Bill Maher & Reginald Foster

I just found out today that the man on the left in this photo,

talking to Bill Maher just outside of Vatican City in Bill's documentary film Religulous after Bill was thrown out of the Vatican, this Vatican priest whom the Swiss Guard allegedly referred to as il benzinaio (the gas-station attendant) because he chose to wear simple working man's clothes instead of a priest's habit, this priest who in Bill Maher's movie agreed with very much of what Bill had to say about the Vatican and Catholicism -- this guy is Reginald Foster, who for almost 30 years lead the Vatican office which was responsible for writing official Vatican documents in Latin or translating them into Latin, Reginald Foster, whom many regard as the world's foremost living Latinist and teacher of Latin, Reginald Foster, the most prominent exponent of Living Latin, which places as much emphasis on speaking and writing Latin as on reading the language, as opposed to many others who concentrate on teaching reading comprehension and have given up on treating Latin as if it were still alive.

What a shame that all Bill wanted to talk about were his banal objections to the Vatican and Catholicism, so banal that a priest who had worked in the Vatican for decades didn't disagree with anything he said. What a shame that he missed the opportunity to talk to perhaps the world's foremost living Latin scholar about -- Latin, a subject about which Foster has a great deal of interesting things to say.

What a perfect example of the sorts of things which New Atheists could learn if they broadened their horizons just a little bit. What a heartbreaking example of missed opportunities to share wonderful things with their audiences of millions, because they can't stop repeating their mantra of "RELIGION IS WRONG AND STUPID AND RUINS EVERYTHING!" for one goddamned second any time they're within shouting distance of any place of worship, let alone the actual Vatican.

*sigh* So anyway, back to the interview as it actually was. I agree with Bill Maher and Reginald Foster that the grandeur and opulence of the Vatican are at odds with Jesus' message of simplicity and renunciation of worldly things. Unlike both Foster and Maher, however, I don't particularly care what Jesus said or thought, and I think it's a real shame to let something so silly deprive you of enjoying the grandeur and opulence, of, for example, the Vatican, which in my opinion is one of the most beautiful man-made places on Earth.

I also wonder what sort of jackassery Bill Maher perpetrated to get himself thrown out of the Vatican. I don't think that's actually shown in the film. Bill claims that he was well-known to the Vatican as one of their great enemies. I wonder whether that's an example of Bill Maher giving himself way too much credit. Maybe I'll get to ask him about that someday. Maybe I'll be able to talk to him and his audience about Latin some day. I'd be a very poor substitute for Reginald Foster for that, though.

Hollywood Autism: Vice News: "Autism Under the Lens" and The Accountant, Starring Ben Affleck

Last night's episode of "Vice News" on HBO was entitled "Autism: Under the Lens." "Vice News"' Executive Producer (its only Executive Producer, apparently, in an age where it's more and more common for movie and TV credits to have long lists of Executive Producers for every show) is Bill Maher, well-known for advocating anti-vaccination positions. Anti-vaxxers have promoted the thoroughly-discredited notion that vaccines cause autism, as well as the notion, which I certainly hope is in decline or at least being re-examined by a significant amount of people, that autism is, in anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy's words, a "horrible disease." (And seriously, what's up with calling all of these shows "Vice" in the first place? "Vice," "Vice News," and a whole "Viceland" network. Surely I can't be the only one who finds the name ridiculous.)

And so I was pleasantly amazed that vaccines were not even mentioned once in the entire episode, and that -- along with some researchers and therapists specializing in autism who referred to autism as a disorder as if there where no debate about that, and who might be inclined to refer to the condition as a "horrible disease" -- significant air time was also given to the point of view sometimes referred to as neurodiversity, which considers us autistic people as not disabled, but just different, as atypical. At least one autistic person on the episode referred to achievements of his as being possible because of his autism and not in spite of it.

Is this evidence that Bill Maher, unlike some of his anti-vax and New Atheist pals, can learn? Maybe not. Maybe all it means is that Bill's position as Executive Producer of "Vice News" does not include him paying any attention to the show. I would like to think that Bill is learning, and becoming more sophisticated on topics on which he has been led astray.

