Definitely a PR stunt, and quite stupid

The New Tolerance Campaign is a weird little right-wing organization founded by Log Cabin Republicans who are claiming to be “tolerant”, but their entire raison d’etre is to hate Muslims and anything “woke”. They are also hating on gay people who think Palestinians don’t deserve to be killed.

They have a Hate Map page that lists all the organizations across the country that they hate. Antifa, they hate. Muslim student associations, they hate. Socialists, they hate. Multiple chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace, they hate (because they’re anti-Semitic, obviously). You get the idea. This organization is run by people so twisted by hatred for Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular that they have put every faintly left-wing organization on a List.

They’ve also come up with a stunt.

The New Tolerance Campaign has secured $1,000,000 to underwrite expenses for an LGBTQ Pride Parade in Gaza or the West Bank!

Oh, wait. It’s not a publicity stunt. We know this because they say so.

This isn’t a joke. It’s not a publicity stunt. Our offer is real.

It’s absolutely insane, though, and reflects a lack of understanding and empathy on the part of the New Tolerance Campaign. They are incapable of comprehending the idea that people can simultaneously recognize that people living in a conservative, patriarchal culture or following a religion that is antithetical to LGBTQ values are not on their side, and that those people don’t deserve to die for their beliefs. You can believe that the best approach to dealing with a group that contains many misogynists and homophobes is education, coexistence, and, you know, tolerance, while recognizing that they do not share your goals.

I don’t know what the New Tolerance Campaign expects to demonstrate with this PR stunt (which is what it actually is). That LGBTQ people are actually aware that some people have ideological values that harm LGBTQ people? I think they’re already very aware of that. But maybe, just maybe, they’re capable of empathizing with other groups that are being oppressed and persecuted, and are able to allow them to live.

Maybe they’re also smart enough to realize that the West Bank and Gaza are free-fire zones for the IDF, and taking a walk with banners and flags is a good way to get a bomb dropped on you. Also maybe they can see that this is a relatively trivial cause to throw in the face of people who are being bombed, who might resent a stupid parade through the ruins of their homes.

We’re all happy to see Miss Sassy safe and sound

They keep trying to validate their racist claims.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance tried to prove his baseless claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets by pointing to a police report from one resident in Springfield, Ohio, that alleged her cat may have been stolen by her Haitian neighbors.

How’s that going for them?

Anna Kilgore in Springfield, Ohio with a Trump-Vance hat and flag. The Springfield resident told police last month that her Haitian neighbors may have stolen her cat Miss Sassy. The cat turned out to be hiding in her basement the whole time, and she apologized to her Haitian neighbors

The Trump campaign is not backing down, though.

I’m sorry to say that this is the very last time I’ll link to Snopes. They have a lengthy article straining to justify the statement that they’re animals, because Trump was referring to illegal immigrants who committed crimes. I hate to tell you this, but those are human beings, too.

I finally unsubscribed

I donated to the Harris/Walz campaign a while back, and you know what that means: I’ve been inundated with texts/emails begging me for money a dozen times a day. I tolerated them because I support the Democrats, and I was planning to donate again soon.

I finally had to unsubscribe/block/delete all their messages, because right now they are constantly pushing the Oprah endorsement. No. Oprah is a soft-brained snake oil salesman who got rich promoting feel-good nonsense, and who inflicted Dr Oz and Dr Phil on the world. Go away.

I’m still voting for Harris/Walz in November, but I am not going to stomach Oprah cluttering up my in-box.

Oh, what a catastrophe the New Atheism was for lower-case “a” atheism

Fuck all of these guys

There is no doubt but that the New Atheism was a channel that directed people towards right-wing, conservative, anti-immigration politics. Eiynah explains it all, and I think she’s right.

This link between New Atheism and the far-right is a dangerous and an under-discussed one. This has never been demonstrated so starkly as when Richard Dawkins tweeted out a recommendation for a book by fellow atheist Douglas Murray.

The day after the mass shooting in Buffalo that was explicitly motivated by great replacement theory, by ideas like there being an outright “war on white people,” Dawkins chose to tweet praise for a book titled The War on the West. He called it “utterly superb” and urged his nearly three million followers to read it with an open mind and “forget about labels like right wing”…Because surely, among us secular friends, we can overlook an inconvenient term like that, even in the aftermath of a mass shooting underpinned by the same ideology.

