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This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
In a post at Skepchick announcing new incentives for their cancer fundraiser, Melanie Mallon says, “We can’t let the #FTBullies win!” Don’t worry, we’re sitting here on top of over $5000 raised for the Light the Night foundation, and no one has to let us win. We shall seize victory in our iron grip and raise it high against the pathetic resistance of our feeble competitors. Because that is what we do.
And yes, I noticed that we topped the second of my fundraising goals. Once I finish this pile of grading — this gigantic, overwhelming pile of grading — I’ll get writing on that. Your job is to get cracking and bring us over $7500 so I have to write another post on microRNAs and cancer, and then get us to $10K for a hangout discussion.
The lesson is never learned. MPR is running a local story on a St Paul parish which was afflicted with another of those perambulating pedophile priests. Curtis Wehmeyer was a known sexual predator to the Catholic church, and they sent him to St Paul and didn’t tell any of the locals.
Curtis Wehmeyer kept his white 2006 camper parked outside Blessed Sacrament Church in St. Paul where he served for six years, three of them as pastor.
With the shades drawn, Wehmeyer could avoid the obligations of priestly life. He got drunk, smoked pot and looked at child pornography. He also lured to the camper two boys whose mother worked at the parish, plied them with alcohol, turned on pornography and told them to touch themselves. Several times, he touched one of the boys, according to police records.
The family trusted "Father Curt." As a priest, he had special powers. He could anoint the sick and baptize the young. Maybe, the mother hoped, he could inspire one of her sons to become a priest.
Why would anyone want their child to become a priest?
The St Paul/Minneapolis archdiocese had a “delegate for a safe environment” who actually wrote a letter concluding that he would “recommend against any disclosure in his workplace” — apparently, “safe environment” means safe for priests, because they did a remarkably good job covering for a nasty man who was exploiting the children of his parish. The coverup has been unambiguously documented in a memo posted at the link.
Thomas Doyle, a Dominican priest who was one of the earliest national whistleblowers on clergy sex abuse in the 1980s, said the memo shows that parents cannot trust the archdiocese to protect their children.
“Celibate clergy who aren’t trained in psychology are in no position to make that kind of a judgment call over someone like Wehmeyer,” he said.
Yet they all assume that their training in theology, or perhaps it is their imaginary direct line to a god, gives them the expertise to be counselors, psychologists, and therapists. It does not. These people are quacks and frauds who let a child molester have access to children for a decade — and even now they’re unapologetic about it.
Good morning! Expect a few rounds of fuming racist comments today — I have been discovered by Pat Condell, and he’s sending his pals over to set us all straight.
Pat Condell @patcondell
Many thanks to @pzmyers and everyone at the North Korea of free thought for a most amusing start to the day. https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/09/23/feminism-is-not-an-excuse-for-your-racism-pat-condell/
Ha ha, yes, because a blog network is just like a totalitarian state. I was just telling my kids they need to grow a beard and put on some weight if they ever expect to succeed me.
Pat Condell @patcondell
Ha ha. Honoured to be slandered as racist by @pzmyers and his fellow carpet-chewing PC fanatics at the ludicrously named Freethought Blogs.
“PC” is one of those dogwhistles blown by racists, Republicans, and small-minded thugs who don’t want to recognize the rights of all people…only their own privileged subset. It’s a pretty good marker for regressive idiots.
This is FreethoughtBlogs, which means we don’t kowtow to self-appointed leaders of the freethought movement. To the Condells of the world, it’s only freethought if it properly abases itself before the Loud White Men On Pedestals.
But here come the Condell followers…
The Equaliser P.A.I @Abloorable
@patcondell what an idiot @pzmyers is missing the point feminists are against the ‘list’ of crimes Pat states=acceptance of ISLAM fucks it
We begin with a proper bit of incoherence, which puts us in the right frame of mind for the flood that follows. These people make no sense at all. I don’t know what this guy is trying to say; feminists accept Islam? What?
