Vox Day is one sick puppy

I don’t do debates anymore. One reason is that they give the other side far too much credibility; another is that the format rewards rhetoric, not honesty. But the other big reason is sheer disgust at the spectacle these loons can put on.

Imagine this metaphorical situation: you’re at a debate, and your opponent stands up and in the first round, starts punching himself in the face. Punching hard, until the blood spurts in great red rivers out of his nose. You’re aghast, but when your turn comes up, you try to make your points; in rebuttal, he pulls out a knife and starts gouging out one of his eyeballs. You just want to stop the whole debacle, call an ambulance, and have the poor warped goon hauled away. But then afterwards, he crows victory.

That’s a bit of hyperbole, but not by much. Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, has leapt upon my post in which I used the status of women as evidence that religion does harm to humanity, and eagerly tries to rebut me in a spectacular act of self-mutilation. I won’t link directly to poor sick Theodore Beale — he needs psychiatric help — but fortunately Dave Futrelle quotes him extensively, so you can get the gist without feeding Beale’s pathology directly.

But there’s enough bile to make you wonder. I was arguing that many features of religion clearly don’t benefit women, so I asked:

How does throwing acid in their faces when they demand independence from men benefit women?

So Teddy rebuts that in the most appalling way.

[F]emale independence is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills. Using the utilitarian metric favored by most atheists, a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability. If PZ has turned against utilitarianism or the concept of the collective welfare trumping the interests of the individual, I should be fascinated to hear it.

Say what? So his answer to how this benefits women is to say it’s bad for society for women to be independent, and that honor killings, stonings, and mutilation of women is a small price?

I think he just made my case for me.

But how about this: Beale has not made the case that destroying women’s lives is a necessary price to pay for social stability. I reject his bargain; I say we can have a more stable, healthier, stronger society if human beings live in mutually loving and respectful relationships. I do not have to hover over my wife with a threatening jar of acid in order for both of us to live together happily; in fact, a life where I had to compel a partnership with terror would be a horror and a nightmare.

One more. I also asked this:

How does letting women die rather than giving them an abortion benefit women?

Here’s his answer.

Because far more women are aborted than die as a result of their pregnancies going awry. The very idea that letting a few women die is worse than killing literally millions of unborn women shows that PZ not only isn’t thinking like a scientist, he’s quite clearly not thinking rationally at all. If PZ is going to be intellectually consistent here, then he should be quite willing to support the abortion of all black fetuses, since blacks disproportionately commit murder and 17x more people could be saved by aborting black fetuses than permitting the use of abortion to save the life of a mother. 466 American women die in pregnancy every year whereas 8,012 people died at the hands of black murderers in 2010.

A fetus is not a woman. I’m used to hearing those wacky anti-choicers call the fetus a “baby”, with all those emotional connotations, but this is the first time I’ve heard them called “women”.

The racist tirade is just sickening. So now Beale wants us to lump all black people together as “murderers” to justify forced sterilization, as a logical consequence of my values? I’ve heard of that tactic somewhere else before.

Again with the logical fallacies. Here’s a hint: the death of women in back-alley abortions can be directly addressed by legalizing abortion and providing responsible medical treatment; the socioeconomic conditions that create an environment of crime are not addressed by racially-defined forced abortion. If we want to end murders by any population (yes, please), the answer is not the extermination of that population, but the correction of social and economic inequity and providing opportunity for advancement.

And with that, I’m sufficiently repulsed not to want to continue. Beale/Day has apparently been whiningly demanding to debate me for the last few years; now you know why I won’t even consider it. Getting his words as second-hand text is nauseating enough, I’d rather not have to deal with the poisonous little scumbag directly.

A compendium of the dumbest anti-choice arguments ever

I don’t know whether it’s the content or the ghastly color design of this page. Seriously — here’s a sample of what they think looks good on the screen:

Checkmate, Pro-Choicers!

Jebus, that color combination hurts my eyes.

