A poll with hubris!

It’s not so much the stupidity of this poll as it is the blithe arrogance of it.

For several years the debate has raged on between Conservatives and Liberals about two words in the Pledge Of Allegiance.

These words are, “Under God”.

Let’s settle this debate today.

With an online poll. On a little-known website. Right.

POLL: Should “Under God” Stay In The Pledge Of Allegiance?

Yes 84%
No 16%

So if those numbers change, will the people at that website then just say, “Well, it’s settled then. I guess we’ll stop saying “under god.”? If they stay the same, will you atheists consider the issue resolved and resign yourself to praising god?

iERA blusters

The iERA, that organization of Muslim fanatics, has sent Maryam Namazie a silly cease-and-desist letter. They want her to take down an FtB post because, among all the other documentation about iERA’s status as a hate group, she says they have threatened people with death, which they deny. Which is amusing, because she has long been a target of their hatred (A woman and an ex-Muslim? Horrors) and is able to turn right around and quote what they’ve said about her.

And to prove our point, after the report was published, a number of iERA supporters/activists have called me a “murtad” and “munafiq”, which are clear death threats for anyone who knows the Islamist movement. There have been death threats against me on their Facebook page (which have now been deleted). Plus one of their speakers we exposed in our report, Adnan Rashid, has been calling me Janazie (which means a corpse)…

And then there’s Hamza Andreas Tzortzis arguing that beheading is painless…

So…when is George Will going to retire?

There ought to be a pasturage somewhere for out-of-touch old white men. His latest nonsense, in which he tells women to shut up about rape, will raise a few eyebrows.

They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ("micro-aggressions," often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.

What exactly are these privileges one obtains when one is a victim of sexual assault? Name one. Show me one woman who covets being raped.

Will isn’t even aware of his inconsistency. He tries to do simple math and fails to recognize his failure.

The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12% of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12% reporting rate is correct, the 20% assault rate is preposterous.

Or that the 12% reporting rate is incorrect. The 20% number has been confirmed by the CDC, including both assault and attempted assault (an attempt can be traumatic, so there are no good grounds to exclude that), so it is likely very sound; the 12% reporting rate is an inferred estimate, because there is no directly measured number of unreported assaults — if there were, they’d be reported. So what should be understood from the “simple arithmetic” is that the frequency of reports is far lower than 12%.

But think about what Will is saying: being assaulted is supposed to be a “coveted status” that “confers privileges” on college campuses, but somehow, even with his inflated number, the vast majority of incidents are being kept secret by the victims. Why? Don’t they want their prize from the box of Cracker Jacks?

I’ll also note that Will complains that sexual assault includes nonconsensual touching as well as forcible penetration. I don’t get this attitude. Why does he want to narrow the definition of assault so much? Does he think it would be bad if someone walked up to him and shoved a dildo up his ass, but it’s OK if they instead slide their hand down his pants and gently cup his balls? There are a heck of a lot of things one could do to George Will short of literally raping him, and I think he’d agree (as would I) that a great many of them would represent criminal violations.

Perhaps he simply thinks all women ought to be accessible to a little involuntary fondling.

“Defend” does not mean “kill”

We had another terrible person armed with a gun swagger into a peaceable place here in the Pacific Northwest, and he callously killed one person and wounded three others at Seattle Pacific University before he was stopped. The student who stopped him used a can of mace to do so. That was brilliant: why don’t we endorse the use of non-lethal weaponry by our citizens? There’s no need for guns. The whole NRA/gun-fondler argument for the necessity of self-defense is taken care of by weapons that don’t kill people.

Dear Mr Atheist allow me to destroy evolution in 3 minutes!

That’s the title of a video I was sent that is supposed to utterly crush my faith in evolution. By the way, why is it that people who worship faith as a perfectly valid way of knowing so insistently insist that evolution is wrong because it takes too much faith to believe in it? Shouldn’t that be a sign to them that it’s even better than God?

I don’t know why anyone is impressed. It’s an ignoramus ranting at his cell phone camera, reciting tired, familiar creationist tropes.

evolution is not a science…because it was never observed…which is why it is called a theory.

But people have observed and documented evolution, and done experiments to test its predictions, gone out in the field and the lab to do science guided by the theory. Of course it’s a science! And it’s called a theory because it’s predictions have been successfully tested, and the mechanism has a lot of useful properties to inform the science. I don’t think he knows what “theory” actually means, but if you stuck it out to the end, you know his grasp of language is rather weak.

