Hitchens interview

Catch this Hitchens interview while it’s still available. He’s lovably irascible. My favorite part:

Interviewer: Do you think you would win more converts to atheism if you were less dismissive of religious…

Hitchens: I have no idea, but I can’t be other than dismissive. I hear someone like that sheep-faced loon from [garbled…a previous caller] I have to say it sounds like bleating to me, and I have to remember why you people call yourselves a flock. Be like a sheep yourself if you must, but please leave me out of it. I’m not a sheep and I don’t need a shepherd and what shepherds do when they’re not actually messing around with their sheep is they’re keeping them around and alive so they can be fleeced and then killed. And yes, hearing these bleatings from the church of England does remind me of that and I don’t feel any need to make converts by not saying what I think. I leave it to them to make their hypocritical, unctuous, pseudo-friendly statements in the hope of keeping people inside the church.

Andy Schlafly’s “success” story

Another major paper has a story on Conservapædia. I’m sure Andy is proud of his accomplishment — the truly stupid would be proud of promoting stupidity.

Schlafly, 46, started small, urging his students to post brief — often one-sentence — entries on ancient history. He went live with the site in November. In the last six months, it’s grown explosively, offering what Schlafly describes as fair, scholarly articles. Many have a distinctly religious-right perspective.

There’s some complaining at the end—there’s a rival wiki, RationalWiki, that comments on Conservapædia silliness, and some of its members also edit Conservapædia, prompting much outrage at those liberals who want to “destroy” them. I don’t think we can blame liberal mockery for these entries, though:

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Flounces for coelenterates? Squid bikinis?

Some clothing store called Diesel is supposed to have a fashion show tomorrow that will be streamed live to the web. Normally, I wouldn’t give a pickled pucker, but they advertise it as a “journey with us through time and liquid space to a futuristic world of bioluminescence, giant mechanic cephalopods, futuristic aquanauts and mysterious galactic polyps”…and the accompanying images are all of weird jellyfish looking things and strange organic blobs. Hummm. Well. That sounds somewhat interesting.

Denim jeans for squid, do you think?

Maybe skinny naked models draped with ctenophore tentacles, with the welts slowly rising as they strut down the runway to collapse in anaphylactic shock?

Whatever it is, I’m sure my imagination is much better than whatever they’re going to do.

(via Boing Boing)

Child abuse? Or not?

A 7-year old boy is traveling around the country, standing on street corners and preaching hellfire at passers-by (you can hear him in a recording, too). He’s part of a caravan of Baptists making an expedition up to the land of the Yankees to tell us all we’re going to hell.

Is this abuse? The poor kid is wasting time on the Bible and haranguing random people at the behest of his parents. Oh, excuse me, at the behest of God.

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