I was out all day, so the last thread got a little full…here’s a new one!
(Episode CCLXXXVIII: Haute cuisine)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I was out all day, so the last thread got a little full…here’s a new one!
(Episode CCLXXXVIII: Haute cuisine)
Fresh thread, mmmmmm.
Here in ND, every other 40/50something man has long hair. Lotsa hippies here.
Caine, I’ll 2nd that. (Ewww, I got the santorum spot)
‘Bout damned time, PZ. :p
@Bill
This is how I viewed GWB. Twice. I was wrong both times.
Also thought this about Harper getting a majority. Was wrong then too.
—
On a brighter note: Yay! Leafs won. Now I’m going to go to bed early and finish the last of my book (Canadian pre-First World War poetry that I’ve been reading off and on since the summer). Talk to you tomorrow.
Adam & The Ants, that is a guilty pleasure for me.
Antmusic
Kings Of The Wild Frontier
Stand And Deliver
Dog Eat Dog
I can’t believe I love those songs. Go figure.
Am I the only one watching Modern Times on TCM?
Well, if you don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?
Ibis:
The current crop of Republican presidential candidate hopefuls is a whole hell of a lot scarier than Bush was during his first campaign, IMO.
I don’t care what anyone says, Charlie Chaplin was funny!
I just read up on Emperor Norton. What a guy. I would have preferred him to what we have now.
I don’t know, Dubya was pretty scary back in 1999–no experience other than that of failed businessman, dry drunk, religious nutjob, climate denialist, and all around privileged fuck. What he was not was hateful, and I cannot say that of most of the current camp.
In any case, Cheney actually ran things the first term, and he had more than enough hate, cowardliness, dishonesty, delusion and evil for the two of them. He’s also the reason they got elected. I can still remember my heart sinking as he mopped the floor with Joe Lieberman’s face.
We need to remember that regardless of who the Republicans elect, we will be governed by the oligarchs and aristocrats who put him there. They’re all Koch suckers.
ahem, Bush was hateful, 3 words: Karla Faye Tucker.
Arabian Knights-Siouxsie & the Banshees
Suburban Relapse-Siouxsie & the Banshees
Cities In Dust-Siouxsie & the Banshees
Dazzle-Siouxsie & the Banshees
The Sailor:
Oh, yes, the ever so wonderful, redeemable murderer. Why? Because she found God, God, God!
I’m against the death penalty, but I wouldn’t use Tucker as an example of Bush’s hatin’.
Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Heart Like a Wheel
Me too. Like I said… the last great American statesman.
Sadly, His Imperial Majesty is no longer with us, and as far as I’m aware he left no descendants to succeed to the imperial throne. But American monarchists need not despair. It’s always possible to borrow a spare prince or princess from a foreign royal house (as Greece did in 1863, electing Prince George of Denmark as King of Greece; Norway did the same thing in 1905 with Prince Carl of Denmark, who became Haakon VII of the newly-independent Norway).
Rush was my first show sometime early 80’s
since then i’ve seen maybe 500 varying shows
maybe more
i’m kind of a whore
Bush hatin’ on Karla Faye? “Please don’t kill me.”
QFT. And his strong support for the death penalty in general.
It’s a deal-breaker for me. I will never support a candidate who, as a state governor, has presided over any executions.* (For this reason I could not have voted for Bill Clinton.) For that matter, these days I’m not even willing to be friends with people who express support for the death penalty, or for extreme punitivism in general.
*I’m uncomfortable even using the word “execution”, because I do not accept the moral distinction between “execution” and “murder”; I share Tolstoy’s views in this respect, and I don’t think there’s any moral difference between killings by the state and killings by private actors. Killing is killing is killing.
Helter Skelter
The Passenger
Dear Prudence
The Lord’s Prayer
A few bits of Jesus’ teaching to which I wish modern-day American right-wing “Christians” would pay more attention:
“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
“Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
I think you’re rubbing off on me in some ways Walton. I see lots of people spouting about nonviolence, and most of them seem full of shit. But you’ve actually got me questioning some of my angry urges. Some of them. I could never get rid of aggression in myself completely- there’d be very little else left, sadly.
You’ve also forced me to concede on free will.
You’re a strange one, you are.
YAY Zimmerman!!!!
His namesake was the Voice of a previous “protest” generation.
May Roy be the Voice of this generation.
Walton’s blind spot yet again. Hates executions. Yet until forced by modern society, not only did royalty kill citizens who opposed their authority, they killed one an other in order to ascend the throne.
Did he have a sign?
So I just started watching Downton Abbey. And then I find that I have to watch them all before the next season premieres on PBS tomorrow. Sorry kids, Mom’s busy. :)
@ CM
I can only pressume that there must be something inside.
@ Walton
[BBQ … “but I’m vegetarian”]
No problem at all (other than that BBQ is just not as good as a “braai” over hot coals). Here are some suggestions:
1. Sosaties: Skewer chunks of onion, green & red pepper, mushrooms, courgettes, … onto satay sticks (should be easy to find at Asian market). You can baste them (see below) as you slow roast them on the fire. If you are going with a more Eastern vibe, consider adding pieces of fresh or dried fruit to the sosaties.
2. Halved eggplant and courgettes. Grab a couple of large eggplants and courgettes from your local farmers market. halve them along their length. Place them on BBQ grill inside up and baste as they cook (you will want to turn over from time to time.) Always cook far too much, as you can mash up the leftovers and mix with some lemon juice for a delicious babaganoush style spread for your toast the next day.
3. If you are cooking with vegetables that may come apart (example tomatoes) try making a boat of aluminium foil to roast them in. Essentially you chop up all your vegetables and herbs and make them into a parcel which you put over the fire. Adding a large dollop of chutney helps to coax out the flavours.
4. Stab a handful of potatoes and wrap them in tin foil. You can put these right into the coals to let them bake. It is a bit of an art to guess the cooking time, but you can check from time to time. This also works well for whole onions.
5. garlic bread: Cut some thick slices of sourdough bread and baste as you toast them on the grill with olive oil, garlic and fresh rosemary. These make delightful snacks.
Basting sauce: It is quite important to ensure that your vegetables retain their moisture and cook evenly with all the intended flavours. It is a good idea therefore to baste them regularly when cooking over a fire. As a basis, at least use olive oil mixed garlic and whatever spice you prefer. To make a marinade, you can always add wine, a dab of honey, chutney, herbs, spices, bay leaves …. whatever tickles your fancy. Always have fresh lemon or lime to add a little je ne sais quoi before serving (I avoid salt). Once you have the basics right you can go crazy experimenting.
We’re going to have to replace our washing machine, soon. I want a front loader this time, but I don’t want to spend a frigging fortune. (We currently have a Crosley washer & dryer, which didn’t break the bank and have worked very well for a whole lot of years.)
Any suggestions on the washer front? I haven’t been out looking yet.
Carlie: Thanks. You just made my evening. This song calls for a doobie.
Careful with that axe, Eugene. Plenty of scumbags use that line in order to say that no one is allowed to judge them.
*high fives TLC*
Theophontes: For shame. You forgot grilled corn. Maybe it doesn’t count as ‘barbecue’, but that’s some damn good corn.
Two ways: Brush shucked cobs with olive oil and grill directly, or soak unshucked cobs and steam them over fire in their own leaves.
You know what really grinds my gears?
The fact that I was in the fourth grade the first year Bush was elected, so much of the lunacy was lost on me.
I was a senior in high school when Obama campaigned in our state days before the national election. I didn’t get to vote. I went (alone, without any friends or family because they couldn’t be bothered)because I needed that affirmation that change would come.
Now, I am staring at the first presidential election I get to participate in and, I can honestly say, am a little disappointed. I’m going to say that I am a little saddened that Perry and Bachmann and Perry are dropping. We need that faaaaaaaar left rally cry so our apathy ridden centrists get a little stir.
The Sailor:
She didn’t give the people she murdered even the time to plead with a “Please don’t kill me.” One of them a woman who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. *shrug*
Again, every one of her claims of being rehabilitated rested on God! God! God!. I prefer something a tad more reality based.
Holy FSM. Why did I say left? It should read ‘right’. As in ‘Holy shit, thought I cannot be moved to ever voice a political opinion at the thanksgiving dinner table, I better get my ass to vote because or else we’ll be living in a godly and anti-abortion wet dream filled to the neck with santorum.’
Any errors that I make can be attributed to a night of wildflower honey wheat ale. Many pardons.
TLC:
Mmmm, corn. I’ve posted this before, but I don’t think you were around then:
Barbecued Corn with Three Savory Butters
Ingredients:
1 dozen ears unhusked corn
Kitchen string
Three Savory Butters (recipes follow)
Directions:
1. Carefully peel back husks; remove corn silk. Bring husks up and tie securely with kitchen string. Soak corn in cold water to cover for 30 minutes.
2. Grill corn over medium-high heat for 25 minutes or until corn is tender, turning often. Remove string and husks. Serve with one of the Savory Butters.
Makes 12 servings
Horseradish butter:
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
3 tablespoons Spicy Brown Mustard
1 tablespoon horseradish
Spicy Chili Butter:
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
2 tablespoons Cayenne Pepper Sauce
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 clove garlic, minced
Herb Butter:
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
2 tablespoons snipped chives
1 tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce
1 tablespoon minced parsley
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt (optional)
General Directions: Combine ingredients for each flavored butter; beat until smooth. Serve at room temperature. Makes about 1/2 cup each.
You know what? I am just going to go ahead and say that #32 can just be ignored altogether. I am just going to duck on out of here while I still have my pants on. Good night FtB!
Caine, I wasn’t talking about KFT, I was talking about Bush mimicking her. He’s a cruel, cold hearted asshole. Mimicking someone you sentenced to death was a big sign of it before his first appointment as Prez.
@ janine
In the good old days ™ before the current crop of milksops, it was the only way to ascend to the throne. The high priestesses would go through a king and a tannist every year!
Ahh, those where the days…
It should go without saying that didn’t make it ok for the state to kill her, nor for George Bush to mock her requests for clemency. Two wrongs do not make a right.
From Wikipedia:
I, for one, don’t want to be on the same side as those people.
And given that she had an extremely shitty life, was trapped into prostitution at the age of fourteen and was self-evidently severely mentally disturbed, I, personally, refuse to judge or condemn her for what she did. George Bush, whose life was extremely privileged and sheltered by anyone’s standards, is certainly not in a position to do so. She was a sick person who, in a civilized society, would have been given the treatment and care that she needed.
And now I’m out of this, because this is an emotionally stressful subject for me (not her in particular, but punitivism and moral judgment in general), and I’m sure you’re going to call me an asshole and a cupcake again as you did on the last few occasions.
The Sailor: I heard about that. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know it was the same woman.
Whatever she did, the idea of the president taunting a condemned person in a cage is bile-inducing.
Bush was my big introduction to politics. I didn’t follow it or give a rat’s ass about it until I saw his creepy speech on 9/11. I got chills when I heard him going on about prayer and already starting with the ‘for us or against us’ crap. The dust had literally not even settled yet.
So at the very least, President Bush made sure I’d never neglect to pay attention again.
Dammit. And with that last paragraph I am being an asshole.
I’m sorry, Caine. I shouldn’t snipe at you like that. I just find it very hard to discuss this subject because the subject of punishment and forgiveness has a very emotional, personal impact on me; that’s something I can’t help. I believe strongly in unconditional, universal love as the foundational moral principle, and I would not be able to handle life, or cope with the amount of guilt I feel on a daily basis, if I did not hold that belief.
Caine
Washing machines
When the previous washer was snuffing, I was all for a front-loader.
We bought a top-loader “Maytag – Bravos”.
(I don’t know how this translates into ‘murcan)
It has a small-whirlly-thing-at-the-bottom as opposed to the big-whirlly-thing-in-the-middle.
I can was 4 pair of blue jeans in a load.
I am very happy with it.
Walton, I’m against the death penalty. (Pay attention to that, please, because I don’t want to have to repeat myself 5 thousand times for your benefit.) I don’t think Tucker was rehabilitated and while I wouldn’t personally be in favor of executing her, I do think she belonged in a cage for life.
As for her shitty life, I’m the last person you want to use that crap with – I know about her life and in many ways, mine was worse for a long time. I didn’t decide to murder people.
Now, that’s it for me, please don’t keep arguing, because I have nothing more to say about it.
Walton, I know it’s a tough subject for you and I’m not helping. I’ll drop it, okay?
Chigau, thanks! I’ll look into that, even though I really want a front loader this time.
@ TLC
*blushes* Ooops, my unreserved apologies… Add corn to the list above at 1 (chop), 2 (no need to halve) & 3 (chop). To cover my bases, I’d like to add sweet potatoes and lotus roots.
Caine’s butter … Mmmmmmmhhhh, nomz. (could add any of these to basic baste and slather on BBQ veggies as they cook) *drools*
Lotus roots? I have to try those when the opportunity comes up.
Theophontes:
What’s really nice is that you can riff on those to your heart’s delight. What goes in the herb butter tends to depend on what strikes my fancy when I look at the herb garden.
Careful With That Axe, Eugene
Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict
The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party
Set The Control For The Heart Of The Sun
One Of These Days
Damn, I forgot Caine’s butter. That sounds good, though I may adjust the spices to my own tastes if I ever try it.
I love corn. It’s always worth stealing. I’ll even eat the cow corn sometimes, if I’m in enough of a ‘corn’ mood.
Caine
washers
top-loading = no squatting
My knees consider this very important.
I wish someone could determine the recipe for the herb butter at Harry’s. I swear, one of the ingredients must be crack.
chigau:
Mom’s frontloader is high enough not to need to squat. The door is at chest level.
@ Caine
We bought a second (third?) hand AEG that just kept going. Solid as a rock and worth looking into. Think carefully as to what capacity you need. To big is wasteful and to small is frustrating, though I would err on the side of bigger.
Ben Geiger
In any FoodZoo in Western Canada with 3 or 4 choices of coffee-place, the long line-up is always at Tim Hortons.
I figure they put heroin in their coffee.
Roy Zimmerman’s “Vote Republican” is also particularly fantastic.
Chigau:
I’ve considered that, but large loads being hauled out once they’ve been twisted and tangled half to death is tough on my back and my knees are in much better shape than my back. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
Theophontes:
Thank you! I’d err on the bigger side, especially when it comes to Mister’s stuff – he brings home all his dirty laundry once a week and tends to *large* loads. Lotsa jeans, heavy shirts and such.
I have to pack. I don’t want to pack. Go over there and pack, Cipher. *points* No, I don’t want to.
That is all.
Go pack River Tam ( Cipher ), then come back and play.
@ TLC
Barbequed lotus root is a common street food in China. Essentially just peel the root and cut into rings about 10 mm (1/4 inch) thick. Put them onto sticks like lolipops and baste and spice ’til done. Another nice snack is spiced grass (yes grass!).
An absolute delight for a vegetarian BBQ is bamboo stuffed with rice. (Special type of bamboo from Yunnan … sorry.)
CC:
I don’t blame you. Now, go pack. (Why are you packing? Or rather, not packing?)
FWIW, I won’t ever tell you, or anyone else, that you should try to “get rid of aggression” in yourself. I’m not one to suggest trying to suppress parts of one’s identity; I don’t think it works. And there are plenty of healthy and non-harmful outlets for aggression. (Competitive sports, for instance.)
I just think that aggression and punitivism are best avoided when it comes to making decisions about how society should be run; and that it would be nice, as an aspiration, if our society relied less on violence and the threat of violence as the primary means of social control. (After all, we live in a society shaped by institutionalized violence – in the form of prisons, executions, wars, militarized borders, walls, private security forces, the entire security-industrial complex, and so on. It is, of course, almost certainly true that it is impossible to eliminate violence altogether from human relations; even Tolstoy admitted that it would take a “moral revolution” in the mindset of human beings for this to be achieved. But we can certainly try to build a less violent society, one built more on compassion and freedom, and less on control and punishment.)
If you’re going to use satay sticks over coals, soak them in water for an hour or so before use so they don’t burn.
I’ve been a huge fan of Roy Zimmerman for a while. In common with Tom Lehrer and the late great W.S. Gilbert, he possesses both a sharp wit and an enviable skill at the art of rhyme.
My favourite of his songs is probably Christmas on Mars, which I won’t post because the Christmas season is now over (yesterday being Epiphany). But a few of my other favourites:
Let’s Go After The Buddhists (now a little dated, but still one of his best)
Defenders of Marriage (particularly appropriate for Rick Santorum’s stupid comments today)
End of the Ship
Dear Number 1036924053887 (a realistic portrayal of healthcare in America, I gather)
And, of course… The Sing-Along Second Amendment.
I’m surprised that FtB let me post that many links at once. Yay!
chigau:
Yup. I’ve only had Timmy’s coffee once and, damn, I still dream about it. :)
Oh, I nearly forgot: Chickenhawk (also a little dated, being from the bad old days of Bush/Cheney, but still hilarious)
Oh walton, I drive my family nuts singing Let’s Go After The Buddhists!
And Osama on a box of Wheaties will never not be funny.
Oh, how could I forget Ted Haggard Is Completely Heterosexual? Now when he sings it he adds a list of all the other completely-heterosexual anti-gay-rights crusaders.
My back hurts.
The chicken stock is done.
I’m for bed and Unseen Academicals.
Is Terry Pratchett a god?
Josh (@previous):
Yeah, Kristy’s brother was an actor, just not that actor. I had posted that on my way out the door (to a comedy club with the fam; nice that my daughter is now old enough to get in), and didn’t get a chance to Google it ’til just now.
***
Audley:
True.
It’s hard to remember back through the filter of everything we now know he did, and I’m mindful of all the reasons others have given that he was contemptible already before taking office, but there really was no way of predicting, in January 2001, how differently he would govern than he had campaigned.
As hateful as his cowboy, pro-execution tenure was in Texas, Texas is a weak-governor state, and we really didn’t have any example of what he might do with real power. And nobody anticipated that 9/11 would happen and give him (and Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.) political cover to roll out a radical neocon agenda they wouldn’t have dared try otherwise.
All that said, even the most “rational” of the Republican candidates this year are taking positions far to the right of how Bush governed, nevermind the “compassionate conservative” he campaigned as. Aside from the fact that they probably won’t have an opportunity to start a major war (fingers crossed) any one of them would be significantly worse than Bush if they just governed according to their campaign positions. If they moved right after election like W did… well, that just doesn’t bear thinking about!
Squee.
*hug*
I did now, thank you :) Well, kinda. And I was supposed to pack because I have to go back to LA tomorrow. I was in ND, then now I’m in Sacramento with my grandparents, and tomorrow I have to go back to LA.
I just… don’t want to go back to my house with my landlady, and I don’t feel ready for classes to start at all, which is why I’m reluctant to pack, I think. Plus I’m just kind of dragging in general – I’m lethargic, my head feels funny, I keep falling asleep. Plus my jacket threw my phone on the floor and destroyed it.
So… Boo.
*pouting and petulant*
Modern front loading washers often come with an optional “pedestal” to sit on top of, thus bringing the machine up to a comfortable height.
Never unpack.
now bed
walton @ 21,
Sorry to disappoint, but the story of the woman taken in adultery is a fabrication, a feel-good story inserted into the gospel of John long after the fact.
Watch it
I’m sure it is. What’s that got to do with anything? :-/
(My argument was that it would be nice if Christians would follow the moral teaching of their own purported scriptures. The actual historical provenance of their scriptures is hardly relevant to that.)
Shit yes ! Puberty crush x1000.
(…the nice bits, that is. I certainly wouldn’t want them to start actually following the Mosaic law, or even the misogynistic nonsense misattributed to Paul in 1 Timothy.)
Well, and my argument would be that it does matter whether those teachings are the word of god or not…And since they are not, we should just hold Christians to the same standards we would hold normal people, rather than insisting they are true to the sham messages of their scripture.
I thought y’all might be interested in this lovely little survey about American Values. From the Christian Coalition. I think we should probably help them out.
1 Timothy 2:12
There are a few babble quotes worth memorising.
@ CC
Done.
@Classical Cipher
WTF???
Yes/No?
Hehe, right? They wrote it very badly. Par for the course, I imagine.
It’s an interesting insight into early Christian thought, yes, but of course it’s not Pauline.
Nevermind – sorry. I was reading from the bottom up, and hadn’t seen that walton already pointed out the false authorship.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Content of second sentence is uncoupled from the first. It’s possible to reduce aggression without suppressing it, by exercising mindfulness.
(It’s also possible to use the same exercises to deliberately amplify one’s anger, if that’s desired. Neither does this involve suppressing the other emotions which contradict one’s anger.)
First concert: The Doobie Brothers. I was, maybe, 15.
Also saw (in high school) Petra, Phil Keaggy, Amy Grant, Bill Gaither Trio, and a few others from that era. Never saw Stryper, though.
Later, in grad school, I saw Tina Turner and Billy Joel. Tina was the most memorable of all the concerts I’ve seen before or since.
Went to see Hank Williams, Jr. with my brother and a couple of his friends. Hank was so drunk he couldn’t remember the words to his own songs.
——–
I’m trying out a new bread book this evening. It really goes more into the science of bread making, which is really interesting. The sourdough loaves are going to be doing a slow rise in the garage refrigerator all night. I’ll have to report back tomorrow on my success or failure.
Got me a three-pronged day trip tomorrow. Prong One: Smithville Reservoir, where at least three snowy owls have taken up winter residence. Prong Two: A Mormon pilgrimage to Independence.* Prong Three: My first Schlotsky’s meal in far, far too long.
* Sadly, that grassy lot shown in David Fitzgerald’s Skepticon talk is not necessarily the site of the Garden of Eden. The Mormons have disappointed me by not pinning down its location beyond Jackson County, MO**. Still, many still cite it as being the site of Jesus’ temple at the Second Coming. So I might as well have a gander.
** Unless it’s super secret temple knowledge.
rorschach, I come to a similar conclusion by a different route. We should not encourage Christians to think more about scripture, for the same reason we should not encourage US Americans to think about the flag; thinking about traditional authority encourages most people to become more right-wing.