ShorehamBoys1889 @ShorehamBoy1889
@pzmyers Pat has never been racist he just says what the majority are thinking and isn’t scared to upset the pc lefty liberal scum.
“He’s not just racist, he just says things that get anti-racists upset!” Great defense, guy. Also, what did I say about “pc”?
Veelkantie @Veelkantie
@patcondell Thank god we didn’t have much @pzmyers 70 years ago blaming the ‘small groep of nazi fundamentalist’ for al wrongs at the time.
Godwin!
Yisroel Shalom @YisroelShalom
@patcondell @pzmyers good on you you racist, lol, I wish all racists were like you!! #respect to you Sir!
Yisroel, you’re not helping to make the case against Condell being a racist.
demoivre @dugfuser
@patcondell @pzmyers If an ultra-liberal PC feminist shithead like Myers calls you a racist you know you’re doing something right.
“PC,” check. Liberal and feminist used as a pejorative, check. Embracing “racist” as a compliment, check. I think we’re done here.
1Pat @1Braque
@pzmyers Facts “feminists” remain silent while +100Sharia courts in UK subjugate women’s rights, no convictions of 1000sFGM etc @patcondell
You know, if you get on Google and search for this topic, the top results are all from far right-wing sites raging against both feminism and Sharia law; they never offer any support for their claim that feminists are in bed with Islamists. Instead they just repetitively insist that they’re the same thing, and both must be opposed. It’s a really easy lie: express outrage over some abuse of Islam against women, then say that Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf haven’t condemned it. And it’s true! Every feminist does not stand by their fax machine, watching CNN and waiting for every atrocity so they can send out a disavowal. Instead, they fight for broader principles and the liberation of women everywhere, and condemn Islamic policies as a whole.
I was amused to stumble across this story: Iranian women are translating feminist works to undermine Sharia law, an interview with Azar Nafisi.
WOWOWOW: Who would you describe as role models for Iranian women?
AZAR NAFISI: The writers of the feminist movement — Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Mary Wollstonecraft — are active voices in the Iranian movement today. Their works have been translated. Women very courageously translated all of them. Those women were at the forefront of the movement.
There is something deeply wrong with you if you believe that feminism and Islam are friendly allies. It requires a deeply twisted perspective; it seems to be a story that the right wing press has been pushing hard, though, so if you only read the Daily Mail and Stormfront and Sarah Palin fan sites and the Blaze and Tea Party organs, you’ll get nothing but this breathless assertion that feminists don’t protest against Islam vehemently enough. But note one commonality: these kinds of sites hate both feminism and Islam.
You’d think they’d notice that abortion is outlawed under Sharia, and feminists tend to be pro-choice, just to name one issue. Yet somehow they think they’re allies? Bizarre.
Michael Stephenson @mcsadapted
@patcondell @pzmyers Those folks are fully indoctrinated… to deny that feminists ignore Muslim depredations is absurdly dishonest.
I know these guys ignore what I write, for sure. I rattled off a list of feminists I read —
Taslima, Maryam, Ophelia, Sikivu, Heina — to claim that any of them ignore Islamist oppression of women is simply willfully ridiculous and ignorant.
Alex Rose @SRevision
@pzmyers @patcondell What is wrong with this pz clown?Richard Dawkins, Pat Condell, Michael Shermer..He really thinks he is above them all?
I get this a lot, and it’s hilarious. Do these people really think their heroes are above all criticism? Because that’s the issue here, not that I think I’m “above” all these people, but that I think I can disagree with them on many points.
What is wrong with you that you dare not differ from your heroes, and get offended when anyone points out their human failings?
Oh, I forgot one.
Not Rose Tinted @gpolitica
shut your gob .@pzmyers
Simple, clear, lucid. There’s someone who plainly says what he thinks.
Oh, silly me. Every day is racism day. A hiring manager wrote this? On a facebook page about a NY Times article?
And 720 people liked it. Oh. 720 people liked the original article. Only 2 liked the comment. That’s better.
