Hey, Thunderf00t fans: stuff it!

Ah, it’s another bright crisp summer morning, and I wake up to birds singing, the distant sound of the freight train moving through Morris, and the mad dinging of my email software, alerting me that there’s another flood of new hate mail on twitter, on youtube, and in my mail. Yes, it is August, and Thunderf00t has created a new video denouncing feminism. And me. And the accusations flooding in are so stupid and so wrong. I shall address them one more time, and then, please, slip on your nicest toe shoes and tutu and pirouette up your own anuses.

Here are a few of the bloody idiotic complaints I get.

  • “I am so disgusted with you and your war with Thunderf00t.” Aside from this post here, today, I have completely ignored Thunderf00t for the last several weeks. He, on the other hand, is making videos and twitter comments about me. There are certain people who, I think, don’t understand the internet: if I made a post two weeks ago or a month ago or a year ago, it persists. It doesn’t mean I’m sitting here right now, obsessing over something I wrote yesterday, even.

  • “How dare you violate Thunderf00t’s right to free speech!” This one is especially ironic, given that it’s made in response to Thunderf00t blithering away loudly and freely on the internet, again. We’ve done nothing to compromise his ability to express himself. We have said that this organization does not support his views, and will not give him our space or resources to do so.

  • “You and Rebecca Watson banned Thunderf00t!” No, we didn’t. We refused to support Thunderf00t’s dumbass crusade against feminism on our blog network. Also, do you realized that freethoughtblogs.com and skepchick.org are completely different entities? Rebecca Watson has no input at all on our management, and vice versa.

  • “You banned Thunderf00t for simply disagreeing with you!” No, we get disagreement all the time, and bloggers here have issues with each other frequently. What Thunderf00t was fired for was joining a network he clearly detested and immediately launching a campaign to tell everyone to stop talking about subjects he didn’t like. He hates freethoughtblogs, in case it wasn’t clear to you by now, so why the hell did he join at all? If it was to undermine it from within, his overt antagonism from day two onward made it clear he wasn’t going to be persuasive in the slightest. Dumbest fifth columnist ever.

  • “You promised you wouldn’t meddle with what he wrote!” Yes, and we didn’t. We didn’t edit or censor one word that he wrote: his blog is still here, completely intact and untouched. What we didn’t promise is that we’d give him space on our network forever and ever. I know he’s fond of complaining in academic terms about this, so digest this: he was never granted tenure here. He doesn’t get to complain that his tenure contract was violated, because didn’t have one. Now maybe if he’d built up some social capital with us, and demonstrated some ability to make an intelligent contribution, we’d have been more reluctant to let him go…but he didn’t, and showed no interest in doing so. He had no friends among the established bloggers here, and didn’t want any. That wasn’t a very collegial attitude.

Let me add one more thing: there’s this unfortunate idea that these attacks have to be personalized and focus on just me. I’m the guy who recruited Thunderf00t to join the network. He immediately raised the hackles of just about everyone here; we had a review committee that looked over his raw contempt for everything here, and the pile of disgusted emails we were getting, and his atrociously childish writing, and said, “Uh-oh, this was a huge mistake, this guy does not belong here.” And I was then the guy who asked everyone to hold off on kicking him out, he’ll settle down and start writing good stuff. And then he didn’t. And he didn’t. And he got worse. And every day I felt guiltier and guiltier, not to Thunderf00t but to this collective here where we’ve otherwise done such a good job in gathering good, intelligent writers…so when the whole group decided they could take no more of his abuse, I volunteered to deliver the axe in expiation. I was Thunderf00t’s sole advocate here (my big mistake). If you have a beef here, it’s not just with me, it’s with the whole damn network of about 40 writers who were unhappy to be saddled with a flaming asshole.

Now we’re done. We have been done for a long time. Thunderf00t is not and will not be a part of this network, and it’s quite clear he doesn’t want to be part of it, except to destroy it. I’ve addressed the complaints of his ignorant and indignant followers, so I’m putting it to rest — I’ve blocked him on twitter, I’m not reading his blog or watching his videos, so if you want to complain further, do your posturing for Thunderf00t, not me, because I don’t give a damn.

A re-poll

You know how much I despise internet polls — they’re meaningless and biased, they draw on an already biased sample, and they tend to be so badly worded that their results are uninterpretable — there is a science of polls and surveys, and these things ignore it all.

Now how about this for an example of anti-scientific thinking: remember that last poll on a standard (but uncomfortably kittenish) scientific procedure? The Mirror didn’t get the result they wanted, so now they’re re-running the poll. Yeah, that’s valid. I want to shoot craps against these guys: every time I get a bad roll, I’ll just say I want a do-over.

This is exactly the same article and the same poll, they just reposted it with a new title: “Kitten controversy: 46% of people say stitching up kittens’ eyes for science is OK.”

Is the scientific experiment on kittens acceptable?

Yes 35.85%

No 64.15%

If we add more yes votes, will they just do it over again a third time? What fraction of “yes” votes do they consider acceptable?

