The dose makes the poison

Princeton physicist William Happer is still getting invited on television to say stupid things.

I keep hearing about the "pollutant CO2," or about "poisoning the atmosphere" with CO2, or about minimizing our "carbon footprint." This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth pondering: "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving "pollutant" and "poison" of their original meaning….CO2 is absolutely essential for life on earth.

Did you know oxygen, while not a poison at standard concentrations, is highly reactive and will kill you at high concentration? Or that CO2 is vital for plants and is measured to regulate your breathing, but too much and you’ll suffocate?

What makes a substance poisonous is how much of it there is. Paracelsus figured this out in the 16th century. So Princeton physicists are unaware of developments and explanations that predate even Newton? That’s kind of amazing.

Maybe CNBC and other networks ought to take a lesson from the BBC on ginned up controversies and false dichotomies, and cut this bozo Happer from their invitation list.

It’s not just creationists who mangle science, some atheists do, too

I was sent this terrible statement reputed to be from the guy who calls himself “The Amazing Atheist”. There is, however, no evidence that he actually said these specific words, so the attribution was inappropriate. However, somebody still wrote this idiotic statement:

Nature already has an age of consent. That age is approximately 12-13, otherwise known as the onset of puberty. We don’t need Christian morals to set an arbitrary age on when a sexually mature human female can mate legally. We already have clear parameters on sexually maturity as established by the law of evolution, and acting within those parameters does not under any reasonable definition constitute “rape”. Moreover, because this irrational moral imperialism is almostly solely applied against males who pursue relationships with younger females, I do believe the change of age-of-consent laws should be a critical area of focus for Men’s Rights Activists.

So much wrong.

Nature does not set an age of consent. Nature doesn’t care. Nature doesn’t stop you from raping babies, and it doesn’t tell you it’s OK to rape 21 year olds, either. The age of consent is a social construct, made by people, intended to protect our children from exploitation during those difficult years when they are transitioning from childhood to adulthood.

The law of evolution (tell me, which one?) does not set clear parameters for sexual maturity. Humans have complex, prolonged development — we’re an altricial species, helpless at birth and requiring a long period of nurturing before fully independent. Ovulation is not a magic signpost that says you’re ready to be impregnated. It says your ovaries have developed, but humans live by complex social interactions and sex can be a difficult phenomenon, with obligations and responsibilities and privileges. We expect people to be able to be able to interact with each other in non-damaging social ways before they leap to bumping genitals.

The only way evolution comes into play here is in a pragmatic, rather than a moral sense. For instance, if the author were to promote the idea that since babies are plump, tender, and helpless, Nature’s Law says that we’re free, even encouraged, to eat them, it would be easy to see that any population that thought that would be quickly on their way to self-enabled extinction. Similarly, evolution doesn’t say that you can’t rape young children…it will simply and objectively pass a kind of operational judgment on your population, as the next generation grows up with fucked up, likely unstable and untenable, social structures.

The legal age of consent is arbitrary. Some people might be able to enjoy sex in a mature fashion at an earlier age, others might be best off avoiding it for a few extra years. But we don’t have a way to measure sexual maturity, so as social and legal animals, we abide by one arbitrary dividing line. But picking the moment of first menstruation is also arbitrary — it says nothing about human behavior, or the ability to be responsible for one’s actions, or readiness to cope with the burdens of a possible pregnancy.

Somehow, even worse, the author seems to think that the ability to get pregnant nullifies the concept of rape. That doesn’t follow. If a person has poor judgment because they are too immature to consider all of the consequences, that does not mean you’re allowed to freely have sex with them, as long as they say “yes” to a bowl of candy. We do not use the legal age of consent to dismiss the idea of rape — we don’t say, “she’s over 21, we can rape her now” (well, some people do, but they’re wrong.)

I’ll also condemn with equal severity older women who take advantage of boys. I know, the attitudes in our culture do trivialize sexual assault on boys and men, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss them. Maybe that would be a good goal for MRAs, to work to defend the sexual autonomy of young men and boys.

But that would be a rational and responsible approach. That last line is revealing: rather than a responsible goal, go for personal sexual gratification. Yeah, sure, encourage MRAs to embrace pedophilia. We’ll see how effectively cultural evolution can work.

So close

C0nc0rdance has posted a new video, titled “Clarifying my positions”, which outlines his dissent from the usual anti-feminist ranters on youtube. It’s almost there, but it still perpetuates some problematic attitudes.

Here’s my problem with that: he’s still got a prejudicial view of feminism derived from too much exposure to that weird crowd of angry men on the internet. At one point, he puts up two pictures representing the extremes of radical feminism and anti-feminism, and suggests that they’re equally awful. His choices? Stefan Molyneux, who I agree is a pompous git with some very bizarre anti-woman ideas, and … the woman used as a poster-child for feminist haters everywhere, the woman who was nicknamed “Big Red” by the goons of A Voice For Men.

She was pissed off and angry, no doubt, and was very rude in cursing at men who tried to interrupt her. Her face is now used routinely as a symbol for hating on feminists, supposedly deservedly. Yet what she gets for yelling “shut the fuck up” at people trying to interrupt her is this:

Since being targeted by angry YouTube misogynists and MRAs, the red-haired activist has received death threats, rape threats and literally hundreds of other hateful and harassing messages. She’s also been “doxxed” — that is, she’s had her personal information plastered all over the internet, including on A Voice for Men’s forum. Ten days after being uploaded to YouTube, the video of her faceoff against the MRAs has garnered more than 300,000 views, and YouTubers are still leaving threats and insults and crude sexual comments.

