I can’t believe…YOU CAN DO WHAT IN TEXAS? Jesus Fuck, but it’s time for a national intervention in that goddamn state. Redirect the drones from Afghanistan to this bloated tumor in our own country now, or if that’s politically untenable, rip out their rotten political core and replace it with something decent.
Decent Texans are bowing their heads in shame right now. Or planning to move.
I have received a dreadful rebuke. A user on reddit has announced that I have driven him to become an MRA.
against atheism+ which is largely a feminist ridden anti-male/mensrights movement, hiding behind the guise of atheism.
like PZ myers, a popular atheist/science blogger who is probably responsible for my becoming an mra. i had been following his blog, because it seemed pretty reasonable. posts like burning a dawkins’ book along with the koran/bible to show that it’s not something to take so seriously.
however, one day i saw him posting about feminism, i thought "women’s rights, nothing wrong with that"
then he said something along the lines of "if you are a man, you aren’t even ALLOWED to talk about sexual equality." and i lost all respect for him. just because i’m male doesn’t mean i can’t understand anything, or that i shouldn’t be allowed to have an opinion.
timewarp to the future, he is a popular voice in the "atheism+" movement, which is as i said, pretty feminist/anti-male.
I said what?
All right, I want you all to bow down in gratitude and thank me profusely because I have single-handedly driven yet another fool away from our brand of atheism. You are welcome. You can send checks directly to me, or you can find my paypal account.
Recent surveys have shown that 4 out of 10 American households are headed by a woman. Wanna watch four pampered men lose their shit over this fact? Here you go.
Juan Williams is angry — having women as the primary breadwinner heralds the disintegration of the family and something is terribly wrong with the country!
Professional Racist Lou Dobbs chimes in with some non-sequitur about abortions. Women are working and not having babies! Alert the police! Catastrophe and disaster! The social order is being undermined!
Oh, but smug jerk Erick Erickson takes the cake.
I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science, but this is liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology, when you look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complimentary role.
We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complimentary relationships in nuclear families, and it is tearing us apart.
WTF?
I’m used to conservatives mangling science and telling us that their lies are true, and Erickson does not disappoint. Listening to that I turned purple and tried to blurt out four sentences simultaneously, and then my larynx exploded and my brains geysered out my ears.
It’s not true! Many species exhibit different patterns of dominance, and some have no system of dominance at all. It’s quite common for females to be larger than males, for instance. Erickson is claiming that something common in primates is a universal.
NATURALISTIC FALLACY, ASSHOLE!
You don’t get to spend your pundit career blithering about human (and American) exceptionalism and then turn around when it’s convenient to your argument to point to some monkey over there and say, “See? That’s the natural order!”
Erick Erickson is one hella confused dingleberry. Why does anyone listen to a biblical literalist pontificating about science?
Here’s the deal, Fox News. The world is changing. It’s not getting worse, it’s getting different, and I know that’s the kind of thing that makes bitter, cranky old conservatives weep into their scotch and water, but deal with it. Besides, you’ll be dead soon and won’t care any more.
And it’s not just getting different, it’s getting better — those women in the workforce are more independent, more free, and living more fulfilling lives that matter. Welcome it. And hey, how about getting off your privileged butts and making sure that they get paid the same as men, so those families and children you’re so fucking concerned about can get by?
Big fangs, horns, a hideous face, wielding brutal instruments of torture? Or maybe something sleek and military that can explode in a gout of flame? Sure, those are evil all right, but real evil can be distilled down to something as simple as a lawyer signing a piece of paper, a doctor averting their eyes, a citizen ignoring an act of inhumanity because the victim isn’t worthy…or an entire nation so soaked in godly lies that they will let a young woman die to protect their sanctimony.
I wrote about Beatriz’s case in El Salvador before. She’s 22, she’s very sick, and she’s pregnant with an anencephalic fetus. The fetus is doomed and can never live outside the womb, but the pregnancy is worsening Beatriz’s condition, and could kill her, too. The solution is simple: an abortion would give Beatriz a chance.
