Dark Sacrament
The Arab spring in Egypt has provided a glimpse into the workings of an Islamist mind. “Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives – for up to six hours after their death.” No gender discrimination is involved, however, since women will also be allowed to have sex with their dead husbands.
The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament. It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women’s rights of getting education and employment. …
Egyptian journalist Amro Abdul Samea reported in the al-Ahram newspaper that Talawi complained about the legislations which are being introduced under ‘alleged religious interpretations’. The subject of a husband having sex with his dead wife arose in May 2011 when Moroccan cleric Zamzami Abdul Bari said marriage remains valid even after death. He also said that women have the right to have sex with her dead husband.
The romance of the dead — even the undead — has experienced a similar vogue in Western popular culture. The Twilight novels, for example, have taken the teenage world by storm. “Twilight is a series of four vampire-themed fantasy romance novels by American author Stephenie Meyer. It charts a period in the life of Isabella ‘Bella’ Swan, a teenage girl who moves to Forks, Washington, and falls in love with a 104-year-old vampire named Edward Cullen.”
But even though some people think it is cool to have an undead boyfriend, most people still understand that Twilight is just fiction. Discrimination against the dead — mortism — has not yet attained the earnest status of ageism or racism. There have been no serious proposals — so far — to extend equal rights protection to deceased Americans beyond those they already enjoy at the ballot box.
That does not mean that the War Against the Dead will forever be ignored. For modern Western Culture is beset by dozens of “isms” and”wars.” Here is a just a partial glossary.
- Anti-Mormonism. Discriminating against Mormons.
- Tobaccoism. The right to discriminate against smokers, as described by the New York Times.
- Able bodism. Discriminating against the disabled because of their disability, as described by the British government.
- Employism. Discriminating against the unemployed because of their previous inability to hold a job, as described by the New York Times.
- Size Acceptance. A movement devoted to fighting bigotry against fat, obese, and overweight individuals.
- Mentalism. Discrimination against crazy people as described by the Guardian.
- Languagism. Discrimination against languages that people do not understand, as explained by Miami University.
This is merely a partial list. There are many, many more Wars, proto-Wars, and incipient Wars. The catalog will continue to grow, both in Islamic and politically correct societies, simply because societies falling under the domination of a single ideology have the tendency to regulate personal behavior ever more minutely.
One of the key moments in the march toward regulating every action occurred in 1969, when radical feminist Carol Hanisch coined the phrase “the personal is political.” All of a sudden activists understood that nothing anyone did stood outside the purview of public policy or political debate.
What you ate, thought, wore, listened to, said, viewed, did — or did not do — was political and hence the fair object of regulation.
Consider that the word “niggardly” has an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to its appropriate use. Once a simple word which meant stinginess, its true sinister nature was revealed when David Howard, a white aide to Anthony A. Williams, the black mayor of Washington, D.C., used it in reference to a budget. Then all hell broke loose. Soon there were calls for a “national debate” on the subject of whether the word niggardly could be licitly spoken at all. Words — especially words — are dangerous.
Shortly after the Washington incident, another controversy erupted over the use of the word at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. At a February 1999 meeting of the Faculty Senate, a junior English major and vice chairwoman of the Black Student Union told the group how a professor teaching Chaucer had used the word niggardly. She later said she was unaware of the related Washington, D.C. controversy that came to light just the week before. She said the professor continued to use the word even after she told him that she was offended. “I was in tears, shaking,” she told the faculty. “It’s not up to the rest of the class to decide whether my feelings are valid.”
The personal is political. In strict Islamic societies the personal is religious. There is a code to govern every situation. There is a sunnah which governs the pious use of the toilet. In ideologically dominated societies, the use of words — or the commode — becomes the subject of authoritative pronouncement.
“I don’t give a s**t” is a fundamentally lawless attitude.
This reminds me of the “ism” episode of The Thin Blue Line.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5aUPPS8-vg
When they go after the satirists (satirism), then you’re in real trouble.
Regarding sex with the dead, isn’t one party supposed to think of England?
The feelings of the student from Madison are valid. So are mine. I think that she is ignorant and lacking the judgment or capacity to benefit from the educational resources paid for by the citizens of Wisconsin. Further I feel that her presence costs other students by denying them the opportunity to benefit from the resources she consumes. Therfor I feel that she should get tossed out. She is qualified to fill Michelle Obama’s shoes.
When Feminism clashes with Islamism, bet on the guys with knives.
Religion of piece?
Well this bog subject has managed to creep me out for the day.
Mitt’s new stategy – and it’s working – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld0n3Ir-cCk
And yes, organized religion and the political are one in the same.
I suspect that most Muslims would find the “you can boink your late wife” pronouncement to be depraved. Not that it matters. The West has been waiting for “moderate” Muslims to take back their religion for quite some time now, and it just isn’t going to happen.
She looked so fair, just lying there
With lilies all around
And then they wheeled her to the field
And put her in the ground
But not before I’d one last score
So cold she was and still
Just like the past that seemed to last
And I had time to kill
Question: What would you do if your girlfriend died during intercourse?
Answer: Invite my friends over for a cold one!
Walt, I feel a bit queasy with how much enjoyed your poem. So clever yet, so sick.
#2 Blast From the Past
Regarding sex with the dead, isn’t one party supposed to think of England?
Reminds me of an old joke about a married couple who were constantly bickering but too ornery (or maybe too fond of verbal sparring) to get a divorce.
One day the husband says to the wife: “If you die before I do, you know what I’m putting on your tombstone? ‘Here Lies My Wife– Cold As Usual.’”
