Seriously California, what the fuck is wrong with you? I thought you were all granola-eating tree-hugging leftie communist pinkos. I thought you were all for the gay lifestyle. I thought you were all for equality. You guys used to piss off the social conservatives all the time, what with your San Franciscos and your Berkeleys.

But no, apparently you’re all a bunch of bigots. At least, 52% of you are.

Come on, what the fuck? Since when has California been a beacon for bigotry? Since when has California been a beacon for intolerance? Since when has California been a beacon for fear and hatred? That sort of thing we expect out of backwards states like Arkansas, but California?

Jesus Christ you Californians are fucking idiots.

This Proposition 8 has had its share of mouth-breathers come out of the woodwork. People like Howard Ahmanson Jr. who donated $1,395,000 to help pass Proposition 8. He’s said that his “goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives.” Fuck you, Howard Ahmanson Jr. Leave your “biblical law” out of my life. I suppose now you’re going to be campaigning for banning figs or some other bit of idiocy that’s in the bible.

People like Terry Caster and his family, along with his A-1 Self Storage business. The Casters donated $693,000 to help pass Proposition 8. He says that “without solid marriage you are going to have a sick society.” Go fuck yourself, Terry Caster. And fuck your son Craig too, who’s the founder and pastor of Family Discipleship Ministries in San Diego. Fuck you, Craig Caster.

This whole “gay marriage is dangerous to society and marriage” thing is horseshit. Seriously. How does two men getting married affect you in any way? Gay people are going to live together regardless, so does giving them a marriage certificate make your marriage unstable? “Hey shit John and Steve are married, let’s get a divorce.” What the fuck? When gay marriage was legal in California did heterosexual divorce rates go up? Face it, this whole Proposition 8 was just a way to get legalized bigotry. Now it’s perfectly okay to discriminate against gay people in California. Fuck you California.

Here’s a bit from Charlie Stross:

Here’s a good diagnostic test for whether a proposed law is bigoted: if it applies to a group of people, replace the subject group in question with “Jews” or “Blacks”, and see how it reads. If Adolf Hitler or the Grand Cyclops would approve, then it’s a fair bet that there’s something fishy about it. In the case of Proposition 8, how would you vote if it read, “Only marriage between Christians is recognized in California”? Or “Only marriage between white-skinned people is recognized in California”?

If you are a Californian voter and you vote for Proposition 8, then I’m afraid it means you’re a bigot. You favour depriving a subset of the population of their civil rights, you are willing to vote for a measure that will destroy existing marriages, and you will refuse to honour marriage contracts acknowledged elsewhere in the world. And you’ve tacitly admitted that your own marriage does need protecting (which is kind of pathetic).

You’re also providing aid and comfort to bigots and intolerant, murderous fundamentalists elsewhere on the planet, for which the rest of us (who have to deal with our own local nutjobs) will not thank you. When one state or nation passes a law like this one, it encourages activists elsewhere to campaign for their own equivalent. The organizations backing of Proposition 8 aren’t Californian — they’re mostly national or international, and they will take a victory in the polls in California and push it for all it’s worth elsewhere. So if you vote for Proposition 8 and it passes, you can rest assured that you’ve done your bit for bigotry not only at home, but in the rest of the world.

In case you’re wondering, here’s a list of troglodytes who donated money to help pass Proposition 8. Morons, each and every one of them.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Here’s where I’m going to be getting election information from:

• BBC News election map — the proportional map is quite cool. It resizes states according to how many electoral votes they have, so you can see at a glance how well each candidate is doing without being skewed by places like Montana.
• CNN “Your Races” tracker — I’ve chosen to track presidential results in Alabama, Hawaii, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia; Senate races in Alaska (Begich vs. Stevens) and Minnesota (Franken vs. Coleman); House races in Hawaii 01 (Abercrombie vs. Tataii) and Hawaii 02 (Hirono vs. Evans); California Proposition 8 (ban gay marriage); and Colorado Amendment 48 (human life from moment of conception).
• Twitter — most of the people I’m following are watching election results around the world, so their insight will be interesting.

I’ll probably be watching TV as well, but I’m undecided as to which channel. Probably CNN with occasional jaunts to MSNBC.

What other resources are you watching?

Popularity: 9% [?]

Oh man, I completely forgot about Colorado’s Proposition 48, which reads:

Shall there be an amendment to the Colorado constitution defining the term “person” to include any human being from the moment of fertilization as “person” is used in those provisions of the Colorado constitution relating to inalienable rights, equality of justice, and due process of law?

I hope this abortion of a proposition goes down in flames. I mean seriously, a 3-day old collection of cells is a person? Can anybody see the myriad problems with this?

Can pregnant women drive in the HOV lane?

Would pregnant women go into clubs or bars where minors are prohibited?

Do pregnant women get an extra exemption on their taxes because they have an extra dependant?

Can pregnant women collect child welfare benefits from the government?

How does a pregnant woman respond to census questions?

Suppose a pregnant woman has a miscarriage. Does she get charged with involuntary manslaughter?

Proposition 48 is a fucking stupid question and anybody who votes for this idiocy is a complete retard.

See also: When Is A Human A Human by the Bad Astronomer.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I don’t have a say in today’s US elections, but here’s what I’m hoping happens:

1. Barack Obama becomes president.
2. California’s Proposition 8 gets voted down.
3. Honolulu’s fixed rail vote passes.
4. Hawaii County’s vote on making personal-use marijuana a “lowest law enforcement priority” passes.

There are others, but these are the big ones.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Worse, Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

The reception had been better in Clearwater, where Palin, speaking to a sea of “Palin Power” and “Sarahcuda” T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. “One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” she said. (“Boooo!” said the crowd.) “And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,’ ” she continued. (“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.)

“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.

Dana Milbank, 6 October 2008

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically.

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen….In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic…

George Orwell, 1984

Popularity: 7% [?]

Palin had recently become Wasilla mayor, beating her earliest mentor, John Stein, the then-incumbent mayor. A large part of her campaign had been to enlist fundamentalist Christian groups, and invoke evangelical buzzwords into her talks and literature.

As the ceremony concluded, I bumped into her in a hall away from other people. I congratulated her on her victory, and took her aside to ask about her faith. Among other things, she declared that she was a young earth creationist, accepting both that the world was about 6,000-plus years old, and that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time.

Philip Munger

Popularity: 7% [?]