No contest

If you thought Bambi vs. Godzilla was funny, you might want to witness AronRa battling Pastor Bob Enyart. I give you one representative sample of the back-and-forth:

AronRa wrote:Ignoring for a moment the thousands of creationist arguments which have all been proven wrong a thousand times, yet are still being presented on YEC websites around the world, can you show me one verifiably accurate argument, positively indicative of miraculous creation over biological evolution?

Enyart wrote:The 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics does not invalidate evolution. Evolution relies on thermodynamic laws.

How not to respond to a Rethuglican

Ugh. Witness thuggish wingnut James Taranto’s comment on the killings in Colorado.


I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice.

Perhaps he’d like to judge? Is he going to ask this question of every case where a person puts themselves in harm’s way to defend a loved one? What criterion is he going to use to define “worthy”?

That’s a repulsive sentiment he’s expressing, and seems to reflect a lack of empathy and an inability to imagine any kind of sacrifice without hauling out a ledger sheet to calculate its value. Not nice.

But then I read one of the first comments on the article at dKos highlighting Taranto’s sliminess. And I was ugh’ed out again!

I was prepared for a worthy rant. Apologies, should have known better. If another nitwit does something similar, refer them to Heinlein. Heinlein wrote “anycountry that does not place women and children first” as part of it’s values is a unethical country. (I am paraphrasing.)

Women take nine months to make a baby. Men take minutes. That fact prompted Heinlein’s writing.

Heinlein???!? Jebus, that man was an unrepentant sexist pig himself; I recoiled from his later books when I was 15, because they were too crudely horny and repellently attached to sexist stereotypes. When I was 15, and juiced on testosterone myself! Also, I was even then learning to dislike what would become a typical libertarian mindset.

But to respond to a challenge to women’s worth by declaring the importance of their baby-making abilities…talk about missing the whole point.

Mike Adams one-ups everyone

We’ve been seeing the spectacle of everyone with a cause blaming the Colorado massacre on every tinge of ideological difference they want to oppose. Now Mike Adams, the chronic wackjob behind the deranged alt medicine site Natural News, brings the lunacy to put everyone to shame. First claim: Adams rides his anti-pharmaceutical hobby horse to make a completely unsupported assertion: “James Holmes may have been involved in mind-altering neuroscience research”.

But that’s just the beginning. The rest is a wacky conspiracy theory fit for a 9-11 Truther: Holmes was set up by the FBI through “drugs, hypnosis, or trauma” to carry out a government-planned terrorist attack, all to the purpose of driving a UN-inspired effort to confiscate all of our guns. And then? “government genocide really kicks in like we saw with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and other tyrants”.

Don’t read the comments. A few brave critics express their incredulity, but the rest are saying, “it does make some sense.”

Give ’em a little time, the merely rancid turn rotten

I’ve criticized both atheists and the religious for trying to turn the recent tragedy in Colorado into an ideological battleground. You’d think at some point they’d learn that the best thing to do is shut up about how it shows Christians or atheists are evil, but no…one evangelical fruitcake, Jerry Newcombe, has taken it to the next level. He’s now arguing that not only did the shooting occur because Americans aren’t fearful enough of hell, but that the victims who were not Christian are now burning in hell.

While I appreciate his honesty and commitment to the principles of his religion, I can’t help but feel a little nauseous.

Rationalia isn’t

Ho hum. Another purportedly rational forum that thinks rape is a joke.

Would it be immoral to rape a Skepchick?

Post by Pappa » Fri Jul 20, 2012 8:46 am

Not for sexual gratification or power or anything like that, just because they’re so annoying.

I’m really torn on this one. :dunno:

You know what’s really funny? The guy posting that crap apparently has some admin role there, and every one of his posts has this little postscript:

For information on ways to help support Rationalia financially, see our funding page.

Because professional fundraisers everywhere like to encourage people to contribute by joking about how they want to rape someone.

In case you’ve been wondering who to blame…

The American Patriarchy Association has all the answers! The list of causes for the recent theater shooting is long and predictable.

  • We aren’t sufficiently afraid of god

  • We aren’t afraid enough of hell

  • The ACLU

  • Godless public schools

  • Liberals

  • Movies

  • The Internet

  • Gays

  • Lesbians

  • Professors

  • Liberal churches

Mankind is shaking its fist at the authority of God! And God will not be silent when he’s mocked!

So he’ll scramble the brains of a random person and have him go out and murder something less than a hundred entirely random people who are only united in a common interest in Batman movies. He doesn’t seem to have a very coherent or comprehensible way of enforcing his desires.

Hey! They left one out! Maybe god just hates Batman.

Rick Warren is a lying ghoul

Rick Warren has just weighed in on the Aurora shooting, and of course it is predictable inanity.

When students are taught they are no different from animals, they act like it.

Right. Because it’s only the lies of Jesus that keep people from waking up to reality and going on shooting sprees.

It’s simply a fact that Rick Warren is an animal, like all the rest of us. And what’s with the bum rap on animals? Puppy dogs don’t go on a murderous rampage, you know.