Dave Futrelle has a tag for MRAs trying to make memes. Maybe I should do something similar, because atheists are also sending me inane, nonsensical memes. Like this one.
To all my friends in the atheist/skeptic community who do not believe the West is at war with Islam:
Twenty years ago, you were all railing against the evils of Christianity…
…And you won.
So what happened…your balls drop off?
There’s so much wrong with that.
First, that image: why do these people have an affinity for the Joker? He’s a comic book psychopath. He’s a bad guy. Putting your words in the mouth of a murderous madman does not give them added gravitas.
The people sending me this crap are not my friends. Quite the opposite; they’re people who have been harassing me for years, and generally endorse alt-right values that I find repugnant. So right away I’m put off by the dishonesty.
I do not believe the West should be at war with Islam. When will we learn that “war” is an inappropriate and dangerous metaphor for a conflict between ideologies? You do not resolve ideological differences between cultures by shooting people or blowing them up. Islamists are not persuading American and European people that Islam is an enviable philosophy by making terrorist attacks, and we are not winning hearts and minds in the Middle East with drones and bombs and invasions. These acts harden resistance and polarize nations.
Also, it’s an inappropriate division. This is a conflict between secularism and theocracy. Every person in the West is not secular — and especially in America we have a significant element that is in sympathy with Islamic theocrats in action, even if under a different religious label — and not every person in the Islamic world is fanatically religious. It is especially bogus for atheists, who ought to be clearly on the side of secularism, making a blanket alignment with “the West”. It’s more complicated and confusing than that.
I still rail against the evils of Christianity…and the evils of Islam. Both are still around and still going strong. Where is this delusion that we “won” against Christianity coming from? Have you looked at Congress lately?
And of course that last line…did you know that many atheists do not have “balls”? Never had ’em to lose ’em. Yet somehow people like Susan Jacoby, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Margaret Downey, etc., etc., etc. manage to be intelligent, outspoken, and assertively godless without them. It is also ironic that those who espouse the virtues of testicular fortitude also often tend to be the most slavishly devoted to obeying their manly leaders and excusing their every failing.
It’s also interesting that that last line also aligns the obnoxious atheists with the MRAs. Maybe there’s something to the idea of “balls” — they seem to be poisoning a lot of minds.
Maybe they chose movie-joker because he’s nonsensical, incoherent, badly acted, and part of a cheesy movie. I’d certainly be impressed to be lectured by movie-joker!!!
It’s because Christians can’t teach creationism in classrooms and same-sex marriage is legal.
For the atheist bros, those are the only evils of Christianity (and they probably don’t feel that strongly about the second one).
Black Lives Matter, women’s healthcare and equality for transgender people would hardly rank as human rights issues for the dudebros.
@1:
You’re clearly talking about the Jack Nicholson Joker. That’s Heath Ledger pictured.
@# I was gonna say the same thing! Heath Ledger gave perhaps the best performance of the Joker I’ve seen aside from Mark Hamill. It’ll be interesting to see how Jared Leto does (I have to admit that I’m excited for him, though).
I cannot for the life of me figure out why these atheists are so smitten with the Joker, though…
Heath Ledger gave perhaps the best performance of the Joker I’ve seen
I know that’s the Heath Ledger joker. I didn’t mention the unmentionable Nicholson joker. But – really – saying “best performance of the joker I’ve seen” is a very low bar indeed. It’s the best performance of the joker I’ve seen, too. Is that faint praises enough?
re 3:
[continuing the Joker tangent]:
Heath portrayed Joker as a thinking psychopath, nihilist; who questioned everything, while blaming everyone else for psychopathy. Trying to portray him more realistic than the comic book version Nicholson portrayed.
;-( at least that’s how I saw him.
Funny, I seem to remember you railing against the excesses of Islam too. Almost as though you were able to rail against more than one religion at once and didn’t fear exposing the evils of any religion.
OTOH: That quote (meme) associated with the Heath Ledger Joker image, is plausible; as something Heath’s Joker would’ve said. How that adds any value whatsoever to the meme is inconceivable. Could it be a form of neg-irony?
I guess I recognise a fair point in that silly meme – it is true that a rail against Islam less now than I railed against Christianity ten years ago. (I would say twenty, but I was mostly railing against the vile and insidious threat to humanity that we call brussels sprouts twenty years ago. BLERGH!! (I was ten.)) I also rail against Christianity less than I did then. I still rail against both of them, though, and I still consider them to be vile and insidious threats to humanity. It’s just that there’s a threat much closer to home that seems happy to maintain the vast majority of the things that made me rail against religion, while claiming to be on my side, which doesn’t really attract any kind of moderate, and which appears to be eager to spread panic and, whether deliberately or not, lends support to Islamic extremism while openly opposing moderate or secular Muslims, ex-Muslims, and non-Muslims who just happen to look a bit Muslim-y.
