An Experiment: Birther Website Moderation

During my travels across the internet this morning, I came across this:

Certified COPY of Obama Kenyan Birth Certificate

The gist of this is that a certain Lucas Smith traveled to Kenya (at great personal risk and expense), visited the hospital where Obama was born, and obtained a copy of his birth certificate. He is now submitting it in court to invalidate Barack Obama's Presidency. Representing him is, naturally, this crazy skank.

I have no serious objection to people wanting to come up with crazy theories as to why Obama is not a natural citizen. Maybe he was born in Africa. Or maybe he was born on the long-dead planet Krypton, sent here in a rocket ship by his father, Jor-El. Or perhaps he was never born at all, and his entire existence has been an elaborate trolling of America by 4chan.org, which is currently petitioning to have pedobear voted Miley Cyrus's #1 fan.

Whatever the case, I decided to put this website through a test. All comments require moderation, therefore I posted 2 comments up under 2 different names. One was sent in as "The Truth," the other as "Mudkipz."

As "The Truth," I pointed out the following problems with the Birth Certificate:

1) Lucas Smith has been convicted several times, once on multiple counts of forgery.

2) The document claims to be from "The British Protectorate of Kenya," date 1961. Mombasa was not part of Kenya in 1961, and would not become so until 1963. If it were real it would read "The British Protectorate of Zanzibar."

3) The units of measurement would be metric, not standard (not totally sure this is true actually - Kenya didn't adopt the metric system until 1967, but again - Mombasa was not part of Kenya).

4) I know they all like to think they're much smarter and more clever than the entire Republican party, but if there were even a 1% chance this were true, it would have been brought up to invalidate Obama during the election.

Then, as "Mudkipz," I submitted the following:

Damn straight i hope this clears up the whoel ilegal presidency now and we gt that terorist oreo rite back where he belongs - PRISON! he is a FRAUD who is sukcing our tax dollars into a socialist agenda so he can innoculate our kids after he LIED and LIED about being an American citizen. That is all his peopel do is LIE and STEAL, just like he is STEALING AMERICA.

I only thank GOD and JESUS who is the light and the way for delivering us from BEELEZBAMA and hope we see this great country back in the hands of JESUS where it belongs. GOD BLESS

My comments as "The Truth" were never acknowledged. My comment as "Mudkipz" passed and were put up on the boards within 10 minutes.

Without getting into what the other commentators have to say, regarding vast left-wing cover-ups, socialist conspiracies, and theories that Obama is actually the antichrist, I have to say that my post was fairly ignorant, and borderline racist. Yet that made it through their filters, as well as a follow-up post. I tried putting up a third comment basically stating "this will be the second time negroes start a Civil War" but by then someone had gotten wise and took away my posts (I'm going to try under a new name but I was probably just IP banned).

So let's not make this about birthers. I just want to instead toss out there the inherent danger of this sort of thinking in general. Here is what it basically breaks down to:

- This is America. Therefore I am entitled to my own opinion and the right to state it.
- I will create a site dedicated to like-minded individuals.
- If you do not agree with what we say, you may not state it.

How many other people choose to completely insulate themselves from debate? Not just themselves, but in this case an entire community? Can you really be acting in the best interest of proving your point if you shut down any debate coming your way with the internet equivalent of "lalala, I'm not listening?"

It was the same with Barack Obama's speech to the students beginning their school year. The speech was the subject of intense objection from the right (let's not accuse them of anything new though; when George H.W. Bush gave a similar speech 1n 1991 and also encouraged students to stay off drugs, Democrats accused him of using it as a political commercial for his D.A.R.E. program) before anyone even knew what was in it. People, and I don't just mean the type of people posting on this birthers site, I mean elected officials like Jean Schmidt and Jim Greer actually believed, or espoused to believe, that Barack Obama is a socialist, and his message would be to indoctrinate children into his evil machinations. Not only believed it, but went on the news and argued it. When it turned out that it was just a harmless pep talk designed to do exactly what the White House statement said it would do, the people who were opposing it claimed that their objections had obviously forced Obama to change the speech. Does it really satisfy people to completely stymie all challenge to their immediate beliefs and wade through life in a sea of ignorance? Is it REALLY bliss?

