Blahg

I guess I took January off from blogging. Whatever. If anybody read this thing, maybe they would have reminded me to post every once in a while. That's right, Nonexistent Reader, it is YOUR fault.

Maybe one of these days I'll give a fuck again and post something of substance.

All Your Hitch Are Belong to Us

Christopher Hitchens is six days gone, and his corpse has decayed just enough for the ghouls to find irresistible. As they devour him, they compare him to C.S. Lewis and G.K. Bloody Chesterton, those eloquent old godders, to whom, it should be noted, no one compared Hitch when he was alive. As the hungry foragers dig their fingers into Hitchens’s desiccating body they chirp that perhaps the man who wrote God is Not Great changed his mind about the whole Jesus thing at the very last minute, and if not before death, he certainly did when he turned up in Hell, what what? God is LURVE.

Please piss on his grave. Hitchens was a notorious grave pisser. This was my favorite of his qualities. The world needs talented grave pissers to continue that tradition. Talk about how 9/11 brought out his inner warmongering douchebag. Arch your eyebrow and try to replace him*.



Please do not pretend he came around to Jesus in the very end. The only deathbed conversion having to do with Hitchens was his conversion from a living person into a cadaver. Hitch predicted the vultures would feast, not because he was clairvoyant but because the scavengers for the Holy Ghost are so fucking predictable.

Stop lying for your meat, hyenas. Hitchens was a godless Horseman, not a Christian soldier. He was neither a secret nor an honorary Christian just because his name had the word Christ in it or because militant Islam seriously freaked him out. About the resurrection of Jesus, Hitchens said the following:

“Having no reliable or consistent witnesses, in anything like the time period needed to certify such an extraordinary claim, we are finally entitled to say that we have a right, if not an obligation, to respect ourselves enough to disbelieve the whole thing.” (God is Not Great, p. 143)

Hitch was a war pig, but he was our war pig. You don’t get to claim him, Ross Douthat, now that he’s too deceased to tell you to fuck yourself. A lie about a dead infidel is still a lie.



Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

*Try hard, won’t you? My heart aches for a Hitchens obit of Kim Jong Il.

It Gets Worse

Last month, professional atheist JT Eberhard gave a much-touted talk at Skepticon IV about mental illness, and called for people with mental disorders to share their stories. This is one of mine.

Since I was a little kid I have wanted to die, but I first understood I could kill myself when I was twelve. That year, an acquaintance of my dad’s shot himself in the head. I realized I did not need to beg imaginary beings to get me out of this life when there was a way out right there in the medicine cabinet (we didn’t have a gun). It seemed so obvious, to do it my damn self. Right in my face the whole time, and I never saw it until Dad’s friend blew his own brains out. I thought it was genius.

22 years later, I still think that guy had the right idea. College is going well enough, and I love my husband and family, but none of it matters to my brain. At least once a day, I seriously consider suicide as an alternative to spending one more conscious minute on this ridiculous piece of shit planet.

Sometimes crazy people neglect hygiene and various ailments. My upper teeth have rotted away so that when I smile, I look like a zombie. This is a little bit cool on Halloween or on a movie set, but not so fantastic at a job interview. The bleeding and pain are never even a little bit cool. I have trouble leaving the house a lot of the time, because I cannot bear people looking at me. It will cost over $4000 to extract the teeth and over $1700 to get dentures put in. I am 34 years old and I have to get dentures because I am batshit.

Two weeks ago, I had a five-day-long panic attack. I could not sleep, I barely ate, and what I did eat I vomited soon after. My husband tried to help by dragging me out of the house, but there was no shutting up the noise in my head. I did not know what to do, and so I considered eating my husband’s entire bottle of Xanax to make it stop. Instead, I took three pills and passed out.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I felt much calmer after I got some sleep.

Living with mental illness sucks, but skepticism saves the day almost every day. I can’t reason myself out of a panic attack, but I can determine that, indeed, the Wendy’s has not disappeared or ceased to exist, that my brain is being a douchebag once again, and that I should pull over until it quits doing that. There is comfort in having a framework to better distinguish reality from delusion. Skepticism does not always alleviate the guilt I feel for being crazy, but it helps me to understand that the guilt is irrational, unhelpful, and perfectly understandable given society’s views on the mentally unstable.

