Creeps among us

I don’t think I knew him — but then, I’ve met so many people in the atheist movement I might have — but suddenly, many of my other friends in godlessness are openly distancing themselves from Dan Linford. Worse, I’m hearing that there has been a lot of whispering about him for years, with women quietly telling each other to watch out for him…and, as I’m usually totally clueless about these things, I didn’t know about it at all (just as I knew nothing about the warnings about Shermer for so long).

And now Linford has confessed to coercing and assaulting students from his position of authority as a professor of philosophy. Here’s a public comment from Heina Dadabhoy:

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Rather, a sign of American culture in decline

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I usually say bad things about most movies — you have to admit, it’s not exactly a testimony to creativity or intellectual accomplishment when most of the movies coming out of Hollywood seem to be a) remakes, b) movies based on comic books, or c) remakes of comic book movies. Or worse, the movie version of a video game. I won’t say we’ve reached the nadir, though, because they can always sink lower, but now there’s a movie of a cell phone game, The Angry Birds Movie. I’m skipping it. I’m waiting for Pong: The Movie, or perhaps I’ll even hold out for Pong III: The Paddling.

But you’ll never guess who loves this movie: white supremacists. Finally, someone is catering to the simple-mindedly violent and bigoted Americans, because no other movie has managed to tap so deeply into simple-mindedness. The VDARE review is amusing, in a horrifyingly stupid sort of way.

“Angry Birds” is funny, entertaining, and best of all, right wing and hated by SJWs. It’s PG, so it might be a bit too edgy for very small children, but if you are ok with that, take your kids to see it today!

Dude. It’s a cartoon based on a simplistic, repetitive phone game, and you’re projecting your racism onto it. Most SJWs don’t even care enough to hate it, so that’s even more projection. You couldn’t be projecting more even if you were a little red cartoon bird loaded onto a catapult.

But I’m happy for you that finally the intelligence of movies have descended to your level. Now just wait for the Tetris movie to be made, which you’ll interpret as a horror story about weird sexual combinations.

What does it take to get rid of delusional public servants?

Let me qualify that: what does it take to give far right lunatics the boot in Texas? That’s a different ball game, I know.

Currently running for the Texas Board of Education is the infamous Mary Lou Bruner, who is way out there.

On her Facebook page, Ms. Bruner called Mr. Obama “Ahab the Arab,” and wrote that he “hates all white people and all wealthy people because to him wealthy means white.” Although she condemned the Ku Klux Klan in one posting, she wrote positively of its roots, writing that it started “as citizens trying to fight back against a corrupt government when there were corrupt officials or no officials at all to keep law and order in the rural areas.” Of Mr. Obama’s youth, she wrote: “I heard from a reliable source that Obama was also a male prostitute for a while when he lived in New York with his male ‘partner.’ How do you think he paid for his drugs?”

She’s got all kinds of wacky ideas.

On climate change, she wrote last June: “Climate change has nothing to do with weather or climate; it is all about system change from capitalism (free enterprise) to Socialism-Communism. The Climate Change HOAX was Karl Marx’s idea.”

On the Civil War, she wrote in 2014: “Slavery is not the Reason for the Civil War. by [sic] Mary Lou Bruner…. Historians waited until all of the people who were alive during the Civil War and the Restoration were dead of old age. THEN HISTORIANS WROTE THE HISTORY BOOKS TO TELL THE STORY THE WAY THEY WANTED IT TOLD.”

On the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, she wrote last November: “Many people believe the Democrat Party had JFK killed because the socialists and Communists in the party did not want a conservative president.”

Of course she’s a creationist.

When the flood waters subsided and rushed to the oceans there was no vegetation on the earth because the earth had been covered with water. It took a while for grass and trees to grow back and the big plant-eating dinosaurs needed lots of vegetation to live. The dinosaurs on the ark may have been babies and not able to reproduce. It might make sense to take the small dinosaurs onto the ark instead of the ones bigger than a bus. After the flood, the few remaining Behemoths and Leviathans may have become extinct because there was not enough vegetation on earth for them to survive to reproductive age. Most of the dinosaur fossils which scientists have found are permanently preserved in positions of great distress as if they were trying to keep their heads above water or above the mud.

