Idiots And Democracy

An idiot holds up a sign reading, "Not Hillary, Not Trump," illustrating one of the most exasperating aspects of politics, one for which I thus far have shown no talent: dealing with idiots. It's not just that some people are too dumb to see a difference between Trump and Hillary big enough to justify voting for one or the other, which is already pretty damn dumb. Beyond that, a significant number of people actually believe that Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or Bernie Sanders actually has a chance to win. (Who knows how many idiots didn't believe that, until they read the last sentence and completely misunderstood it, and have now switched from campaigning for Hillary or Trump to campaigning for Stein or Johnson or Sanders.)

Pollsters are saying that up to 20% of registered voters now plan to vote for Stein or Johnson, with about 40% each left over for Hillary and Trump. That means that, although in reality perhaps every election is completely about winning the idiot vote, there's no doubt that this Presidential election is.

Of course, beyond the 20% Stein-or-Johnson-no-doubt-they're-idiots-bloc, some of the Trump and Hillary supporters are idiots too. It's harder to tell how big this voting bloc is, and it may also be much harder to campaign to this bloc, because who knows many idiots are voting for either Trump or Hillary only because they completely misunderstand where the candidate stands on the issues about which they care most? For example, people supporting Trump because they think he's pro-union, or supporting Hillary because they think she's against a woman's right to choose. I think it's pretty safe to say that the percentage of voters who are that confused or worse about every Presidential campaign is bigger than that of those who voted for Nader in 2004, and possibly comparable to those who voted for him in 2000.

In any case, the number is too high to be safely ignored.

So how do we deal with those voters, how do we lure as many as possible over to the Democratic side?

Like I said at the beginning of this post: I have no flippin' idea. I have no practical suggestions to offer, other than to urge those of you who are skilled at persuading idiots to keep in mind that there are a huge number of them out there, and to do whatever you can. Thank you.

Anyhow: although it's very, very early, the first post-Democratic-Convention polls are encouraging. One poll says that Missouri has gone from safely in Trump's column to a tossup. Wouldn't it be sweet if that poll turns out to be accurate, not an outlier, and if it stays that way, and we win Missouri? Don't laugh: it was awfully close in 2008. McCain only won by 3903 votes, 1,445,814 to 1,441,911

And I'd really like to win Texas too. I know everybody considers Texas to be deep-red Presidentially, but I look at the same data that's out there for everybody else to see, and it looks kinda purple to me. (And I'm way above average at math.)

I repeat: it's early. Almost every Presidential candidate gets a post-convention bump, we shouldn't overvalue Trump's bump, too many people have been panicking about that. And we shouldn't get carried away if Hillary gets a big bump too.

But it would be so nice if we just mopped the floor with those suckers this time...

"It's better to have no religion at all, just Jesus, himself, alone." -- ACTUAL QUOTE

Actual quote from a real person:

"It's better to have no religion at all, just Jesus, himself, alone."

My fellow atheists, this is a perfect example of why many of you are way too excited about all those polls claiming that "religion is in decline." Someone tells the pollster they're not religious, but what you don't see when you read the poll results is them saying, "I don't need religion -- just Jesus!"

But you should sense it, because quotes like the one above are now so common that nobody but me remarks upon them. Once again, I have to do everything by myself. (A perfect example of why I deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature.) It's the people who often call themselves SBNR or "spiritual but not religious," whom I often call "religious but in denial about it" or "the disorganized religious." And of course, these people who don't call themselves religious are finding each other and organizing into groups that they don't call churches or temples, led by people they don't call clergy -- place where they get together and talk about how great God is and discuss His plan.

Similar to religion? Gee, ya think?

Yes, it's identical to religion. Identical to early Protestantism in most cases: people leave their churches because the churches are "doin' it wrong," and start their own, more self-righteous and Bible-obsessed groups.

At the very least, those doofuses taking the polls should become aware of all this, and adjust their polls to distinguish between atheists and the disorganized religious -- but as I've said before, sociologists aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer either.

Stupid disorganized religious, stupid atheists, stupid pollsters -- I'm surrounded by idiots! And no, this doesn't make me feel smart. Not at all -- I've allowed a bunch of idiots to surround me!

Idiots

Ran into someone saying that ethics and morality are much older than religion. I pointed out that fertility goddesses more than 30,000 years old have been found, and asked him how old he thought religion was.

Someone else in the same place said that the amount of materials up to 2000 years old in the Vatican archives are vast and that no-one is allowed to see anything in them. I asked him, if nobody's allowed to see these materials, how does he know how vast the amount of materials is? I pointed out that, although the Vatican does indeed have secret archives, the vast majority of their manuscript collection is available to scholars.

