This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
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Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
So when is PZ going to comment on that pig human hybrid story?
http://phys.org/news/2013-07-human-hybrids-closer-theory-evidence.html
It almost seems like he is trying to call out biology bloggers.
paulparnell, PZ covered a pig-hybrid story a month or so back.
Quietish day in the T-Dome.
–
SGU already did a takedown on a recent podcast…….not that they are biology experts but there is some seriously funky “science” involved in that “fiction”.
I would be more interested in PZ’s take on the folks that successfully transplanted the insulin producing cells from a pig into human by essentially tricking the immune response by “rebooting” it with those new cells in place……sounded amazing and a great step forward for diabetes research/treatement.
Science simply rocks.
The theory of evolution predicts where we find altruistic and where we find selfish behavior.
Now read those papers, or I shall taunt you again.
It’s “I shall taunt you a second time,” dude. Fake geek! Fake geek!
Naw, maybe it was kinda classy to skirt a Python quote, then run away from it. Keep ’em off balance.
Is it accurate and fair for me to explain to my creationist parents that “Evolution is the theory that children come from parents”?
I think this is something they can understand, and if I start with it I should be able to explain most of the basics.
I mean, isn’t quoting from a group of absurdist artists repeatedly, and thus getting acclimated to them, sort of defeating the purpose of it?
“The theory of evolution predicts where we find altruistic and where we find selfish behavior.”
I’m sure it does, like it predicts some things evolving like the dickens, while others get stuck.
But it has to come down somehow to mutations and selection. The articles I’ve read seem to struggle with the selection part as it doesn’t square with the slight advantage and more likely to reproduce deal. I don’t recall having seen DNA replication errors mentioned at all.
===
This was the moon origins article I mentioned earlier.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130710-moon-birth-impact-science-space-cover/
Mm. No, no quite.
Maybe something more like: “…the theory that children are never identical twins of their parents.”
And that, in general, parents will have more children than will have children of their own.
And that, in general, the children who will become parents themselves will be those who are more successful in living and finding mates.
Then you haven’t been reading real science, probably just your creationist bullshit. You don’t have any true grasp of science of evolution. Or why your deity is imaginary and your holy book is mythology/fiction. Nothing but ignorance, stupidity, dishonesty, and presupposition all the way down with you. Nothing you say appears to have any basis in reality.
Yes it does. And not only does it predict that some things will evolve quickly and some will not, it also predicts when and under what circumstances things are more likely to evolve quickly and when and under what circumstances things are more likely to evolve slowly.
And the thing about predictions? They can be checked. AND WE HAVE.
A guess what? The predictions of evolutionary theory have turned out to BE CORRECT. On BOTH the questions evolutionary rates AND on the balance of altruism and selfishness.
On the other hand, Tyre is still here.
Evolution works, texpip. That is reality. Live with it.
Your sappy creationism is useless, texpip. That is reality. Live with it.
By “stuck”, do you mean offspring that are identical twins of their parents?
Sounds more like you’ve struggled and failed to understand them, which is hardly surprising.
Articles on evolution didn’t talk about the source of mutations; of genetic variation?
Well, perhaps they took it for granted that they didn’t need to talk about the source of mutations.
Or perhaps you’re stupid enough to fail reading comprehension again, which would hardly be surprising.
Uh-huh. So they offer various models of how the moon split off from the Earth via impact(s), and debate which one of them best explains the data.
And you stupidly think that this is stupid . . . because?
And just as I predicted, that article does not say what you claimed it did. The article plainly states that the basic premise of the giant impactor hypothesis is not in dispute. The overall “story” of the giant impactor scenario is not in question. The only issues are the fine details of the nature of the impact.
Which stands in stark contrast to your poor, useless creationism’s version, which provides no details whatsoever except that the moon was made as a light source akin to the sun. And this one detail also happens to be DEAD WRONG.
“Is it accurate and fair for me to explain to my creationist parents that “Evolution is the theory that children come from parents”?”
No, because they might counter with something to do with “be fruitful and multiply”, and then you could wind up having to explain how DNA replication errors and natural selection crafted males and females, and all the hardware and software that result in children coming from parents. Keep it light and scientific.
As usual, we totally believe that you are being honest, and totally trust your expert opinion.
Perhaps because there are multiple kinds, described in multiple ways? Perhaps because it wasn’t considered relevant since the focus wasn’t at the genetic level? Perhaps because you are blinkered, disingenuous, agenda-blinded assclown who will only see what you want to see, and will blatantly distort reality in any way you can in order to support your agenda?
I find it hilarious that txpiper is now dipping into Ray Comfort caliber creationist talking points. You know, “how did the first woman evolve from the first man, huh smart guy”. Snidely Piplash is immune to facts, impervious to education. The only science that the pip can grasp are only the fragments of science that the pipster thinks they can fashion into a crude weapon. Everything else is forever, willfully, beyond their reach.
Let us examine once more the texpip’s asinine hypocrisy:
The texpip’s creationism:
The scientific view:
The texpip attacks the second one for lacking in specifics and detail, but which of the two statements provides more details and more specifics?
The texpip attempts to support his dishonest claim with a citation, but that citation from beginning to end is completely in agreement with the second statement, and only describes debates concerning the details that follow from that statement. How large an object? How many? What are the specific details of the mechanisms by which the debris was flung into orbit? How did the process of coalescence proceed? One primary lump? Or several that later collided and fused?
The texpip criticizes the theory for doing its job of generating new questions to ask so that knowledge can be advanced.
While in stark contrast, the texpip’s creationism in the first statement offers NO DETAILS AT ALL, and provides NO WAY of asking any useful questions that can help us FIND OUT those details which it DOES NOT give us.
So the texpip is thus exposed criticizing a scientific theory for being incomplete in an area where his preferred alternative is not only incomplete, in in fact OFFERS NOTHING AT ALL.
Pitiful intellectually dishonest hypocrisy all the way down.
And if they did so you would have an excellent teaching opportunity to introduce your children to an active and fascinating field of science.
The texpip says “no” because the texpip is an intellectually dishonesty hypocrite.
The intellectually honest on the other hand, say “YES!”.
(Some may even say “YES! YES! OH YES!”)
It is, and is found here, in libraries at institutions of higher learning. You know, the stuff you disbelieve to pretend you deity isn’t imaginary your holy book isn’t a pile of shit.
“On the other hand, Tyre is still here.”
Well, not really “here”. More like there, underwater from Alexander having built a causeway from the debrie of the destroyed city to get to the island relocation. You can go and see it for yourself if they have the glass-bottom tourist boats up and running. Then you will have found it, and you will be a champion.
I think if you read the moon article carefully, you will find that they don’t have a clue. Maybe it would help if you set up a scale model with a basketball and a tennis ball spaced about 23 feet apart, and evalute impact theories with some kind of perspective.
In contrast to this, the texpip’s sorry, sappy creationism forgot to even mention that living things other than humans even had male and female sexes. And when it does mention the sexes in humans, this is what it says:
What were the sexes of all the animals made before Adam got lonely for a “suitable helper”? If God had already made males and females for all of them, then why in the high heavens was he so cruel as to make Adam alone? If not, then were there no females at all before this? Where then did the female cows and foxes and snakes and hibiscuses and pines and crocuses come from? Did God, after making Eve from Adam’s rib, then go on an orgy of rib ripping across the the animal kingdom to make all the other females? What did he take from the Octopus in lieu of a rib?
WHY OH MIGHTY MAKER, WHY????
The texpip claims the evolutionary scenario for the evolution of the sexes is hard to believe, but what is really less believable, the sappy fantastical lunacy above, or that the sexes first evolved in single cells, where all it takes to differentiate males from females is a single gene mutation, and where computer models show that once you have that differentiation (which requires just a single gene mutation), any cell that was slightly smaller and more mobile, but less effective at storing resources (due to smaller size) would have its relative reproductive effectiveness enhanced if it became even smaller and more mobile, and devoted even less effort to resource storage, while any cell that was slightly larger and less mobile, but more effective at energy storage, would have its relative reproductive effectiveness enhanced by becoming even larger and less mobile, and even better at resource storage, making the specialization of the two sexes into males with small, mobile gametes and females with large, sessile gametes filled to the brim with the resources the zygote will need to get started in life, so likely as to be virtually inevitable?
If you read that moon article HONESTLY, it is OBVIOUS that they have MANY clues, and are working hard on deciphering them.
But reading things honestly is obviously something you are incapable of, you pathetic sappy hypocrite.
And yet your sorry sappy bible predicted that Tyre would never be found. And yet there it is, FOUND. Every version of it. All FOUND.
Thank you for conceding the point.
Again.
Just a reminder, this is what the texpip’s bible says about Tyre:
NOT “relocated” as the texpip so dishonestly tried to claim, but no more. And NEVER again be found, not just “some bits reduced to ruins underwater but which archeologists will find some day and become so well known and so easily found that entrepreneurs will be able to turn it into a tourist attraction for millions of visitors”.
Never. Again. Be. Found.
Now contrast the arbitrary nitpicky skepticism the texpip evinces about the Moon formation hypotheses with the utter laxity and leeway he affords to his preferred tome of failed and useless predictions.
Disgusting hypocrite.
Which would be stupid.
I’m glad that you agree that your God is a liar. Is that why you lie so much? Because you think you’re made in the image of your imaginary lying God?
You’re too stupid to read carefully.
I agree that you don’t have a clue about how to read carefully.
“God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night.”
Good quote, and the results are very interesting. The sizes of the sun, the earth and the moon, and the distances in between them are vastly different but their positions are such that, from our perspective, the two great lights are virtually the same size. That’s why solar eclipses, however brief, are spectacular. And the same holds true for total lunar eclipses. The earth gets in between one great light and the other, so that an aura is on display. Of course, science says that the relativity, sizes and distances are just coincidental.
But there are other remarkable coincidences. The moon rotates on its axis one complete revolution which just happens to coincide with its orbit around the earth, so that only one side of it is ever in view. Now that is cool, but it is hard to imagine the debris of a giant impact all accreting together into a round ball and then settling down into such a stable synchronization. Did they get that far in the computer simulation?
Owlmirror, did you find anything in your files about me and quotes from John and accolades about it?
It’s not a coincidence. Go look up tidal locking.
Mass increases exponentially as a function of size.
Gravity and the amount of force related to gravity are heavily influenced by mass.
Therefore…
The result that should be obvious to anyone who understands how gravity works: You won’t be able to assess gravitational forces by eyeballing scale models because the forces do not scale the same!
It’s equivalent to saying that a 10 ft cube couldn’t possibly have 1000 cubic feet of volume, because a 2 ft cube, a mere 1/5th of the scale, has only 8 cubic feet of volume! A mere 0.8% of the alleged volume of a 10 ft cube! Clearly, somebody must be an enthusiastic supporter of the Large Number Agenda to have tricked so many people into believing that such a thing a possible!
Will you be declaring your war against math next? I mean more overtly, of course.
You’re too stupid to know what tidal locking is.
You’re too stupid to imagine tidal locking.
You’re too stupid to use a computer to simulate gravity.
Ah fuckwit, the moon is not a light. The light comes solely from the sun. The moon merely reflects the light. You are one dumb shit. Stop believing in imaginary deities, and maybe you will become smarter…
Gee, as does a good number of the other moons in the solar system. Locked by gravity. Don’t you ever think of anything beside your book of mythology fiction as a source?
Jeebus intelligently designed Earth’s position in the solar system and the moon’s position relative to us in order to make solar eclipses a thing. God works in arbitrary ways.
Moon
txpiper @27:
This illustrates one of the worst outcomes of dogmatic belief; the curse of incuriosity. One minute on the internet would have brought you to tidal locking, and shown you that it is common as muck. But you couldn’t even be bothered to take the one minute. How many other ‘remarkable’ things do you believe which could be easily dismissed? The mind boggles.
I wondered where the recent bullshit about the moon came up, and I went to check txpiper’s fave creoshit site, crev.info.
Sure enough, on July 17, there’s a post that links to the above NatGeo page above, and sneers at scientists for not knowing everything and for using cautious, qualified language. As usual, it ends with the typical pathetic creationist lunacy: Because there are puzzles, problems, mysteries, and unknowns in astronomy, the answer to everything is that “the universe was created on Day One, and the stars and moon on Day Four”.
Fucking bullshit stupidity that that is.
txpiper, since you hate science so much, and you love crev, why don’t you just fucking leave Pharyngula forever, and post your stupid bullshitty science-hating comments on crev?
Your stupidity and assholishness will not be missed.
Except of course that they are not.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=annular+eclipse&oq=annular+eclipse&aqs=chrome.0.0l4.1858j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
We may as well say that it is a coincidence that human vision is just crappy enough not to notice the difference in apparent size, sometimes.
Except of course, that it is not. The shadow of the earth is over three times bigger than the disc of the moon. The “aura” is caused by the refraction of sunlight through the earth’s atmosphere. The effect is utterly independent on the distance between the earth and the moon or the earth and the sun, or anything at all except for the earth having an atmosphere.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=total+lunar+eclipse&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=9XYEUrziO-HhyQHVxoCwCw&ved=0CEQQsAQ&biw=1194&bih=661
Yet another piece of observed reality that the texpip’s sad, sappy creationism failed to predict and utterly cannot explain.
Still gnawing on this canker, are we?
I thought you didn’t care what other people said about you?
YOU have no compunction against snidery, but the moment the snark is turned back your way, it is all *huff* *huff* *wah* *wah* *wah*.
Pitiful hypocrite.
Hah, hah, hah.
Since by definition the debris from a giant impact will result in a moon forming relatively close to the parent planet at the beginning, and tidal locking occurs FASTER the closer the two objects are together, the giant impact theory positively predicts that tidal locking should be more likely to occur in this scenario than in others.
In fact, all objects that both orbit and rotate in the universe will eventually tidally lock, per the laws of gravity. The only thing that changes is the time it will take for this to happen, which depends on the distance between the objects, their relative masses, and how fast they are rotating to begin with. The only thing that would prevent this tidal locking from occurring is if the objects in question are destroyed or their gravitational relationships disrupted before this happens, which sometimes does happen as in some cases the time to tidal lock is longer than the lifespan of the parent star, or longer even that the current age of the universe.
But, so long as the universe does not end up destroyed in a “big crunch” or “big rip” scenario (ie, the Heat Death scenario is the correct hypothesis for how the universe will die), eventually, everything in the universe that orbits another thing will be tidally locked.
The “synchronization” that the texpip finds so remarkable is a routine and mundane consequence of how gravity works.
There are lots of things that you find “hard to imagine”, texpip, that are nevertheless real.
That is because your imagination is pathetically puny.
Live with it.
Txpiper, you really do fail to think things through. Yes, it would be amazing if perfectly spherical moon just happened to rotate at just the right rate to only show us one side. So, OBVIOUSLY, that isn’t what’s happening. The short version is that the moon isn’t spherical.
I wrote the following for a non-scientific article that happened to involve the moon’s tide-lock. Maybe it”l help:
—–
TIDE LOCK
The moon is an ovoid, with two heavy ends. The end that is closer to Earth is getting pulled a bit more by Earth’s gravity, while the end that is further away is getting a bit more centrifugal force as the moon orbits Earth. The two ends are both hanging down, so to speak, in line with the tidal forces that formed them when the moon was soft. Rotating the moon more than once per revolution would require moving the ends out of line, and that would mean lifting them, like swinging up a hanging pendulum. That lifting doesn’t happen naturally, so the moon is “locked”.
——
Txpiper, for you I’ll repeat what others have said. The Earth pulls tidal bulges in the moon, like the tides in the oceans on Earth are pulled by the moon. The rock of the moon flexing and grinding slowed the moon’s rotation, until it sagged into an ovoid. The tides that the Earth pulled up in the moon’s rock are frozen now, ground to a halt.
That’s easy, obvious, and godammit, you should know that. What kind of ignoramus are you?
I wrote that paragraph for a general audience, but you are claiming to know enough about the moon to criticize scientists, so you shouldn’t have needed that. You have once again exposed yourself as someone who knows fuck-all about the science you scoff at.
Txpiper, you really are an ignorant person, and your ignorance covers so goddamned many fields. You have ranged through many topics here, and you keep revealing that you know jackshit about all of them. But that doesn’t slow you down, by God.
Further, txpiper, why in hell would God bother to make the moon present us with only one face, permanently? Why did he do that?
Religion answers the WHY questions, tx. Tell us why he did that. Go ahead, use your bible, if you need to.
(I mean, Jesus, he could have put up a giant Greek shield, or anything manufactured at all, so we’d see there was a god-made thing up there. But no, we get another goddamned ball of rock—not the fucking light it says in the bible—that is amazingly found to be precisely sized to make eclipses. Except that is isn’t, really, and it isn’t positioned to make eclipses, and the bible doesn’t mention eclipses, and what is the goddamned point of an eclipse?)
They are. The moon, when it was formed, was far closer than it is now. It’s just had billions of years to move away now, which is normal.
I’ll also note that almost every moon of significance in the entire solar system is tidal locked to its parent. Jupiter’s Galilean moons are all tidally locked to Jupiter. Titan is locked to Saturn. The moon is locked to Earth. Charon is locked to Pluto (actually, they’re so close they’re sometimes considered a binary [dwarf] planet instead of a parent + moon, since Pluto is locked to Charon too! of course, the IAU hasn’t decided what a binary planetary system is yet, so they’re still officially dwarf planet + moon).
Hell, Deimos and Phobos, Mars’ two tiny captured asteroids that just manage to count as moons, are tidally locked to Mars.
Apologies, Deimos and Phobos aren’t dense enough to be captured asteroids – apparently they have a possibly similar origin to our own moon, being ejected Martian material.
Independent of the conversation on the lackwit, and because I need to say something happy and the waifu is sleeping, I used to love playing with Encarta’s orbit simulator on the moon’s page. It doesn’t simulate the accretion process, and I almost feel I should go look that up, but seeing how gravity affects orbits in a visceral way was pretty nifty.
“Still gnawing on this canker, are we?
I thought you didn’t care what other people said about you?”
It’s just to point out that some of your posts resemble the press releases of Mao swimming the Yangtze. And to show that nobody in the nest will call you on it.
@txpiper
Lol, what? “Get stuck”? Presumably you mean organisms such as crocodiles and others that are famously “practically unchanged since [arbitrary long, long time ago]”. Note the important word there: “practically”. Nothing has simply “stopped evolving”. And those that have a very low frequency of change over the last [long, long time] do so because they are already evolved into the most, or one of the most, advantageous forms for their unique combination of habitat and lifestyle.
Which would be a fucking stupid answer that didn’t even address the explanation being put forward.
“Aura”? Also, the Moon is not a light. It only glows at night because it reflects the light of the Sun. Also, all those things you listed? None of them are coincidences. You have merely proven that you know nothing of tidal locking or gravity.
You aren’t calling science on anything, You are showing the world you are one stupid, arrogant and delusional asshole with each unevidenced assertion. Especially when your stupidity is quickly and soundly answered.
Your deity doesn’t exist, and your holybook is made of mythology/fiction. Deal with reality elsewhere.
What a strange — and vaguely racist — thing to say.
First you’re dumber than a dog; now you’re speaking in dogwhistle.
“In the nest” sounds like another dogwhistle.
Who is supposed to be calling who on what?
Vaguely racist?
Remember, he knows that I am of Chinese descent, since I posted that on this very thread not that long ago.
Isn’t a solar eclipse a rather obvious case of the moon being up in the daytime and thus utterly failing in its supposed job of ruling the night?
Your response to people explaining in detail why you are wrong is to lob a non-sequitur dollop of tone trolling. This is your entirety TxPiper.
Of course, Mao really did swim the Yangtze, and that event really did have significant political ramifications, deserving of press releases.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2054250,00.html
Yet again the texpip demonstrates his pitiful penchant for denying reality.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(I still don’t feel better)
Then may I suggest that you are reading the wrong articles (deliberately, so as not to challenge your religiously-based biases, or otherwise)? I am far from the sharpest spoon in this drawer, and incredibly under-educated on the subject to boot, but even I recall reading such articles.
A recently-linked-in-the-[Lounge] example:
“Most people who retain the ability to digest milk can trace their ancestry to Europe, where the trait seems to be linked to a single nucleotide in which the DNA base cytosine changed to thymine in a genomic region not far from the lactase gene. “
and
“Once the LP allele appeared, it offered a major selective advantage. In a 2004 study5, researchers estimated that people with the mutation would have produced up to 19% more fertile offspring than those who lacked it. The researchers called that degree of selection “among the strongest yet seen for any gene in the genome”.
Compounded over several hundred generations, that advantage could help a population to take over a continent. But only if “the population has a supply of fresh milk and is dairying”, says Thomas. “It’s gene–culture co-evolution. They feed off of each other.”
from HERE
–
Amphiox
I would suppose that the texpip refers to the press releases issued by Mao’s publicity people claiming that he made 15km in 65 minutes, a time that Michael Phelps couldn’t match. That kind of thing is common with personality cults; I suppose he does remember that you mentioned Chinese descent, since he dredged up something from the 60s to throw at you instead of e.g.someone more recent like Nicolae Ceaușescu or Kim Jong-Il I have zero clue what the hell he’s comparing to personality cults, though.
He’s comparing the scientific consensus on the theory of evolution to a personality cult. He equates posts describing how no observed or experimental findings have ever significantly questioned the basic tenets of the theory to personality cults glossing over or ignoring the faults of the individuals in question.
And yet when the subject is his bible, he is even less critical, ignores even more, and glosses over even more glaring discrepancies.
Hypocrisy all the way down.
And of course he fails to notice that the biggest difference between the statements in support of evolutionary theory and those made in support of cults of personality is that the former are true.
Saying “porn is just consenting people having sex” is pretty much like saying “evolutionary psychology is just the idea that the brain evolved like any other organ”. Wouldn’t it be great if either were true.
Well, of course he is. We all worship Charles Darwin as a prophet, remember?
jose
what the blithering fuck are you on about now?
If anyone has a BookFace account and cares to do some troll squashing, NCSE posted a review of PZ’s book and it looks like it will be garnering some “attention.”
Also, I can’t read the review as it’s behind a Nature paywall, so unsure what it says. Can anyone sum that up as well?
It’s neither particularly scathing, nor particularly praising.
I started trying to figure out how old the idea of tidal locking is, and found that the earliest reference in a recent paper was from 1897, by . . . Darwin. George Darwin, that is, the astronomer son of Charles.
Darwin’s paper is 94 pages long; part of a series of papers on the mechanics of tidal forces on orbiting bodies. This links to the entire series; the particular work is titled “On the Precession of a Viscous Spheroid, and on the Remote History of the Earth”
On pg 92 of the PDF, Darwin writes:
“In Section 23 it is shown that the tidal friction due to the earth’s action on the moon must have been enormous, and it must necessarily have soon brought her to present the same face constantly to the earth. This explanation was, I believe, first given by Helmholtz.”
Helmholtz presumably being Hermann von Helmholtz.
With the sexism grenade exploding right now we’re all very focused on PZ’s thread here.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie/2013/08/09/report-them/
This seems to have slipped in. I’d comment myself, but I’m not a big gun and my comments go unnoticed, and besides – this whole thing has been so triggering. Doesn’t help that I’m dealing with legal stuff right now with someone who simply denies ever doing anything harmful instead of actually trying to make things move forward.
Any hordelings feel like assailing the stupid? I can’t hack it right now :(
This came up a few times over on the grenade thread, but it’s a total derail there.
While a large part of that stems from the fact that Hollywood damn near refused to hire nonwhites for any roles at all during the peak era of the Westerns, but another part of it is that lynching actually describes two separate classes of events (although there’s significant overlap). Lynch(1) is the extrajudicial punishment of someone accused of an illegal act; a majority of victims were probably POCs, but poor whites came in for a share too, in much the same way that judicial punishment is slanted heavily towards POCs. Lynch(1) is largely extinct in the U.S. Lynch(2) is terroristic mob violence aimed at ethnic minorities (Although there is an argument to be made that e.g. the killing of Matthew Shepard or Brandon Teena might also qualify). It appears to have evolved, as a practice, out of lynch(1), as the mobs eventually stopped waiting for there to be even a ghost of an accusation before brutally killing a POC to keep the rest in their ‘place.’ Lynch(2) happens more rarely these days than it once did, and the mobs are usually smaller, sometimes down to a single person, but it definitely happens. Many apoligists like to conflate Lynch(1) and Lynch(2) in order to both downplay the incidence of lynch(2) and to blame the victims (especially those who weren’t white) of both types.
/pedantry
@64: Oh for the love of fucking fucking fuckered fucks.
That post is just fucking gross.
The comments there are … there are no words for how angry I am right now. No. FUCKING. WORDS.
I’ve made a reply, but since I’m getting a 503 error I don’t know if it’s going to make it through.
I’ll tell you this, though…
I am amazed at how much I’ve been able to keep my rage in check over this shit. I actually managed a reply that had not even one cuss word in it. That a woman would be so fucking blinkered just makes me want to … Ugh… I can’t even. Fuck.
@66 I still feel I have to clarify – I didn’t mean to imply that Maryam herself was stupid, more the MRA contingent in the comments. The post is very naive though – I simply hope that the response won’t be another Stefanelli. :|
@Sophia: At best that post is incredibly naive. At worst? It’s more victim blaming and shaming and displays not only a lack of empathy but an ignorance of the realities of living in a patriarchy that I would not have thought possible.
The comments?
They’re just slime.
I do think anyone who’s been assaulted should consider going to the police. To throw up your hands and say, “I just don’t understand why they didn’t,” is nothing but ignorance.
@Praxis
I agree, though through my ocnditioning and years of abuse I tend to have a severe need to give people the benefit of the doubt, often to my own detriment.