I think the least American thing you can do (besides renouncing your citizenship and declaring allegiance to the United Kingdom and the Crown) is be willfully ignorant. In a country where our system of government depends on the people being informed enough to make a smart decision, nothing is more detrimental than refusing to engage in debate and view the research of others. That's how we end up with a frightening number of people who don't believe in evolution.

Also, on that topic - there's no such thing as "micro" and "macro" evolution. Evolution is evolution. Stop using creationist terms. One species can become another given enough time and reason. Birds evolved from dinosaurs. Man did not evolve from monkeys, but we do share a common ancestor in the gene pool. They just discovered some jungle in Papau New Guinea where kangaroos live in trees and frogs have fangs. Stop trying to deny science, dammit.

Anyway, back to the point at hand. If you're not willing to defend your point, don't make it. Or at least don't try to keep the people who argue with you from speaking. Walking through life in a bubble isn't going to benefit you, and the worst that can happen if you open yourself up is that you might learn something.

In closing, giant pandas refuse to mate because they're saving themselves for Chuck Norris.

The Dream

It was Stan Lee, the spiritual Godfather of Marvel Comics and former head honcho for years and years, who anecdotally gathered his editors around sometime in the 1970s once it looked like the comics industry was here to stay and said 'We no longer need change - we only need the illusion of change' - a philosophy which has carried through mainstream Super Hero comics almost completely undeterred to this day. In the 1960s, especially in the new and blooming Marvel Comics, change was a constant - characters actually aged, their surroundings changed, their premises weren't yet set totally in stone.

Nowadays that kind of change is almost impossible to find - characters have a status quo and almost every great change will eventually revert back to that status quo. Daredevil and Spider-Man may both be publicly unmasked, Steve Rogers can be murdered on the steps of the Capitol, Spidey and Mary Jane can even enjoy a 20 year marriage together - but eventually things revert back to their most classic forms. There's a logic to this - comics are unique in a way that no other industry can boast: characters like Superman or Batman have now been published consistently on a monthly basis for 70 years, and nearly all of their appearances are canonical. In the goal not to alienate both long term and first time readers, these characters enter a sort of cyclical pattern - whereby they constantly change and revert - or the 'illusion of change.' This is especially true once a character reaches a certain degree of popularity or mainstream attention - a small character can be endlessly re-tooled, but once public perception of a character is established you can bet that they'll be back that way one day.

Even harder to change is the actual premise of a strip, the fundamental ideas that govern a specific Super Hero. One of the few lasting changes has been the marriage of Lois and Clark, completely changing the 'Love Triangle' engine that a lot of people felt was the core of Superman's success (Clark loves Lois, Lois loves Supes, Supes wants Lois to love him as Clark). Now, with Lois knowing who Clark is, the nature of Superman's core has changed - Lois is played as Clark's tether to humanity, his true connection to the people of Earth in his times of greatest struggle as an outsider, his greatest source of strength and his greatest weakness, and in a way his embrace of mortality even as a God. Even with this deepening of the character, most of the Superman mythos remains the same: Clark is a mild mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper, kryptonite can kill him, Jimmy Olsen is his goofy pal, Metropolis is his home, etc. All of these elements are intrinsically Superman and even if one changes for a time it will return because that is the satus quo.

Which is why has happened recently and over the years with the X-Men is so fascinating.
In a way it makes sense that a comic book who's premise is based in evolution would be one of the few to slowly but genuinely change past the point of it's original concept and evolve into something I don't think can ever revert back from.

