who is distorting reality, mr. sanity or whatever you call yourself? The reality is that the shrub is a totally fucked president who should have never been allowed to rule. He has killed so many by his policies and deserves everything he gets.
anonymous | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 8:25 am | #

Congratulations, DR. Sanity. A perfect example of what you were talking about surfaced just 35 minutes after your post!
Capn Billy | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 8:55 am | #

"distorting reality to reveal a larger truth"

Dr Sanity,
Great post! Keep up the good work.

But seriously, who comes up with this stuff? I have to question the intellect of anyone who makes statements like the one above. In science for instance, we take great pains to make sure our results are NOT distored in order to find fact. In the research of history we attempt to find primary sources so as to obtain data undistored by others thus marring the truth. If society decides that truth can be found by distorting what is real, then we, as a people will be lost.
DK | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 9:56 am | #

The world is having convulsions after the Pope's speech. How long will it
be until people start suggesting that there really should be a new Crusade.
Why not take over Turkey and drive out the Muslims. Put the church back
into Constantinople. Give the northeastern part to the Kurds, and drive
everyone who won't renounce Islam into the desert. The Turks killed 1.5
million Armenians, time to settle the score. Drive the Muslims out of
Lebanon into Syria. Drive the Palestinians into the desert and give
everything to the Christians and Jews. Declare war on the Saudis and take
over the Saudi oilfields and seize all the royal family money. Drive the
Saudis back into the desert with their camels. Nuke Mecca and Medina and
outlaw Wahabbi Islam.
Anonymous | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 10:06 am | #

Anon 10:06 -

How long? Hard to say. One or two Islamic nukes in western cities ought to serve as that trigger. The timetable for that - well, you'll need to ask Ahmagoddamnutcase for what he's thinking re timing.

Of course, there'll be folks like yourself who will scream conspiracy on that, I'd imagine, because Islam's a religion of peace. It says so, therefore it must be true, right? And they'll cut your damn head off if you dare say otherwise, but they wouldn't nuke the West, right? No matter how many demonstrations, how many Christians they kill, no matter how many effigies are burned, they wouldn't do it - right?

Have a nice day, and don't forget to floss.

J.
JLawson | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 10:34 am | #

Damn, Doc - it's getting worse and worse.

Post 9/11, I was fairly certain that Islam WAS a peaceful religion, based on Muslims I'd worked for stateside. Coexistance, mutual respect, the whole thing... not a problem!

But the more I'm seeing, the more publicity the extremists are getting, the less and less it seems to me that Islam is compatible with free speech, free thought, and freedom of action. And I don't have the first clue as to what we can do about it.

I'm getting pretty worried that we WILL end up in an all-out clash of civilizations, simply because Islam (at least the extreme versions, which seem to be the most prominent) is not compatible with Western culture - and the only cure is going to be eradication of the extremists.

We CAN coexist, but there needs to be mutual respect, and it's not happening. They'd want me to die because I don't believe like they do and I won't convert, and I don't feel any obligation to oblige them.

J.
JLawson | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 10:46 am | #

"for the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth."

I can't help but be reminded of many defenses of The Path to 9/11. Sure, some of the scenes were made up, but this is a docudrama, people. It has to compress so much time into six hours. And besides, the larger truth is that Clinton was a horrible president, so even though some scenes are entirely fictional the overall message was correct.
Josh | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 10:50 am | #

Doc, thanks for leaving anon's comments up....why is this stuff almost nearly always from anonymouses? Especially since they are, certainly by their own estimations, so courageous and audacious. I find them funny....must be projecting my inner George Carlin. At anyrate, have you ever examined some of the lefty stuff from the perspective of Jung's "retrogressive restoration of the persona"?
Mike Fay | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 11:03 am | #

"He has killed so many by his policies"... MORE THAN CLINTON? Hardly.

Clinton's first foreign debacle; Somalia, resulted in over 1000 Somali Muslims killed, thousands more wounded in what was considered the largest battle in the history of Somalia.

