Looks Like HP Isn't Going To Publish This Comment

Actually, this is my 2nd, toned-down attempt to reply. Unfortunately, I didn't save the 1st attempt. (In that attempt I pointed out that Hitler was never on the Index.)

Below, the stuff in italics was put online by HP, the 2nd, apparently unsuccessful attempt to reply is in bold italics:

COMMENTER A: I'd just like to point out that the Catholics have never taught in the literalism of the creation story, and have never been against evolution!

COMMENTER B: Correct, except where it comes to what the soul, which Catholics are taught is created separately by god and that the Adam and Eve story is about this creation of the soul and the division this created between animal and human.

Second, is that Catholicism still teaches that man is god's pinnacle, ie the end game of evolution, which evolution clearly states is hogwash.

But, at least theistic evolution is better than creationism and ID.

ME: Hold on a minute, B -- A said Catholics were NEVER "against evolution." Are you going along with that? Has the Church actually been on the scientific cutting edge here -- since Darwin? since Lamarck? I think A is the victim of a Catholic PR campaign. I could be wrong, but I think Catholicism's official embrace of evolution actually goes all the way back to 2009, and still contains a few thoroughly unscientific if's and but's. But you covered some of that by pointing out "that Catholicism still teaches that man is god's pinnacle."

COMMENTER B: Actually it goes back to 1950 which is a surprisingly long time and an encyclical entitled Humani generis. And, let's not forget that Mendel was an Augustinian monk and Lamark was Jesuit educated.

While the RCC didn't exactly accept evolutionary theory until 1950, they never placed On the Origin of Species on their list of prohibited books list, so while there was no official acceptance, there was also no official denial. So, technically A is correct with the caveats I mentioned previously.

ME: The moderation doesn't seem to have liked my first attempt to reply to this, let me try again:

1950, not 2009, I stand corrected. But 1950 still isn't anywhere near the scientific cutting edge. It's more than 20 years after a large segment of the population was dismayed by the result of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. And it seems that as late as 2009 the position taken in 1950 was still unclear enough to the average Catholic that another official Vatican statement on the matter was necessary. And as you point out, the Catholic characterization of man as the pinnacle of creation is unscientific and in complete disharmony with evolutionary theory. And finally, it is absurd to claim that the Church was never in opposition to an author merely because that author was never on the Index. There are many famous authors who never made it to the Index whom the Church in no way embraces: Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, to name just three.

Pub Theology

A ridiculous person named Bryan Berghoef has published a few ridiculous articles on that ridiculous presence (on which I spend a ridiculous amount of time), the Huffington Post, plugging his ridiculous career, pub theology. His latest ridiculous effort is entitled "Pub Theology Is a Waste of Time," and he's right, or, that is to say, he would be right except that he is speaking ironically. In this article he erects an amazing number of small flimsy straw men, a collection of objections to his calling of pub theology which I simply don't believe exists apart from his imagination and this article, in order to deftly knock each one down.

Except that he's not really so deft. Take the following example, with which I wouldn't even be bothering you if the Huffington Post moderation had not rejected several perfectly reasonable and mild attempts of mine (Over there, I didn't even use the word "ridiculous"! Not once!) to address it. As my regular readers well know, I WON'T be IGNORED:

"I've heard some criticism along these lines, and I've had some of these thoughts myself. Pub theology -- gathering with folks to talk about life over beer -- is nice. But isn't it time to start doing some things that really matter? Isn't it just dressing up a relic without really changing anything?"

Hæc locutus est Atriummontem! Leaving aside for the moment the imaginary nature of this criticism -- which Mountaincourt advances in order to distract from real critics. Like me. With the craven assistance of his tools, the Huffington Post moderation -- Corte de Montaña here clumsily attempts to disguise his ware, theology.

Mmwahaha! Nice try, Corte de la Montagna, not! Gathering to talk about life is not theology. Theology is the study of God. Life exists. God doesn't. By defending all sorts of things in this article, normal, everyday, healthy, non-ridiculous things, falsely defending them because no one has assailed them, you are attempting to smuggle theology, theological nonsense and doubletalk and confusion, in among all of these normal everyday inoffensive things. And you're fooling me about as much as those green night-vision filters on the camera lenses make me think there really are ghosts on "Ghost Adventures," and about as much as I've been swindled into thinking that the talking heads on "Ancient Aliens" are world-renowned scientists. And if I ever meet you in a pub, Cour de la Montagne, I'll say so to your ridiculous face, in which I might also just laugh, and your big strong moderators won't be there to muzzle me!

