The NY Times features a long and horrific story on a gang rape at a college campus. Hang on, I shouldn’t call it a gang rape: a campus committee acquitted the football players who participated, despite all the evidence of what had been going on. Remember, there is no such thing as rape culture.
This is a terrible story — details below the fold, and you might not want to click on the link if it’s too raw for you.
Kent Hovind is counting the days now, and unfortunately he has followers who are going to afflict us with badly made videos. If you feel the need to be deathly bored, here’s an interview with Hovind’s “lawyer” (not really a lawyer, but a “consultant” on Hovind’s financial planning — which is why he’s in jail right now.) Yes, you want to listen to this man’s crazy tax advice.
I only mention it because it includes a note from Kent Hovind that mentions me. The ignominy.
Dr. Hovind says:
Hey folks! New way to mass communicate! Check clubcreation.org and ask about Zello! They let us out 1st today so it’s 4am in Vancouver.. I’ll not call. Maybe tomorrow?
For Tommy Comer- The 1040 days of wrath is from Dan 8 and the 2300 days of the temple being desolate minus the 1260 days of great trib we go through. more in WOE about that! WOE=What on Earth is About to Happen for Heaven’s Sake by Dr. Hovind
For Ian- He does good math but bad logic- he needs to see seminar part 4 about Jump frog! Ps 104:6-9 says the mountains rose up near the end of the flood and the water rushed off. There is enough water in the oceans today to cover the earth 8000ft deep. Plenty to drown in. As for "comparing his doctorate with mine" if his education left him believing he came from a rock I’m already un-impressed! he also makes the silly assumption that the water for the flood came from rain where the Bible says it came from inside the earth via the fountains of the deep. He also says the flood lasted 40 days where the Bible says the earth was covered for 5 months and Noah was in the ark over a year. read the Bible Ian!
For PZ- glad you exposed Michael Shermer’s behavior and his rape of the other atheist at the atheist conference. I don’t understand how any atheist can decide ANYTHING is right or wrong. Where is the standard to judge by? If that woman’s husband or brothers or dad or uncles get Shermer drunk and make him a eunuch (which I suspect they have thought of and may yet still do!) would that be "wrong" in PZ thinking? Christians have God’s Word to show us right and wrong. What do atheists have?
Until next time.. see you at the finish line!
Kent Hovind
Jebus. I decide that something may be wrong by empathizing with the victim, and recognizing that an injustice was done. I don’t need a magic book to see that a harm was done to someone else. Further, when a wrong is committed, it makes me a worse person to consider committing a greater wrong in revenge. That Hovind considers castration to be a reasonable response simply tells me that God’s Word is simply a compendium of barbarisms used to excuse savagery.
Here’s what atheists have: respect for our fellow human beings.
But it’s a powerful short story, Trigger Warning: Breakfast. We hear all the time from MRAs about how women make false rape accusations to cover their regrets about having sex, but this rings far more true: that they sometimes make new narratives to cover over their regrets about being raped.
Ah, Mormons. Utah is a lovely state, but one thing I don’t miss at all are inhabitants who make a mess of it — I recall a camping trip in the Stansburys in which we found a campsite totally trashed by the previous visitors. That just took a little clean up, but here’s a story of a group of enthusiastic Mormon missionaries visiting a designated wilderness area, climbing up a mountain, and using concrete to mount a flagpole so they could leave their ugly mission flag flapping over the area. Not cool, dudes, not cool at all.
But just to further tarnish the reputation of Mormon missionaries everywhere, they did one thing further: they signed the flag.
They signed the evidence of their crime.
I know. It sounds so…Mormon.
That’s what I see in this boatload of immigrants trying to reach Italy.
There have been several mass drownings recently, and the Italian navy is trying to rescue people. It’s not clear from the article what they do with them — are they granted asylum in Italy? Or sent back? Or parked in a refugee camp?
Or possibly worse. Although it can’t be worse than what the US has been doing. Mass graves of migrants have been found in Texas.
Unidentified migrants who died entering the United States were buried in mass graves in a South Texas cemetery, with remains found in trash bags, shopping bags, body bags, or no containers at all, researchers discovered.
In one burial, bones of three bodies were inside one body bag. In another instance, at least five people in body bags and smaller plastic bags were piled on top of each other, Baylor University anthropologist Lori Baker said. Skulls were found in biohazard bags — like the red plastic bags in receptacles at doctors’ offices — placed between coffins.
This is not a discovery of a tragedy in the distant past — these are bodies that have accumulated since 2005, and it’s the product of an ongoing practice by a funeral home that was paid to dispose of the bodies. Dispose of them like trash, apparently.
Human beings deserve better.
I just got around to watching Cristina Rad’s rebuttal of Jaclyn Glenn — it’s often difficult to find a spot of time and a quiet place to watch videos when I’m flitting about. It’s very good.
It pins down a lot of my difficulties with the “He’s Crazy!” brigade. It’s just not an explanation. It’s about as useful as declaring that he’s possessed by a demon. It’s also as universally applicable: was Adolf Hitler insane? How about George W. Bush? Nelson Mandela? Richard Dawkins? If you’re just going to say that mental illness is believing strongly in something that other people find repugnant, then they’re all bug-buggering nuts, and ought to be locked up.
