given

August 19th, 2020

QED

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Discussion (36)¬

  1. Jesus F Iscariot says:
    August 19, 2020 at 2:47 pm

    Reminds me of that infallible old song by Dale Evans and Roy Rogers:
    —-

    Jesus loves me
    This I know
    For the Bible
    Tells me so

    QED

  2. Trevor H says:
    August 19, 2020 at 3:39 pm

    “For the bible tells me so” is Paulogia’s ‘tagline for anything not backed up by alternate (secular) sources

  3. Laripu says:
    August 19, 2020 at 3:46 pm

    Jesus F. Iscariot, I was forced to learn and sing that in elementary school, along with “Mothers of Salem” and other Christian hits, despite about 30% of the class (and my family) being Jewish.

    So we changed the words to:

    Khrushchev loves me, this I know
    For the Kremlin tells me so
    Little ones who love him not
    Are tied to a post where they are shot!

    God Save the Queen became God Shave the Queen:

    God Shave our gracious Queen
    Shave her with shaving cream
    God Shave the Queen.
    Send her to Halifax
    Make her pay income tax
    God Shave our gracious Queen
    God Shave the Queen.

    Ah, good times at the “Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal”. 🙂

  4. Son of Glenner says:
    August 19, 2020 at 5:15 pm

    Barmaid’s comment in panel 3 made me think of Trump supporters.

  5. Mockingbird says:
    August 19, 2020 at 6:25 pm

    Laripu.

    Thanks for the songs, good laugh! (and now we have an edit feature! Things are looking up.)

  6. cjsm says:
    August 19, 2020 at 7:29 pm

    Johnny Cash put out some albums just before his death. My husband avoided church of any kind his entire life. We got the album collection in high anticipation and were not disappointed. One of the CDs was “My Mother’s Hymn Book.” To my husband’s astonishment and my own surprise, I knew and sang along with all except one of the songs on the album. Thanks to my junior high stint at the Foursquare Gospel church. Didn’t think I had remembered so much.

  7. Oozoid says:
    August 19, 2020 at 7:42 pm

    Son of Glenner, I don’t disagree, but does not the same apply to those who oppose Trump? And to basically anyone who has unshakeable faith in their chosen party or political stance? It would be interesting to compare how many people who grew up in a left-wing household and swung to the right in adulthood to those who were brought up right-wing and swung to the left. My guess (based only on personal experience) would be that the latter lot would win. If so, would that mean that Left is right, or that Right is less prescriptive and allows greater freedom of thought? I am not trying to start a fight, honestly. I love the socialist ideal but I find it increasingly difficult to defend – and the current champions of socialism are of little help. Their main argument seems to be ‘being Right isn’t nice’. They need to make the case for socialism and not just appeal to our charitable emotions in the way that Trump and others appeal to to the emotion of greed.

  8. M27Holts says:
    August 20, 2020 at 12:26 pm

    “Faith is beleiving in what you know isnt true”…Mark Twain…

  9. jc1742 says:
    August 20, 2020 at 1:38 pm

    I wonder how they’d explain why optical illusions work. Does their god really want us to be fooled so easily? And why can’t we see in the IR or UV parts of the spectrum, just in the “visual” portion which is really tiny. What was their god trying to hide from us?

  10. Mockingbird says:
    August 20, 2020 at 2:06 pm

    cjsm

    So you can see how brainwashing works on young schoolchildren for the rest of their lives. That’s why the nutters have to catch ’em young.

  11. jb says:
    August 20, 2020 at 4:21 pm

    Oozoid — When do these left-right and right-left swings occur? Our education system is run by people who are extremely liberal and put a lot of effort into indoctrinating their students, so that could explain many right to left shifts among young people. When people get older and have children, abstract save-the-world universalism often becomes a lot less appealing, and that could explain a lot of left to right shifts among older people.

    Of course, many people don’t have children now days, especially in places where it is difficult and expensive to raise them, like cities. And you’ll notice that there seem to be a lot of childless urban liberals. An interesting corollary is that if you make it difficult for natives to raise children by flooding a region with foreign immigrants who bid up the price of housing and whose children burden the school system, a possible consequence is that this will increase the number of childless natives with no skin in the game who display an enthusiastic liberal universalist willingness to accept even more immigrants! Possibly. Society is complicated and full of all kinds of interesting feedback loops, some of which are probably going to be difficult to discuss in polite society…

  12. Mockingbird says:
    August 20, 2020 at 4:42 pm

    Hey Author, what happened to the nice little pigeon who used to fall over when the irony became too much to bear? Nature’s own little Irony Meter. Bring him back.

  13. jb says:
    August 20, 2020 at 4:57 pm

    I should also mention the well known observation by… um, somebody…, that “If you aren’t a liberal when you are young you have no heart; if you aren’t a conservative when you are old you have no brain.”

  14. Son of Glenner says:
    August 20, 2020 at 7:10 pm

    Mockingbird: I too liked the pigeon. But how did you know the pigeon was male?

  15. Mockingbird says:
    August 20, 2020 at 10:16 pm

    S of G.

    Us thorniologists know that female pigeons do not recognize irony.

  16. Anonymous says:
    August 20, 2020 at 11:34 pm

    Good one thanks

  17. Anonymous says:
    August 20, 2020 at 11:50 pm

    ozoid – The dem party is hardly socialist. Comparing to European countries and around the world – they are quite “centrist” (mostly) in their ideology. It is really the republican party that has drifted to the far right, embracing divisive ideology(racism, eg), conspiracy theories and more. The republican drift began before Trump appeared on the scene, although he has certainly exacerbated it.