I didn't mention that some written artifacts owned by the Vatican are well over 2000 years old. I get tired sometimes. I also didn't mention that the collection of manuscripts in the Vatican library, the above-mentioned part available to scholars, is well-known, famous to scholars, even, and that the Vatican has begun putting images of those manuscripts online for one and all to see. See for yourself.

I'm not at all optimistic about getting an intelligent answer, or even a coherent answer, from either of these gentlemen. But I felt I had to do something.

Islam Doesn't Do Anything

Because Islam is not a unified entity. You don't have to be paying very close attention at all to have noticed that Shia Muslims always seem to be in conflict with Sunni Muslims. It doesn't take excruciatingly long and difficult research to discover that the Shia-Sunni split goes back to within a few decades of Muhammed's death. Muslims haven't all agreed about anything since the 7th century. If you've gone from a horrified rejection of any examination of Islam to a casual interest in it, you can also see that even though one individual is a Shiite and another is a Sunni, they often will get along just fine. The way there's nothing at all strange about a Catholic and a Protestant being friends.

The same way that there's nothing at all strange about a Catholic and a Protestant and an Orthodox Christian and a Copt and a Shiite and a Sunni and a Hindu and a Sikh and a Buddhist and a Druze and a Bahá'í and an atheist all being good friends with each other and getting along just fine, although many of those individuals, perhaps even every single one of such a circle of friends, might unfortunately know people who share his or her religion or lack of it and think that it's not fine at all to be mingling with those others. But most people in each one of those groups don't want to kill over the differences between the groups.

I'd like to think that the great majority of people belonging to each one of those religious or non-religious groups feels a stronger identification with the entire group of humans than with their own individual group, and thinks of the people in the other groups as people like them, who get happy and sad and hungry and sleepy and have friends and families and quirks and senses of humor and hopes about putting ethnic and religious hatreds behind us once and for all, the sooner the better!

Let's compare the tensions over religion which are obsessing some people so much these days with ethnic tensions. There have been some terrible atrocities committed against non-white people by white people, horrible deeds committed in the name of white people. Nevertheless, white people are not a hate group. Why? Because the people who have done those horrible things, although they claimed to be acting on behalf of all white people, did not have the approval or backing of all white people. In the case of the Nazis in WWII, many of the people, probably most of the people, who fought against them and finally defeated them were white people. You didn't have to be non-white to vehemently hate everything the Nazis stood for.

In just the same way, most of the people fighting against ISIS today are Muslims. That's no secret, there hasn't been any official media black-out of that information in the West as far as I can see, and yet, many people act as if it would be news to them. As if Islam were one unified group which was coming to get us. The same way that some Muslims -- ISIS, for example -- talk about the West as if the West were one unified group which was coming to get them.

Imagine if in the midst of the Thirty Years' War, some Muslims in Egypt or Persia talked about how the Christians thought of nothing day and night except how they were going to crush Islam. Some Christian idiots were pre- occupied with such thoughts then, just as some Christian and New Atheist idiots think of little else today. Others were much too busy with the mostly Catholic-against-Protestant conflict in Europe to give much thought to Muslims.

Then as now, the biggest problem facing humanity was not one religious or ethnic group against another, but many different groups of idiots, large groups and smaller ones, each group against pretty much the entire rest of the world.

In The Reza-Aslan-Vs-The-New-Atheists Flapadoodle, I'm Rooting For Neither Side

What a bunch of idiots. On either side people are twistng their opponents' words and trying hard not to understand one thing about what their opponents actually mean. (Not that there's a tremendous amount, on either side, to be understood.) This isn't a debate, it's the forensic equivalent of pro wrestling, except that the wrestlers aren't even in on the scam.

So, they're fighting about the Koran and its relationship to terrorism. On the one hand Aslan says that there is no relationship when we're talking about people who scream verses from the Koran as they commit acts of terrorism. On the other hand there are over a billion Muslims, and perhaps as many as 30,000 men in ISIS, and the New Atheists constantly talk as if those 30,000 were representative of the whole billion, interrupted by frequent protestations that they're doing nothing of the sort. Lately it's become fashionable to accuse any and all of their opponents of being "dishonest" and "cowardly." I think the real cowards are keeping their heads down and hoping that the New Atheists will simply go away, as most people do most of the time when confronted with raving lunatics.