They Put It Back

I've never seen anything like this: yesterday a comment of mine on Huffington Post was deleted for "violating Huffington Post's guidelines," and this morning it has re-appeared. In the meantime the replies to my comment, and the replies to those replies, remained on the website, which was also a bit strange. In a blog post yesterday I attempted to give the gist of my offending comment from memory. The comment which prompted one reader to call me "as bad as the fundies[...]a jerk, as ugly as a fundy[...]as repulsive as a fundy[...]You hurt, not help the liberal cause[...]You are an embarrassment to our side. My wish is for you and Pat Dobson to be stranded on a remote island together for the rest of your lives." and another to declare, "[...]how dare you tell me what to think and what to feel. If I wanted that, I'd go to a fundamentalist church." Now that my original comment is back, I can give it to you word-for-word in all of its gruesome, unbearable ruthlessness, or whatever it was which upset some people -- which I wrote in response to this article by David Michael McFarlane, whose gist is summed up very well in its title, "Christians, Can We Drop This 'Creationism' Thing Already?" Here comes my deleted and now resurrected comment. Clutch your pearls:

"How about if you just drop the whole "Christianity" thing, already? You religious moderates spend so much time and energy insisting how completely different you are from the fundies, but you still believe in God, a God who sent his Son to Earth to be a human sacrifice to save the world from Himself. As long as people believe all of that, some of them will still go the rest of the way and believe the parts you don't like anymore. It's not such a long distance from your beliefs to theirs. It's NOT."

That sort of talk, apparently, is repulsive, a disastrous disgrace to liberalism, an attempt to control the thoughts and feelings of others, and who the Hell is Pat Dobson anyway? The only Pat Dobson I can find was a Major Laegue Baseball player decades ago, has been dead for a few years and didn't seem to be well-known for either his religious views or his views on religion. You know what? I bet the guy meant to say "Pat Robertson," and was in such a towering rage that he typo'd "Robertson" down to "Dobson."

I'm biased, of course, but I don't think my comment is extraordinarily atrocious or repulsive. I think what happened is that I hit a nail on a head, hit a few religious moderates square athwart a big subconscious blind spot. Having some denial deftly ripped away can be quite traumatic.

Immoderate Huffington Post Moderation

As I have mentioned before, I suspect that some HP readers have attained Community Moderator status, with the power to remove comments by other readers, and are busily demonstrating that Community Moderators are a bad idea, because they have attained that status by spending all of their time on HP, and not by being possessed of moderation or good judgement. (Indeed, spending all day every day on HP is a much surer indication that someone is NOT particularly well-balanced or wise.) (Yes, I am aware that I'm venturing into throwing-stones-in-my-glass-house territory here. But it's really not all day every day in my case.)

A comment of mine appeared this morning, in response to this article by David Michael McFarlane, entitled "Christians, Can We Drop This 'Creationism' Thing Already?" In the removed comment I took McFarlane and other moderate Christians to task for the absurdity of his attack on fundamentalists for their creationism, while they still believe in God, and Jesus, and the Immaculate conception, and the Resurrection, and so forth. I know, not all moderate Christians believe in the Immaculate conception or the Resurrection, but those whose do are not assailed for these beliefs by their fellow moderates, while the fundies are constantly assailed for rejecting evolution. My contention in the removed comment was that the moderates believe much of the superstitious nonsense in the Bible and are attacking the literalists for believing other superstitious nonsense, and that the distance between them and the fundies is not so great at all. I also said that I reject their portrayal of themselves, of the religiously moderate, as the true enlightened sages of our time, and of atheists and fundies as closely resembling each other, raving fanatics on either side of the calm, wise, moderate middle. Why not just drop Christianity altogether? I asked them, and bringing it to such a fine point seems to have enraged a few people. I wonder whether they were thrown into a similar rage by Rev Lovejoy talking about a cult, and saying something to the effect that it was

"[...] a bunch of mumbo-jumbo designed to separate fools from their money. And now, let's sing the 'Doxology' twenty-three times while we pass the collection plate."

And now my comment has been disappeared for "violating Huffington Post's comments guidelines."

Perhaps I should just be grateful. It may be slightly less pointless for me to write here in my blog than to write comments on HP, even if I'm writing here about the little goldfish-bowl world of HP comments. The removal made me angry, and as the Clash sang, "anger can be power." It can energize you.