Or if you’re going to try and narrow it down to just those who rationalize doing physical harm to others (you’d have to be crazy to murder people, you know!) then please, do send the men in white coats to pick up Obama. And all the legislators who passed ‘stand your ground’ laws, and support the death penalty. And the entire roster of the Texas Open Carry organization. And at last, we’ll be able to lock up Sheriff Joe Arpaio. It might also mean you get locked up, but I’m willing to pay that price.
I think part of the problem is an excessively reductionist attitude that leads to a kind of identity essentialism. You are who you are because that is your nature (an entirely circular argument), and that nature is determined, so that if you differ from my nature, it can’t be because you are misinformed, confused, miseducated, or warped by your circumstances — it must be because your nature is broken and defective. And sadly, there’s nothing to be done about that other than to label you as someone outside the healthy circle of humanity and ostracize you.
That’s also visible in the recommendations some people make to deal with these problems. Bullies, rapists, misogynists are treated as an external force of nature, rather than as part of our communities already — they only possible response is for us sane ones to change our behavior to defend against them. We can’t possibly recognize the bullies’ existence as part of us, because that would change our essential view of our society as a good one. So we set them apart, insist that it is neither our responsibility nor within our power to change their beliefs, and we let ourselves suffer to maintain the fiction. The demons will occasionally possess one of us, making them an Other, and thereby justify isolating them.
Gosh, I hope the word doesn’t get out that you have to be insane to not go to church. Or has it already?
And it’s usually wrong and makes everything worse. I see that the Baltimore police have a response to a panicky pet. No excuses for the dog; it was lost and apparently a bit frantic, and tried to bite someone.
Nala’s owner, Sarah Gossard, said that her dog “had a collar around its neck with tags, with my phone number. She was just the sweetest dog and would never hurt anyone. She was just scared that day, and through all of those events — being scared and lost, thirsty, hungry — yes I’m very sure that she bit someone, but the actions after that were not OK.”
So what should the police have done? Caught the dog to prevent further harm, sure; maybe even fine the owner for negligence. I can imagine lots of ways to appropriately deal with this real problem. Officer Jeffrey Bolger came up with an innovative solution.
After the dog, named “Nala,” was secured with a dog pole, Officer Jeffrey Bolger approached the dog and slit its throat. According to the charging documents, before cutting Nala’s throat, Bolger yelled, “I am going to fucking gut this thing!”
Oh. So we’re out of the realm of ‘appropriate’, and into the realm of ‘extreme lashing out’. In that case, the proper Bolger response to Bolger ought to be simply putting Officer Jeffrey Bolger down…quickly and humanely, of course, because we aren’t barbarians.
But I guess if we’re going to abide by the law, maybe instead Bolger should be arrested (he was) and fired (not clear if he will be).
I’m just curious why a policer officer was out serving and protecting while carrying a knife suitable for throat-slitting. Is that standard issue in Baltimore?
Today, it’s at Reynolds High School in Oregon.
We are waiting on news of the shooter’s race to determine the cause behind this one. If he’s brown, this will be an act of terrorism; if he’s white, he’s mentally ill or has been playing too many video games; if he’s black, it’ll be that violent rap music. I can just tell the media are all distressed because they don’t know what narrative to follow yet.
At least one bit of certainty that they’ll be able to rely on is that for sure it has nothing to do with guns.
There ought to be a pasturage somewhere for out-of-touch old white men. His latest nonsense, in which he tells women to shut up about rape, will raise a few eyebrows.
They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ("micro-aggressions," often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.
What exactly are these privileges one obtains when one is a victim of sexual assault? Name one. Show me one woman who covets being raped.
Will isn’t even aware of his inconsistency. He tries to do simple math and fails to recognize his failure.
The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12% of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12% reporting rate is correct, the 20% assault rate is preposterous.
Or that the 12% reporting rate is incorrect. The 20% number has been confirmed by the CDC, including both assault and attempted assault (an attempt can be traumatic, so there are no good grounds to exclude that), so it is likely very sound; the 12% reporting rate is an inferred estimate, because there is no directly measured number of unreported assaults — if there were, they’d be reported. So what should be understood from the “simple arithmetic” is that the frequency of reports is far lower than 12%.
But think about what Will is saying: being assaulted is supposed to be a “coveted status” that “confers privileges” on college campuses, but somehow, even with his inflated number, the vast majority of incidents are being kept secret by the victims. Why? Don’t they want their prize from the box of Cracker Jacks?
I’ll also note that Will complains that sexual assault includes nonconsensual touching as well as forcible penetration. I don’t get this attitude. Why does he want to narrow the definition of assault so much? Does he think it would be bad if someone walked up to him and shoved a dildo up his ass, but it’s OK if they instead slide their hand down his pants and gently cup his balls? There are a heck of a lot of things one could do to George Will short of literally raping him, and I think he’d agree (as would I) that a great many of them would represent criminal violations.
Perhaps he simply thinks all women ought to be accessible to a little involuntary fondling.
We had another terrible person armed with a gun swagger into a peaceable place here in the Pacific Northwest, and he callously killed one person and wounded three others at Seattle Pacific University before he was stopped. The student who stopped him used a can of mace to do so. That was brilliant: why don’t we endorse the use of non-lethal weaponry by our citizens? There’s no need for guns. The whole NRA/gun-fondler argument for the necessity of self-defense is taken care of by weapons that don’t kill people.
