site, too, which isn’t surprising---humor is often the only weapon you’ve got. 

I see one sign that sites like this are effective.  Usually at Kotaku, when there’s a post up about racism or sexism, the comments turn into a sea of white dudes yelling, “Nuh-uh!” And this didn’t happen, probably because the evidence is just so compelling.  Instead, they started to bicker about whether it’s worse on PC or console games, an irrelevancy that was nonetheless heartening for what it wasn’t. 

It was during the half time performance of the Black Eyed Peas last night, precisely when the dancers with boxes on their heads came out, when I realized I was in a very Devo set of mind, which is to say, really enjoying the de-evolution of culture as described by the band Devo.  (Example: “Those two people over there in the polyester double-knit body suits driving that gas-guzzling Cadillac are more DE-vo than we could ever be.") Some people would put boxes on their dancers’ heads to symbolize or represent something, to create an emotional impact with artfulness.  BEP does it because why the fuck not?  It’s truly beautiful, if you have a real appreciation for mediocrity, which I occasionally do, and why I have come to enjoy watching the Super Bowl.  And last night was awesome, everything I wanted.  Besides the actual game---the fact that football players are really good at what they do justifies everything else that happens around the game---last night was a glorious sea of mediocrity. 

At its best, the spectacle of the Super Bowl proves the principle that aesthetics by committee will tend towards the mediocre, because that which offends no one will get more backing than that which is actually interesting. Of course, “offending no one” is another way of saying “boring”.  Clay Aiken is the epitome of this principle, but last night’s Super Bowl really was competitive.  The ads tended towards absurdity in an attempt to be eye-catching without having any of the bite that actual humor has.  (One exception was the little kid playing at Darth Vader, which still had some bite in it.) The “jokes” in ads that dared to offend mostly were pretend daring to offend---sexist jokes that are less about having bite than about reassuring the lowest common denominator that all their vicious prejudices are still acceptable. But the cake of mediocrity was definitely that BEP performance.  That was the most perfect “offend no one, entertain no one” balance of mediocrity I’ve ever seen.  I mean, they had the word “love” all over the place---it’s unobjectionable, and in this context, utterly meaningless.  Love?  Who or what, to what purpose?  I don’t know, but isn’t it a nice word? 

They should have the Black Eyed Peas play every year, seriously.  They’re the perfect halftime band.  They can’t be too awesome, like Prince, which always causes complaints from the large idiot faction of the audience.  But they didn’t make you want to hide behind your couch at the tragedy of it all, like The Who last year.  They are white bread with butter: we can all tolerate it, but no one will really enjoy it too much.

Matt Zoller Seitz declared at Salon today that the Super Bowl spectacle (which is different from the game, which was actually interesting this year) is a temperature gauge of the national mood.  And that would mean that the national mood is one of not wanting anyone to be too happy or too sad or too thoughtful or too opinionated or too intellectual or too stupid.  The more meaningless and mediocre, the better. Add some sparkle to it so people don’t notice that it’s empty. It’s safer that way. 

I hope this isn’t boring you guys, but I need to do some more blogging on the Live Action/Lila Rose situation.  As I’ve noted before, Rose knows and works with James O’Keefe, and she shares his belief that deceptive editing and outright lying are acceptable means to their ends.  The chance that deceptive editing isn’t in play with these Planned Parenthood videos was nearly nil; these come from the same group of people who edited Shirley Sherrod to be saying something the opposite of what she was saying, and edited videos to make it seem like ACORN was doing stuff it wasn’t.  (For instance, O’Keefe edited a video to make a worker who was suggesting that a trafficked woman hide money from her pimp so she could escape look like she was saying she should hide money from the IRS.) Rose has been known to engage in deceptive editing before, and as I noted, she reneged on her agreement to debate me when I made it clear that she wouldn’t have a chance to edit it to make it seem like I said things I didn’t. 

Now the evidence is in.  We know that Rose deceptively edited at least one of the videos she’s released, changing the audio around to make it sound like a Planned Parenthood employee is saying something she didn’t say. Ironically, even in the edited video, the employee isn’t saying anything wrong, but in the full length video, it’s even more clear that the employee didn’t address judicial bypass until all other explanations had been exhausted.  This matters, because the narrative on Fox News---echoed by a concern troll who is pretty clearly lying about his own views on this site---is that it’s somehow wrong to inform teenagers of their legal right to judicial bypass.  Not only is it not wrong to inform patients of all their rights, it’s the moral and often legal duty of medical professionals to do so, as explained by Media Matters:

ABC: “Legal Experts” Said Worker’s Advice “Is Consistent With State Law.” A February 4 ABC article about the second Live Action video stated that “unlike the first video, the Richmond clinic worker appears to act professionally and appropriately.” The article further explained that “the clinic worker’s advice on how a minor could obtain an abortion without her parents’ consent is consistent with state law.” A lawyer interviewed for the article noted, “It would be ethically required of a health worker to notify a minor seeking an abortion of her right to a process known as ‘judicial bypass,’” because it is “a clearly recognized constitutional right of minors to seek a judge’s approval without their parents knowing.”

