Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Would you believe that Greta Christina of Greta Christina’s Blog, Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist, Jen McCreight of Blag Hag, and JT Eberhard of Zerowing21, after the severe beat-down I gave them and even before they had belatedly dragged themselves over the finish line in our race to raise money for Camp Quest, are now changing the terms of our competition and saying that the winner is whoever raises the most money by the end of this month?
No fair, I say! Moving the goalposts, I complain! Just like a bunch of dastardly atheists, I declare. Well, I will just have to lazily raise another tentacle and crush them again. The widget will be up on the sidebar all month, and I’ll periodically remind you to contribute, again.
And remember, if it’s annoying you like an NPR fundraising campaign, it’s their fault. I wouldn’t reward them for their obnoxious behavior if I were you — funnel all your donations through me, the nice guy who would rather not harrass you, unlike Greta, Hemant, Jen, and JT.
I can’t just beg without giving you some reward. Here, behold the fate of those who oppose me.
There isn’t much information available, but apparently Osama Bin Laden has been killed and his body recovered. I’m expecting his head to be mounted on a pike outside the White House now.
So…are we done? Can we bring the troops home and call off the war on terror?
Some people don’t seem to realize that my words above are sarcastic. Allow me to clarify.
While it’s necessary to stop terrorists, sometimes with violence, it is barbarous to gloat over the execution of an enemy. I find the chanting crowds cheering over the corpse disturbing, and the triumphal tone of our leaders is misplaced. We killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and threw away trillions of dollars, and our trophy is the bloody corpse of one old man? There’s no victory in that.
I’m also cynical. What was the point? Nothing will change. We live in Idiot America, which is also Fearful America, which is also Paranoid America, which is also Solve-Our-Problems-With-A-Gun America. One figurehead is dead, now the focus of our country’s fear will shift to some amorphous mass of generic Muslims, and the troops will continue their destruction, and we’ll still flag our cowardice with pointless color changes at our airports, and we’ll continue to sacrifice our civil liberties at the altar of national security. Nothing was accomplished, our purpose is as vague and tyrannical as ever, we’ll need to continue to kill more to feed our illusion of safety.
Oh, there is one thing we’ve got now. A few more politicians will cloak themselves in the blood of our enemies in the next election, and victory will be achieved for Blowing Shit Up in the name of Getting Things Done. And we’ll perpetuate the violence because it appeals to our citizen savages.
…except for the reminder of all of the surveillance cameras my parents used to keep me out of trouble.
You know I’m coming to the big city in less than two weeks, right? I’ll be at the Anti-Superstition Bash on Friday, May 13, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM at the Corinthian Yacht Club, in Essington, PA. You know you want to go, if for nothing else for the snooty thrill of being able to tell your friends you have an engagement at the Yacht Club to attend that evening.
I’ll do my best to dispel any bad luck you might be experiencing right now, replacing it instead with chance events.
Say hello to Grady Warren, presidential candidate representing the Florida Tea Party. He’s not a racist, he says, he’s just “tired of Blacks, nigras, Muslims, and Hispanics, especially the illegals, calling us racist for trying to save the America that we love.”
I bet you can’t make it all the way to the end of this video. I only got about halfway before I shut it down.
Michele Bachmann opened her mouth again. She compared increasing the tax rates for the rich to the Holocaust.
She said she was shocked to hear that many Americans weren’t aware that millions of Jews had died until after World War II ended.
Bachmann said the next generation will ask similar questions about what their elders did to prevent them from facing a huge tax burden.
“I tell you this story because I think in our day and time, there is no analogy to that horrific action,” she said, referring to the Holocaust. “But only to say, we are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar death and a similar taking away. It is this disenfranchisement that I think we have to answer to.”
Shorter Michele Bachman: “Expecting me to bear a fair share of my civic responsibility is like gassing me to death!”
