One more thing about the odious Coulter…Amanda takes note of the bigotry lurking under her schtick in the way she uses “Jew” like it was a dirty word. But look at her book: her weird attitude is right there in the title, Godless. I really thought nothing of it except, well, she’s at least acknowledging us irreligious people, until I saw her on Leno where she made this same point, and read this Townhall column, Party of rapist proud to be godless.
My book makes a stark assertion: Liberalism is a godless religion. Hello! Anyone there? I’ve leapt beyond calling you traitors and am now calling you GODLESS. Apparently, everybody’s cool with that. The fact that liberals are godless is not even a controversial point anymore.
I suddenly realized that she intended the title as some kind of ghastly, unforgivable insult, and she’s disappointed that no one was taking it that way. When someone calls me godless, I scratch my head, wonder what the big deal is, and agree…I sure am, and proud of it. I may argue with my fellow liberal/progressives who call themselves the Christian left, but I can guess how they would react. They’d scratch their heads, think that was absurdly wrong, and wonder what the insult was supposed to be. Sort of like if someone called me a Jew; I’d just think they were wrong, wouldn’t be bothered at all, and wonder what the heck was wrong with someone who thought it was powerful slander. Everybody’s cool with it because it’s revealing the slimy nature of Coulter’s character, not ours. So I’m not complaining; I think it’s bizarre that someone believes everyone in the Democratic party is an atheist.
Since GODLESS didn’t have the effect she wanted, I guess she’s going to have to ramp up the hysteria further in her next title. Maybe it will be JEW or GAY, or maybe she’ll go all the way and drop the TOLERANT bomb on us…and we’ll all be scratching our heads again.
By the way, the “rapist” in “party of rapist”? Bill Clinton, of course.
Coulter is simply certifiable.
There are liberals who aren’t Godless, … NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT!
I am amused by people who have called me an atheist, a hippie, and a Pagan. They say those things like they’re bad!
I don’t know. I found it a little insulting when Coulter said that Jews are Christians. I agree, though, she is certifiable.
I just picked up the book at Target (bought the last copy on the shelf, in fact – meanwhile, Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” books sat untouched) and while I haven’t read the whole thing yet, what I have read makes it obvious that liberal beliefs make those who follow them essentially godless, not atheistic. Religious liberals may pay lip-service to God or a god, but their true devotion is actually to themselves.
I thought the Town Hall column was a parody. Are you sure it isn’t?
Um, perhaps you should use a dictionary to check the meaning of ‘atheistic’ — it means ‘godless’.
what I have read makes it obvious that liberal beliefs make those who follow them essentially godless
I’m cutious, but not curious enough to give my hard earned money to Coulter. You have, though, so I’ll ask you. In what way does Coulter prove that liberal beliefs cause people to become “godless”?
In what way does Coulter prove that liberal beliefs cause people to become “godless”?
I doubt that she‘s proven it in her book or elsewhere, but oh man is that ever opening a can of worms.
Jason, since you made a reference to “An Inconvenient Truth”…I went to see it the other day. Not only was the theater full, but people wouldn’t even leave through the end credits, and then when it finally ended they gave a hearty applause…So just a reminder, need to be aware of sampling errors, that is all.
The people read Coulter and agree with her are too stupid to understand what she is saying.
Religious liberals may pay lip-service to God or a god, but their true devotion is actually to themselves.
Don’t ask Jason to support his fallacious No-True-Scottsman canard, as he’s never supported any of his other nonsensical claims. One could make a better case that this is a better description of the Straussian Neo-Cons, who believe in promoting religion not for its own sake, but for its political utility.
Perhaps Jason can tell us how one can demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that what they are devoted to is indeed a god.
In Jason’s case, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt if he could show me he prefers truth over lies, but he’s already shown his preference for monsters.
ummmm Jason? Are you aware of the concept of restocking?
Contrary to what people like troll Jason, or Ann Coulter think, religious liberals happen to be people, Christians, or otherwise, who think that there is more to obeying God besides using Him/Her as an excuse to wallow in one’s own gross ignorance and ejaculating after demonizing everyone deemed different.
Coulter’s column of nonsequitors was one step above glossolalia. I don’t think that this mental case should be allowed to parade her psychosis before the world. I think it violates the Geneva Convention or something.
How does it benefit her to claim that liberalism and dead, and it’s “all over but the sobbing”? As we have seen by the glorious success by our Soviet Premier (oops, I meant our President Bush) in Iraq, total removal of the enemy leaves one vulnerable as the next target for people’s hatred.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I took the label godless as a compliment.
You’re not the only one.
Hey I said you’re godless
And it seems like you’re a souless friend.
