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.

The Great Oreo War

We Minnesotans have a constitutional amendment coming up in our November elections — certain anti-human, regressive elements in our state are peeved that anyone would dare to give equal legal protections to icky gay people, so they want to have us vote on this uncivil question:

“Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to provide that only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota?”

The correct answer, of course, is NO, written in tall bold letters with a flaming sword. You’ll probably have to settle for punching a ballot, but do it with fury, anyway.

So I’m pleased to see that General Mills, a major employer and creator of mass-market foodstuffs, has come out against the measure. Their CEO gave a $10,000 donation to opponents of the bill, and they also put out a lovely ad (I have been corrected: Kraft made the ad. So there are two companies to praise!):

Now the patriarchs and theocrats of the odious Minnesota for Marriage organization have declared war on Oreo cookies, an action as doomed to failure as declaring war on cute kitten pictures on the internet (wait, hang on, I should try to think of a better comparison…) There is now a campaign to show support for General Mills, which is a good thing to do when corporate America does something good.

But don’t underestimate the cunning of the Minnesota for Marriage folks! They are fighting back. After declaring a cookie the incarnation of Satan, smart move number one, they have made smart move number two: sentencing gays to death! From their facebook page:

Brilliant! There is a tactical genius behind all this, I’m sure. And he or she is probably gay.

The latest drama comic opera

No, not that one over there. This one on twitter.

I have deeply offended a small group of indignant skeptics. But here, I’ll let you read their side of the story first, although I’m sure that while they have been complaining about not getting my attention, now they’ll start complaining about the horde of vicious winged monkeys I just flung at them.

Now my side of the story. On my twitter account, I get a daily barrage of comments, mostly welcome, but there are idiots and spammers everywhere, and I block them. It’s easy: I click a button labeled “block”, and boom, they can’t write to me anymore. I probably block, on average, one or two pests a day.

So some guy writes to me yesterday and says, hey, you blocked my friend. I said I didn’t know that I had (not surprising, there’s a gigantic pile of bodies trapped in the filter; also, sometimes I do make mistakes and block the wrong person). So I checked. I don’t have a record of who I blocked, but I can at least check the guy’s blog out and see if there was a reason.

And oh, boy, but there was a good reason. His friend was one of those toxic privileged dimwits who was totally unhinged by the idea that a woman might turn down a guy’s proposition in an elevator. He really, really despises Rebecca Watson (I think I want an amulet with her face on it — it would make an excellent asshole detector and moron repellent). Also, what do I see in the comments but the usual slew of misogynist slimepit denizens who show up everywhere someone criticizes Watson, and there’s the blog owner agreeing with them and cussing out those annoying feminazis who are tainting the one True Skepticism™.

It was a righteous block, man, a clean kill. I want nothing to do with this clown and his sleazy associates.

And then Rebecca Watson lets me know that this is a guy who begged her to unblock him before, and called her a rude name. Yeah, that all fits. No, I’m not going to unblock him.

Only now he’s all upset: he didn’t call her that specific rude name, he claims, and it was unjust and unfair that I blocked him over that. You know what? I don’t care. That wasn’t part of my decision. I saw just another boring deranged anti-feminist, and saw no reason to unblock him. I don’t know what all the slighted blog owner said to Rebecca, but I do know that “feminazi” is a damned good tell.

But of course now it has escalated: he and his friends are whining that I wasn’t fair, that I didn’t look at the evidence, I should unblock him. No, I’m not fair, I did look at the evidence, I judged him to be an ass I don’t want to listen to. Done.

So now, to add to the fun, I’m blocking all these privileged twits who are popping up on twitter to whine at me more. With no regrets or remorse, since I even warned them all that I was just going to block anyone who tried to tell me who I must listen to. Also, the ERVites are having a grand time joining in, and I do love pissing them off.

Just let it be known: I can and will block whoever I want on Twitter, just as I can ban anyone I want on my blog. It’s not as if I have a shortage of participants in either medium, and I think it helps to cull out the stupid. And one thing that marks you as especially stupid is when you bother to complain that I don’t want to listen to you. Where does this sense of unfounded entitlement come from? Because it just makes me laugh harder at you.