Fox is trying very hard to get their viewers to believe the word “bypass” means to circumvent the law.  In fact, they state so boldly.  But this is a pure, unadulterated lie.  Judicial bypass is a legal right established by the Supreme Court.  It was put there because the language of Roe v Wade makes it clear that abortion restrictions cannot be there to harm women seeking abortion, and young women therefore have to be able to make the case that informing their parents would cause harm to them.  I’m sure you can see how that could happen, and if not, you’re being deliberately obtuse.

Of course, the video has another lie implied, because Rose doesn’t inform her audience---nor are they informing the audience in most cases on Fox News---that the Planned Parenthood employee in this tape immediately informed the proper authorities after the hoaxers left the clinic. 

Lila Rose’s attempt to defend her lying ass in this particular instance reveals exactly what kind of person we’re dealing with here:

“It is utterly disgusting that Planned Parenthood’s response to this is that their employee reacted ‘professionally,’” said Live Action President Lila Rose. “The only acceptable response to encountering a self-identified sex-trafficker of underage girls is zero tolerance. The only ‘professional’ response is to immediately call law enforcement to the scene and push for an arrest.

I will point out that this was originally published on Jill Stanek’s blog.  This is important, because Stanek claims (falsely) that she witnessed killing of born babies in a Chicago hospital.  She reported these claims after she claims they happened. Holy double standard, Batman!  By her and Rose’s measures, Stanek should have whipped out her handcuffs (which all citizens should have at all time on their bodies), arrested everyone involved, and called the police immediately.  If you’re going to expect that of everyone else, you have to do it yourself.  Granted, unlike the employees at Planned Parenthood, if Stanek had called the police after the alleged baby-killing, she would have gone to jail for filing a false police report.  Still, the point stands.  In grown-up land, ordinary citizens do not make citizen’s arrests simply because someone claims to have done something illegal.  That’s why we have the police, and they often don’t appreciate it if you do their job for them, since you’re probably going to do a shitty job of it.  Rose’s insistence that trying to detain a claimed pimp is the only proper response is fucked up beyond belief.  Think about if he was a real pimp; if Planned Parenthood tried to do that, he would a) likely escape, b) likely physically assault and possibly kill someone in the office, and c) become a stone wall for information on the whereabouts of his slaves.  Pimps are bad people who have no problem enacting violence, especially against women.  That’s how this works in grown-up land. 

Make no mistake: Lila Rose is out to make sure that low income and young women are deprived access to decent health care, including and especially contraception and cancer screening, both of which are the majority of Planned Parenthood’s work.  And her claims that she’s trying to expose how Planned Parenthood is “dangerous” is the biggest lie of all.  She objects to Planned Parenthood because she objects to sexually active young women getting proper health care, especially if they’re not privileged like she no doubt is to have a lot of money to obtain private health care. 

My only real question is how is it that the conservative movement is pumping out so many young people that literally have no moral grounding, like Lila Rose and James O’Keefe?  Why do these young people blithely assume that it’s okay to lie to get your way, and that sadistic attacks on vulnerable people is a good way to spend your time?  Where do such lowlifes come from?

Jessica Valenti has formally ended her time at Feministing.  It’s one of those moments when I get all sentimental, because it’s kind of crazy to think of the journey we’ve all been on.  I don’t know how many of you know the whole history here, but when Feministing was started, I was still blogging at a small Blogger blog called Mouse Words, and there was no such thing as “feminist blogging”.  In fact, political blogging was still sort of a new thing; the word still connoted “web logging”, and had a diary feel to it.  The only two blogs that existed that were explicitly feminist blogs were Feministe, which only had Lauren Bruce at the time, and Feministing.  And I suppose Mouse Words, but then as now, feminism was only part of a whole cloth liberal agenda I have with my writing.  There was also Rox Populi, which is defunct now, and it was, like Mouse Words, straddling feminism and liberalism in general.

Jessica was the only one of us who had a vision, though.  Most of us had blogs because we liked ranting into space; we didn’t actually think about audience-building.  I was absolutely floored when I won the Koufax award that year for Best New Blog, since it never occurred to me that I had more than five readers.  I was even more floored when Jesse asked me to replace Ezra Klein on Pandagon.  Most of us had no ambitions with our blogging.  But Jessica was the exception.  She saw Feministing as something that could be up there with feminist behemoths like Ms Magazine.  I thought she was way too optimistic, but she proved me wrong, and now Feministing is probably more of a feminist powerhouse, especially for young women.

