The Devil’s Publicist, maybe?
See, if the Devil is on trial somebody has to represent him. If he can’t afford an attorney one will be appointed to him by law. But nobody has to do P.R. work for him. So doesn’t that make his publicist a worse person than his lawyer?
What brings this question on? One of the reasons for this blog was that I’d quit writing. I realized that if I kept it up eventually there’d be enough material for a book. I’d toyed with “Newmerica”, the “Constitution 2.0”-based country that hopefully will arise from America’s ashes. But it’s never gotten me fired up enough for the enormous effort a book requires.
Nor am I exactly excited about realizing I’m the “Devil’s Publicist”. But my parents visited yesterday. My Mom had been thinking about my argument that letting women vote was a bad idea. She’s decided she agrees.
(For the record: I’m only against letting women vote in federal elections. They can take over all the others for all I care, as long as everyone remains free to travel and live where they desire. With a properly restrained national government they could control far more government wealth and power than men do. Although, if you love liberty, it’d be even better if they never voted at all. )
That position, combined with my defense of white privilege, made me think about some other WORMy arguments. Let’s review, sans links for now:
“White” people deserve their privileged positions.
Women voters are helping to destroy the U.S.A.
The Democratic Party is almost pure evil.
The so-called “United Nations” is almost pure evil.
Islam is almost pure evil.
The “black community” needs to grow the hell up.
Progressives are mentally retarded. (Wait, I haven’t formally proven that one yet. Maybe next post? It’s a very simple and scientific argument.)
The federal government has turned parasitic and needs putting down.
The “Talky Classes”–Government workers, teachers and academia, “journalists”, media, entertainment, have also turned evil and need putting down.
Nuclear power is the least-bad option for electricity.
The Catholic Church has child abuse problems because it departs from the Bible. And I like most Catholics!
None of these positions are intentionally provocative and outrageous. They are just where reason has led me. So obviously I want to know what you guys think is my most offensive writing. (Giving me a mulligan on the Joe Biden Rapist Rant.)
Also. The Devil’s Publicist is a good title, maybe a great one, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. I welcome any and all of you to label…whatever the heck it is we do here.
World's Only Rational Man 
You know, that cave I found in Japan a few years ago?
It looks better every day…
From mountain bear to care bear? Or, a la LOTR, a cave troll?
Care bear? I resent that! 😛
Well, pulling a Musashi (famous fencer Miyamoto Musashi spent the last years of his life in a cave, writing his book, painting, among other things) looks better every day, with the madness that is gripping and/or has already gripped the world.
My younger brother is working seriously toward “getting off the grid” and living semi-secretly in the wilderness.
Btw, I’ve wanted to put this up here for a while now… and you will be very scared by it. Let me c&p it quickly.
Jesus fulfilled roughly 300 prophecies concerning his coming.
There were no prophecies about Mohammed.
Jesus was likely never married.
Mohammed had roughly 15 wives, one of them was 9 years old when the marriage was consummated.
Jesus, reportedly, led a life without sin and often forgave the sins of others.
Mohammed often begged for forgiveness for his sins.
Jesus never waged war and said his kingdom was not of this world. He told his followers not to fight, never ordered even one execution and died for the sinners.
Mohammed waged war and fought in 66 battles to spread his ideology. He also condemned countless of people to death.
Jesus was about 33 when he died on the cross without committing any crime.
Mohammed died at 62 in Medina from pneumonia.
Jesus made the blind see (Luke 18:35)
Mohammed made the seeing blind (Sahih Bukhari vol. 8, p.520)
Jesus healed catatonic hands (Matthew 12:10)
Mohammed cut off hands (Sahih Bukhari vol. 8, p.520)
Jesus forgave his enemies (Luke 23:43)
Mohammed had his enemies murdered (Sahih Bukhari vol. 5, p.248)
Jesus promised freedom to the slaves (John 8:1)
Mohammed made the free into slaves (Sahih Bukhari vol. 5, p.248)
Frankly? I’m an atheist. But if I get a choice, I take that Jesus guy over that Mohammed guy. Seriously. I don’t like slavers, murderers and pedophiles and Mohammed was exactly that. Of course, with islam you only get 3 choices: 1) convert, 2) submit, 3) die. So yeah, that Jesus guy? Wasn’t so bad.
So now you may collect the shards of your skulls and the pieces of your brains. A atheist said something positive about Jesus.
Very nice, thank you!
BTW, you can change that “likely never married” to “never married”. Not only that, Jesus never had sex. Those are both 100% certain.