He followed up by allowing the UN mission to fail - leading to tens of thousands of more deaths from starvation.

Then he not only didn't act to save Rwanda, he actively connived with then UN peacekeeper Koffi Annan TO PULL OUT PEACEKEEPERS FROM KIGALI, resulting in 800,000 CIVILIANS KILLED.

He slapped an economic embargo on Haiti - wiping out the economy of the poorest nation on earth, and then installed a puppet government while giving specific orders to our troops to not feed the civilians or help them.

During his regime while promising to make abortion "safe, legal and RARE" he not only did nothing to make it 'safe' he did everything to make it NOT RARE, BUT A MANDATED UN INTERNATIONAL RIGHT - nearly forcing it on the Muslim world at Cairo in 1994....

In the Balkans...his polices (bombing from 30,000 feet) led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians killed when their convoys were bombed.

His efforts to SUPPORT the North Koreans with free food, oil, and light water reactors while doing nothing to spur their change contributed to further death by starvation there too...

So if you want to argue apples to apples, Clinton's policies resulted in far more death "in peacetime" than Bush's policies have resulted in war.
John | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 11:08 am | #

Actually John, Clinton's first debacle was reneging on his promise that he would not turn back Haitians trying to paddle here. When he took office, Haitians came in droves, and when they were turned back by the Coast Guard, they perished at sea. Bush 41, who was clear from the outset, didn't invite thousands to drown for a lie.

As to the "audacity," this is a cousin of speaking truth to power. As that latter phrase has come to mean "telling lies to a sympathetic audience," the term audacious in the arts is becoming synonymous with "predictable."
Assistant Village Idiot | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 11:26 am | #

"Doc, thanks for leaving anon's comments up....why is this stuff almost nearly always from anonymouses? "

In our introductory psychology class, we were asked a question "If you could do one thing, anything you wanted, and remain perfectly anonymous and unaccountable for it's effects, what would you do?". He then had us write it down on a slip of paper and hand it in. You'd be surprised at the number of answers that involved killing, silencing, raping, or stealing from other people.

Sure, some of it is shock seeking, and some of it involves being a member of a society where it's usually not forbidden to do anything that's not completely evil. But still ... it was an overwhelming percentage of the total responses.

Anonymity allows for the expression of all sorts of things that people would shut up about in public. And on some level, that's why I understand the need for anonymity, that it has a certain necessary place in society. Because, while idiots can reveal their idiocy without fear of being personally thought of as such in our free and mostly tolerant society; it also protects people who need to say something unpopular from violent retaliation in the case of things like Mohammed cartoons, ect. It allows things to be said that would be silenced in a million subtle (or not so subtle) ways by the people who really need to hear such things.
Aaron | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 11:45 am | #

"for the audacity with which it distorts reality in order to reveal a larger truth". Say what?

That's a very audacious statement itself, in a bad way also. But I think the Faux Liberal cult has just come upon a meme which correctly captures its own, and very real, essence. And doing it with the epitome of nuance - nonsense.

How about the redneck's version, "In order to save reality, we have to destroy it"?

Another ready-made anecdote to horn in here: about two years ago I was talking with my main female Fliberal acquaintance whom[?] I hadn't seen for about 8 months. She asked me what I had been thinking about. I told her, approximately, "about memes, which might or could be true, but are usually quite faulty; so I'm really wondering about why some people don't think about them at all and at the same time feel very comfortable and confident with simply repeating them. Why don't they think about what they say?"

She responded really too quickly and authoritatively with, "Well, isn't that what most people do?" For me, this was a stunning show-stopper, and she intended it to be so. So that ended that line of thought. I was truely mystified and caught off-balance by seeing it right in front of me. But I at least sensed it would only cause her further threat to try to continue.

Another terrific post, Dr.. And who needs to look very far to find the wonders of Nature? But I don't try to consort with Grizzly Bears, either.

Lord help us.
J. Peden | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 12:10 pm | #

Prehistoric: I get to kill you and take your stuff because I can.

Long out dated: A statement is TRUE if it corresponds to what actually is.