Wife replies: “Very funny. And if you die first, guess what’s going to be on your head stone– ‘Here Lies My Husband– Stiff At Last.’”
Ideologies come, quite unconsciously, to the point of reductio ad absurdum. Medieval theologians finally concerned themselves with the number of angels who could stand on the head of a pin. Islamists are now pronouncing on sex with dead people and the PC brigade is taking away turkey sandwiches from little girl’s lunchboxes.
It won’t end there because people like this never know when to stop. Individuals have a greater amount sense of than ideologues, and usually more than bureaucrats, because they have to live in reality. Ideologues and bureaucrats, by contrast, live in a wholly synethetic world, where even the planets are painted against a fake sky. Just plains folks are different. I do not doubt that just as the average Christian cared little for angels on pins, the typical Muslim has no interest whatsoever in nailing his deceased wife, for humans tend to love other humans, and grief, if nothing else, would intervene in the proceedings.
Humanity is alike in the main. So alas, are bureaucrats and True Believers of all stripes.
But such human decency rarely troubles the ideologue. It is not in the regs. So they do apparently crazy things in monomaniacal observance of their guidebook. Magda Goebbels offed her own kids because she could not bear to see them grow up in a “world without National Socialism”. Nor does it bother the Die Hard Commie. They are all of them self-important, humorless and obsessed. Readers will recall the term “grim and determined”. This is grimness and determination carried to the extreme limit.
Nor are ideologues even aware, any more than Jay Carney appears to be, of the ironic absurdity of their statements. It all makes perfect sense to them. The truly crazy don’t know they are crazy. Ideology works like that.
I am sorry, This leaves me cold.
Wretchard #11
But such human decency rarely troubles the ideologue. It is not in the regs. So they do apparently crazy things in monomaniacal observance of their guidebook.
Case in point: the EPAcrat who used Roman crucifixion as an analogy for the agency’s enforcement policy:
“Al Armendariz, the EPA administrator in the Region 6 Dallas office, made the remarks at a local Texas government meeting in 2010. He relayed to the audience what he described as a ‘crude’ analogy he once told his staff about his ‘philosophy of enforcement.’
‘It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean,’ he said. ‘They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them.
‘And then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years,’ he said.”
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/04/26/epa-official-apologizes-for-call-to-crucify-oil-companies-senator-investigating/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mcqEkjURnM
The Bible explicitly condemns a lot of depraved sex acts, but necromancy isn’t one of them. Probably because even the most depraved pagans still found it inherently repulsive, so there was no need to condemn the practice. Of course, the Torah also declares that a corpse and anything that make contact with it are all unclean, and must thus be sanitized or discarded. The body is to be swiftly buried and anyone who made direct or indirect contact with the corpse had to be quarantined for a week and washed to be cleansed.
One thing I miss
Is Cold Ethyl and her skeleton kiss
We met last night
Making love by the refrigerator light
Ethyl, Ethyl, let me squeeze you in my arms
Ethyl, Ethyl, come and freeze me with your charms
One thing, no lie
Ethyl’s frigid as an Eskimo pie
She’s cool in bed
Well she oughta be ‘coz Ethyl’s dead
Ethyl, Ethyl, let me squeeze you in my arms
Ethyl, Ethyl, come and freeze me with your charms
You are wrong about the bible not clearly condemn necromancy.
I refer you to the first word of the Decalogue.
I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
#15 myth buster
I think you mean “necrophilia” rather than “necromancy”– the latter refers to magic or witchcraft associated with summoning the dead or communicating with them. The story of the Witch of Endor in 1 Samuel 28 is a Biblical instance of necromancy.
EBL @ #12
Link doesn’t work?
Walt @ #7 – Now that one made me laugh out loud. And I have a terrible feeling it didn’t take you long to write it!
13 – PA Cat
The thing that I find remarkable about the Armendariz “crucifixion” statement, as well as Nancy Pellosi’s attempt to rewrite the first amendment and Gov. Bev Perdue suggesting that we suspend senate elections for a couple years, is that these people feel safe enough to say these things publically or in front of a camera. This was stuff that was always kept behind closed doors and between themselves. This leads me to ask two questions: What is making Democrats and leftists (I repeat myself) feel so brave as to let statements like these see the light of day and what are they now saying behind those closed doors?
KRB
“Drop dead gorgeous” takes on a new meaning.
#21 Kae Arby
I’ve wondered about that myself– something wicked this way comes, for sure.
Something is not right. For the ladies, Mr Rigor Mortis starts about 3-4 hours apres the death. Max stiffness is around 12 hours. However warm conditions can speed up the process. Mr Mortis could be around for up to 2 1/2 days. I don’t think they are giving enough time, the party does not start for 6 hours …..Need to change that law
My cousin and his buddies went to choose an Emperor fair,
I said I couldn’t go, I need to stay and wash my bloody hair.
I nailed his wife not once but twice, cause I knew Belisarius would be there.
Not sure if you can post copyrighted lyrics in here, but going on the theme: look up Mary Anne by Gwar, with lyrics. Fits right in with some of these poems.
#22, drop dead gorgeous!
It reminded me of a case where a Saudi man was asked to ID his dead wife at the morgue.
He said they would have to put a veil on her or he couldn’t be sure.
He had NEVER seen her without it!
So, why on earth would any Muslim man want to have sex with a dead wife?
All those bagged ladies look the same.
A few more:
Sarcasmism
Jismism
I guess I’ll take a bit of a contrary thought on this one.
I just don’t believe it.
Seems to me this is like when some crazy rumor (or lie) about some aspect of American culture or Christianity and the Mid East goes ape poop. ie like ALL Christian pastors are burning Korans.
