Vast Consensus Is Biased

I just saw this thing Jack Black did on The Daily Show about this website Conservapedia, this website that says Wikipedia is, as a whole, biased against Christians.

Now Wikipedia isn't perfect. If an article doesn't get a lot of traffic, errors and even blatant vandalism can go for days, sometimes weeks, before someone corrects them. That's not why these people are saying it's biased, though. They are saying that it's biased because of things like the fact that Wikipedia allows articles to use either the AD, BC dating system or the CE, BCE dating system.

That's right, they believe that failing to force people to use Christian dating notation is bias against Christianity.

Conservapedia claims not to be neutral where Wikipedia is not. Here are the first sentences from the Conservapedia and Wikipedia article for "Palestine." You tell me which one sounds more neutral:

Wikipedia:
Palestine (from Latin: Palaestina; Hebrew: ארץ־ישראל Eretz-Yisra'el, formerly also פלשתינה Palestina; Arabic: فلسطين Filasṭīn, Falasṭīn) is one of several names for the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and various adjoining lands.

Conservapedia:
Palestine is the name given to the land of Israel by the Romans and others.

Dick Cheney Thinks We're All Retarded

This is a guy with such horrendously dark and disturbing secrets that he doesn't even want historians to discover them decades after his death. So in order to avoid obeying an order that says everyone in the Executive Branch has to give their records to the National Archives, he is now making the astonishingly, insultingly ludicrous claim that the Vice President, part of the White House staff and someone to gets into office by running in an executive election, is not a member of the Executive Branch.

This is an especially mind boggling claim considering that Cheney has previously claimed executive privilege in Cheney v. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Either this guy is schizophrenic enough to be capable of a remarkable level of double-think that allows him to believe that he is entitled to executive privilege, but not a member of the Executive Branch, or he thinks everyone in the entire world is feces-throwingly retarded.

Gay Marriage Is Good for the Family

When people who are against gay marriage try to explain themselves, they always go back to arguing for the importance of the family. They argue that families are the basic unit of society, are necessary for the raising of children and providing a safety net for people during hard times. To undermine the family would mean more crime, alienated children and an increased need for government welfare programs.

I actually agree with them on all of these points. The illogical conclusion that they come to is that any change in what they consider the traditional family will undermine and destroy it. They believe that "traditional" sexual morality is what is necessary for the family to exist. This is why they are against gay marriage. However, does gay marriage really undermine these things?

There are three reasons marriage in general is good for society:

- The first is that it is an incentive for people to settle down and get a real job. If a guy wants to get married and have kids, he's got to show the women who want to get married that he's committed to raising a family. The same is roughly true for women. This motivates people to seek out more financial stability and deters them from anti-social behaviour. Having wanted children has also shown to make people more cautious and responsible, at least in general.

Since this is the case, why would you want to exempt homosexual couples from this? Why would you want people who would not otherwise marry to remain bachelors and spinsters? Even if you believe that homosexuality can be "cured" the statistics show that the majority o people who claim to be cured are actually just celibate. The celibate are not responsible for a family, and do not have the same motivation to seek financial and personal security, and as such are still a potential liability to society.

- The second reason is that marriage is a good environment in which to raise children. People who are against gay marriage believe that a same sex couple raising a child subject that child to obligatory motherlessness or fatherlessness. They believe that having a male role model and a female role model is best for a child. They may have a point, but given that homosexual couples rarely ever end up with unplanned children, while heterosexual couples frequently do, the stability of same sex parenthood would more than make up for the lack of a mother or father.

There may very well be disadvantages to growing up with two mothers and no father or two fathers and no mother, but they can't possibly be as bad as growing up with one mother and no father or one father and no mother, or with both parents who were financially and psychologically ill-prepared for parenthood. More homosexual couples would be a net benefit for children.

- Marriage's third benefit to society is the fact that it creates extended families and kinships. This was an important function of marriage in the middle ages. Royal families would marry their children off to the children of some other royal family in order to cement allegiances between kingdoms. Today, extending kinships means having a greater pool of people you can fall back on in the event that you hit hard times. This is good for society because it means there are fewer people dependent on government programs.

It is especially baffling that conservatives, who normally encourage people to go to their families instead of depending on tax-payer funded programs for their social safety net would sabotage a homosexual's ability to form an extended family through marriage. They don't seem to realize that they are just keeping many of them dependent on a big government nanny state.

So marriage in general lowers crime, is better for children, and reduces dependency on big government. All of these functions would be enhanced by extending the ability to marry to gay couples. Why would any conservative in their right mind be against that?