But it’s generally sensible to learn moral sentiments from fiction. In particular, much young adult fiction is morally didactic.
(If only the youth these days were true to such virtues as honesty which can be learned from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Alas, they only know the theme song.)
No worries. Both you and Walton are sophisticated enough to see the whole picture. But it really doesn’t matter that it was tacked on in rather obvious fashion. What matters is that goddists swallow it hook-line-and-sinker, warts and all.
Does it mean one wins an argument with a xtian woman by default if one is a man? Are christian women in acknowledgement that by accepting this verse they play straight into a misogynist worldview? Do such obvious fabrications ever come under review?
It is much like poor people voting Republican. Their own beliefs and actions undermine their own best interests – in a clear and simple way. Surely they can’t be blind to the liabilities? It is just such a difficult and perplexing idea to wrap my head around.
Does anyone here follow Misfits?
I watched the first episode of the third season yesterday with as open a mind as I could and… damn, was I disappointed. I’m not even talking about its shortcomings as comedy or drama.
Misfits had always been anything but unproblematic before that, but that episode just struck me as having an utterly different perspective and tone regarding sex and gender as the previous seasons, so that it was actively offensive to me rather than just shocking.
I realize that I might be the only one to feel that way.
No, but I’ve taken to watching “Nikita” lately.
Well, yeah. Danzig’s not in it.
Stone Temple Pilots – Interstate Love Song
The CC poll is an email harvester. And useless.
I’ve only seen the first season and it was more than enough for me. I mean, “making everyone who touches me want to rape me” really isn’t much of a superpower, it just kept creeping me out. I’m not sure why I even finished the whole season, I guess something must have been good about it.
Good Morning
Just skimming through on the way to cut the girls’ hair
Caine
Whatever you do, pay attention to the spinning frequency. I wouldn’t go for less than 1400. That saves so much drying time, especially if you’re using a dryer, where it’s pure money going up in vapor.
Hair and job
Mr.’s old boss retired a few years ago and on his farewell-party he disclosed that when his boss suggested that Mr. should change into his department (Mr. works in the world’s biggest chemical complex) from another one, he was very much opposed to this because he didn’t want the hippie. Well, hie boss overruled the opposition and Mr’s boss never regreted it.
Listen, folks, I don’t think this guy means bad, but someone please give him and his readers a clue. A self-professed atheist, who writes garbage like this. There’s a discussion on my blog as well, but maybe if we take it to the guy’s place, he won’t be able to dodge any criticism as easily. Some serious education needed there.
I’m not done reading (probably won’t finish as I don’t find it interesting) but I don’t see what’s there to complain about. True hir views are so undefined he simply throws out every possible explanation for why anyone does anything and it’s very self-centered but as far as objectionable it seems very meh to me.
@ rorschach
Pretty much what Julian said. Ta comes over as a precocious, slightly egotistic and naive kid. I’m sure they’ll grow out of it.
(Or perhaps a goddist in mufti? Is ta really worth your time?)
Look, that person is spewing lies and misconceptions about atheist positions, and we get enough bull from the religious already, so Im kinda hoping this self-professed atheist can maybe learn something here. Not that I’m holding my breath. But I’m making an effort.
More likely a xtian Poe. (If not very young and naive, I can scarcely believe ta is that blindly privileged. eg:”And it’s a strange system that feeds itself.” Like oppression, Bret Alan idjit. The atheists are gettin’ uppity are they?)
TL;DR: I bet Poe.
walton:
Talking about authorship and the Scripture: that one is attributed to Jesus, but similar ideas are found in the Old Testament.
Ezekiel 16:52 “Thou also, which hast judged thy sisters, bear thine own shame for thy sins that thou hast committed more abominable than they.”
Take that you Pseudo Feminist PZ
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120104174812.htm
I noticed it failed to differentiate between genetic and social causes. And if the differences are caused by society, why not minimize those differences?
@dinamalar #105
Did they do it cross culturally? Is there anything to suggest that the differences are genetic rather than imposed culturally?
Differences in personality traits does not imply that either is better either.
I recorded it (and a couple of the others). It was strange: I’m reading The Pathology of Normalcy and Fromm was gushing about Chaplin’s films, and then minutes later I noticed that several were going to be on.
Hello, folks. Happy Monday!
(Yeah, I know this is not my usual Monday but, through early April, I have Fridays and Saturdays off — which means I have a day off with Wife and my boss and I do not share days off so I only see him three days a week!)
Because that would be admitting that men can change their behaviour, or have some control over their behaviour? And we know what that would mean. Widespread respect, lack of misogyny, far fewer rapes, actual equal rights — chaos! Chaos, I tell you.
Oh, blather blither:
That’s stupid. It assumes without warrant that all religions have a rational deep structure. It’s also a theological exercise.
So what are the the rational truths he discovers in Wicca underneath the veneer of woo?
1) The Ultimate Deity is not a god but “is just the ultimate immanent creative power of being.”
2) The God and Goddess are “two abstract powers of being. Natura naturans expresses itself as objective will and objective reason. Objective reason [sic] is symbolized by the goddes and objective reason by the god.”
3) The Wheel of the Year “concretely represents the abstract algorithmic iteration in the logic of creation and evolution by rational selection. The Wheel symbolizes the logical action of the Priniciple of Sufficient Reason as it generates all natural complexity.”
4) Reincarnation “is palingenesis – it is the recreation of a counterpart of the self in some other universe…As rational rebirth, it is supported by the logic of creation and evolution by rational selection.”
5) techniques for self-empowerment: “If any technique for work on the self is empirically supported, then atheistic Wiccans are free to use it. And such techniques should be used. Through these techniques, the rational manifestation of the will of the self is maximized. Thus natura naturans is maximally manifest through the self.”
6) rituals: “atheistic Wiccans can preform ceremonial activities in sacred circles. One might cast a circle against woo, summon the various cognitive and practical virtues, and so on. But it seems best to leave the details of such practices to Wiccan groups.”
I sure am glad he’s managed to slough off the woo and reach the rational core!
Dinamalar@105,
Oh FFS. Let’s keep looking at more and more variables until we get statistically significant fluctuations and publish a paper quickly before somebody catches on.
Well, there still seems to be some woo glommed onto it, but that’s easy enough to fix. All you have to do is cast a circle against it and summon some virtues.
What could be more rational than that? (I mean, besides the immanent creative power of being, of course.)
“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
The way it really happened:
Jesus was in the city center when the priests brought to him a woman saying, “This woman has been found guilty of adultery. The law says we must stone her to death. What do you say?”
Jesus said nothing, drawing with a stick in the dirt.
The priests asked again. Again, Jesus said nothing, as the people cried out in bloodlust.
The priests asked again.
Jesus replied: “Let whoever is without sin cast the first stone.”
There was silence, as one by one the crowd began to melt away…except for this little, old lady, who picks up this big rock and caves the adulteress’s head in.
Jesus said: “Dammit, Mom, sometimes you really piss me off.”
On the death penalty in general: In the US, it is indistinguishable from lynching. I do think, however, that some people are simply too broken to have any hope at redemption and continue to constitute a danger to anyone with whom they come in contact.
Examples:
Ted Bundy
Charles Manson
Any guerilla leader who uses rape as a weapon.
We put down vicious dogs. I see no reason why shortening the time these folks spend on the planet detracts from anyone’s life, including theirs.
Rorschach:
I’m working my way through it now. Hoo boy. It’s just one long stawman argument, isn’t it?
theophontes:
Nah. An idiot, sure, but not a Poe.
Well, anybody who has some level of reading-comprehension can understand that all they meassure is an is. They don’t talk about reasons or anything.
In a world in which certain traits are strictly put into a gender-box, nobody should be surprised that adults actually come to reflect them.
@Bill
Whenever the Republicans move to the right, the Democrats move to the right as well. To wish for a far right Republican candidate is to wish for Obama to move to a position halfway between Romney and Santorum. It is to wish for the horrible rightward trend of American politics to strengthen and accelerate, at a time when the American economy is weak, and particularly vulnerable to the damage right wing economic ideas can do. It is to wish for the trend in antiscience politics to worsen at a time when the need for science-directed policy, particularly to address issues such as global warming, is essential. And rightward move by the Democrats would be a disaster for women’s rights.
On the death penalty in general: In the US, it is indistinguishable from lynching. I do think, however, that some people are simply too broken to have any hope at redemption and continue to constitute a danger to anyone with whom they come in contact.
But what if we come up with viable treatments later on? To be fair I’m not really sure anyone has actually even tried in all earnest to rehabilitate or treat people like Manson, we just sort of accept they’re broken and lock them up. I hate bringing it up but isn’t there actual concern of some in psychology that non-offending pedophiles are denied access to treatment or aid because of the law? But what if people like Bundy are sociopaths due to genetics or developmental? What if it turns out to be something we can fix with advancements in neural surgery? I’m not presenting it as an argument I think it’s a topic that would be interesting. On one hand, seems a potential waste to keep someone around based on hope of future advancement, on the other hand it seems a waste to kill someone when they’re locked away and danger is neutralized and later find out they could have been helped.
*wince* Consider what the ethnic background of most death row inmates is. Now say that in a southern accent and tell me how that sounds
a_ray:
Then leave them in a cell for the rest of their lives. Society gains nothing when it murders its citizens, no matter how irredeemable they are.
*headdesk*
You’ve just compared people on death row to animals. Do I really have to spell out the implications of your statement, a_ray?
Come on, man, you’re smarter than this.
theophontes,
If you’re around, I want to give you a +1 for “godfapping”. Made me snort my coffee!
(I didn’t mean to imply above, of course, that I was unfamiliar with Chaplin’s films prior, but Fromm was discussing specific emotional aspects to attune to.)
What exactly is a “pseudo-feminist” in this context, at least?
What it it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?
Right, here’s my latest response to the ill-informed replies I got, and I’m starting with the issue that people here undoubtedly consider to be the “biggie”.
Regarding proving God’s existence while criticising New Atheism: FFS, I don’t have to prove that god exists to show how religion is a positive for the world and ergo New Atheism is a bad thing. Likewise, I have no need to prove God exists for ANY of the descriptions and criticisms of the New Atheism movement. It only fits as a religion if you use SUCH a loose interpretation of what a religion is, and I don’t. It doesn’t change the fact that New Atheism was started by journalists and scientists rather than philosophers and historians. It isn’t Marxism (which is an intellectual movement before it was a political one) and its not romanticism (a purely intellectual movement) Its not like Postmaterialism. It at best is a social movement, at worst its like “Occupy WallStreet” where all it can hope to achieve is act as a political movement and influence policy against religion. Its like the Tea Party or the No Nothings. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that. I just don’t think we should pretend it has the intellectualism of Romanticism or view it as far reaching intellectually as a religion.
I don’t understand how you guys can be so dishonest to twist a conversation about New Atheism as a movement into a question of “Does God exist?”. This is called “steering the argument” and that’s fine, because from past experience I’ve found you guys find it hard to argue things that you don’t have things which you are prepared to argue but we aren’t talking about proof. Personally my argument is that if a theory is generally accepted in the world then it should have to first be disproved. But that isn’t what we are talking about.
Regarding Caesar/Rubicon vs Jesus/Crucifixion evidence: You have the same amount of evidence for two separate instances. You believe one but patently disbelieve the other. I wasn’t talking about the resurrection (because that is not a historical event) but the crucifixion of Jesus.
Someone mocked me for pointing out evidence of crucifixions, but clearly they didn’t read the entirety of my post. We have Pagan Roman historical examples of the execution of Jesus. Tacitus is not only scholarly accepted, but he’s independent and a Roman source from someone who hated Christians and was not a part of the church. He talks about the execution of Christ and even mentions Pontius Pilatus by NAME. Tacitus is considered to be one of the greatest Roman historians and certainly the most accurate of his time. In order to claim that there isn’t a source that speaks of the historical crucifixion of Jesus you then have to ignore similar sources that you use to “prove” Caesar crossing the Rubicon.
Regarding “atheism /= secularism” and Atheist vs Communist responses: Wait. Are those that brought up these points SERIOUSLY saying that China isn’t a secular state? I think you’ll find it is. Why don’t you look up the definition of secular?
I made no such equation of Science with communism. What I ACTUALLY did was completely the opposite: that it came from TWO places (Science AND ex communists). Or are you denying that Christopher Hitchens was an ex communist? I mean he did say he was a Marxist. Or are you denying that Christopher Hitchens was a daddy of New Atheism as a movement? That’s where this movement originated from. Communism is the Islam of Atheism. You may all not agree with State Atheism but the fact is Dawkins and Hitchens believes that Religion should not have the “Special protections”. Richard Dawkins claims that teaching religion to children is a form of child abuse. What a load of tosh.
Face it, Marxist Communism is a form of Atheism. End of. It might not be something you agree with but it IS. The fact is the Communist intellegent elite, that is to say the educated atheists are actually often the ones who become the leaders of said Communist revolutions. In reality they attack the theist institutions like universities and churches because they are Theist and nationalistic. Look at Tito’s revolution in Yugoslavia. Look at The Russian Revolution and look at the Cuban Revolution. These are the traditional academic examples of a Communist revolution. This is because it does not include an anti-imperialistic revolution like China and Vietnam.
Regarding philospohy and philosophers: So are you all denying that Daniel Dennett is a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science? Oh wait he is. The person who specifically posted links with Dennett had a quote from one of the links you posted where it said “his overall philosophical project has remained largely the same since his time at Oxford. He is primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind that is grounded in empirical research.” Which makes him, in practice, a Behaviorist. Full stop. Being a behaviorist is important. Don’t think I’m looking down on the important work of behavioral science.
Ophelia Benson is a philosopher like the editor of Cosmo teen is a teenager. She is a Journalist. That’s cute though that you would try and make that laughable claim that because she works on a magazine that makes her a philosopher.
Victor J Stenger Is a particle physicist. My point is only made stronger by that. He’s a philosopher like creationists are scientists. I mean, from the way your minds work, you must then think that Charles B. Thaxton is a scientist because he wrote a book on science. Is he though? Or is he a journalist who wrote a book on science. I mean I don’t think he is but he’s got a job that makes money from science. People can have hobbies. I earn money occasionally when helping my dad cook food for important work colleagues of his, but that doesn’t mean I’m a chef. Stenger, for the majority of his life was a particle physicist .
Regarding Islam and “sexism”: I think those that brought this topic clearly confuse the hijab and the burqa. “Cover your chest and wear long garments” /= “hide your face”. Again, look at Kazakhstan and other countries where the scarf is common but the burqa is seen as foreign. The burqa is cultural. In Islam, women are required to cover their hair, cover their cleavage, shoulders and arms, and wear long skirts to cover their knees and legs in public. That isn’t the burqa. Calling this modesty misogyny is absurd because men have a dress code too which also values modesty.
Regarding the Crusades: Two things about the Crusades. 1) The single biggest international business in the middle ages was what? Pilgramages. What was the single richest organisation of the Middle Ages? The Knights Templar. How exactly did that happen if all the Holy Land was “desert and goat headers” as you imply? 2? Who was the second most powerful person in France during the reign of Louis? Abbot Suger. I don’t think I have to explain to you the place of Bishops and Abbots in the governments of Europe in the Middle Ages. Hell, isn’t Britain a country that STILL has Bishops in one of their houses of Parliament?
This proves my point. What was the objective of the Second Crusade? Jerusalem? Nope. It was to help a crusader state. Explain to me why Lisbon was part of the second Crusade? I mean it was PURELY a religious crusade to free the Holy Land right (though by this point the Europeans still held Jerusalem)? Did the Third Crusade take Jerusalem? Nope, it took Jaffa, and that’s because it WASN’T about the Holy Land. Did the Fifth Crusade attack the Holy Land? Nope, it attacked EGYPT, and the reason was to maintain pilgrimage routes which in turn was about MONEY!
Regarding “Religion is and always has been a injurious influence on society”: Oh man. This is an argument I’ll take on any day of the F’n week! Here are some questions for you all to ponder while bathing in your ignorant anti-theism:
Which institution has spent the most money in history on Science, Hospitals, Justice, and the invention courts and the two major legal systems in the world? Who safeguarded secular and religious writings, histories, and philosophy? The Church.
Law and Universal morality flows from? Religion, the whole time, everywhere, throughout history. This doesn’t even count the religious philosophy that even you guys base your morals on. You can’t have the same evolution of philosophy and law without the religion.
Without the Church there is no western civilization. No Renaissance. No Enlightenment. Heck I’d also say there’d be no Industrial Revolution without religious universities. Religion is the basis of Western Civilisation.
Hey peoples, who invented the Scientific Method in the east? Alhazen – a devout MUSLIM philosopher and scientist. Who conceptualised the scientific method in the west? Roger Bacon – a FRANCISCAN MONK.
And if Religion is an injurious force on society then what happens in Atheist States?
It’s one thing to say Religion is no longer required (although personally I think religion is still the basis for most societies you would want to live in) but its another to say that religion was not required in history and that it was always a bad thing, which is just wrong.
See, despite the hostility here, I’m actually doing my BEST here to have civil conversations with you. I’m really trying NOT to point out when you’re all being blatantly ignorant or making this about you all personally and what you know and rather sticking to the actual topics I brought up. I try NOT to make you look uneducated. I try NOT to make you look unintelligent or zealot-like in your natures. I even try to give you all outs where you could at least moderate your positions so you don’t sound like an antitheist extremist.
But, to conclude, the last series of posts I got both here and in other FTB blogs, I had people saying that they didn’t want to live in a society without religion and yet that Religion is and always has been “OMG A PLAGUEISH CANCER ON SOCIETY OH NOES!” How can I take your opinions seriously when you guys are essentially contradicting each other?
Audley, I’ve compared highly social animals to highly social animals. Both can be broken to the point where there is no hope of redemption AND where anyone they are exposed to is harmed. What is the advantage of warehousing such people. How does anyone benefit, indluding the warehoused.
What is your solution for people like Ted Bundy or Joseph Kroy?
I do not advocate the death penalty for the vast majority of criminals, including murderers, but murderers who have demonstrated that they still pose a threat even after incarceration.
Rey:
Seriously. Accusing PZ of not being a feminist, then leaving a gotcha! link is just, well, dumb.
Our local channel preempted the debate this morning for a church service broadcast.
I can’t decide which is worse.
No, religion is not a positive for the world. Your presupposition, not fact, and you haven’t demonstrated otherwise with conclusive evidence. Without a deity, religion is nothing but mass delusion. How can that be good?
This has nothing to do with any facts, just as the existence of your imaginary deity. Who did it first is irrelevant, just as most of philosophy and all of theology is.
Irrelevant. Gnu atheism needs no philosophical underpinnings besides the lack of evidence for deities, and science is based on certain philosophies. You delusionally think otherwise. Philosophy is mental masturbation (see any post by Matthew Seagal, bullshit from start to finish).
It might have happened much earlier without the dark ages.
Which came about when people started telling the one church to fuck off.
People getting together and discussing how to keep the tribe together. Just as it was before Xianity was a gleam in anyone’s eye. Just as is done now in secular countries. All religion does is mess things up.
Which is irrelevant. Because one had to be religious at the time of Bacon to get an education. Ever think how many folks trained in theology are atheists at heart? The numbers would stagger you.
You aren’t discussing, because requires you to actually hold the concept that you could be wrong. I don’t see that. You are preaching your gospel of fuckwittery. Which is why we are making fun of you. If you want true discussion, acknowledge each and every one of your points that is rebutted by evidence. And you shown no evidence for your claims. And philosophy isn’t evidence, most likely bullshit from start to finish.
What is wrong with you? What I mocked was your pointing out that crucifixion was a common method of execution under the Romans as though that would mean anything regarding claims about a specific crucifixion.
I linked you specifically to a historian specializing in the era who has stated unequivocally that Tacitus was not an independent source on this subject. I provided you with a quotation from that post, containing the words “So yes, Tacitus is in fact giving us useless evidence, since it is not independent of the Gospels (that’s why his account contains nothing not in them, yet that would have been in an official government record, like Jesus’ full name and crime).” His claims almost certainly came from the Gospels via a deaconess interrogated by his friend Pliny the Younger, but regardless they can’t be assumed to be independent because there’s no evidence for independence. He’s a useless source on this subject. I then linked to a comment from that thread in which he notes his forthcoming articles in academic journals demolishing the other major alleged extra-Biblical sources (Josephus and Thallus).
Do not respond unless you’re going to engage with this instead of continuing to repeat unsupportable claims about independence and acceptance.
arrogance and dehumanizing bigotry are incompatible with
Whose rocket science got us to the moon? Therefore Nazism is a source of good for the world!
@ Dr Audley
I am thinking you are right. (“idiot”: He could also just be very young.)
{theophontes waits for curtains to rise… strides across the stage and bows to the audience}
Merci boucoup… (Wait ’til you see my new new word in that thread, kekekeke :)
a_ray:
Okay. Great. You’re completely ignoring the fact that most death row inmates are African American.
Even ignoring the racial implications of what you’ve said, by comparing humans on death row to animals, you’ve reduced them to something less than human and have made them less worthy of being treated as a human. I’m sorry, but that’s totally not okay.
*sigh* Hannibal Lector was a fantasy. We kill people for retribution, not because we can’t handle them in a prison setting.
Here’s one advantage: the “justice system” is seriously broken. Even in extreme cases like the ones you mentioned, is it worth risking killing an innocent person just so you have the ability to kill the future Ted Bundy?
(I should add that even if the justice system was 100% totally and completely foolproof, I would still be against the death penalty. But there I go again, being a pacifist and shit.)
I’ve told you– I’m not opposed to life sentences with no possibility of parole.
The ideal would be to completely overhaul our penal system, so we could safely remove dangerous people from the population without the tortures of being in an American prison. (Look at prisons in California– overcrowding has gotten to the point where it’s a fucking human rights violation.) But we all know that’s not going to happen in our lifetimes.
