So I invented a new law the other day

I’d prodded the libertarians again, so they poked back en masse, and it was hilarious. The arguments were so familiar and so inane and so wrong that I had to say it: in any discussion about libertarians, the comments by libertarians will invariably make the stupidity of libertarianism clear (yes, I stole it with a twist from Lewis’ Law).

There was the usual knee-jerk attempt to associate me with that liberal socialist, Obama — because it doesn’t abide by the laws of PZ’s god Obama. Class warfare, confiscate and redistribute… — followed by sneering comments that I’m a political naif and therefore ought to shut up about it. Look, Obama is not my god: as far as I’m concerned, he’s been a colossal disappointment, occasionally able to say a few good things, but a failure at doing them. He’s a center-right politician, a relatively conservative Democrat, who has expanded the surveillance state and maintained programs like Gitmo and the drone war that can only be described as villainous. He only looks good when compared to the circus full of clowns that the Republicans and Libertarians fielded in the last election.

So don’t call me politically inept when you think Obama is a socialist.

The other thing these libertarians did, so predictably and at least a little more productively, is try to tout the virtues of their political philosophy. Freedom, no initiation of force, no corporate welfare, no censorship, no drug war, peace…no initiation of force, individual liberty, live and let live, no corporate welfare, no drug war, etc. Yes? So? Those are things progressive liberals are all for, too, and we do it without the destructive baggage of unfettered capitalism, which they all neatly leave off their laundry list.

You cannot call yourself pro-liberty, even including the word in your name, if you are unwilling to recognize that the greatest oppressive force opposing freedom in America is unregulated greed. Libertarianism is a philosophy for the well-off, the privileged, and those who dream someday of being a wealthy boss with power over the peons. When capital is the measure of success, those who have it thrive at the expense of those who don’t; when we don’t have redistribution of wealth, we do not have equality of opportunity.

The US is already a libertarian paradise, and look what it gets us: a widening gap between rich and poor, a rotting infrastructure as the exploiters look for short term gains while neglecting services vital to those who can’t afford a limousine service, a corrupt and decadent privileged class, and thriving new political parties that are simply nuts. To use one of Ayn Rand’s favorite words, this country is infested with looters: only they’re not the poor, they’re not the mythical “welfare queens”, they’re bankers and obscenely overpaid executives and corporations that demand the right to buy elections.

And there stand the libertarians, the useful idiots who cheer them on.

Wow, Phil Robertson is getting famous!

I never watched his duck show, and I didn’t know who he was until he started saying these egregiously stupid things, but now the all-seeing eye of the internet is scrutinizing him carefully and all kinds of slime is emerging. You already knew he was a homophobe, and you also probably knew he was some kind of nasty racist, but did you also know he was a misogynist and proud recipient of male privilege? And that he uses Christianity to prop his odious beliefs? And if you didn’t know, are you at all surprised?

He’s speaking to a sportsmen’s ministry in Georgia, waving a Bible and telling the men they have to marry girls who are no more than 15 or 16, and that by 20 they are too old.

By the way, that quote he throws around, that George Washington said you can’t run the world without god and the bible? Totally fake; so fake even David Barton has disavowed it, which tells you it’s got to be ridiculously invented.

Spider-Man gets a new costume! Fans are the same old sexist scum!

Apparently, there’s a new Spider-Man movie in the works, and he’s got a fancy new costume (without nipples, I’m happy to report), and it’s got the hardcore comic fans in a lather. Well, not about the costume. It turns out that a few photos of the actor playing Mary Jane Watson were also leaked, and…she’s not sexy enough for some.

There’s actually 28 pages of people arguing whether Woodley is hot or not, seven times as many as there are talking about the new costume. (Although, like all comment threads, they go off-the-rails after a while. Flicking through, there’s an intense argument over whether the phrase "lipstick on a pig" is sexist, and a fair amount of discussion about porn.)

I hope the people making the movie aren’t as superficial as the ones who want to see it, although I fear there may be some unfortunate feedback between the two groups.

Speaking of libertarians…

Adam Lee has a live one. This guy, fuguewriter, is now claiming that the laws of thermodynamics do not apply to electrical energy, in defense of Ayn Rand’s magic MacGuffin in Atlas Shrugged that produces near-infinite quantities of electrical energy.

Be honest and make an argument. Show how *thermodynamic law* – any one of them, or all – is what infinite *electrical* energy would violate, especially under a new conception of energy, which presumably would get beyond QED (which Rand knew a bit about from interviewing Oppenheimer, knowing about Feynman, etc.).

This is one reason this isn’t a serious discussion: y’all jump to the attitudes without an argument in between. So much easier that way. The fixed, permanent contempt for the other is maintained.Then, when challenged, if an argument’s provided it’s hash.