Just In Case Some Of You Haven't Noticed Yet: Theologians Don't Play Fair

Here are just a few of a countless number of instances:

I think maybe every single one of my comments on Nathan Schneider's non-mind-blowing essay 10 Proofs That Will Change How You Think About God on Huffington Post Religion may have been removed, because of "violations of our guidelines," ie because some holy roller has achieved Community Moderator status. A time-honored Christian approach to inconvenient criticism is to pretend it never existed.

From Aristotle's prime mover to the "endgueltigem Beweis Gottes" Schneider says Hegel was working on at the time of his death -- perhaps it's very good for Hegel's rep that he died when he did -- Schneider's 10-point stroll through thousands of years of Western philosophy resembles a walk through a minefield which the perambulator survives, in that not one of the many bombs of skepticism in Western philosophy was set off by the merest hint of a mention. If one's only source of info about Western philosophy has been Huffington Post Religion -- and I fear that it is some people's only source, and that many have only seen Western philosophy through similarly-filtered lenses -- then one definitely could get the impression that philosophy and theology are synonymous to a great extent.

In any case, the assumption that they are in harmony seems to be very widespread among both theists and atheists. The former love to trot out their favorite quotes from Augustine and Aquinas, they often assume that Spinoza and Einstein were on their side. The atheists generally dispute the subject of Einstein's religious view much too much -- his religious views are unclear, that's about all there is to say about it -- and the case of Spinoza not nearly enough. If they have looked at all at the actual words of Spinoza, they immediately notice all the theological-looking phrases, up to and including the 2nd word in the title of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,
and often they discard Spinoza long before they have begun to suspect that what looked at first glance like theology could have been camouflage for atheist arguments in the 17th century when plain spoken atheism was not allowed. (The same may also have been true for Descartes, whom Spinoza regarded as the greatest of his immediate predecessors in philosophy, although to assume atheism in Descartes' case is a bit more of a stretch. But even a century after Spinoza, even the plainly-atheist Hume never actually said in so many plain words that he doubted the existence of God.) Just as I myself discarded Spinoza after my first contact with him, and only returned because Nietzsche praises him so often and so highly.

But of course the theists (especially those tedious 21st-century pantheists) cite Spinoza as if he had been perfectly free to say plainly and literally whatever it was that he really thought about the idea of God.

Among other absurdities which theists present with maddening smug stupidity as fact, such as that Biblical literalism was invented in 19th-century America, that fundies have much more in common with atheists than with them, the religious moderates, the truly enlightened, and that the "conflict thesis" has been thoroughly refuted and discredited among historians (How many people who have not read much more theology than is good for anyone have ever even heard of the "conflict thesis"?) is this version of the Western philosophy absent its religious skepticism. Democritus, Lucretius, Seneca (Seneca was an idiot but even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then), Boethius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Even worse than behaving as if all of these people had never existed, the theists, the theologians often go one disgusting shameless step further and cherry-pick them for quotations to take out of context and make these thinkers seem quite different than the critics of religion (/spirituality, po-TAY-to/po-TAH-to) which they were, just as they cherry-pick Augustine and Aquinas to make them look tolerant and urbane and not like the bloodthirsty Bible-thumpers they were. If you want to learn about the integrity and reliability of a philosopher or theologian, read an entire book by someone they've quoted, and compare the impression you've gotten from that entire book with the impression you got from the citation.

Moderate THIS, Huffington Post!

Still in the wake of the latest Richard Dawkins-induced brouhaha, a friend of mine responded to someone's assertion that there probably wasn't a Muslim university in the world's top 200 universities. The person asserting this was perpetuating Dawkins' stubborn refusal to face the issue of who does things like hand out Nobel prizes and make lists of the world's best universities, and hey, let's not forget the problematic nature of the phrase "Muslim university." As I say, my friend responded to this assertion, and his comment was judged, by whoever the Hell moderates the comments at Huffington Post these days, to be beyond the pale. Too horrifying to appear on the website. My friend's comment was removed. Here it is, in its entirety. Brace yourselves:

"At least one Muslim country made the top 200."

Wow! I know, right? What a horrible, disgusting thing to say! Who can blame HP for deleting it?

The thing is, this wasn't a one-time glitch. Similar comments posted by this guy are removed so frequently that it doesn't even surprise me any more, just makes me angrier. So why don't I go complain to HP, you ask? I did, and my report that something was wrong got an error message several times in a row. And at least one comment of mine was deleted. (I don't know how many of my comments had been published in the meantime.)

Something is wrong. Another one of my friend's deleted comments reads as follows:

"There is no archaeological evidence of Jesus' existence. There is some historical evidence but it is biased evidence. Other than that there is the Josephus' mention of James. And there is the Pilate Stone with Pontius Pilate's name on it."

