Someone wanna explain the Streisand Effect to the Pope?

The Vatican wants to sue a clothing company over an ad.

“It is a serious lack of respect for the Pope, an affront to the feelings of the faithful and an evident demonstration of how, in the field of advertising, the most elemental rules of respect for others can be broken in order to attract attention by provocation,” Holy See spokesman Federico Lombardi said in a statement about the ad.

“The Secretariat of State is examining the steps that may be taken with the competent authorities in order to guarantee adequate protection for the figure of the Holy Father,” Lombardi said, referring to the Vatican’s secretary of state.

Odd…I wouldn’t have even noticed the ad, and certainly wouldn’t have thought to put up a blog post about it, except for the fact that the Vatican is popping blood vessels all over the place over it. So here you go, free advertising for Benetton!

#NudePhotoRevolutionary

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, and Egyptian secularist, has done something striking: to protest against repressive Islamic culture, she has taken her clothes off, and posted photographs of herself on her blog

The 20-year-old wrote on her blog that the photos, which show her naked apart from stockings, are her “screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy”. Her blog has received 1.5 million hits since her photos were posted earlier this week.

This has had an expected result — the conservative and religious elements (but I am redundand) are outraged — and another, subtler, annoying aspect: even the liberals are whining. The comments on her blog, those few that are in English that I can read, are revealing. Among the comments praising her bravery, there are a few craven, well-meaning people urging cowardice, like this one.

With all respect to you – what good will it do the world if men and women in the Middle East take their clothes off?

It would be more accurate to say that it is a freedom, and we should be willing to fight to keep. Personal freedom? what this concept means in Egyptian society?

Personal freedom had limits and this kind of personal freedom – nude male and female art – is unknown in our society.You misunderstand the concept!

I have no problem with nudity.If you wish for people to be more understanding about nude photography you need to understand and deal with negative comments.

Yes,Nude does NOT equal sexual and nudity is artistic expression,but that doesn’t mean that it is acceptable in the society where we live in. As much as I want to believe being open minded about nudity,It would be great if we could get to a place where nudity was just a person with no clothes on. I think that will take a very long time though!

I hope this clears things up for you.

It doesn’t. What a muddle. So yes, you should be free to take your clothes off, but that isn’t “acceptable in the society where we live in,” and maybe you shouldn’t do it. You’re free, but you’re only free to do the things that the puritans in charge will allow you to do.

I think the problem is that this person is using the word “freedom”, but he doesn’t know what it actually means. That’s OK, we Americans act like we invented the word, but most of us seem perfectly willing to throw it away for a little imaginary security, or for the privilege of feeling sanctimoniously superior to our neighbors, or just to conform.

I’ll just say…bravo, Ms Elmahdy. I hope the reactionary haters in your country don’t do you harm, and I hope the tepid semi-liberals don’t applaud while they try.

(via Maryam Namazie.)

The Mormon mentality

Ashley Billasano was an 18 year old girl in Texas who claimed to be a victim of sexual abuse by her stepfather and another family member. She poured out her story on twitter and then committed suicide. It’s a tragic and horrible story, but of course there’s always someone around to make it worse, and that someone will use religious morality as a prod.

A demented fuckwit has opined.

I don’t care what did or did not happen to her. First and foremost, I don’t believe rape exists. When there are incidents that are classified as “rape,” or names that are similar, what usually ends up happening is that the “victim” tends to “forget” to mention immodesty, flirty actions, or other conduct on their part that contributed to the matter. A woman who dresses immodestly must accept accountability for her choice of attire.

If, in fact, this girl was being molested or forced into prostitution as the media outlets say her tweets claimed, then it was her fault that it happened, and continued to happen.

The guilt of the stepfather has not been established, but it must be some consolation to him that his actions were irrelevant, no matter what: if he raped his stepdaughter, it was all her fault.

This sounds like the institutionalized misogyny of the Taliban, doesn’t it? You won’t be surprised to learn that the source of this heinous doctrine was the Mormon church.

