“uncomfortable by my presence”

Do not wear humorous t-shirts on a plane. Do not mock the absurdity of the TSA security theater. And most of all…

Having been booted from our flight, the transit police now began to aggressively question us. At one point, I was asked where my brother lives (he was the one who gifted me the shirt). A bit surprised by the irrelevant question, I paused for a moment before answering.

“You had to think about that one. How come?,” she asked. I explained he recently moved. “Where’d he move from?” “Michigan,” I respond. “Michigan, what’s that?,” she says. At this point, the main TSA agent who’d questioned me earlier interjected: “He said ‘Michigan’.” Unable to withhold my snark, I responded with an eye-rolling sneer: “You’ve never heard of Michigan?”

This response did not please her partner, a transit cop named Mark. Mark grabbed his walkie-talkie and alerted his supervisor and proceeded to request that he be granted permission to question me further in a private room. His justification?: “First he hesitated, then he gave a stupid answer.” Michigan, my friends, is a stupid answer.

And then, he decided to drop any façade of fair treatment: the veil was lifted, this was about who I was and how I looked: “And he looks foreign.”

…do not look foreign.

Arijit got to experience the full weight of our stupid airport security system: he was thoroughly screened, held over and questioned at length, and ultimately kicked off a flight because he made the bigot sitting at the controls feel “uncomfortable”.

(A prediction: someone in the comments will blame the victim. He shouldn’t have been wearing a scary t-shirt, they will say, or he should have been deferential and cast his eyes downward and answered every stupid question politely. Just so I don’t have to reply to every such inanity, I offer you this preemptive reply: fuck you. Attitude is not and should not be a crime. Nor should be flying while brown.)

I guess you shouldn’t always trust your doctor

Especially if that doctor is associated with Physicians For Life, an organization of ideologically warped doctors who abuse science to justify anti-abortion screeds. In one article, they carry out a set of weird calculations to trivialize pregnancies from rape. They go through a series of calculations to throw out most rapes (the woman is too old or too young to get pregnant, for instance…which should set off your alarms right there. Child rape is less of a problem simply because they won’t get pregnant?), and then comes to this weird excuse:

Finally, factor in what is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that’s psychic trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. To get and stay pregnant a woman’s body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is easily influenced by emotions. There’s no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, and implantation.

Does that sound familiar? Missouri congressvermin Todd Akin recently echoed that sentiment, claiming that ‘legitimate rape’ rarely causes pregnancy (and it’s not just Akin — right-wingers everywhere parrot that claim).

Dr Jen Gunter speculates that Akin got his misinformation from Physicians for Life, and also takes apart their claim.

The Physicians for Life site quotes 3 sources, only one is original research. The one article was authored by Goth and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 1977 (yes, 1977) and in NO WAY SUPPORTS THE NOTION THAT RAPES ARE RARE OR THAT THE STRESS RESPONSE LOWERS THE PREGNANCY RATE. It is an article about sexual dysfunction among rapists. Put another way, the Physicians for Life have not provided a single published article to support their claims. Interestingly, Physicians for Life also promote the long disproven claim that abortion causes breast cancer.

It’s based on nothing but air and lies, in other words.

That’s not an experiment

Only a theist could come up with this one. It’s the Atheist Prayer Experiment; they’re recruiting atheists to say prayers. It’s an amazing pile of sneaky, devious, theological nonsense.

Here’s what we’re supposed to do:

We are asking each atheist who wishes to take part to pray for 2 to 3 minutes a day for 40 days for God to reveal Himself to them.

We would like any reflections, reactions, or revelations (positive or negative) experienced during the experiment to be recorded by participants. This may be video/audio Journal, blog, on a dedicated Facebook page, sent in by email etc.

Any participants need to be willing to record a radio interview about their experience of the experiment, though not everyone who takes part will necessarily be asked to do this.

This isn’t an exercise in appealing to a deity. It’s an exercise in psychology. If you tell yourself something every day over a fairly long period of time, will it affect how your mind works? I suspect the answer would be yes. Just the act of making a commitment to a religious belief and reinforcing it with daily rituals and reflection is going to fuck up your head. Most of us atheists have defenses against it — I couldn’t go through this without grumbling to myself that this behavior is bullshit, and it would probably end up making me even more disgusted with religion (if I bothered to do it, which I won’t) — but it could affect somebody who is gullible and impressionable. There’s nothing in this ‘experiment’ that could provide evidence of a god, but there is plenty of stuff to show that plastic minds exist…which we already know.

