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stcynic | December 31, 2004Paul Musgrave has written a response to some of the same statements I commented on in my recent post that has gotten so much controversy. Though Musgrave is himself a Christian, he has some of the same problems with those responses that I do:
One Christian website writes that the tsunami affected worst those countries that persecute Christians the most; some Indians think the wave was punishment for the arrest of a Hindu religious leader; and one rabbi writes:
This is an expression of God's great ire with the world. The world is being punished for wrongdoing -- be it people's needless hatred…
stcynic | December 31, 2004Sandefur points to this article in Reason, responding to this article in the Washington Times about American popular culture's dominance over the rest of the world. Sandefur is quite right to point out that Bork has far more in common with the Taliban than he or his followers would like to admit. Witness this comment:
Robert H. Bork remembers his ambivalence in 1989 as the Berlin Wall came down and dungarees and rock music poured into the former East Germany.
"You almost began to want to put the wall back up," says the former Supreme Court nominee, a tart critic of American popular culture…
stcynic | December 31, 2004For those who think that my article using the tsunami (that is, using scientific explanations for the tsunami, not the fact that it killed people) to make a point is tasteless and inappropriate, let me show you what a real tasteless response to it might be. I'm sure there will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth coming any minute now from the ARN crowd over this one.
I think some people really need to get a grip on this one. I was discussing the scientific aspects of it, I wasn't making fun of the victims. It's no more "exploitative" than newspaper articles discussing how warning systems…
stcynic | December 31, 2004I have to confess to being amused to no end by the reaction to my tsunami post on ARN's message boards. They've all got their panties in a bunch because of how horribly insensitive I am, though I frankly think this outrage is entirely fake. It's just easier to focus on that rather than on the actual substance of the post. Charlie D, who I don't know, tried mightily to get one of them to actually discuss the substance of my argument and get them to attempt to show that the analogy wouldn't work, but they absolutely refused to do so. That rather frantic avoidance of the issue suggests something…
loom | December 29, 2004Phyllis Schlafly has suddenly become interested in evolution! She has written the most staggering display of buffoonery on the subject that I've read in a long time. She can't even tell the difference between Darwin and Lamarck--seriously. At least Steve Reuland at Panda's Thumb can dismantle this ignorant nonsense while retaining his sense of humor.
stcynic | December 25, 2004Jon Rowe has a wonderful post about Christmas from his secular perspective. It really is a must-read essay on the subject of how the secular and the religious co-exist and blend in American culture. As Jon puts it:
Christmas perfectly exemplifies the larger phenomenon of the unique culture that is the West which has a religious (Jerusalem) and a Secular-Pagan (Athens) origin. Culturally, the West presently is and always has been every bit as much of a Pagan society as it is Christian.
And what makes the West special is this unique combination, this tension between Athens and Jerusalem. The…
stcynic | December 24, 2004This pathetic webrag that publishes Robert Meyer is just full of lying idiots. Take one Charles Cole and his column on the entirely fake myth of Christian persecution and the "they're trying to kill Christmas" meme. And look at this stunning lie:
Have you noticed that this Christmas season seems to be the climax of a multiyear assault on religion in America? If a store puts up a simple "Christmas tree", not to mention one with an angel at the top, the ACLU threatens to sue and the owner (or company) usually cowers under the legal threat and removes the "offending" object (be that a tree, a…
stcynic | December 18, 2004The New York Times reports that the ACLU has a huge internal battle going on over their use of a data mining company to gather information on those who contribute money to the organization, as well as potential legal trouble:
The American Civil Liberties Union is using sophisticated technology to collect a wide variety of information about its members and donors in a fund-raising effort that has ignited a bitter debate over its leaders' commitment to privacy rights.
Some board members say the extensive data collection makes a mockery of the organization's frequent criticism of banks,…
stcynic | December 16, 2004Click here to read the first chapter of Joe Queenan's hysterically funny book Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon.
stcynic | December 15, 2004The new edition of Carnival of the Vanities is up, which is something I usually wouldn't bother mentioning but it's hosted this week by Ace Pryhill and Ace rocks.
stcynic | December 14, 2004As much as I rail against the astonishing stupidity of many of the Worldnutdaily's writers, I've discovered a group even more dull: their readers. Wow, have you read some of the letters that WND publishes from their readers? Like this gem from one Bob Atkinson:
A more descriptive name for the ACLU, but keep the acronym, is Atheist, Communist and Liberals United. This name accurately describes who the ACLU is and what it represents. I've been using this name for about five years.
