Can we have some backlash *now*, please?
This is a big story that, for some reason, isn’t getting much US attention yet.
So, this guy is walking down a London street today — some reports say he’s a soldier, at any rate he was wearing a Help for Heroes t-shirt, a military charity — and these two guys knock him over with a car. Then they get out with a knife, a machete and a handgun and hack the man to pieces while screaming “Allahu Akbar!” and “‘We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you!” and drag his corpse into the streets.
It takes twenty minutes for the police to get there, during which time the two yoots stood around trying to get the horrified bystanders to take their pictures waving their weapons in the air, like they’re going to be on Britain’s Got Talent tonight or something. Africans, from the look of it. Shot, but alive.
It’s already classed as a terror attack, so we don’t have to go through THAT linguistic dance, at least.
So. Doesn’t there come a point where that backlash they’re always wringing their hands about is actually appropriate?
May 22, 2013 — 6:11 pm
Comments: 54
Gnarly Mummy Head!
Gnarly mummy head! It isn’t even my title – it’s Discovery’s title: Gnarly Mummy Head Reveals Medieval Science.
Neat story. This is the oldest surviving European anatomical dissection. It’s a proper, prepared anatomical specimen, too — the anatomist ran wax into the arteries for preservation and everything. Carbon dating puts its origins round about 1200 AD.
Yup, during the Middle Ages. When things like autopsies were supposedly verboten.
I’ve read for some time that the Dark Ages were unfairly tagged with that moniker. I mean, that’s been a trend in history books for my whole lifetime: rehabilitating that long stretch between the Romans and the Renaissance.
Until I read the article, though, I didn’t put that together in my head with Protestantism. That newly minted Protestants talked a lot of crap about the state of science before their time, as a sort kind of anti-Church thing. “Oh, boohoo — the Pope didn’t let us cut up dead people!” Which was not, apparently, true.
Worth a read, anyway.
Oh, speaking of dead people! I’m delighted to acknowledge that Hugo Chavez is officially dead. I’m even more delighted to point out that his official date of death is today, Tuesday, March 5. Which means he falls between Dead Pools and I don’t owe dick.
Sorry, Hutch. I suspect you wuz robbed.
March 5, 2013 — 11:30 pm
Comments: 37
Job opening!
Zo, the Pope is retiring, eh? That’s something that happens, like…never.
Yeah, I don’t know where I was going with this. I think I had that old game Mystery Date stuck in my head. Remember that?
Oh, hey, Kung Hei Fat Choi, y’all! Happy Year of the Snake (that sounds auspicious, don’t it?) Yesterday was Chinese New Year, so we drove to our favorite Chinese restaurant for takeaway. Which is a long, long, STUPID long drive, and the weather was lousy. High winds and raining sideways. The ground is saturated, so it was all slopping over the road in a bad way. We plowed through a few puddles of an almost-stall-the-car depth.
Though seeing the FaceBook pictures of what fell on my buds back in Rho d’Island this weekend, perhaps I shouldn’t complain.
So, hey, you going to apply for that pope thing?
February 11, 2013 — 11:18 pm
Comments: 42
Enjoy the Streisand Effect, boys!
ZOMG, have you seen The Innocence of Muslims? Oh My God, OHMIGOD, omigod! It is the dumbest thing ever.
The trailer, anyway. As far as anyone knows, that’s all that’s out there. The longest clip I could find is 13:51 and it is pure triple-A tincture of stupid. (The link is a generic YouTube search of “Innocence of Muslims” – I wouldn’t worry too much about the clip coming down. There are dozens of copies, including the one I saved locally).
It’s a dozen or so American community theater refugees hamming it up in front of a green screen, mostly against a backdrop of desert dunes. So nobody casts a shadow and the sand doesn’t move when they walk on it. Oh, it’s rich.
And, boy, were those poor bastards set up — they were acting a perfectly innocent generic sand epic. The inflammatory parts were dubbed in later, in different voices, with different mics, in a different room. The lips don’t synch at all.
“Is Mohammed gay?” “Of course!”
You can clearly see the original line was Gamera is a friend to all children.
Seriously, you’d have to be a platinum ‘tard to be the slightest provoked by this silly pile of fluff.
Which is, of course, entirely not what happened. I mean, look at those scruffy young men shouting in the streets. They obviously don’t have YouTube accounts. If they had access to funny cat videos, would they be that cross?
September 14, 2012 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 27
Use the word, Lefties
Oh, man. I thought I was angry yesterday. Today, I am apopleptic.
Sorry, y’all. I’m not a very good angry blogger. It’s just not my thing. “Happy, poo-flinging monkey” is more my style. I’ll just sit over here and seethe for a bit.
Go read Ace. He’s a much better angry blogger than I am. He makes an excellent point: by calling for sanctions or consequences or shunning or jail or something against this anti-Muslim filmmaker or that yahoo Koran-burning preacher or whoever, what American ‘liberals’ are really asking for is American legal recognition of the crime of blasphemy.
Blasphemy laws.
They can’t say it. They can’t think such a thing of themselves. Blasphemy is such a crude and un-nuanced and illiberal idea, calling it by that name is like biting down on a scrap of aluminum foil. But that’s the proper word for the thing they’re demanding today.
Make them call it by its proper name.
September 12, 2012 — 9:46 pm
Comments: 41
My pet goat
Happy Eid al-Adha, everyone (this year, it runs from Sunday the 6th until Wednesday the 9th). The Festival of Sacrifice celebrates Abraham’s willingness to cut his son’s throat in obedience to God — one of the more disturbing chapters in the book, I’ve always thought.
