Ladies, this is a delicate subject, and I’ll have to ask you to step out of the room for a bit while the men talk among themselves.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Ladies, this is a delicate subject, and I’ll have to ask you to step out of the room for a bit while the men talk among themselves.
The worst attorney general in the world has to be Virginia’s Ken Cuccinelli, who has been on a crusade to promote a far right conservative social agenda.
The Washington Post wrote that Cuccinelli has been ”the most overtly partisan Attorney General in Virginia history” and ”has waged war on Obamacare, harassed climate-change scientists, sanctioned discrimination against homosexuals and embraced Arizona’s (now mostly gutted) immigration law.” Cuccinelli waged an all-out assault on academic freedom by using state resources to sue a University of Virginia Professor who was researching global warming, and bullied members on the State Board of Health into shutting down abortion clinics by threatening to sue them.
But I’m hoping now that he has finally crossed the line with an effort to control people’s sex lives.
Although most people think sodomy laws have been unconstitutional since the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli would like to explain why — in his view — that’s not so.
What’s more, he wants the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to agree with him and uphold the constitutionality of Virginia’s sodomy law — which makes anal and oral sex between people of any sex a crime — in the process.
Yes. Ken Cuccinelli has a platform of outlawing blow jobs. Anyone campaigning against him in the future needs to remind the Virginia electorate of that.
The Telegraph’s environment denier James Delingpole wants us to know he really doesn’t think environmental scientists and journalists should be executed:
Should Michael Mann be given the electric chair for having concocted arguably the most risibly inept, misleading, cherry-picking, worthless and mendacious graph – the Hockey Stick – in the history of junk science?
Should George Monbiot be hanged by the neck for his decade or so’s hysterical promulgation of the great climate change scam and other idiocies too numerous to mention?
Should Tim Flannery be fed to the crocodiles for the role he has played in the fleecing of the Australian taxpayer and the diversion of scarce resources into pointless projects like all the eyewateringly expensive desalination plants built as a result of his doomy prognostications about water shortages caused by catastrophic anthropogenic global warming?
It ought to go without saying that my answer to all these questions is – *regretful sigh* – no. First, as anyone remotely familiar with the zillion words I write every year on this blog and elsewhere, extreme authoritarianism and capital penalties just aren’t my bag. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it would be counterproductive, ugly, excessive and deeply unsatisfying.
So why does he bring it up?
Indeed, it would be nice to think one day that there would be a Climate Nuremberg. But please note, all you slower trolls beneath the bridge, that when I say Climate Nuremberg I use the phrase metaphorically.
A metaphor, let me explain – I can because I read English at Oxford, dontcha know – is like a simile but stronger.
There’s something that tickles the back of my brain about him using a simile to explain a metaphor by comparison to a simile. Why not go the whole way, and say something like “a metaphor is like a simile because each is analogous to an allegory”?
Anyway, Delingpole was engaging in hyperbole in response to criticism of a paywalled piece of his in The Australian, in which he said:
The climate alarmist industry has some very tough questions to answer: preferably in the defendant’s dock in a court of law, before a judge wearing a black cap.
For those of you not well familiar with the intersection of fashion and British jurisprudence, the black cap is a black square of fabric worn by a judge when ordering an execution. (Which hasn’t happened since 1973.)
I almost certainly need not explain what’s completely criminal about Delingpole’s disingenuous hate speech, whether or not he appends the condescending Oxford grad equivalent of a winking emoticon at the end. Technically speaking, Hutu “journalists” referring to Tutsi people as “cockroaches” was also just a metaphor.
It’s hate speech, plain and simple, uttered with the express intent of riling those who agree with Delingpole to suppress science.
Delingpole should be careful what he pretends he isn’t really wishing for. Life on this planet is likely to get very nasty for a large number of people in the next decades. At some point, as Britain suffers the third or fourth or fifth triple digit summer in as many years, and crops fail and people go hungry and the urban aged drop dead when the power goes out, there may well be calls for a “Climate Nuremberg” — and it’s doubtful that prominent denialist writers who call metaphorically for executing scientists and climate change activists will go unsummoned.
I was sent this curious collection of recent tweets by Joe Rogan, a comedian I’ve never much cared for, but they’re so bizarre I had to put them up for your amusement/contempt. Click for a larger image.
His central point is this one:
I view women that don’t like children the same way I view dogs that like to eat their own shit.
How odd. Personally, I like some children, especially my own, but I don’t automatically melt into affectionate reverence when I see one; I have no problem with someone electing to not have children of their own. I also know from personal experience that, while there are definitely great rewards to raising kids, they are also a giant electrified flaming cattle prod to the butt through most of their childhood. Don’t you remember being a teenager once? Imagine what it’s like living in a house full of scrambled hormones, pimples, tears and frustration.
It’s OK to not want kids, or even to detest the very idea of having kids, as long as you avoid having them and making them as miserable as they’d make you.
But the way it’s phrased by Rogan is so weird: if you don’t like children, it’s equivalent to indulging in process that is disgusting to others. You are socially and psychologically required to want children, or you a morally reprehensible person. That’s a mindset I can’t embrace. We get a lot of the equivalent attitude from right-wingers: if you’re a man who doesn’t like having sex with women, you’re a vile human being.
Which leads into the real repugnant attitude here: all of his comments are addressed to women. Women, you must love children, if you don’t, you’re odd, gross, weak, a “hateful twat”. I have to ask…what about the men?
That’s the more disturbing part of his rant. He’s trying to shame women into doing something he considers vitally important, apparently, but men…eh, they aren’t part of his concern. We men can go ahead and dislike children, and that doesn’t make us weak and gross. That gives the lie to a claim he made in another tweet, that he’s not a feminist, he’s a humanist.