The prophet Spencer W. Kimball wrote in his book “The Miracle of Forgiveness”:

“In a forced contact such as rape or incest, the injured one is greatly outraged. If she has not cooperated and contributed to the foul deed, she is of course in a more favorable position. There is no condemnation where this is no voluntary participation. It is better to die in defending one’s virtue than to live having lost it without a struggle.”

The bold emphasis is mine. Even though a woman may cry rape or may claim that sex was not consensual, if she doesn’t successfully defend her virtues, and allows the so-called “attack” to take place, then she loses the right to call herself a victim. It is better to die defending one’s virtues!

There may be no “condemnation,” as he says, but notice that that only puts the woman in a “more favorable position,” and that’s assuming that she didn’t “cooperate,” by not defending her virtue or in cases such as this story allowing the “abuse” to go on for years without taking steps to stop it.

I would say that, condemnation or not, she is not completely absolved of accountability unless she successfully defended her virtues or died in the process, or at the very least take steps to stop it. She appears to have not done any of these things, save for the last one, and that was done far too late, which I would say calls her motives into question.

The Mormon leadership claims to be literal prophets — this is the church of latter day saints, after all — and therefore speaks the literal voice of god. Which just means that wretched awful excuses for humanity like Spencer Kimball get to stand up and declare their bigoted opinions to be divine and inarguable. It’s a sweet gig. And the followers get an unlimited excuse for tolerating the intolerable.

Here’s Michael Crook’s Mormon morality.

There are those who would say that her followers should have helped her. Not so! They had no legal obligation to do so. I wouldn’t help someone, whether they cried out on Twitter, or whether I personally witnessed so-called “abuse.” Welcome to real life. The onus is on the so-called “victim” to man up, per at least two General Authorities of the LDS Church.

He’s admitted that if he saw a woman being raped, he’d shrug it off and let her defend herself. It’s all her fault, and church dogma tells him that that’s OK. In fact, there are a lot of things he considers OK that normal people would find repugnant.

For greater moral rectitude!

Penn State’s reputation will be saved now! They’ve got an ally willing to work with them to get over the stigma of pedophilia: the Catholic church. Whaaa…?

The Roman Catholic Church is willing to partner with American educational institutions to educate the public about child sex abuse after the Penn State scandal, according to the head of the U.S. church.

Well, sure, that makes sense. It’s like if you’re caught stealing cars, you do restitution by volunteering to work in the biggest chop shop in the state. You bring together two groups renowned for a crime, and they magically cancel each other out and return to a state of probity, right?

Using my gift of prophecy, I see other brilliant tactical moves from PSU soon to appear. The fired coaches will be replaced with recruits from the sex offenders wing of Graterford, and they’ll soon have a new mascot:

That won’t be as big a change as you might think. Here’s the current mascot:

He just wants to give the boys and girls a big hug!

Oh, agony

We had a debate on the subject “Is Atheism or Islam More Rational?”, between Hamza Tzortzis and Dan Barker, at UMTC last week. It’s now on youtube. It’s agonizing. Tzortzis is a kind of cut-rate Islamic William Lane Craig, and again he repeated his lies about the Quran containing inexplicably accurate embryology. It does not, and I’m tired of telling him so.

Why not?

We’ve encountered Michael Voris before: the painfully dogmatic and fervent Catholic Dominionist kook. He has a ridiculous video in which he asserts that theology is the queen of all the sciences because everything reduces to god, ultimately — which does leave one wondering why theology never produces any ideas that are actually useful to all of those scientific disciplines. I mean, take math for example: mathematicians are constantly coming up with tools and ideas that chemists and physicists and biologists and geologists all find awesomely useful. But what has theology given us? Nothing.

Michael drones on, going through the motions — he really seems dead-eyed and robotic in this video, doesn’t he? — and you probably got bored 30 seconds into the 5 minute clip. So I want to focus on just one point that Voris made, and mentioned in the caption, and which actually isn’t unique to Catholic nutjobs at all.

The fields of science can offer all kinds of information in answer to the question how… through the observance of the human intellect. But when asking the question why, man MUST turn to the divinity of the Creator.

