The important things in life

Luis Martinez stopped at the Subway sandwich shop and ordered this thing they call a Philly Cheesesteak…and he ordered it with ketchup. The Subway worker, Lawrence Ordone, objected.

"That’s when I flew off the handle," said Ordone.

"He shoved a chair to the side, like knocked it down to come at me, and I said, ‘This is going to be serious,’" said Martinez.

"I said, ‘Let’s go, fight me like a man,’" said Ordone.

"I was scared. Next thing, I’m thinking a gun’s going to come out," said Martinez.

Ordone said he blocked the customer so he couldn’t get out.

"He threatened to kill me in front of my wife," said Martinez.

These are important issues that a man should engage in battle over: everyone KNOWS that a true Philly cheesesteak is served with ketchup and fried onions. The abomination that the Subway serves lacks both. And now we have learned that Subway employees are willing to fight to the death to preserve their heresy.

Oh, and American cheese? Pffft. It’s supposed to be Cheez-Whiz.

By the way, Ordone was fired — Subway apparently objects to their employees assaulting customers. They still, however, refuse to serve ketchup.

Science journalists accept logical fallacy, therefore journalism is compatible with stupidity

I said I was done with this guy, but his latest includes a bit that annoys me to no end. Keith Kloor interviews Daniel Sarewitz to get ammo for his claim that religion and science are compatible.

Based on your piece, I would presume that you think the two are compatible. However, some of the prominent New Atheists, such as PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne, insist that science and religion are incompatible. Why has this discussion become so binary? Why the either/or mindset exhibited by some atheists?

DS: There are lots of scientists who are also religious, so as an empirical matter science and religion are apparently not incompatible.

Gah. Dumb.

There are scientists who believe the earth is 6000 years old and that there was a global flood 4000 years ago. Therefore, science and creationism are perfectly compatible.

There are accountants who skim off profits and hide them in the books, therefore accounting is compatible with criminal larceny.

There are doctors who smoke, therefore smoking is compatible with healthy lungs.

Why has this discussion become so binary? Easy. Because some scientists have gigantic religious blindspots and want to pretend that their gullibility is part of their science.

I hope this haunts Michael Nodianos for the rest of his life

A 16 year old girl was reportedly drugged and gang-raped by football players in Steubenville, Ohio, and two people, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, have been arrested for it. And now a video has emerged of other players joking about the rape and helpless, unconscious state of the girl. Warning: the video is appalling, not only that they so demean another human being, but that the whole crowd thinks the “jokes” are funny.

This was done by football players. So of course, many people in town are rushing to defend the rapists, including coaches on their football team.

“The rape was just an excuse, I think,” said the 27-year-old Hubbard, who is No. 2 on the Big Red’s career rushing list.

“What else are you going to tell your parents when you come home drunk like that and after a night like that?” said Hubbard, who is one of the team’s 19 coaches. “She had to make up something. Now people are trying to blow up our football program because of it.

I spit on football culture. What should be just a fun game has become a focus for misogyny and abuse in far too many communities.

And I dare anyone who denies that rape culture thrives in the US to watch that video.

Good grief, the girl was unconscious and unresponsive, people were joking that she was dead, and onlookers couldn’t figure out that this was rape. She didn’t say “no,” after all.

That’s not rape! It’s “intercourse marriage”

You know, one of the tough things about being a jihadist is that you get all these…urges, yet all the freedom fighters around you are covered with beards and body hair. And of course, as a devout, pious Muslim you also want to maintain your purity. What to do, what to do?

An Islamic cleric has come up with an answer! A fatwa that sanctifies rape!

Muhammed al-Arifi, a Wahhabi religious cleric, officially calls this act an “intercourse marriage” that can last only a few hours – “in order to give each fighter a turn” — and restricts the men to Syrian females at least 14 years old, widowed or divorced.

Al-Arifi, expressed his annoyance at the "warriors of Islam" being denied sexual pleasures while fighting in Syria “alongside the armed opposition forces” for the past two years. He said this fatwa "solves [their] sexual problems" and “boosts the determination of the mujahideen in Syria and is considered a duty to enter paradise for those females who enter such marriages.”

Hey, rape victims! You weren’t being brutalized: you were entering a kind of marriage that will win you a spot in paradise once you’re dead!

Taslima beat me to it.

This story has been retracted by the source.

The company you keep

It’s a new year, and Thunderf00t hasn’t changed a bit — he has a new video where he’s apparently ranting about how feminism is poisoning atheism, which I haven’t watched, so I can’t judge. But there are hints that it’s more of the same. It’s been picked up and praised by A Voice For Men.