Modern: A statement is TRUE because I feel it is TRUE.

Post Modern: A statement is TRUE because I feel it should be TRUE.

Post-post Modern: A statement is TRUE if you let me get away with it and. if you don't, you are a bigoted, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, uncaring, fascist neocon which gives me the right to riot, burn, and threaten to kill you.

Post-post-post Modern: I get to kill you and take your stuff because I can.


PS: When faced with a pending attack of a mindless rabid beast, you kill the beast first and then ask questions about how to prevent such attacks in the future.
A. Rational Human | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 12:49 pm | #

Chesterton said that the mentally ill have not lost their reason, but they have lost everything else. A manic depressive has lost his sense of proportion and his self control; a schizophrenic has lost his solid grounding in reality.

But what do you call people who have lost their reason but retain everything else? ..."Moonbats", I'm guessing.
Rorschach | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 1:02 pm | #

"The denier (or part of him) has made an unconscious decision that awareness of certain feelings, needs, or thoughts is more threatening to his sense of self than the act of denial." Dr. S..

Global Warming Alarmism partly seems consciously constructed logically to achieve bald control as the Holy Grail of meaning. So do such Machiavellians actually know themselves quite well, that they are controllists by nature, and that's all there is to it, and are thus in touch?

Or are they also in denial about the truth regarding obsessive control, or control as self - that it can't save you - and are out of touch.

Off hand, I prefer to agree with Gnarles Barkley:

Come on now, who do you
who do you, who do you, who do you
think you are?

Ha, Ha, Ha, Bless your soul
You really think you're in control?

Well, I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
Just like me...."

But who knows?

Btw, did you know that Polar Bears automatically "fast" when they touch dry land? And that they can't swim very well. And that the Polar Bears are aware that some noble Humans are trying to save them, and are "thankful" since they don't eat these Humans when given a chance? Certain Wildlife "scientists" and Organizations - WWF, Greenpeace - are making these claims. Are they crazy? "Just like me"? I hope not.

Lord help us.
Anonymous | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 1:24 pm | #

Mea culpa, 1:24pm. They're after me.
J. Peden | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 1:29 pm | #

This dishonest notion of "distorting reality to reveal a larger truth" is a favorite tactic of the Left. We need only consider a few recent examples.

Dan Rather and his co-liar Mary Mapes used crudely forged documents to reveal a "larger truth" that Bush was AWOL.

The NYTimes and the rest of the MSM knowingly peddled Joe Wilson's fraudulent story for three years to reveal a "larger truth" of White House leaks and lies about Iraq's uranium-seeking.

The MSM -- Reuters and all the others -- used doctored and staged photographs to reveal a "larger truth" that Israel is immoral and Hezbollah is moral.

In conclusion, we may reasonably believe that any time we are revealed a "larger truth" by the Left, it is almost certainly a really large lie.
GnuCarSmell | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 1:44 pm | #

Most religions, including Catholicism and Islam, have much to be ashamed of in their respective histories. Because Ultimate Truth is inherently unknowable and unverifiable, religious disputes can be hair-trigger and particularly vicious. Everybody gets defensive, and defensiveness gets ugly fast. I must agree with Sigmund, Carl and Alfred -- with whom I usually disagree -- on this important point: Muslim outrage and violence in reaction to every imagined, misunderstood or actual insult will pale very quickly. Grow up, get over yourselves and join the real world. Islam has no lock on the Truth; no religion has.
Athenawise | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 2:05 pm | #

The simple truth is neither the fundamuslimists nor the radical liberals can win stragetically. The truth keeps getting in the way. Sometimes it takes awhile but it does.

So their only option is to win in the tabloids, leftist newspapers, and movies.

The (Left) West Wing.
The BBC.
NY Times
This movie.
and of course places like KOS.

