Monday Morning Videos

It's Monday, so let's just sit on the couch and look at some videos:

Via The Partisans, via Dusty, here's a marvelous parody of Texas Governor Rick Perry's recent ad declaring that he believes in his god, no matter who doesn't:



What's so funny to me about Perry and his paranoid view of the world is that non-believers have been voting for candidates of nearly all political parties since we've been here. It's not that we don't have choices. We could always start our own minority parties, after all. It's just that, in most cases, it doesn't matter that much to us. Sure, I'd like for there to be more atheists and other religious minorities in government, but that has always come a distant second to my desire for better government, and for a better world. If Christians want to bring those things about, then I don't care if it's because they think their bearded guy in the sky told them to or not. If, as in Rick Perry's case, they want to make things worse, then I don't care if they're outspoken atheists who want to expunge all religious tests and references from government - they're still the wrong candidates.

Heck, looking back on it, I wrote this almost five years ago on this topic:

Organized religions are too often political institutions themselves, in that they seem to spend far more time worrying about things like their religion's popularity and finances than to their spiritual beliefs. They don't strike me as any more interested in the good of the nation than oil companies or big pharma are. The more the people who run them are ignored, I think, the better off we'll be as a society. Having a diverse range of religious beliefs represented in Congress can go a long way toward making that happen.

In short, with its first female Speaker and more minority religious views represented, the Congress became more representative of the country today.

More Diversity

Does Congress really seem any more representative of all of us to you? I certainly don't think so. In my opinion, they've never missed a chance to screw us in favor of the people who finance their campaigns. That's certainly not what all of them are there to do, but whether Congress were composed entirely of white, Christian, heterosexual men of northern European ancestry, or of Asian lesbian women who were all staunch non-believers, wouldn't make a bit of difference to me if they continued to produce what they've been producing.

Barack Obama has certainly proved that it's going to take more than voting for someone from a different ethnic background to change things. In retrospect, Nancy Pelosi showed that it's going to take a lot more than putting women in positions of power in Congress, too.

If anything, identity politics means even less to me now than it did back then. It's what a candidate has done in his political and other careers that matters, not what he looks like, what nonsense he believes in one day a week, or where he carries his (or her) genitals that matters.

The other video has no political ramifications that I'm aware of, but it's one of those things that you just don't see every day:



Thanks to Starspider and Dana Hunter for preserving the memory of this treasure. After all, videos of cats and dolphins so rarely attract attention, we need to do all we can to promote them. Otherwise, the malevolent forces waging the War Against Felines And Cetaceans will win, and we can't have that now, can we?