Somebody is going to have to explain comedy to me

I know it’s often offensive; it’s supposed to be offensive, especially if it’s targeting people in power. When Michael Richards had his temper tantrum, calling black members of the audience racist slurs, he crossed a line by targeting a more vulnerable group, and echoing a sentiment that was the product of centuries of oppression. It’s not surprising that the audience walked out on him and that his career took a crippling hit.

But something very similar just happened. Another comedian, Daniel Tosh, uses the stage to tell rape jokes, and when a woman in the audience calls out that rape jokes are never funny, he has a totally inappropriate response.

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…” and I, completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening but knowing i needed to get out of there, immediately nudged my friend, who was also completely stunned, and we high-tailed it out of there. It was humiliating, of course, especially as the audience guffawed in response to Tosh, their eyes following us as we made our way out of there. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said about me.

And there’s what I don’t get. The audience laughed and stayed for that? Talking about raping a heckler is now a laugh line?

I don’t know, has his career taken a hit? It might be hard to tell — hosting a youtube clips show on basic cable isn’t exactly the pinnacle of comedy.

It’s just odd that people can have a sense of shame about racism, but it’s still considered hilarious to laugh at the idea of women being gang-raped (or, since I know it’s coming, that joking about prison rape is good for a laugh. Please don’t try to turn the joke around and make it about Tosh getting raped, because that isn’t funny, either.)

The Saga of Paula Kirby

This is going to confuse some angry trolls. We’ve got one thread persecuting Thunderf00t, and now I’m going to add another one dissing Paula Kirby. I love the stuff Kirby has written before, so it was horribly depressing to read that illogical hash she recently wrote: The Sisterhood of the Oppressed. Apparently, it’s really bad and bullying to call people names, so she calls me and many others Feminazis and Femistasi.

I know! It makes no sense!

I just find it too depressing, so I’m just going to pass the baton on to Jadehawk and Suirauqa to administer the drubbing. They do it well.

You want to see bullying?

I’ll show you bullying. Laci Green has been hounded off tumblr by some very confused and evil people — they are threatening her and sending her pictures of where she lives.

You can see why I say confused: they’re accusing her of being transphobic and anti-islamic; I wonder if they even know what the first word means. She’s neither — she writes a sex blog — but it wouldn’t matter if she were. Trying to frighten people off the internet with physical threats is inexcusable, and I hope the police are on this case.

How can anyone do that to a kitten?

Some people are just sick, demented little bastards. And when they’re in a sick, demented church, it just magnifies the problem. And really, you can’t get much sicker than the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints — the church of Warren Jeffs, the abusers of women and children, the mega-patriarchal colony of polygamous parasites.

Like most cults, they’re very protective of their own and hate apostates passionately. They must send a message to anyone who dares leave the church, as Isaac Wyler discovered. He found a kitten on his property: a kitten half-encased in concrete, which suffered for a little while before it died.

Local authorities, also members of this inbred nasty sect, just laughed at the dying animal.

I just want to see that cult demolished and its members sent off to make an honest living on their own, the men without women to dominate.

Republicans really do hate everything good and true

Unbelievable. They don’t just reject science, they don’t just despise women, they don’t just want to silence labor, Republicans hate art.

Over the weekend, the governor, Nikki Haley, destroyed the South Carolina Commission for the Arts — the cut was such that the 20 people who work there cannot show up to work today, can’t even go into their building, because of liability issues. The arts in South Carolina brings in $9.2 billion and creates 78,000 jobs at a cost of 1.9 million to the Arts Commission. It’s a phenomenally stupid cut — our state has one of the two best arts in education programs in the country! We don’t do a lot well in South Carolina, but this is one of the few we really do. And now we’re about to be the only state in the country without a public arts agency.

Read the whole thing. There’s a contact form there, you can contact the responsible idiots and tell ’em off; you should do that especially if you’re from South Carolina, but I think a world-wide show of solidarity would also be good.

Tell the philistines what you think.

Did Ancient Aliens visit the earth and guide human evolution?

No.

One other event I participated in was a “debate” with an ancient alien theorist. It was very peculiar, as you might guess. The way this came about was that Scotty Roberts, the alien astronaut fan, proposed a session on his wacky speculations, and the conference organizers didn’t want such lunacy to sail through without a word, so they asked some of the people on the science & skepticism track to engage. Greg Laden and I agreed to sit on a panel with him and another person, with Desiree Schell to moderate. And then I just kind of ignored the prospect until the day of.

