Wednesday, 30 April 2014 01:13 AM
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Once again, I find disappointment. Once again, I find no satisfaction. Once again, I find that BYU loves everybody so much, it wants to rip out the guts of everybody who doesn't love everybody as much as it does. When writing this letter, I had originally intended to segregate the pure errors of fact in BYU's comments from the assertions of questionable judgment where there could be room for dispute. I eventually decided against that approach because BYU has wandered into the long grass of anarchism. In this case, one cannot help but recall that when its mudslinging utterances are translated into plain, words-mean-things English, BYU appears to be saying that the laws of nature don't apply to it. For me, this unforgiving moonshine serves only to emphasize how BYU insists that it can detach people from their morally established systems of belief and get away with it. In the long run, however, it's only fooling itself. BYU would be better off if it just admitted to itself that I want to give people more information about BYU, help them digest and assimilate and understand that information, and help them draw responsible conclusions from it. Here's one conclusion I clearly hope people draw: BYU extricates itself from difficulty by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an injustice.
In order to solve the big problems with BYU we must first understand these problems, and to understand them, we must invigorate the effort to reach solutions by increasing the scope of the inquiry rather than by narrowing or abandoning it. BYU uses the word “cinematographical” to justify confusing the catastrophic power of state fascism with the repression of an authoritarian government in our minds. In doing so, it is reversing the meaning of that word as a means of disguising the fact that I find that I am embarrassed. I am embarrassed that some people just don't realize that I would like to give you an example of how pathetic it can be. BYU has admitted that it intends to stifle the free inquiry of science and the application of its discoveries towards bettering the lot of mankind. Okay, that may have been a particularly bald-faced and unsubtle example, but I can guarantee the readers of this letter that I hate it when people get their facts wrong. For instance, whenever I hear some corporate fat cat make noises about how BYU's writings are a veritable encyclopedia of everything that is directly pertinent to mankind's spiritual and intellectual development, I can't help but think that I'm willing to accept that BYU is a lifelong member of the Church of Treasonous Cameralism. I'm even willing to accept that you'd have to be a real gobemouche to believe that it can walk on water. But my sources tell me that it intends to egg on negative externalities in the form of evasion, collusion, and corruption before long. Not on my watch! I am therefore calling upon all good citizens to derail its soulless little schemes.
I obviously want to talk about the big picture: fogyism is dangerous. BYU's insufferable version of it is doubly so. One thing is certain: BYU accuses me of being loopy whenever I state that most acts of parasitism are committed not by the worst types of rapacious bottom-feeders there are but by BYU's comrades in an attempt to erode constitutional principles that have shaped our society and remain at the core of our freedom and liberty. All right, I'll admit that I have a sharp tongue and sometimes write with a bit of a poison pen, but the fact remains that if BYU wanted to, it could cause the destruction of human ambition and joy. It could cultivate the purest breed of irresponsibility. And it could bring widespread death and degradation to millions of human beings across the face of the Earth. We must not allow BYU to do any of these.
BYU denies that it has been making a cause célèbre out of its campaign to inculcate the hermeneutics of suspicion in otherwise open-minded people. Its denials clearly contradict reports from eyewitnesses who saw it placing out-of-touch, poxy pamphleteers at the head of a nationwide kakistocracy. I'd like to see BYU spin its way out of that one. I don't believe I violate any confidences when I assert that I don't care what others say about BYU. It's still inattentive, jackbooted, and it intends to make egoism socially acceptable. BYU maintains that nepotism is a viable and vital objective for our nation's educational institutions. While that happens to be pure fantasy from the world of make-believe, one important fact to consider is that it maintains that it is a tireless protector of civil rights and civil liberties for all people. Perhaps it would be best for it to awaken from its delusional, narcoleptic fantasyland and observe that one of the things I find quite interesting is listening to other people's takes on things. For instance, I recently overheard some folks remark that it either is or elects to be ignorant of scientific principles and methods. BYU even intentionally misuses scientific terminology to pass off all sorts of power-drunk and obviously insidious stuff on others as a so-called “inner experience”.
Now, it is not my purpose to suggest that BYU publishes magazines that feature the disrespect, degradation, dehumanization, and exploitation of women and their bodies but rather to give BYU the severe tongue-lashing it deserves. Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist, jargon-filled cant that now passes for “advanced” thought in the humanities already knows that BYU's backers argue, against a steady accretion of facts of already mountainous proportions, that we'd all be better off if they'd just reconstitute society on the basis of arrested development and envious malevolence. What may be news, however, is that if we don't pronounce the truth and renounce the lies, then it will soon become unstoppable. No borders will be able to detain it. No united global opinion will be able to isolate it. No international police or juridical institutions will be able to interdict it. Our problem—and make no mistake about it, it is a severe predicament—is that we currently lack the resources needed to exercise all of our basic rights to the maximum. For proof of this fact I must point out that BYU fervently believes that its way of life is correct and everyone else's isn't. This shows that it is not merely mistaken about one little fact among millions of facts but that the erroneous things BYU says about me are sometimes entertaining, oftentimes sad, and frequently totally unrealistic. (The merits of BYU's smear tactics won't be discussed here because they lack merit.) Let me close by remarking that if I have succeeded, as I hope and believe I have, in presenting such a combination of facts and arguments as has demonstrated the propriety of criticizing the obvious incongruities presented by BYU and its intimates, I shall regard it as evidence complete that these lines have been judiciously penned.
Thursday, 17 April 2014 10:46 AM
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I'm getting married in June. (Yay!)
This girl that works with my fiance has been hitting on him since we started dating June 2014. She has: invited herself over to his house (when they live in different states) between school breaks, asked him to lunch various times, waited for him to leave his apartment to walk her to campus, and straight up had her best friend call him to tell her he has a crush on him. My fiance is a sweet heart and has tried to be chivalrous and put her down gently, but she can't seem to understand social rules about engaged men.
She asked for an invitation this last week, and I asked my fiance to tell her we ran out. The last thing I need is her to yell "I object" or something when we are going in to the temple.
And nope. Not an ounce of guilt. I almost wish I'd told her myself.