Hard as it may be to believe in current times, I actually wrote for Feministing for a week, to cover Jessica while she was on vacation.  The blog now is more of a news blog for feminism, but back then it was a little more free form, and my style fit right into it.  On any given day, you’d get maybe 5 comments.  There was lots of raunchy humor and shenanigans, because we didn’t think back then that what we said mattered very much.  Feministing is obviously a more valuable service nowadays, but I still have nostalgia for the early days, when we were still trying to figure out what we were doing with this blogging thing, and it was just a hobby and so having fun was the main idea behind it all.  Lots of time was spent in chat.  Nowadays, everyone is super busy and grown-up, and so those early days seem like a second adolescence to me.

And we totally worshiped Kathleen Hanna, so I’m dedicating this Friday Genius Ten to the people we were in 2004 and 2005, the ones who saw ourselves as Riot Grrrls redux and online, the people who saw feminism as a punk rock subversion and were outside of the establishment.  Jessica was right and I was wrong; we could totally be ourselves and still create a voice for ourselves in feminism.  So, thanks to her for having a vision, and for being a friend.

Original song: “Hot Topic” by Le Tigre

1) “Modern Girl” by Sleater-Kinney
2) “Meeting Paris Hilton” by Cansei De Ser Sexy
3) “Flower” by Deerhoof
4) “Tick” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
5) “In Particular” by Blonde Redhead
6) “Hombre” by MIA
7) “Pile of Gold” by The Blow
8) “Cross Bones Style” by Cat Power
9) “I Hear Noises” by Tegan and Sara
10) “Hello? Is This Thing On?” by !!!

Videos below the fold. 

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Update: If you want more info on this sour young woman named Lila Rose, Media Matters has a round-up.  However bad you think she is, she’s worse.

Please, I beg of you. Because the current system you’re working under is a nightmare: Thinking sex is dirty, and waiting until you’re really drunk before giving in and having unfulfilling gropings.  Taking all that pent-up energy and channeling it into fantasies of being pimps and prostitutes that manage to be both lurid and corny.  Then inflicting your silly sexual fantasies on the public as part of “sting” operations, where you justify your own would-be perversions with your sadistic desire to punish the vulnerable for daring, I dunno, to exist I guess.  If you could just spend your youth like less-evil people did, by screwing around joyfully and maybe listening to some non-shitty records, maybe you would calm down and not be such terrible pieces of shit.  At least you would lose some of that constipated expression that is the surefire marker of a young conservative, one that’s common to Lila Rose, James O’Keefe, and Hannah Giles.  And maybe the dudes would spend a little less time thinking about ways to play at being rapists, either in terms of playing pimp or, like James O’Keefe tried to do, trap female journalists in situations that basically scream “rape dungeon”. 

The latest “let’s play pimp!” situation comes courtesy of Lila Rose, who really, really doesn’t like women who just go ahead and have sex like it’s a thing you just get to do.  Her group, Live Action, sent a bunch of undercover hoaxers to Planned Parenthoods so they could pretend they were pimps (seriously, the well of conservative men who want a chance to play pimp is endless, isn’t it?) in order to get “shocking” footage, and basically to do them like Rose’s buddy O’Keefe did to ACORN.  They didn’t get a whole lot.  One employee was egregiously unprofessional, and she’s been fired, and that’s about it.  The second video that’s out mostly demonstrates exactly how little Lila Rose can get done without aggressive editing:

As Jodi Jacobson notes, this video actually proves that the nurse at the Planned Parenthood was doing her job. She immediately went to her supervisors after the hoaxers left and alerted them to the potential underage prostitution.  The video doesn’t mention this, making Rose and her comrades big fat fucking lying sacks of shit.  No surprise there.  As I’ve noted before, Rose asked me to debate her, but when I insisted it be done in a style where she couldn’t edit it, she balked.  Someone who won’t accept a fair fight is not an honest person, sorry. 

It’s also interesting that nothing the nurse says is wrong, illegal, or messed up.  She offers medically and legally accurate information.  The only thing she does “wrong” is not to leap up and lock the door the second the guy drops the vague term “sex work”, and again, she immediately reported the visit, as she’s supposed to. When I worked in banking and someone was trying to pass a bad check, we didn’t immediately say, “Hey, wait here.  I’m going to call the police.” We fronted and acted normal, while quietly trying to report them.  That’s how this works.

What’s really interesting about this second video is that it’s only shocking if you have one or more of these assumptions:

*That young people don’t deserve correct information or medical attention.

