Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn’t, even when it’s allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist. Of course, before Al Qaeda, nobody ever thought to detonate bombs ingovernment buildings or go on indiscriminate, politically motivatedshooting rampages. The NYT speculates that amonium nitrate fertilizer may have been used to make the bomb because the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, owned a farming-related business and thus could have access to that material; of course nobody would have ever thought of using that substance to make a massive bomb had it not been for Al Qaeda. So all this proves once again what a menacing threat radical Islam is.
3) another excellent essay by Benjamin Doherty that follows media reactions to the terrorist attacks, and also points out that the opinionated people who are presented by the media as ‘experts’ might severely lack any expertise:
The threshold for a terrorism expert must be very low. This whole rush to disseminate a false, unverifiable and flimsily sourced claim strikes me as a case of an elite fanboy wanting to be the first to pass on leaked gadget specs.
(Because I have to take a break. Pshaw, internet forms, pshaw. Especially if they’re really stupid pdfs that need to be filled out FAIL and sent to like five different secretaries HUMANITY WHAT’S WRONGH WITH YOU *HATES*)
“It’s awful”, explains Alain Grand, still shocked by the discovery. “It left horrible tracks inside the detector that made the physicists on duty at the time feel quite sick”.
“But then we realized that both of us shared one important trait with Ayn Rand: all three of us really, really like money. That made it much easier for Cory and I to cash the seven figure check.”
7. A very insightful post about framing reading books as a moral issue. While I dislike books like the Twilight series as the next sentient person, I also believe that arguing that they ARE BAD FOR THE CHILDRUNZ will get us nowhere. I mean, when you’re a 11 year old, you simply don’t notice stuff like sexism they way you notice it, say, even ten years later. I mean, I do know I would have hated Twilight even as a 11-year old, but only because it was boring, also romance, also boring. I was into Tolkien and Philip K. Dick when I was 11.
(OTOH, I think Justine Larbalesier goes on a crusade against strawmen when she argues that the issue of reading versus going to play outside is some sort of a problem. I seriously doubt there are parents telling their kids to not go outside to play BECAUSE BOOKS. C’mooooooon)
8. The “new written language” thing everybody and their cousin’s talking about. Seems like a load of bullshit to me, haven’t had the chance to look at the actual paper yet, though.
Because this is about the amount of attention I believe we should give to ridiculous bigots like this one. Specifically, I mean his laughably inane video about Rick Warren’s hidden homosexual agenda.
(The YT one is totes not available in Europe, but the one from WND should work just fine)
(Before I even start, I’d like to point out how absolutely unimpressed I am with Rick Warren’s fake claims of concern for gay people. In fact, I’m so unimpressed I might even link to people who will explain to you why His Gay Agenda Is Pastede on Yey)
Anyway, this guy, Molotov, is, like, a real gem. I mean, he thinks he’s funny or something. He says that people in Uganda should kill gay people because:
– Gen 9:6, Lev 20:13, Ex 22:19
BUT!
Gen 9:6 is actually the following quote:
Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made man.
So, should we kill people who kill other people (that is to say, men)? Like, you know, the anti-gay bigots in Uganda? Ups.
Lev 20:16
‘If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
So, gay sex is Biblically OK as long as it’s between two (or more) women, not men. Did the anti-gay bigots in Uganda take this into account when they drafted their bill?
I didn’t think so. Ups.
Ex 22:19
Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal must be put to death.
In as much as humans are animals too, heterosexuals are having sexual relations with animals as well. In as much as having sex with members of a different species should be forbidden, it still has nothing to do with anti-gay bigotry. Unless you’d want to argue that homosexuality makes you a member of a different species, which, hah, wouldn’t go down very well.
Ups. Try harder, Molotov, try harder!
– “unless there are some Biblical passages that I’ve missed”
Yes, in fact quite a few. For starters Lev 11:9-12 or Lev 19:19, darling <3
– Killing people is OK ’cause it was God who created the death penalty
BUT!
Well, I went to check out the Book of Genesis again. I expected something like:
By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he created the death penalty, waterboarding and Superbowl commercials, and then he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he created the death penalty, waterboarding and Superbowl commercials, and rested from all the work of creating that he had done. And then God watched Buffy.
You know, a little bit of omnipotent multitasking. I mean, I’ve normally a pretty relaxed attitude: show me a Bible verse, and I’ll laugh at you. Heartilly.
But this time? There was no quote!!!
Can you believe it?! The Bible never mentions god inventing the capital punishment and waterboarding! This must be the Liberal Bias showing, clearly.
