If you’ve ever wondered what Vox Day looks and sounds like when he’s not holding a flaming sword, Futrelle has unearthed a video interview. He’s actually not particularly interesting; he recites tepid versions of the awful things he’s written, and he gives a good impression of a not-very-bright person scuttling around in a corner to avoid getting pinned down.
So he does say there’s no such thing as rape within a marriage, and that being gay is a birth defect. He also says that being an atheist, or rather, lacking a spiritual sense, is a birth defect. I didn’t watch the whole thing, and just skipped about, because jeez, he’s boring.
Vox Day has always come across as an intellectual lightweight. A vicious and hateful one, but still a lightweight.
Remember when he and his followers tried to take on the commenters back when the 8th skeptics’ cycle was hosted at the original Pharyngula?
Didn’t Vox Day post his Mensa membership card to prove his intelligence? Wasn’t the card expired?
Needsmor froth. That was surprisingly dull. If you’re going to be a fascist with pretensions to the intelligentsia (the butch manly alpha intelligentsia not that wooly liberal kind obvs.) you could at least have the basic decency to put on a bit of a show. Dance for us Vox Day, dance! With your flaming sword of divine truth and your puissant shield of moral integrity, show us how we to could one day aspire to the goal of sort of gaming several categories of a literary award long list. We’ve got our eyes on the prize and we need inspiration.
Wow. So dodgy. Much beta. Wow.
No, that was somebody else. A creationist no less.
Yeah, this ad “New Diabetes Breakthrough Shocks Doctors” is so disgusting I can’t fucking take it anymore. Please try to get it removed.
Well, by Beale’s standards, I’m hopelessly defective. Happily defective, I might add.
sugarfrosted @ 6:
Instead of complaining about ads in various threads, it might be best to pursue other options, such as Adblock. PZ doesn’t control the ads – I believe Ed Brayton deals with that sort of thing.
I know we want to make fun of these hypocrits, but do you really want to imply that letting your Mensa membership expire makes you stupider?
sugarfrosted @ 6:
I would like to know what the picture shows. The best answer I can think of is that someone has pressed dried peas on their laps and then taken this picture with some of the peas still in place.
Any other ideas, if we are all seeing the same picture, of course.
Yeah, the first way I was introduced to Voxy was his book “The Irrational Atheist”, where he starts describing atheism as “socially autistic”. I see he wasn’t just being his useful polemical self and actually seriously believes this to be true.
Also, yes, Voxy claims to be in Mensa: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Theodore_Beale
So he is pretty my admitting that his creator-God is an incompetent bungling fool. A competent creator would not produce that many birth defects.
Sugarfrosted, I have no idea what you’re whining about. PZ has no control over the ads on his site, and it’s been mentioned many, many times that you can either install Adblock, or subscribe to the ad-free FtB. Complaining that someone else hasn’t taken actions that are your responsibility is kinda silly.
Vox Day has always come across as an intellectual lightweight.
Yup. Which is why he comes across so much worse in the interview; it’s a lot easier to make dipshit arguments when you’re doing so in a written screed and nobody has the opportunity to respond to or question your logical fallacies. In person, having to actually defend what you’ve said in real time, not so easy if your intellectual arguments are a mashup of bad Christianity and MRA-style Robert E. Howard fanfic.
Cathy F:
This was one particular case, which had quite a history behind it. Charlie Wagner was a creationist who repeatedly demonstrated his less than stellar thinking processes, and at one point declared that he was not stupid at all, and directed people to a scan of his Mensa card, which was expired.
Mr. Wagner was in good (or bad) company with his flourishing of a Mensa card – Vox Day pulled the very same thing, as did Prof. Dendy and a few others. Generally, when you get someone claiming high intelligence and whipping out a Mensa card, you aren’t dealing with a great thinker.
@9 it’s a Photoshop of plant structures on human fingers. It’s gut wrenchingly disgusting. And knowing it’s fake doesn’t help.
That sword needs to make it into an RPG.