How do I know? Because He is engaged. His betrothed is the entire Church. No, I have no idea what that means either. I do know it doesn’t make me gay, any more than any single cell of my own body determines my (lack of) sexual partners.
You’re welcome. Though, given the evidence that I have, I’m still leaning to the “likely” instead of a 100% statement. I require more evidence before I make a call. I need to see it, measure it or have multiple sources. Source criticism, very important for historic research. I can’t take things at face value just like that.
But with “in dubio pro reo” in mind, yes, I will change it in the future.
Sheesh! Nice sermon there, Edo.
By the way retreating into a cave has good spiritual precedents. I’ve been checking out the desert fathers: seriously bad *ss ascetics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Fathers
Anyway, I just found some abandonded railway tunnels–close as I could get so far.
On to the matters at hand. Well, we all reach our, er, rational conclusions in our own way, I guess.
As for me, one of my conclusions is that Southern fundamentalists do incest so much because of their adherence to the “once saved, always saved” doctrine. Mind you, I like most Southern fundamentalists!
[I don’t believe this; just experimenting with the templates above to see what comes out.]
I must have missed this one; do not remember it.
>>>The Catholic Church has child abuse problems because it departs from the Bible.
As for which is most offensive, which is what you asked of us, the problem is, none of it has been offensive because LOGIC is used. Because your writings are based on logic, a reasonable person cannot take offense, although they may disagree.
Sorry, I didn’t read the assignment correctly, somewhat as usual.
“White” people deserve their privileged positions.
That’s not really what you said, and you’re rewording it tendentiously, I think, just to bring condemnation down on yourself. You implied basically (I think) that the anglosphere birthed certain combos of human rights, freedom, achievement, etc. and that white people to some extent inhabit what they inherited, but it is also now open to all. Thus, what you’re saying is it’s all about culture, which for some reason known only to yourself, you want to get impish about and put in racial terms–perhaps because race-baiters p*ss you off so much, and you want to bait the race baiters.
Women voters are helping to destroy the U.S.A.
All I can think is, “YOU can’t say THAT!” Is that a helpful response?
The Democratic Party is almost pure evil.
Over the top. (Probably not quite what you actually said, either.) But I’ve been out of the country for a while. Problematized by “people”–I know loyal democrats who are neat people. It’s a question of error, not evil? I don’t really know. You might say “I mean the party/principle not the people.” But it’s always complicated by people.
The so-called “United Nations” is almost pure evil.
I’m . . . disturbed by how readily I agree with that.
Islam is almost pure evil.
I don’t agree, but don’t want to get in a fight with Edo.
The “black community” needs to grow the hell up.
Which one? The black church ladies? They might be our last, best hope defending religious freedom. But like Worme I’m deeply disturbed by the steady destruction of the black community.
Progressives are mentally retarded. (Wait, I haven’t formally proven that one yet. Maybe next post? It’s a very simple and scientific argument.)
I can wait. Probably like the Democrat thing above.
The federal government has turned parasitic and needs putting down.
See “United Nations” response, but agreement not quite so automatic and visceral.
The “Talky Classes”–Government workers, teachers and academia, “journalists”, media, entertainment, have also turned evil and need putting down.
It’s not so much too broad of a brush as much as too broad a population to generalize absolutely about.
Nuclear power is the least-bad option for electricity.
I’m kind of leaning toward fossil fuels and methane and such, because of all the new discoveries and extraction techniques. And because Fukushima is so F-ed up. And because nuclear is (I could be wrong about this) by nature statist and depends on a stable statist arrangement and stable statist arrangements are weakening? But I can see why you’d say that.
The Catholic Church has child abuse problems because it departs from the Bible. And I like most Catholics!
Look, I shouldn’t be the one representing Catholicism, or anything else for that matter, but I think there’s no one else here, so . . . Anyway, I’m not offended. But it’s not fair. It’s not accurate. It’s misleading (because it mixes accurate with inaccurate). That’s what I was trying to say before. Let me give a different example.
“The South has a liberal problem because Southerners believes in unbiblical end-times theology.”
You could break it down like this:
The South has a liberal problem. True! Bill Clinton. Al Gore. James Carville. All Southern! All liberal! Democrats: controlled the South for a political eternity. Hence, The South = Liberal. Wait, false . . .? End times theology is unbiblical. True! (I think) End times theology causes the liberalism of the South. No, because the first premise is wrong; there is no “Southern Liberalism” that needs explaining for being more preponderant as compared to other liberalism. Even if it were right, I think, no correlation yet. You need (at a minimum) to show that a lack of end times theology correlates with less liberalism. Then you need to figure out if it’s causation and not correlation.