My one major criticism of the episode was the weight given to the belief that autism is becoming more common. It's true that diagnoses of autism are becoming more common. But I myself feel that this could be entirely explained simply by the fact that diagnosis is getting better and becoming more widespread. The term "autistic" is barely 1 century old. As recently as the 1970's, the vast majority of people, including the majority of physicians, had still never heard of autism, let alone understanding it well or diagnosing it. People in general are still just beginning to learn about autism. So of course the diagnosis of autism is becoming more common. People who believe that autism is becoming more widespread, and that it is a horrible disease, say: Oh no, oh no, it's a plague. People like me, who think that autism is about as common as it has always been, and that what's changing is that we're understanding it better, think that things are getting better. Understanding is key, and it's definitely happening: neurologically-typical people are understanding autistic people better, and we autistic people are understanding the rest of the population better. It's not a plague, it's a healing. That's how I see it.

In any case, this episode of "Vice News," along with other things such as the 2016 Ben Affleck movie The Accountant, whose title character, played by Ben, has been described as "the first autistic superhero," gives me hope that Hollywood in general is getting smarter about autism. (And of course, just like anyone else who is opposed to actual plagues, like plagues of measles and influenza, I hope they're becoming better informed about vaccines too.) I don't know whether the Accountant actually is the first autistic superhero, and The Accountant, although not a bad movie at all, is far from the masterpiece that The Dark Knight is: it copies some of The Dark Knight's style in cinematography and editing and music and the back-and-forth chronology of the plot, without giving you the same level of thrills and chills as the Batman movie. The Accountant does have some very nice moments: the montage at the end with Sean Rowe singing "To Leave Something Behind," for example, should leave you pleasantly verklemmt whether you're autistic or not, I should think, if you've been watching carefully up until then.

Although the superhero stuff in The Accountant is occasionally somewhat silly, the movie is very smart and realistic about autism. It doesn't say that autism will make a child grow up to be a superhero: the superhero part has more to do with Affleck's character having been intensively trained in various martial arts all during his childhood, and then someone close to him having been murdered by the Mafia. But when it comes to the characteristics and behaviors of autistic people, The Accountant does a better job than any other movie or fictional TV show I've seen with the exceptions of Rain Man and Temple Grandin with Claire Danes in the title role. The real-life Temple Grandin was a technical consultant on Rain Man and the Claire Danes film. I haven't been able to find out yet whether she also worked on The Accountant. I didn't see her name in the credits. Maybe, at last, Hollywood can portray autism realistically without Dr Grandin's help.

As far as I know, Ben Affleck has not been on Bill Maher's show "Real Time" since that particularly unpleasant (for Ben) episode in 2014, during which Sam Harris mocked Ben for asserting that Islamophobia exists and is related to racism. That was Ben's 7th appearance on the show, dating back to 2005.

Jesters

In many a Medieval court, so I gather, the only one who could safely say the truth to the monarch was the jester, the fool. We've come a long way since then, eh?

Except maybe not at all. Maybe we've gone backwards since then. Maybe today the simple plain truth about many extremely important things is hidden from us, the public, and not just from the most high and mighty. And no, I'm not saying that global warming is a hoax or that lots and lots of aliens have been chillin' underground in a huge secret government complex underneath Roswell since 1947. I'm not talking about secrets held by the government at all. I'm talking about the press, and how much they suck at reporting on politics. Generally speaking.

F.B.I. Regretfully Announces That Hillary Committed No Crimes

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—James Comey, the F.B.I. director, held a press conference on Sunday to “regretfully announce” that Hillary Clinton had committed no crimes related to her e-mails while Secretary of State.

“It is with a deep sense of sadness in my heart that I report that Hillary Clinton committed no crimes,” a visibly emotional Comey said.[...]

That's from Andy Borowitz at The New Yorker, one of the best sources of info on the 2016 Presidential campaign. A humorist, a satirist. "Not even" a "real" reporter. And it's understood that those are not authentic quotes from Comey. But Horowitz nails Comey and brilliantly sums up his role in the campaign, better than all or almost all "real" reporters, almost all of whom are afraid to openly denounce Comey. It's not their place to be as direct as the clown Borowitz, and to say that it's obvious that Comey has tried to use his office to damage Hillary Clinton's campaign, that it's obvious that he's biased in favor of Republicans.

Only jesters like Horowitz are allowed to get right straight to the heart of such important matters. Jesters like Horowitz and Bill Maher. Or to put in another way: those who report on politics and make altogether much sense about it, the way Hunter S Thompson did in 1972, are dismissed as clowns. I'm autistic, I can always be easily dismissed as a clown whether I succeed in being funny or not.

