I am blessed with the talent to infuriate people like this.
Try out the new ™PZ Myers Target! Guaranteed to sharpen your shooting skills and hone your hunting instincts… almost as good as blasting the REAL thing!
Based upon the Trayvon Martin hoodie design, this target naturally inspires a sense of righteous indignation in any patriotic, God-fearing citizen worried about the encroaching subversive elements in our society.
While we can’t reproduce the EXACT dimensions of our portly infidel guru, given his walrus-like girth and facial features, this target, nonetheless, will provide hours of fun shooting for every family member!
Suitable for either slow and deliberate surgical sniper fire, or combat-style, full-auto machine gun and riot shotgun blasts, this durable target will acclimate the conscientious patriot/Christian to the pleasures of obliterating a national disgrace and social cancer without the legal entanglements that usually follow.
We’re currently working on a 3-D version that more fully simulates the structural characteristics of a grossly overweight anti-theist boar, so you can actually see pieces of the fat bastard fly off as you hit it with all manner of artillery.
Great fun for the whole family!
Don’t feel left out. He’s a hysterical anti-Semite, homophobe, and 9/11 Truther who despises atheists, so he probably hates you, too.
Now that’s a credential I’d wear with pride.
Bless Gideon’s heart.
There are so many people who hate me for I am, I am not sure if I need another… But what the hell.
I can’t tell if that is what it is, or if it is a parody of what it is.
I can’t tell if that’s a parody or if he’s being serious. Poe’s Law in effect I suppose.
I think unhinged best describes this person.
I’m an uppity, childfree, bisexual, atheist woman, so…yeah, no doubt.
“unhinged”? Nah.
My guess – coldly sane, but broken. Damaged goods.
If one is judged by the quality of their enemies, you have apparently hit the jackpot.
I like this:
Where’s the ACLU, the NCSE, and the ASPCA? They’re on the Illuminati list last I checked…
And people wonder why the radical right scares the shit out of me.
A former boss got kicked out of Puerto Rico after he used a photo of the governor for pistol and rifles quals while a federal employee. He scared/scares me. These people scare me. Because I do not know where their sense of ‘humour’ ends and actual threats begin. And, I suspect, they don’t, either.
“Patriotic, god-fearing citizen”
Yeah, on that… doesn’t their god say something about killing? Starts with “Thou shalt not…” I think.
Oh lol.
I honestly don’t think the 3D version will work, given the obivous lack of effort made in this one.
But hey, I’m another one of those fat atheists… so expect the Thunk targets soon!
Og: Yes…
I have a friend whose grandmother is planning to get her own handgun, despite her lack of knowledge in knowing how to use one (and violent racism to boot). The gun culture in America has just run amok.
Pfft…that’s just laziness. Skittles? Where is your devil’s bible?
Charlie Foxtrot:
Eh, Yahweh didn’t pay any attention to that, if you go by the OT. He was constantly demanding that people be slaughtered by whoever his current pet was at any given time.
@rayndeonx: I can’t tell if that’s a parody or if he’s being serious. Poe’s Law in effect I suppose.
From his About This Blog page:
I couldn’t make it very far into the blog before risking permanent burn-damage from the stupid, though the caricatures of his hate-targets in the sidebars was almost amusing.
I really don’t understand people like that…
-Other Dave B.
Sorry, but this is fascinating. He’s calling for a boycott of Dairy Queen. Why is he calling for a boycott of Dairy Queen, you ask? I will tell you:
So it is, my friend. So it is.
Seriously, though, this guy seems rather seriously unhinged. And he’s posting pictures of targets with your face on them. I do not like this. I mean, I’m not sure this is an amusing but harmless crank on the internet who is going to keep his fantasies on the internet.
I am pretty sure though that that concern probably already crossed your mind.
We must keep the eye of Horus on this one. I’m off to get a Butterfinger Blizzard.
It does worry me that some people, when they go to make a joke, somehow invariably end up with a gun in their hand. It says something about how they think.
From gideon’s website (hey! wasn’t Gideon in the OT a Jew!):
“I can tell you from hard experience that when the chips are down, you cannot count on anyone but yourself and your own relationship with Christ; ”
And one of these two is an idiot and the other doesn’t exist. So my money will be on C: for dependability – None of the Above.
The zeroth commandment: Do as I say, not as I do.
Wasn’t me. If he is anti-semitic and advocating violence as a means to solve the world’s problems, he is probably a Nazi, or a very angry student. Christians living by the Book are required to love their enemies, and not to murder. Even crass jokes like this is not acceptable.
I am so sorry, Dr Myers, that someone thinks you should be treated like this. You are intelligent, and a worthwhile human. Nobody deserves such disrespect as this photo, and the associated comments you published, made.
Charlie Foxtrot:
When I was young and forced to go to church, I asked my Sunday School teacher why God would command us not to kill in one verse and then turn around and condone killing in pretty much the rest of the OT. She said that “Thou shalt not kill” was a prohibition against a Jew killing a fellow Jew. It didn’t apply to those other, obviously evil groups.
Then why the obsession with firearms?
20:13 If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
Nice pun there, champ.
Whut? You mean it might have been an inadvertent spelling error, and the glorious wit and wordplay of homophones eludes this fellow? Oh, right, he probably doesn’t like homophones either.
There is no finer measure of a person’s ethical character than the kinds of people that he or she infuriates.
Congratulations, PZ. You’ve just netted yourself a grand, grand prize!
