The Great Oreo War

We Minnesotans have a constitutional amendment coming up in our November elections — certain anti-human, regressive elements in our state are peeved that anyone would dare to give equal legal protections to icky gay people, so they want to have us vote on this uncivil question:

“Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to provide that only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota?”

The correct answer, of course, is NO, written in tall bold letters with a flaming sword. You’ll probably have to settle for punching a ballot, but do it with fury, anyway.

So I’m pleased to see that General Mills, a major employer and creator of mass-market foodstuffs, has come out against the measure. Their CEO gave a $10,000 donation to opponents of the bill, and they also put out a lovely ad (I have been corrected: Kraft made the ad. So there are two companies to praise!):

Now the patriarchs and theocrats of the odious Minnesota for Marriage organization have declared war on Oreo cookies, an action as doomed to failure as declaring war on cute kitten pictures on the internet (wait, hang on, I should try to think of a better comparison…) There is now a campaign to show support for General Mills, which is a good thing to do when corporate America does something good.

But don’t underestimate the cunning of the Minnesota for Marriage folks! They are fighting back. After declaring a cookie the incarnation of Satan, smart move number one, they have made smart move number two: sentencing gays to death! From their facebook page:

Brilliant! There is a tactical genius behind all this, I’m sure. And he or she is probably gay.

The latest drama comic opera

No, not that one over there. This one on twitter.

I have deeply offended a small group of indignant skeptics. But here, I’ll let you read their side of the story first, although I’m sure that while they have been complaining about not getting my attention, now they’ll start complaining about the horde of vicious winged monkeys I just flung at them.

Now my side of the story. On my twitter account, I get a daily barrage of comments, mostly welcome, but there are idiots and spammers everywhere, and I block them. It’s easy: I click a button labeled “block”, and boom, they can’t write to me anymore. I probably block, on average, one or two pests a day.

So some guy writes to me yesterday and says, hey, you blocked my friend. I said I didn’t know that I had (not surprising, there’s a gigantic pile of bodies trapped in the filter; also, sometimes I do make mistakes and block the wrong person). So I checked. I don’t have a record of who I blocked, but I can at least check the guy’s blog out and see if there was a reason.

And oh, boy, but there was a good reason. His friend was one of those toxic privileged dimwits who was totally unhinged by the idea that a woman might turn down a guy’s proposition in an elevator. He really, really despises Rebecca Watson (I think I want an amulet with her face on it — it would make an excellent asshole detector and moron repellent). Also, what do I see in the comments but the usual slew of misogynist slimepit denizens who show up everywhere someone criticizes Watson, and there’s the blog owner agreeing with them and cussing out those annoying feminazis who are tainting the one True Skepticism™.

It was a righteous block, man, a clean kill. I want nothing to do with this clown and his sleazy associates.

And then Rebecca Watson lets me know that this is a guy who begged her to unblock him before, and called her a rude name. Yeah, that all fits. No, I’m not going to unblock him.

Only now he’s all upset: he didn’t call her that specific rude name, he claims, and it was unjust and unfair that I blocked him over that. You know what? I don’t care. That wasn’t part of my decision. I saw just another boring deranged anti-feminist, and saw no reason to unblock him. I don’t know what all the slighted blog owner said to Rebecca, but I do know that “feminazi” is a damned good tell.

But of course now it has escalated: he and his friends are whining that I wasn’t fair, that I didn’t look at the evidence, I should unblock him. No, I’m not fair, I did look at the evidence, I judged him to be an ass I don’t want to listen to. Done.

So now, to add to the fun, I’m blocking all these privileged twits who are popping up on twitter to whine at me more. With no regrets or remorse, since I even warned them all that I was just going to block anyone who tried to tell me who I must listen to. Also, the ERVites are having a grand time joining in, and I do love pissing them off.

Just let it be known: I can and will block whoever I want on Twitter, just as I can ban anyone I want on my blog. It’s not as if I have a shortage of participants in either medium, and I think it helps to cull out the stupid. And one thing that marks you as especially stupid is when you bother to complain that I don’t want to listen to you. Where does this sense of unfounded entitlement come from? Because it just makes me laugh harder at you.

Trolling trolls truly trolled

Some of you know that there’s a small collection of self-satisfied sexist scumbags who complain endlessly and bitterly about Freethoughtblogs — they’re nothing to be concerned about, especially since they’ve neatly encapsulated themselves, like an abscess, and removed themselves from the conversation. But Ophelia did something amusing: she parenthetically called them out.

(They’re going nuts here these days, by the way. Hundreds of hits every day. Hi Justicar! Hi franc, hi gang. Sure you don’t want to call Greta Hawkins names on Twitter by way of a holiday?)

That’s not the really funny part, though: they replied in the comment thread! I immediately thought of this Calvin & Hobbes cartoon.

The last panel in particular is precisely accurate.