I’d love to go comment there with my own experience of rape, the experience of my friend who was raped by the same mutual “friend” that raped me, and the differences in our approaches to reporting. I didn’t, she did, nothing came of it as usual.
What bothers me most of all is the lack of reading comprehension – people -do- report these things all the time. The problem is that nothing comes of it, and that causes people to say the cases were obviously false. I’ve got a feeling that’s where a lot of the “false rape accusations” schtick comes from – people not getting rape convictions, so they must have obviously been lying.
Sophia:
I’m sorry, Sophia, I just don’t have the spoons. I’m over my limit already, with the grenade thread.
@Sophia:
I get why you don’t want to wade in that pool of slime in the comments. It’s not worth it if it’s going to make you feel bad or drain your energy.
I really, really get it.
I hope that right now you’re in a good place, and that you’re doing okay with all this.
@Caine:
That you’ve had the spoons to do what you’ve already done today is astounding. Somewhere between the 1470’s in the comments on the grenade post and now I’ve discovered a hidden pile of spoons that I didn’t know I had. I don’t know how long they’re going to last, but I’m going to use each and every one of ’em to attempt to get my point across.
I don’t know how well I’ll do. I’m angry and I’m not always the most articulate person when I’m in the throes of trying to lay a smackdown on the scum that invades these threads. But I’m going to try. I’m going to try because, dammit, I hate that every day women and men have to deal with what I and so many of us have had to deal with and if I had my way it would never happen again.
Yeah, I like to dream big. Go big or go home, right?
If anyone is wondering what the bit about the spoons is supposed to mean, it’s this. It’s a great piece, so thanks for the reminder.
@Caine
You deserve a medal for your contributions, and I couldn’t possibly ask you to do anything else. Considering what you’ve been through yourself, knowing how triggering and horrible it all is for the ones who can’t speak up so much like me (though I try every now and then)…
You have no obligation to do more. In fact you have no obligation to do anything, the fact you do is unbelievably wonderful.
For the record, I’m currently myself being accused of stupid and blatantly untrue things, for which I thankfully have solid rebutting evidence. You’d think I might sympathise with the accused – but I’ve also been raped and not believed, and abused for long periods of time thinking I was at fault for somehow bringing it on myself. Preventing harm is much more important than further bloating the ego of privileged famous people, and anyone who doesn’t see that needs a swift, solid kick up the arse.
@Praxis
I wish I were in a good place. I’m in a legal bind right now, family court (That most favouritest of MRA peach-pits) where I’m being accused of rubbish and since there’s no consequences for my accuser unless this goes to trial and the evidence is actually examined, which he is currently trying to avoid citing costs, I’m stuck.
Also, I just had to delete a paragraph I’d written here as to what I’m going through, because as much as I want to vent and simply state what I’m going through, the person on the other end has lifted comments from here and produced them in court to discredit me, even though they were completely irrelevant. Can’t even vent in public, or on my own heavily privacy-locked facebook. He’s using a post from there to accuse me of stuff too, despite not having access and there being a paragraph in the post that explicitly states that telling him about the post would likely have dire consequences for me, and a plea not to do so. In fact, the comment he’s using in that post doesn’t even contain what he’s accusing me of, so yu’ve got to love that too.
Thanks, person who tattled. Hope you’re bloody proud.
If anyone would like a break from the slime, our good pal Ross Olson is on the Historical Science thread Gish galloping on creationism.
Jesus Christ, Sophia! I am so sorry. Stay strong, we’re here for you, even if you can’t talk. You have all my support, always.
Praxis, bite their damn heads off!
G’night, I’m out.
@Sophia:
Oh … that’s awful. I’m so sorry. I don’t have the words for how angry it’s made me that someone violated your trust like that and shared something they KNEW would hurt you.
Why can’t people be decent?
Bleh. I hope that your situation doesn’t go further south for you. I hope that you end up being treated fairly by the courts.
…but most of all I hope you get some moments of, at the very least, okay-ness.
I wish it didn’t have to be this way for you.
@Caine: Goodnight… and I’m gonna do my best.
*cue up inspirational yet somehow sinister montage-y type music*
*cut to woman grinning with steely determination as she’s hunched over a keyboard, typing furiously*
*camera pans out as impossible “hacker” type special effects light up her face with the words she’s typing on the screen*
*music swells*
*woman smacks the “Enter” key with a viciousness normally reserved for the killing of angry wasps*
WOMAN: “That’s for you, Caine.”
*woman nods with satisfaction, grin still in place*
WOMAN: “Yeah. That’s for you.”
I think I just had my first mini panic attack over that stalking in years thanks to the giant thread. And a part of me is experiencing it very detachedly going “Yup… total panic response. Fascinating”
Sometimes I think my brain/self is very very weird.
And I am currently very, VERY angry.
@rowanvt
I read your account of your experiences and was shocked. I’m so sorry you’ve had to go through that, and in addition be shat on by the likes of the commenters in that thread. It’s thoroughly disgusting, and shows again how people so easily twist victims not being believed into “you were lying”, and then cite that as if it were some kind of actual statistic.
Secondly, I know the brain thing! My brain has developed all sorts of weird coping mechanisms, some of which are more helpful than others. My favourite one right now is the one that shuts off all my conscious sensory input when something nearby is incredibly stressful but not involving me. A friend and I were at the checkout when a lady started hurling abuse at people, eventually got locked outside, banged on the glass (with us locked in) and beat up a store manager. I was there the entire time, but I didn’t notice any of it at all – I had to ask my friend what just happened as my brain decided “NOPE NOPE NOPE” and simply blacked it out.
I also have that little clipboard-wielding scientist that analyses my emotional responses. I figure that comes from having to be aware of your reactions to avoid going totally off the deep end… or at least trying to.
@ Sophia, thanks a bunch.
I think my brain thing came from having to analyse my emotional responses as well… but that began much earlier than my stalking because I had a *terrible* temper and actually hurt several people. When I snapped out of the rage, the fact that I had done something like that horrified me so I think I made the “scientist” to go “You are beginning to become quite agitated. It is time to leave this situation before you do something regrettable.”
The all conscious sensory perception shutoff sounds both fascinating and kinda “eep” to experience. Thank you for sharing it.
@rowanvt:
I saw that crap go down.
I am so sorry. I would like to offer you internet hugs, empathy, and MY AXE.
I’m angry, too.
Please take good care of yourself.
@rowanvt
Glad it was interesting, I find it utterly fascinating. In fact, that’s my most common coping mechanism now – just going in and analysing horrifying situations instead of simply being immersed in them. It’s how I got through hospital for surgery and childbirth despite being utterly terrified and having to deal with my severe needle phobia. I just found everything really, really interesting! How my body reacted, exactly what was being done and why, and how… Really does help to occupy your brain with the mechanics rather than the trauma. If you can, that is. It’s my own mechanism, but if it helps anyone else then that’s fab :)
That’s a very noble thing to do – your regular asshole won’t give a crap about the feelings of others, and certainly won’t actively work to change their behaviour. You’re a good person. :)
YAY AXE! As a major LotR fan, I now have a big grin.
I really should go to bed. That thread kept me up until almost 2 am yesterday and I was still recovering from food poisoning (why teriyaki salmon did you betray me soooooo?) so today has been no fun. More sleep good. More Will bad.
@rowanvt
Goodnight! Sleep well, imagining the gigantic pulsating anal pile that is Will shouting itself into an explodey rage and then deflating with a giant fart sound before exploding into coins a la video game. Yay, 1up! :D
…or not, because eew. Heh. Night :)
Goodnight, rowanvt.
I hope that when you wake up this particular anxiety crisis has passed and that you have a restful, peaceful sleep.
Sophia, I like what you write. *hug* Good luck to you.
That grenade thread was too much for me today. I looked in a few times, thought about commenting, and just felt anything I said would get lost in the deluge. PZ is a good person.
I’ve been fighting malfunctioning phones and a wonky washing machine all day, with no money to fix either. I woke up thinking I really didn’t want the job I had applied for, was later shown how it would actually be good, and got the phone working long enough to get the message the job was gone. There are two cat that insist on sitting on me, and two dogs that want to be near me, the other dog keeps pissing on his bedding, which needs to go into the malfunctioning washing machine, and at some point he took a dump on the floor. The person who allowed that to happen cleaned it up, which was better than if the other person of the house had allowed it, because then I’d have had to do the cleaning. And it is flattering that the dogs and the cats like me so. And I had a lot of people helping me get the job, and they’ll help with other job opportunities, and the application just needs a click to go after other chances. So it isn’t all malfunctioning dog feces, it just frustrates me.
I know other have it worse, and I find those who stick up for them, and who try to make the world a better place, to be amazing people. Thanks to all who speak for right and justice and truth.
The full text of the review is now here:
http://pastebin.com/wARRS0Nw
Note that it is set to self-destruct in 29 days. Grab it if you want to keep it.
@Menyambal
Thankyou. That… actually makes my day today much less awful. I always get the feeling nobody ever reads what I write (or it’s actually total rubbish so they skip over it without engaging). Doesn’t help that my self esteem is pretty much nonexistent, so thankyou. You’ve made me feel slightly less shite today. :)
There’s some little turdmonkey named Will Clemens over on the grenade thread, derailing incoherently and writing poorly.
I told the egotistical jerk to take it over here.
He’s probably too dumb to follow a link.
Menyambal:
Yeah, he ain’t too bright. Just prolific.
Also, he likes to break the law for his own vigilantism, but is quick to take PZ and the rest of us to task for the same (even when what’s going on isn’t even close to vigilantism).
Breaking HIPAA just to get some kind of revenge? Not cool.
Will Clemens actually thinks that lie detectors work.
He claims to be a private investigator or something, and seems to have the morals of a diseased rodent. He outs people for his alleged gay-defending campaign, and bragged that one doctor died of a heart attack after Clemens trashed him.
I think he’s lying, and trolling, but he’s ignoring the voices of women in a thread about women who have been ignored.
What a horrible person.
Will Clemens seems to think the grenade thread was started as a direct attack on Michael Shermer, and as a call to take serious action against him—physical violence, perhaps. The little snirp doesn’t realize that all it was was a warning to women to not go drinking with the guy, and a call for all to be more aware of rape and more mindful of the possibilities that it can happen, yet be dismissed.
Some people just assume, then go about making asses out of themselves. Will Clemens, for instance.
I dunno if this’ll draw him, but Christ, what a shitweasel Will Clemens is.
Sophia, have a good night.
Sophia, *hugs*
I’m really sorry about what you’re going through, and that your safe spaces for venting are being used against you.
@Menyambal
Disclaimer: chemically altered
Will set off my bullshit detector. I think he’s a Classic Troll; intentionally being annoying/hurtful for lulz. Even if he is a MRA or Sexist supporter or whatever in that thread he’s clearly spouting what he thinks is the most offensive or stupid thing.
Sophia
*hugs* I’m sorry to hear what you’ve been going though, and I hope things improve for you soon.
Sophia:
*hugs* if you want them. I wish only the best for you.
Ing:
Yeah. I don’t think he’s done most of the things he claimed. I suspect he said things to be as confrontational as possible.
Like an ass.
@Sophia: I hope you can find the tattling shit and throw them out, and also that you feel better.
Fuck. That’s it. I’m out. I can’t identify with this bullshit anymore. It seems that skeptic circles are filled with exactly the kind of putrid people I ran away from when I abandoned organized religion. Silly me, believing a rational approach to reality would help make people better. Instead, I get people who believe themselves enlightened for not believing in facile crap while offering me the same flavor of assholery as ever.
I will live to see this abject joke called “skeptic movement” die, and I will spit on its grave. Thanks for the fun, and bye.
I’m really sorry to see you go, Vaiyt. You’re one of the consistently cool people too… but yeah, shit’s tiring as fuck.
vaiyt,
Um, that’s “bye, skeptical community” or “bye, Pharyngula”?
Vaiyt
Sorry to see you go. You are a great voice to have around.
Forgive my ignorance in advance. Does anyone know why the moniker is freethoughtblogs. I think atheistblogs would be better. I don’t know of many people who refer to themselves as freethoughters – seems arcane.
Well, it’s more archaic than arcane. But there are still Freethinker/Freethought groups active around the world.
I think it has a bit more of a “rational” implication than Atheist does, though that’s prolly due as much to my own inner linguist as anything else.
@107. Thanks. Just curious, that’s all. No biggie.
It’s probably related to the fact that at least some bloggers don’t really make atheism their primary goal. Ed certainly doesn’t, although he is an atheist who is quite fierce about maintaining secular government. Pretty much nobody tends to take society’s default view. But I’m speculating. Perhaps PZ or Ed can answer at some point.
Hi, I’m here for some peace and quiet. There’s a riot going on next door.
Wouldn’t it be cool if the apparent size of the moon were smaller than the sun? Can you imagine how awesome solar eclipses would be, with the disc of the moon traversing the sun and causing geometric shadows on everything? Or wouldn’t it be really, really cool if the apparent size of the moon were much larger than the sun? We’d have an extra night every few years and the real nights would be much brighter.
Or wouldn’t be the most incredible if we had three moons, all of just the right sizes, and once in a lifetime or so we’d hit a triple eclipse? Babies born during the triple would be though to be favored by the gods.
Real point is that the teleological arguments are all very very weak when you start to push against them. They are also kind of arrogant, as they imply that God made a choice like that especially for you when I clearly asked for three moons.
“Lee Moe Joost” (@95) like the joke. :)
This is Thunderflash!
Oops, sorry, dome. ;-)
Enjoy the London Acid Techno, if that’s what floats your Thames barge.
—
I kept trying to comment on the grenade thread but all I could muster was this.
ChristineRose
Frankly, I like Baily’s Beads enough that the I want to keep the current apparent sizes.
In for a penny, in for a pound. The sound of (bits of) my mis-spent youth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AH_5OyCsco
You have been warned!
More half of the time, it is.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=annular+eclipse&oq=annular+eclipse&aqs=chrome.0.0l4j69i62l2.2512j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
From here:
http://www.mreclipse.com/Special/SEprimer.html
We can see that annular eclipses occur slightly MORE frequently than total eclipses, and the size discrepancy can be as great as 13%.
So if that so-called “coincidence” was something intentionally set up by a designer, then the designer was f*cked it up over half the time. An epic fail, as it were.
Particularly when the design solution to the problem is piss easy. All he had to do was make the moon’s orbit more tightly circular (and there are literally thousands of known objects in the universe orbiting with more circular orbits than earth’s moon, so this should have been an easy, easy fix).
I finally caught up with the Grenade thread. Goddam that was exhausting just reading it.
Jose:
Have you managed to read up on the history of PoC and why it is the preferred phrase, over ‘colored’?
As for the fits you get into regarding porn, you should read Greta Christinas blog.
You have some serious issues with porn. Some of it is justified, while much is not.
Sophia @64:
Thanks for the heads up about Maryams blog. It is disappointing to see her fall in with the ‘Report him’ crowd. Of course she has Pitstains defending her. That should tell her something.
ChristineRose:
A riot you say?
Stay safe.
Your comment about three moons has the ‘not-scientifically-inclined-me’ curious…
[Anyone who is knowledgeable]
How different would conditions on Earth be if we had more than one moon?
Mikeyb:
I think it is called FreethoughtBlogs to reflect that the bloggers (ostensibly) use science, logic, and reason to arrive at and justify their beliefs. Atheism can be arrived at through freethinking, but not all freethinkers need be atheists.
Tony!
I especially loved the allusions to the catholic church in that post. I’d thought I’d heard it all, but that one was brand spanking new for me.
Whoops, html fail.
No, I do not see the gender of parents as irrelevant to kids, just like you don’t see the gender of your sexual partner as irrelevant to you.
This has nothing at all to do with rape victims. I do not see it as discriminatory or bigoted, to say that children deserve a mother and father more than homosexuals deserve something that they cannot create for themselves.
Any “natural parent” would be an opposite sex partner, thus we wouldn’t need to have this discussion if homosexuals could fill the role of “natural parents”. You’re talking out of both sides of your mouth when you claim on one hand that gender is unimportant, then on the other hand say that it’s important to you as a homosexual. If gender is truly a non-issue then it shouldn’t matter whether you partner with males or females, so why not partner with an opposite sex partner for child rearing purposes?? Bottom line is that there are fundamental differences between male and female, and it is those differences that provide the best sense of balance and identity to children, that’s why the biological parents raising the child in a loving home is the gold standard. Same sex parenting encourages children to be brought into the world knowing that the child is going to be deprived of one or more of its biological parents.
False analogy again. Of course there are going to be extreme exceptions to the rule, and no one will hold it against a rape victim. That’s just silly.
The fact that you need to redefine marriage and family is proof that homosexuals don’t fit. Marriage is a man and a woman, a family is a father, mother, and their children. Any deviation from that fact means that something went wrong with the natural order and structure of the family. Those deviations should be minimized as much as possible, but homosexuality being included in the family structure actually encourages people to bring children into the world knowing full well that they will be deprived of one of their parents. That’s just wrong any way you slice it.
Housing serves a valid function. Homosexual attempts at parenting and homosexuality in general, provide no valid function to society and is actually a detriment.
What are you asking me to prove?? That boys are male and girls are female?? That there is a difference between the two genders?? I’m not really clear here.
Single parent homes are another one of the exceptions that happens in the real world. The evidence shows that kids fare better in homes with both a mother and father, so single parent homes, like adoptive and other necessary arrangements, should be minimized for the betterment of children. I’m sure you’ll turn that into me saying that single parents or adoptive parents aren’t good parents, though that isn’t what I mean. But the fact is that people should be encouraged to have children inside the bonds of marriage, and raise the kids that they have in a loving home, that’s where they do best.
Like it or not, there is a difference between men and women, thus there are differences between mothers and fathers. Real men and real women are different and each provides the child with a different set of qualities, together as a couple they provide the child with a good balance, and good role models for future relationships, that same sex partners do not provide. By being homosexuals, they have a distorted, demented view of gender from the outset. No homosexual male can provide a good role model to show a boy how to become a man, since he is not a real man himself. Same goes for lesbians trying to turn a young girl into a lady. If those kids actually turn into a real man or a lady, then they got that positive influence somewhere other than in the home.
Don’t poke me with that bigot pole when you yourself have it crammed so far up your own ass that you’d need a tow truck to get it out. You don’t even respect people’s individuality and freedom enough to allow them the luxury of differing with your political stance without referring to them as intolerant bigots or homophobes. That’s as bigoted, intolerant, hateful, and childish as an individual can get, so you have no room to call anyone else a bigot.
Among other things, be a father. Show his kids how to be a man, and how to be a husband and father. That’s not something a woman can do.
Among other things, the mother can show her kids how to be a mother, and how a man and woman interact together, combining qualities to make the family stronger. That’s not something a man can do.
Hey annejones!
Why do you keep coming back here? Aside from txpiper, the rest of us know all about your lies. You are not going to convince anyone here.
At the end of the day, the fact that I suck dick has no bearing on the quality of my character. Which I am quick to add is much more compassionate than yours. You are encapsulate so much of what is wrong with people with your religiously inspired hateful bigotry.
See, you keep making the same stupid argument that Corolla makes fun of you guys for. The hetero in your scenario is always someone that no one would want to have children, while the homo is always portrayed as the loving, caring, trustworthy type. Make all things equal in your scenario, same job, same house, same good character, etc., and it boils down to man/woman as mother and father vs. man/man as father(maybe) and his sexual partner, same for lesbians. Two males or two females do not present the natural family structure, or provide both a mother and father role model for the child, without having to turn to people outside the home. If you have to turn to people outside the home for role models then there is something wrong inside the home.
This is stupid. Show me the science that says that taking a child away from one of it’s biological parents, and replacing that parent with an unrelated opposite sex individual who has deficient views on gender, has no ill effects on the child, and I’ll show you junk science, and biased information. Decades of research show that kids are negatively affected by the absence of a mother figure, and the same goes with the father figure.
I’m shocked!! You mean a woman really can raise her own biological child without it becoming a bat-shit crazy axe murderer?? Who’da thunk that could happen??
Seriously though, no one says that gay people don’t love their kids, especially when they are the biological parents. No one says that those parents can’t raise a child that can be ok. Even the most poor, welfare dependent single parents do have success stories. The argument is that kids, overall, who are raised without one or more of their biological parents, are at higher risk for, and show deficiencies in certain areas, over those who are raised with both a mother and a father figure. There are decades of research showing this, and current studies continue to show the same findings.
In response to your example, Zach, I suggest you look at Robert Oscar Lopez. He’s a bisexual, raised by his lesbian mother who he loves very much, but he says that kids need a mother and father.
http://lgbtpov.frontiersla.com/2012/08/19/bisexual-csun-prof-robert-oscar-lopez-explains-support-for-regnerus-study/
A couple of Zach’s statements caught my attention…
“My sister and I have the same anonymous father, so we’re full siblings, which is really cool”.
Why is it important that his sister is his “full sister”, if biological relation is unimportant?? Don’t you see the absurdity of a 19 year old having to mention his “anonymous donor father”?? Don’t you notice that he HAS to, as a protective mechanism, extoll the virtues of his two mommies, in order to hide the fact that there was no normal family structure?? No child should have to talk about his anonymous donor father.
This is paraphrased but he talked about how they did things like a normal family, going to church etc. His lesbian parents took their children to church at the Unitarian universalist church…That would be a hilarious statement if it weren’t actually happening to kids. It’s like, how many self-contradictory absurdities can you pack into one sentence?? It’s actually sad that kids are being forced to accept such obvious lies, and are forced to substitute that reality for truth because it’s their only option. I do admire their coping skills, and their ability to compensate for deficiencies, but it’s sad that that had to be such a big part of their childhood when it didn’t need to be.
No, it isn’t ridiculous. You’re argument is the one that’s ridiculous, we’re just following nature. Man and woman make babies, thus man and woman get married and become father and mother. That’s not JUST tradition, it’s the only way nature works, and it’s what is best for kids.
No society that allowed so called gay marriage has lasted, while marriage between man and woman has always been a constant. A man or woman marrying their same sex friend with benefits IS redefining marriage.
And we show how each of those kinds of families are not as well suited to raise children as a home with a mother and father. We show how the kids suffer the effects of the irresponsibility of the adults who bring kids into the world intentionally, knowing that those kids are going to be at a disadvantage. You advocate for doing that even more often than we do now. that’s ludicrous.
You have no clue how to raise a child. You have no clue what a marriage is. You don’t have an ounce of morality or common sense, and have no clue what it means to be a real man or real woman. You have no tools with which to even contend in a discussion on these issues. The only thing you have to fight with is your hatred of anyone who doesn’t want to give you special rights because of your choice to participate in an unnatural sexual lifestyle that has no value at all to society.
Oh wow, the hatred is deeeeep in this one. What the matter annejones? Did a gay person say mean words to you? Something like ‘scum sucking liar for jebus incapable of forming a rational argument’?
How you can be so proud to hate and discriminate against a group of people is beyond me. I can only hope you have no children. Infecting the next generation with your anti-science, anti-human views would be tragic.
Once again I ask you ‘Oh Uneducated One Who Cannot Perform a Google Search’, what is your point in coming back here?
Thanks for the concern, people. I’ll be still around. Pharyngula is not just about skepticism, and that “not just” still means a lot to me.
Fuck you annejones, you’re really into stupid arguments, must be your religious indoctrination. Raising kids to be decent, tolerant and caring of all other decent tolerant and caring people is obviously beyond you. Luckily there are some decent tolerant and caring people around to undo the damage your type of bigoted upbringing causes.
And yeah, I recognize the value of skepticism in a world that has people like anniejones – proud of being ignorant and hateful. Here’s my two cents:
Non-sequitur. There are two fundamental disconnects in this argument.
a) Sexual preferences are in no way analogous to parenting capacity.
b) Preferring a certain gender combination in a sexual relationship does not invalidade other people choosing other combinations.
As an heterosexual myself, gender is important to ME when choosing MY sexual partners, but that does not affect the choices of other people. Likewise, if I choose to partner with a woman to raise a child, that does not mean I should or would preclude two men (or two women, or a single parent, or any other possibility) to do the same.
I guess infertile heterosexual couples are shit out of luck as well, right? Right?
Please. Your “natural order” is far from being natural or even historically dominant. It’s a recent fantasy. The extended family alone has had a far longer history in humanity than the nuclear family ever had, and it’s still the norm in a sizable portion of the world.
Bald assertion, made without evidence and dismissed without evidence.
Meanwhile, in the real world, marriage and heterosexuality do fuck-all to guarantee a loving home, so your whole attempt at appearing concerned falls flat. Nice try.
When your “differing political stance” is that homosexual people don’t have the capacity or the right to raise a family of their own, that is bigoted and homophobic. I really don’t get you on this, anniejones. Why do you avoid the homophobic label when you’re proudly in favor of discriminating against same-sex relationships? What do you even think ‘homophobic’ means?
YOUR scenarios assume a household with a man and a woman is better a priori. Your assumptions are being challenged.
So?
Bald assertion, blah blah blah.
a) Loaded language. Using a wording reminiscent of kidnapping to refer to adoption. Likening homosexual people raising a child to forcible substitution of someone’s parent.
b) Assumes facts not in evidence – that homosexuals have “deficient views on gender”, and that they matter.
Tsk, tsk.
Citation needed.
But we must deny them the right because…?
We’re certain that, if he was never told about the relation, he wouldn’t give a shit.
That isn’t true today in a good portion of the world. It hasn’t been true for most of humanity’s history. Your “only way nature works” flies in the face of evidence.
A lot of things put kids in a disadvantage, that’s no argument for taking away the rights of same-sex parents unless you want to do the same with poor, minority, disabled, abusive and proudly ignorant parents.
wait… Corolla?
Adam Corolla?
you’re taking advice from a radio comedian…
you might as well have said you admire Rush Limbaugh’s economic advice.
