Facebook Responds

Facebook has responded to my email in which I asked why the ID account has been disabled. They are saying they cannot verify the ownership of the account, which is odd, since I am not using the name of a person, but my own website for the name of the page. Check out my correspondence with them:

To Whom It Concerns:

My (website’s) Facebook account—which I do not profit from in any way—was suspended without warning within the last two weeks. Although I had been warned in the past about requesting too many friends, I had not requested anyone in quite some time. While my page is not a personal page, it is nonetheless a vibrant forum of discussion for issues regarding politics and religion. I believe a disservice has been done to the hundreds of people who participate in that exchange. I would appreciate being informed as to why the account was disabled, as well as being told what steps I may take to remedy this issue.

Regards,

Max Canning

Hi,

At this time, we cannot verify the ownership of the account under this address. Please reply to this email with a scanned image of a government-issued photo ID (e.g., driver’s license) in order to confirm your ownership of the account. Please black out any personal information that is not needed to verify your identity (e.g., social security number). Rest assured that we will permanently delete your ID from our servers once we have used it to verify the authenticity of your account.

Please keep in mind that fake accounts are a violation of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Facebook requires users to provide their real first and last names. Impersonating anyone or anything is prohibited.

In addition to your photo ID, please include all of our previous correspondence in your response so that we can refer to your original email. Once we have received this information, we will reevaluate the status of the account. Please note that we will not be able to process your request unless you send in proper identification. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Thanks,

Zoe
User Operations Analyst
Facebook

Hello,

Thank you for you assurance that my scanned photo ID will be discarded by Facebook upon receipt and confirmation. However, I have learned to be very wary of such requests, even made by reputable outfits because I cannot guarantee my security will not be compromised. But I’m having a hard time understanding why this is necessary, considering that my Facebook page is not in my name, but in the name of my website. I am impersonating no one on my Facebook page, on which I only use my first name, Max. Second, I fail to see how a photo of me will help you considering that I have no photos of myself (or anyone else on the page or site). Since this is the email I used to establish the Facebook page which was linked to my website, if I post this correspondence on www.inebriateddiscourse.com (which you can verify) then this will clearly demonstrate that I am the proprietor of of both the website and its Facebook page. If verification of ownership is the issue, this will effectively remedy the problem.

Also, if I may ask, why all of a sudden was this account disabled? It has existed for almost a year. Why was it disabled now? I doubt you make this request of everyone, so I'm curious to know what the catalyst for this inquiry was.

I look forward to your response.

Max

Stay tuned.

The Lowdown On The Police

Although the motto of police departments across the United States is “To Protect and Serve,” the men and women who populate these departments are motivated neither by a desire to protect nor to serve. However, police officers are almost universally regarded as heroes in the who voluntarily place themselves in danger to ensure the public’s safety and well-being.

In reality, the motivations of those who become cops are far less noble than the popular narrative would have us believe. We have all grown up with or gone to school with people who later went on to become part of law enforcement. Their characters vary widely just like general population: a few of them were nice, a few quite stupid, and a few of them were downright assholes with major attitude problems.

In many departments the assholes undoubtedly run the show. Emboldened by their shameless union leaders, police in Massachusetts have taken to harassing civilian flaggers at construction sites. You see, once upon a time here in Massachusetts, the state legislature thought it would be a good idea to mandate that Massachusetts become the only state in the union to require the presence of police officers at construction sites to ensure “safety.” Of course, the only thing being ensured here is the existence of an unnecessarily fat stipend paid out for performing these police details. But recently the state did away with this requirement, paving the way for civilian flaggers to direct traffic around construction sites for cheaper pay. Unfortunately, police are still used for most projects across the state, but even this is too much for cops across Massachusetts who have become accustomed to being coddled by the state. The Boston Globe describes the most recent flap on this front:

Lynn Williams, a construction worker in a yellow vest, was standing in the middle of a South Boston intersection, holding a sign warning drivers to slow down, when police showed up and ordered her to stop, she said.

“They threatened to arrest me,” she said. “Wasn’t that nice of them?”

Within moments, according to the state’s top highway official, a project supervisor had pulled Williams away from assisting traffic to “deescalate the situation.” Police deny that they threatened to arrest her, but by the next morning, the civilian flagger had been replaced by a uniformed officer.

To protect and serve.