That's much, much milder, not to mention more accurate, than many atheist comments which are published every day on HP and which stay up. I copied-and-pasted that last comment into a comment of my own. Later, in a comment which included my entire comment which had included his earlier comment in its entirely, my friend informed me that my comment had also been deleted. They haven't gotten around to deleting that one yet. And the deletions of my friend's comments happen much, much too often to be a coincidence. It's so obviously not a coincidence that I have to wonder whether my comment or comments being deleted is a coincidence. Some childish person (or persons) has been given an HP moderator's buttons and is abusing them maliciously. And/or, those moderating functions have been hacked by trolls. My inability to report this to HP through normal channels would seem to suggest the latter. Whatever. I'm not going to be quiet about this. The thought of being banned from a forum as effed up as this doesn't bother me much. On the other hand the thought that some grown-up at HP might eventually hear me and look into this, the possibility that this might eventually be straightened out, the very thought is sweet.

My Opinion Of Myself And Some Others. An Advertisement For Myself

I feel pretty good about what I write. I think I'm a good writer.

And suddenly today that started to worry me, when I contrasted it with remarks about writing by two of my favorite writers. One is by Kurt Vonnegut,from the preface to one of his books. I don't remember it word-for-word but it went something like this: "How do I feel about this book? I feel lousy about it. I feel lousy about all my books." Seemed he felt somewhat embarrassed that he hadn't be able to do better. The other remark is by Samuel Beckettand is more concise: "To write is to fail."

That's what two writers whom I find to be excellent -- Beckett especially -- have to say for themselves. Pretty close to outright apologizing for doing what they did. What I'm worried about is that perhaps they were so good in significant part because they were profoundly dissatisfied with themselves, and therefore constantly striving mightily to do better, and that, conversely, my satisfaction with my own work keeps it relatively mediocre. But you know what? I still think I'm pretty good. And people whose opinions I value highly also have praised my work.

I wouldn't say that it's a widespread opinion that I'm a good writer, because I don't think enough people know anything at all about me for any opinion about me to legitimately be called widespread. I'm not good at marketing my work. I'm more sure about this negative opinion of my marketing skills than about my positive opinion of my writing, because marketing skills can be measured objectively, in terms of numbers, and the quality of writing cannot. I won't tell you how few clicks this blog gets, because 1) I don't want you to cry or feel sorry for me, and 2) it's basically nunya bidniss nohow. But I need an agent. I had an agent once, a good one, but I lost him again, because I never finished the novel which got him interested in working for me, and by the time I finished another novel he had moved on to another profession. I got that agent by the sheerest and dumbest of sheer dumb luck, and unfortunately for me, finding an agent, a skilled person to market one's work, is itself a kind of marketing. (*sigh*)

And because I am not (yet) so hugely successful that counting my money and turning down business offers occupies all of my free time, and also because I am a bit of a schmuck, let's face it, I spend some time commenting on articles on Huffingtom Post, where they keep us schmucks coming back and clicking on their site and making them money with dumb things including badges, yes badges, and what inspired me to write this post was that today I noticed that ________* had received the Community Pundit badge, which comes with the perk that some of yr comments are conspicuously placed above the others immediately below the text of an article. I'm pretty sure that the Pundits don't actually get PAID or anything, still it irks me mightily than an absolute dolt and moron like ________ has been named a Pundit, whilst I have not.

Then again, do I really want to be in a club which would have ________ as a member? And how are Pundits really chosen? HP says:

"HuffPost Pundits are our most engaged and thought-provoking commenters. Pundit Badges are awarded based on a strong history of insightful comments,"

which sounds as if HP would have us believe that some actual human beings working (as unpaid interns?) for HP found ________ to be insightful and thought-provoking. Can that really be? If that's true it would be quite discouraging, for it would mean that some real bozos are driving the bus over there. Or are Pundit badges actually awarded like the other badges: by a machine which counts clicks, counts things like fans and friends and faves? That too would be discouraging, but in a different way: it would be yet another indication that HP comments section is just another internet flame war trying to pass itself off as a moderated "community."

In any case, sad for me that my life's empty enough that I care. May that change soon, completely and forever. From your lips, gentle readers -- from both of you -- to Andrew Wylie's ears.

*I considered writing ________'s handle in this post, but why do that?