– the USian Founding Fathers were totes for killing the gay with fire
BUT!
HURR DURR
Also, even if they were, what do they have to do with Uganda? Didn’t somebody say that Uganda is a sovereign nation around 1:55? Ups.
– Evil Homosexual king required all men in the kingdom [of Budanga] to submit to his sexual desires (wah wah wah)
BUT!
Orly? Also, what does it has to do with anything? I mean, in 1675 it came to light that the Marquise de Brinvilliers poisoned a lot of her relatives. Does it mean we should murder all French women now?
Didn’t think so, ups.
– persecuting gays is part of Ugandan culture
BUT!
Yes, ever since Xian missionaries taught people to hate the gay. Ups.
– liberuls only embrace multi-culturalism when it suits them
HURR DURR POT-KETTLE
– if they [the gays] don’t like the law, they can always leave!11!111
BUT!
Orly? Also, Molotov, princess, if you hate America with its distinct lack of legalised gay-killing, why don’t you just leave? Instead of posting spurious videos on YouTube? Ups.
– “Don’t think our Founding Fathers wouldn’t support this legislation.”
BUT!
How are they relevant? Uganda is an independent nation, after all. Also, clearly Molotov doesn’t think very often, does he?
“The term “witch-hunt” is often used by analogy to refer to panic-induced searches for perceived wrong-doers other than witches.”
-“they don’t want to kill homosexuals, they just want them to stop practicing the homosexual act”
Oh, because what two (or more) consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms concerns them how? Also, gee, thanks for being so tolerant! I mean, they could kill people like me! But in their boundless generosity, they will only shower them with the Xian love beat them up a bit, ruin their lives, maybe imprison them and kill them only if they’re really obstinate about not stopping to be gay.
I cried, a little.
And the cherry on top of epic fail:
-“Like the great Dr. King told us, ‘the moral arm of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.’ Ugandans, stay on the right side of history.”
Ooooh, I get it now! This is, clearly, the right wing logic sort of thing. This is when you say that when Bush started the war in Iraq, he was just liek Gandhi, and when Hitler started killing Jewish people, he was just liek Jesus, and Ted Haggard is a completely heterosexual magical glittery unicorn.
Sleep well, my prince Molotov.
BUT WAIT! I like happy endings, therefore, have some Gay Agenda (via nameste via mrw):
This cupcake is very manly. You can tell, because it has khaki top covering its manly filling (there are, like, 100 bad porn jokes I was tempted to make here, please appreciate my restraint)
Bah. My cupcakes are bloody badass with marzipan pink roses and glittery sugar stuffses and frilly pink stuff and sparkly icing and a LED unicorn on top topped by a pony.
These guys are just a bunch of ridiculous nerds with a silly if effective marketing strategy who re also really uncomfortable about their sexuality, that is, I mean, totes sissies. Do the cupcakes at least drink bear while scratching their crotch and watching football and (insert moar ridiculous stereotypes here)? Can they use an AK-47 like a real manly uniform-clad cupcake would? Can they smell a Barbie doll from 100 m distance and vomit Bailey’s in a manly manner to express their manly disdain? Have they or have they not ever observed a My Little Pony in its natural habitat and shot it on sight? Can they use a screwdrivers without messing up their filling?
(If only they would grow claws and teeth and eat Hollywood, the dumb Heroes guy, and basically all the people I’m too lazy to mention? They could also transform into giant robots, sort of like Kim Dzong Il)
2. I’m afraid I’ve only noticed it recently. But. CHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARTSSSSSSSS. STATISTIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICS! At Grauniad’s Data Blog.
(I mean, CHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARTS)
(I mean, statistics! You never know when you’ll be able to pwn somebody using the statistics)
(The statistics you’ve been hoarding for ages on a separate delicious account)
The guy who built the temple, satisfied that it truly represents his beloved load of horseshit in the best possible light, then opens the temple to the public, to attract not only the already-established horseshit enthusiasts, but possibly to entice new people to come and gaze on the horseshit, and to, well, who knows, admire its moundyness, or the way it piles just so, to nod in appreciation of the rationalizations for its excellence or to clap in delight and take pictures when an escaping swell of methane causes the load of horseshit to sigh a moist and pungent sigh.
Yes, please. I might have to pick up his books one day, after all.
Also, creationist commenters and their typically overblown dramatics:
274. John Scalzi on 13 Nov 2007 at 9:43 pm
Joe:
“Re: the Ark and Dinosaurs isn’t big a deal when you realize that the DInosaurs didn’t have to be full grown to be on the Ark.”