Oh, no! He’s twigged to the global meeting places of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy! And he’s also figured out why we’re all so fat!
Dammit. If only we could switch to a new secret meeting place…but we’re all addicted to soft-serve ice cream now.
Mr. Looney Tunes listed the Canada Revenue Agency. Apparently Canadians paying their income tax somehow is going to deprive gawd fearing Amuricans of their liberty. He has me convinced! It’s all a plot to gain revenge for the War of 1812!
Prepare to be assimilated!
Tell that to the Amalekites.
“…our portly infidel guru…”
The rest of it is fairly standard hate mail boilerplate, but I have to say that’s a nice turn of phrasing right there.
antigodless #21
What’s the matter? Guilty conscience?
Too bad so many Christians fail to live up to this ideal.
Translation: Gideon is in no way Scottish. No sir. His Glaswegian accent was a result of watching too much Taggart.
Wrong book, Rev. Antigodless was obviously talking about Dianetics.
Hardly a new trend among these folks. In the 1990s G. Gordon Liddy bragged on his show that he had spent a weekend teaching his grandkids how to fire automatic weapons at his ranch out west: their targets were cardboard life-size models of the Clintons.
See, you should have accepted gelato-guy’s apology. Then we’d have an alternative to soft-serve.
What a nutter. I laughed but I’m worried for your safety at the same time. It’s hard to know when something like this is just a joke or publicity stunt and when it’s a genuine danger sign.
Looking at his site he seems to be a racist as well. Classy.
Caine,
Yeah I know. But I figure if they get to pick and choose the bits they want at any time, then why can’t I?
Confusing stuff:
Exodus 20:13 “Thou shalt not kill” (pretty clear, I’d say)
How long until it’s ok to kill someone, then…?
Exodus 21:12 “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death”
25 verses. Probably on the same page in many bibles. Yeeesh!
Also, this guy throws around the ‘satanic’ a bit much. Ancient Egyptians were satanic? That’d be news to them, I’m sure…
That seems right.
I’m guessing that Homeland Security is keeping on eye on him. That is their job after all.
Odd factoid. Two thirds of all terrorist attacks and plots since 9/11 have involved right wing extremists and/or fundie xians.
You can bet the FBI knows this. That is where that statistic comes from.
@ antigodless
Liar! Read it. Which bits don’t apply? Oh right, the bits you don’t like.. well ain’t that convenient?
@Daz
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m57f1e95hy1qzhxye.gif
Well done
Man. What a newb. He totally missed the most important part of our covert satanic symbolism.
That ‘D’ in ‘DQ’? That’s not actually a D…
No, that’s actually the roman numeral D, which, sure, to the ignorant sheeple meant ‘500’, but to the initiates, meant the sooper sekrit mystical number ‘eleventy’…
What, you’ve never heard of eleventy?
Huh. Apparently someone‘s been dozing off after scarfing down the complementary donuts we serve at the beginning of the weekly Sinister Secret Society Coordinating Meeting, Social Mixer, and Potluck, and so hasn’t been paying attention, but anyway: eleventy is the number of the destroying angels in the even more sooper sooper sekrit arcane text the ‘Marmitocon’, which, legend says, was originally written in yeast drawn from the keg of Evil Beer brewed in an Evil Monastery…
The ‘Q’ on the other hand…
‘Q’ of course stands for ‘Q-Bert’, and ‘Q-Bert’ was the sooper sooper sooper sekrit handle of the protagonist in the dreaded Black Masque script which can be heard in reverse and only in the audiobook version of the Velveetacon…
Yes, ‘Q-Bert’, who, as all those in the know know, swears finally in the breathtaking climax upon his own grave (he was already dead, at this point, y’see) he would wipe out everyone with a doublewide and a set of TruckNutz™ and running really conspiratorial websites–or possibly just unfriend them on Facebook; the interpretation from the dialect of Pig Latin used is deliberately left ambiguous–if it was actually after the last thing he did. So do you see where all this is going, now, finally?
… oh, and Q also stands for ‘Quidditch’ and ‘Quoits’, but that was mostly unintentional. Couldn’t be helped, really…
… anyway, what I’m getting at is: the whole of it winds up being a complex and subtle acrostic built up from the hidden meanings implicit in those two very sinister symbols, and which finally comes out to, oddly enough: ‘ice cream and burgers, sold at roadside fast food joints’.
(/But the point is how we got there, see.)
You know what I like? He has a picture of that Answers In Genesis billboard with a kid pointing a gun on his site.
The irony is that groups like AIG blame evolution for people who have the anti-semitic attitudes that this guy has! Yet this guy hates atheists and denies evolution and global warming, just like the AIG people do!
Guy isn’t very coherent or competent.
On the back of the US $1 bill is a pyramid with an eye floating in space above it, some foreign language writing (revised Ebonian or perhaps Paknotic), and the words The Great Seal. I have no idea what it means so it must be the Eye of Horus.
In which case, the USA was taken over long ago by pagans. Which as a pagan sounds good to me except that if we actually ruled the USA, we would know it by now.
“He’s a hysterical anti-Semite, homophobe, and 9/11 Truther who despises atheists, so he probably hates you, too.”
His womb is moving around his body? I know that would make me afraid of jews. *shiver*
It’s why you don’t see me at those meetings. I refuse to set foot in Dairy Queen until they start making peppermint Dilly Bars again.