I confess, I liked his early anti-religious rants, but as he became steadily more irate about the brown hordes invading Britain, I tuned him out…until now, when I happened to run across his latest video. Holy crap, what a racist cretin.
He’s chewing out those
…”progressive” feminists who confidently challenge everyday sexism but who are struck deaf and dumb by Islamic misogyny…they turn a blind eye to religiously endorsed wife-beating, forced marriage, honour killing, genital mutilation, organised rape gangs, sharia courts that treat women as less than fully human, and little girls forced to dress like nuns.
Turn a blind eye to Islamic misogyny, or you’ll be a racist, you racist.
Way to go, Pat! Teach those strawfeminists a thing or two!
I really don’t know of any feminists who think anything on that list is at all acceptable. Who are these mysterious feminists who have no problem with honor killing or rape gangs?
I’m looking around at my circle of progressive feminists — is it Taslima? Maryam? Ophelia? Sikivu? Heina? He seems to be flinging about wild accusations with no basis in fact here; it’s hard to even imagine a woman not deeply indoctrinated into Islam who would excuse murdering other women for infidelity, for instance.
I don’t see anyone turning a blind eye to Islamic misogyny. I do see plenty of conservative racist dorks turning a blind eye to the fact that the majority of the victims of Islamic misogyny are Muslim women, and using the abhorrent tactics of Islamic fundamentalists as an excuse to blame all Muslims for their pain.
Really. Pointing out that many Islamic cultures formally endorse hateful policies is not racism; looking at every immigrant and assuming they’re there to rape ‘your’ women is.
This kind of backward, ugly attitude towards women prevails throughout much of the Islamic world and it’s being deliberately imported wholesale into western society unchallenged and uncorrected thanks to the insane “progressive” view that all cultures are equal, except, of course, for western culture, which is inferior, and this is making life more dangerous for women.
You know that backward, ugly attitude? Islam didn’t invent it. We’ve got plenty of it to go around in the western world as well. To assume that it’s being imported by brown people into a white civilization that is innocent of sexism and misogyny is, well, racist.
It’s also a reflection of an attitude Pat seems to miss. Saying that Western culture is not necessarily superior to other cultures is not implying that we’re inferior. The attitude I see among progressive feminists is that fundamentalist Islam is well and thoroughly fucked up, as is fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Judaism, and maybe we should reject all of that garbage.
The progressive part, of course, is that we also recognize that Muslims are human beings and they deserve equal rights. That’s the equality I endorse. Maybe Condell is confused because he thinks they don’t deserve that?
And now this is flaming racism.
Norway and Sweden used to be among the safest for women. Now they’re best known for their high levels of Islamic immigrant rape that nobody in power wants to acknowledge or do anything about that because that would be racist.
Consequently, Norwegian and Swedish women are no longer safe in their own countries, for cultural reasons. Indeed, Sweden has been so “enriched” by Islamic immigration that its women statistically have a 25% chance of being raped in their lifetime.
Oh, god. That is so dishonest; this is the kind of lies fed to a racist public by right wing tabloids. Sweden does have a remarkably high rate of reported rapes. But that’s because, as a progressive culture, they’ve taken great care to document all cases of sexual abuse. Nothing gets swept under the rug.
But that is a misconception, according to Klara Selin, a sociologist at the National Council for Crime Prevention in Stockholm. She says you cannot compare countries’ records, because police procedures and legal definitions vary widely.
"In Sweden there has been this ambition explicitly to record every case of sexual violence separately, to make it visible in the statistics," she says.
"So, for instance, when a woman comes to the police and she says my husband or my fiance raped me almost every day during the last year, the police have to record each of these events, which might be more than 300 events. In many other countries it would just be one record – one victim, one type of crime, one record."
Condell is holding the conscientious record keeping of Swedes against them. This misleading statistic has been widely reported, so there’s no excuse for this lie…unless he gets all of his news from the Daily Mail.
