asshats

Trolling to be illegal worldwide (Updated: bill dead!)

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , , 11 Comments

Update: The below is mostly nullified as the bill was sent back to the House with amendments, but died anyway. Thank goodness. Of course, all the other non-trolling-related nonsense mentioned below still stands!

Well, if you happen to troll someone in Arizona, anyway.

Arizona House Bill 2549 passed both legislative houses last Thursday and is now awaiting approval from Arizona’s governor Brewer. The statute states that,

“It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use a ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.”

If the electronic devices and means are employed to stalk a victim, the penalty bumps up to a class 3 felony.”

Continue reading “Trolling to be illegal worldwide (Updated: bill dead!)” →

Trolling to be illegal worldwide (Updated: bill dead!)
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Ontario judge (maybe) to anti-choice activist: “You’re wrong and your God’s wrong”

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 37 Comments

Hat tip to Ibis3 for pointing this story out to me.

Apparently, according to “pro-life” news aggregator LifeSiteNews.com, Justice S. Ford Clements dispensed approbation judiciously to an anti-choice protester by the name of Mary Wagner who’s been harassing abortion clinic patients in violation of her probation. Dammit Janet reports:

[Wagner] was charged with mischief and two counts of failing to comply with probation orders (indicating previous brushes with the law, yes?).

She’d been harassing patients and workers at the Bloor West Village Women’s Clinic. But she’s not content to stand on the sidewalk with gory pictures; she enters the clinic with flowers, brochures, and counselling in-person harassment.

Continue reading “Ontario judge (maybe) to anti-choice activist: “You’re wrong and your God’s wrong”” →

Ontario judge (maybe) to anti-choice activist: “You’re wrong and your God’s wrong”

News flash: Rush keeps being Rush

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 9 Comments

As though this is any surprise. Despite his not-pology, despite his declaring that when he called Sandra Fluke a slut he was “being like the left”, he’s still on the attack — any woman who dares speak up about contraception is fair game to this man.

I seriously have no idea what it’ll take to finish this ass off once and for all.

News flash: Rush keeps being Rush

The Rush Limbaugh implosion continues apace

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , 16 Comments

Looks like Rush is getting his just desserts. Forty-plus advertisers have pulled their ads from Rush Limbaugh’s show, and the show itself has been pulled outright from two radio affiliates. At least two prominent musicians have told him not to use their music on his show ever again.

And somehow, it all continues to snowball.
Continue reading “The Rush Limbaugh implosion continues apace” →

The Rush Limbaugh implosion continues apace

The Lorax used to sell SUVs

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , 41 Comments

Via Badass Digest, easily some of the most cynical and tone-deaf marketing I’ve ever seen. Remember The Lorax? The Dr. Seuss classic with heavy environmentalist overtones? The story about how corporations will destroy the environment to make a buck and it’s entirely up to the reader to preserve said environment?

Well, Mazda apparently convinced the braintrusts behind the new movie to sell old Theodor Seuss Geisel’s soul post mortem.

I cannot imagine the estate of Dr. Seuss being cool with this. I’m certainly not. Way to take the mantle of the Once-ler, Mazda. Sure, an SUV is probably the most fuel-efficient way to transport six people, but seriously, what percentage of the time do you see an SUV that’s actually full?

Just… whargarbl.

The Lorax used to sell SUVs

Reports of gender roles’ death are greatly exaggerated

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , 7 Comments

Via Right Wing Watch, James Dobson and Bill Bennett mourn the death of traditional male gender roles, thanks to those meddling gays and feminists. If only those roles were actually dead!

Dobson: You’re concerned about manhood today, aren’t you?

Bennett: Yes.

Dobson: Especially in the Western world, we’ve forgotten what it means to be a man. And we’re not teaching our boy’s to be men. Why?

Bennett: That’s exactly right, because… moral relativism, the notion that there’s no right and wrong, who’s to say? The dizzying array of signals, the gay culture, which has confused an awful lot of boys, the message is there.

Dobson: The feminist movement has just hammered away at what manhood means.

Bennett: The feminist movement, remember Gloria Steinem, ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’ If you put on TV, if you go to the universities, if you check the popular culture, there is not a consistent message to boys about what it means to be a man, and as a result they’re confused.

Why exactly is it so hard for these people who are so anti-feminist to understand that there have been multiple waves of feminism, just as there has been multiple waves of the civil rights movement (including the fringe Black Panthers), and that not everyone in a movement believes as the fringe does? And that Gloria Steinem, with her criticisms of transsexualism and pornography and even of enjoying the company of men, by no means represents even a majority of feminists, much less all feminists in the movement? I mean, these are the same people who would throw violent right-wing Christian extremists under the bus for “not being true Christians” when they murder abortion doctors or gays. How is this difficult for them to comprehend, when they say the exact same thing when we talk about their violent fringe, and they demand that we not paint all believers with the same brush?

Forgetting what it means “to be a man” is not a bad thing. None of the things that these lackwits believe makes “a man” are intrinsic to maleness. I know too many women — heterosexual sex-enjoying women who wage constant war with this patriarchy we live in — who are more “man” by those standards than Dobson and Bennett. Likewise with gay men, who face oppression every single damned day just for enjoying cock regardless of what else makes up their personalities. Never mind that their other attributes are never in question, just their preference in genitalia.

Reports of gender roles’ death are greatly exaggerated

Moderation, censorship, and The New Stasi at FtB

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , 41 Comments

The latest imbroglio here at Freethought Blogs appears to be an ongoing systemic campaign of trolling and attempting to silence several voices via liberal application of a megaphone and a large and varied vocabulary of misogynist slurs and outright libel about certain individuals. One aspect of this campaign and one possible course of action that we’ve stumbled across, having had Franc Hoggle’s identity dropped into our laps by one of his real-life acquaintances, has repercussions that have drawn out a contingent of slimepit denizens to amp up the silencing campaign. I will refer herein to these crusaders collectively as “douchebags” or some variant thereupon.

