The Corvallist recently wrote about Nathanael Blake’s recent anti-islam piece that yesterday incited peaceful protest by Muslim students on campus. The Corvallist’s blog post is a much more serious criticism than mine is, but I did write about it too in my blogspot blog. I really want to cross-post it here, but I know how annoying that is to some people. So i’m just going to link to that post: (linky)
Bottom line is that I think Blake is like a terrorist of the pen, and while I’m NOT calling for censorship in the barometer, I do wish they’d have a higher level of intelligence and critical thinking standards for their staff.
shazamaramack | 03-Mar-06 at 10:13 am | Permalink
Have you ever read one of Blake’s articles before? They are ALWAYS filled with hate and ignorance. At this point, I doubt they are even his real opinions… he wants the attention.
starladear6 | 03-Mar-06 at 10:19 am | Permalink
yes i have. and i talk about how occaisionally they’re interesting because they’re totally different and remind me that my views aren’t the only ones out there.
So yeah, i brought that up in my blog post. it’s kind of the point.
drdougfir | 03-Mar-06 at 5:05 pm | Permalink
i know him to some extent. he’s part of the uuber right wing cabal of the barometer staff. nice guy in person, aside from a slight touch of social akwardness. and i must say he’s much less of a pen terroist than a large portion of the oppinion columnists in arabic-language papers.
he did raise an interesting point about the double standard being applied to islam right now — in both directions. way too many islamic appologists around these days. way too many islamophobes today. case-in-point: DWP ports deal.
i’m starting to plan an analysis of the whole thing to post on the aqoul.com group blog. should prove for interesting reading. maybe i’ll submit it to the chronicle too. of course anything over 500 words will automatically be thrown out by them… also i’d be afraid they’d do their usual editing job like they did to Dr. Sex’s column a few years back. sadly, our newspaper is one of the better college newspapers in the country. although my friend up at PSU who just started writing for the vanguard is giving the barometer a run for their money but i digress.
is islam really the largest religion? i thought buddhism or some derivative there-in was…
feel like delaying your homework a bit? i have writers block on a piece for Dennis.
drdougfir | 03-Mar-06 at 5:08 pm | Permalink
haha well duh he wants attention! he and his friends are all kinda shy introverts and hardcore rightwingers with few friends. i have a class with him and the right wing wench.
they’re actually fairly nice people in person if you don’t talk about politics or anything remotely related to a hot-button issue. i talked him and his friends down the other night from trying to lynch the ASOSU president for driving drunk. they get carried away sometimes.
autarchex | 04-Mar-06 at 12:52 am | Permalink
I would guess Islam would be the largest, if measured by number of self-professed adherents. There’s got to be at least over a billion. But I have zero facts to back that up.
drdougfir | 04-Mar-06 at 10:50 am | Permalink
according to this highly unbiased website, it’s christianity. http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html
this one also says christianity is number 1 http://www.religioustolerance.org/islam.htm
saying something is number 1 makes me want to run around chanting “USA USA USA” for some reason…
starladear6 | 04-Mar-06 at 12:21 pm | Permalink
ok, so my mistake. Islam is the fastest growing religion.
I still seem to remember my non-western civ professor explaining that if you bunched all the different types of christianity together, it’s the largest, but if you divide it into the different types (protestant, catholic, etc etc) Islam wins hands down.
But I’ve googled for that info and can’t find it. I did however find a number of sources reporting that Islam is by far the fastest growing religion.
autarchex | 04-Mar-06 at 7:47 pm | Permalink
You know what’s scarier than 1.3 billion Muslims?
2.1 billion Christians.
drdougfir | 04-Mar-06 at 7:59 pm | Permalink
you know what’s scarrier than both? 500000 scientoligists.
drdougfir | 04-Mar-06 at 8:01 pm | Permalink
if one were to break the various parts of christianity up then one would also have to do the same thing for islam. once one delves below the supposed unified surface of islam it becomes quite clear how fractured it truely is.
autarchex | 04-Mar-06 at 8:45 pm | Permalink
That’s scarier than ten billion of each.
autarchex | 04-Mar-06 at 8:49 pm | Permalink
imagine if 500k scientologists each donate a mere $100/month to their churchcorp. That’s +$50,000,000/month income! That’s pre-taxes +$600 million per year!!!
And that is why I don’t believe there are really 500k scientologists. No scientologist is gonna get away with less than 100/mo going to the churchcorp. Which pretty much guarantees that the churchcorp would have billions and billions of dollars by now. And if they had so much money, they would have a much larger and more aggressive military than they have presently.
Also, we would have noticed their new spaceport and be monitoring all the rocket activity they would be producing.
drdougfir | 04-Mar-06 at 9:25 pm | Permalink
one has to respect a clut with their own navy, secret service, and space port.
http://www.xenu.net/archive/go/index.htm
http://www.xenu.net/archive/so/
damn. can’t, in 30 seconds of googling, find a link to the scientologists’ spaceport.
autarchex | 05-Mar-06 at 3:27 am | Permalink
I hope they don’t have a spaceport. I was joking. Though, if they had the money, they would build one in a heartbeat. After all, that is technically the goal of the entire religion, getting “back to the stars”.
drdougfir | 05-Mar-06 at 7:07 am | Permalink
they have a space navigation / landing strip thing somewhere in the desert southwest.
ahh! here’s a link!
http://www.sploid.com/news/2005/11/the_town_of_tre.php
be sure to click on the picture for an up-close view of the spaceship navigation aid.
autarchex | 05-Mar-06 at 11:45 am | Permalink
From that story: “As a lifetime staff member, you sign a billion-year contract. …”
And from a linked story: “The site in central San
Miguel County was chosen because “it is away from the
pollution of a major city and it is an area that is not
likely to be a nuclear target,”
Unless, that is, if you ARE the nuclear target.