Newsflash! Christian groups are still trying to enforce idiocy on America. Chris Taylor had a post today on Synthetic Morpheme about the Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair [link]. The fair took place in 2001. I'm not sure if this goup is still very active. The winning entry was "My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)":

Cassidy Turnbull (grade 5) presented her uncle, Steve. She also showed photographs of monkeys and invited fairgoers to note the differences between her uncle and the monkeys. She tried to feed her uncle bananas, but he declined to eat them. Cassidy has conclusively shown that her uncle is no monkey.

This fair is apparently an effort at teaching children to embrace logical fallacies. The winning projects are little more than snyde remarks with posters. This is typical of creationism. It attempts to teach its audience (mostly children) to be skeptical of scientific and logical thinking, and to be confident in the use of immature, simplistic retorts. Science is regarded as nothing more than a lot of big, meaningless words. Projects with names like "the thermodynamics of hell fire" are praised for lampooning some of the best scientific ideas in human history. Careful thought and fair consideration of unfamiliar ideas is actively encouraged. This is characteristic of christian thinking on virtually every subject. Speaking of virtually every subject, here's what this group thinks about the internet:

The Internet was created by the United States of America - a Christian nation [ref. 1, 2, 3] - and should not be used to spread anti-Christian, secular, or non-Christian propaganda and hatespeech. This is our Internet, and we should exercise our position as its owners and as the guardians of civilization to stop its misuse. [link]

The page goes on to complain that "Their [Landover Baptist's] modus operandi is simple: post articles that take good Christian values and twist them - beyond recognition - such that they look arrogant, hateful, or just idiotic." Do I even need to point out that the majority of technical contributions which led to the internet's creation were made by non-Christians, and a big chunk of them were probably made by non-Americans. The Internet belongs to no one. The parts that make up the internet belong to millions of private companies, individuals, schools and government agencies. The have the arrogance to suggest that The Internet is the property of Christians alone -- thereby committing that age-old christian sin of appropriating the property of others on shaky religious grounds. They furthermore are hateful enough to ignore the vast contributions and interests of non-Christians in use of the internet. And they are manifestly idiotic (see the creation science fair). Sounds to me like Landover is on the right track.

Odds of being sued by RIAA (see my earlier post below). I've given some more thought to the problem. 53 million Americans use file-sharing services. Assume, rather arbitrarily, that 1 in 10 users actively shares significant material (these are the people the RIAA is targetting). If the RIAA has the resources and interest to pursue 10,000 lawsuits, then the odds of being sued (if you are in their target category) are one in 530. This is roughly equal to the odds that you will die from being hit by a car (evaluated over your expected lifetime). If the RIAA mounts 1000 lawsuits, the odds go to one in 5,300. This is only slighly more likely than dying in some transportation accident over the next year (one in 5877). Of course we all know a few people who died in transportation accidents in recent years. Your odds of being sued no doubt increase according to how many files you share and how often you make them available. The RIAA has probably already evaluated these numbers. If they are planning to use this as a meaningful deterrent, they will have to bring a lot of suits. They will probably gain little, in financial terms, from these suits. I expect they will try to use a few demo cases as examples to scare people. Perhaps I am naive about the cost of mounting lawsuits, and the resources available to RIAA, but I don't see how they can sustain lawsuits as a viable deterrent without going broke. If that's the consequence, then maybe they should proceed at full pace.

In the days since RIAA announced plans to sue individual users of file-trading software, online file sharing has gone up 10% [TechNews]. According to the article, 53 million Americans use file-sharing software. I'm not sure how many lawsuits the RIAA is able to bring, but the odds of actually getting sued by them seem quite small. According to the National Safety Council, your odds of dying in a plane crash this year are about one in 381,566. The odds of dying in a car crash this year are one in 18,752 [NSC]. I don't quite have enough information to compute the odds of getting sued by RIAA if you're a file-swapper, but the accident numbers might help figure out how much to worry about it. [I lifted the news link from Synthetic Morpheme.]

Richard Cohen has written a review of Ann Coulter's Group II book Treason [link]. His review -- a bit belated I think -- is remarkably similar to mine (although I confess that Cohen's is less hot-headed and more elegantly put than my own). The review is titled "The hard right finally dumbs out." Cohen says:

I am happy to report that Ann Coulter has lost her mind... Coulter conflates dissent with treason, opposition with treason, being wrong with treason, being right with treason and just about anything she doesn't like with treason. If the book were a Rorschach test, she would be institutionalized... In some ways, the nutso American brand of archconservatism mirrors traditional anti-Semitism. Jew-haters proclaim that Jews control the media, international finance and almost everything else of importance - but somehow have accumulated a 2,000-year history of expulsions, pogroms and, finally, the Holocaust. It is the same with liberals. They control everything, and yet somehow the White House, both houses of Congress and, with the exception of several New York delis, virtually the entire business community are in the hands of conservatives. It's hard to figure... But I think she sometimes gives the left too much credit. "The left cut down a brave man," she writes about Sen. Joe McCarthy, forgetting that the ol' redbaiter was censured only after he tangled with the Eisenhower administration. When her book reaches the best-seller list, as it surely will, we'll know the conservative movement has cracked up. Happy days are here again.

Popular Group II author Michael Savage has been cancelled from MSNBC after he suggested a gay caller should "get AIDS and die" [CNN]. Meanwhile, the guys who run Take Back the Media are potentially seeking damages against Michael Savage (aka Michael Weiner) stemming from his nonsense lawsuit against them and other web sites. I hope his firing is only the first step in freeing the cable news channels from such arch-conservative pulp gibbering.

