waagnfnp

It’s How You Play (or Write About) the Game

By JP Stormcrow

A kinder, gentler intro to the rituals of surrogate warfare this weekend. I will attempt some calm, cool, collected liveblogging of the NCAA semis (~6:00 and 8:45 PM EDT Saturday) and invite all to join in (even if you are not watching the games.) [And I might throw a little Pens in there if I need a fast-paced break from the giants lumbering up and down the hardwood.] 

In the meantime, Open is as Open does, so have at it. A suggested topic is folks’ favorite sports writing (fictional, autobiographical or actual sportswriting.) [And despite my transparently dishonest attempt at taking a positive approach above, I will note that even Grantland Rice’s famous Against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again piece focuses on oppositional fear.]

Oh, and I just wanted to say There is nothing old under the nebular collapse created by a supernova shock wave again, because I can and it is so original. A continuing hat tip to James Killus.

[Update: Picked up this amusing link from Crooked Timber. You may also want to try this blast from the past future or this little escapade.]

[Update #2 - Monday evening: Please go ahead and liveblog tonight’s championship game on this thread. I am at a family member’s house out here in meatworld - so need to maintain minimum level of social interaction, but will try to pop in on breaks. In comments spyder points out what is at stake tonight:

Aaaahh the state that stole another presidential election for Bushco competes against the first state]

Anybody who has looked for a job - and I recently spent several months doing just that - has probably asked herself: “that’s all there is? I’m so tired of it. I really want to do something different!”

Now, maybe you’ll think “easy - I’ll just become a professional humorist - how hard can that be?” Well, as the writers for FOX News Channel’s fake fake news show The 1/2 Hour News Hour can tell you - it’s really hard.
So, what else is out there? Hoping for the big lottery win? Busing tables? Swindling companies out of their ill-gotten gains by offering management seminars? Working as minor functionary in the WAAGNFNP?
Meet the insults writer. Now, the only one who’s ever held that job is, as far as I can ascertain, Orson Scott Card - the science fiction author turned wingnut. But our esteemed readers won’t be surprised to hear that I believe this to be a growth sector - maybe one of the few left that can’t be outsourced. After all, to insult a person effectively, you need to understand that person. That’s why insults aimed at someone you don’t understand are really slurs, not insults. Case in point: Bill “Papa Bear” O’Reilly. He constantly aims to insult liberals - and fails miserably. Who isn’t tired of hearing about the “fascist ACLU” or the “secular-progressive war on Christmas”? It’s pathetic, really. And it is the direct result of Bill’s lack of understanding of the liberal mind.

So it’s lucky for Bill that I’m here to help out. I used to be a liberal. And I have decided to apply for the job of insults writer at the Factor.

Continue Reading »

A MESSAGE FROM THE MINISTER OF JUSTICE

It’s happening April 6 -8, 2007. I first learned about this at PZ’s place, where I was directed to the ringleader of this esteemed event: Blue Gal, who now has a site devoted to it here. Mock, Paper, Scissors designed the cool logo (which gets better the longer you look at it), and is deeply involved with putting this all together, as is The Neural Gormet.

*Whew!* That’s a lot of credits. Hope I didn’t leave anyone out.

But now to the heart of the matter: The WAAGNFNP needs to be all over this. We need to be loud and proud on this one, people, and not simply because this dangerous melding of government with religion distracts people from focusing on their personal relationship with Astaroth and becoming One with the Vision of Gojira™ - the necesary prerequisites toward hastening the arrival of the Giant Nuclear Fireball.

So here’s your opportunity to show your WAAGNFNP Party Patriotism and click that Submit a Post link above. Officially, BAT Week goes from April 6 -8. But the Ministry of Justice is more than happy to start early and finish late if we have enough submissions. Go ahead, make us blog administrators work overtime processing all the great material you send in. It will definitely be a labor of love.

Remember, BAT Week is about how keeping religion and government separate gives us all more freedom, including the freedom from religion. It’s not a simple religion-bashing exercise. That being said, the good news is there’s plenty of room for participation, even for folks who express themselves in ways other than words. To quote Neural Gourmet:

The idea is simple. Just post something related to, and in support of, the separation of church and state each of those three days. Something big, something small, artistic, musical, textual or otherwise. The topic is your choosing. Whether your thing is stem cell research, intelligent design/Creationism, abortion rights, etc., it’s all good. Separation of church and state impacts so many issues and is essential.

