wingnuts

Dutch mumps epidemic: how religion threatens public health

Oh Those Crazy Cloggies, wingnuts
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You wouldn’t think it possible anymore in a modern, rich country like the Netherlands, but we are in the midst of a mumps epidemic. Actually, that’s not quite right: only part of the country is influenced by this epidemic and not so coincidently, it’s the most Christian part, the socalled bible belt, which stretches from my homeland of Zeeland, up to the central part of the Netherlands. This is where the communities of strict protestant churches are the largest and unfortunately many of these churches belief vaccinations, like insurances, are incompatible with a proper Christian belief. If god wants you to be sick, you will be sick and you shouldn’t attempt to thwart the will of god. More sane christians argue that if god wants you to be sick you will get sick, vaccination or not, but these are hardcore.

Normally, this isn’t that much of a problem, apart for those unfortunates who get polio because their parents refuse to protect them against it. But get enough of those loons together and it’s not a question of a few children getting diseases they needed have had, but you get a proper epidemic threatening not just them, but everybody. Vaccination programmes only work if enough people participate; once you get enough unprotected people infected, the risk that you will get the disease as well despite your vaccination gets much bigger. Which seems indeed to have happened, as about a quarter of cases in this epidemic concern vaccinated children as well.

In other words, this is a case in which freedom of religion conflicts directly with public health. Because of their beliefs about vaccination, these Christian groups endager not just themselves and their children, which is bad enough already, but also the rest of us. that’s why vaccination programmes should be mandatory and religious beliefs not be allowed as a reason to opt out. Especially since so often it’s the parent‘s beliefs which are responsible for the refusal to protect the child.

Oh no John Ringo!

science fiction, wingnuts
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I would just like to note Davind Hines’ delightfull takedown of John Ringo’s Paladin of Shadows series makes. If you don’t know Ringo, he’s one of an interchangable stable of authors writing the kind of formulaic mil-sf series Baen Books churns out by the dozen, featuring flint-eyed conservative he-men saving the world from alien menaces while spineless liberal appeaseniks are trying to stab them in the back. Those are bad enough already, both in content and writing, which is several rungs below David Weber, my personal bright red line below which I don’t bother, but this is much worse. A sample from the first chapter of the first book:

He knew that at heart, he was a rapist. And that meant he hated rapists more than any “normal” human being. They purely pissed him off. He’d spent his entire sexually adult life fighting the urge to not use his inconsiderable strength to possess and take instead of woo and cajole. He’d fought his demons to a standstill again and again when it would have been so easy to give in. He’d had one truly screwed up bitch get completely naked, with him naked and erect between her legs, and she still couldn’t say “yes.” And he’d just said: “that’s okay” and walked away with an amazing case of blue balls. When men gave in to that dark side, it made him even more angry then listening to leftist bitches scream about “western civilization” and how it was so fucked up.

It gets much worse and Hines is good at showing how bad it gets without getting the ick all over you, so to speak. What is it with Baen anyway? It’s not that they publish rightwing wankfests that I mind, it’s that several of their authors are decidedly creepy. There’s Krautman, who seems to think having the Waffen-SS star as heroes in one of his booksis no biggie, Leo Frankowski, who first presented a lighthearted rape in one of his intermibable Crosstime Engineer novels before moving to Russia because American women just didn’t understand a man’s needs and now Ringo and his not-quite rapist-hero and his collection of whores. To be sure not every rightwing Baen novelist is this batshit insane –David Weber might have some issues with liberals but seems quite sensible otherwise, while Eric Flint writes the same sort of mil-sf as the rest of them but featuring union members (he calls himself a Trotskist as well) — but there is a high percentage of outright nutters being published there.

Evolutionary psychologist is just another word for loon

sciencebollocks, wingnuts
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Two years ago I blogged about Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist who argued that Asians cannot make basic contributions to science, despite being, well, you know. Now if that wasn’t enough to completely destroy the already dodgy reputation of evolutionary biology, he’s upping his game this year. Not content with just slandering whole races, he’s now blogging on how much better the war on terror would’ve gone with president Coulter in charge:

Both World War I and World War II lasted for four years. We fought vast empires with organized armies and navies with tanks, airplanes, and submarines, yet it took us only four years to defeat them. … World War III, which began on September 11, 2001, has been going on for nearly seven years now, but there is no end in sight. There are no clear signs that we are winning the war, or even leading in the game. … Why isn’t this a slam dunk? It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire. We are not even allowed to call our enemies for who they are, and must instead use euphemisms like “terrorists.” … Hatred of enemies has always been a proximate emotional motive for war throughout human evolutionary history. Until now.

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

Further thoughts on Cuba

socialism, US foreign policy, wingnuts
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(I posted the comment below first at Unfogged but it was too good to just waste on those ingrates.)

What you need to keep in mind when judging Castro is that the man has stayed in power for almost fifty years and is only giving it up because his health has detoriated. This despite enormous odds against him, what with a certain superpower not a hundred miles away not liking him much. Unlike the Eastern European socalled socialist countries, his regime did not crumble once Soviet support was withdrawn, nor did Cuba go the Chinese or Vietnamese way of economic but not political freedom. At the same time his regime has been repressive, but it hasn’t engaged in mass murdering opponents in the same way US backed dictatorships in central America have done, or even (afaik) in the kind of repression that China went through.

That suggests to me that the reason Castro has survived so long in the face of so much difficulty is because the Cuban people want him to and believe he is their legitamite leader, despite some of the nastier features of the system he built.

What might help with this acceptance is the example of neighbouring countries like Haiti, with its history of brutal dictatorships, short periods of democracy undermined by Uncle Sam and civil wars/chaos…

Cuba is poor, but doesn’t have the extreme inequality of many Latin American countries, has free healthcare and school system for all its citizens annd has been able to go its own way despite superpower pressure. Would Cubans want to give up these hardwon achievements in return for the often dubious freedoms of liberal democracy as defined by US foreign policy?

Cuba and the American wingnut

socialism, US foreign policy, wingnuts
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Chris Bertram was a bit naughty on Crooked Timber last Tuesday, putting up a post celebrating Cuba under Castro, or rather acknowledging that Castro was not quite the mad dictator of American propaganda. The result? A thread of over 300 comments filled with decent leftists and wingnuts denouncing him for his soft stance on tyranny. Ironically in the process they showed why Chris was right in saying that anti-Castro fanatics hate Castro less for his human rights abuses than for the simple fact that he hasn’t knuckled under, that half a century of US pressure has not been able to make Cuba get in line.

It also shows how dangerous it can be to look at human rights issues without taking into account the context in which they are reported. The best example of which has been the War on Iraq, in the runup to which claims about Saddam’s awful regime were plastered all over the media, some true, others not, all of which in the end served not to end those abuses and bring the perpetrators to justice. Instead it helped to justify the invasion and subsequent occupation, which has so far has already killed a million Iraqis.

It’s not hard to see that American concerns about Cuban human rights abuses serve the same goal. It’s also not hard to see that undemocratic as it might be, Cuba would be much worse off under any US-led attempt to “democratise” it, as the example of Haiti should make clear. Democracies can commit massive crimes as well and worse, US/EU-approved and imposed “liberal democracies” usually shaft their own populations. Would you rather have Cuban or US style healthcare?

If we denounce Cuban abuses we might feel good about ourselves, but this will not end them and worse may help create a worse situation. Only the Cuban people can liberate themselves.