As thoughtless as you were back then,
I swear that you are godless.
Anyone else been humming Dandy Warhols lately?
I can only scratch my head at the liberal=godless equivalence. Because when Coulter talks about the godless, she’s talking about me — but I don’t recognize any of the traits ascribed to it. Does not compute.
I wonder if her book contains a chapter explaining why godlessness is a bad thing. Or is it taken as a given, like “treason”?
I am proudly codless, as it’s a fashion for an earlier generation, despite the potential attentions of self-proclaimed “codpiece inspectors” who, too often, turn out to be Chris Matthews.
You could pretty much predict Coulter would get all Jesus’d up as her career hit its inevitable crisis–the one where she can’t keep up with the need to be progressively more shocking each year and still pass herself off as a reasonable person, even to the dwindling band of drooling ‘wingers who still buy her books; and can’t pass herself off as a sexpot to the dwindling (Hell, dwindled) band of ‘winger frat boys who didn’t know any better (and if you saw her on Leno, you saw how desperate her grasp is on the latter).
I gotta hand it to her, though: I figured she’d hit the religious broadcasting circuit and actually, y’know, repent of being such an unChristian excuse for a human being. Not a lot of repentance, mind you–she’d still be a walking pile of crap. Just not work at it so hard.
The recasting of Christianity as a religion based on sheer psychotic hatred–now that hadn’t occured to me.
Nevertheless, I’m mildly sorry not to be one of Coulter’s coreligionists. It would be entertaining to contemplate her arrival at the Pearly Gates–when Jesus storms out, rips that crucifix off her neck and bitch-slaps her off His porch.
* * *
[From the Townhall column] . . . let’s pause for a moment to observe that two facts are now universally accepted: Liberals are godless and Hillary’s husband is a rapist.
Let’s pause for a moment to observe that two facts are now universally accepted: Coulter is a liar and when she’s not lying intentionally, her handle on reality is too deranged by hatefulness, to get anything right.
—————————————————————————
1 And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:
2 With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.
3 So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.
4 And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:
5 And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.
6 And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.
———————————————————————————
Revelation 17:1-6 (KJV)
End of Days, indeed.
Fasten your seat belts, people…it’s gonna be a bumpy ride….
I see the hit and run troll jason is at it again.
No biggie, the trashy romance novels probably fly off the shelves at 10 times the rate of either. I also would not be suprised if Coulters book outsold Gores 100-1. His book deals with science hers with name calling and mud slinging. One most of Coulters base can comprehend the other requires ‘thinking’.
That is very enlightened. Wow. Do you read much?
See I’m not what would be called a classical liberal, I’m more of a centrist and was once a republican delegate and see nothing of that in what most call a liberal. I may not agree with their politics all the time but all the liberals I have known are very kind and helpful people. I cannot say the same for every ‘conservative’ I have known who seem driven by the dollar as much as anything.
Now I don’t know which religion to which you belong but the most active ones seem to have this ‘liberal’ spirit. You know kindness, giving, loving, help your fellow man type ideal. Not bash them and tell them they need to get a job and are abomination type mentality so common among the opposition. One thing is clear(and I think it’s one of the few th things actually) from the bible and that is the fact that Jesus did not appreciate Pharisees and always put the people first. Sounds pretty liberal to me.
Coulter simply doesn’t get it.
And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:
OK fine, “woman” but adjust the chroma on your set; that’s a crumpled black cocktail dress with a two-bit crucifix from a crackerback jox burning itself into the flesh. The golden cup is a Big Gulp. As for the look on her face? Only her meth lab knows for sure.
What I wondered with great admiration, is how George Carlin managed to mime the phrase “…not with a rented…” merely by blowing into his cupped hands and rubbing them.
Poor old Ann Coulter. It’s one thing to be polemical or controversial; it’s quite another to rant about something, and then have to petulantly draw attention to the rant!
A reminder – by Coulter’s definitions, the Archbishop of Canterbury is an atheistic liberal.
Erm ……
But if Coulter is not “Godless”, how comes nobody’s seen her at church?
Smoking mirror, Coulter got on fucking Leno? Is he going to have David Duke next?
Coulter is a woman who somehow managed to make internet style trolling into a career. The crap she spouts is not meant to make anybody think, it’s not meant to make anybody mount useful defenses of their opinions, and it’s not even really sincere.
If she thought she could defend Hitler and still have a sizable audience then she’d do it.
What I can’t understand is why people keep responding to her. Since the things she says aren’t the least bit rooted in reality, trying to rebut her book is like trying to rebut the assertion that liberals are all purple moon-men.
DON’T FEED THE TROLLS, PEOPLE!