The tension has been simmering since October 2008, when Massachusetts became one of the last states in the nation to allow civilian flaggers to work at construction sites. In the weeks after the law was passed, police in some communities taunted civilian flaggers at construction sites. In Woburn, for example, where the first civilian flagger was used, 50 off-duty officers shouted down a union-represented civilian flagger, calling him a “scab’’ and “pathetic.”

To protect and serve.

The fact that these knuckle-dragging troglodyte cops shouted “scab’’ at the civilian flagger gives the lie to the claim that the police are in the main concerned about public safety. “Scab” is a term designated for workers who cross picket lines, not a person who endangers the public. And the worst part about this most recent incident is that the construction supervisor acquiesced to police intimidation. Here we have a woman doing a job as a lawfully-sanctioned civilian flagger, who is suddenly accosted by police officers who tell her stop doing that job and that they might arrest her. What a gross violation of the public’s trust. While this nonsense was occurring, it is a guarantee that any number of crimes were being committed across the city, and yet, a few officers take it upon themselves to browbeat a flagger, who, unlike police at construction sites, may not use a cell phone while on duty, and must be outside a vehicle. Cops on the other hand, may sit inside their vehicle if they are not directing traffic. Well, what’s the point of that?

And then there is Quinn Bill here in Massachusetts. Thankfully that awful piece of legislation has been significantly rolled back, as it provided police officers with extra pay for having associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees—an absurd provision especially in this day and age where every professional is expected to have some type of degree. The police also whined about this, insisting they be paid extra. It does not matter that municipalities across Massachusetts are broke because police unions will be damned if they allow the public good to factor into their collective bargaining decisions.

Readers of this site will know that I am generally a union-friendly person, and that I decide on the merits of unions on a case-by-case basis. But the police unions of Massachusetts have shown themselves to be some of the most selfish and pig-headed organizations in the state. “Entitled” is how I would describe police in this state, and probably all states.

Should any of this come as a surprise? Many cops have significant personality issues, which is what we might expect from the vanguard of state oppression. They drive souped up cars, carry guns, tasers, clubs, and when they say “Jump,” we civilians are supposed to say, “How high?” At sobriety checkpoints where police stop motorists who have done nothing wrong to ask, “Where are you coming from?” the proper response in any decent democracy with a respect for liberty and the right of the innocent to be left alone would be, “Fuck off…officer.” Instead we are to tell him that we are coming from our regular romp at the local swingers’ club, whose theme this week was S&M, and that we’re only sorry he had missed it. Even after the officer waves you through with all due haste and dispatch, we are left to feel somewhat violated because after all, he hadn’t a right to do that. Even though the Supreme Court has ruled that sobriety checkpoints are constitutional, we citizens know better: the state may never stop us without probable cause to ask us our business.

Police should not be universally hated, but they should not be universally praised either. Cops are just like you or me, except that at some point in their lives they decided, “I wanna be a cop,” and they went through some perfunctory training and took a simple exam and were given a badge and a gun. That is the only real difference between police and civilians. That, and a psychological urge to tell other human beings what to do.

- Max

Facebook Account Disabled

FYI: Please note that Facebook has disabled both of our pages. We have no idea why they did that. I have appealed to Facebook and hopefully they will un-disable (re-enable?) the page ASAP.

- Max

Catholic Priest Arrested For Soliciting Sex From...An Adult Female?

Recently just across the border in New Hampshire, a 31 year old Massachusetts Catholic priest was arrested as part of a prostitution sting. The priest was responding to a Craigslist ad posted by police who obviously had nothing better to do than to commit entrapment and fabricate a “criminal” act where otherwise one would not have existed. Now mind you, this priest thought he was soliciting sex from an adult female, unlike the pederast ministers within the Catholic Church who prey on little children.

The priest in question has taken a forced leave of absence, and when the case is concluded the Boston Archdiocese will pronounce sentence on him. But we need not look that far ahead to consider that this leave of absence is already harsher than what the Archdiocese meted out for John Geoghan and other child-rapists who were simply shuffled from parish to parish once they had sampled all the available prepubescent ass at a given location.

But the police are arresting the wrong preacher. What of Bernard Law—the disgraced former cardinal of Boston who now resides in the Vatican out of the reach of the American justice system? Or of any number of Church officials still in America who helped cover up sexual abuse? Or Pope Ratzinger himself? These are suspects who had many victims, even if they themselves were not the ones pulling the pants off the children. Prostitution on the other hand, is victimless. Degrading? Yes. Criminal? No.

