Cruelty In A Christmas Carol

The lesson imparted by Dickens' best-known tale is not to seek joyful connection with your fellow humans, but to wait for your oppressor's moment of illness-induced weakness and strike with impunity.

171 years ago Britain was experiencing a resurgence in the popularity of Christmas wholly foreign to us now, blessed as we are with a Christmas holiday that is attempting to overtake Halloween and must be bludgeoned to death halfway through January. The Industrial Revolution was ending, but the negative effects of high-density urbanization in Britain were devastating to the lower levels of social strata and, therefore, the morale of the country at large. As a result, people leapt at the chance to have their own Christmas tree, recently made trendy along with the Christmas card and public caroling. It may not seem like much now, but it was a remarkably effective way to take everyone's mind off the daily horror of pestilence-soaked London before the invention of Valium and Netflix. Hot on the heels of the new-fangled trees and cards Dickens published his little Christmas yarn, and it is with us now, after having been filmed twenty-one times, adapted for television twenty-seven times, and translated into at least two dozen languages. But, as I will show, we've been getting it wrong for almost two centuries.

The story is well known to you, and I won't rehash any more of it than I absolutely must. In the interest of preventing sloth, however, I decided to not rely on my slightly pickled recollection based tenuously on thirty-four years spent watching the film in a dozen or so different flavors, usually repeatedly and with only a fraction of my attention over the course of fifteen or twenty consecutive days. Details can start to run together due to familiarity, so I thought it necessary to re-read the original text. I set out to write this convinced that Scrooge became startled by his ghostly doorknocker and fell backward down the steps, as any attempt on my part to remember the scene involved that particular. I was entirely wrong, and not just because of the medicinally-applied alcohol. As it turns out, various directors and screenwriters throughout the years have decided that this timeless classic needed a little punching up in places, similar to Michael Bay turning The Transformers into two hours of crayons in a blender while an old Calvin Klein underwear model never quite makes it out of his wet paper bag. These kinds of thing must be resisted, and so in deference to placing far more importance on tiny details than they deserve, Dickens' edition will be the one I refer to.

Do you want a Wahlberg as Tiny Tim? Because Bay will do it.

It should be noted that, across a century's worth of film interpretations ranging from abysmal to your personal favorite, The Muppet's Christmas Carol objectively stands out as the film which keeps onscreen dialogue closest to the original text. Gonzo the Great, acting as Dickens acting as The Narrator, speaks whole paragraphs word for word in the singularly simple yet striking style. You recall the early scene which finds Scrooge arriving home and turning his key in the door lock only to be startled by seeing Jacob Marley's face where the door knocker should be. Dickens describes the specter as having “a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar,” and Gonzo speaks those words on camera. The inclusion of that particular line of narration, a simile for which no amount of explanation can bring clarity if one lacks the understanding, makes this interpretation of the story unlike any other and deserving of appreciation, interminable musical numbers notwithstanding.

Well done, rat and Whatever.

Ebenezer Scrooge was an asshole. That much we can all agree on. His moods and attitudes were such a clear cut stripe of constantly mean-spirited, greedy, and confrontational that his name is now invoked as archetypal shorthand when seeking a way to describe horrible people we know. Scrooge is the progenitor to Snidely Whiplash, the Nazi dentist from Marathon Man, and Mitt Romney. Scrooge is the reason one wheel of a shopping cart is always fucked up, and why the toilet seat is always frigid. To wit: “External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often came down handsomely, and Scrooge never did.” His financial dominance over the town and people in it is absolute, and has created such antipathy toward him that no one will give a moment's thought before taking his dressing gown and bed curtains away to fence before his dead body has cooled, as some of the more timid adaptations choose to omit. When Scrooge arrives on Christmas morning with kind words and gifts for everyone, instead of reacting as any abused people naturally would – with mistrust and wariness – he is joyfully accepted. Dickens would have you believe the warmth of the Christmas spirit had overtaken everyone and elevated them as a community, but this is inexplicable and inconsistent with how the group could reasonably be predicted to react.

On the other hand, you rarely find bloodthirsty mobs in heartwarming classics.

At the opening of the story, a collector comes to Scrooge asking for money to benefit the poor and hungry, and Scrooge sends him away with the suggestion he enlist the services of poor houses and debtor's prisons. When, the following morning, Scrooge pounces on him with gleeful promises of a substantial donation including “many back payments,” the charity worker doesn't react with the derision and scorn one would rightly expect. Instead, man acts gullibly elated at the good news. This doesn't just cast doubt on his selection as a solicitor and handler of money, it paints him as likely too stupid to survive a haircut. When your malevolent overlord becomes startlingly gracious to you without warning, what right-thinking, pattern-recognizing person wouldn't steel themselves for the other shoe to drop on the cruel indignity that is surely to come?

Upon waking Christmas morning, Scrooge publicly engages in behavior that is so drastically far from his normal disposition that it should raise serious concerns among anyone paying the slightest attention. He becomes excessively generous with his money instead of unerringly greedy, displays exceedingly good will towards his fellow citizens instead of enmity, treats his staff as a valued asset instead of a manipulated commodity, and seems to become the philanthropic patriarchal pillar of the community in less time than the sun shines on one of the shortest winter days. Everyone just takes this in stride, for absolutely no reason, and even actively participates. The young boy Scrooge sends to the butcher should never have believed for a second the errand was real, it being far more likely that he would have taken the opportunity to throw a shit-covered rock from the gutter at Scrooge's head. Even more disturbing are the choices of the shop butcher, who is both open for business at dawn on Christmas morning and willing to personally bring one his most expensive items C.O.D. to the town's biggest asshole on the word of a filthy street urchin.