So why are they doing this? It’s based on a philosopher’s rationalization for prayer.

The experiment is based on the paper by Oxford philosopher Tim Mawson titled Praying to Stop Being an Atheist. In it Mawson argues that, on balance, it is in the interests of those atheists who don’t think it’s absolutely impossible that there’s a God to investigate the issue of whether or not he exists by ‘the experimental method’ – trying to ask him. Those interested in participating will be sent a copy of the paper.

I haven’t read the paper, and I’m not particularly interested. I did look up the abstract:

In this paper, I argue that atheists who think that the issue of God’s existence or non-existence is an important one; assign a greater than negligible probability to God’s existence; and are not in possession of a plausible argument for scepticism about the truth-directedness of uttering such prayers in their own cases, are under a prima facie obligation to pray to God that He stop them being atheists.

If a god actually existed, it would be an important matter; the fact that in millennia of searching no one has found reasonable evidence of such a being is empirical evidence that there isn’t one. This philosopher doesn’t seem to realize that atheists don’t believe in any gods at all; the reason we are overtly godless is that there are so many people who do. We believe in god-belief, not gods, and we also are pretty damned sure that believing in things that don’t exist is bad for you.

Personally, I assign a zero probability of “God’s” existence, because no one can define specifically what it’s attributes are. Every god that is defined semi-specifically — say, the Catholic god or the Lutheran god — contradicts known aspects of the universe and doesn’t exist. The vague deist’s deity only has a minuscule chance of existing because nothing is specified about its nature, so they reserve the right to label just about anything that does exist as “god” (I also reject that approach — I think it’s dishonest.)

We all have plausible arguments for skepticism: the absence of evidence for this being, the inconsistency of definitions for a deity under different faiths, the godawful nebulous handwaving of believers, and the incompetence of sophisticated theologians in being able to generate reasonable tests for the truth of their beliefs. That Mawson even thinks there is good cause to not be skeptical discredits him.

I am under no obligation at all to practice this guy’s weird magic rituals. Every religion has its own strange practices that believers are quite sure are essential to maintain their relationship with whatever gods they think are floating around; am I obligated to follow every random cult’s beliefs for some period of time? Is he?

Now look at the procedure they expect us to follow:

The question of how an atheist should pray is an interesting one. [No, it’s not.]

Tim Mawson has some suggestions in his paper: the prayer should be kept as open as possible, e.g., rather than ‘God of Christianity; if you’re out there, turn this water into wine for me’, ‘God, if you’re out there, reveal yourself to me’ would be better.

We only ask that anyone taking part commits themselves to finding a quiet meditative ‘space’ and praying there for two to three minutes each day as earnestly as they can for any God that there might be to reveal himself/herself/itself to him or her, and that he or she remains as open as possible to ways in which that prayer could be answered.

As expected, the rule for theologians to keep the story as fuzzy as possible, and to accept any unexpected result as evidence for their specific belief. It reminds me of those idiotic ghost hunter shows that infest television right now: send some people off with night vision cameras and microphones and have them wander about in some dark and crumbling relic of a building, and every odd noise and glitch and cold draft and emotional tremor is frantically reported as a sign of unusual paranormal activity.

That is not an experiment. An experiment would have a clear hypothesis, would define the parameters of the procedure precisely, and would set specific criteria for success or failure of the experimental test. See any of that above? No. It’s just another set of wackos building a pseudo-scientific rationalization for their delusions.

Summary of Thunderf00t/Phil Mason’s disgrace

The story so far: Thunderf00t/Phil Mason was invited to join our blog network last month. All he wrote during the short week he was here was incoherent, unprofessional rages against feminism and the whole network he was on; we could not understand why he even accepted the offer to join us if he hated us so much, and his inane rants certainly weren’t going to persuade us that we were wrong, so we kicked him off. And ever since he has been obsessed with howling about our perfidy.

The latest development is that it turns out that almost as soon as he’d been evicted, he snuck back onto our mailing list and has been reading all the confidential discussions we’ve been having. He has leaked these to third parties as well. When we shut down the security hole last week, he then tried to hack back in, to no avail. We have logs of all of this computer activity on his part.

