Civil Commotion

In the old days, if you wanted to be a martyr, you could count on finding a Roman soldier who would consent to crucify you, or a Coliseum event manager who would feed you to the lions. Fast forward fifteen hundred years, and despite the inevitable cultural decline, it was still possible to get yourself broken on the rack or burned alive. Now that was martyrdom.

But these days, the best you can hope for is a weekend in jail, while still collecting your $80,000 a year salary as a County clerk. Hunh. Next they’ll turn Purgatory into a theme park and give discounts on family night.

Robert Wolff

A Saudi engineer is reported to have said that the crane collapse which killed 107-worshippers in Mecca was an “act of god.”

Mecca: The collapse of a construction crane that killed 107 people at Mecca`s Grand Mosque was “an act of God” and not due to a technical fault, an engineer for the developer said Saturday.

The massive red and white crane, which crashed into the court of the mosque during a rainstorm and high winds Friday, also injured around 200 people.

Since it is hardly possible that a thorough forensic examination has been conducted, we can dismiss the remark out-of-hand as posturing. This wouldn’t be a bad time, though, to review the language with which we discuss these sorts of things.

Generally, for starters, engineers do not design against an imaginary “worst case scenario;” engineers design against the worst realistic loads as established by experience. I studied engineering in an area which routinely receives more than 200-inches of snow per year, for example, but engineers do not design roofs to support 16-feet of snow; after all, the storms which deliver all that snow are ordinarily accompanied by strong winds which blow the snow off the roof, and designing a roof which can carry that much snow would be prohibitively expensive and unnecessary.

Local building codes, based upon experience, establish how much snow the roofs must be designed to carry. So, too, wind loads. I don’t have the slightest idea what the Saudi building code calls for but, since other cranes in the area weathered the storm without incident, I doubt that the winds experienced during the storm were so freakish and unexpected that they could rightly be characterized as an “act of god.”

Second, as used by engineers, the word ‘failure’ has a very narrow meaning — that something did not perform as designed. The iconic example is the Titanic, which sank catastrophically but did not ‘fail’ because it wasn’t designed to survive a collision with an iceberg. So, too, the crane; it may have collapsed, but it ‘failed’ only if it was loaded by winds within the design range. Since Mecca is in the midst of a building boom and only one crane of dozens collapsed, I think it is quite likely that the loads were within design range and that its collapse was indeed a failure.

It is much too soon for a proper forensic examination to be complete, so all we can or should say at the moment is that we don’t know why the crane collapsed. Experience suggests the place to begin looking for a cause, however, is corrosion or fatigue at connections. That’s certainly the danger in America’s neglected infrastructure.

• The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille [William Jennings Bryan]; if it fails, they will devour it.

• It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

• An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.

• Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

• All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

• When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand.

• To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

• If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

• The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud.

• Once more, alas, I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the World’s contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

  True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. . . . They are free to shoot back. But they can’t disarm their enemy.

  The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us. . . . What should be a civilized man’s attitude toward such superstitions? It seems to me that the only attitude possible to him is one of contempt. If he admits that they have any intellectual dignity whatever, he admits that he himself has none. If he pretends to a respect for those who believe in them, he pretends falsely, and sinks almost to their level. When he is challenged he must answer honestly, regardless of tender feelings.

• By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists?

• No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

• Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe
anything upon insufficient evidence.”   — William Clifford

As Expected, House Committee Votes to Boot Courser and Gamrat

Honestly, I just can’t get over how overt Teavangelical persecution has become in this country.