The X-Men's original premise was that Charles Xavier was a mutant with a Dream - a fictional analogue to Martin Luther King. Homo Superior, or 'mutants' had begun to evolve from Homo Sapiens, each blessed and cursed with strange and wondrous powers. More importantly, their very arrival signaled the impending deth knell of the Human species, a prospect that fundamentally scared the crap out of a culture that generally fears and hates what it does not understand. Mutants are considered a menace to society and face termination and camps. Xavier secretly runs a school to train and teach young mutants with an eye towards peaceful co-existence between man and mutant alike - never hating the humans back for their fear, but offering peace as a choice instead. His students become the outlaw group the X-Men, designed to combat the more violent and proactive mutant groups, especially those led by Magneto - Xavier's old friend, a holocaust survivor, and the Malcolm X to Xavier's MLK.

So while there are a ton of other fantastical aspects to the stories, the core of the X-Men is a few things - that Xavier dreams of peaceful coexistence, runs a school to teach young mutants, operates in secret; the world not knowing he is a mutant, and is embroiled in a deep idealogical debate over the nature of evolution with Magneto. The X-Men are taught the moral code of most heroes: not to kill, to act selflessly and with care to man and mutant alike, lead by example. His greatest student is a young man named Scott Summers, or Cyclops, an orphan who looks to Xavier like a father figure. Cyclops is so straight laced that it becomes a character point - some fans see him as lame, but he becomes synonymous with Xavier's dream. Established many times is that Scott is groomed to be Xavier's succesor. Being an X-Man is the only thing Scott knows.

What makes the X-Men so culturally relevant is the idea of mutant as the minority, easily accessible to any group who has been hated or feared. The camps in Days of Future Past are reminiscent of Concentration Camps during the Holocaust, the rounding up and registration of mutant Americans like Japanese internment camps. Prop X, a law written to keep mutants from breeding is the Marvel U analogy to Prop 8. Gay, Jewish, Black, White, Straight, Asian, what have you - all of us have likely been persecuted at one point because of what we are and the X-Men stand as a spandexed point of unity to that shared experience. Because of that the X-Men have been one of the few comics to embrace a diverse cast - the first major change in the comic being the '70s when they went from a classic whitebread quintent to a more adult lineup featuring a German (Nightcrawler), Canadian (Wolverine), African (Storm), Irishman (Banshee), Native American (Thunderbird), Russian (Colossus), Japanse (Sunfire), and soon a Jew (Shadowcat). Even with this radical cast expansion the school remained the same. And of course, Scott led them unwavering into the field.

But the basic tenets of the X-Men have actually completely changed now, and in a deep and profound way. Whether it be a response to the changes of society or the evolution of the story, Xavier's dream is no longer the guiding force of the X-Men as a group and I truly believe we have moved so far past that original concept that things will never fully revert.

The X-Men comic and what it represents has truly evolved and in the world of mainstream comics that is amazing.

One of the key moments of this was Grant Morrison's 'outing' of Professor X to the world at large as a mutant. Suddenly the school was no longer a secret, and that was a total game changer in the premise of the storytelling. Taking the Homosexual metaphor that True Blood has also been playing with - once the X-Men were out of the closet, there is no going back. That would be an insult to the very audience supporting the comic. Scott Summers took on the headmaster role of the school after being posessed by and released from the ultimate evil and was no longer the straight forward boy scout he used to be - carrying on a telepathic affair with the White Queen. 16 million mutants were massacred by Sentinels in Genosha - showing that mutants were no longer a minority in the way they had always been, but capable of populating a country the size of Israel. And Charles Xavier was revealed to have been manipulative in ways only hinted at before - including Xavier hiding the existence of Scott's younger brother Gabriel and how he almost killed him - creating a seismic schism between teacher and student.

Then Marvel pulled the coup de gras - in an attempt to make mutants more unique and less prevalent, with a magic word they rid the entire Marvel U of every mutant but 200. Mutants are no longer the inheritors of the earth - they are a dying species hell bent on survival at any cost. Forget the dream - there is no school anymore, Xavier has been completely replaced as the X-Men's leader. Scott Summers is no longer a teacher or the leader of a team - he is the spokesperson for an entire people, like Moses before him. Settled in San Francisco, America's cradle of acceptance, Scott has gone from student to President/General/Ambassador/Savior. The man who wouldn't kill now has a secret Wetworks team he sends to take hits out on mutant and human foes alike. He operates on the political level against the government of the United States and sees his people as an army.

