Saturday 9 August 2008

Which one is the Antichrist?

Mc Cain or Obama? Read all about it here.

If you ask me, they both are. And Hillary is the Scarlet Woman.

17 comments:

Steelman said...

This story is ridiculous; it was published on the eighth of the month.

You see, although the names of many possible candidates were bandied about, at the Pentecostal church I formerly attended, the Pope was always the Antichrist on even numbered Fridays.

anticant said...

All the twaddle uttered by barmy preachers of all stripes is ridiculous!

How can any sane person take any of it seriously?

zola a social thing said...

Sanity. Ah!!!!!
Another excuse to avoid the truth.

anticant said...

What is sanity? What is truth?

Are you a poached egg, Zola?

If not, why not?

Yankee Doodle said...

While both are beholden to a great many special interest groups, the one special interest group I have keyed in on is those who represent Big Heroin.

McCain's ties to heroin-trafficking jihadists are obvious, and I document them at my blog.

Obama is the frontman for a group that wants to legalize heroin.

I address Obama in the series Proxy Fight, which begins with Part 1.

anticant said...

Drugs are indeed a serious problem, but the "War on Drugs" is as phoney and futile as the "War on Terror". Surely Americans, who are so hooked on capitalist free enterprise, should know better than most people that you can't buck the market. Prohibition never works - remember the disastrous 1920s experiment!

Distasteful as it is, there is a huge and growing demand for illegal drugs, either just for kicks or to assuage the pain of the sick societies we have created. The only effective policy would be regulated legalisation and control through registration of users and taxation. This, of course, would be anathema to pious moralisers, but would remove the trade from the criminal underworld and the black market pushers and pimps at as stroke. For a sensible libertarian discussion of drugs, see Thomas Szasz: "Ceremonial Chemistry".

In sane policy making, what Marx called the "opium of the people" is as poisonous as that extracted from poppies.

Yankee Doodle said...

In the U.S., cigarettes are perfectly legal, but increasingly heavily taxed -- and there's a growing black market in them.

Gambling is legal in Nevada, and Las Vegas has a very high rate of people addicted to playing the machines.

Legalizing a vice doesn't work, either.

Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign was headed in the right direction -- people need to be convinced to not do it, but it needs to be a private choice, not a legislated or compelled one.

anticant said...

Yes, it must be a private choice - like most other things in life. There is far too much regulation and compulsion in the modern world. This is not what those who expended much blood and treasure to win WW2 were fighting for.

But anyone with experience of education, or therapy, knows it is the hardest thing in the world to convince people that they need to take responsibility for their choices and behaviour. The trouble with "Just Say No" is the "Just". It's not as simple as that.

And if we're to believe the gossip, Nancy Reagan had her moments of not saying No with Ol' Blue Eyes and others.....

Bodwyn Wook said...

The point is that in any case there is a naturally occurring top limit in populations, for example on how many will be predisposed to become junkies.

As to heroin, with the headlong lunge by us God-damned "Baby Bombers" now into an indecent and inevitably-with-yoo-miuch-technology-to-be-evilly-and-overly-prolonged, altogether obscene, old age, all of the junk we can get will be needed and a bumper crop or so will merely keep the prices down and so thwart the filthy pretensions of Big Pharmacology.

As to "just" saying no to things, this re-opens the whole contradictory business of "free will":

http://bodwyn.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/free-will-revisited/

(Najmi's point seems to be that moral distinctions, like Owl's ideas, is so much fluff that has to be blown into people's brains from outside....)

Anonymous said...

Szasz was quite insane.

anticant said...

Having read most, if not all, of Szasz's books, I profoundly disagree.

Of course, as dear old "Professor" Joad used to say, "It all depends on what you mean by 'insane'".

zola a social thing said...

Indeed AntiPsychiatry : Punch and Judy were always the best Bildung-bet and indeed you are mad and bad and that is why we love you.

anticant said...

I'll stick to the rum punch, and you can have the buxom judy!

Anonymous said...

Coming soon in the Burrow - a preview of my current bodice-ripping oeuvre, "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know", or "Losing It at the Astor", in which the elderly Anti-Byronic hero [modelled on Anticant] vainly strives to preserve the virginity of assorted youths and maidens living it up at a luxury hotel....

Bodwyn Wook said...

"I'd rather pour beer!"

(Emmett Jacobson, Eagle Lake, MN [d 1980])

Jose said...

Those pharysees dubbing the others evil makes me remember a story a friend recently sent me:

"A drunk man who smelled like beer sat down on a subway next to a priest. The man's tie was stained, his face was plastered with red lipstick, and a half-empty bottle of gin was sticking out of his torn coat pocket. He opened his newspaper and began reading. After a few minutes the man turned to the priest and asked, 'Say Father, what causes arthritis?'

The priest replies, 'My Son, it's caused by loose living, being with cheap, wicked women, too much alcohol, contempt for your fellow man, sleeping around with prostitutes and lack of a bath.'

The drunk muttered in response, 'Well, I'll be damned,' then returned to his paper.

The priest, thinking about what he had said, nudged the man and apologized.
'I'm very sorry. I didn't mean to come on so strong. How long have you had Arthritis?'

The drunk answered, 'I don't have it, Father. I was just reading here that the Pope does."

anticant said...

Nice one, Jose!