Based on what criteria? Prisons in the US are violent places, because the system is broken. You’ve essentially said that pretty much anyone sent to prison is a candidate for the death penalty.
Jamesmichael1, Thank you for your massive outflow of mental diarrhea. So, in short, you would contend that the truth doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that gods don’t exist, because you contend that they are the source of some good.
It would appear that you contend that there is no way to achieve that good except by giving lip service to lies.
What I contend is that the truth does matter. I contend that our nature as social animals and the need for an efficient society if we as social animals are to survive and prosper establishes an objective basis for morality. I further contend that said basis cannot be used to justify the sorts of racist, homophobic or misogynic proscriptions we find in religious based morality.
Morality is too important to allow it to be based on lies told by influential members of society.
As to Marxism, it is not religion, but it is plagued by woo, which we also condemn here. Your veneration of philosophy and condemnation of science is telling. It is a pity that you are too thick to appreciate the irony of your using a computer to broadcast your anti-science nonsense to the world.
ardis
Just chiming in quickly:
How about letting the “warehoused” decide that?
You know, if somebody who is deemed to be a danger to society so they cannot be set free ever again (even not when they’re 85?) asks for assisted suicide, let them have it. If not, let them live.
theophontes:
He claims to have some education, so either he’s lying and very young, or he’s an idiot. Either way… *shrugs*
I suppose in theory if you gave them jobs that they could do while isolated that are otherwise unprofitable you could turn it into a social good but I think it’d be difficult to find a way between doing that and having forced labor. I suppose you could have voluntary work programs with luxuries granted as payment…
That’s a frighteningly authoritarian thing to say. So you think you are in a position to decide who is worthy of living or dying? You think you have that moral authority? You think that others’ lives are yours to take away, that their bodies are public property, that a person’s right to continue living should depend on whether you think they are deserving of life? Seriously.
“We put down vicious dogs” is a dehumanizing and cruel thing to say, in this context. For the record, I don’t think that our society’s practice of “putting down” unwanted animals is morally good either: the fact that we treat non-human animals as though their lives were worthless (which we should not) is not a good excuse for extending the same callous treatment to human beings.
You talk about human beings as though they were machines, as though a “broken” human being were something to be discarded and destroyed as of no value. That’s a very scary attitude.
I see no reason why ARIDS’ death-penalty-apologetics are any better than any of the other nasty authoritarian views that get smacked down here. I am not saying this to condemn him personally – people can be simply misguided, and there was a time in my life when I supported the death penalty too, when I was a little younger and a little more stupid than I am now – but I am not willing to let this lie.
@ Dr Audley
Update … it is an idiot.
Furthermore, I am as follows:
I haz a happy, I am becoming more and more like my Ebil Oberlawd ™ . Callooh Callay!
Oh, and the new word is “blogturd” (used to describe one of its more idiotic comments.)
I can’t see how religion has been a positive influence in your life, JamesMichaels1. It appears to have turned you into an arrogant and self righteous little shit of a know-all. That Teal Deer you just posted? A perfect example of what people mean when they compare philosophy to mental masturbation.
Impossible! A place called ‘freethoughtblogs’, allowing differing opinions? That’s crazy talk, man!
Okay, cleaning up my writing a little bit:
Okay, so I don’t actually know this, but considering that African Americans are more likely to receive the death penalty than whites and make up ~40% of the prison population (vs ~13% of the total population), I think it’s safe to say the African Americans probably make up a large percentage of inmates on death row.
Anyway, I’m Googling for some hard numbers now.
QFT.
The overwhelming majority of people in American prisons should not be there. If drugs were decriminalized, and most offences were dealt with using community sentences and/or restorative justice rather than custodial sentences, the prison population would plummet. This is not idle fantasy; most Western European countries have prison populations per capita barely a sixth of that in the US, and, not coincidentally, also have lower crime rates. This is a separate issue from the death penalty (which is a barbaric atrocity), but it is important for Americans in general to remember that their broken and destructive penal system is not the only answer.
ARIDS,
It is not up to you to decide whether it is “beneficial” to let someone live, because their life does not belong to you, but to them, and is not yours to take away.
Furthermore, even if one leaves aside moral considerations, there is no practical benefit whatsoever to the death penalty. There is zero evidence that it deters crime – and it would be very surprising if it did, since committing murder is not generally a rational act, and people who murder do not conduct cost-benefit analyses or quantify the risks before committing those actions. And it is no cheaper, and no more efficient, than life imprisonment. I outlined this more fully here. There are no coherent utilitarian arguments for the death penalty.
Rather, there is one reason and one reason only that people support the death penalty: retributivism, an irrational desire to make a perceived “bad” person suffer by inflicting violence on him or her. But such irrational desires should be perceived as psychological problems to be overcome; they should never be a factor in public policy.
theophontes:
A yup. It’s like little ol’ Bret hasn’t even read what he wrote!
Really? A political movement of the early to mid-1800s? Called the “Know Nothings If you are going to bring history into it, at least get it right.
Then you have no clue what a theory is. Where is the evidence to support your theory (whatever the theory is?)? If your are going to bring the theory of science into it, at least get it right.
Er, no. We know Caesar actually lived. We have multiple, and contemporary, sources of documentation for that. Jesus shows up in zero contemporary documents. Same for the crucifiction. If you are going to bring historiography and sourcing into it, at least get it right.
When I read a history book, I have a three strikes rule. I will forgive the first two egregious errors. If there is a third, I put the book down and go to other sources. You have hit strike three rather quickly and thus, to me, have proven that you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about.
No one who supports the death penalty gets to lecture others on morality.
I, for one, given the choice, would far rather hang out with these people than with ARIDS.
llewelly:
I disagree, for two reasons:
1. I’m not wishing for “the Republicans” to move to the right; I’m wishing for the party — right where it already is — to nominate its least electable candidate. In the same way that people advocate for the true environmental cost of products to be reflected in their price, I want the true social cost of voting Republican to be reflected in their candidate.
2. Your second sentence above suggests that all politics is purely reactive, and that principles have nothing to do with it, and that’s not true. I can’t offer science to back that statement, but it’s not uninformed: I speak as someone who’s personally acquainted with his State Representative, State Senator, U.S. Representative, and U.S. Senator, and has worked on all their campaigns over a period of several years. Every one of them (even the Republican State Senator, whom I worked very hard to try to defeat in 2010[1]) is a person of principle, and while each has certain areas of bipartisan interest, none of them would shift hir philosophical core just to win an election. Not withstanding all the (bogus, IMHO) “no better than Bush” talk, Obama is what Obama is, and he’s not going to shift to the right of Romney if Santorum is the nominee. If anything, Romney being the nominee might tempt him to try to out-centrist his opponent (but even then, it would be a tactic, not a shift); if Santorum (or someone equally radical… if that’s possible) is the nominee, the right tactical move will probably be to draw the distinction between them even more sharply.
As I’ve already said, I don’t think the Dems will move right (and in fact, they’re not: look at the way Dems are pushing to reverse Republican-led moves to the right in the states), but they could move reasonably far to the right of where they are now without being anything like the disaster, in all the areas you highlight, that would be represented by even the least imaginable right-wing configuration of Republican rule. Your litany of risks is exactly why we must “wish for” almost anything that helps prevent the Republicans from winning.
***
[1] I worked on his opponent’s campaign, I mean; I didn’t run against him myself.
Ignoring the misuse of theory, and argumentum ad philistine hordium; let’s take this on face value
God is/was a generally accepted theory in the world (er the West, no sense in paying attention to those Pantheistic Hindus, Atheistic Buddhsits, Ancestor Worshiping Chinese, and animism/atheistic Japanese right?)
Evolution is universally accepted by those in the feild.
Evolution contradicts the basis of the God theory (the bible).
Ergo the newer one with more evidence disproves the first theory (or at least the bible). With the bible gone there is no actual reason to believe in God, it is the source of the idea. Ergo, now God needs evidence outside it. Thus God is disproved due to lack of it and evidence to contrary, QED.
Now, you may say that only works for a literalist God. Doesn’t matter. The non-literalist God theory comes from an attempt to salvage the idea of God when the literalist God theory is disproved. the Non-literalist God, if we’re treating this as scientific theory, isn’t valid. It’s using the same conclusion even though the supporting evidence has been junked, it’s a post hoc rationalization. And with throwing out the bible it’s in the same position of needing evidence. The Diest/liberal God is the same thing, just one step further. The root of it is the bible. The roots are gone, the tree is chopped down the fruit is rotten.
At most you could say that SOMETHING happened with Jesus, but evidence clearly shows that those who wrote the Bible were wrong in their interpretation of it which was influenced by their monotheistic beliefs.
WHOA! Walton, way too fucking far. You owe ARIDS an apology. Even if he’s wrong in his reasoning that is an actual example of Ad Hom. In all seriousness, for shame.
No, I don’t owe him an apology. I am saying that I would rather hang out with a progressive/liberal religious person who opposes the death penalty than with an atheist who supports it.
There is zero difference between ARIDS’ stance on the death penalty and Ben Radford’s stance on sexism, and there is no reason why the former should be given a pass just because he happens to be a regular.
walton:
This would certainly solve part of the problem, but we need to completely redesign the system– from the investigations all the way through incarceration and parole– in any case. We need to stop treating prisoners as if they’re less than human to create any humane changes.
Which I don’t think you’ll have any argument with.
Yep, I agree with that too. The more-or-less unchecked police power and endemic police brutality is at the heart of the problem; as is the system of elected politicized prosecutors in most states, the immense discretionary power that the American system gives to (both federal and state) prosecutors, and the strong incentives to pursue a higher conviction rate rather than the good of society. And then there’s the endemic institutionalized racism.
The system needs multiple layers of fixing: institutional reform, a complete overhaul of sentencing rules, and a change in the culture of criminal justice across the board. It would take many years and serious political will to fix (and of course it also varies enormously state-by-state, and state systems have different problems from the federal system).
Giliell, thanks for the tip on spinning frequency, that wouldn’t have occurred to me. I do have to use a dryer half the year, due to weather, so not wasting more money than I have to is a serious consideration.
Walton:
Notwithstanding your cogent response to Ing, I still think you should, if not apologize for, at least walk back this…
…which suggests you think anyone who comes to a different conclusion than you do on one moral issue loses any right to speak on moral questions generally. IMHO, disagreement with Walton ≠ moral bankruptcy.
Also…
Not “given a pass,” and not “just because he’s a regular”… but we regulars have a significant database of personal experience with ARIDS, and none of it suggests that he’s a racist[1] or a violent authoritarian thug. So if our initial reading of his comments seems that way, it strikes me that our store of historical data ought to prompt us to review that reading to see if we’re reading correctly. Nobody gets a pass just because they’re “famous” (whether in the parochial sense of being a longtime regular here or in the larger sense that Richard Dawkins or Stephen Hawking is famous), but we ought to apply what we actually know about people in evaluating what they say.
FWIW, I’m with you on the death penalty. I used to hold a position roughly similar to ARIDS’: That some people’s behavior is so heinous that there is no hope of ever allowing them contact with society, and that in those cases it was safer (and possibly even more humane to them) to execute them. Over time, though, I’ve come to see that…
1. There is just no reliable, just way to accurately determine what people fit in that category.
2. The whole business of executing people is toxic to the psyches of the people involved — the victims’ families, the prison personnel, the lawyers, the chaplains — and to the collective mental health of our society. The net social cost of execution is, IMHO, far greater than the benefit (if any) of removing those people from the planet.
All that said, how to deal with individuals who have irretrievably shattered the social contract is a thorny problem; you really don’t get to just send otheres to bed without their supper if they disagree with you about it.
***
[1] An aside on the racial question: I believe (pending Audley’s numbers) that it’s true the majority of Death Row inmates are African-American… but I wonder if that’s still true when you look at the much narrower subset of inmates I think ARIDS has in mind: the sociopaths who commit mass murder, serial killings, serial rape, etc.? The examples that come most readily to mind (e.g., Bundy, Manson, Berkowitz, Dahmer, etc.) are all white. Is it possible we’re talking about acts so heinous that they overwhelm the undeniable endemic white bias in the criminal justice system? Jus’ wondrin’….
Well, that whole “judge not others” business doesn’t go very far with you, Walton. That stick up your ass just blossomed into a tree again.
I don’t think he’s a racist, and I did not accuse him of being one. As for “violent authoritarian thug”, the view he expressed was, as a simple descriptive matter, both violent (in the sense of advocating violence) and authoritarian (in the sense that he evidently believes that the state, or society collectively, should have the authority to decide who should live and who should die). “Thug” is an irrelevant pejorative, and a word I didn’t use.
I don’t buy the idea of a “social contract”, and this particular language is a good example of why I find it to be not only a meaningless, but a dangerous, concept. Although I understand that you are not using it to justify punitivism, this particular way of couching the question leaves an easy rhetorical opening for other people to do so.
And I honestly believe that support for the death penalty needs to be met with the same hostility that support for sexism, racism and homophobia are met with. There are reasons why we don’t just agree to disagree, as it were, about certain issues of social justice and morality. If anyone, even a regular, turned up here and started arguing that (say) LGBT couples should not be allowed to adopt children, we would not be content to respond with polite disagreement, nor would we continue to view that person in the same light in future interactions. This is not because of how I feel about the person expressing those views; it’s because I believe that those views are actively harming society, and that it is very dangerous to grant those views any kind of legitimacy or to treat them as socially acceptable.
Of course not everyone will agree; that’s inevitable. There is no way of “proving myself right”, because, as far as I can tell, there is no way of proving the objective truth of any moral proposition. All I can say is that I do not want to be a part of, and that I cannot identify morally or politically with, any community which does not explicitly condemn the death penalty and work actively to oppose it.
Okay, I’ve gotta stop arguing with that idiot over at Rorschach’s link before I waste my entire day on it.
Have a good one, my lovelies! Off to play some Saint’s Row!
And with that, I’ll bow out, since I can see that this is apparently no longer a community in which I can fit in.
For the record, I am not judging others. I believe that certain opinions are harmful to society, and that those opinions should be condemned vocally and frequently because of the harm they are causing. I do not condemn a person who holds those opinions (I would be a hypocrite if I did, since I’ve held far worse opinions of my own in the past). People can always change their minds.
You too, Audley! I still have this Spring cleaning thing going on…
*whiiiiiiiiiine* I’m so thread-bankrupt! Please tell me what interesting topics I’ve missed and what replies I owe.
South Africa: population: 80 % black, 10 % white; politics: 90 % black; economy: 95 % white.
Hah. That’s what he told people.
He was obviously drunk at his birthday in 2007! Almost fell over trying to shake someone’s hand.
*grin becoming broader and broader, and toothier and toothier*
PZ has set the limit to six.
How do you establish guilt beyond doubt?
If you’ve erroneously locked someone up, you can set them free and try to compensate them with money or something. If you’ve erroneously killed someone…
Come on. We had that discussion in highschool.
Speak for yourself, really.
Bookmarked.
Come on. Tacitus simply retells what the Christians had told him. He had no reason to either believe no crucifixion had happened or try to find out.
The passage by Tacitus is historically important as early evidence that Christians existed at that time in particular places. It doesn’t say anything about whether Jesus had existed.
As to whether Caesar crossed the Rubicon… well, he was on one side, then he won a civil war on the other side, so he must have crossed it, sometime, somehow. Whether he made a show of it, such as exclaiming “alea iacta est” or the same thing in Greek, cannot be said for sure.
As to whether Caesar existed… for instance, there are coins from the right time and the right places, and there’s archaeological evidence for at least the major battles in De Bello Gallico. Alesia in particular fits the description.
Oh well. His Germania tells us at least as much about what he thought of contemporary Roman society as about how the Germanic tribes actually lived.
~:-| Non sequitur. “There shouldn’t be special protections for religion” is nothing different than what the 1st amendment to the US constitution says. What’s your point?
We’ve had that discussion often. How bad it is depends on the religion, but teaching religion to children means systematically teaching them claims that lack evidence or, in many cases, even contradict it – and in many cases, it means teaching them rather evil kinds of morality.
Dude, Marxist communism is a big edifice of ideology that contains atheism as one little building block.
It’s fairly well integrated, but it’s still small enough that nothing breaks down if you take it out and replace it by something else or just leave a hole. There’s a whole Wikipedia article on Christian communism.
In reality they attacked them because they were competition. Totalitarian ideologies, for example communism and many religions, always want to eliminate all competition.
Besides, few universities (other than their theology departments) are theist these days, few are nationalistic these days, and churches are by no means automatically nationalistic.
Requiring women but not men to hide their hair isn’t misogyny? Then what is it?
See how religion poisons everything? It makes a nice cover for organized robbery with a few massacres on the side. It can even make people flock to help you rob and murder because it can make them believe in all seriousness that God wants them to!
For a long time, there was no institution other than the church, and for quite some time afterwards, there was no richer institution than the church.
Atheism isn’t and has never been an institution…
[citation needed]
What I base my morals on? Innate empathy and long-term self-interest. That’s all.
Sure. Does that mean you can’t have the same results…?
Is this an “is” claim or an “ought” claim?
You’re talking about a time and place when any open atheists would simply have been killed.
(Besides… did he discover falsification & parsimony? If not, I wouldn’t call that the scientific method.)
If he wanted to spend his life thinking, he had to be a monk. In that time and place, there was no other choice.
(Besides… important as his contributions were, he didn’t conceptualize falsification. He emphasized induction, which doesn’t even work.)
Who wants an atheist state, let alone one with two capital letters? I want a secular state – one not ruled by a totalitarian ideology, religious or otherwise.
…Really, we don’t care about your tone. Call us morons to your heart’s content. :-| We’ll continue to judge what you say, not how you say it.
Now, however, I’ll call you an asshole. If we’re being blatantly ignorant and you fail to point it out, how the fuck are we going to learn anytime soon??? How the fuck will we notice the gaps in our knowledge if you refuse to tell us about them?
Something in your education was bass-ackwards.
O noez! Teh blag reedurship no is monolith! i has a sad -_-
*mock*
*mock*
The fact that you can do something about errors of justice.
*sigh* Nerd, that’s inductive reasoning, and a particularly bad example of it at that.
Beaucoup. With [o], not [u], in the first syllable. :-)
And when it more or less is, it’s committed by people who are sure they won’t get caught, which means they can’t be deterred.
Subthread won.
Bill:
It’s close. According to the NAACP, 41.74% (1,345 out of a total of 3,222 death row inmates in the US) of death row inmates are black, 43.61% (1,405) are white.
(Information from here and here (PDF warning). I have not read the entire report at the second link.)
Caine:
I wish I did. I’ve absolutely zero ambition today and there’s shit that I should be doing… oh well.
Now, that’s it! Off the computer for a little while at least!
…Also: eastern Austria (mostly flat): no winter; November weather grading seamlessly into March weather. No freezing except for a few nights in early December, no snow at all so far. Western tip of the country (alpine): five meters of snow or more.
Also also: more and more protesters in Syria. More dead protesters, too – 40 last week, IIRC.
I’ve recently become aware of another troubling aspect. A friend of the family is related to a murder victim. The crime was horrific and high profile. It has been long enough now that the murderers are up for parole. There is no doubt of guilt, at all. The only question is whether or not they have paid their debt.
Every time a parole hearing comes up, the relative travels to the hearing and speaks against it. Followed by weeks of depression. Worse, outside parties who are drawn to the case and empathize with the murderers (some of whom have “found god”) will contact her out of the blue, trying to enlist her aid in freeing these people. The entire family has been consumed by this crime, to the point where it now defines them.
I am still against the death penalty. But had these murderers been executed, the family of the victims would have been less affected.
It’s troubling. Putting the choice of the death penalty into the hands of the victim’s family would be granting legal retribution. There’s no way to justify that. At the same time, it’s hard to justify decades of re-inflicted pain.
Come on, that’s not a fair summary of Walton’s position.
He doesn’t speak that way about any ol’ “one moral issue”; murder is the moral issue.
It’s internally coherent to say that a person can get many moral issues wrong and still be taken seriously, but to make a Type I error about murder — advocating murder when it’s not justified — renders the person’s morality wholly suspect.
Walton’s said more or less the same thing to ARIDS that he’s said to me when I’m advocating political assassination. I disagree only because I think there are more times when murder is justified; his premise is defensible.
@Bill Dauphin:
From what little I know (mostly from reading John Douglas the FBI profiler), the violent serial predators and cult leaders he worked with are almost always white and almost always sexually motivated (i.e. have a sexual dimension to their crimes; he states that rape is about power not sex per se.) He never tried to explain WHY serial predators were usually white, but given all I’ve read about rape culture in the last year, I wonder if being white (and male) doesn’t just give them huge unwarranted credibility, and thus freedom to operate, in a racist society and racist criminal justice system.
Incidentally, John Douglas says this about the death penalty:
Quote from “Journey into Darkness” p.366 sourced from here: (link)
He’s talking about, and gives specific examples of, serial predators who had life sentences commuted or were pardoned for political reasons (IIRC) and then went on to commit further murders. And these are individuals who had long strings of victims, who boasted about their crimes and techniques, showed off their dump sites to investigators… ones for whom there’s no question about whether they were wrongfully convicted, and who WILL kill again if they have the freedom to do so.
That’s really the only argument in favor of the death penalty that I don’t have a good answer for; if the risk to their potential victims outweighs keeping a person like this alive once they’re helpless.
(edit) and as kerfluffle just mentioned, the need to avoid re-traumatizing victims while KEEPING these predators confined for, one hopes, life. Which Douglas specifically mentions and I forgot. *slinks away*
Walton:
Sorry, that’s my bad habit of folding the whole conversation into a response nominally addressed to one person. You hadn’t said anything about racism, but it had been part of the larger conversation.
Well, if you don’t believe society exists, or that society (if it exists) has a collective right to defend itself, then you might as well skip the rest of this, because that would mean we simply don’t share the basic assumptions necessary to discuss the issue.