And to imply that this surge of Swedish rapes is a consequence of raping hordes of Muslim immigrants is simply unconscionable. Given that between one in five and one in six women in America (and one in three if you’re Indian!) will be raped in their lifetime, with the more stringent requirements for counting an act as rape here, a figure of one in four for Sweden does not sound remarkable in comparison. Remarkable that it’s so damn high, but not remarkable in that it’s so high everywhere, even in the US, where we can’t blame it on an invasion of Muslim rapists.
Wait, you do need a cherry on top of all this racism, don’t you?
So forgive me for being blunt about this, girls, but there are more important things to get angry about than offensive language on twitter or sexist comments about your appearance.
Fuck you, too, Pat. We can be angry about genital mutilation and honor killings at the same time we’re angry about cranky old racists who are still fussed about every new wave of immigration since the Normans, and about sexist dudes who think they should be given a free pass on calling women “bitches” and “cunts” because they can find someone else who did something worse. We’re also quite capable of evaluating the relative harm of each of those without you falsely telling us that some of them do zero harm and must be ignored. You don’t get to tell me what I’m allowed to be enraged over, and let me assure you, I’ve got enough anger at all of these cultural toxins to go around. My fury encompasses whole worlds, and you’re right there in the list with mullahs and popes and KKK members and Republicans and assholes on youtube and members of UKIP and the English Defence League.
Boy.
Rebecca Watson seems to be somewhat sarcastic, but wow there are some similarities here.
Why are all your speakers older white men?
We asked several women and people of color to participate but unfortunately none were able to make it. We’re not sure why, but it’s a shame because we were planning a workshop with Richard Dawkins titled, “Things Marginalized People Should and Should Not Be Angry About: Everyday Bigotry (No) and Religion (Yes).”
Tauriq Moosa is writing about villains in computer games. It was weird, it started out reminding me of me.
Stereotype dictates he be male, control a horde of minions, and have a fortress somewhere lit by flashes of thunder. His plans are some unfathomably weird concoction of revenge and pure malice, directed at something unachievable and vague – like “world domination” – and born from some dark deed or horrid wrong done to him or a loved one. He probably is talented at creating weird gadgets and weapons which, without fail, will fail.
Except for that last sentence. My plans never fail! NEVER! Mwuahahahaha!
Moosa’s point, though, is that that kind of fictional villain is boring — there’s no depth, no motivation, he’s just there — and describes a couple of video games where the bad guys are more complex.
I thought of a transitional form: Dr Horrible. It’s done for humor, but the pieces of the stereotype are all there. The villain is just a villain for villainy’s sake at the start, and he’s also got all the toys of the stereotypical mad scientist, but then it slowly becomes clear that he’s really craving the prestige of being recognized by bigger villains, and it gets all messy and complicated with the introduction of a hero who is a manipulative stuffed shirt, and The Girl…who complete tangles up The Villain’s motivations. And then there’s the inevitable Tragedy.
What makes it interesting is that it’s all told from the villain’s perspective, and he goes from moral simpleton to…moral simpleton who’s aware of the magnitude of his mistakes. That’s what makes the story interesting, is that the character changes and grows a little bit, in this case just enough to realize what a screw-up he is.
Isn’t that really what we expect from a good story? That people change in interesting ways over its course?
Donations to the Light the Night Fundraiser are getting awfully close to the next landmark of $5000; we’re at $4748. Get there and I’m going to have to write a post about tumor suppressors, and I know you’re all just panting away with lust for that.
Then there’s a long stretch to $10K, so maybe I should add something at $7500. A post on micro RNAs and cancer, I think?
By the way, we’re getting matching funds from Todd Stiefel, who has now promised to get a red buzz-mohawk if we hit $20K. That’s a really long stretch, but if we make that, I’ll have to think of something even better. What is it with everyone doing exotic things to their hair? We’re supposed to be public intellectuals, shouldn’t we be doing weird things with our brains?