*That sex workers don’t deserve correct information or medical attention.

*That sexually active women don’t deserve HIPAA rights to confidentiality.

*That STD testing, contraception, and especially long-term contraception are too filthy to be spoken about, even in confidential medical settings with trained professionals.

I don’t share any of these assumptions.  On the contrary, I believe that all people---even women, even young women, even women who have accepted money in exchange for sexual favors---deserve basic human rights.  I believe they deserve medical care, and that being sexually active in ways outside of how Lila Rose approves does not mean you should be doomed to have an untreated STD or an unwanted pregnancy.  I think most people, if they think about it, agree with me.  Lila Rose is hoping that a knee-jerk hatred of young women and sex workers will override reason and the basic rights of humans here.  I think she’s going to be surprised how many people don’t agree that widespread, unchecked STD transmission and unwanted pregnancy is such a great fucking idea. 

Thank you, Sean on Twitter, for making my day last night by drawing my attention to the latest front in the battle of wingnuts vs. science.  Often, when we pro-science sorts are arguing about evolution with wingnuts, they’ll pull the “it’s just a theory” card, to which we often reply, “It’s also called the theory of gravity.  Are you going to argue with gravity?”

Answer: Of course they are.

I sometimes still find that people on the liberal, or at least thoughtful, side of the fence still think that global warming denialism and creationism are discrete things borne out of an emotional need not to believe either in global warming or evolution, and while that’s true, I think it’s deeper than that.  I think that science itself is under attack, and that the reason that conservatives are so eager to lash out against it has to do with an anti-modernist bent.  This is especially true when you understand that science really is a threat to religion.  A lot of people say it’s not, because science doesn’t address “spiritual” needs, but said folks are really overrating the importance of spirituality for most people---or assuming that this urge isn’t better scratched by loving others and enjoying life.  Religion really draws its power from explanation.  It gives order to the world.  And science is poaching that territory rapidly, which pisses off authoritarians, because they rightfully understand that if they lose the power to create facile goddidit explanations for everything from gravity to the problem of evil, they will lose their power over people. Thus, the attack not just on specific scientific theories, but on science in general, and most of academia, as well.

The latest installment is Bill O’Reilly’s war on gravity. Or, specifically, his belief that goddidit is a better explanation for the tides than the real explanation, which is that they’re created by a combination of moon and Earth gravity.  He had this exchange with David Silverman, president of the American Atheist Group on his show:

O’REILLY: I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O’REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can’t explain that.

Of course, the problem with this is that 3rd graders can in fact explain that, at least well enough to basically trump the goddidit theory.  You don’t need in-depth knowledge to understand that gravity pulls on the oceans, and they basically slosh around, except with predictable regularity because the moon is predictable.  Once this was pointed out to O’Reilly, he called people who understand the theory of gravity “pinheads” and suggested they hadn’t thought this through, because they totally didn’t know where the moon came from!  Also, they can’t explain why god gave us a moon but didn’t give those uninhabited planets moons.*

I would like to point out that O’Reilly’s explanation of why you have to believe in god because that means there is “order”.  To which I must point out that this is the authoritarian, patriarchal mind at its best---he wishes to believe that him being on top of others is the natural order, so he creates a parallel fantasy of a white guy in the sky who created everything, and his power is derived from the magical white guy in the sky, because presumably they look alike and are both assholes. Also, said white guy in the sky making all the rules means you don’t have to think any more, just obey.  People who say that religion is about “spirituality” miss this, because really, many religious people like O’Reilly like religion because it makes the universe seem small and orderly.  In reality, the universe is huge and, from the small human perspective, seemingly chaotic, making an atheist understanding of nature ironically more awe-inspiring than any petty god invented by mostly illiterate people from the ancient world.

At one point in this rant, O’Reilly, in an attempt to be satirical, suggests that the non-god explanation is something crazy, like suggesting that a meteor hit the planet and created the moon.  In fact, this is basically what happened.

Because we know how the Moon got there (a Mars-sized planet struck the Earth a glancing blow about 100 million years after it formed, splashing debris into orbit which coalesced to form the Moon).

I’d read the whole post by Phil Plait, who breaks down just how silly this all is.  Basically, we know all the stuff that O’Reilly claims we don’t know: where the Sun came from, where the moon came from, and of course, why other planets don’t have moons.  The answer to that is, they do.  Mars---who O’Reilly says doesn’t have a moon---has two.  If I recall from my days of star-gazing with my dad, Jupiter has like eleven billionty moons.  If you’re trying to make an argument that god loves us special best by looking at moons as evidence, then you have to believe god loves Jupiter most of all. 