OTOH, if society does exist, and if it has a right to defend its existence, then the question will naturally arise as to if/when it has the right to kill in its defense (and again, if your answer is Never!!!, then we can skip the rest of this conversation). The problem of capital punishment is part of that question. I’m not sure I’m up to proving it on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, but it seems to me this is a categorically different issue from racism, sexism, or homophobia. I agree with your position on the death penalty, but it doesn’t seem correct to me to treat expressions of an opposing view as morally equivalent to expressions of racism, sexism, or homophobia (about which I otherwise also agree with you).
Anyway…
…I was never suggesting that your (or our) response to a person’s views be conditioned on how you (or we) feel about the person; I was suggesting that our understanding of what those views actually are should be informed by what we know about the person.
Natural language is not precise; readers interpret what they read… and the more information that can be brought to bear on interpreting accurately, the better.
Some folks in this thread interpreted ARIDS’ (admittedly unfortunate) “vicious dog” metaphor as him comparing a class of people (many of whom are from racial minorities) to dogs, and drew from that that he was making a racist and anti-humane comment.
To me, it seemed more likely that he was saying something on the order of vicious people : people :: vicious dogs : dogs. We don’t treat vicious dogs differently because they’re “less than” other dogs in some moral sense, but because of the threat they present. I saw ARIDS’ comparison as being about threat analysis rather than about making invidious dehumanizing comparisons.
My suggestion was that our history with ARIDS can help us evaluate which interpretation is more likely correct, not that our history with him makes him immune from criticism or argument… which even my interpretation leaves plenty of room for.
Finally…
If you make a habit of rejecting people who fail to share not only your position on, but your precise level of passion for, very specific individual issues, you will necessarily be isolating yourself from a vast number of people who agree with you in principle about damn near everything. Perhaps you really believe this is “the hill you want to die on,” but don’t be surprised if you get lonely up there.
LM:
You’re right, and I didn’t mean it to be. Rather, I meant it was a predictable way of reading what I thought was an unfortunate turn of phrase… which I suggested to Walton he might want to “walk back” (i.e., rephrase or better explain). It made him sound morally haughty (and in fact, some others reacted to it that way), blunting the effect of his actual position.
Haw haw haw! That’s funny. You’re funny.
But even if anyone else were to pretend that this was a remotely plausible interpretation, it still doesn’t matter what he meant by it.
It is in fact dehumanizing to justify the killing of a human by comparing them to an animal which more people are comfortable killing.
For those of you who are pro capital punishment (in some situations), how about an argument from practicality? Basically, if we think someone is guilty of murder, as a society, we have the ability to lock someone up for life (they have almost no chance of getting out and harming anyone else again). And in reality, life sentences cost the state less money than death sentences.
Kerfuffle:
As someone who has had to deal with decades of parole hearings for the man who raped and tried to murder me, along with the other victims and the families of those he murdered, yeah…what can I say? You can never move on all the way, it’s like having fanged shadow hovering over your head all your life. Those who think the victims don’t do life as well are sadly mistaken. Troubling is the least of it.
Pteryxx:
Thanks for the info!
This is an admittedly unscientific observation, but it seems to me that the whole lengthy process of capital punishment itself retraumatizes victims and survivors. In fact, watching families of the slain spend years — sometimes decades — in a state of suspended bloodlust, waiting and hoping for their tormenters to be slain, rather than getting on with healing, is one of the key factors that finally swung me to opposing the death penalty. It seems to me that execution feeds and encourages the least humane impulses of the innocent, and thereby deeply wounds society.
which doesn’t mean it’s something he should walk back from.
He can just as well continue to point out that he was explicitly talking about getting murder wrong:
That statement has a narrow scope, and anyone like you who tries to read it more broadly can be corrected.
Bill:
*near fatal eyeroll*
Jesus fuckin’ Christ. I’m out.
LM:
It only matters if you value community. From the POV of intracommunity relations, there’s a hell of a lot of difference between…
“What a racist comment!!”
…and…
“Dude, I know you well enough to know you probably didn’t mean it that way, but that comment could sound racist.”
Not least among the differences is that the former is likely to drive the person addressed to defend his comment, while the latter is likely to get him to think about it… which is potentially the more net-positive outcome.
But you and I have been around this block before, and I don’t intend to start that trip again.
So I’m (finally) chalking for Freethinkers in about an hour and a half.
Does anyone have suggestions about what I should write? Any attention grabbing phrases?
No. What you actually mean to say is that it only matters if you value community more than human decency.
We do not need to tolerate the justification of murder by comparing people to dogs.
Full stop.
There ought to be no point at which social cohesion among blog commenters becomes more important than holding people responsible for saying destructive things which will harm society as a whole. That is a recipe for insularity, when we become excessively partial to those near us, at the expense of everyone else.
And I don’t know why you’re replying to me about racism. I haven’t said a thing about it. If we were explicitly advocating only murdering white people by comparing them with dogs, I would still say it’s dehumanizing to compare people with dogs for the purpose of murdering them.
Caine (@170):
My family is waiting for me to go out, so I won’t be able to do this justice, but I didn’t want to let a minute go by without apologizing to you. I expressed myself poorly, but nothing I said was meant with anything other than sympathy for victims and survivors. The system brutalizes you by forcing you, through ongoing court or parole proceedings, to stay linked to the facts of your suffering, rather than enabling you even try to move on.
I’ve watched news coverage of death penalty cases, and my heart has broken for families that seem trapped, Groundhog Day-like, in their moment of loss (and in their perfectly natural anger), because they keep having to go back to court, get interviewed by the press, etc. They deserve better.
And so do you. I’m very sorry I caused you pain. I’m’a shut up now, before I cause more.
StarStuff!:
I like:
from the Ken Ham vs. Karl Giberson post.
Bill, it’s appreciated. Thank you.
*Puts LC on and goes back to cleaning* Hallelujah and all that.
Ogvorbis:
I’m not sure the administration will approve of that one (with the profanity and all), but I like it.
That’s basically what I was trying to say, and you said it better than I could. Thank you.
LM:
That’s what I was trying to say.
But it is from
our prophet leader cultmasterone of the leaders of the atheist community. A direct quote. Think of what theists can get away with saying by claiming they are quoting gods. Why can’t we. . . .Nevermind.
For things to write on campus, so far I’ve got:
-Good without gods? So are we.
and
-Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (which is my favorite Carl Sagan quote, btw)
Please forgive me, I phrased that very poorly. What I meant to say was that the conflict between wanting what is best for the victims and wanting what is best for society is troubling. I see very little recourse and all solutions are at best merely compromise.
Victims and families fought hard for the right to give victim statements. Those rights must be supported but it is agonizing to see what they are going through. I want more for them but I can’t figure out what that would be. From the outside it seems horrific but I don’t know if I can speak for them. I haven’t experienced this, there is so much that I don’t know.
Kerfuffle:
You just said one of the most valuable things you can do for victims and their loved ones – don’t speak for them.
Armchair pontificating (in the general sense, not you) is usually far removed from how people actually feel and what they want to see happen. A majority of victims or the families of those murdered don’t favor the death penalty and they certainly don’t sit around in a state of “suspended bloodlust” as Bill said.
Some people do want the death penalty applied, sure. In those cases, I support the victims unreservedly. Back when I did groups, I’d talk about my own stance, but I’m not going to tell the father of a woman who was stabbed over 100 times how he should feel and think about things. If someone doesn’t like that, tough shit.
For those who would like to know more and do more, join a victims group in your local area. The primary focuses tend to be advocacy, law changing and attempting to fix an extremely broken justice system. Justice? There’s no such animal.
More things to write!
-No god? No problem.
-WWCSD (What Would Carl Sagan Do?)
-Oh my FSM [drawing of the Flying Spaghetti Monster], it’s [group’s name]!
Walton:
Sigh. I for one, wish that Stephen Harper and his cronies (I almost said “fappers” because I think it’s rather appropriate [/ht:theophontes]) would get the memo on this one. We had a system that was moving left (restorative justice and diversion programmes and decriminalisation of drug use), but now the government is going to spend billions on new prisons, tougher sentences, and waste a billion more destroying gun control data.
Interesting choice of link. It suggests that animal activists support killing animals that have attacked other animals or humans. Of course, the comparison can be turned around and we can ask why people who strenuously object to the death penalty for humans don’t actively oppose it being used as casually as it is for nonhuman animals.
(By the way, it’s inconsistent to call what you advocate simply assassination and what you don’t murder. I think you should call them both killing unless you’re specifically making a case for why one or the other is illegitimate.)
I haven’t read all the death penalty arguments here yet, but one that I think is quite powerful and often overlooked (mostly because the potential miscarriage of justice (even if one agrees that putting someone to death could be just) can not be morally justified) is this:
We should never allow those who control government* to have the power to kill citizens (or non-citizens for that matter) in a judicial process. It makes it far too easy to legally rid themselves of dissenters and political opponents, either by framing them** with capital crimes or by classifying their dissent itself as a capital crime.
*including the police
**whether on an individual or group level, either in a deliberate or systemic fashion
It’s one of the first ten results of this search.
No need to fixate on one particular moment in the dozens of times I’ve advocated political violence. I’ve called what I advocate murder as well in the past. I used assassination this time because I’m referring to my conversations with Walton about assassination, regarding Gaddafi, bin Laden, Jefferson Davis.
Yes. I agree completely. (Sacco and Vanzetti, and Joe Hill, being perfect examples of this phenomenon in the supposedly-“free” United States. If one looks at out-and-out dictatorships, the examples become too numerous to count.)
The reason I do not rely principally on this argument, though, is the same reason I do not rely principally on the argument that the judicial process is flawed and that innocent people may be wrongly executed. Of course this is true. But even if it were not, even if the judicial process were infallible and scrupulously fair, I would still oppose the death penalty in principle, in all circumstances. And I see it as important to win that principled debate first and foremost.
I largely agree with that, and have said as much in the past. The way that our society treats non-human animals is seriously morally problematic in countless respects. (I imagine that LM would say much the same, though I don’t speak for him; given that he’s a vegan, and far more militant on the animal rights front than I am.)
However, the fact that non-human animals are treated badly does not, of course, justify extending the same bad treatment to humans. Not that I think you were suggesting anything of the kind; but LM’s and my posts were responses to ARIDS’ grotesque arguments.
Caine:
That’s one part of the “justice” system I’ve often wondered about, the way it can be so harsh to the victims. Thankfully, I’ve never had to go through anything similar myself. But if we try to think of ways to better the system: could it help to record on video the victims’ testimonies, during the inquiry, to avoid making them come back again and again for trial dates and parole hearings? The judges, lawyers and juries would be able to watch relevant parts as many times as they needed without adding to the trauma of those who suffered. At least, for often repeated questions. It would limit the need to call back the victims so many times.
IIRC, a system like that is already in use for cases of child abuse in some countries. Could it also be implemented for adults victim of rape and murder attempts?
Irene, parole boards themselves are a fucking joke, it’s almost always a different panel of people, most of whom aren’t terribly qualified to do the job. Judges, juries and lawyers don’t come into it (unless a prosecutor shows up to oppose parole). I can’t speak to everyone’s experience, of course. How things are done and how parole boards are selected also vary from state to state.
Parole boards tend to lend more weight towards victims when they show up in person. I haven’t flown back to SoCal the last three times, which is why I have to spend so much time on letters/affadavits, phone calls and all that. I speak with the other victims and the murdered victims families once a year and of course, whenever a parole hearing comes up.
One thing all of us would like to see changed is life in prison means life. Then, maybe, it wouldn’t feel like we all got life sentences too.
I didn’t mean to imply anything – added “choice of” because I didn’t want to appear to be agreeing with the link itself. It’s sad to me that people so immediately focus on the “dehumanization” of comparing people to nonhuman animals rather than challenging our views and treatment of other animals that makes comparing people to them mean removing those people from full moral consideration.
In Fear of the Animal Planet, Hribal talks about the history of executions of circus elephants who’d attacked (in the case of one, a full-out lynching – she was hanged (yes, I’m serious)). I have a video of the electrocution of one elephant, Topsy, on my blog.
Ah – OK. Sorry.
SC:
Oh, some animal activists do condemn even the killing of animals who have killed humans. In fact, the first link to come up in the Google search linked by LM #188 is to an article calling “death penalty” the killing of three dogs after they killed their owner.
LM:
Oh, no. No need. Some things speak for themselves…
Wow, Caine. It’s just baffling to me that a serial murderer and rapist can even be considered, in any universe, as a candidate for release. What the ever loving fuck? Why is this even a question? Why are the victims put through this horror? Why is money being spent on this? Gah-that makes me furious.
Josh:
Our lovely justice system and tax dollars at work! Manson still gets regular parole hearings and you know he’s never gettin’ out. I’d say as far as states go, California is one of the worst in that regard.
WTF? I obviously wasn’t. I’m arguing the opposite: the agreement that the problem of comparing humans to other animals is that it’s “dehumanizing” makes all of us a little more vicious (or at least callous), and if we’re going to talk about causing an animal’s death in response to a violent act we shouldn’t limit the moral discussion to our species.
Josh:
One thing in particular that’s infuriating is the burden of aging. The parents of those women who were murdered are getting older and they worry that if they die, there won’t be anyone (or enough people) left to continue opposing parole. Fuck, I’m 54 and I’m the youngster of the group.
It is hellishly unjust that you and the families continue to be punished with the burden of begging the state not to let a serial killer out who may do it again (aside from the fact that you’d never, ever have a moment of feeling safe). I admit I hadn’t ever thought about this – now that I know it happens it makes me want to break dishes.
Yes, I know!* My response to that link wasn’t very well written, was it? I meant to add this this was inaccurate.
*The impetus for the movement that led to the elephant sanctuary in Tennessee, by the way, was the shooting of an elephant named Tyke in Hawaii in ’94.
Yes, I think you’re right about that, and I apologize that I evidently wasn’t clear. And I oppose such treatment for non-human animals just as I do for humans. (Which is why I find ARIDS’ argument grotesque on multiple levels; in arguing that society’s callous treatment of dogs should be extended to humans, he also impliedly assumes that society’s callous treatment of dogs is justified.)
(I was about to type “I want to focus on one issue at a time” – but, of course, in assuming without argument that the killing of humans is a categorically distinct “issue” from the killing of non-human animals, I’d be engaging in the same kind of human exceptionalism that you’re criticizing here.)
Yep. I actually entirely agree with that.
Caine, Josh:
From what I gather, one reason (not often acknowledged, but which seem to have a lot of traction with policy makers) that even rapists and murderers can be eligible for parole is to make the job of prison guards easier, and the cost of imprisonment lower. Criminals who know they have no chance to see the outside are harder to handle, and more expensive to keep in.
(BTW, I’m not saying that I agree, just that it seems to be a factor in the whole sad equation.)
Another reason taken into account by the justice system, is the idea of having a gradation in the punishment of crimes, to give an incentive for perpetrators to avoid escalation of violence. For instance, that rapists who murder their victims must be punished more severely that rapists who live them alive; robbers who kill witnesses must be punished more harshly that those who avoid killing, etc.
Which makes sense, even though this cold arithmetic doesn’t address the pain the survivors can go through. Even if a justice system is designed to be useful to society, there are many ways it could be made to work better for human beings who find themselves having to deal with it.
P.S. I hope the above doesn’t sound to cold or judgemental. It’s a difficult subject for me too, and I don’t trust myself with the expression of emotions, so I prefer to keep to factual statements.
Aaand praised be the god Tpyos! I meant “who let them live”, of course, not “live them alive” ><
Irene:
No, you’re fine. At least you pay attention to the victims, which is more than I can say for a lot of people.
Caine:
Thanks. I don’t know enough to speak about the USA, but in the country I live, there’s been an ugly trend of politicians pretending to speak for victims of crime while implementing “tough-on-crime” policies that actually make things worse. (For instance, pretending to better control the release of dangerous criminals by making more rules for parole hearings, while at the same time diminishing the budget allotted to justice.)
And they never ever use the word rape, even when that’s what she literally does with it. Repeatedly.
That’s what was creepiest about it, to me.
I might be misremembering, but I think that the aforementioned “power” not coming up at all in the second half of the season might have helped me get over it.
In this context it might now seem kind of weird that I wanted to make the case that the third season of that same show had somehow a more offensive take on sex than the first one.
I’m watching Downton Abbey too. OK, and the Big Bang Theory. End of confession.
Nobody’s watching the feetsball game?
I’m not watching it either.
I should find a drawstring bag to hold the candy I’ll be tossing out to students. For now I’m using a big freezer bag (the 1 gallon size), but that’s kinda redneck.
The candy is a mixture of soft peppermint pieces and Atomic Fireballs. (I bought a big jar of each at Sam’s; I figure as I run out I’ll pick up different varieties.)
####
Also, I need a question to ask the students for their information cards. I ask them for their ID number, their name (phonetically if they think I’ll mispronounce it), major, experience with math, experience with programming, and an unrelated question. Last semester it was, “Which book (other than Twilight, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings) do you recommend I read?”
Suggestions on a better question for this semester? I might take the same question and reorient it… “Name the last book you read for your own enjoyment.”
####
Are any of you on Fitocracy? I saw a couple of names when I was signing up (Facebook/Twitter import), but if you want to keep me accountable, my username is “benjamingeiger” (yes, I’m exactly that imaginative).
Irene:
Yeah, a lot of that sort of crap goes on here, too. One real problem is that there is no established criteria for selecting those who make up a parole board (in a lot of states, it’s a volunteer position), people aren’t well-vetted (more than one person has been caught accepting a bribe) and there are no consistent rules, even within one state, let alone state-wide.
Wow. I really am a nobody. I thought I was just a faceless beaurocrat. Go Steelers.
How about something like, “What book changed the way you look at the world and why?”
I like the idea, but this is all going on a 4×6 index card, not an essay. I might borrow your idea, though, with the caveat of limiting it to a sentence or two.
####
I don’t get any TV reception here; if I set up my antenna, I might get one station. So no handegg for me.
Hour and fifteen minutes until season 2! Woo!
Took a silly quiz. Apparently I’m Mr. Bates.
Patricia, glad to see you back, and I hope you’re doing well. Nerd, I hope the Redhead is doing better this evening.
For those here who think Ex-Senator Frothymixture’s dead babby is off limits rhetorically, I disagree with you and agree with Steve M and Thers:
Oh, and yeah, it was an abortion, regardless of what he and his wife want to call it.
Quoting a Whiskeyfire commenter: “He also was one of those who made the ‘intensely personal’ decision of Michael Schiavo into a congressional matter. So, fuck ’em.”
Thers provides a bonus link, which I will not include because Bill Donohue doesn’t deserve additional traffic:
Donohue is a piece of shit.
Thread Bankrupt. The Civ III monkey has me in thrall. Again.
–
I agree; Bush struck me, back then, as being a personally-ineffectual, somewhat lazy good ol’ boy figurehead for the corporate puppeteers to rule through, whereas this lot strike me as being a bunch of proudly, defiantly ignorant ego-monsters, actively and energetically in the service of the
HorsesCorporations, and firmly in the “baffle them with bullshit” camp.Granted, I wasn’t following the process then as closely as I do now…but then, he’s the reason why I pay more attention.
–
Thrilled to see Patricia back.
***
Nothing to add to that.
Miss Daisy – Thanks, I’m doing much better – finally.
Hey Nerd, how is the Redhead?
Hi SC!
Carlie – Woo Hoo for season 2! The costuming is pure eye candy.
Aaaaaaaaaand the Steelers gak it up. Now we get to hear the godbots brag about another Tebow miracle from gods.
So, off to bed to read Jingo.
Patricia, your input could be most valuable on this thread: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/08/do-you-have-religious-trauma-syndrome/ where there’s at least one person who thinks that religious people don’t really believe all that stuff, no matter the flavor of religion they were brought up in.
*just back from the hospital* The hospital is getting tired of her (they appear to have her blood pressure under some control) and is trying to ship her off to rehab.
Went to ***mart this morning and got a bunch of sweats for rehab. Rehab will be aggressive, 3 hours per day. I’ll have to sneak a picture of her in sweats.
There are now 38 Freethinkers chalkings on campus. I’m a little sore because of it, but it was totally worth it. We now have more chalkings than the College Republicans (who are fucking everywhere).
Some of my favorites:
-“Religion is all bunk” – Thomas Edison
-Good without god? So are we.
-Atheist, agnostic, humanist? You’re not alone.
-In the beginning, man created god.
-No god? No problem.
-WWCSD (What Would Carl Sagan Do?)
StarStuff: Good work. Taking bets on how long they’ll be there before they get washed or scuffed away? (Typically the winning bet is in hours.)
Nerd, it’s good to hear the Redhead is appropriately feisty. Get lots of pics, gotta take those when you get the opportunity. :)
@ Ben
That shit ain’t happening on my watch. I’ll bring chalk with me every time I go to class if I have to. They will be repaired if damaged.
Caine, I had no idea that your attacker is still affecting your life. That makes me extremely sad.
…
…
…
Yeah. That’s about it.
56% false positives for drug dogs
…I mean, in a direct immediate way. Besides how it affects your mind and feelings and so on.
SallyStrange:
An overwhelming amount of people get to go through the same thing, for decades on end. A lot of people can’t get past a DA who talked them into a charge they aren’t okay with (2nd degree murder rather than 1st, frinst.) One of the reasons I get so angry over people who constantly talk about “oh, those poor murderers and rapists, they need a pat on the head, a cookie and a hug!” is that their empathy is reserved for the criminals. People rarely think about the victims or the impact of crime.
The main reason I stopped going to parole hearings is that I couldn’t stand being in the same room with him anymore. At this rate, the bastard will probably outlive me.
Just the thought of strenuous rehab would make me feisty. *snort*
Hot damn is PZ sick of sandiseattle over on the KOMO thread. Whew!
Sally:
I know, thank you.
Time for Larkrise & Downton Abbey.
Later…
Patricia:
Yes, but not banhammer sick. At least Sandi didn’t pull his “I have a three digit IQ” on PZ in response.
Hi, Patricia!
***
That sounds hellish.
I’ve got the banhammer out, and am swinging it in anticipation. Man, I hate that dishonesty: how can Sandiseattle of all people lecture others on how intolerant this place is?