She won 48% of the vote in her district in the Republican primary.

Any of those bizarre claims ought to have been sufficient to get her rejected by sensible voters; the long history and vast collection of infuriating stupidity ought to have been more than adequate to disqualify her.

But now, finally, a Texas Tea Party group has reconsidered their endorsement of Bruner. Was it the dinosaur story? Accusing Obama of being a drug addicted gay prostitute? The open hatred of “Middle Easterners”? No. It was this video of a speech she gave before a group of teachers, in which she misrepresented the number of teachers employed in a school district.

I guess I’ll take it, whatever it takes to discredit her in the eyes of Texas voters. But it’s just odd that it was this bit of casual ignorance, instead of her record of idiocy, that finally broke some of her support.

Same-sex marriage kills babies

At least that’s what the Heritage Foundation says. It’s going to kill 900,000 babies.

On the surface, abortion and same-sex marriage may seem unrelated. However, as explained in an amicus brief of 100 scholars of marriage, filed in the pending Supreme Court marriage cases and summarized here, the two are closely linked in a short and simple causal chain that the Supreme Court would be wise not to set in motion.

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There is more evidence that ex-wrestling coaches will molest your children, than that transgender people will

Ah, Republican hypocrisy. Ripe and pungent, flowing everywhere. While they’re flailing across the land to gin up a new moral panic over transgender people needing to pee, they’re also rushing to defend a convicted child molester who was one of their own. Dennis Hastert, form speaker, is guilty of sexually abusing children when he was a wrestling coach, and is about to be sentenced. His pals have written letters begging for leniency, and those letters have been made public, because the judge refused to accept them unless they were made openly.

So here’s the verminous Tom DeLay:

So I know his heart and have seen it up close and personal. We all have our flaws, but Dennis Hastert has very few. He is a good man that loves the lord. He gets his integrity and values from Him. He doesn’t deserve what he is going through. I ask that you consider the man that is before you and give him leniency where you can.

So we get a heavy dose of Christian hypocrisy, too. If Hastert gets his integrity and values from Him, that really puts an insidious twist on Matthew 19:14 (Suffer the little children to come unto me).

I also have to ask: do transgender men and women deserve what they go through?

Toxic gallantry

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This afternoon I’m giving a talk on how evolution, and fundamentally, the naturalistic fallacy, is abused all over the place, and then I find this open letter to the various heroines of recent movies, and I just want gak all over it. Not only does this guy call on bad biology to defend his traditionally misogynistic position, but he’s a fundie Christian who believes humans were created by a deity, so he doesn’t even accept the biology he’s misusing.

I know the whole world is ladling on the adoration for your brave contributions to modern womanhood. However, you are behaving, all of you, in ways that do not befit your sex or glorify God. Frankly, and I’m sorry to have to say this, I really am, many of you look ridiculous. Your friends and family and fans may not laugh at you. But the angels do and history will. What you’re doing might be good politics (of a sort), but it’s bad biology, bad theology, and bad storytelling. It lies about who you are as a woman and how God made you. And it makes for lousy movies and TV.

Okay, that’s the nastiest part. Now let me explain.

Let’s talk about biology first, who you are as a woman.

The most obvious things are the hardest to defend. You can write whole textbooks proving something unseen and unexpected like gravity or photosynthesis. But how do you prove the existence of Mt. Everest besides saying “Look, there it is?”

That’s why I feel dumb saying this, but:

Women are the weaker sex. They may be the smarter sex, they are often the wiser sex, they’re probably the more industrious sex, they’re definitely the prettier sex. But they’re also the weaker sex.