See that? You can submit something artsy, not just wordsy, if you’d like. (Not that wordsy can’t be artsy, of course. But you know what I mean).

So saddle up people, and get ready to ride! When this thing is done, we want everyone to be saying, “Damn…did you see the WAAGNFNP during Blog Against Theocracy Week? They freakin’ tore the Roof off that Sucker!”

By Aaron Barlow

One of Philip K. Dick’s worst books, Counter-Clock World has events moving backwards while our time sense moves forward. We periodically regurgitate food that takes shape on plates that we remove, scooping into pots and pans, etc. And, of course, we shove… er… well… up our… uh, you get the picture.

Not everything moving in a direction opposite of what we expect is necessarily inane, of course—but we do tend to disparage anything that is “backwards.” But it may be that we have it a bit wrong. Hell, if Ginger Rogers can be lauded for ‘doing everything Fred Astaire did, but in high heels, and backwards,’ maybe there’s something to be said for it.

Since the explosion of online publishing possibilities, from blogs to on-demand book creation, there’s been little sense of direction at all in Internet publishing as a whole. Everyone heads where they will, but most of us still look offline for “real” publishing—even if we write extensively for the Web.

Why is that?
Continue Reading »

[?aedi eno siht fo tuo teg I nac egaelim hcum woH]

***BREAKING*** *** Web Only Exclusive*** ***BREAKING***

By KIRBY ALTHOUSE, Associated Press Writer

PALO ALTO- Cyber-researchers at the Hoover Institution on Massively Redundant Sucking and Blowing** are tracking the emergence of yet another Internet White Hole.

Continue Reading »

By Zeus

A central faith question for our time: “What would religion be if it weren’t trying to sell something?”

The reply is not easy to the tongue. Our religious imagination has been captured, felt up, coveted by self-serving “right hands of God,” and appeals to our most primitive emotions: fear of damnation, love of money, hope of eternal reward. Yet let us inquire more deeply.

What indeed would religion be without the falsely evangelistic snake oil of the “prosperity gospel”, which, against Jesus, blesses the worldly and materialistic rich over the humble and suffering poor. What would religion be without New Age gurus selling recipes for personal/universal awareness. What would religion be if it were not simply grafted on to political campaigns to attract so-called “values voters” (yet another term of vanity). “Holier than thou. Holier than thou,” proclaims the bankrupt faith whose coffers are bursting with coin.

In the last week we are “graced” with the launch of GodTube.com, the “Christian answer to YouTube,” according to the recent March 26^th Newsweek. We witness a “BattleCry” rally attracting tens of thousands of Christian youth to San Francisco (the den of the devil I suppose) to rail against materialism (while using a wholly corporate, materialist format—rock concerts, etc.—to do so). We have a mega-rich celebrity Brazilian husband and wife televangelist team trademarking the word “gospel” and getting caught smuggling in 9,000 dollars IN A BIBLE into the United States (New York Times, March 19, 2007, A3). Talk about an apt metaphor. You can’t make this stuff up.

This is not the first time that the powers in the world have attempted to dominate and obscure the presence of spirit, and I’m quite sure it will not be the last. However, this is a time of acute and unrecognized irony. “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Yet, the love of money (and its attendants, status, power, ego, and ideology) seem to be America’s unifying religion. The idol of the almighty dollar is confused with an almighty God. Money is religion! Capitalism is democracy! Poor people deserve it! We are chosen! The absurdity is evident. The mistake of the Pharisees (the falsely pious of Jesus’ time) is resurrected for yet another run.

When irony has lost its power, and spiritual kitsch substitutes for conscience, is there a way out of the mess?

A Fan’s Note - March Madness and the Agony of Defeat

By JP Stormcrow

[Very Late Update 04/07/07: An MB post at Pandagon on Chocolate Jesus reminded me that I forgot to put on the list:  October 12, 1980 - Philadelphia 8 Houston 7 (10 innings)]

[Update 3/25/07: Ignore the anxiety-ridden shell who wrote this thread Intro. It is a beautiful spring day, my teams have passed the “Humiliation Barrier” (see comment #30 here, - comment linking roolz!) and maybe, just maybe, a third-rate burglarly has come to light to semi-save us all.]