But no, El Salvador has an absolutist law on the books that completely outlaws all abortions, no exceptions, not even to save the life of the mother. It is a very Catholic country — yet again, religion poisons everything. This is a law very much like what the far right pecksniffs in the US would like to impose on us, and it’s operating effectively in El Salvador.
Beatriz’s only hope was that the El Salvador Supreme Court would see the light of reason and make a rational exception. They didn’t. They condemned her to die.
That’s what pure evil looks like. It’s a bureaucrat hearing the pleas of a dying woman and turning their back on her to worship the letter of the law. It’s a whole nation with their heads stuffed up their asses as an act of piety. It’s symbolized by this man, with his rituals and rites and his bullshit theology.
That’s the face of evil, neatly coiffed, smiling, seemingly benign. People are petitioning the Pope to save Beatriz’s life, and I find that offensive as well. By what goddamned right does this foolish old man have the power of life and death over anyone? Shouldn’t everyone have autonomy and a right to live?
That’s evil too, that we accept that some people have the power to inflict death and destruction, directly or indirectly, on others.
The Republicans are giving me some hope. They have quite the pair running for governor in Virginia: Cuccinelli and Jackson.
Here are some of the comments from Republican women in Virginia:
Waddell called “the worst ticket ever”, adding that she was “completely embarrassed and mortified by the Republican ticket of Cuccinelli and Jackson.”
Jan Schar told Blue Virginia that although she’s been a Republican for years, “I simply cannot support them,” as they would “end a woman’s right to make her own health care choices, including access to birth control.”
Schar was disturbed by the Republican ticket’s attack on Planned Parenthood, “which does so much good for women in Virginia…. to call them a racist group is simply beyond the pale and hopefully will frighten Virginians from voting for them. This team of three would take us back to their ideology.” Schar concluded, “I know so many Republicans who just can’t support [this ticket].”
Waddell (I/R) called Cuccinelli “extreme”, according to Blue Virigina, due in part to his “dangerous… anti-woman health agenda.” Reacting to the ticket’s charges against Planned Parenthood, she pointed out that it made “absolutely no sense to accuse Planned Parenthood of being a racist organization; it’s an organization which brings much needed health care to many.”
But that’s nothing. You should listen to Phyllis Schlafly’s latest remarks.
…in an interview this week with conservative radio program Focus Today, Schlafly just came right out and said it. Calling the GOP’s need to reach out to Latinos a “great myth,” Schlafly said that “the people the Republicans should reach out to are the white votes, the white voters who didn’t vote in the last election.” Schlafly accused the Republican “establishment” of nominating “a series of losers…who don’t connect with the grassroots.”
“The propagandists are leading us down the wrong path,” she said. “There’s not any evidence at all that these Hispanics coming in from Mexico will vote Republican.”
Yay! Please please please, Republican party, quit pretending and just admit that you are the Wealthy White Man Party! Come right out with it in the next election, court the KKK, announce that you want to amend the Constitution to prohibit women from voting, sneer at all our citizens who are of Central and South American descent, campaign on a platform of banning contraception and evolution, and just be yourselves! I’ll enjoy it.
Unless they get elected, that is.
It is the douchebag against which all other douchebags must be measured, Roman Polanski.
Polanski told the press that he is not pleased with how the sexes act with one another today. “I think that now offering flowers to a lady becomes indecent, that’s how I feel about it. I think to level the genders—it’s purely idiotic,” he said. “I think it’s a result of progress in medicine. I think that the Pill has changed greatly the woman of our times, ‘masculinizing’ her. I think that it chases away the romance from our lives and that’s a great pity.”
Right, because letting a woman control her own sex life and reproduction is a dismal outcome and totally unromantic. And medicine for women? What a pity. Remember what Polanski is famous for…
He was arrested for having sex with a 13-year-old girl after allegedly drugging her and plying her with alcohol.
He was originally indicted on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs, child molestation, and sodomy. He accepted a deal by which he plead guilty to unlawful sex with a minor in exchange for the other charges being dropped and a sentence that was most likely going to be probation. Before final sentencing, however, he fled the country and returned to his native France out of fear that the judge would send him to prison.
Oh, yes — autonomy is such an unattractive and unstimulating feature in a woman.