Joe the Plumber is simply not very bright

The recent conversion of Leah Libresco has exposed some really stupid thinking: one of the junior woodchucks at Stedman’s site, for instance, chastised atheists for not realizing that “some people have good reasons for believing in God,” the kind of assertion that should make one stop and think, “Hmmm, and what might those reasons be?” They never follow through and explain what they are. And for the record, I think that Libresco’s reason, because she wants to personify her ethics, is pretty damned stupid.

But here’s a guy who makes Libresco and the Stedmanites look like super-geniuses of reason. Joe the Plumber explains why he became a “Bible-believing Christian” (in case you’re unfamiliar with the code words, that phrase means he’s a fundagelical wackaloon).

He first claims the Bible contains “everything we need to live a great life is right in the Bible”. Really, Joe? You get your plumbing instructions from the Bible? You live your life by the principles of blood sacrifice and retribution? Again, I wish these bozos would get specific: what, exactly, is the principle of life found in the Bible and not found anywhere else?

But then his big conversion moment comes from the fact that his doofus pastor shows him a science book and the Bible and points out that the science book gets revised, but the Bible never changes. My jaw dropped twice!

  1. That science adapts to new information is a strength, not a weakness. No one knows everything; as we learn more and more, an ability to change our ideas is a good thing.

  2. If the Bible were really that inflexible, it would be a terribly useless document — does he really think ‘everything he needs’ is to be found in the words of dead scribes and priests from an ancient iron age civilization?

    But mostly I wanted to ask him if he thought the Bible was originally written in English. I’d also like to see him babble if confronted with your average Christian bookstore, which will contain dozens of versions of his one true Bible.

Joe the Plumber: dumb as a soggy cardboard box full of bricks. And he’s running for congress. Why am I not surprised?

Bill Donohue sticks his foot in his mouth again

He’s such a charming fellow. A rabbi in New York wrote an op-ed in which he defended the right of women to make their own choices about reproduction, and in reply, Donohue called him a “man full of hate” and issued a veiled threat.

Donohue responded with a note to Waskow that launched an email exchange that ended with a warning, forwarded to BuzzFeed by a source close to the rabbi, that "Jews had better not make enemies of their Catholic friends since they have so few of them" (Donohue writes that this is a saying of Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York).

Those Jews. Everyone hates ’em, so they better not cross the few Catholics who are willing to let them live, I guess.

But wait, there’s more!

Donohue also includes a postscript saying, "I do not have a long nose."

Donahue also raised a recent child abuse scandal in Orthodox Jewish communities.

“You need to do something about this epidemic right now,” he told Waskow, who is not Orthodox, suggesting that Jews follow the Catholic Church’s reforms in dealing with clerical abuse.

Wait, what? The Catholic church is now the model in how to handle priestly child-rapers? Please, no, not that…anything but that.

Another douchebag: Marty Klein

Ladies, aren’t you used to this yet? Marty Klein is a sex therapist who writes for Psychology Today; he’s also a dishonest hack who will distort the facts to make his case.

You may remember that strange incident in which Elyse of Skepchick was working at a conference, and out of the blue, was handed a card offering group sex by a pair of strangers. Klein has taken that story and turned it into a tale of a prude squawking hysterically at a kindly offer by a pair of friends. It’s one of the more egregious manglings of a story I’ve seen in a long time.

What I find particularly outrageous, though, is that Klein is exactly like Ken Ham: nowhere in his fractured fairy tale does he include a single link to the actual participant and witness to the story, where readers might have discovered how he lied, and of course his article doesn’t include comments, where readers might correct him.

Douchebag rising

We are privileged to witness something in our generation that will change the world, a series of legal events of awesome import.

Step 1. Humorless organization lacking in creativity builds humor site called FunnyJunk by aggregating webcomics. Not their own creations, of course; they just harvest them off the web without their creators’ permission.

Douchebag Level: Throbbing.

Step 2. One of the victims of this theft of intellectual property, The Oatmeal, complains.

Response Level: Reasonable

Step 3. FunnyJunk hires a lawyer, Charles Carreon.

Douchebag Level: Expectant.

Step 4. Carreon demands that The Oatmeal take down its complaint, and also pay FunnyJunk $20,000.

Douchebag Level: Boiling.

Step 5. The Oatmeal launches Operation BearLove Good, Cancer Bad. Not only won’t The Oatmeal pay up, but it’s going to raise the money and donate it to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. Almost $200,000 is raised.

Response Level: Epic

Step 6. Carreon expands his lawsuit against The Oatmeal to include the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. He’s suing charities to harass a web cartoonist!

Douchebag Level: OFF THE SCALE

You do realize what this means, don’t you? Suddenly, lawyer jokes are obsolete, and ordinary shysters look angelic next to Mr Carreon. All the lawyer jokes will have to be changed to Carreon jokes. Lawyers everywhere will at last be able to defend themselves with the simple words, “At least I’m not Charles Carreon,” and we’ll all stagger back at the enormity of the gulf between “lawyer” and “Carreon” and say, “No, no, you’re not — I think I love you, you sweet person, you.”

