This is pretty much a re-blog, which I don’t usually like doing, but the story is so mind-bendingly stupid it bears hating on in as many venues as possible.
Story Here. Reblogging from boingboing.
The short version is, Trijicon, who make (apparently very nice) gun optics, took it upon themselves to emboss references to bible verses into the ends of the serial numbers of the ones they are selling to the US military (as part of very large contracts). That are going into combat in the middle east. In that conflict where the most important thing we can do is win the PR war with a skeptical populace. A linchpin of doing so is demonstrating that there is no religious motivation, to avoid invoking centuries of violence and hatred, and legitimizing the arguments of the other side that we are invading crusaders (although even dumber presidents have trouble keeping that straight).
The most obnoxious part is that, rather than playing it down and claiming the sequences are just part of the identifier (optics nomenclature is easily confusing enough to make something convincing up), Trijicon went ahead and confirmed that they had intentionally added bible verses, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that it might be a Bad Thing. At least they were clever enough to to choose verses having to do with light.
Any attempt to play down the degree to which this is stupid should be met with consideration of the media/public shitstorm that would occur if someone were found attacking Americans with a weapon engraved with quranic references. I’ve always read that humans were supposed to develop a theory of mind that supports this kind of reasoning around 4 years of age, but sometimes I wonder.
With stupid behavior like the above, supplanted by things like groups thinking it is a good idea to send audio bibles as aid to Haiti, it’s no wonder there is such suspicion of (Christian) religious motivation in US foreign policy. When reading the audio bibles article, I couldn’t help but picture those propaganda-spewing eyebots from Fallout 3, but the pictures on the organization’s website just show a cheap self-powered boombox with a flash card. At least they have useful parts in them, solar panels and hand-crank generators to keep personal communication devices powered are pretty high on the list of things I would want in a large scale disaster, and since Haiti has been in one sort of disaster or another pretty much continuously since the late 1400s when the first Europeans showed up, I imagine there are plenty of folks around who know how to improvise.