Two things that are actually missing in your screed:
Who is “we”, and where is evidence of anything that “we” have shown?
or a Scottsman.
so can the father.
No, see, that’s you. You’re the one saying that terrible parents should get to raise their kids, but the well-adjusted gay men can’t. We have to rebut that. Corolla’s a lackwit because he doesn’t realize these arguments aren’t made in a void. Well, he’s a lackwit for a lot of reasons, but that’s one of them.
Well, sure, but neither do a man and a woman. The best evidence indicates that the most natural family structure for the overwhelming majority of human history was, and is, an extended family structure. Two people can’t provide that, regardless of what their genders are. I don’t see the problem, because breaking from an extended family structure hasn’t caused society to come crashing down on our heads.
Because you imagine that you do use your genitals to raise children?
You want to give rapists the children of their victims.
You are a bigot regardless of whether or not you can see it.
Because homosexuals are sterile?
Any natural parent would be any responsible partner.
I insist that it’s not important for raising children. Because — I repeat — by and large, parents do not use their genitals to raise their children. Or so I thought I understood.
Please describe the activities that you use your genitals for in raising children.
Because, by and large, parents do not use their genitals to raise their children.
Because you imagine that parents use their genitals to raise their children?
I agree that raising the child in a loving home is the gold standard, but for that very reason, “biological parents” is of lesser importance. And if, for whatever reason, biological parents are unavailable, then whatever provides a “loving home” — be it opposite sex, same sex, or single, or multiple partners — works just as well.
So what? As long as a loving home is available, it doesn’t matter that much.
I agree that you are silly, and that giving rapists custody of their victims’ children is the natural fallout of your position.
Your bigoted assertion is proof that you are a bigot, not that homosexuals don’t fit.
Marriage is also a man and a man or a woman and a woman; a family is any set of partners or individuals that provide a loving home for their children.
Something went wrong with the natural order and structure of Jesus’ family, true.
So do sperm banks.
I see that you erased an important question, so I’ll post it again:
One of the things being worked on in biology is transforming male cells into eggs, and female cells into sperm, so that it would technically be possible for a child to have two biological fathers or two biological mothers.
Would that shut you up?
You’re being asked to prove that male and female parents use their genitals to raise their children, and to describe how they do so.
And there’s no reason that it can’t be two men or two women who provide that loving home.
Your bigotry is noted.
You are a bigot regardless of whether you are poked with a pole or not.
But you differ in your political stance because you are an intolerant bigot and a homophobe.
You don’t get to make bigoted and homophobic statements and then not have that bigotry and homophobia called out.
I assure you, you are a hateful, intolerant, and bigoted person, and you are rather childish as well, and there’s plenty of room to point out your hateful bigotry when you insist on being a intolerant bigot.
You bigot.
Robert Oscar Lopez — whom you cite below — says that his lesbian mother did pretty much exactly that.
Do you agree that abusers, deadbeats, and rapists should not have access to their children?
Then, just like us, you want to deprive a child of their biological parent. How horrible a hypocrite you are.
What prevents a homosexual from being loving, caring, and trustworthy? Besides your hateful intolerance and bigotry, I mean.
So what?
You have failed to explain how male and female parents use their genitals to raise children.
Now you’re just lying. Because you’re a bigot.
Nonsense. You have no idea what science there is, or what it shows, and you don’t care, either.
Except bigots like you.
Except bigots like you.
Nonsense.
He’s passionate but very confused.
So you’re also a bigot against sperm banks?
So you’re also a religious bigot, as well as a homophobic bigot?
What “obvious lies” are you referring to?
Even deadbeats, abusers, and rapists?
Obviously not.
No, what’s best for kids is a loving home — whoever happens to provide that.
No, you don’t. You just say they are.
Or rather, you spout stupidity and bigotry.
You’re the one claiming that parents use their genitals to raise children.
Your hate and bigotry are noted.
Neither do you.
Your doubling down on your hatred and bigotry is noted.
I infer from annejones’ silence on Miller v. Jenkins that she’s conceding the point that Miller was a lawbreaker, and is now a kidnapper, due to Miller becoming an indoctrinated religious fanatic.
Exactly what does this mean? How does being a father differ from being a mother? If all you can think of is “you can teach your child to be a father/mother”, then clearly your position is entirely circular.
You say “among other things”. What are these “other things”? Be specific and cite your sources.
annejones back with more homophobic bigotry, dismissed as total bigotry. Tealdear not even read. Did not her thinking a youtube video is evidence of something. Nope, just an opinion piece.
annejones:
Leaving your bigotry and bad science aside for the moment (I don’t discount them, but you have already been asked to cite your sources: I doubt my asking as well is any more likely to produce actual cites from you), please explain what you mean by “real man” and “real woman”, and what exactly it is in the role of a mother that is not also part of the role of a father. In better than a decade of asking this question hither and yon on the internet I have never yet been given a clear answer. Usually I get “You know perfectly well” or words to that effect, which is not so much an argument.
Moment’s over. Regarding this:
Recognizing assholery does not equal being an asshole.
I have a strong need to quote juicy excerpts from gay erotic novels to annejones. Just to imagine her scramble around and panic.
She’s a joke. An especially disgusting joke.
I don’t get why you hate being called a bigot. You obviously don’t want gay people to have rights. One would think you would be proud to be called a bigot.
No, it isn’t. You know what would actually be intolerant, hateful, and bigoted? Denying people rights. Calling you a bigot is just the price of you spewing hate.
annejones
Why don’t you go back to your own blog?
You want a quote from a story? How about “pink ass juice”?
Thanks to the pharyngulite that originally posted that link. I forget who it was, but it has more than once caused me to burst out laughing and really hoping that nobody would ask me to explain why.
Seriously, don’t click that link unless you’ve got the stomach for it.
LykeX
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
I was thinking about some sweaty bodies, bulging muscles and turgid members, not a horror story.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
*runs around screaming*
I did warn you.
My guess is that nobody is paying any attention to it, or just laughing at her fuckwittery. Hard to be a serious bigot when people are laughing at or ignoring you.
Well, one incoherent post where you don’t respond to the comments, followed by six months of complete silence; that’s not exactly the way to build a loyal reader base.
LykeX,
That story doesn’t need a warning, it needs a flame thrower.
Thank you, annejones, for once more demonstrating how religious influence leads directly to immoral and unethical stupidity in people like you.
Once more you provide excellent propaganda for the atheist cause.
Bravo!
Please proceed.
annejones still refusing to specify still how genitalia are relevant to parenting. Surprise surprise! And still shitting on adoptive parents of any kind! Why don’t you just shut the fuck up already anne? It is clear that you have said everything you have to say and all you have left to do is repeat your same inane arguments over and over, pretending we haven’t already refuted them.
As has already been mentioned, marriage has been “redefined” plenty already, and “family” doesn’t even currently meet your definition. “Nuclear family” =/= Family.
Conveniently ignoring that you have no actual argument that homosexual parenting is detrimental, given studies that prove the opposite that you have only objected to on the basis of a comedian’s opinion on the matter. Sadly, neither you nor he are particularly funny. Speaking of “no valid function to society”!
You forgot to add the ™ to Real men ™ and Real women ™. You also still forgot to specify what this difference is, because we all suspect that you just buy into cultural gender stereotypes on the issue and thus fail at biology, which is where you are pretending your argument lies.
Anne’s playing the “Just Disagreeing” card now. Along with the “You’re Intolerant of My Intolerance!” card. Compelling!
A male father is necessary to teach males how to be a father because this can only be done by male fathers. Well, I’m convinced. Stellar argumentation based heavily in facts and evidence. You should submit your findings to the nearest anthropological, biological, psychological, and sociological journals you can, anne.
Anne now adds “deadbeat dads” and “sperm banks” to her list to why gay people should not be allowed to be married and adopt children.
Aww isn’t that precious. Anne’s showing her true fundie colors.
Marriage ™: It’s how Nature ™ “works”.
Except for the ones that have recently allowed gay marriage that are currently existing, and doing just fine.
(Weren’t you pretending that you weren’t a bigot?)
Pure projection. You have no clue that marriage is secular and it is definition is more arbitrary and fluid than your dogmatic, religious mind allows you to comprehend. You have no clue how to raise a child because you can’t fathom the possibility of deviating from “natural” parenting roles and can’t bring yourself to imagine any family working aside from a nuclear family. You don’t know what it means to be a man or a woman because you simply lack nuance. You believe that in very rigid gender roles, you believe in very simplistic definitions of what “man” and “woman” mean, you ignore any possibility for gray areas that are fucking known to exist (even just in terms of biology!) and take it for granted that all the cultural baggage associated with male and female roles are natural and therefore immutable and indisputable.
You are piling bullshit upon bullshit. You are using the most facile of interpretations of scientific evidence to excuse your opposition to gay people on every possible front. You are bringing creationist tactics to homophobia, and using the traditional homophobe tactic of denying that you hate gays while still disingenuously throwing every half-assed argument you can against the wall until you find one that sticks.
Yeah, we are the ones who are hateful. Because equal rights is “special rights”. Being gay is an “unnatural sexual lifestyle”. And, of course, all sexual attractions are gauged upon whether they have a value to society! You’re really making it clear how much of a Not-Bigot you are, anne.
(Bonus point: I’m pretty sure this last sentence, as a reply to me, is implying that I, specifically, am gay. Which, incidentally, I am not. Whoopsie! I’m sure the Not-Bigot just made the honest mistake of assuming that everyone advocating for gay rights is gay. Totally understandable.)
Weird how it always goes to sexual language with these folks.
The important (and painfully obvious) difference is that we’re not forbidding you to marry the one you love or to raise children with him. I realize that being called a bigot for your bigoted words is likely the worst “oppression” you’ve ever felt, but please at least make a token attempt to understand the difference.
Hmmm nope. Weak sauce. You got to go into the details here. (That vague “among other things” doesn’t help either). How does one show how to be a man? What are the important things to learn? How to drive a stick shift, how to play football, that kind of thing? I suspect you’re so vague with your all-important gender parenting roles because you know how silly they sound without all the unquestioned privilege they get in your normal circles. And anyway, if gender differences are really as natural as you say they are, then why do they have to be socially enforced with such rigor?
And wait, if the only importance of the father role is to teach boys how to be fathers and husbands, does that mean that girls don’t need fathers after all?
Seriously anne, your worldview is incoherent. That’s what happens when you try to apply logic and evidence to religious-based dogma and prejudices. Those things do not play well with each other, anne. Just a good rule of thumb for future reference.
Of all the assholes in the last couple of days, some narcissist making it all about himself makes me finally lose my patience in the grenade thread.
Grumble. I find it strangely apropos that while we have a heterosexist (I dislike ‘homophobic’) raging in the thunderdome, Futrelle’ gets referenced by PZ.
That’s how it is with bigots: they always have difficulty accepting that there are people outside their despised group who don’t share their bigotry: if such people don’t express that bigotry, or particularly if they deny it, it’s just because they’ve been bullied into “political correctness”.
I want to highlight this some more.
Annejones: Why do YOU think the Heterosexuals of Pharyngula are in favor of Gay Marriage? Because we are. How do YOU think we Square what seems to you to be a circle. Why do YOU think Gay Marriage proponents who are Heterosexual are proponents of Gay Marriage?
I’m guessing the response will be something about how we’re evil sinners who hate god and/or we’re just cowards who want society’s blessing before doing lots of gay sex or something. But I still ask because Annejones has twisted themselves into knots to try and avoid just telling the truth and saying “I hate Gays” (don’t worry cupcake, that message comes through quite well) so I expect their response to be both noxious and a hoot.
@b0nezbrigade
But why? According to you, it doesn’t work, so why are you doing it? Why not at least explore other angles? Why are you deliberately engaging in a style of behavior that you yourself do not believe will effect the change you’re supposedly looking for?
I suggest that you go back and rephrase your original post. Specifically, make it a lot clearer exactly what you’re objecting to. Given the number of times where you’ve said “that’s not what I wrote”, I think we can establish that there’s a certain communications gap here. I’m certainly not clear on what you’re saying.
Maybe give an example of the kind of thing you have a problem with; you know, a specific post. Detail the exact comment you find problematic, why you think it’s a problem and why you don’t think it has the right effect. Then we can discuss what, if anything, needs to be done differently.
You are interested in changing things, right? You’re not just a troll, here to stir the pot, are you?
[un momento, por favor…]
b0nezbrigade, I still want you to address my comment, specially that bullshit lie you said about us telling rapist and rape apologist to go kill themselves.
(Link to my comment just to make sure you get to it..)
Annejones
Normally I can’t be arsed with your crap, but I just thought I’d point out yet another failure in your assumptions. To wit, I don’t actually care in the slightest about the gender of my sexual partners; it’s not a concern for me at all.
Vaiyt
I’ve highlighted the categories that make good arguments for removing children from a situation.
Owlmirror
Indeed, the option for two mothers is very nearly here
*Posted to the Grenade thread b/c people talking about the DIAF comments, and the Thunderdome so Bonez can respond*
So, I went back through looking for the DIAF and kill yourself comments. I found 3 people who said such things (2 DIAF and 1 kill yourself). The kill yourself comment happened first and by a non-regular, which was called out immediately 3 times. (Here, Here, and Here. It’s called out a fourth time by Nate, though Nate refers to
but I’ve went back and read the preceeding 595 comments before Nate’s and haven’t been able to find any other comments about suicide, veiled or not.
The DIAF comments, first by Illuminata where they say
admits to being against the agreed upon decorum here. The second by a commenter I’ve never seen before
. Both of those comments were made by the comment PZ whited out at #624 for the graphic use of a real rape scenario to say PZ was a rapist. This is followed by Tony calling it out.
So, yeah Bonez was fucking lying when they said
.
It wasn’t Caine, it wasn’t accepted, it is not what we stand for here.
GRRRR. Too many links in my comment proving Bonez was fucking lying about the kill yourself comment so it’s in moderation.
*PART 1*
*Posted to the Grenade thread b/c people talking about the DIAF comments, and the Thunderdome so Bonez can respond*
So, I went back through looking for the DIAF and kill yourself comments. I found 3 people who said such things (2 DIAF and 1 kill yourself). The kill yourself comment happened first and by a non-regular, which was called out immediately 3 times. (Here, Here, and Here. It’s called out a fourth time by Nate, though Nate refers to
but I’ve went back and read the preceeding 595 comments before Nate’s and haven’t been able to find any other comments about suicide, veiled or not.
*Part 2*
The DIAF comments, first by Illuminata where they say
admits to being against the agreed upon decorum here. The second by a commenter I’ve never seen before
. Both of those comments were made by the comment PZ whited out at #624 for the graphic use of a real rape scenario to say PZ was a rapist. This is followed by Tony calling it out.
So, yeah Bonez was fucking lying when they said
.
It wasn’t Caine, it wasn’t accepted, it is not what we stand for here.
Sorry for the double post, wasn’t expecting to be out of moderation that quick. Usually it takes more time. O course, I should’ve figured with that thread and all. Though, it’s mostly moot not since he’s outright banned now.
Oh, well. My bad, folks.
Not at all. Good on you for doing the grunt work. Now at least it’s there, for the record.
Heh. I was showing Kid #1 that today (engine off, just going through the motions).
But guess who taught me that? My mother. Supermarket carparks for the win!
Oh, and.
annejones, you are a horrible and ridiculously bigoted person. You should be ashamed of yourself.
JAL… in my defense, because I’m helping my parents move and haven’t had consistent access to an internet connection, I haven’t been able to keep up with that thread. I’ve tried (even over the past hour), but have failed miserably every time.
I saw all three comments referring to suicide. I somehow managed to miss them being called out, I think because I tried to commit suicide a few times when I was younger, and so the topic is very sensitive for me; when I see such suggestions, everything else stops mattering for a bit while I freak out (happily, the freak-outs have been reduced to the point where I can sort of control them and I no longer have to remove myself from sharp objects, which makes me feel good… :D). Hence I called it out. I should have read more diligently and that’s my bad. If I had seen it was already called out, I wouldn’t have bothered.
For the record, I hate the “die in a fire” comments, as well, but I did see those getting called out already… plus… by the time I could actually respond, there were already so many comments after it wouldn’t matter anymore.
I also want to say this: those of you keeping up with that thread… holy shit I admire all of you greatly. You are all incredible people. Seriously. You should all win awards.
I’ve been away from internet for a couple of days, and have just laboured through the grenade thread.
(I had to take two breaks and it took me over six hours!)
I doubt any normal person could be expected to do the same.
Next couple posts have no reference to thread and are just me fussing with the tags to prevent blockquote fail in future posts. Disregard.
I’ve been keeping away from the Grenade thread myself. I glanced a couple of comments, and then morbidly wished I’d made myself a bingo card because every run of bullshit I could come up with was in the 50 or so comments I did actually read.
What really makes me feel dead inside is that I don’t see any road to a better place. I don’t really see a path that would even eventually get to the point where stupid shit like what Shermer may have done stops happening and is treated as NOT OKAY as it is.
Next couple posts have no reference to thread and are just me fussing with the tags to prevent blockquote fail in future posts. Disregard.
I think I’ve got it.
Nope! Here we go:
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Just . . . wow . . . again. I finally made it through the grenade thread. I’d wanted to say a few things along the way, but they were nothing that hadn’t been said an uncountable number of times before. And so I took a long break.
I decided to pop in here and came upon the screed by hateful BIGOT annejones (Note to annejones: one cannot tolerate intolerance. The two are mutually exclusive.) And I’m still just blown away that some of you are able to respond to this sort of thing. I’ve got to admit, my first response to her comment was widened eyes, upraised eyebrows, and my jaw hanging all the way down to my chest.
So, really. Gratitude and respect to you all. You are champions.
dickdave:
Heh…thats like the fourth or fifth time xe has dumped the exact same load of crap in here. For all that xe says the same shit, each time I am mildly shocked.
I feel like a terrible person. I’m beginning to disbelieve Mike in the epic thread. :/
Not respecting their analysis doesn’t entail disbelief.
I know. And I feel like a terrible person for it. Hell, even if Mike is proven to be a lying troll I will STILL feel like a terrible person for that smidge of disbelief. :/
This is a test: Not respecting their analysis ≠ disbelief. Thank you.
Ah. Hugs if you want them. I surely don’t see you as horrible. This has been a confusing set of days.
Menyambal,
No doubt. I was projecting my own reading. Other times I hope to do better.
Dhorvath, no, sorry, I was agreeing with you, really. I just popped in to test the “not equals” symbol, and thought what you said bore repeating, so I copy-and-pasted.
My comment ≠ snark.
Is that the “not equals” symbol? I mean, is that what it’s called and means?
I surely read it as such.
Dhorvath, okay, I’m kinda twitchy, reading-wise, the last few days here.
I’m gonna go help the dogs look for meteors.
I get that. My twitch is strong as well. Enjoy the falling sky.
I believed Mike right up until he said “Well IN THE PAST we totes were big on being mean to rapists”
No. Explicitly not.
168
NateHevens, resident SOOPER-GENIUS… apparently…
Oh, no defense needed. Wasn’t trying call you out saying what you did was wrong or anything. I was just doing control+f until I hit your comment and then decided to read the preceding comments to make sure I wasn’t missing more subtle remarks. That’s the only reason I brought up your comment specifically. I’ve been suicidal and so has my mother so I deeply loathe “kill yourself” comments. I was just being extra careful.
Thinking there was more than one suicide comment is on par with accidentally typing a person’s nym wrong, to me. Not really a big deal, and it’s good you called it out anyways.
I was giving Mike the benefit of the doubt until he threw in that bit about his parents dying. That pushed me into mostly doubting him.
He and others seem to have a 100% certainty thing. Either you wholeheartedly believe and will kill for a cause, or you opposite someone with all your might, and slag them mercilessly.
I thought his story was probably true, now I think it is probably false, with the key word being “probably”. And the probably-true bit was just taking him at his word, because stuff like that can/will happen, but I always keep a corner for the possibility of trolling.
IOW, gender is totally irrelevant except where you need it to be relevant. Gotcha.
Gender is important to ALL people, but you guys use it when you need it and try to disregard it when it gets in your way. Either gender is an important natural part of the human experience, or it isn’t, you can’t have it both ways and remain logically consistent.
If you deny that there are non-physical qualities that define what a man or a woman is, then you are forced to admit for consistency’s sake, that a homosexual’s attraction to the same sex is purely physical and is contingent on him having a penis, and her having a vagina. A relationship based purely and solely on the sexual organs of one’s partner is called lust, because a man can’t be attracted to someone who doesn’t have a penis, right??
If you admit that there are non-physical qualities that define what a man or woman is, then you have to admit that men and women provide something different for the child, that the other sex can’t provide. Those non-physical qualities are what make them a “man” or a “woman”. They are an important part of any relationship that the person is going to be involved in. If you take this route, then you have to admit that same sex couples intentionally deprive a child of the missing ingredient, while insisting that their own relationship must have that missing ingredient, which is selfish and childish and demonstrates that they are putting their own needs ahead of the best interest of the child.
That, in a nutshell, are the choices, so which choice are you arguing for??
You obviously don’t believe that a child has any rights at all to be raised by both a mother and a father figure. Your position amounts to making children a commodity, provided to anyone who wants to play house, rather than seeing adoption as a means to find a family for a child. Instead, you see it as a means to provide a commodity for those who have chosen a relationship that can’t provide that commodity for themselves.
Your phrasing of the question is a little silly, but I already addressed the applicability and relevance of the gender issue above.
Together they are sterile. They have to resort to (GASP!) natural hetero use of their sexual organs or reproductive system. They have to go outside the monogamy of a marital relationship in order to create a child, and only one of them can actually be related to the child, thus a “parent”. That also means that the child is going to be deprived of its other “parent”, or even a reasonable facsimile, which a hetero step-parent or hetero adoptive family can provide. That’s where the choice that I asked you to make earlier comes in to play. How are you going to argue it from here??
All I can give here is my opinion. Personally, I think that so long as there are children who need adoptive homes, ART should only be allowed if the prospective couple are going to be the child’s biological parents. If they would otherwise have to use donor sperm, eggs, or a surrogate then they should only be able to use that technology if there are no adoptable children that are suitable fits for that family. So in the way that you phrase the question, yes, infertile hetero couples would be SOL so long as there are children that are in need of adoptive homes, which would be a good fit for that prospective family. Once the adoption/foster situation is made more manageable, then we can revisit the issue and my view would likely change based on the situation. Yes it may suck for some people, but I believe that we’ve put ourselves and kids in a particularly bad situation, and it’s going to require some drastic actions to fix the problem. That means that not everyone can have everything exactly as they want it. I realize that that statement is a shock to the system of those on the left but it’s just the most reasonable way I can see of dealing with the both problems at the same time.
Please quote where I said, or even implied that, or else stop using that strawman. That’s an asinine statement and I never said any such thing, nor would I even consider giving a child to a rapist as a possible option.
If two men or two women could naturally be the parents of a child then we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.
This stupid argument…again…lol.
No, parents don’t physically use their genitals to raise children. They do however, use the humanity and skills that come as part of that package deal.
lalalala
How many repetitions is that now??
I have to admit that if you guys are trolls, which I’ve seen as a possibility since our first interaction, you are among the best that I’ve encountered, although you do make it tempting at times to just ignore you altogether. I think that would be the only aspect you’d need to improve on, with your trolling skills, aside from the ridiculous arguments of course. That’s not really your fault though, it’s just the nature of the beast that you’re working with.
Annejones if you were arguing in good faith I would say your problem is that you ascribe too much importance to biological sex. You seem to think that somehow a couple being both biologically male and biologically female is somehow necessary for good parenting. You have yet to prove that. You have yet to explain why the genitalia of the parents in any way affects the quality of parenting.
If you stand by all you have said then you must then answer the following questions:
1) Are the gender roles you put forth actually necessary? Is it truly neglectful to not have a masculine male and a feminine female raising a child? If so then why do you take such umbrage when people follow out this logic and ask about single-parent households? If you want to convince use that a child NEEDS to be raised by a male and a female biological parent then you need to pony up the proof.
2) Why are these roles sex specific? If a child actually NEEDS Manly role model and a womanly role model (which you have not proven yet BTW) then why can a man not be “Feminine” and a woman be “masculine”? Sex is not the same thing as Gender, Gender is a social identity and Sex is a biological distinction. If a child is raised by two male partners why can’t one of them teach the child to be “Feminine”?
3) Why do you fetishize biological parents? You seem to believe that being the biological father or mother creates some sort of magical invisible bond between parent and child. However this does not hold up. There are abusive and/or neglectful biological parents and wonderful adoptive parents in the world. You repeatedly denigrate adoptive parents, Heterosexual or Homosexual, with your rhetoric and then seem surprised when people take you to task for it. Speaking of which:
4) Why are you blind to your own implications? You got pissed off when someone pointed out that your own philosophy would lead to women marrying their rape victims if they were pregnant. That’s the ugly repercussion of putting so much stock in biological parenting. You yourself dismissively called any caretaker besides the Biological parents a “Nanny”. By the logic you put forth if a woman is raped and carries the child to term then the rapist is magically the ideal parent for the child because he’s the biological father.
5) Why do you put so much stock in “The natural order”? The nuclear family is a modern invention, throughout human history the majority of marriages were not based off a love and were done to create an extended family and cement familial alliances. Also there are Homosexual relationships in “The natural order”, there are gay penguin couples and whiptail lizards who are all female. How do you arrive at a “natural order” that is so patently unnatural and ahistorical? This is a question you have repeatedly refused to answer annejones which is very telling.