We've come a long way since the Middle Ages when it comes to openly criticizing our leaders? Really? Seems to me that we're in about exactly the same spot.

Bill Maher: "Islam Needs A Reformation"

One thing which made me tired of the New Atheist movement was the unrelenting tendency to equate Christianity with fundamentalism, Islam with ISIS, etc.

And, as I've mentioned before on this blog, there's the very unfortunate combination of constantly talking about religions with not knowing very much about them, not studying their history, which pretty much amounts to not studying human history in general. Again last night on "Real Time," Bill Maher -- who is not all bad, and who started off the show in a very knowledge-based way, talking to an environmentalist and saying, quite accurately, that climate change is the world's #1 political issue at the present time, because if we don't deal with it it will kill us all -- said not for the first time that Islam needs a Reformation.

Spoken like a New Atheist who knows squat both about Islam and about the Western Christian Reformation. (Western Christian: the Orthodox and Syriac and Armenian and Coptic and Ethiopic Churches weren't involved in the Reformation. It all happened among Catholics.) For one thing, there is no one thing which Islam needs because Islam is very far from being one unified entity. (Although I'm sure that one thing most Muslims would appreciate is if people like Maher would learn more about them and pontificate about them less.)

For another thing, an atheist who calls for a religious Reformation knows squat about the Reformation. The leaders of the Reformation, Jan Huss, Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, were much more pious and rigidly literalist and grimly fanatical than the Catholic Church around them, not less. Hus wore a hair shirt and trembled his whole life at the memory of how as a youth he had had a couple sips of wine and played a few games of dice. Before he invented Lutheranism, the Catholic monk Luther traveled to Rome and was outraged by how secular and worldly and non-Biblical the Church in Rome had become. And when some peasants misunderstood Luther's break from the Catholic Church as a call for them to rise up and free themselves from their feudal masters, Luther wrote to those masters and urged them to kill the rebellious peasants like dogs, which they did. Jean Calvin, besides giving the world the doctrine of predestination, was also an avid hunter and burner of witches, and the Puritans who hung and crushed dozens of witches in Salem in the 1690's were largely Protestant in their theology.

That was the Reformation: the hardcore nuts among the Catholics breaking away from the main Church because it wasn't hardcore enough. Protestantism has changed quite a lot since it began, and diversified so much that it's difficult to define the entire group of Protestants in any meaningful way, and there have been some ironic changes, such as that way that the Congregationalist Church, which used to be the witch-hunting Puritans, is now one of the most liberal and free-thinking of Christian denominations. But that was the Reformation.

What does Islam need? Well, different Muslims need all sorts of different things. One thing which I think would benefit all people, Muslims, Christians, atheists and others, is if history were more intensively and rigorously studied. That would tend to decrease the frequency with which people said clueless, unhelpful things, like Bill Maher saying that Islam needs a Reformation.

How Reasonable Is The Reason Rally?

The first Reason Rally was held on the National Mall in Washington, DC on 24 March, 2012. I just learned that the 2nd one will be held in the same place this coming 4th of July.

No, I don't plan to be there. If I am there, I won't be the event's most enthusiastic onlooker. I don't expect to be asked to speak to the assembled allegedly reasonable crowd.

These are New Atheists. And as regular readers of this blog know, I don't consider New Atheists to be the most reasonable people in the world. Yes, I agree with them that God doesn't exist, and I agree with most of them about the non-existence of other things -- although that simp Sam Harris believes in spirituality, so he and I disagree about that.

The thing is that there's a whole world aside from religion, and the more I learn about New Atheists, the less important religion looms in the grand scheme of things, and the more disagreements I have with them about other things.

Many of these disagreements can be summed up in the fact that New Atheists spend their entire careers attacking theism. I, on the other hand, feel that theism is worth a minute or two of debate at the most, usually not that much, and if I disagree with someone on that issue, I move on. Since first coming across New Atheists a few years ago, I've seen a Hell of a lot of debate between them and various theists over that one question: Does God exist? , and a more colossal waste of time and energy I can scarcely imagine.

