Sunday, October 11, 2015

Open Carry Oath Keepers Swear to Keep Bigotry Alive

Photo by Ryan Dickey
CBS Detroit reported that a group calling itself the Oath Keepers--an open carry group--rallied yesterday in Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn is a suburb of Detroit with a large Muslim population. According to CBS, a rally organizer explained:
As this invasion of Muslim colonization continues unchecked on American soil, we can only expect the same suffering now endured by EUROPE…Now is the time to act.
It's true that Dearborn has one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in the US, a demographic phenomenon that began back in the mid-1970s with an influx of Lebanese fleeing their country's civil war. As Michigan Radio reported last year:
  Today, Dearborn is a unique Arab-American community--both nationally and among the smaller Arab communities scattered around Metro Detroit.
  The Dearborn community is overwhelmingly Muslim, and majority Shiite Muslim. Shiites are a minority in the Muslim world. It’s also mostly Lebanese, with smaller pockets of Iraqis, Yemenis, and Palestinians.
  Nationally, Arab Americans are roughly half Muslims and half Christians. Metro Detroit also has a number of smaller Arab communities, many of them majority Christian—like the growing Chaldean community in Sterling Heights.
Is this an "invasion" or "colonization?" Hardly, but not surprising that some people think that. The British polling firm Ipsoso MORI found that people in the US tend to wildly overestimate the number of Muslims in the country:
According to the new poll, US citizens guessed the Muslim population of the US to be about 15 percent when asked “Out of every 100 people, how many do you think are Muslim?” This would mean that the US has 47.4 million Muslims. The reality is quite different, with current research putting the percentage of Muslims in the United States at about .8 percent of the population, with an estimated 2.6 million Muslims in the US as of 2010 [quoted here, see also the Pew Foundation's similar estimate here, which also predicts a doubling of that population by 2030, to 1.7% of the US population].
But given that Oath Keepers label this tiny demographic shift an invasion of colonization (an odd conflation of two different concepts), no wonder they want to gather in Dearborn, openly bearing their weapons. They've a country to defend! Even humanity to defend, for yesterday's "resistance" was part of a nation-wide "Global Rally for Humanity."

Apparently, humanity excludes Muslims, who make up almost a quarter of the world's population. What are we to make of a group that dehumanizes such a large number of people? Worse, a group that connects the demand for unfettered gun rights to the fear of Muslims?  And not just fear of them. This regurgitation of John Birchers (see a profile of their leader here) is afraid of the United Nations, of a black president, same sex marriage, and immigrants in general who don't look like what they think an American should look like, even if they're Christian (see here for a resume of Oath Keeper actions). Must be tiring to go around lugging those guns, day to day, afraid of so much.



They remind me of a lovely person I live with who happens to be tragically sliding into dementia, talking to people I cannot see, who won't come out of her room because there's a "man" out there, who fears unlocked or open doors, who is constantly startled by whatever. But she has no control over this. The Oath Keepers, on the other hand, have made the choice to live a life of fear, and to take it out on others.

According to one source, only "about twelve" showed up, just four of them openly armed. The Detroit News reported that
Saturday’s boisterous assembly included about 75 people, mostly counter-protesters, according to Dearborn Police Chief Ronald Haddad.
That heartens me. Only a paltry number in Michigan exhibit, at least publicly, this collective dementia that unjustifiably translates difference into existential angst.

Friday, October 9, 2015

I'd rather you not eat my brains, thank you


I've been having a lot of fun using this text in my introductory course on International Relations, and most of my students, even those saying they're not into the zombie genre, enjoy this witty ride through different paradigms of international politics via this premise: what would countries do in the face of an outbreak of zombies?  Or to put it in non-zombie terms: what would countries do if there were an unprecedented, catastrophic event on a global scale? Think of the movie Contagion, or any story of world-wide plague, real (American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic) or not (The Stand). Drezner walks readers through the various descriptions and predictions that the different paradigms offer (realism, liberalism, constructivism, including theoretical derivations of each), and my students have found it a useful repetition of what they're getting out of the other standard primer that I use (my one criticism is that Drezner blithely dismisses critical and feminist theories).

