The fundamentalists actually have the courage of their convictions. They're the true believers. Be honest with yourself. Either you believe in these fairy tales or you don't.

So I'm supposed to respect this sort of thing? Don't try to say that these aren't the "real" Muslims.

It should read "its network."

Either the "holy" books are holy, or they are not. Either they mean what they say, or they don't.

In Roger Ebert's review, he mentions that the titular lieutenant is so disconnected from humanity that he (not Ebert) buys sex just for the sensation of someone touching him (not Ebert.)

If you read so-called holy books literally, you should be killing infidels and such. If a book is really a holy book, how can you not read it literally? To pick and choose what you want to believe from a "holy" book is to act in bad faith, and/or engage in self-deception.

More to the point, nearly all religions/spiritualities/whatever are mutually exclusive. They can't all be true.

Incidents like this, and so many others, make this very clear. It's time to make a decision and take a stand. Try a little honesty.

Taiwan, like all the other Asian Tigers, developed its economy behind protectionist walls. The industrialized world didn't force them to adhere to any neoliberal "free trade" policies. Now contrast that with The Philippines, just a short distance away.

Land reform is impossible under neoliberal policies, and you can't get an educated population when most of them can't afford privatized education.

This article appears above an article about a "trail of dead Iraqis."

I often wonder about the differing proportions of grief. It just doesn't seem logical to me. We make these kinds of value assessments of life and death all the time, and that does make sense in principle. This sort of thing, though, does not.

I just don't understand sports fandom at this level. It's one thing if somebody is on your school's team, and you know them or know people who do. The "professional sports religion" that grips so many reminds me of that shirt from The Onion that says "The Sports Team from My Area is Superior to the Sports Team From Your Area." It's so arbitrary.

Fans of Hawthorne Heights were clearly very upset at the sudden, still unexplained (I think) death of guitarist Casey Calvert. He helped create music that spoke to them. It seems sensible that this death might create a more intense (if perhaps quantitatively smaller) reaction than that of an NFL player. That doesn't seem to be the case, and I'm not sure why.

Related question: Why do the deaths of children seem to matter more? Why does the age of the victim matter?

I was trying to avoid any unintentional humor.

I remember once seeing a reference on Broadsheet to a "magazine for really cool girls," or something like that. Was it Cricket?

The GSA might actually be rather subversive here, as it exposes these girls to something other than backward religious nonsense.

I wonder how many readers are simultaneously upset by the situation in Kenya and enamored with Obama. Remember his press conference in Nairobi, where he made it clear that he doesn't want to take the steps necessary to allow Kenya's economy to develop?

Make connections!

Would be various cheap musical instruments and related equipment, and lots of spikes and hair dye and ripped jeans and flannel skirts and fishnets and boots and...

That would be even more subversive. The Girl Scouts aren't punk rock.

Movie idea: Muslim girls bond via Girl Scouts, then they discover punk rock, and this leads them to reject religion and so much else...

If you don't give, you presumably won't get (perhaps later on.) So isn't it a wash? If you buy stuff for people, you decrease your assets, but then you get stuff from them, adding to your assets.

What are you missing?

I'd like to opt out as well. If I participate at all, it'll be more of a solstice/New Year/whatever holiday. With that said, my parents both go through the motions of Christmas and Hannukah (acting in bad faith, but anyway...)

I'm not close to many people at all in the "extended family," indeed, I don't know what many of them look like. I think I'm happy about that, especially after reading some of these letters.

Growing up, I loved various kinds of action figures (no, they didn't break easily. Why do people say that?) and video games (which I played for the same reasons I read books and watched films: I got into the story) and whatnot. I got a lot of "stuff." But as I got into my teens, I wanted less stuff. I grew out of that level of materialism. Now, I have to repeatedly tell my insecure, oblivious, petty-bourgeois parents that I don't want any clothes, since I don't need any. I'm low-maintenance to the point of laziness.

Seriously... do Republicans know that Clinton was an imperialist war criminal, and that most of us on the Left (not bourgeois libeals, I mean leftists) hate him for that? Do they not realize that CNN is part of the same corporate media we loath?

I'm really getting tired of this.

It's really simple. Religion poisons everything. There's absolutely no sensible reason to do any of these awful things, but religion has that extraordinary power to stop a thinking mind.

Jesus may have never existed, either. www.thegodmovie.com