Tag: Quotes

Hamm Fisted

I’ve never seen an episode Mad Men. I can’t recall seeing Jon Hamm act in anything, but I am a recent fan. This past month Jon Hamm was quoted in an Elle UK interview as saying,

“We’re at a place where the idea of being ‘elite’ is somehow considered a negative.

“Whether it’s Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian or whoever, stupidity is certainly celebrated.

“Being a fucking idiot is a valuable commodity in this culture because you’re rewarded significantly. And incuriousness has become cool… It’s celebrated. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

Bravo, Mister Hamm for speaking your mind and speaking the truth.

A few days after the quote was made public, as is to prove his point, Kim Kardashian tweeted this,

“We’re all working hard and we all have to respect one another. Calling someone who runs their own businesses, is a part of a successful TV show, produces, writes, designs, and creates, ‘stupid,’ is in my opinion careless.”

Apparently, Ms. Kardashian isn’t aware that, in a free country you don’t HAVE to respect anyone you don’t want to respect or that working hard and being intelligent do not necessarily go hand in hand.

Oh, but the drama is not yet over. When pressed, Hamm did not back down from his original statement. On a recent Today show appearance, Hamm responded to Matt Lauer’s bringing up Kardashian’s rebuttal to his comments thusly,

“I don’t think they were careless; I think they were accurate, It’s a part of our culture that I certainly don’t identify with, and I don’t really understand the appeal of it other than in a sort of car crash sensibility, and it’s not something that I partake in or enjoy, but it is what it is, and here we are.”

Again, Bravo to Mister Hamm for not backing down from his opinion just because someone took offense.

I may never see Jon Hamm in an acting role, but I will remain a fan if he continues telling it like it is and battling against the celebration of ignorance in American society.

Ironically, Paris Hilton wisely chose to keep her mouth shut on the matter.

*Note- All puns were intended.

The GOP from one Canadian’s perspective

Yesterday, I came across the following quote, attributed to GOP candidate, Rick Santorum.

“It has been my experience that when dealing with females, you need to treat them as though they have a mental disorder… especially those that are constantly seeking equality in the workplace, the military, and in the home. Women need to know their place and need to know when it is okay for them to speak. They were put on this earth for two reasons, and two reasons alone: taking care of their husband, and giving birth to his children… that is all. Any woman who tells you otherwise is obviously touting the liberal agenda of equality, and they need to be told the truth of their purpose. It is a disorder that can be fixed, but not until they go through several years of therapy to understand that they need to be subservient.” 

I have since been informed that the quote is fictitious. To which I responded “Can you blame me for not putting it past him?” After all, this is a man who gave us such bon mots as,

“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country…. Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

and

“In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don’t both need to. … What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else — or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon — find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism.”

He doesn’t exactly come off as woman friendly. Sadly, he’s not the only one. The entire Grand Old Party is seemingly waging a war on the American Woman, or more specifically, feminists. It seems that Republicans want their women to be docile and subservient, do as they’re told types who don’t challenge what rich, white, old men tell them is the way things should be. To which I say maybe you should move to Stepford… but, oh no, Stepford doesn’t exist, and neither does the female ideal you pine for.

Newt Gingrich had this to say about women on the front lines of war,

“If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for thirty days because they get infections and they don’t have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they’re relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn’t matter, you know. These things are very real. On the other hand, if combat means being on an Aegis-class cruiser managing the computer controls for twelve ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.”

Then there’s this tidbit when speaking to a friend about why he was divorcing his first wife,

“She’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a President. And besides, she has cancer.”

Mitt Romney fired off these beauties regarding reproductive rights,

“As president, I will end federal funding for abortion advocates like Planned Parenthood.”

“I am pro-life and believe that abortion should be limited to only instances of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. I support the reversal of Roe v. Wade, because it is bad law and bad medicine. Roe was a misguided ruling that was a result of a small group of activist federal judges legislating from the bench.”

Is it any wonder that I was so easily duped into thinking that the first quote was a real quote and not a parody?

**All caricatures were brilliantly done by Donkey Hotey  http://donkeyhotey.wordpress.com/

People with Gods

Each day on Twitter, I post my quote of the day tweet. The other day, the quote I posted was, “Gods don’t kill people. People with Gods kill people.” – David Viaene. One of the responses I got to this quote was, “people without Gods hold it down in the killing dept just as well. It’s a human problem.”

While I take no issue with the fact that there have been many killings done at the hands of people without Gods, the problem I have with the above statement is with the phrase, “just as well”. I decided to do a little research on the subject and here is what I came up with.

While there is really no way to tally the amount of individual murders committed by individual atheists, there are some numbers to be found when one looks at State Atheism, for instance in Mexico, under President Plutarco Elias Calles, there were at least 40 priests killed between the years 1926 and 1934. In the Soviet Union, Marxism-Leninism ideology sought to eliminate religion from the state entirely. In the period between 1922 and 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox Bishops and more than 1200 priests were killed. In Cambodia, under the Khmer Rouge, the estimated death toll is between 740,000 and 3 million. In the Mongolian People’s Republic, the Soviets launched a full-scale attack on Buddhism in 1936 where between 30,000 and 35,000 lives were lost. In North Korea, in the late 1940’s 166 priests and religious were killed or kidnapped. Using the high estimates, the total adds up to 3,036,434 deaths. Which, is a very substantial number.

On the side of people with Gods, I am only including the tally of one  mass killing.  The Holocaust, which took place between 1938 and 1945. Christians like to tell you that Hitler was an atheist, but, by all accounts, Hitler was a Catholic raised, Christian who espoused his belief in Jesus Christ (albeit an Aryan Jesus Christ), which makes him a man with a God. “As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.”- Aldof Hitler  There were 5.9 million Jews, between 2 and 3 million Soviet POWs, 1.8 to 2 million Poles, between 220,000 and 1.5 million Romani, 200,000 to 250,000 disabled people, 80,000 Freemasons, between 20,000 and 25,000 Slovenes,  5,000 to 15,000 homosexuals, and between 2,500 and 5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses killed in the Holocaust. Even using the low estimates, the death toll is 10,227,500 or more than 3.3 times the number killed by Atheist States in 5 different instances.

The reason to only include the Holocaust on the side of men with Gods was because, all of the Atheist State examples I used were from the 20th century and I didn’t want anyone crying unfair if I used examples like the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Thirty years War or the French Wars of Religion, which all took place in  different eras, when people were not as enlightened as they were in the last century.

I do agree that killing is part of human nature, and I am positive that, even without a belief in any sort of deity, people would find something to fight about on a mass scale. My point here is that belief in a god seems to be a pretty popular reason to kill people. Here’s a question to think on… is God the reason, or the excuse?