Jonathan Badger

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• Commented on Alligators in NYC sewers
  Odd that alligator farmers spend so much money on pricey alligator chow filled with vitamins. Silly farmers!...
• Commented on Alligators in NYC sewers
  People claiming to have been abducted by aliens have been interviewed by journalists as well. Nobody doubts that Betty and Barney Hill (or any of a number of people claiming to have been abducted since) were real people either. The...
• Commented on Alligators in NYC sewers
  How is Conduluci's story different from any *other* alligator in the sewer story? No photographs -- nothing at all. And what's with Coleman's explanation? Something printed in a newspaper is reputable just because it was in a newspaper?...
• Commented on Tom Gauld print: "Characters for an Epic Tale"
  Don't forget the battle between the Dancing Bear and the Metal Man, helped by a headshot from the Sniper! I think the moral is "blessed are those with a laser sight on their rifles"...
• Commented on Science Jokes to Brighten Your Monday Morning
  A bacterium is trying to enter New Zealand -- the customs officer is giving him grief about not having a good reason to enter the country. The bacterium responds "But I heard that New Zealand was a nuclear free zone!"...
• Commented on Advisor: What will happen if I clone my dog?
  Well, duh -- obviously you have to get the clone ill too. Haven't you seen (or read) "The Boys From Brazil"? It wasn't enough to clone Hitler -- they were trying to give the clones crappy childhoods to make sure...
• Commented on $50k novel advance == "almost qualify for foodstamps"
  I have no idea about tax writeoffs for novelists or whether this novelist is lying about her take, but I do know that the type of novelist I favor tends to write considerably *less* than one novel per year, so...
• Commented on Peter Bagge comic about Ayn Rand
  @Avram Who is comparing Marx to Washington except you? Much like Rand, Marx was an ineffectual dreamer who harmed nobody personally -- I have no beef with the man. He did spawn some pretty murderous followers, and *those* I have...
• Commented on Viacom's top lawyer thinks lawsuits were "terrorism" - but he's learned nothing from the experience
  There are certainly arguments against DRM (generally from the consumer's side, not the seller's), but the idea that it it is worthless because it can't be infallible is a ridiculous one. Door locks aren't infallible either for exactly the same...
• Commented on Scooby Doo Apocalypse tee
  Actually some of the recent Scooby Doos ignore this -- for example "Scooby Doo on Zombie Island" actually involves supernatural explanations. Which I hated. I mean, I can deal with supernatural stuff on Buffy, but Scooby Doo is supposed to...
• Commented on Peter Bagge comic about Ayn Rand
  No. Not at all. There is pretty much a one-to-one mapping of religious ideas to Marxism -- the final victory of Communism is basically the rapture -- and just like religion, they had major issues with science. Just like how...
• Commented on Peter Bagge comic about Ayn Rand
  @Antinous Just one of the reasons that Marxism has been called a religion. The USSR didn't attack religion for the benefit of atheism; they attacked it because it was a competing faith to Marxism....
• Commented on Peter Bagge comic about Ayn Rand
  @Antinous and robulus Merely pointing out the lack of evidence for many religious beliefs (as many atheists do) is not the same thing at all as saying that the beliefs are immoral. Pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes...
• Commented on Peter Bagge comic about Ayn Rand
  I don't get your point -- how is it a fantasy? For example, I don't know of any atheists who want to force Muslims or Mormons to drink beer. Where we get annoyed is when people want to impose their...
• Commented on Peter Bagge comic about Ayn Rand
  So the defense of Che is say that he wasn't any worse than Robespierre? That's a new one......
• Commented on Peter Bagge comic about Ayn Rand
  No, I think he is saying that it is a bit odd for an atheist to believe in absolute (dare I say objective?) morals -- which Rand seems to have done. Most atheists realize that different people have different moral...
• Commented on Peter Bagge comic about Ayn Rand
  Perhaps all the Che shirters are being ironic (although I'm not so sure as you seem to be about that -- if irony was intended, wouldn't wearing a shirt featuring a *fascist* be more ironic for a leftist?), but still...
• Commented on Hotel proudly proclaims Winston Churchill's displeasure with its service
  Maggots with teeth? Scotland is a strange, frightening place indeed....
• Commented on Anatomical vegetarian ad
  If Arcimboldo's work wasn't creepy enough as it is, read Ian Watson's brilliant short story "The Coming of Vertumnus"......
• Commented on Humanizing Psystar
  What bugs me about PsyStar is that they want to have it both ways; they want to be seen as radicals sticking it to "The Man" (the man in question being Jobs, I guess) and to make money as a...
• Commented on Mark Dery on 2012 bunkum
  I'm not sure what modern villagers have to do with the Mayan calendar -- since the fall of the Mayan civilization, nobody could read the calendar, or indeed any Mayan, until quite recently. There's some resemblance of some modern spoken...
• Commented on Goldwag: I Was A Teenaged Straussian
  Strauss believed, rather, that the authors had deliberately coded their texts; applying sufficient care and scholarship, they could be decoded too. We spent an entire semester working through Allen Bloom's copiously annotated translation of Plato's Republic, for example, which had...
• Commented on Archaeologists May Have Found Remains of Lost Persian Army
  Reminds me of one of my favorite Onion articles......
• Commented on Teen sex belongs in teen lit
  @Spekkio I agree that the "life imitates art" argument is pretty bogus (people have free will despite what some philosophers say), but what *isn't* bogus is the idea that people get the idea of how their life *should* be like...
• Commented on Teen sex belongs in teen lit
  Look, I didn't drink or have sex in high school, and think that was quite typical both then, and I, suspect, now. And it wasn't that I was some born-again puritan that went out of my way to avoid either....
• Commented on Ebook license "agreements" are a ripoff
  @octopod I'm not sure where you are going with that. Are you claiming that Apple now selling DRM-free music was either 1) the reason for the iPod's success (no, it was already the #1 player in the days of DRM-only...
• Commented on Teen sex belongs in teen lit
  I know saying this opens up me to accusations of being a "geek" who wasn't "popular" as a teen (probably true on both counts), but I think considerably more teens (at least middle class teens) *talk* about sex and *think*...
• Commented on Ebook license "agreements" are a ripoff
  @Bookguy Of course not. That's what all this anti-ebook FUD ignores. Having the option to buy DRMed content from Amazon (or Sony, or in the future Barnes & Noble) in no way prevents you from putting public domain stuff (or...
• Commented on If you love something, feed it lasers and pizza: Machine Project Benefit, Mister Jalopy's, Sat. Nov 7, LA
  Slime mold? Like Dictyostelium?...
• Commented on Fun With the Minneapolis Mayoral Race
  @Starfive Note that Lombard has not promised to not kill *any* puppies -- just not *all* puppies... that's truly worthy of the "is awesome" label. Even mean puppy killers can get on board with that, unless their plan is to...