The title of this thread is mistaken – Un Cola believes nothing at all, even in the desiribility of money. I doubt such a being exists at all, except in a Max Headroom cum vampire sort of way. At least, I don’t believe she’s any more real than Santa Claus or Scrooge.
Why the fuss?
Oh, and the so-called resident troll here isn’t really a troll either, he’s just a dumb, unemployed asshole. Feed him? I don’t even read him!
I wish! That would mean reason and civility had won out over superstition and xenophobia.
{Sighhh} Someday… {-;
I’d advice to stop dissecting this jongo’s vomit, and train for asymmetric warfare instead. Because, you see, things have gone too far to leave any other possible future than a totalitarian nightmare and/or another civil war.
For the record, Jason is not a troll. He has his own blog and is open for attack there.
Of course, he would have a hard time supporting Coulter’s nonsense. Lets see, in the USA 88% of people believe in God, and around 50% of people are Democratic. Many Catholics are Liberal. The numbers don’t add up.
Of course, Republicans are most likely to be YECs. So are high school drop outs.
Coulter’s book can be summed up in five words:
“MY GOD OR DENY GOD!”
Come to think of it, those five words sum up quite a lot that’s being said by the Right.
1) To assert that liberalism and Christian theology are mutually exclusive is laughable. For the era that much of the New Testament was written in, it’s actually phenomenally liberal.
2) Using Ann Coulter to interpret someone else’s religiosity and politics is like going to the pope for sex advice.
Simple demographics tells that most Democrats are religious. However, given how the GOP has become nothing more than the political arm of the religious right, it would be pretty silly for an atheist to do anything but oppose it. An atheist (or gay, or scientist) voting Republican is pretty much like a chicken supporting Colonel Sanders.
Well. May I confess that godless me went to a memorial service for a relative in Georgia, the land of Baptists (Whoa! That’s putting it lightly!), and because I was accepting someone else’s hospitality and eating their food, I tolerated all the prayers (“Use us for Your service,” ugh) without raising the unladylike stink that Her Bottle-Blondness does about other people who are not forcing their atheism on her? Oh, wait–that’s right, because we exist, and because people want to teach science in science class (the idea), they are forcing atheism upon her. I’m the oppressor. I get it now.
I guess Coulter’s problem is similar to what would happen if I called her heartless, without a shred of compassion or feeling for anyone outside the bubble of privilege she was born into. To me as a liberal, that’s a damning criticism, but a typical rightwinger would just wonder what my point was supposed to be–giving a rat’s ass about anyone else is just a sign of weakness, right?
What diety do lizardoid aliens pray to, anyway, Annie?
David Letterman at least has more class than to allow a troll to make an appearance on The Late Show.
The recasting of Christianity as a religion based on sheer psychotic hatred–now that hadn’t occured to me.
What do you mean, “recasting”? It’s just getting back to its roots. Liberals are the new Moabites. Or Ammonites. Or dozens of other targets of righteous genocide at the command of God.
There are non-hateful religions, but Christianity isn’t one of them. Try Buddhism, I don’t think Buddha ever ordered anyone to commit torture, murder or genocide. (I could be wrong, though.)
“…what I have read makes it obvious that…”
Jason, when reading a book by a political pundit – ANY political pundit, the only things that should be made obvious to you are the opinions of that writer.
You’re supposed to take it as opinion, compare it with your own life experiences, compare it with what others are saying, compare it with facts that you are able to verify, news reports, and everything else from the whole world around you and then decide whether the writer’s opinions may have some merit or basis in reality.
If you are of the mindset that you can just read an opinion piece and have that make some “reality” obvious to you, you might as well cut to the chase, read Mein Kampf and have it be made “obvious” to you that Jews are evil. (Fuck Godwin’s law)
If you’re by nature ovisian, why the half-measures? Embrace your inner sheep!
If you are looking for signs that Al Gore’s book is selling, you need look no further than me. I bought it a week ago, and it is enjoyable, informative, sobering and important. You can tell he wrote it with the emotion and the passion he feels for the cause, and it shows in how he makes his points. He doesn’t just point to glaciers or the accelerating rates of extinction; He also tackles it from a geopolitical viewpoint.
It’s a book that’s a very quick, efficient read, and worth a look by everyone here. I wholly intend to see the flick this week, and there are friends I will be going with that are also interested.
As for Coulter “proving” that liberals are self-involved, why take the opinion of someone who’s never been a liberal (indeed has obviously never considered being one and openly refuses to try it) commenting on what she thinks liberals are? Go read FDR or Truman or JFK or Jimmy Carter. Find out what liberalism truly is from the men who have lived it and continue to live it how it was intended. Don’t get your opinions from an opposition party that intentionally misrepresents the other side for its own ends.