They were all seething, orgiastic hot-beds of prancing nancy-boys, according to Scott Lively. Alternatively, all three are lied about by Scott Lively.
It’s breakfast time here, so you might want to skip reading that whole essay: it’s stomach-churning homophobia and dishonesty. You won’t be able to read it without realizing that Lively really does hate gay people.
(via Joe. My. God.)
23 years ago yesterday, as my friends Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were driving through Oakland, California on their way to appear at a Santa Cruz rally against clearcutting California’s remaining old-growth redwoods, a bomb exploded beneath the driver’s seat. Judi was in that drivers’ seat and nearly died of her wounds. She lived in constant pain until cancer took her life seven years later. (Thankfully, Darryl’s injuries were not as severe.)
The bomb was a home-made nail-filled pipe bomb with a motion-sensitive trigger. (The explosion happened as Judi and Darryl were driving past a middle school’s bus stop at Park and Macarthur boulevards in Central Oakland: it’s a wonder no one else was injured in the blast.)
Judi and her daughters after her release from the hospital. David J. Cross photo
At the time of the bombing, Judi, Darryl, and their fellow Earth First! activists in Northern California had been the targets of a campaign of sustained harassment, including death threats. Mailed leaflets featuring Judi’s face with superimposed crosshairs, for instance. A few weeks before the explosion, Judi had been run off a rural Northern California road Silkwood-style by a logging truck. The local cops told her “if you get killed, then we’ll investigate.”
The context for this was that some time earlier, a local timber company — Pacific Lumber — had been bought out leveraged-style by junk bond trader Charles Hurwitz. Hurwitz and his shell company Maxxam then started to liquidate PL’s holdings to generate cash. Among those holdings were some of the 5 or so percent of remaining old-growth redwood forests in California, which PL had previously been logging slowly enough that some people actually called the company a sustainable timber firm. Those trees started getting cut really quickly, endangering wildlife, the safety of timber workers , and the lives of people who lived downhill from the clearcuts.
Activists countered with a campaign modeled on the Civil Rights movement’s sit-ins, originally called Mississippi Summer In The Redwoods. Before long Judi and Earth First! had become central to the campaign, whose name was quickly shortened to Redwood Summer.
It was a really tense time in Northern California. Maxxam/PL managed to persuade some workers that the hippies were threatening their jobs, and the consequent conflict was ugly. That ugliness made the press fairly often. What didn’t make the press was the fact that Judi was an old-school union organizer: she identified more with the loggers than did most enviros, and she built some serious bridges between the two camps. Among other things, she got Earth First! in Northern California to renounce tree-spiking. She helped unionize a timber firm. Above all, she worked with timber workers to point out that sustainable logging meant sustainable employment, and that Maxxam’s cut and run practices meant mills would be closing as soon as the last tree was cut.
Still, those threats were out there and continuing. As horrified as we were when the bomb went off, it wasn’t particularly a surprise. What was a surprise was that the FBI arrived at the crime scene within minutes, and that the Oakland Police Department arrested Judi and Darryl before they’d been extracted from the ruins of Judi’s Subaru, charging them with transporting an explosive device.
The interior of Judi’s Subaru, the blast damage showing that the bomb was directly beneath the driver’s seat and not in the back footwell. Oakland Police photo.
The architect of this legal strategy? Mythbusters’ bomb expert Frank Doyle, then a special agent with the FBI.
Four weeks before the explosion, Doyle had run what was called a Bomb Investigator’s Training Course in Eureka in which law enforcement agents blew up cars with pipe bombs and then examined the wrecks for forensic evidence. There are two things that are especially spooky about this confluence of events. First was that Doyle, on arriving at the corner of Park and Macarthur, told his fellow first responders — four of whom had attended that course — “this is your final exam.” His statement was caught on tape.
The second spooky coincidence was that the bomb’s construction closely paralleled that of the practice bombs used at Doyle’s “bomb school.”