New Atheists divide the world up into Us and Them, and Us is atheists and Them is theists -- with the exception of a few of them who've heard about atheists like me who have a lot of problems with New Atheism. But then, very often, when they've heard about me they've assumed I'm a theist, because an atheist who doesn't think that they're perfectly reasonable and extremely bright and profoundly good -- that shit just doesn't compute.

For me, Us is progressive and Them is reactionaries, and unfortunately, boys and girls, Dawkins, Harris, Hitch, Coyne, Myers and Dennett are all reactionaries. Because American atheists were in hiding to such a great extent before New Atheism, the combination of atheist and reactionary does not compute for a lot of Americans. They're much more used to it in Europe.

For me, Us is people who are against economic exploitation, racism, sexism and Islamophobia. And most of the people who oppose those things happen to disagree with me about God or gods. Opposition to economic exploitation, racism or sexism is absolutely not required to be in good with New Atheists, and opposing Islamophobia is pretty much enough to get you thrown out.

According to the official statement of purpose of the 2012 Reason Rally, it aimed to "unify, energize, and embolden secular people nationwide, while dispelling the negative opinions held by so much of American society."

You notice the lack of any internationalism there? I sure did. A recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag by the assembled masses, omission of the two words "under God," has been described as one of the highlights of the Rally.

Whoop-dee-freakin-doo! At a rally ostensibly devoted to reason, I would've liked to have seen some discussion of why people do something as silly as pledging allegiance to a Flag in the first place. But then, I've had advantages of upbringing and education: the Church of the Brethren, to which my family belonged when I was a child, discussed things like that.

The things supported at the 2012 rally included science education and marriage equality for GLBT's, and hey, I actually agree with the Reason Rally about something! Two things, actually! But what about education in general? What about feeding the hungry and housing the homeless? Unfortunately, Americans don't need to widen their horizons to the international in order to confront large numbers of hungry and homeless people. What about combating sexism and racism? How about addressing the mania, in Western civilization, of Islamophopbia?

If you go to the upcoming rally and you raise that last point, I admire you, and I hope you have great big balls, because it might just get really scary really fast.

"Unify, energize, and embolden secular people nationwide, while dispelling the negative opinions held by so much of American society." I feel much more unity with progressive believers than with reactionary atheists. People who sue governmental institutions over things like the 10 Commandments on the walls of public buildings and do nothing about poverty, who champion science education but despise historians and archaeologists, are getting it less than half-right.

Among the live and remote speakers to the rally, Bill Maher said: "When it comes to religion, we're not two sides of the same coin, and you don't get to put your unreason upon the same shelf with my reason. Your stuff has to go over there, on the shelf with Zeus, and Thor, and the Kraken. With the stuff that is not evidence based, stuff that religious people never change their mind about, no matter what happens." Maher's stances on vaccines and Middle East politics are two famous examples of how atheism does not guarantee evidence-based thinking on all issues.

Penn Jillette said, "I can make the argument that the only ones with true morality are us, the atheists. We are doing good because it's good and are doing right because it's right, and not for reward or punishment. We have love for each other, we have community, we have charity," and that just makes me want to throw up. The amount of love, charity, community, kindness and other really nice things displayed by billions of religious believers daily that you have to ignore in order to make a statement as arrogant as Jillette's is staggering.

Jillette's statement is not reasonable. It's downright blind, is what it is. "The only ones with true morality are us" is the kind of thing that bigoted fanatics say. Surprise surprise, you don't have to believe that God exists in order to be a bigoted fanatic.

Richard Dawkins said of people who talk nonsense: "Mock them, ridicule them in public." Will, do, Dick!

Saying That There Are No Peaceful Muslims Is As Stupid As Saying That There Are No Violent Christians

Or no Jews who eat shellfish. Or no Hindus who eat beef. Or no Buddhists who don't meditate.

It's pretty freakin' stupid.

And -- I've said this before but it bears repeating -- making ISIL's actions about Islam as a whole is pretty insulting to Muslims in general, and especially insulting to most of the people who are actually in combat against ISIL. Most of those people are, of course, Muslims.

Bill Maher asks, "Why do they hate us?" without bothering to be specific about who "they" and "we" are. Lots of people are always trying to tell Bill why some Muslims hate some Christians, but Bill's not listening. If it's not about Islam as a whole, then to Bill, we're naive liberals.

What do I, an autistic American atheist raised in a Protestant Christian family, have in common with the vast majority of those of the world's Muslims who know who Maher is? I've never opposed the fight against ISIL in any way, and Bill Maher frequently pisses me off.