I haz my principles.
antigodless,
I appreciate that you don’t condone this guy’s behaviour but why aren’t you actually condemning him?
Oh! That!
Yeah, we haven’t got that here in Australia.
We have to make do with ‘Donut King’.
eeeeeeeeevil Donut King! Muahahahahahaaaaa!
This guy is clearly deranged but the problem is that there are a lot of people out there who won’t see the difference between shooting cardboard cutout of atheists and shooting actual people. BTW PZ, since he’s using your likeness to make a profit can you sue for a cut of the loot and use it to buy a billboard just across the street from his place, put the most strident atheist massage with a subtitle saying “this massage brought to you courtesy of your local moron” (or to take a vacation).
… waiting, waiting.. where are you “Gideon”? *giggle* (That’s such a name!)
Why is PZ still alive? Fucking slacker.. burn in hell you shit for not doing God’s wishes.. keeel hiiim! Kill him now! What you waiting for oh omnipotent fucker?!
I tried to read his website, but I sprained my smirking muscles.
Wow, their QOTD:
“Our race is the Master Race. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race,
other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves.”
– Menachem Begin, Israeli Prime Minister
Again, WOW.
While it’s all good fun to mock crazy people like this, I’m still thinking that it might be a good idea to talk to the authorities about this person, stat. Where mental illness is concerned, it’s a very thin line between raving internet loon and Norwegian Mass Killer Guy.
He’s not his brother’s keeper.
Christians living by the Book are required to love their enemies, and not to murder.
IOW, antigodless subscribes to the school of passive aggressive, instead of aggressive aggressive.
can we PLEASE put this zombie in the pen?
pretty please with cordite and napalm on top?
Grumps:
Not cool. Not funny. Not mocking. Stupid, thoughtless and crossing the line.
I don’t think this person is crazy. People can have completely different and spectacularly wrong views and not be crazy.
This dude just has a completely sheltered from reality view on the world.
That doesn’t make him “crazy”. Just not screwed on tight.
Or Jared Loughner or Cho Seung.
Naw. The fundies threw out the commandments about murder and lying a long time ago. They only have The Eight Commandments and the vast majority couldn’t even tell you what they are.
They toss off death threats like normal people say hello. Xian terrorism has been a problem in the USA for decades.
Is he saying he’s a potential arsonist?!?
0_o
Begin probably never said this. This quote is passed around endlessly without any accurate citation of who is supposed to have heard him say it or when. It’s occasionally claimed that Kapeliouk quoted him, but this is almost certainly false; no writing by Kapeliouk ever mentions it.
I the Teh Roolz say not to MURDER. Meaning, don’t kill unlawfully. If God tells you to kill someone, obviously it’s lawful.
Duhhhh, doesn’t anyone get sophistimacated theolology yet?
Well, we could head over to that one burger joint. You know the one I mean, the one that has a giant yellow pentagram?
Thanks pitbull for clearing up the validity of the quote.
@ Caine #55
blockquote>Not cool. Not funny. Not mocking. Stupid, thoughtless and crossing the line.
You’re right. Sorry. I was trying to parody, but I’m too drunk to tread that line. Missed it.
Some of these people are so fogged up they can’t tell the difference between the voices in their heads, microwave ovens, toasters, or gods.
Robert Beale is Vox Day’s father. He’s now in prison for mistaking voices from his microwave oven (or somewhere, who knows) for god’s.
Too drunk to blockquote too… goodnight.
raven, who uses mental illness per se as an insult,
I read the article mentioned. It contains no evidence that Robert Beale hallucinated any voices coming from anywhere.
No Robert Beale is just a Grade A Asshole.
Like his son.
http://www.startribune.com/local/west/18424219.html?page=2&c=y
raven, who uses mental illness per se as an insult,
SG, who likes to play at being Don Quixote, and really, really sucks at it.
seriously, you made me unkillfile you, which was painful enough.
can’t you fucking control yourself for even ONE thread?
of course not, you’re on a fucking righteous crusade of fuckwittery.
They’re an “organization” now? Do any of the MQs here have the phone number for the purchasing department? Because I could supply the spiffy Hugo Boss uniforms.
Do I even want to know what this piece of shit thinks about atheists of Jewish heritage?
No.
No, I don’t.
I might be the first Mom to go live in her own basement, if it could save me from knowing assholes like this exists.
Think of the bullets as little stones. PZ has to be guilty of blasphemy at the very least, so stoning him seems appropriate. And, with a target like this, you can do it again and again. That must add up in the brownie points column in St. Peter’s book of tattle tales.
Who doesn’t he hate?
Okay, I read that whole article too, and it contains no evidence that Robert Beale hallucinated any voices coming from anywhere.
Oh, goodie! I just hate being left out!
With fans like that, who needs enemies?
Trouble is, though he probably thinks he’s the seedy underbelly of the Internet, it’s more like he’s the sad, out-of-touch, friendless armpit of the internet.
He still has access to reality, cash, and guns though.
unbound @#14:
I believe that’s a box of crackers he’s holding. Gideon obviously didn’t think that one through. ;)
Christians living by the Book are required to love their enemies, and not to murder.
Tell that to the Amalekites.
Or various Midianites.
Or various Edomites.
All the first born of Egypt.
All the people of Sodom & Gomorroh except for a drunk and the daughters he’ll later have children with.
Every person in the supposed flood but the 8 on the boatload of dung.
