As most readers already know, John McCain opposed establishing a federal holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr in 1983. Most Republicans (including Cheney and Gingrich) supported it at the time, but Arizona seemed dead-set against it. The holiday became official in 1986, but only 27 states and D.C. recognized it initially. The governor of Arizona at the time (a Democrat) declared the holiday through executive order, but it was later repealed by a Republican governor.
Around that time, in 1990, McCain was given a chance to change his mind, and eventually did. Though he initially supported the Republican governor’s controversial action to repeal the holiday, he later changed his stance and supported the recognition of the holiday. The governor continued to oppose the holiday, saying “I guess King did a lot for the colored people, but I don’t think he deserves a national holiday.” In 1992, the citizens of Arizona voted to recognize the holiday.
I wasn’t around at the time, so I don’t really know first-hand how important Martin Luther King Jr.’s contributions to civil rights, to our country, and to humanity as a whole were. I have, however, studied many of his speeches in school, and though I’ve only scratched the surface of his work I feel comfortable in saying that he was one of the most influential and important people of the twentieth century. To oppose naming a national holiday in his honor is absurd.
McCain also voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1990 (specifically, he voted to uphold President Bush’s veto of the 1990 Civil Rights Act), which lost by only one vote. To this day, he refuses to apologize for his vote. When asked earlier this year, he defended his action and claimed that the bill would have set up racial “quotas,” but that simply isn’t true. The bill had nothing to do with quotas, and everything to do with restoring laws regarding employment discrimination that had been put in place nearly two decades prior, and had only been recently overturned by supreme court cases that made it harder for minorities and women to win discrimination suits:
The act was a response to a series of controversial Supreme Court decisions made the year before. In those decisions, the court overturned a 1971 ruling that required employers to prove a “business necessity” for screening out minorities and women in its hiring practices. That burden of proof, the 1989 court said, should instead be placed on the plaintiff who alleged that his or her client had been unlawfully screened.
Both the House of Representatives and the Senate, deeming this unjust, passed bills that would restore the old law. But the Bush administration objected, insisting that a reversion to the old way would amount to forcing employers to have hiring quotas. It was a controversial and somewhat dubious claim, one that the New York Times editorial page called “an unjustified charge.”
McCain continues to justify his vote by claiming somehow the bill would have required “quotas,” and refuses to apologize for it. He has, on the other hand, apologized for his votes regarding the MLK holiday — while the fact that he initially opposed it remains, I like it that he was at least willing to change his mind. In this case, hoewver — when combined with his opposition to civil rights legislation — saying “I changed my mind” just isn’t enough.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-07-21 | Filed under: Opinion | 9 responses
. . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in’an interesting hole I find myself in’fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
From a Speech given by Adams at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge, UK, 1998. Later quoted in Richard Dawkin’s Eulogy for Douglas Adams.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-07-19 | Filed under: Atheism | 43 responses
I got my wisdom teeth removed today. Not fun. Read more…
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-07-14 | Filed under: Other | no responses
I recently got back from Las Vegas (went to go see Penn & Teller and Spamalot), and had the pleasure of flying on an airplane there and back. I wasn’t searched or hassled or anything like that — being in the majority pays off, I suppose — but what bothered me more was the general incompetence everywhere.
This is a little personal post. I’ll have a few of these in the next day or so. I’ll be back to posting serious articles shortly. Read more…
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-07-13 | Filed under: Other | one response
I’m working on other stuff. BBL.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-07-02 | Filed under: Other | no responses
I’ve started a new section of this site, called Talking in Circles Games. I’ve already released one game (interactive fiction), and I plan to release more in the future.
Honestly, I’m surprised it took me so long to do this. I’ve been making games on-and-off for a long time now. In elementary school I messed around with QBasic. In middle school I messed around with Visual Basic and Game Maker. In high school, Flash, Multimedia Fusion, then Python and C++. That whole time, however, I never actually finished a game. I came close a few times, but ultimately got tired of the project and moved on.
Currently I have a few projects I’m working on, including more (longer) IF works, and a graphical point-and-click adventure game I’ve been toying with for months. I plan to release them all as freeware, or even GPL where applicable and useful.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-06-17 | Filed under: Other, Tech and games | 6 responses
- Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
- I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: “The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.” In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
- To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.
- Most people would die sooner than think — in fact they do so.
- There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.
- I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.
- No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.
- The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.
- We shall be wise to build our philosophy upon science, because the risk of error in philosophy is pretty sure to be greater than in science.
- The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
- Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
- The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
- Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power.
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
- This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organising a mass massacre of mankind.
- “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.” (Russell’s reply when asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him)
- Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-06-17 | Filed under: Other | 9 responses