I’ve been listening to the audio version of Murray’s book myself, and it is reminiscent of the incendiary rhetoric of former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. In his promotional podcast tour for this book, Murray talks repeatedly of an “outright war on white people.” He is losing patience, he says, done being polite with people who don’t “respect [his] ancestors, history and culture” – while disparaging other cultures for supposedly not contributing to “mathematical, scientific or artistic discoveries”. The combination of ignorance and arrogance is staggering, as this is patently, overwhelmingly untrue.

This is no dog whistle, it is an airhorn.

While I was attracted towards Dawkins’ ideas, at least I was never tempted by Murray. I was actively repulsed by Douglas Murray — he was just a garden variety Nazi wanna-be, fed on racist literature and never questioning it. It was one of the factors driving me away from New Atheism and the Dawkins fandom, evidence that he was losing it altogether with his fawning over Murray. Sure, Murray is an atheist — but he’s a cultural Christian atheist who values his local religion as a tool to bludgeon those foreign people with different traditions.

Of course, Douglas himself is no outsider to the atheist scene. He too is a well-known and prominent atheist figure, one who happens to lament the loss of Europe’s Christian heritage and the supposed identity-crisis caused by increased secularization. Despite this, he has been propped up in vocal anti-theist circles because, rather than consistency on the matter of critiquing religion, it is his views on Islam and immigration that are appealing to a certain crowd. Murray has a long history of cloaking extreme statements in a posh accent, his rhetoric has been described as gentrified xenophobia. Which is putting it mildly.

Remember Dawkins’ declaration that he was a “cultural Christian” because he like hymns and church bells, and hated Islam because it was “indecent”? That sounds like he’s been hanging out with Douglas Murray too much.

Any much is too much.

Let’s not forget Sam Harris, who has also been sipping from the chalice of Douglas Murray.

Harris often claims that ‘woke identity politics’ is destroying the path to a harmonious ‘colourblind’ world. But his actions and endorsements do not paint a picture of someone who truly prioritizes colour-blindness, as seen by his repeated promotion of race and IQ, or his endless propping up of Douglas Murray.

The War on the West is overflowing with racialized language. The first chapter is even called “Race.” It wouldn’t be unbelievable as a parody of a far-right book featured in The Onion. But colourblind Harris has been filled with praise, referring to it as a “fantastic read and a doubly fantastic listen.”

Interestingly, Harris’s attitude changes completely when it comes to anti-racists like Ta-Nehisi Coates whom he refers to on several occasions as a “pornographer of race”—not Douglas Murray who talks obsessively of race, or even Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a book funded by the white supremacist organization Pioneer Fund. In fact Harris is also a dedicated defender and promoter of Charles Murray, referring to him as a “deeply rational and ethical thinker” and “the intellectual who was treated most unfairly in my lifetime.”

Has anyone else noticed that all of the worst people associated with atheism have been gravitating together into one horrible toxic clump? And that they’re all making apologies for conservative Christianity nowadays?

One of those movies where I was left wondering, “What did I just watch?”

Uh-oh. I just learned that Grave of the Fireflies is streaming on Netflix. It’s a magnificent movie, but I don’t know if I could cope with the painful catharsis of seeing it again.

I took my daughter to see it years ago; I should ask her if she considers that a horrific instance of child abuse, or an opening of her emotional experiences. Or if she’d take her daughter to see it.

Here’s someone arguing that You Should Show Grave of the Fireflies to Your Kids. They make a good case.

It is okay for children to experience sad and even scary stories. In fact, doing so in safe environments is extremely healthy! Feeling sad allows us to learn empathy so we know how ourselves and others should be treated. The need to healthily experience sadness is literally the entire point of the movie Inside Out — a movie made with child audiences in mind — which will probably get its importance across better than any short paragraph I could write here. Sadness is an inevitable part of life, why would we want to leave children ill prepared to deal with it?

If the continued relevance of fairy tales and Goosebumps Books didn’t make it clear, stories that safely scare kids as part of consensual fear experiences are healthy for their development too. As psychologist Emma Kenny explained, “when you are reading a scary story to a child, or they’re reading to themselves, the child has got a level of control — they can put it down, or ask you to stop. And the story can raise a discussion, in which they can explore and explain the way they feel about a situation.”

I suspect that the kids could cope with the experience better than many parents, including myself.

Good morning!