Asinine

I'm no fan of retarded kids who wear their pants around their knees. That's a trend that twenty years from now people will look back on and say, "What the hell was I thinking?" when they see pictures of themselves. Saggy pants are this decade's version of the mullet.

That being said, this is fucking asinine.

How the Great Depression Ended

A lot of right-wingers like to say that the Great Depression was prolonged and worsened by the New Deal, contrary to popular belief. They hate keynesianism and hate the idea that the Great Depression could have been repaired by government intervention. I've been reading Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and that book provides an interesting explanation of how the Great Depression ended.

"How was the problem of the depression finally 'solved'? By the favorite expedient of all statists in times of emergency: a war."

So World War II was an "expedient" of the "statists"?

I'm still looking into whether the the New Deal really made the depression worse or not and haven't made up my mind, but I did find this interesting survey. It asked economists and economic historians to evaluate the statement, "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression." 51% of the economists disagreed and 74% of the historians disagreed. So we know what the consensus is.

Even if the Great Depression was not solved by the New Deal, it certainly was solved by government intervention. Keynesianism, the belief that government turn downs can be reversed by money introduced by the government into the economy, was very effective in ending the depression, regardless of what the righties like to believe. FDR did massive amounts of deficit spending to put government money into the economy via defense contractors and other industrial routes to priduce weapons and supplies for the war effort.

Even Milton Friedman, hardly a critic of the free market believed that the depression could have been prevented if the Federal Reserve had done more to prevent it. (The Rand book says they did too much by keeping interest rates artificially low.)

Brilliant!

Now this is a good idea.

Leftists Should Not Be in Favour of the Immigration Bill

Bush's plan to secure a source of cheap exploitable labour, and the "left-wing" Democrats' mindless aquiescence to it has been defeated. No I have no doubt that most people oppose this bill because they are inbred hicks who shudder at the thought of their country becoming overrun by brown people - who don't even speak English! *gasp* - or are worried that they'll take their jobs, even though they work for wages so low that their employers wouldn't be able to afford to offer many of these jobs if they had to pay any higher.

Anyone on the left should see a bill allowing people to stay in this country illegally as the same as a bill allowing people to work for below minimum wage. Both only open the door to exploitation.

Now, you don't have to round up every illegal and kick them out. The top priority should be to severely prosecute the people hiring the illegals. As George Carlin said, giving the death penalty to drug dealers will not deter them, if you want to stop the drug trade, you have to execute the white collar bankers who launder the drug money. This is the same. When the white-bred farmers and construction contractors who hire people illegally start feeling the heat, you'll see a lot fewer illegal immigrants. As soon as the undocumented workers realize they can't find any jobs, they'll head back home on their own.

If Nobody Did Anything Wrong, Why All the Secrecy?

I'm sure all the righties are going ape-shit over the conviction of Scooter Libby. After all, outing Valerie Plame wasn't even a crime, right?

Since that is apparently the case, why did Libby feel the need to lie about the disclosure of her identity? If there was nothing illegal, and nothing wrong with telling the world that Plame worked for the CIA, if the only reason they did that was to "set the record straight" about Joe Wilson's trip to Africa, why all the anonymity? Why does the person responsible for divulging this information feel they have to hide behind Robert Novak? What are they afraid of?

Jack Kevorkian and Conservative Sadism

Kevorkian has finally been released from prison just in time to live out his last days. He contracted Hepatitis C while researching blood transfusions in Vietnam, and it doesn't look like he'll live much longer than a year. One of the conditions of his release was that he not counsel or help anybody else who is dying and in pain.

After Kevorkian is dead, who knows if anyone else will take up his fight. Hopefully someone out there has the courage to fight against the sadistic, tyrannical notion conservatives have that life should be lived no matter how painful or humiliating. It's hard to listen to people who refuse to allow people to die in a time and manner of their choosing and not be convinced that they take a lot of pleasure in the idea of someone continuing to live despite their agony.

They claim to hold life as sacred, but are perfectly willing to watch it continue under twisted, humiliating and horrific conditions. To many of these people the American flag is sacred, and the flag code says, "When a flag is so worn it is no longer fit to serve as a symbol of the United States, it should be destroyed in a dignified manner." If you really regard something as sacred, you don't allow it to continue under undignified conditions. A person should be free to decide what is or is not dignified for them, and when they decide their life is so worn it is no longer fit to continue, they should be free to die in a dignified manner.