Oh well — I guess I’m glad to say I support it…

I gotta say, that the more electro and spacey crazy aspects of hip-hop are certainly my favorites. The first hip-hop album I really loved was Missy Elliott’s Miss E… So Addictive (which I also think is her “gay” album).

I’d rather have candidates talk about one or two issues and talk for five minutes and really explain their thoughts than feel pressured to fit everything into 30 seconds (which moderators seem to selectively enforce anyway…).

For the fun of it, I was reading about the song today and came across this amazing unofficial video:

I love that the video really highlights the transgressive nature of the Depeche Mode re-interpretation of the “traditional” version of “John the Revelator,” which has a much more religious tone. (Not that the Depeche Mode version isn’t religious — but it’s anti-religious, if anything.) Showing George W. Bush as an evil version of John the Revelator is just awesome.

In addition to that awesome video, the CD single for “John the Revelator” is pretty great, too. The UNKLE remix is my favorite, but Tiefschwarz does nice straightforward and dub versions of the song, too.

Finally, the official version of the video is nice too… it captures the spirit of their “Touring the Angel” tour (which I didn’t see in person but have a DVD of…):

One part of the interview especially struck me. The man says:

It’s not easy for everybody to get out of that situation. Especially right now, it’s very difficult for Iranians to leave Iran: they cannot get visas to different countries. They just have to deal with the situation, lead a secret life and tell lies all the time …

I never realized that the U.S. war on terror and all sorts of diplomatic restrictions (denying visas, travel, etc.) against certain countries are making it even more difficult for people in these (often Islamic and religious and extremely conservative) countries — not only economically, but also when it comes to progressive social change.

I’m not sure what the ideal situation is, but the specific case of gay people desiring to leave their super-religious conservative countries never occured to me.

Why not with Iraq?

“They are trying to make us more afraid of fixing the problem than the problem itself.”

Rachel Maddow said this tonight on Countdown about America’s health care problem. While it can certainly be applied to health care, I think this is basically the conservative position against almost anything progressive. It’s the best way to maintain the status quo. I think understanding this can make it a lot easier to achieve progress.

Who is Bill Breeden? He’s from John Poindexter‘s home town and held a sign for a street named in Poindexter’s honor for “ransom.” He was arrested and jailed for this. None of the military or government officials involved with illegally selling weapons or funding a war that the U.S. wasn’t supposed to be involved with or covering up served jail time.

Anyone who thinks that the recent news about Paris going to/from jail/house arrest has anything to do with faith in the justice system is terribly confused, I’m afraid.

(Fact thanks to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.)

The whole idea of mental illness is still very subjective and so this logic still returns to the fact that people with guns is a bad idea.

Homosexuality was defined as a mental illness until 1973. While nowadays people don’t really accept that and if you ask most people who say “people with mental illness shouldn’t be able to buy guns” (I’m thinking of someone faily liberal like Bill Richardson, who made the comment about mental illness that inspired this post during last night’s debate), they would have no problem with gays buying guns… but that’s because times have changed.

Let’s say some bill is passed and somehow “people with mental illness” cannot buy guns. Now lets say in 50 years or so there is some big religious war and some new religion or who knows what is behind it. Then lets say that a conservative president appoints conservative-minded people to whatever association decides what is and isn’t mentally ill. Next thing you know that association finds some “mental link” between mental illness and religion X.

The point of this is, defining mental illness is very inprecise. It’s a subjective label that might be helpful for doctors and psycologists, but not for making policy decisions.

Look, if I was in charge, I wouldn’t hesitate declaring “bigotry” as a mental illness. Racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. — I honestly and truthfully think that people who hate someone because of some innate trait have mental issues. I also, personally, think that there could be a connection between religion and mental illness. But that’s the thing — who am I to decide?

This whole “people with mental illness shouldn’t buy guns” thing is just an excuse. The problem is guns. While I want to be in favor of any little thing that gets more guns off of the street, I find it hard when the underlying premise is still “Guns are OK.”

For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children’s bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to “respect” their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon.

(emphasis mine)

Whenever I get all hot-headed and pissed off about conservative politics, I often have more than a few friends say, “Jason, you sound just like they do.” And while this may be true (and I loved it when someone called me an evangelical athiest once), although I may sound like them, in the end I don’t act like them.

Conservatives and the religions behind them want to say, “Jason, as a gay person you cannot married and if we had our way (those damn courts!!), having sex would be illegal and we might even kill you.” I would never do that. While laws outlawing homosexuality are not uncommon or even that “extreme” in today’s politics (a city manager in Largo, Florida was fired for wanting to have a gender-changing operation), I would never think of or suggest that Christianity or any opposite-sex marriages should be outlawed or punishable by the law.

A goal of religion is to create more religious followers. They are always going to be trying to do things to convert people like me. Athiests don’t do that. Sure, I get in a lot of heated and maybe offensive debates with people, but I honestly and truthfully believe the situations are different. Am I wrong?