The only move O’Reilly can make now is to attack the theory of gravity, which is how all these other ideas hang together.  Screw attacking Darwin!  It’s time to go after Newton!** Maybe O’Reilly can work with the Insane Clown Posse on their next big hit single, “Miracles II: Falling Apples, How Do They Work?”

The good news is that this expanded war on science from conservatives is going to eventually come into conflict with their support of endless spending on weapons research, some of which requires knowledge of the basics of astronomy and physics that explain how the moon got there and the tides works.

*Yes, I know.  Finish the post before leaving a comment crowing about how I didn’t note that there are other moons, because I did, in fact, do so later in the post.  I don’t want you to look foolish in your eagerness to demonstrate your swift recall that Mars has two moons.

**Seriously, we all know is more complicated than that, and that Einstein played a role in revising Newton’s theories, etc. Just let that pedantry go for a moment and enjoy the joke. 

Still playing catch-up, but I wanted to draw attention to this link that I only saw because of Ta-Nehisi: the USDA actually told people to eat less for health in their latest round of recommendations.  So, health care reform has definitely influenced policy outside of just medicine, as expected.  Or that’s my guess, anyway, because in the past the possibility that the USDA would actually tell people to restrict how much food they ate seemed remote to impossible.  But with a renewed interest in saving money because of health care reform, the equation almost surely changed, and now the USDA had financial pressures coming not just from the food industry, but from health care sectors that have to find ways to cut costs or else. 

The NY Times article doesn’t even begin to address how big a deal this is.  The USDA has been stymied and blocked at every turn for decades on this front.  At best, they’ve been able to say you should eat more fruits and vegetables, and they just sort of hoped you took a hint and therefore ate less of everything else.  Marion Nestle’s entire book Food Politics was basically a reaction to her experiences with the USDA and the FDA, and how the food industry was able to manipulate all the recommendations to send the message that people should be eating more, especially eating more meat, dairy, and refined foods. The only thing the government got past these powerful lobbies were recommendations to eat sugar and fat sparingly; the meat industry felt they could take advantage of those particular recommendations, and that’s basically why. 

I don’t know how much this sort of thing actually impacts people, but the food industry is clearly scared to death of government recommendations to eat less.  I think it’s actually because, believe it or not, such a recommendation undermines the dieting mentality.  Right now, our culture is one where people are basically encouraged to stuff themselves all the time, and then when they feel they’ve gained too much weight, go on highly restrictive diets to lose it, which they can’t wait to go off of and go back to “normal”, where they gain it all back. This obviously benefits the food industry in multiple ways---they can feed you the food that makes you gain weight, and then feed you diet products, rinse and repeat.  The notion that we should be eating less than the current average as a matter of course hurts the food industry. But the notion of having a lifestyle instead of going on a diet is growing in popularity already; maybe this will help it along. 

Back online, and stoked about it!  I’ve been interested in this story for a couple of days, but haven’t been able to blog about it: a man was arrested in Dearborn, Michigan for attempting to blow up a mosque, and this time there is no wriggling out of the fact that the would-be terrorist is a classic teabagger.  Nor is there wriggling out of the fact that Dearborn has long been a town that wingnuts use for propaganda purposes.  During the campaign, Sharron Angle claimed Dearborn was ruled by sharia law.  In reality, it just has a lot of Muslim residents. 

I’ve been too busy to read much these past couple of days, so maybe you can tell me how right wingers are trying to wriggle out of this.  Mostly, it seems they don’t have to, since the mainstream media has decided to pretend there is no such thing as domestic terrorism, because every time you actually pay attention to instances of it, the whining and crying and lamentations of victimhood from the people who say the sorts of things that make would-be terrorists feel self-assured is so shrill.  I did find Conor Friedersdorf---who I occasionally find cause to respect only to have something like this happen, which makes me lose it all---trotting out what appears to be the standard minimization line.  He’s noting that the explosives weren’t that explosive-y---they were fireworks, basically---and that the guy was, sigh, “crazy”. 

Both of these excuses are full-blown bullshit.  It’s super duper great the guy didn’t have the wherewithal to get better explosives, but the next guy---or the last guy that attempted to attack the MLK Day parade---just has to get in touch with his local militia to get whatever he wants.  Or he could skip the explosives and just buy a bunch of powerful guns and open fire on a crowd.  To point to the fireworks is to imply there’s controls on what kind of access people in this mindset have to dangerous weapons, that’s just a lie, if only by implication.  The “crazy” gambit is bullshit for a couple of reasons.  The big one is the “So?” reason.  So what if he’s crazy?  That just makes it worse---people like Sharron Angle are out there, talking up paranoid fantasies, and they know there are crazy people out there who are going to take them seriously.  The fact of “crazy” just means you have more, not less responsibility not to spout paranoid lies. 