Doyle told the press that the damage to the car showed that it had been carried behind the driver’s seat, therefore was visible to the passengers, therefore they knew it was there and were deliberately transporting it. That lie was thoroughly shredded in a later court case, but at the time the press ran with it. Within two months all charges against Judi and Darryl were dropped for lack of evidence. You still hear people refer to them as the “people who were carrying that bomb.” The act of character assassination worked — a sentiment with which a Federal court judge and jury agreed.
Judi died of metastatic breast cancer in March 1997, leaving behind two young daughters. In 2002, that federal judge ordered Oakland cops and FBI agents to pay $4.4 million to Darryl and to Judi’s estate for violating their civil rights. During the trial agents admitted tracking Judi and Darryl for weeks before the bombing. The forensic evidence was clear. It was pretty much an open and shut case.
I am not saying that Frank Doyle had other than an after-the-fact a role in the attempted murder of my friends, though it wouldn’t shock me if I found out that he did. But Doyle absolutely did thwart an effective investigation of that attempted murder. That’s a matter of established record. He ignored obvious leads, misrepresented evidence, and worked to frame activists for a horrible act of violence against them.
And nonetheless, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman decided to use Doyle as their go-to guy for explosives on Mythbusters. Despite the fact that Doyle tried to destroy two lives with a myth of his own concoction.
Let me be clear about one thing. Judi was not just targeted for being an environmental activist. The worst harassment, the worst threats that Redwood Summer activists received were directed at women. My friend Karen Pickett got some of those threatening letters too, and they were rife with misogyny to the point of being nearly laughable, before the bomb went off. (The accusation that women Earth First! activists were “box lunch eating lesbians” got used a lot.) One of the prime uninvestigated suspects in the bombing, a blithering godbag calling themself the “Lord’s Avenger,” claimed responsibility for the bombing and said it was in retaliation for Judi doing clinic defense at the Ukiah office of Planned Parenthood. That may or may not be true, though the Lord’s Avenger did apparently possess some interesting knowledge about the bomb’s construction.
Either way, Judi’s feminist activism definitely played a more than significant role in her being targeted. Male Earth First! activists got threats, and some of them were scary indeed. But it was the women who bore the brunt of the threats and harassment, and Judi paid the biggest price.
The film “Who Bombed Judi Bari?” screened on the outside of the Mythbusters building in San Francisco, May 24 2013
Which raises a question. For all the criticism it has received for being sensationalist and superficial, Mythbusters essentially serves as a public face of Skepticism to viewers who have never heard of Skepticism. Yet apparently it’s no big deal for Adam and Jamie to support, employ, and publicize a man who may have helped target a feminist environmental activist for unbelievably painful harassment, and who certainly provided effective cover for the people who tried to kill her.
Darryl Cherney, who has plowed some of the proceeds from the court settlement into making a film about Judi, is trying to get Jamie and Adam to explain why they employ Frank Doyle. They’ve been reluctant to answer, even though Darryl went so far as to offer a free screening of the film on the wall of Mythbusters’ building this weekend.
Anyone concerned with the role of women in the Skeptics’ movement ought to ask them for an answer.
Ah, Glenn Beck: bizarre as always. He’s now claiming that Wolf Blitzer Was Set Up, that “forces of spiritual darkness” maneuvered him into asking an atheist on air about whether she wanted to thank the Lord, just so she could denounce God publicly. Now everything is a conspiracy theory to these guys.
But what I also found interesting in his long ramble is his challenge to Christians to prove themselves worthy by getting out there and doing something that atheists can’t. This sounds like the inverse of Christopher Hitchens’ challenge: “Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.” There is an assumption that somehow, Beck’s Christian followers have some mysterious capability that atheists don’t, although he never specifies what it is. I’d love to hear it, though.
Perhaps…standing by and doing nothing in the face of tragedy other than praying, and somehow feeling self-righteous about it? They do seem to have an almost magical lock on sanctimony.
Or we could be in big trouble. The antis of Ireland have a whole arsenal of secret weapons in the battle to keep women pregnant that I haven’t seen deployed here — they have access to Catholic magic. I don’t think we’d be able to resist if they started cruising our country with magic paintings, magic garments (guaranteeing immunity from hellfire!), and magic faces.
No word yet on whether they have any magic briar patches.
