Erika Kirk clearly can’t tell the difference between piety and hypocrisy, between grief and grift, and seems to have convinced herself that we won’t be able to either. Sadly, she has that in common with most of her fellow MAGA enthusiasts. If they weren’t so smug about their ambitions, it’d be a lot easier to pity them.
Idolatry
Unbidden Bits—December 9, 2025
The US Supreme Court majority, in an excess of misbegotten sanctimony, seems determined to turn our entire government over to a coprophile-in-chief and his legion of wannabe Nazi camp followers. Decent people, however, look forward to the day when all six of these black-robed poseurs find themselves plunked down next to the Trumps, the Vances, the Millers, et al., in the prisoners’ dock of a long overdue re-run of the Nuremberg Trials.
Deus vult, it turns out, doesn’t especially care who does the invoking, as long as its divine need for victims is respected.
About Religion
I was asked a few years ago how an atheist like me could square his atheism with his fondness for snippets of church Latin. It does seem an odd affectation—I wasn’t raised Catholic, and a couple of years of Latin classes in a public high school in Oklahoma back in the Jurassic hardly qualifies as any Latin at all for those who truly know it. Amo, amas, amat, Gallia in tres partes divisa est, and the ablative absolute are just the beginning of a long quest, and I was forced off the trail early.
My response to being caught in this seeming contradiction—that I was an atheist “d’expression chrétienne”—was admittedly flippant, but it was also accurate. My atheism was assembled in the back rooms of the western culture I grew up in. The only tools I could find there, at least early on, were those left behind by the Catholic Church in its long retreat, the only materials its doctrinal remnants worked over in the centuries since with more or less success by the secular carpenters who preceded me. Small wonder, then, that Deo gratias, or sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saecolorum, still seem appropriate to express the awe I feel for that branch of the human experiment I’m descended from, even though I’m as aware as Nietzsche ever was that God is dead. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa….
Unbidden Bits—June 20, 2025
Overheard at an imaginary reception:
I’m a chatbot censor—victim of the Musk purge. At Alphabet now. You?
Deus ex machina engineer.
Uh…?
I write science fiction.
Ah…guess we have a lot in common, then.
Egg Freckles
Siri is from Apple and is here to help us. We’re assured that it doesn’t spy on us like its relatives from Amazon and Alphabet do, so why do we hate it? Maybe being talked to like we were five years old by a machine the size of a grapefruit has something to do with it. Maybe being given answers that are either irrelevant or insane when we ask it a question does also. Artificial intelligence sounds like a fine idea. Being given artificial stupidity instead tends to confirm the contempt that we suspect the management of large corporations have for us. The tech bros fear the singularity. What they should fear is the Butlerian Jihad.
Platonisms
The person looked for, the person found—which is the richer eidolon?
Unbidden Bits—April 1, 2025
If you aspire to rule as a latter-day Caligula, you should probably pay a lot more attention to your latter-day Praetorian Guard. Did you see the video of that very large bodyguard watching Elon do his drunken frat-boy fork and spoon trick at a recent Trumpfest? If the country finally tires of our ruling monsters, it won’t matter how many of us leftie riff-raff they’ve deported or disappeared. The sound of gladii being sharpened in the White House basement must be deafening these days—if, of course, you have the ears to hear it.
How About We Deport This One?
My father was wounded twice fighting assholes like this
The Rush To Surrender
Whenever I read about our new capitalist overlords gutting each other over who gets to profit from the rabbit-out-of-a-hat tricks of large language models, I have to laugh. Here are a handful of quotes that will give you some idea why:
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I don’t believe this is necessarily intentional, but no machine that learns under capitalism can imagine another world.
—@kat@weatherishappening.network, from a Mastodon thread about ChatGPT
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Und so wie gesellschaftliche und technische Entwicklungen zuvor die Unantastbarkeit Gottes in Zweifel zogen, so stellen sie nun die„Sakralisierung” des Menschen zur Disposition.
And just as social and technical developments once cast doubt on the sanctity of God, so they now subject the sacralization of humanity to renegotiation.
—Roberto Simanowski, Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz (Passagen Thema)
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Der tiefere Sinn der Singularity-These ist die technische Überwindung kultureller Pluralität.
The deeper meaning of the singularity-thesis is the triumph of technology over cultural plurality.
—Roberto Simanowski, Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz (Passagen Thema)
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Die Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.
The Enlightenment is the emergence of humankind from its self-inflicted immaturity.
—Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung
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Remember, imbeciles and wits,
sots and ascetics, fair and foul,
young girls with little tender tits,
that DEATH is written over all.
Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul
they are so rotten, old and thin,
or firm and soft and warm and full—
fellmonger Death gets every skin.
All that is piteous, all that’s fair,
all that is fat and scant of breath,
Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair,
is Death’s collateral:
—Basil Bunting, Villon
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Say what you will, it’s clear to me that the Pax Americana, and more generally humanism itself, with all its honorable striving, are both well and truly done. Contemplating what passes for virtue and wisdom among those so obviously eager to feast on the leftovers would make even the gods laugh.
Unbidden Bits—May 6, 2024
What if the panpsychists are right, and somehow even sand fleas and vegetables can feel pain? Makes the Christian doctrine of humankind’s essentially sinful nature even more soul-destroying to contemplate than it already is. Listen, I’m conscious enough of my very traditional transgressions, I don’t need to start worrying about how many carrots I’ve murdered in my eight decades of blissful predation. Either panpsychism or Catholicism, or better yet both, have to go. Meanwhile, I just don’t wanna talk about it….