Comments on: And We Support Israel Because ?

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 20:41:49 +0000

I really worry about what people call me, as long as it isn’t late for dinner or a Republican.

I know what regular Jews call the ultra-Orthodox among themselves, and it isn’t ‘brother’. I figure that if you want to be a jerk, find an island somewhere and leave the rest of us alone.

I can’t tune an instrument, but I know when one is out of tune. It’s not that I hear it, as much as my brain telling me something is ‘wrong’, i.e. I can’t tell whether it is too high or too low, but I know it isn’t right – it doesn’t fit the pattern.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 16:27:07 +0000

I can tune a harp. Give me one reference tone and I can tune the whole thing by ear, I’ve even tuned a piano by ear before which is somewhat harder. I can switch between drop-d and regular tuning on my guitar by ear without resort to a tuner or even fretting, when I do check it’s dead on. But I know from my own relatives who are bluegrass professionals that this is a fairly rare skill, on those occasions they tune by ear without recourse to reference strings, tones, or tuners, the results are usually ear-scraping for me since I can hear that they’re out of tune (my other relatives, being tone-deaf, don’t notice). The results if they were tuning several dozen strings rather than four, five, or six strings (hey, gotta include the banjo players in there 😉 ) would be… awe-inspiring, in a sickening sort of way :twisted:.

Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. Mark Twain had that one right, that’s for sure ;).

BTW, you are officially now anti-Semitic, Bryan. It doesn’t matter that you’re agreeing with Israel’s own President about the behavior of the ultra-orthodox in Israel. Any criticism of any Jew anywhere for any behavior, no matter how awful the behavior, makes you either a self-hating Jew or a Nazi. I know this is true because AIPAC tells me so :twisted:.

– Badtux the WTF Penguin

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 04:24:49 +0000

I can fake that, Jams 😉

It is kind of frightening, Steve, an eternity of trying to tune harps, and listening to bad choirs.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 03:45:17 +0000

Mark Twain had similar choice comments about Heaven. They’re not all in one place in his work, but they’re worth finding… they make it into more than a few anthologies of his work. One of my favorites is his questioning the wisdom of having all the angels sing and play harps, when not one person in a hundred on Earth has a decent singing voice or can handle a musical instrument properly. Twain said it much more entertainingly, of course.

By: jams o donnell

jams o donnell — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 03:34:32 +0000

Ah Bryan but you also have to be very sorry… and then you will be geting to munch on some -king good wood!

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 06:01:11 +0000

Or the ‘Asses of Evil’, Jams.

Missing comments is a feature of the comment system, Steve. It does it to me on occasion. Not very often here, but on other WordPress.com blogs.

You know, the Fundies are the best argument I can think of for not aspiring to ‘Heaven’. Spending eternity with these jerks is not something I can feel motivated to want. I have to conclude that it would really be ‘Hell’, but they wouldn’t get the ‘joke’.

I may have to start carrying a potato with me [a Pratchett reference to those who wonder.]

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:01:13 +0000

jams, I must have missed your comment. I do indeed have a post up about Tanya Rosenblit, comparing the extremists of all three Abrahamic religions in their treatment of women, but I don’t see any comments on it yet. I wonder what happened to yours.

By: jams o donnell

jams o donnell — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:29:32 +0000

As I said on Steve’s blog, I’m sure they would all get on like a house on fire, the ultra-evangelicals, the extreme Haredi and the salafists…Hey you would have an Axis of Misogyny!

As far as I am concerned they are called fundamentalists for a good reason (if one takes fundamentalist to be a portmanteau of fundament and mental) – lunatic arseholes!

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:24:48 +0000

Jams, Na’ana Margolese is being raised in the Orthodox Jewish tradition, as are all of the girls in her school, which is why it is a girls’ school. That they are attacking her and the school show how far around the bend these whackoes have traveled. The ‘ultra-Orthodox’ are not ‘out of the mainstream’, they are part of the same fetid swamp as Salafi Muslims and many of the US Evangelical Christianists.

A number of Evangelical tour groups have been attacked while visiting Jerusalem by the Haredi gangs, but it doesn’t get reported in the US, and the Israeli police don’t arrest those who are throwing the rocks.

They have a right to believe whatever they want, but they don’t have the right to force others to act in accordance with those beliefs by the use of violence. It is past time to cut them off the welfare rolls and let them pay for their own upkeep and large families.

By: jams o donnell

jams o donnell — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:07:40 +0000

I find the attitudes of these misogynistic dinosaurs as repulsive as those of the misogynistic dinosaurs in the countries that surround Israel.

Na’ama Margolese as well as Tanya Rosenblit, a woman abused on a bus by one of the Haredi (her crime being not moving to the back of a bus) are now the “poster girls” of of the secular majority.