I’m getting close to the finish line on this armoire project, but it turns out that trying to cut doors to fit a not-exactly-square opening, without a table saw or decent circular saw, is extremely difficult. Who knew?
Walton,
Ah, it’s so easy to be self-righteous when you don’t have to come up with a solution, isn’t it? Must be a great joy to you. I ask again: what do you do with people like Ted Bundy–who in effect said he would never stop trying to escape so he could kill more women.
How about Joseph Kroy who has used rape as a weapon and has countless acolytes (including Rush Limbaugh–who’d a thunk) who would never stop trying to spring him so he could continue enslaving child soldiers and using rape as a weapon of terror.
What do you do with the likes of them?
Audley,
I do not support the death penalty as it is administered in the US. I’ve written letters for Amnesty. In the case of most murderers, they pose no serious threat once they are incarcerated. I favor any reasonable effort at rehabilitation. And yes, some may someday be released and end up living worthwhile lives.
Some, though, are broken. They cannot be fixed. No amount of effort or love or resources will allow them to live in society ever again. Even for them, I favor incarceration.
There are a tiny minority, though, who, even incarcerated, continue to pose a threat. Some pose a threat because they are compelled to kill–usually women. Some pose a threat because they inspire others who are sick.
Others, like Timothy McVeigh, Joseph Kroy, Charles Manson, and yes, Osama bin Laden still spread their messages of hate and poison the minds of others. I do not see that it cheapens human life to take the life of someone who never valued human life to begin with.
What is gained by warehousing such people?
PZ:
It’s got something to do with that hellish mix of Christianity and that vaunted 3 digit IQ, I just know it.
This has already been enumerated, hasn’t it?
1. You retain the chance to correct a false conviction
2. You avoid inflicting psychological trauma on victims as well as the people responsible for killing the convict*
*provided the sentence is life in prison with no possibility of parole
We have no trouble keeping Timothy McVeigh and Charles Manson locked up. The US claims that there was a fight which made taking Osama bin Laden alive too dangerous; assuming that’s true, nobody should have a problem with it; if it’s not true, I don’t really care but it would have been a great PR example to find him guilty of murder and imprison him for the rest of his life instead of granting him martyrdom. As for Joseph Kony, I have argued that any moral imperative to attempt imprisonment depends upon a nation’s actual ability to do so; if he were captured alive, it may be dangerous to imprison him in Uganda, but he could be extradited to a nation with a strong prison system and tried by the ICC.
Do whatever is practical and ethical to prevent them from escaping; and if one does manage to escape despite our best efforts, have predictions in place of their likely behaviors to try to apprehend them again as soon as possible. It isn’t perfect or foolproof, but neither is anything else.
a_ray:
This again? In addition to the practical & moral answers already given, I’d like to emphasise that just like the comparison of people on death row with “vicious dogs”, “warehousing” is a dehumanising word that is best avoided here. Warehousing is for things, not people.
@ David Marjanović #157:
Did I tell you that this comment is full of teh awesome? :-)
How common do you think prison escapes are? Do you really think this is a serious argument? You’re proposing murder as a “solution” to an imagined problem.
You’re coming up with ex post facto rationalizations for your desire to murder people you hate. It frightens me.
Their lives. Which are not yours to take away.
Seriously. You’re frightening me.
If he is captured alive, he will, in fact, be imprisoned in the Hague and tried before the ICC; the Office of the Prosecutor having requested a warrant for his arrest back in 2005, which remains outstanding. This is consistent with Museveni’s stated policy; indeed, Museveni himself referred the situation in northern Uganda to the ICC for investigation.
I support this, since Kony, if ever captured, is likely to be treated far more humanely in the Hague than he would be in Uganda.
Sally:
As I said much earlier in the thread, ‘life’ sentences are a massive problem. Not that many murderers or rapists receive a life with no possibility of parole.
Again, everyone wants to talk about the criminals, no one cares about the victims. (Not you, Sally, just saying in general.)
Well, that just makes your arguments even more unfortunate.
It sort of doesn’t matter what any of us think about the summary executions of war criminals and terrorists; governments will always act illegally against those they deem enemies of the state. That’s fine and all; I don’t have a problem with that in principle.
But then you’re conflating them with more common criminals like Charles Manson, who are handled by the civilian justice system. Problem: whatever the government can do to Charles Manson, it will also do to innocent people. To whatever degree you justify the death penalty for Manson, you are justifying the real death penalty in the real world, the death penalty which is carried out on a racist basis.
You probably can’t get to the ideal kind of world you want, so your arguments have to be considered instead in the context of the world we actually live in. Your arguments would be less objectionable if we already lived in a world where the death penalty was outlawed in civilian contexts and unlikely to return; then you’d be just floating a basically irrelevant hypothetical, which could do very little harm.
Unfortunately, we are in a world where every justification for the civilian death penalty will be twisted to justify the current system.
As long as people believe that the death penalty can be implemented fairly and accurately, most of them will believe that it already is being implemented fairly and accurately. We can predict that from studies of the Just World phenomenon.
Nothing good is likely to come from you arguing this. If there are any consequences — that is, if you change anyone’s mind about anything — it’s likely to be in a bad direction, and more still to the degree you make these arguments among acquaintances who are not hardcore anti-death-penalty liberals.
(It should be added, therefore, that ARIDS’ comments about Kony are based in utter ignorance of the actual situation. It must be nice not to feel the need to bother to do any research before advocating killing people.)
And nobody is obliged to pretend that the consequences of your hypothetical could plausibly be decoupled from the current situation.
a_ray:
I’ve answered this twice now. If you need a refresher, Sally’s 239 sums up my points quite well.
If you’re suggesting that I am not concerned about victims of atrocities, this is far from the truth. (Nor, to my knowledge, is it true of anyone else here.) There is a reason why I am pursuing a career working with refugees and asylum-seekers, and I am all too aware of the way that our laws re-victimize victims of atrocities and compound their suffering, something about which I have written here often in the context of racist immigration laws.
And, for what it’s worth (and I hope sincerely that it does not sound like a platitude) I’m genuinely sorry for the repeat horror you had to go through in dealing with the parole hearings. I didn’t say anything about it earlier because I worried that, in the context of this discussion, anything I said might cause you inadvertent hurt, and I have absolutely no desire to hurt you. I’m sorry if I have done so. Truly.
In this case, I am talking about the criminals because ARIDS is advocating killing them; a proposition to which I cannot assent, and on which I cannot remain silent. This does not mean that I do not think victims matter. Rather, the issue is simply that revenge will not repair anything; it will not put right what is wrong; it will only create more death and more suffering.
Caine #238
Don’t be mocking sandiseattle’s 3 digit IQ. Do you know how many times sandi had to take the IQ test to finally achieve hir goal? It took hir years and much hard work to reach to reach the coveted three digit IQ.
Walton:
It must be nice to be ever so empathic when it comes to criminals but not ever once give a shit about victims. Lovely, that is.
Didn’t he say he’s male? Or am I still confusing him with that other twit?
Walton:
In all the reams you’ve written about this subject, Walton, you never bring up victims. There’s a reason for that, I suggest you think on it.
Thank you. You write as though it’s all over, though. It’s not. I’ll be doing parole hearings until I’m dead or he’s dead. I have a life sentence in this regard and so do the others.
Sandiseattle might be male, might not. I don’t pay attention to minor details of NPCs.
SC:
Yes, he did, more than once, after defending spelling his name with an i.
‘Tis:
I’m sure it did. You’d think, though, that after all that effort, Sandi would be clever enough to figure out the connection between his moaning and whining about how xtians are treated here for years and tolerance. Perhaps he should sit for the test again.
Not caught up yet.
What did this mean?
Chigau:
Walton was upset that not every single person here shares his views on a particular subject.
He means he’s going to start going to UU church, because social justice is more important to him than skepticism.
Which really doesn’t mean that he doesn’t fit in here, and he hasn’t been acting like he’s bowing out anyway. So…
The reason I do not generally bring up victims in arguments about criminal sentencing, specifically, is not because I am unconcerned for their wellbeing, but, rather, because I am used to seeing the “tough on crime” right-wing lobby using victims as their principal argument for advocating tougher sentencing, the death penalty and more use of imprisonment. (See, for instance, the discourse surrounding the riots last year in the UK.) This political meme has been extremely influential, as evidenced by the fact that criminal sentences have been getting generally tougher, and that the prison population has shot up considerably, in the last few decades in both the US and UK; and it is a serious problem.
I may very well be guilty of not talking about victims enough and of not paying enough attention to their interests. And I apologize for that. What I will say in my defence is that there is a reason for that, and the reason is that I am always afraid (with, I think, good reason) of encouraging the powerful pro-incarceration “tough-on-crime” political meme that has made the criminal justice system into the mess it is.
I have written about victims quite frequently in other contexts: asylum-seekers who are victims of rape, human-trafficking and debt-slavery, for instance, and undocumented immigrants who are victims of domestic violence and receive no protection, and victims of torture at Guantánamo Bay, and victims of racist police brutality, and victims killed at the hands of the British state while being deported, and victims of homophobic hatred and violence in Uganda.
The reason I do not generally bring up victims in arguments about criminal sentencing, specifically, is not because I am unconcerned for their wellbeing, but, rather, because I am used to seeing the “tough on crime” right-wing lobby using victims as their principal argument for advocating tougher sentencing, the death penalty and more use of imprisonment. (See, for instance, the discourse surrounding the riots last year in the UK.) This political meme has been extremely influential, as evidenced by the fact that criminal sentences have been getting generally tougher, and that the prison population has shot up considerably, in the last few decades in both the US and UK; and it is a serious problem.
I may very well be guilty of not talking about victims enough and of not paying enough attention to their interests. And I apologize for that. What I will say in my defence is that there is a reason for that, and the reason is that I am always afraid (with, I think, good reason) of encouraging the powerful pro-incarceration “tough-on-crime” political meme that has made the criminal justice system into the mess it is.
I have written about victims quite frequently in other contexts: asylum-seekers who are victims of rape, human-trafficking and debt-slavery, for instance, and undocumented immigrants who are victims of domestic violence and receive no protection, and victims of torture at Guantánamo Bay, and
[post broken to avoid link filter – will be continued]
[continued]
…victims of racist police brutality, and victims killed at the hands of the British state while being deported, and victims of homophobic hatred and violence in Uganda.
First, just to remind everyone, Timothy McVeigh was executed last June. That does, of course, make it easier to keep him out of circulation… but it still doesn’t change my mind about the death penalty.
***
LM:
I had to leave earlier to drive my daughter back to school, but I’ve been thinking about your last to me. The community is never well served when you and I have extended exchanges, but you said some things I did want to respond to. So I’m just going to reply once; leave my thoughts hanging out there for the community to take, leave, or rip to shreds; and go Do Other Things™ for a couple days, specifically so I won’t be tempted to engage in a rhetorical ping-pong match.
Initially…
Of course we don’t, and I never said we did. I did say, and still believe, that whether “justification of murder by comparing people to dogs” is a fair characterization of what ARIDS said is an open question. ARIDS’ history of positive contributions here in no way bears on the former question, but I believe it does at least inform the latter.
I think you consistently overstate the impact of individual comments here, and undervalue the existence of a community like this one. I very seriously believe that the latter has far more potential to enable social goods than the former does to “harm society as a whole.” But in any case…
…I’m not arguing for some sort of tribal fealty. I’m saying we get to know each other here, and what we know about each other ought to inform how we interpret what each other says. It’s a call for knowledge-based responses, not a plea for fraternal blindness to fault.
People earn a certain level of trust by virtue of their history of positive contributions, and I think it’s a positive group value that we should give people the benefit of the doubt based on that trust; FSM knows we’re quick (and correct, IMHO) to do the inverse with people who’ve earned our distrust by virtue of their history of negative contributions.
And “benefit of the doubt” does not mean a free pass. It means that when you read something and say, “wow, I wouldn’t have expected ARIDS to say something like that,” ARIDS’ history here justifies taking a second or two to reread, and to consider whether he really did say that, or if there’s another way to read it.
As a not-quite-perfect analogy, I know my congressman personally. I have come to trust him — both to trust him to behave honorably and to trust that his values are closely aligned with my own — and therefore when he says something (or votes in a way) that seems wrong to me, my first reaction is not to dash off an angry letter, but to take some time to think about whether I’m understanding what he said correctly, whether he’s thought of something I haven’t, etc. Sometimes I end up disagreeing with him anyway, and if I end up disagreeing with him often enough (seems unlikely so far), my trust will be eroded, but in the meantime, he’s earned that moment of second thought.
Similarly, I think the best of our regular contributors have earned that moment of extra consideration. Lately, it seems like we go the other way around here more often, jumping quickly to the least charitable interpretation, even of things said by people we have reason to trust.
That’s a defensible approach, of course: Zero tolerance for moral (or even rhetorical) error, no matter who you are. But I’m not sure it’s a productive approach. Even the best of us.. even you… will occasionally say the wrong thing, or say something that isn’t necessarily wrong in an unfortunate way. Of course we must call out error where we see it, but how we call out error, and how we decide when we see it, makes a difference.
Unlike you, I don’t think the comments here change the world, per se… but I do think the people here do, and we’ve heard uncounted stories of people whose consciousness has been raised, or whose minds have been changed, or who have committed (or re-committed) themselves to activism because of the inspiration they’ve found here. The difference between feeling that kind of inspiration and just feeling rhetorically horsewhipped can be as simple as the difference between “that’s awful!” and “you probably didn’t mean it this way, but that sounds awful.”
If you’re worried about fending of insularity in this community, the answer is to keep it growing, flexible, and inclusive. Dipping it in liquid nitrogen and smashing it to shards is not going to make the world better.
***
Now, as I said, I’m going to go away for a few days, and when I come back, I’ll be talking about Top Chef or Project Runway or Tim Fucking Tebow or pretty much anything but this. See y’all then….
I should add to this that it is not generally the victims themselves who are promoting this meme, but, generally, politicians and the right-wing media who use the victims’ perceived interests as an argument for tougher sentencing. So if the above sentence comes across like victim-blaming, I apologize; it wasn’t meant as such.
Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001.
—-
I hope they don’t put that on their t-shirts.
(I’m reading Unseen Academicals.)
—-
I had to look up NPC and now I think I’m offended :(
Walton:
Walton, you rarely have a well-balanced view of things, it’s always ‘all this’ or ‘all that’ and perhaps you have too many fears that keep you from considering more than one point of view.
I honestly don’t want to jump all over your ass here, but I don’t think you have a good sense of just what victims go through. Your hesitancy on addressing anything I wrote in that regard is telling – you can’t hurt me by talking to me about the victim side of things. If you really want to work with victims, you’ll need to get over that, and I think it will be one hell of a shock to you. The criminal justice system, whether you’re here in the U.S. or the U.K., looks a whole lot different when you’re a victim.
Chigau:
Thanks for the correction; I misread my source (i.e., 2011 v. 2001). I thought last June seemed oddly recent.
I feel like I may be coming down with a cold. In the past two hours, I have consumed at least three quarts of tea, plus four cups of Emergen-C drink, plus a bowl of Campbell’s chicken soup.
On to making it an even gallon!
On September 11, 2001, just three months after McVeigh’s execution, someone, somewhere said something like:
“I wonder what Timothy McVeigh would have thought of this.”
It kinda stuck in my mind.
You’re not the first person to tell me that (from early childhood onwards), and I’m sure you won’t be the last. It seems to be a personality trait. (I’ve held many different views and philosophies in my life, but the one thing I’ve never yet been is a moderate.)
Perhaps. And I’m sure I sometimes have a stronger and more one-sided reaction on these issues than is warranted. For that, I’m sorry.
But I doubt you’d disagree that there are serious problems with mass imprisonment in America. And in this specific context I think it’s hard to argue that there are any sensible or reasonable arguments for the death penalty. (Indeed, you yourself have said that you don’t support it.)
Well, I have some experience working with clients in my own field – immigration, refugee and asylum law – and intend to practice in that area.
But aside from that, of course you’re right: what I do not have is any experience working in the criminal justice system, either with victims or with offenders. Nor do I plan to practice criminal law. With that in mind, I certainly wouldn’t claim to understand what victims of crime go through; nor would I claim to understand what prisoners go through, or people on death row. All of these things are far outside my personal experience.
With that in mind, I’m genuinely sorry if I haven’t listened to you enough on this subject, or if I’ve seemed to be dismissive of your experience. I only hope you know that I’m trying – perhaps clumsily, but I’m doing the best I can – to make the world better. And I think opposing the death penalty is a part of that.
=====
No, that was actually nothing to do with it. I’d decided to write that blog post long before this discussion started, and the two things have nothing at all to do with one another.
Rather, my comment above was an immediate emotional reaction to the grotesque thing that ARIDS said, and to what I perceived as others defending him. Nothing in particular to do with UUs.
Walton:
You’re right, I don’t disagree. There are massive problems, to say the least. For one thing, we have to stop locking people up for drugs – it’s well past the absurdity level here. However, that has nothing to do with serious offenders and the problems they present or just how victims are fucked over repeatedly.
I do know that, Walton, and I appreciate your feelings and efforts in that regard. I do think you might struggle for a balanced view much of the time, but you do try and that’s a whole lot more than many people do.
Sally:
Do that and more chicken soup! Take care of yourself and I hope you can head this off at the pass, at least a little bit.
Yeah yeah–first I gotta PEE!
Hey, new thread! *looks at clock* Ah man . . . maybe tomorrow.
Of course they’re separate issues, but given that you mentioned that these events took place in California, I suspect – although I can’t be sure – that the endless chain of parole hearings you’ve been forced through is, in part, to do with the massive overcrowding in the California state prison system (which is the most overcrowded in the US), and the state’s consequent desire to free up space by paroling more people. That’s speculative, and I could be wrong, but it seems plausible. And this, in turn, is down to the War on Drugs, the “three strikes” policy, mass imprisonment of people for non-violent crimes, and so forth.
If prison were only reserved for rapists, murderers and people of similar ilk, as it should be, it would likely be much easier to keep those people detained securely for life. The issues are connected: the criminal justice system would probably be better at protecting people from serious violent offenders, if vast resources were not being wasted instead on locking up millions of people for victimless crimes.
Walton:
Actually, what it has to do with is California’s constant waffling on the death penalty. The death penalty was in place at the time of my rape, but it was abolished when my rapist/murderer was sentenced. At the time (early ’70s), there was no life without the possibility of parole (or if there was, the judge didn’t think to sentence him that way), so he got the standard “life”, which meant he could start seeking parole after 10 years. It’s gone on since then, every 7 years to start, then every 5 years on the parole hearings.
You’ll get no argument out of me on that.
Oh, I see. For these kinds of reasons, England now has “whole life sentences, which are expressly intended for this type of case (multiple murders, particularly murders with a sexual motivation) in which the person is deemed too dangerous ever to be released.
Walton:
Right, which translates to “life without the possibility of parole” here. “Whole life” is much more succinct. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who should get such a sentence, but don’t. As I said earlier, I’ve met a fair amount of people who ended up consenting to a charge they weren’t happy with, such as a reduction to 2nd degree murder, which does not get a whole life sentence. So, you end up with scores of victims or victims families who get stuck with the whole possibility of parole business.
On a trivial topic:
I’m watching sumo live streaming from Tokyo :):):)
Bill, since you are determined to waste my time yet again, I’ll return the favor.
No, a person’s history of positive contributions cannot have anything to do with the fact of whether or not they justified murder by comparing people to dogs.
Facts are facts. We can read what people actually said:
That is a justification of murder. See the second part, where he is advocating murder. With me so far?
Now, do you see the first part, where he makes a comparison between people and dogs? Okay, now if you put the two together, he has justified murder by comparing people to dogs.
I know this may be hard for you to understand, because with you it’s always personal, and you must think that if I recognize ARIDS is justifying murder by comparing people with dogs, I must therefore hate him for that — and since that would be bad, you feel you have to argue against the facts of the matter.
But that would be a faulty assumption! As it happens, I like ARIDS a great deal. I am positively disposed to him, personally. It is also no surprise to me that someone I’m positively disposed toward would justify murder by comparing people to dogs, and as far as I can tell, it has not led me to feel any less positively disposed toward him. People say fucked up shit, and that includes people I like, and this is not a surprise to me. I have heard even worse shit from other people in the last week, and I remained positively disposed toward them too.
What my positive disposition cannot do, and what my familiarity with his various stances cannot do, is make me fail to recognize the simple fact that he justified murder by comparing people to dogs.
You think it matters what his intention was. You are wrong about this, as usual. His intention cannot change the fact of what he actually said. For some reason, you think that if a person had a good intention — and in this case, I cannot imagine how we could possibly pretend that he had a good intention, but hey, just for the sake of argument — that this somehow should be more important than what they actually said.
No. Wrong. Get over this. If he wanted to say something less fucked up, he could have done exactly that. The words that people choose matter.
I think you’re subliterate, since I just said to ARIDS: “Nothing good is likely to come from you arguing this. If there are any consequences — that is, if you change anyone’s mind about anything — it’s likely to be in a bad direction, and more still to the degree you make these arguments among acquaintances who are not hardcore anti-death-penalty liberals.”
Part of the meaning of that statement is that there might be no consequences beyond the annoyance of commenters here.
You don’t have a clue what I think about the value of this community, and you have almost no basis whatsoever to speculate. I hardly ever talk about it, and I have my reasons for that, but what little evidence is available to you does not support your conclusion. If I thought you had any goddamn decency reserved for me, I’d expect an apology. Instead, I’ll just remind you: you barely know me, Bill, and you’ll understand better if you try to avoid making up unevidenced narratives to fill the gaps. You ought to have recognized that you had no basis to make this statement. Please recognize similarly in the future.
I can read what he did in fact say. And! He has now had the opportunity to clear up any misunderstandings, and he has not done so.
And when I do, people criticize me for it. I don’t need to be coddled, and neither does ARIDS. Honestly, I don’t think anyone here really needs to be coddled except for you, Bill.