Furthermore, no one bothers to reference the horrible radical feminist things she was trying to read as a statement. Do you think they were equivalent to death and rape threats? It was an abbreviated paraphrase of this list of feminist goals by Lindy West. Read it. It’s a pretty accurate summary of the position of most Radical Feminists…you know, the people c0nc0rdance thinks are just as bad as a hate-filled MRA who blames women for all the evil in the world.

C0nc0rdance is basically making the same mistake (to a lesser degree!) this clown in his comments is doing, caricaturing the feminist position because he doesn’t have the slightest clue what it is, so he fills it in with garbage he heard on the internet.

TF wasn’t saying that all men are stronger than all women, but the reality that on average, men and women have differing muscle mass. The feminist message is that women and men are equal in every respect, except in the ability of men to rule over women in the patriarchy. It’s silly.

That is silly, because it’s not the feminist, or even radical feminist, message at all. You will not find any rational feminist declaring that the average man and woman have the same dosage of testosterone running through their veins, or that testosterone and estrogen do not have differing effects on physiology and even brain development.

I appreciate the message he’s trying to send, I would just recommend that c0nc0rdance do some actual research on what feminism argues before making poor comparisons.

The Middle East, untangled and unknotted

Slate has published a fascinating grid explaining all the relationships between different groups entangled in the Middle East. Countries that hate each other have a red cranky face, countries that like each other have a green smiley face, and the yellow confused faces mean the two countries have a complicated relationship. If you go to the link, each point on the grid is clickable, and reveals a short summary of the relationship. At last, we can understand everything…until the faces change next week.

Unfortunately, the only clarity that emerges is that everyone hates ISIS, and most of the groups hate Al Qaida. I also see that hate faces outnumber happy faces 43 to 17.

But I have a solution! Every country should follow the US and Israel’s lead, and bomb, topple, annihilate, or otherwise destroy every country with a hate face. Just pick your favorite country and look down either row or column, and have them go to war with every country that’s red on the grid. The yellow ‘it’s complicated’ faces do complicate this approach, unsurprisingly, but I’m pretty sure that after you blow up their neighbors, they’ll either go green or red. It’ll evolve towards greater simplicity, naturally.

The survivors after this apocalyptic orgy of destruction will be any country that has nothing but green or yellow faces in their column, which means a wave of happiness and peace will sweep across the region. Easy. All solved. Victory!

You can even examine the grid now and predict who the victor will be.

My only prayer is that Hillary Clinton will not be the Democratic nominee

This is news to me, but it’s an old story that needs wider circulation. Hillary Clinton is a conservative Christian with ties to the anti-choice movement. She’s not imbedded deeply in that crap, but she likes to affectionately skirt the edges of it.

That’s enough for me — my nightmare would be an election with Clinton vs. some ratbag Republican, with me in the voting booth vomiting all over the ballot.

Can we please have a secular candidate? Please, please, please?

No more US support for Israel

They no longer hold the moral high ground, if ever they did. The massacre in Shejaiya is an obscenity.

Two small bodies lie on the metal table inside the morgue at Gaza’s Shifa hospital. Omama is nine years old. Her right forearm is mangled and charred and the top half of her skull has been smashed in. Beside her lies her seven year-old brother. His name is not certain. It might be Hamza or it might be Khalil. Relatives are having trouble identifying him because his head has been shorn off. Their parents will not mourn them—because they are dead too.

All of them were killed in Shejaiya, one of Gaza’s poorest and most crowded neighborhoods, which came under a brutal and sustained assault by the Israeli military today.

90 dead. The Israeli military was firing artillery shells into a residential neighborhood. It’s unconscionable, indiscriminate murder.

"Those of us who worked in Shifa can say that last night was the worst night of our lives," says Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor at Shifa. He has come to Gaza many times to provide medical assistance, including during the previous two Israeli assaults in 2008/2009 and 2012.

"Israeli impunity is a huge medical problem," Gilbert says. "Every single dead child and adult, and all the injuries, all the amputations, are one hundred percent preventable. This is a man-made disaster. Cynically planned and brutally executed by the government of Israel."

I’ve had people try to tell me that it is justifiable — that Hamas is firing rockets into Israeli neighborhoods. I freely grant that trying to kill random citizens with rockets is also unconscionable, whether it’s done by Palestinians, Israelis, or Americans. But how can anyone condemn one and not the other?

We should not be propping up the vile and bloody government of Israel anymore. Maybe if they’re deprived of the teat of unquestioning US aid, they’ll realize that they can’t afford to solve their problems with attempted genocide.

Although why a Jewish state would need any kind of compulsion to recognize that is surprising.

Church camp looks so … fun?

Look at this video and images from the Rose of Sharon Summer Camp in Tennessee.

churchcamp

Please note that these were not selected excerpts chosen to make the camp look bad; these were publicly posted by a camp counselor who was overjoyed with what the camp was doing, and was trying to promote the camp to others.

All I know is that I’d never send a child of mine there. What a horror of a place.

Compare and contrast that with this video of Camp Quest, made with similar intent.

“Freedom to be who you are without judgment”…yeah, I like that.

Even scarier, the counselor who released the initial Rose of Sharon video was very surprised at the negative response it prompted on the net.

nitareplies

Chilling, isn’t it? She’s abusing children in the name of the Lord, who she loves so much. What you’re seeing there is the end result of generations of indoctrination, of the kind still being practiced at the Rose of Sharon.