Oh, wait, no…it’s the content. It’s like a collection of the most ignorant arguments against abortion anyone could find — and they triumphantly present each bit of glib inanity, and follow it up with Checkmate, Pro-Choicers!

I’m not going to even try to dig into all of their idiotic cliches, but here’s a couple that represent a major pet peeve of mine — the conflation of “life” with “deserving all of the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of an adult woman.”

If we found something on Mars with a heartbeat, we would call it “alive.”
Checkmate, Pro-Choicers

Oh, sure, and then we’d let it vote, marry it, and let it own an ice cream shop in Philadelphia. This has never been an argument about what is alive or not; a fetus is alive. But merely being alive has never been sufficient criteria for giving something human rights. We don’t even need to go to Mars to find things with heartbeats that we willingly turn into Happy Meals, poison if we find them in our kitchens, or turn into pets. We are selective in the assignment of human status, and having a pulse or breathing are the very least of them, and are definitely not sufficient.

A zygote meets all of the scientific qualifications of HUMAN life at the moment of conception.
Checkmate, Pro-Choicers

How interesting. I’m always amused when I see these bozos insist indignantly that they’ve got science behind them. And what are these “scientific qualifications”? List them, please.

The problem here is that there are scientific markers we could use to define whether something is of human descent, but they tend to be fairly reductionist and don’t provide a good indication of the kinds of sociological distinctions we want to make with the word “human”: it’s not just the zygote at the moment of conception that is human, but so is the sperm and the oocyte, as are cancers and HeLa cells. And when you look at cells as being of human origin, that still doesn’t help you in the slightest in determining whether a cell has rights.

Waving a flippant hand in the direction of undefined “scientific qualifications” is useless. Tell me what the specifics are, and I promise you, I can shoot them down one by one. How do I know that? Because the people who put these lists together are ignoramuses, every time.

(via Pandagon)

Distilled, condensed, conflagrating stupid

Here’s the most evil thing I’ve ever done: it’s a recording from Trinity Broadcast Network (you are already recoiling) featuring Hugh Ross, Eric Hovind, Ken Ham, Ray Comfort, and a couple of other guys talking about evolution. Seriously, you will lose brain cells watching this. If you try to sit through the whole two hours (!), you will be reduced to a mindless zombie with a craving for human flesh. So I may be triggering the Zombie Apocalypse by posting this. But, you know, atheist, so what do I care?

I skipped through most of it. Somewhere in the middle, Ross and Ham really get into it over the age of the earth. Unfortunately, it’s mostly the two of them citing bible verses at each other.

I wonder why they didn’t have an atheist or two in the conversation?

GET OUT OF LOUISIANA WHILE YOU STILL CAN!

You’re doomed, all doomed. The state is about to privatize their “public” education system, turning it all into voucher-based chaos…and the Christians are looking forward to feasting on the shambles.

At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains “what God made” on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution.

“We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children,” Carrier said.

Other schools approved for state-funded vouchers use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don’t cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.

They’re building idiocracy down on the bayou, I guess. It may be the place where the Mississippi drains, but they don’t have to take it literally and turn the place into the sphincter of the nation.

Dennis Markuze is being a good boy

We have an update from a Montreal newspaper on Dennis Markuze, the raging spammer who yap-yap-yapped at me and many others for over a decade. He’s free, he’s employed, he’s been ordered to abstain from participating in online discussions. That’s the good part; I also hear now and again about an occasional Mabus-like rant appearing in some obscure forum on the internet, so he might be breaking the strict wording of his orders, but at least the deluge has been dammed.

I am bothered by one thing. It sounds like his trial didn’t do him justice: he blamed everything on drug and alcohol addiction, the court agreed with him, and all of his post-trial treatment has been directed towards his addictions.

“Since the therapy team at (Freedom House) does not have the competence necessary to make a psychiatric diagnosis, it seems to us that (Markuze) absolutely needs a follow up after he leaves the centre,” Proulx wrote.