"Isn't this a face you can trust?"

Accustomed as we all are to the moral of the story, and to the unexplained and slightly suspicious desire we all seem to innately have for Scrooge to change his ways and become Tiny Tim's BFF, I think we've let a cynical accounting of the tale remain neglected. Scrooge's turn at the end of the story to become a broad-spectrum beneficiary of mankind is still mildly motivating and heart-warming in a contemporary reading, as well it should be. But as warm and fuzzy as it may make us feel to witness his seamless transition to benevolence and the community's immediate and unconditional embrace of him, as vindicating as it might feel to know Scrooge has sponged away the writing on not only his stone but the Cratchits as well, we have allowed an idea that makes us happy to go unchallenged due to the probable unpleasantness of examining it. In fact, an attempt to check in once more on Scrooge would no doubt be an unpleasant and shockingly ugly rehash of the first fifth of the story with none of the transcendent experiences or redemption of the latter sections. Because of how I say he came about it, Scrooge's philanthropic transformation will likely be brutally temporary, and the resulting backlash as he returns to his normal disposition will no doubt carry with it vicious overcompensation to correct for his resultant shame and embarrassment.

"Mandatory quartz buttplugs for everyone!"

As mentioned before, the extant text has no account of Scrooge suffering any head injury as a result of either falling on his steps or any other accident. Since some of the movies have seen fit to include it, however, there's no harm in taking a look. Falling backwards as he did, Scrooge would have suffered a trauma to his occipital lobe and, one would assume, a countercoup trauma to his frontal lobe. My degree from the Hollywood Upstairs Medical College is enough for me to know that occipital damage could produce hallucinations while frontal lobe damage could create the dramatic behavioral changes. Unfortunately, damage to the extent I am describing would likely be accompanied by a host of other problems like uncoordinated speech and movement. The damage, combined with no witnesses to Scrooge's fall and the missed opportunity to employ the stunning efficacy of Victorian-era medicine means the chances of Scrooge having a cogent exchange with the errand boy regarding the availability of the prize goose, much less awakening from his time-traveling coma, would be slim to none. It's not all depressing, though. In fact, given one of the more striking but common behavioral changes reported in “didn't-kill-you” head trauma, it's a wonder we haven't been treated to Scrooge unceremoniously displaying his Victorian twig-and-berries to the assembled onlookers without provocation. I argue that some old-fashioned British dick-swinging could have made Tiny Tim's final speech that much more poignant.

There's a "third leg" joke in there somewhere...

Another possible explanation for Scrooge's established standard of selfish and miserly behavior could be a simple result of oxytocin deficiency. Oxytocin is a hormone produced primarily in the brain without which society would be harder to maintain than it is now, as its effects are associated with trust, social bonding, and generosity. Artificially-delivered oxytocin creates a predictable result in testing environments, making people more likely to share or empathize, for example. In some people the receptors responsible for uptaking oxytocin are not as plentiful as they should be, due to genetic abnormalities, and these people have marked differences in social interaction and an exaggerated anxiety response. This kind of condition would be completely undetectable to the medical community of the time, and in any case untreatable overnight and could be in no way affected by spectral intercession of the kind Dickens describes.

Some "smoke-tral" intercession, though...right? I apologize.

Since neurochemicals cannot be blamed, and Dickens' own hand precludes head injury, we are left with the most probable explanation, an answer Scrooge himself had known the entire time. When he accused Marley of being composed “more of gravy than of grave,” he was exactly right. Dickens describes early on how Scrooge's evening routine plays out, with him taking “his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern.” Given that Marley's arrival and his dinner can only have been separated by a handful of hours, his evening meal -- which he relates as consisting of beef, mustard, cheese, potato, and the aforementioned gravy -- would not have had sufficient time to incubate enough pathogens to create illness. However, since Scrooge's behaviors as a creature of habit have been spelled out in great detail, it seems reasonable to conclude that a poorly-handled bit of uncured meat or gravy from earlier in the week is undoubtably responsible. Some nasty bout of acute foodborne poisoning delivered from any number of the readily available and nauseatingly disgusting sources in overcrowded and choleric London could be responsible for his feverish hallucinations, and the shock resulting from the mortal terror instilled in his mind due to those hallucinations could then conceivably produce his philanthropy. But, like all moments we consider life-changing while their perfume hangs in the air, the resulting sway these visions had over him and his strength of will no doubt faded with the passage of time. It is truly unfortunate Dickens never gave us a sequel, so we could see Scrooge return to caning orphans in the street on New Year's Eve, once his stomach felt better.

"Quartz! For EVERYONE!"

