HJHOP: Your source for lost HJHOP episodes...

I have been having a hell of a time writing lately. But I have taken numerous running starts in the last few weeks. I'm not exactly sure why the radical religious right is being so disappointing lately. Perhaps they are finally giving up?

More likely, I'm burned out on summer, I think. But, I have been trying to work. When I hit these rough patches, I like to whip out a thing that I call: HJHOP's Lost Episodes. These are posts that never quite lived up to my exacting standards of being finished. It's been a while since I posted one of these, so we're going to have to go pretty far back to find some good ones. The first one, though, is my favorite. It would have been called: Answers in Genesis: "Does Crucifixion Hurt?"

I don't know what it is about fundamentalist Christians and stupid titles for articles, but Answers in Genesis takes the taco, hands down. They ask questions that anyone else who is predisposed to enthusiastically agree with them can answer. And they are stuuuupid questions: "Is Hell Unpleasant?" "Is Evil Bad?" "Was Jesus God's Son?" "What's Vietnam?" And I'm dimly forming a hypothesis about why they ask such relentlessly stupid questions, one that does not go straight to the obviously attractive conclusion that fundamentalists are, well, fundamentally retarded. It's a different type of fundamental. When I played football in high school, we spent an insane amount of time working on really, really basic things: practicing counts, blocks, our stance, shadowblocking for passes. These were known as "the fundamentals." They need to be automatic. When you are an offensive tackle pulling down the line, you need to not even to have to think about whether or not the guard in front of you is pinching his man in or kicking his man out--you need to follow his butt and you'll find your man. Needs to be automatic. Unthought of. Simply done. And it's not done by thinking about it--mastery is done by doing it. Rote repetition. I happen to know that it is an important characteristic of basic Army life that you take a new recruit and drill it into him that when a superior officer says something, that he does it without question. If they thought about it, there is a chance that they might consider that running through an open field under fire might not be in their best interest.

I think these fundamental questions are fundamental to fundamentalist fundamentalism: perpetual affirmation of the most basic beliefs (and better yet, ask it as a question so that the church member has to answer the question himself--he can convince himself easier than anyone else could) makes for unthought, automatic agreement.

Drats...I have things to do. The day is slipping away from me....

Haha! How very droll! Good on you, Bing!

The next one was an experiment that I never did. It was called: "Know who I hate? Psychics. A lot." I really wanted to answer an ad for a position as a psychic, just to see if I could land one and punk their jackasses--the only problem is that I would have had to give these people my real name. Oh, well. Enjoy. This one is my favorite!

Seriously. Really strongly dislike them in every way. These people are thieves who live in the open. Sylvia Browne deserves every STD that is coming to her.

Now, as an academic looking at a long, lean summer before my new position kicks in, I was perusing the help wanted section for a position, I don't know, as a supermodel butt-waxer or something. Something that would be fun. Well, when you do your job search, it is probably best to not do what I do, which is look at the free classifieds page on the back of the Riverfront Times, the local formerly alternative weekly paper. There is an entire weird, exciting world out there just waiting for you to slip down into, kind of like the bowels of hell. There are often ads looking for models for "classy" pics, a bottomless maid service, and other positions of authority. I don't have a problem with this. The people who take those jobs are just turnin' an honest buck with their pink parts. Go crazy. (Do you take bad checks?)

Seriously, it's like the most depressing thing that you will ever read. Here are just some of the ads on the printed version of the backpage: Genital Warts Center (Specializing in HPV), "The Original" Intuitive Massage by Kathleen, Yucko's Pooper Scooper Service, Voodoo Spells, DWI/Bankruptcy Hotline, Save your home from foreclosure!, Colon Hydrotherapy: Cleanse + Detox + Supplements, Locked Up?..., Pass All Drug Tests, Cheating Spouse?, Too Broke to be Bankrupt?, and my favorite: DNA Paternity Test--Father's Day Special!

But there was one today that I got my heimlich in a maneuver. It came on the RSS feed I get and read...

Professional Psychic & Tarot Readers PROS ONLY

...in that font, even.

It's really a bizarre sort of application.

Oh my! These are saucy! Naughty, naughty Bing!

This next one is brief, but it also my favorite. It is called: "Worst. Advertisement. Ever."

And I don't mean that horrid car salesman's odious unprovoked screed against atheists.

This one was posted in my cubicle, you know, way back when I was a graduate student two weeks ago. It is written in a pseudo-gothic script and is black text on a plain background:

Dear Ketel One Drinker
Do you enjoy pushing the envelope, thinking outside the box, zagging when the world zigs, coming from left field, being ahead of the curve, breaking the mold, swimming against the tide, marching to the beat of a different drum, drinking Ketel One Citroen?