It's actually rather startling to see how a concept to born and bred in the '60s, that gained entirely new success with it's diversity in the '70s, and was the example of absolute excess in the '90s has come to perfectly capture the fears of our generation, in the post-modern and technical age. Who has time for dreams when the Government is telling you how to breed? (or marry?)

Scott Summers is the new face of the X-Men, and while Xavier will still live on the margins, I don't see us ever going back.

The dream is dead.
Embrace change.

Wow! Anger evolved into . . . Outrage!

It is things like this that drive me nuts.

Texas may start teaching against Evolution

How is it that the people who most vocally oppose science end up in positions to influence it on a national scale?

I'm going to be perfectly frank on this issue. Some ungentlemanly language may arise. I don't know, I'm not planning it, but I feel fair warning is warranted as the issue of how we continually re-elect people intent on undermining education, the single most important element in the framework of our country, is one that outrages me.

Teaching Creationism to "let kids understand the argument" is bullshit. BULLSHIT. We are talking about a class in which we send our children to learn science. That is why it is called science class. Evolution is, to the best of our knowledge, the strongest scientific argument for how life arose on the planet. Creationism is not science. It has no scientific basis. It's teaching children that we should be skeptical of what science tells us if there's a religious precept contradicting it. The textbooks in question are meant to teach our students biology; that is, the biological functions of the plant and animal life on Earth as we best understand it. Not "Here's 500 years of painstaking research OR we can just say it all magically appeared one day."

Goddammit, my Pokemon EVOLVE, they do not have their prayers for better stat growth answered by a kind and benevolent deity.

Is Evolution that hard to reconcile with religious beliefs? Do any of the people who argue that dinosaur bones were put in the ground by Satan to test our faith (and yes, those people are real) believe that God falls under the same constraints as the typical Roman calender? It does not actually state the age of the Earth at any point in the bible. Is it really that much of an affront to suggest life was made to adapt on its own? "Intelligent design" has us believe God planned out every stage of existence for us. Doesn't that run completely contradictory to the idea that we were given free will? Is it that impossible to believe that God created life, gave it the ability to adapt and survive in changing environments, and then left us to our own devices? Wouldn't that actually work out a lot better?

I digress. Evolution and Religion walking hand-in-hand as some Creationists would have you believe man did with dinosaurs (which, remember, by another school of thought, were buried there by the devil) is not the issue. The issue is that there are people in our society actively trying to push our education system backwards and pollute the institution of science because they don't think it gels with what their invisible man has to say. If we want students to question evolution, why don't we teach them the holes in the theory and the unresolved issues with the fossil record? Maybe that will inspire more biologists and archaeologists, and fewer television evangelists. Maybe it will make people want to learn. A friend of mine put it best; "The "Darwin made errors" argument simply shows that the person is ignoring hundreds of years of research since his publication and perhaps assumes that science, like religion, is an archaic dogma that is against change. Rather, science embraces new theories and corrections and well, it becomes clear that the person using this argument is not even aware of how the scientific method is intended to be put into use."

This isn't about promoting discussion or argument. This is about mandating religious beliefs be taught in a scientific course. That's the kind of education we would send children off to college with. Could this be a contributing factor to 25% of high school students in America not graduating on time - or at all? Maybe not this specifically, but things like this, definitely. Because this kind of thinking contributes to the idea that there are forces too complex for us to understand, therefore we shouldn't even try. It doesn't just stymie knowledge, it prevents it from ever being formed in the first place.

Creationism is not a bad thing to learn. Not by any means. If your school teaches a class on Comparative Religion or Religious Studies, it's the perfect venue for it. Not biology. Evolution, imperfect as the theory may be, can be supported by scientific evidence. There is no part of Creationism that lines up with any ideas other than those which are religious doctrines. That is not science, and should not be taught to our children.

Please, for all of our sakes, let's keep try and keep our education system from getting worse. Teach religion at home, or let children learn it objectively in the classroom. Don't let them believe that it has any basis in science.

And can we convert to the fucking metric system already?!