Yes, Reading Schiller's Historical Works Was Idiotic

But don't worry, I stopped after a few dozen pages' worth of Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung. So awful! Let me ask you, when you think of Lutheranism and Calvinism, is the first thing which comes to your mind -- freedom?

Yeah, me neither. But to Schiller it seemed much too plain to need any discussion that they equaled freedom, and that Catholicism equaled pure wretched evil, human misery and slavery. Except when it didn't, like when he talked about the brilliant Templars, or other brilliant Catholic orders.

When Schiller thought of Protestant freedom in the 16th century, did he think of peasants' revolts? No. To him, that sort of thing was "Rebellion," which was an even worse horror than Catholicism itself -- the horrible kind of Catholicism, not the brilliant knights in shining armor on white horses.

No, freedom was exemplified by Dutch businessmen. Catholicism was the religion of artists (if Schiller was saying here that he wasn't an artist, then finally we agree on something, except that I'm afraid he's not nearly that consistent), and Protestantism was the religion of commerce. And freedom.

I don't know. Maybe Schiller had some money invested in businesses and was a libertarian, and when he said "freedom" he meant laissez-faire, and when he said "tyranny" he meant taxes, just like a 21st-century libertarian bozo, and there was nothing more complicated about him than that.

Whatever. Earlier today I gave up on Schiller, and I started looking for the passage in Nietzsche where Nietzsche says that it is a measure of Beethoven's genius that he could take something as pedestrian as Schiller's "Ode to Joy," put it in his 9th symphony and turn it into something great, thus giving a great gift to an entire nation which until then had been suffering under endless non-musical recitations of Schiller's extremely-popular poem.

I couldn't find that passage. I googled nietzsche beethoven schiller, and looked and looked and looked, and man oh man has there been a lot of nonsense written about Nietzsche and Beethoven and Schiller. But it's okay, I just got back into my volumes of Nietzsche. I prefer the editions from Insel-Verlag. So everything turned out okay. (Standard disclaimer: everything Nietzsche writes about women and war in his philosophical works is nonsense, the rest is incomparably brilliant.)

Islam Doesn't Do Anything

Because Islam is not a unified entity. You don't have to be paying very close attention at all to have noticed that Shia Muslims always seem to be in conflict with Sunni Muslims. It doesn't take excruciatingly long and difficult research to discover that the Shia-Sunni split goes back to within a few decades of Muhammed's death. Muslims haven't all agreed about anything since the 7th century. If you've gone from a horrified rejection of any examination of Islam to a casual interest in it, you can also see that even though one individual is a Shiite and another is a Sunni, they often will get along just fine. The way there's nothing at all strange about a Catholic and a Protestant being friends.

The same way that there's nothing at all strange about a Catholic and a Protestant and an Orthodox Christian and a Copt and a Shiite and a Sunni and a Hindu and a Sikh and a Buddhist and a Druze and a Bahá'í and an atheist all being good friends with each other and getting along just fine, although many of those individuals, perhaps even every single one of such a circle of friends, might unfortunately know people who share his or her religion or lack of it and think that it's not fine at all to be mingling with those others. But most people in each one of those groups don't want to kill over the differences between the groups.

I'd like to think that the great majority of people belonging to each one of those religious or non-religious groups feels a stronger identification with the entire group of humans than with their own individual group, and thinks of the people in the other groups as people like them, who get happy and sad and hungry and sleepy and have friends and families and quirks and senses of humor and hopes about putting ethnic and religious hatreds behind us once and for all, the sooner the better!

Let's compare the tensions over religion which are obsessing some people so much these days with ethnic tensions. There have been some terrible atrocities committed against non-white people by white people, horrible deeds committed in the name of white people. Nevertheless, white people are not a hate group. Why? Because the people who have done those horrible things, although they claimed to be acting on behalf of all white people, did not have the approval or backing of all white people. In the case of the Nazis in WWII, many of the people, probably most of the people, who fought against them and finally defeated them were white people. You didn't have to be non-white to vehemently hate everything the Nazis stood for.

In just the same way, most of the people fighting against ISIS today are Muslims. That's no secret, there hasn't been any official media black-out of that information in the West as far as I can see, and yet, many people act as if it would be news to them. As if Islam were one unified group which was coming to get us. The same way that some Muslims -- ISIS, for example -- talk about the West as if the West were one unified group which was coming to get them.

Imagine if in the midst of the Thirty Years' War, some Muslims in Egypt or Persia talked about how the Christians thought of nothing day and night except how they were going to crush Islam. Some Christian idiots were pre- occupied with such thoughts then, just as some Christian and New Atheist idiots think of little else today. Others were much too busy with the mostly Catholic-against-Protestant conflict in Europe to give much thought to Muslims.