I don’t like Islam – I don’t think I need to list the reasons why? – but Muslims are just people. Some people suck, some people might actually count as evil, but most people just want to get on with their lives (and force their poor children to eat sprouts like the monsters they truly are). Islamic terrorism has made me very uneasy on several occasions over the last few years, but it’s not actually the threat in the west that it is in Islamic nations. Whipping up panic and fear of Muslims in the west, on the other hand, is very much a threat in the west – not just because of the risk of terrorist attacks targeted at the Muslims living here who’re just people who happen to believe the wrong kind of nonsense, or the people who look like they might be Muslims, but also because of the support it gives to Islamic terrorist groups. Despair is the fuel of terrorism (one of the fuels, anyway) and whipping up hatred can only create more despair among those targeted. I have a hard time seeing anti-Muslim rallies as anything but ISIS (etc.) recruitment drives. In my more paranoid moments, I sometimes suspect direct involvement in some instances – it’s pretty clear that they understand the value of a good European freak out for their subscriptions, and, dedicated as our lot are, I don’t think they can really rely on home grown bigotry to keep the pressure on… that might just be conspiracy thinking, though.
So… yeah, I guess what happened is that, at least for my part, I noticed the fucking neo-nazis (and the clueless fools who march in lockstep with them) who seem desperate to escalate tensions and spark off actual rivers of blood crusades, and thought that maybe they were a more pressing threat than your average religious person.
Maybe they all miss VenomFangX?
Birds of a feather …
It’s not that we’re not railing against the evils of Islam. It’s that we’re not calling for all Muslims to be rounded up and sent to the gas chamber.
There was one thing the Heath Joker said when he was dressed as a nurse and trying to convince Two-Face to join him against Gotham City.
To paraphrase: ‘Everything is Ok if there is a plan. It doesn’t matter how insane the plan is. Or the evil things you do. As long as you are following the plan’
Then insanity doesn’t matter. Morality doesn’t matter. Apply that to the invasion of Iraq, or the drone killings of muslim innocents and even muslim first-responders. Or you are putting innocent people into Guantanomo Bay.
It doesn’t matter if it’s not working or if it’s making it worse. As long as EVERYONE is following the plan.
Yeah, I also missed the part where we defeated Christianity. Dear atheist conspiracy, I’m not getting the memos!
Last I checked some 70% of Americans were Christian. That number has been on a steady downward trajectory, but it’s still a supermajority. And the percentage of evangelicals hasn’t changed much, so what’s really happening is that the moderate, sensible Christians are exiting the fold leaving behind the crazies. Christianity is becoming rarer in the West but also more strident, as the culture warriors see themselves fighting a desperate rearguard action. They’ve gone so far as to declare that “religious liberty” means that laws they don’t like don’t apply to them. But hey, the 1% of Americans who are Muslim might take over and impose Sharia Ebola or something…
Yeah, you pick a murderous madman as your avatar, you call your enemies “social justice warriors” and “white knights”… Just maybe you’re the bad guy, right? Did that ever occur to you?
I never even got the memo anybody was “at war” with the xians, other than the other xians.
What? You didn’t fight in the Youtube wars?
Well, they can waste their time yelling at theists of different stripes on the Intertoobz. I have better things to do. Like, you know, anything.
(Looks blank…)
I like it under this rock. It’s nice and comfy and damp with plenty of crunchy worms and no nassssty eye in the sky that burns us, yes it does, and and and and…
PZ:
Hmm…
From Slithey tove @6 (on the acting):
Slithey, I think you just found a hypothesis to answer PZ’s question.
@15
“Hans, are we the baddies?”
Totally off topic: Some time ago there was a thread where people posted favorite/much-read books. Could somebody with better googling skills then me post a link to that post/thread.
Sorry for the interruption.
Found it! Finally noticed the search bar on the left.
Sorry again for the interruption
I used to care a lot about the evils of religion. I thought that, if we could just get people to stop believing false thing, we could finally start making the world better.
But now?
Atheists are just as bad. So who cares who’s right about unimportant things like gods and stuff.
