Hello!
This is the Tumblr for my campaign for Commissioner of the 2nd Ward in Springfield, PA. This blog will be used to convey my position on issues affecting the citizens of the 2nd and Springfield as a whole, help citizens of the 2nd Ward get to know me, and find out important information about the election.
I’m really excited to get started. Thank you for taking the time to stop by. I hope to see you again soon!
Get on this, Springfieldians.
posting some old stuff while i scan some new stuff
(Source: tommmmmmmm, via diamondandbroad)
Please note: this flier is from 200… 7 maybe? 6?
I’m really starting to lose patience with professed secularists who seem only to be interested in trashing celebrity atheists. I have a hard time reading something like Ian Murphy’s latest Salon re-hash without thinking that the true objective is a pretense of looking reasonable when standing next to a straw man.
Murphy is an apparent fan of the list article – The 10 Most Outrageous Prank Calls By a Low Rent Humorist! –because nothing says ‘thoughtful writing’ like mimicking a tired Buzz Feed format. Of his twelve submissions to Alternet, seven of them are list articles fashioned like this: “The [Arbitrary Number] Most [Pejorative Adjective] People in America.” Tedious. If it looks like this stuff writes itself, that’s just because half the work is done before he even opened his laptop.
“The Five Most Awful Atheists” (appearing in Salon as “Five Atheists Who Ruin it For Everyone Else”) runs with the subheading “Many notable atheists believe in some powerfully stupid stuff, thereby eroding the credibility of all atheists.” It’s a bold, stupid claim, but let’s give him a chance to live up to his buzzy branding.
“The thing about the so-called ‘rationalist’ movement in America is that disbelief in gods seems to be the only qualification to join the club … Many notable atheists believe in some powerfully stupid stuff—likely owing their prominence to these same benighted beliefs, lending an air of scientific credibility to the myths corporate media seeks to highlight, and thereby eroding the credibility of all atheists in the long-term. In other words: The crap always rises to the top.”
Can we please just get one thing straight at the start? The only prerequisite for atheism is to disavow any belief in an intervening, supernatural deity. By definition. You don’t need to know Greek to grasp this. I am an atheist by this standard. So is Joseph Stalin. I happen to be an anti-Stalinist, but that is irrelevant to my atheism. It’s a rather meager thing to have in common, and that’s fine by me. Atheism provides no instruction about how to feel about the subjugation of women or the war in Iraq. Atheism is not prescriptive because it’s a term that describes a very simple, very concise assertion. No god is influencing human affairs, and as far as we can tell, has never interacted with the natural world in any discernable way.
You can be a racist atheist, a Randian atheist, an atheist hawk, an atheist isolationist, any sort of atheist you want. That’s because atheism has absolutely nothing to say about race relations, biology, economics, or military intervention. You have to get your moral thinking from somewhere else. The only kind of atheist you cannot be is a religious atheist.
It’s really important that we draw their ranks from a diverse lot. If there’s an assertion that lives up to the standards of a hardcore libertarian and an authoritarian Marxist, that makes it more likely to be a non-ideological assertion. It makes it more likely to be an assertion of truth. Murphy opens his article by citing the growing demographic of non-joiners in this country. If one and five Americans agree on anything it means that you’re talking about a small agreement among a diverse group of sixty million people. So be it. That’s what building consensus looks like.
It doesn’t bother me that I might only have one thing in common with other atheists. That strikes me as a strength of our movement, not a weakness.
And if an atheist turns out to be an incorrigible idiot, that poses absolutely no challenge to the validity of atheism. Negating a claim on the sole basis of the person saying it at the time is an ad hominem. And guilt by association, by the way, is a Stalinist tactic. Murphy should have packed up here, but instead insists that the credibility of atheism is eroding. Why? Because of “many notable atheists” – a phrase that wouldn’t be publishable on Wikipedia, so it’s a wonder how a respectable magazine like Salon ran with it. I can’t say that this list article was provocative or enlightening because I actually agree with almost all of Ian Murphy’s criticisms of Sam Harris, Bill Maher, Penn Jillette, Ayan Hirsi Ali, and S.E. Cupp.
For example, I sure hope Christopher Hitchens found time to embarrass his friend Sam in person on his creepy defense of torture. Harris’ incomprehensible case for profiling at airports relies some sort of terrorist “profile” – a non-racial profile, he insists unconvincingly – that does not exist.
Bill Maher is as skeptical of religion as he is of science-based medicine. He’s too enamored with the pop-pseudo-science peddler Ariana Huffington. (Though a word to the wise, Mr. Murphy, if you’re going to criticize someone for being unfunny, make sure you don’t do it in a boring, joyless way.)
