Sacrificing children on the altar of the Constitution

We have a new low — and there have been so many lows — in the gun fondler canon. Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, the dumb right-winger adopted as a pal by the McCain presidential campaign, has weighed in on the Isla Vista murders.

I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now, wrote Wurzelbacher, who became something of a mascot for John McCain’s failed 2008 presidential campaign. But: As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.

His precious Constitutional rights…how come they never pay attention to the second and third words of that amendment?

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

It’s a bad amendment that has been no end of trouble throughout our history, particularly because of its sloppy wording and lazy interpretation, but also because it is no longer true — technology has progressed to the point where a militia is pretty much useless in providing security. What we need is another amendment to bring the Constitution into the 21st century, rather than the 18th, and then of course, because it will be in the Most Holy and Inviolable Constitution, every right-winger will respect it and get their guns checked and registered, as well as accepting limitations on access to particularly deadly weaponry. Right?

I have another question, though. Wurzelbacher also complains about gun-grab extremists who want to capitalize on these horrific events for their own political ends. I’d love to know, though…what are those political ends? How does he think we gain, and who profits, from enacting laws that limit the flood of weapons of mass destruction within our own country?

Other than not seeing our children murdered, that is.

Which he’s already said he doesn’t think is as important a goal as allowing him to stroke his rifle.

Dammit. I spoke too soon. Right after I say, “Look at this amazing new low,” someone has to go and dig a deeper hole. In this case, Todd Kincannon of South Carolina, who gets all macho and blame-the-victim.

No idea how my son will die, but I know it won’t be cowering like a bitch at UC Santa Barbara. Any son of mine would have been shooting back.

Drink some water, while you can

Last night, as promised, I watched Gasland. It’s an excellent documentary presented in a jarringly low-key style — jarring because every place visited that had extensive fracking was a horror. There were landscapes where farmers and ranchers were trying to make a living, and everywhere you looked, there were drilling rigs and condensate tanks, clouds of toxic vapor, and the water from local wells was coming up yellow to brown to black, fizzing off flammable gasses and saturated with chemical sludge. In some cases, water wells would actually explode.

Josh Fox, the documentarian, had to struggle to get any interviews with the corporate slugs who were greedily promoting this abuse of the environment. The most honest of them said, essentially, that there were always going to be compromises and a tiny bit of pollution was the price we have to pay for our energy; the worst would flat out deny that fracking could be causing any contamination of the water. Right. They snake pipes a mile or two under the ground, and then pump many thousands of liters of water loaded with organic solvents, a witch’s brew of carcinogens and teratogens and greasy poisonous crap, into the rock under such intense pressure that it cracks the confining geology, all to tap into trapped oil and gas, and there’s no way it could possibly leech into aquifers. And they pay desperate affected individuals some small sum, tens of thousands of dollars, to shut up and accept the damage.

This map was shown several times in the movie. All the red areas are deep shale beds, natural gas reservoirs, that are likely candidates for drilling.

Gaslandmap

Do you live in any of those places? You should worry. If they aren’t drilling now, they want to soon.

We also got to meet the greatest villain of this century, Dick Cheney. He’s the architect of the legal exemption of fracking companies from the restrictions of the Clean Water Act (among all the other things Ol’ Dick has done to advance the United States of Halliburton). Our government has washed its hands of any responsibilities, and an employee of the Environmental Protection Agency came right out and said the EPA was consciously avoiding getting into dealing with the consequences of fracking.

It’s one of the most depressing movies I’ve seen in years. We’re doomed, aren’t we?

At least there were a few nods to the gallant heroes are actually doing something to try and stem the flood of oil money: the movie has an interview with Theo Colborn, who really deserves wider recognition. It also features the real hero, the planet, with lots of lovely shots of Fox’s home in a secluded bit of the Delaware River basin — a place I remember well, having taken my kids camping and on scouting trips in the lush deep woods of Pennsylvania. That’s what prompted the movie, that that area is threatened with fracking development. All it would take is one neighbor to sell out to a natural gas company, and because the government is dragging its feet on protecting the environment, everyone could enjoy a river filled with benzene and 500 other killer chemicals.

By the way, today Google is celebrating Rachel Carson’s birthday.

rachelcarson

We haven’t learned a thing.

What are we going to do about Amazon?

I was reading a summary of Amazon’s bullying of Hachette — basically, Amazon used it’s near-monopoly power to shut out an independent publisher — and that, on top of it’s labor practices, tells me I need to find a way out of the Amazon trap before they become a full monopoly.