All the Anakim inside Israel
A bunch of people in Jerusalem were probably killed when Judah’s tribe put a lot of people to the sword there–and whoever might have survived probably didn’t survive when his troops set the city on fire.
The children of Shion
The children of Og
The men of Penuel
The people of Laish
The people of Makkedah
The Ammonites
The Debirites
The Eglonites
The Gibeonites
The Hebronites
The Lachish
The Libnahites
Some Assyrians
Various Benjamites
Various Canaanites. First all of them. Then when they somehow magically showed up again in Bezek. Then in Zepath.
Various Edomites
Various Moabites
Various Philistines
Various Syrians
A bunch of Israelites, multiple times via plague, pestilence, stoning, gang rape, or whatever else the genocidal scumbag in the sky can come up with.
42 children who were teasing a senile old piece of shit
And, of course, jebus the emo slacker piece of shit, who wants eternal torture for everyone who doen’t kiss his psychotic ass.
Usually, the genocidal scumbag in the sky caused or demanded that all those people be killed because they were enemies.
Anyone who says the book wants anyone to love anyone else is a deluded and lying piece of shit who needs to go fuck himself.
Gun targets!
For when you can’t win a debate with your brains.
I don’t think that opposing ableist rhetoric is necessarily wrong.
I mean, I think “This person is crazy!” myself, all too often, when reading about what they say or do. And maybe they are crazy, at that.
But on the other hand, I remember hearing or watching shows about people who really do hear voices, and it’s something that they cannot help, and people belittle them for it if they find out.
So conflating violent right-wing authoritarians who confabulate permission from God to kill, with people who really do have auditory hallucinations, just seems . . . wrong, and wrongly insulting to people with auditory hallucinations.
I wonder if Gideon isn’t a Canadian. Amongst his “bad guys” list is CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. If you scroll down the page you’ll see an anti David Suzuki bit, which strikes me as something you’d more likely see from a Canadian than an American. And he has a widget that refers to Queen Elizabeth as a walfare cheat, which again seems a bit odd to see from an American.
I think we should reconsider the “integrate the mentally ill into society” attitude. You can’t let these kind of people have access to the Internet. It may defeat the purpose of their medication. Look at this guy, he just has a magnetism for every conspiracy in the world and probably hates every person on the planet. On the good side, I learn new things about the trendiest paranoiac delusions.
…okay, I’ve never even touched a loaded gun and…
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Aquaria — Great list! Only one group missing: everybody. Because, according to that damn OT story, the fucking genocidal maniac in the sky kills all of us because people got a little too smart.
I don’t think that opposing ableist rhetoric is necessarily wrong.
that’s nice.
Just so long as we’re clear, that’s not the issue?
it’s SG’s obsessive compulsive behavior.
oh, wait, that would be ableist rhetoric, no?
*shrug*
So conflating violent right-wing authoritarians who confabulate permission from God to kill
and you concluded Beale didn’t hear God telling him to kill the judge… how?
certainly not from the words of his I quoted.
These people are freaks, and I don’t think you should just scoff at their stupidity PZ.
OOOPS! Posting link fuck up. Sorry!
That was not actually clear from what you originally wrote.
Your citation has him saying “God wants me”, not “God told me”.
Lots of people seem to think they know what God wants, by projecting their own desires onto God. Confabulation is more parsimonious than inferring an auditory hallucination.
Let me know if you find anything that specifically states Beale attributing his knowledge of God’s desires to a voice he heard.
Ref:
Epley, N., et al. Believers’ estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people’s beliefs. PNAS. December 22, 2009 vol. 106 no. 51 21533-21538
Isn’t the fact that his blog address is houseofgideon.blogspot.ca a pretty strong clue, besides the other stuff?
so we’re only supposed to call out ableism intermittently?
FWIW, some states prohibit or regulate “targets that depict human figures, human effigies, human silhouettes or any human images”. E.g., in Massachusetts it’s illegal to use such targets at “Class A” shooting ranges that allow use of automatic weapons (except for law enforcement):
http://www.malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXX/Chapter140/Section131
Earning the ire of someone so contemptible is perhaps the clearest sign of all that a secular humanist speaker has ‘made it’.
I don’t know what’s more disturbing, the fantasy to hurt people for having a different opinion to him or the tacit approval of Martin Trayvon’s murder.
so we’re only supposed to call out ableism intermittently?
seriously?
ok, this game is getting tiresome.
…if you think playing games with myself or Raven accomplishes anything other than irritation, you guys are losing it.
turn your headlights on to yourselves.
If we define everything as ableism, we empty the word “ableism” of all meaning.
you think calling out your and raven’s use of gratuitous “internet diagnosis” to attach mental illness labels to horrible people is “playing games”? cute.
how exactly is it not ableism to attribute negative actions to a mental illness, especially when no mental illness is even in evidence?
if getting called out for using mental illness and mental disorders the way you and raven do is tiring you, why don’t you stop doing that and stop defending it? then you won’t have to watch us call it out ever again.
[meta]
Why is the conversation about mental illness and such, when the topic category is <checks> … um,
Posted in Kooks?Never mind.
@19. jnorris :
Yup. See :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon
via usual fount of all wisdom.
Of course the Rabbi Jesus and all his disciples and followers were Jewish too – with maybe just a handful of gentile exceptions.
PS. Plus of course Rabbi Jesus’es whole fucken family incl. maryand Joseph and his brothers and perhaps also sisters.