Turning to the people of Britain now, and their astonishingly out-of-character response to Scrooge's turnaround given his history and character, just a little investigation finds a cleverly hidden moral underneath the many obfuscating layers of lofty community togetherness. Dickens would have you believe that, were your master – a term my contemporaries use sexually, having no understanding of what it would be like to live under the whims of another human being – to appear at your doorstep on Christmas morning, you would throw open your arms and take him into your family celebration without the slightest compunction. Indeed, the way the Cratchits are painted would make any kind of effort on Bob's part to stand up for himself entirely out of character, so it's not a terrible stretch, but no one should believe it for a moment. I ask you to consider the motivation of these people for their instant and inexplicable acceptance. Instead of being an example of redemption through forgiveness, Scrooge is the lame animal who doesn't know enough to try and hide its infirmity. Why would the kind-hearted townspeople take advantage of him? For the same reason you or I would were we presented with a mentally broken Donald Trump or Rupert Murdoch handing out diamonds or Rolex watches or whatever it is the superrich keep in their pockets to tip jet bartenders. I say they saw him coming, thanks to advance notice from the street urchin and butcher, and were laying in wait to try and get whatever they could out of him. By presenting all toothless smiles and unbared claws, the townspeople displayed their cynical and shrewd calculation of Scrooge's state as a poorly-stitched moneybag. You know the kind, with the dollar sign on the side that the Beagle Boys used to carry?

Seen here in a historical document on loan from the Library of Congress.

There is no alarm at his condition or investigation as to how his change of heart came to be, but unquestioning acceptance of a Christmas miracle. It is perhaps worth mentioning that this is the first non-religious story to introduce the now-familiar concept of Christmas miracles, though the implied significance attached to arbitrary calendar dates continues to elude my understanding. Had Scrooge become Daddy Warbucks on Saint Swivven's Day, or of his own volition rather than the threats of spectral terrorists, would his charity then be less heart-warming or – if you can stomach it – inspirational?

Fair Game

It's very fashionable to claim that ideology can be separated from people, and that attacking one doesn't mean attacking the other. This is not only wrong, but a fatally flawed method of thinking.

There is an insidious capitulation occurring among unbelievers who lack the capacity for critical thinking that seeks to soothe the hurt feelings of theocratic zealots, a pitiful and feeble attempt to distance the claimant from the reactions that occur when religion and its practitioners are rightly brought under scrutiny. “Ideology is separate from people,” the claim goes, “and we don't attack all Christians when we attack Christianity.” What off-brand excuse for simple-minded casuistry is this?

This argument, always presented in pictorial meme form because its proponents still aren't capable of holding up their end of an argument without one finger firmly on the caps lock, makes the following (paraphrased) proposition: attacking capitalism is not attacking westerners, attacking nazis is not attacking germans, and attacking religions is not attacking their adherents. To begin with, this argument completely ignores the differences between political and economic practices and religious ideology. Capitalism has no book of doctrine or spiritual figurehead, and “the west” is more than a little difficult to nail down. Do they mean the Dutch, or the kind people of Estonia (I promise, you guys, that statue was dressed like Dr. Frankenfurter when I got there)? No, they mean America, where capitalism may be the general order of the land, but it is not doctrine. No one is killed or made a pariah due to their unwillingness to value money and trade, though they may be viciously mocked as I drive past the farmer's market.

Agrarian culture does not allow for iPhone repair, just so you know.

Similarly, the eight million or so members of the Nazi party at its height in 1945 was a fraction of the roughly 65 million people composing the nation of Germany. The majority of people there saw no necessary connection between their nationality and required affiliation with a national socialist group, and rightly so. Being born in Germany doesn't make one a nazi, any more than being born in a taxi cab makes you a member of the transportation union. Choosing to join the nazi party, however, means that your nationality becomes incidental to the argument. You can be a Swede and a nazi, or an American for that matter, and many were.

You can't tell, but they're wearing Hugo Boss.

Turning to the meat of my argument, the problem that has arisen is this weak-spined, almost ecumenical position that followers of a religion are not to be attacked for their ideology because they are somehow absolved or detached from the horrific consequences visited upon us by their faith. The ideas and doctrines can be attacked, so the argument goes, but it is unfair to include the clergy in that attack because people are only people, or some such neo-hippie bullshit. This position is just a half-hearted secular redressing of the nonsensical “love the sinner, hate the sin” philosophy espoused by the more nauseating evangelists who walk among us, and not a very clever one.

Which is odd, because they usually make so much sense.

To reiterate, plenty of Germans were not affiliated with the nazis, an equally large amount of westerners do not appear to consider themselves capitalists, but no religious person considers themselves separate from their faith. One exception might be an allowance for their angst-ridden dark night of the soul, but that strikes me as the same kind of self-aggrandizing pity play seen in overly-dramatic teenagers. Belief in ideology involves you in same, because without people reading it and attempting to live their lives by the rules set out therein, the bible or Qur'an is another book gathering dust on a forgotten shelf of our collective library.

It's in there, as meaningless as the rest without a person to believe it.

To oppose comes the argument that criticism of any book, Huckleberry Finn as an example, doesn't extend to the people who enjoy reading the book or find value in it. The critique of the literary work is separated from its readers, it is argued, because arguments against the book are not arguments against the people. With the exception of the light fluff we all consume for mindless entertainment, I find two significant problems with this approach.

Aside from the selection of one of Twain's dullest works.

First, we do make judgements about people based on what they read and write. Criticism of whatever softcore porn leads the Times Bestseller list is a direct criticism of the tastes of people buying that book, in this case their literary standards and ability to walk upright without dragging their knuckles too terribly. Reading Mein Kampf doesn't make one a nazi, but if that's all one reads, your friends have the right to question your thinking process. We use literary scope as a metric to base our perception of an individual's intelligence in many cases, and rightly so. Someone who has shelves full of a broad range of titles has a different kind of mind and way of thinking than someone who has one shelf full of Danielle Steel. Pretending otherwise is an exercise in self-deception.