Minds Ruined By Religion -- And I Don't Just Mean The Minds Of Believers

I believe I've just had an epiphany.

Nietzsche said that Pascal was the saddest case he knew of a fine mind being ruined by religion.

Last Friday, Richard Dawkins was the 1st guest on "Real Time" with Bill Maher. Bill's 1-on-1 guest. Dawkins appeared on the occasion of his new book, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science.



I haven't read the book, I have nothing to say about the book except that its title made me hope that Bill and Richard might actually talk about science -- the way that Neil deGrasse Tyson did later on in the very same episode. The way that Richard wrote about science up until 2004.

Up until he became a full-time atheist, a New Atheist, a professional atheist.

No, Richard and Bill said fuck-all about science. Within 30 seconds they were knee-deep in those tired old New Atheist cliches and claiming to be oppressed because some people, "deluded liberals," don't like their Muslim-bashing.

Bill isn't a full-time atheist, a New Atheist. Not yet. He still actually talks about a wide variety of issues. Unless he's around Dawkins or Sam Harris.

I'm not as familiar with Pascal's scientific and mathematical work as I am with Dawkins' work on evolutionary biology, and so, for me personally, the saddest case I know of a mind ruined by religion is Dawkins. I'm still an atheist, I haven't stopped being an atheist for an instant over these years of getting to know New Atheists better and better and becoming more and more appalled by them. But one thing which has changed enormously for me is that a person's religious beliefs or lack of them have come to mean less and less to me in my overall opinion of a person. (You notice I said "person," singular. Almost as if I regarded people as individuals or something.) Although I haven't stopped being an atheist for an instant, I still do think about things other than religion, and I sometimes even have very positive thoughts about religious things -- religious art and architecture and music and literature, mostly.

And to those of you who are offended by being compared to religious fanatics, let me quote Dawkins and Hitch and Stephen Fry and the millions of you human parrots who are constantly quoting them: "Oh, you're offended? So fucking what?!"

Often, Bill Maher Sounds Almost As Intelligent As Ben Affleck

And then there are times like last night's "Real Time," marred by Bill's ant-vax screeds. To be sure, Bill insisted that he's not anti-vax, but just a "vaccine skeptic." Well, those are the same thing. Just as criticizing people's religious beliefs is the same thing as criticizing the people who hold the beliefs..

A moron like Jenny McCarthy or Sam Harris is one thing. But Bill sounds perfectly intelligent most of the time, offering cogent and precise evaluations of morons who deny climate change and vote Republican and think that the Affordable Care Act is a tragedy. But when the topic is Islam or vaccinations, it's as if someone changed the channel to Fox News.



Bill points out that the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is happening, is caused by human activity and is big, big trouble for life on Earth, and that there is a clear fix: green energy, wind, solar, plug-in electric cars and so forth. The thing is, the very same scientists also overwhelmingly agree that vaccines have nothing whatsoever to do with autism, or kidney disease, or any of the other things the anti-vaz nuts link it to, and that not vaccinating children risks re-creating the very same plagues which vaccines eradicated a century ago. So it's quite surreal to hear Maher spouting unscientific bullshit to support his "vaccine skepticism," and concluding, "[...]and it's not like global warming, cause that's real!" and chillingly, last night Bill's audience cheered him for that, instead of booing him as any well-informed crowd would have been expected to do.

It's not just backwoods rednecks who have an anti-vax problem in the US: prosperous, liberal Hollywood has that problem too. Does Hollywood's anti-vax bullshit have something to do with Scientology, and with charlatans preying on movie stars and peddling holistic treatments and magic crystals and pyramids and other such garbage? How could it not have everything to do with those things?



(Some of you may be old enough to remember when Ben Affleck and Matt Damon suddenly became huge stars on the strength of Good Will Hunting, which they wrote and in which they starred, Damon playing a genius and Affleck a sympathetic but not particularly intelligent schlub. Maybe you remember the rumours following Damon and Affleck's spectacular Oscar win for the screenplay, rumours to the effect that Affleck, like his character in the movie, was not particularly bright, and that he owed his Oscar mainly to his good friend Damon's generosity in sharing the writing credit with him. In light of the screenplays Affleck has written since then, and the movies he's directed, those rumours now seem kind of dumb. Not that I see any reason to suspect that the rumours got it exactly backward and that Damon is dumb.)