Your condescending drone is probably the worst possible way, but let’s go back and see just what was actually said to ARIDS:
That’s what was said, before you started whining about it. Those statements are a lot more diplomatic than you need to pretend for your argument to be useful. Two of them explicitly involve precisely what you pretend was not present: requests for him to rethink what he said.
It’s bad enough that someone justified murder by comparing people to dogs. That’s unfortunate, but shit happens. The far worse thing is to pretend that that statement wasn’t justifying murder by comparing people to dogs.
That’s far worse because if we were to start taking your advice, then it would sometimes be okay to compare people to dogs while justifying murder. That really is one of the worst possible outcomes of this discussion. You seem to think one of the worst possible outcomes would be if ARIDS doesn’t think about why it was wrong for him to say what he said — or maybe you don’t think that; it rather appears you don’t even think there was something wrong with what he said — but no, we can usually expect that people won’t learn anything about being wrong. That he won’t admit error is pretty much to be expected. Most people don’t most of the time when they’re wrong.
The probable outcomes here are either: ARIDS doesn’t admit error and he is criticized for justifying murder by comparing people with dogs; or ARIDS doesn’t admit error and your excuses carry the day so we all agree it’s really okay to justify murder by comparing people with dogs, for the sake of the community.
The latter option is much worse than the former.
@ Caine 152
*snorFle*
@ Dr Audley 154
… and my whole evening. I think we should blame rorschach for pointing out that windmill ;) SIWOTI – a hard habit to shake.
@ Walton 155
Rather, this is a community you need to fit into. We love you, but you could turn down the volume a bit without changing your message (which I generally agree with by the way) or losing your passion. Not trying to open the tact/tone debate, but a comment like that smacks of passive agression.
We all can. Not just other people.
@ David M. 157
Beaucoup. With [o], not [u], in the first syllable. :-)
Merci Beaucoup, monsieur Marjanović . Sorry, my spelling is even worse than my French. Quelle enfer! *googles to check* (Pheeuw.)
Nerd,
Some philosophy is, and some philosophy isn’t. Some philosophy, taken seriously, can help people work through their prejudices.
Downton Abbey was lovely eye candy again.
Gawd, the religious trauma thread is ugly.
I’ve spent 30 seconds imagining what flavor of cupcake the Walton is…complete waste of time. I’m going to bed.
Goodnight sweethearts!
@ Patricia
*waves*
The horde has been singing your praises, so I hope to see you back on TET. Schlafen Sie wohl!
Hey guys, I need some ideas from the Horde. I’m doing this photo challenge thing – 112 photos in 2012 – each of a different subject. One of them is religion. I don’t want to do a photo that might imply that I like or endorse religion even a tiny bit, but I don’t want to do anything that is blatantly slamming it either.
NB: I’m in Australia, so I can’t just pop out and find an anti-abortion rally or something.
So, thoughts?
@ kimulrick
Whyever not?
kimulrick, if you don’t mind that it’s commonly done, look for religious architecture in disrepair, or out-of-business temples.
Where in Australia? If you’re in Sydney, I quite like the urban grunge/stained glass contrast of the street by Christ Church St Laurence in Sydney. Or there’s Mortuary Station. The Newtown graveyard is pretty cool, too.
Kimulrick:
No need to be In your face about it. Religion is about money, greed and suppression. There is lots to suggest; just this side of Poe.
A crucifix, an offering plate, altar boys, priests. Glorious cathedrals, crumbling catholic schools with no playgrounds.
That’s just the RC’s.
Gloria Jeans cash registers.
Yeah, I should have thrown in a modifier, and said most philosophy is mental masturbation. JM seems to think philosophy is everything, and needs to be brought up short on its real usefulness.
Good morning everyone. I’m back at work following a terrible stomach virus and the worst back ache I’ve had since college (took me two minutes to shuffle to the bathroom to get some Naproxen – which only barely helped.) Feelin’ fine and dandy now, except for the part where I have to work… drat.
Not all big heads are bad.
@ Kitty
Eeuw. Get (more) well quickly. {Maxxie the cat sends you a get-well-lick too}
@ Dr Audley
re: rorschach’s linky
Teh troll has assploded in a glittering shower of misogyny. Quite a sight to behold.
Hey, can people technically troll their own blogs? … this one has…
Interesting thing I keep running into with trolls. When they get angry they either assume I am a woman or use misogynistic language against me. A bit of a back-handed compliment in a way. (Though I would rather they didn’t resort to bigotry.)
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2487#comic
*giggles*
Kitty
Sorry about the work.
Good about the body, though.
This is completely unfair. As you must be aware, ARIDS, the whole of Europe has abolished the death penalty – and no problems I am aware of have arisen from this. Keeping those you want to kill – highly dangerous serial killers such as Peter Sutcliffe, and terrorists such as Carlos Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (“The Jackal”) – incarcerated is not, in practice, particularly difficult or expensive. IOW, the solution (an alternative to the death penalty) is known; if you want to go on having people killed, you at least have a moral responsibility to accept that this is not necessary for public safety.
SG/LM and Walton,
Actually, given the relative affection in which I hold canines and hominids, comparison of the latter with the former is flattery.
And NO, I did not say ALL those on death row are vicious dogs. I said that when a dog cannot be rehabilited, we put it down. This is an incredibly sad thing–but sometimes it is necessary. I suppose we could keep the dogs–who are still social animals, despite the fact they cannot be kept with other dogs without killing them–in a cage, and watch them bet crazier and crazier. Just so, we can keep humans warehoused–and yes, it is warehousing–isolated from human contact for all but 1 hour a day. It is the warehousing that is dehumanizing, but have the courage to at least call it what it is.
I brought up Bundy and Manson. Manson did not have to escape prison to direct his followers to continue to commit acts of violence. Durg kingpins and gangleaders do the same–not just in the US, but in Brazil…all over the world. Incarceration doesn’t keep them from killing. Rapists still taunt their victims from prison.
Ah, and Joseph Kony. Do enlighten us, Walton. I’d love to hear your defense of him. Tell us how he is justified in kidnapping children and turning them into murderers and rapists of their own families and villages.
Kony is also not alone. Rape as a weapon of war is on the rise–in the former Yugoslavia, the Caucusus, Congo, Rwanda, Uganda,… Again, you’re mighty silent about the victims there.
Frankly, I think it is an insult to the people of Uganda to contend that they are incapable of dealing with him as they should. In Rwanda, they were far more merciful and efficient than the clowns at the Hague.
People make choices. Those choices determine the value of their lives. Most of us develop meaningful relationships to a greater or lesser degree. Some of us leave the world a better place. There are some, though, that make the world better by leaving it.
Note that I detest the way capital punishment–hell the entire judicial system–in the US is run. Even China has a more just system. The vast majority of murderers pose no threat once incarcerated. They may even repent of their actions and grow as humans. They should be given that chance. There are lines, though, that once crossed make one irredeemable. When the proof is irrefutable and the criminal irredeemable, how can you contend that solitary confinement for 23 hours a day is more humane than death?
@chigau:
I know you meant it how you meant it, but I still giggled thinking you were complimenting my body XD
@ ARIDS/SG/Walton
The Red Cross is there to stick plasters on the gaping wounds left by ghouls like Bashir, Kony, Turabi … (without even leaving NE Africa). These are people responsible for the ongoing suffering and murder of tens of thousands of people. To really solve the problem would take a Black Cross ™ that goes in and surgically removes the very source of the problem.
If the death of one person can prevent these evils, surely we should hold the idea up for consideration.
(In this particular case I would actually even support implementation thereof, even though I would generally agree with the Walton Position. Just do the maths.)
*sterile Internet hugs for Sally and Kitty*
*blink*
1994?
I find that seriously hard to believe!
The elephant that killed someone here in Vienna a few years ago is alive & well (just not, AFAIK, in Vienna anymore), and there was never a discussion about whether to get literally medieval on his ass. ~:-|
Of course, I was also shocked to find out that minors can sometimes be tried as adults in the US.
In other words, it’s a way to avoid the problem Dracon faced, the one the draconian punishments are named for. He drafted a code of law for Athens. People read it and found the punishment for apparently everything was death, death, death. They asked him why he wanted to punish petty theft with death, the same punishment as for murder. He answered: “The just punishment for petty theft is death. It is unfortunate that nature hasn’t given us any harsher punishments fit for more severe crimes.”
But, WTF, frequent parole hearings for Charles Manson? I don’t know how such things are actually handled over here (except that “life” means something more like “17 years” in practice), but I’ve never heard of the kind of horror Caine has described. :-S
Ah! Glad to know it’s not just Austria’s universities that have their budget cut while they’re being ordered to increase their expenses! </industry-grade sarcasm>
Subthread won. :-)
All seconded.
(OK, “I don’t really care” is too strong a statement for me, but I’m not exactly crying!)
:-) It’s just sad I haven’t got a reply…
*giggle*
Quel enfer ! The inferno is a he.
…Not that it changes anything about the pronunciation.
Also, I’ve never heard anyone say this. I recommend quel bordel – “what a fucking mess”. :-)
Obsolete; might not even be readily understood by everyone. Just Schlafen Sie gut or Schlaf gut.
Of course. Some do it when they think they aren’t getting enough traffic.
How does one determine that someone is irredeemable, that there is no chance (or not a sufficient chance) they can be rehabilitated to some degree (so solitary confinement or other restrictions are no longer necessary)? If you contend that there is such a line that can be crossed, how can we determine that line so that those in “the vast majority of murderers” are not categorized incorrectly?
Can this line ever shift as better rehabilitation techniques are developed? If so, how does one determine in advance where that line would be for an individual, for however long they would live if they weren’t given the death penalty?
Mitt Romney: “I like being able to fire people.”
:-D
Evidence for “all over the world”, please.
o_O
Do tell us where Walton has said Kony is justified.
Not that it matters, but I don’t think it’s rising at all. I think it makes the news nowadays, while in earlier times armies were simply expected to rape & pillage – if anything, it was news when they didn’t do such things.
No.
“Value” doesn’t even apply to “life”.
Is that what life sentences look like in the US? Over here, that’s only a special extra punishment for extreme misbehavior committed while already in prison.
You know how the Mossad kidnapped Eichmann? You know how that US commando broke into bin Laden’s house and may well have been able to get him out alive? I think that kind of thing should happen a lot more often. The ICC should have a fleet of black helicopters to bring even acting heads of state to justice… :-)
It may be a flaw in my thinking but I have always agreed more with this sort of thing than executions. It may be the remnants of primitive ethics codes or the like but the idea of assassinating someone to end a war or conflict sooner and executing someone who is your prisoner, and thus your responsibility, or is now neutralized as a problem always felt very different.
It bugged me in the last bombing where it looked like NATO and the like were barred from bombing anything BUT the target that would end the conflict for the rebels quicker because it was a head of state. There seemed something hypocritically hilarious about giving air support to rebels trying to over throw the government, but not attacking the dictator in question because he was the head of that government.
Granted I don’t think I trust any organization in existence to distinguish between “a danger to others” and “an inconvenience to us”
I’m having problems with FTB. (Hard to believe, I know.) When I comment, the page often reloads without displaying my comment or many of the newer comments. A similar things occurs sometimes when I click on a link from the Recent Comments list: I also don’t see the newer comments, even though I’ve clicked on the link directly to them.
While I’m at it — this one has been an issue for a long time — the Recent Comments list sometimes doesn’t appear at all when I refresh the page (usually the main Pharyngula page). The words “Recent Comments” will be there with no comments listed after it. Apparently the widget or whatever generating the list doesn’t load. I don’t know. I’m not a computer wizard.
It’s just bizarre and annoying. Someone should find the gremlins who infested this site and teach them some fucking manners. Then, if there’s time, put them to work making the site easier to navigate when it does work. Maybe a decent search engine, or a drop-down list or two (at the top or on a separate page) instead of a long stream of links I rarely click on taking up a big chunk of the page.
*grumble*
consciousness razor
Me, too.
I thought it was my netbook and browser.
This might seem like a minor detail, but I don’t want it to go uncorrected.
KG:
Except for Belarus. It’s certainly legal for “grave crimes”. And according to Amnesty International it’s still actively used: they executed two people in 2011.
KG continues
With this part, and the rest of your post I can absolutely agree.
@ David M.
Yes!
We tend to see things arse about face in the political arena. Terms like “sovereignity” are bandied about rather than going in and resolving the root cause of problems. It is like people are to be left to their own devices – to “resolve their own internal issues”. This in spite of suffering every kind of violence and lack of resources to even survive from day to day.
We would not stand by while a neighbour abuses his (e.g.) wife or children and blithley say: “Oh well, if they really want to change their circumstances they should stand up for themselves … it is an internal issue.” Why would we do this for a monster harming thousands or even millions of people?
…………….
PS: How do I make the ć thingy without resorting to copypasta?
Here’s the Wikipedia entry. I didn’t mean to imply that she’d been executed in the same way as the others. She was shot by police…86 times (actually, according to Hribal, 89 – the first 86 didn’t kill her, so they gave her a lethal injection, which also didn’t, so they shot her three more times).* A miserable end to a miserable life. (Incidentally, her previous rebellious episode was in Minot, ND.)
(Seaworld did not kill Tilikum, note, because they can still exploit him. That appears to be the deciding criterion: future profits.)
*There are videos on YT, but since they’re so violent you need to sign up to view them, which I haven’t.
@theophontes:
The ALT code for ç is ALT+0231 (use the numpad and hold ALT.)
You really are a dishonest asshole, aren’t you? Did you actually read what I said about Kony? Me @243:
At no point did I defend him. I pointed out that killing him is not remotely necessary by any possible standard.
The Museveni régime is a violent dictatorship which has rigged several elections, and the Uganda People’s Defence Forces have committed atrocities in the course of the war. Uganda has an extremely shitty human rights record, and there are plenty of Ugandan refugees in other countries. The Ugandan government is nowhere near as bad as the LRA, but this does not mean the Ugandan judicial system should be trusted. (Besides, as I pointed out, Museveni himself referred the situation to the ICC.)
And the ICC – which I know a fair bit about; international law and human rights is my field, and I’ve talked with people who work in the Office of the Prosecutor – is doing its best, and while not perfect (for one thing, it doesn’t have its own police force and must rely on the voluntary cooperation of states), is a hell of a lot better than the status quo ante.
Why don’t you go hang out with Joe Arpaio? Sounds like you and he would get along swimmingly.
Such solitary confinement is completely unnecessary and unjustifiable unless a prisoner is a constant danger to other prisoners.
The broader question is the brutalizing effect of the death penalty on those who inflict it, and on society as a whole. You may like to reflect on the fact that it is the US that imposes both such solitary confinement even when unnecessary, and the death penalty; and sentences juveniles to life imprisonment without parole, and locks up a vastly greater proportion of its citizens than any other country.
BTW, you have not responded to my point that in practice, it is not that difficult to keep very dangerous people securely confined, as Europe shows. Your point about gang leaders etc. causing damage from their prisons is an irrelevance, since that would justify killing people who have not been convicted of homicide. Are you arguing for that? Prophylactic capital punishment? Do you really want to go there?
QFT.
(Also, this…
…is not true. And you don’t even seem to be aware of the difference between the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda – which was actually fairly successful in fulfilling its mission – and the ICC. They are not the same body, and I wish you wouldn’t pontificate about international law from your position of ignorance.)
David Marjanović: Evidence for “all over the world”, please.
In Brazil, gang leaders orchestrated machine-gun attacks at Tourist sites such as Corcovado.
In Central America and Mexico, drug kingpins and gang leaders continue to order murders, intimidate witnesses and control neighborhoods.
In Italy, mafia dons continue to supervise criminal activity from behind bars.
Serbian Nationalists continue to direct followers from behind bars.
You see similar situations in South Africa, Argentina, Indonesia…
As to Walton, he claimed my condemnation of Joseph Kony was from ignorance and did not elaborate. I presume from this he intends to justify Kony’s actions, as I cannot imagine what else he would have in mind.
In Super Max prisons, prisoners are isolated 23 hours a day. They rarely see another prisoner and only rarely interact with guards during their “recreation” hour.
theophontes, there’s no shame in copypasta. I have this bloody useless key on my keyboard that is meant to produce things like è and é, but for only a very limited set of characters. ć requires either an unnecessary amount of effort or copy & paste. I have redefined my keyboard to have one more CTRL where there usually is caps lock, but I don’t expect to be using ć so often is would be a problem. :)
Either you didn’t read my post at #243, or you are lying. Based on your pattern of dishonest conduct throughout this discussion, I suspect the latter.
Hmm, the International Criminal court in the Hague has been in existence for 10 years. In that time, they have issued indictments against 18 individuals, only 5 of which are in custody. None has been convicted.
What a model of efficiency! Dude, dictators tell jokes about the ICCC.
Is it seriously your contention that Uganda, a sovereign state, is not competent to deal with a predator who has preyed on its women and children for decades?
@ Kitty / Weedmonkey
Thank you, but it seems too difficult for my little tardigrade brain. Therefore:
@ David M.
Niagara, on the album “Quel Enfer”
Take it away Muriel…!
My, my, my Walton, you seem to be incapable of keeping a discussion civil. You accuse me of ignarance of the situation in Uganda. Yet, you won’t elaborate and say what I am ignorant of.
Dude, have you ever even set foot in Africa? Can you even name the countries on Uganda’s borders without looking at a map?
I am sorry that life is not as simple and warm and fuzzy as you’d like ti to be, but it is not. Either live in the real world or confine yourself to an ivory tower and spend your life building castles out of ice cream. Just don’t confuse the two.
Weed Monkey@307
Thanks for the correction. I was relying on the fact that a state can only join the Council of Europe if it has abolished the death penalty – but Belarus isn’t a member. You could also have added Kazakhstan, which just overlaps with the broadest geographic definition of Europe, and still has the death penalty on its books, although I believe it has not been used for some time.
There, ARIDS: the USA and Belarus can fight side-by-side for the right of the state to kill people – you must be so proud!
KG, I’ve noted this in responses to others. Perhaps you didn’t see it. Incarceration does not keep gangleaders from engaging in criminal activity either within the prison or outside its walls. Witnesses are being intimidated and people are being killed. Communities are being terrorized. This is happening from Brazil to Canada in the Americas. It is also happening in Europe. A cell phone is easy to smuggle into a prison. A cell phone can be a lethal weapon.
Are we talking about Kony or Museveni here? Uganda is a brutal and corrupt dictatorship – and I’m relying for this information both on news sources, and a friend who’s just spent three years working there.
So ARIDS, let’s be clear – are you in favour of executing gang leaders even if they have not been convicted of murder?
KG and Walton, as you are incapable of arguing like adults, I see no point in continuing this discussion and will stop before I descend to your own peurile level. Have a nice fucking day, infants.
It is seriously my contention that the Museveni régime is a brutal authoritarian government that has an appalling human rights record, yes. (And if you think that “sovereign states” should be able to do whatever they please, you’re even more of a fuckwitted moron than I thought.)
In any case, Museveni voluntarily referred the situation to the ICC. He did not have to do so; the ICC works on a principle of “complementarity”, so an ICC prosecution will not be brought if there are already criminal proceedings in the national courts against the offender. The ICC is not forcing intervention on Uganda. It was invited by the government. (And of course the Ugandan government opted of its own accord to become a party to the Rome Statute.)
There are multiple reasons for this. One is that the ICC does not have its own police force, so it must rely on the cooperation of states parties; and it often deals with live conflict zones (such as the DRC and Uganda) in which it is not at all easy to capture people against whom arrest warrants have been issued. Another is that the ICC works on a principle of “complementarity”: the ICC only has jurisdiction where the state with primary jurisdiction is not itself bringing criminal proceedings against the offender. Yet another is that the Office of the Prosecutor has a policy of only prosecuting those most responsible for the worst crimes; it goes after leaders, not foot-soldiers.
The ICC is a difficult project to operate, in a world of sovereign states in which it must rely on states’ voluntary cooperation. The ICC itself derives its authority from a treaty, the Rome Statute, to which many of the most powerful states (the US, Russia, China and so forth) have declined to become parties. This contrasts with the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, which were set up by the UN Security Council and enjoyed a broader international consensus; not surprisingly, they were much more effective. The ICTY has indicted 161 people, for instance, of whom 64 have been sentenced. (And it has contributed to peace in the former Yugoslavia.)
The first person prosecuted before the ICC was Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, who falls into exactly the category of people you’re talking about: leader of a Congolese rebel group that is guilty of mass murder, rape, and using child soldiers. The ICC also issued, of course, an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan; it has no way of enforcing this warrant (short of a régime change in Sudan, and/or military intervention by other states), but you can hardly blame the Court for that.
I’m not telling you this because I think you’re going to listen; I’m telling you this for the benefit of anyone else who might otherwise take your ignorant sentiments seriously.
It’s simply bizarre to use one indefensible practice in an attempt to defend another.
Or if you have an Android tablet, you can just hold down on “c” until the little menu appears and drag over to the “c” with the right accent mark on it.
Have I mentioned yet that I love my new tablet?
(admittedly, not enough to be using it right now)
theophontes, you’ve probably already seen this, but here’s one more version of the waterbear song which I like a lot. (alot?)
The dishonest moron runs away when presented with facts.
=====
QFT. There are also a great many Ugandan refugees in the US, UK and other countries: actual or assumed supporters of the opposition parties (the Forum for Democratic Change and the Democratic Party) are often “disappeared” by the military and security forces, which are controlled by Museveni’s National Resistance Movement. And let’s not forget the horrific persecution of LGBT people (which is common to most African countries, but is particularly severe in Uganda). Uganda has a terrible human rights record; of course Museveni’s régime is less bad than the LRA, but that isn’t much of an accolade.
And yet as a species you shall surely outlive us all.
IN SPACE!!
PZ’s “friend” has a 3 digit IQ.
I am impressed !
That must put him in the, wow, top 50-percentile of the entire population.
How can any of us keep up with such erudition!
Perhaps he/she should be excluded before he/she puts the rest of us in the shade.
