Melinda Barton

Whackjob.

However, what is the last refuge of a small, marginalized minority under tremendous external pressure (such as a real attack on their rights and/or rapid social/political/economic changes that result in great anxiety and fear) with limited political power? Terrorism. By the logic you've employed, Al Quaeda would pose no threat to us b/c they're not taking over a political party. Neither would the Christian Identity Movement b/c there are only 350,000 CIM members in America, Canada, and Great Britain combined, they are seriously marginalized, and they have no real political power.
Do I think "atheist extremists", or "antitheist extremists" if that works better for you, will necessarily become terrorists. No. But I also don't think we should allow tunnel vision to set in. Just b/c the enemy before us is great, doesn't mean there isn't an enemy sneaking up from behind. Remember: the religous right was once a marginalized minority within the right that the left refused to take seriously as a potential threat.

Sounds eerily Malkinish.

I'm still at a loss to find out why these atheist extremists need a good pummeling. Has the atheist extremist influence on US politics somehow reached some dangerous peak?

The now-reposted article remains bad, with those ridiculous five points and their embarrassing counter-arguments, but assuming that there are people believe who what Melinda says they believe...why pick on these particular people and not lunatics as a whole? It seems to me that ignoring the obvious overall argument (zealots of any stripe are to be avoided) to limit it to a teensy pool of people (a small subset of the already small pool of atheists) is just a way to hunt for unimportant people to demonize.

Further articles in the Extremist Subsets of the Already Ignored series could include:

Albanian Orthodox Babblers
Ashkenazy Goggle-Eyed Freaks
Foam-at-the-Mouth Baha'i
Shaker Silliness
Pagan Pinheads (Earth Goddess-focused)
More Pagan Pinheads (Non-Earth Goddess-focused)
Snakehandler Stupids
Stop Jainist Aggression Now

Not Quite Like Reclaiming "Queer"

Has nobody noticed that being a chickenhawk means you're an old guy who likes to fuck young boys? Just saying.

Update: Left this at Special Ed's, but it's gone. I'll try again in sweeter, more ringing tones.

From Crooks and Liars

You have to watch this video. I've been converted and I now bow down to the sacred "Chiquita." Make sure you only watch from the 3:30 mark until the 4:36 mark.

Melinda Barton: Whackjob

If you believe you know for certain there is no God or higher being, you're as full of shit as anyone who believes they know for certain there is. About that, Melinda is right.

Only in the most sophomoric way. People love to think of that as some sort of exploitable crack in the door of the whole atheism argument, and fortunately the Flying Spaghetti Monster fits through there as well. I can promise you I accord the same degree of respect and probability to YHWH as the FSM gets.

When dullards get offended over the idea of Godlessness, it's the vanishingly small probability of their particular God existing that they feel comforted by when the "you can't disprove it" line comes around: they're not thinking about Abdul's God or Tajinder's God or the god of some alien species somewhere. Pascal left the roulette wheel out of his wager. (Note that I am referring to unnamed and unidentifiable dullards and not all the swell people who quite reasonably feel insulted by the foregoing paragraph. Thanks Melinda!)

Fun snark:

There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus. 'Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct tract marked on the heart of the element by the psychical converge of the universe upon itself.' 'Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself,' and evolution is 'nothing else than the continual growth of. ... 'psychic' or 'radial' energy'. Again, 'the Christogenesis of St Paul and St John is nothing else and nothing less than the extension ... of that noogenesis in which cosmogenesis ... culminates'.

Just Testing

There is still much to learn.

Rumsfeld as Batman Villain

Too much fun.

The Rude Pundit

The Rude Pundit quotes the hideous Ann Coulter, and I guess I'm oblivious or something, but the general formula of

"Liberals spit out all these names with more venom than they've ever been able to muster for names like 'Saddam Hussein' and 'Abu Musab al-Zarqawi'"

is that hating's good, you're just hating the wrong people. Again, I'm an innocent or something because Vampire Ann's never been shy of wanting to nuke, poison, or torture those who she doesn't like, but the Two-Minute Hate sure seems to have been a prescient idea.

Shit Hits Fan for the Nth Time

Wow. Completely remarkable that these guys continue to get away with this stuff.

Graduation 101 - Stranded

Graduation 101 - Stranded must be one of the most terrible articles I've ever read in a student newspaper. Awful writing, humorless jokes, usage errors, and flavourless swearing from some cock-biting bore. The curdled cream of the crop I s'pose.