I’m sorry, I’m getting the giggles again, here.
275. Joe on 13 Nov 2007 at 9:54 pm
John, to think, my mom told me I wasn’t funny. I guess she was wrong. Put a gun to my head and tell me to renounced Christianity or you’d shoot me…Pull the trigger because I am not doing that. It isn’t because I am stubborn..trust me, I don’t like being shot at, it’s because I fear God, not man.
Heh heh. The evil Scalzi, shooting poor persecuted creationists in the head again. Which makes a little sense, after all, since it’s not like they use them all that much anyway. I bet he also had Christian-baby-porridge for breakfast!
(Commenter number 300 also claims that Scalzi is so mean, because he’s just like Ann Coulter, heh heh. Heh heh!)
(A few comments down, Joe also proudly announces that he 1) never met Pascal, 2) gambling’s not for him. I’d think TROLL TROLL TROLL, only Poe’s law)
Also, I’d like to maybe repeatedly emphasise that there are 101 photos. With captions. Go, now!
2. A truly bizarre article about the oppression of women in fundamentalist regimes. On the one hand, it raises several important points, on the other:
The use of women’s naked bodies to market commercial products in the West is merely another application of the idea that women are commodities. Anyone who visits the redlight district in Amsterdam can see for himself how wretched prostitutes, completely naked, are lined up behind glass windows so that passers-by can inspect their charms before agreeing on the price. Isn’t that a modern-day slave market, where women’s bodies are on sale to anyone willing to pay?
Yeah, right. Because being oppressed by men with political and religious power is just like deciding to be a sex-worker.
I’m not saying everything is legal and perfect in the blessed land of socialism and sexual permissiveness, and that there’s no human trafficking and that sort of stuff. It’s just that apples and oranges, dude.
What’s also quite disturbing is how women/feminists/activists who are supposedly against the sex industry and pornography for the sake of the women always end up blaming the sex-workers anyway, and not maybe suggesting the logical solution, which would be “so let’s convince people that paying for sex is uncool or something“. Because, seriously, demand and supply, dudes!
1. As it turns out, both my landlady and the new housemate are atheists! The housemate came out after I said I was studying Sumerian stuff. She started a monologue about LOL!Bible, which was riddled with tiny little inaccuracies.
I managed not to engage in a megalomaniacal monologue myself. These days, I try to show a little bit of restraint, and only do this in the privacy of my room.
But, to those who happened to read this blog, and read there. (If any) I apologize for my profanity. I should not have wrote it. I just get so angry when I see Socialist Liberals mocking a party that has done more good, than the Democratic Party has ever done. Further more, a party that still fights for America. Unlike the Terrorist appeasing Liberal Democrats.
5. Meanwhile, the veterans in the UK tell the BNP to kindly fuck off and leave the military alone. Why yes, this is what they mean by “The BNP are, quite honestly, a very unattractive group” *snerk*. But wait!
“The values of these extremists – many of whom are essentially racist – are fundamentally at odds with the values of the modern British military, such as tolerance and fairness.”
This is a good week for veterans!
6. This is also a good week for vaccines! Wired spanks the anti-vaccine movement thus:
One of the most remarkable features of science is that it often leads its practitioners to change their minds and to say “I was wrong.”
Hah!
8. Meanwhile, in real life, an awesome trans woman doctor, Marci Bower, is helping the victims of female genital mutilation (FGM) by doing “clitoralplasty” FOR FREE.
Fact: Marci Bower is so totally badass.
9. I watched this vid, because Dan linked it. I don’t know what other people saw, but what I saw was this:
1. The things happening to LGBT people in Iraq are horrifying. I hope at least they seek asylum in some western countries easily (if they manage to escape, that is) (via Camels with Hammers):
All of the men who had escaped Iraq were still very fragile. The evening after I arrived, I met a slim man in his late twenties named Mukhaled. A driver for a Baghdad delivery company, Mukhaled had been in only one relationship in his life, with a man named Ali whom he met in high school. Ali was a year younger than Mukhaled. They lived in the same neighborhood and, as far as anyone knew, were just friends.