My wife has been keeping an eye on a chrysalis on the neighbor’s garage, and this morning it looked like this:

Empty! Where did the former resident go? It was stretching and warming itself up on a twig down below.

We have to celebrate every single monarch that emerges, because they’ve become too uncommon nowadays.

My tarantula, Blue, might be mad at me

I cleaned up their container because it was choked with silk. They seemed kind of sulky afterwards, but look, clean soil, and I propped up a clam shell to give them a nice shelter. What did they do? They coated everything with silk! I can’t even see into their hiding space because the silk is nearly opaque!

I think the evidence is clear that they’ve entered their spider teens: sullen and sulky, their room is incredibly messy, and they really want their privacy.

“Iles” is an anagram for “lies”

Martyn Iles, the heir to the pile of dishonest shit that is Answers in Genesis, has posted a tirade about the sin of lying.

One of the biggest changes | have seen over the course of my not-that- long life is the normalisation of lying.
Yes, at the level of worldview and culture . .. “woke” is effectively an “objective truth is evil” belief system. Politics is a festival of lies to the point of being a depressing joke. The media lied so much they’re dying. But also at the level of relationships. People actively deceive each other, deny their behaviour, say whatever is expedient to the moment, or hide their true agenda, simply as a way of life.
And when you catch them out, they kick you out of their life.
It’s become shockingly normal.
Effortless, brazen, easy liars, and deceivers are multiplying. People who have become so calloused in their own self-interest and self-serving that they say whatever it takes.
I have sat in rooms where apparently reputable people tell outright lies to get what they want or avoid scrutiny. It’s so shocking that your first assumption is to imagine that you must be mistaken.
Are you a Christian? Then you tell the truth. Ruthlessly. Consistently. Without fail. Without fear. Every time. Because truth is good, no matter what. .. even when we feel like it will cost us. The cost will ultimately be for good.
The closest you will ever come to a lie is remaining silent in those exceptional situations where wisdom demands it.
And if your goals cannot be achieved with honesty, then your goals are simply wrong, and you are on a wrong path, no matter how self- righteous you may feel about it.
Remember, the Holy Spirit is called “the Spirit of truth™—and Satan is called “the father of lies.” Your denials, misrepresentations, masked agendas, and self-serving deceptions only serve one of those two. Really, this issue is a barometer for measuring how active Satanism is in a given place or situation. If there is a pattern or system of deception, you know what’s up.
Stay true.

The most brazen, easy liars I’ve ever met have all been creationists. I am reeling at the level of projection and the lack of self-awareness in his post.

If this is an admission that Satanism is active at Answers in Genesis, I might agree with some of it.

The grill is blue, therefore the racism is true

Creationist logic is soaking into the general discourse, I’m sorry to say. As we’ve all heard, Donald Trump declared that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, and some people have been desperately trying to validate that. Among their ranks we have Chris Rufo, the professional racist, destroyer of universities, and flailing idiot trained in the heart of the Discovery Institute, who attempts to mimic skeptical reasoning in a post titled…

The Cat Eaters of Ohio
The establishment media called it a racist myth, but is it?

Yes. Yes it is.

He’s going to get to the bottom of this story.

So, is there any truth to the charge? We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals that, yes, in fact, some migrants in Ohio appear to have been “eating the cats,” though not exactly in the manner that Trump described.

“Not exactly” is doing a lot of work here. To translate, he’s saying “not even close to what Trump described,” which he interprets as reasonable doubt that any rebuttals are valid.

Our investigation begins in a run-down neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, the closest major city to Springfield, about a half-hour’s drive away. We identified a social media post, dated August 25, 2023, with a short video depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbeque. “Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood,” reads the text, referring to Parkwood Drive. The video then pans down to two live cats walking across the grass in front of a run-down fence, with a voice on the video warning: “There go a cat right there. His ass better get missin’, man. Look like his homies on the grill!”

I watched the video. It’s true, there are live cats on camera, and there is a barbecue grill, and there is something unidentifiable cooking on the grill, and there is a man vocally accusing them of grilling cats. That’s it. One ambiguous video yanked off of TikTok. That’s Rufo’s evidence.

He does go a significant step further, and he or someone he’s associated with contacted the creator of the video, and even visited the neighborhood to ask questions. It’s a significant effort, but all he’s going to get out of it is a lot of irrelevant details. As any creationist knows, piling on random detail is an adequate substitute for actually confirming a hypothesis.

