Recent Comments

1. about 8 hours ago on Non Sequitur

    This is how Atheism always turns out: Rule of Man based on their arbitrary whims.

   Arbitrary whims, eh? How ironic that you should say that after the long long long list of religions oppressing human beings before the Enlightenment came along and we started to throw off both the mental and physical shackles of mindless adherence to preposterous nonsense — often enforced by fire, stake, the rack, thumbscrews, exiles, wars, and jihads.

   Remind me again, which atheist was it who said “Kill them all. For the Lord knows who are His” as justification for having his troops to massacre every single citizen of a city that had just surrendered to him?

2. about 8 hours ago on Non Sequitur

    Nah. Being without faith in God and placing all faith in yourself is a sign of narcissism.

   Well, then, I’m in luck, because I try as assiduously as possible to avoid using faith as a method of making decisions about anything.

3. about 13 hours ago on Non Sequitur

   And we find ourselves in congenial agreement.

4. about 13 hours ago on Non Sequitur

   If their attitude was, as you claim, unrelenting, then how do you explain their relenting?

5. about 13 hours ago on Frank and Ernest

   Not to mention Puerto Rico. But those have always been considered to be “possessions”, lesser territories, not part of the continental United States itself (as DC used to be before it was carved off from Maryland and Virginia, the latter portion of which was eventually returned). But I take your point; it’s not as if those areas are full participants in democracy, either, just that they don’t have the population that would merit full statehood.

6. about 15 hours ago on Frank and Ernest

   I C

7. about 16 hours ago on Doonesbury

   No slur intended, capitalized Stan.

8. about 16 hours ago on Non Sequitur

   You don’t see it as two different authoritarian rulers conspiring to keep their mutual serfs under their thumbs, one hand washing the other? Well, I guess Sergius learned how far that “temporary evil regime” bit went, didn’t he? Maybe he thot it would be the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time”, but he and his successors eventually learned what happens when you try to strike a deal with power-mad dictators: accommodate or die.

   My point was that first the czarist regime and then the Communist Party kept the Russian commoners crushed, subservient, and docile, and the Russian Orthodox Church (in particular) was happily complicit in that effort, which worked to its own benefit as well. They had already brainwashed the peasantry into submissiveness, regardless of who was running the government. Over the long haul, the church was more ally than opponent to authoritarian Communist rule, and Stalin was more than willing to take advantage of that extra leverage on the populace, despite your efforts to make the Commies seem unrelentingly anti-religious.

9. about 18 hours ago on In the Bleachers

   LeBron James was the one to finally break Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s NBA scoring record, but remember that Kareem had to get all of his only 2 at a time.

10. about 18 hours ago on Non Sequitur

    There are 8 methods of making decisions (arriving at conclusions). In order of reliability:

    (1) Logic (limited usefulness, and can’t say anything about the premises that go into it)

    (2) Reason (the legal standard, heavily larded with considerations of the practical)

    (3) Confidence (in things, based on their track record of previous performance)

    (4) Trust (in people, based on their track records, mitigated by varying motives and conditions)

    (5) Chance (coin flips between reasonably evenly matched alternatives)

    (6) Obedience (not necessarily the wisest or best for you, but at least you don’t get beat up)

    (7) Hope (pretty unlikely, but one can always wish)

    (8) Faith (deservedly last and least, arriving at a conclusion for which there is absolutely no supporting evidence and frequently a great deal of opposing evidence; nobody would use this terrible method of deciding if it weren’t for the priest class, which praises it to the skies and tries to conflate it with trust and confidence, because there’s no way anybody would ever believe all of their horseshït without it)