Scanning my list of unread posts in Google Reader this morning, I saw this, from PZ Myers: “What if they wouldn’t sell cars to uppity blacks, Jews, and women?”
PZ has been one of my favorite people on the Internet for years now, in part because of his habit of pointing out disgusting behavior and unleashing a healthy ire on the perpetrators. So, reading that post title, I ran through the short list of social groups who I consider fair game for such a comparisson, trying to guess who had been discriminated against at a car dealership. Honestly, it’s a short list. Maybe a gay couple got mistreated at a Chevy dealership? Maybe someone wouldn’t sell a van to a guy with a Middle Eastern accent?
Yeah, the story turns out to be way less interesting.
A Ford dealership is taking a novel approach to advertising: by telling a small subset of their potential customer base to shut up.
But did you know that 86% of Americans say they believe in God? Since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians, who believe in God, we at Keiffe & Sons Ford wonder why we don’t tell the other 14% to sit down and shut up. I guess maybe I just offended 14% of the people who are listening to this message. Well, if that is the case then I say that’s tough, this is America folks, it’s called free speech. None of us at Keiffe & Sons Ford are afraid to speak out. Keiffe & Sons Ford on Sierra Highway in Mojave and Rosamond, if we don’t see you today, by the grace of God, we’ll be here tomorrow.
PZ calls for a boycott of both the dealership and Ford (though see here for more on that), which is fine. It’s a stupid ad, and I guess if I heard it on the radio my reaction would be “Yeah, well, fuck you, too.”
But what interests me is the absurdity of the title of PZ’s post. For one, there simply isn’t any sense in which the lives of atheists today are like the lives of women, black people, or Jews at any point in history. Some people may not like atheists, but they aren’t regularly beating us to death or burning crosses on our lawns.
And I know you could say, “Well, look, all he means is, try substituting in ‘Jews’ for ‘atheists’ in the above, and see how offensive it is.” Yeah, fine. But all that means is that there’s some formulation of the ad that’s really terrible. But what if you replace the atheists in the ad with Yankees fans, or emo kids? No one likes either of those guys, either. But then the ad is just goofy and misguided. And, in my experience, being an atheist is more like being a Yankee fan than a black guy. (Not that I have any idea what it’s like to be a black guy. Or, Ceiling Cat forbid, a Yankee fan.)
For another thing, it isn’t even like anyone was denied a sale. For all of the talk in this is one ignorant radio ad, I wouldn’t be surprised if PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris could all walk into this dealership and drive out in brand new Explorers today. It just sounds like bluster from some yokels, and it seems to me that the price PZ pays in dignity when he makes it out to be some kind of segregated lunch counter is much worse than the ad itself.
I promise that this won’t devolve into a scarcely-updated Mathematica blog (there’s a post about bourbon coming soon, for one), but I thought this bit from the program’s “reading and writing files” documentation was priceless:
In Mathematica’s standard notebook interface, you are directly giving input and getting output every time you press Shift+Enter. Although much more rarely needed than in more primitive languages, Mathematica also allows you to get input and generate output as side effects in a computation.
This is so amazing that I don’t even have a joke. If I were smart, like Dr. Shalizi, I might have a joke. But I’m not, so I don’t.
(I saw Cosma speak on Friday. He was really good, and actually did get in a sly crack at A New Kind of Science, though I’m pretty sure I was the only one at UCI who got it. He was talking about models of complex systems and he said something like, “It’s not good enough to simply recreate the behavior of some part of a system and say, ‘Aha, since this looks just like that, then the mechanism behind this must be the mechanism behind that.’ That is, unless you’re writing a 1200-page self-published tome.”)