LIkewise, you could break down the Catholic Church statement like this:
Catholic Church has child abuse problems. (True!)
Catholic Chuch has an unusually high degree of child abuse problems compared to other groups. (Implied? False.)
Catholic Chuch has a moderately high degree of child abuse problems compared to other groups. (More modestly implied? Also false, to the best of my knowledge.)
Catholic Church has more child abuse problems than biblical religions (more bibl– OK, get to that later. Anyway, if you rephrase it as, “Catholic Church has more child abuse than Evangelical or Fundamentalist Protestant groups,” to the best of my knowledge, false.)
Catholic Church has about the same amount of child abuse problems as other groups. (To the best of my knowledge, true [though I think Non-Asians abuse children more than Asians, for whatever that’s worth] making the identification of causative factors to account for difference problematic, because there is not a difference.)
The reason the Catholic Church has more child abuse problems is because . . . (No, starting with the wrong premise, or at least implied premise; haven’t established that)
Catholic Church departs from the bible (Essentially, untrue. Arguably departs a great deal less from the bible, but has a different–but biblical–understanding of where the bible fits in. But the sentiment [that the CC departs from the bible] is not offensive and I could see why someone would think that; I’ve thought it before.)
See, the way I see it, the problem is not the Catholics. The problem is the organization and the leaders. We had our fair share of child abuse cases by Catholic priests and monks here. The problem was of course that it happened, but this crap happens everywhere. The real problem for me was always how the leadership dealt with it. Bishop Krenn downplayed it. He once called the findings of police on the computer of a young priest a “young boy’s foolishness”. They had found a load of child porn on the machine. Others tried to cover it all up. Groer comes to mind. And the Vatican did nothing else but half-arsed apologies that too often sounded more like “I’m sorry that I got caught”.
Now mind you, there is a MASSIVE double standard in the media when it comes to reporting such crimes.
A few years back Germany had two such scandals. One was, as expected, with in the Catholic church. The media had a field day. Front page headlines. The other, however, was in a left wing elite school, the so called Odenwald School. The abuse in this school was, IMO, worse than what the Catholic case showed (rape with objects, torture with fire and similar.) And worse yet, the school apparently had an at least 100 year history of this. The founder was said prey on pre-puberty girls. The media was… silent, except a few papers that pointed at this. In general the reports on the Odenwald Horror were footnotes
It doesn’t matter who does it. It remains awful, but the media shows massive bias, though the responsible Catholic leaders always show massively poor handling of such cases as well.
It doesn’t matter who the criminal is, what skin color he has or what religious tree he barks at. If you touch my niece or my god-daughters, I’ll hunt you, find you and kill you. You will beg for death before the end. That’s how simple it is. Whether you’re a Catholic, a mohammedan or an atheist “progressive” doesn’t matter.
Of course, the media doesn’t care, they just want to sell something. And the Catholic church is stuck in the ways of PR from more than 100 years back. People here have been leaving this group like rats getting off a sinking ship.
I sometimes wonder what Jesus would do if he’d walk today’s Earth. Would he grab a big stick and whack the religious leaders into shape, or would he just facepalm. I mean, the original message of Jesus is very simple and very clear. All the convoluted stuff was added later, by a clergy with growing power. And we’re back at the issue I have with organized religion. 2,000 years later, what Jesus preached has turned into an IP that sold extremely well for hundreds of years, gave them immense power and even today still sells. That’s all there is by now. Religious leaders, fatcats like our political leaders, sitting on their thrones, in their palaces, laughing at us and not really caring about us but only about their own comfy chairs and how to stay there. From the Dalai Lama to the Pope, from the Japanese PM to Obama, they all work like that.
I appreciate the thoughts. A lot of good ones.
I’ve got nothing against the Dalai Lama. As religious leaders go, he’s not so bad.
There’s no doubt that we screwed up Jesus’ message, and continue to screw it up day after day, night after night. My main objection to Christianity is that it’s an invitation to screw up his message, and screwing it up is inevitable since he asks for perfection, and you find out you can’t even do the basic crap right, and you wonder why he invited you in the first place. And sometimes it just breaks your heart. God must be like what the girls say a bad boyfriend is. He just breaks your heart. It’s hard to evangelize because I really want to say, “Don’t be a Christian! It’s all true, but God will just break your heart!”
But anyway . . .
I’m not sure how “simple” Jesus’ message is–seems simple enough at times, seems way cryptic at others, seems absolutely preposterously outrageous at others.