Secondly, the main significant difference between popular fiction and religious texts is that very rarely do people become so enamored with fiction that they endeavor to enforce the content of the text on others. One reasonable exception might be the pitiable Randians of today, who are so taken with Galt's message that their way of thinking and interacting with the world changes fundamentally instead of gradually. But even they do not come to my door in the morning to make sure I've heard the good word, they do not introduce legislation in our nation's capital in the name of Rand, and they do not say I should be killed for disagreeing with them. People who believe in religious texts do all of those things, which is why it is improper to level an equivalent accusation at common popular fiction.

Believe it or not, this has nothing to do with whitewashing fences.

But, for example, it isn't hard to imagine an economist or broker so convinced of the truth of capitalism that they would enact its principles on everyone, regardless of compassion or consequence. In that instance, is there anyone who would argue that in criticizing capitalism you are not criticizing the person carrying out the doctrine? Without people to enact these ridiculous and archaic ideas brought to us by religion, they would be harmless relics of our ancestors and soon forgotten, just like Beanie and Cecil. This is where these conciliatory apologists fail in their argument, by imagining that the holy texts have some kind of agency on their own. They think that faith in a religion doesn't mean you're affiliated with that group, or somehow that you do not share in the responsibility for the damage done to our society. Instead, argument against a faith necessarily includes arguments against the followers, and rightly so. To pretend otherwise merely extends the time the rest of us are forced to let these addle-minded fakers and the willfully ignorant dictate our lives.

Detrimentally Open-Minded

While it is foolish to dismiss any hypothesis out-of-hand, it is equally foolish to continue believing a thing to be true after it has been shown to be demonstrably false.

The greatest advancements in human understanding of our objective world are perhaps always prefaced by the dismissal and ostracization of the few people to catch on first. Consider the skeptical treatment of Pasteur or Jenner, and try to imagine for yourself how outlandish and impossible it must have sounded, however fascinated your intellect may have been. Consider the public shaming, charges of heresy, and punishments inflicted upon Galileo by the church for writing a book on what he observed through his telescope. It was detrimental in the extreme for a scientist of that era to publicly proclaim things that we teach without a second thought to our very young children today, and it should not be forgotten that the church did not publicly admit Galileo to be correct until 1992. This attitude varies from one pope to another, it would seem, as the most sinister pope in recent memory didn't accept this concession from the church and instead sided with church leaders of Galileo's time. Pope Quitter Nazi Benedict invoked the position that the church was just in punishing Galileo because of the church's adherence to reason, ethics, and social consequences, and revision of the verdict could only be politically motivated, a statement made while he was still a Cardinal responsible for the concealment of unconscionable rape and torture of 200 deaf children to protect the reputation of the church.

It's entirely possible PR was never his strong suit.

I am not above acknowledging how ridiculous someone claiming knowledge of a round Earth would have sounded to the general public pre-Pythagoras or, if you prefer, before the time of Augustus of Hippo. The only physical evidence in favor that could be provided was the mysterious way a ship's mast appeared on the horizon before its hull did, and the spherical shadow which fell on the moon during an eclipse. It would have been the ravings of a madman, an ill-founded conclusion absolutely contrary to what were the best explanations for the natural world that were available to us. Except those ravings actually were the better explanation, they simply sounded so contrary to traditional common knowledge and were inflammatory to church doctrine (admittedly not difficult to accomplish), making them something of a social poison.

Not pictured: logic or reason.

The upshot of all this is that there are many hypotheses advanced by our peers that sound laughably simple-minded and deserving of our scorn. While the history of scientific advancement is nothing if not littered with pipe dreams and crazy ideas or explanations for things, the fact remains that a handful of those insane propositions happened to be true. We take combustion reactions completely for granted, but what did the first layperson think when Joseph Priestley explained and demonstrated that oxygen made things burn, not phlogiston? There is undoubtably some idea being knocked around right now that couldn't sound more disconnected or feverish which may prove to have a kernel of understanding beyond what we now collectively possess. The benefit of our current method of scientific discipline allows for these outliers to become separated from and raised above their undeserving contemporaries in order to become well-understood accepted knowledge, rather than killing or making outcasts of their proponents, provided they fulfill the dirt simple requirements of the scientific method.

Not everyone makes it through the process.

Unfortunately, an unpleasant counterpart to our powerful drive to discover more about the world around us is the stubborn insistence on holding on to antiquated ideas after they have been proven false because of a personal affinity for them based on comfort or, even worse, routine. Every specific point illustrated in holy texts and claimed as factual has been dismantled in short order by honest investigation, in many instances by scientists and historians who claim a religious faith. Artifacts, events, and locations have, time and again, completely escaped discovery or been demonstrated to be non-existent by highly-trained investigative professionals who were specifically looking for evidence. This fact has not escaped the religious community entirely, but it has done nothing to convince them that their ideas are incorrect and better off discarded. Mystical shrouds, forty years spent wandering the desert, settlements and figures, all debunked in no uncertain terms.

It was a beach towel the whole time.