So, pony up. Show how (allegedly) infinite electrical production (whatever that would mean exactly) is specifically a violation of thermodynamic law, particularly under a new conception of energy – which presumably gave access to an unsuspected type of energy. This will be a pretty trick.

Gosh, Ayn Rand met Oppenheimer and knew about Feynman, which makes her physics fantasies plausible. I’ve met Krauss and read some of Hawkings’ books, therefore I guess I’m a physicist now.

That was easy. It doesn’t even require any math!

Geraldo Logic

This will be useful shorthand. You may recall that Alec Baldwin lost his show for calling a photographer a “cocksucking faggot” — now Geraldo Rivera weighs in on the phrase.

SKLAR: When I heard about what Alec Baldwin – Alec Baldwin had a history of making these homophobic slurs.

RIVERA: That wasn’t a homophobic slur.

SKLAR: Okay —

RIVERA: I mean if you grew up where we grew up —

SKYLAR: And yet he is no longer on the network, right?

RIVERA: Sean, Baldwin and I all grew up within ten miles of each other and when we were growing up, in my year especially, those comments were commonplace.

Remember that next time someone strolls in and starts flinging the “cunt” insult around, and tries to excuse it because it was commonplace when they were growing up in Australia or England or New Jersey or wherever. Just let them know they’re using Geraldo Logic, and with any luck they’ll feel a twinge of shame.

Nah, they won’t. We know from long experience that they won’t.

Douthat’s Christmas delusion

I see it’s time for Ross Douthat’s Christmas folly. Once again, we get that casual assumption that his personal freaky weird favorite religious myth is utterly true and significant, while reality is a fringe occupation. I wish I knew how that guy got to be a NYT columnist. I suspect we all wonder at the parade of wackaloons who get prime real estate on the esteemed Times’ opinion page.

He’s writing about the Jesus story, of course. The theme of his little essay is that there are three worldviews used to interpret Christmas. There’s the Biblical view, that’s all about the complete picture: gods, angels, people, the whole shebang.

Because that’s what the Christmas story really is — an entire worldview in a compact narrative, a depiction of how human beings relate to the universe and to one another. It’s about the vertical link between God and man — the angels, the star, the creator stooping to enter his creation. But it’s also about the horizontal relationships of society, because it locates transcendence in the ordinary, the commonplace, the low.

And then there’s the waffly vague non-Catholic spiritual picture, which doesn’t try to claim that the details are real.

This is the world picture that red-staters get from Joel Osteen, blue-staters from Oprah, and everybody gets from our “God bless America” civic religion. It’s Christian-ish but syncretistic; adaptable, easygoing and egalitarian. It doesn’t care whether the angel really appeared to Mary: the important thing is that a spiritual version of that visitation could happen to anyone — including you.

And then there are those damned atheists.

Then, finally, there’s the secular world picture, relatively rare among the general public but dominant within the intelligentsia. This worldview keeps the horizontal message of the Christmas story but eliminates the vertical entirely. The stars and angels disappear: There is no God, no miracles, no incarnation. But the egalitarian message — the common person as the center of creation’s drama — remains intact, and with it the doctrines of liberty, fraternity and human rights.

Guess which one he’s going to argue is the right and proper one?

Oh, he tries to put up the illusion of even-handedness. The spiritual view is more flexible, he says, and notice that he acknowledges that atheists can be egalitarian; he also notes that the Biblical view has the problem of “how to remain loyal to biblical ethics in a commercial, sexually liberated society” (Really? That’s the Bible’s big problem? How about why we should believe in its nonsensical stories at all?)

But ultimately, his goal is to snipe at non-Catholic interpretations of the Christmas story. The spiritual New Age version lacks the Bible’s “resources and rigor”, at which point I just about fell off my chair laughing. Rigor? In biblical theology? That word does not mean what you think it means. Both are just arcane rationalizations for whatever they want their religion to mean.

But here’s what you want to see: how does Ross Douthat dismiss godlessness?

The secular picture, meanwhile, seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than either of its rivals, because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher. And the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism — tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss.

I can be fair-minded too. Part of that is actually accurate: atheism does propose “a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory.” That’s our reality. That’s what science tells us about our history and the nature of our existence. We are contingent products of chance events, shaped by necessity, alone (so far) in our universe, with no supernatural agents telling us what to do with our lives. We have had millennia of evidence, of people crying out for help to their imagined heavenly saviors, and they never answer, they never give aid, they never ever do anything that isn’t better explained by natural causes. The concepts of gods and angels fail to harmonize with the reality of human experience, and therefore cannot support any rationale for moral behavior.