But here’s the catch: I live out in the boondocks. The nearest bookstore is a 50 minute drive away. I am addicted to the Kindle app — I can use my iPad to click on a title and get it zapped into my hands in 30 seconds, like magic. So I went searching to see if any other bookseller has similar functionality. Barnes & Noble has an app that will let you search their inventory and find a nearby store (I looked. Two hours away.) Powell’s is even worse: it assumes you will show up at their door in Portland, Oregon, and their app provides an interactive map to help you find your way around their store.

These are not useful for me.

Does Amazon already have an effective monopoly on e-books? To rebuke Amazon, am I going to get off my e-book addiction and start reading those old-fashioned things with ink and paper again?

Would you learn the philosophy of science from a creationist?

Yesterday, I attended a discussion led by a philosophy professor after a matinee showing of God’s Not Dead. It was a strangely skewed group: about half the attendees were local pastors or wives of pastors. Also, not to my surprise, most of them didn’t care for the movie. It was too over the top, it paid short shrift to serious theology, some of the scenes (especially the death scene) made them uncomfortable and wasn’t true to how Christians actually respond to death. So that was good. Of course, I had to point out that the caricatures of atheists were also unrepresentative.

One guy wandered in with a bunch of tracts and books and announced that he wanted to talk about creation and how the earth was young and recited a bunch of creationist cliches — he got booed out of the room, and looked dismayed that ministers weren’t accepting his conclusions.

Now I’m wondering how Christians respond to this collection of nonsense from Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis.

Does science trump the Word of God? No way!
This fun, animated video demonstrates how science couldn’t even be possible without God and how we need to be careful how we “interpret” evidence.

Always be wary when they have to tell you their own video is “fun”. It wasn’t very. It’s another of those videos that is just words in varying fonts and locations flashing on the screen, while a narrator speaks a bunch of drivel.

Once again, it’s the Hamites reciting this magical distinction, that there are two kinds of science, historical and observational, and that the only one that really counts as true science is the observation of things in the here and now, and that the only historical science you can trust and that is important is stuff that has documents and eyewitness accounts to back it up (You can see where this is going.) As an example, they use the Eiffel Tower, pointing out that you can use observational science to measure its height and location, but in order to figure out when it was built and who constructed it, you’d need to look at old papers.

This is total bullshit, and a terrible example.

If every document describing the Eiffel Tower were destroyed, we’d still be able to make estimates of its age. We’d look at rates of oxidation of the iron in the structure; we’d compare construction techniques with other buildings around the world and identify its contemporaries; and I’m sure engineers and architects would have many other tools they could use to analyze it.

Furthermore, if the two hypothesis they were testing were that a) it was constructed of earthly materials by natural mechanical means vs. b) it was conjured instantaneously into existence last Thursday by a god, who cast a discarded toothpick down into Paris, we could evaluate those ideas and come very quickly to the conclusion that (b) was stark raving nonsense. And that’s analogous to what these bozos are trying to do with their bogus philosophy of science.

What they really try desperately to claim is that you can only examine the past through the first person accounts by people who were there, and presto, they have one for the creation of the world, the Bible, which is totally trustworthy in its every word, and therefore you are supposed to believe it in every detail, because you can’t do observational science of the past.

Bullshit, through and through. The Bible is not trustworthy; it’s a hodge podge of historical accidents assembled in a biased and political process 1500 years ago, it’s full of contradictions, and even if you accept the crappy distinction of science as AiG presents it, it is not a document that is at all contemporary with the creation of the world. (I wonder…maybe they are so delusional that they think the Bible is 6000 years old.)

You can’t simply accept an account of the past because it is a “document”. People lie all the time. More charitably, people make up stories for entertainment. With their kind of uncritical swallowing of myth because it is simply written down, we’d have to conclude that Ilúvatar was the creator, and Tolkien was his prophet. Hey, were you there? Then how do you know it was wrong? I have a book right here that explains how the Ainur sung the world into existence. A real book, with words even.

Then they go on to claim that Observational Science confirms that every word in the Bible is accurate. So why does nearly every scientist in the world disagree?

Finally, they trot out Plantinga-style baloney: we must have been created by an intelligent being, because if our brains are byproducts of chance…we couldn’t trust their conclusions to ever be accurate. To which I have to say…EXACTLY. We can’t trust our brains — the whole elaborate edifice of science is a collection of protocols we follow to avoid trusting our brains. They have to know this; by their own ideas, they think that the majority of the world’s scientists, who all use their brains rather than the Bible, have come up with a set of explanations for the world that the creationists consider wrong.

Evolution does not claim that our brains are solely the product of chance, either. These guys don’t understand science, they don’t understand history, and they don’t understand brains. They do know how to put together a slick, superficial stream of lies into a very low information density video, though.