This is fine for the false biblical declarations of physical things which would leave evidence we could locate, but a more difficult argument takes place concerning the phenomenally silly tale told by believers concerning what awaits us upon our death. Specifically, some people with belief structures ranging from devoutly religious to limp-wristed spiritualism claim that they have died and witnessed another aspect of consciousness disconnected from the experiences common to the rest of us. Their claims vary, from tunnels to dreamlike hallucinations to visions of the biblical ideas of the afterlife, but they are all exactly alike in the sense that there is no proof whatsoever. There is a general consistency of experience from person to person, but there is no sufficient sample group of people accurately reporting any information they could not have gleaned normally, and there is concrete evidence that these experiences are due to stresses on the brain. This is proven by the documented ability to induce an identical response when subjecting a pilot to high gravitational forces in a centrifuge, such as the one formerly operated by the aerospace physiology department of the now-private Brooks Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas. The only difference found is the spiritual significance some people choose to attach because they underwent the experience during a medical emergency instead of inside a training facility. These reports are thematically familiar to all of us, and I argue they are just another extension of the innate fear we have of no longer existing. I completely understand why this trepidation results in reassuring and comforting imagery regarding our disposition, but that imagery offers no benefit over the understanding that our terror is a direct result of being the only species capable of contemplating its own death when not under immediate threat.

Not like this adorable little fucker. Look at him. Contemplate your demise, you bastard!

People should look on reports of near-death experiences as only what they are, the cacophonous chemical experiences of a panicked and terrified brain related through a filter of the storyteller's mythos and paper-thin understanding. The disgusting practice of inculcating religious ideology with an entirely threat-based reward and punishment system in children and then, if something unthinkable should happen to one of them and they regurgitate this nonsense to their parents and doctors upon reviving, trotting them out on a national stage as some kind of ghoulish poster child for the harp-and-halo afterlife story is perhaps the most shameful thing a person can do to a child without being ordained. The phenomenon is predictable and consistently reproducible, but that fact along with the dearth of scientific and biological information provided by the resulting studies have done nothing to even slightly quiet the shrill ignorance of the believers. One more thing bears mentioning, as the arrogance of claiming scientific proof while not even beginning to understand high school biology infuriates me to no end: if your brain is dead, the hippocampus and associated sections of the brain which are associated with the formation and retention of memories have no function. No function, as I don't have to explain to you, means no memory formation and no ability to report back to us what color the angel's hair was or what kind of pony your dead relative was riding through a cloud.

Or whomever they should happen to see.

Open-mindedness is a term used to describe a willingness to listen to and try to understand ideas one had not been previously exposed to, but the meaning of this term has been skewed through misuse in two ways I wish to mention. Firstly, it is entirely common now to hear people who argue from the secular or skeptical side of the aisle labeled as not being open-minded, by which the accuser means the individual is convinced against the proposition and will not accept the points made in favor. This is a misuse because the appropriate word is the one I have chosen: convinced. The skeptic had an open mind to the idea, originally, but the subsequent investigation and critical thinking caused them to become convinced it was false. For example, it is possible that a video recording showing an erratically-moving light in the sky could be documentation of an alien spacecraft, but evidence presented in the form of weather reports, flight histories, and technical understanding of the field of view captured by the lens is convincing proof that the video documented a perfectly normal passenger aircraft. Similarly, lack of religious faith (or even soft spirituality) earns one the accusation. In this instance, it is not the evidence against that convinces the non-believer, it is the deafening vacuum of evidence in favor.

The second misuse is when open-mindedness is used as some kind of defense by people who cling to baseless methods of thinking. The proof has been presented, the debate has been won. However, no matter how much argument is leveled against them, they contort through amazing mental acrobatics to explain why they still believe. “At least I'm open-minded,” they say, despite the fact that they have methodically refused to accept new information precisely because it threatens their favored view. This is not intellectual honesty, nor is it admirable persistence. It's wasted energy and, when allowed to influence society, an incredible waste of resources. When school districts, for example, allow the waste of money, time, and human talent and potential by allowing children to be lied to during class time in the name of open-minded fairness the component of examining new ideas concerning critical thinking is intentionally abandoned. When people with legitimate illness – or, more commonly, those surrounding them – turn to faith healers and quack remedies, the shield of open-mindedness is thrown up to deflect the accusations of negligent care. No amount of belief or faith will enable a crystal to cure cancer. This kind of behavior is more accurately described as being mindlessly stubborn, or if one is less inclined to generosity as willful ignorance.

Ignoring The Islamic State

We can make the collective choice to turn our backs on what the Islamic State represents, but that decision must be a deliberate one made with full knowledge of the trade we are making.

The somewhat limp and always disappointing-to-me backlash against American involvement in a military action against theocratic fascists in Mesopotamia seems to me, looking at it in a generous light, to be solely driven by the desire to not continue sending our countrymen to die in the desert at the hands of people we probably wouldn't collectively be thinking or talking about if our soldiers weren't there. This is drawing an affirmative conclusion from a negative or unproved premise, namely that our soldiers being there is guaranteed to result in their death and that non-involvement will somehow insulate us from the developments in the region. It is inaccurately described as “war weariness” by our media, as if any civilian opining on military action from the comfort of 6,000 or more miles removed has the right to claim to be weary of combat. This is more of the same petulant and smug complaining from the comfortable set, weary of nothing but the intrusion of other people into their self-serving cocoons. Instead of choosing action based on well-reasoned and logical argument for non-involvement, it is a complacent and conciliatory trade we are engaged in with this growing horrorshow, just as a lifelong laborer trades wage for cartilage.