The main thrust of Jesus’ message is himself, I think; he IS the message, the perfect harmony of word, deed, person. And the gist of that message is the offering/sacrifice of himself. Another big part of his message is, basically, “eat me.”
Jesus is not against ‘organized religion’ per se (though in many ways he’s always by definition against organized religion, and probably disorganized religion as well) because he gathered men around himself (conspicuously imperfect men, so it would be clear that there’s nothing special about them) and gave them authority to do certain stuff, and he gave one in particular (probably the most imperfect) some sort of authority over them. And this (from my sectarian niche) is what Jesus set up to hand down his message, and offer up his sacrifice, generation after generation, all the way up to us, all the way back to the first apostles.
I don’t know why Jesus set it up this way. But he did.
Women voters are helping to destroy the U.S.A.
I would disagree. Working, tax paying women should vote, just like working, tax paying men.
What is really destroying the US, and us over here is that people, who contribute nothing to society, who sit on their butts and cash welfare checks, who live off the tax payer (because, why work 40 hours a week for 900 Euro, when I can get 1,000 Euro easily from the government for not working), have the same voting rights as the rest of us.
That is absolutely mad!
Oh, it’s their human right. Oh yeah? So we leave the fate of our countries to an ever growing mob of lazy non-achievers? Who will those hordes vote for? The politician who wants to cut spending, who wants to support the free market, who wants a successful private sector, who wants to reduce the unemployment numbers? Or the politician who screams “Tax the rich!”, who promises more welfare, more money for “the poor”, who points at how “horrible poverty in our county is” (*) and thus we must spend more money?
They will vote for whoever promises to keep them in their cushy, lazy, non-achieving ways of life, cause really, you gotta be mad to get off your butt every day and work 40, or maybe more, hours a week. You gotta be totally nuts, man!
Therein lies the real problem in my opinion and something needs to be done about it.
If someone lives off the tax payer, why should he be allowed to vote? There’s not a single logic reason for letting him vote. The human rights are NOT a logic reason.
Let’s go into history. In the late 19th century and into the late 1920s/early 1930s Japan had a first form of democracy. Let’s ignore for a second that this parliament was effectively useless and became even more useless with the rise of militarism and nationalism (two things that weren’t around until Japan was “westernized”), because that allowed the military to effectively control the cabinets by purposely withholding army and navy ministers (who, eventually, had to be active officers.) Let’s ignore all that. The early forms of voting in Japan were based solely on taxes. Rich people, who paid more tax, were allowed to vote. Eventually this was extended to the whole male population. A welfare system, like we know it today in the EU and US, didn’t exist. It took after WW2 for women to be allowed to vote as well.
Now here’s the thing. The idea of a tax based voting system isn’t so bad. Every one who pays income tax is allowed to vote. In Austria that would be everyone in a work contract. Welfare isn’t counted as income over here, so that would remove tens of thousands of worthless votes. For the US this could be adapted. Income tax, yes, and maybe… Actually, forget it. If you want to vote, get a better job, where you get enough money to pay income tax. Or introduce income tax for everyone who’s working (which, on the long run, will happen anyway, you can’t milk the “evil rich” ™ and the middle class forever, even though the fact remains that income tax for everyone doesn’t change anything, you will still go down, just slower, as Germany and Austria prove, because ultimately any tax just gives politicians an excuse to spend more money they don’t have.)
Of course, one could now say that this system would place all the power in the hands of the “evil rich” ™. Well, personally I rather see the power in the hands of some hard working, successful citizen than someone who’s just sitting on his butt the whole day doing nothing.
The system is not perfect, of course not. Democracy is a bad form of government. Too bad that we don’t really know a better one.
As for… “Omg! People have the right to vote!” No. Rights without connected duties are worthless. The entire notion of having a certain right simply because one exists is ridiculous. When I came to Vienna I was one of those folks who saw things to rose-colored glasses. I was very far left. I was young. As I got older I learned the hard way that respect, among other things, has to be earned. So today I say if you want something… EARN IT.
(*) they’re actually doing this here, both the far left AND the church scream constantly how many children in Austria are endangered by poverty and how the “new poverty” is the issue. Now mind you, we don’t have any poor people in Austria, but today, in our lazy, comfortable western countries, not being able to buy the nextgen iPad on release date counts as poverty.
Btw, the politician examples? We’ve just saw that in France. Who won? The guy promising more “tax the rich!” and more spending. The large mass of people is blind and stupid and who voted him into power? The ever growing horde of lazy non-achievers.