“He sometimes makes remarks that leave us perplexed.”

I’m perplexed, too. His past behaviors did not seem to be the product of being drunk — they weren’t impulsive, they were planned and obsessive. So he wasn’t actually diagnosed or treated for psychiatric problems? That’s a body of possible causes for his behavior that weren’t examined or treated in the rush to pin the blame on the simplest explanation.

Let them have coathangers

He had to be named Bubba. He just had to fill every possible stereotype of the Southern good ol’ boy, the shallow, narrow-minded redneck who treats his women like he treats his dogs. Only he’s a state representative, elected to serve in the Mississippi congress — and Bubba Carpenter is proud to have stripped medical services from the women of his state.

We have literally stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi. Three blocks from the Capitol sits the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. A bill was drafted. It said, if you would perform an abortion in the state of Mississippi, you must be a certified OB/GYN and you must have admitting privileges to a hospital. Anybody here in the medical field knows how hard it is to get admitting privileges to a hospital…

It’s going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to– Roe vs. Wade. So we’ve done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They’re like, ‘Well, the poor pitiful women that can’t afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger.’ That’s what we’ve heard over and over and over.

But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi.

“You have to have moral values.” I agree. I truly wish Bubba Carpenter had some.

It’s not just coathangers. Poor women will also use clorox, turpentine, quinine, misoprostol, and back-alley butchers. They’ll bleed out, they’ll have perforated bowels, they’ll suffer unbearable agony, they’ll die. These are “moral values” at work. And note that he even acknowledges the other inequity: if they’re wealthy enough to go out of state (read: Republican), they won’t have to worry about the coathanger. This is open warfare on both women and the poor.

Bubba let slip the naked truth about the Republican agenda. The video of his statement is on youtube, but I suspect it won’t be for long: they’re scrambling to hide it away right now. I suppose it’s good that they exhibit a little shame, but it seems to be embarrassment that they were caught openly expressing what they think, not shame at their callousness.

His name was Carlos. What more do you need?

Someone named Carlos murdered Wanda Lopez in Texas. Carlos Hernandez. Someone named Carlos was arrested near the scene of the crime. Carlos DeLuna. Good enough! So after a hasty trial with a cheap and incompetent defense lawyer, Texas executed Carlos DeLuna.

Hernandez had a mustache and was wearing a grey flannel shirt, DeLuna was clean-shaven and wearing a white dress shirt. Hernandez was later arrested for another murder, and confessed to killing Wanda Lopez.

Didn’t matter. Texas had a Carlos.

There can’t be that many Hispanic men named Carlos, right? Just round ’em all up.

Once we’ve cleaned them out, we can start on the Juans.

Man, it’s like Texas took all the flaws of America and blew them up to ten times the size of anyplace else, and is proud of them.

I’m rubber, you’re glue

Why do cult leaders and religious fanatics try to insult atheists by comparing atheism to a cult and atheists to religious fanatics?

Zealous atheists resemble religious fanatics.

Rabbi Dow Marmur

#Atheism is a cult with a small following.

Deepak Chopra

I really don’t get it. It’s as if I were to sneer at creationists by calling them scientists, or clobbered seminaries by referring to them as research institutions (those are things I would not do, by the way).

Rabbi, you’re a guy who has dedicated his life to learning arcane and largely irrelevant nonsense from holy books. You go through weekly (probably daily) religious rituals, you believe in improbable foolishness, you wear special garments — you’re a religious fanatic. My profession is educator: I spend every day putting together information and evaluating the work of my students. I dress as I will. I have no rituals, other than the deadlines dictated by the academic calendar. That I reject your brand of theology (and all brands of theology!) does not make me religious, nor does it make me a fanatic.

