{"id":5963,"date":"2011-12-22T09:23:39","date_gmt":"2011-12-22T09:23:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/12\/22\/links-for-2011-12-22\/"},"modified":"2011-12-22T09:23:39","modified_gmt":"2011-12-22T09:23:39","slug":"links-for-2011-12-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/12\/22\/links-for-2011-12-22\/","title":{"rendered":"Links for 2011-12-22"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href='http:\/\/whatever.scalzi.com\/2011\/12\/21\/17117\/'>Reminder: Tis the Season Not to Be an Ass \u00c4\u009b\u00c2\u00b0\u00cb\u009d\u00e2\u0082\u00ac&#8221; Whatever<\/a>\n<p>But &#8212; but &#8212; what about all those horrible atheists taking over holiday displays with crucified Santa skeletons? Surely that&#8217;s evidence of a war! Well, no, it&#8217;s evidence of some non-believers taking a page out of the PETA playbook, i.e., being dicks to get attention and to make a point. I do strongly suspect that if we didn&#8217;t have some certain excitable conservatives playing The War on Christmas card when a business says &#8220;Happy Holidays&#8221; rather than &#8220;Merry Christmas,&#8221; and such, there would be less incentive for certain excitable non-believers to make a public show of desecrating Christmas symbols, but that&#8217;s just an opinion and I don&#8217;t have anything to back that up. What I do know is that the War on Christmas crusaders and the Santa crucifiers deserve each other; the rest of us, unfortunately, have to watch them both make public asses of themselves.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href='http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2011\/12\/20\/i_knew_christopher_hitchens_better_than_you\/'>I knew Christopher Hitchens better than you &#8211; Satire &#8211; Salon.com<\/a>\n<p>In the annals of history, only Orwell, Voltaire and maybe a half-dozen other guys could match&#8217;s Hitch ideological bravery and breadth of political knowledge. In 1977, after I&#8217;d returned to his graces by aiding him in a plot to assassinate Henry Kissinger&#8217;s character, Hitch and I visited Borges&#8217; library in Buenos Aires. At the time, Hitch was working for the KGB while pretending to work for the BBC, and I was working for the Mossad while pretending to work for Burger King. But our many identities were merely covers for our lives as political writers at low-paying magazines. Borges invited Hitch and me into his home, fed us tea and empanadas, and launched into a seamlessly brilliant discourse on surrealism in Latin American history. He talked for 30 minutes without stopping, during which time Hitch smoked six-dozen cigarettes. When Borges finished, Hitchens paused, spat in his ashcan, and said, &#8220;Of course, you know, you&#8217;re wrong about everything.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reminder: Tis the Season Not to Be an Ass \u00c4\u009b\u00c2\u00b0\u00cb\u009d\u00e2\u0082\u00ac&#8221; Whatever But &#8212; but &#8212; what about all those horrible atheists taking over holiday displays with crucified Santa skeletons? Surely that&#8217;s evidence of a war! Well, no, it&#8217;s evidence of some non-believers taking a page out of the PETA playbook, i.e., being dicks to get&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/12\/22\/links-for-2011-12-22\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Links for 2011-12-22<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links_dump","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}