Deleted From Huffington Post's Readers' Comments, Reconstructed From Memory

Frank Schaffer writes:

Where is God when a child is shot in Newtown or hung in Auschwitz or killed in an American drone air strike or for that matter dies of cancer? I don't know. There is no answer.

There's a very clear answer, Frank, believers just don't want to hear it: He's all in your heads. People made him up to try to explain things and to help them cope. God is obviously still a great coping mechanism for many people, but science has been explaining things better for a long time now, and coming up with all sorts of ways to solve problems, undreamt of in earlier eras when religion still represented the intellectual cutting edge (thousands of years farther back in the past in my opinion than in yours), problems which therefore don't have to be coped with by means of flights of fancy and escapes from reality. For example: we haven't completely eradicated cancer yet the way we've eradicated many other diseases, but we're getting closer, and in the meantime we're getting better and better at treating it, and we haven't eradicated those other diseases nor made that progress with cancer by praying or interpreting Scripture, we've done it with science. Science, with which religion is still constantly interfering. (Pushing the HP Religion party line that neither fundamentalism nor literalism nor a conflict between religion and science goes back further than the 19th century is a blatant interference with the study of history, as blind and counterproductive as insisting that the world is 6000 years old.)

By the way, HP mods? Deleting perfectly reasonable comments phrased in a civilized manner just because they express points of view at odds with your own does not make HP look modern and enlightened and progressive and tolerant. HP Religion constantly pushes an image of itself as modern, enlightened, progressive, tolerant believers -- plus a couple of token docile atheists -- and it's constantly deleting perfectly reasonable comments. I can see the comments posted by my friends which have been removed. Of course, if which comments are removed is not decided by the moderators' judgement at all but is just a matter of how many flags a comment receives, that would be even worse. That would mean, in effect, that what we have here are not moderated comments at all, but flame wars.

Does The Huffington Post WANT Stupid Readers' Comments From Atheists?

Why would anyone want stupid comments all over their website? Well, it could be that they want to reinforce a stereotype of a certain group -- in this case, the stereotype of atheists making disparaging remarks about the history of religion without knowing that religion well.

The question in the title of this post occurred to me today when I saw that a comment on HP from a friend of mine had been deleted. He's pretty brainy, and regularly points out historical inaccuracies in other readers' comments. As do I. A couple of regular obnoxious know-it-alls we are, if you don't enjoy learning things. And clearly, stupid people don't. (That's why they're stupid.) Sometimes, when my friend or I point out that Constantine actually didn't revise the Bible, or that the development, written or oral, of the Old Testament has not as yet been traced back in time earlier than the Iron Age into the Bronze Age, or that many of the earliest Popes wrote in Greek instead of Latin, or that the status of dhimmi was offered to Zoroastrians as well as to Christians and Jews in Islamic states in earlier eras, or what have you, the person we're addressing, or a third party, will actually thank us, or even ask if we have reading tips for further information on the subject at hand. (Of course we do. How d'you think we got so friggin' smart?) Often, however, the person we're addressing (or a third party) reacts with hostility to our attempt to help. If they are atheists, they often (mistakenly) assume that I and my friends are believers. A couple of hardcore cases don't believe us if we happen to correct them and say that we're atheists. That's right -- they think we're Christians posing as atheists in order to trick them. (Or maybe it's just one, whom I encountered on more than one separate occasion, and whose handle I had not lovingly memorized the first time. I hope it's only one. That this would be a pattern would be quite discouraging.)

Yesterday I corrected one of the popular ahistorical memes concerning the history of religion in another reader's comment. That reader responded by asking me whether I was planning to sacrifice an animal or my first-born child. I said I was commenting in the interest of historical accuracy, with no religious belief and ergo no attempt to proselytize. The other reader only became more hostile and more bizarrely imaginative about me and my intentions, and after a brief to-and-fro I gave up.

Then today I learned of the above-mentioned deleted comment by my learned friend: he had not given up when I had, but replied to the last reply to me by the reader who got very angry at me and my fancy-pants book larnin'. I was very surprised that my friend's comment was deleted, both because it contained information which was, you know -- accurate; and because it was not one bit harsher in tone than the other person's comments, none of which were deleted.

