The next step in our descent

We’ve already got the right wingers outright denying science. They couldn’t get any worse, could they? Have we hit bottom yet? No. They could be accepting the evidence for all the wrong reasons. Expect this to be the new normal for the far right in a few years.

Christian Post blogger Michael Bresciani writes this week that changes in the climate are indeed taking place, but not due to human activities such as fossil fuel emissions. Instead, he says extreme weather is the result of “homosexuality, abortion [and] general sexual preoccupation,” which according to Bresciani is bringing about the End Times and the coming of the Antichrist.

I hope it’s a few years. But you never know — with the midterm elections coming up, the Republicans may embrace it as a winning strategy.

Fresh new enemies — their tears give me strength

I’ve long pissed off the sexist anti-feminist gang, and now that I’ve pointed out their ideas are simply racist, I’ve had the HBD twits hollerin’ at me, and now I discover that the intersection of misogyny and racism is simply the worst. Heartiste has weighed in.

He’s referring to my criticism of that absurd sexual market value chart, which is all made up. A couple of the more obnoxious HBD ravers turn out to be happy supporters of the SMV concept, too.

And that brought in even more low-lifes. Take a look at this guy, making his grand statements about rape.

And then, the pièce de résistance…

I am so happy to have these wretched people as enemies.

The right wing’s new/old strategy for dealing with an uncomfortable reality

Declare that they are smarter than scientists. Simple!

George Will and Charles Krauthammer are right wing hacks who have an air of cultivated superciliousness that passes for intelligence in the smugly self-serving atmosphere of the Sunday morning talk shows…but they have no other talent or ability to justify their existence. The two got together on Fox News to pontificate on the usual conspiracy theories about how scientists are all lying. Here’s Will:

Now, there is, as Charles says, the policy question is how much wealth do we want to spend directly or in lost production in order to have no discernible measurable effect on the climate? People say, well, what about this report? There is a sociology of science. Scientists are not saints in white laboratory smocks. They have got interests like everybody else. If you want a tenure-track position in academia, don’t question the reigning orthodoxy on climate change. If you want money from the biggest source of direct research in this country, the federal government, don’t question its orthodoxy. If you want to get along with your peers, conform to peer pressure. This is what’s happening.

Krauthammer doubles down by claiming that all of science is subjective and simply made up by the eggheads.

99 percent of physicists convinced that space and time were fixed until Einstein working in a patent office wrote a paper in which he showed that they are not. I’m not impressed by numbers. I’m not impressed by consensus. When I was a psychiatrist, I participated in consensus conferences on how to define depression and mania. These are things that people negotiate in the way you would negotiate a bill, because the science is unstable, because in the case of climate, the models are changeable, and because climate is so complicated.

And then he declares that the conclusions of science are equivalent to superstition.

And you always see that no matter what happens, whether it’s a flood or it’s a drought, whether it’s one — it’s warming or cooling, it’s always a result of what is ultimately what we’re talking about here, human sin with the pollution of carbon. It’s the oldest superstition around. It was in the Old Testament. It’s in the rain dance of the Native Americans. If you sin, the skies will not cooperate. This is quite superstitious, and I’m waiting for science which doesn’t declare itself definitive but is otherwise convincing.

Do either of these guys have any knowledge of how science actually works? No. That doesn’t stop pundits from declaring it all invalid when it produces answers different from their ideological presuppositions, though. Isn’t it nice that the news media has become a haven for propagandists? It pays them a cushy salary and bolsters their prestige so they can go on air every week and engage in that exercise in projection in which they declare scientists to be scum-sucking shills who’ll say anything for money.

And now watch Marco Rubio. Oh, he’s pandering to the Tea Bagger vote.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) asserted recently that there was nothing that humans could do to stop climate change because it was not caused by humans, and that any new laws would only destroy our economy.

In an interview that aired on Sunday, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked the Florida Republican if he agreed with scientists who said that two of the cities in his state were being threatened by climate change.

I don’t agree with the notion that some are putting out there — including scientists — that somehow, there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what’s happening in our climate, Rubio insisted. Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research, and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that’s directly and almost solely attributable to manmade activity.

Don’t try to tell me these frauds aren’t science deniers.

How to drive a Brit crazy

It turns out to be really easy. All it takes is five little words.

“‘Cunt’ is a sexist slur.”

Ophelia is discovering this.