We spoke with the author of the video, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed its time, location, and authenticity. He told us that he was picking up his son last summer, when he noticed the unusual situation. “It was some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” he said. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill.”

Point of order: there has been no evidence presented that it was a cat on the grill. Having the initial accuser repeat the accusation adds nothing.

We then identified the home by matching it to the visuals in the video and cross-referencing them with the eyewitness. When we knocked on the door of the first unit, a family answered, telling us they were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that all of the surrounding units were occupied by other African migrants.

So, not a Haitian. Telling us the country of origin of the accused does not in any way confirm that they were eating cats — we keep drifting further and further away from the initial claim — but it does contradict the story we were told.

But hey, people from Africa, people from a Caribbean island, they’re all the same. They’re black. Is Rufo trying to establish that yes, it sure is a racist myth?

One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. “Her dad was going to find meat,” she said. “Her dad was going, holding a knife.” The current residents also showed us a blue grill of the same make and model as in the video, which the former neighbors had abandoned after they moved out. There were at least ten cats wandering around the complex and another resident complained that they were breeding on the property.

At this point, we’ve lost the plot. Now we’ve got the testimony of someone in the neighborhood saying that she had a neighbor, not necessarily the same person as the one accused in the video, was from Africa. In Rufo’s mind, this is a connection sufficient to establish guilt, and he had a knife, and he was reputed to have hunted for meat in the neighborhood.

Somebody had a blue grill, the same color as the grill in the video, therefore they must have been cooking cats.

There are many cats wandering about, further evidence. I’m going to have to confess: there are many feral and pet cats living in my neighborhood. I’m going to be in big trouble if ever I’m accused of cat-eating, because they’ll be able to point to a random cat strolling by and announce “A-ha! Opportunity! Therefore, guilty!”

Rufo imagines himself a reasonable man, so he offers a reasonable interpretation.

To be clear: this single incident does not confirm every particularity of Trump’s statement. The town is Dayton, not Springfield; cats alone were on the grill, not cats and dogs. But it does break the general narrative peddled by the establishment media and its “fact checkers,” who insisted that this has never happened, and that any suggestion otherwise is somehow an expression of racism.

It does not confirm any particularity of Trump’s statement. It’s a different city and a different nationality. Notice how he now segues from a video of something indefinite on a grill to a definitive statement that “cats alone were on the grill,” something that has not been established by this investigation. The question he should be asking is — what was Trump’s source for this garbled, ugly claim? I know, he’s just going to say it was people on television, but what ought to be engaging Rufo is not whether there is some thin, tenuous thread of circumstance that can be attached post-hoc to Trump’s claim, but what was the actual basis for the claim?

Also, the fact checkers never insisted that this has never happened. Every account I’ve read points out that there was an isolated instance of a mentally ill person eating a cat, so right away there’s an awareness that it’s entirely possible that there have been individual cases of such incidents. The expression of racism arises from the fact that Rufo and Trump and a whole wing of conservatives are flatly accusing an entire group of people of reprehensible behavior on the basis of the flimsiest evidence. It arises from the fact that Rufo can blithely equate Congolese with Haitian.

It takes only a single exception, however, to falsify a hypothesis, and the logical next step, for any honest broker, is to ask if it is happening more often, and elsewhere. It is not implausible. Many developing nations, including the Congo and Haiti, have traditions of animal sacrifice or consumption of what Americans would consider household pets. And if this occurred in Dayton, where the migrant population is relatively small, it could be going on down the road in Springfield, where it is relatively much larger.

Keep in mind that the hypothesis that Rufo is falsifying is the idea that no one has ever eaten a cat, which is both trivially false and a hypothesis that no one has proposed. An honest broker would not suggest that this is the premise in contention; the concern is that it has become a Republican talking point that an entire large community of immigrants is habitually preying on household pets in Ohio.

This is simply not true.

You also cannot extrapolate from one poorly documented possible case in Dayton to conclude that it must be happening on a larger scale in Springfield. You also don’t get to plop down the claim that pet-eating is endemic in Congo and Haiti without a source and without evidence, trusting only in the assumed racist bias that of course, black people everywhere engage in behaviors that good, civilized white people deplore.

Rufo has managed to confirm only that a) he’s racist as fuck, and b) has no grasp of elementary logic. It’s about what I’d expect from a creationist fool and professional hatemonger. How can we doubt that Haitians are eating your cats if he has photographic evidence that blue barbecue grills exist?