Greg Laden and I met in the hallway briefly, and we asked each other what we were going to say, and wondered what this Roberts fellow’s position was. We didn’t have a clue. So the afternoon of the debate I pulled Scotty Roberts’ book off the magical internet, and quickly speed-read the whole thing, which turned out to be not very difficult at all, and unfortunately, he turned out to be even further out there than either Greg or I imagined.

The book is called The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim: The Untold Story of Fallen Angels, Giants on the Earth, and Their Extraterrestrial Origins.

You’re already cringing, aren’t you? Just the title is enough.

Pity me. I read the contents. I shall give you a sample so that you may suffer as well.

In the occult science of Numerology, the number 33 represents the ultimate attainment of consciousness. Keeping that in mind, it is very interesting to note that the geographic location of Mount Hermon, the very place where the Watchers are said to have descended to the earthly plane, lies on the 33rd parallel, which is a latitude of 33° north of the equator. If you trace the 33rd parallel to the exact geographic global opposite from Mount Hermon, you will find yourself directly on top of the most controversially mythic place in current ufological history: Roswell, New Mexico. Mount Hermon, where the Watchers descended to the earth, and Roswell, New Mexico, are exact polar opposites on the same 33rd degree north latitude. The global coordinates of Mount Hermon and the Roswell crash site are no accident, and speak to some deeper, perhaps secret significance.

So the basis for making a connection between a greatly distorted myth about divine intervention in the Middle East and UFOs is numerology and geography, where global opposites is supposed to be somehow significant. I take this bizarrely scientific attitude towards facts, though, and despite the absurdity of the logic behind this tortuous connection, I had to look up the numbers.

(My source gave me the wrong Roswell: corrected below)

Roswell is at 33.4° N. Mount Hermon is at 33.4° N. Close!

Roswell is at 104.5° W. Mount Hermon is at 35.85° E. They aren’t even close to being longitudinal opposites. The opposite side of the globe for Roswell would be somewhere deep in Asia, while the opposite for Mount Hermon is in the Pacific Ocean.

The rest of the book has the same deep affection for the truth: none of it matters. The entire basis for his argument is a few lines from the Bible and the book of Enoch, in which Nephilim and giants and angels are casually tossed around, and what he wants to do is pretend those are scientific data, from which he can build a gigantic rickety framework of speculation intended to support his foregone conclusion, that angels mated with humans and produced a special line of meddling magic creatures.

Now what about the “debate”?

As expected, it was awful. Scotty Roberts opened by protesting that he hadn’t known it was going to be a debate, so he didn’t have any “facts” on hand, and besides, it wasn’t an argument built on facts, but was a theory and philosophy — this was something of a theme for him, dismissing mere science and claiming that the ass-plucking he was doing should be called philosophy. He actively avoided making any specific claims about what he was arguing for — he did not talk about UFOs, Nephilim, Roswell, or any of the details he promoted in his book, preferring instead to recite vague creationist claims (“there were 600 flood myths!”) and complaining about having to provide evidence, of which he had none.

We poked at his gelatinous gooey non-statements. Greg ripped into his pseudo-archaeology: no, there aren’t 600 flood myths, there are racist connotations to all of these alien beings stories, because they’re often trotted out to support claims of the inferiority of native peoples, who weren’t possibly clever enough to construct those peculiar artifacts. I hammered him on the absence of evidence and the absurdity of his pretense to logic.

He was, of course, imperturbable. There was nothing rational about any of his claims, so there was no way rational argument was going to make him question them.

It was a mildly entertaining afternoon, nothing more.

One other thing: he’s hosting another convention in Minneapolis this October: The Paradigm Symposium: Re-visioning our place in the universe. I see one word in the title that’s been overused to the point of meaninglessness, and another awkward invention. It’s gonna be ugly, folks.

But look at the speaker list: they actually have Erich von Däniken coming in, also with George Noory, and, of course, the notorious Giorgio A. Tsoukalos. You know who I’m talking about.

Roberts casually invited me to the conference to participate in a debate there, and I would be tempted, just because JESUS LOOK AT ALL THE BLOG FODDER! I suspect, though, that the invitation will fade from his memory as it sinks in that I would be sitting in the audience, laughing way too hard throughout the event.

