Where Worlds Collide

I’ve left it a couple of days before posting anything on the US election.

As an non-American, my overwhelming sensation is one of relief.  Not that I want to downplay the significance of American’s first black president, or the sense of hope so many feel.  But I agree with Scottish SF writer Charlie Stross on this.   The world dodged a bullet on Tuesday.

Barack Obama may turn out to be a very good president; in the coming years he’s going to have is work cut out to clear up the mess his predecessor has left behind, and is almost certainly going to have to make some unpopular decisions.

But the alternative really didn’t bear thinking about.  McCain was 70, there are rumours that he’s got cancer, and his choice of Vice President was deeply frightening.  I’m not sure how many of the 46% that voted Republican realise just how extreme this woman’s religious views are.  I’ve already blogged about The New Apostolic Movement and their profoundly unChristian world-view. I don’t want anyone that believes she’s God’s choice to usher in the End Times to be allowed anywhere near the nuclear button.

Just in case you though I was exaggerating when I talked about “spiritual warfare” advocates taking credit for the death of Mother Theresa, read this:

“Our assignment from God was to take down the foundations of The Great Babylon, the harlot over many waters, who supported the false systems of the world. God clearly showed us where we should go for our main prophetic act by revealing a large, brown stone formation, completely surrounded by walls of ice resembling a castle and shaped exactly like an idol of the Queen of Heaven! This seat of the Mother of the Universe was 20,000 feet high, and to get there we had to cross the ice fall, the most dangerous par of the Everest ascent, with no guide but Him and no help from anyone else other than the angels.”

OK, so far it reads like a particularly weird scenario for some RPG, perhaps a twisted version of Mage: The Ascension, or perhaps Call of Cthulhu run from a weirdly fundamentalist perspective. But apparently this was an account of a real “spiritual warfare” mission into the Himalayas.

It then gets a lot darker and more disturbing.

Within two weeks of the expedition, other things happened which I believe are also connected: the huge fire in Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation; an earthquake destroyed the basilica of Assisi, where the Pope had called a meeting of all world religions; a hurricane destroyed the infamous temple ‘Baal-Christ’ in Acapulco, Mexico; Princess Diana died, a representative of the British throne, to which Sir Edmund Hillary dedicated Mount Everest; and Mother Theresa died in India, one of the most famous advocates of Mary as Co-Redeemer.”

This isn’t Christianity. It’s a cross between Voodoo and the Manichean Heresy. And it’s not a fringe cult; they have their tentacles deeply embedded in American politics, and claim huge numbers of followers. Sarah Palin is one of them.

(Thanks to Making Light for the link)

You may have heard the phrase “Dagenham East” as in “He’s completely Dagenham East”. Dagenham East is four stops past Barking on the London Underground’s District Line.

But if you stay on the train to Upminster, then change to the parallel London Tilbury and Southend line, you can travel all the way to the seaside resort of Shoeburyness.

But even that’s not quite the end of the line. The tracks continue past the station into the military depot at Pigs Bay. If you go any further you’ll end up in the North Sea.

Pigs Bay is therefore as mad as you can possibly get.

It’s an apt description of the lunatic fringe of America’s religious right. These are sort the people who preach that you will go to Hell if you vote for Barack Obama. They’re also claiming Kenyan witches are casting spells on John McCain to make him look stupid, and ensure the election of Obama, who although he claims to be a Christian, is really a Muslim and therefore a Satanist. You couldn’t make this stuff up. The stuff about so-called ’spiritual warfare’ has always rather scared me.

As Teresa Niesen-Hayden says in the first linked article

“Spiritual warfare” is a sort of folk thaumaturgy with ambitions to theurgy. If it worked, it would be a branch of black magic. There are “spiritual warfare” adherents out there who publicly take credit for the death of Mother Teresa.

So we have a what amounts to a syncretism of fundamentalism and folk magic which reminds me of a Protestant version of Voodoun, plus a big dollop of conspiracy theory and an unthinking adherence to authoritarian right-wing politics. It makes me think of Baby Doc Duvalier and the Tonton Macoutes.

I’d love to think they’re a tiny lunatic fringe, but Sarah Palin seems to be deeply immersed in this subculture. While there’s little chance of McPalin being elected unless the poll is rigged massively, the fact that politicians think they’re a significant enough voting block to have to pander to them is rather frightening.

Unlike some people on this side of the Atlantic, I haven’t commented much on the American elections, probably because I don’t want my blog turning into angry political rants.