And what of the Nashua, New Hampshire police who set this sordid trap? Do they not have enough real criminals to track? Isn’t New Hampshire’s motto “Live free or die”? I find it ridiculous that a person can walk around New Hampshire with a loaded firearm strapped to his waste without getting hassled by any John Q. Laws, but a man may not anonymously and privately solicit sex in exchange for money. Ditto for the woman who offers such services. Am I missing something here?

The great irony in all of this is that a woman is allowed to sleep with whomever she wants, as long as money is not involved. If she posts an ad offering free sex to any man who comes along, that is fine. But request payment, and it becomes a moral scandal worthy of criminal prosecution.

I do not understand this society.

- Max

America: Land Of The Free, Home Of The Anti-Intellectual

The surest way for an American to draw the suspicions of his compatriots—short of the commission of some heinous crime—is to develop an intellect whose existence he does not attempt to hide. A person of intellect need not flaunt his intelligence to elicit the ire of others; it is simply enough to let others know he possesses it. For not only is anti-intellectualism a rampant force in the country’s social and political circles, it is proudly practiced by its adherents. When a Palin denounces the president for being a “Professor-in-Chief” to uproarious applause, we know full well what is occurring in that sorry scene. In American politics education is not an asset but a liability, and strangely, good educations must be ignored or explained away by the candidates who have them. Bush the Younger was not elected because he was a good orator or because he came across as intelligent, or because he went to Yale and Harvard. He was elected because he was not a good orator and did not come across as intelligent. It was as if he had no instruction at an institution of higher learning whatsoever. As such, Bush was the quintessential American candidate: a Christian everyman, a politician without any intellectual baggage, and a man of fixed convictions who was incapable of seeing shades of gray, let alone green.

Like the European feudal lords who feared the potential ramifications of Gutenberg’s press, Americans give intellectualism all the due reverence of an influenza virus. To them it is an unfortunate fact of life and a potentially serious condition. It cannot be eradicated, and so it is recommended that the most vulnerable are vaccinated against its dangerous effects. In order to achieve this, the American is taught, as soon as she is able to comprehend and speak, that her country is god’s gift to humanity. To say otherwise is heresy, which is why—by this criterion—the universities are littered with apostates of the Americanist religion.

But are they? Without question, liberalism is the dominant ideology on American campuses of higher education. As polls consistently demonstrate, the more education one has, the more liberal he is likely to be. There are several reasons for this, but chief among them is the propensity of universities to teach students nuance and to refrain from drawing simplistic conclusions of an either-or variety. A competent professor of political science or history does not teach that the United States is wholly good while its enemies are wholly evil. Although this is a core principle of Americanism, these distinctions are not intellectually serious. Indeed, such rhetoric is common in the public discourse, and the dialogue always suffers immeasurably because of it. The American cannot examine a foreign policy question divorced from moral considerations. His inner puritan will not allow it. Thus it should come as no surprise that he regards American foreign policy as only motivated by the loftiest of intentions. Gott mit uns, always. And when some foreign venture fails miserably, such as the debacle in Southeast Asia or some other place Americans cannot locate on a map, it is due to some problem with Them, and not Us. As one bombastic television personality put it years later, “The South Vietnamese didn’t fight for their freedom.” Apparently, it matters not that the South Vietnamese were busy being bombed, sprayed with Agent Orange, and rounded up into concentration camps called “strategic hamlets,” by the Americans. According to Americanism, if the United States ever fails, it is most likely due to a foreign culprit.

Despite the perception that the universities are incubators for anti-Americanism, they are often the source for reinforcing the inherently honorable nature of the American state. The phrase “American Exceptionalism” entered the public discussion during the 2008 presidential campaign in a few fleeting references. However, a rather significant contingent of university professors fervently believes in this ethnocentric doctrine which, despite its presentation as a novel theory, is as old as the oldest empire in the annals of history. There are many ways in which America is “exceptional,” just as there are many ways in which France and Brazil and Indonesia are “exceptional.” But the proponent of American Exceptionalism means something more specific (but still nonetheless vague)—that the United States holds a special place among nations in world history with its commitment to republican values and its benevolent foreign policy designed to free the unfree from the treacheries of tyranny.