He doesn’t have anything of actionable substance — we really haven’t been planning the overthrow of the government or any bank heists or anything nefarious — but he does have personal information about some of the contributors to FtB who want their privacy respected. That is his threat, and it’s not something we can trust him on, given that he’s already sent some emails to other people. And there was no legitimate reason for him to even need to be browsing our private email.

I’ll be compiling the responses to Thunderf00t’s lack of basic decency and ethics here, but first I have to highlight this, from Ed Brayton:

I really do find this outraged declaration that he does not “doc drop” to be almost laughably deluded. It’s like someone who breaks into your house because you forgot to latch a window. He comes into your house and steals your china and jewelry, then reacts in mock outrage when you suggest that he might steal your TV too. In fact, he screams “I do not steal TVs!” at the top of his lungs to the neighbors while he’s handing your other possessions out the door to someone else. And then he expects that declaration to be credible and to provide some assurance of his character.

Phil Mason also doesn’t seem to realize that his declaration that he broke in is in fact a confession. It’s not just that he’s violated our confidence, but that he’s so goddamn stupid that he’s announced it to the world.

Here’s the current list of blog posts protesting Thunderf00t’s inexcusable behavior. I’ll add to it as more come in, but I’m also going to be traveling a bit today, so my access may be spotty.

Thunderf00t/Phil Mason, treacherous hack

Fuck Thunderf00t/Phil Mason. The accounts that Zinnia and Natalie and Ashley have revealed are true: for the past month, Thunderf00t took advantage of a security exploit to hack into our private mail server; when the hole was closed, he tried multiple time to use the same exploit to get back in. He knowingly and willfully violated a confidential email list. And worse, what he has since been doing (and this is how we discovered the security flaw in the first place) is disseminating some of this email to third parties.

Yeah, this is the guy who expressed such outrage at people ‘dropping docs’ on him, but he has absolutely no qualms about breaking legally binding confidentiality of an LLC, and thinks it’s just fine to hold hostage personal information on pseudonymous posters who, under the promise of privacy, had discussed personal matters and job-related issues. He is a colossal hypocrite.

Just to make matters even worse, I woke up this morning to find some reassuring email from some friends of his, who had basically staged an intervention, trying to get him to back off from his unethical behavior. I was told that he had listened and agreed, and piously assured everyone that he thought the goals of the freethought movement were most important, and that we should all step away from the petty divisiveness and concentrate on education, science, secularism, and politics. His friends wrote to me and they sounded quite convinced that he was sincere and high minded.

And then he turned around, no doubt chortling to himself, and posted another slimy, sneering, lying article about freethoughtblogs. It’s appalling. Not only has he stabbed FtB in the back, but he has no qualms about lying to and betraying the people he still regards as friends.

Yes, we want to make Thunderf00t/Phil Mason a pariah in the atheist movement, and for good reason: he’s a dishonest scumbag. The nice thing for us is that he’s making it easy: Phil Mason is destroying his own reputation with his sleazy behavior. Who in their right mind would ever trust that guy with any confidence at all?

Don’t go into the light…until I’ve milked this story for another book

A while back, I wrote a couple of articles on near-death experiences: The NDE delusion and Near-death, rehashed. It’s a topic I’ve been following off and on for quite a few years.

So I was quite surprised to see this name popping up in the news lately: Melvin Morse. Morse is one of those gullible paranormalists who has a couple of sloppily breathless books out about NDEs — he gets mentioned a couple of times in this nice article debunking a couple of well-known cases. His specialty is describing NDEs in children.

Yeah, children. Which adds a little extra disgust to the news.

He has been arrested for waterboarding his own daughter, punishing her by holding her head under a running faucet so she couldn’t breathe.

The daughter told police she “could never understand what she did to be punished” and felt scared, court documents reported. Once, she said, her father told her he “was going to wrap her in a blanket and do it so that she could not move.” In another instance, she said Melvin Morse told her that “she could go five minutes without brain damage.”

…

After her father did these things, the girl said she would “go outside and cry,” prompting Melvin Morse to come outside and then “hold her nose and mouth with his hand,” police said in court records.

“He would tell her she was lucky he did not use duct tape,” police said in the documents. “He would not let go until she lost feeling and collapsed to the ground.”

It sounds like he was trying to do a little “research” on his own child. There’s good money in almost-dead children, you know.

What do you mean, we can’t shoot Canadians?