I’m just not ready to believe everything I read — even on PJM as much as I like this place.
We have an opportunity to be generous and charitable by not falling for this crud.
Haven’t we always been at war with east ism?
Well the story is now on Al Arabiya, and by the looks of it the Egyptians themselves are taking it quite seriously, many of them protesting it in fact.
Once upon a time it was possible to pick out satire, a report from the Onion. You did not have to mark or tag it. It was self-evidently a spoof. That is now becoming harder to do. The first question that occurred to me was why this happening. The obvious answer is that extremism, rather than genuine “tolerance” has been on the ascent. And since extremism has an insane signature, it is what you would expect, rather than become alarmed at. But it is hard to shake old habits and still find myself thinking “OMG” or with greater frequency, “WTF” when reading the “serious news”.
On page one some days back was a threat by Pyongyang to incinerate Seoul for making fun of their their missile failure. There’s no shame at saying stuff like that any more. People say it. The papers print it. Move on. Move along.
But whatever has gotten into the water is not confined to North Korea. In the recent news is a video of American “activists” describing the marvelous life in Cuba and North Korea. You wonder: “why don’t you go there? Why stay in this miserable vale of tears?” But to suggest such a thing would be intolerant. Hurtful. Offensive. Who is crazy anyway? And since when did crazy have anything to do with anything?
Camus said after the Second World War that we live in a time when innocence, not guilt is called on justify itself. Today you have to explain that you’re sane. Nobody notices any more.
Ah yes, so I did accidentally say necromancy instead of necrophilia. Yes, I meant necrophilia, and I should make sure to proofread my posts before submitting them. I apologize.
“You wonder: why don’t you go there? Why stay in this miserable vale of tears?” But to suggest such a thing would be intolerant.”
The threat of censure by idiots doesn’t stop me from calling them out anymore.
They crossed the Rubicon of faux propriety and intolerant tolerance ages ago.
“I aim to misbehave.”
@10:
Reminds me of another joke. A man’s wife is a total shrew and is constantly telling him that she looks forward to his death so she can dance on his grave. He promptly arranges for burial at sea!
What a sick ideology.
I used to hold them in contempt; I think I’ve gone a step farther now.
31. wretchard
Who knows why this is happening? Maybe it’s all just a bad pun contest. After all, the argument about when a best-before date has expired is a dead issue. Mind you, when looking for someone to love there may be other alternatives on the table.
#36 stevesmith
Bad puns on this subject go back a long way:
Romeo: Courage, man. The hurt cannot be much.
Mercutio. No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church
door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me to-morrow,
and you shall find me a grave man. (Romeo and Juliet, Act III, scene 1)
this isn’t a new idea. it’s in the first set of islamic laws. Prof Mernissi in Egypt took this as proof that the original Muslim jurists were thinking through everything Muslim to the last particular.
It’s in the original Islamic law.
and, well, it’s egypt. families would wait a few days to send the body to the embalmers. they seemed to have an elastic definition of desirable. It’s in kids books about mummies.
“Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives – for up to six hours after their death.”
Now THAT’s birth control.
Urf, just flashed onto the next horror movie theme, “The Pregnant Zombie”.
“Brainz, diaperz, formulaz.”
As I recall, I read in some monograph on customs in ancient Egypt in Pharonic times that Egyptians used to keep the mummified remains of their ancestors in their houses, and used them for surety on loans–trucking them over to the lender and then–when the loan was paid off–trucking them back to the house. No mention of what happened if they defaulted on the loan.
So, this kind of weird crap regarding the bodies of the dead is very old, indeed, in Egypt.
There is one other thing that contributes to the atmosphere of insanity in ideologies: the closed shop. They are echo chambers, places where people have been listening to each other for so long they cannot imagine another point of view. Reality for them is what they tell each other.
For example, Secretary Sebelius admitted to Congress that she got no effective legal input on her birth control mandates (remember how church owned hospitals had to implement it or else) when she was considering them. She didn’t bother. Video here. Now she realizes it might be totally illegal after all. What a thought.
George Will begins his new article with an extraordinary paragraph.
But I can sympathize with Quinn. After all, who needed to consult reality before? When the Design Margin was still fat people just wrote out the check and it got cashed somehow. Only when things got tight did they notice that Reality after all existed. Before that, they could ignore it.
Crazy habits are formed in times of seemingly absolute power. That is why ideologies at the height of their power are susceptible to such madness. Caligula appointed his horse as a Roman consul. The medieval Church lost itself in obscurantism. Communist Parties the world over attempted to start everything from a Year Zero. Islamic ideologues say you can have sex with your dead wife. And Governor Quinn thought you could just keep borrowing money ad infinitum.
It reminds me of the old macabre joke. “Michael Jackson couldn’t have died of an overdose. He never did before”. But, as Quinn now admits things are different. When reality shows up one day it actually seems unnatural. It is an unpleasant interview to be sure. But reality is our our only check against insanity.
CAIR Demands US Morgues Allow Conjugal Visits.
http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog/cair-demands-us-morgues-allow-conjugal-visits-t8907.html
Poe and Lovecraft made up weird stuff from their imaginations. Muslims live a horror story. There’s probably more cobwebs in downtown Cairo high-rises than every American horror film ever made combined.
It reminds me of the old macabre joke. “Michael Jackson couldn’t have died of an overdose. He never did before”.
Reminds me of an actual event in my high school history class, c. 1970, someone expressing doubts about the severity of (what we at the time called) The Great Depression:
“I’ve never met anyone who died from it.”
He then stopped and furrowed his brow, and I don’t recall precisely what the teacher said.