Then he blathers on with creationist misconceptions about evolution. We developed different characteristics because we willed it? “Will” doesn’t play any role in evolutionary theory. And of course he has to trot out Creationist Thermodynamics, which he defines as chaos can never produce order…because it defies the logic and laws of science, which is not something the laws of thermodynamics claim, and naturally he has to babble about tornado in a junkyard. Thanks, Fred Hoyle, your legacy lives on!

Then he wraps it all up with made-up etymology. You know what universe means, right? Uni, one; verse, like in a poem. Therefore Uni-verse means one single spoken statement, just like the book of Genesis says. Too bad the dictionary says otherwise:

late Middle English: from Old French univers or Latin universum, neuter of universus ‘combined into one, whole,’ from uni- ‘one’ + versus ‘turned’ (past participle of vertere ).

As long as we’re making up word origins, I think it’s clear that it’s like “united” + “versus”, meaning “everyone against”, reflecting the inimical, conflict-driven nature of existence, and therefore we have to all gather and laugh at the dumb-ass obnoxious mouth-breather who made that video.

No cure for insomnia here

I’m not adjusted to Pacific time yet, so I woke up this morning at 3am, and figured the thing to do is watch some boring debate…and you may have heard that Sye Ten Bruggencate debated Matt Dillahunty last weekend. Just the thing! Bruggencate is a tedious kook, and it’s just the thing to put me to sleep.

But then it turns out that Bruggencate’s position is so far out there it jarred me constantly. He’s arguing that belief in god is reasonable, and here’s his reasoning:

Why is it reasonable to believe god exists? Because it is true that god exists.

I say it’s true that god exists, therefore it is true that god exists.

You can’t know what’s ultimately real without revelation from god.

This is called begging the question. His entire opening argument is snippets of video of Matt Dillahunty, quotemined bits that he falsely boils down to claim Dillahunty is a solipsist who can’t tell whether he’s a brain in a vat.

And then, darn it, Matt is a really good debater and drills right down to Bruggencate’s fallacious approach. I keep saying this, that debating is a very specific skill, scientists don’t do debate, and you need someone who knows both sides inside and out. It was very entertaining to watch Bruggencate publicly dissected. Too entertaining. How am I going to get back to sleep?

So I kept going, and Bruggencate is infuriatingly obtuse. Also not conducive to sleep.

So here you go, better than a quart of coffee.

Evidences presupposes truth, truth presupposes god.

Grrr. Idiocy. And ultimately he admits that he regards Scripture as Absolute Truth.

I’ve debated Jerry Bergman, and I thought that was a futile exercise with a fool. I would not be able to calmly argue with Bruggencate, so kudos to Matt.

Oh, and a suggestion for Matt. One of the questions in the Q&A was from a neuroscientist who questioned the value of philosophy, and asked for a specific example of a genuine contribution of philosophy to our understanding. Matt fumbled it a bit, though, but there’s a really easy answer to give to a scientist who asks that kind of dismissive question about philosophy.

Philosophy gave us science.

There’s more, obviously, but that one ought to silence any anti-philosophical scientism.

Dumbasses on parade

Watch a gang of heavily armed lunatics draped with big guns march into a restaurant, proudly. What the heck is wrong with these people? Do they think these stunts make them look rational?

Texas dumbasses seem to get away with this nonsense, but imagine if they were a different group of people. Imagine if they were black.

You don’t have to imagine very hard. California once had the most restrictive gun control laws in the country — in particular, the Mulford Act made it illegal for people to play the stupid games Open Carry Texas does. And it was prompted by the fact that black people were advocating carrying guns around to protect themselves from an abusive police. That was enough for St. Ronald.

Then Gov. Ronald Reagan, now lauded as the patron saint of modern conservatism, told reporters in California that he saw "no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons." Reagan claimed that the Mulford Act, as it became known, "would work no hardship on the honest citizen." The NRA actually helped craft similar legislation in states across the country.

We could probably reverse these stupidly permissive gun laws if our black and Latino citizens started flaunting more legally carried guns, but I wouldn’t recommend it — it’s not worth getting shot over, and you know there are white people — and white police officers — who would feel threatened, and there would be blood spilled.

A better strategy: if an idiot with a gun shows up at a place of business you are frequenting, go up to the management and say, “There’s an idiot with a gun over there: throw him out or you’ve lost my business.” Those bozos are dangerous.

Is Ken Ham literate?

It’s an open question. He’s quite irate with me for stating the truth, which he says is a lie, while confirming that I was accurate.