Then I saw this HP article: Too Simple to Be Wrong: Atheism's Bronze-Age Goat Herder Conceit. And that's when I started to wonder whether some individuals who decide what sort of readers' comments on articles in HP Religion will appear on the website, and which won't, have a preference -- maybe subconscious. Maybe not. Maybe the one in certain individuals and the other in others -- for those comments by atheists which reek more of jackassery, all the better to portray atheists as jackasses. I was very disappointed, as soon as I saw the article's headline and read its first paragraph, a quote from Sam Harris, that the time when comments on this particular article were being accepted for consideration had passed, because I wanted to point out that I had repeatedly pointed out in my comments that I realized that the Bible had not been written in the Bronze Age, and that I had never been the slightest bit impressed by Sam Harris, indeed that I cringe when I think that Harris is a leader of the current atheist movement. Then I read the rest of the article and saw that its author also did not seem to realize that the Bible was not a Bronze-Age artifact, but more disappointing that that was the presentation of certain simpleminded attitudes bundled together as "Atheism's Bronze-Age Goat Herder Conceit" and not attributed specifically to certain simpledminded atheist individuals. Those of you who have seen Philadelphia,please recite along with me:

This is the essence of discrimination: formulating opinions about others not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in a group with assumed characteristics.

That's right, Dawg: that's what the Federal Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973 says. I don't ignore the individual merits of religious believers based on their membership in the group of believers. I don't assume that certain characteristics belong to the group of believers. I don't appreciate it when someone formulates an opinion about me based on assumptions they make about a whole group of people. Of course I don't. Nobody appreciates that sort of thing, and nobody should have to put up with it.

And hopefully it goes without saying that I hope that this suspicion that hit me today like a chill down my spine, about HP wanting certain sorts of dumb comments from me because I'm an atheist, so that they can say Hey look how dumb those atheists are, is dead wrong.

PS, May 30: This morning, in a Huffington Post reader's comment, I called another reader "a retard." I'm not at all proud of having said that, and to my great surprise, HP published it. Yet another HP reader commented on this Wrong Monkey blog post by insisting that I'm thinking way too hard about all this, and that the HP moderation is simply "arbitrary and capricious," a phrase which apparently is often used by lawyers.

PC Language Rules Are Wrong

American Congregationalist church communities tend today to be very liberal. Which is very good. It may surprise some people -- perhaps even some Congregationalists -- to learn that the 17th century English Puritans were Congregationalists. Including the Pilgrims. Including the authorities who presided over the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 and 1693. As far as I know, no Congregationalists today will try to kill you for being a witch. But many of them are strong advocates of PC speech, which to my thinking demonstrates an unfortunate persistence of self-righteousness and the desire to control the actions and speech and, yes, thought of their neighbors. Yes, there has been definite improvement in the progress from killing witches to advocating PC speech, but, yes, there is significant room for improvement still.

What got me thinking about this today is that I have been attempting to debate against a pronounced advocate of PC speech in the Readers' Comments at Huffington Post. I say "attempting," because, ironically, it seems to me, HP, whose moderation is very PC, has no intention of publishing anywhere near all of my comments about PC speech, even though I carefully avoided all non-PC terminology in those comments.

But, of course, if PC is not actually about avoiding bad words, but is an attempt to restrict the free exchange of ideas, then there's nothing ironic about it at all. It's not about being kind or caring, because, as we all know, PC speech can be thoroughly unkind and prejudiced, while spectacularly un-PC speech can be thoroughly kind and bravely loving. If we don't actually all know this yet, that's what this movie is for, which I very frequently recommend: Bob Fosse's Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffmann as Lenny Bruce. Watch it while you still can.

Immediately Rejected by the Huffington Post Moderation:

"Ah haz a nicens kitteh. She iz ver ver nice. She iz making ah kittteh kwassant in the couch right now. Squeeee!"

This comment was removed in accordance with HuffPost's moderation guidelines, Part 2

Here it is, the entire comment, cut and pasted:

“Hard to make my case when the moderation removes my responses.”

I wonder if they'll post a link to this. This is getting to be pretty funny, to me at least. I hope someone else is enjoying it.

PS: And now (an hour or so later) the response to which I was referring is back on HuffPost. If anybody from said moderation is reading this: on the slim chance you guys ever get your shit together, please let me know just what exactly those guidelines are. That'd be great.

PPS: It continues. This morning (Saturday morning, September 18) Coats -- we're discussing, or rather, Coats is discussing, and I was trying to discuss, this silly piece by John R Coats on HuffPo. I think I'm done trying now -- continued the exchange: "You want me to defend what somebody else said/wrote?" to which I retorted, “You wrote: 'Beneath the glare of uber-left-brain logic, the stories and myths that had carried the larger truths about being human in an overwhelming, frightening, awe-filled universe were declared to be nonsense' Whether or not you defend it is your business, but if you keep removing my responses, at some point I'm just going to take my toys and go home.” My retort was promptly removed.