Also reminiscent of the classic:
“Although he had never been sick a day in his life, he woke up dead the next morning.”
“It won’t end there because people like this never know when to stop.”
Indeed, that is why they are called “Progressives.” Like people who just keep adding onto their house and fixing up their lawn, they are never satisfied. It’s the act of doing, not the end result, that brings satisfaction. And with them it’s mainly other people’s houses and lawns. And the end result is always terrible, so they have to do just one more thing and all will be ….
As for the Egyptians and Necrophilia, after all they were the guys with all the mummies. Do you suppose…?
Josh #45:
Like my favorite Danny Thomas joke:
“My great uncle smoked a cigar every day, never went to the doctor, and was never sick a day in his life. I don’t recall what he died from but I’m sure it was nothing serious.”
One of my favorite songs is “He stopped loving her today”
by George Jones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JeS49eftoE&ob=av2n
Wretchard@#11/
“Just plain folks are different.”
Cue Orwell’s comment made in Parliment re Laborite MPs quoting even crazier French Marxist intellectuals: “Only an intellectual could possibly believe in such things; no ordinary person could ever BE such a fool!”
When Wretchard above named a phenomenon as an “insane signature”, he really did me a favor. He clarified a foggy and unamed notion that has been spinning around in my head ever since 1979 when the Ayatollah banned the act of using any piece of paper that had the word “Allah” on it for wiping your ass. We all had a big laugh over that back in the day, saying, “What? This is a problem?”
This new reality of post-mortem nuptial rights is yet another entry into a swelling list of this heretofore unamed category of Insane Signatures. Is there a faction of Egyptians vying over this great question, “How long after the spouse dies can I still have sex with the corpse?” Decidedly not.
No, these kinds of edicts are flashing signals emitted from disconnected, diseased minds.
It is not good to pick on Muslims alone for coming up with this stuff, just look around. The signatures of insanity abound all over the fruited plain right here in America, and cooked up left and right by earnest but misguided neighbors.
Will the tide turn toward common sense one day? When will that day arrive?
Does the new law apply to goats also? Inquiring minds want to know. Seriously, a religion that turns heaven into the playboy mansion shouldn’t surprise us with other odd proclivities.
Instances like this are precisely why multi-culti relativism does not have an intellectual, or moral, leg to stand on. These people are depraved, and their “age-old” culture is seriously F’ed in the head.
Ibn Abu to his dead wife: “Was it as good for you as it was for me?”
Sorry for the multiple posts but I saw this over at Pournelle’s site and thought it fitting.
A Servant When He Reigneth
by Rudyard Kipling
Three things make earth unquiet
And four she cannot brook
The godly Agur counted them
And put them in a book —
Those Four Tremendous Curses
With which mankind is cursed;
But a Servant when He Reigneth
Old Agur entered first.
An Handmaid that is Mistress
We need not call upon.
A Fool when he is full of Meat
Will fall asleep anon.
An Odious Woman Married
May bear a babe and mend;
But a Servant when He Reigneth
Is Confusion to the end.
His feet are swift to tumult,
His hands are slow to toil,
His ears are deaf to reason,
His lips are loud in broil.
He knows no use for power
Except to show his might.
He gives no heed to judgment
Unless it prove him right.
Because he served a master
Before his Kingship came,
And hid in all disaster
Behind his master’s name,
So, when his Folly opens
The unnecessary hells,
A Servant when He Reigneth
Throws the blame on some one else.
His vows are lightly spoken,
His faith is hard to bind,
His trust is easy broken,
He fears his fellow-kind.
The nearest mob will move him
To break the pledge he gave —
Oh, a Servant when he Reigneth
Is more than ever slave!
Wretchard: “The personal is political.”
This is as concise a statement that can be made concerning what constitutes the essence of totalitarianism.
#49 Cowboy
It is not good to pick on Muslims alone for coming up with this stuff, just look around.
Indeed. With regard to homegrown pervs, Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway both admitted to investigators that they had sex with the corpses of their victims over a period of several days or even weeks after their serial murders.
Jan #47:
A friend of mine grew up with the guy who wrote that song. She has always found it odd, since he was a real cut-up, always making up silly songs. Then he writes that one. He just got inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
As for “The personal is the political.” In the 90’s, with Bill Clinton, the Left suddenly found they did not like that concept any more. “It was just street theater, back then, doncha’ know.”
Marching around with those communist flags, calling for an American defeat, saying how much the people of Eastern Europe loved communism? “Well, everybody was doin’ it. Like listening to The Monkees or The Beetles, that’s all. Didn’t mean nothin’, just like all that pot and LSD didn’t mean nothin’. Besides, that was our private lives and how dare you bring that up!”
And with Obama this has further progressed to “He never even had a personal life before becoming President! And if he did it’s none of your business!”
Will an “item” like this be enough to *arouse* Western “feminists” to speak out?
Yes, it is a rhetorical question.
Of course they will not. The only “sisters” they care about are those who toe the radical leftist line. It is a very exclusive club. You must be female (or, at the very least, female by choice), college-educated (and therefore disproportionately white), rather lacking in feminine attraction, Marxian-informed, chronically put-upon by WHAT and WHOM ever, and, of course, virulently anti-Semitic to qualify for these ladies’ unstinting, sisterly concern*. Female genital mutilation? Well who are we to judge? We have bigger fish to fry. Violently-imposed purdah? Sorry, can’t help ya (that would require us to seemingly endorse Jews and non-leftist women generally).
*see Fluke
Was it Samuel Gompers who said, when asked “What do you want, sir?” answered “MORE.”
