Let’s do the google+ thingie again, shall we? It’s been suggested that we talk about quackery, and that sounds good to me — there are a couple of recent news items about the placebo effect and good ol’ Burzynski that are giving me heartburn.
I’ll send out a general invite on Google+ to previous participants; if you want to join in, leave (or email) your Google+ name to me and I’ll chuck you into my Pharyngula podcast circle.
Hovind has been inducted into the Creation Science Hall of Fame, which is nothing but a website run by a crank. It seems a fitting honor.
I was amused that half the write-up about him had to consist of making excuses for the fact that he’s a jailbird, though.
The Creation Science Hall of Fame believes that Kent is in jail out of principle, and not deceit as per our discovery.
Kent Hovind is a tax protester. His is only one of many tax protests that Americans, from time to time, have lodged in the federal courts. Did Kent make mistakes during his attempt to prove his point? Yes, and he admits to them. None of us are perfect.
What the judicial system calls “tax crimes” was an attempt to invalidate the tax structure. In America at least, the simplest way to get standing to invalidate a law as unconstitutional is to break said law and suffer punishment for said breach. Kent Hovind gambled that he would find a righteous judge. He lost. And his experience bears witness to us all that our entire national judiciary is willing to accept disagreements on principle as illegal acts worthy of punishment. This is why the Creation Science Hall of Fame believes that Dr. Kent Hovind is in jail out of principle and not deceit and that he should be honored, especially among the Christians who believe in a super natural creation as described in Genesis by God.
He cheated on his taxes and lied about it; he made efforts to conceal his income by, for instance, making multiple bank withdrawals of less than $10,000 in order to avoid automatic reporting, and he also paid employees under the table to avoid having to pay taxes on that. He was not standing up for a principle, he was doing his damnedest to avoid getting caught lining his own greedy pockets.
(via Robert Baty)
Eric Hovind has shown up in the comments to claim that none of my allegations are true. However, the wikipedia summary of the charges is clear.
On July 11, 2006, Hovind was charged in the District Court in Northern Florida in Pensacola with twelve counts of willful failure to collect, account for, and pay over federal income taxes and FICA taxes, forty-five counts of knowingly structuring transactions in federally insured financial institutions to evade reporting requirements, and one count of corruptly endeavoring to obstruct and impede the administration of the internal revenue laws. Twelve of the charges were for failing to pay employee-related taxes, totaling $473,818, and 45 of the charges were for evading reporting requirements by making multiple cash withdrawals just under the $10,000 reporting requirement (a technique known as “smurfing”). The withdrawals, totaling $430,500, were made in 2001 and 2002. Jo Delia Hovind, his wife, faced 44 charges.
He and his wife were found guilty on all charges. Every one.
A 16 year old girl was reportedly drugged and gang-raped by football players in Steubenville, Ohio, and two people, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, have been arrested for it. And now a video has emerged of other players joking about the rape and helpless, unconscious state of the girl. Warning: the video is appalling, not only that they so demean another human being, but that the whole crowd thinks the “jokes” are funny.
This was done by football players. So of course, many people in town are rushing to defend the rapists, including coaches on their football team.
“The rape was just an excuse, I think,” said the 27-year-old Hubbard, who is No. 2 on the Big Red’s career rushing list.
“What else are you going to tell your parents when you come home drunk like that and after a night like that?” said Hubbard, who is one of the team’s 19 coaches. “She had to make up something. Now people are trying to blow up our football program because of it.
I spit on football culture. What should be just a fun game has become a focus for misogyny and abuse in far too many communities.
And I dare anyone who denies that rape culture thrives in the US to watch that video.
Good grief, the girl was unconscious and unresponsive, people were joking that she was dead, and onlookers couldn’t figure out that this was rape. She didn’t say “no,” after all.
Here’s a great summary of the 14 kinds of sexist commenters. It was amazing. I know all 14 of them! They keep showing up at my blog!
OK, people, you insisted and demanded and rebuked me for not watching Thunderf00t’s latest video, so I did.
It was a great steaming pile of dishonest, sleazy shit, disgraceful propaganda to serve the cause of sexism.
Guess what? I’m never taking your advice again. Jerks. What a waste of time.
At least one good thing has come out of it, though: Michael Nugent takes it apart piece by piece. I can tell he was as appalled by the shameful smears as I was.
I also hadn’t realized until I watched it that Thunderf00t concludes by calling on conference organizers to blackball Rebecca Watson, Melody Hensley, Amy Roth, me, and all those other people who want to make the events respectful of women. It’s truly remarkable. He’s been whining about censorship! and bannings! and FREE SPEECH! yet here he is, organizing his followers to bombard secular leaders to silence feminists. I haven’t seen anything remotely similar from our side of this argument, yet here is the champion of holy sacred FREE SPEECH calling on his mob to ostracize people he disagrees with.
His priorities are genuinely screwed up, and if anyone is guilty of hypocrisy, it’s Phil Mason. Michael Nugent gets it right:
Please consider channeling your passion for freedom of expression into our fight for the right of people to express their secular beliefs without being beaten or jailed or killed for blasphemy, instead of fighting for the imaginary right of the Wooly Bumblebee to call Melody Hensley a twat on YouTube without having her video flagged.
