Odd?

Some homophobes don’t believe in the existence of straight people.

🍕 I only have pepperoni.

Orange you glad …

How many 1700s drinking songs does anyone know the tune of today? Well, there’s “To Anacreon in Heaven”, better known as “The Star Spangled Banner”.

“Aura Lee” is from the 1860s, but the tune is better known today as Elvis’s “Love Me Tender”.

Maoism did a lot of evil without any religion. Were all of its perpetrators bad people?

Being targeted by Nazis doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. And thus, there’s nothing you can avoid doing, that will protect you from Nazis.

Anti-science, misogyny, etc. are bad independently of whether they are done in the name of religion, or pseudoscience, or political ideology. Doing bad things in the name of religion is exactly as bad as doing them in the name of communism, or capitalism, or racial ideology, etc.

Sure. Voting for religious genocide is just as bad as voting for non-religious genocide: e.g. on the basis of nationalism, pseudoscience, or the like.

Imagine if that person did all the same things they do, but without the label of “religion” being attached.

Charity? Awesome! Habitat for Humanity is an explicitly Christian organization and does great work. In my neighborhood, the local Lutheran and Quaker churches give out free food to the poor, and they don’t sneak any Lutheran or Quaker cooties into it. If you’re good to others because you think God wants you to be good to others, that still really does count as being good to others.

Prayer? Okay, take “religion” off of it and they’re meditating, thinking, or talking to themselves. That’s good. Unless they’re thinking and talking about torturing their neighbors eternally, or something creepy like that. (But even then, better to keep those fantasies to yourself than to act them out in public.) Die Gedanken sind frei — thoughts are free.

Going to worship services? Okay, they’ve got a weekly social event where they sing songs and listen to speeches. Sounds great, unless the songs are about “everyone outside this room is a terrible person and deserves to suffer forever” and the speeches are about hate politics. If they’re about how wonderful it is to be nice to each other, or being brave and standing up against oppression, or something else that would be positive even without the label of “religion” on it, great!

Dietary rules? It’s okay to have preferences, distinct cultures, cuisines, and so forth. For that matter: my family isn’t Jewish, but when I was little, we ate kosher beef hot dogs, because my mom expected the rabbis would care about the meat being sanitary. (Unfortunately in retrospect, kosher slaughter is, shall we say, not clearly better than secular slaughter.)

Beard, not mullet.

Anxiety stopped having nearly so much of a hold on me when I realized that there usually wasn’t a “why”, that it was just anxiety chasing its own ass and only pretending to have anything to do with the stimuli.

I think they’re still on Bawdy Satans or something. Fools!

Microsoft, the state of South Dakota, and the Freemasons have been infiltrated by the Unified Buttjones Imperial Court (UBIC), formed in 1834 by the merger of the Imperial Buttjones Society and the All-Ireland Industrial Arsing Federation. UBIC agents camouflage themselves as janitors, assistant product managers, or beagles, and spread an invisible green slime over toilet seats to infect the minds of their targets. Through this mental infiltration, they obtain control over the vazween or pony-flavored sector of the human soul, creating Inter-Vazween Buttjones Networks (IVBN) through repeated application of the Greater Invoking Pentacle of Pony Erotic Revelation (GIPPER). Using an apparatus constructed from illegal immigrants, UBIC uses the IVBN and GIPPER to insert bugs into Windows, Masonic initiations, and the Lewis & Clark State Recreation Area. Anyone who denies this obvious truth is a buttjones.

If you’re looking for commercial games on Linux, Steam has pretty much solved this with the “Steam Play” compatibility feature, which uses a customized version of WINE to run Windows games. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 runs perfectly. It should work anywhere Steam does.

Plenty of goth squirrels in parts of the Bay Area, California too.

In Heinlein’s story “The Man Who Sold The Moon”, a businessman threatens to put a corporate logo on the moon … in order to get a rival company to bid higher to keep the moon un-logo’d.

Mispi

“The Electric Company” came on TV, so of course we were dancing around the TV in excitement … and knocked it over. Crash!

To be fair, Samuel had tried to convince the people of Israel not to do the king thing in the first place. See 1 Samuel 8:10-22.

And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you:

He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. […] And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.