Chopra, you’re a guy who peddles feel-good woo to the gullible. You’ve got bizarre, unsubstantiated beliefs about a conscious universe that aspires to fulfill the desires of individual humans; you rake in big speaker’s fees and sell empty fluff in books to the fools who follow you. You’re a cult leader. Atheism tells people to think for themselves and learn about reality; we have a few people who rise to prominence in the movement by their words and actions, but they aren’t exactly leaders — they get barraged constantly with criticism by their fellow atheists.

So I’m a bit lost at what point those two loons are trying to make. Their comments don’t seem to fit atheists or atheism at all, but do apply with a vengeance to themselves.

Derbyshire finds a new home

You knew he’d be just fine. After getting fired from the National Review for his ghastly racist views, he’s now been picked up by the openly racist VDARE. He’s come out now with a little post wondering about what label he should apply to his political camp. Before settling on calling his in-group the “dissident Right”, he considers this one:

Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think "White Supremacist" is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group.

Wait — he forgot to consider “The Racist Assholes” as a possibility. I think that’s the real winner.

Then he speaks the truth openly about the Republican party, or “Conservatism, Inc.” as he likes to call it. It’s one of the good things about Derbyshire: he’s so shameless that he isn’t at all hesitant about describing himself and his political pals in terms he finds copacetic, and the rest of the world finds contemptible.

I don’t mind the word “white” in either of those expressions. Conservatism, Inc. or otherwise, is a white people’s movement, a scattering of outliers notwithstanding.

Always has been, always will be. I have attended at least a hundred conservative gatherings, conferences, cruises, and jamborees: let me tell you, there ain’t too many raisins in that bun. I was in and out of the National Review offices for twelve years, and the only black person I saw there, other than when Herman Cain came calling, was Alex, the guy who runs the mail room. (Hey, Alex!)

This isn’t because conservatism is hostile to blacks and mestizos. Very much the contrary, especially in the case of Conservatism Inc. They fawn over the occasional nonwhite with a puppyish deference that fairly fogs the air with embarrassment. (Q: What do you call the one black guy at a gathering of 1,000 Republicans? A: “Mr. Chairman.”)

And why is this? It can’t be simply because conservatives are racist assholes, no…it’s got to be because minorities are parasites.

It’s just that conservative ideals like self-sufficiency and minimal dependence on government have no appeal to underperforming minorities—groups who, in the statistical generality, are short of the attributes that make for group success in a modern commercial nation.

Of what use would it be to them to embrace such ideals? They would end up even more decisively pooled at the bottom of society than they are currently.

A much better strategy for them is to ally with as many disaffected white and Asian subgroups as they can (homosexuals, feminists, dead-end labor unions), attain electoral majorities, and institute big redistributionist governments to give them make-work jobs and transfer wealth to them from successful groups.

Derbyshire has been fired from his more mainstream position, and he’s dying of cancer — he’s got nothing to lose. It’s quite bracing to see an old-school bigot open his yap and vomit forth his prejudices without the mealy-mouthed cliches all the others use so freely.

But still…he’s a racist, homophobic, bigoted asshole. I think he should even more freely embrace that label.

Goddamned racist America

A few years ago, at TAM, Blake Stacey and I took Ben Goldacre to a shooting range — we wanted to introduce him to the real America. Once we got there, though, we discovered an unexpected challenge: we had to choose a paper target to shoot at, and most of them were horribly racist. It turns out you can’t choose a picture of a redneck picketing an abortion clinic to blow holes in, but you’ve got a wide range of photos of black people looking snarly and vicious and threatening to “kill”. We ended up choosing the most abstract target we could find, a mere black outline, which we discovered on closer inspection had all the major organ locations market out in grey. It was all a bit squicky.

This was several years ago, though, so we didn’t have the option of choosing this target, which is apparently quite popular right now.

Nothing scarier than a figure in a hoody, armed with iced tea and skittles, I guess.

There is a petition. You can sign it to try and make yourself feel a little better. I don’t think there’s a single thing that can be done to reconcile me to the fact that our country is populated with racist thugs and morons, though. It just is.