Then as now, the biggest problem facing humanity was not one religious or ethnic group against another, but many different groups of idiots, large groups and smaller ones, each group against pretty much the entire rest of the world.

Tour de France / Death Race 2000

Idiotic spectators impeding the riders have always been a problem at the Tour de France. The attitude of these idiots generally seems to be: Look at me! Look at me! when naturally nobody is there to look at them, it's about the riders. In case this Look at me! - attitude might have been hard to perceive, many of these idiots make it more obvious by waving enormous flags in the riders' faces and/or by dressing up in grotesque costumes.

And of course by standing or running in the middle of the course during a bicycle race, which is what brought me here today. I'm not the first to suggest that these jokers should be kept from the race course. These days the final 2 kilometers or so of each stage tend to feature barricades on both sides of the course -- but the idiots lean way over the barricades into the paths of the riders, and still wave those huge flags in the riders' faces, and sometimes go over or around the barricades and into the race course. You really need 2 rows of barricades, far enough apart that it's impossible to reach the mightiest giant flag over the outer barricade, and then over the inner barricade, and into the face of someone working very hard at something he has trained very hard his whole life to do, and is doing it for great stakes and, sorry, you idiot, doesn't want to look at you or your flag or your costume right now.

Having stay-off-the-course-you-idiots laws, and enforcing them strictly, might improve race conditions, but they would also cause a huge uproar. Idiots would rise up in indignant solidarity. French idiots would claim that the standing-or-running-in-the-middle-of-the-course-thing is a French thing which I do not understand because I'm a crude fat American pig who only loves cheeseburgers, and that it has to do with freedom and the Bastille and that the riders love it.

[PS, 3. August 2015: During this year's Tour de France, although it still activated my ADD and rage big-time when it looked to me like spectators might be interfering with the riders, 1)I heard the TV broadcasting comments from various riders saying that the fans getting right up in their faces, and riding through a sea of fans, got them pumped up, and 2)I saw some footage from cameras mounted on the race bikes as the riders plowed through great excited crowds, and, uhhh... This is hard to say... Okay: maybe that footage gave me a sense of how the fans might impart a thrill to the riders. What I saw from those bike-mounted cameras did not look like 100% annoyance and hindrance. Ahh, why must I have such personal growth?!]

[PPS, 15. July 2016: Yesterday they ended the stage by climbing that mountain which always ends the stage on Bastille Day, the climb which is more notorious than any other for fans crowding the riders, and yesterday they shortened the climb at the last minute, which meant there was even less room for the millions of fans on the route, and surprise surprise, there was a major incident: a motorcycle carrying a TV cameraman had to brake suddenly to avoid running over some idiots, and the Yellow Jersey wearer Froome was one of 3 riders who piled into back of the motorcycle. Froom's bicycle was also struck by another motorcycle coming up from behind, and rendered unrideable. If the results had been left as they were, Froome would've lost the yellow jersey, but the race officials decided the 3 riders involved in the crash were in no way at fault and that it would be unfair for them to lose time as a result of it, so they adjusted the stage results accordingly, and Froome still has a big lead. Researching the incident, I saw that Froome struck a spectator on the Tour in 2013. Without getting off of his bike or changing course, to give you an idea of how close the spectator was. Froome was fined for that. Not a huge fine. There were lots of interviews of riders and associated team members yesterday about the crash involving Froome, and it was clear that a lot of them are very annoyed with the spectators. This was clear, even though a lot of people were clearly editing their remarks and paying lip service to an official line of "the fans add excitement to the race and are an essential and glorious part of it." So it's NOT just me who's annoyed by these jerks!]

I'm sure that most French people are not idiots and are embarrassed by the idiots impeding the Tour de France riders, and doubly so by the French idiots who impede riders and claim it is a French thing. And of course it is by no means a French thing: idiots flock to the Tour de France from all over the world in order to get in the way and force people to look at them. (Maybe idiots, generally speaking, feel neglected and ignored. Hm.)

And this year, I gather, a bad situation has become worse because of fans leaping into the course in order to take selfies with the riders.

I don't think that selfies are entirely useless. I believe that, just like leisure suits beginning in the 1970's and mullets in the 80's, selfies will aid future historians in determining who the real idiots of our era were.

But in the meantime riders have been colliding with fans in the Tour de France since its inception, and the collisions have grown in numbers over the decades, and now there's these Tour de France selfies, and so, with apologies to those future historians, I propose that the Tour de France be combined with aspects of Death Race 2000,



a 1975 Roger Croman movie starring David Carradine and Mary Woronov, about a cross-country auto race in which the drivers are awarded points for hitting pedestrians. Not to be confused with 2008's Death Race



with Jason Statham and Joan Allen, not a bad movie, but significantly different than the original in that its race is held inside a prison, and the deaths are those of the racers as they destroy each other for the delight of a sadistic pay-per-view audience and the profit of Allen, the yummy, evil warden. I'm inspired here by the pedestrian kills of the 1975 flick. In this improved version of the Tour de France, riders would be awarded points for colliding with fans. These points would amount to time being subtracted from their Tour totals, bringing them closer to victory. So and so many points would be awarded for striking a fan, so many for seriously injuring a fan, so many for killing one outright, so many for striking a fan waving an enormous fan, so many for one in costume, so many for one attempting to take a selfie and so forth, you get the idea.

