Atheist Meditations

Anybody else out there fondly remember reading Card's Ender's Game? I even read his whole series that sorta follows that, with his goofy takes on the next world war. I totally dug that Bean character, and even liked Achilles (with the french pronunciation - a She el.) They were alright books.

Sometimes authors need to shut the fuck up and stick to their fantasy writings. I mean, I'm all down with free speech and go Dixie Chicks and all that, so I'm not saying dumbasses like Card and Crichton should not be allowed to write out 'their opinions' - but when they do so they should expect a bit more backlash than what those poor country girls have had to endure. The shitstorm aimed at the Dixie Chicks was designed to squelch their freedom of speech - evidently, many Americans have huge fucking holes in their head and can accept that fact that entertainers need to 'shut up and sing.' Your knowledge of music must be pretty fucking shallow if you can ignore the Dylans, Youngs, Waters, Beetles, fuck even Lynard Skynard was fucking political.

Orson Scott Card is a douchebag not because he's expressing his opinion. He's a douchebag cuz his opinion reveals such a level of ignorance that's it's fucking shocking. Honestly, I'm shocked, that a man who has made a name for himself as a writer would put that name behind this sort of shit.

Since I myself rarely click links to read up on supporting matters for somebodies blog, I don't pretend my reader has now completed Mr. Card's extremly long-winded opinion piece. Here's how the great man begins his article:

There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that's the War on Terror.

And the success of the War on Terror now teeters on the fulcrum of this election.

If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one.

Unfortunately, the opposite is not the case -- if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the outcome of the present war will be favorable for us or anyone else.

But at least there will be a chance.

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations. But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war

Nice, hunh?!? Maybe the fucker is a democrat, I'd hazard that at least seventy percent of that party are a bunch of whistledicks who live on exactly the same rations of selective media that the most brain dead amongst the neo-conned savor. I don't know, I'd think that a fucking citizen of America would care that he only has two choices and even the lesser of two evils still cannot insure a positive outcome to what haunts him as civilization's greatest threat. That could be changed, just about every democracy on the planet does it differntly than we do it here in the U.S., but that's a whole 'nother rant.

I should'nt be so abrasive. Mr. Card has got to be getting up there in the years. Perhaps he's had a stroke recently and no one in his familial structure has stepped up to prevent him from publishing such statements. Let's be a bit more abstract and dwell on these specific statements apart from the man. I'm a seeker, not an assassin.

First, we have the Zell Miller effect. Everyone remember Zell on Earth? He was that looney dork who was getting torn up in the South by the evag media machine. Sure he had limited choices, but he chose to do the speech at the Republican National Convention as a way of trying to make nice with his tormentors. A fair percentage of the republican stalwarts are evags, they broker in 'redemption' stories in a way that most normal people cannot understand. A few formor addicts talking about how much better a high Jesus is over crack - that goes a long way with them. Mr. Card's intro is not meant to entice democrats into pondering his wisdom, it's intended to get 'the base' hard while Mr. Card grovels in his submissive display. Think of a low status dog on his back urinating on himself before the pack, same shit different species. Nothing like having a supposed ideological enemy admit that he was wrong and then argue why for your amusement.

All that and he also gets in his two givens: The 'War on Terror' is real (or important, or logically sound) and the democrats will undermine it if they have the opportunity. Writing which will never endure critical thinking be filled with 'givens' that are laid out in the opening and never solidified. Mr. Card does go a step further than most, he devotes an entire bold headed segment to defining:

However, there are several excellent reasons why "War on Terror" is the only possible name for this war.

1. This is not a war that can be named for any particular nation or region. To call it "The Iraq War" or the "Afghanistan War" would lead to the horrible mistake of thinking that victory would consist of toppling certain governments and then going home.

In fact, it is precisely the name "War in Iraq" that is leading to the deep misconceptions that drive the Democratic position on the war. If this were in fact a war on Iraq, then in one sense we won precisely when President Bush declared victory right after we occupied Baghdad. And in another sense, we might not see victory for another five years, or even a decade -- a decade in which Americans will be dying alongside Iraqis. For a "War in Iraq" to linger this way is almost too painful to contemplate.

But we are not waging a "War in Iraq." We are waging a world war, in which the campaigns to topple the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan were brilliantly successful, and the current "lukewarm" war demands great patience and determination from the American people as we ready ourselves for the next phase.

2. We cannot name this war for our actual enemies, either, because there is no way to name them accurately without including some form of the word "Islam" or "Muslim."

It is our enemies who want to identify this as a war between Islam and the West. If we allow this to happen, we run the risk of achieving the worst of all possible outcomes: The unification of one or both of the great factions of worldwide Islam under a single banner.

President Bush and his administration have shown their grasp of our present danger by stoutly resisting all attempts to rename this war. We call it a "War on Terror" because that allows us to cast it, not as a war against the Muslim people, with all their frustrations and hopes, but a war in which most Muslims are not our enemies at all.

That can be galling for many Americans. When, after the fall of the towers on 9/11, Palestinians and others poured into the streets, rejoicing, it was tempting to say, A plague on all of them!

Yep, a plague on them all. This is an awesome example of writing with a cock in your mouth. 'Our enemies want us to define the war as a war on Islam cuz their planning on waging a fucking total war of global domination. Fortunately, our totally great Leader won't play that game. He knows what's best and will do it regardless of what the majority of Americans think.' When Palestinians rejoiced after 9/11, only our moral superiority kept us from nuke'n those fuckers.

It must have been a stroke that did this to Orson Scott Card. Obviously, the guy read plenty of war histories to conjure up his fiction, did he never read a single word of history of propaganda? Golly gee whiz, every state fighting a war has employed tactics to keep their population docile while they did so, and Mr. Card be going right down the list in his lame ass article.

In Ender's Shadow, Bean has a scene where he remarks, 'It felt good to speak truth to power.' Unfortunately, nobody seems to have the fucking manhood to simply state the fucking obvious about 'the War on Terror.'

When large groups interact in conflict, like when white America was pushing west through the vaginas' of native squaws, or when huge international petroleum extractors use loads of money to support repressive regimes that will give them unfettered access to the resources they crave; often one group grinds the other into the dust. History has recorded about a fucking million examples, and perhaps we're all grown up enough to realize it ain't much differnent today. In conflict where one side has total military superiority - and demonstrates that they will simply kill every member of your group - resistance to that requires desperate tactics.

It's just fucking evolution. The noble members of a group that refuse to murder civilians or torture or whatever don't survive. Those who fight by whatever means necessary don't live all that long either, but sometimes truly brutal terrorism does have an effect - so it will be repeated.

The simple fucking fact is that the middle east if full of fucking oil and oil runs every-fucking-thing in our modern world. The world has been fighting over the middle east's resources since WWII, and as the lone superpower, many in our country feel that it's ours 110%. The neo-cons have been writing papers about this for a couple of decades.

Some fucks still want to see the world in black and white, even though a few World Wars and decades under the threat of nuclear planet death didn't seem to get us too far with that mentality. They are tittilated by the notion of an 'Us vs. Them' kinda war, cuz they don't know shit about war or human suffering. Guys like Orson Scott Card are buying into the seduction of telling the American People what those in power want them to hear. Ain't hard to do. He's becoming just another Christopher Hitchens - just with a lot less talent.

I'll bow to the guys at South Park, Mr. Card is not a douchebag on par with the 'psychic' Jonethan Edwards, but he's still a douchebag.

Now, I've got to drink some beer and see what's happened at the polls today.