By the way, I do just want to make one observation about the Left reaction to Chapel Hill. If you're on the Left, or a liberal, and you're condemning the Chapel Hill murders, and decrying the double standards of the media, and you're not also at least occasionally speaking out against the wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Arabs by Western governments (chiefly but by no means only the USA), and the support given by Western governments to regimes that violently oppress Muslims (i.e. Saudi Arabia, Israel), and the double standards of the media on these subjects, then guess what... you're a fucking hypocrite! Congratulations!Depressing that the local news one of our best bloggers has on his radar is about a vicious crime, but glad to see someone bringing needed perspective. If you've been here before, you've likely noticed that "atheist" is one of the one of primary modes I self-identify in when giving my (unsolicited) opinions. It might surprise you then that I haven't commented on how the media have picked up so joyously on this murderer's atheism as an excuse to tut-tut atheists in general for not taking care of their radical extremist problem. I'm just tired. It seems to me if you're talking about this story as first as a problem of Islamophobes as a subset of atheists, and atheism in general, then you've skipped over the problem with the bloodlust of the NRA and the fact it is criminally fucking easy for these damaged men to get their hands on guns in the first place.
And it's along those lines that I'm so fatigued with the other "big news" in the same cycle as this: the Brian Williams "scandal" over his self-aggrandizing exaggerations about a that helicopter came under fire in his general vicinity, which his story-telling eventually placed him in. For this he is suspended without pay for six months and has to earn back the trust of the American people as consumers of what passes for journalism. And yet ... and yet ...
If you are talking about this helicopter story like it matters, and not talking about how so many journalists and pundits and news analysts failed the American people with regard to the whole War On Terror and WMDs and What Have You, how many journalists abdicated, and continue to abdicate, their duty to investigate and inform about the most important matters of American policy, then you're a fucking hypocrite.
Music for the mood ...
I think of the things that matter
And I think of the things that don't
Whatever it is no matter
I hate feeling the way I feel
I hate feeling the way I feel today
I wish I was high
Brighter than nothing
Smarter than nobody
I've wasted away