The ability to question my own assumptions has kept me ticking. Maybe on dark days that disappoints me, but what do I know? I’m crazy.

Fundies Piss Me Off

In a nation with as diverse a population as the United States, where all races, creeds, religious beliefs, genders, etc. come together in the public space, how the fuck is it that I ended up the only atheist among a horde of Christian fundamentalists in my philosophy class?

First, there is the fellow who answered a discussion question about ethical relativism with an incoherent screed about the immorality of men who lie with men, quoted the bit in Leviticus about such men being "put to death," and something about how the government says "God bless America" all the time. This was all in one post. He backed off a bit when I asked him what he was trying to say; should the U.S. government put men who lie with men to death? But that is what happens when you confront fundies with the implications of what they believe. They back off so they don't appear to be the monsters that their words imply them to be.

Being gay, BTW, is totally more abominable than eating shellfish because Jesus said so.

Then there is the young lady who claimed she was "very upset" because other people did not believe the same things that she believed, that she did not even realize it was possible. Really, lady? You never met a Jew? Hell, you never met a Christian of a different denomination than yours? She never spoke to me, but I know my disproof of the stupid stupid STUPID ontological argument the week before was probably one source of her discomfort.

Anyway, it is almost over, and soon I will enter Intro to Film. This is a class where maybe, for once, the Godders will talk about something other than how awesome their god is. Like movies, for instance. Hopefully not the Left Behind movies, but fuck it. Kirk Cameron at least is good for a laugh.

Internet Shitstorm Highlights Fact That "Nature" Publishes Fiction

So. Womanspace. A lot of folks are pretty pissed about it, for various reasons. The short story, published recently in the science journal Nature's fiction section, is a lighthearted look at the differences between men and women, using hackneyed old stereotypes that were not especially funny back in the '50's when they were slightly fresher. Menz be shopping like this, but wimminz, y'all, they be shopping like this.

But I am not here to rip on Mr. Rybicki. Much. The Internet, cruel creature that it is, has not been kind to the author, and anyway, most of us who write have written some really dumb shit. Rybicki got luckier than most of us, though. He got paid for it. And that is what I want to talk about today.

Some of the commentariat wonders why a science journal would contain a fiction section in the first place, and calls for its elimination. By all means, Internet, use your power to get the editor fired, and to bring in someone who knows what they're doing. That second bit is the key, though. You see, back in the days of Bradbury and Ellison, there existed a good number of outlets for short fiction. A writer could, if properly motivated, earn much of a living wage writing speculative fiction and tales of the weird for periodicals.

No longer. The decline of the magazine has been well-documented. Writers must fight each other for a spot in one of the few publications left that pay for fiction. Another outlet for short science fiction, particularly in a well-respected journal, is good for the genre, its creators, and its fans. While it is unfortunate that Nature's editorial staff chose to publish a sub-par bit of controversy generation instead of high-quality speculative art, the upside is that readers and writers alike are all now aware that this journal publishes short fiction. This opens up the possibility for Nature to nurture the next Bradbury or Ellison.

So, let us not be so hasty, dear Internet, to throw out a good idea because it was executed poorly. Fresh eyes and ideas can turn this thing around.

I Have No Fandom, But I Must Squee

Since LOST and Heroes went off the air, I have been without a TV boyfriend. Sure, there are plenty of good-looking gentlemen populating Television Land, but it takes more than nice abs and a pretty face for a character to win my heart. Sawyer had sarcastic quips to go along with his adorable dimples, and Sylar could flip trucks with his mind while raising a gorgeous eyebrow. In addition to being ridiculously beautiful, Sayid and Mohinder were rational thinkers with deep inner conflicts and a yearning to be accepted and loved. These characters had depth and soul, so that even when they did terrible things (looking at you, Sy), I could not help but love them.

With the premiere of American Horror Story, I had hoped that a new TV boyfriend would present himself in Dylan McDermott's character Ben Harmon. The problem is that Ben is such an insufferable enema bag that I just can't muster up any sympathy for him, his shapely derriere notwithstanding. Allow me to illustrate how fiercely this character turns me off. In the pilot, there is a scene in which Ben furiously masturbates while weeping. If Sylar were doing this in a fanfic, it would feel like home to me. However, at this scene, rather than a quickening of the breath and a tingle in the nethers, I felt something very different bubbling up inside me: laughter. Peals and peals of side-splitting laughter. "What the fuck?" I giggled. "That was awesome!"