This is an actual letter to the Calgary Herald from an American tourist.

I recently visited Calgary from Michigan. As a police officer for 20 years, it feels strange not to carry my off-duty hand-gun. Many would say I have no need to carry one in Canada.

Yet the police cannot protect everyone all the time. A man should be al-lowed to protect himself if the need arises. The need arose in a theatre in Aurora, Colo., as well as a college campus in Canada.

Recently, while out for a walk in Nose Hill Park, in broad daylight on a paved trail, two young men approached my wife and me. The men stepped in front of us, then said in a very aggressive tone: “Been to the Stampede yet?”

We ignored them. The two moved closer, repeating: “Hey, you been to the Stampede yet?”

I quickly moved between these two and my wife, replying, “Gentle-men, I have no need to talk with you, goodbye.” They looked bewildered, and we then walked past them.

I speculate they did not have good intentions when they approached in such an aggressive, disrespectful and menacing manner. I thank the Lord Jesus Christ they did not pull a weapon of some sort, but rather concluded it was in their best interest to leave us alone.

Would we not expect a uniformed officer to pull his or her weapon to intercede in a life-or-death encounter to protect self, or another? Why then should the expectation be lower for a citizen of Canada or a visitor? Wait, I know – it’s because in Canada, only the criminals and the police carry handguns.

Walt Wawra, Kalamazoo, Mich.

The letter has been confirmed as genuine by the newspaper.

I’ve been to Calgary several times. I never knew I should have shot those pushy Canadians who tried to say hello to me.

Next time!

I think I might have second thoughts about visiting Kalamazoo, though.

A wee scrap of Mormon madness

These are the words of Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith of the Church of Latter Day Saints, uttered at a conference in 1961.

We will never get a man into space. This earth is man’s sphere and it was never intended that he should get away from it…

The moon is a superior planet to the earth and it was never intended that man should go there. You can write it down in your books that this will never happen.

He also wrote this in a book called Answers to Gospel Questions.

When man was placed on this earth it became his probationary, or mortal home. Here he is destined to stay until his earth-life is completed….There is no prophecy or edict ever given that mortals should ever should seek dominions beyond this earth while they dwell in mortality. Here we are, and here we should be content to stay. All this talk about space travel and the visiting of other worlds brings to mind vividly an attempt long ago made by foolish men who tried to build to heaven.

This belief that Mormons have that they were given Earth, and that the faithful can someday get their own planet, has consequences and implications.

Now you might be thinking, that was 1961…boy, did NASA show that Fielding was wrong 8 years later. But I was sent this link to a poll from 2009, where the LDS Freedom Forum is considering the problem.

What do you think about Joseph Fielding Smith’s moon prophecy?

He spoke out about something quasi-political. As a Church official, he should have known to leave well enough alone. 3%

It was his personal opinion and he was wrong about it. Big deal. 28%

I think this is proof he was a “false prophet.” 1%

He’s human…sometimes even Prophets or Apostles get stuff wrong. 17%

Joseph Fielding Smith was right about the moon, and still is to this day. 50%

Yep, 50% thought Fielding was right, humans couldn’t travel to the moon, and much of the following discussion is about how the moon landing was faked.

(It’s an old poll, and I think it’s closed, so don’t bother trying to change it. I just thought it was amusing.)

Flaming Cheerios: a weapon of mass destruction

The Smoking Gun has a hilarious video of a guy with a blowtorch and a box of Cheerios. It turns out that cheerios burn really well, and he set the lawn of General Mills on fire.

But there’s also a sad part. The event took place in Minnesota; I hate being reminded that I’m surrounded by stupid people. The guy with a blowtorch is Mike Leisner, and wouldn’t you know it…he’s doing this to protest the policies of tolerance practiced at General Mills, because he has a hard-on for the gays; he hates ’em, and thinks we all ought to, too. He’s been preaching hatred on youtube for some time.

He had a youtube channel called “Live4Chr1st” (wouldn’t you know he’d have to be a raving Christian nutcase?), but no more. It’s been taken down. He works as a real estate agent for Greater Midwest Properties — it’ll be interesting to see how long that lasts.

But I will try to look on the bright side. We have a referendum coming up in November on gay marriage in Minnesota; it helps that the opponents are such embarrassing fools. I’m also thinking that when the Revolution comes, I should stock up on boxes of Cheerios, rather than molotov cocktails.