Gayness and Respect for Subcultures. From Joe Pixel's weblog:

How does the gay agenda expect to get any real respect when we see displays such as this picture? Highly concentrated gay events are known to commonly have public displays of body parts, open sex and many other examples of wild abandon. Gays are always going to be viewed negatively with this sort of communication. This is as effective as peace protesters who use violence and destruction to achieve their goals. A total oxymoron. [link]

The logical skeleton of this complaint is "if they do things I disrespect, then I will not respect them." Joe Pixel's premises include "their goal is to gain my respect." "Respect" is, of course, a weakly-defined sentiment. If we take this complaint to its ad absurdum limit, we arrive at "if the gay community continues being gay, then the gay community will not earn my respect." Joe Pixel will probably object that he does not intend to say this, but I believe his statement does imply this. They "gay" identity is precisely what is on display in a gay parade. Like most identities, it is adaptive and evolving. There will be disagreement among members of the community about what "gay" really means. For some of them, "wild abandon" is a part of the identity. In displaying their identity (or their version of it, at least), I think relatively few of them intend to change the opinions of anyone who is not gay. Particularly when non-gay people can pick all kinds of arbitrary things to disrespect about gay people. The point of a parade is not to suck up to your detractors. I'll now make use of the all-too-easy-and-convenient Jewish analogy: let's imagine a kinder, gentler Nazi regime which doesn't like Jews but doesn't take it to the level of the holocaust. They encourage (or at least don't actively discourage) discrimination against Jews, and they refuse to recognize Jewish marriages. The nice-Nazis further allow the Jews to have parades and public religious exercises. The nice-Nazis also don't censor the liberal press, which complains about the discrepancy in treatment of Jews. In response to this criticism, conservative editorials appear which argue "if the Jews really wanted to be respectable, they would do XYZ." XYZ could be "performing their rituals in Hebrew -- if they are true Germans then they should always speak German!" or possibly "wearing those silly outfits" or maybe "circumsizing their male children; how barbaric!" Basically XYZ can be anything that makes Jews different from non-Jews. Now the important question: if you are a Jew and you hear these comments coming from the nice-Nazis, like "stop wearing that hat" or "shave your beard" or whatever, would you respond by taking additional measures to please the ruling conservatives? If you participated in a public march or prayer service, would you think, "this will surely show those Nazis that we are nice folks"? I imagine that the average sentiment among Jewish marchers would be "This is who we are and this is what we do. We are a significant sub-culture and we will not adjust ourselves to suit anyone else's vision of how we should be." Quick digression: I defend the Jew-gay community comparison by noting that both are strong, persistent subcultures; both groups have diverse internal interpretations of their identities; both groups were targetted by the Nazis; gays occasionally express the opinion that they deserve the sort of post-holocaust respect acquired by the Jews; and so on. I would argue that public demonstrations are commonly not designed with the intent of changing the attitude of the average person. A gay-pride parade is mostly for the benefit of gay people. A large public exercise improves the cohesion of the gay community. Perhaps it helps gays feel more comfortable with being gay. Perhaps it gives inspiration to closeted individuals. It certainly improves the visibility of the gay community, which may benefit them politically. And it may encourage stronger recognition and support among people who don't already have anything against gays. But I don't think most gays are out to change the minds of conservatives. The default conservative position is to disrespect homosexuality, period. The conservative might say to a gay person, "if you just changed XYZ then I would respect you." What kind of requests should the gay person consider reasonable? Possible requests include: "Just don't show public affection with your partner;" "Just don't dress in [whatever way];" "Just don't be sexually attracted to people of your same gender;" "You can be sexually attracted to members of you gender, just don't act on it." Where should the gay person draw the line? Which requests are reasonable and which are not? Seriously, if you're a gay person and someone says they don't respect you, do you respond by changing yourself to suit the preferences of Joe Normal? No, you probably don't.

Interesting: A BBC story about The Mercury 13. They were a secret group of women who were training with NASA to become the first women in space. And, though this may shock those of us who were certain that women immediately gained a full and completely equal footing with men on all matters the second they won suffrage in 1920, the Mercury 13 met with constant resistance and skepticism. NASA never officially sanctioned their group or their training program, as far as I can tell.

In part, Ms Akman said, they were restricted by prejudice both within Nasa and also other parts of the scientific community. "The environment here really did suggest that women were thought of as weaker, as less intelligent, as not able to handle the complicated skill that would be required in spaceflight," she stressed. Unlike their male counterparts - all of whom were test pilots flying with the full backing of the military - the Mercury 13 women were ordinary civilians. This raised another problem - they had to get time off from their jobs. "These women had to approach their bosses and say: 'I have to be away for a while - I can't exactly tell you why, I can't exactly tell you where I'm going,' and some of them lost their jobs," Ms Akman said.

Eventually, the Russians sent up a woman (who, like Gagarin, seems also not to have seen any god up there), and that was it for the chicks. They even appealed to then-VP LBJ. No dice. I know, I know. "Johnson? Insensitive and closed-minded? Never!" I feel the same way, but it's true. I don't need to fill in the rest of the history for you, but, just for closure: in 1986, NASA finally sent two women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, into space. As we all know, they were sent to Mars to help the Martian women win suffrage and to lobby the Martian congress for a true and universal prohibition on spirituous beverages.