One day in April, armed men burst into Ali’s house and shot him dead. There were incriminating photographs of Mukhaled and Ali in Ali’s bedroom, and other personal information that could lead the death squads to Mukhaled. For the next two and a half months, Mukhaled slept at the homes of different friends, and sometimes in a park. He lost twenty pounds. His black hair became streaked with gray. He worried that people were following him and planning to kill him. And then one day a woman named Rasha called him. She said she had been given his name and number by a gay friend of his. She said she was from New York, but was phoning him from a safe city inside Iraq, and asked if he needed any help. Mukhaled left Baghdad for the safe city inside Iraq on July 3, and moved to the second refuge city shortly after that.
There are no words.
2. Something of which I have been completely unaware is that in a developed and civilised western country like the Australia* 90% of women with intellectual disabilities were abused at some point in their lives, and many of them by their care-givers.
3. When you’re naive and young you might think to yourself that there’s no way a commercial for raising breast cancer awareness could ever be so very very very wrong you’ll want to pull your hair out when you see it.
But it can!
You see, because women’s tits are only here for other people’s entertainment.
Where by “people”, I mean “men”, of course.
(Also, every woman enjoys having her tits ogled. It means she’s appreciated!** And we, wimminz, the shallow and vain creatures that we are, cannot possibly live without that sort of validation***)
4. The Catholic Church proudly announces that the abuse and rapes of children perpetrated by Catholic priests were all because of the ghey. You see, there were no paedophiles in the CC! Also,
Um. Personally, I always find people who go on prattling about how it’s oh-so important to keep paedophilia and ephebophilia apart a bit skeevy. It’s almost as if they were suggesting that ephebophilia is like the lesser evil or something.
That or too much Plato.
Also: Yay, CC, we know you hate us already. Shut up, you’re boring.
He added that “available research” showed that only 1.5 to five per cent of Catholic clergy had been implicated in cases of child sex abuse.
Hahahaha. YES PLEASE SHOW US YOUR LEARNINGS RESEARCH!
Dude, when you pee on a golden see it’s maybe a tad hypocritical to criticise for materialism people whose HDI so low almost their entire continent is in red red red on this cute little map? But no.
Food is evil, and so are the condoms.
* This was completely unironic.
** I’d like the person who thought of the commercial to choke on their own dick, or a giant dildo.
Nothing feels better than having your literary dislikes validated.
As it happens, I’ve hated John Irving and his books for at least a decade. I hated every word of Garp (blargh), when I started reading it being a fifteen-year-old almost-but-not-quite nice person. I still have no idea how and why, why on Earth did I finish it at all. Suffice it to say, there was pain, and suffering, and fail fail fail fail fail fail, and it might have made me hate USian literature for a couple of years*.
A lot of things happened in the intervening decade.
I learned like six languages or so.
I shaved my hair, and it was fun, and all my professors were afraid of me until it grew back.
(I still regret that it had to grow back)
I realised I was gay**.
Poland became a member of the EU.
I realised I will always vote for the most leftist party that has any chances of actually getting into the parliament.
There was a war in Afghanistan, and another one in Iraq.
However, during all those years, I never wavered in my passionate hatred for John Irving and his crappy shitty piss-poor excuses for books. I never forgot about my disdain for all things John-Irvingish.
ONLY TO BE FINALLY VALIDATED WHEN JI TURNED OUT TO BE A COMPLETE ASSHAT:
“My response is as brutally upper class as I can make it,” he (John Irving) has said, adding later that Vermont “has a high degree of knee-jerk presumptions against the rich” and against people “who weren’t born here. There’s a minority which is an open target in this country which no one protects, and that’s rich people.”
LOL PLZ SAY IT AIN’T SO. It must be so terribly, terribly hard being rich, what with all those money causing you migraines whenever you don’t know how to spend it, which happens frequently, especially since they started adding all those security features to the bills, and they don’t burn quite as prettily as they used to, so you can’t well be making cigars out of them anymore.
I weep with you, brother, and I weep for you.
And all that because a US state decides to divide its taxes more efficiently, so that children from poorer towns have an equal access to education. How terrible! How outrageous! How Marxist!
2. Eddie Izzard needs to have a superhero comic written about him saving kittens, with lots of kittens in dangerous life-threatening situations, and Eddie Izzard pulling death-defying stunts to get them off all those trees at last.
KITTENS OMD CUUUTE *flails*
* Not really. Do we need a rec post? I could do one! I’m easy!
** As far as realisations go, this one wasn’t very exciting. It mostly went like “LOL TITS YAY”. Then I trolled off to read something, most likely.
I don’t even remember anymore. That’s how unexciting it was.
I’d want to say that I realised that I was an atheist, too, but (un)fortunately, that had happened much earlier than ten years ago.
梅雨眠中 