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Liars and monsters

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Robert Lewis Dear, the asshole who shot up a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic and murdered three people, has been flapping his wretched yap again. He’s been talking about how much he admired that other asshole, Paul Hill, who murdered an abortion doctor, and he’s been saying that he was hoping to be welcomed into heaven by a swarm of grateful aborted fetuses. And of course he was influenced by those phony videos from the “Center for Medical Progress” made by sick fuck David Daleiden.

The National Abortion Federation released a report last week documenting what should come as no surprise to anyone: that anti-abortion harassment, threats, intimidation and violence have spiked dramatically since July 2015 when the Center for Medical Progress began releasing deceptively edited videos aimed at discrediting Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue donation practices.

Despite the Center for Medical Progress’ videos having been widely discredited, and the indictment of its leader, the group continues to release videos — which federal and state politicians are using to justify invasive government investigations into abortion clinics and further abortion restrictions. This one-two punch of anti-abortion activity almost guarantees that the increased violence against abortion providers NAF documented in 2015 will continue into 2016 and beyond.

Now if you want further evidence of the hypocrisy of the Republican vermin who hate Planned Parenthood, look no further than these telling laws. Samantha Bee has noticed something strange: did you know that food stamps can’t be used to purchase disposable diapers? It’s not just punishing babies (you know, those critters they don’t want aborted, and that will be greeting Robert Dear in heaven by shitting all over his shoes), but it’s also a clever way to shackle parents, especially mothers, to their homes and making it impossible for them to find jobs.

How can you be adamant that all babies must be born, yet so callous and uncaring that you deny their mothers basic supplies for hygiene? If the Republicans were actually sincere about caring for children, you’d think they be all over bills to allow poor people to use their food stamps on something as unglamorous and useful as diapers.

After all, it’s not as if they’d be using them to buy red potatoes or spaghetti sauce.

That’s the other thing: the scum of the Republican party in Wisconsin, which is fast becoming a desolate hellhole of smug selfish bastards under Scott Walker, is now trying to pass a bill to control what things poor people are allowed to buy with their food stamps. Why? I don’t know, except that being Republican means you are compelled to meddle in the lives of others to make them more miserable. It’s a kind of psychopathy, I think.

Hypocrisy to the fourth power

Jud McMillin has resigned from his position as a Republican representative in the Indiana legislature. I know this bothers you — another promising political career cut short — but the hypocrisy of this one is positively enthralling. Rarely does a politician engage in such furious foot-shooting.

  • He’s resigning because he sent explicit sex videos recorded on his cell phone to a large number of people. Oh, excuse me, his cell phone was stolen and “his cellphone sent a sexually explicit video to an unknown number of recipients”. This is what the passive voice was intended for by the good Lord Above, people!

  • This is the second time he’s resigned because of the escape of sexually explicit images of himself from his phone (AI researchers: look into this. It may be a sentient device). He previously resigned from his job as an attorney because he’d been taking advantage of a client who was a victim of domestic violence. How did he get elected to high office after that? I don’t know. Indiana?

  • A highlight of his legislative record was working to pass a “2015 “religious freedom” law allowing businesses to ban gay customers”. Because, of course, he’s very concerned about public and private morality, since God frowns upon men who touch penises, except of course, when that man is making a masturbation video to send to his mistress. Oh, wait, I just got kneemail from Jesus, and he says Dad disapproves of that, too.

  • I think this one should count as irony, rather than hypocrisy: he also helped stall a bill to outlaw revenge porn, so any Hoosiers who have copies of his porn video, there’s nothing but your conscience to prevent you from disseminating it wildly. And if you’re the kind of person McMillin counts as a friend, there’s a good chance you don’t have one of those!

But don’t you worry about Jud, he has announced that he is resigning to spend more time with his family. You all know about Republican families, right? The family is a versatile institution that both provides an excuse to sanctimoniously moralize at the public, and acts as a perfect, untouchable refuge when you’re caught violating your own moral code.