  18. Author says:
    August 21, 2020 at 9:30 am

    Mockingbird and SoG – The pigeon is definitely female. I stole it from the brilliant New Yorker cartoonist Carolita Johnson, who used to read and comment here (maybe she still does – hello Carolita!). Here is the original.

  19. Rahn says:
    August 21, 2020 at 9:43 am

    I think it usually is Havel that is associated with the saying:
    “Follow those seeking the truth – but shun those that claim to have found it”
    And this goes for all kind of ideologies, including but not limited to religion and politics.

  20. Rahn says:
    August 21, 2020 at 10:06 am

    …Correcting my self: Voltaire not Havel

  21. Rahn says:
    August 21, 2020 at 10:59 am

    Now this is getting embarrassing…. The origin seems to be by Concordet, 1791
    “Les amis de la vĂ©ritĂ© sont ceux qui la cherchent et non ceux qui se vantent de l’avoir trouvĂ©e.”

  22. Mockingbird says:
    August 21, 2020 at 11:35 am

    Author and S of G: Carolita Johnson’s brilliant pigeon cartoon (thanks for that, Author) is funnier than you realize.
    Both the birds she has drawn are male. The fluffy one of them must be gay, which puts a whole new meaning to the lack of attraction and the cartoon. :o)

  23. Son of Glenner says:
    August 21, 2020 at 4:28 pm

    I was quite happy to think of the pigeon in non-binary terms and just call it “it”, until Mockingbird referred to it as “him”.

    I still like the pigeon and would be delighted to see it/him/her/them the next time J & M are on their park bench.

  24. Mockingbird says:
    August 21, 2020 at 10:15 pm

    Agreed, S of G. I’m coo, coo, cool with that.

  25. Paul Seed says:
    August 22, 2020 at 9:28 am

    Rahn: When a thing is worth saying, it is worth quoting. “Approved by Haval, Voltaire Concordel (and Rahn).” It has to be good.

  26. Rahn says:
    August 23, 2020 at 10:43 am

    @Paul Seed. Ha ha. Well ought to have been faster so I could have used the edit function… Anyway the first was an attempt to stop the initiated political debate in here.

  27. M27Holts says:
    August 23, 2020 at 2:42 pm

    Aye…Voltaire was an exceptionaly good mine of quotes. as for politics, it is as man made as religion, in fact I reckon that religion is just a branch of politics that invokes the supernatural to verify its claims….

  28. Rahn says:
    August 24, 2020 at 12:45 pm

    @M27Holsts Oh indeed. At the least ideological politics can be hard to separate from religions. My point was that in the comment forum debate on different political viewpoints would be as futile as if different religions debated theirs.

    Actually a lot of what we call science ALSO is based on some silent assumptions that people tend to forget. E.g. the math we use have some deep axioms, that we are so used to that we forget they are not proven (and some most likely not even provable) and thus get into the same realm as religions: Theories deduced from a base of assumptions.

    To put it very polemic, invented things like the “cosmological principle” and “constants of nature” are /assumptions/ from which we deduce the Big Bang based on what we see. and that does not differ a lot from assuming an invented omnipotent deity, could have created what we see.

  29. M27Holts says:
    August 25, 2020 at 8:34 am

    However, the maths is a tool that has proven to work to.give us space flight and my magnificent quantum LED giant telebob thingy….and if you insist that philosophically that Everything is just an illusion created by some omnipotent unknowable entity then you are basically allowing nuts to belleive that they can kill for their deity because that is as valid as unknowable mathematical proofs….

  30. Mockingbird says:
    August 25, 2020 at 9:39 am

    M27 – Yep. The cartoons here are quite good too, aren’t they? ?

  31. Son of Glenner says:
    August 25, 2020 at 9:47 am

    Nice Gordian Knot cutting comment by Mockingbird!

  32. M27Holts says:
    August 25, 2020 at 12:43 pm

    Aye very good cartoons….SOG, only those peeps with a classical education would know that alexander sliced the knot with his sword, very likely apocryphal, but a good reposte for those that espouse that violence is never a solution…?

  33. Rahn says:
    August 26, 2020 at 9:02 am

    @M27Holsts I’m not saying that math is not a good tool, but when we try to use a tool to it’s limits it might not give us the correct results.

    Newtons mathematical models works for all practical daily calculations, but yet is not accurate. The theory of relativity adjusts the model, and that broadens the fields where we get the correct results. But that does not mean that there are no needs for additional adjustments. When we by this models and our observations do back calculations to prove the existence of oddities as black holes, dark matter or the big bang theory as we know it, it MIGHT be correct, but it just MIGHT be that our model is not accurate enough to prolong roughly 100 years of accurate observation to back calculate billions of years….

    The point is that just like religious people the idea that anyone got the overall “truth” is dubious to say the least…. What we got is a best guess – based on our assumptions.

  34. jb says:
    August 26, 2020 at 10:21 am

    The fact that mathematics is such an effective tool for describing the natural world is in itself a deep mystery. There is no obvious reason why this should be so.

  35. BobT says:
    August 26, 2020 at 3:57 pm

    Enjoy the cartoons when I occasionally stick my nose through the door – thank you Author – but not being ‘jb’ I was a bit surprised to find I have ‘Click to Edit’ and ‘Request Deletion’ buttons on jb’s comment above. Are they meant to be there for anyone else to see / use ? Don’t want to break anything, so I don’t know if they actually do anything.

  36. Mockingbird says:
    August 27, 2020 at 5:53 pm

    Bob – Its really easy and foolproof, all you need to do is *SPLOINGG* .. .. oops !

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