Well, that explains everything

An expert on a news program has figured out why Rodger killed all those people.

He was gay. Also schizophrenic.

She never met him, but she’s a psychologist on Fox News. That’s enough for a diagnosis, right?

Otherwise, the consensus I’m seeing all over the place is that we don’t need more gun control, other than adding more psychological screening to the process of buying a gun. Huh. What kind of screening would catch an Elliot Rodger, but wouldn’t also cause every Tea Bagger and gonzo flying a Confederate flag from his pickup truck to be similarly prohibited from purchasing any ol’ gun they want?

What I saw on the Rodger video was a well-dressed, wealthy young man who was lucid and speaking hatred in clear language, and who was perfectly in control. If he were getting a few questions to determine if he could buy a gun, I don’t see any reason to think he wouldn’t be able to choke back the hate long enough to be approved.

For that matter, hating women or any other group probably won’t be among the criteria for denying someone a gun — imagine, a restriction that would prevent a Republican from buying a firearm!

Let’s be clear about something: I am not agreeing with this irresponsible psychologist. My point is that Elliot Rodger was as sane as your average Republican. You will not solve gun violence by locking up everyone who ever had psychological counseling.

He was also not gay. Full stop. It’s ridiculous to even bring it up.

He did not kill people because he was frustrated about not getting sex. We’ve all been there: I went through adolescence, when my hormones were sizzling at their peak, and I managed to survive years of ‘involuntary celibacy’ without so much as punching anyone. And I was a homely shy nerd who didn’t own a BMW (I had to pick up my dates in my dad’s station wagon.)

The insanity defense, the gay nonsense, and the toxic blue balls excuse are simply not valid explanations for what happened.

The real culprit in all of this is a culture of thriving misogyny, in which women are dehumanized and regarded as grudging dispensers of sex candy, who must be punished if they don’t do their job of servicing men. Elliot Rodger was a spoiled, entitled kid who had his brain poisoned with this attitude. First he learned that women are disposable, then he learned that they were evil for not having sex with him, and then he rationally put together two delusions and acted on them.

And it’s not just MRAs and PUAs that spread that poison. Every politician and media blowhard who bargains away women’s rights, who dismisses efforts to correct economic inequities, or patronizingly decides that they must manage women’s lives for them, is polluting the atmosphere further.

Yet another explanation.

Even more strangely, the proudly racist Steve Sailer – a hero to Heartiste and others in the “alt-right” wing of the manosphere – has declared that Rodger wasn’t motivated by misogyny but rather by “anti-Blondism,” and that his targeting of “ blonde sluts” in a popular sorority house was “an extremely intentional racial hate crime.” Never mind that the half-Asian Rodger idolized blonde women as superior (even as he hated them) and that his comments online are littered with rather crude, rather traditional racism against people who weren’t white.

Somehow, I’m not surprised that the scientific racists share many common causes with misogynists.

Go away, racist HBD freaks

Ever since I antagonized the HBD nuts, it’s been Happy Fun Time on twitter and in email. They claim to be all sciencey, but then the kind of crap I get sent looks like the same old racism and anti-semitism.

It’s no secret that the (very misnamed) feminist ideology is has been disproportionately Jewish almost since its inception , in the first part of what will be a series of posts I will discuss how it, and related ideologies and movements, are also Jewish in character, and how this puts them at odds with the Western spirit. Hence, while many Jewish feminists were also Marxists and probably saw their feminism as another weapon in the Marxist assault on Western civilization, it should also be noted that feminism and the attack on traditional sex roles is also an effort to inject Jewish characteristics into the host society: an amorphous and androgynous mass of soft, selfish, degenerates is unnatural, repulsive, and easy for a predatory alien caste to control, yes, but it is also a projection of Jewish traits.

I would have happily lived my entire life without seeing the ugly side of humanity, except that it seems that would require closing my eyes and never setting foot outside my house, ever.

The perfect guy, the supreme gentleman

Seven people were murdered and another seven wounded in a drive-by in Santa Barbara by a deeply disturbed MRA/PUA. He considered himself a frustrated Alpha Male who was owed sex by women, and when he couldn’t get it, he decided to punish random women. Dave Futrelle has a complete transcript of his manifesto, along with the video he made (the video may disappear; youtube has been busy deleting copies).

Hi, Elliot Rodger here.

Well… this is my last video. It all has to come to this.

Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day in which I will have my revenge against humanity. Against all of you.

For the last 8 years of my life, ever since I’ve hit puberty, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires. All because girls have never been attracted to me.

Girls gave their affection, and sex, and love, to other men but never to me.

I’m 22 years old and I’m still a virgin. I’ve never even kissed a girl.