So I’ll link to an American model railroad site, with the diorama M Cain & O Bama Fish Oil & Fertilizer. It’s both very funny and pretty much non-partisan.

On the other hand, if the Candidates Were Trains is probably something supporters of one candidate will find far funnier than those of the other.

Nick wants anti-war songs. I suggested Marillion’s “A Few Words For The Dead”

Somewhere in history you were wronged
Teach your children to bang the drum
Tell all your family, tell all your friends
Teach your brothers to avenge

It carries on

Or you could love
You could love

Much more profound that John Lennon’s platitudes. Well, I think so, anyway.

At least according to one of John McCain’s attack ads, he is.

As Fred Clark of slacktivist notes:

There’s not a second wasted here — every image, gesture, note, word and allusion points in a single direction, everything in the film says a single thing: Barack Obama is the Antichrist. Yes, it’s propaganda, but like the films of Eisenstein or Riefenstahl, it’s also art — unsubtly didactic, yet beautiful in its unity of purpose.

The McCain campaign denies this, of course. Despite being what Orcinus describes as “blasting the dog-whistle at air-raid volume at the religious right“, it’s all allegedly just a joke. As Fred Clark continues.

Tragically for Davis, however, it turns out that accusing your political rival of being the Antichrist is considered a bit over the line. Apparently according to conventional American political mores, the claim that your opponent is the ultimate personification of evil, the 10-horned beast of the Apocalypse, is regarded as sleazy gutter politics of the worst sort.

As Street Prophets points out, that doesn’t wash. It’s a pretty blatant attempt to associate with Barack Obama with Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist figure from the appalling “Left Behind” books.

It’s clear the McCain campaign recognises that the rapture cultists (I refuse to use the word “Christian” to describe their heretical belief system), although dangerously bat-crazy, are a powerful voting block.

Anyway, I’ve always thought Sun Myung Moon would make a good candidate for the Antichrist. One world religion and all that?  But somehow the rapture cultists always ignore him. Presumably it’s because he’s a conservative, and they’ve all be conditioned into assuming that the horned beast of the apocalypse would be a liberal.

Bruce Schneier in The Guardian comes up with one explaination as to why photographers seem to be hassled more and more when trying to take pictures in public places out of misplaced fear of ‘terrorists’

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Because it’s a movie-plot threat.

A movie-plot threat is a specific threat, vivid in our minds like the plot of a movie. You remember them from the months after the 9/11 attacks: anthrax spread from crop dusters, a contaminated milk supply, terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats, from the news, and from actual movies and television shows. These movie plots resonate in our minds and in the minds of others we talk to. And many of us get scared.

At to this that many of the sorts of people employed as security guards are not exactly the sharpest tools of the box, are poorly-paid, poorly-trained, and recruited through a process that fails to weed out small-minded bullies, it’s not surprising that some photographers get hassled.

And I’m not willing to listen to the sheeple who bleat “it’s better to be safe than sorry” when authority figures overreact to largely imaginary terrorist threats.  If we do nothing, our freedoms will be slowly salami-sliced away.  If when they came for the railway enthusiasts with cameras and you did nothing, what will happen when they come for you?

Charlie Stross mixes E Gary Gygax with the US presidential election, and gives us D&D 1st edition Monster Manual stats for the three principle characters:

John McCain (Demon Prince of Republicans.) (Lesser God.)

FREQUENCY: Very rare
NO APPEARING: 1
ARMOUR CLASS: -7
MOVE: 3″ (72″ per flight sector on the campaign jet)
HIT DICE: 200 hit points (But first you have to defeat 4d8 Secret Service Agents)
% IN LAIR: 0%
TREASURE TYPE: All your NATO base are belong to us!

And it gets a lot better after that.  Go and read the rest of it!

Not only was it a setback for space exploration (yes, really!), but is also responsible for the rise of young-earth creationism, and innumeracy. So says Ken MacLeod.  Talk about the law of unintended consequences.

J Michael Neal has a great post about the importance of trust in economics, using the current mortgage crisis as an example of how American capitalism has gone off the rails.

The switch from the concern of corporations with various stakeholders to the approach where profit maximization was the overriding, and in many cases, only, goal, did drastically increase the efficiency of the economy. It did so at a cost, however, and that cost was trust.

At its most bleeding heart, this has been a critical change in the employer/employee relationship. There are all sorts of euphemisms for it, but the idea that your boss was only going to employ you so long as he didn’t have some other way to get the job done for more profit is corrosive. It eliminates the trust on the part of the employee that his employer has his interests in mind.

Read the whole thing.