I submit that these rule changes would greatly alter the nature of the Tour. It's also possible -- very unlikely, of course, but possible -- that they would cause some idiots somewhere to stop and think about who they are and what they do. And wouldn't that be a miracle.

Yet Another Idiot From Real Life!

IDIOT: I wish I lived in a swing state. Not only would Obama and Romney actually care about my vote, my vote would count! My vote has been written off by the media and the two major presidential campaigns. I voted third party! I voted against the status-quo and for real change!

ME: Well aren't you special! Now, if you want to do something which could actually lead to real change, support amending the Constitution so that we have proportional representation like they have in many other countries, where voting for a third or fourth or fifth or sixth party is not throwing your vote away.

IDIOT: How would that weaken the two party system? You think for one moment the two parties will do anything to help third parties? Every time congress passes a law about campaign finances or elections, it's for one reason and one reason only: protect incumbents! If you vote democrat or republican, you're just enabling the status quo, voting for more dead soldiers, and voting for fewer civil liberties!

At this point I considered giving up, but I gave it one more try:

ME: Seriously, how would proportional representation weaken the two-party system? It would completely do away with the two party system.

IDIOT: How so? Would the two parties still control the debates? Would they still control how money is spent on campaigns? Would incumbents still get free mailings?

It's depressing. Some things are so simple that I don't know how to explain them. I don't have the patience to be a teacher of morons.

Criticism of Religion (and Spirituality, po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to) is Good. But Not Every Negative Remark Rises to the Level of Criticism, or Even Common Sense

People I'm often on the same side with on religious issues sometimes turn me right back off when they start to grind some personal, irrational, bigoted ax. They might, for example, speak as if all Muslims were pro-terrorism.

Often they start going on in an unproductive manner about the Catholic Church. As an extreme, some people flatly say that the Church is responsible for all of the evil in the world. I don't know how scapegoating prejudice can get a lot more extreme than that. Moving from the cosmically, insanely paranoid down to the petty, boring and silly, there are those who go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about the "dresses" and "jewelry" and "purses" and so forth worn by male Catholic clergy, and how "fabulous" it all is, and well you get the idea. As an atheist trying to lessen the influence of religion, I am so tired of these people, and so aggravated at the impression they give that atheists are -- well, idiots.

First of all, they're not dresses, they're robes. If these sneering, sniggering fools look at Raphael's School of Athens, do they get similarly giggly, and point and say Oh look, Plato and Aristotle are wearing dresses, nya, nya-nya nyaaaaa-nya?

And if they were right about the robes of Catholic clergy and ancient Greek being dresses -- they're not -- but if they were, do these same people giggle and point and mock whenever they see trannies?

Can someone say "issues"? Thank you, I knew that you could.

I saw one particularly obnoxious anti-Catholic for the first time I could remember about a month ago. Using CAPS in a VERY ANNOYING manner, mentioning things like RATZI's NAZI past -- Hey it rhymes! that must make it even more appealing to idiots -- and so forth. I don't like Ratzinger. Apart from the enthusiasm we share for the Latin language, I honestly can't think of one thing I like about him. I was very disappointed when he was elected Pope. But he was a teenager in 1945, which means that all this talk about his "Nazi past" is plain stupid. The Hitler Youth was not an organization which a German boy either joined or spurned with no pressure.

(Some time ago I asked another person who was calling Ratzinger a Nazi just how young he would have to have been in 1945 in order to be off the hook. They didn't get back to me.)

There's a critique of religion, and then there's bigotry -- and unfortunately the former often acts as camouflage for the latter. It turns out that that IDIOT I MENTIONED ABOVE who OVER-USES CAPS and called RATZI a NAZI left the Church about a year ago. (There are many churches, but only one referred to simply as the Church by friend and foe alike.) Who knows what horrors he or some child he knows may have suffered at the hands of priests or nuns, or what repressive political policies he sees tied to the Church. I don't know, because so far he's just been spewing silly stuff. Maybe eventually he'll calm down, become more coherent and actually contribute in a positive way to public discourse. Who knows. I hope so.

And as for all the men who sniggeringly refer to the dresses of Catholic clergy, I'll just continue to assume that they're all self-loathing closet wannabe transvestites, until I see some reason to assume otherwise. People need to come out, come clean, get down to the real stuff.