These are questions you must answer annejones if you are arguing in good faith. But you aren’t. We still remember how you arrived annejones, when you came in here with a driveby Gish Gallop full of religious presupposition and bullcrap. We remember when you got on this gay marriage kick and how you tried to intentionally misrepresent an equality advocate. We remember how you repeatedly cast the gays as some sort of child-kidnapping boogieman to intentionally obscure legitimate adoption. We remember you intentionally misrepresented the happenings of a court case to make it seem like gays were legally stealing children. You have born false witness here many many times annejones, you have no credibility and there is no reason to see you as anything but a hateful religiously motivated bigot. You are a liar annejones, and your most egregious lie is to claim you are anything but a homophobic bigot.
No, any kind of “loving” home is not the gold standard. Decades of research shows clearly that children are at high risk for multiple problems when raised in a home that doesn’t include both their biological mother and father, in a marital relationship. That is the gold standard that we should strive for because it causes the least amount of preventable problems for kids, and provides the least amount of societal intervention to care for those kids. Anything that encourages people to deviate from that gold standard, intentionally, puts kids at risk and therefore is detrimental to society in a way that is preventable, or at least can be made more manageable by simply using a little common sense.
“That much”?? Ok, maybe you believe that it wouldn’t matter “that much” for you personally, but by logical extension you’re forcing that position onto kids. You’re putting them in a position that removes that option for them, and takes away any right they have to be raised in a normal family.
You complain about religious people trying to force their views on people, but religion is a belief. We can’t force people to believe something. You’re doing something even worse than that. You’re forcing those children to live that lifestyle, disregarding nature, and disregarding the benefits that the mother and father roles provide for them. That is physical manipulation of defenseless people, children, and it is akin to slavery since you have removed any rights they may have had.
No it isn’t, that’s another asinine statement, and is not an argument that I’ve ever seen a single person make. It’s YOUR strawman, not a legitimate point made by my position.
At no point in history has a mother, father, and their children not been the basic building block, the “family”. If by extended family you mean grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc., yes obviously there are going to be extended families. It’s called ancestry, but even the extended family started out with the mother, father, and child.
blahblah…Kids can only be born through a mother and father which means that I’m a bigot. I got it, troll on.
Already has been redefined=/= Should have been redefined
Already has been redefined=/= Redefinition was logical
Already has been redefined=/= Redefinition provides anything valuable to society
lol…I think being a deity eliminated any potential negatives or risk factors that are applicable to humans.
Agreed
Yes, I’m well aware that man is hell-bent on destroying himself, with radical progressives at the helm. I pray to God that He intercede and not allow that technology to become usable.
No. It’s that gender isn’t relevant for everything. I don’t care if the cashier at the supermarket is a man or a woman, because it makes no difference.
Let me give a counter-example: Hair color might be important when picking a sexual partner; people have various preferences in that direction. I assume you don’t think that hair color should be a factor in deciding who’s a proper parent, right?
OK, so we can all grasp the simple concept that a quality which is important in one situation might be completely irrelevant in another, yes?
Good. Now, according to you, gender is important when it comes to raising children. We’ve repeatedly asked you to provide some evidence for that; to give your reasons for thinking this. So far, the only thing you’ve been able to come up with is not vague notion that only a father can teach a boy to be a father; an obviously circular idea and one which doesn’t address the situation of e.g. two gay men raising a boy.
You’ve also hinted at some bizarre notions about gay men not being “real” men, and likewise with women. On this subject, you’ve also failed to back up your statements with anything beside your own opinion.
You clearly have some weird ideas about gender and parenthood. You also consistently fail to argue for them, except by a kind of fiat. We’re just asking you to back up what you’re saying. That’s not too much to ask, is it? You don’t expect us to just agree with you instantly, for no reason, do you?
But not in ALL situations. (And actually, you may well be wrong, but that’s an argument considerably beyond your comprehension)
No, we simply ask that when you make a claim about gender being important in some regard, you back it up. It’s neither unusual, tricky or deceptive.
Sure we can. It’s not all or nothing. I refer you back to my earlier example of hair color; important in some situations, irrelevant in others. It depends on how the situation is related to the quality in question.
No. We would have to admit that physical attributes play some part in attraction. There’s no necessity for the attraction to be purely physical (not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that – we don’t share your medieval sexual morals, remember?).
Again, a counter example: An engine is a vital part of a car. Without it, the car is useless. If a car doesn’t have an engine, you’re not interested in buying. Does that mean that the engine is the only thing you look for when buying a car?
Non-physical qualities (AKA personality) do not need to be firmly gender separated in order to factor into attraction. The personal qualities that I find attractive in potential romantic partners are much the same as I find attractive in potential friends. I haven’t noticed any distinct difference in the qualities I prefer in the people associate with, correlated with whether I also wish to sleep with them.
Could you explain what these qualities are and some verification for their existence? Seems to me that men and women have largely the same qualities and these vary more by individual than gender.
The one you overlooked: Qualities are not gender separated and physical attributes, while important for a romantic relationship, are no the only qualities that are.
Not really. Once again, you’ve simply asserted your position.
Look, if I just tell you you’re wrong, does that convince you and change you mind? No? So why the hell would you think that would work with us?
Give us an honest to god argument, and remember that we don’t share all the many premises that your thinking clearly relies on. If we did, we’d already agree with you. You need to persuade us of the validity of these ideas or you’re just wasting your time.
Stop asserting, start arguing. Stop assuming and start proving. Give us evidence or just shut up.
Annejones @123&194: I am pansexual, so the gender of my sexual partner is irrelevant. I am not attracted to someone based on the physical configuration of their genitals, but rather on the makeup of their personality.
Annejones, you were much less of a despicable, disgusting troll (and much more entertaining) back when you were trying to define what a nucleotide is while knowing nothing about biochemistry. But I note that the smugness, the ignorance and the stupidity remain the same.
Go ahead, be specific. Name these qualities and explain their relevance when it comes to raising kids. It looks like you think they are so obvious you don’t need to mention them, but they’re obviously not obvious to the people you are arguing with. So you need to tell us what they are.
Except this does not follow at all. Attraction can include both physical qualities, in which things like biological sex and how gender conforming one looks may be included, and non-physical qualities which do not need to depend on gender at all.
Now explain how biological sex and gender conformity are relevant to parenting.
Such as? Again, be specific.
Also, you seem to be using sex and gender interchangeably. And then you complain that people keep asking you about genitals and child rearing….
Genitals, gender. I am curious. Would you be okay with, say, a feminine transgender woman and a masculine cis man raising a child together?
What about genderqueer people who do not identify as either man or woman, would you also deny them parenthood? Or would that depend on whether their genitals are different from the genitals of their partner?
In other words, I guess…. how deep does your bigotry run?
@ All
Just popping in to see how it is going with Teh Horde ™ . I am in South Africa now, hurriedly trying to catch up with all my family and friends. Boland Wijnkelders en biltong are taking the edge off the hatefulness of annejones and putting a glow about the wonderful fisking in this thread. Keep up the good work.
@ annejones
You are as wedded to the Jesus Narrative as you are divorced from reality.
(Give it up, all that hate cannot be good for your health.)
annejones, I scanned your bigoted screed for any real evidence other than you OPINION. Your opinion is dismissed as bigoted bullshit. NOT ONE LINK TO REAL EVIDENCE. There is a problems here, and that is ignorance, homphobia, and inability to understand and cite reality.
There is no reason to read your teal deer screed. Bullshit from start to finish. Time to either put up the right information from legitimate sources outside of yourself (and we get to decide if those sources are legitimate or not), or shut the fuck as the evidenceless over-opinionated bigot should do when called out. But then, that requires honesty and integrity. Both of which you need to go in search of–for years.
@ annejones
Perhaps comics help? Linky: Animal Gender Roles Explained in Adorable Cartoons
Are you claiming your imaginary sky-god has nothing to do with this?
Yellow Thursday #196
I tried that at 159, but she didn’t answer then either. Maybe repetition is the key, though.
I have been mostly away from Pharyngula and blogs in general for a while. But some of the recent threads, some of the threads showing up on the recent comments side bar (damn, that Greenade thread is one hell of a thread, I couldn’t catch up with it if I wanted to), Annejones and StevoR taking turns here and competing for the Most Repulsive Human Being Award. Aaargh.
I almost feel like I need to take a break already. *sigh* I need to go slowly, I guess.
annejones
Bearing false witness is a sin.
For giggles, hit Ctrl-F on this page and type in the word “decades”.
No, YOU have to admit WHAT the man and woman provide differently. How many times have we asked you to do this now?
A saying about a broken clock comes to mind here.
Hee hee. I think you’re going to need the other four power rings for the summoning.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
So you know nothing about 6 continents over the last 9k years. FFS, the extended family was the basic unit in most of dark ages Europe. I’m not asking you to pay attention to things that don’t involve white people!
Uh, twit, it’s exactly what you keep saying when you insist on biological parents uber alles. It’s not a strawman – it’s the DIRECT FUCKING CONCLUSION YOUR ARGUMENT FORCES ON YOU. That you refuse to admit it doesn’t surprise me – I don’t think you’ve even admitted it to yourself.
lol. Tell that to Zeus. Or Loki.
This implies you think the atomic bomb was god’s will. If your deities were real, and responsible for all you impute to them, they would literally be inhuman monsters, and we would be bound by ethics to try to slay them.
:::blinks:::
The raging homophobic bigot ANNEJONES comes here and calls the commentariat trolls?
Up is red and music is green I guess.
So let me see if I got this…
::cracks knuckles::
1- Resident Bigot #2, ANNEJONES, declares gays and lesbians unfit to be parents bc non complementary gender, or sex (needs clarification here, as the idiot uses the terms interchangeably)
2- ANNEJONES declares that children absolutely need a mommy and daddy bc there exists some qualities essential to rearing children that can only be taught by parents of opposite genders (or is it sex? I haz a confuzed.). ANNEJONES has thus far not explained what these ephemeral qualities are, but continues to assert how vital they are.
3-ANNEJONES says that children should not be taken away from their biological parents (bc children need their biological parents for an as-yet-undefined-and-likely-never-will-be-defined-reason)
4- ANNEJONES thus does not support rapists having custody of their kids, but rather rapists marrying their victim and raising the child together.
How biblical.
ANNEJONES:
This resident cockmoster has some required reading for you–>
http://www.bu.edu/today/2013/gay-parents-as-good-as-straight-ones/
http://www.autostraddle.com/australia-conducts-largest-ever-study-on-gay-parents-finds-kids-are-in-fact-alright-179614/
I hope this is the right thread to ask this, although I’m not sure how to ask it, so please bear with me.
Is/are there any of the motley crew experienced in gently advising one of rape culture’s walking wounded, and willing to…mentor(?) someone who experienced intense comfort in hearing about the …vigorous… message of believing those that have been assaulted. Preferably someone in Edmonton?
I’m sure everyone understands I’d like to take any more off board but please consider, even if there aren’t people of such experience around here, the weekend’s furore was a help to more than those directly participating.
Conveniently ignoring that “homosexual parents” is a self-contradictory, thus logically inconsistent term. Being willfully ignorant of, or conveniently ignoring all research of the past 4 or 5 decades, as well as denying the validity of any current research that reinforces the validity of that past research, and conflicts with your point. Duly noted.
Assertion made without regard for what the research actually shows, as well as hand waiving and cherry picking which information to base your opinion on, thus dismissed based on the assertion not being consistent with known facts. Ain’t this fun??
ROTFL…Where are we now, #6?? I said 12 times so we’re halfway there already in just two posts.
Nor does homosexuality do anything to guarantee a loving home any more than heterosexuality does. However, heterosexuality can offer the child as close to a natural, normal home as possible, thus starting their childhood with less conflicts and difficulties than they will face in a homosexual household. Homosexuality of the child’s caretakers put the child at a disadvantage right off the bat, and that is something that will never change in that child’s life.
In fact, it is true that homosexuals are putting kids in an unnatural family structure, that a child has to internally justify. That child has to spend valuable parts of their developmental years sorting out this “gay parenting” thing, while during many of those years not even understanding what homosexual or heterosexual really means. Meanwhile, a child raised by his mother and father don’t have that strike against them, and he can go on about the business of childhood and development without having to deal with those issues that homosexuals force upon a child. Even if a child has to be adopted by a heterosexual couple, at some point he can make peace with the fact that his biological parents for whatever reason, aren’t there, and he can look to his adoptive parents as his mom and dad. He is still at an advantage over a child raised by homosexuals because he doesn’t have to deal with having to rationalize the fact that two men can’t even present the appearance of being the parents.
Unless the child is a different race, or obviously a different nationality from the adoptive parents, you can’t tell from appearances that a child is adopted. That isn’t true with a set of homosexual caretakers, they make that child stick out as different like a sore thumb, even though it isn’t really the child that is different, it’s those that are trying to give the impression of being the child’s parents that are the different ones. The more involved those homosexuals are in the child’s public life, the harder they make it for him to present himself as normal, to his peers. Most kids try not to stick out as different in major ways. Even though they love the adults in their lives, they must be just mortified when their “two dads” show up at school functions to meet all the other normal moms and dads. It may seem kinda cool in the early years where kids don’t really get it, but as they mature and they do get it, it has to become a total drag(no pun intended) for that child.
Put yourself in the hypothetical position of one of those children who grew up faithfully and lovingly believing that he really had two dads. Though they tried to explain the logistical/sexual part to him, he never quite understood the gravity. Then, one day the reality hits and they become mature enough to finally understand sexuality. It becomes apparent that he has been sold, and is living a lie. No child can have two dads, that’s logically impossible, and he now knows that and understands what it means. Every single child that has ever been born has both a mother and a father, including him, and he has been deprived of his mom.
He now knows that the other kids were right, he IS different (InB4 it’s my fault that homosexuals are different) from a normal kid, at least in his mind he is. He isn’t the different one, his “parents” are, he is unlikely to see it that way though. They’re the ones who are living a lie and pretending to be something that they can’t possibly be because nature prevents them from doing so, and they’re the ones who forced him into living that lie. At this point he has only two options…
1. Turn on his “parents” and rebel against the two people that he has loved up until this point. That’s something that most children would not want to do.
2. For peace of mind, he has to develop rescue strategies that help him psychologically rationalize the situation he has been forced into. That means that he has to justify and continue the lie throughout his entire life. This is going to mean that at any point in his childhood where he felt the absence of that missing parent or felt that he was different from other kids, he HAS to put that away, to pretend that it didn’t matter. He HAS to make the memory of his “parents” much better than reality. He HAS to extoll the virtues of his loving “parents”. Otherwise he has no hope for having any peace of mind or self-identity. He HAS to psychologically make that lie that he lived, not a lie anymore. He has no choice but to portray that as a normal, and beneficial thing that he is happy about.
Does all this mean that homosexuals can’t really love kids?? No, and I have never said that. Does this mean that kids can’t love the only adults in their household?? No, and I’ve never said that. What it means though, is that by virtue of being homosexual, those adults saddle children with baggage that is detrimental to them right from the beginning of their lives, or their time in that household, that other kids don’t have to deal with. The fact that their situation is radically different from the other kids’ situation is a constant in their lives, every single day, and it cannot ever go away. No anti-bullying campaign can remove that difference, or even the perception of difference.
Rule #1 in parenting is that you should put your child’s best interest above your own desires. Homosexuals can love a child, in their own way, but they fail rule #1, right off the bat.
A N N E J O N E S!
Jesus fucking goddamn Christ but you are an ignorant assclam.
You keep ASSERTING that there is *decades* of research to back up your hateful opinion, yet you never link to anything. Your assertions count for less than nothing. Cite your sources you hateful scumbubble.
Also, I gave you modern links from extensive studies that thoroughly refute what you say about same sex parenting.
Or you can just leave. You achieve nothing here.
Interesting that ANNEJONES makes another unfounded assumption about gay parenting. It’s like xe is incapable of doing a Google search. There are plenty of gay families that put the needs of children first.
Does this hateful stain upon humanity ever stop lying?
No. Its what AJ was trained to do from early childhood by her community of godbotherers.
@ annejones
Again. Are homosexuals sterile?
How can you speak of “natural” or “normal” you giant_bag_of_mostly_hate? How could a child possibly grow up “natural, normal” under your parentage? You choose to come here and spew out every ugly thought that crosses your reptilian complex, yet regard yourself an authority on parenting. Where is theLOVE, annejones?
@ Tony
Some inspiration for you: 2 Brads/Dads
Teh Brads:
Contrast this with annejones who has nothing to share but bigoted hate.
No, it isn’t. Why do you place so much importance on genitals and gametes? After being conceived and born (and, you know, put up for adoption) children need many things, none of which involve the genitals and gametes of who raises them. Or so I understand.
How weird. There is research out there that for some reason cannot be cited or linked to. Must be really hard for you to argue under such conditions, knowing of all this research that backs you up and for some reason all you’re allowed to share is over how many decades it was done…
Or rather, sorting out this “bigotry and hatred” thing that people like you aim at their parents, while not even understanding why such vile and hateful people who wish them and their family misery exist.
The problem is you, annejones.
And if you can tell from appearance that a child is adopted… so what? It’s only a problem in the minds of homophobic bigots. And racist bigots. And people who stupidly insist that children must be raised by their biological parents (and would like to give rapists their victim’s child).
For pity’s sake, Anne Jones. You’re so set on this “natural order” stuff about children being raised by biological mother and father – have you ever thought about the real natural order?
When biological mothers and fathers lived without the benefits of vaccines, antibiotics, and reasonable dentistry, surgery and other healthcare. And died like flies. Surviving children were brought up by any available mix of grandparents, uncles, aunts, neighbours. Often they were brought up in a succession of step-parent families. My own great-grandmother came from a family of 12+ children. Her father married when young, after a few children he was widowed – and married a widow with children of her own, rinse and repeat. So the third wife was raising children who were biologically unrelated to either her husband or herself, he was head of a household containing 5 or 6 kids biologically unrelated to him. It worked.
Other families have other arrangements. In the days before modern travel, sailors, whalers, sealers and navy as well as trading vessels kept men away from their families for years at a time. Same thing for other occupations which required long periods away from home. Some children barely knew their fathers despite the parents living blameless lives. They could still be well brought up by the attentions of adults other than their mother. Servants for middle and upper classes. Relatives and neighbours for the others. That also worked – when those people were decent people.
annejones, this discussion you are taking part in here is exactly the sort of thing that has pushed the American public to the side of marriage equality. The arguments have been going back and forth, and it has become clear to the onlookers that your side has no actual argument – just anger and bigotry. The more you and your ilk take part in these discussions, the stronger the support for equality will become.
Keep up the good work!
annejones, another evidenceless bigoted screed that is dimissed without evidence. YOUR OPINION ISN’T AND NEVER WILL BE EVIDENCE.
It would have been trivial for your God to have prevented the technology to have been developed in the first place. If he could have done it with Babel for something as simple as a ziggurat, he could have done so for this.
That he did not do so should be prima facie evidence that he WANTS this technology to be used and APPROVES of its use.
So why then are you taking the name of the Lord they God in vain, hm?
No it is not. This is your particular, private delusion. You are not entitled to impose that on the rest of us.
Indeed. Thank you for admitting that heterosexuality has nothing to do with guaranteeing a loving home.
No it does not. That is your personal delusion. You are not entitled to impose that on the rest of us.
Annejones, please name one, ONE, just one thing that a parent of one gender can do for or to a child that is important or even just useful for that child’s growth and development that a parent of the other gender cannot do, or cannot learn to do.
And provide evidence through a citation to support this contention.
“Homosexual parents” is only self-contradictory if you define “parents” as “a couple, each of whom supplied half of the genetic material of the child.”
While that’s often the case for parents, it’s not at all uncommon for one parent or both not to be biologically related to their child. Most people understand that genetics is not the end all and be all of parenthood; in fact, it’s so easily understood and so commonly accepted, I don’t even remember the last time I had to point it out.
I’m not sure why annejones is stuck in such a stone age view of parenting, but more importantly, I’m not sure why she thinks repeated assertions is going to convince anyone else.
You all are awesome.
Nah. It’s just that next to such stupid people, we can’t help but look good.
Cuervodecuero:
I’m not in Edmonton (I’m next door, in ND), but if I can offer online help, my e-mail address is available at my zenfolio: http://caine.zenfolio.com/
@annejones
Wow, are you still here?
I think much of your problem, leaving aside the obvious virulent homophobia for just a second, is that you define parents as the people who provide the gametes which create the child, and seem to think this gives them some sort of claim to ownership of the child. Most people here seem to make a distinction between a parent, the person who raises a child; and a biological parent; the person who provides the gametes. This is an entirely logical distinction given the obvious fact that children are not always raised by their biological parents and, obviously, the person who actually raises the child has far more right to be called it’s parent than an absentee biological parent. Most people here also seem to be of the opinion that you can’t own a person, either explicitly or implicitly.
As such, no, “homosexual parent” is not self-contradictory, you contemptible sack of manure.
Also, a far less complex argument (and therefore one you might understand, though I won’t hold my breath): my neighbour left his wife a couple of years ago… for a man. He is now in a loving, committed relationship with said man and claims he was in denial about his sexuality for most of his life.
He and his ex-wife have three children together. Is he not a parent?
annejones, with (what appears to be) your relentless focus on hard-wired mother roles and father roles (and leaving the genes and genitals out of it), how do you deal with families where the parents are a heterosexual couple, but the man is the stay-at-home parent (doing the housework and child-rearing), and the woman is the bread winner? ‘Cause without involving genes and genitals, it seems to me that all that remains of “parenting” is in the roles.
–
@annejones
You do realise, of course, that no child anywhere would see a problem with that situation were it not for you and your ilk telling them it was wrong? See, children aren’t generally well-educated enough to ask for evidence, and tend to believe their elders no matter what stupid shit they spout… see the propagation of homophobia, racism, and religion for proof.
False. Every child grows up believing and wholly satisfied in the belief that his or her own family situation is “normal”, until such time that they get old enough to encounter other family situations and understand that they are different from their own. These children only have to “internally justify” their own families because of the the actions of evil, unethical people like you, annejones, who deliberately poison the social milieu and directly harm these children.
If you truly cared about the welfare of children, annejones, you would shut up right now.
But of course you don’t actually care at all about children. Your ilk never does.
*Paging monitors!* I’ll be going AFK, please keep an eye on the ‘Last word for now’ thread. Thanks.
The Stone Age was not this big a group of assholes to their children. She’s got an Edwardian view of kids. Which is actually even worse, in thise case.
“And where does your father do his barnacles?”
– One of Charles Darwin’s daughters to a friend of hers. Darwin was working on his huge monograph on barnacles at the time; that’s what he did for years before he got the Origin ready for publication.
annejones, the research has been done, and there is no evidence that kids raised by same-sex couples fare any worse than those raised by opposite-sex couples.
The “children need a mother and a father” trope is not backed by evidence. And it’s rooted in gender stereotypes: the gender essentialist assumption that men and women are fundamentally different, that boys need male role models and girls female role models, and that some parenting tasks have to be done by fathers and others by mothers. The proponents of this gendered model of parenting never offer any evidence for their assumptions.
Walton, you’re doing it wrong. You’re not supposed to cite and link to research. You only have to declare that it exists and that there are decades of it. Decades! 4 or 5!
See also. With a quite extensive list of citations. It seems the scientific literature disagrees with annejones.
Decaaaaaaaaades!
(delivered in the voice of Captain Kirk shouting “Khaaaaaaaaan!”)
(…I refer to The Wrath of Khan, of course. I haven’t seen the new “reboot” and don’t intend to. *shudder*)
Of course.
I know. If you had, you’d know that Spock yells it.
To avoid derailing the “Last Word for Now” thread any more than it already is, I’m putting some advice for “believerskeptic” over here, if he’s still hanging around.
Don’t let what happened on this thread prevent you from doing what you can creatively to help the goals of the Horde and Social Justice Skepticism in general. If you feel you have something to contribute, do so—just because it’s the right thing.
I started reading and commenting here just after Crackergate (and was sorry I missed it.) I commented fairly frequently (not enough to be considered a regular) through Elevatorgate. I tried to contribute my poor mite to that shitshow when it looked like the constant stream of assholism was getting the frontline troops punchy—nothing that couldn’t have been said much better by others.
After you’ve been on a forum like this for a while, you start to feel as if you’re among friends, and can afford to let your guard down just a little bit. Certainly you should watch what you say very carefully on an emotionally-charged thread like the Grenade thread or the one you flamed out on, but many people here are so shell-shocked from real-life and online experiences that you have to evaluate everything you say to be maximally innocuous. It’s worth it if you feel you have something real to contribute. Since I usually don’t, it’s not worth the effort to me.
Just for reference, here’s why I flounced out of here a year or so ago, before I delurked momentarily to offer my support in the Grenade thread: It was not during any crisis like the current one, and the subject of the thread seemed neutral enough that my extreme-caution feelers weren’t extended properly. The subject was how to get more women interested in the sciences. The article quoted in the OP had asked some rhetorical questions as to who were positive role models who were helping that cause, and one of them was Kari Byron from Mythbusters. The article was so poorly written that I couldn’t tell which side of the coin they put her on.
Well, from hearing what certain young women in my extended family said, I thought she definitely was a positive role model in that regard (even though her degrees are in Art and Film, IIRC). I wrote a comment saying so. As an aside, I said that it was possible I was biased because I personally found her so attractive, but on consideration, I didn’t think so. I knew what would ensue as soon as I hit submit, and I wasn’t wrong.
I immediately got various replies that didn’t even notice what my actual comment was—they were all in the vein of “So why did you feel you had to jump on here and tell everybody what your pathetic little pee-pee wants?” After a few of those, even though I should have known better, I played the card you tried to, that I had been a reliable ally all through Elevatorgate. All I got was “Who the fuck are you? I never heard of you!” from various ‘nyms I’d never seen before. At that point I told them who laid the chunk and flounced, secure in the knowledge that the real good work would get done without me, and deciding that I get enough aggravation in real life that I don’t need to go looking for it online. I suppose they tore me a new one (or several dozen new ones), but I didn’t check back to see. My self-esteem is exiguous enough as it is.