So far, PZ Myers and Ophelia Benson have borne the brunt of the assault by the douchebags, though Stephanie Zvan is rapidly climbing the ranks of people being targeted. Greg Laden and I are thus far mere also-rans.

One of the things that I do around these parts is observe the larger knock-down drag-out fights, and pull out the side concerns — the little individual jabs and parries in conversations — and dissect them. During this ongoing fight, one of the largest bête noires raised by the douchetariat is the question of censorship. Specifically, that when one of them gets put into moderation for refusing to stay on topic or for outright flaming or spamming or otherwise disrupting conversation, they are being censored in violation of their freedom to douche publicly.
Continue reading “Moderation, censorship, and The New Stasi at FtB” →

Moderation, censorship, and The New Stasi at FtB

FFRF vs Creepy Pastor in Florida

Jason Thibeault, , , 4 Comments

It’s more than a little disturbing to me that this pastor is visiting an elementary school grounds on a weekly basis to lead the wee little kiddies in prayer.

Forget the separation of church and state for a moment — what non-scholastic adult visiting an elementary school on a weekly basis shouldn’t get visited by local cops?

FFRF vs Creepy Pastor in Florida

It might not get better after all.

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , 7 Comments

I love the “It Gets Better” campaign, started by newspaper personality Dan Savage. The message he has to deliver though, that bullying and oppression that you might experience by coming out as gay or transsexual or any other non-hetero orientation will eventually wane as others mature and learn to embrace plurality, might be… shall we say, inaccurate? Via sinned34’s blog:

President Obama to gay victims of bullying: “It gets better.”

Family Research Council to those same kids: “No, it doesn’t, you goddamned queers!”

Yeah. Really. Hardly any exaggeration there.

I honestly wish I was joking about this, but here’s the mailing the Family Research Council sent out recently.

EGADS! A homosexual extremist! I fully expect Dan Savage to strap on his pink Hello Kitty AK47 and bomb churches with fragmentation grenades shaped like dildos now! And I’m sure his terrorist attire would match his pumps, too! Seriously, people on the right throw around the word “extremist” to mean “people who advocate things that we don’t believe in”. It’s a pejorative that’s lost all meaning today, such that when you point to religious fundamentalists who stockpile guns and bomb buildings and call them extremists, the word just doesn’t capture their extremism any more.

The Family Research Council is not an extremist organization by any stretch of the imagination, but they are a religiously motivated single-issue political organization built around the idea that the only Biblically-acceptable family unit is one of man and wife, and any other family unit is evil and immoral. The people making up any non-heteronormative family unit are equally evil and immoral according to these chuckleheads.

Homosexuality, despite all the bloviating by these fools, is probably genetic.

The Family Research Council is therefore casting as a “moral failing” something that these children can no sooner control than they can control their handedness or hair color. Sure, you could train yourself to write with your right hand despite your natural inclinations; sure, you could dye your hair; but neither action will change your genetics. The fact that some really old book can be interpreted as saying that homosexuals are evil, doesn’t mean that anyone with that particular confluence of genes is actually evil. There’s nothing immoral (in the sense of “objectively harmful to society as a whole”) for people to be attracted to whomever they’re genetically predisposed to be attracted to. The only argument I’ve ever seen that might make it objectively harmful to society is one where you extrapolate out homosexual behaviour to the populace as a whole — if everyone were to switch to homosexuality, the human race would stop breeding and would die after a generation.

But that’s not what anyone’s suggesting here; what we’re suggesting is that we accept that proportion of the population whose genes direct them to be attracted to the same sex. We’re suggesting that you just live and let live. Love who you want to love. Tolerate who doesn’t love what you love. Be intolerant of people who are intolerant of others for stupid reasons like what genes they happen to have. Treat homophobes the same way as we’d treat someone who called being left-handed immoral and sinful. It is incumbent upon us to achieve a more perfect morality than the morality handed down by some goat-herders in the Middle-East who knew less about genetics than they did about the shape of the Earth or the orbits of the planets. We’re better than those morals. We deserve better than those morals.

Unless we can stomp out this bigotry, this intolerance, this hateful adherence to really old prejudices, then it might not get better. It’s up to us. Do we want it to Get Better? Because if we let bullshit like this slide, then it might not get better after all.

It might not get better after all.

This can only end in cruel and unusual punishment.

Jason Thibeault, , , 4 Comments

Via Mother Jones:

“We are not evacuating Rikers Island,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference Friday. Bloomberg annouced a host of extreme measures being taken by New York City in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, including a shutdown of the public transit system and the unprecedented mandatory evacuation of some 250,000 people from low-lying areas. But in response to a reporter’s question, the mayor stated in no uncertain terms (and with a hint of annoyance) that one group of New Yorkers on vulnerable ground will be staying put.

New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city’s evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B–all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.

According to the New York City Department of Correction’s website, more than three-quarters of Rikers Island’s 400 acres are built on landfill–which is generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters. Its 10 jails have a capacity of close to 17,000 inmates, and normally house at least 12,000, including juveniles and large numbers of prisoners with mental illness—not to mention pretrial detainees who have yet to be convicted of any crime. There are also hundreds of corrections officers at work on the island.

Read more. And remember what happened at Orleans Parish during Katrina.

Update: Compounding this questionable decision is this warning regarding potential electrical shutdowns throughout New York.

This can only end in cruel and unusual punishment.