Hey, cool: ZOMGItsCriss recorded the whole thing.

Is anyone else getting these?

A long white envelope with no return address, postmarked San Francisco. Inside, a folded piece of paper that looks like this:

That’s all.

I’ve received four of these so far, some at work and some at home. My wife has been sent one.

I wish to complain.

This is the most rinky-tink, cheap, pointless evangelical campaign yet. Come on, whoever you are, put some goddamned effort into it. Throw a Chick tract in the envelope. Pound a keyboard for a while and produce a little screed with your religious views that you photocopy and stuff into the envelopes. Personalize it a little; scribble your initials in the corner. Toss in a cheesy poem you copied off a greeting card in the evangelical bookstore. Do something — man, you couldn’t even bother to send a whole sheet of 8½ x 11 paper, you could only send me a quarter slice.

And no, I don’t believe for a minute that this was a personal message from Jesus Christ. If it was, though, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn he’s living in San Francisco. Probably in the Castro. And loving the fact that he’s escaped those assholes promoting his religion by hiding in the last place they’d look for him.

Preemptive disclosure

I just had to send a complaint to one of my fellow bloggers here at FtB. And since he likes to post his email publicly, I just thought I’d do it myself and get it out of the way.

Justin:

I looked over the shenanigans on your latest post, “the pits”. I am disgusted and appalled.

You claim to be so knowledgable about this anonymous/4chan “culture”*, but for someone so savvy you are being so thoroughly manipulated that it offends me to see the raging stupidity and naivete.

Do you even realize you have been manipulated into providing a forum on FtB for these jerks to engage in a long, tedious, abysmally contemptible discussion of the appropriateness of kicking your colleague Ophelia “in the cunt”? They don’t care what position anyone takes — they are having a gigglingly good time just dwelling on it. And you’re happily going along with it. You are encouraging it.

Most normal human beings resolved that question in kindergarten. No, you do not get to kick girls or boys in the crotch. No, it’s not debatable. No, we do not need your new friends to chatter for a few hundred comments about whether it’s reasonable or a real threat or just for lulz or whatever pathetic non-excuse they’re giving — it’s wrong. And your response to this prolonged exercise in gaming Justin’s blog?

“Cute. I actually did laugh.”

I’m not impressed. It’s not just that you are indulging these people, it’s that you’re being so stupid — literally, I MEAN STUPID — that you don’t even see how you’re being played.

Jebus. I wash my hands of you.

Maybe you should try cleaning up the mess you’ve created. I’m sure not going to do it for you, and I’m sure not going to regard your efforts charitably otherwise.

*We had these same people back in the olden times, before there were computers and networks, only we didn’t dignify them with the title of “culture”. We just called them assholes.

Our terrible secret exposed!

I am dismayed. Freethoughtblogs has been accused of being a den of Feminazis, Femistasi, totalitarian thought, and being equivalent to a totalitarian state, by no less a person than Paula Kirby. This is terrible news!

We aren’t ready! The interrogation rooms haven’t even been furnished, all the razorwire is sitting in spools and hasn’t been deployed, and we haven’t even settled on the final design for the uniforms. I mean, we’ve picked the colors (black, of course, with blood red highlights), but we’re bickering over the retro and dapper 1940s look, or this spectacular futuristic art deco Ming the Merciless style. They both look so fabulous it’s impossible to make up our minds. We have settled on the symbol: skulls — absolutely required — and tentacles.

But it’s not enough and we’re nowhere near prepared! I’ve had to spend my evening browsing through military surplus catalogs — it’s amazing what you can buy online — to get the gear for the 1st Pharyngula Panzer Division, since as you all know, fashion is more important than guns for a good solid popular fascist movement, so we waited until the last moment. We’re going to have to settle for some rather marginal tanks, I’m afraid, but it should be adequate to roll over the Dakotas and Wisconsin, especially since they don’t suspect a thing, and once we’ve seized a few depots we can upgrade. But still! We had a goddamned timetable (you know how we fascists love our timetables), and this just messes them all up!

Oh, well.

Say, if I put up a chipin widget or create a kickstarter to build a war machine, you’ll all contribute, right? We’ll take your name off the purge list if you do!

And, well, you all know what will happen to you if you don’t.