And all you have to do is to replace reality with fantasy. Cheap eh?
jim b | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 2:20 pm | #

"The vicious hate...cannot be hidden away at will...." Since a psychological war is being waged against the West, why don't we respond with a psychological defence? Why not use passive aggression against the Islamofascists? For example, each week a well-known person makes a statement that evokes the anticipated irrational response orchestrated by Islamofascist leaders. Then, instead of putting the irrational response on the front page or blogging about it, the response is completely ignored by the West. Such "inaction" on our part would curtail the apparent power of the Islamofascist leaders, rendering them less effective than they are presently. This plan could be announced to the mainstream media as a warplan. It involves no expenditure of money on their part and the public would also immediately see who is pro-Islamofascist by observing how much space or time the newspaper or TV news broadcast devotes to the Islamofascist response. Bloggers could keep a public record of space and minutes for the major media so we all could see who is "flghting" the terrorists through silence and who is helping them through publicity.
Gloria the Linguist | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 3:45 pm | #

"In conclusion, we may reasonably believe that any time we are revealed a "larger truth" by the Left, it is almost certainly a really large lie."
GnuCarSmell

Amen, or "Nunwe" - let this be agreed on or be the way, "we" pronounced "way". A reasonable approach, indeed.
J. Peden | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 4:00 pm | #

Gloria, nice thought, but we know how it, "suppression of free-speech/press so that Bush can get the oil and become Dictator of the World", would then become "the story" for a few hundred years. Btw, I ain't no linguist myself, in case I have misled anyone.
J. Peden | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 4:13 pm | #

hum, interesting thoughts on the anti-boldness of this piece...I'm gald I stumbled upon your blog so I could read this great post.

--RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com
RC of strangeculture | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 4:37 pm | #

I would say that if the Muslims don't police their own, we'll do it for them. And there'll be a HELL of a lot fewer of them around if we have to do it than if they do it themselves.
Garry K | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 5:18 pm | #

>>anonymouses>>

Should the plural of anonymous be anonymice?
suek | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 6:18 pm | #

If we put an observant Muslim in orbit, and he/she has to pray, facing Mecca, five times a day, what direction will they be facing when Mecca is on the opposite side of the Earth?
Tom TB | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 6:53 pm | #

Toward uranus? Sorry that's very insensitive, but I just couldn't help myself.
Dr. Sanity | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 7:44 pm | #

Gloria, that would indeed be brilliant. Our own people won't cooperate.
Assistant Village Idiot | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 7:51 pm | #

Dr. Sanity-

Please take down that hideous picture. I feel like hurling every time I visit your wonderdul site.

-A Patient
How | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 7:52 pm | #

Dr. Sanity,

I have no respect for you. You sit around lying about Democrats, and then when you and your friends are called on your lies, you delete all the comments and try to forget about it.

Go ahead, sweetheart. Make up shit about Democrats again. Maybe next time you'll show a bit of courage and not delete all the comments to cover your ass.
anonymous | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 10:14 pm | #

> Might I suggest that original, bold, and even daring behavior would be creating a movie that breaks out of the breathtaking conformity of thought that has dulled the brains of Hollywood elites? Now, that would be audacious. Not to mention unbelievable.

Awwww, come on Doc! Unlikely, sure. Unbelievable? Nah.

It's only been a week since "Path to 911"!!

And some of the people in Hollywood don't have their heads surgically connected to their intestinal tract. Ron Silverman, for example, or Clint Eastwood. I suspect Harvey Keitel has a clue, too.
Oh Bloody Hell | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 11:09 pm | #

> I have no respect for you.

And this is supposed to be of concern to us that someone too chickenshit or too stupid to create a name and/or use a free mail service to produce an EMA "has no respect for us"?

SOBBBB!!!

BOOOOhooooo!!!

Whimper!!!

Oh, right. My absolute lack of concern borders on the supernatural.

> You sit around lying about Democrats,

Who needs to lie about Democrats? You mark your idiotic selves with your own words.

> and then when you and your friends are called on your lies, you delete all the comments and try to forget about it.