PZ, I can’t believe you missed the chance to say,
“But according to the dictionary, ‘atheist’ just means that I don’t believe in a god. It says nothing about going to war with Islam.”
and also the ones who are most dedicated to their anonymity, who foam at the mouth about being “doxxed,” and claim that they are being intimidated into silence by “PC” and SJWs.
P.S. I have nothing against anonymity/pseudonymity myself. But I don’t pat myself on the back for my “bravery.”
What a price one pays when one substitutes testosterone for a neurotransmitter.
Of course there also are secular muslims. Almost all Carribean muslims are. One of them became Surinamese Minister of Justice and Police in 19 frigging 55. And no, he did not try to introduce the sharia.
I hate it that they call a kind of meme “memes”. This is an image macro. Memes can be any symbolic representation of ideas and cultural information that function to quickly and efficiently transmit ideas. And that is also their most limiting feature. They are ultimately assertions that feel good and are very useful in rapidly transmitting social information, but have the intellectual substance of Cheetos.
The value in a meme is solely in the ability of the person posting it to unpack and defend it, so any meme maker that ensures there is real substance could be pretty politically effective. I really really wish I could see the person who made the image macro posted above try to defend it. That would be immensely entertaining to see them attempt to pull reason and logic from that partially digested social vomit.
Dara O’Briain sort of sums up my views on why I never speak out about Islam beyond the obvious “Fuck Boko Haram”;
“There are two reasons I don’t do jokes about Muslims: A) I don’t know a fucking thing about Muslims. And B) Neither do you.”
My name is totally made up. I was actually born as Songoku3328.
I’ve got to be honest: As much as I like secularism, I’d take a religious, pluralistic society (regardless of religion) over an secular, absolutist society any day.
Cesar Romero is the only true Joker.
Speaking of the “war” rhetoric, isn’t it funny how the same people who talk about a war on Islam are vehemently against the war on drugs, because you can’t bomb a concept man!
Amen.
Massively off-topic, but the mention of Cesar Romero forced me to watch a clip of him on youtube, which has now lead to me watching “What’s My Line?” with Salvador Dali, and ending up in fits of giggles in a library. I HOPE YOU’RE PROUD OF YOURSELF?! :3
I believe it’s got something to do with another “meme” which states that Batman was awesome when you were a kid, but that the Joker started to make more sense the more you grew up.
Because he’s unapologetic!
Okay, it’s unapologetic about having the time of his life when he slaughters innocents for shit and giggles but who cares? He’s a badass rogue who tells his truth (murder is fun) to the sheeple, and that’s what being a Real True Atheist is all about, don’t cha know?
***
That’s because adepts of violence do not want to convince: they want to subjugate: it’s very easy to simply proclaim “I’m right and everyone who doesn’t see how obviously right I am is either stupid or vicious, and therefore deserve to be beaten up until they either submit and serve or die so their lands and belongings be granted to some who deserve it“: you don’t need to think, or doubt, anymore and will spend the rest of your life swimming in serotonin spawn from your sense of righteousness and inherent superiority.
***
I’d say that the conflict is between secularism and sectarian supremacism: a non-religious dictatorship that enshrines the privileges of the despot’s followers and cronies and invoke the intrinsic “superiority” of the despot’s chosen ideology to justify its rule may be merciless toward fundamentalists and still fuck secularism’s corpse sideways.
***
I fought in the great Mac-PC war…
Then my side won, and I’ve become jaded about the results.
@laurentweppe, as one who successfully lived, with his wife on an “extended visit” of a handful of years life in a GCC state (Google it), plus far too many years in combat in non-GCC states and one GCC state, let’s disagree.
I’m a man who actually adopted a biological clock in the call to prayer.
My dyslexic wife eventually managed well enough to sell artwork to the royal family.
That said, loving life there, we returned home to escort my father during his waning years and such an experience wasn’t pleasant at all.
Your casual comment ignores out mutual experience base as bad as the original “meme”, also ignoring reality.
I’ve dealt with hard core Islamists, done so with Christian varieties.
Hard core extremists are those that I most extremely loathe and honestly want a reason to give me an excuse to kill.
But then, I’m a veteran and retiree.
While the mind is the penultimate weapon, we did have other weapons to rely upon.
Arguments about his performance aside, but why has no one mentioned that despite the entertainment value and profundity of many of Film-Joker’s nihilistic anarchist rants, he was actually ultimately proven wrong about society and humanity at the end of the film?
Bad Film-Joker! Still wrong!
