Russian, Albanian Election Monitors Sent to Florida

The most heartwarming thing just happened to me.  Regular readers of mcgees.org will know of my love for tea, specifically teas from In Pursuit of Tea, and more specifically the Autumn Green that I wrote about previously.  In that post, I mentioned using the last of the Autumn Green, and being intrigued by In Pursuit of Tea’s offering of Pouchong Ming Yue, which is supposed to be similar but better.  I finished the post with the lines

I’m considering whether to re-order the Autumn Green, of which they still have some sealed stock left over from last year, or to just order the Ming Yue.  Considering their high recommendation, and my sentimental attachment to the Autumn Green, I might just do both.

Well, I ended up not doing so.  I did not re-order my cherished Autumn Green, instead ordering the Pouchong Ming Yue, the Tieguanyin Competition Monkey Picked, the Dragon Well Superior Grade Green, and re-ordering the Sencha, all of which are expensive teas.

Exactly four weeks ago I placed the order.  My credit card was charged, but after two weeks the package had not shown up.  I called them and they apologized profusely: my order had never been sent out.  They promised to do so immediately.  A week and a half later, the order still had not shown up.  I called back: again they apologized, as they once again neglected to send out my order.  By this point I was getting slightly annoyed, as I was highly looking forward to tasting the new teas.  They promised to send the package out second day air, and it would get here by the end of the week.

Today, Thursday, I woke up to find the package on my doorstep.  I took the box in to work, unopened, glad to finally have my four teas.  I got to my desk and opened the package.  On my receipt, the co-owner of the company had hand-written “Please enjoy the Autumn Green Oolong.  Sorry again for the mixup.”  He knows I love the Autumn Green, knows I did not order it this time, and sent a quarter pound of it free of charge.  How wonderful is that?

Last night I was fortunate to catch the second half of a National Public Radio roundtable between the American Independent, Natural Law, and Green Party candidates in California’s gubernatorial race.  It was an interesting half hour.  The American Independent party is frightening, seeming to be right of Pat Robertson.  In his closing statements, their candidate expressed his desire for the state to — I am not making this up — “return to an Ozzie and Harriet California.”  The Natural Law candidate, after she loses this election, could probably get a job writing greeting cards for Hallmark.  Her speech was packed full of platitudes such as, “We must remember that our greatest resource is our human resource.”  Well, thanks; that was informative.

The Green Party candidate, for whom I am voting, generally came across well.  He completely blew his top at one point, however, to the point of near shouting, and in the process seemed to disparage European-descended Americans (he is a Latino.)  He did have a bit of provocation: the American Independent candidate had just stated that the solution to California’s immigration problems is to — and again I am not making this up — return to an Ellis Island model in which prospective immigrants are screened for diseases and their criminal records checked to make sure we are not letting rapists and murderers into the state.  The quote out of context, unnerving as it is, does not give his sentiment enough force: the intonation and context were akin to his saying “we need to keep those filthy, criminal, diseased wetback animals from polluting our beautiful state”; that is, our beautiful, white, Ozzie and Harriet state.

According to an ABC poll, the Green Party candidate is receiving 9% support (I don’t know if this is all people surveyed, registered voters, likely voters, or some other subgroup.)  That’s close to double-digits.  Europe went from Fascist leaders to Green leaders in half a century: I can still hold out hope for California.

(Note 31 October 2002: This came about a bit more harshly than it should have.  Sorry about that.  I have left it up unedited as it has already been discussed at QuickTopic, where a good discussion is going on.)

From the Christian Charity Department of mcgees.org:

If you don’t like Christianity, [t]hen why don’t all of you leave America, this country was founded by Christians for Christians. And if you don’t like it then go to a Godless heathen nation that agrees with your retard tinged philosophy. Their are way more of us Christians than you losers. Their is NO separation of church and state and you heathens will lose. Thankfully you are old and I hope you get a painful disease like rectal cancer and die a slow painful death, so you can meet your God, SATAN . . . .

There’s more.  You can view other hate mail filled with intolerant diatribes, racist, misogynist, and anti-gay messages, and anonymous death threats.

I am told frequently by Christians that while Christians might say hateful things and perform horrific acts, this is not the fault of Christianity.  Besides echoes of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, it is simply untrue.  Racism, intolerance of homosexuality, misogyny, and death threats are what the Bible excel at.  The book has taken these sentiments to dizzying heights.  Yes, I know that the Bible also attributes to Jesus the sentiment that we should love our neighbors.  But accepting that in light of other Biblical tales requires either a very diseased notion of love or a very limiting definition of neighbor.

Talk some time to a mainstream Christian and try to discern his or her criteria for determing whether something in the Bible is custom, a fallacy of man attributed to God, or truly God’s word.  A woman wearing men’s clothes is an abomination to God: that’s just a custom, you will be told, especially by a woman in slacks and a shirt.  We’re allowed to keep slaves: whoops, that’s a fallacy of man attributed to God, because we know slaveholding is wrong.  You must believe in God or you will go to hell: tada, that one’s God.

If the Christian is a non-fundamentalist with even an gram of education or understanding of physical processes, ask about the six day creation story.  Umm, must be a customary story, or a metaphor of some sort.  A woman who commits adultery, or a son who disrespects his parents, should be killed: yikes, that’s a fallacy of man, because, after all, God is Love.  One should love one’s neighbor as oneself: yep, God.

A pattern emerges quite rapidly.  If your conversation partner has already decided something is right, that’s the will of God.  If he or she has already decided something is wrong, that’s the will of man.  And if he or she has decided something is absurd, that’s custom.  In a way you have to respect the logic of Orthodox Jews more, who follow jaw-dropping, staggeringly pointless rules such as a hamburger being OK to eat, and a grilled cheese sandwich being OK to eat, but a cheeseburger being an abomination to God.  For the mainstream Christians, it’s all ad hoc justification.  It’s just each person’s prejudice given selective support by a deity.  (I’m not, by the way, saying Christians should logically follow kosher laws.  In their “New Testament” kosher laws are explicitly overturned.  “Yes, I know that eating pork was an abomination last Tuesday,” God says, “but it’s not any longer.”)

Rather than send hate-filled, death-threat-laden, and badly spell-checked missives to people in their communities, this group of Christians should grow spines, stop threatening that their invisible friend will beat people up, and begin to come to grips with their own hate, bigotry, and closed-mindedness.  We are all neighbors, folks.  Put down your Bible, unload your shotgun, and start acting like it.

My hard drive at home crashed this weekend.  Not the mcgees.org machine, but the Windows machine that I use for banking, browsing, and word processing.  I have that feeling of a deep pit in my stomach that always happens in these situations where I should have been more intelligent, should not have trusted the particular hardware I was using, and should have been more diligent about making backups.  I was cavalier, and once again it cost me.