Trolling trolls truly trolled

Some of you know that there’s a small collection of self-satisfied sexist scumbags who complain endlessly and bitterly about Freethoughtblogs — they’re nothing to be concerned about, especially since they’ve neatly encapsulated themselves, like an abscess, and removed themselves from the conversation. But Ophelia did something amusing: she parenthetically called them out.

(They’re going nuts here these days, by the way. Hundreds of hits every day. Hi Justicar! Hi franc, hi gang. Sure you don’t want to call Greta Hawkins names on Twitter by way of a holiday?)

That’s not the really funny part, though: they replied in the comment thread! I immediately thought of this Calvin & Hobbes cartoon.

The last panel in particular is precisely accurate.

Joe the Plumber is simply not very bright

The recent conversion of Leah Libresco has exposed some really stupid thinking: one of the junior woodchucks at Stedman’s site, for instance, chastised atheists for not realizing that “some people have good reasons for believing in God,” the kind of assertion that should make one stop and think, “Hmmm, and what might those reasons be?” They never follow through and explain what they are. And for the record, I think that Libresco’s reason, because she wants to personify her ethics, is pretty damned stupid.

But here’s a guy who makes Libresco and the Stedmanites look like super-geniuses of reason. Joe the Plumber explains why he became a “Bible-believing Christian” (in case you’re unfamiliar with the code words, that phrase means he’s a fundagelical wackaloon).

He first claims the Bible contains “everything we need to live a great life is right in the Bible”. Really, Joe? You get your plumbing instructions from the Bible? You live your life by the principles of blood sacrifice and retribution? Again, I wish these bozos would get specific: what, exactly, is the principle of life found in the Bible and not found anywhere else?

But then his big conversion moment comes from the fact that his doofus pastor shows him a science book and the Bible and points out that the science book gets revised, but the Bible never changes. My jaw dropped twice!

  1. That science adapts to new information is a strength, not a weakness. No one knows everything; as we learn more and more, an ability to change our ideas is a good thing.

  2. If the Bible were really that inflexible, it would be a terribly useless document — does he really think ‘everything he needs’ is to be found in the words of dead scribes and priests from an ancient iron age civilization?

    But mostly I wanted to ask him if he thought the Bible was originally written in English. I’d also like to see him babble if confronted with your average Christian bookstore, which will contain dozens of versions of his one true Bible.

Joe the Plumber: dumb as a soggy cardboard box full of bricks. And he’s running for congress. Why am I not surprised?

Bill Donohue sticks his foot in his mouth again

He’s such a charming fellow. A rabbi in New York wrote an op-ed in which he defended the right of women to make their own choices about reproduction, and in reply, Donohue called him a “man full of hate” and issued a veiled threat.

Donohue responded with a note to Waskow that launched an email exchange that ended with a warning, forwarded to BuzzFeed by a source close to the rabbi, that "Jews had better not make enemies of their Catholic friends since they have so few of them" (Donohue writes that this is a saying of Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York).

Those Jews. Everyone hates ’em, so they better not cross the few Catholics who are willing to let them live, I guess.

But wait, there’s more!

Donohue also includes a postscript saying, "I do not have a long nose."

Donahue also raised a recent child abuse scandal in Orthodox Jewish communities.

“You need to do something about this epidemic right now,” he told Waskow, who is not Orthodox, suggesting that Jews follow the Catholic Church’s reforms in dealing with clerical abuse.

Wait, what? The Catholic church is now the model in how to handle priestly child-rapers? Please, no, not that…anything but that.

Another douchebag: Marty Klein

Ladies, aren’t you used to this yet? Marty Klein is a sex therapist who writes for Psychology Today; he’s also a dishonest hack who will distort the facts to make his case.

You may remember that strange incident in which Elyse of Skepchick was working at a conference, and out of the blue, was handed a card offering group sex by a pair of strangers. Klein has taken that story and turned it into a tale of a prude squawking hysterically at a kindly offer by a pair of friends. It’s one of the more egregious manglings of a story I’ve seen in a long time.

What I find particularly outrageous, though, is that Klein is exactly like Ken Ham: nowhere in his fractured fairy tale does he include a single link to the actual participant and witness to the story, where readers might have discovered how he lied, and of course his article doesn’t include comments, where readers might correct him.