Anyway, it was one of those 1930s insatiable Labor kingpins. Indeed, they have no limits.
Judge Bork noted the same thing about Leftists in our government, and called it “the ratchet effect,” saying that it only works in one direction. Restrictions and regulations, once installed, are NEVER eliminated, and conservatives only preside over a sort of interregnum.
In 897 AD there was a remarkable trial of a corpse–a dead pope– whose corpse was dragged into court in the the Cadaver Trial or, in Latin, the Synodus Horrenda) .
“The trial was conducted by Formosus’s successor, Pope Stephen (VI) VII.
Stephen accused Formosus of perjury and of having acceded to the papacy illegally.
At the end of the trial, Formosus was pronounced guilty and his papacy retroactively declared null.
The Cadaver Synod is remembered as one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of the medieval papacy”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jean_Paul_Laurens_Le_Pape_Formose_et_Etienne_VII_1870.jpg
On another topic–Richard Fernandez should publish a book of his collected posts-
-Hitch did that in ” For The Sake Of Argument” and made a fortune
Wretchards posts are much more interesting than those of the dead rake Hitchens-RIP
Ultimate Spinach – (Ballad of) The Hip Death Goddess
See the glazed eyes, Touch the dead skin
Feel the cold lips, and know the word of the hip death goddess
Touch my hand and you will know
Touch my hand your heart will cold
Come let me take you in my arms
I will keep you safe from all harm
Kiss my lips for they are very nice
Kiss my lips and you will turn to ice
Look at me and I will turn you on
Don’t try and think because your mind is gone
Come and look into my frozen eyes
Come and let me free you from my story
I am the hip death goddess of your dreams
Life isn’t all that it seems
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE0JTDhvsJE
The idea of “Hunger Games” made me wretch because I had never thought that thought before. Now I wonder what else I have not thought. And here it is: Necrophilia. No,the thought of necrophilia has never entered into my considerations even in the thrall of sexual excitation.
What we have here is the age-old question: How does the torturer go home to a quiet family dinner after a long day in the police station basement?
Why did the Nazi guards feel the need to halt their killing activities to attend an occasional concert – sometimes brought to them by the next day’s victims?
When we learn in college courses on Existentialism that life is meaningless, we rarely understand the implications for such insights. They now appear clearly in our cowardice, our failure to judge when judgment is called for, and in our abandonment of our humanity – the humanity that generations of humans have extracted from the chaos of our fight for survival.
Chaos makes people nuts! And our imaginations create our own chaos. A person is just not the same after considering necrophilia for fifteen minutes. Well, it’s back to Pooh for me and back to poop for you folks.
Ok. I swear! Last post.
Black Bart @60: Hippies… ;^)
…How ’bout a little ditty from yonder Wretchard’s way?
Hoodoo Gurus – Dig it up
My girlfriend lives in the ground.
My friends ask why she’s not around,
She won’t come home.
I’m so alone (you’ll never know!).
You can’t bury love, You’ve gotta dig it up.
Yeah, you’ve gotta live it up…
http://youtu.be/MRhyu-4b-L8
This is almost too unbelievable to be true. I’m as cynical as the next guy, more so as I get older, but even I question the veracity of this.
If it does turn out to be true, my only thought is that we had better prepare for something truly cataclysmic – in a Biblical sense – to be visited upon our heads. Because humanity is well and truly f**ked in the head if this kind of depravity becomes accepted. And I’m not saying embraced by us – the non-muslims – but accepted under the tyranny of the new religion of multi-culturalism claiming it as being in some way equal and not something to be judged. Because by that rule, silence means consent, and assent. And at that point we truly deserve a modern day extinction level retribution.
Thank you President Obama, for helping rid us of the scourge of that maniac Mubarek. This is all sooooo much better.
Coexist my ass.
wretchard said:
That good old 29th Day Problem and design margin. Once you notice that you are running out it is already too late is the lesson. Good engineers know this instinctively.
We are out of it and just treading water until the inevitable comes. That may be much sooner than most allow.
Hey, are the rules different depending on whether or not the husband is the one who killed her?
I have always thought that a good education required meeting one or two psychopaths in life. Not so many as to permanently warp the personality, but enough to convince one that such things truly exist. The conviction that true and false, right and wrong, good and bad are real quantities form the single most important element in learning.
They give it a purpose, since only the conviction that not all answers are equal can make us reach for the right one. The scientific and mathematical professions teach that implicitly in the technical sense. While “art” may be beautiful or ugly according to taste, a computer program either runs or it doesn’t. A patient survives or dies. A bridge stands or falls. Why? Because things matter. They really do.
A glimpse of good and evil teaches the same lesson in a generalized sense. It creates the sense that actions have consequences and there are some which are better avoided. Back in World War 2 there was saying among fighter pilots that is was “five and live”. If a rookie survived five missions and he would live. The reason was that those five missions were enough to teach him that death, 30 mm shells and the surreal world of air combat were after all quite real. And that knowledge made all the difference.
CS Lewis observed that the Devil’s greatest trick was to convince modern man that he didn’t exist. That he was just a bad upbringing, a different point of view or a lack of material resources. Something you could ignore, remain indifferent to; he was anything but actual.
It’s become too easy to forget something that all our ancestors once knew: that the devil is just an angel on the other side of a thin boundary of choice. And that both were quite real. But that’s not so frightening if you consider what that signifies when you look at yourself in the mirror. If the world is real, then ‘so am I, so am I’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7zyDaQrSZ0
Arlene Brett and Rennie Sparks
Arlene, I’m sorry for what I’ve done
I wasn’t looking for love till I saw
Your red hair in the sun
What we had could never be love
That was easy to see
But when I saw you at Red’s pouring coffee
Something took a hold of me
Arlene, you wouldn’t even let me hold your hand
When I stopped you in the road you just screamed and ran
That night I decided I was gonna marry you
My knife went through your screen door
And I went away with you
You were singing “Please let me go”
All the way down to Miller’s cave
When I picked a stick up off the ground
You cried “I ain’t ready for my grave!”