Anyway, a Washington Post blog by Christopher Ingraham popped up on my Facebook page this morning: Where to live if you want to survive a zombie apocalypse: The definitive guide. Ingraham wonders where in the US would we have the highest chance of surviving a plague of zombies. He determines the best places based on these five factors.
Low population density (less people = less zombies)
Access to guns (self-explanatory, to be honest)
People with military experience (veterans!)
Terrain that's difficult for zombies to traverse (when's the last time you saw one scale a cliff?)
Access to bodies of water (zombies can't swim, and you need water to survive)
Using sliders, the reader than can chose which of these variables she or he would think more important. The reader can then slide the arrow over the map getting the county by county results. Here's the map based on my preferences



I buy the logic that lower population density means lower chance of running into zombies (and therefore lower incident of infection). Besides, I'm an introvert. But one problem here is whether the zombies are the slow-moving kind as depicted in George Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead, or the fast-moving kind as seen in 28 Days Later and World War Z. I hope for the former, since I'm 55 and my hamstrings are shot (Drezner thinks the speed is irrelevant--zombies will get to where they want to go no matter their speed, given their numbers, the 100% rate of infection, and human unpreparedness for this, again, unprecedented and catastrophic event).

George Romero's 1968 cult classic.

Danny Boyles' 2002 28 Days Later

Access to guns? Haven't shot a gun since I was, I don't know, 15? Besides, as we know from almost all zombie stories, there are large variety of non-firearm weapons humans can employ against zombies. As well, humans often turn on one another in times of existential crisis, especially where there are limited resources (I assume a zombie plague would disrupt access to basic necessities, along with the disruption of communications).

Veteran population? Well, veterans would certainly be better shots than me, but I'm concerned that the standard operating procedures that govern military engagement with a human enemy might lead to huge tactical errors--zombies won't respond like the usual human enemy. Veterans may adapt to the drastically new situation, but that adaptation may come too late. I'm thinking here of my Peace Corps experience. Volunteers with prior professional experience in their particular program (e.g. forestry, agriculture) often had a more difficult time adjusting to a radically new environment, in comparison yahoos like me who had no prior experience, and therefore fewer pre-existing assumptions or biases. We'll need flexibility of thought when seeing a swarm of zombies lurching towards us.

Landscape features? The "stopping power of water," as realists remind us, is a powerful factor in the geography of conflict. Rivers, big lakes, with steep terrain around them. That's what I'm looking for. Zombies can't swim, and are, at best, sloppy climbers. And wintry weather in upper elevations might be a boon (as long as we have a way to keep warm). The zombies will freeze, giving us a breather.

Access to bodies of water? Again, a good defensive terrain feature, but we'll need water. Just hope it's not too polluted.

So--based on my preferences, and Ingraham's calculations, where to go? I live in Grand Rapids, Kent County. The map reports that my chances of surviving there are "way way below average" and that I'm "basically dead already." We could head west to neighboring Ottawa county, where chances are above average, but the area is surrounded by low survivability counties--wouldn't take long for Ottawa to be overrun. We could head north, but given that I'm irrational, I'd try to convince my wife and whoever else is with us to try the run across risky Illinois and Iowa, and head for eastern Oregon, maybe Harney county, the Burns area. Always wanted to get back there again anyway....

Whitehorse Lake, Harney County, Oregon







Thursday, October 8, 2015

O Bachmann! My Bachmann!

Former Representative from Minnesota, Michelle Bachmann
The caption of a Ring of Fire Radio story yesterday (10-7-15):


As usual, Bachmann got it wrong. According to my divine source (or maybe those strange voices in my head), the SC floods are God's punishment for tolerating same-sex marriage, not for US relations with Israel (yeesh--so obvious). Rather, because of the US's insufficient support for Israel, God has decided to double the number of historians teaching that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, as the new Jerusalem.




And for good measure, He's going to quadruple the number of prosperity gospel preachers.


Oh, by the way, the lack of prayer in public schools is what has caused the spate of providentially-permitted mass shootings in recent years. Sure was a long time coming--the Supreme Court declared state school-sponsored prayer unconstitutional way back in 1962--but then, providence is mysterious. If we keep seeing this little imaginary prayer below after a few more mass shootings at schools, maybe we'll finally be convinced to let Him back in. And then all will be well again in our once great nation. It will be like living in a combination of Leave it to Beaver and Have Gun Will Travel !