OK, so who used the chemical weapons in Syria? The government or the rebels? How likely is it that we are headed into yet another “We attacked a government for having WMDs but the WMDs are not there, oopsie daisy”?

I really hope we are not seeing the repetition of the Iraq invasion. Because how stupid will we be to fall for the same story about WMDs?

Whatever the answer is, however, it is disturbing to consider a possible US invasion of Syria at this point. If the United Nations really existed, it could handle such issues. What a beautiful idea the UN was and how pathetically it failed! It was the greatest, most pathetic failure of the post WWII era.

A blogger explains why he reads so much Young Adult literature:

YA almost never features 45-year-old men from Brooklyn having mid-life crises. This has been done to death, and I have no interest in reading it.

Oh, yes. This is the kind of books and movies that I can’t stand either. Contemporary European literature is obsessed with 45-year-old women in the throes of a mid-life crisis and contemporary US literature has the same unhealthy obsession with men going through their version of it. I don’t think one can even experience a midlife crisis any more without feeling like a plagiarist of the worst caliber.

“So why do people accept all these adjunct positions if the work conditions are so poor and these jobs never lead anywhere? How come they don’t see that this is not a smart thing to do? Like, what’s with the self-defeatism?” a woman asks her companion in the queue at Starbucks.

If it weren’t rude to butt into conversations (even ones between really obnoxious people), I could tell the condescending lady that people don’t leave because the work we do is completely addictive. Once you have experienced the joy of coming into a classroom, speaking at a conference, working on a research article, that’s it, you’ve been poisoned and will keep seeking out this potent drug for as long as you can crawl back onto campus.

I believe that the reason why we get so addicted to academia is that it provides access to the purest form of being human. What makes us human is our capacity to reason, to generate ideas, and to communicate them to other human beings who will then use them to generate ideas of their own. Seeing people get excited about knowledge, books, learning and being surrounded by those who know no greater joy than to fly away into the realm of ideas is an experience that redeems much of the humanity’s indisputable nastiness.

Yes, yes, I’m idealistic. And the academia is not perfect. Let’s try to move past stating the painfully obvious for a change.

Stupidity knows no boundaries. Look what Atheist Republic is publishing to illustrate “retarded idiocy from religious nuts” (this is a direct quote from comment #1 in the ensuing discussion):

The move to make virginity testing of high school girl students in Indonesia mandatory has drawn flak from activists, arguing it as discrimination against women and violation of human rights.

Muhammad Rasyid, chief of education in south Sumatra’s Prabumulih district . . . was quoted as saying that the virginity test was proposed for the good of the children. He also added that virginity is a right of every woman and students are not expected to commit negative acts.

As per the requirement of the test, female school students in the age group of 16 to 19 years would have to undergo hymen examination every year till they completed their graduation. On the other hand, boys would not be examined to know whether they had sex or not.

Yes, this is barbarity, and I’m more appalled by it than you can ever be because I was subjected to this kind of practice starting at an age younger than 16. Care to guess where that happened? Yes, in the completely and officially atheist USSR.

It would be really cool if, before pointing fingers, atheists learned at least some very basic facts about the history of atheism. Of course, religions often control and persecute women. But the removal of religion does not automatically cancel woman-hating practices. The hatred of women is not caused by religion. It exists in and of itself and will use any means, including religion, atheism, agnosticism, or anything else, to self-perpetuate.