Osama Bin Ladin's Niece: On Our Side, Apparently

She disclaims any real connection with the terrorist. She's just trying to get noticed in her career as a wannabe musician.

Not to get off on an anti-religious rant or anything. I'm not Bill From InDC, after all. Religion is terrific.

But some religions -- and some systems of totalitarian thought which are similar to religion in their promulgation of an all-encompassing worldview -- are downright grim and antihuman in their denial of basic human desires for small doses of joy, whether in the form of cheesecake pictures of a cute Persian chick or a ban on the playing of Layla in Iran.

To some extent, this helps the theofascists or run of the mill fascists (Nazis hated jazz, after all; that savage Negro music!), because if you've made everyone's lives so grim and miserable, they'll be more willing to blow themselves up for you. The less joyous life becomes, the cheaper it becomes as well.

But, on the other hand, you can only make people so miserable before they rise up against you.

It's true that in any repressive, grim system of thought and desire and minor-pleasure control, those who do the controlling allow themselves all of the pleasures they deny to everyone else. The 9/11 hijackers hung out at strip bars drinking alcohol (just researching the American way of life, I'm sure); the politically-connected in the Soviet Union got all the benefits of a capitalist, consummerist society. And of course the Saudi princes, who support the Wahabist cleric thought-control police, are infamous for their materialist, pharmacological, and sexual excesses.

So they're all set.

But what about everyone else?

Is there any way we can get David Hasselhof to start crooning in Farsi? After all, it was one of his songs that brought down the Berlin Wall.

Edited: I didn't just mean to speak of religion. I meant to speak of any coercive totalitarian thought-system. I've edited a little to reflect that.

posted by Ace at 01:47 PM

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