Today, a taxi driver told my mother in law this story: when he was a lad in Kashmir, his grandmother bought a young goat every Summer and raised it as a pet. She stroked it and spoiled it with treats until it loved her and followed her everywhere.
Then they killed it for Eid al-Adha.
Because, see, Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, you should sacrifice something you love, and that loves you back.
I’ve been trying to tell myself that of course the gods must ask you to do difficult things; but I’m not sure it follows that the gods must tell you to do rotten, shitty things. You can draw a pretty straight line between people who think God expects them to kill their pets, and people who rejoice when their sons fly airplanes into office buildings in the name of God.
November 4, 2011 — 11:09 pm
Comments: 46
Satan’s early warning chicken
Still feel like crap. The way my colds go, I feel awful at the beginning but don’t sound bad, and when I start to sound hacky and snotty, I’m actually feeling a lot better. So never with the sympathy when I need it.
Anyhow, I forgot to tell you…yesterday, mid-morning, Mapp started to alarm call. This is the sound they make when there’s a fox or a cat or a tractor or other threat they’re pretty sure they can take on. You know, the bok-bok-bok-be-GAAAAK bok-bok.
She doesn’t usually do that. She’s the quietest of the four. But she kept at it, and suddenly…there was a knock at the door.
Muffled voice: is this house really four hundred years old?
Uncle B: Jehovah’s Witnesses?
Muffled voice: muffled response.
-=SLAM=-
Yeah, British JW’s! Who knew? There are quite a lot out here, and they’ll come right into your back garden (that’s a really severe British no-no) and everything. I couldn’t think of a less British idea than sending religious missionaries out to challenge a Limey’s private space, but they do.
From what I’m told, the Church of England is a little snooty and high church for some, so out in the country there are flourishing colonies of JW’s and Strict and Particular Baptists and whatnot.
Anyhow, we got us an Early Warning Chicken!
September 15, 2011 — 8:14 pm
Comments: 36
The weirdification of the perfectly fucking ordinary
Oh, man. This is a scientist. He wrote an article skeptical of global warning.
What does the BBC think you need to know about this today? Well, dude has the crazy eye. And he’s a “committed Christian” (check the caption). Yes, it’s as perfectly irrelevant as you think.
Byron York had a thing yesterday about Leftists trying to make the 2012 presidential election all about religion. Well, Christianity. Well, some creepy zombie Jesus conspiracy caricature of Christianity.
Me, I’ve got a head start on this one. The BBC has been working on this fucked up view of American religious life for as long as I’ve been coming over here.
I’ll never forget a BBC TV special I saw on one of my first trips, about religious life in America. Somehow, they managed to find video of a Texan female achondroplastic dwarf preacher standing on a chair blowing a shofar.
Google it. I’m too weary to explain.
Oh, and this one! Remember when Trijicon, the gunsight maker, ‘fessed up that they’d been inscribing their products with Bible verses (things like 2COR4:6) and had done for years? Not a good idea for an internationally traded company, but whatever. How did the media describe this?
U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes.
Military weapons. Secret Jesus Bible codes. Since when did ordinary old Bible verses become secret Jesus Bible codes? What breathless bullshit is this?
Now, as you may (or may not) remember, I’m an atheist. Pretty much. An atheist with smartypants tendencies. There is a point with most religions — that point where “take it on evidence” becomes “take it on faith” — that the whole business becomes creepy and off-putting to me.
But to pretend there’s something uniquely creepy and off-putting about American Protestant Christians as compared to any other religious group…well, that totally plinks my sense of fair play.
Put it this way: how many times did the media try to pin down Nancy Pelosi or John Kerry on the magical power of Jesus’ foreskin or the little toebone of some saint?
Yeah. Not.
September 2, 2011 — 10:59 pm
Comments: 63
I wore gaiters to church!
Our parish did the Rogation walk yesterday. Not, technically, Rogation Sunday (that would be April 25), but this service is one of the many that wadded up Roman customs with pagan rituals, put a little Jesus sauce on it and called it a Christian festival…so punctilious observance seems unnecessary.
“Rogation” comes from the Latin rogare — to ask. In rural areas (like what we are) the priest asks a blessing on the fields and the animals. It’s also associated with the ancient custom of beating the bounds — a ritual in which all the boys were marched along the parish boundaries while the men threw them into ponds and briar patches and slammed their heads on boundary rocks and markers.
Hey, no Google Earth. It was the best way to ensure they never, ever, ever forgot the property line.
Sadly, we didn’t have any boys. We didn’t even walk the whole boundary line. We did lead a whole herd of bluehairs across a good few fields of sheep (also, unexpectedly, cows) and we blessed the bejesus out of the lot.
We recited the Benedicite Omnia Opera at them.
Yeah. It was one wand short of a Harry Potter.
May 9, 2011 — 8:11 pm
Comments: 19
A big ask
You know, it is a huge thing we’re asking of the Middle East and Afghanistan. We’re asking them to catch up to, like, 400 years of Western cultural shift. Overnight.
We’re demanding they instantly accept attitudes toward self-government and religion that it took us hundreds of years and a few nasty wars to reach.
We’re asking them to adopt attitudes about women we’ve only reached in the last forty years and attitudes to homosexuality we’ve only realized in the last twenty.
And some of the stuff we’re pushing on them has to look pretty unattractive. They could be forgiven for thinking free speech and a secular society inevitably results in our current style of slutty, trashy popular culture. (I don’t think it is inevitable. I think it took a relentless campaign to eradicate shame to make that happen).
It’s not exactly sympathy. But I think we asking for a huge leap from…excitable people. I’ll be astonished if the Arab Spring ends well. Or soon.
April 12, 2011 — 9:49 pm
Comments: 23