The Usual Warning Signs

This profile of James Fields, the 20-year old Nazi-fanboy who allegedly murdered Heather Heyer and injured at least 19 others, is chilling in that there were obvious warning signs that this young man was headed for violence--because he was already performing violence:

In a report sourced to police records, the newspaper said that wheelchair-bound Bloom called police in Florence, Kentucky, at least nine times starting in 2010 seeking help with her sometimes violent son.

Soon after graduating high school in 2015, Fields joined the U.S. Army but left by December after failing to meet training standards, the Army said in a statement.

What kind of person physically assaults his disabled mom? What kind of person seeks out a profession that involves firearms and violence but displays no aptitude for the actual working parts of the job description? A person with a fuse easily lit in a tiki-torch atmosphere.

I've covered this before--Elliot Rogers.  Ismaayil Brinsley. James Hodgkinson.  (There are others, but these posts stand out in my mind.) Sometimes you know someone is liable to hurt masses of people because they already hurt people, often women, they already associate with.

This violence ideation was apparent with Dylan Klebold, who dwelt upon Nazis, and Eric Harris, who dwelt upon all kinds of things, but also a dehumanized image of female sexuality.

They all failed to see people as just...people. So they resorted to violence against people. There was no understanding what the humanity of their victims even was.

There are warning signs. They just look an awful lot like our culture. We separate people by race, creed, gender, religion. We objectify people based on what they can do or can't do for us. And we depersonalize them by creating narratives about them based on our ignorance, not based on our curiosity about the Other and how those who are not ourselves even live. And I include myself in that "we". Trying to break out of that othering, dehumanizing, and situational dealing with other people is a struggle everyone deals with. But we don't talk about it intelligently, if we talk about it at all. And those who don't sort it out within themselves, do violent shit, because they never learned that people were people. And none of us are fucking special. We just live, bleed, try to get by, and hopefully find other people who will love us for our difficult and unspecial selves.

But we don't need to be special to have earned the right to live. We are all here. It's all we have. It is all we need to have. I don't understand how it eludes anyone that human beings not yourself have their hereness to justify their existence, and that life is not cheap, but a daily struggle for air and water and calories, and room to move and think and be, but it is the basic principle on which I think any kind of reality needs to be based--the other is not unlike you in uniqueness and rights. They like you are physically capable of suffering and can be injured, get sick, fear death, deserve love. And this is the best part of them, and you. Because it makes it incumbent upon us all to see one another for what we are.

Be fearless enough to love and be loved, be ready to hold back your worst until you've seen your fellow human for their best. And if their best is Nazi shit, well, I guess, bust them up until their asses get fixed. Because that way is a sunken place and nothing any good can come out of.

Raif Badawi Has Received the Sakharan Prize

Raif Badawi, the Saudi Arabian blogger who still faces serious injury for the kind of speech I take for granted every day, has been awarded the Sakharan Prize, named for the Russian nuclear physicist who became a human rights activist. If Saudi Arabia, a petrostate on the brink because of lowered oil prices that might not economically be able to survive the next ten years because they can not produce wheat in their climate and they can not eat oil, wanted to show goodwill to the outside world, the kind they don't get from killing Yemeni civilians, why, I think it might be very nice of them to consider pardoning Raif Badawi.

It would be only a start. But it would be a noble start. Continuing to punish Badawi is not a proof of the strength of Saudi Arabia, but of its weakness. They punish bloggers because they are not strong enough to deal with what questions are raised, or what activists might be aroused. Reacting to the individual who points this out and not the questions he raises, is a sure sign of a failure to be communicated to. This should hand SA its Royal Ass eventually. But for now, were they just to let Badawi go, they might at least earn a little good will from one of their sometime allies?

How do they not see this gesture as a positive one? Free Raif! You have nothing to lose but some of your horrible human rights reputation!

Religious Extremists Killed Avijit Roy

Avijit Roy was an atheist blogger who was brutally hacked to death for being an atheist blogger.

Being an atheist is not reason for being hacked to death--I hope.

Being a blogger is not reason to be hacked to death, I hope.

Being an American atheist and blogger a couple days younger than Roy, I realize I haven't challenged religion in the in-your-face way he did, but I feel no less like the kind of religious movement that would kill him, would kill me. And am, not surprisingly, very much against that kind of extremist--the same kind that made a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, that follows Lars Vilks to this day, and that slew several contributors to Charlie Hebdo magazine.

The willingness to slaughter people for words is the weakness that will make religious extremism collapse, because they lead people to the gallows, and there is, no kidding, a humor for that. And this little humor of mine, this bile....this little bile of mine, I'm going to let it shine. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Martin Gardner, enemy of b.s. and relator of cool things, passes on.

Here's a bit about Gardener:

This is the link to his bibliography.

That's a lot.

But a bibliography isn't really the final word about someone, even if it is the best evidence of their thoughts and all, being a recap of all that person wrote. And Gardener wrote and wrote. And was interested in every little thing.

I am amazed by his longevity and his ability to stay interested and turned on by the world to the last. I always was impressed by his dedication to reason. He really didn't suffer bullshit, and that was what was refreshing about reading his columns in Scientific American etc. He showed a lot of people that thinking was a good thing to do. He even represented how it was done--as my math teachers liked to say he "showed the work". He was a good explainer.

Anyway, he had a perceptive mind and tried to teach and reach people. That is always a good thing. I appreciate what he stood for and how he wrote.