Also, I’m really concerned that “crazy” is getting defined down rapidly, from potential schizophrenia to a situation where someone who does something terrorism-related will get called “crazy” for pretty much anything, letting the right off the hook for their constant stream of paranoia. The problem with that is that mental illness is like the common cold---almost everyone has a touch of it---so they’ve created a neat little loophole where there is no such thing as a terrorist action, no matter how neatly it ties into paranoid wingnuttery, that will actually “count”.  Hey, the guy felt blue after his divorce.  That’s a history of depression, so ignore what he actually did and shake your head in rue that there’s nothing that can be done. 

I read the article that Conor used to minimize right wing responsibility here, and it does nothing of the sort.  While Roger Stockham had a long history of mental health problems, his history of acting out is mostly to completely related to being a patriarchal-minded, entitled wingnutty guy.  He’s done it all: kidnapped his own child (which is the outer limit of the “fathers rights” assholery), harassed a woman that was at the VFW with him for having a black boyfriend (there’s probably more to that story, though who knows?), and tried to kill a bunch of people so he could blame it on Muslims.  The man had a lifelong obsession with racist beliefs.  Yet, he chose to act within a few months of anti-Muslim sentiment---especially by a politician in his area (his previous violence was all in the Nevada/California area) targeting Dearborn specifically---had reached a fever pitch in the run-up to the election. Coincidence?  I’m skeptical.

I’m also fully expecting this one to go right down the memory hole. 

Update: I was also on Bloggingheads with Mollie Ziegler Hemingway.  We talked about abortion, of course, and I even brought up this rape thing, for which she had nothing to say, really.

Talking to antis is frustrating, mostly because they’ve all learned that by invoking the red herring “human life”, they can distract people from what the reproductive rights debate is really about, which is sexual liberation, women’s health care, and women’s rights.  Sperm are “human beings”, and have more autonomy than fetuses.  Plus, one’s views on abortion are incredibly predictive of one’s political leanings overall.  If it was about “life”, then being “pro-life” would not correlate with being pro-war and anti-health care, and pro-choice wouldn’t correlate with being otherwise more protective of human life.  This dialogue hints at how much B.S. the “life” gambit is.  Hemingway is defensive of anti-environmentalism, for instance.  If one’s real concern were human life and not constraining female sexuality, the environment would be the most important issue to you, since it’s the one that has the most impact on whether or not human beings will actually be able to sustain life.  Instead, she takes potshots at energy-saving light bulbs. Even though all those lives she cares so much about in the womb are really going to need this planet our needless wastefulness is destroying when they’re born.

Seriously, anyone who thinks a twisty light bulb to save the planet is too much of an imposition, but giving up your body for nine months to nurture a mindless ball of cells into a person has something else going on besides a love of life.

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Today, we’re moving, so there may be radio silence from me for a little while (but please email me if there are concerns; I will be checking email), but I just want to report that the #dearjohn hashtag is going strong.  There are many things you can do, but the most important is, at this point, shaming and contacting the Democrats who have co-sponsored this bill.  Remind them that people vote for Democrats because they want support for ordinary, working people.  They don’t vote for them because they want Democrats to force teenage girls and the working poor who’ve been raped to carry their rapists’ babies.  A nice reminder of how lashing out against women ended Bart Stupak’s career would be helpful, as would noting that it’s really rich for a bunch of men to tell women they don’t deserve abortions unless they can pay out of pocket. 

Dan Boren [D-OK2]

Jerry Costello [D-IL12]

Mark Critz [D-PA12]

Joe Donnelly [D-IN2]

Daniel Lipinski [D-IL3]

Collin Peterson [D-MN7]

Nick Rahall [D-WV3]

Mike Ross [D-AR4]

Heath Shuler [D-NC11]

HR3, misleadingly named the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act”, is a perfect storm of everything that’s nasty about the modern, hyper-conservative Republican party.  It’s dishonest, since women who have federal health insurance are already banned from using that money for abortion care.  This bill is actually an attempt to shut down abortion coverage through all private insurance, including employer-provided insurance, which means that it’s beyond even the dreadful Stupak-Pitts amendment/executive order.  Some “small government”.  As Rachel Maddow documented, this bill is just the most egregious example of how the GOP basically hoodwinked the voters.  They ran on “creating jobs”, which they clearly have no intention of doing, since they’re going to be too busy looking for ways to put the screws to everyone they hate, a long list that includes poor people, people who read a lot, gays, and basically all women, but especially the most vulnerable in our society.

Which is why they rushed out this bill, which I’d call the “Economic Crisis Is A Good Time To Rain Hell On American Women In Need Act”.  In fact, John Boehner called this bill a “top priority”.  We have 10% unemployment, but making sure that abortions are only a privilege for those who can pay out of pocket on a moment’s notice is the GOP’s top priority.

