That human need to control their perceived inferiors

The Onion lampoons an attitude we’ve encountered here a few times before.

With her remarkable ability to determine exactly how others should be allocating their limited resources for food, local woman Carol Gaither is considered to be one of the foremost authorities on what poor people should and should not have in their grocery carts, sources said Thursday.

As verified by multiple eyewitness reports from supermarkets across the Northampton area, the real estate agent and mother of three is capable of scanning the contents of any low-income person’s basket and rapidly identifying those items which people like that don’t need to be buying, based on the products’ nutrition and cost. Additionally, Gaither, 48, is widely regarded as a leading expert in determining which groceries they would purchase instead if they had any common sense or restraint.

Creepy. How is it funny if there really are a lot of people out there like that?

Ben Affleck’s new Batman costume…revealed!

There were groans of dismay throughout Nerd-dom when it was announced that Ben Affleck would be playing Batman in the next movie in the franchise. But then the always over-the-top Kevin Smith saw the costume.

“I saw the Batman costume. More than that, I saw a picture of [Ben Affleck] in the costume…I don’t want to give anything away ’cause that is up to them and stuff, but I am going to say this…I instantly bear hugged [Snyder]. You have not seen this costume on film before. For a comic book fan, it was mind-bending… Because every other movie does this Matrix-y black armor thing…There wasn’t a single nipple on this suit. I think everyone is just gonna be like ‘Holy S**t!’ It’s its own thing. We haven’t been down this path before. Even the hardest core [most skeptical] person will be like ‘Alright, I’m ready.’…It seemed like it was very [Redacted] influenced.”

And as we all know, the most important thing in a superhero movie isn’t the plot or the acting — it’s the special effects and the fancy costumes.

But I have to agree with Smith. I have seen the costume, and it is awesome. It’s going to make the movie for sure. And here it is.

[Read more…]

Ken Ham gets his wish

Poor ol’ Ken has been feeling oppressed lately — there was that Noah movie (unbiblical!) and this Cosmos series (godless!), and it was so unfair. Where was the Cosmos show that gave equal time to the one true Biblical story of the universe?

He gets his wish at last. Here it is, Creationist Cosmos.

I hope he’s satisfied now.

Kilstein is in flyover country

Just a reminder that tomorrow, Friday evening, Jamie Kilstein will be performing at Freethought Festival 3 in Madison, WI. This video is definitely NSFW, but it’s hilarious.

I am tempted to just hop in my car and make the 7 hour drive to Madison…but I’m going to be trapped in grading all weekend instead. I do not want to be a grown up anymore.

By the way, he makes a good point that I’ve noticed, too. Piss off the Catholics, they’ll swarm you with letters accusing you of persecuting them, with lots of “I’ll pray for you” noise, and only an occasional death threat. Piss off the anti-feminists, especially the sexist atheists, and you will get real rage-hate of a magnitude I never saw from the Christians. It’s actually the most appalling and disappointing failure of movement atheism, its failure to strongly support equality.

The abortion problem…solved!

Dana publishes the simple, brilliant solution to abortion. I can’t see any downside to it. We already live in a culture where pointless surgical alterations to boy’s genitals are common, and this just adds one more.

I’m thinking we could also make it a ritual of passage into manhood. You aren’t really a man until you’ve had The Procedure.

Yes, really

Yet another critic of Cosmos speaks out on Giordano Bruno. This time it’s Andrew Sullivan, who first complains about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “style”, calls him intrusive and silly, and then gets to the real complaint: he dissed the Catholic Church.

David Sessions pans it. The segment previewed above is on the 16th century priest and philosopher Giordano Bruno, which includes deGrasse Tyson intoning that the Roman Catholic Church sought to “investigate and torment anyone who voiced views that differed from theirs”. Really?

Yes, really. I call the Inquisition and the fact that they’re setting people on fire supportive evidence for that contention. Investigation, torment, and execution. That’s what the Inquisition did, enforced church dogma.

So he cites this Sessions fellow. It doesn’t really help his case.

Bruno’s conflict with the Catholic Church was theological, not scientific, even if it did involve his wild—and occasionally correct—guesses about the universe. As Discover magazine’s Corey Powell pointed out, the philosophers of the 16th century weren’t anything like scientists in the modern sense. Bruno, for instance, was a “pandeist,” which is the belief that God had transformed himself into all matter and ceased to exist as a distinct entity in himself. He believed in all sort of magic and spirits, and extrapolated those views far beyond his ideas about the infinity of the universe. In contrast to contemporaries who drew more modest conclusions from their similar ideas, Bruno agitated for an elaborate counter-theology, and was (unlike the poor, humble outcast portrayed in Cosmos) supported by powerful royal benefactors. The church didn’t even have a position on whether the Earth orbited the sun, and didn’t bring it up at Bruno’s trial. While the early-modern religious persecution certainly can’t be denied, Bruno was killed because he flamboyantly denied basic tenets of the Catholic faith, not because religious authorities were out to suppress all “freedom of thought.”

How is killing someone for denying the faith not an attempt by religious authorities to suppress freedom of thought?

He then goes on to argue against treating Bruno as a martyr for science…despite the fact that Tyson never claimed he was a scientist, and clearly said he was not a scientist.

I guess facts and evidence are irrelevant when you’re busy Defending the Faith.

The Eugenics Creed

Salon has a good essay on Charles Davenport, a prominent American biologist from the first half of the 20th century who was one of the loudest voices promoting the eugenics movement. Oh, let’s call it what it was: the Wealthy White Racist movement. It begins with the tale of Carrie Buck, as was previously told by Stephen Jay Gould (pdf) — a young woman, raped by the nephew of her foster parents, who was then punished by sterilization for being one of the shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South. It’s all part of the ongoing war on women, especially poor, minority women, that has been going on for a long, long time.

Davenport’s awful and influential work is discussed — read it and gag — but one thing that jumped out at me as particularly creepy was Davenport’s Eugenics Creed.

I believe in striving to raise the human race to the highest plane of social organization, of cooperative work and of effective endeavor.

I believe that I am the trustee of the germ plasm that I carry; that this has been passed on to me through thousands of generations before me; and that I betray the trust if (that germ plasm being good) I so act as to jeopardize it, with its excellent possibilities, or, from motives of personal convenience, to unduly limit offspring.

I believe that, having made our choice in marriage carefully, we, the married pair, should seek to have 4 to 6 children in order that our carefully selected germ plasm shall be reproduced in adequate degree and that this preferred stock shall not be swamped by that less carefully selected.

I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits.

I believe in repressing my instincts when to follow them would injure the next generation.

Oh, my, his precious germ plasm — it must be promulgated to fend off the brown hordes. Blech. Must take a shower now. It’s like reading vdare.com…it just incites extreme disgust.