Plus among Jesus’es lats words before he died was a call to forgiveness NOT racist fucken hatred.
Shit, Christian anti-Semites are thick and pig ignorant!
As are all fucking anti-Semites generally, natch, there’s no such thing as an intelligent anti-Semite / Judaeophobe far as I know (Noam Chomsky maybe – slightly different category and also batshit insane tho’) but still.
From Wikipedia:
AFAIK there is no dichotomy either:
* Negative actions can be a sign of mental illness.
* Negative actions can be a sign of being an asshole.
* Negative actions can be a sign of being a mentally ill asshole.
The Norwegian justice system and psychiatric community seem to have no idea whether they should define Anders Behring Breivik as mentally ill or mentally sound. This appears to point to a pretty deep philosophical problem with how we define mental health. After all, neither psychologists or philosophists seem to be able to reach agreement on this.
And how we define mental health, has implications for how we define ableism (at least mentalism). It seems to me to be less black and white than you and LILAPWL seem to think.
Does any douchebag really want to be a douchebag? Is it a lifestyle choice that we should respect? Or is it in reality just a symptom of an underlying mental problem? Or is it something else entirely? And who is in the position to decide/define this?
If we define it as a sign of an underlying mental problem, that means calling people douchebags would be mentalism. In fact, almost every disparaging term in every language would be mentalism. Which in turn means we should stop using them.
Now, this is not meant as a strawman. I am aware that this is probably not how you define the borders between illness and shithead-ness.
So how do you define it, and how do you defend your definitions?
I know I can indulge my moderate passion for violent rhetoric in the pursuit of obvious hyperbolic comedy a little too often, especially when in the virtual presence of Vox Day who particularly irritates me, but making gun targets?
DUDE! NOT COOL!
If I were to go to a gun range and there were photos of people on the targets, people living, dead or even fictional, I’d be seriously uncomfortable. And yes, even if that person were Hitler or the Fictional Person Who Was Out To Murder Me And My Fambleh This Week Like Hannibal Lecter Or Something.
Seriously uncomfortable to the point of vocally and vehemently expressing that discomfort and leaving.
I get that law enforcement officers or military personnel need human shaped targets, I get the esprit de corps that leads people to write “this is for you Adolf” or “burn in hell Osama” on the casings of bombs, I get it. I don’t have to like it or agree with it outside of those very narrow contexts though do I?
So human shaped targets for practical purposes in limited contexts: yes.
Violent rhetoric directed at specific individuals during combat situations: nasty but yes. Anything to get those people through their day, frankly. They have my utmost admiration and gratitude.
Those two things combined outside of those limited contexts: Just no. It’s not big, it’s not clever, it’s actually pretty toxic.
Louis
irrelevant. even if half the world’s mental illnesses turn out to be figments of people’s imagination, using them as weapons against someone is still ableism; after all, the biological non-existence of race doesn’t mean the use of such invented race-categories as a weapon against people isn’t still racism.
completely irrelevant if all someone is doing is internet-diagnosing someone with auditory hallucinations for which there is no evidence; especially as part of a pattern of calling any kook mentally ill as a way of dismissing and insulting them.
in fact, your entire screed is irrelevant to whether using a mental illness, real or otherwise, actually present or otherwise, as a means of attacking someone’s action is ableism or not.
If we can make a clear qualified distinction between mental illness and douchebaggery, then you’re absolutely right, it is.
Can we?
On the Mental Health Derail:
Lars,
Look at it from another angle. No one is necessarily disputing that some arseholes can suffer from some mental illnesses and indeed this informs their actions somewhat. What is being disputed is the association of arseholery with mental illness as a rhetorical gambit.
(Incidentally Ichthyic, regardless of how much LILAPWL occasionally pisses me off, and he does as evidenced recently, on this I think he’s right. Tactically maybe we differ…not even sure about that tbh…but not on the “wrongness” of misusing mental health terms. And yes, it is a fine line to walk sometimes.)
Without re-delving into the deconstructions of mental illness/health discussed elsewhere, and currently in review etc by me for purposes of future conversations (if you’re reading SC, I’m on the job! And enjoying it actually! :-) ), mental illness of a clinically meaningful, pathological degree is frighteningly common. Like many other diseases, most sufferers will simply get through it. Periods of clinical depression (i.e. depression above and beyond the emotional turmoil brought on by mere circumstance, like grief), for example, is thought to affect, conservatively, 1 in 6 people at some point in their lives. Some figures go as high as 1 in 4, but I am erring on the side of caution. Despite this wide degree (in all nations btw, this is not a “First World Problem”) of prevalence there is an astonishing level of stigma attached. Just like little kids in the playground call things/people they don’t like “gay” so as to, perhaps unconsciously, associate the object of their dislike with the supposed negative qualities of homosexuality, they also call kids “nutters” or “spaz” or “mental” or some such thing. For the same reasons: association with the supposed negative qualities of mental illness.
Mental illness cuts to the quick of who we are, it deals with our very view of what it is to be human, our theories of mind. It’s a contentious area for good reason. The remote, unqualified, “diagnosis” of mental illness in another is to dismiss them as a person, not merely their argument as wrong, but them as incapable of making rational, coherent arguments by virtue of a “flaw”. The same tactic has been used against oppressed groups for donkey’s years. It’s identical in form and function to sexism or racism.
