I'm going to rake in lots and lots of your decadent capitalist dollars with latest gem, a country song called "Women Got Sensitive Feelings (And Boobies)."

Women got sensitive feelings...and boobies
When their feelings get hurt the boobies get sore
And they won't let you play
With their boobies no more...

I can hear the steel guitars a-wailing and the cash registers ching!-ing even now.

Sorry, readers, if you still read this blog. I'm not the type of person who typically has his shit together.

Anyway, here's a post I did on the Kallini blog that's probably worth reading.

Some awful, awful Bible humor for your enjoyment.

An idea whose time has come: Proletariat: The Uprising (link takes you to a page that links a *.PDF file). With this game, is it really necessary to construct the giant puppet heads or carry the World Workers Party banner any more? Put the Feudal-Theocratic Elements in gulags from the comfort of your kitchen table, with no risk to yourself from the m***********s you put up against the wall!

American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, in his famous 1968 speech, pleaded to "let freedom ring" across the land, "ringing" in a new era of racial harmony. In Bakshi's film, we have that very "ring" in our hands, the "ring" of freedom and racial equality, the "ring" that will let every white and black child play with race-blind eyes.

Frodo's mission is to destroy the ring.

-PWoT

Q: How do we know Christopher Columbus was a sex god?
A: In 1492 he came all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

(Oh, the humanity! Oh, the persecution!)

Must the tofu and Birkenstock crowd ruin everything?

Not ASfM, though. Probably my favorite writer ever, David Wong of Pointless Waste of Time, and his occasional co-humorist John Cheese, do a comic strip for their website called The Adventures of John and Dave (which has been linked in the Web Comics section of this blog's sidebar for a while now). Anyway, Wong put up a thread in his website's forums, providing a blank Adventures of John and Dave template, and inviting readers to make their own AoJaD cartoons. If he likes them enough, he posts them on the main part of his site, within the comic strip's continuity. Anyway, I made three attempts at an AoJaD comic strip, which I posted in his forums.

Comic 1
Comic 2
Comic 3

Comic 1, I was told by David Wong, he would post on his main site. Comic 2, he said, was good but he usually doesn't use animated strips (with a few exceptions) because he likes to tweak them before he posts them and he can't do that with animated 'toons. 3, probably my favorite, he didn't say anything about, but I'm guessing he's not using it on account of its tastelessness.

I posted the following on the Kallini forums, in response to a comment by Korgmeister, and it was substantive enough that I thought to give it it's own post:

I took a Middle East history class where we had to read a lot of primary sources, and one of the most striking things was that you'd commonly see impressive prose applied to statements of rather horrific reasoning. I mean, if you learn about logical fallacies it becomes a lot easier to notice faulty reasoning in your own culture (including recognizing one's own faulty reasoning, or that of those you agree with), which honestly everyone on the planet is guilty of, but among Islamic world scholarship there just seems to be so much doctrinaire irrationality. There are double standards everywhere in their beliefs, and like a person with OCPD (not to be confused with OCD, which I believe I may actually have), they have no problem with rationalizing any beliefs. I mean, the Koran explicitly states Islam can not be brought to people by coercion, so Islamists created the argument that the conditions for the opportunity to embrace Islam to be able to be brought to people (i.e. universal Sharia) can be violently fought to achieve. Then you have instances like that of Farag Foda, an Egyptian columnist who was highly critical of Islamists, who, consequently, obviously just had to be assassinated for apostacy by any reasonable person's standards, right? But the kicker with this one is that at the trial of his killers, an Islamic scholar was brought in as a witness, who actually argued that there should be no punishment as there was nothing wrong with killing an enemy of Islam. Can you imagine such an argument even being admitted (or, for that matter, attempted? By even the craziest of religious nuts?) in any Western court? (though, to be fair, one of his assassin's was indeed executed for the assassination)

Also worth noting, the writings of Islamists tend to be overly repetative. It seems to usually be a lot of flowery (or fiery) prose of limited substance. Not that that is by any means unique to the Islamic world, but it seems to be a lot more prolific there.

Of course, conversely, if you look at a list of history's worst dictators, the Middle Eastern dictators with the largest death tolls on their hands tend to be more secular by Middle Eastern standards. The three that top one million deaths are Enver Pasha, dictator of Turkey during WWI and the Armenian genocide, Saddam Hussein, whose crimes we here are all familiar with, and some military dictator of Pakistan named Yahya Khan, who I've never heard of. In the 10,000+ range you have Mustafa Kemal, the president of Turkey who was the main architect of Turkey's massive secularization (he banned fezes, and made Western, brimmed-hats mandatory, as they obstruct certain prayer positions) and Babrak Karmal, president of Afghanistan, who I wasn't at all familiar with but who was apparently a communist. There's other leaders in the 10,000+ range of that list that could be added here, like Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir, but for the most part it seems like most of their worst leaders were comparably secular. I think a lot of the reason for this is because in the decades after WWI, when the European superpowers defeated then divvied up the Ottoman Empire, the newly established nation states had to look to Western governments as models for their own governments, and the political elites found it more satisfying to borrow from the fascist models in Italy and Germany, as well as other authoritarian models like that of Russia/the USSR, than the more liberal models of the United States, France, or Britain.

Of course, the Islamists pose a greater threat of attacking people outside their immediate region, as the more secular political leaders have a lot more to lose from doing so (I talked to my Middle East history prof once since completing that class, and I asked him about Ahmedinejad. He thinks Ahmedinejad is unlikely to launch a first strike on anyone for this reason, but he thinks there is a potential threat of Ahmedinejad providing nuclear weapons to a terrorist group that doesn't have so much to lose. Incidentally, back during that class the prof mentioned that in the largest tower of our university, there is some grafitti in Arabic inside one of the elevators. My prof reads Arabic, and according to him the graffiti read "Hamas." Fun!).

Q: Did Hitler enjoy New Year's parties?
A: No, he just always stood there looking angry while he waited for the ball to drop.