I’m #888!

In checking through my SiteMeter references today, I came across an interesting (if useless) factoid: apparently, I’m #888 of 4417 “Political” blogs in the Technorati system.

Something seems off to me there; you’d think there would be more blogs in that category. Plus, I don’t use any Technorati tagging, so I’m not sure why I got classed as a Political blog over any other category. I’ve always maintained that this is primarily a personal weblog mor than anything else. But what the heck, it’s always nice to be noticed.

8 is also a lucky number to the Chinese, and my Econ final is tomorrow. I’ll take all the luck I can get with that one.

This War on X-Mas

Echinde today:

Consider this seriously: a country where the majority of people are Christian, a country where Christmas advertizing starts right after Labor Day, a country where you cannot escape hearing “Dreaming of A White Christmas” has a war against Christmas, a war so powerful that this majority is on its knees, silenced, driven out of the public space. What utter crap. Who are these powerful enemies of Christmas, pray, tell me.

Long story short, this isn’t really about Christmas. It’s about insecurity and dominance, and much more the latter than the former. Some segment of the Christian population feels threatened by people who are different. Others, emboldened by asstards like Bill O’Reilly, feel entitled to be in-your-face about their dominance. They don’t just want to celebrate Christmas, they want people to “just shut up,” be ashamed, or even scared if they don’t celebrate Christmas too.

These people seriously need to get over themselves.

On Tookie Williams

I’m surprised that Governor Schwarzenegger denied clemency to Williams.

From the information I have currently, I think I would have granted clemency simply because it seems to me that Williams alive provides a service to society by continuing to speak out about why gangs are bad. Williams can’t do that dead, plus his execution could polarize some members of the community in negative ways. I have not done an exhaustive review of the case though, so perhaps if I examined all the facts I might feel differently.

To be clear: I am not opposed to the death penalty as a concept. I believe that there are some crimes that display such a complete disregard for your fellow humans that it is not unreasonable to deprive the person who commits those crimes of his life as the price of their acts. That said, I am well aware that the American judicial system has massive systemic problems that result in the death penalty being applied unfairly. I think there should be a moratorium on its implementation until such time as we can fix those inequities.

Or put more simply, the system is broken, but I still think that some really evil bastards deserve to fry for what they did.

On Bigotry and Mental Illness

As I was doing my morning pass through my Bloglines feeds, I noted AmericaBlog’s John in DC calling attention to a piece in the Washington Post about whether extreme bigotry should be considered a mental illness.

John takes that ball and runs with it:

We should set a long-term goal to get the psychological and psychiatric associations to officially make bigotry a mental disorder. The religious right would flip, fun in and of itself, but this would set the tone for an entire change in the culture, where prejudice of any kind of is considered the work of sick people.

I have two problems with that advice; one scientific, the other tactical.

First, the science. While it seems pretty clear that the people talked about in the WaPo are indeed mentally ill, I wonder whether the bigotry displayed isn’t really just a symptom of the underlying disorder. Do we really need to create a new illness for this, or is it more likely that that the people in question are actually suffering from paranoia, or schizophrenia, or some other already-identified diseases?

Next, the tactics. Choosing “They’re mentally ill!” as a tactic with which to attack the Religious Right is not helpful. For if you accept the underlying premise, then prejudice against bigots also falls into the illness category. In other words, when both sides get to flog the other with accusations of mental illness on top of all the other mud they fling at each other, nothing really changes. And the people who really need help still won’t get it.

Finally, Shakespeare’s Sister beat me to the punch with the excellent observation:

Bigotry isn