Once upon a time, there was a little paingod attached to humanity. It was mostly benign and useful; it was there to warn people not to step into that patch of thorns, that that spearpoint was sharp, that fire was hot, that you’d regret drinking that whole skin of beer in the morning. It brought with it the gift of empathy and forethought, as well, so the people were mainly well-served by its presence.
Humanity prospered and grew, and the paingod got ever busier; as societies got larger, not only were there more people experiencing or avoiding pain, but the complexity of their lives created new opportunities for pain. New diseases erupted in the denser populations, wars flared up between competing city-states, social stratification created breeding grounds for envy and contempt. The paingod also grew.
Now this is the thing about gods of all types: they are ambitious. They all aspire to be the greatest manifestation of their gift that they can be. After all, people had been defining god as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”, so there was definitely pressure to escalate — if it wasn’t the greatest of all possible paingods, then it really wasn’t a god at all, now was it?
But now comes the tricky part. The paingod served humanity, and that was also an essential part of its existence. It could not simply lash out and promote death and suffering, like a cartoonish cult in a cheesy sword-and-sorcery novel; no, it had to convince people that their personal pain was a great boon, get them to revel in it, and also get them to willingy define their existence by their suffering. Then the paingod would be the the ultimate deity!
And so was hatched a cunning plan. The paingod would ask everyone to give it their pain as a gift; it would present itself as a savior to the world, telling everyone that they can find salvation from the suffering they experience by consecrating it to the paingod, that it loved them so much that it would accept their burdens and bear them for humanity. And it spread a story that claimed the paingod took on the form of a man and suffered heinous torture and died in agony, just to prove it was willing to take on the very worst that people could offer.
It was actually true. The man, though, was symbolic; it was the paingod, and it experienced every death and felt every person’s agony. There was no sudden change in the paingod’s role, only a clever semantic twist: now you metaphorically bestowed your unhappiness on the paingod as an offering, and it was no longer your fault or your responsibility, or anyone’s responsibility, really. It was the paingod’s will. Your duty was to bear up under it, and thank the paingod for sharing it with you.
And so it came to be that the people accepted the paingod’s rationale. When the inequities of their society bore them down, they wouldn’t rise up to change them — they’d go to the paingod’s church and praise it. When the paingod’s acolytes enthusiastically embraced their role in giving charity — after all, the poor and hurting were clearly the most blessed of the paingod’s subjects — they subverted that role into one of maintaining poverty and disease. They would provide a quiet place for people to die as slowly as possible, every moment one of redemption as you shared your pain with the paingod.
Every improvement that reduced the people’s suffering was shunned, and every social change that might make pariahs appreciated for who they were was discouraged. The paingod rules, and the only way the paingod can grow in power is if the misery of our existence were made the central focus of our lives.
And now we live in the world the paingod made, and true to form, it’s a world of pain.
We can’t end the pain, but we can kill the paingod and end the cycle of reinforcement. We can own our pain. It’s not the god’s, it’s ours — we don’t reduce it by pretending to share it with a supernatural being. We cause pain in others, and we don’t minimize it by claiming our sins are redeemed by the paingod — we accept the fault as our own, and struggle to change and repair and redeem ourselves. Tell the paingod that nobody died for your sins, they can’t…because they’re yours. The suffering we cause, the inequities we propagate, the unfairness and misery of a world split between those who have and those who don’t, those are all our responsibility, and no one else’s, especially not a paingod who feeds on grief and regret and sorrow and harm.
You know, one of the tough things about being a jihadist is that you get all these…urges, yet all the freedom fighters around you are covered with beards and body hair. And of course, as a devout, pious Muslim you also want to maintain your purity. What to do, what to do?
An Islamic cleric has come up with an answer! A fatwa that sanctifies rape!
Muhammed al-Arifi, a Wahhabi religious cleric, officially calls this act an “intercourse marriage” that can last only a few hours – “in order to give each fighter a turn” — and restricts the men to Syrian females at least 14 years old, widowed or divorced.
Al-Arifi, expressed his annoyance at the "warriors of Islam" being denied sexual pleasures while fighting in Syria “alongside the armed opposition forces” for the past two years. He said this fatwa "solves [their] sexual problems" and “boosts the determination of the mujahideen in Syria and is considered a duty to enter paradise for those females who enter such marriages.”
Hey, rape victims! You weren’t being brutalized: you were entering a kind of marriage that will win you a spot in paradise once you’re dead!
This story has been retracted by the source.
I like the idea of MOOCs — massive open online courses — as ways to help spread the information at universities to a wider public. I don’t like the idea that these can replace real universities, though. It buys into the assumption that what universities deliver is big brains talking at a passive audience, when that’s only a small part of the experience. Scicurious is unimpressed, too.
Look, you want to learn? These online courses are a good supplement, and give you an opportunity to hear from experienced instructors. But if you really want to dig deep, there’s the disciplined grind as you try to master the minutia of a subject, there’s the hands-on lab experience, there’s give-and-take with peers and professors that you really need to bring it home. MOOCs just don’t do that.