I encourage you, though, if you feel you have something to contribute to fight the good fight, please don’t let one little incident stop you. Things have improved in one respect since I flounced—there was one constantly-morphing troll in those days that took over every thread excoriating everyone for insufficient purity in page after page of sanctimonious preening bombast. He apparently escaped banning for morphing because he followed every new ‘nym with “AUM” in the Devanagari script. I’ve seen some self-important assholes on line, but he was the absolute king. He seems to be gone now, so that’s one small improvement.
If you can help, just try to rise above the occasional pileons you’re going to get, and keep on keeping on. I’m probably going away until the next major blowup like this, when I’ll come back to offer my support, with which and $1.99 you can buy a cup of coffee.
Into Darkness is pretty good, except for the ways that Hollywood fucks it upw ith averageness (Dr. Wozzername and Kirk’s shenanigans, and Khan being white as snow).
Also, the guy who plays Sulu made the rest of the cast super uncomfortable by pointing out Khan wasn’t white. Which almost by itself warranted money XD
Back home now. Nick and the other monitors who were keeping eyes out, *thank you*.
We had to make a stop at Big Lots today, and I found a fab pair of wellies for 10 dollars. The fit great and are seriously comfortable. They are also an obnoxious pink with a splash of purple. (Eh, it’s all about keeping the feets dry over winter, so who cares.) I made a remark about the obnoxious pink and Mister glanced at the box and says “the colour is listed as ‘Berry'” and I burst out laughing. So, I found myself in Big Lots explaining about Radford, pink berries and pink, fluffy ladeebrainz. :D
X-posted to Lounge
(Or rather, what he intended was “OM” — as in “Order of the Molly”, which accolade he received in Aug. 2009)
sgbm isn’t here to defend himself, so I’ll just take a moment to say that “insufficient purity” is a gross and unfair distortion of what he was trying to promote and convey. Nor was he a troll.
You may not have liked him. You may not have agreed with his methods or tactics or arguments (I certainly did not always agree with him). He definitely had problems with de-escalating conflicts with people, and with letting things go.
But he did care about issues that concern Pharyngula as a whole, and often what he was doing was calling out things which he perceived as harmful, which in some cases were as subtle in their implications or splash damage as the “cop A Feel” joke that led to the kerfuffle you’re responding to.
QFT. Thank you, Owlmirror.
Yeah, lay off of strange gods. Pretty much every regular has had their problems with his style at one time or another, but I do not view his absence, per se, as an improvement as he had a lot to offer and many of the blow-ups he was involved in had as much to do with his interlocutors’ obstinacy as with his own (no question he is obstinate). But you obviously lack context, and perspective. Self-importance was not the issue; in a sense it was quite the opposite. (And in general, what Owlmirror said.)
From that crazy bit of fiction writing in her last comment, I’m wondering how Anne deals with any parents who aren’t fucking Ozzie and Harriet. And we get the common argument-from-schoolyard-peer-pressure as well. I’m guessing Anne was probably one of the mean girls back in the day.
Shall I try one more time? Maybe in bold like some others have?
Anne.
What, specifically, are the father’s roles?
What, specifically, are the mother’s roles?
What do each of them specifically bring to the table that the other doesn’t?
Maybe I should try using the word “genitals“, that always seems to get her attention.
Also, “decades”.
Speak for yourself. I miss him.
***
Caine,
Oh, pink and purple. They must look like the headphones I’m wearing right now. Yes, they are awful and I hate them. No, I didn’t buy them*. They are very comfortable, very good, and I wear them at home, so I don’t care. I’m not spending money unnecessarily just because they look frankly horrible.
*Long story made short: I was going to buy headphones when someone told me there was a pair of the kind I wanted at my grandmother’s home, practically new, not being used and not wanted by anyone, and that I could take them if I wanted to. Yay, I thought. Before seeing them.
CJO:
It’s hardly a dogpile, it’s just one person, and given that SG wasn’t at all shy about expressing his personal opinion about various people, I doubt he’d give a shit someone else was doing that. We can’t all come off as delightful to all people all the time.
Caine,
sg probably wouldn’t care, you’re absolutely right, but I do and so I said so. My issue is that anyone who forms an impression of “troll” and “sanctimonious preening bombast” and “self-important asshole” from sgbm is probably projecting, and thus missing his whole raisin date (as long as we’re talking about the old days…). (Meaning, I think some people would look at his behavior and say, “well if I was acting in this way that was apparently pissing everyone off, I would be aggrandizing myself and trying to be the center of attention,” and that’s really not what sg was/is about, so I took umbrage.)
strange gods was not a troll.
and he didn’t ‘escape banning for morphing’.
I don’t think sgbm would have cared about being called insulted. And, heck, he was an asshole sometimes.
But he hated being misrepresented. Especially with respect to “calling out harmful language” being misrepresented as “excoriating everyone for insufficient purity”.
I concur that Strange Gods wasn’t a troll. Very opinionated, very stubborn, and not taking any grief, yes. But he wasn’t posting just to get a rise out of people and just piss them off.
His last stint here, I mostly avoided him. If he got on my case, I ignored it.
Caine
The colour of emulsified troll blood? Find some nice clean mud to splash in, that’ll hide it.
Hey, annejones!
You remember that blog you started, like, 6-7 months ago?
The blog you started for the stated reason that you wanted to, you know, carry on discussin’ and debatin’ Evolution-vs-Creationism?
The blog that has exactly one (1) post in it, a single post with (as of this writing) 12 comments?
The blog whose lack of participation on your part kind of puts the lie to all your assertions about how you realio, trulio wanted to debate evolution?
Yeah. That blog. Do you think you’ll ever get around to returning to the blog you started, for the purpose of debating evolution, so that you can, like, debate evolution? Or do you just want to be sure you’ve borne enough false witness to shatter the Ninth Commandment irreparably, and thereby ensure your post mortem reservation in the lake of fire that (we are told by Scripture) God has waiting for false witnesses?
“name one, ONE, just one thing that a parent of one gender can do for or to a child that is important or even just useful for that child’s growth and development that a parent of the other gender cannot do, or cannot learn to do”
Your “just one thing” inquiry avoids the bigger story that grim statistics are telling. You will struggle with it, but there really is such a thing as normal:
http://thefatherlessgeneration.wordpress.com/statistics/
I read #257 in Stewie Griffins voice.
Sorry fuckwit, you are the one with grim statistics. Evolution, a million or so scientific papers. Your imaginary deity/creator/phantasm, zero scientific papers. Whatever you say or link to is taken as lies and bullshit, as you must lie and bullshit to acknowledge you have nothing but your delusions..
Nerd
sshhh
maybe annejones and txpiper will find each other
annejones
How’s your blog?
txpiper failed to actually answer the question, but decided to make up for that fact with an extra dollop of Smug. Shock, surprise and horror all around.
(X is observed in families with only a mother is not evidence that all that fathers inhibit X and mothers are incapable of doing the same. It is an argument for more parents, not necessarily that male fathers, per se, are necessary.)
Indeed. It is how we can tell your logical ability and level of honesty is below the norm.
For example, you could and should realize that normal means neither perfect nor necessary. A deviation from normal could be either bad or good and this can vary from situation to situation. Though I obviously wouldn’t expect someone who scoffs at the idea of beneficial mutations and natural selection to admit that this is true! So at least your utter lack of imagination and dogmatic insistence on simple answers and universal rigidity is actually consistent with your other nonsense. Congratulations on the achievement.
Honestly, that’s a troll mash-up I would prefer to avoid. They are bad enough apart. Get txpiper’s creationism to amp up annejones’, get annejones’ homophobia to amp up txpiper’s, and we will have two super asswitgots to deal with. No thanks.
anteprepro
I was hoping they would take it to annejones’s blog
Ah. Good idea. That would greatly reduce the amount of babysitting we need to do around here, and there would be far less turds to clean up. If only the door to her blog had locks on it, we could just lure them in by setting up a good rustic book-burning fireplace and a Ken Ham statue/action figure. Or a trail of Chick tracts.
txpiper:
So all the problems listed at the link would be miraculously solved if fathers were present in the homes?
Any fathers, huh?
Hope you are not going to start asserting that rapists who impregnate their victims should marry them. At this point, you are only marginally more tolerable than annejones.
Behold the coward, avoiding my question, like the pathetic, weak coward that he is.
Dishonest as well, when he pulls statistics that compare SINGLE MOTHER households to TWO PARENT households, when my question was explicitly a comparison between EQUAL numbers of parents, either one to one or two to two.
Now ANSWER THE QUESTION, texpip, or are you afraid? Or so pitifully weak that you run away and dissemble from mere words?
Or has intellectual dishonesty become so habitual for you that you no longer remember how to provide an HONEST answer, and simply cannot do it?
How pitiful.
Oh, no, he’s cool. Ya see, he posted that link to prove that single moms need to give up their kids to be adopted by gay male couples. Twice as much fatherhood! Double plus good!
Too bad about the lesbian couples, they’re still shit out of luck for parenting.
Though I’m not sure there are enough gay male couples in the world to adopt all the single moms’ kids just from Texas alone … but ya know, the lord will provide somehow!
One thing, texpip. ONE. Just one. One thing. Only one thing. That A parent, a parent, a parent, a SINGLE parent of one gender can provide to a child that another SINGLE, another single, another single parent of the other gender cannot, under any circumstance, provide, or learn to provide.
I’ll make it easy for you. You can also answer with one, ONE, one, just one, one single thing that TWO parents of the different gender can provide to a child that TWO parents of the same gender cannot, under any circumstance, provide, or learn to provide.
One thing, texpip.
One. Thing.
Just. One. Thing.
One.
You too, annejones. You have avoided answering this question for even longer.
txpiper:
As usual, txpiper links to something that doesn’t say what he thinks it says.
First off, it’s a Christian site, so its truthfulness is automatically suspect. BTW, statistics aren’t “grim”, the story they tell may be grim, but statistics are just numbers.
If the need for a father is so great, surely a household with two fathers would be twice as good, wouldn’t it? Let’s all go to a gay marriage, then.
The statistics mostly don’t argue for the biological father, just a father figure. Some mention biological fathers, but don’t address whether a non-biological father would be any good.
Most of the “results” of not having a father are more likely causes for not having a father. Like crime, for instance—if it is a family as a whole that dabbles in crime, chances are that the father will goo off to jail. That doesn’t mean that having a father in jail causes crime.
Some are side-effects of having a single-parent household, regardless of gender of parent. A father alone would likely have many of the same issues in his household. One person cannot take care of the kids all day and hold down a job at the same time.
Some of the problems would be reduced if there were two wage-earners in the household. Then there’d be nobody at home taking care of the kids, would there be?
Parenting is a challenge, regardless of who is in the house and whether they work or stay home, and how they are related to the children. Simply saying that the home must have a father figure, then saying that it must be the biological father of the children, is very simplistic, and not really supported by the statistics at that site. It’s just a Christian delusion and a faith, like all of Christianity. It’s a wish for a time that never existed except on the TV.
It’s a shame they have to hate other people for being different, and to blame them for the troubles in their lives. It’s very un-Christ-like, but it is very Christian.
Goddamn it! Why won’t the fuckign Bellcurve bullshit die!? Then I remembered how gleeful may skeptics are to stick their dicks in that rotting carcass
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Then there is the bilge that the texpip and annejones spill out.
A whole new level of depraved dishonesty.
Must be divinely inspired. There’s no other rational explanation for it. There’s just no way vileness THIS astoundingly complex could have arisen by anything other than supernatural means.
Of course by trying to deny same sex couples the right to raise children (and in annejones’ case apparently opposing ALL forms of adoption (I wonder what annejones thinks of her own church’s long and storied history of deliberately taking young children away from their biological parents to indoctrinate in the faith….), by opposing abortion, and even birth control, texpip and annejones are working to create a world where MORE of the kinds of things in the texpip’s link will happen.
Disgusting hypocrisy all the way down.
Or, for a far more concise descriptor, evil.
And now for the amazing. . .
the resilient. . .
the irrefrangible. . .
the bigoted. . .
annejones !!
That’s right. And you believe the same thing: That gender is totally irrelevant to all sorts of activities, presumably including reading, writing, and posting your particularly loathesome opinions on someone else’s blog.
And you would do the same. Or would you give up your voting rights, right to drive, right to employment, right to an education, and right to voice your opinion?
If you think that women should not express their opinion, you’re a hypocrite. If you think that expressing an opinion can be done disregarding gender, then you believe the same thing that you accuse us of.
Your stupid false dichotomy is noted.
So. . . heterosexual couples are only based on lust, too, by your own argument.
Not at all. The only “non-physical quality” that is relevant to providing for a child is the willingness and ability to provide for children. So of course that quality can exist in a man and a woman, or in a single parent, or in two homosexual parents.
See? Your own argument destroys itself.
And actually, there’s no reason that other “non-physical qualities” related to gender cannot appear in someone whose body is of the opposite gender. So someone with a male body could have the “non-physical qualities” of a woman, and a someone with a female body could have the “non-physical qualities” of a man.
See? Your own argument leads straight to gender fluidity, transgenderism, intersex individuals, and other genderqueer situations. And individuals with those qualities may (or may not) be great parents as well.
Nonsense. This is garbage logic.
I believe that a child has a right to be raised by loving parents.
So what?
That’s all you have: your bigoted opinion.
Your bigoted desire to deprive people of reproductive choice is noted.
Would you tell Lisa Miller that in your perfect totalitarian society, her daughter Isabella wouldn’t exist?
By, for example, opening up adoption to singles and same-sex couples. . .
Your
superabundanceabsence of compassion is noted.By, for example, restricting adoption to heterosexual couples only. . .
Like opening up adoption to singles and same-sex couples!
Yes, you don’t get to have your bigotry made policy!
Every time you say that biological parents should be given priority.
Excellent. Then you do want to deprive children of their biological father . . . in some situations. So much for all your sanctimonious bullshit about how children are so deprived by not having both of their biological parents raising them.
Excellent. So when it happens, you’ll shut up forever on the topic, and allow same-sex marriage and parenting.
And homosexuals can have the same humanity and skills as heterosexuals!
Because parenting doesn’t involve using your genitals to raise children.
======
See; now you’re contradicting what you just posted above. There’s no mention of the biological mother and father not being rapists, abusers, neglectful, or deadbeats. So presumably you’re perfectly OK with a “family” containing one or more of the above.
Which is it?
Kids are forced into existence by biology. They’re forced to have parents who will sometimes discipline them. They’re forced to have parents who will, sometimes, not give them what they want. They’re forced to have parents who will sometimes do less than entirely pleasant things to them for their own good, like baths, teeth brushing, and vaccinations. They’re forced to have parents who will sometimes not give them a cookie!!!!!!!
How terrible for them, to be so forced!
As noted by others in this thread, what a “normal” family is depends on time and culture.
And children usually see their own family as what is “normal” anyway.
But religious people do try to force their children to believe the same nonsense that the parents believe! That’s what indoctrination is!
Nonsense. You’re just being bigoted here.
Oh, the horrors of having two mommies! Oh! Oh!
Silly ignorant bigot. Homosexual parenting, like single parenting, exists in nature.
What benefits?
Pfft. What blithering nonsense. Children have a right to have loving parents, and since homosexuals can be loving parents, the children have what they have the right to have.
The only one who wants to enslave children is you, by giving them to rapists, abusers, negligent, and/or deadbeat parents.
Sure it is. You just proved it above by contradicting yourself, and saying that the “gold standard” is biological parents — with no mention of the quality of parenting being provided.
If the biological parents will not provide good quality parenting, what should happen? Should the children. . . maybe be taken away from them? Deprived of their biological parents? Have “slavery” “forced” on them, to use your own stupid asinine definitions and arguments?
If you don’t like it, you need to re-think your own position. The fact that you suck as a debater is your own problem.
Pfft. You’re not a bigot because reproductive biology exists; you’re a bigot because you hate homosexuals.
Excellent. So God eliminates the potential negatives or risk factors in same-sex parenting, because humans — including homosexual humans — are made in the image of God.
Problem solved!
So Isabella Miller should not exist, right?
Hooray!
Please explain your asinine, stupid, moronic, idiotic theory on how additional reproductive methods can possibly result in man “destroying himself”.
Why are you using a computer, if you hate technology so much? Why not live like the Amish, or the Bedouin?
What on Earth makes you think that you can get the putative power that runs the entire universe to change its mind?
And why are your prayers so paranoid and picayune? You could ask for hungry children to be fed and cured of disease, but noooooo, you want God to be as stupid and bigoted as yourself, and irrationally hate the same things you hate.
======
Because words only mean what you want them to mean, right? The hell with sterile and/or adoptive heterosexual parents anyway. They don’t exist, according to you.
Or rather, you’re ignoring the 7 or 8 centuries of research that shows that homosexual parents do just as well as heterosexual ones. Hey, if you get to bullshit the science, so do I.
And exactly how relevant is it to the child what their parents do in the privacy of their bedroom?
What issues?
And how is getting shit from homophobes or racists something that reflects on the child or their parents? It’s not their fault that society is full of bigots just like you!
And it only matters to bigots anyway.
Because his peers are all bigots?
Because the peers are all bigots, and act out their bigotry on the child?
Because he turns into a bigot who is as stupid as you are?
Because words only mean what you want them to mean . . .
The child has magically become the slave of annejones, bigot and totalitarian ruler of the dictionary.
Because not being a bigot is not an option to annejones!
Every family situation is, or can be, radically different. The point is to teach people not to be bigoted against the radically different, not to not have “radically different” families.
Because not being bigoted is never an option?
Don’t bother trying to pin down txpiper on anything. Just let the thread run for another few dozen comments and he’ll come back a week or two later with a glib one-line response to one cherry-picked quote from one post. This time it wasn’t even a post directed at him.
Since Anne Jones seems to have mostly focused on fatherhood and male children, I’ve had to wonder why she would even want any mothers in the house. All that femininininity is just gonna sissify a boy. Two fathers is best, three is even better, they made a movie AND a sitcom about that.
Then again, I guess you gotta have someone around to cook and clean, and lord knows that ain’t the the biological father man job. So I guess they can hire a maid, as long as she stays out of sight.
You never answer even the simplest questions, but what, exactly, do you think “normal” means, in general, and in this specific case?
And why is it relevant, here?
I swear to mother fucking god, I’m glad we’re on the net so I wouldn’t be tempted to do something uncivil.
Fuck you
ugh why do you people routinely willingly talk to such ambulatory ass grease?
Annejones, I was raised by my biological parents, both of them, in the same house, legally married and all that. I still stuck out at school as a total freak, and it was because of my parents.
See, they didn’t own a TV, and all the kids at school talked about was TV shows.
Mom made us healthy, inexpensive lunches to take, and the other kids laughed at me.
Mom bought me gym shoes like she wore, not Chuck Taylors, and the other boys laughed at me for wearing girl’s shoes.
My dad didn’t hunt or fish or drink, and none of the other dads would spent time with him.
See, annejones, most of that was good, or well-motivated, or necessary, but my hetero-and-biological parents made my childhood into the sort of confused mess that you deplore, and they were very good and smart people.
Now, if you don’t realize that a lot of biological parents are married but hate each other, their kids, their lives and the world, you are terminally stupid. Children can be frightened, beaten, abused, raped and killed by their own parents. Your policy would force people who should separate to stay together, allegedly for the sake of the children, and the children would suffer greatly.
Really?? You want me to give you a list of things that make up a man, or a woman?? You think that I can just explain in words something that it takes years to instill in a child, something that needs to be shown by example?? You can’t “tell” someone, in a box of text, how to be a man or woman.
Ugggg…this is going to take awhile and I know exactly what you’re going to do with it but, against my better judgment, I’m going to go ahead and try to address this topic as best as I can in words. Truthfully though, you should have known the answer to this before you ever entered into a discussion about the issue.
Admittedly, if “manhood” or “womanhood” could be relegated to mere words in a web post, that argument could easily be torn to shreds. If I could “tell” you how to be a man, we wouldn’t need to parent children for so many years, and still watch them make their own mistakes as young adults. We’d be able to “tell” them what they need to know, give them an instruction manual, and send them on their way at a much younger age. You’re 7 now and I’ve “told” you how to be man, now go get a job. That’s just silly, and if forced into that sort of argument, there’s no way that I could defend a “man list”. But forcing that sort of argument doesn’t really touch the real issue. At face value, men and women share a lot of the same qualities, and some typical gender roles are just cultural and fluid, which is why such a list is hard to defend, it doesn’t give you the whole story. I simply can’t show you the intangible factors that make a man, by using words. I suspect you already know that though, and intentionally chose to try and force the argument this way.
Manhood and womanhood have their own “essence”. I can’t tell you how to be a man in a forum post, but give my husband a child and some time, and he can show him/her what a man is. Manhood is made up of a series of moments that are somewhat ephemeral in nature. There is no one moment where you are suddenly a full-fledged man, but over time your manhood is shown by your behaviour, reactions, interactions, etc. There are qualities that a man must have but those qualities don’t tell the whole story. Strength, leadership, responsibility, honour, self-discipline, self-confidence, self-respect, etc. etc., are all things that a man must have. Are those qualities unique to men?? No, women have them too, what separates us is the degree to which they are displayed, and used. A high degree of strength and leadership is normal and even expected, in a man. However, a woman who tries to show those qualities in the same way and to the same degree as is expected in a man, comes off looking unnatural, unwomanly. She has abandoned her womanhood and is trying to fill a role that is not natural for her.
What is “womanhood”?? Frankly, my husband doesn’t know, and I only know from my experiences. I can tell you what men find attractive, or what traits I like to see in a woman, but that doesn’t tell you what it means to “be” a woman. If my husband had to teach that to a little girl she would be at a huge disadvantage because he could only read books on the subject, He can’t lead her into womanhood through example. He don’t have a hope of fostering in her that motherly instinct, or women’s intuition that most women have. Both he and I don’t even know where those things come from, but we both know they’re there. All my husband could do is just wing it, and hope for the best, though I’d be more likely to succeed. I guess I’d say that we should have motherly instincts which include stuff like compassion and caring and we should have respect and should be the ones who take up command in the home fort, so to speak. The situation my husband would find himself in if he was by himself or with another man is the situation that girls are in when being raised by men only, and boys when raised by only women.
So now, before you proceed to attack this post and tell me how I’ve failed to adequately demonstrate what a man or a woman is in an objective manner, you need to think about whether or not you can prove that a homosexual male can be a man and a woman, or that a lesbian can be a woman and a man, in an objective manner. If not, then your expectation for me to provide the counter to that is unreasonable. If not, then your claim that the two are interchangeable is false. I think you’re going to find that, in order to turn them into real men, you’re going to have to have an extremely subjective and flexible description of what a man really is. I think an honest examination of this question of manhood reveals that it’s much easier to point out things that are not “manly”, than to tell one exactly what a man is, in an objective manner.
If you want to see the best example that I can give you of a real man, here in this web post, then watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=j8Pp4Jzk_C4 . You can leave out the references to God if you want because I know that will have no effect on you. But even if you just listen to what he says about being a husband and a father, you’re still left with an example of a Real Man(TM), albeit a movie character. The entire movie is a great one and should be required viewing in high schools.
annejones, try engaging with the evidence that I linked earlier, which appears straightforwardly to contradict your claims about gender and parenting. You haven’t cited any studies so far, just a movie.
Falling back on some ineffable, non-measurable essence of manliness or womanliness – which you admit you can’t actually explain, much less provide any evidence to illustrate – isn’t a very convincing argument, and certainly doesn’t rebut the large amount of evidence demonstrating that kids of same-sex parents fare just as well as those of opposite-sex parents.
annejones:
It’s not as simple as that.
In annejones world, womanliness is a descriptor for what you need to have an exclusive mothers’ group at church. Manliness is obviously the other way round, where men can exclude women from their Secret Mens Business. Ain’t it obvious? It’s just tribalism applied to the sexes. Dare anyone cross that divide, they are sneered at by both sides. Its far easier to out someone by their superficial external appearance than their empathy, care, love, insight, intelligence, strength, health, skill, and so on.
.
Shallow thinking, annejones.
theophontes, if you’re around:
Still supporting the military junta in Egypt? How many people do they have to massacre before you’ll rethink?
Heh, I’ve been on BBC news now too.
Is it just me, or they aren’t reporting about Israel bombing Gaza again today, right before the negotiations?
Beatrice@287,
They’re not, but I’m not seeing that on Al Jazeera either. Where are you seeing it?
Re Gaza, the Muslim Brotherhood is aligned with Hamas, and the junta have acted against the latter as well as the former. Not that I’m any fan of either, of course, but whatever faint “tut-tut”s we may hear from the west about the current crackdown in Egypt, you can be sure no effective action will be taken, any more than against Israeli settlement and (if you’re right) bombing provocations in the run-up to the negotiations.
Ah! It took my rewording of the question we’ve been trying to get annejones to answer for
decadesdays for her to stop ignoring it! I feel… slightly nauseated, actually. Especially after reading it.***
I don’t see that list going much further than “person who identifies as man/woman” without you getting into trouble (and I suspect you know this: “I know exactly what you’re going to do with it but, against my better judgment”). But you did put yourself in that position, so yes, I guess I do.
Why does it need to be instilled in a child at all? What needs to be instilled in children is how to be decent human beings, regardless of their biological sex or gender identity.
And I was raised by heterosexual parents and everything! My biological parents at that! Loving parents too. And I don’t know! What happened annejones, you told me this was the absolute gold standard, and yet I failed to apprehend what it was like to be a Woman™!
