Hillary Equals France ?

New rule: conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes every time they hear the word France. Like just calling something French is the ultimate argument winner. "Aw, you want a health-care system that covers everybody and costs half as much? You mean like they have in France? What's there to say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?"

---Bill Maher in Newsweek International's
Hillary Equals France

You need to read the whole thing. It's a wonderful screed by the comedian behind Comedy Central's Politically Incorrect.

QotD for 18 June, 2007

In the spirit of the Mad Priest's Thought of the Day posts, may I offer...

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

---Steven Weinberg,
Nobel Prize winner (Physics),
in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

How Nerdy are You ?

96% scored lower (less nerdy).

(sigh)... But at least I clean up fairly well ;)

[via Eileen]

QotD for 9 June, 2007

I am particularly unconcerned with the sexual activities of my fellow human beings as long as nobody is being hurt. But the fact I have just eaten a chicken sandwich at the same time as somebody died of starvation scares the shit of of me.

--- the Mad Priest

Cognitive Hazard Zone!

Being a reader of various religious and political blogs, I'm often drawn back to resources like the Logical Fallacies pages on Wikipedia for references to refute the distressingly poor quality of argumentation I encounter.

I've now found a new favorite - 26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong. Which, besides being quite readable and entertaining, has the coolest warning sign ever ;)

[via By the Way]

Photoshopped Children's Books

Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday has some hilarious images of fake children's books. Like this bit of H.P. Lovecraft, illustrated by Richard Scarry!



Certainly not for real children, or the easily offended...

[via boingboing]

But Not the Sinner ?

One of the most common canards of the AAC/ACN and their fellows on the Christian Right is that, when confronted by people of which they disapprove (gays, liberals, uppity women), they really “only hate the sin, not the sinner.”

It's always been my experience that such people use this as a way to “hate” and still feel clean afterwards. Now, the Rev. Br. Tobias Haller has posted a penetrating entry on this topic with Enough of Hate:

It is impossible to “hate the sin” apart from the sinner, as if sin had some reality apart from the desires and actions of fallen human beings, as if you could somehow extract the sin from a person and vent your purifying fury upon it. Such a notion is very far from the Gospel. What is worse, those who begin by “hating the sin” in this abstract way soon will come to hating the sinner in a concrete way, as indeed they must, since the one cannot exist apart from the other. And when those who legislate what is sinful have sufficient power, we have seen what results: the auto da fé was intended to save the souls of those repentant heretics being burned alive.

Amen, Amen, Amen - What I tell you three times is true.

[with thanks to Fr. Jake]