Note an important difference here: X is an idiot and therefore has nothing useful to say is different from X has nothing useful to say and is therefore an idiot. One’s an ad hominem fallacy, the other almost definitional! Also, words like idiot and moron and stupid have lost a lot, if not all, of their technical baggage. Moron no longer refers to someone with a specific IQ for example, at least in common usage. That’s not to defend the use of these words, which I use all too damn commonly by the way, it’s to note that these words are perhaps more defensible than others. It’s grey, not black and white…perhaps…depends which school of linguistics you belong to!
Back to the angle: look at it from the perspective of someone with a mental illness, not necessarily any specific person, just the statistical mean, the general mentally ill person. By using mental illnesses as insults we are maintaining a strong association between “mental illness” and “personal unpleasantness”. This isn’t a pure, noble environment of unsullied logic, it’s a cultural and social environment with a great degree of context.
Like Jadehawk correctly notes, the unreality (or being very generous, complexity…there are biological “demes”, or at least genetic subpopulations/clusters, but thy ain’t what most people think they are, and they certainly ain’t “races” in the colloquial or common sense) of human races doesn’t preclude the existence of racism.
Perhaps a more physical example will help you: the electron. Just because, using the most up to date quantum mechanical equations, we cannot perfectly describe the wavefunction of a particular electron within a complex atom, and thus have to put a bound of probability on what we define as an “orbital” for that electron to “occupy” doesn’t mean that electrons in one orbital aren’t distinguishable from electrons in other orbitals from a purely chemical perspective (there are physics wrinkles here that make this analogy imperfect). A hard, clear line is not a necessary condition for useful discussion. It’s okay to work with 95%, and in fact it’s a better representation of reality.
Does that help?
Louis
Louis @103, I guess it’s the American way of burning an effigy: the profitable one.
(Semi-serious, here)
John, #107,
Oh sure. And, hey, if that’s what some people want to do, I’m not campaigning to outlaw it, people are free to be arseholes in my book.
I don’t have to like it or stifle that dislike though. I too am free to be an arsehole!*
Louis
* And there is a slogan I think we can all get behind.
@Louis: I don’t feel that much wiser yet, but thanks for trying. I’ll discuss this futher with a good friend of mine who hears voices, she will probably have a thing or two to tell me in the context of this discussion.
Good one. But what about the freedom to be a half-arsed arsehole? (Like the kook in the OP who coldn’t even be bothered to replace the skittles with communion crackers.) Who will think of the half-arsed arseholes?
He seems a tad obsessed with PZ’s weight as well. Must have mentioned it, like, 8 times. Sounds like (a) his perception of fatness is way off, and (b) he thinks someone being “fat” is extra justification for hating them and wanting to kill them.
Lars, #109,
@Louis: I don’t feel that much wiser yet, but thanks for trying. I’ll discuss this futher with a good friend of mine who hears voices, she will probably have a thing or two to tell me in the context of this discussion.
And if your friend says it’s okay for you to use these terms what will that mean?
If you ask a black friend if they consider the use of the word “nigger” as an insult to be racist or not and they say it isn’t, is it suddenly not racist for you to call black people “niggers”?
If you ask a female friend if they consider the use of the word “cunt” as an insult to be misogynist or not and they say it isn’t, is it suddenly not misgynist for you to call women (or anyone) people “cunts”?
If you ask a Jewish friend if they consider the use of the word “kike” as an insult to be anti-Semitic or not and they say it isn’t, is it suddenly not anti-Semitic for you to call Jewish people “kikes”?
If you ask a homosexual friend if they consider the use of the word “faggot/dyke” as an insult to be homophobic or not and they say it isn’t, is it suddenly not homophobic for you to call homosexual people “faggots/dykes”?
Does permission from one member of an identified group extend to permission for the whole group, or absolution? Or is that attitude itself prejudiced? Treating individuals as representative of groups…
Think about it.
Louis
LDTR,
Oh of COURSE! {painfully large eyeroll}
Being fat is a moral failure as ANI FUL NOEZ. And fatness is always an indicator of Low Moral Character and Weakness And Stupidity. It’s in the bible or something.
Can’t you see Gideon is just saying this because he cares?
[/sarcasm]
Louis
Giddy’un’s Baybull?
Or maybe Giddy’un’s Buybull?
(Cannot type for shit durnit,. Even when sober. Which I’m not.
I saw what you did there.
PZ’s working for the Pope now? Anyone tell Benny?
I’m going to talk to her to increase my understanding, not to ask permission FFS.
Prejudice? You’re fucking projecting.
Oh, this Gideon asshole’s obsession with “fags”, feminists, and “Zionists” is really fucking creepy. Be careful PZ, I wouldn’t be surprised if someday soon he managed to work himself into a frothing violent tizzy.
I’m going to quote one of Gideon’s posts– he’s not threatening violence, but it’s some amazingly hateful shit.
You hear that everybody? Feminists, Jews, teh gheys, et al. have managed to kidnap everybody and now you’re all suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
I had no idea I had so much power.
Lars,
@80
I think you’re right. This guy is Canadian. Do Americans even know who David Suzuki is?
Is there any way we can deport him to the U.S.? He’ll probably fit in better. Maybe someplace like Alabama, Mississippi or North Carolina.
Oh fuck I has several borkquotes.
FML!
Louis
YOu know this could be considered a physical threat. It may be a good idea to have the local police have a quiet talk with the man.