And do you know why I failed? Because I grew up looking around myself. At first I may have thought that being a woman meant being like my mother. But being a woman was also being like my only female cousin. And being like each one of my aunts. And like each one of my grandmothers. And like each one of my friends’ mothers. And like my primary school teacher. They were all woman, and they were all different. Radically different. And then I looked around even more and met lesbian woman, trans woman. I learned about genderqueer people. I got the message: you don’t get to tell other people how to be a woman or how to be a man, or that they are not doing it right, or that they are not of the gender they identify as. You just let them be themselves and as long as they’re decent human beings everything is alright. Everything, including them raising children if that is what they wish.
Get it?
See? Gender hardly matters.
Meaningless.
Or rather, he can show him/her what he is. Ideally that would involve showing them how to be a decent human being, but if he is as much of a bigot as you are I don’t think that is very likely.
Actually, the degree to which those traits are displayed and used is what makes individuals precisely that. Individuals. Again, gender hardly matters.
True, but there is nothing wrong with her. The problem, as usual, is you and sexist (this time!) bigots like you. Similarly, if two men raise their daughter to show a high degree of strength and leadership that’s okay and there is nothing wrong with her or with her parents. It’s the sexist assholes that have something wrong with them.
Good for her, I say. By the way, it’s perfectly natural for a woman to be herself.
Or rather, you know what is annejoneshood.
1) You are obsessed with gender. Either your husband knows how to be a decent human being and can show it to her by example, or he doesn’t and can’t.
2) If your husband raised that little girl together with another man, do you think they would plan to keep her in isolation from the outside world? I’m asking because, sure, I had my mom, but I also had other female caretakers and role mothers during my childhood. I mean, it’s not like gay parents plan on raising their children without ever letting them know what a person of the opposite gender is except through books, ffs.
Because a fatherly instinct is radically different form a motherly instinct and fathers don’t love their children as much as mothers do? Because men are incapable of fostering the skill of intuitive thought on children*?
*If you mean men are not as capable of intuition as women, I’m pretty sure the research doesn’t back you up there, but go ahead and look it up. No, I don’t know if there are Decades! of it.
What?
You do realize that I’m not the one who is saying a child needs their parents to be a man and a woman, right? I think they do just fine with two fathers or two mothers, and the research backs me up. Why the hell would I need to prove whatever the fuck it is you mean by “a homosexual male can be a man and a woman, or that a lesbian can be a woman and a man”?
Yeah, whatever, And who the fuck cares if someone with a penis who identifies as a man has qualities that are not generally thought to be “manly”? I mean, apart from bigots?
See, you can do links. So where is the research (decades of it!) you keep talking about?
If only someone had done that for annejones. We should pity her, and of course her children, as well as defending the targets of her bigotry.
“motherly instinct” needs to be taught?
chigau:
To be fair, annejones said fostered, not taught.
Nick,
Other than in Croatian papers, I found it in french:
http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2013/08/14/raid-israelien-sur-la-bande-de-gaza_3461150_3218.html
and
http://news.yahoo.com/israel-strikes-rocket-launching-devices-gaza-060612470.html
Others are writing about the release of some two dozen Palestinians.
@annejones
You know you just fucked up, right? You realise that by admitting that whatever makes a man a man and a woman a woman has to be taught, you have by extension admitted that it is not intrinsic? If something has to be taught, then it can not be intrinsic, the two are mutually exclusive. So you have just admitted that there is no intrinsic “manhood” that means only men can be fathers and no intrinsic “womanhood” that means only women can be mothers. Which means either sex can fulfill either role.
In other words, you have just shot yourself squarely in the foot. And it was very entertaining :)
When your argument resembles General Ripper’s from “Dr. Strangelove”, you may want to reconsider.
I think you may have misunderstood. We don’t need to prove that “a homosexual male can be a man and a woman”, as you put it, because we don’t think that there are parenting qualities provides by a man that cannot equally be provided by a woman. We asked you to define your terms. You have not defined your terms.
Incidentally, this:
is silly, of course, because that’s not how we teach children anything. “Here’s a book on potty training. Have at it!”
Beatrice & Nick,
I was just reading the news and for what it’s worth, Portuguese newspapers are talking about Israel bombing Gaza today too…
Yep. Same annejones that was saying a while back that it was not about genitals, it was about the all “package” that comes with them.
I just finished the rest of AJ’s ridiculous screed. I am honestly crying with laughter :) what a ridiculous load of utter bollocks.
@Nightjar
Oh come on! My colleagues are already casting nervous glances at the crazy man giggling to himself, now I can’t fucking breathe!
My husband would simply take the approach that he did. He supported the activities and behaviours in me that he hoped our daughters would emulate – within the bounds of their own preferences and abilities.
He also modelled “the good husband and father”. He prepared most meals and a lot of other domestic tasks – because he just took it for granted that my persistent injuries from my biological motherhood, bearing children, as well as arthritis – meant that the rest of the family had to take up the tasks that many other households expected from mothers. He enjoyed teaching them to cook. He never made a big deal of it. He just did it.
And he would have done exactly the same if we’d had sons.
Annejones, I checked your teal deer screed for links to real evidence. You know, the academic/scientific literature. There weren’t any, just a link to a video. Video is nothing but opinion. You want to make a point, you need to actually do the research and present the data with something other than your bigoted opinion to back it up. Your opinion is dismissed without evidence to back it up. So, you haven’t said anything in your last few posts. Its like they don’t exist.
Thumper
But if you don’t teach gender differences properly God will hate you and cast you into the lake of fire…it probably says so in the babble somewhere. Wait while I put on my long white robes and interpret it for you.
Gay parenthood is a conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids!!!
@Lofty
And he specifically made those “differences” something that had to be taught and not something that was intrinsic because FREE WILL!!!111elebenty!!11!!
Because being coerced into doing something through the most outlandishly complicated version of the “carrot and stick” method ever concieved is totally still free will *nod nod*.
/sophistimacated theology™
Annejones, what do you think about this woman succeeding in a male dominated sport? Horrible freak or just bloody amazing? Does this affect her ability to be role model to children?
Beatrice, Nightjar
BBC does now have a single sentence about Israeli bombing in Gaza, near the end of a story on the negotiations:
So.
Is ‘flounce’ a homophobic insult
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/08/12/last-word-for-now/comment-page-2/#comment-668987
or a gendered insult?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/08/12/last-word-for-now/comment-page-2/#comment-669006
@chigau
… or the etymological derivative of a Norse word meaning “to leave in a hurry”?
chigau, dunno, seems a bit prissy to me.
Thumper
well…etymology is less important than current usage
—
John Morales
;);)
I have actually wondered that about heterosexism m’self. The reason I have kept this musing private is that I don’t recall the last time I heard the word ‘flounce’ except in this context.
If it has to be taught, it ain’t essential. This is actually the worst complementarian argument I’ve ever fucking heard, and I’ve read the ones from the suffrage ‘debates’.
Oh, and Annejones, I’m still waiting for you to actually keep on going on how ‘the nuclear family has been the building block in all societies’. I’m laughin’ – you don’t even know the history of white people, let alone history of anyone else on the planet. Fuck, there’s societies NOW that don’t practice that shit, they’re just mostly small.
The Egyptian junta has now announced a “state of emergency”, to last a month, after at least 95 deaths (their own figure – the real one is almost certainly higher) in the current crackdown.
So now I continue to wonder: What if the children are all one sex? I come from an all-boy family, so what exactly did my mother bring to the table? Can’t be all that stuff about nurturing and “women’s intuition”, that would have made us unmanly.
I’m guessing the sacred mother woman’s role is…unpaid labor?
For what it’s worth, contrary to Elizabeth Hamilton’s assertion on the “Last Word” thread, when I image-googled “flounce” I got no Scarlett until about six rows down. The third image was a dog dressed as a fighter plane and wearing a cap and goggles.
In my life, I’ve been taught by various sources, that shorts that end above the knee, sitting with my legs crossed, and looking at my fingernails with my hand held straight rather than my fingers curled over my palm, are not manly. So my guess is that it’s all about arbitrary behavior policing and tribalism.
Funny, I just conveyed in one sentence what it took you two and a half computer screens of semi-coherent fumbling to.
@ledasmom:
OMdoggie!
Chigau:
It’s never come across as homophobic to me, because in my mind, it’s always been applicable to all people, and I don’t think of gay men as some sort of effeminate monolith.
I do think it could be used in a sexist way, however, I haven’t seen it used that way here. (Maybe I haven’t been paying close enough attention.)
If it becomes a point of contention, I suppose ‘starfart’ could be used instead, but it doesn’t fit as well.
I can’t speak to whether “to flounce” is sexist, but since I’m a gay dude I feel like I do have an opinion on whether it’s homophobic, and I don’t. If flounce were derived from being inherent to gay people, or if it were used primarily towards gay people (like “mince”, which was brought up in the thread), then I think there’d be an argument for that.
That said, between that and the “butthurt” conversation that won’t die, I’m getting pretty tired of pushing all the fainting couches around for Very Concerned Straight People to pass out on over their outrage at something they deem homophobic without asking any actual gay people about it first. The excessive word policing is annoying enough without straight people treating me as some fragile little flower with tiny little diaphanous gay ears that can’t stand a word with even a teensy imagined whiff of gay undertones that aren’t 100% positive.
Re: flounce.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that if a word has sexist connotations (or homophobic, or racist, or ableist, or…), there is one place you can go to see them laid down in all their ugliness. It almost never fails: Urban Dictionary.
(I don’t know how anyone can look up “butthurt” there and still feel comfortable using it, by the way.)
So I looked up “flounce”. Didn’t see anything particularly damning, so I’m inclined to think the word is fine.
But then… there’s this. And it’s making me slightly uncomfortable, though I don’t think the problem here is the word “flounce” itself, but the idea that women are overly emotional and more likely to get irritated and leave in a huff. The idea that flouncing (or any other equivalent term that is not also a word for a strip of cloth) is something only woman and effeminate men do. That’s probably the problem here, the association of the behaviour, rather than the word, with femininity.
@chigau #310
Indeed. So the modern meaning “to leave in a huff having lost an argument” supercedes any hypothetical etymological connection to a woman’s dress?
Oh dear – I was planning to get mine shortened, because walking in shorts that go just over the knee is so uncomfortable (I’ve been turning them up). But I was going to ask my wife to do it (she’s much more skillful with the needle than I am), so perhaps that would save my manliness. What think you, annejones?
Thumper:
Erm, clothing styles have undergone vast changes since flounce could be commonly and oft used in regard to womens’ clothing.
RahXephon:
I think this is very important to take under consideration as well. As far as I know, this is the first time ‘flounce’ has been brought up as potentially homophobic, which in itself, is rather telling. If many GLBT people felt that way, I’m pretty sure we would have heard about it long before now.
Annejones does not worship god.
Annejones worships at the altar of gender essentialism. Funnily enough, despite proclaiming that she would explain what these essential qualities are that only fathers can pass to sons or mothers to daughters, she never explains anything.
You would think that after 4 or 5 decades of research, she would have some studies to cite.
I’ve been reading here for many years, and I’ve seen ‘flounce’ used hundreds of times, with nary a word said against it, and on Pharyngula, that probably means it’s unlikely to carry any baggage.
That’s not to say Pharyngula commentators can’t be wrong, but just good evidence to me that there’s no compromising association, as these things usually get flagged pretty quickly.
@RahXephon
My position is that I will wait for a gay person or a woman to say they find it insulting before I throw the word out, so it feels like vindication to hear you say that. “Political correctness” is, generally speaking, a good thing, but it can sometimes get silly and when it does, it is almost always (in my experience) a straight, white, cis-gendered person taking offence on behalf of other people.
An example is that, here in the UK, schools/preschools/nurseries no longer sing “Baa Baa Black Sheep”… they sing “Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep”. I originally thought that this was the usual right-wing bollocks being circulated, so I asked my sister, who works with children, and it turns out it’s true. This seemed ridiculous, but I thought there might be connotations I was unaware of, so I then went and spoke to POC I know, and not one found it racist. As my friend Henry put it, “What the fuck? It’s about a fucking sheep”. How many people would like to bet that those guidelines came from a white, straight, cis-gendered rich man in the Department for Education?
@Caine
I know, but that was the connection originally put forward on the “Last Word” thread. Apparently a flounce is a synonym for a ruffle, as on a woman’s dress, and therefore saying someone is “flouncing” is homophobic. *shrug*.
Some of the measures announced under the Egyptian junta’s state of emergency:
*Granting the army the authority to help the police to take whatever action it deems appropriate to maintain security
*Putting restrictions on the freedoms of persons, movement and traffic in certain places at certain times, and the arrest of suspects or persons the authority deem dangerous to public order
*Surveillance on messages of any kind, and monitoring newspapers and publications and all means of advertising prior to publication
Frankly, Thumper, I don’t believe your sister.
Thumper,
If I remember correctly*, it was gay man who first took issue with the word “butthurt” here on Pharyngula and explained why he found it insulting. So I threw the word out. FWIW.
*Meaning that I definitely remember him taking issue with the word, I just don’t remember if he was the first one to do so.
FFS, I go to sleep and wake up to “flounce is homophobic”?? Is this in a parallel reality next to annejones’?
Its funny, but I had never heard of flounce before reading here. I always assumed it a term made up here (that never happens). Guess I was wrong. Still, I have never encountered the word in hetero- or homo- sexual dealings in meatspace.
@RahXephon, Waahmbulance Driver for St. Entitlement’s Hospital:
Oh my. I simply adore this turn of phrase. May I use it in my ‘nym?
____________
Disclosure: I myself am afflicted with teh lezbianizm.
@Polistes, sure, why not?
Mohamed El Baradei has just resigned from his post as Egypt’s interim vice president. I’m no great admirer of his, but it looks as though he at least has realized that supporting a military coup against the Muslim Brotherhood was jumping out of the frying pan, back into the fire.
Polistes:
Bisexual person here. I’ll weigh in again as never having considered ‘flounce’ to be homophobic in any way.
Nightjar:
Yes, and SG did a lot of research and provided it, which made an effective case for tossing ‘butthurt’ out the Pharyngula window. That’s not happening with ‘flounce’ – the opposite is happening. GLBT people, so far, are saying it doesn’t read as homophobic to them.
Nah, that has a specific meaning. It has to be out of proportion, and out of nowhere, that’s what the original starfart was. And it’s not necessarily someone’s exit from a thread.
That IS the real natural order, and it doesn’t matter whether you believe in evolutionism, or creation. Imagine the original ancestor of any sexually reproducing species, they all started with a mother, father, and children. As that process continued and new generations were born, extended families came into being, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. Can you think of any species that reproduce normally then turn the kids over to homosexual members of that species for rearing the newborns?? I can’t. It seems that humans are the only species stupid enough to take that route.
What do you consider the “real” natural order??
Sure, that’s true. When parents are unable to care for the kids it makes perfect sense for the surviving family to care for the kids. Even today in most states when a child becomes adoptable the extended family is given the first option to take the kids. DSS actually prefers to place the kids with other relatives if possible, but they are subject to background checks, homestudies, financial analysis, etc., just like prospective adoptive parents are.
Ok, again death happens, but how does any of this refute the natural order??
No one says that exceptions don’t come up, but they are exceptions, not the norm.
That’s because people like you have been given control of the schools and the media, and recent generations have been reduced to apathy, and have lost any modicum of common sense, on moral issues. Some good ones still slip through though, and many of them will eventually come to their senses when they know what marriage, family, and parenting, are about. Take away the youth vote and see where you stand.
That would require putting limits on our intelligence. I can’t speak to His intentions about the future but I don’t think that was something He wanted us to use our intelligence for.
So you think He WANTS us to have the ability to create life through unnatural means, so that homosexuals can have children?? Umm…Have you ever read the Bible??
First, you keep talking as though you guys on Thunderdome are the representatives of the masses here on FTB or even on the larger national scale. Truth is that most people here and on a broader debate avenue seem apathetic and don’t take part in the conversation on these issues. You guys are good at making it seem like you have way more support than you actually do, so you can keep that up if it makes you feel good.
Second, although it doesn’t mean that they don’t have a right to speak on the issue, most people on your side of the fence have never been married, and never raised children. They have no practical experience on the subject that they’re discussing. They don’t know what it means to “be” a husband or wife, they’ve only seen other people do it. They have no practical experience raising children, they’ve seen childhood from the child’s perspective, but know very little about the big picture. Very few of them have been given any truthful information about what happens, long term, when you enact policies such as those you’re pushing for. Few of them actually know how all these leftist policies have denigrated the family, marriage, and society, over the past 5 decades, nor are they getting accurate information about how homosexuality further denigrates society.
So even if you could prove a majority, an appeal to the majority is a fallacy, but hey if it makes you feel better then knock your socks off.
I agree that hetero adoptive parents, step-parents, etc., deserve the title of parent for loving and raising those kids as they would if they were their own biological kids. I even respect the title of foster “parent”, even though I know that most of the kids that come into my home are going to leave again at some point. We still have to love them and guide them just as if they were our own.
We really do have little disagreement on this issue. Where we disagree is that I think we should strive to make these situations as rare as we possibly can, while you favour policies that increase the number of children that society, rather than the biological parents, are responsible for.
Yeah well once Isabella Miller gets old enough to truly understand what caused her and her mother to be run out of their homeland, the U.S., I’d like to see you try to sell that BS to her about how you think you can’t own people…lol…That’s laughable given your stance on that issue.
Rey:
You’re absolutely right. I was trying to come up with ‘flounce’ alternatives, but nothing else seems to capture the action as well. Hopefully, something will kick in eventually.
Yes, as I tried to explain (in what now reads as a pretty dense couple of sentences), sg not only gave reasons for why he found it insulting, but more importantly provided evidence of intentional homophobic usage of ‘butthurt’.
False
Wikipedia can
@Nick Gotts #329
She works with children, and she confirmed it. No offence, but I trust her over a web page.
I should point out, the nursery rhyme is not banned. It’s not illegal to sing it, and the only people who suggest it is are Right-Wing “it’s PC gone mad!” anti-multiculturalist morons. I don’t even know if it’s the result of “guidelines”, or just a meme that has propagated itself throughout the UK childcare industry. She was simply instructed that now they sing Baa Baa Rainbow sheep, and that is what she teaches the children. *shrug* My point is, wherever it comes from, I bet it didn’t come from listening to POC.
@Nightjar
Yeah, I’m on board with butthurt. The homophobic connotations were immediately obvious to me, and I saw commenters on here I know to be gay describe it as homophobic.
Caine,
Yeah, even Elizabeth admitted that, if anything, the word would read as sexist, not homophobic. Speaking as a woman, the word itself and the way it is used here doesn’t read as sexist to me. I don’t have a problem with it. And apparently no one else does.
Not to mention the many many species that just abandon their young, like, you know, a decent percentage of r-strategists.
@RahXephon – Thank you!! :)
@Caine – Do you remember me? Used to post as “Bonnie” and later as “BMS” – several years ago.
Nightjar:
Same here.
Polistes, yes, I remember you! I am so happy to see you posting again.
@annejones
Lions.
annejones #337
Given that this is a freethought site, and not Bigoted Religious Assholes Inc., then the vast majority of those on FTB disagree with you. As for the larger national scale, don’t conflate apathy to the issue as support for your position; notice all those equality changes going on in the States and the UK?
Chas:
Yes, which is all most people needed to drop it. Given intentional homophobic use, I’d rather not risk using it and upsetting someone.
If someone comes up with an equally rigorous case on ‘flounce’, I’ll give it the same weight I did to SG’s research and reasoning.
Hi, Caine! Wow have you been doing great (and difficult) work here – tip o’ the hat to ya.
Re: “flounce” – eh, it’s fine w/ this lesbian. Reads like, “Well haRUMPF I say – I’m LEAVing. Good day. I say Good Day!” Which is pretty funny.
But an appeal to nature isn’t?
You’re funny sometimes, annejones.
You have a disagreement with reality.
Caine,
\re: advising.
Thanks kindly. Will be in touch.
Polistes:
There’s little point in talking at annejones as long as her head remains firmly lodged in her own shit, but one doesn’t need to go outside their own species. A number of Indian tribes counted on GLBT members of the community to do a lot of the primary work in child rearing. There’s a whole lot going on in the world that is outside aj’s knowledge, because she simply doesn’t want to look past the shit in her mouth.
@annejones
When I said “most people here”, I was referring to here on Pharyngula, you pillock. I wasn’t conflating our opinions with those of the wider FtB community, let alone the “larger national scale” (you are aware this an international community, right?).
No. No Anne, that is not where we disagree at all. Where we disagree is here:
[Emphasis mine]
Why? Why only hetero adoptive parents? Why are you deliberately excluding homosexual adoptive parents from that list? Why do homosexual couples who “lov[e] and rais[e] those kids as they would if they were their own biological kids” not deserve the title of parent? Explain, you bigoted sack of puss-ridden shit.
Caine – True. And I need to watch my blood pressure. Just had a kidney scare. Yeeeesh.
annejones, the hate-filled ignorant bigot,
Whatever happens is the natural order of course. It’s a meaningless phrase, thought to have a useful meaning only by ignorant bigots like you.
Translation: the majority now disagrees with me, but I’m going to blame that on an ebil librul conspiracy.
But it’s the ignorant hate-filled bigots like you that are dying off. The majority against you is only going to grow.
Well if “He” doesn’t, why would “He” need your help to stop it?
Yes. You have a point here: if the biblical god existed, he’d clearly be a hate-filled bigot like you.
Where’s your evidence for this? I’m married, my wife and I have an 18-year-old son – I’m just not an ignorant, hate-filled bigot like you.
Where is all that “decades of research” you claimed exists to show these dire consequences, annejones. You can’t produce it, or you’d have done so by now. Which proves that you are a bare-faced liar.
Polistes:
Reads that way to me as well. I don’t think Elizabeth has a good case for tossing flounce out the window. Good, because my vocabulary and just about every other brain function has deserted me in the last couple of days. Brain want vacation. :D
Cuervodecuero:
Anything I can do, I will. You might want to put out a call for any advocate in the area in the Lounge, too, just in case you haven’t done so already.
It is my understanding that many of the Pacific Islander cultures do this as well.
RE: Flounce
It looks as though it ran afoul of the niggard (old anglo saxon word meaning a miser or skinflint) problem. Two completely different etymologies leading to similar, or in the case of flounce identical, sounding words with no actual relation to each other. So unless someone actually gets seriously offended by it, which I don’t see happening, no worries.
Polistes:
Yikes. That doesn’t sound good. I have to be careful that epic threads full of doucheweasels don’t repeatedly break my pancreas. When I get seriously involved, I forget to eat, then the pancreas starts making major threats. So yeah, it’s important to watch out for yourself.
Docfreeride made me laugh in the epic thread by noting that she heard one particular asshole in the voice of Droopy Dog, helped keep her blood pressure down. Now she has me doing that with all kinds of asses.
@Nick Gotts
I think that was Anne assuming that all proponents of gay marriage must be gay. Because obviously no red-blooded hetero could ever be on the side of teh gayz.
Hey Anne! I’m hetero too! *waves* Hi!
Pardon me, your most high Dipshittedness, you are once again depending on assfax. Most people on this side of the fence (otherwise known as Reality Land, the home of Decent Human Beings) are married or in long term partnerships and have children.
I’ve been married for 34 years, Oh Fuckwitted One. Try and cram that little fact up your not so noble arse.
I’d let others deal with the oblivious annejones except someone ought to address these issues of general zoology.
All sexually reproducing species have mothers, fathers, and “children” (actually a human-specific term, analogous to ‘shoats’, but anyway) in the sense of egg-donor, sperm-donor, and zygotes/offspring, but parental care of any kind is rare.
AFAIK among the vast majority of animals (‘invertebrates’) it consists only of protecting (brooding or carrying) the young, and this is always (afaik) the female’s job (inc. social insects).
For vertebrates, in the few fishes and frogs with parental care, it’s the male’s job. In caecilians, it’s the female (she actually feeds the young–pieces of her skin!). Crocodilians: females. In mammals, parental care is ubiquitous and it’s always the female (on account of ineluctable details of reproductive physiology); very very few male mammals provide any parental care at all. Only in birds is biparental care the norm.
Beyond that, ‘families’, in which a breeding pair live with offspring from multiple breeding seasons, are extra-super rare. Even there, it almost always occurs in the context of larger group-living (flocks or herds or troops, which may or may not be mostly kin, depending). Some corvids (crows, ravens, jays, etc.) and a few other birds, and some human societies live in nuclear families, and that’s pretty much a complete list (possibly some cichlid fish, meerkats, and I’m guessing maybe some rodents and other primates, but the point is it’s exceedingly unusual).
So you can take yer naturalistic fallacy, shove it, and return to 1950s TV sitcoms as your source of what’s right and good and normal and natural.
hmm, no, I can’t either. But that’s because no other species is known to include exclusively “homosexual members,” let alone such members recognized as such by other “normal” members.
And also because “species” don’t make decisions in the way you seem to imply here. Individuals can make decisions, and when enough make the same decision then societies can seem to make decisions. (That goes for nonhuman societies too.) Not species.
@Caine
Thank you so much, I needed to laugh at least once before I left :)
@Everyone
Speaking of which, I have to go or I’ll be late for kickboxing. Have fun with Annie. ‘Night all!
Caine,
Hearing the dribblings of “Rope Avenger” in the voice of the Hybrid from BSG: Razor helped mine. Tee hee.
I’m (and my kidneys) actually OK. Primary care doc over-reacted to an errant lab work / probable contaminated sample and sent me to a nephrologist. Yikes! The nephrologist promptly sent me away with the diagnosis of being in my late 40s. “And don’t come back.” :)
Polistes:
Hahahahaha, yeah, I know that one. I’m 56 now, and the bod ain’t what it used to be.
[de-lurks]
Well, I popped in here to have a look around, and spotted this from annejones:
I had to check my calendar to reassure myself that time had not somehow slipped back two centuries, and that we are, indeed, in 2013 and not 1813.