Sadly, the mainstream media (outside of a handful of awesome fighters, like Rachel Maddow, Nicholas Kristof, and Bob Herbert) has gotten inured to relentless attacks on women from conservatives, and subsequently fail to properly understand that a bill like this is pure misogyny, with a giant side dose of class warfare.  They’ve failed to cover the nefarious workings of Rep. Chris Smith from New Jersey, who competes regularly in the heavy competition in Congress for the title Biggest Misogynist, and who has made a special pet project out of trying to shut down any foreign aid that would include contraception, and who has accused Secretary Clinton of being a friend to child rapists because she believes child rape victims should get medical care.  But as you’ll see, Chris Smith is actually the worst enemy in Congress a minor victim of rape could have, starting with the fact that he seems to believe they’re lying sluts who need to be punished. 

Smith’s egregious misogyny is why this bill, HR3, has a strong chance of getting more media attention and political pushback than we initially thought it would.  See, on top of the usual routine of denying abortion services to the most vulnerable, exploiting a terrible economic situation to make people’s lives even worse, and straight up lying, Smith also decided to wedge one more pet project into this bill, which is rape apologism.  And that is what finally broke everyone’s capacity to put up with this shit anymore.

See, HR3 has---like the Hyde Amendment---a provision in it that carves out an exception for rape, incest, and the health/life of the mother. But because anti-choicers like Smith are such ruthless misogynists, they tend to believe the misogynist stereotype that all women, especially those who claim to be ill or victims of crimes, are lying whores until proven otherwise.  Or just lying whores, regardless of the evidence they produce.  And so, to make sure those lying whores don’t get their hands on those delicious, orgasm-inducing uterine scrapings, the bill has language in it that, in essence, assumes that 70% of rape victims weren’t really raped.  The exception is only for “forcible rape”, which is vaguely defined, but in practice tends to mean that anything short of getting your ass beat down means you weren’t “really” raped.  Even if you’re a 13-year-old who was impregnated by a 30-year-old.  Also, if you happen to get pregnant by your abusive, rape-y father on your 18th birthday, you will get no funding to make sure you don’t give birth to your own brother.  Consent is implied if you’re female under these guidelines, and consent to sex with your male relatives is implied the second you turn 18. 

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Thank you (should I say “thank” you), Scott Lemieux, for linking this display of really first class wingnutty sex hysteria from Maggie Gallagher, where the head of the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage argues that legalizing abortion is bad for women because now they have anal sex, which I guess wasn’t an option before because of the fear of making santorum babies.  I really needed this, because I spent yesterday morning taping a Bloggingheads with an anti-choicer who kept repeating as a mantra that antis oppose abortion because it’s the taking of a human life.  (I did not, sadly, have a chance to point out that so is ejaculation, because sperm are, like fetuses, both human and alive.  Plus they do fetuses one better, which is they can live outside of their host, sometimes for days.) So, this was a nice refreshing bit of sex-phobic honesty from Gallagher to cleanse the palate. 

And yes, she seriously jumps from abortion to anal sex.  Her logic is pretzel-like, as it often is from antis who are trying to argue against sexual freedom without using the tools they’ve had for thousands of years of simply saying someone’s a pervert and letting that be enough, but this is how it goes: Abortion rights convinced young women that their sexuality is “like a man’s”, i.e. something you do for fun instead of grimly tolerate so you can have babies.  But deep down inside, women don’t really want to have sex for fun.  Women just want to get married and make babies, and sex is a means to that end.  But now they all feel they should be pretending to enjoy sex for its own sake, which opens the door not just to casual sex, but to doing things like anal sex, which you have to grimly tolerate to prove you’re “like a man” (even though few straight men are up for having someone put dicks up their butts), when in the past the only sex you were required to grimly tolerate was vaginal intercourse within marriage.  We’re doing it to please our boyfriends, which we don’t even have, because boyfriends are a quaint relic from the time before men had all the power.

Oh yes, Gallagher---this is standard wingnut nonsense now, by the way---argues that women had more sexual power back when they were forced to give birth against their wills, raped without any hope of legal recourse, and ushered into marriage before they were often old enough to know what they wanted, where they were then expected to give up, if they could afford it, any paid employment they may have enjoyed outside of the home.  The logic here is basically that women love men, but men don’t love women, so women need leverage in order to force men to be with them, and pregnancy is that leverage. 