That’s like going to a synagogue with an interest in becoming a Christian, and asking the rabbi to give you guidance on how best to follow Jesus. It ain’t gonna happen, and he’s going to try and steer you into Judaism, just as an Imam would try and convert you to Islam if you wandered into a mosque.
Coulter and her views are empty husks in the wind of time compared to what the great leaders of liberal, democratic movements have done for not only this country, but the lives of others abroad. What she espouses, whether or not she truly believes it to the depths she portends, is the political equivalent of the Dodo and the Albatross…except those two were likely less disagreeable to have in your company.
Bacon says:
“For the record, Jason is not a troll. He has his own blog and is open for attack there.”
From Wikipedia: “In Internet terminology, a troll is someone who comes into an established community such as an online discussion forum, and posts inflammatory, rude or offensive messages designed intentionally to annoy and antagonize the existing members or disrupt the flow of discussion.”
Nothing in the definition is about owning blogs or having factual email adresses. It’s about inflammatory messages.
So, yes, Jason fits the mold perfectly. (Which is not surprising. Most people where their mental deficiency is synonymous with low IQ behaviour are boringly similar.)
Torb, I think if we use troll to describe Jason, troll really starts to lose its meaning. I think Jason believes the crap he is spewing. Are you saying that anyone who disagrees with the bloghost is a troll? OK, in this case though, the fact Jason hit and ran so far, he is looking like a troll. But he was called a troll way too early here.
“Troll” lost its meaning back when people mistook it for a noun referring to a person. On Usenet, it was common to accuse people of “trolling”, or intentionally making a ridiculous statement to catch suckers who took them seriously. This was by analogy to the verb “troll” as used in fishing: “To fish in by trailing a baited line: troll the lake for bass.” http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/troll
Occasionally “a troll” could be used as a noun, but it referred to the posting whose author was engaged in trolling. It was even then misunderstood to refer to people, but this misunderstanding was usually corrected in replies.
Sigh… I don’t know what happened. I guess the democratization of the Interet or whatever, which on the whole is a good thing, just makes it a losing battle to do anything about this kind of semantic drift. I personally avoid using the term at all because the basis is so ill-founded. I admit that there is something troll-like (in the mythological sense) to certain “contributors” to blog comment boards, but this really misses the original meaning, which referred to an intentional hoax, often one that others on the group approved of and found amusing (like expressions such as “if you doubt my voracity”).
BTW, somebody might think I’m just spreading a folk etymology. I am actually writing from memory. I did a quick google groups search stopping at 1995.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22is+a+troll%22&start=10&num=10&hl=en&lr=&as_drrb=b&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1981&as_maxd=19&as_maxm=6&as_maxy=1995&safe=off&
You can see that references to “is a troll” often refer to the content of a posting, though there are references to people as well. It was always a confusing term, but the clear meaning referred to intentionally baiting readers as opposed to merely lurking and being annoying.
While I don’t doubt that the method of fishing is the basis for the term troll, I always thought that the practice of equating the person who made such posts with the mythical beast that lives under bridges and whatnot was more-or-less-intentional punnage.
The usage of the term may be much looser than you may like, but I don’t think no one knows what a troll is. Rather, I think people have a tendency to see anyone who posts in a manner similar to Jason as simply trolling. Though perhaps the meaning has shifted to a person who is looking for attention rather than someone who is looking specifically for direct responses.
Guys, arguing about what the word “troll” really means is pointless, especially when you consider “Jason” only posted once. It’s not like he stuck around this post to keep stoking anger.
There are far bigger fish to fry than hashing about the definitions of internet-spawned terms.
Sez you. I couldn’t care less about Jason, but for years I’ve been annoyed at people using “troll” without any appreciation for its origin. It’s a small point, but I think there’s some value in keeping the old Internet folkways alive and not acting as if it was invented with the release of Netscape 2.0.
See, to me, it’s only a Troll if the person/post isn’t actually meant to spark useful discusion.
You can come into a forum and have contrary opinions to everybody there, even call them names, without being a Troll/Troller.
It’s folks like Coulter, whose opinions are entirely without useful content, and can’t even be argued with, who are the real Trolls.
Trolls are not only inflammatory, they possess no meaningful content. If a person posts meaningful AND inflammatory content, they’re not trolls.
Unfortunately, this is a distinction virtually every easily-offended twit on the ‘Net fails to grasp.
PaulC: Ah, the evolution of language. Isn’t it grand? :)
Prescriptivists can only lament that it’s a descriptivist world.