Gideon’s blog is on Blogger, and Blogger recently introduced a new feature that “localises” the URL. So someone looking at his blog from the UK will see it as having a co.uk address. Makes it a bit harder to tell where a Blogger blog owner is actually located.
Larrylyons, are you aware of how many years Mabus was sending death threats before he was finally picked up?
Tim,
If you read his posts*, it’s pretty clear that he’s Canadian, especially considering that he thinks Canada is a nanny state and the Canadian government is fascist (ha!).
*Yeah, I got several pages in before my brains started to turn into soggy corn flakes,
This is actually pretty good. In a way.
(but yeah, not in that other way)
Lars :
Yeah that sounds about right.
P.S : Duuude, really?
Did he seriously register your name as part of a trademark?
There are lots of gun enthusiasts and avid hunters in my neck of the woods. As my brother and I have often observed, XXL or even 3XL seem to be the most common sizes in which camo clothing is sold. Without 4Wheelers some of those guys would have a hard time getting up the mountain.
Seems to me that the seller of the PZ Myers target might offends his own customers with all that talk of “girth” and of walruses.
I do not know where their sense of ‘humour’ ends and actual threats begin. And, I suspect, they don’t, either.
The kind of coward that thinks shooting holes in a picture of a person is somehow edgy, is not the kind of coward that is dangerous. Not even when armed. They only get dangerous when in large enough numbers to support a lemming rush. Then, once they get started, they are absolutely ruthless.
Dogs that are busy barking don’t bite – it’s the ones that come at you silently and go for your hamstrings that are dangerous. These clowns aren’t even as threatening as an amphetamine-crazed pomeranian. But, a large pack of amphetamine-crazed pomeranians is scary…
This is precisely why these people need to hunt with guns (long ago declared by the infallible pope to be an abominable creation of Satan himself), instead of chasing down their pray with atlatl’s and flint-napped spears the way nature and god intended man to hunt.
I disagree with your assessment in the first paragraph but have no evidence or anecdotes to back that one up. The part that I quote I know is incorrect. A dog (a collie, in fact) that lived along my paper route, was a barker. And big me three times (the final time requiring eleven stitches). And was put down after the third time. So yes, barking dogs do bite. And if that is the totality of your evidence claiming that asshats like this are not dangerous, well, you may be right. But can yo ube sure of that?
A reference early in this thread to so called ‘secret knowledge’ prompted a thought in my head. Science based knowledge is the most useful and valuable of all yet no-one feels the need to keep it secret. It is freely available, no-one needs to take action to prevent it from falling into the hands of the unworthy. Presumably this is because the unworthy are either too stupid to recognise the value of this knowledge, or too lazy to put in the work required to benefit from it.
The UK had/has a rather prickly Conservative politician called Norman Tebbit who made the following quotable remark:
“Don’t judge a man by his friends, judge him by his enemies, I’m very proud of my enemies.”
I and one other person were attacked by a pittbull….I can assured you it barked. It also shrugged off getting hit by a car so yes it was dangerous.
So the maker of the target is a Christian? His God approves of making targets out of people (Trayvon and now PZ)? This is how he shows his God’s love?
So nauseating. I felt physically ill when I saw the target for Trayvon and feel the same about this one. Not seeing how this is not hate speech.
This was not always the case. That moment in history when this changed, when society decided that scientific knowledge should be widely available to all who wish it, when “disseminate your findings freely among your peers” became added to the scientific method, is the moment that the modern world was born, the moment when the current explosion of human understanding, knowledge, and capability began.
Re 127 TM
PZ, I suppose a good strategy would be to let this guy market (go on marketing) the TM PZ Myers target and then sue him for all he’s worth, not for hate speech, not for incitation to violence, threats or anything, but for unauthorized use of your name.
Would be a memorable trial, excellent PR, possibly draw some people’s attention to who is being victimized, and how.
@jand
I think it’d be thrown out right away since the targets are protected as parody/satire of a public figure. You have a better bet (IANAL) sueing for incitation for violence.
Inciting voilence* fucking passive voice
This guy seriously needs to step away from the internet for a while. And probably seek some therapy. But until then, I’ll cheerfully be his Enemy. Allow me to bask in your hatred, Gideon.
Mmmmm… cheery, warm hatred.
Don’t let the Language Log guys see this. (You used the passive voice twice in 137; neither involved a derivation of the word “incite”.)
Ya rly. She’s not as dumb as you think.
Owlmirror,
What about when some religious person does refer to God talking to them? Because I’m pretty sure we’ve come across that, too. Even then, unless they get into a detailed account of it, it still can refer to feeling God’s messages and such rather than literally hearing a voice.
The thing is, I think that that distinction can be irrelevant, if the idea is just to rethorically play along with their claims of having instructions.
Because that’s what it is: the smudging between feeling and hearing is already integrated in what they’re saying. There does seem to be a desire to present what they experience as something articulated and direct and clear, like someone talking to them. And then go on to claim it as the justification for their behaviour.
So, I think that it’s legitimate to take that part at face value to give bite to the questions of where the desires or instructions are coming from. It has to be hammered that no, that it’s about “God” doesn’t make it reasonable or innocuous.
That does always rely on some degree on people thinking of “hearing and/or complying with voices” as something negative. And I have no problem with that in itself. Because as I said, I think it can be relevant to putting some kinds of religious claims in perspective, and because it is something negative. It’s not because it can be (among other things) a symptom of mental illness doesn’t make it not basically an undesirable thing, and that if that’s acknowledged in any way then it’s ableism by extension.