Jillette’s libertarianism is too much for me to stomach. Ayan Hirsi Ali has said some really ugly things about Christianity’s superiority to Islam. And S.E. Cupp strikes me as the poster child of the self-hating secularist.
But these failings do not for a second reflect poorly on atheism. Because to reject Harris, Maher, Jillette, and Ali, you also reject the brilliant and incisive raids on religious territory they’ve achieved. (I don’t include Ms. Cupp here because I don’t know of any worthy contributions she’s made to the argument.) I can’t abide the “crap rising to the top” jab. These men and women are “notable” for worthwhile reasons: Harris as a philosopher and writer, Maher and Jillette as comedians and entertainers, and Ali as someone who has survived what believers are capable of when they think no one is looking. If atheism is going to be a movement, let it be a diverse one. We’ll hash out the other stuff at a different rally.
And Mr. Murphy, if you’re so worried about atheists doing harm to the reputation of the movement, you can start by apologizing for this incredibly flippant, fatuous, screed.
(Source: jessethorn, via putthison)
(Source: putthison)
I think that saying it’s not possible to be racist towards white people inadvertently defends an unjust racial status quo. Would it be fair to say that, phrased another way, you mean white people cannot be the victims of racial hate? It means “white” is not a racial category that can be hated. This line breaks down as soon as someone professes to be an anti-white racist, but I think it’s problematic for trickier reasons, too.
You’re quite right that “whiteness is a construct.” But isn’t every race a construct? White is no more arbitrary than any other racial distinction.
This is where it gets into really shady territory, because if you’re implying that “white” is not a racial category, you’re assenting to a deracinated white default. A huge part of the problem of racial oppression is that white escapes racial category. Kartina Richardson wrote recently in Salon,
“This is called The Default: The belief that the white experience is a neutral and objective experience and white consciousness is the standard consciousness unless otherwise specified … Whiteness as The Default keeps brown people in subjugation by convincing them that every part of their being, physical, spiritual and emotional, exists within a white narrative. When you are made to exist within something you are forced to be smaller than that which contains you.”
This is a part structural racism, don’t you think?
My concern with your argument is that it seems to sideline those who profess racism towards whites. I wouldn’t want to say that these racists don’t understand their own bigotry. I don’t question the existence of these racists because there are very intelligent and compelling accounts of them getting over their white hate. Malcolm X used to say that white people were genetically inferior to other races. Changing his mind ended up contributing to his assassination.
“Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to Black people … Anyone who has studied the genetic phase of biology knows that white is considered recessive and black is considered dominant.”
And what are we to make of the pejorative “white devil,” Farrakhan’s pet phrase? Would you say to him, well you really don’t hate white people, you hate a variety of Eurasian ethnicities simultaneously? No. Sure, someone can be an anti-Irish racist for reasons exclusive to Irishness. That doesn’t mean there aren’t people who direct their hate at the white construct. Just as someone can hate Puerto Ricans exclusively and still be disgusted with someone who hates all Latinos. (I also tend to think that someone who just hates Irish tends to be white. It’s the prejudice of small differences. The Domincan-Puerto Rican racism and Tutsi-Hutu racism are the same.)
When you say whiteness isn’t about color, you’re partly correct. In the United States at the turn of the 20th century, there were several European ethnicities that weren’t considered white, the Irish among them. Despite being the descendant of two ethnic groups who wouldn’t have been considered white at the time of their emigration, I’m a white person now. To that extent, “white” is not about color. It’s a means of deciding normal in a way that benefits some and oppresses the rest.
However you can’t say skin color doesn’t play a role. Because the darker your skin, the harder it is to be considered white. President Obama is as black as I am Polish, but he’s black. Do you see what I mean? Just because racism is directed at white ethnic groups doesn’t mean whiteness isn’t about color.
(I didn’t want to get into anti-Semitism because I think that it’s a unique kind of racism. The white American guy who hates African Americans talks in much the same way as the Arab Sudanese guy hates the black Sudanese. People who hate Jewish people are hateful in a paranoid, pseudo-intellectual way. Freud was right to say that racists of all sorts will sink their differences when it comes to the Jews. Excluding them from or including them in whiteness is fraught for that reason.)
And there are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books-especially the dark and dangerous ones-will save them.
As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life.
And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.
—Sherman Alexie, Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood (via thegirlandherbooks)
(Source: thefirstgentleman, via prettybooks)