Boy, there's nuthin' funnier than coming up with alternative acronyms for ACLU, is there? American Communist Legal…
stcynic | December 13, 2004Of all the prominent religious right figures, you'd think the last one to scream persecution and claim victimhood would be Pat Buchanan. But here he is in - where else? - the Worldnutdaily proclaiming himself and his fellow Christians the victims of a silent and unnamed conspiracy deep within the bowels of Macy's:
Now Macy's has stopped using the phrase "Merry Christmas" in all store advertising, replacing it with what Macy's calls the more inclusive "Season's Greetings" and "Happy Holidays."
But how is it "inclusive" to exclude the Christians' greeting? Is that not anti-Christian? Why would…
stcynic | December 12, 2004Kevin Drum (formerly CalPundit) of the Washington Monthly, is usually a pretty reliable source, but in this post I think he misses the point almost entirely. He is arguing that the "Social Security Trust Fund" is not an IOU even though Congress steals it to make the deficit appear smaller, and the premise of his argument is that it's no more an IOU than money itself is in our society:
One of the most common conservative critiques of Social Security is that the Social Security trust fund is a myth. Since it consists solely of treasury bonds, it's nothing more than a promise from one branch of…
stcynic | December 12, 2004My pet troll is "chortling with glee" over "yet another example of how Ed Brayton is full of excrement" - with a link to a story on CNN that says that some gay couples in Massachusetts are getting divorced. Is there anything more pathetic that watching someone struggle so mightily to put together a coherent argument when they're just not capable of it? I suspect he doesn't actually MAKE the argument because he knows how stupid it is, so instead he just implies it as though it was self-evident. But let's try and reconstruct the thought process, such as it is, that leads to his chortling. In…
stcynic | December 9, 2004Bloomberg reports:
Canada's Supreme Court ruled that the federal government can proceed with a plan to legalize same-sex marriage, saying the rights of gays and lesbians to formalize their bonds is protected by the constitution.
``Canada is a pluralistic society,'' the Supreme Court said in the ruling, which was released in Ottawa. ``Marriage from the perspective of the state is a civil institution.''...
In its ruling, the Supreme Court said religious officials can't be forced to perform same-sex marriages, as their beliefs also are protected by Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
This…
stcynic | December 9, 2004Yet more evidence that "family values" is nothing more than a catchphrase for "get the fags": the case of Tina Burch and Christine Smarr, a lesbian couple. In 1999, Smarr gave birth to a son, presumably through artificial insemination. In 2002, Smarr was killed in a car accident. Since that time, Smarr's parents have been fighting in court to have legal custody taken away from Burch, the only other parent the child known since the day he was born. In the initial trial, the court rightly found that Burch was the psychological parent to the child even while not being the biological parent,…
stcynic | December 9, 2004Hat tip to Majikthise and Steve Gilliard for bringing my attention to this article about vets from the Iraqi war becoming homeless after leaving the military. I'll quote just a little bit of the story from one returning Iraqi vet:
A gunner's mate for 16 years, Arellano said he adjusted after serving in the first Gulf War. But after returning from Iraq, depression drove him to leave his job at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He got divorced.
He said that after being quickly pushed out of the military, he could not get help from the VA because of long delays.
"I felt, as well…
stcynic | December 8, 2004I somehow missed this in the Washington Post article about Henry Waxman's report on misleading and false statements in abstinence-only programs:
Congress first allocated money for abstinence-only programs in 1999, setting aside $80 million in grants, which go to a variety of religious, civic and medical organizations. To be eligible, groups must limit discussion of contraception to failure rates.
Wow. I didn't know it was actually written into the eligibility criteria that they could not mention condoms at all except to convince students that they don't work. No wonder the use of condoms has…
stcynic | December 8, 2004One of the cherished myths of the social conservatives is the one that says that the US, by "throwing God out of the schools" has been following in the path of godless, immoral cesspools of permissiveness like Sweden or the Netherlands. And in this context, I don't mean the good kind of myth, the kind of unifying historical narrative that brings a people together; I mean an outright falsehood. The truth is that by the US should be following the lead of such nations because, by almost any measure, they're doing a whole lot better than we are on issues like the breakup of the family, teen…