It’ll never cease to amaze me how many people want to believe Barack Obama is some kind of secret Muslim. I mean, first off, what will it take to get people to finally believe him when he says he isn’t a Muslim? And second, what exactly is wrong with Muslims? I happened to be reading the Constitution the other day and I didn’t see anything in there that said, “Muslims cannot be president and if one does become president, that’s a sign of the apocalypse and the United States will turn into a nation of gay abortion-lovers who rape children.” Seriously.
The latest weapon of the “HAY GAIZ, OSAMA IS A MUSLIM” campaign is the fact that Obama used to go by the name Barry Soetoro when he lived in Indonesia. This is hardly surprising considering that his mom married a guy with the last name Soetoro. Oh wait! That’s apparently bad, too! Why? Because Obama didn’t make it public. No, I’m serious. Apparently, presidential candidates are supposed to be up front about everything in their lives, regardless of how important it is to the job they’re pursuing. And this isn’t that important. From what little I’ve been able to dig up on the whole Barry Soetoro thing (seriously, search for the name on Google and you’ll get pretty much all anti-Obama links), it wasn’t a legal name change, which means it has absolutely no impact on anything. Just like McCain’s five years as a POW. It’s irrelevant to the presidency.
The argument goes that if Obama used to go by a different name, he could be a different religion (?) or even have a dual citizenship (?!). There’s scant evidence to this effect, and a dual citizenship wouldn’t necessarily bar Obama from the presidency. The requirements, listed in the Constitution, say that a person must be a natural-born citizen of the United States, be 35 years old, and have lived in the U.S. for at least 14 years. There’s nothing in there about dual citizenships, but, to be fair, dual citizenships didn’t exactly exist when the Constitution was written. It’s a rather weak attack on Obama, but that’s nothing new. After all, the secret Muslim accusation has been flying around forever and we still have yet to hear what’s wrong with being a Muslim…
The uproar surrounding this election is proof the world has gone insane. Rationality flew out the window a long time ago and it depresses me. I really can’t wait until November so this can all finally be over. Of course, I’m being optimistic. Even if Obama was to win in a landslide, the anti-Obama crowd would claim he stole the election (kind of like how the anti-McCain crowd will claim McCain stole the election if he wins) or whine about how the country will go downhill now that a Muslim is president. I don’t think I’ll ever escape from the madness.
Signal-to-noise
It’s always difficult to find good online communities. I was hanging around Reddit for a long time, but I deleted my account today because the community was going downhill fast. When I first signed up, people were willing to participate in intelligent discussions and half of the links on the main page were actually interesting. More recently, however, almost every link has been about politics of some sort (I’m sure most of that has to do with the upcoming election) and rational discussion is almost impossible. If you disagree with the popular Reddit opinion on an issue, you’re downmodded into oblivion and few people are willing to debate with you. What’s worse is what the popular opinions often are. Any article about police will have a highly-rated comment about how all police are pigs and should be shot on sight. It’s depressing that anyone would agree with a sentiment like that. It’s the same with religion, politics (especially politics), and even technology. Not as bad as Digg with respects to hating Microsoft, but you still see the occasional dollar sign in place of the letter “s”.
I suppose I could have ignored all that for the good links I do sometimes find, but those links are few and far between, buried amidst all the noise of articles about how dumb Sarah Palin is, or the antics of some religious group, or stories about how the police tasered a guy who may or may not have attacked them first. I know what you’re thinking. “Cody! Unsubscribe from the politics, religion, and atheism subreddits!” I did, and somehow political and religious links still snuck in, under the guise of the funny subreddit or the WTF subreddit. It just wasn’t worth sticking around if I wasn’t getting what I wanted out of the website. What did I want? Interesting links, complete with intelligent discussion of said links. What did I get? Uninteresting links, complete with unintelligent babble about how the government is going to take over everything and use religion and Tasers to force everyone into submission. The gradual transformation into a mainstream version of /b/ didn’t help, either. Yeah, there were some pretty awesome memes (100 pushups, anyone?), but memes aren’t a good substitute for worthwhile comments and there are a lot of meme comments on Reddit.
My absence from Reddit probably won’t last. I doubt I’ll create another user account, but I did get a fair bit of my news from Reddit. Maybe the community will get better sometime in the future. Maybe not. I suppose I can’t avoid what I don’t like forever.