They just keep popping up out of nowhere, all shrill and assertive and extreme. Take a look at this new guy getting all in-your-face about religion. And he’s a Scot, too; even worse.
Disreputable rascals, every one.
Earlier this summer, I mentioned the Oregon Octocam, which featured an octopus named Deriq.
Deriq has died. It’s a sad fact that most cephalopods are very short lived.
“The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly, Deriq.”
They’re Christian, so you can trust them to have your best interests at heart. The Modesty Survey is a bizarre instrument created by asking young Christian women to put together heartfelt questions about their clothing (“Are bikinis immodest?” “Are jeans immodest?”), and then teenaged Christian boys are surveyed to get their opinions. Because, of course, the girls need boys’ advice.
Reading through the questions is weird: they’re phrased in different ways, but one of the most common motifs is the “stumbling block”. The boys are asked to judge whether an item of clothing is something that might cause them to think wicked thoughts…so once again, the women are to blame for inciting men’s behavior by wearing tight jeans or a strapless dress.
They’re also explicit about it:
We’re not telling you what to wear — we’re just telling you what we, as guys, have to guard against. It is God’s Word, your own heart and conscience, and your parents and godly friends who should help you decide what to do about it.
What they have to guard against? They should be plainer. “We’re not telling you what to wear — we’re just listing the stuff that will justify raping you.”
I get a Taliban tingle just reading it. It’s a far more generous document than anything Islam dictates — young Christian men do not want young Christian women to wear burkas — but in principle, it’s the same thing. It’s men declaring ownership of women’s bodies and telling them what to wear, with the the threat of justifiable sexual assault if they do not obey.
It is a little disturbing, though, to see that their logo has a picture of a woman with a veil over her face.
One of the more contemptible anti-gay activists is Reverend Scott Lively, a true liar for Jesus who considers it his sacred mission to rid the world of homosexuals. He was proud to have inspired the Ugandan death penalty for homosexuality law (although in the face of the outrage that generated, he backed off, claiming they should give them the choice of prison or gay conversion “therapy”).
His other claim to fame is that he is a holocaust revisionist. He has written a book, The Pink Swastika, in which he claims that Hitler and his entire inner circle was gay, that the atrocities the Nazis committed were driven by the immoral impulses of the gay Nazi elite, and that the well-known anti-gay laws and mass murders of homosexuals in the Third Reich were just a cover, a distraction to conceal the fact that Nazis were all gay. Oh, and also that the reason they were murdered is that gays are intrinsically violent, anyway.
Lively is an evil little liar, so it was delightful to see him exposed on the Daily Show. This is one of the clearest illuminations of the insanity of these gay-hating evangelicals I’ve seen.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Gay Reichs | ||||
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The best moment was after Lively expounded on his ferocious gay Nazi theory and how the Nazi’s public denunciation of gays was evidence that they were all secretly gay, the interviewer asks him, “That which you hate the most you secretly are?” Reverend Scott Lively sits there stunned for a moment before he can say, “I’m not gay.”
I don’t see how we can conclude that he’s not, though, given the Christian logic he has so impeccably applied to the problem.
Mark your calendars! The end of the world is nigh, and we’ve got a specific date: the Rapture will occur on 21 May, 2011, and the world ends on 21 October 2011. How do we know this? As near as I can tell, it’s pure numerology, diddling dates to create a pretense of pattern that are then used to draw conclusions.
I wouldn’t worry about it. But now you’ve got an excuse to plan a party for next spring.
Zeno catches something amusing: a right-wing radio host ranting about professors.
Sussman:I get a kick out of— You go to UC Berkeley, you go to Stanford, you go to these various campuses and these students are out there protesting, “We need more money for our schools!” And standing next to them are the professors. “We need more money for our schools!” Hey, have you ever asked that professor how much money they’re making every year? These professors are all millionaires. They’re millionaires with big, big salaries and big, big retirement packages. And yet they dress like little schmoes, you know, with their crummy jackets [Officer Vic: Patches on the elbow.] that are twenty years old, yeah, and patches on the elbow. And their ties are askew and their hair’s kinda crappy and they drive crummy little cars and they’re millionaires. They’re all millionaires! And they actually have the gall to stand next to the kids who are protesting because their fees are too high. “We need more money for our schools!” So you can pay these millionaires!
Reality doesn’t matter to these guys, does it? We wear the crummy jackets and drive the crummy little cars because that’s what we can afford: professors are proud members of the middle class, not even the upper middle class. It isn’t pretense.