The ignorant and self-defeating proposition from the more fuzzy-minded among us would have you believe that groups such as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda are somehow extremists, that their incredibly barbarous and backwards ideas and actions are a perversion or corruption of the horrific relic referred to unironically as a religion of peace instead of a fundamental command from their holy texts. The latter is obviously true, and denial of that fact in the name of tolerance is one of the more odious symptoms of the virus running unchecked through otherwise intelligent people who would like very much to allow for religious pluralism while simultaneously not being at war with those same religions. This proposition necessarily requires peaceful co-existence with groups of people who are told they have divine warrant for the wholesale slaughter of anyone from any other group. As you can see, this is an incredibly difficult endeavor to simply imagine, let alone achieve with the rapidity we require to avoid the worst outcomes imaginable.

I'm actually referring to a nuclear war, but this is still somehow horrifying.

The population of a group of true believers relative to the rest of us, especially when they are committed to getting what they want through violence, has never created an obstacle to one crackpot religion after another shaping us through force both culturally and politically. It must be unthinkable to us to forget what all religions of the world have done – the damage inflicted and civilizations lost forever – when they thought they could get away with it due to no secular resistance. Dismissals of the Islamic State as being a non-threat to America due to their geographic distance and perceived logistical shortcomings may be technically true for the immediate future, however those dismissals ignore the fact that diseased beliefs like religion spread very quickly in both a benign vacuum as well as under threat of death. The converts flocking in currently small numbers to the pretender caliphate are not only people with no futures from the region, they are people from tolerant and pluralist countries like the US, Australia, and Great Britain, where publicly speaking out against the threat Islam poses us is not yet recognized as common sense. Whether their group grows by the dozens or thousands by year's end, there is no amount of them small enough or geographic region isolated enough to be tolerable or judged to pose no threat to the rest of us. I argue that if left unchecked they will grow and expand outside Mesopotamia to pose a constant and credible threat to all nations, and they will do so waving their holy texts.

Just like these extras from "Conan" and their ghost horses.

Either the writings of the Qur’an and hadith are the divine delivery of mandate from the creator of everything through the Archangel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed or they are not. Within those writings are the mandates for the oppression of other peoples, the subjugation of women, the destruction of modernized civilizations, and the death penalty for apostates. If these instructions are the creator's divine word then these “extremists” are the only true believers getting it right, as it were, and our decision to pretend they're not Muslim is not only suicidally ignorant but incredibly disrespectful to their religious beliefs, which we claim to respect. On the other hand, if these mandates are nonsense dictated by an illiterate epileptic, which they are, what does that say about the parsing of real Muslims from false ones? And why, with the inability of influential mullahs and imams to issue a blanket fatwa against any kind of false crusade due to their religion, do we continue to pretend these actions are not recognized, promoted, and praised by the leaders of this sick and dangerous cult? I do not propose a false choice, and I do not see how any other conclusion could be reached.

Those other conclusions have an inordinate amount of 'splaining to do.

In anticipation of the immediately obvious rebuttal, that of the vast majority of people who profess the Muslim faith are peaceful and contributing members of society, perfectly wonderful human beings to all they meet, loved by puppy dogs and goldfish, let me offer this explanation. Every person I have personally met who claimed to be Muslim has been a genuinely warm and sweet individual, not including those whom I have met tangentially through debate. They do not want to kill me or anyone else, they are as furious at the actions of the Islamic State as I am with the added seasoning of shame and revulsion at what they feel is being done to their religion's reputation. Their wives and girlfriends speak openly, and I can see their face when they do so, and no one is missing any body parts. I can scarcely believe they're being honest with me about their faith. I again argue that if you are not adhering to the mandates handed down by the being you believe created you and will punish you for disobedience, on what authority can it be argued you are an adherent of that cult? If Allah told Gabriel to tell Mohammed to tell Muslims to kill apostates, and you're smarter than that, what need have you to still tie the noose of religion around your own neck? It should be cast off, as all the needs people fulfill with religion can be satisfied just as easily without it.

As illustrated here, in this poorly photoshopped metaphor.

On material costs. By postponing the extirpation of the Islamic State, we are actively delaying the reconstruction of a tragically and needlessly destroyed modern civilization that made irreplaceable contributions to the advancement of knowledge and humanity. This is a consequence that should cause any thinking person discomfort. We prevent the reconstruction of education and trade infrastructure, which the area is muddling through but can obviously use as much help and time as possible without ignorant savages blowing everything up. Postponing the stabilization of development of Mesopotamian oil supplies, which is approaching amounts unseen since the Hussein crime family controlled the region, strangles the financial benefits to both Iraqi and Kurdish people.

 Ignoring our pocketbooks for a moment, I want to explore what would result as the moral consequences of our decision. To begin with, we leave the peoples of the area who are powerless or ineffective at providing real resistance to the Islamic State at their mercy, which is a very grim thought if you mull it at all. The eschatology of Islam, along with all other religions, calls for the absolute end of all humanity. Total erasure of man from the face of the Earth at the time of (or to bring on) the second coming. Since these people proclaiming an Islamic State must have the primitive self-awareness necessary to understand how pitifully inept they would be at any kind of scientific or technological endeavor, they must outsource the brain power necessary to achieve their ends. Muslims educated at European and American institutions must go and help these savages with their work. The consequence of this, and no one can call it alarmist, is that every day we do not actively participate in the stabilization and reconstruction of the region we move one day closer to finding out what the religious will do with nuclear and biological weapons. This isn't news to anyone, but I bring it up to reiterate and reinforce that Islam calls for the extermination of all humanity to bring on the final judgement. 