Any honest American with a modicum of sense will immediately see the self-serving nature of this doctrine. Second, she will recognize that the reality of American history fights this theory every step of the way. The Founders of the country have achieved a mythical status and are regarded as supremely moral geniuses who loved liberty and freedom more than anything else. But what exactly is exceptional about a collection of white male property and slave owners in the 18^th century gathering to form a government that excluded blacks and women, and who wrote a clause into their founding document declaring that a slave is three-fifths of a person? What is so exceptional about a nation that provoked a war with its neighbor in order to acquire its territory in an exercise euphemistically called Manifest Destiny? What is so exceptional about a global hegemon insisting that it is indeed exceptional? This is why American Exceptionalism is a stale tale. It is simply a recycling of the Pax Romana, of the Pax Britannica, of any number of nationalist narratives that paint the hegemonic home country as a beacon of progress and civility for the rest of the world to emulate. But if the country’s founders had freed the slaves, or if they had given women the right to vote, then we should certainly consider those acts “exceptional,” as they would have defied the norms of their day.

Whenever the Founders are brought up in some discussion by talking heads, they are always invoked to justify some sort of policy, regardless of what the Founders actually thought. When recently a former House Majority Leader was asked how he could cite the Federalist Papers to advocate for states’ rights when one of its authors proposed a plan that would have given the national government veto power over the actions of the states, he responded simply by saying could not believe that was so. Of course it was so, and the matter is hardly a secret and is well-known to those with even a superficial knowledge of the Founding. This misinformation and lack of historical knowledge is not an accident. It is the natural product of a society that shuns intellectualism and embraces revealed wisdom, which is promulgated by the ideological torchbearers of Americanism who know as much history as the yokels they pander to with their platitudinous declamations.

- Max

Of Christians And Atheists

A recent survey has confirmed what is already well-known: that Americans are a hopelessly religious lot, given to infantile delusions about their place in the cosmos and a penchant for believing the utterly implausible.

The poll found that 78% of Americans believe that not only did Jesus exist, but that he rose from the dead, a feat that was most notably replicated by the estimable Dr. Frankenstein. Like the barely literate ignoramuses who assembled the tall tale of Jesus, Dr. Frankenstein created his monster from an assortment of discarded parts, which, by their individual selves, were hardly remarkable in any sense. But with a few serendipitous tweaks and revisions, the good doctor struck the perfect combination and brought his beast to life.

So it went with the gospels, a collection of third, fourth, and one hundredth-hand hearsays about the alleged miracles of Jesus. Realistically, if he existed at all Jesus of Nazareth was most likely little more than an eccentric preacher, and thus by definition a charlatan. The gospels were written at different intervals, but all were penned at least fifty years after the death of Christ, which is plenty of time for the notable peculiarities of one man to morph into a fantastic story about the savior of humanity; and more than enough time for the countless clueless of antiquity to warm up to it.

A short meditation on this score: Most of us have played some version of “telephone” as children, whereby one child starts by whispering a statement to another, and that child whispers it to another, and so on and so forth. When the last child receives the news, she is to repeat aloud what she has just been told for all to hear. Very often the final statement is so bowdlerized, so misinterpreted and tinkered with, that it hardly resembles the opening remark if at all. Quite naturally, the likelihood of a sentence becoming lost in translation increases when there are more players. Now imagine a game of telephone that starts not with a statement, but a vague anecdote. Imagine also thousands of players, most of them illiterate and gullible. And suppose the game takes place not over a few minutes or over the course of an afternoon, but instead for more than a half-century. I should hope we do not need the informed opinion of a child to surmise that the fruits of this grapevine would be very rotten indeed.

The lack of contemporary extrabiblical sources accounting for Jesus does not bode well for this already extraordinary tale’s veracity. Indeed, the evidence on which Christians base their faith is put to shame by the available data speaking to the existence of the elusive chupacabra. Nonetheless, that hardly prevents 81% of Americans from believing that Jesus was sent earthward by god to serve as a child sacrifice so that humans could be absolved of their inherently wicked ways.

Naturally, these statistics are reported in earnest by the reputable media, no members of which deign to remark on the absurdity of the figures. Of course, with more than four-fifths of the general population having bought this sordid story of vicarious redemption, believers are going to be everywhere, including the media. But it is the political ramifications of this idiocy that produces the worst kind of mischief.

Article VI of our Constitution states, “[N]o religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Yet such examinations are given all the time, informally, by the virtuous and faithful populace which demands that the metaphysical beliefs of public officials do not stray too far from what the collective wisdom deems “normal.” That is to say, Christian. Failing that, a belief in a god of some kind is necessary. One survey indicated that Americans are less likely to vote for an atheist than a Muslim candidate, which is puzzling for this observer since he cannot recall any atheistic terrorists waging jihad against the United States.