I’m also not really getting a pay raise. In Minnesota, we’re getting a pay cut this year.
JL Vernon is lobbying to have Huffpo dedicate a section of their undeservedly popular, cheesy website to science. He makes a superficially reasonable argument: to work within the belly of the beast to promote good science, in opposition to the tripe they usually publish. I’m sympathetic, really I am, but I see the Huffpo as a dead cause.
I also think Vernon fails to grasp the problem here. For instance, he complains about the refusal of anti-creationists to debate the opposition.
The most resounding message emerging from the opposition is the idea that having “real science” share a platform with “bad science” will ultimately tarnish the reputation of the legitimate scientists and science communicators who choose to participate. This is essentially the same argument Richard Dawkins, PZ Meyers and others take when refusing to debate evolutionists. The concept here being that by sharing the stage with creationists, scientists lend credibility to the creationist arguments. In some ways, I think this is a cowardly response. If you have a sound argument, the opposition should not win the debate.
That’s wrong on multiple levels. First, a debate is not won by sound argument; it’s by persuasive rhetoric. Many creationists have that skill (I have to repeat a mantra I’ve got: creationists are not stupid, just ignorant and misled by ignorant arguments), so it is a serious tactical error to think that because all the facts and science are on your side, you’re going to win debates. That’s a recipe for consistent failure.
The other problem here is that I’ve “won” most of my debates…because the other side is just nuts. Jerry Bergman and Geoff Simmons, to name two, were raving loonies who made me embarrassed to be sharing a spotlight with them. There was no gain for me, and plenty for them. You get two possibilities: you’ll face an eloquent rhetorician who will run rings around you despite your command of the facts, or you’ll get a nutcase who makes you feel like you’re sharing the podium with a brain-damaged hobo. Neither are great options.
The final big problem is that creationist debaters willingly lie and distract to win their arguments. The Gish Gallop is just one of the tools they use; they sputter out dozens of claims that are false and falsifiable, if you had an hour to address each one. And then, of course, if you do “win”, they’ll cheerfully lie to their little closeted evangelical audiences that they not only defeated you, but that you were a big abusive meanie who was rude and accused the creationists of making stuff up.
I have little hope for Vernon’s endeavor if he doesn’t grasp these basic realities of dealing with kooks.
As for Huffpo, he has a couple of hurdles. He has openly announced his intent to expose the “bad science” on HuffPo — while I like that idea, does he really think Ariana Huffington is going to look kindly on that proposal?
Also, we know that Huffpo editors censor articles. There isn’t going to be any criticism of the site’s major goals, the promulgation of Newage garbage, getting through unbutchered.
But let’s assume Vernon succeeds, and gets a good science section with reputable contributors writing about good solid science and criticizing the pseudoscience and quackery otherwise rife on Huffpo. If it acquires even a scrap of prestige and respect, I can predict exactly what will happen: Deepak Chopra and Robert Lanza will ask Huffington to include their raving madness in that section. They write about “science” and “medicine”, after all. And a credible science section on Huffpo will be quickly subverted to promote quackery.
Convergent Revolution agrees that Huffpo Science would be a bad idea. Huffpo is tainted fruit — stay away from it altogether.
Some things just make you want to cringe under a table somewhere, they’re so awful and embarrassing. And sometimes they’re so bad I don’t want to cringe down there alone, so I’m going to creep you all out, too. Behold, Andrew Cohen. His ex-girlfriend, who turned down his proposal of marriage for what rapidly become obvious reasons, was getting married to someone else — so he wrote her a ‘wedding gift’, a publicly published, soppy opinion piece on how wonderful she is and how much she’s hurting him by spurning his deep, stalkerish obsession with her. For her wedding, he tries to hand her a long guilt trip; I’m hoping that if she saw it at all, she’s just had the rightness of her refusal amply confirmed.
It’s an amazing example of inappropriate obliviousness, so painful that I thought Cohen had to be uniquely blind and self-centered…but no, the comments contain several people praising him for his fantasies about marrying and impregnating her. Gah. I need a shower now.
If you can’t stomach the whole mess, read this distillation of the worst of Andrew Cohen.
(via Amanda.)
Well, traffic was down a bit yesterday, although the dedicated thread is going strong. I suspect that some of the readers here were distracted by some silly little game that was released yesterday, and the only way to get them back is to dangle the eye candy in front of them.
Now we’re all caught up on everything.
(Current totals: 10,712 entries with 1,069,687 comments.)