We are not worthy …
/sarc (Do I really need to?)
I have expanded at some length on the situation in Uganda, on this thread. Anyone can read my posts and see that you are lying. This is really becoming extremely tiresome. It’s very much reminding me of the experience of arguing with the denizens of the Slimepit.
Would someone point me to some real science links about frontal lobe maturity?
My google-fu today is leading me in circles of popular magazines.
Walton,
The ICC also can only prosecute for crimes committed after the court came into existence. Given the type of crimes it tries are those committed over a period of time helps explain why there have not many prosecutions to date.
The number of indictments is 25, not 18 as claimed by ARIDS.
I lived for a while in Sudan, of which a few months in the capital, Khartoum. At one stage I was invited to a get-together with some French officials at which the leaders of the regime would be in attendance (at that time it included both Bashir and Turabi, though they later fell out). The chances were that I would have been introduced to the asswipes.
What to do? Shake hands with them and thereby contribute to their unfounded legitimacy – even if just in a tiny way. I then thought “What if I get a moment alone with one of these?” I could stab it with a butter knife and in that way reduce the suffering of so many people. Here was a tiny group causing so much suffering. That vast land held in thrall by this little nest of vipers.
As it was, the event did not go through (IIRC for “security reasons”) so it never came to that.
{In any eventuality, I do not think I would be capable of such a thing if push came to shove. I am very certain that the security would have been way too tight anyway. But I am guilty of that thought crime.}
Walton, you have demonstrated that you are incapable of arguing in a mature or civil manner. We are done. It is clear you would rather argue against straw men than real adults. Go to it. No one is stopping you.
I will state my position once more. It is my position. You need not argue against it.
I am against the way the death penalty is administered in the US.
However, I still think that there are some prisoners who continue to do great harm from behind bars. I have cited several instances of this–gangleaders who intimidate or kill witnesses by orders from behind bars, rapists who taunt their victims from behind bars, white supremacists who order their henchman to commit crimes from behind bars, ultranationalists and guerillas who continue to use rape as a weapon by directing their followers from behind bars.
Normal prison life is an insufficient safeguard against such people. The ICC is utterly laughable as a deterrent. The alternatives for such people are essentially solitary confinement or death. I think the latter is an option and is no less humane than the former.
I freely admit that the number of such criminals is small. I freely admit that the death penalty should never be carried out unless evidence is incontrovertible AND the criminal continues to pose a danger even from prison.
This is my position. I will not argue it further.
We are done.
Yep – 1 July 2002 being the absolute cut-off date for the ICC’s jurisdiction, although in some cases the cut-off date may be later, as regards states parties which ratified the Statute after that date. It also has no jurisdiction over crimes occurring on the territory of states that are not parties, unless (a) the crimes were committed by nationals of a state party, or (b) the situation has been referred to the ICC by the UN Security Council, as happened in Libya.
(Hence why, for instance, the ICC can’t do anything about alleged war crimes by coalition forces in Iraq; neither Iraq nor the US is a state party, so the ICC has no jurisdiction. It does theoretically have jurisdiction over British forces in Iraq, since the UK is a state party, but the Prosecutor concluded that there was not enough evidence of grave crimes to warrant a prosecution.)
As Matt rightly points out, the ICC also only has jurisdiction over three, by definition very grave, crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. In theory, it is also supposed to have jurisdiction over the crime of aggression (the crime of waging war in breach of international law), but the states parties were originally unable to agree on a legal definition of aggression, and so the Court was not given jurisdiction. This was revisited at the Kampala review conference in 2010, and amendments were drawn up allowing the ICC to exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression, but these amendments won’t enter into force until 2017 and require further agreement.
Shorter ARIDS: “Waaaaaah! I don’t like Walton’s tone!”
Locksley! I’ll cut your heart out with a spoon!!
@Mr. Fire
Why a spoon? Why not a knife?
From this observer’s point of view, Walton is bringing considerably more facts and arguments to the table than you. And KG has a question that you haven’t answered yet.
You’re not being sufficiently apologetic. ;)
@ Weedmonkey
Interesting. He starts the song in fairly good Tardigradese (with a twinge of Australian accent). I have no idea why he switches to English though. It kinda ruins the song.
@theophontes:
ALT codes are so easy to do. You need to hold down the ALT key and type four numbers on the keypad.
See?
çèüå :p
You have offered no evidence that these occurrences are any more severe or widespread in countries that have abolished the death penalty.
That’s an impressively stupid argument. In the context of international war crimes and crimes against humanity, most dictators and rebel warlords who are defeated are either killed in combat or summarily executed after capture, and this has been the case throughout history. Yet this does not seem to have been much of a “deterrent”, given that atrocities have always been and continue to be committed by governments and rebel groups alike; the prospect of being killed for their crimes has never stopped rulers committing atrocities.
And in the domestic context, the idea that the death penalty is a deterrent is simply stupid. Most perpetrators of violence do not conduct a rational cost-benefit analysis, quantifying the risks of capture and death, before committing violent crimes. Some killers act irrationally in the heat of the moment. Others are simply convinced that they will not get caught. For this reason, it is not surprising that there is no evidence whatsover, when comparing across jurisdictions or across time-periods, that countries with the death penalty have any lower rate of violent crime than countries without it.
@ Mr. Fire
There was a Canadian-Sudanese who tried this on Turabi with his bare hands. Linky.
Sadly the attempt failed.
@ Kitty
You are assuming waaaaaaaaayyyyy to much intelligence on my part. (Memory like a sieve etc)
Let’s try anyhow: Marjanovi …. Maaarjanovi … {“feel the force
grasshoppertardigrade”}… Maaarjaanoviii…c.Summoning fail, I haz a sad :'(
(For some reason my browser just scrolls though tabs.)
Should’ve taken lessons from Mola Ram.
KG, and Latvia! They are about to abolish capitol punishment completely this year :)
Dude, you called him a “dishonest asshole” and a “dishonest moron”. He’s supposed to like that?
@ Mr Fire
One cannot go chanting “Kali maa, kali maa, kali maa” on an assassination run!
(I see your Indiana Jones and raise you: Apocolypto.)
Of course not. But if he’s going to whine about my lack of civility, instead of actually responding to the substantive arguments offered, I’m going to point this out. From where I’m sitting, insults are a great deal less harmful to society than advocacy of state-sanctioned murder, and no one who engages in the latter can be surprised when he gets insulted.
I would not have called him a dishonest asshole if he had not repeatedly demonstrated both dishonesty and assholery on this subject. As for “moron”, he’s not stupid, but he is, in this instance, engaging in wilful stupidity (which is in some respects actually worse).
Damn. Maybe the Waterbear song was funny only four years ago. Sorry!
@theophontes:
Feel the Alt-codes, you must be one with the Alt-key. Let the Alt flow over you, tardigrade. I know you can do it. Believe in yourself!!!
@ theophontes:
I’d rather have the Hot Chocalypto!
Oh, sure. And I describe lubing the porcullis and, well, something something something I don’t remember.
Good letter. Derpy comments. Anti-vaxxers, y u no think?
Katherine Lorraine–sad you’ve been sick, glad you’re better. Get betterer. :)
–
There, indeed, is a very large rub.
–
ARIDS@325,
I have aimed nothing worse at you than a bit of sarcasm. If you are too thin-skinned to take that, perhaps you should consider whether Pharyngula is really the place for you. You are quite evidently unable to justify your support for the death penalty on rational grounds.
Rey Fox:
Oh gods, me too. Mr Darkheart bought me a Kindle Fire for Xmas and it is fucking awesome.
(I’m not using mine right now, either. Just my old, crusty laptop.)
On a completely unrelated tangent:
Does anyone have any ideas with what to do with a humungous jar of marmalade? I mean, besides putting it on toast*. I bought it for the orange/ricotta pound cake and now it’s just taking up shelf space in my fridge.
*Not a huge fan of jams, jellies, preserves, whatever over here. Cooked fruit *shudder*.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtN1YnoL46Q&feature=related
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=updmGFGDIpg&feature=related
(If you haven’t seen this before, please watch both – if you can stand them! And, NO, it’s not badgers or narwhals. HONEST)
Audley,
Try it as a glaze, say on chicken, with soy, pepper, garlic and a bit of water if it’s too thick (and whatever other spices strike your fancy, think Asian. Maybe 5 spice?). We do that with the calamondin marmalade that we make and it’s darn fine IMHO.
Mike:
Thanks! That sounds absolutely amazing. :)
I am fucking steaming right now.
A dear friend of mine who’s involved with Occupy Boston is walking away from it because they’re allowing a known pedophile — and a long-time NAMBLA “activist” — to hang around the site. I’ve posted details about this on my Dreamwidth. Trigger warning for attempts to silence people who objected with the use of misogynist language.
(Note: I restrict comments to my DW and LJ friends. Most of my journal has been locked down for a while, except for certain political posts, mainly to discourage certain assholes I used to know from keeping me friended.)
Sure thing, Audley, have fun. Go easy if it’s really bitter, though.
“On a completely unrelated tangent:”
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Dr. AZD! Tangent away!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I saw on a different channel (Balloon Juice) where people recommended Reamde: A Novel by Neal Stephenson. They thought quite highly of it.
I liked Snow Crash a lot, maybe I’ll check this one out too.
+++++++++++
*** grumble *** Srlsy, FTB, I have to load the page 3x to see ALL the comments? FY and your 500 errors. / *** grumble ***
Where is the real a_r_i_d_s, and what have you done to him!?!
I’m deeply astonished that someone of your intelligence can hold such a poorly thought-out position based on so little knowledge of the evidence, let alone retreat to tone-trolling – to using Walton’s over-the-top insults as an excuse for not engaging with his or anyone else’s questions and arguments.
What the fuck?
Third World country.
Third World country; in Mexico, the drug cartels have quite disgusting connections to the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution.
That’s because the Mafia fucking rules southern Italy and maintains intimate relations to the conservative parties. Even in recent times… last time Berlusconi was voted out, the Boss of All Bosses (il capo di tutti i capi, Bernardo Provenzano) was arrested the evening of the same day; when Berlusconi finally retreated from politics last year, the next Boss of All Bosses was arrested a few days later.
Most Serbian politicians are some shade of nationalist. Like with the Mafia, the Mexican gangs, and even the Brazilian gangs, if you have large amounts of supporters in the general population, including the bureaucracy and the prison guards, prison loses its scare factor for you.
Third World, except Argentina, on which I’d appreciate details.
Do such things occur in a First World country, the kind of place the US is supposed to be, involving prison inmates who don’t have political or other connections to powerful organizations outside?
And if so, can’t they be fixed by just improving controls on what gets into prisons and what gets out, you know, cracking down on corruption and the like?
You completely misread him. Scroll back up and try again.
And? Do supermax prisons even exist outside the US?
It doesn’t work as well as it should, so it must be destroyed instead of, like, improving it? Is that what you mean?
Apparently, but he’s not telling.
Currently on trial at the ICC is Laurent Gbagbo, long-term president of Côte d’Ivoire who recently had to allow elections and simply refused to accept the result, triggering a civil war that he lost a few months later. Instead of just shooting him, the otherwise murderous hordes of Alassane Ouattara (the winner of the election) arrested him live on camera and escorted him safely to extradition. That’s progress on several levels.
You won’t even defend it?
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Yeah. I still don’t understand this well-established practice.
Reminds me of how Internet Explorer 8 didn’t load that widget at all in long threads. Firefox 9 has no problem.
I practically always copy & paste from the character map… but the HTML entity is ć. The capital letter is of course Ć.
*headdesk*
Yeah, but ç and ć aren’t the same thing. If your browser claims otherwise*, something on your computer is horribly outdated.
* It just so happens that ç occupies the same position in the ISO-8859-1 (“Western”) code table as ć does in the ISO-8859-2 (“Central European” or “Eastern European”) code table. I’ve seen… even scientific articles that had ç instead of ć.
There isn’t just a single species of tardigrade! About 1,150 have been described.
Because a spoon, being blunt, hurts more.
The only Alt code I’ve learned is the one for the dash, Alt+0150. This laptop doesn’t have a separate keypad, so for me it’s Fn+Del (to switch Num Lock on), Alt+0150, and then Fn+Del again.
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
Cute overload! Read the comments, too.
Mike:
It’s not too bad. I used it to glaze the last pound cake that I made and it worked well there.
The Sailor:
:D
I’d offer more unrelated tangents about gerbils and turtles and whatnot, but they’re all sleeping right now. So I’m bouncing up out of here for a little while (gotta start playing Saint’s Row before Mr gets home and hogs the tv).
Shouldn’t that read “allowed to bomb anything but the target that would end the conflict”…
Not to mention that the US War on Drugs and the militarized border are making things worse, not better.
(In point of fact, many of the worst endemic problems in Latin America can be traced at least in part to ham-fisted US intervention, past or present: this is particularly true of Colombia and Nicaragua, for instance. Which makes the US government’s present xenophobic hostility to Latin American immigrants especially hypocritical and disgusting. But I digress.)
Audley, I’ve recently discovered the “Splendid Table” recipe page… it’s great! (Splendid Table is an NPR cooking show, not sure if you get it in your area.” Anyway, one popped up that looked promising: Lamb spareribs in Chinese bitter orange sauce. You could do pork or beef ribs as well.
It’s on at noon on Saturdays, which is usually when I find myself making breakfast on Saturdays, so I end up listening to it a fair bit.
David M: “Yeah. I still don’t understand this well-established practice.”
Yeah, I know, right? It’s like at some point all the leaders got together and decided assassinating leaders was beyond the pale in a war.
++++++++++++++++
I had a real Monday today. When I got into work one of my co-workers was trying to ‘fix’ our archive server. It had shit the bed over the weekend. He was doing a good job of it except for the part where he let the Recovery program search for a valid OS. We have 5 Terra Bytes of disk space.
I sent him off to do his tasks and then I unplugged the machine, (the only way to kill it, I hate soft-power buttons), and just started to reinstall the OS. Drive one, dead. Drive 2, dead. I shifted a couple of drives around. Yep, the drives were dead. And so were their slots. WTF!?
When I left the OS installed just fine in an unused drive in an unused slot, but it doesn’t seem to want to load the drivers for internet, USB, &c.
FY Dell. And FY M$ for not including standard drivers in your OS. My Macs never have this problem, they only shit the bed when they’re dead.
Sally:
I don’t think we get The Splendid Table, but I only listen to NPR on weekdays while I’m at work. (Except Car Talk on Saturday mornings.)
Anyway, that recipe looks OMG, so good!
What is this milk, that the cat would rather sit in it than drink it?
Is it soya?
It’s a fun show–my favorite segment is “Stump the Cook,” where some random person calls in with 5 ingredient they have in their fridge, and the host has to come up with a recipe on the spot that will work. Then they make it and report back in a later show. And yeah, that recipe looks good. I’m hungry.
@changeable moniker
Have you checked kitty for hemorrhoids? :P
Did someone say Marmalade?
Umm, Walton? What is your favorite song?
Marmalade glaze is good on lamb. I slather the lamb chops or shanks with it and then grind enough coriander seed over it to choke a shetland pony.
In a fit of drunken high spirits one night I tried poaching a catfish in marmalade. Never do that.
Marmalade glaze is also excellent on a pork oin roast. BBQ’d or broiled in the oven.
You have a point, but you forget one thing: The last thing we need to provide these people with is a Martyr for their cause.
Walton: I mostly agree with you on the Death Penalty, but I’m curious: What do you think of killing in self defense?
Fact is, humans are animals. And animals sometimes kill each other. Killing of one form or another has been going on since the dawn of life. Even noncarnivorous animals kill sometimes.
Also, the more I think on it, the more it seems that human nature simply demands that someone swing from the gallows from time to time. It doesn’t matter if they’re guilty or not, or if they ‘deserve it’ or not. There’s just this deep seated human desire to find some guy to pin the blame for evil on, and then set hir to swing. It disturbs me, the more I think about it.
I think Walton has a good point about the death penalty. The idea of being locked up and killed by the government fills me with unreasoning horror, actually. But I don’t think the world Walton dreams of will ever exist. Human nature simply demands a Judas.
I’m not gonna lie, there are people I’d kill if I knew I could get away with it. Thuggish cops, lying politicians smiling their shit-eating grins, frothy-mouthed ranting preachers screaming hellfire and damnation on sunday and counting their bucks on monday…
Rationally of course I know that there’s a million more just waiting to fill their shoes, though.
I really hope that last bit didn’t disturb anyone.
TLC #383
While I would not (probably) actually kill a politician or preacher, I do have a list of “People on whom I will NOT perform the from Heimlich manoeuver”.
Scapegoat.
–
Yes it should.
]
Additional problem. Such a spree would distract for the issues of their corruption as any such vigilante would become “the problem” and thus “the story”
True. And although some people have believed that violence even in self-defence is wrong (Tolstoy, for instance), this has never really caught on widely as a moral norm, for precisely the reason you highlight: as a simple empirical matter, most humans will, in fact, defend themselves when attacked, and there’s not much point in advocating moral beliefs which are simply impossible for most people to follow. Most people want to live rather than die, and will instinctively act accordingly; and a moral philosophy which ignores this fact is something of a useless one.
However, there’s a big difference between instinctive violence in self-defence – protecting your own life against someone who is actively trying to kill you – and cold-blooded deliberate violence against a person who is already disarmed and in your custody. The latter is not a matter of instinct or necessity, but of deliberate choice, and can thus be avoided.
I think you are right that such a tendency exists; but I don’t think it’s insurmountable. The death penalty has, after all, been abolished in many nations, and its abolition has caused no discernible harm whatsoever to society. Of course there are still calls for its reinstatement
Of course, more broadly, all societies, whether or not they employ the death penalty, rely to a great extent on institutionalized violence as a means of social control. (The state is, after all, institutionalized violence; and yet where states have disappeared or been abolished, as in Somalia, the violence has become even worse.) I don’t pretend to think that violence can ever be ended completely; I’m not that much of a utopian.
But the amount of violence in society can be reduced. And the way it can be reduced is by designing institutions that seek to insulate the machinery of the state from the baser and more cruel instincts of human beings. An independent judicial system which is insulated from the whims of the mob, for instance, is a very good idea. (I see a direct connection between the appalling condition of most state justice systems in the US, for instance, and the practice in many states of directly electing judges, prosecutors and sheriffs and of subjecting any and all legislative decisions to the “popular initiative” process. No other country’s justice system is quite as intensely politicized. And if it is left up to the whim of the majority of voters to decide which civil rights people should and should not have, unpopular minorities are not likely to come out of it very well.)
Side thought. LC’s post brought an interesting quesiton to my mind.
If you’all found a Death Note (magic artifact that untracably kills anyone whose name is written in it) would you use it and if so how?
Too late.
According to the Catholic League(Bill Donahue), child rape victims of priests are cry-babies.
That actually makes me hate Bill Donahue more. He is the assclam who whined that Hollywood is run by secular Jews who like anal sex in their movies. (Not an exaggeration, it was part of a talk about Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ) But children who actual were raped should shut up. If there were truly natural justice, his tongue would lodge in his throat, choking him. But there is not so it will not happen.
The Redhead (not transferred due to fluctuating BP) had the Travel Channel on all day. One 30-minute show was on BACON. We both thought the chocolate bacon was a little over the top.
@ Nerd
I’ve had chocolate bacon before. It’s actually really good.
We Are Ing: You want the rational response, or the emotional one? Rationally, I think I’d burn it. I’m an angry person sometimes and I’m not sure I’d trust myself with it. Emotionally? I’d need more than one. One for every cop who’s ever abused his power. One for every single member of the 1%.
Walton: I think I can see where you’re coming from.
If keeping it JUST to the institutionalized Death Penalty, and not killing in general, then I agree 100 percent. The government simply cannot be trusted with who gets to live and who gets to die. This is also why I agree that the world population is a real issue, but I would fight to the death anyone who wanted to institute government-enforced population control.
“Here Mr Fox, guard these chickens for me. BUT NO FUNNY BUSINESS NOW!” *finger waggle*
Audley
Mind, I hate marmalade and I’m really not fond of orange-flavored confections. But I get the concept.
* Make sticky orange rolls. Think yeast-leavened (well, Cadmus-leavened) cinnamon-type rolls with marmalade instead of cinnamon and sugar. Top with a cream cheese icing.
* Make a marmalade jelly roll
* Make marmalade turn-overs. Small pastries made of all-butter pie crust sealed at the edges with a fork.
Audley
For a savory dish, make orange chicken, Chinese-style. Mix marmalade with a touch of shoyu, vinegar, ginger and cayenne, and use as a marinade for chicken pieces to be stir-fried. Or, to be really decadent, bread and fry the pieces then coat them in the hot marmalade sauce.
I find it disgusting that Donahue (and others) are complaining that the victims like being victims or they wouldn’t be drawing the whole process out for such a long time. Ignoring, of course, the wholesale lies, obstructionism, delaying tactics, legal manouvering, and wholesale denialism of the Catholic Church which has, quelle surprise, drawn the whole process out. He is blaming the delay on the victims when it has been the RCC. The man is scum.
No, I take that back. He is sludge. At least scum floats.
Don’t worry, it never runs out of pages
If you’all found a Death Note (magic artifact that untracably kills anyone whose name is written in it) would you use it and if so how?
No. I also don’t want anyone else to have that power.
Now, what are you willing to do to prevent someone else from having that power?
I can think of several interesting things to do with Bigbadbill involving chocolate bacon, marmalade, a short lodgepole pine, and a fire ant hill. Let’s call it the cry baby experiment.
In that case Ing, I’d definitely burn it.
I’m not very smart sometimes, or 100 percent ethical, but I am smart and ethical enough to know that I’m not smart or ethical enough to have that kind of power.
The Death Note:
I’d burn it. NO way would I trust myself, or anyone else, with that kind of power. I can already think of people I would like to use something like that on and that is a part of me that scares me.
I wouldn’t use it.
I’d do a lot, but I wouldn’t sacrifice my own life nor anyone else’s.