An anonymous post on Richard Dawkins' website asserts that:

"Aslan insists that approaching these holy books the way most people approach most books — by reading the words on their pages precisely as they are written and assuming that the author actually meant what he wanted to say — is somehow 'unsophisticated.'”

The irony of this accusation coming in the midst of a diatribe accusing Aslan and Ben Affleck of making bigoted, racist statements about Muslims, simply because they said that the Koran was not the only source of Muslims' motivations for their actions, must be striking for almost anyone but a New Atheist. (Affleck is the only individual mentioned in this post I don't consider to be an idiot. I think he's very smart. So's Maher, but he has some dumb friends. Okay, so that's a total of 2 smart people, Affleck and Maher.)

"As my friend Christopher Massie points out: 'The conclusion that disproportionate numbers of intrinsically violent and misogynistic people reside in a certain region of the world could not be more bigoted or racist.'”

It also couldn't be further from anything that either Aslan or Affleck ever said, but you're off to the races already.

"Here’s the thing: there is good reason to believe that neither Aslan nor Affleck is racist or bigoted."

Well, of course. And it'd be a shame, wouldn't it, anonymous blogger, if people thought you had accused either Aslan or Affleck of bigotry or racism simply because you said that things they said were racist and bigoted.

Tour de France / Death Race 2000

Idiotic spectators impeding the riders have always been a problem at the Tour de France. The attitude of these idiots generally seems to be: Look at me! Look at me! when naturally nobody is there to look at them, it's about the riders. In case this Look at me! - attitude might have been hard to perceive, many of these idiots make it more obvious by waving enormous flags in the riders' faces and/or by dressing up in grotesque costumes.

And of course by standing or running in the middle of the course during a bicycle race, which is what brought me here today. I'm not the first to suggest that these jokers should be kept from the race course. These days the final 2 kilometers or so of each stage tend to feature barricades on both sides of the course -- but the idiots lean way over the barricades into the paths of the riders, and still wave those huge flags in the riders' faces, and sometimes go over or around the barricades and into the race course. You really need 2 rows of barricades, far enough apart that it's impossible to reach the mightiest giant flag over the outer barricade, and then over the inner barricade, and into the face of someone working very hard at something he has trained very hard his whole life to do, and is doing it for great stakes and, sorry, you idiot, doesn't want to look at you or your flag or your costume right now.

Having stay-off-the-course-you-idiots laws, and enforcing them strictly, might improve race conditions, but they would also cause a huge uproar. Idiots would rise up in indignant solidarity. French idiots would claim that the standing-or-running-in-the-middle-of-the-course-thing is a French thing which I do not understand because I'm a crude fat American pig who only loves cheeseburgers, and that it has to do with freedom and the Bastille and that the riders love it.

[PS, 3. August 2015: During this year's Tour de France, although it still activated my ADD and rage big-time when it looked to me like spectators might be interfering with the riders, 1)I heard the TV broadcasting comments from various riders saying that the fans getting right up in their faces, and riding through a sea of fans, got them pumped up, and 2)I saw some footage from cameras mounted on the race bikes as the riders plowed through great excited crowds, and, uhhh... This is hard to say... Okay: maybe that footage gave me a sense of how the fans might impart a thrill to the riders. What I saw from those bike-mounted cameras did not look like 100% annoyance and hindrance. Ahh, why must I have such personal growth?!]

[PPS, 15. July 2016: Yesterday they ended the stage by climbing that mountain which always ends the stage on Bastille Day, the climb which is more notorious than any other for fans crowding the riders, and yesterday they shortened the climb at the last minute, which meant there was even less room for the millions of fans on the route, and surprise surprise, there was a major incident: a motorcycle carrying a TV cameraman had to brake suddenly to avoid running over some idiots, and the Yellow Jersey wearer Froome was one of 3 riders who piled into back of the motorcycle. Froom's bicycle was also struck by another motorcycle coming up from behind, and rendered unrideable. If the results had been left as they were, Froome would've lost the yellow jersey, but the race officials decided the 3 riders involved in the crash were in no way at fault and that it would be unfair for them to lose time as a result of it, so they adjusted the stage results accordingly, and Froome still has a big lead. Researching the incident, I saw that Froome struck a spectator on the Tour in 2013. Without getting off of his bike or changing course, to give you an idea of how close the spectator was. Froome was fined for that. Not a huge fine. There were lots of interviews of riders and associated team members yesterday about the crash involving Froome, and it was clear that a lot of them are very annoyed with the spectators. This was clear, even though a lot of people were clearly editing their remarks and paying lip service to an official line of "the fans add excitement to the race and are an essential and glorious part of it." So it's NOT just me who's annoyed by these jerks!]

