I've been eagerly anticipating another festival of self-centered, moronic sophistry from good ol' Camille. I feel a little let down- the only really stupid thing in it is her opinions about trade school. OK, I'll bite: we're having to import engineers from Asia just to fill all the jobs that we can't outsource *to* Asia, and Camille thinks public education should be reformed to teach carpentry? You should mosey on down to your neighborhood Home Depot, Camille, where you can find Latino immigrant carpenters who will do twice the work for a quarter of the price of a native. The only advantage natives have is a better command of English, which is why we're all working the drive-thrus. Tell me more, Camille, about the exciting opportunities awaiting today's students in the fields of landscaping and air conditioner repair! And about how much they're like art school!

All right, I'm done.

The only thing worse than Camille's trademark infuriating stupidity is a Paglia column that's just kind of boring, mostly because the letters aren't as good- witness the needless pissing match over whether Mormonism counts as a kind of Christianity. I know, more needless than this letter, right? When Paglia's as dull as this, it's almost not even worth it to write in. . . almost. You suck, Camille! Ha ha!

Let's go ahead and get this out of the way early: blaming religion for genocide is disingenuous, because the will to commit mass murder arises independently of religion. The history of the 20th century provides many examples, including Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Idi Amin, Mussolini, and others.

When this was pointed out in the Slate forums after their publication of excerpts from Hitchens' repellent book, the most common rebuttal was that the ideology or cult of personality cultivated by these leaders amounted to a religion because it inspired or demanded slavish devotion and total, unquestioning obedience.

This argument is invalid because these behaviors are characteristics imputed to religion by its detractors and are not definitional characteristics of religion. Describing totalitarian regimes as inherently religious presupposes that religion is the source of totalitarianism, and in the absence of stronger evidence to that effect than pithy quotations, it seems unreasonable to conclude that avowedly atheist regimes were actually religious simply because they displayed some of the same behaviors as a tiny and unscientific sample of religions.

This may seem obvious to many people, but in the interest of not seeing people advance this argument I am willing to take a bullet and appear foolish by stating the obvious. If sarcasm were easier to detect in print I might express my confidence that this posting would preclude self-righteous atheists from using subsequent letters to blame religion for all of history's war crimes. Go team.

Let's go ahead and get this out of the way early: blaming religion for genocide is disingenuous, because the will to commit mass murder arises independently of religion. The history of the 20th century provides many examples, including Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Idi Amin, Mussolini, and others.

When this was pointed out in the Slate forums after their publication of excerpts from Hitchens' repellent book, the most common rebuttal was that the ideology or cult of personality cultivated by these leaders amounted to a religion because it inspired or demanded slavish devotion and total, unquestioning obedience.

This argument is invalid because these behaviors are characteristics imputed to religion by its detractors and are not definitional characteristics of religion. Describing totalitarian regimes as inherently religious presupposes that religion is the source of totalitarianism, and in the absence of stronger evidence to that effect than pithy quotations, it seems unreasonable to conclude that avowedly atheist regimes were actually religious simply because they displayed some of the same behaviors as a tiny and unscientific sample of religions.

This may seem obvious to many people, but in the interest of not seeing people advance this argument I am willing to take a bullet and appear foolish by stating the obvious. If sarcasm were easier to detect in print I might express my confidence that this posting would preclude self-righteous atheists from using subsequent letters to blame religion for all of history's war crimes. Go team.

I have a lot of sympathy for letter-writers complaining about Salon's continuing willingness to provide a forum for Camille Paglia. Her columns suck. Big time. But does nobody else love to read her columns BECAUSE they suck so bad? Just as I do with Christopher Hitchens' columns in Slate, I look forward to Paglia's columns here because they're so trashy.

I'm tempted to compare it to the proverbial car accident from which one cannot turn away. There's a pornographic thrill in watching someone made such an idiot of herself, and an even bigger one in watching here get torn to pieces in the comments section, every single time.

It's easy to feel superior to someone whose ideas make no damn sense, and the truth is that many people like that feeling. That's why every Paglia column gets so many negative comments. Just admit it. I have: I'm addicted to intellectual pornography. Ah, what a relief.

Camille, you suck. You're laughably pretentious, pathetically sophistical and perennially irrelevant. Don't ever change.

Yeah, they did:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,11710,1365982,00.html

What a complete waste of time.