I’ve been through college for two and a half years, more than that actually, and I’m still a virgin.

It has been very torturous.

College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex, and fun, and pleasure. But in those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness.

It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me.

I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.

It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men, instead of me, the supreme gentlemen.

I will punish all of you for it. (laughs)

On the day of retribution I am going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB… and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut I see inside there.

All those girls that I’ve desired so much, they would’ve all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them while they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes.

I will take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you.

You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true alpha male. (laughs)

Yes, after I’ve annihilated every single girl in the sorority house, I’ll take to the streets of Isla Vista, and slay every single person I see there.

All those popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasure while I’ve had to rot in loneliness for all these years, they’ve all looked down upon me every time I try to go out and join them. They’ve all treated me like a mouse.

Well now, I will be a God compared to you. You will all be animals. You are animals, and I will slaughter you like animals. I will be a God, exacting my retribution, on all those who deserve it.

And you do deserve it, just for the crime of living a better life than me.

All you popular kids. You’ve never accepted me, and now you’ll all pay for it.

And girls, all I’ve ever wanted was to love you, and to be loved by you. I’ve wanted a girlfriend, I’ve wanted sex, I’ve wanted love, affection, adoration, but you think I’m unworthy of it.

That’s a crime that can never be forgiven.

If I can’t have you, girls, I will destroy you. (laughs)

You denied me a happy life, and in turn, I will deny all of you life. (laughs) It’s only fair.

I hate all of you, humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species. If I had it in my power, I would stop at nothing, to reduce every single one of you to mountains of skulls and rivers of blood, and rightfully so.

You deserve to be annihilated. And I’ll give that to you.

You never showed me any mercy, and so I will show you none. (laughs)

You force me to suffer all my life, and now I’ll make you all suffer.

I’ve waited a long time for this.

I’ll give you exactly what you deserve.

You know, I think I kind of understand why women wanted nothing to do with this guy.

It doesn’t help that this severely mentally disturbed individual was feeding on a steady diet of the misogyny pouring out of various so-called “men’s rights” channels and websites.

Cause to celebrate!

I surprise myself. I actually have two positive things to say about the movie, God’s Not Dead.

First, the projection was excellent. The last time I wrote about the workings of the theater, I described the amazing elaborate old-timey gadgetry to show a movie print. That’s all gone now, replaced by a modern digital movie projector. Crisp, bright, reliable.

Also, the movie itself was an elaborate exercise in projection. The academics were all portrayed as dogmatic and authoritarian and rather stupid — even the debate which was supposedly the core of this movie consisted of the Christian protagonist and atheist professor exchanging rounds of quotes from their respective corners. Dawkins says this, but Lennox says that. Hawking asserts X, but Strobel trumps it with Y. That may be how dopey Christians argue, with dueling authorities, but sorry, that’s not how philosophers discuss much of anything.

It was also implied that all of the students at this university were atheists, or apathetic enough about religion to blithely agree with the statement that God is dead, as part of the filmmakers’ martyr complex: this straw America is populated almost entirely with godless unbelievers. Here I am at a secular state university, and even here, that’s simply not true. Most of my students are religious, although probably not to the degree that the hero of the film is.

The second bit of praise, though, is for the fact that this is the most profoundly anti-Christian movie I’ve ever seen. I left the theater filled with contempt and loathing for Christians.

You know, most of us atheists are able to respect believers as human beings — I can appreciate that they’re just as intelligent, just as capable of living a productive life as I am, but that they’re simply burdened with years of indoctrination. Not this movie. In the hands of whoever wrote this drivel, Christians are dumbasses. It has to set up a whole universe made of straw. All the atheists are callous, cruel, vindictive people, while the Christians are pious and sincere. A first year college student is knowledgeable enough to out-argue a philosophy professor…and every argument he makes is well-worn idiocy dredged from the bowels of people like William Lane Craig, Lee Strobel, and C.S. Lewis, larded with bad quotes from Hawking or Dawkins, or good science mangled and distorted. It was little more than a Big Daddy style fantasy in which a Christian student can regurgitate tired, facile nonsense and send the godless professor reeling back in confusion and anger.

Really, the arguments for Jesus are: 1) the universe had a beginning, 2) life had a beginning, 3) there had to be a god to start things, and 4) how can you be moral without Jesus telling you what to do? And every time the professor would try to put the kid in his place by telling him that some other Big Name said otherwise, and how dare the credential-less punk disagree with them? It was appalling. I shall look forward to the young students who optimistically believe they will be able to crush the atheists with their brilliant strategies lifted from God’s Not Dead. This movie is setting up a lot of Christians with feeble assertions that will be so trivial to destroy — I fear my opponents have just been made stupider.