Oh, Arlene, in the dark your hair’s just as red
And this long, dark cave will always be our wedding bed.
OK, OK, I understand the issue. My Muslim wife, number 3, was fine, but, I’d sure like to get a chunk of the 4th wife of the guy down at the corner of the block, alive or dead.
If I paid the Egyptian Imam a modest fee, could we modify the law to allow a non-husband get get a piece of a dead Muslim wife within the six hour rule? How about if we kicked in to give the Imam a chunk of the fine but rapidly cooling Muslim stuff?
64. R Daneel
We are out of it and just treading water until the inevitable comes. That may be much sooner than most allow.
………
If you are talking about mere money — don’t count on it.
A couple things in the next year are going to break just right.
The first is this year — the supreme court is going to knock down obamacare.
That will suddenly knock out a huge burden on the government.
The second will be that Romney will be elected in november followed next year by a lot of cuts in federal spending. Plus the final elimination of obamacare, the repeal of the bad banking bill and finally a rejiggering of the tax system to encourage investment and growth.
Finally there will be pretty big shift toward government support of oil & gas drilling. It looks very much now like the massive rise in natural gas production in the last half dozen years will be matched in the coming half dozen years by a massive rise in oil production.
Falling federal deficits, rising US growth and US oil independence will stabilized and reorder the world financial system long before the financial margins are restored which will take another decade or more.
The left is self deporting itself into the wilderness as is Islam.
Right now –it is the peculiarity of the modern world that it makes the most sense to those who are forward looking.
(But in time the margins will reach out to Islam and the left — and draw them back.)
imho gold has topped for now.(even if you don’t buy the argument above, just look at the tv, there are zillions of buy gold commercials. that’s the equivalent of the 1920′s saying that when shoe shine boys talk about their stock market investments its time to get out of the market.)
This news item may seem silly to westerners, but the rules regarding halal (and haram) intercourse are of absolute primary importance to muslims. This is why shariah based standards placing paedophelic marriage for girls and sexual slavery for unsubmitting infidel women (i.e. “right hand possessions”) on the “halal” side of the ledger are still relevant and very much operative today. For observant muslims, it’s really not a rhetorical question.
Genesis 15
New International Version (NIV)
The Lord’s Covenant With Abram
15 After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision:
“Do not be afraid, Abram.
I am your shield,[a]
your very great reward.[b] ”
2 But Abram said, “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit[c] my estate is Eliezer of Damascus? ” 3 And Abram said, “You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir.”
4 Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir. ” 5 He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars —if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring[d] be.”
6 Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
2000 years later St. Paul, reflecting back on Abraham said this:
Romans 4
New International Version (NIV)
Abraham Justified by Faith
4 What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, discovered in this matter? 2 If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about—but not before God. 3 What does Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”[a]
Galatians 3
New International Version (NIV)
Faith or Works of the Law
So again I ask, does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard? 6 So also Abraham “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”[c]
7 Understand, then, that those who have faith are children of Abraham. 8
Sex with the dead in Egypt; in Chicago, they vote.
Wretchard #66:
It’s also a good education when you first encounter someone who is not a psychopath but just screws things up deliberately. The klutz is common but understandable; we have all been him at times. So is the guy who is pursuing his own viewpoint to the detriment of everyone else; we all do that a bit. The bureaucrat who thinks that constantly complaining about something is his job is another standard issue type. As is the bureaucrat operating under his own self-serving mythology – and they usely end up in charge of something important that blows up.
But the bomb-thrower, the vandal in a suit and tie, the guy who concocts one crisis after another because then he’ll be be the only one who knows how to fix it, the first one of those I met was a surprise. In my USAF career there was only one case in which I had to provide a back-channel of info that the next time a a certain guy pulled something official action would be taken. He changed jobs soon thereafter.
#31 Wretchard
In 1985 I got to spend a month in London. I went to speakers square in Hyde Park. The first speaker I started listening to was going on about the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He was going on about how if only the Americans would stop meddling in their country they could build a new country based on socialism and not the evils of capitalism, blah, blah, blah. So, like an idiot, I said “what if they don’t like socialism.” He kept on about socialism and I slowly moved to the back of the crowd and started off to listen to someone else. At this point a guy walked up to me and said, “You’re an American. You’re government is killing our people” blah, blah, blah. I was standing there trying to think of something to say to this 40 year old guy that was now yelling at me. Suddenly, an older couple well dressed clearly out for their daily stroll said to the socialist yelling at me. Do you care about the Nicaragua? Do you care about what is going on there? The guy, a little surprised at being interrupted while lecturing me says “Yes.” The old guy says, “then why aren’t you there helping them instead of living the in England?”
This threw the guy way off his well rehearsed lecture to me. He looked the older couple up and then declared, “I know you…you’re a Jew”. The little old man paused for a second, looked the socialist up and down and said, “If it wasn’t for Christmas we’d all be Jewish.” I and a couple others around me started laughing. He slowly turned and walked away, guiding his lovely bride of many years, locked arm and arm down the sidewalk.
Every time I see people on TV prattling on about the socialist havens of Cuba and Venezuela I think of that encounter and the nice elderly couple. If those are such wonderful places to live then move there. They won’t. Like the elderly couple, they enjoy too much the freedom of where they live now.