Why is this the worst ad ever? The same reason my cubicle-mate decided that it should go up on the wall of an office packed with people who are teaching freshman composition. Teaching freshman comp means enduring weekly barrages of cliches.

And that's where it ended! I know! It just sort of leaves you begging for more, doesn't it?

This one was a riff I was going to do on a reply at Pharyngula. The author's handle was Sirius Knott. My response to his post was going to be: "Sirius Knott Not Serious," and it is with out a doubt my favorite:

I am not in the habit of taking the remarks of readers of other, good blogs and commenting on them. I feel that there is a bit of a proprietary issue--I mean, they are replying to the blogger, not me--but, damn it, PZ Meyers gets so much traffic that I don't think that he'd mind me eagerly devouring some of the scraps from his table, you know, like some starving rodent.

This comes from a reader of PZ's called "Sirius Knott" and it is written in defense of Ken Ham, who for some reason is not a fry cook in Sydney but instead runs Answers in Genesis.

PZ,

Sticks and stones, brother. Sticks and stones.

Ah, the Nanny-Nanny Boo-Boo Defense. Well played, sir.

Oh, tantalizing stuff there, eh what what?

The next port of call in our tour of the Bermuda Triangle of Wackiness would have been called: "James Dobson is, and I'm going out on a limb here, a fucktard." You know what? I think it's probably my favorite!

So, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, is going after Obama, because, let's face it, the 'Pubes are going to get stomped in the upcoming election. Big time. That means the Supreme Court will not have the Right's bizarre agenda and have the theocratic planks of the Republican platform, let's face it, shoved up our asses by true activist judges.

In this article by the AP, Dobson warns that Obama is misusing his Magic Book.

I love it when assholes do logical loop-the-loops. Dobson, as best as I can tell, is a theological munchkin. Take this statement:

"I read the Bible literally..."

James Dobson said it. I'll hold him to it.

But I didn't!!! I'm so awful! But there it is, and you can't unread it! Sucks to be you! Exclamation point!

My next, and dare I say it, favorite non-post would have been called: "British cloning race of pig-men for world domination!"

I get all my worthless news from OneNewsNow, whose journalistic format is invariably: "Overly religious weirdo panics; is news." For instance, take the first line of the latest Chicken McNugget of shame to be slam-dunked into the sweet and sour sauce of my daily perusal of blogs:

"A license to create human-pig embryos has been granted in Great Britain. An American professor says the moral and ethical implications of that decision have not been thought out."

See? "Git has opinion. Whoopty do!" Every article is like this.

There are moral ethics involved, says Dr. Mark Mostert of Regent University. He believes that, in this case, technology has "outstripped our thinking," and contends that the creation of human-animal embryos presents the potential for doing a great deal of harm.

I'll say! Technology has outstripped our thinking, but that's no reason to halt technology--it's the best reason to start thinking harder!

Mark Mostert is a professor of special education. He got a dregree "special education and biblical studies," did "post baccalaureate work in cerebral palsied education," and wrote a dissertation on "Metaphor in Special Educators' Language of Practice." He has since served as "coordinator of programs in Learning Disabilities" at a number of different institutions, and according to his bio: his "current research interests include research syntheses related to effective educational interventions, issues related to face validity in meta-analysis, and the utility of the history of special education to inform current educational and social practices."

An impressive resume and an undeniably important area of study. But it is not the resume of a bioethicist (beyond the simple assertion that those who may have or may develop learning/physical diabilities should not be victims of discrimination or erradication), geneticist, or physician. Keep this in mind as he discusses the science behind the recently issued licenses. Of course, one may easily and rightly object: "Hey, Bing, the veridical value of someone's argument is independent of the scholar's training and ideological ground." I hear you, and I want you to remember that objection.

"...[W]e've not thought through on a moral and ethical level what this means for the future," he maintains. Plus, he points out that embryo research has not produced results.

"The truth, however, is that stem cells have provided very little to this point for any kinds of diseases," says Mostert. "[W]hereas...cells from [sources other] than embryos, for example in cord blood, [have yielded] a number of successes," he notes.

Of course there is a glaring omission here, namely that one needs to jump immense hurdles here in order to do experiments on stem cells. I suspect that part of the reason that these licenses are needed are to swerve around the moral barriers that you have thrown up so that research can continue.

The important question that goes unasked, of course, is whether or not we will be able to cast demons into pig-human embryos so that we may drown them.

That's enough for now! I am currently working over an article by Deepak Chopra, and I'm not optimistic. Look for in a few months on HJHOP's Lost Episodes!

HJ