Maki Naro posted this little comment on twitter.

I retweeted it, and then the replies came flooding in. The defenses are hilarious, irrational, and indignant. It’s incredibly common to see people protest that it’s a perfectly acceptable word; everyone says it in England; it doesn’t have any sexual connotations at all, because apparently, people in the UK are so stupid that they don’t remember that it’s a word that refers to the female genitalia. The Argument from Regional Ubiquity simply doesn’t work — would we accept that Southerners get a free pass on calling people “nigger” because everyone down there is rednecked cracker, so it’s OK?

Other common arguments: it can’t be sexist, because we mostly call men “cunts” to insult them. Yeah, there’s nothing misogynist at all about thinking the most degrading thing you can call a man is to refer to him as a woman’s private parts.

Another one: So then is calling someone a “dick” sexist, too? Yes. We shouldn’t do that. And since when does “you said a bad word!” mean you get a free pass to use a different bad word?

Maki has been making his replies to these idiots in cartoon form.

There have been silly attempts to redefine “cunt” to strip it of all sexual connotations. Sorry, it’s still got them.

Another common excuse: “well, I don’t mean to be sexist, so it’s OK.”

I’ve also been amused by the condescending criticisms: we Americans don’t know how to swear properly, or it’s supposed to be insulting, that’s why it’s a bad word.

Right. Because the best way to hurt an individuals feelings is to demean half the population of the planet.

I’ve also been impressed by how damned insistent some people have become over this — they’re practically frothing in their insistence that it’s not sexist at all in their demand that it’s perfectly legitimate to use women’s vulvae as the most disgusting and contemptible thing in the world. They do go on and on. So I won’t. It’s still a prohibited usage here. Swear all you want, but racist/sexist smears are examples of bigotry and will not be tolerated.

I think Rob Ford must be my fault

Because, as we all know, I have so much influence on the Canadian electorate, and I keep making fun of Canada’s reputation for niceness, so they probably elected him just to spite me.

The latest account of Ford’s hijinks occurred right after his notorious softball interview with Jimmy Kimmel.

Ford is behind the wheel and hammered. One constituent he calls that night recalls Ford slurring his words.

The Star has heard audio of Ford and Bellissimo talking and both are slurring. (The Star has interviewed people who say it is nothing for Ford to down a 40-ouncer of vodka. The man who recorded the audio of Ford at Sully Gorman’s bar two weeks ago told the Star Ford’s ability to drink shots of tequila is “incredible.”)

Ford has two ways of communicating as he drives — his cellular phone and his Onstar device, a General Motors product that acts as a cellphone. During one call as he drives that night, Ford is recorded as saying the following about Jews, blacks and Italians:

“Nobody sticks up for people like I do, every f—ing k–e, n—-r, f—ing w-p, d-go, whatever the race. Nobody does. I’m the most racist guy around. I’m the mayor of Toronto.”

On a roll, Ford continues to spew invective that may be the worst published yet. At one point he makes a rude comment about his mother.

It goes on. It gets worse.

Wait…maybe it’s not my fault. We can blame Jimmy Kimmel!

For my part, if it will help, I’ll try in the future to avoid characterizing Canada as Mr Rogers’ neighborhood in real life, and try to remind everyone that the nation has its share of slimy assholes. For your part, Canada, could you at least get Ford off the road? Coked up drunk jerks shouldn’t be driving.

They can be mayor of Toronto, though.

The font of creationist idiocy continues to gush

I will say this for our latest creationist visitor, medic0506: he’s persistent. His foolishness has bloated up another thread to over 1200 comments, so I’m starting the conversation anew with this post.

One reason it’s going on and on is that he is full of shit and refuses to recognize that his ideas are ridiculous. He’s still babbling about the nature of light; if it’s bright enough, light is instantly teleported to your eye. He has some very curious explanations for how telescopes work. In response to a comment that if light behaved as he says it does, you wouldn’t be able to see more stars with a telescope than with the naked eye, he says:

On the contrary, if you think that through, you have it backwards. A telescope makes no sense under your theory of light travel, and can only work if my ideas or something very similar is true.

Under your theory, starlight has to physically travel and c remains a constant, telescopes should not be able to change any part of the equation. Light photons still have to reach all the way to earth and physically enter your eye. Likewise they also have to physically reach the earth in order to enter the telescope lens. Telescopes cannot in any way change the speed or distance in the equation and thus would become a useless middle-man.