There is a contrasting story out now, which says that elements of the Egyptian military released this story to discredit the Egyptian parliament, and that no such bill has been proposed, now will be.
Of course I don’t know what’s “true” here, and I don’t think anyone CAN know at this stage. That’s the problem with any neo-byzantine unstable political situation; they are so screwed up that *anything* is possible, and thus it’s impossible to tell the difference between a wild rumor and the “Truth”, whatever that is.
Is it possible that Islamists will propose this law in Egypt? Of course it’s possible.
Is it possible that elements of the military created this rumor to discredit their opponents? Yep, that’s possible too.
Is it possible that something else which we haven’t even imagined is behind this story? Sadly, that’s possible too.
When a system gets so screwed up that “Truth” becomes indistinguishable from Falsehood, to any reasonable person, then the system itself is psychopathic, and all anyone can do is dissociate themselves from it as completely as possible until it blows itself up.
Because it WILL blow itself up. It’s only a matter of time.
recalling “Le Pape Formose” which put a corpse on trial: I think that’s more an act of bitter revenge against someone who the successor hated but who was always too powerful in life to touch.
Call it p*ssing on the grave, but it’s always a pathetic act. It reminds me of the English royalists who dug up Cromwell’s bones 3 years after he died and scattered them in various places.
They thought they were doing something – but the real lesson was “wow, this guy was so strong that you had to wait for him to be dead for 3 YEARS before you finally found the guts to challenge him????” But Cromwell had the same flaw that Marshall Tito had centuries later, and which perhaps all warlords have: he was absolutely unable to groom a successor who had anything close to his strength and talent, and so when he was gone everything he had built fell apart overnight.
Although I don’t know that this was the case with le Pape Formose, I strongly suspect it was, especially since an act like this *Does* have one practical and politically useful effect: all of the supporters and hangers-on of the deceased are discredited by association, unless they abase themselves and decry all the old perceived evils. So, it’s an easy way to sweep out all of the old whose loyalties are suspect and replace them with a new group of Loyal Followers.
of course to the people being governed, this is just Here Comes the New Boss, same as the Old Boss!” but isn’t that always how it goes?
I laughed, but then I became grave. A Rose for Emily sprang back into my memory, and I shudder to remember.
Speaking of he unspeakable from that corner of the world, here is something that has received little publicity in the USA, but is apparently viral elsewhere.
Not for the fainthearted:
http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=/watch%3Fv%3DLPaX7VlZsks
Syrian dissident buried alive by Syrian soldiers, who taunt him with ‘there is no God but Bashar’ as they cover his head with dirt.
I hope someone has referred this to Obama’s Atrocity Board.
I once dated a dead-head….for a short while.
Well it does give new meaning to the saying I wouldn’t be found dead with her but I am really wondering what the context of all this was. It could be an issue of what religiously happens when a spouse dies of something like a heart attack during intercourse. I would like to know the real context of the ruling.
This could provide a needed boost to the Egyptian economy. a whole “necrotourism” industry could develop now that Mossad Sharks have chased a lot of the regular tourists away. There is nothing to see in Egypt except the Necropolis and mummies anyway and Egypt’s most famous piece of literature is the Book of the Dead. For the more adventurous traveller a whole new venue opens up…
77. wws
But Cromwell had the same flaw that Marshall Tito had centuries later, and which perhaps all warlords have: he was absolutely unable to groom a successor who had anything close to his strength and talent, and so when he was gone everything he had built fell apart overnight.
…………..
Cromwell was a Calvinist as were all of of the settlers of the Massachuttes bay colonies and most of the settlers in the 13 colonies from england scottland, germany, holland switzerland sweden and france. (they were the losers of the wars of the 1600′s.)
There were instances of people from the Massachusetts bay colonies returning to England in Cromwell’s day to fight in his wars.
100+ years later these calvinists produced the American constitution which has a unique characteristic among the nations.
for most nations the job of the sovereign is to restrain evil–both internal and external. but who will restrain the sovereign? in atheist and moslem lands the answer is nobody. they require the big man to work.
What’s unique about the american constitution is that it recognizes that (not just the people) but the sovereign himself/itself/herself is evil and therefor needs to be restrained. Therefor the constitution has a series of checks and balances and a separation of powers.
o @ 70: This news item may seem silly to westerners…
Your post is clear, but I just want to point out, saying the westerner may view it as “silly” rather misses the point, just as the western dismissal of the seriousness of the issue would rather miss the point.
(there, I got that down to one sentence, hopefully clearer than the long rant that was my first draft!)
So, I’ve read one or two commenters who believe this is not true.
My question, under what circumstance would you believe that it is?
It was Beaudelaire not C.S. Lewis:
“La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.”
“The Devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist!”
From his short story, “The Generous Gambler.”
85. Terence57
My question, under what circumstance would you believe that it is?
Here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2135434/Egypts-plans-farewell-intercourse-law-husbands-sex-DEAD-wives-branded-complete-nonsense.html
What’s the problem? Muhammad had sex with his dead wife Fatama in the grave. As the mother of believers, she would not be dormented as much while waiting for judgement day.
Classic moon god worship. They are just following Muhammad, and I bet the State Department will call them moderate.
With their sexual tastes, I see Islamists as natural Democrats!
But thanks Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood for completely ruining this song for me…
84. Josh
o @ 70: This news item may seem silly to westerners…
Your post is clear, but I just want to point out, saying the westerner may view it as “silly” rather misses the point, just as the western dismissal of the seriousness of the issue would rather miss the point.