Here are a few of the amusing reactions that the video elicited from that gang. Well, they would be amusing if they didn’t testify to a deep hatred of women.

Well, now I look upon these women as nothing but Clowns who have deliberately allowed themselves to brainwashed into believing stupid things like the Earth is flat or some other stupid crap. The vomit that spews from their mouths is not just stupid, it is absolutely laughable. I now sit here laughing my head off at what I read. In my own social movements in life, I laugh at the idiotic dialog of the females I come into contact with. It is unbelievable the level of childish trash that issues forth from the mouths of women whose ages range from 20 all the up to nearly 70.

Women, WILL NEVER BE EQUAL TO MEN!

I don’t care how they put it, because the simple overwhelming fact throughout the history of Mankind, is that women have NEVER been equal to men and they never will be.

We are on this earth for completely different reasons and “never the twain shall meet.” (thanks Kipling, such a great saying)

That’s from a self-described orthodox Catholic, raging about believing in “stupid crap”. This same commenter is concerned that the Catholic church is a liberal, feminist organization.

I am angry at what feminism has done to all belief structures. They hijack everything to change it to be their own. As I said previously, the Liberal organisation of the Catholic Church is overrun by feminists and has been responsible for the spreading of this disease throughout the modern world.

And then there are the traditional excuses for “manginas” coming from people who are unable to think of a single reason for women other than gratifying the penis.

Just another classic case of feminists colonising a formerly male-dominated arena, then attempting to change its rules (unwritten or otherwise) to better suit themselves. If that alienates men, so much the better (and better yet if it criminalizes men).

And, as usual, some of the worst offenders are the mangina-enablers, collaborating in a transparent attempt to score some feminazi ass. *shudder*

Just for laughs, there are a few there who don’t like atheism, either, and really detest Richard Dawkins.

I wasn’t criticising Atheists, I was criticising Dawkins.

I personally think the man is an idiot. I have watched some of his interviews and all he does is drop bombs in conversation, by demanding his religious opponents prove their points, but I have not seen him prove anything himself. Indeed he is a bit like watching feminists in an interview trying to survive the argument when it’s obvious they lack substance.

For some reason, none of this entices me to watch Thunderf00t’s video.

By the way, I learned a new acronym! The MRAs have all these weird little code words I have to look up to figure out what the heck they’re talking about: the new one is NAFALT, or “Not all feminists are like that”. It’s a condemnatory phrase: you are bad if you recognize the range of thought in the feminist community and don’t lump them all into one evil long-haired, smooth-skinned, bosomy chimera of wickedness.

Now I’m waiting for the first MRA to show up and claim I’m cherry-picking the comments, saying NAMRAALT.

Piero Corsi continues that fine Catholic tradition…

…the tradition of recognizing the Satanic nature of women’s existence. He apparently authored a little tract that he posted as a Christmas message.

"How often do we see girls and mature women going around scantily dressed and in provocative clothes?" Piero Corsi said in a Christmas message posted on the door of his church in the small town of San Terenzio in northwest Italy.

"They provoke the worst instincts, which end in violence or sexual abuse. They should search their consciences and ask: did we bring this on ourselves?" it read.

The leaflet, a copy of which was posted online sparking a wave of outrage across the country, said the 118 women killed in acts of domestic violence in Italy in 2012 had pushed men to their limits.

"Is it possible that all of a sudden men have gone mad? We don’t believe it," Corsi wrote.

"The fact is that women are increasingly provocative, they become arrogant, they believe themselves to be self-sufficient and end up exacerbating the situation," he said.

"Children are abandoned to their own devices, homes are dirty, meals are cold or fast food, clothes are filthy," he added.

…

"I don’t know whether you’re a queer or not, but what do you feel when you see a naked woman?" he asked a reporter for Rai Radio.

"Are women themselves not causing harm by unveiling themselves like this?"

I’m one of those not-queer people, and yeah, I do feel rather tingly when I see a naked woman…but it doesn’t inspire me to kill them, or abuse them, or commit violence and blame it on women’s bodies.

Must be because I’m not a Catholic.

Spleen venting, or the inadequacy of twitter

For the last few days, my twitter account has been getting spammed by some twit named @lettlander; he seems to be one of those Christians who is infatuated with the First Cause argument. Here’s a small sampling:

@f0xhole @pzmyers @Pipenta something appearing out of nothing isn’t just scientifically impossible – it’s logically self-refuting.

@f0xhole @pzmyers @Pipenta The ONLY way the problem of an infinite regress can be solved is the postulation of an extra-natural element

@f0xhole @pzmyers @Pipenta Besides, you’re perfectly fine with scientifically asserting the universe was uncaused, right? Why not “God”?

