There’s a men’s clothing store in Ahmedabad, India called Hitler. The owner might be trolling or just might be incredibly stupid – as often is the case, it’s difficult to tell the difference – said his business partner’s grandfather’s nickname was Hitler, but that he didn’t know anything about the actual Hitler other than that he was a “strict man.”
There are a bunch of neo-Nazi related stories I wanted to get caught up on, so I’m going to stuff them all into one post and then systematically execute them for maximum efficiency. I wish there were more good news about Nazis getting what’s coming to them for being fuckfaces, but there isn’t.
You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, and if you’re sneaky you can pick your friends’ noses while they’re sleeping. But you can’t pick the most prominent atheists who get lots of media attention.
The thing about atheism is that it barely tells you anything at all about a person. Atheists can believe in ghosts, demons, racism, sexism, alien abductions, or any other number of other weird things just as well as theists. I once had a conversation with a young woman who told me, all in the same conversation, that she knew for certain that God didn’t exist and that fairies were real. Like, they have a type of habitat and certain environment where they thrived and there are foods they prefer and all that. In another conversation I learned that organized religion was horrible, but also that astrology wasn’t total bullshit.
Short of untimely deaths, there’s really nothing stopping bad proponents from speaking out on atheist issues on major media networks except for conversion. So here are some prominent atheists who would do better work making the other side look like idiots instead of doing the same for us.
I have a feeling that writing a weekly column about people saying and doing crazy things is going to get a lot easier now that it’s getting warmer. The heat seems to drive normal people nuts and sends the ones who were already a little off into Francis E Dec territory. At least that’s the explanation I gave myself when I tried to narrow down all the weird news stories to summarize this week. And that’s probably a self-serving explanation because the alternative – that this is part of a larger downward spiral into universal lunacy – is just too depressing.
I first heard about Alex Jones during one of my first breaks home from college, catching up with a friend from high school. He went to college in Meadville, PA, at the same school which after one semester drove Trent Reznor into the happening nightlife of Cleveland and probably fueled his angst-based career for the next 20 years.
So there wasn’t much to do in Meadville. One thing to do was drive around delivering pizzas to townies while listening to the Alex Jones radio show. That’s what my friend did. This was in the days before iPods, so unless you wanted to drag around your CD collection and risk it getting stolen by Alex Jones fans for crystal meth money, radio was your only option.
So we would get stoned and laugh at the crazy man yelling about the global “elite” in his documentaries. It’d be fun to pick apart the fact from fiction and to try to identify the point where reasonable concerns about government waste turned into the fever-dream rants of a paranoid lunatic. So yeah, the drug war is bullshit, but it’s not part of a UN plot to end American sovereignty.
Who’s the craziest motherfucker you’ve heard about? I’ll give you a minute to think it over. Got one? Who is it? OK, you’re wrong. The correct answer is Francis E Dec. In my obsessive pursuit of all things unhinged I’m pretty sure he will be the ultimate yardstick for the scale of the craziest motherfuckers of at least the 20th century. Guys like Deepak Chopra, Fred Phelps and Jack Chick just have to stand back in awe of the way Dec fully embraced his inner crazy. The time cube guy was probably inspired by him. But you’ve probably never heard of him. And if it weren’t for his letters you never would.
Last week on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart did a segment on how the media’s been conspicuously avoiding coverage of the Quixotic Presidential campaign of Ron Paul. His supporters loved it, probably hoping that more coverage of Paul would mean more people getting on board with his campaign. But more coverage means more coverage of his crazier positions too, and there are a lot of them.
A couple of weeks ago those teabagger people had their April 15 demos. They had been on their toes looking for infiltrators who would pose while carrying ridiculous signs so that the media would report on how crazy those teabaggers were. To be fair, there’s something to that fear because some blogger announced exactly that as a strategy, and he tried to organize people to that end.
But in this instance, what it looks like is that some honestly racist person decided to show up to protest big guvmint in a swastika shirt. So the Republican teabaggers decided he was a “crasher” and kind of sort of chased him out. So good for them, I guess.
I’ve really got to make a disclaimer here because the original source I’m getting this from is in Italian. Since I don’t speak it, and haven’t even needed to speak Spanish since 2001, I’m at the mercy of Google Translate. So it’s possible that, like most things I say, all of this is completely wrong. The difference here is that it wouldn’t be entirely my own fault. So there.
Atheist Hobos 