joe:
Long story short; when a guy says that his wife isn't going to heaven, we get to stop paying attention to anything else that's coming out of his mouth. Like my boss says, "okay, good, maybe she doesn't want
to spend eternity with this jackass".

Concurrent joke (s borodoy).

Two friends, one a pious and moderate man and another a degenerate lecher, both die on the same day and go to heaven. The pious man is given a clous, a harp, and a halo. The impious one is given all of these, but in addition he is chained to a beautiful woman. One day, the pious man gets up the nerve to ask a passing angel why the lecher was thus rewarded, to which the angel scronfully replies, "Foolish mortal, how dare you question this woman's punishment?"

joe:
This stuff is all just as silly as your repeated debates with Inna about who was worse - KGB or CIA. Kant had this one right. Deontological ethics may be questionable on a personal level, but as far as government goes they're the only way to go. As soon as one country does something that no governemnt should ever do (i.e. suborning elections) it loses the right to bitch about any other country doing it. That's what NGOs are for. The question "who did it first?" or "who did it more?" is immaterial and indicative of a thought process more appropriate in the kintergarden playground than in political debate.

Ditto for this business about comparing genocides. Rape, torture, and large-scale murder have been part of recorded history since the dawn of - well - recorded history. Putting the Holocaust in it's own conceptual pigeonhole does nothing to ameliorate that situation. The rallying cry of "never again!" has become a sad little mockery of itself both within and without the state of israel, as well as within and without the Jewish community. Holocaust as a historical phenomenon for the Jewish people is, and always will be, important. Holocaust as a separate category of historical event may well have outlived its usefulness before it came into being.

  ¶ 9:33 PM