………………
When a christian spouse dies you never see the survivor crawling on the casket. But you do see this sometimes with a Jewish couple where the surviving spouse crawls on the casket.
The reason for the difference is that Christians have the assurance that there is an afterlife and that they are going to heaven.
Jews don’t believe in an afterlife. This world is it. So when the spouse dies, the survivor is confronted with the great mystery of death.
Moslems believe there is a heaven but whether you get there or not is unknown and totally conditional. Even the most assured way — death by jihad–does not provide unconditional assurance that the deceased will go to heaven. Its all, Inshallah or God willing — for the Moslem. Allah can be just as capricious as any greek god.
This gives the imman enormous manipulative powers that can be wielded just as capriciously as if their own god Allah had wielded them himself.
It is the very capriciousness of man that caused the Founders to write a constitution that set forward a government of laws and not of men.
They’d all read their bible. Which is just full of how deceitful a person’s own passions can be.
Proverbs 21:2
2Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the LORD pondereth the hearts.
Jeremiah 17:9
9The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
Proverbs 28:26 says, “He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool”
Matthew 15:19 ESV /
For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is practicing polytheism, particularly making reference to the cult of Isis.
One of the central motifs of Egyptian pagan antiquity was Isis (in the form of a bird) copulating with the dead Osiris to produce Horus, who would then avenge his father’s murder. As a rule, Egyptian pharaohs claimed to be “the living Horus”. So, if there were some way for a woman to keep her husband’s genitalia alive while the rest of him is dead, this law would allow reenactments of this ancient pagan ritual.
I can see it now with a bumper sticker saying, “CONVERT TO ISLAM, THE RELIGION OF NECROPHILIA”…
87. Don Rodrigo
OOps! From your link, I see that the Egyptian Embassy in London is denying that the proposed law reported by Al Arabiya ever existed. “But sources inside the Egyptian Embassy in London have said the claims were ‘completely false’, ‘forbidden in Islam’ and ‘could never imagine it happening’.”
I wonder who is right – the Daily Mail(1), the Daily Mail(2), Al Arabiya or the Egyptian Embassy? Or did the widespread derision cause the Egyptian Embassy to claim it never happened?
If the first report was completely false, this could be embarrassing. Gosh darn. But I saw it on the interweb!
91. Charles
Judaism does believe in an afterlife. The hebrew is Olam Ha’boah = The World to Come.
It is not stressed much in Judaism. The basic idea is we are here so that is where we must act.
Personally I think I can deal with my record with HaShem when the time comes. It is the daily stuff where I could have done better that is difficult.
c @ 91: When a christian spouse dies you never see the survivor crawling on the casket. But you do see this sometimes with a Jewish couple where the surviving spouse crawls on the casket.
Not familiar with this, I’m constantly amazed at traditions in various faiths and other groups I have managed to remain ignorant of (and that they have managed to hold onto though you might think they’d endeavor to forget), though it is common enough in Islam to find precursors in Judaism and Christianity though more commonly in Arabic traditions older than either.
Not sure I want to start Googling for more info on this, that’d get my name on some FBI list I’d rather not be on – I’ll stick with plutonium and anthrax, thank you. Oh, and these too:
http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog/dog-interrupted-obama-to-host-culinary-adventure-show-t8852.html
http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog/if-only-the-romans-had-the-epa-to-crucify-the-dissenters-t8908.html
An old British lady once told me about her youthful shock when her young sailor husband returned from World War II with tales of homosexuality amongst some of the crew on board Her Majesty’s ships. She had literally never heard of homosexuality before, and she could not imagine it was physically possible.
Now decades later, she noted it was rare for the BBC to make a TV series which did not have at least one homosexual somewhere in the story line, and generally portrayed very sympathetically.
I imagine that most of us have a similar reaction to necrophilia as that lady had decades ago to homosexuality. We should remember the “liberal, “progressive” creed — Everything which is not Forbidden will become Compulsory.
Leftism, like all evil, glories in misery and destruction. But that is only a means to an end, which is power over others, the ultimate form of which is murder in one form or another. All these isms are, I believe, are designed to reduce the boundary between good and evil through a process of desensitization. By breaking down those boundaries the power to recognize, denounce, resist and defeat evil becomes increasingly difficult and ultimately impossible. The prospective victims are rendered impotent, through learned helplessness. Having learned not to react to nonsense the prospective victims learn to regard former liberties not as rights but as privileges, and their ever diminishing scope as normal and, however regrettable, natural and right. Next comes outbreaks of violence which become normalized in turn. Once violence is normal, the State is free to act without interference.
I ran across this over at Gerard’s place today, which I thought was just great.
If you read only one book and all of the glorious footnotes hidden like sapphires within its pages, you must read Gulag Archipelago. When you come to this footnote, you will have struck mind gold.
Memorize it. Let the words pulse through your veins with your blood to the very chambers of your heart and back out into your hands and feet:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
Akin to the notion stated – was it by Wretchard? – that it’s not the middle aged who are closed minded, but the young. The young don’t know just how vile, evil, mendacious or just plain crazy people can be. You’ve got to run into a few choice specimins of your fellow humans to realize what horrible things people are capable of doing.
69 Charles: Where do you get all your optimism? I’d sure like a little of that.
I wonder what the undertaker will think about sloppy seconds? That will have to be a first!
I see that wretchard has produced another orphan post. The threads that land in my mailbox but are never available for comment or linked to the Belmont Club top page make for interesting reading. The last one was on artists and their fantasy islands and this one is on the malleability of race.
97. Tamquam
Your first paragraph is just as quotable as the Solzhenitsyn one.