Belaboring the Obvious

Friday, August 12, 2011

Oh, yeah, and speaking of God-botherers...

... the eminent Ms. Jennifer Bryson at the equally eminent Witherspoon Institute, wishes to make a causal relationship between porn and terrorism where none existed before, and may yet not exist at all.

Now, apart from needing a remedial lesson in correlation not necessarily indicating causation, Ms. Bryson also seems to assume that the rest of us are as pissing-in-our-pants-scared of Islamic terrorism as she is, and would, as she does, describe it as a dire threat to our species' survival. Umm, sorry, sadly, no.

Ms. Bryson, moving out of the slow lane of intellectual befuddlement into the fast lane of religious frenzy, makes the improbable assertion that if a connection between porn and terrorism could be made, well, it "would pose a more widespread threat to human existence than nuclear proliferation." This woman seems to have forgotten that pornography comes from the ancient Greek, meaning "pictures of prostitutes," which strongly suggests that pornography has been around for at least 2500 years before nuclear weapons, and in all that time has managed to coexist quite nicely with human existence, whereas world war, genocide and nuclear weapons have in the 20th century alone taken a toll wholly more, uh, dramatic and real than her imagined terrorism resulting from pornography.

But, hell, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, and give her a choice. She can have a copy of Hustler dropped in her lap, or she can have a two-megaton warhead dropped on her head.

At the very least, if she chooses the former, she'll still be around to rant about pornography's imminent destruction of civilization, even if no one pays any attention to her.

Let's get utterly real for a moment. The real threat to civilization is state-sponsored terrorism, of which the very moral and upstanding policy elite of this country of ours--and our friends--are past masters.

The real pornography of terrorism is wanton death and destruction, regardless who's doing it, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with what Jennifer Bryson, in her willful ignorance and her desire to shift the public's gaze from the obvious, claims is of existential importance.

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Just one thought on the panoply of...

... Repug presidential candidates.

Including the soon-to-declare Gov. Goodhair, more than one has said, in so many words, that "God told me to run."

Now, applying just a tiny bit of logic here, either one or more of them is lying, or God is fucking with them, or us, or both.