@ #37 =8)-DX
Yeah, that prisoner tossing out the detonator was just awesome. Such an uplifting moment. :-)
I never really got the Ledger-Joker’s motivations. I guess you weren’t supposed to, but that didn’t really impress me, on the contrary: He came off as pointless, just trying to be edgy. Or maybe I’m being unfair, I dunno. But other Jokers at least had a revenge motivation or something.
Sort of off topic, but has anyone seen those posters of Obama photoshopped with Joker makeup, above the word ‘socialism’?
Why is it when idiots want to get your attention they slap a Heath Ledger Joker face on their message?
It’s like pasting a swastika on a pony and saying ‘See, it’s a Nazi pony! Fear the ponies!’
Except the Joker isn’t even a swastika, he’s a comic book guy who never stood for anything that ever really happened. He scares kids mostly, who haven’t learned the difference between fantasy and reality.
MichaelE at 35:
I was thinking the same thing. What is left out of that meme, however, is that this only holds true for people with the right levels of myopic insularity and ignorance-born arrogance. These are also the same people who post the meme comparing Batman’s thoughts on killing (if I kill a killer, the number of killers in the world hasn’t changed) to the Punisher’s (that’s why I kill a bunch of them at the same time) which, in the end, only shows they suck at math.
=8)-DX at 37:
Probably because these are the same people who think Tyler Durden was right about the state of things since they stopped watching Fight Club right about the point the Narrator was figuring things out. It doesn’t help that they then directly run out and join the nearest Ron Paul Youth Society.
I’ve been feeling more like Christianity is at war with me. I have no desire to think in their church; it is they who want to pray in my school classroom.
Maybe Islam, too – I have no desire to kill them. They are perhaps a bit nutty, but that’s very different than what Hitler was up to, for example. On the other hand, some of them seem to have a desire to kill anyone not like them.
Saad @ 2;
Absolutely right. Too many atheists keep wringing their hands and going on about the division and collapse of atheism as if it is some new phenomenon conjured out of the ether be progressive atheists causing trouble for no reason, ignoring the fact that atheism has been infested with bigoted right wing arseholes ever since day one, and all that is happening now is that the veneer of unity is sloughing away and people are now left with an ambiguous choice about what kind of godlessness they want to embrace – is it progressive, inclusivist and cognizant of the moral implications of living a life without religion, or is it merely empty dictionary atheism that exists as little more than a means for godless dude bros to stroke their egos with an undeserved sense of intellectual superiority?
ShowMetheData @ 13;
To further expand on the analogy, the problem we have today is that we are witnessing a clash between factions mostly consisting of people just following the plan no matter how horrific, whether that plan is the atrociously incompetent and toxic notion of the ‘War on Terror’ with its drone strikes, invasions, torture and extra-judicial state sponsored murder, or the plan of the extreme Islamist groups like ISIS, with their delusions of global conquest and enforcing their version of a debased and corrupted Islam upon every human being on the face of the planet. Each side assumes their plan is just and reasonable, and they assume that it is somehow working to some higher collective good, and both sides are wrong.
Unfortunately, that applies to the mass of both sides, but not the entirety. Within each factions there are those who cynically see opportunity for entirely temporal and usually pecuniary advancement in the blood being shed, and construct the plan accordingly – those would be the ‘schemers’ the Joker so despises in the movie. In a sense, both plans are actually quite similar; each is really about power and wealth. Who has it, who wants it, who wants to keep the status quo. It is the old, old tragedy of our species, just with a new coat of ideological paint.
There’s a moment near the end of the movie where the Joker explains that he’s just trying to expose society’s hypocrisy and show people what they really are. IMDB gives me this quotation: “You see, their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these… these civilized people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.”
When I saw the flick, I found this striking, because it’s basically the same self-justification I had heard from Internet trolls on more than one occasion. So there’s your explanation for the affinity that trolls feel for him.
Carl Muckenhoupt wrote:
Or as Alfred Pennyworth (Micheal Caine) said in the same movie, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
Of course the MRAtheists identify with Nolan’s Joker, a director who made movies about Occupy and a white Jamaican terrorist overthrowing the government and rounding up all the the job creators, and about how Earth is swallowed by mega-dustbowls because “the planet has grown old” and the environmentalists brainwash schoo kids into believing Apollo was a hoax.
Nolan is a man who knows how to make vacuous, incoherent right-wing nonsense appear profound.
PZed, there’s lots of things idiots shouldn’t do.
However, being idiots, they are going to keep doing them….. :-(
Does this quote actuality come from a Batman movie?