I would just like to thank Hunter Dennis, Chuck Konzelman, and Cary Solomon (the writers) for sabotaging the brains of another generation of proselytizers. You make it so easy for us.

But all that vapid noise was just the white bread foundation for the awesome mountain of fecal matter that would top this shit sandwich. I am going to tell you about the ending. You shouldn’t care — you don’t need a spoiler alert for a movie that is rotten from the first few minutes. This was the part that had me gawping in disbelief; it was the fate of the atheist professor that had me convinced that Christianity is actively evil.

He is crossing a street when he’s hit by a car and killed.

Not right away, though. He’s hit right in front of a car containing two missionaries, who get out and run to his ‘assistance’. Somehow, they are sufficiently knowledgeable about medicine to be able to tell that he’s going to die, and only has a few minutes left to live. So, with smiles on their faces, they tell him he’s going to be facing God in heaven in a few minutes, and that he must accept Jesus into his heart. It was my nightmare, that the last, brief, passing moment of life is spent with smug stupid assholes quoting Bible verses and pressuring the dying to affirm their superstitions, which is obviously the most important thing he could do.

See, projection. I just wish whoever made this film could imagine lying on their deathbed, when an atheist barges in and starts yelling that they are about to cease to exist, and there will be nothing forever, and slaps them a few times ordering them to reject God right now. That’s not going to happen, but of course all they can do is project their authoritarian proselytizing impulse on other. And of course, since this is the Christian straw universe, our atheist professor accepts Jesus with his dying breath.

After which, the two smiling missionaries tell each other that they have “cause to celebrate”. A man just died. They want to celebrate. They’re going to Disneyland!

Fuck me. All I felt was hatred. That was despicable.

I’ve got to start carrying a knife now. Just so all you Christians know, if I’m in a fatal accident, and I’m lying in the street dying, and you’re not running over to stop the bleeding or otherwise physically help me, and you try to pull that prayer-and-conversion shit on me, I’m going to stab you. I’ll have nothing to lose, and you sure as hell don’t deserve to continue living. I don’t like violence, but I will make an exception for this one possible circumstance.

Now I know a lot of Christians aren’t like that, and that there are many who are also appalled at this wretched excuse for a movie. You can have another reason for disliking it: it has hardened the heart of an atheist even further against your religion.

Christianity is barbarism, evil, and gibbering insanity. Thanks, God’s Not Dead. When your religion is extinct, then I’ll have cause to celebrate.

James O’Keefe finally accomplishes something

O’Keefe, who has made a career of stunts to mislead people about the Left’s political goals, has screwed up again. He tried to entrap an environmentalist documentarian, Josh Fox, by having one of his accomplices pose as an agent for a Saudi sheik, and trying to get Fox on tape accepting money from Big Oil interests. O’Keefe then appeared triumphantly on Fox News with a tiny sliver of a recording that has Fox saying one sentence that sounds like he’s willing. That was it.

We are familiar with what creationists do all the time, aren’t we, boys and girls? You know what we should immediately suspect Mr O’Keefe of doing, shouldn’t we? Quote-mining. Blatant editing. Unfortunately for him (although this won’t hurt his reputation, since everyone knows that if you look up Bumbling Sleazebags in the Yellow Pages, you can get O’Keefe’s number), Josh Fox recorded the full ten minute phone conversation. You can guess what’s on it: Josh Fox refusing to work for anyone without full transparency, and just generally finding the whole discussion suspicious and weird. O’Keefe tried to play gotcha, and instead Fox got him right back.

But there is good news. O’Keefe’s stunt and backfire got one happy result: I am now aware of Fox’s movie, Gasland, which is available on NetFlix right now for streaming. I’m going to watch it this weekend.

Say…if I were Alex Jones, I’d be wondering if James O’Keefe was a secret agent for the environmental movement who had just carried out a successful false flag event to raise awareness of the perils of fracking.

The perfect picture of privilege

smugasshole

You will enjoy superb food and drink and be cosseted in a private compartment with a sliding door, a lie-flat seat with mattress, a vanity, a personal minibar and flat-screen television set, and a luxury bathroom down the aisle where you can take a shower.

The cost of this one round trip flight in first class? $32,840. That’s more than half my yearly salary. And some of you are sitting there thinking Myers is awfully privileged, because it’s more than your entire yearly income. You’re right, I don’t deny it.

I don’t blame the airline, it’s a symptom of a system that is so screwed up that some people are granted such astronomical wealth that they think nothing of spending so much on a single luxurious outing while others scrabble at two jobs to try and make enough to simply live.