Either that, or all the lawyers will see Carreon as a new standard of douchebaggery, and they’ll rise to meet it by, for instance, including baby-punching in their billable hours.

Also, the homophonic properties of Mr Carreon’s name are perfect.

They all look alike, don’t they?

The Republican National Committee is reaching out to the Latino community with a new website, RNCLatinos.com, which is nice. Unfortunately, they put a splash of color on the page with a picture of happy smiling kids — a stock photo of a group of…Asian kids.

Well, you know, they’re slightly less pale than the Good Ol’ Party, so it’s close enough, right?

The Dawkins Challenge…doesn’t even get out of the starting gate

Are there any good Christian writers who write about Christianity? I’m always astounded at what a confusing mess they generate when they try to explain their faith.

Case in point: some theologian named William Carroll has issued something he calls The Dawkins Challenge. I read halfway through it before I could puzzle out what it was about. He’s annoyed that Richard Dawkins (along with many other atheists I could name) has knocked the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Dawkins opined both in Australia and previously at the Reason Rally in Washington, D.C. that people should be encouraged to confront Roman Catholics about transubstantiation. Do they really hold the “utterly nutty belief that a wafer turns into the body of a first-century Jew just because a priest blessed it?” Such a view is “barking mad.”

He goes on and on about Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss, and I thought he was going to get around to issuing some challenge to them…but no, it’s completely different. He’s challenging Catholics to defend themselves against charges that their beliefs are silly. Fair enough, and a good idea; please do. I’d love to hear your sensible, rational defense of transubstantiation. Go ahead, be bold and open in your beliefs and explain them!

So this is what we get from William Carroll.

The body of Christ, present in the sacrament of the Eucharist, although real (neither symbolic nor metaphorical), is vastly different from the ordinary bodies subject to empirical analysis. It is sacramental presence and theology, aided by philosophy, that help to make intelligible what is believed.

Oh.

Well, I guess you showed Richard Dawkins…that he’s completely right and that your beliefs are “utterly nutty” and “barking mad”.

I think Carroll recognizes that his explanation is pretty damned stupid, because he wraps it up in excuses, claiming that the conclusions of physics are also hard to comprehend and often defy common sense. But what he really doesn’t understand is that those conclusions are a consequence of mathematical reasoning and actual experimental observations — they aren’t just made up, but are derived from the real, natural world, and can be evaluated objectively no matter what your religious upbringing. The accreted natterings of Catholic apologists have no such virtues.

You can’t say something is “real”, and then claim it exhibits none of the properties of any other real objects, and can’t ever be examined or analyzed empirically. That’s pretty much a good definition of “not real”.

The wages of pseudoscience

I completely missed the disgraceful hokum the Animal Planet channel aired last week, Mermaids: The Body Found, a completely fictional pseudodocumentary dressed up as reality that claims mermaids exist. You can watch it now, though, until Animal Planet takes it down.

It’s genuinely awful. Total nonsense, gussied up with more nonsense: would you believe it justifies the story with the Aquatic Ape gobbledygook? Brian Switek has torn into it, and of course Deep Sea News is disgusted. How could the channel have so disgraced themselves with such cheap fiction?

Here’s the answer:

ANIMAL PLANET SLAYS WITH BEST-EVER MAY IN NETWORK HISTORY

— Monster Week’s MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND Made Mighty Splash with More Than 3.4 Million Viewers —

(May 30, 2012, Silver Spring, Md.) – Animal Planet devoured the month with its best May ever, earning its strongest performances in both prime and total delivery among all key demos, including prime deliveries of 681K P2+ (+7%), 508K HH (+7%), 330K P25-54 (+21%), 301K P18-49 (+12%) and 193K M25-54 (+30%), and total day deliveries of 456K P2+ (+13%), 355K HH (+10%), 215K P25-54 (+26%), 203K P18-49 (+13%) and 120K M25-54 (+32%).

Animal Planet’s May victory was propelled its first-ever Monster Week (the week of May 21), featuring MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND, which made a huge splash at the “tail” end of the week. MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND delivered nearly 2 million viewers (1.96M P2+) for its premiere, making it the most-watched telecast since the Steve Irwin memorial special in September 2006. The two-hour premiere scored a 1.3 HH rating and helped rank Animal Planet #2 in the timeslot, including 960K P25-54 (0.9), 482K M25-54 (1.0) and 477K W25-54 (0.9). The subsequent late-night airing of MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND earned the title of Animal Planet’s most-watched late-night telecast ever, delivering nearly 1.5M viewers (1.46M P2+), bringing the combined viewership to more than 3.4 million viewers. MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND encores Thursday, May 31, from 8-10 PM ET/PT.

Brace yourselves. More of this will be coming…unless more of us protest by turning off the Animal Planet channel altogether. They’ve just been rewarded for epic dishonesty with peak traffic; what lesson do you think they’ll learn from this?