But mere belief in the proper deity does not always suffice to convince the masses of one’s virtue. It is often necessary to persecute some group or vice in order to demonstrate an adequate level of religious commitment. No longer is it considered appropriate in America to target Jews, or Mormons, or even Muslims. Thus xenophobia, a constant presence in American society from the moment the Europeans arrived, manifests itself in other ways more acceptable to so-called good society. Atheists are always a reliable whipping post, because while it is inappropriate to attack a man because of his religion, it is only right and godly to scold him for his lack of one.

- Max

Christopher Hitchens Calls Pope "Institutionally Responsible" For Child Abuse Coverups

I Have Seen The Light And It Is Christ (*April Fool's)

Our Savior

Although I haven’t posted in a few days, there is a reason for my brief hiatus. For the last several days I have undergone a remarkable personal and spiritual transformation. It all started on Sunday when a friend whose father recently died asked me to attend his church for a service dedicated in his honor. I was reluctant at first, but I came to realize that it would be kind of dickish of me to refuse the request of a grieving buddy. Besides, my friend isn’t really that religious, but just wanted to attend the sermon at his father’s church.

As I sat in the pew, my mind drifted in and out of the sermon being delivered by the oddly-proportioned preacher before me. He was a balding man, short and bespectacled like an evangelical George Costanza. And he was just as animated.

“We all deserve death,” he began what was to me a very strange way to start a sermon dedicated to a churchgoer who just died. “Every last one us. But through the grace of God, and the sacrifice of His Son, we are rescued from the darkness of death and are allowed to bask in the righteousness of His light.”

We all deserve death. Interesting.

“And in His light, all our desires are fulfilled. All our questions are answered. All our suffering is ended. If we glorify God during our life, he will surely glorify us upon our death.”

I’d like to be glorified, I thought.

“Not to glorify God during life is to fail God,” Pastor Costanza continued. “It is to do disobey him. It is to disgrace him. It is to turn your back on God. God will not tolerate the prideful because pride is Satan’s best friend. And pride goeth before the Fall.” He then proceeded to remark how my friend’s dad was one of the most unprideful people he had ever met.

For some reason I cannot explain, the sermon was resonating with me. And I could have sworn that the giant cross on the wall above the minister began to radiate, as if surrounded by an aura of that light he had just been talking about. I rubbed my eyes and even shook my head a couple of times, but the aura remained and seemed to pulsate correlative to the intensity of the pastor’s message. My brain felt numb, as if high on drugs, but this was no substance-induced high. This euphoria was not a natural phenomenon. The warm feeling that washed over me that day was nothing short of an otherworldly experience, no doubt brought on by unerring truth of the words emanating from the stocky and unassuming man at the front of the church. Had he been more charismatic, I might have chalked up the entire experience to the skillfulness of the messenger. But there was nothing remarkable about this preacher, which seemed to lend legitimacy to the very strange yet uplifting experience I was so gleefully enjoying.

After the sermon I went home and consulted my Bible, which up until then I regarded as a work of literature only. I reread the Gospels and to my surprise, found that they actually made sense to me for the first time in my life. Not only did they make sense, but the truth of them seemed so obvious that I wondered how I could’ve been so stubbornly resistant to the Word. The reason was my pride, and like the pastor said, pride goeth before the Fall.

At that moment, I told myself that I would refuse to fall. Right there on the spot where I had been reading the Bible in my kitchen, I knelt on the hardwood floor and prayed to Jesus and begged him for forgiveness for having been such a prideful fool. Only weeks before I was telling a relative how I was utterly incapable of believing the “nonsense” in the Bible. Praise be to Jesus that I was wrong.

I am now glad to call myself a slave to Christ. I am here to serve Him and no other. Thus, in good conscience, I cannot contribute to this website any longer. It is embarrassing for me to go back and read the awful things I said against God, and I hope that Wolf will understand why I want to take them down. In the meantime, I am working on a new blog designed to spread the good news of Christ’s sacrifice. I will work tirelessly to make sure his message is heard loud and clear. I know many of you will be upset by my “conversion.” However, I can only ask you respect that I have had an epiphany that I can only hope will lead to a fulfilling life that is devoid of the rank cynicism that has hardened my heart for much of my life.

Thank you and God Bless,

Max Canning