WHAT IS THIS CRAP?

I made the mistake of reading the news this weekend and saw where there were riots in Afghanistan over Korans being included in the incineration piles at army bases, American troops were killed in those riots, and the locals are calling for more riots and attacks and murders and bloodshed.

Not a deliberate act of arson.
Not a deliberate policy decision.
Not a prime time publicity stunt provocation by some fringe fundamentalist preacher asshole.

Just a bureaucratic mistake.

And, yet, they still lost their shit and killed people, and want to kill more.

Over books.

Books special to them, certainly, but in the end: books. (I'm well aware that to me, they're just books, but to them, they're not just books, and you're welcome to toss all kinds of labels, terms, and barbs over cultural biases and such.)

So, with that in mind, let's ponder this image I posted to my mySL thread for a bit.

A book is burning.

What book is it? Well...

What if it's a Koran?
What if it's a Bible?
What if it's The Book Of Mormon?
What if it's Moby Dick?
What if it's an unspecified book?

And let's ponder how it got there...

Deliberately dragged and dropped there?
Rezzed in one location, but got dragged there by mistake when looping objects?

Any different?

Instead of a book, perhaps:

A baby?
George W. Bush?
The Burning Bush?
More wood?
A bale of marijuana?
A mythical salamander?

Or, let's ponder the following: What if it's just an entry in a massive database with fields laying out coordinates and size and textures in virtual space?

My take on it's pretty simple:

Paper burns. Books burn.

The world is not an oxygen-free environment. Stuff burns.

There's no sura or hadith saying "Store this in an oxygen-free environment" as far as I can recall.

If you don't want something burning, call up NASA and buy up their supply of heat-shield tiles from the grounded Space Shuttle fleet and use those to write on and bind into books.

Otherwise, one way or another, whether through bureaucratic fuck-up or Bashar Assad ordering his troops to shell mosques in Homs, those things are going to burn. (Oddly, nobody's bitching about those Korans burning. They're a bit too busy worrying about the people dying these. Weird, huh?)

*sigh*

There's some seriously fucked-up shit going on in the world, and when you try to call fucked-up shit for the fucked-up shit, those who cling to that fucked-up shit cling to it harder, and shit gets even more fucked-up.

And it's just going to get worse.

(Now if you'll excuse me, Menubar Memorial is chasing me with a scimitar because he thinks I'm trying to burn Moby Dick.)

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This entry was posted by -ls/cm on Monday, February 27th, 2012 at 10:24 and is filed under Who gives a rat's ass?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.