How many times have you heard that claim: science can answer “how” questions, but it can never answer “why” questions, therefore we have to leave those kinds of questions to a non-scientific domain, which must be religion, therefore god. And that’s wrong at every step!

There’s no reason the interpreter of “why” questions has to be religion…why not philosophy? That seems a more sensible objective source than a religion burdened with a dogma and a holy book and wedded to revelation rather than reason. Voris assumes there has to be a divine creator, but that’s one of the questions, and you don’t get to just let it go begging like that.

The more fundamental question, though, is this oft-repeated distinction that science can’t answer “why” questions. Of course it can, if there’s a “why” in the first place! We are perfectly capable of asking whether there is agency behind a phenomenon, and if there is, of exploring further and identifying purpose. Why should we think otherwise?

Imagine you came home, as I did the other day, and saw this on the edge of your yard.

You’d immediately assume it was artificial, as I did — the perfectly circular outline suggests that a machine came by, and someone lowered some auger-like device and drilled a large hole in the yard. You could also look up and down the street and see that the hole-driller had struck several other places, all in a line parallel to the road and exactly the same distance from the curb. They are almost certainly the product of intent.

Does that in any way imply that I’m now done, that asking why these holes were dug is beyond the scope of all rational inquiry? That I ought to drop to my knees and praise ineffable Jesus, who caused holes to manifest in the ground for reasons that I, as a mere mortal man, cannot possibly question? Oh, Lord, mine is not to question why, I must accept what is!

Of course not. I can speculate reasonably; it looks like a hole for planting something in. I can check into the city offices, and learn that there’s concern about emerald ash borers killing trees in our community. I can see the next day that a city crew came by and put new saplings in place all up and down the street. Even without actually talking to anyone directly, I can figure out from the evidence why there is a hole in my yard.

Similarly, if there was a god busily poofing the entirety of the cosmos into existence, that’s an awful lot of evidence that can be examined for motive…are we to instead believe it is so incoherent that we can discern no possible purpose behind all this data?

And what if instead, I’d come home and found one hole in the neighborhood, it was a rough-edged and asymmetrical crater, and in the center of it was a small rocky meteorite? Then I could ask how it came to be there (it fell out of the sky and smacked into my yard), and I could try to ask why, but the answer would be that there was no agency behind it, there was no purpose, and it was simply a chance event of a kind that happens all the time.

When people try to argue that science can’t answer “why” questions, what they’re actually saying is that they don’t like the answer they get — there is no why! There is no purpose or intent! — and are actually trying to say that the only valid answer they’ll accept is one that names an intelligence and gives it a motive. That is, they want an answer that names a god as an ultimate cause, and a description that doesn’t include agency doesn’t meet their presuppositions.

Hitch on the Mormons

Christopher Hitchens takes a moment to highlight the weird and sinister beliefs of the Mormons.

I have no clear idea whether Pastor Robert Jeffress is correct in referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more colloquially known as the Mormons, as “a cult.” There do seem to be one or two points of similarity. The Mormons have a supreme leader, known as the prophet or the president, whose word is allegedly supreme. They can be ordered to turn upon and shun any members who show any signs of backsliding. They have distinctive little practices, such as the famous underwear, to mark them off from other mortals, and they are said to be highly disciplined and continent when it comes to sex, booze, nicotine, and coffee. Word is that the church can be harder to leave than it was to join. Hefty donations and tithes are apparently appreciated from the membership.

Whether this makes it a cult, or just another of the born-in-America Christian sects, I am not sure. In any case what interests me more is the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS, discussion of which it is currently hoping to inhibit by crying that criticism of Mormonism amounts to bigotry.

He makes the point that the LDS church is certifiable lunacy of undeniably fraudulent origin, and that “I don’t think I would want to vote for a Scientologist or a Moonie for high office” — and there’s a dilemma. I don’t want to vote for a Catholic or Lutheran or Baptist for any office, either. Mormonism and Scientology and the Moonies are simply one other kind of religion, the only difference being that those strange recent cults are snuggling nicely in the uncanny valley of faith — we’re accustomed to the absurdity of Christianity, it no longer makes most of us blink in astonishment that someone actually believes that, but Mormons? Alien crazy ideas, instead of Grandma’s comfortable crazy ideas.