Please use this thread to discuss the tournament, your bracket, sports in general, or anything else the MOJ you desires. Reading Exley’s A Fan’s Notes and Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. recommended, but not required. And in the spirit of those books (as well as my considered reaction to the trials and tribulations of “my” teams in the tournament) let me say this: Let no one deceive you, there is no symmetry or balance in sports fandom. The badness of a bad loss is to the goodness of a good win as the GNF is to a nice spring day. To wit:

Continue Reading »

When the Da died, we knew the jig was up. That’s when I took the job here at the Bureau. No more the free and easy life living off his largesse like before, no. Popcorn and pie and another round for your man down at the end of the bar? No, no more of that ever more. All of us needed to go out and depend on our own selves now instead of him, and for myself, well, truth of the matter is, I took the first position offered me. Something to do.

I found myself here in the back offices, working for the Deputy Effectuator and all. This is years ago now, back before the bewildering decades of mergers and acquisitions, spinoffs and layoffs that have continued down to the present day;— simpler times, when the Bureau was part of some other concern entirely, some sort of publishing house, or maybe it was financial services.

Suddenly it became common to come to work and find all the previous letterhead gone, removed overnight and a new and unfamiliar outfit seemingly in charge, though the Bureau’s routine was barely affected. Paychecks drawn on a different bank, parking slots reassigned, that sort of thing. For awhile there I remember a fashion for names starting with X, or Z, or some other unlikely letter, and we had a pool, an office pool, you see, where you could wager a small sum on the date a new consonant would rule us.

Continue Reading »

Last week i got into a bit of a pissing match with an associate who is a powerful voice and advocate for progressive politics. He had sent out a email post sharing the views of a friend of his, and i took some offense at one startling paragraph. I’m not sure if i need to preface my posting of that paragraph, or leave it for the reader to decide how this particular comment relates directly to the founding of the WAAGNFNP. I do know that there might come a time, along that spiralling arrow, when some future/past commentator might say the same thing about the “us” now, that the paragraph says about the “us” then (i being one of the us thens to whom the author Scott Lilly refers). Well, obviously i chose the path of prefacing now, didn’t i?

To this day, I think those who insisted on injecting arguments about drugs, sex, personal hygiene, and respect for law into the debate over Viet Nam prolonged the war (perhaps by years) and, as a consequence, contributed to the deaths of hundreds and possibly thousands of my fellow soldiers. That is a lesson that anyone engaged in a struggle to build a coalition large enough and strong enough to change national policy should remember.

Wayback in that wayback machine of Peabody and Sherman, a rift did develop between the antiwar movement and the counter-culture movement, particularly in the Bay Area of California. The lines seemed to have been drawn between Berkeley (antiwar camp) and San Francisco (hippie/prankster camp). {Country Joe MacDonald, of Country Joe and the Fish, regularly attempted reconciliation but mostly to no avail, as it were.} Those on the East side of the Bay professed the view that the war was the one and only cause worthy of all the efforts and activism. Those on the West side (when you’re a Jet with Ruben) were more concerned with altering consciousness, environmentalism, back to nature intentional communitarianism, individual liberties and freedoms, and so forth. Lilly states, seeminglingly unequivocably, that the West siders (Pranksters, hippies, yippies, freaks, commune celebrants et al) were directly responsible for empowering the “man” to keep on keeping on in Vietnam. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Continue Reading »

By Dr. Free Ride

[Update to the Update: 4/11/07 - On the off chance that anyone comes back by here. Dr. Free Ride’s response to the comments can be found here.

Update 3/25/07 - Good news! Dr. Free Ride will be making a follow-up post to address “a bunch of the points raised here”. Look for it sometime during the week of April 9th. Would be sooner, but a dealine on a paper has to be met by next week. Thanks for your patience. - Oaktown Girl, MOJ.]

There’s a rumor afoot that serious scientists must abandon what, in the common parlance, is referred to as “faith”, that “rational” habits of mind and “magical thinking” cannot coexist in the same skull without leading to a violent collision.

We are not talking about worries that one cannot sensibly reconcile one’s activities in a science which relies on isotopic dating of fossils with one’s belief, based on a literal reading of one’s sacred texts, that the world and everything on it is orders of magnitude younger than isotopic dating would lead us to conclude. We are talking about the view that any intellectually honest scientist who is not an atheist is living a lie.

I have no interest in convincing anyone to abandon his or her atheism. However, I would like to make the case that there is not a forced choice between being an intellectually honest scientist and being a person of faith.
Continue Reading »