Really, annejones? Really?
Wow. Just wow.
Hearty, sustained applause and thanks to all of you who have the stomach to dissect annejones’s spewings. I appreciate the reasoned, factual approach.
annejones, you may want to consider laying aside your shovel sooner rather than later, although I daresay you may not appreciate the rich entertainment value you are providing here.
[re-lurks]
“Asking who’s the ‘man’ and who’s the ‘woman’ in a same-sex relationship is like asking which chopstick is the fork.” — Ellen DeGeneres
I’m about to leave for birthday-lunch, so someone may have already mentioned this, but I would like to see txpiper’s statistics re-run, factoring in poverty as a variable. I’m thinking that we’re seeing corelation (like the apparent connection between ice cream and drowning deaths in swimming pools) rather than causation. And all that poverty comes bundled with, socially, educationally, nutritionally—heck alla that stuff.
–
I’ve read most of it, it’s a pretty terrible book. I can’t remember any “Thou shalt not create life through unnatural means so that homosexuals can have children” part though. I think God is mostly concerned with whether or not we’re worshiping the wrong gods.
(sits back and waits for the inevitable stretching of the word “worship” to claim that we worship science or IVF or liberal adoption laws or some such bollocks)
Then how do the little boy mammals learn strength, leadership, responsibility, spitting, shotgunning beers and all the other natural gender roles that nonetheless need to be rigidly enforced socially?
annejones:
As others have pointed out, many of us are married. I’ve been married, what, 12 years now. We’ve been together 22, in a married-like relationship for the first 10 years. I have a daughter that is 25. My current wife and I raised a niece as our own.
When I was married to my daughter’s mom, do you think we had any experience raising kids? Do you think any couple really has experience raising kids until they have their first one?
What makes a hetero couple special about seeing “the big picture?” Then again, what is “the big picture,” as you see it?
Near as I can tell, the big picture is this: we’re all in this together. We share this world with an unbounded spectrum of human experience. We rely on the kindness of strangers for our very existence — strangers who may fall anywhere in that rainbow of existence. Why would you treat these strangers with anything less than respect?
We are all in this together.
Rey:
I’ve read all of it, more than once, more than one version. If you’re looking for a book on how to be a sadistic psychopath, that’s the book for you! If you’re looking for a guide on how to be a thinking, decent human being, not so much.
As for creating life via “unnatural” means, I think her most high Dipshittedness should run after all those horrible hetero couples using IVF to conceive, because obviously, even though they are hetero and doing that whole ‘mommy, daddy, nuclear famblee’ thing, it’s terrible and awful and horrible and against ol’ El Shaddai and stuff.
Lunch delayed, so I’ve got caught up. Yay!
–
flounce (v.) Not seeing gender, or even tailoring.
My admittedly uneducated guess would be that any “genderization” of the word takes place where huffiness and fancy skirts collide.
–
I notice that annejones still hasn’t commented on the research I’ve repeatedly linked on this thread, which contradicts her assertions. Nor has she bothered to back up her assertion about “decades of research” with any links whatsoever to any actual research.
Hmm. I need to re-consider my reaction to annejones’ postings. I’ve been trying to be a nicer person lately, and there I was, referring to annejones’ postings as “spewings.”
Well, here goes.
[takes deep breath]
annejones, I appreciate your appropriate use of block quotes, pretty good spelling, and generally clean syntax; you seem to do better with these than do most hateful bigots.
Cicely:
*snortle* Perfect!
Walton:
Don’t wait, because you’ll be waiting until death. Annejones has perfected her little drive by dumps, and will not actually answer anyone, let alone all the specific people who keep refuting her a/o asking questions of her.
Ages ago now, when she was relatively new to her drive by dumps on Thunderdome, she made a remark about how, unlike others, she wasn’t “super-duper mean to gay people.” I asked for a specific explanation and clarification on just what qualified as being “super-duper” mean, more than once, and so did others. Never did find out, either. I must admit, I’m still very curious about how aj defines being “super-duper mean”, because it seems to me she’s doing a bang up job of it.
Quodlibet:
You can thank all the people here who persisted in teaching aj that little trick.
@Caine:
She did, kinda, @#194 above (no donor sperm/eggs/surrogates allowed!).
More “think of the unadopted orphans!!!”
Hi Caine, Fleur du mal – Of course, I was being facetious, but yes, I do thank you for teaching aj that small, but important skill. The fact that aj can present hir ideas clearly makes the dissection easier and more entertaining.
Too bad aj is less receptive to learning more important concepts, such as Human Biology is Varied and Wide-Ranging; Kindness 101; and Good Parenting is Not Gender-Dependent. :-)
I just want to say; am I ever sorry that I even tried to be nice to EllenBeth Wachs.
Walton,
The last sentence she quoted on her last comment was from a comment before yours, so I suspect she hasn’t gotten there yet. She doesn’t read the whole thread before posting, she responds as she catches up.
Not that I expect her to comment on the research you linked to, but there’s no way to know for sure until you see her responding to comments posted after yours.
Caine,
Oh. Yes, I remember that.
Quodlibet:
Oh, I didn’t do it. Others did, among them notably Chigau, who persists in attempting to get blockquoting skills into one thick skull after another.
I’m still pissed off I never got an actual answer regarding “not super-duper mean to gay people.”
Janine:
Oh fuck. I’m afraid to ask, because I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.
…I looked. Urgh indeed. Twitter place to start
I’m not sorry I tried to be nice to her… but I’m very sorry she’s gone wholeheartedly down the pit.
She has come out full on Slymie. She has laughed about one person getting a Twitter death threat (It is just a troll, get over it.) and threatened to let her job know about it.
She tweeted about how safe she felt at TAM because one should be responcible for one’s own alcohol consumption.
She has been call for a lawsuit again PZ. (And did you know PZ posted that because he is looking for blog hits?)
And, Caine, you might find this funny. After, PZ posted that long running thread, SubMan asked EGW and Edward Gemmer what their opinion of the piece was.
And there is more. So much more.
Pteryxx:
Yeah, so did I. I was right, I didn’t want to know. *sigh* Seems EllenBeth has a lot in common with Dr. Robert Gross. They should look each other up.
Thank you for that link, Pteryxx.
And, oh yeah, she mocked Melody Hensley’s case of PTSD by claiming she now has it.
Wow.
Every time I think ANNEJONES could not make another utterly banal pronouncement, the lackwit proves me wrong.
#337 is full of idioces.
1-i daresay, the vast majority of bloggers and commenters at FtB *do* agree with us. However, evven if they did not, the fuckwit is assuming others share in her bigotry.
2-no one on our side knows what it is like to be married or have children. OMG, I feel like thumper, earlier. Glad I am not at work. This is the most unintentionally hilarious thing she has ever said. She is so clueless. I am not, nor have I ever been, married or a father. Why do I often feel in the minority then?
Someone called it earlier. She thinks everyone defending equality is gay.
Janine:
I’m pretty sure you can imagine the look on my face. I’m sitting here, telling myself that banging my head into a wall, hard, would not help and it would hurt. A lot. I don’t think it would hurt as much as all that shit they are spreading about, though. I think I’ll get mister and the monster dogs and go for a walk.
Hell, annejones never bothered to answer Cubist’s criticism of her anti-evolutionary blathering.
Sorry about that, Caine.
I notice that after the initial bit directed at Wachs, they leave her the fuck alone.
(not at Caine, just in general)
I don’t want to know either, but IMHO at some point (as each has the spoons or stomachs for it) it’s important to bear witness to this stuff. These aren’t people raised by fundies or confused by rape culture or kept ignorant by lack of education about consent. They were part of our community at one point and they considered themselves feminists – many of them still do. The only commonality I can see is that their perception of a personal attack overrides any capability to look at evidence. Lovebombing before facts, or facts before lovebombing?
*shrug* If Dr. Gross goes that way, we should see it about this time next year. I tried to be nice to him too, and I won’t forget it.
The bible can be interpreted to say almost anything. But one thing that is very consistent is that when something is about to happen that he does not approve of, he will stop it from happening.
He did NOT stop this from happening. Ergo, he must approve.
He created this universe, remember? Set in place all the physical laws. Technology can only accomplish what the physical laws of reality allow. Anything those laws DO allow ergo MUST be what the creator intended, because the creator designed those laws. And THIS creator is also supposed to be omniscient, so he would know EXACTLY EVERYTHING that the laws that he designed would allow to happen.
If he did not want homosexuals to have children, he would have designed a universe where that was not possible and NO mere human technology would ever be able to make it so. Since he did not, he must approve.
Quodlibet:
You may want to avoid reading any more of ANNEJONES’ hateful screeds. Her most High Dipsittidness has a unique knack for bringing out the not-so-nice side of me (aaaand I would guess a few others too, though said dislike is not borne of irrational, unbridled, biblical hatred and bigotry). She has been posting her bigoted wall 0′ texts for a while. First time she delivered a pitch perfect Gish Gallop. Quite talented at that she was.
Does annejones not remember that nearly every one of her “arguments” have been from the child’s perspective? How the CHILD does not get to learn this or that, or how the CHILD will have trouble internalizing this or that?
Every time I hear of the harassment people get on Twitter, I wonder what the benefits of it are. Especially with that pesky 140-character limit.
(Note: not a Twitterer)
Not exactly.
Billions of individuals of sexually reproducing species today pretty much reproduce by throwing their sperm out in their massive billions, on the off chance that some will meet the egg of the female of the species. The offspring result when sperm and egg meet, and are then dropped by the “female” with no care whatsoever.
Pollen is plant sperm.
Many species that provide care for their offspring do so with same-sex collectives or couples. Some of those same-sex couples mount each other, and could therefore be described as homosexual.
Your bigotry is noted.
The point is that what you think of as the “norm” isn’t, and rarely has been.
Because you can magically read God’s mind?
Of course, “creating life through unnatural means” is exactly what God did. If God is morally perfect, then God is to be emulated, so “creating life through unnatural means” is exactly what we should be doing.
Of course, what’s actually happening is not “unnatural”, since all of biology and biochemistry is natural. And it isn’t life being “created”, since all of the cells involved are already alive. I guess we aren’t so good at emulating God, but in that case, your criticism is meaningless.
The Bible says, among other things, that rapists should be given their victims, if said victim was not betrothed or married. That means, of course, that the rapist will have custody of the victim’s future child and additional children.
You, above, said that that was an asinine idea. I agree, of course, but you’re basically saying that the God of the Bible is asinine. So you don’t think that the Bible is a good guide to figuring out what God “really” wants, assuming God exists.
Of course, another way of figuring out “what God wants” is to look at nature — where we do see all sorts of different ways of raising children, including homosexual couples.
You mean like most people in the Western world are becoming apathetic about marriage equality, and are slowly but surely passing laws to allow same-sex marriage?
Because you have magical powers of magically knowing the private lives of everyone everywhere?
It is impossible to know things that are false, so you don’t know such things either.
The irony here is palpable.
. . . Thereby contradicting your previous assertion.
Do you not care that you contradict yourself?
Homosexuals have been producing offspring “naturally” throughout human history. Not necessarily willingly, bearing in mind the chattel status of most women and the desire to keep up appearances for men, but this idea that being not-straight means you can’t or won’t or don’t want to reproduce is just ridiculous.
These assholes really get off on their “one-man-one-woman” schtick don’t they? They just seem to enjoy inflicting as much anxiety and hurt as they can.
*blood pressure, blood pressure*
But what of the ability to sustain life through unnatural means?
The original ancestor of all sexually reproducing species was a single celled organism that had only a single gender.
Single celled organisms with this kind of mating pattern remain the most common of all sexually reproducing organisms on the planet to this day.
Offspring with same sex parents was the original pattern, is still the most common pattern, and has always been most common pattern. It is the most natural of all natural configurations, at least on this planet.
If a creator designed the tapestry of life on this planet, then same sex families was the arrangement he favored the most and made the most of. It is high time we humans started conforming again with the wishes of our maker.
And yet annejones obstinately flouts the creator’s will, manifest in his creation, the Book of Life.
Repent, annejones! Repent!
What could be more natural than in vitro fertilization? (Or any other procedure with similar steps)
The gametes involved are wholly natural, created within wholly natural bodies. The water in which the reaction takes place is wholly natural. The glass of the containers? Wholly natural. The metal of the syringes? Wholly natural. The humans who developed the procedures? Wholly natural. Not cyborgs. The humans who perform the procedures? Wholly natural. The humans who ask for the procedure? Wholly natural. The motivation for having the procedure? What could be more natural than the desire to have children?
All natural, all the way down.
Time to start up that research into making humans parthenogenetic!
God has shown the way! Time to emulate him!
More fucked-uppedness to add to the pile: http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2013/08/the-gospels-are-anonymous-geddit/
I know I’m late to the discussion but I wanted to say that the only reason I’ve personally tossed out “butthurt” and called it out in the Last Word thread* was because of SGBM’s arguments about it. I totally get being annoyed with straight people white-knighting (or whatever the equivalent is) and I will stop if I should. I just want to say I only said something to the user of the term because of what SGBM said before about it, which thoroughly convinced me it was Bad. I don’t even want to go look at the urban dictionary definition…
I had yucky feelings about the word for quite a while, and couldn’t quite elucidate them. It feels to me also like it might be misogynist, because of the aforementioned attribution of hurt feelings to femininity. That could be misguided, and I don’t need it to be true to stop using the word. These are my unsolicited thoughts about the term and why I objected to it in that thread.
*I realized I should have qualified it with something akin to “not everyone is offended by it” but I thought of that too late. I also didn’t intend to derail the thread with the comment about it, so I apologize for that.
Portia, it was no big deal, really. I’m not sure what Elizabeth’s motivation with ‘flounce’ was, she seems to take everything talked about here seriously, but with her pronouncement that she refuses to “go to thunderdome” in place, Imma a little wary of what’s going on there.
@ Nick Gotts
I do not. I am however very anti the misogynistic, bigoted clusterfuck called the Muslim Brotherhood. Spot the difference, if you can.
Fuck off with your lies and your apologist bullshit. This is not a soccer match where we pick sides. Both the military thugs and the Brotherhood thugs are a complete disaster for Egypt. Are you pissed off with me about something else Nick? Should we talk about that rather?
…
By some co-incidence, this evening I happen to have been scanning my old pre-digital images from when I lived in the Sudan. I look at all my old colleagues. Their lives ruined by the fucking Muslim Brotherhood. All of my local colleagues ghosted and/or tortured by the Muslim Brotherhood led junta. Sudan is what a Muslim Brotherhood country looks like. It is one big inhumane fuckup.
I’ll draw the transmutation circle!
The slymie troll known as EG has moved on to harassing people not involved with FtB and A+.
He is now storifying many of the tweets of the person who wrote of Storify’s part on enabling a stalker.
It should come as no surprise that EG also does not like transgendered people much. He has storified transgendered women talking about what a relief it is to live full time and how normal it becomes.
Sadly, EG is not just our problem anymore.
Thanks Caine.
Yeah, anyone who won’t go to the Tdome (come to the Tdome, I guess, since I’m here now) seems a little disingenuous or ill-informed. Either they have gotten the idea that they will necessarily be unfairly and/or harshly shredded or they just don’t want to be held accountable. Probably the second one, in which case there’s a lack of good faith. *shrug*
Here is Stephanie Zvan chronicling the exchanges between Sarah Jones and EllenBeth Wachs.
It gets really ugly.
Looks like Dave Silverman approves of the latest “Mr Deity” video. What a surprise.
#410 Goodbye Enemy Janine
Ohhhhh, shit. Now, is the only time I feel guilt over been “brutal” to her before, not because I was wrong but because that’s what lead her to be such an awful person to people recently.
(Note: Have not followed her or her downward spiral since the last PZ post on the subject and people held her in high esteem before so I’d assume she wasn’t doing this shit before the Andria Richards thread.)
———————–
———————–
#411 Walton
More ughhhhhhhhhhhh.
Caine, Portia:
I wonder if some commenters do not know what the Thunderdome is. Some people describe it, but some simply link to it. Perhaps Elizabeth is wary bc xe does not know what to expect.
JAL, I doubt that the treatment she got here lead her to acting like that. Hell, her current allies had a sustained series of abuse directed at her for a while. I tried to act as a peace maker because of that abuse, no one deserves that. But I did not know that EBW would also act in this way.
Its like these guys do not understand the difference between claims made by persons unknown to EVERYONE and claims made by persons that are known and trusted by SOME people, but unknown to others.
Walton:
Oh for…*screams*
What in the hell is going on here, where one supposedly good guy after another ignites flame and turns into a doucheweasel?
Man, I think I’m going to make my pancreas a nice tuna sammich, then tune out to a Richard Kadrey book, where it’s a bit easier to identify the bad guys.
#414 Goodbye Enemy Janine
*sigh*
True but there’s a difference between what I rationally understand and what I feel. Stupid Catholic upbringing. In the Midwest no less so it was also very heavy on being “polite”. I can’t even count the times I was told “Children are seen not heard” and “Women should speak when spoken to”.
http://skepchick.org/2012/07/speaking-out-against-hate-directed-at-women-david-silverman/
—
JAL, I can also attest that EllenBeth getting smacked down on Pharyngula wasn’t the first or only incident. Before that, she went off on several of us promoting A+Scribe because of a misunderstanding over permissions, after we tried to correct her and the friend she was defending. That was in Greta’s comments.
Admittedly, the Silverman post on Twitter looks to me like it was automatically shared when he clicked “like” on the video, so I don’t know how much thought he put into it.
I see EBW still thinks it’s perfectly okay to say awful things about anyone she likes, but they better apologize if they say something about her she doesn’t like, by gosh!
Fuck. Fucking douchebag. I don’t watch Mr. Deity’s videos regularly so I didn’t really know what to expect, I’m neither disappointed nor particularly surprised, just… angry. Tired. It just doesn’t stop.
And… I just remembered something that happened a few years ago. And I wish Algernon was here, because now I feel like a owe her an apology.
theophontes,
Easy: one was the elected government, the other is a military junta. Both are oppressive and misogynistic, but only one has carried out massacres and imposed a “state of emergency”:
Granting the army the authority to help the police to take whatever action it deems appropriate to maintain security
Putting restrictions on the freedoms of persons, movement and traffic in certain places at certain times, and the arrest of suspects or persons the authority deem dangerous to public order
Surveillance on messages of any kind, and monitoring newspapers and publications and all means of advertising prior to publication
I haven’t told any lies. It’s not a soccer match, but yes, we did pick sides. You supported the coup (while refusing to admit that’s what you were doing), I opposed it. Anyone who wants can go back to this thread, and see the likes of this:
I point out in that thread that when the Egyptian people had a chance to make their will known in elections, the Muslim Brotherhood won; and moreover, that Morsi’s opponents – who were able to burn down the Brotherhood’s HQ without police or army interference, so clearly there was zero chance of Morsi being able to establish a dictatorship – did have alternatives, specifically a series of one-day general strikes, which if they really had the Egyptian people behind them, would have demonstrated that fact. Anyone can go back and check that whole you were certainly mealy-mouthed about it, you clearly regarded army rule as preferable to the continuation of Morsi’s rule. I disagreed. So we picked sides. Are you yet ready to concede that you picked the wrong side? If not, what would persuade you that you had? Are you, indeed, prepared to condemn the army’s actions of today?
Nightjar:
There are too many of us in that club. About Algernon, she posted in a thread the other day. I know she has a blog, and I used to have the link for it, but that was on the last laptop that melted down. I’m pretty sure Walton would be able to help you get in touch with her.
Pardon my ignorance, I watched Mr. Deity video, and maybe I got distracted (Ok I know I did, I got a phone call) so did I miss the awfulness? I don’t get what’s wrong with it, if someone would be inclined to spell it out for me. (I’m a little braindead after the day I’ve had, I apologize).
So a friend of mine just informed me that Pensacola will be having Science fiction, horror, fantasy convention in February called PensaCon. Excited as I was, having never been to one, given the harassment problems at various cons, I decided to email the organizers:
I hope to get a positive response.
*applause* for Tony :)
Portia:
Not having watched it, I think it has to do with the nature of anonymous claims. I believe there is an epilogue to addresses the Shermer allegations directly or alludes to them.
OK what I got was Joseph Smith Jr. teaching Mr. Deity how to read ancient languages, and Mr. Deity telling Joe that he has to take out the racist parts of his new religion.
Huh, someone fancies herself a Slayer I see…
}:)
It was the first word that came to mind, must have it on the brain ;)
The second word was “Eviscerator”
@Portia
I think the questionable part is in the section after the main video, where he’s out of character, talking to the camera. I’m not 100% because I frankly don’t have the energy for any more bullshit right now.
Oh, that would explain it, I closed the tab after the main part, didn’t know there was more
JESUS H CHRIST WHAT A FUCKING ASSHOLE.
(Yeah I continued watching).
DON’T YOU INVOKE THE CONFRONTATION CLAUSE, FUCKER. You clearly don’t understand it.
(Yeah I got to the “confront witnesses” part).
Then he asks for donations…guess MRAs’ money is green, too.
Portia:
Yep, it’s in the afterword. For those who don’t know, after the usual Mr. Deity vid closes, Brian does an afterword, as he often does. In this one, he uses the gospels as an excuse to expound on how no one, especially genius skeptics, should ever accept an anonymous statement. Then he goes on to lecture women about drinking, all of which boils down to “hey, don’t want to be raped, well, don’t get raped. Duh.” Short form: women who drink are slutty, they don’t say “no” to another drink, therefor, they are responsible.
Yeah, and only people “without backbones” get raped. What a fucking flying fucker.
Pteryxx, I’d love to give Silverman the doubt. Perhaps he didn’t watch the complete video. Let’s see if someone alerts him about the afterword, then see what he has to say.
I just want to say to him “Say that to my face, fucker.” Seriously. Tell me I was date raped with alcohol because I’m a doormat. Tell me that. Fuccccck.
Ok I might be triggered, I’m not sure. I’m leaving my office and going home now. Deepbreaths.
Caine,
I thought I had the link to her blog too but now I’m getting a message saying it doesn’t exist any more. I don’t know if she remembers it, it was years ago and we were both posting under different nyms. The comments are gone, not even the Wayback Machine seems to have them, which means I can’t go refresh my memory. But yeah, I’m feeling bad about it.
On the other hand, if she’s trying to take a break or just stay away from this shit I don’t want to disturb her by reminding her of it just so I can feel better about some things I said and did 3 or 4 years ago. It’s not that important. If she was/is around that’s one thing, but if she isn’t… I’m not sure.
Caine: yeah, I don’t know anything about Silverman past that statement last year. He hasn’t replied to anything on Twitter… from his feed I’m not sure that’s even how he rolls. Hope someone closer to him points it out… and that he actually bothers to look and respond. For all we know the video was intended to bait him.
@ Caine,
I just decided to come see what the Thunderdome was. I thought it was going to be one step above banishment or something like that. The place to send trolls. Before relegating them to the Slymepit or the Dungeon. “Thunderdome” sounds like a place you get hit with lightning bolts. I went to the Slymepit already. PZ specifically asked me not to report back.
What is the difference between here and the Lounge, is it only that there’s no moderation? You seem to discuss the same sort of things in the Lounge and in Thunderdome. Also, Where is the Dungeon? Or, should I look that one up on Urban Dictionary? (Have been spending a lot of time there since I began to read Pharyungula.)
By the way, I did not intend to derail anything with “flounce”.
Tony, and all the rest of you in that conversation – thank you; thanks to you all, even annejones’ repulsive bigotry and utter inhumanity can also be a source of amusement.
annejones, you don’t get to spout homophobic bigotry without running the risk that people will notice – and oh my, perhaps even comment – that you are a bigot and a homophobe. Oh, and I happen to be cis het and living in a nuclear family – unlike you, though, I just don’t feel any burning need to oppress others by denying them the same rights that I already enjoy.
Children need loving, supportive relationships with adults who care for them, annejones, and who show them how to be decent human beings by being decent human beings themselves – that is the gold standard, not your sad little fantasy Flintstones nuclear family.
Elizabeth:
I did not think you were trying to derail the other thread. It still was a derailment. Thats one of the good things about The Lounge & The Thunderdome. Both are places to talk about what you want. The Lounge is for kinder conversations, not blow out and arguments. Over there we discuss all manner of topic, but try to avoid topics of a controversial nature or ones that are polarizing (vegetarianism, for instance). The Thunderdome, OTOH is the place for heated discussions and arguments. As the heading says, we can say what we want here. PZ does have limits though, so the Dome is not completely unmoderated. The Dome is also a place teh Poopyhead will banish people to if they are disruptive in other threadd, rather than outright banning. There used to be a dungeon, but PZ got rid of it. I forget why.
For more details, click the ABOUT button above the banner.
FYI, I do not know how much of the Pit you have read, but lets just say that they are automatically banned at Pharyngula, and many people here have little patience for them or their supporters. Personally I despise the place and loathe any of the commenters from there that I have encountered.
I say this so that on the off chance you become sympathetic to them you are not taken aback by any responses you get here.
The lounge is where one must play nice and polite. Thunderdome is a no-holds-barred arena. Both are open threads, so any topic can be discussed. More controversial topics, that might elicit strong emotions and strong responses, should be presented in the Thunderdome. Both are monitored, the Lounge heavily, the Thunderdome very lightly.
Just a word of caution. If you bring something up in the Lounge, and everybody say take it to the Thunderdome, do so ASAP.
Xposted from Ophelia’s, my transcript.
—
I want to take this time today to answer this question I get a lot: why don’t I believe in the gospels.
Um — the first big problem I have with the gospels is that they are anonymous — a lot of people don’t know that, but it’s true.