I'm sure that most French people are not idiots and are embarrassed by the idiots impeding the Tour de France riders, and doubly so by the French idiots who impede riders and claim it is a French thing. And of course it is by no means a French thing: idiots flock to the Tour de France from all over the world in order to get in the way and force people to look at them. (Maybe idiots, generally speaking, feel neglected and ignored. Hm.)

And this year, I gather, a bad situation has become worse because of fans leaping into the course in order to take selfies with the riders.

I don't think that selfies are entirely useless. I believe that, just like leisure suits beginning in the 1970's and mullets in the 80's, selfies will aid future historians in determining who the real idiots of our era were.

But in the meantime riders have been colliding with fans in the Tour de France since its inception, and the collisions have grown in numbers over the decades, and now there's these Tour de France selfies, and so, with apologies to those future historians, I propose that the Tour de France be combined with aspects of Death Race 2000,



a 1975 Roger Croman movie starring David Carradine and Mary Woronov, about a cross-country auto race in which the drivers are awarded points for hitting pedestrians. Not to be confused with 2008's Death Race



with Jason Statham and Joan Allen, not a bad movie, but significantly different than the original in that its race is held inside a prison, and the deaths are those of the racers as they destroy each other for the delight of a sadistic pay-per-view audience and the profit of Allen, the yummy, evil warden. I'm inspired here by the pedestrian kills of the 1975 flick. In this improved version of the Tour de France, riders would be awarded points for colliding with fans. These points would amount to time being subtracted from their Tour totals, bringing them closer to victory. So and so many points would be awarded for striking a fan, so many for seriously injuring a fan, so many for killing one outright, so many for striking a fan waving an enormous fan, so many for one in costume, so many for one attempting to take a selfie and so forth, you get the idea.

I submit that these rule changes would greatly alter the nature of the Tour. It's also possible -- very unlikely, of course, but possible -- that they would cause some idiots somewhere to stop and think about who they are and what they do. And wouldn't that be a miracle.

Return Of The Son Of Arguing With Idiots

(All dialogue guaranteed etc etc)

HUGE FRIGGIN IDIOT: Man (Western culture) overthrew Mother nature ,the closest thing to "God" we'll ever know, 10-12 Thousand years ago and has been "in charge" of the Earth ever since. How's it working out for you ?

ME: Western culture has not existed for anywhere close to 10,000 years and has never been as close to "in charge" of the entire planet as many Westerners have liked to think. The two cultures which have come closest to ruling the entire planet both came from Mongolia.

HFI: Take "our" culture back to it's roots in what is now Iraq The "agriculturist" (10,000 yrs ago) that started in the Golden Crescent with their new ability to gain more from the soil than the hunter gatherers built cities and armies that have slowly but surely expanded, defeated ,destroyed or enslaved every "primitive" culture of hunter/gathers they have contacted since. Their/our curse that goes with the agri-culture is overpopulation and need for constant expansion. We, the agriculturist , rule the world. At least we will until we destroy the planet's ability to sustain us. Not a problem though, Mother has many children and lot's of time.

ME: More than a few Iraqi's are annoyed by Westerners claiming ancient Mesopotamian culture as their own. (And who can blame them?) While farms and cities were being organized in Mesopotamia, the people of Europe were still living in caves.

And besides Mesopotamia not being Western civ, it was not the only origin point of large-scale agriculture and cities, which also were to be found 10,000 years ago in present-day Mexico and on the north-west coast of South America. Your conception of Western civilization and its supposed dominance is wrong, just spectacularly wrong.

(And after I posted that I was thinking: where does he get all this? And then it hit me: Rousseau. White man: civilized, rest of world: savage, civilization: bad, savagery: noble. I figured HFI would ignore what he was ostensibly answering and just triple down, and sure enough -- )

HFI: You mean we're not an agriculturaly based war machine that conquers every thing that get's in it's way including Mother Nature like all our predecessors ? Mesopotamia>Greece>Rome>Northern Europe> England >America/Western Culture. No?
Resistance is futile , the primitives will all be assimilated.

(A hermetically-sealed mind, not responding to, by all appearances not even noticing the points I'm making. At this point nothing remains for me but to repeat myself that, as the saying goes, insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Whether the saying was formulated by Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Rita Mae Brown or someone else appears to be controversial.)

(Beware, beware of the evil agricultural Borg!)