Beale’s Cursed Blade of Annoyance (-5 to intelligence, -5 to charisma, -10 to party reputation)
I would consider it a genetic advantage, of course. But that’s assuming that there are genetic tendencies towards or against religiosity, and how one might define religiosity in this sense (over-strong pattern recognition, tribal affinity, etc.), and whether it would or would not be reproductively advantageous in various environments, or whether any of that would lead to any degree of fixation in any population, and it’s early Saturday morning, so never mind.
I think the ad that everyone is complaining about is a picture of the knees of someone who had been kneeling on a tray of chickpeas. I saw it in an article some months ago, the subject of which I can’t now recall.
You gotta be careful when you pray Voltaire’s Prayer. It’s the only one that works even half the time!!
In the interview, Beale says:
Is it even worth unpacking this? And Beale thinks he’s smart?
Not a crime because: system of justice. I see, Beale has answered the ancient philosopher’s question “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there to see it, is there a sound?” as follows: “if there’s nobody there to see it, it didn’t fall.”
(emphasis mine)
Uh… what are you trying to tell us about yourself, Beale?
I despise and pity poor Ted. He grew up in one of the more rabid christian church sects (Southern
baptistRacist ) and has never managed to recognize its contradictory, hate filled hypocrisy. His father sounds like a perfectly horrible example of humanity. I feel pity for anyone unlucky enough to have such an authoritarian asshole for a parent. A brief biography of Robert Beale includes highlights such as; rabid hatechristian, tax evasion – criminal, making death threats against a federal judge, supporter of worldnutdaily and Pat Robertson, currently in jail for the tax evasion and death threats. Ted It’s not too late! Renounce the evil of judgey hatred and come join the darkside. Be like Jesus and love thy neighbor, especially thelepersLGBT people, the oppressed ( ie. women and POC) , the unfortunate and the poor . Its easy if you try! The world of happy weirdos is much more interesting and fulfilling than the world of repressed authoritarian xtians. ( We proudly play with fun toys like catapults and ninja costumes in addition to swords)The only thing that was clear in this video is that Vox Day is utterly unable to view topics — even a little bit — from any perspective other than his own rather narrow views (but, I suppose that was already evident to anyone who has read anything he has ever written). He never distinguishes, for example, between a conclusion he has formed based merely on his personal opinions from those he has actually formed based on sound evidence (e.g. his views on rape, race, marriage, etc).
What was new, is just how comfortable he is — evidenced by his extreme over-confidence in himself and his points-of-view — with being deficient/devoid of this particular aspect of empathy that most other humans possess naturally. Probably not quite a psychopathic personality, if I were to guess, but certainly empathetically deficient in this particular way. This is often the result in people who simply fail in their development to distinguish between the positive qualities found in being merely self-assured from the negative qualities found in the pathology of megalomania.
…and, yes, I agree. He is really boring to listen to.
Dago Red @23
Vox Day confuses his opinions for facts. His intelligence may be high but his wisdom is quite low.
Theo should listen to NPR. Perhaps then he might learn what intelligent people really sound like and actually say.
Doesn’t he seem like he could be an a elaborately ridiculous side character from Arrested Development? The 46 year old spoiled brat son of a shady businessman, unable to hold down a steady job but convinced of his own incredible superiority in every category he wishes to dominate? Is the Bluth family secretly the Beale family?
The peas-on-the-knees picture is of a Japanese schoolgirl who had been forced to kneel on dried peas (which hurts like hell) as a punishment. It’s cropped close to make the viewer think her legs are fingers, thus to surprise with the actual explanatory article, but even in the closeup you can see some of the rest of the girl behind her knees. I have no explanation for why it’s currently attached to a quackery ad.
I have no explanation for VD either. Maybe a birth defect?
“If sex without written permission is a crime, then all sex is rape”.
That assumes that no sex ever involves written permission. It’s a slow Sunday, I’ve got a pen and some paper, and my wife is downstairs. Expect his assertion to be demonstrably false in an hour or so.
@whirlwitch #28
I also expect that means we have to ditch all the romantic and explicitly sexual correspondence of years past, as well as people’s text histories on their phones. It does however seem to me that Vox emphasizes “written permission” because that is what he considers the marriage agreement: written consent to sex, no caveats, no excuses, which is disgusting.
Why does he have such a problem understanding that men and women can use their words to express or request consent? That most people aren’t in a perpetual state of wanting to have sex?