The Null Device

2002/9/12

Says God, a more intelligent retort to all those "God says" billboards in the US:

If I wanted you to have seven kids, I would have given you a bigger planet. --God
I never said, "Thou shalt not think." --God
You'd better have stopped fighting by the time I get back, or you're all grounded. --God
Here's a clue--if they say they're doing it in my name, they're lying. --God

(via bOING bOING)

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Those comsymps at the Grauniad are having a minute's silence for September 11 victims -- September 11, 1973, when the CIA-backed Pinochet regime overthrew Allende in Chile. Mind you, the estimated 30,000 men, women and children who were killed were all Communists, who would have enslaved Chile under a hellish Stalinist dictatorship had the CIA not intervened in the name of defending freedom worldwide.

(Wasn't it Kissinger or someone who articulated the difference between "totalitarianism", which is uniformly evil (and ideologically "left-wing"), and "authoritarianism", which can be benign, a strong state concerned about defending cherished values and such?)

On a similar tangent, I once heard that one of the reason for the West's toleration of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor was that Fretilin had troublingly leftist leanings; an independent East Timor would have been a probable Soviet client state, and Australia could have had its own Cuban Missile Crisis. And what better experts on Communist eradication in the asia-pacific region than Suharto's New Order?

9/11 authoritarianism chile cia pinochet totalitarianism usa 4