(Who is not insulted by this Bizarro-World of HFI's? Middle Easterners, the descendants of prehistoric city-dwellers, are denied their birthright when it is insisted that those city-dwellers, somehow, were white men. And white men, it is insisted, are evil, and all-powerful, relentlessly crushing all in their path -- why? Because they invented farming. [Actually because Jean-Jacques Rousseau had huge unresolved Daddy issues, obviously.] Nevermind that they didn't, and that Mesopotamians weren't the only ones who invented it, and nevermind that the two largest empires in human history were those of Mongolian hunters, nevermind the thousands of years of civilization, of cities and farms [aarrghh! helphelp, cities and farms!] in East Asia and in Africa and in the Western Hemisphere, sorry, none of that jibes with this Bizarro-World and so none of it exists, and nevermind that it's kind of a stretch to include even Greece in Western civilization, let alone Mesopotamia -- why? Because, as has been pointed out by some people, some of whom, very strangely, insist that Western civilization is the only one there is, it began to take its contours when the residents of the former Western half of the Roman Empire began to lose their knowledge of Greek. The people who are so proud of this civilization don't put it that way, they say Western civilization began when Christianity took over Western Europe, but it all happened at once: collapse of the Western Empire, takeover of Christianity, losing touch with Greek culture. Greek culture stayed alive, of course. But only among Greeks and Muslims and a teeny-tiny handful of Westerners, until Greeks and Muslims taught Greek to Westerners who, in obscene, absurd arrogance, called it the Renaissance. Sometimes things get so stupid it makes me want to spit. Ptui!)

Yet Another Idiot From Real Life!

IDIOT: I wish I lived in a swing state. Not only would Obama and Romney actually care about my vote, my vote would count! My vote has been written off by the media and the two major presidential campaigns. I voted third party! I voted against the status-quo and for real change!

ME: Well aren't you special! Now, if you want to do something which could actually lead to real change, support amending the Constitution so that we have proportional representation like they have in many other countries, where voting for a third or fourth or fifth or sixth party is not throwing your vote away.

IDIOT: How would that weaken the two party system? You think for one moment the two parties will do anything to help third parties? Every time congress passes a law about campaign finances or elections, it's for one reason and one reason only: protect incumbents! If you vote democrat or republican, you're just enabling the status quo, voting for more dead soldiers, and voting for fewer civil liberties!

At this point I considered giving up, but I gave it one more try:

ME: Seriously, how would proportional representation weaken the two-party system? It would completely do away with the two party system.

IDIOT: How so? Would the two parties still control the debates? Would they still control how money is spent on campaigns? Would incumbents still get free mailings?

It's depressing. Some things are so simple that I don't know how to explain them. I don't have the patience to be a teacher of morons.

Close Encounters With Real-Life Idiots, Part However Many it Is Now

IDIOT: Just for the record, "infidel" was what the Muslim and Arab religions referred to Christians as... during the crusades in particular.. - it IS defined as a broad term in the dictionary... but I have never hear Christians refer to those of other religions as "infidels."

(For the record, no less!)

ME: "And what concord hath Christ with Belial? Or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?" —2 Corinthians 6:15. "But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel." —1 Timothy 5:8. King James Version.

IDIOT: As I said - it has broad meanings... that it is referenced in the bible - it not at all surprising.. The writings in the bible are referenced and written from people from the same geographical areas.. where non-Chistians may have been referenced as infidels... as a common term in that time and part of the world.. I believe I was clear that during the Crusades - it was the Muslims and other Arabic sects etc. who referred to the Christian invaders as "Infidels"... that it has raised so much attention to detail is delightful.

And...scene.

Anybody have any Earthly idea what this dingbat finds delightful here? I welcome guesses, including wild ones.

That's the entire exchange between me and this particular idiot. Am I growing more impatient, or just wiser? Either way I saw no point in rejecting his "As I said" and pointing out that what I said clearly contradicted what he said. Because, how much more clear could it be? And how much more clear could it be that this person refuses to see the very numerous instances where what he has said is wrong? (This refusal is key to being and remaining an idiot.)

I'm still enraged and appalled by the idiocy, but unlike earlier exchanges I've recorded here, this time I had no desire to extend the exchange further than: Idiot says something nonsensical; I point out it's wrong; Idiot says: Yeah, that's what I said.

This doesn't mean I don't care about idiocy any more, that I no longer regard it as a serious problem. It means I'm stumped. I don't know how to help these people.

Maybe shame might help: videotape idiots behaving idiotically, show the tape to the idiots surrounded by roomfuls of relatively-normal people, which of course would cause the idiots to wonder what all the derisive laughter was about. Might. Might cause them to wonder. I don't know. As wise men before me have pointed out, stupidity is tenacious.