I really hate to say it, but I see no reason to suspect that Maher is going to brighten up any time soon, either about vaccines or about Islam. I can only plead with his fans -- I'm a fan too -- to think for themselves when listening to Maher, and realize that sometimes he knows what he's talking about, and sometimes he doesn't have a clue, and that when he sounds like he's on Fox News, it doesn't mean that Fox News is sometimes right about something.

Open Letter To Bill Maher

Hey, Bill. Last night on Jimmy Kimmel, you said:

"We have to stop saying when something like this that happened in Paris today, we have to stop saying, well, we should not insult a great religion. First of all, there are no great religions. They're all stupid and dangerous. And we should insult them, and we should be able to insult whatever we want. That is what free speech is like."

And here is some more of what free speech is like:

It's very depressing, but not at all surprising, that you jumped on the opportunity of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy to make one horrible thing seem to be all about Islam, you stupid islamophobic fuck. What you and Harris and Dawkins and all your dopey fans don't get is that Muslims are horrified by this massacre, the same way that anybody is horrified by any atrocity. They're kinda like people that way. They're speaking out against this horrible deed and saying that it was not done in their name, and you don't give a flying fuck. The same way that you make ISIS all about Islam and don't give a flying fuck that most of the people that ISIS have tyrannized and displaced and tortured and executed, and most of the people bleeding and dying fighting ISIS, are Muslims, and pay no attention to all of the majority-Muslims states who have denounced ISIS.

I agree with you that all religions are stupid primitive nonsense, and that the sooner they become history the better it will be for mankind. That's not rocket science, you don't need to spend so much time patting yourself on the back for having figured out something that simple. I'm not a believer attacking you for disrespecting religion, I'm an atheist attempting to point out to you that you and your nitwit New Atheist buddies are making atheism seem repulsive to most people. You're not helping.

Religions aren't the only form of stupid primitive nonsense currently plaguing mankind. Bigotry is stupid primitive nonsense, and it can be 100% religion-free, as you and the New Atheists constantly demonstrate by constantly holding billions of Muslims accountable for the deeds of a few psychopaths. What would it have been, if atheists, back in the 20th century, had reacted to every one of the atrocities of the KKK by saying: "See? This is what Christianity is like!"

One of the things that would have been is, unhelpful. The same way that it's unhelpful for you yahoos to insist that Islam is barbaric or "Medieval" and that Christianity has become more civilized than that, at the very same time that so many Muslim civilians are collaterally killed and maimed by the militaries of majority-Christian countries, countries which often enough pick the very unfortunate name of "crusade" to describe the military efforts in which those civilians are being killed and maimed.

You've figured out that religions are nonsense. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. You're right, they are. To quote William Goldman: "Give the genius a box of fucking Mars bars." Now, what are we going to do about that in a world where most people still are religious? Are your words and actions helpful? Or are you mostly just irritating, like some math-wiz Poindexter in elementary school who constantly rubs it in to everybody else that he can solve problems they can't solve, and never helps anybody with their assignments, and in general more than utterly fails to make math more sexy to the other students?

Most of the people you and I have to live with are religious, and aren't going to suddenly drop their religion and exclaim, "You're right! Thank you, Bill!" just because you insult them. Just try to keep that in mind. I don't think you should stop criticizing religion. I'm not going to stop criticizing religion. I'm not going to stop criticizing atheists when they're stupid and obnoxious for no damn reason, either, and I'm not going to stop telling comedians when they're not funny. We have to live with these people, these believers. I'm not trying to tell you what to say or do, I'm just saying that I don't think you're particularly funny when you talk about religion. Extremely monotonous, but not very funny, not full of the extraordinary insights which make for truly funny jokes. You're very funny most of the time, but when you get on religion, it's time to channel-surf for a minute because we've all already heard you say what you're about to say 100 times and get some fucking new material about it for the love of Jesus, so to speak! I'm not asking you to shut up, I'm begging you, on behalf of millions of fans who are getting more and more bored, to wise up. I believe in free speech just as much as you do, and I'm just as strongly opposed to people being killed over writing magazine articles and drawing cartoons as you and 99.9%+ of the rest of the people on this planet are, you stupid ugly fat-faced fuck.

Your pal,

Steven