One atheist blogger is claiming that I was wrong to write on Wednesday that Rachel Maddow of MSNBC TV declared that our Ark Encounter would be built using taxpayer money (through tax incentives). The blogger (PZ Myers) stated:

"He [Ken Ham] declares that no Kentucky taxpayer money is being used to construct the Ark Encounter, but that is a claim no one made. Maddow says quite clearly several times that the Ark Park has been given $43 million in tax incentives — that is, Answers in Genesis has been exempted from a requirement to pay taxes on their for-profit enterprise, and will also receive rebates on sales taxes. So all Ham has done is rebut a claim that Rachel Maddow did not make."

Well, judge for yourself. At the beginning of her mocking rant against us Maddow stated:

"And when the creationist group Answers in Genesis announced their plans to build their Noah’s Ark theme park, the state of Kentucky offered them $43 million dollars in tax incentives for them to build that theme park …".

You can hear Maddow say it for yourself at around the 1:55 mark of the video captured at https://answersingenesis.org/ministry-news/creation-museum/media-coverage/rachels-rant-msnbc/ . The atheist blogger has once again, as such secularists often do, did not tell the truth—and of course Rachel Maddow didn’t tell the truth, either.

I said, and Rachel Maddow said, that Ham received $43 million in tax incentives. We know exactly what that means: he got tax exemptions and rebates that would total $43 million as an incentive to construct his monument to idiocy. So when Ken Ham says we’re lying because no armored cars rolled up to his front door and unloaded big canvas bags with dollar signs printed on them, he is replying to a claim we did not make. Which I also clearly said in that bit of mine that he quoted.

You know, on the cop shows when a suspect is accused of X, and he immediately starts blustering “I did not do Y!”, you kind of suspect that he’s guilty of something. What is Ken Ham hiding?

Mega-facepalm

I am disappointed. Jaclyn Glenn makes an incoherent rant.

Her point: it’s terrible for feminists to take an issue like this [the Elliot Rodger murders] and try to twist it around, and tells everyone to look at the problems for what they are. It’s not misogyny, she says, it’s because Rodger was mentally ill. And then she reads a paragraph from is manifesto that is melodramatic, self-aggrandizing, and totally over-the-top, and announces that it proves that he is mentally ill.

The standards for psychiatric diagnoses have really gone to the dogs, haven’t they?

So a guy writes a 140-page raving rant about how women owe him sex, how he hates them, and how he wants to lock them up in a concentration camp and starve them to death, and it’s not misogyny — it’s just random insanity, completely unconnected to the culture around him. OK. So much for looking at problems for what they are.

She should have stopped there — it would have been just stupid and wrong, but she had to get in one more bit of self-defense of her views that completely contradicted what she just said.

There’s an obvious counter-example: what about people who commit acts of terrorism in the name of god, or mutilate themselves or their children, or immerse themselves in absurd life-styles because their holy book says they must? Are they insane, too?

No, no, says Ms Glenn. People do evil things because of religion, not because they’re insane. Rodger killed people because he was insane, not because of the influence of a misogynistic culture that he joined and that flooded him with constant messages of contempt for women. But when religion floods people with constant messages of extreme lunacy, it must be held accountable. Ideological indoctrination only influences you when it’s something Jaclyn Glenn doesn’t like.

I think she noticed the conflict in her position, though, because she quickly starts making excuses, saying there are big differences between religion and patriarchy: there’s not a rule code-book for men that says they are superior to women, she says. No, there’s not a single specific book — it’s just the whole default attitude. It’s an atmosphere of media bias. It’s a world that says, from the minute they are born, children must conform to gender stereotypes.

But we can now safely ignore everything Jaclyn Glenn says, because she also flings in a bizarre anecdote about how she was raised with a mother who freaked out over bugs, and she blames her upbringing on her phobia about insects. She shouldn’t be blaming her mad fears on her upbringing or her culture — she’s just taking this issue and twisting it around to avoid the unavoidable conclusion: fear of insects is a mental illness. How dare she blame her mother when the answer is so much simpler: there’s something wrong with her brain.

The one good thing about this attitude is that we now get to diagnose everyone with wild, stupid ideas as “mentally ill”. Is there enough room in American asylums to lock up Donald Trump, Cliven Bundy, the Wall Street Journal editorial staff, the entire Catholic hierarchy, those screaming pro-lifers lined up outside Planned Parenthood, and all the Tea Party membership? ‘Cause them folks is obviously crazy.

I’m a little worried, though, that it’s also beginning to look like we’re going to have to lock up a lot of the voices of the atheism movement on the same grounds.