Just in case you forgot what that will look like.

At that time, Mahdi the redeemer of Islam will come to Earth and team up with Jesus like some kind of post-modern Superfriends to do battle against the false messiah, whom they apparently have in common. Their inevitable victory will result in all of our deaths and the eradication of sin so that their ghosts may eat grapes and our ghosts may suffer eternally. As silly as all this sounds to anyone with half a reasoning mind, it barely begins to relate the sheer mindless nonsense the Muslim religion imparts to our enemies. The very real consequence of that nonsense, and our reward for trading in tolerance, is that as soon as these people get their hands on a way to carry out nuclear or biological attack on our civilization, they will.

Reflections On The Revolution In Scotland

Despite Scotland's loss in tonight's referendum, an irreplaceable example of democracy and a mortal blow to the monarchy has been delivered.

Independence is a remarkably easy thing to take for granted. Living where I do, through no effort or sacrifice of my own, I daily enjoy the benefits delivered by my country without ever fully thinking about or recognizing what those benefits consist of. That realization made being able to witness tonight's Scottish independence referendum live something of a lesson in where my countrymen and I have fallen short of our democratic ideal.

"Bitch, bitch, bitch. I didn't hear you making any suggestions."

Years in the making, with a fever pitch reached in the last month, the buildup to the referendum fascinated me. The wheedling promises delivered by Britain, the thinly-veiled threats of Scotland being somehow left out in the cold by gaining independence, the nonsensical and distracting arguments over currency, all played out tonight district by district. Live coverage on anything other than BBC showed static shots of the smaller polling places, the BBC itself went with more of a CNN feeling. Multi-pundit panels discussed incoming speculation while useless holograms floated polling data and a map of Scotland produced by Atari through the room like the unwelcome wafted aroma of a crypt.

The results began slowly, and the head pundit frantically cut off the panel exchange that was struggling to retain civility to introduce us to the first of a string of ballot officials walking to a podium in a gymnasium. The production department had tried to give the event an air of majesty but the construction crew and the video crew had failed to coordinate their efforts, resulting in a carefully dressed stage made ridiculous by the cameraman pulling back to include the crowd and the pitifully minimal arrangements that had been made. The official began their recitation, clearly worded to simply deliver the voting results in as straightforward a manner as humanly possible. District, population and turnout, hard numbers up and down, accounting of why each discarded ballot had received their disposition. This last bit fascinated me: unclear mark, mark in favor of both options, no mark, all easily understood. The last reason for a ballot being disregarded was for having a mark which would identify in some way the citizen who had cast it. Now, seeing as this ballot had a spot for “Yes” and a spot for “No,” the initiative and creativity to fuck that up impresses me to no end.

"Where do I pick my side dishes?"

By 9pm Pacific Time (5am Glasgow) the district results were being announced so regularly that the BBC anchors stopped covering the feed from each district immediately after the hard numbers, as by then we had all listened to the mundane list of reasons for discounted ballots more than a dozen times. The cheers that came from each pronouncement of a “No” district victory were those of animal revelry, immediate and overwhelming but carrying with it a wave of exhausted relief, as if an immense wave had broken before reaching their homes. The timid-looking and mousey ballot officials reciting their result script scarcely seemed to know if they should speak through the uproar for the benefit of the record or stand in uncomfortable anticipation of the crowd's abatement.

Picture a tinier version of this dapper gentleman.

By 9:45p (5:45a Glasgow) there were roughly six districts left to report, and they were taking their sweet time. This led to a forced conversation that lobbed between the panel members, interspersed with the ever-frustrating “Let's go to Twitter” breaks so we could find out what JuicyKitten548 had to say regarding the fate of the empire. Again some over-eager ponce was trotted out to waltz with hologram numbers, his delivery stilted and pausing due to the un-coordinated effects timing. It was then that I sorely missed the relative dramatic mastery of CNN and their resident Shakespearean genius, Wolf Blitzer. The BBC anchors tried so hard to reach his levels of mindless babbling and useless numbers, but sadly fell short of one of my nation's chief news outlets.

"For live results, here's a hologram of the second coming of Jebus."

Glasgow was the rearranged deck chairs on tonight's sinking ship. The BBC sound engineer working that polling station had clearly not prepared for the volume of the crowd's reaction, as the overwhelming response reduced the sound output to the furious crackling ocean noise of redlined microphones. The pride those people felt was incredible to witness.

As soon as BBC called the result, the shaming sting of loss and disappointment caused some online who had been optimistically watching their declining chances to turn on their countrymen and themselves. Nonsense was written about people being ashamed of being Scottish, accusations of their ancestors dying in war against the British for nothing, jeering insults about being the only country in history to vote against their own independence. What they didn't do was congratulate the rightly-proud people of Scotland for conducting themselves immensely well through what could not have been a more difficult referendum, something my home country doesn't always accomplish in the tidiest fashion. In addition, the ridiculously high voter turnout in most districts is nothing short of amazing and needs to be lauded. To learn that between 80% and 90% of the people who could vote chose to is not only a victory for the process, it shows the strength of the democratic system when used by an informed and motivated populace. Over 1.5 million residents of the United Kingdom voted to no longer be a part of it. The biggest city in Scotland, the roughly 600,000-strong Glasgow, voted to be independent. Aberdeen voted no, but Groundskeeper Willie could not be reached for comment.