The desperate rope-flinging is all done by believers. When confronted with pain and suffering, with our limitations, with our mortality, they’re the ones who conjure up ridiculous rationalizations to try and reconcile reality with their fantasy of a purposeful and benign universe. They look up to a sky where a thin film of atmosphere separates us from a vast, cold, and barren void and invent a grandfatherly puppetmaster to fill the terrifying emptiness.

Atheists turn to one another — our hope lies in substance and reality, not wishful thinking and delusion, and what we know exists are our fellow human beings, our world, and that ultimately we must rely on our interactions with what is, rather than what isn’t, to find happiness and survival. We don’t have absolute answers on how to do that, and we do have to continue to struggle to work out principles to promote that essential cooperation, but it’s absurd for someone to accuse us of absolutism (comparing us to religious advocates, no less, with no sense of irony) while arguing for a literal interpretation of an Iron Age god-myth. And further, to argue that our reliance on human values rather than theological ones is tantamount to trying to bridge a chasm with failed hopes.

You know, we’re not the ones even trying to bridge a chasm separating us from an invisible fantasy-land on the other side at all. We’re here on our side, with each other, trying to build a society that fosters equality right here.

The flip side of the MRAs

Radfems. Just as freakishly twisted, I’m afraid. I somehow stumbled across a radfem site that is arguing that penis-in-vagina sex is always rape, and that men are always rapists. It’s the weirdest perspective, and uses the sloppiest logic. One way she makes her case is the loaded characterization, like this:

If we look at the act in more detail (skip this parag if you can’t take it), PIV is a man mounting on a woman to thrust a large member of himself into her most intimate parts, often forcing her to be entirely naked, banging himself against her with the whole weight of his body and hips, shaking her like he would stuff a corpse, then using her insides as a receptacle for his penile dejection. How is this a normal civilised, respectful way to treat anyone? Sorry for the explicit picture, but this is what it is and it’s absolutely revolting and violating.

That’s a description of rape, all right. The key words there are “forcing” her, treating her like a corpse, using her as a receptacle. And I would say that she’s exactly right, that if you see intercourse as “absolutely revolting”, you’d never willingly engage in it, and therefore the only way you would find yourself in such a situation would be if you were being raped.

And, of course, sex is really a silly looking activity anyway, and it’s easy to write a slanted description of it. She has every right to find it personally unpleasant and to avoid ever having a sexual relationship with a man.

But she goes too far in assuming her perception is universal. Sex can be entirely consensual, no “forcing” involved. And then she goes further: she makes the naturalistic fallacy.

The fact intercourse causes so many infections and tears and warts attests to the unnaturalness of intercourse, that it’s not meant to be. The vagina’s primary function isn’t to be penetrated by a penis but to eject a baby for birth. They are two muscle tissues / sphincters pressed against each other to help the baby be pushed out. Penetration of the penis into the vagina is completely unnecessary for conception.

Life causes infections and tears and warts and pain and death. So? That’s not an argument that it is unnatural. It’s also ridiculous to argue for a “primary function” for the vagina — especially when it’s a function that is only going to be carried out a handful of times during a woman’s lifetime, at best. How about arguing that its primary function is as an outlet for menstrual fluids? For some women its primary function might be for giving and receiving sexual pleasure. How about if we let individuals decide what they like to use their body parts for?

Biologically, I’d say that sexual intercourse is a perfectly “natural” use for a vagina — which does not impose on anyone an obligation to use it that way. It’s also perfectly natural that the vagina functions as a birth canal, and I’d remind our angry radfem that if she were to use it solely that way, she might just pass a son through it — who would have the potential to be just as good a person as a daughter.

Fools fail, f*ck their own sh*t up

You’ve probably already read Ophelia’s discussion of the latest MRA stupidity: a group of them on Reddit decided to flood Occidental College’s sexual harassment survey system with a collection of fake rape reports. The logic escapes me; people who claim that women make frequent false accusations of rape decide to inflate the statistics with false accusations of their own? Why? It was a spectacular own goal that effectively demonstrated that Men’s Rights Activists don’t actually care about ending rape, but are more interested in throwing up clouds of doubt and confusion to obscure their own repulsive activities and desires.

It was such a backfire that they’re now frantically trying to backtrack (It was so obviously stupid that even MRAs were aware of their mistake? That tells you how stupid it had to have been) and pretend that no, no one with any clout in the men’s rights movement had anything to do with inciting false reports. No, it was 4chan, yeah, that’s the ticket, it’s all the fault of those irresponsible pranksters at 4chan.

Except…here’s John the Other aka John Hembling, bigshot at AVoiceForMen:

jtoonbrothers

A word for Hembling: Yes, rape is a crime. So is falsely reporting a rape.

And gosh, but Hembling is really an awful person.