Jean Meslier
Let us proceed to the pretended visions and Divine Revelations, upon which our Christ-worshipers establish the truth and the certainty of their religion.
In order to give a just idea of it, I believe it is best to say in general, that they are such, that if any one should dare now to boast of similar ones, or wish to make them valued, he would certainly be regarded as a fool or a fanatic.
I started writing this as a sort of open snark-gram to Caitlyn Jenner, but I just couldn’t do it. As I started to think things through from different angles, I just got more and more depressed. So, I hit “Move to Trash” and tried again.
Root cause analysis, for me, always comes back to privilege, which is an instance of exceptionalism.
If you’re not familiar with Derek Lowe’s “In the Pipeline” blog, you should be. Whether you’re a chemist or not, his writing is witty and wonderful and breathes zing and pizazz into, uh, your breath-mask. [things I won’t work with]
There were scandals a few years ago regarding test-cheating by operators of the US’ strategic missile systems. [nyt] But that’s just cheating. What about “rank incompetence” in the forces that prop up the nihilist triad of ‘mutual assured destruction’?
Voltaire by Houdon
We know of no religion without prayers; even the Jews have them – even though they had no published formulas back in the days when they chanted their canticles in their synagogues, those arrived much later.
I’ve keynoted and attended a lot of conferences in the course of my career. So, naturally, a piece of spam that looks like it’s a conference invitation goes right through my bayesian spam classifier.
The FBI and the US attorney’s office have also joined the investigation as authorities work to determine if it was a hate crime.
Since it’s OK to say hate-filled things, here:
During the “Arab Spring” (what a loathsome, patronizing, attitude we express!) the US Government repeatedly socialized ideas about how Twitter, etc, were important to helping anti-government protests, i.e.:
The Obama administration, while insisting it is not meddling in Iran, yesterday confirmed it had asked Twitter to remain open to help anti-government protesters. [guardian]
In an earlier posting I describe a fun word-game in which the word “pants” is substituted into quotes or lyrics of sentences. We used to play it at a company I started back in 1997, and I always thought we were the inventors of it (alcohol was involved!) We had another game that we played, which was the elaborate retelling of Official Jokes. There were 3 (the lion hunter joke, the parrot in the fridge joke, and the kennedy assassination joke) and since we all knew them, for some reason it was screamingly funny to hear someone trying to tell an old joke in a new way.