I think there needs to be more than just that to feed/use the stigma of mental illness.
—
That said, if the idea is to pretend to remotely diagnose a literal mental illness then from what you’re saying the jump to saying they literally “heard voices” is wrong on top of more wrong, I agree. I mean, just the “hearing voices” thing is pretty much phrased (down to the plural, when singular would probably fit the “voice of God” better) like a stereotype of mental illness, I guess.
It’s just that it’s harder to tell than when someone literally just throws the technical name for a condition around like an insult. It kind of bleeds into a grey zone.
Louis @106:
I’ve been following this derail with much interest as it’s a subject to which I’ve given much thought, so apologies for keeping it going. Not long ago, I wrote a (loooong) post, provoked in part by a comment of Brownian’s about one of raven’s. He had two objections: one to an “over-the-top conflation of religiosity and mental illness,” and the second to the use of “mental illness as an insult.” An interesting and clarifying discussion ensued (which can be read here if anyone’s interested). I think this issue haunts me because I sometimes wonder whether I might just be rationalizing something I do when in reality I am crossing a line that I really do not want to cross. It goes like this:
It should be uncontroversial to say that right-wing conservatives (e.g. YECs, climate change denialists, anti-choice zealots, free market dogmatists) have something very specific wrong with their minds. I’m sure that the regular commenters here know exactly what I’m talking about and can recognize this specific something, because whatever it is, unfortunately it is an all-too-common impairment. That being the case it is easy to see why, lacking a more precise label for it, one might resort to “mental illness” to describe it when perhaps one should not. Nevertheless, it is not sufficient to simply say that someone is a “young earth creationist” and leave it at that, because “young earth creationist” does not account for the very specific kind of anti-rationality, the willful ignorance, and the cluster of other related delusions that almost invariably accompany that one. “YEC” is specific, but it is too specific. This is why I coined the term Conservative Personality Disorder (“CPD”) to describe hard-core, anti-rational, right-wing conservatism, in all of its manifestations.
The thing is, I find CPD (and my understanding of personality disorders generally) to be a useful paradigm through which to examine, discuss, analyze, and yes, sometimes outright mock right-wing conservatism. To tie this back to Louis @ 106, I am speaking of people who are indeed “incapable of making rational, coherent arguments by virtue of a ‘flaw’.” It’s the nature of the flaw(s) that I am interested in. Further, it is this kind of conservatism, and not my examination or ridicule of it, that is similar in form and function to racism and sexism.
That being said, I sincerely do want to limit any collateral damage; as Brownian memorably put it during our discussion, “as someone capable of spewing my fair share of venom, I try to make sure my poisonous gobs hit my target and none other.” I’m honestly not sure whether I’ve crossed a line into mentalism with my “diagnosis” of CPD. And if I have, how is this any different from PZ referring to someone as “deluded” or a “kook”?
(Apologies again for continuing the derail… and now for the fookin text wall, too.)
“Don’t feel left out. He’s a hysterical anti-Semite, homophobe, and 9/11 Truther who despises atheists, so he probably hates you, too.”
Oh sure, he hates me too…but do I get a target? Hah!
I feel so…slighted…
It’s more pathologizing than mentalism, I think. But pathologizing is a precursor and a prerequisite for mentalism.
Whether your “diagnosis” is correct or not, and whether or not it’s morally right to pathologize what you (possibly correctly) think is wrong with their minds, is also a question. (Or rather, two questions.)
irisvanderpluym @ 143:
As a person with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), I’ll just say that “disorder” is the appropriate medical term for any sort of mental condition that is disadvantageous to the person but not caused by some external infectious agent.
Having said that, it’s a bit rude to flippantly make up acronyms to describe personality types which you disapprove of, in the sense that there are a lot of otherwise intelligent people out there who refuse to believe that conditions like ADD, gender identity disorder, etc. actually exist as real things.
Here’s a snippet from a great book on ADHD called Delivered From Distraction which explains what I wish I could say as elegantly myself:
[part 1/2]
[delivered from distraction contd. I should probably say TW for descriptions of ableism. I know it can be personally painful for me to hear some of the dismissive stuff in the 2nd paragraph.]
It goes on to say that if you look at the basic symptoms of ADD/ADHD, distractibility, impulsivity, and restlessness, there have been people throughout history with all of those traits, “but until the twentieth century, the lens through which those people were viewed was the lens of morality. The moral diagnosis a person received spelled trouble for the sufferer.”
[meta]
Numad,
¬(¬((S(x))→(¬U(x)))
is more complicated than
S(x)→(¬U(x))
(It’s only false when both are S and U are true)
Lars @ 141 :
Oh no, I was not implying she is dumb, whoever *she* is. I just thought the whole I’ve-a-friend… sounded, ya know, a bit flakey?
I have more friends that have been institutionalized at some point, than friends who have jobs, and I can’t be arsed to give a flying fuck if you believe me or not.
Lookathat, chump at life trying to shadowbox as a muscular Christian, but achieving nothing beyond displaying his barftastic thinking process to the networld. Love how he thinks him and his wank-cramped hand necessitate the first person plural. Also, shoulda put down the Jesus and picked up the web design book, dude.
Lars @ 150 :
Okay man, if you’re sincere…
(But it still sounds flakey, if you say it like that, right after being such a clueless thickhead)