Needless to say, while Gallagher and others like her try to claim this is a “feminist” argument, because they’re totally trying to get women what they want, it is in reality incredibly misogynist.  This belief is based on the premise that men are good and women suck.  Think about it.  In this formulation, women obviously want men for their personalities, bodies, intellects, values---they love men’s whole entire lovable selves.  But men don’t love anything but boobs and vaginas (and buttholes), and will only tolerate women’s odious personalities if forced to in order to get access to the vagina.  Babies, in this formula, are the weapon used to force men to do this.  I’m afraid I don’t see the “feminism” there.  My feminism is one that suggests that women are men’s equals, and that just like men, we totally have value outside of our sexual functions.  And that men can and do love women, instead of just pretend to love them in order to get access to their vaginas. 

Hell, I’d go a step further and say that not only are men perfectly capable of loving women, but women also can love women.  And men can love men!  No wonder Gallagher finds homosexuality so threatening---since men are lovable and women aren’t in her world, what’s to stop all dudes everywhere from just quitting women altogether so they wile away the rest of their days gloriously loving each other?  Well, that, and same sex attraction really undermines her notion that all of human sexuality can be reduced to “women want men, and men hate women but really like vaginas”. 

I could write some about how the GOP is trying to use anti-choice nonsense to redefine rape so that simply saying “no” or being legally unable to consent isn’t enough, but it’s Friday, and I’m in a good mood and I don’t want to depress myself.  So, instead I’m going to deliver to you a cheery tale of how to monetize right wing idiocy, brought to you by Tyler Cowen.

Moving to dispel claims that President Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, his supporters in the state’s legislature have introduced a bill that would allow anyone to get a copy of his birth records for a $100 fee.

The idea behind the measure is to end skepticism over Obama’s birthplace while raising a little money for a government with a projected budget deficit exceeding $800 million over the next two years.

If they’d done this up front, when they were getting 10-20 requests a week, this would have netted them $78,000 a year.  Not a lot, but not nothing.  But there’s a little nugget that’s interesting in this story that doesn’t bode well for the Tea Party.

But the number of birther requests has been declining from the 10 to 20 weekly inquiries received early last year, according to the Department of Health.

“Requests have decreased significantly over the years. Currently we receive anywhere from zero to five per week,” said department spokeswoman Janice Okubo.

Are Birthers losing enthusiasm?  It seems like it.  There’s been a resurgence in right wing media over the past month or so in Birther nonsense, and Jesse’s been sending me near-daily links to places like WorldNetDaily that are really pumping this crap up.  My initial feeling was that they’re bored and so going back to the well, but I was all wrong.  They’re actually acting like someone in a relationship who feels the spark waning, and so starts buying new lingerie and proposing going out on date nights.  They’re trying to win the Birthers back! And now it’s not just the usual crew of rabid internet goobers.  Even Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who in the past have either ignored or even criticized Birther nonsense, are jumping on the train. 

Limbaugh:

Top-rated talk radio host Rush Limbaugh on Friday questioned why new Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie has not gotten support from the White House in his efforts to resolve the doubts of so-called “birthers” about Barack Obama’s place of birth.

Limbaugh also says he finds it “stunning” that Abercrombie still can’t prove Obama was born in Hawaii as he maintains.

What’s great about being a Birther is you can be a Birther while pretending you’re not a Birther.  I think it was Rick Perlstein who summed it up to me once, which is that all conservatives think everyone else in their movement is the sucker. 

Glenn Beck, as is his custom, is putting his own spin on it.

For those who can’t click the link, Beck---while holding a bunny he probably then decapitated so he could drink its blood as soon as they quit filming---claimed that Obama referenced the five pillars of Islam in coded terms in his State of the Union speech, by having five platform points, or something like that. While not directly questioning the birth certificate, this is part of the general Birther tent, since the imagined lack of a birth certificate is part of a larger conspiracy theory about how Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim that is out to turn the country into a socialist theocracy. 

The New York Times publishes an article by yet another journalist who dug into the vaccination controversy and realized that vaccines really don’t cause autism. Outraged believers scramble for any excuse to keep on believing their conspiracy theory.  I, once again, am sorry that my predictions panned out. 

Today’s Friday Genius Ten is dedicated to believers.  Leave yours in comments, or comments about whatever you like.  Open thread.

Original song: ”I’m My Own Doctor” by The Jail Weddings

1) “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield
2) “Sympathy for the Devil” by The Rolling Stones
3) “7 and 7 Is” by Love
4) “O My Soul” by Big Star
5) “Song of a Baker” by The Small Faces
6) “Harry Rag” by The Kinks
7) “Splash (Now I’m Home)” by The 13th Floor Elevators
8) “Lies” by The Knickerbockers
9) “Hey Gyp” by The Animals
10) “Care of Cell 44” by The Zombies

Weird list to generate off The Jail Weddings, but maybe they’re just obscure and Genius doesn’t know what to do with it.  Videos below the fold.

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