Don’t worry, though. He’s a comedian. He’ll say he’s just joking around.
Steven Landsburg carries out three “thought experiments”. They’re all pretty bad — one suggests that we have no grounds to complain about environmental destruction in Alaska if we’re living somewhere else, to which I’d have to reply, “You mean like Mars?” — but the third one…jebus, Mr Creepy McLiberturd is masturbating publicly here.
Let’s suppose that you, or I, or someone we love, or someone we care about from afar, is raped while unconscious in a way that causes no direct physical harm — no injury, no pregnancy, no disease transmission. (Note: The Steubenville rape victim, according to all the accounts I’ve read, was not even aware that she’d been sexually assaulted until she learned about it from the Internet some days later.) Despite the lack of physical damage, we are shocked, appalled and horrified at the thought of being treated in this way, and suffer deep trauma as a result. Ought the law discourage such acts of rape? Should they be illegal?
He provides his Libertarian philosophical answer.
As long as I’m safely unconsious and therefore shielded from the costs of an assault, why shouldn’t the rest of the world (or more specifically my attackers) be allowed to reap the benefits? And if the thought of those benefits makes me shudder, why should my shuddering be accorded any more public policy weight than Bob’s or Granola’s? We’re still talking about strictly psychic harm, right?
Maybe we could even talk about a positive advantage. You go in to a hospital for some essential medical treatment that involves anesthetizing you, and while you’re unconscious, the hospital pays for its services by leasing out your body to anyone willing to pay. Free health care! It’s a benefit, right?
It’s a remarkable claim from a Libertarian. If we’re not using our property at some moment, do we forfeit our rights to it? When Landsburg is not driving his car, is it OK if someone takes a joyride in it as long as it’s returned when he needs it, with the gas consumed replaced?
Is there really no cost to a person if their body is abused while they are unconscious? He writes as if this “psychic harm” is meaningless nothing. Reputation, security, trust…these are mere “psychic” phenomena, so they have no significance to a person?
And what gives this hypothetical rapist the right to use someone else’s body? Flip it around and try to justify the rapist’s exploitation of another for his personal benefit — by what right does that person deserve to “reap the benefits” of someone else’s unconsciousness…or for that matter, reap the benefits of the Alaskan wilderness? Mr Landsburg seems to naturally take the side of the takers and looters.
We’ve got a convenient phrase for what Landsburg is doing: it’s called JAQing off. He’s clearly a master.
Another item for your personal Ray Comfort trophy collection via the Global Secular Humanist Movement Religion Is A Joke Facebook page. [Updated: or even better, via fredericksparks]
I’ve never been surprised at a conference by anything like this: Ken Ham got a certificate for fighting the “principalities and powers of darkness.”
He [the creationist with the award] told the conference audience gathered at Quentin Road Bible Baptist Church that his creation group, Midwest Creation Fellowship, had passed a resolution—which they called a “spiritual bouquet.” In the resolution, it stated that because the “principalities and powers of darkness have captured the minds of many in our society, and whereas Ken Ham left his homeland of Australia to confront the forces arrayed against God and His Word,” I was being acknowledged by the MCF.
OK, gang, in order to keep up, I’m expecting an award from you guys for combat against fictitious beings. Maybe a “wrestling with mermaids” framed certificate, or a shiny medallion that praises my competence at squishing angels. We have a spiritual award gap here, people!
It’s an extraordinarily common accusation: those #FtBullies are getting offended, they’re reacting to something offensive, they’re so delicate and sensitive and ready to take offense based on moral outrage.
And now I’m accused of proliferating the stupid because I’m offended.
Maybe someone can help me understand the logic in this: P.Z. Myers disagrees with the message conveyed by a stupid meme on Reddit, and instead of ignoring or down-voting the post — or whatever it is people do on Reddit — he brings attention to it and even publishes the offending picture.
If you are offended by something posted on the Internet, why not just move on? Rather, Myers has effectively ensured that this piece of Internet trash will be further proliferated and cached online for years to come from his own site. That’s what I call a good feminist hard at work.
I’m really not used to that peculiar mindset. Why do you assume I’m offended? Why don’t you recognize that I’m pointing out that something is wrong?
I’m waiting for a student to come in and complain that I took points off for an incorrect answer on an exam. “Why were you offended at my answer, Dr Myers? Wouldn’t it have been better to avoid bringing attention to it, so that maybe I’d forget my incorrect answer in a few years?”
Gosh, I hope the author’s brain doesn’t explode when he realizes that by posting about my terrible perpetuation of the ‘offensive’ photo, he’s propagating it as well, and further, he’s promoting my dreadful gaffe! Quick, everyone, go silent and never publicly disagree with anyone ever!
Pat Robertson is asked why poor people in Africa have more miracles than we do (assumption not supported with evidence), and he gives his condescending answer: Americans know too much science, while people overseas are “simple, humble” and God loves ’em more.
Well, gosh. All we have to do is shut down higher education, then, and we’ll have all the blessings of, say, Somalia.
OK, you’re not despairing for humanity enough. You need to see this: Google celebrated Cesar Chavez’s birthday yesterday, on 31 March. Wingnuts saw this, and went apeshit on twitter: how dare they honor a foreign communist dictator!
As if that weren’t enough, a subset of them are praising Bing for paying respect to the religious holiday by showing pictures of Easter eggs. All hail the divine ruler of the universe, the Easter Bunny.
Religious people are among the dumbest people on the planet, I’m afraid.