The dilemma is that Hitch’s preference would mean that none of us could actually vote for any candidate who has a chance of winning. At least not until we achieve our majority in the future.

I have a resolution, though. We acknowledge that everyone has some weird ideas in their heads, and that we can’t practically exclude people from office for thinking crazy thoughts. What we can do, though, is refuse to vote for the ones who are proud of their insanity, who brag about believing in space ghosts, and who think their dotty dogma actually provides useful policy advice.

I know, there goes the entire Republican slate, and Obama is skating on awfully thin ice himself.

JoePa has an answer

Joe Paterno has finally, after ten years of denial and sheltering a child rapist, taken a moment to do something. He has spoken out for a change and for action to be taken, and it’s amazing…I thought my respect for the guy had hit bottom, but no, he had miles to dig further.

I shall pass this one on to a fine angry rant at the Atheist Camel:

His termination by Penn State was right and proper, and that would have been the end of it save any legal actions that might befall him as a result of his inaction. I’d have had nothing to comment upon, no further ax to grind with him. But then he said this:

“As you know, the kids that were the victims, I think we ought to say a prayer for them,”

And there, in that one sentence is the very heart of the grotesqueness of religion, the very core of what I have raged about, fought against, and endeavored to put a face on for these many years all summed up nice and tidy by a disgraced coach.

PRAYER?? Say a PRAYER for the child victims? You self righteous sanctimonious jerk… some of those kids are victims partially because you failed as a man. You relinquished your responsibility as a human being. Your hubris and self interest over shadowed those victims interest. But, now, NOW you’ll implore us to mumble words to a nonexistent thing in the sky as though that will fix things? As though those kids’ lives will be repaired by words to a deity when your own misbehavior, self-serving actions, or apathy was a causal factor for their pain?

When you’re at the very bottom of a pit, when you’ve failed egregiously at basic human decency, there’s always that one last recourse for the scoundrel and coward: turn to Jesus and hope that piety will buoy your reputation up a little bit. It’s sad, too, that it often seems to work with that credulous majority.

It’s interesting how much loathing Paterno’s remarks have inspired here. Let us make public piety a repulsive act!

If you really need to puke, look at this video, where students have a sign that says “Two of my favorite J’s in life: Jesus and JoePaterno”. It also says he plans to coach this weekend. Is it too much to hope he’s met by the police and turned away?

Oh, man, it just gets worse and worse. There was a press conference at PSU, and the media and students embarrassed themselves. They were questioning the firing of Joe Paterno by raising the spectre of what is good for the university and the football program. Allen Barra has the best and strongest answer…what the PR flacks should have said.

Angry student: Was any consideration given as to how his would affect the football program?

Me: The football program? The football program?? Are you serious? A former assistant coach was just indicted for over 40 counts related to sexual assault on a child, your football coach was fired in disgrace, your athletic director has been indicted for perjury, and a current assistant coach will, I’m sure, soon be fired. And the crimes against humanity — against children — took place in the university’s athletic facilities. Do you think you will even have a football program when the full extent of this becomes known?

Do you even think you’re going to have a university?

I made the point the other day that sports programs can develop an undue and even pathological effect on academic programs, but that a winning season does have a surprisingly powerful effect on enrollments. This is quite possibly the most catastrophic disaster I’ve ever heard of hitting an athletic program, and it’s at a university that has always made a huge deal of their football team. Barra’s article emphasizes the financial hit the university is about to take — a whole department sheltering a pedophile for more than a decade? They are about to cough up more in legal fees than my university spends on operating costs — but it will be interesting to see what happens to enrollments next year. It’s going to hurt. I hope it hurts a lot…not because I have any animus against PSU, but because I hope the students who planned to go there will discover a shred of conscience.