Telescopes magnify, and magnification can only work if vision is the primary active mechanism, and works from the ground up.

It’s rather obvious he doesn’t have the slightest idea how light behaves or how telescopes work. C is not constant — it varies with the medium. We can use this property to refract light with a lens, or reflect it with a mirror, changing the direction. Telescopes are light collectors that gather photons falling on a large surface area and focus them on a smaller point. We design telescopes — light has mathematical properties that are accurately described by theories that are a few hundred years old — and modeling lenses on the assumption that eyes actively emit some kind of mysterious sensory rays, or whatever the hell he’s trying to suggest, doesn’t work and makes no sense at all.

And then, on top of the godawful ignorance, there’s his incredible arrogance.

…I have done my homework over the past couple years, and continue to do so. I have been researching information from both sides. I’d be willing to bet that I’ve read at least as many, if not more, scholarly articles from secular research journals, than many of the people on this site. Most of the information that people here post is old hat to me, and after researching the actual scientific arguments, links like Wikipedia and talkorigins aren’t the least bit helpful in making the case for evolution.

Without having done the amount of research that I have, I could not be as convinced as I am that it is false. It is that research that shows me that this theory should have been deemed falsified, and scrapped long ago. Every basic tenet of the theory has been falsified, or proven not to be sufficient to show what evolutionists claim that it shows. All anti-evolutionists know that to be true, whether they are creationists or not. It’s no longer a matter of trying to falsify the theory, that’s done, it’s a matter of persuading people to accept what the evidence shows. Proof and persuasion are two different things.

My god. This is a guy who still believes that visual perception is a product of extramission, claiming that he is a scholar of science, and that evolutionary theory has been falsified by the scientific literature. The man is astonishingly full of bullshit, and completely divorced from reality.

I’m happy to have him going on and on here, though: what a wonderful demonstration of the intellectual bankruptcy of creationists.

As has been explained in the comments, C is a constant; it’s the propagation of light through media that is variable.

The NRA version of play time

A reckless dumbass gun-fondling idiot named Chad Olm was entertaining his nephew. To reckless dumbass gun-fondling idiots, “entertainment” means showing off your gun collection and pointing weapons at children.

After letting the boys handle three handguns — a .357 Magnum revolver, a .22 revolver and a 9 mm — he then pulled out a Glock 27 .40-caliber handgun that was equipped with a laser sight.

Olm stated that he did not check to see if there was a round in the chamber, but said that the handgun did not have a magazine in it. Olm said that he pointed the laser at the walls and ceiling. And then he pointed it at his nephew.

“Look, you have a red dot on your forehead,” Olm recalled one of the boys saying.

Olm said that when the nephew reached out for the gun, he pulled the trigger. A single bullet struck the child above the eye, causing him to start bleeding and fall over.

Eleven years old, and he got his brains blown out because his uncle was a gun-fondling fuckhead.

We have received a creationist challenge!

It’s about the physics of light. This is coming from a guy who insists that if light is sufficiently bright, it can ignore the speed of light — so starlight blitzes instantly across multiple light years. He has a whole cacophony of bizarre ideas about how light works, but that doesn’t stop him from challenging evilutionists with this challenging challenge.

If your ideas about light travel are true, you should be able to catch some of these photons from a distant star of your choosing, and ship them to me with a note telling me which star they’re from. Once I open the container, those photons jump into my eyes, and I see your star, I will come on to Pharyngula AND DDO, publicly admit my ignorance on light travel, and issue an apology, as well as reimburse you for any shipping costs.

Isn’t the announcement of that challenge sufficient evidence that he’s ignorant of how light travels?

But don’t worry, he immediately backs up his challenge with a declaration that any statement that notes he has made a very stupid assumption is an attempt to chicken out.

Any takers, or are you guys just going to grumble about how ignorant the challenge is and make excuses for why it’s not possible to meet the challenge?? That seems to be the MO here for many of you, or the few of you and your puppet accounts, whichever the case may be.

Gosh, creationist, how about if you take a box into church and have the congregation pray into it, so that when I open it, Jesus pops out? Isn’t that what your religion preaches?

Or are you going to grumble now about how ignorant I am of religion as an excuse to not meet my challenge?

You want your starlight in a box, I WANT MY JESUS IN A BOX.