On certainty and doubt

We in the west are performing the experiment, for the first time in human history, of living without faith. And we’re a mess. We’re heavily medicated and in therapy, we’re addicted to anything we can get our hands on, fucking everything that moves, buying tons of ugly useless shit no one could possibly need, and making up wonky, jerry-rigged or retrofitted new religions even stupider than the old ones, all in a desperate effort to stop feeling so empty and afraid. I love us. I think we are heroic, even if we’re doomed. We are up against people who suffer no such spiritual malaise: they are flush with clear-eyed certitude, they think they know the mind and will of God, and they are wrong, wrong about absolutely everything. They are ignorant, bigoted, cruel, life-hating assholes. Doubt is no day at the beach, but certitude is more like a day at Dachau. That’s what certitude gets you: the Final Solution, Manifest Destiny, the Great Leap Forward, Jonestown. Evils so enormous it’s hard to believe mere human beings were their agents. We Godless infidels may a bunch of fuckups and addicts and flakes, but we’re better people than they are. If are only alternatives are existential confusion or Assholism, I know which side I’m on.

- Tim Kreider

Well that made me smile!

The Soviet Union was so Gay

I can't remember where I downloaded this Soviet propaganda poster but I've been meaning to share it for a long time. I believe it portrays a Red Army soldier being greeted with homoerotic joy by a 'liberated' Polish peasant during WW2 (beginning or end? Unclear). With the detail of the two forefront characters I can't help but wonder who modeled for the artist in that era.. or whether there's some sort of subversive or ironic message here. (Like the Brezhnev-Honecker kiss on the Berlin Wall.)