According to the Liberty Counsel, Macy’s is covering up the rapes that happens in their dressing rooms. Yes, being transgendered is just an excuse to hang out in dressing rooms in order to rape.
And in other news (I do not feel like linking.), the Pope yet again goes off about how LGBT marriage is just absolutely destructive. Damn, I did not see that coming.
I’ve had bacon chocolate. I assume the difference is that one is chocolate-dipped bacon, and the other is a chocolate bar with bits of bacon in it.
Sailor: I believe I’ve already answered your question. Fire kills everything.
Ogvorbis: We say we’d burn it. Right now there’s no doubt in my mind I’d burn it. But, if actually confronted with the thing, would we? Would we ACTUALLY destroy it? Or would we find some way to convince ourselves that ‘just this once’ is justified? Or would we hang on to it, ‘just in case’?
Ing:
Oh god, the guilt would be crippling.
Mike, Sally, Patricia, Oggie, Josh (and anyone I’ve missed)– thank you for the marmalade suggestions!
So far I’m planning: lamb ‘n’ marmalade and sticky orange rolls, ‘cos I haven’t cooked lamb or made homemade cinnamon rolls. It’ll be an adventure this weekend!
Ahh, but the unintended consequences from good intentions comes into play.
I never lied to my lover,
But if I did I would admit it.
If I could get away with murder
I’d take my gun and I’d commit it.
I never gave to the rich, I never stole from the poor,
I’m like a curious child, give me more,
More, more, more, more, more, more.
How so?
The Ring would help Gondor, but at what price? I have no doubt that I would destroy it. How far I would go to achieve that, I do not know. Nor do I want to know.
Marmalade?
You can guess what this is. Try do deny the greatness.
Love the evil. PZ, take lessons…
I’m about to try a new concoction with 1/2 a jar of marmalade, one tablespoon of apricot white balsamic vinegar & 1/4 cup of white wine on lamb shoulder steaks. (and enough freshly ground coriander to choke the above mentioned equine.)
Thanks for the inspiration!
Well, if we’re talking Tolkien, there’s another quotation which seems particularly appropriate for this subject:
And I’ll leave it at that.
Also, by the way, thank you – to KG, Audley and David M in particular, and several others, who have restored a little of my shattered faith in humanity today.
Patricia, just don’t waste it on an unethical Catholic gasbag.
Damnit Ogvorbis, I was just about to make a ‘Ring of Power’ comparison too.
But in that case, you know what I mean then. It’s easy to say “I’d destroy it!” or “I’d never use it!”, but if you were actually holding the thing in your hand…….. I’m still pretty sure I’d burn it though.
I’ve had chances in the past to screw people over and take massive revenge, and I’ve (nearly) always passed them by after a few moments of painful temptation. I’d tell myself it was because I chickened out or was a coward, but I dunno. I spent a long time thinking there was just something naturally ‘bad’ about me (Why else would so many people cast me out of their circles?) so maybe I’m just more ethical than I think.
Aw, Walton, I’ve always loved that part.
Oh, hell yes, I KNOW I’m a coward. I have had chances to screw people over big time and I was afraid to do it because (a) one of them might have a chance to screw me over and (b) I was scared shitless that I might enjoy it (this is one reason I was a shitty car salesman). When in the occasional fistfights as a callow youth, I could never finish off an opponent — again, I was scared of future repercussions and, even more, scared of myself. Much of my ‘ethical’ behaviour is due more to cowardice than it is to any ethics on my part. Doing the right thing is often immediately painful but far less painful (or humiliating) in the long run.
Janine – No spice comes to mind that could make ol’ Bill platable, yuuuck!
How he get’s away with blaming the children sticks in my craw. It’s as bad as the popes latest bullshit about LGBTs. I suppose gawd told him the news in person?
Nerd – thanks for the update on the Redhead. Continuing to send you good vibes via USB port…plus liquor.
I dunno Ogvorbis. I mean I’d TELL myself it was cowardice, but that’s because I wanted to be hardened and terrifying in those days.
But I was also religious and occasionally trying to follow the ‘Jesus example.’ Not the Jesus that actually exists in the bible, mind you, I mean the nice compassionate guy most people envision as ‘Jesus’.
Inherent duality of humankind, I suppose. “Which wolf wins?” “The one you feed, son.” and all that. But I am kind of glad now. There’s more to be had in compassion, sharing, and ethics. And I don’t have to fear people as much.
Nerd – Has she started demanding her knitting bag yet?
———–
platable? Where the hell did that come from? I meant palatable of course.
Although, Bill might just be wide enough to plat & rezone!
——–
What about revenge is a dish best served cold* ? That’s kept me from doing something ugly to an enemy for decades.
*Khan or Klingon?
TLC:
I have no idea if you are a coward or not. As I said, I know that I am.
Coyotes are supposed to be notorious cowards. Mark Twain said so. I think.
I… don’t know. I think, knowing me, that I would keep it, buried somewhere in a closet or something. The concern there is that I would eventually use it, once, to kill the person who broke me? It wouldn’t be ethical or okay, and there are definitely more useful people to kill and people who are more deserving (I can think of plenty right off the top of my head), but I don’t think in the end that I would be able to kill someone for ethical or rational reasons because when I’m not in a state of overwhelming emotion myself, I cannot stand to see anyone hurt. Unfortunately, that would prevent me from using it in any way other than a rash and selfish one. I’d like to say I’d burn it, but I wouldn’t.
Death notes, huh? In reality? Well, I simply wouldn’t believe it so that makes the whole “what would you do” question quite difficult. Probably read it out, with Ruddock or Cheney or the Kochs or Danny Nalliah as a demonstration that it didn’t work – and then be extremely surprised and shocked and horrified, and still wondering about coincidence when it did. Next test, Charles Manson.
And then I go off into total superhero fiction territory – let’s see if a bit of conditioning works on the human race. Let the stoning of the rape victim begin? Bye bye imam! Execute the mentally challenged child with the DNA exoneration that you won’t accept on a technicality? Bye bye governor! BWAhahahaaha! Who’s next?
And then people would start believing in karma, and you have to ask if it’s better to make the world more truthful, or less vicious? And how will this faery gift go wrong in the end, because you just know that it has to, and I’ll probably have to use it on myself in the end. Hey, has someone written this story already?
@Patricia
First one then the other
Ugh. I’m just furious. Greta Christina has finally taken DJ Grothe to task, and with a lot more restraint than I could muster. Cross-posted on Greta’s thread:
She has mentioned it, but I am deaf on that subject until the therapists give permission.
Alethea: I know Death Note exists as an anime, but I don’t follow anime really. It’s only recently I’ve given any of it a chance. All the stupid (and creepy) aspects of the fandom kept turning me off (which I now realize is a stupid reason to automatically dislike something).
Is that pretty much how the story goes?
@TLC
Actually the main character of Deathnote takes a leaping dive off of the moral event horizon, starting out killing off criminals who avoid the justice system, but doing it in a way to make himself known so he can eventually rule the world as a god-king.
nothing to do with anything else here, but funny, in a twisted way ….
the real Death Panels
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2012/01/09
Testing: Am I not getting new comments, or is the thread just real quiet right now?
I was just wondering the same thing, TLC. That’s nearly an hour between comments.
Real, real quiet.
Well since there aren’t any profound conversations going on right now,
Hey, CC. Is that Rip Van Winkle from Hellsing in your gravatar? I’ve been trying to place where I’ve seen that pic before and that’s all I’ve been able to come up with.
Too quiet…
Too quiet.
Well, I’m off to bed, so it’ll get more quiet adn more intelligent now.
You get the fluffy unicorn! :D Yeah, Rip Van, despite being a Nazi vampire, is pretty much my favorite.
I’d walk away. I’m not the sort of person you want walking about with that sort of power.
Huh, so the idea already came from a story. Does the story have an end yet, Ing?
The lamb has been eaten & it was tender, juicy, and very nicely flavored. For those more timid souls that want every detail of a recipe, the lamb and mixture were baked in a 350 degree oven for 1 hour in a Le Creuset dutch oven, lid on.
This got me thinking of grilled corn (yeah I know, evil minds think of grilling corn in January). Cilantro, cumin seeds, and ground coriander would really stick well to an ear of corn slathered in marmalade. Pull the shucks back up, and then grill it until the shucks are well chared.
*Note to someone – please remind me of this in July.
—–
Nerd – If she wants her knitting, she’s well enough to be bored & testy. Good sign!
@ClassicalCipher
woot
re: The Death Note
Yes. In a heart beat.
Not because I’m interested in becoming a less macho Punisher, but because this magic book is my link to all that fantasy shit I’ve been obsessed with since I read Harry Potter when I was in elementary school.
I will make Voldemort look like a n00b by the time I’m done, damn it.
Josh – Because part of my time out was during the Sock Summit I never got the chance to gloat , and brag to you that I got to finally meet, hug, and smell the cutest, smartest, cutest, most brilliant,cute, gay knitter and lace designer in the world.
Did I mention he’s cute?
And guess what he was wearing? A kilt! *squee*
OK, now pretend to be jealous.
I spent the last hour crocheting and reading Greta’s post that Josh linked to. Yow!
Patricia:
I think he might prefer an introduction.
@ Sally
What are you making (if you don’t mind me asking)?
Caine – He might not be into lace or kilts.
*innocent batting of eyes*
Patricia:
Hah! Oh, you are such a tease.
Hellz. Yes.
I’ll even overlook the kilt if he smells yummy enough.
Or underlook. . .or whatever. . .
Josh, that post you linked from Greta’s blog… why do these things keep happening? I’m only about a fourth of the way into the actual post and it makes me want to give up a little bit (but then stubborn me kicks in and says “fuck ’em”).
Starstuff, I wish I knew. I’ve gotten a bellyful of reminders about how dismissing oppression is a going concern over the past two years, and it’s just about made me sick. Lord, how naive I’ve been thinking we’d gotten past so much of this.
I’m making a hat. A very simple hat. Like so: http://www.eatingoutloud.com/2011/09/beginner-ribbed-crochet-hat-pattern-mens-unisex.html
As far as the sexism stuff goes, I find it encouraging and invigorating. It’s a HUGE improvement on seeing sexism shit go down and seeing it go unchallenged. So it makes me happy.
Well, I’m really tired of this kind of thing coming from the community that I’m a part of. I think that I’ll use my little power within my own group to try to help.
I’ve recently been made vice president (and acting president) of my campus Freethinkers group. I’m going to have a meeting about women in atheism/skepticism this semester. If I can make at least one person aware of this shit, it’ll be worth it.
I try to remember that, Sally. Some days I feel the same way. Other times it makes me cry out of tired frustration. There are so many wretchednesses—ongoing sexism, transphobia/ignorance, bigotry against bisexuals—that I was blind to until recently (and some that I fomented unwittingly) it can feel exhausting.
/walton
LOLOLOL!
@ Sally
That’s a nice hat. I’m working on this one right now (using Fishermen’s Wool).
And I guess it is great that we’re actually talking about it, but it’s still shocking to me that it’s still this bad.
Hell yeah, girl. And a lot of people here have your back.
I still need to learn to knit basic round shapes such as hats and socks. I’m stuck doing squares for an afghan I’ve been working on for five years (at least).
Well, my ex just talked to me on the phone for about an hour or so, about her sexual abuse, about the way people mocked and dismissed her, and about the way people have treated her in general.
She’s internalized it. She honestly thinks that because she didn’t struggle hard enough or say no, she partially deserved it. She was a fucking kid. She didn’t deserve it.
I hate feeling useless. I want to help her better than I have. Rationally I know I’m doing good just by listening to her and not minimizing or dismissing her pain, but emotionally it hurts me to see her hurting.
Josh, just teach yourself how to crochet! It’s super easy, and crocheting in the round is the easiest thing ever.
Sally – I know, I used to know how to crochet. . I’ll ask my mom to re-teach me. But knitting is my thing now and I just must learn how to do it in the round, you know?
(((hugs))) for TLC. That’s rough man, that’s really all there is to it.
Starstuff, you kick some ass on your campus group! I only wish I had discovered freethought and atheism before I graduated.
Time for some DS9 and a snack before bed.
Wow, TLC. That’s awful. Like always, hugs if you need them (hugs to everyone tonight!).
*falls out of chair*
The yummy cutie I’m speaking of is Franklin Habit, author, photographer, and designer extraordinaire. I’m not sure he would remember me out of the hundreds of squealing knitters lined up to get their books signed and photos taken with him.
OK, I’ll confess, he didn’t seem the least bit impressed with the ample bosom…
But I can try, he’s so damned cute and brilliant. His blog is called The Panopticon.
*better not tell the Redhead I got to hug Franklin…
Goddamn kitteh. Paper recycling bin is not litter box.
Am I stoned? The number on my last post was 66…
My husbands elderly aunty (mine now) is having the first great grand boy (not literally) – so I’m knitting three pairs of baby socks – wool, bamboo, hemp, and an eggplant hat. That should be enough…I hope.
@ Audley
At this time of the year people are drinking hot marmalade and honey in China (lemon, orange or kumquat). Simply chop it up, mix with honey (or sugar/syrup I guess) and pour on boiling water. Delicious and hearty, so you are bound to get through it.
@ TLC
As cicely pointed out that is called scapegoating and goes back into the very depths of human history. The jews practiced this with a goat (hence the name, scape-goat) , but humans have also been used by a wide range of cultures.
The concept of the god-made-flesh also refers to the practice (Attis, jeebus etc). Essentially a person would be chosen (or volunteer) to be scourged, to create a purified “receptical” for taking on the sins of his (usually a male) community. He was then killed -as a god!- to take away those sins. Saviour of mankind and all that.
One of the two main branches of superstitious magic holds that the properties of one thing can infect another. This allows for the transfer of the sin from one person to another (or an animal obviously). But the person/animal receiving the sin must be of great purity.
The concept arises spontaneously and universally. It can be found all across the world and in all ages. (Compare pure jeebus/scapegoat with the virgin who takes away the HIV (bad/sin) from people in South Africa. No amount of rationality will kill this memetic weed.)
………..
I would use it to prevent injury to innocents, but not to avenge them. (a la Black Cross) But, as Alethea points out, I am quite sure it would go horribly wrong with me in the end.
pteryxx,
please don’t send me any more long screeds to my email address asking me to post them on TET, because I won’t. Go find an internet cafe.
I watched 10 epidodes of “Nikita” in a row last night, and am now convinced that there is a god. And her name is Maggie.
Oh, and NB : Interesting to see that there must be some drastic social slope on FtB, Daniel Fincke boasts that he just had 100.000 hits in a day, while I note in the Grothe thread that Crommunist bemoans his almost total lack of readers and commenters.
I like my status of utter insignificance.
@ TLC
You can just show her TLC (Tender Loving Care). *hugs*
& Scapegoat …Argh. Don’t bother to much with Pfffting that. (Hint: It is NOT all about jeebus.)
@ Josh
Mwahahahaha… (I know, I am truly Ebil.)
You are, of course. But what can I do? My household—small as it is—is ruled by the dominatrix felines. They come and go (and go, and go) as they please all the while treating me as their vassal. Sigh. I’ve no choice but to obey their purring commands.
Rorschach:
So nice of you to help.
Pteryxx, if you’re in a bad spot, grab my e-mail address from my Zenfolio and I’ll try to help you out.
Ah, whatever.
Thanks, Rorschach. That was a nice thing to do, and I enjoyed Pteryxx’s post.
Thank you Rorschach. And Pteryxx.
Canis Sativa…*smirk*…Biggis Dickus…*peeks*…Bosomus Maxima…*looks innocent*
Alright, enough barnyard humour for 12 year olds.
Goodnight sweethearts.
TLC, internalizing is common behaviour, even with adults who have been sexually assaulted. I never said a word about being raped on a regular basis as a child. Unfortunately, that’s very common.
The most important thing is that she’s talking about it, letting it out means she’s willing to deal with it at this point. Let her take the lead, all you need to do is what you’re doing – being there, being a friend. There’s more value in that than you know and you’re being far from useless or helpless.
I know it’s often someone’s first feeling, when hearing about such things, especially when you’d feel better if you could smash the offender’s head in, but that wouldn’t help you and it won’t help her, either. What she needs is support, someone who listens and takes her seriously. You’re doing that, you’re doing good.
Sorry, I was initially under the impression he had sent me some long rant, and not a response to something discussed here previously. My bad.
Good Morning
Have we changed topic?
Good.
Patricia
Sooooooooo good to have you back
crotchet and knitting
Can’t knit, and find crotchet way toooo slow.
I’m a passionate seamstress (yes, I know ;))
It’s hard to justify spending 20 hrs crotcheting something I can sew in 1 (and fabric is usually cheaper than wool)
Sallystrange, Starstuff, Theophontes, Caine, and anyone I miss: Thanks.
Thanks, Caine. I know you were writing it to TLC, but it happens to be good for where I am too, just now. Funny how that happens.
—
TLC, *hugs* I’m sorry your friend is hurting, but I’m glad she has someone like you there to listen and believe and care.
—
Thanks to Rorschach and pteryxx for the story.
Thanks CC. I’ve always known about her history, but tonight was the first time she REALLY unloaded on me about it. I mean, she’d told me what happened before, but tonight she was telling me more about how it made her feel, and still makes her feel.
Oh, and in brighthappyland, I’d just like to point out that I cannot actually think of answers to the questions* on my German 2 worksheet that do not sound… mildly to moderately pissy.
*”What did you enjoy about your German 1 class? Is there anything you didn’t like? What are your expectations for German 2?”
Classical Cipher:
I’m glad to hear it. :) I think we all need reminders now and then that what we do isn’t useless and we aren’t helpless.
Then let them be mildly to moderately pissy. If they are looking for honest answers, then let ’em rip.
Classical Cipher
Question 1: Learning how to spell “beer” in German.
Question 2: Not enough actual Bier
Question 3: More Bier
(You know we all drink Bier all the time ;) )
TLC
Hugs for you and the Ex.
First off, I’d have to kill L..
I know it’s really early for most of you, but I wondered if I could ask any blogging skeptics to give me a hand with this issue:
http://autistwriter.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/okay-now-im-furious/
Nothing much, on the face of it; just that the major clinical organisation in the UK is listing a bunch of woo-peddlers as stakeholders in the discussion for the new guideline on adult autism. That no one in an organisation entirely dedicated to evidence-based decision-making thought this was inappropriate is just breathtaking, especially on the back of the recent parliamentary decision on homeopathy etc.
I know it’s not as exciting as Burzinski clinics, but I could use a little of the glittery power of the skeptical community on this one.
TLC
Just listen to her. Really, truly, that is helping. Never underestimate listening.
*******
And I’m just trying to remember who was lined up for the spanking couch with Patricia. Wasn’t that some noob over on the other thread?
Didn’t object to the idea, as I recall.
Have I mentioned that I hate it when doctors call something a miracle when they mean “statistically very unlikely”?
There was a birth on monozygotic quarduplets, which they believe to be the first in Germany ever on record.
So, yeah. Likelyhood 1:13 million. But with about 1 million babies being born every year that’s not a miracle but something that happens once in a while.
Winning the lottery has a much smaller likelyhood yet nobody talks about miracles when it happens.
Tielserrath:
Yep, a person by the nym of fullerer on the DJ Grothe thread. I don’t spank noobs, they have to go through Miss Patricia first.
No one with any sense whatsoever would turn down Patricia and the spanking parlour.
In the midst of yet another sexism fight, I have a good story.
Last night my son and I went to a jewelry-making class at the local fabric store. He adores shiny glittery things and rocks, and has always mooned over the jewelry section, so I thought he’d like it. The instructor and the other two participants didn’t bat an eye at it. I was braced for at least some “Oh! We never get boys in these classes!” or “How NICE to see a boy taking this class!” kind of comments, but we didn’t even get that. The instructor treated him just like the other students, the other students didn’t say anything about it, nothing. It was just… normal. And it was so, so, so nice.
(and he made a lovely bracelet)
Carlie:
That’s nice. Really nice. If only it was normal, all the time, everywhere.
I do crafts workshops once a year (meaning I’m the instructor) together with a friend.
Sure, we always try to make something that is not unfortunately strictly in the “womenz stuff box”, but I really couldn’t say that I’d ever noticed that the guys were much different from the women. The workshop that exploded with participants was about making jewlery.
Mister took a class last year in metal clay and casting jewelry making and told me it was close to 50/50, men and women. A lot of people design jewelry as well as make it, so I don’t see why making things in the “womenz stuff box” would necessarily deter men from taking classes and learning.
Caine
Well, I should explain more: I do those workshops at a fantasy convention. People coming there are mostly interested in making something for themselves, projects to finish on the spot, they are less about learning techniques and stuff.
(And it is really nice to see them bring them along for the next year, and the next, and the next as they become parts of their costume)
So, if we had a “sparkling tiara workshop”, the attendance of men would probably go down.
Sending up the bat-signal for Jason Thibeault, he’s got a bit of a troll infestation. http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2012/01/08/are-universal-statements-always-a-problem/
Don’t bother if you’re bored of the sexism stuff. Just putting it out there. For some reason the trolls seem to enjoy his blog, perhaps because he’s more on the accomodationist side, I don’t know.
Anyway.
Gilliell, it helps to have a sewing machine does it not? *want*
I like having something to occupy my hands while doing other things, listening to a lecture, watching a movie, whatever. It’s soothing.
Carlie – what a nice story.
I know I have been gone a long time, but it nice to see the apparently recently absent Patricia.
TLC – we do not know each other, but you are being very helpful just by listening. Listening is so hard when your impulse is to do something active to help. Took me years to learn to just shut up and LISTEN. One thing that did help me was to write things out. I did mine on a blog, but that is not necessary. The writing can be therapeutic even if only tossed once done. Might mention that to your fiend. Anyway, listen to my friend Caine and the other good people on here. Their advice is usually good.
Also, if I got the Death Note, I’d likely research who are the richest and most powerful people on the planet and just slowly kill them off. All of them. Multinational CEOs and world leaders.
Probably a good thing I don’t have it.