@f0xhole @pzmyers @Pipenta Since science and philosophy lead us to a concept of a contingent universe, a non-contingent element must exist

Don’t you just love how these guys pompously dress themselves up as philosophers and scientists to defend the silly notion of a god? But let’s go through those one by one.

1. Something appearing out of nothing is impossible? Tell that to Lawrence Krauss and other physicists. Not only can it theoretically happen, it happens all the time. We must be done already — he’s simply wrong.

2. Since I don’t accept the premise that simple causation is present at all levels, microscopic and macroscopic, no, I don’t have to postulate an “extra-natural element”. The initial cause could have been a quantum fluctuation in nothingness, nothing more. I certainly don’t have to postulate a grand, intelligent cosmic being.

3. Caused, uncaused, it doesn’t matter — show me the evidence for an intelligent agent at the beginning of the universe. I’m not a physicist, though, so I’m neither an authority nor a committed proponent of any particular model of origins, and I’ll heed instead what people like Krauss and Hawking and Stenger say…and they all argue that god is an unnecessary hypothesis.

Why not “god”? Why not a purple space gerbil? Why not snot from the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure? Even if @lettlander were correct and there was a reasonable logical argument for a necessary first cause, it wouldn’t mean Jesus was the one.

4. On the large visible scale, the scale that we perceive and operate under, it is true that we see a pattern of contingency, where one event leads to another. But on the quantum scale, that is no longer true: science and philosophy lead us to a completely different, unintuitive understanding of how the universe works, and the naive and silly guesses of theologians do not apply.

And isn’t it cute how these kooks blithely reduce their omnipotent, omniscient god to “non-contingent element”? It’s as if they expect that if we acknowledge the possibility of a spontaneous accident, a fleck, a speck and spatter of a singular dot of existence that is not the product of a causal chain, then they’ve proven the existence of the Christian God, the truth of the Bible, and the veracity of their own personal dogma.

Sorry about all that. I couldn’t fit that all in a tweet — although I suppose I could have reduced it to a simple accusation of “bullshit!” It’s just that these presumptuous pseudoscientists who claim science supports their cult leave me cold and contemptuous.

File this under “People Are Jerks”

You know, many species of turtles are in trouble; they’re just slowly dying off. So one Clemson student, Nathan Weaver, did a very simple experiment: he watched what happens when a turtle crosses the road.

Weaver put a realistic rubber turtle in the middle of a lane on a busy road near campus. Then he got out of the way and watched over the next hour as seven drivers swerved and deliberately ran over the animal. Several more apparently tried to hit it but missed.

What? People intentionally run over small animals on the road? I’ve been doing it wrong: I hit the brakes or swerve to avoid them, and there have been a couple of times I’ve stopped and carried a turtle across the road.

I’m rather appalled that anyone would think it entertaining to squash turtles just for the hell of it.

Is innumeracy a prerequisite to being an MRA?

These numbers do not add up. A redditor is claiming that women are after men’s precious bodily fluids, because the average annual child support payment is $5,150. “Be careful with your sperm. Your very freedom is at stake,” he says.

But this makes no sense. What woman would steal sperm to get impregnated for a lousy $5000/year payout? That’s nowhere near what it costs to raise a child, not counting the costs in time and worry and all the responsibilities of taking care of the little pain-in-the-butt. Yet somehow, all this guy sees in women is venality — that they’ve got a way of milking $5K/year out of him, as if having sex with him is like buying a lottery ticket for her.

I had no idea that child support costs were so low, though. Women, you are being robbed by this system. Don’t you wish you could just have a baby, then pay up a measly $5000/year to greet a well-adjusted, mature, interesting young adult 18 years later?

Also, warning: be careful with his sperm. Pregnancy is just the start of a lifetime of servitude for you, and you should only do it willingly and with some appreciation for the non-monetary rewards.

Not at all clear on the concept

Ah, what a lovely example of theistic incomprehension. Did you know that the reason Christians go to church is out of a sense of civic duty, even when they think church is godawful tedium?

fail

Why do atheists think that just because they are atheists that they don’t have to go to church? I don’t like standing in line at the DMV. I’m not a car, but I do it anyway. I don’t like standing in line at the grocery store either. I’m not produce, but I still do it anyway! I am a responsible citizen and I do the right thing, so should atheists!!!

Responsible citizens attend science classes and learn. Have you been keeping up with your obligation to understand the complex world we live in?

(via FAILblog)

(By the way, if you start babbling about poes, I will cut you. I really really hate all the telepathic scrying people do to discern poeishness.)