Pictured here not commenting.

Regarding the matter of a people rejecting their own independence, this slight turns out to be technically false, as a handful of people have voted down their own referendums for one reason or another. Nevis from St. Kitts, Tamil from the Sri Lankan diaspora, Veneto from Italy. Perhaps most similar to Scotland is the failed vote in 1933 to make Western Australia independent from Australia Prime, a voting process which the British Parliament ignored in its entirety, and which would have provided a template for Parliament to deal with this bothersome little uprising if only Scotland wasn't so indignantly right-next-door. Soon comes Catalonia's referendum seeking independence from Spain, which is set for the ninth of November of this year, and is being actively opposed by the Spanish government.

That worked out okay, as I recall.

It's unthinkable to me to vote against one's own independence, but I expect there will be reams of analysis over the next week that will explain to me why it was the best and only choice, no doubt glazed with fawning reverence for the hideous royals and their Skesis-like matriarch. It would appear that, despite the negative outcome of the independence vote, a severe blow has still been dealt against the monarchy. The frenzied promises, from tax levying to Tesco's, must now be followed through with by Parliament, with proposals scheduled to be presented at the beginning of next year. Despite the apparent willingness of the British Parliament to grow and adapt in order to accomplish their “devolution” and of the majority of Scotland's citizens to believe them, it still strikes me as not having the courage to bet on yourself to win, deciding to never leave your parents' home and succeed or fail on your own terms.

Submission to Harpocrates

The self-imposed censorship when dealing with the murderous threats of our religious enemies is less a misguided attempt at retaining an imagined innocence and more our culture's inability to face a serious and fatal threat head on.

When the so-called "caliphate" that has imposed its noxious presence on Mesopotamia released a recording of the brutal slaughter of a non-combatant journalist, the immediate response of major media outlets was to omit access to the video entirely in their reporting, choosing instead to provide excuses that managed to be simultaneously groveling and self-aggrandizing. 

Their position argues that the dissemination of this recorded war crime (which they refer to as "propaganda") needlessly frightens Americans while providing encouragement and motivation to our enemies, thereby "helping the terrorists win." You will recall this dirge of a platitude from roughly 2004, the last time I can recall that level of childishly sniveling pseudo-psychology from our bastions of the fourth estate. Even if you choose to call the recorded slaughter of a civilian non-combatant sent to western civilization as a crowing threat propaganda, a descriptor which I find incredibly dismissive and diminutive in this case, we are swayed by that threat and not fulfilling our requirement as a civilized culture when we intentionally deny our citizens an opportunity to witness for themselves the horrific crushing force that nameless people half a world away face daily. Looking away, treating our sworn enemies as if they were schoolyard bullies that can be disarmed or dissuaded from hurting us by ignoring them, is an irretrievably fatal attitude.

The reactionary and mistaken argument that bearing witness to the vicious brutality of our religious enemies will bolster their credibility or respect ignores two simple points indicating the opposite to be true. No one thinks that these theocratic assholes are not serious actors in their region (not legitimate actors, mind you), nor does anyone think they lack the infrastructure and armament to accomplish their goals. The videos released by the "caliphate" therefore act as reminders and reinforcement, not as revelation. Consideration of what effect our reaction has on our enemies is entirely irrelevant in this case. Secondly, any kind of censorship ignores the irrepressible ability for people who want to see or hear something to seek it out, be they news addicts or the easily conned western jihadist, already planning on betraying both their community and their affiliation with humanity. Conversely, those of us who actively avoid graphic images from war zones are unaffected, as they would have no interest to begin with.

Regardless of the position taken by the major American media outlets, and independent of how many individuals choose to view the video in its entirety, our religious enemies are fervently slaughtering people from every subsection of humanity that isn't theirs. It may thrill them to hear that the spineless among us had our resolve crushed instead of steeled by this barbarism, but they're not sitting on their heels waiting for that news to arrive, nor would its arrival make them feel in any way understood or sated. 

Calls to censor and conceal the video represents a cowardly capitulation to our religious enemies on the part of the American media, as it shows we are willing to repeat the same reprehensible and indefensible mistakes engaged in during the Danish Mohammed cartoon incident. In that case, mindless and violent Imams cried without injury while threatening the rest of the world with violence if we should so much as look at a cartoon, which we spinelessly submitted to. Any kind of censorship is an assault on our first amendment, doubly so in the current case, when some external actor can cause us to voluntarily censor ourselves without so much as a request. Our culture's method of information gathering is now almost entirely visual. The idea of verbally relating an event when a video record of it exists is the kind of journalism better suited to a century ago. No interpretation of the first amendment requires or allows forcing people to watch anything they don't wish to, but any interpretation of it proscribes preventing or restricting the free flow of information.

Indeed, in our lifetime, the free flow of war zone information, images, and video have had huge impact. An increase in exposure to the engagement seems to herald its end, in my opinion. Following the cessation of conflicts, objective review of the timeline shows transparency and unfiltered images reaching the mass populace both beneficially increases our collective understanding of the location, consequences, and cost in lives while negatively affecting public support for the conflict.

We simply must know what we are up against. These people mean to kill us, one by one if they have to. And while they may not feel like the most proximate threat, our countrymen are defecting to their ranks in handfuls. The very real danger posed by the pretend "caliphate" is only going to grow until they are extirpated, and volunteering to cinch our own muzzle against them will be our collective future regret.