Shit that Pissed me Off – 1/8
With Christmas and January 1st falling on Fridays, I’ve been a bit backlogged on this column. That means this week might feature more anger than usual. If you are a regular reader, I’m sorry for the time off.
A Couple of Prosperity Preachers Spend Some Time Justifying Their Private Jets
The sheer amount of privilege these guys exhibit when they talk about how difficult it is for them to fly coach is remarkable. What is frightening, though, is some of the points they make are completely fair. I hate that.
Imagine you are a super popular preacher who has to travel all over the country. Imagine you are flying somewhere new almost every day. If you had to fly commercial air the whole time, it would be a lot less convenient.
What if god loses your luggage?
I mean, you’d get all the first class upgrades and I’m pretty sure whoever is bringing you in to speak would be paying for your ticket but it would still be less convenient. If you schedule yourself that tightly, it would likely be very difficult to get everywhere you needed to go with commercial airlines. You might have to cut back on your appearances or something. Which would be a damn shame.
Thing is, they are getting luxury jets paid for by convincing poor people to give them money. Lots and lots of money. And they have conversations with god on their planes (not kidding – watch the video) in which god apparently tells them that they should want a better plane.
Which means it is time to fleece the poor people again!
Shit that Pissed me off This Week 8/3
Climate Change Denier Releases Study that, in Effect, says “I was Wrong”
I know, why would this piss me (someone who has long accepted the Global Climate Change is happening and is largely caused by humans) off?
Because it won’t change anything. No amount of data proving that climate change is happening will convince those who believe otherwise.
Not even when that data actually convinces a skeptical scientist. Unless 100% of scientists agree on climate change, the deniers will always have someone on their side. No matter that 97% (or more) of climatologists – the people whose field of expertise most closely focuses on climate change science – believe climate change is real and caused by humans. If one climatologist says differently, we still have a “controversy.”
I don’t blog much about climate change science because I know a lot of deniers and they are smart people who, I believe, are completely wrong on this one topic. My fear is the longer we argue, the more damage we are doing. That is a fear shared by many scientists who know a lot more about this shit than me.
Shit that Pissed me Off This Week – 7/27
Some guy kills a bunch of people in a Movie Theatre and Some other guy on Facebook has a Solution
So first off, thanks for taking a horrible tragedy and making it all about your agenda. Well done.
This is not a guns are awesome/guns are awful thing. I’ve talked about that before. This is a “what are you – stupid?” thing.
You don’t know what the fuck you are talking about because the guy released tear gas into the theatre and then opened fire. If you were in that theater with a gun, you would have needed to get a clear shot at the killer so that you wouldn’t kill any of the panicking crowd that is all around him. In a theatre filled with tear gas. Your odds of killing an innocent bystander are probably just as high or higher than your odds of killing the bad guy.
It’s great to think that if you were there, you would have saved more people. We all want to believe that. It’s bullshit. John McLean is a character in a movie.
A guy walks into a packed theatre, fills it with smoke and starts shooting, a bunch of people are going to die. If you were there and you had a gun, you wouldn’t have stopped it from happening. You are not Rambo.
When is a Personal Opinion a Business Practice?
Yesterday evening, my friend Cargill decided to poke the bear. In response to the internet vitriol over Chick-Fil-A, he tweeted the following:
Boycotting a business over their business practices is the democratic free market in action. Doing so over their personal opinions is not.
By boycotting a business over personal opinions, you are saying it is okay to threaten someone’s livelihood if they don’t think like you.
Let’s start by pointing out that Cargill isn’t a dick. Yes, he’s a Republican and I’m a left-of-Democrat liberal but he and I actually agree on most social political matters and even some economic ones. I don’t fully agree with him here, although I do see what he is saying and understand the point he’s trying to make.
He’s a good guy and he argues fairly. I’m not trying to take him down. He got me to think and that is a good thing. He’s very good at it.
But this isn’t an argument that could be fairly explored over Twitter.
Grail Diary 