Awesome, indeed, in its hilarity. Rapey Gimp Ghost is orders of magnitude sexier than Weepy Wanky Ben.

So, it has been lovely to enjoy the glorious presence of one Mr. Zachary Quinto (Code name: Sugarplum) on AHS these last two weeks. His character Chad, being an angry gay ghost, is not really an ideal TV boyfriend for me, but that doesn't matter. We could be really great friends, Chad and I. We could sledgehammer Jack-O-Lanterns together, and then later, over a bottle of wine, commiserate about our respective relationship troubles. Then we could chase interlopers out of the Murder House and go bobbing for Granny Smiths. No, that is not a euphemism.

Please, Ryan Murphy, in the interest of keeping your show the craziest, campiest thing on TV, give my Sugarplum plenty more to do. You will not regret this.

Lying for Xenu

Earlier this week, former Scientology bigwig Marty Rathbun leaked documents on his blog describing the church's efforts to plant a mole inside South Park Studios. Everybody saw "Trapped in the Closet," and everyone with half a brain looked that shit up after the episode aired to confirm the truth of its claims.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone exposed Scientology's wacky intergalactic secrets to millions of viewers around the world at a time when the church's membership (and thereby its revenue) was ever-expanding. These secrets were supposed to be kept behind a pay wall. Who thought the COS was just going to let this go? Fact is, you fuck with Miscavige's bottom line, the best you can hope for is a mole in your workplace. I can't wait to see more documents, to find out exactly how far they got in this ill-advised Super Adventure.

Until then, I'd like to discuss something about the documents that disturbs me intensely. Apparently, the church used Lloyd Kaufman's old "Yale buddy" Eric Sherman to pump Kaufman for information about Parker and Stone. Kaufman, of course, is the founder of Troma Studios, and one of my favorite human beings on the planet. Top ten, for real. I love this man. Here I am with him a few years ago at a convention (I'm next to Sgt. Kabukiman).

I show you this for full disclosure. When Lloyd Kaufman says that he had no idea Eric Sherman was a Scientologist, I believe him. When he says he would never intentionally do anything to harm Parker and Stone, I know this to be true. It angers me to my core that someone purporting to be his friend would lie to him just to get information that could hurt other people. In what universe is this moral?

It is moral in the universe where society affords privilege to the religious liar--in other words, the universe we currently occupy. We have no way of determining whether or not there was a moment when Sherman said to himself, "Gee, it's kind of shitty to use my friends this way." Regardless, it's clear that Sherman determined any reservations he had were less important than doing as his religious leaders told him to do.

And Sherman's religious leaders declared that Parker and Stone needed to go down for having the temerity not only to mock Scientology's ridiculous ideas, but also to point out what those ideas actually are (which circumvents the revenue stream). Sherman decided that this crime--the crime of producing a cartoon that his religion did not like--was a worse offense than betraying the trust of his old college friend to get gossip, and presenting a mole for formal introduction, that said mole might sabotage people's lives.

In a culture that encouraged people to question religious authority, would Sherman still have made this decision? Possibly. The authoritarians will be with us always. But in such a culture, a mendacious organization like the Church of Scientology (amongst many others) would be less likely to flourish.

More thoughts on this later.

Proper Fallacies: What Is Not Ad Hom

Everybody loves to commit logical fallacies, but it is important to get them just right. At this very moment, someone on the Internet is accusing someone else on the Internet of an ad hominem attack. Is it so? Here's how you can tell.

You and I are debating X. You claim that X is true, while I claim that X is false.

1. You say: X is true because Y.

I say: No, fuckburglar, X is false because Not-Y.

This is not an ad hominem fallacy. It is a valid argument containing an insult. To truly commit to the fallacy, avoid valid arguments.

2. You say: X is true because Y.

I say: No, fuckburglar, X is false because you burgle fucks.

This is the ad hominem fallacy in its proper form. The truth or falsity of claim X has nothing to do with whether or not you actually burgle fucks. A mere insult is lazy; it lacks the fallacious flavor of the juicy ad hom.

I hope this has been helpful. We really must elevate the dialogue, you know?