Uh, where? You mean that thread she closed the other day? They're still there, you can even read them if you've got a-1 clue how computers work (hint, figure out how the URLs are associated with the comments, and take a good look at the information available about the thread)

You just can't COMMENT on them any more, which is what I'll guess was the Doc's purpose and intent. The bullshit level was a bit thick and showing no sign of thinning.

> Go ahead, sweetheart. Make up shit about Democrats again. Maybe next time you'll show a bit of courage and not delete all the comments to cover your ass.

She didn't need to delete the comments to cover her ass -- she was tired of the blithering idiots throwing out vast quantities of easily refuted CRAP.
Oh Bloody Hell | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 11:31 pm | #

> Most religions, including Catholicism and Islam, have much to be ashamed of in their respective histories.

Quite true, Athenawise -- but Islam has much to be ashamed of in RECENT history.

*THIS* would be the primary fact we'd like the Left and the Dems to show the minutist grasp of.
Oh Bloody Hell | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 11:34 pm | #

> Should the plural of anonymous be anonymice?

No. Mice have balls.
Oh Bloody Hell | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 11:35 pm | #

Doctor, if everything you write is true, then why are we helping the deniers? We grant them honor when they deserve none, and deny ourselves material benefits that we bestow upon them instead.
Solomon2 | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 11:36 pm | #

> I can't help but be reminded of many defenses of The Path to 9/11. Sure, some of the scenes were made up, but this is a docudrama, people. It has to compress so much time into six hours. And besides, the larger truth is that Clinton was a horrible president, so even though some scenes are entirely fictional the overall message was correct.

OK, halfway legitimate question, at least, Josh:

1) There is a bit of a difference between showing something one argues against the reality of and showing a film which expresses a great desire to kill a real person. No one in P2911 was depicted as expressing a desire to kill Bill for his part in the events, were they? No one said Bill should be brought to trial for negligence, did they? Ya think there MIGHT be a small difference?

2) No one, whatsoever, has argued convincingly about these "factoids" being inaccurate -- There were supposedly all of three listed events which were -- as clearly stated multiple times during the showing "composites of actual scenes and events". In other words, someone in the admin stepped off the ball in multiple places and times -- and this includes the Bush Admin, whose failures are more forgivable because they literally only had 8-odd months to assimilate all the information needed to realize how utterly the Clinton admin had screwed things up, and WERE in the process of reversing things.

3) There's no "larger truth" about it. It's flat out FACT. Clinton was a horrible president, he demeaned the presidency, lied more than anyone since Nixon, set vast numbers of records for corruption, and, as an ex-president, he's battling it out with Jimmy Carter for worst ex-president in US history. You don't need to alter the record, it stands on its own like a pair of jeans worn for six weeks in the sewers. The asswipes in the Clinton admin weren't trying to actually deny anything significant that P2911 said, they were trying to discredit it by claiming that a couple debatable flaws represented wholesale fabrication throughout (let us, at this point, recognize the vastly greater flaws in the docudrama "The Reagans" -- which, unlike p2911, attacked a less than competent president unable to defend himself. If Clinton's supporters do not like P2911, let them creat a webiste which details these supposed flaws, with sources
Oh Bloody Hell | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 11:57 pm | #

> Doctor, if everything you write is true, then why are we helping the deniers? We grant them honor when they deserve none, and deny ourselves material benefits that we bestow upon them instead.

Uh, Solomon, could you be more specific? I, for one, have no idea that I'd respond to you with, as to what you are talking about.
Oh Bloody Hell | Email | Homepage | 09.18.06 - 11:58 pm | #

"Toward uranus?" Dr. S.

Remember when the p.c. sensitives tried to get it pronounced "urine-ous"? What a show, what a show!
J. Peden | Email | Homepage | 09.19.06 - 2:10 am | #

"Most religions, including Catholicism and Islam, have much to be ashamed of in their respective histories." Athenawise

Those people are all dead.
J. Peden | Email | Homepage | 09.19.06 - 3:19 am | #

> Those people are all dead.

Not the Islamic ones.
Oh Bloody Hell | Email | Homepage | 09.20.06 - 1:49 am | #