Archive for April, 2007

Okay, I know this news is a couple of days old. But I’m hoping its repeated posting here is enough to convince the small army of Hovindites who’ve descended upon this comment thread that the game is over, the jig is up, your boy is toast, and any further attempts to defend Kent by trotting out innuendos about government conspiracies or wondering whether the jail tapes are legal (they’re still up on YouTube; they are) isn’t going to change reality any more than Hovind’s “Dinosaur Adventure Land” dog park and its chintzy displays changed the reality that Earth is 4.5 billion years old and all its living things are descendents of a common ancestor. Go watch the video about the martial arts “qi” master again, getting pwned by someone who seems to be a thoroughly run-of-the-mill black belt. When fantasy meets reality, it’s like a squirrel on the highway meeting a semi. I do feel sorry for Jo, though.

As Pharyngula recently noted, Dinesh D’Souza has written a characteristically appalling opinion piece on the absence of atheists providing comfort to the bereaved Virginia students: “The atheist writer Richard Dawkins has observed that according to the findings of modern science, the universe has all the properties of a system that is utterly devoid of meaning. The main characteristic of the universe is pitiless indifference. Dawkins further argues that we human beings are simply agglomerations of molecules, assembled into functional units over millennia of natural selection, and as for the soul–well, that’s an illusion!” Over at Daily Kos, an atheist professor at Virginia Tech has written a beautiful and moving response: “We atheists do not believe in gods, or angels, or demons, or souls that endure, or a meeting place after all is said and done where more can be said and done and the point of it all revealed. We don’t believe in the possibility of redemption after our lives, but the necessity of compassion in our lives. We believe in people, in their joys and pains, in their good ideas and their wit and wisdom. We believe in human rights and dignity, and we know what it is for those to be trampled on by brutes and vandals. We may believe that the universe is pitilessly indifferent but we know that friends and strangers alike most certainly are not. We despise atrocity, not because a god tells us that it is wrong, but because if not massacre then nothing could be wrong.” … “You can find us next week in the bloodied classrooms of a violated campus, trying to piece our thoughts and lives and studies back together. With or without a belief in a god, with or without your asinine bigotry, we will make progress, we will breathe life back into our university, I will succeed in explaining this or that point, slowly, eventually, in a ham-handed way, at risk of tears half-way through, my students...
Read more

Lost amidst the media coverage of the VT shooter is this grim report from Turkey about an attack on a Christian publishing house, in which three people were tied up and had their throats cut. While Turkey is “officially” secular, it is only “secular” in that it is not an overt Islamist theocracy; sociopolitically, it may as well be. Ultra-right-wing nationalism is rampant, and these killings were carried out by just such a group of Islamist extremists. So here we have another case of people dying because of differences in belief about a nonexistent invisible man in the sky. And that’s it. It is sobering and disgraceful that in the 21st century, people still kill other people because of what they believe about their god. If the human race does not grow up sooner rather than later, reject these ancient superstitions, and embrace reason and reality, civilization as we know it will not make it. Deal with this: THERE. IS. NO. GOD. Full stop. So put down your guns and your knives and your bombs and learn to live with each other.

In the race to the bottom to see who can be the worst douchebag to comment self-servingly on the tragedy at Virginia Tech, I present the National Review‘s John Derbyshire, who seems to think that, had he been present at the campus when the shooter went on his rampage, he wouldn’t have been one of those emasculated pussies running for their lives or diving under desks. No ma’am! He would have leapt into action, somersaulting over desks, dodging bullets in mid-air like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, and taken the fucking gook out with a solid one-two punch, after which he would have been hailed as the hero of the day, carried around on everyone’s shoulders, and every sorority girl, Hooters waitress and cheerleader for 100 miles around would have been lining up to ball him. Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn’t anyone rush the guy? It’s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness’ sake—one of them reportedly a .22. At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Read more
Read more

Thru Americablog to Towleroad: Un-motherfucking-believable. Am I being Coulter-ish in wishing the VT gunman could have descended upon Westboro Baptist Church instead?