Um, and no good skeptic, atheist, freethinker should ever accept any anonymous report just offhand; aah especially when we’re talking about something truly awful — I mean, the gospel writers have Jesus doing some pretty ugly stuff. Umm, killing a tree for no reason, which makes him look completely insane; they have him claiming to be God, which would have been a major blasphemy within Judaism at the time; and they have him turning water into wine, which we all know is just a tactic to get the ladies drunk — right? — I mean, no-one turns water into wine for any reason that’s not just completely nefarious!
But if you’re gonna talk [whoopee noise] about someone like that, you can’t do that anonymously — and if you do, what is that? What are we talking about?
That’s nothing more than gossip.
And I think that as good skeptics, atheists, freethinkers, we should all know how absolutely toxic, disgusting and beneath us it is to repeat and or report mere gossip.
[Person with wine bottle approaches wineglass-holding Mr. Deity: “would you like a refill?”
“Um, no. Thank you.”]
Now. See how easy that was?
Here’s another little tip: if you find it hard to say no to the refill, you can just leave the glass full! Don’t take another sip!
That’s my friendly little piece of advice to those of you without a backbone, or any sense of personal responsibility!
The other problem with the gospels is that these anonymous reports are made years after the fact; some scholars say decades.
Ah, that gives Jesus no opportunity to refute the claims — I mean, there isn’t a decent justice system in the entire world that doesn’t give the accused the right to confront his or her accuser. That’s just basic justice.
And in many cases, even the witnesses of the witnesses are anonymous.
Really?!
C’mon! We’re skeptics!
We don’t take stuff like that at face value!
The other problem here is confirmation bias: the tendency to see only what we wanna see.
That’s clearly what the gospel writers were doing here; they wanted a hero (or a villain, depending on your perspective), and they found one!
But, as good skeptics, we should all know the power of confirmation bias — I mean, for heaven’s sake, they found witches in Salem, and Joe McCarthy found the communists under every bed — as skeptics, we need to stand up to these anonymous gossipal authors and those who would repeat such gossip and say “have you no sense of decency, Sir! At long last, have you left no sense of decency.”
Of course, if you’re completely divorced from the skeptic community, I don’t expect you to understand these basic principles — but the rest of us should know better!
Remember: “do unto others”
I think Thunderdome is a Mad Max reference. It’s a place where you can have a good scrap and settle your differences without cluttering up other threads with more specific subjects. We fight trolls here, sure, but this is also the place to take heated discussions of any kind, including those with other Hordelings.
The Lounge is more for casual chit chat. The Rules describe the intended focus of each thread.
Elizabeth, I know you did not intend to derail the other thread. However, when people point out that something is a derail and to please take it to thunderdome, please do just that.
Thunderdome is one of two open threads on Pharyngula. The other is the Lounge. There used to be only one open thread, TET (The Endless Thread), but things got contentious to the point of no return at one time, so now we have two. The Lounge is place where you can talk about anything, and it is okay to have disagreements, but the level is to be kept cool and kind at all times. Thunderdome is a place where you can indulge in no holds barred discussions of all kinds. Trolls are sometimes banished here, where their nonsense won’t be derailing other threads, and we can all enjoy a chewtoy.
Some helpful links: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/08/01/pharyngula-standards-practices/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/08/06/the-new-rules/
http://pharyngula.wikia.com/wiki/Pharyngula_Wiki
The Dungeon is now demolished, as it had become problematic, thanks to the various doucheweasels at the ‘pit.
Also, Elizabeth, I hope you noted the discussion regarding the usage of flounce. Right now, the consensus is that the usage is fine and not problematic when it comes to splash damage. Your concern was taken seriously and discussed. I hope you’ll realize that it’s fine to bring up such subjects, and the horde is always happy to discuss them.
Nightjar:
Yeah, not an easy situation. As I said, I’m pretty sure Walton could help you get in touch, or relay a message for you. I don’t know what would be the best thing to do here, either, so I’m not exactly much help. I wish I had a magic answer for you.
Yep. And somehow, death threats = funny things you shouldn’t take seriously, but calling someone a sociopath = SERIOUS LIBEL.
On Thunderdome v. lounge – Lounge is My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Thunderdome is Super Smash Bros Brawl.
John Morales –
thank you for transcribing that!
carlie:
I think some of the subject matter in The Lounge would make Anyone’s Little Pony shit rainbows and run far away.
Still, I like your comparison.
As such, no, “homosexual parent” is not self-contradictory,
A (one) homosexual can be A parent, but two homosexuals together can’t be “parents”. Parents, whether biological, adoptive, or step-parents, consist of a mother and father figure. A child raised by homosexuals can logically, at most, only have one mother or one father, the other one is just the one that the parent is playing house with. Even if I gave you that they have two mother or two fathers, that’s still only more of the same that the one homosexual parent provides, so there still aren’t any “parents”, plural.
Umm…seeing as though you seem to like putting your weiner in that stuff, I feel sexually harassed by that comment.
<blockquoteTell me annejones, how do you deal with families where the parents are a heterosexual couple, but the man is the stay-at-home parent (doing the housework and child-rearing), and the woman is the bread winner? "Cause without involving genes and genitals, it seems to me that all that remains of "parenting" is in the roles.
I can see that as a short term solution, but I don’t think it’s good long term. I think it sends a bad message to kids about parental roles. It feminizes the men and puts the responsibility for providing for the family entirely on the woman. I don’t think that is good for a man’s self-esteem, or for the family in general. Can it work?? Sure, I guess it could be made to work and the kids still do have a mother and father, but I just can’t imagine any man feeling really good about himself in that role. I could do it for a little while, but long term, no way.
Convincing people that kids don’t need mothers or fathers, that 2 of the same thing can be just as good, even when it means encouraging people to have children outside the bounds of marriage and turn to non-monogamous forms of creating life, isn’t poisoning society?? Sorry but you’re ate up with that dreaded leftistitis. That’s that dreaded illness that doesn’t even affect the carrier but poisons everyone that’s under your influence.
You mean that people aren’t interested in their genealogies?? No one seeks to learn their ancestry, where they came from, the kind of people their ancestors were?? No one seeks out their biological relatives when they get older??
For all our history men have looked into the past because of their longing to know who we are and where we came from. Humans like to know these things about themselves. Do you really believe that these kids are different, and they have no interest in their ancestry?? Frankly your just talking out your butt and have no logical proof of that claim.
blahblahyaddayadda
blahblahyaddayadda
First off, since the APA has become a political wing for the homosexual movement, anything you post from them has no more credibility than you would give to the FRC, AFA, NARTH, etc. That’s not to say that no study that they use has any validity at all, but the fact that they support gay rights means that they have taken a side, thus have abandoned their position as a neutral, unbiased source of information. I view anything from them with extreme caution. I’ll put it in words that you guys on the left like to use, they’re on my list of hate groups.
Since you want me to link to some things, here is some for your viewing pleasure…
*Abstract…In 2005, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued an official brief on lesbian and gay parenting. This brief included the assertion: “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents” (p. 15). The present article closely examines this assertion and the 59 published studies cited by the APA to support it. Seven central questions address: (1) homogeneous sampling, (2) absence of comparison groups, (3) comparison group characteristics, (4) contradictory data, (5) the limited scope of children”s outcomes studied, (6) paucity of long-term outcome data, and (7) lack of APA-urged statistical power. The conclusion is that strong assertions, including those made by the APA, were not empirically warranted. Recommendations for future research are offered.
Highlights… 26 of 59 APA studies on same-sex parenting had no heterosexual comparison groups. In comparison studies, single mothers were often used as the hetero comparison group. No comparison study had the statistical power required to detect a small effect size. Definitive claims were not substantiated by the 59 published studies.*
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X12000580
Really?? 26 out of this group of 59 studies supporting homosexual parenting had “no heterosexual comparison groups”?? Single mothers are being used as a hetero comparison group?? And this is your APA supporting these studies and their outcomes.
See, what’s happening here is the leftists are saturating the professional journals with with all these “studies”, which amount to nothing more than propaganda, which is easy to do since most journals prefer leftist policies. That makes it appear as though there is this “vast amount of professional research”, to support homosexual parenting. When the leaves are peeled back though, we find that the fruits are spoiled. Meanwhile, legitimate studies like the Regnerus study get challenged and reviewed, run through the mill, just because it produces findings that conflict with what the homosexuals want to see. Regnerus was investigated and cleared of unprofessional conduct, and I haven’t seen anything that disproves the legitimacy of his findings. You can laugh at that study all you want but guess what, some of us know that that is a nervous laughter. Here’s a recent interview with Regnerus where he addresses some of the criticisms of his results…
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20130614-mark-regnerus-defending-my-research-on-same-sex-parenting.ece
http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2012/06/12/children-do-better-with-mother-and-father/
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765581831/Studies-challenge-widely-held-assumptions-about-same-sex-parenting.html?pg=1
http://www.citizenlink.com/2010/06/15/mom-and-dad-kids-need-both/
http://ncfm.org/2012/07/news/mens-health/childs-behaviour-linked-to-father-infant-interactions-study-shows-children-need-their-fathers/
Ok, this should is easily refuted since it’s fact, so let’s go at this a different way.
First, since you need proof that kids need a mother and father, I ask this question…Where do kids come from?? One man’s sperm fertilizes one woman’s egg, right?? That makes those two people the mother and father. So now we know that it’s true that a child does indeed need both a mother and a father, right??
Ok to continue on from there. Since you favor homosexuals adopting kids, which requires removing one or the other parental role, which role is most expendable, the mother or the father?? This is where it gets tricky for you, so be careful.
If you say that the mother role is more expendable, that’s an admission that allowing any lesbians to adopt means putting those kids in a less than optimal situation. Since you say that you care about kids, I’m going to assume that you are not in favor of putting kids in a less than optimal situation, when it can be avoided. Is that a safe assumption?? If so, then with this option, lesbian adoption is ruled out since it can be avoided.
If you say that the father role is more expendable, that’s an admission that allowing homosexual males to adopt means putting kids in a less than optimal situation. With this option, adoption by homosexual males is ruled out since it can be avoided.
You could say that either role could be expendable, as long as the other one is left. Two males or two females can raise a child, since there is still either mother roles or father roles present, but that means admitting that mothers and fathers are equally important. It makes no sense, though, to say that mothers and fathers are equally important, yet also say that one of those roles can be expendable. That would logically necessitate that any child raised without both of those roles is being placed in a less than optimal situation, which is avoidable.
I can’t think of any other options and unless you can think of any others, I don’t see how one can be in favor of homosexual adoption without admitting that they are putting kids in a less than optimal situation, when doing so is not necessary.
Many of these cultural roles of gender have developed and lasted for thousands of years because they work, and have helped to build society to what it is today. If we were asexual organisms, you would have a good argument, since there would be no need for gender roles. That is not the case though, we are not androgynous or asexual organisms. Men and women are different, that’s part of our humanity. Those gender roles have suited us well, and we continue to progress in making society more equal for both genders. You have offered no reason to support dropping those gender roles that have got us to this point.
Huh?? How did this suddenly turn to me oppressing the female gender?? I must have missed a step.
It isn’t JUST homosexuality that is responsible. No fault divorce, the sexual revolution, abortion, social acceptance of and taxpayer support for women having kids outside of marriage(baby daddy phenomenon, for which males and females are equally irresponsible), cohabitation, substance abuse, etc. All those things have combined to put us in a situation where people are having kids left and right with no regard for how they’ll be taken care of. People don’t take marital vows as seriously as they use to, and there is no penalty for sexual irresponsibility since we’re not allowed to hurt anyone’s feelings by telling kids that certain things are wrong. Society has no sense of morality anymore and that is why there are so many kids in the foster care system.
Uh no…We’ve done it your way for 50 years now and it’s just getting worse all the time. It’s time to get back to some good old-fashioned common sense values.
That’s assuming that they are fit parents. Not even I favor letting unfit people endanger kids, but the state better be able to show them unfit before removing their kids.
If he’s a rapist then heck yes he should be deprived of any parental rights. He’s a danger to both the child and the mother, so why would you think he should have access to either. He should be locked up.
And you think…Ya know what, this is so stupid I’m not even going to spend time on it.
You’re right, they can if they want to. Problem is that the choices they make show a lack of some necessary qualities that parents need. Strength, self-control, self-respect, self-discipline, putting the interests of the kids above their own sexual desires. Those are all qualities that parents need, and homosexuals fail at each of them, and that’s not even an exhaustive list.
Christ, what an asshole.
How does one go from dismissing the truth value of the rape allegations to blaming the victim for her rape? I couldn’t be that duplicitous if I tried.
I’ve never watched any Mr. Deity, partly because I generally don’t click on video links, I’d much rather just read something if you have something to say. And I also find out over and over again that the video talking heads of the atheskeptowhateversphere seem to universally be assholes.
Carlie:
As people were saying in the Epic Thread, “if you don’t want to be accused of rape, don’t rape”, I’d say to EBW, “if you don’t want people to call you a sociopath, don’t act like a sociopath.”
This was found over in the Skepchick post about Dalton’s smear against rape-victims.
I don’t understand this aspect of the word. Are there really people who are ashamed of having their asshole associated with people who’ve shown the capacity for shit-spewing reminiscent of such a body part? What am I missing?
Since I’m too lazy to sign in there or remember my password, and I need to go to the store now, I’ll just mention here really quick that I’m pretty sure that “jerk” refers to masturbation. Shouldn’t shame that, eh?
@Tony @Caine & anyone else whose replies I might have missed,
Thanks for all the info!! Really!!
Tony,
You say vegetarianism is a contentious subject on Pharyngula. (That surprises me. Being a vegetarian is a good thing but nothing to get riled up about.) What are some other contentious subjects? Just so I know. Also, are there subjects no one seems much interested in, say, things in the news (I’m sure the Royal Baby wasn’t much of a hit around here, but what about economic news?) or academic fields? (I’m guessing Kant doesn’t have a great following here).
Ah, annejones!
There you go again, once more vividly demonstrating how your pitiful, toxic religious worldview turns people like you into vile, immoral scum-wops.
Capital job spreading our atheist propaganda!
Here, here!
Please proceed.
I’m way behind in reading this thread so, FWIW, I appreciated the consciousness raiser regarded “flounce.” Generally I say that the person has “gotten on their Huffy bike and rode off.”
Fuck off
Throwaway:
I don’t know what you’re missing, because I’m missing it too. Um, everyone has an anus, and everyone has the capacity to act the asshole. I’m not at all ashamed of having an anus (gad, think how bad it would be if we didn’t have one!), and I can honestly say I have never even once given it the slightest bit of thought whenever I have seen the word asshole.
Oh FFS, really? That’s out of bounds now?
Elizabeth:
It’s not fair to say that vegetarianism is a contentious subject here. It can be, depending on various attitudes and the main thrust of the discussion. However, that can be said about all things, which is why providing you with a list would be both pointless and wrong.
I understand you’re eager and all, but most of your assumptions are wrong. Everything gets discussed here. *Everything.* PZ did a post on the royal baby, I suggest you look it up. On the sidebar, as you scroll down, there are archives*. To answer all your questions, the best thing is the same thing we suggest for all new people: read.
*Or just go to the bottom of the page, and click ‘older posts’, and once you’ve read what you wish, click ‘older posts’ again, and so on.
Ing:
No, it is not. See the discussion, starting at #307, this thread.
An accurate summary of Mr. Deity, and a timely way to start your sentence, considering the person who posted immediately prior to that comment.
annejones, how long do you intend to continue shitting on our carpet before you finally get nearly as bored with your routine as we are? What is your goal here? What is your end-game? Are you just this starved for attention? Are you actually so blinkered that you think you are arguing competently? Changing minds and converting stalwart warriors over to your position through your logical might and verbal gymnastics? What exactly do you think you are accomplishing?
Hey! annejones! Please explain, in detail, what you meant when you said you, unlike other people, were not super-duper mean to gay people.
1. Please provide, in detail, your definition of being super-duper mean.
2. Then explain, in detail, why the horrible, immoral hate you spew does not qualify as super-duper mean.
3. Please explain what you mean by gay people. Does that refer to men only, or do you simply use that as a default for all GLBT people, being that you are a lazy ignoramus?
Three simple questions. Let’s go for three clear, concise answers, annejones.
and which bible are you using this week, annejones?
Oh good I was following that and afraid I missed a turn into wackyville
Oh, lovely…in addition to HOMOPHOBIC, we see that ANNEJONES is SEXIST & RACIST.
Great.
I wonder what else is on her FRC resume.
****
How ironic that she treats the Regnerus study as reliable given a recent post by PZ…
This fucking bellcurve bullshit just won’t die will it?
Caine:
I’m thinking someone should create an entry in the Urban Dictionary for ‘assfax’ and copy/paste annejones’ latest pile o shit there as the perfect example.
Elizabeth, Caine:
I used vegetarianism as a controversial subject bc the few times I have seen a discussion here about it, it tends to get heated. However, that is a very biased opinion, and I should have noted that. Its not as if I have seen a sufficient number if vegetarian conversations to make a generalized statement like that.
My bad.
Did you know that members of the former government of the MB (because, really, that’s what it was), are currently indicted for plotting to murder protesters to the MB regime, PRIOR to the military taking over?
Did you know that when the Egyptian police mention detaining witnesses and suspects during the breakup of the MB protests, that those were related to the former?
Please don’t be thinking the MB is the innocent in all of this.
Plenty of people tried to discourage the use of force to end those protests, but the recent protests were hardly peaceful, either. Lots of evidence of kidnapping, assaults on Coptic churches and people, amassing of weapons, etc. etc.
There never was a democracy in Egypt. It was a dream that is still many years away from fulfillment.
Tony:
*snort* It would be a good working definition of assfax. That said, I still await an answer on annejone’s “I’m not super-duper mean *hair toss* to gay people.”
shorter AJ:
yup. that about sums up your argument alrighty.
we’ll pray for u.
That would make an awesome blog post.
Two posts on annejones’s blog? *swoons*
I hear it lasted decades.
You’re the one who’s insisting that these are wholly separate roles (while failing to define them).
So?
Tell that to my friend I just visited over the weekend. He’s been a stay-at-home dad for three years now and he feels just fine about himself. Imagine that!
Re: asshole
ISTR a conversation a few years back where the use of it as an insult was called into question because of body shaming. It was some time back, before I was commenting, so I could not begin to remember when or who was involved.
In any case, I do not agree with the argument that it is body shaming. If nothing nasty ever issued forth, maybe.
When it is clean, the asshole can be fun to play with.
When it is not some pretty gross stuff comes out which is akin to what annejones leaves here.
****
Seconding the “why the fuckity fuck is Mrs Shitbubble still around?”. What do you hope to accomplish here (he asks for the third or fourth time)?
I don’t think annejones remembers where she left her blog.
Should I link it?
Well. The toddler fell out of her crib after dinner, landed on her head, and bent her little neck backwards before landing flat on her back. But because my wife and I lack
we failed to
so we didn’t take her to the ER and instead lay naked in bed and fed each other grapes while the toddler screamed and then died on the floor.
No. Wait. That’s not at all how we responded.
Fuck you annejones. Just fuck you.
okay wait a second , all those qualities that ANNEJONES says homosexuals fail at…are all qualities every hetero sexual person has.
Can I Godwin? Huh huh pleeeeeeeease?
And there we have it.
Bring all the boys up to believe that the only possible way to be a man is to reject anything they have been taught belongs to a “woman’s sphere” so that they feel their only possible role in life is as a provider and never as a nurturer. So they are automatically excluded from loving relationships with women who have demanding or travelling jobs – nurse, soldier, firefighter, miner – because they’d always feel they were being asked to violate their sense of self by taking on tasks and behaviours they’ve been taught are beneath them. As a bonus, they are destined for a life of sadness and regret if they ever have an accident or an illness, or their industry lays off thousands of workers like them, which leaves them unemployed or unemployable, because their only avenue of personal fulfilment is partly or wholly denied to them.
What a limited, dismal view of the world this is.
annejones:
Green Velvet – Preacherman
(I’ve posted this before.)
That’s Aretha Franklin’s father.
You may search for Aretha’s somewhat contrarian views on the subject.
You might as well. The worst thing that can happen is that she might actually pay attention to what someone has said for a change!
Oh and Brian Dalton has now lost his place as one of the (very) few video people I look out for because I enjoy their work. Nasty man.
“But one thing that is very consistent is that when something is about to happen that he does not approve of, he will stop it from happening.”
No, that is not the program.
ANNEJONES:
So, all those qualities you listed that homosexuals lack…
You imply heterosexuals have them, by virtue of being heterosexual…
Possessing those attributes, as all heterosexuals do, makes one a goid parent…
…so Hitler would have been a good parent?
****
In all seriousness, given that she thinks homosexuals do not possess these qualities, yet we know all humans have the capacity for them and probably display them all to varying degrees, does that mean she sees homosexuals as subhuman?
I think yes.
Which actually answers Caine’s ‘super duper mean’ question…in a horrific way.
You have a program:
10 “print I am stupid”: goto 10
Shut up txpiper. You will get your turn again.
I actually sort of agree. It would be the case if the God in the Bible was actually omniscient like it is claimed in Christian dogma. But God actually vastly prefers punishing people or broad geographic regions for things already done, rather than to prevent things that they will do. Because God very much enjoys shutting the barn door after the cows have gotten out. And then burning the fucking barn to the ground, because fuck all y’all for letting those damn cows out. But that’s just in the Bible, where magical things happen, horrible things happen to “bad” people, and wonderful things happen to marginally better people who win the favor of a capricious mystical super being. In real life, which is decidedly less magical than the fairy tales that you believe trump scientific facts, it really doesn’t seem like God gives two shits about anything, unless God just really hates women, cars, the Middle East, and smokers.
I would be vastly entertained with details about what “the program” actually is, rather than what it “is not”. I would just love to see what it winds up contradicting.
Winner!
So you not only want to be Ruler of the Dictionary, you also want to be the Despot of Mathematics.
Fixed that for you.
A child raised by homosexuals has two parents.
The other one is the other parent.
Because in your universe, 1+1 ≠ 2 .
Because parents can only have the roles that you want them to have?
How?
And why is that a bad thing?
And why is that a bad thing?
The only reason it might be bad for a man’s self-esteem would be because he’s absorbed the same bullshit gender essentialism that you keep spewing — or he’s bullied or mocked by other assholes who have absorbed the same bullshit gender essentialism that you keep spewing.
The answer is not to insist that the man not be a homemaker; the answer is to stop spewing bullshit gender essentialism.
It’s not “poison”; it’s the absence of bullshit gender essentialism. Society is better off without that, not worse.
The wisdom of your position is palpable, here.
Because only bigots can provide neutral, unbiased information?
Sort of like the KKK views the SPLC as a “hate group”.
The Regnerus study was created with deliberate bias by people with a bigoted agenda.
But not of bias.
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2013/summer/suspect-science
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19359705.2013.772553
In a widely publicized and controversial article, Regnerus (2012a) seeks to evaluate what he calls the “‘no-differences’ paradigm” with respect to outcomes for children of same-sex parents. We consider the scientific claims in Regnerus in light of extant evidence and flaws in the article’s evidence and analytical strategy. We find that the evidence presented does not support rejecting the no-differences claim, and therefore the study does not constitute evidence for disadvantages suffered by children of same-sex couples. The state of scientific knowledge on same-sex parenting remains as it was prior to the publication of Regnerus.
…And you’re once again confusing biology with social roles, and giving rapists custody of their victims’ children.
It isn’t necessary to admit that the kids are in a less than optimal situation, because your entire argument is based on nothing but bullshit gender essentialism.
I’ll note this as a concession that your bullshit argument from nature must have been wrong.
I’ll note this as a concession that you do indeed believe that gender is totally irrelevant except where you need it to be relevant.
You keep missing the point that gender roles are not necessarily parental roles.
The point is what you conceded above: you do indeed believe that gender is totally irrelevant except where you need it to be relevant.
Homosexuality cannot be “responsible” for what you’re claiming.
You know what reduces unwanted children the most?
Educating young women about birth control options, and providing those options. Always and forever, in every society there is. Studies have been done over the past century, not just decades: Educate young women; provide them with birth control — and birth rates drop.
Like telling them that it’s wrong to have sex without birth control unless you actually want to conceive a baby?
Sexual shame, in and of itself, is not the same as morality.
Nonsense.
Exactly: Quality of parenting has precedence over biology.
I assure you, I don’t think any such thing.
Once again: your own arguments about biology trumping everything else imply giving rapists access to their victims’ children
I agree that you are stupid, but you should spend time figuring out what your position really is.
Good grief. You sure opened the bigot box and took out every damn smear inside.
Homosexuals are perfectly capable of having strength, self-control, self-respect (especially when bigots like you aren’t around giving them shit), self-discipline, and of putting the interests of the kids above their own sexual desires.
Because homosexuals who want to be parents are more likely to have exactly those qualities.
Only in your bigoted, hate-filled, tiny little mind.
“I would be vastly entertained with details about what “the program” actually is”
No, you wouldn’t. But for this dispensation, which is about to wrap up, it looks like this:
“Let the one who does wrong, still do wrong; and the one who is filthy, still be filthy; and let the one who is righteous, still practice righteousness; and the one who is holy, still keep himself holy.”
It seems that one little ole religious bigot is feeling left out.
Oh.
Is that why you’re such an irredeemable, ineducable, bigoted asshole? Because you’re convinced that your imaginary friend commands you to be that way?
txpiper #495
Was that a quote from the bible?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/27/thunderdome-28/comment-page-1/#comment-656386
Ah, so that explains your serial, unrepentant intellectual dishonesty, texpip?
A religious obligation, eh?
Thank you for providing yet another example of how or sad, sappy worldview is useless and evil.
So your god outright commands sinners to continue to sin and not repent, then?
So why are you expending so much effort trying to convince those you see as sinners change their minds?
Why are you flouting your own god’s manifestly expressed will, you heretic?