Sometimes it’s the little things that are the most revealing, that expose the bankruptcy of an idea. For instance, this story from a Florida school where the principal and teachers cast a magic spell.
See that guy over on the right? The well-fed fellow doing the salute?
That’s Jesus.
Not just a guy named Jesus, but the Son of God. The Messiah. The literal second coming of the Savior. King of kings, Lord of lords, yadda yadda yadda, and he swears he isn’t a False Christ.
That’s what he says, anyway. And apparently he’s got a substantial number of followers who believe him.
Thanks, Liberal Debutante, for disillusioning me further. Jebus, but people can be awfully stupid, especially when religion is involved..
At least, I hope so. The “conservapedia” is supposed to be an alternative to Wikipedia that removes the biases—although one would think the creators would be clever enough to realize that even the name announces that Conservapedia is planning to openly embrace a particular political bias. Unfortunately, that bias seems to be more towards stupidity than anything else.
Somebody shoot me now. The Washington Post tallies up congressional votes, and in an astounding display of technological mastery, allows you to sort and display them by the congressperson’s astrological sign. If you’ve ever wondered whether Scorpios were more likely to vote for highway appropriations than are Virgos, now you can find out.
I really want to know what the conversations the editors or publishers had about this decision were like. I’m thinking they were getting worried about how idiotic and cowardly the press has been looking lately, so someone decided to do something bold and exciting and revolutionary…and this is what they came up with.
Man, this Keith Henson character is a fearsome dude. He was convicted of a crime, fled the state, has been on the lam for 6 years, and was finally caught and thrown in jail, with bail initially set at half a million dollars. What heinous act won him such a nefarious reputation?
He posted a joke on usenet. A joke that made fun of a religion.
Henson was convicted in 2001 under a California law (Sec. 422.6) that criminalizes any threat to interfere with someone else’s “free exercise” of religion. One Usenet post that was introduced at his trial included jokes about sending a “Tom Cruise” missile against a Scientology compound (the actor is a prominent Scientologist). Picketing Scientology buildings and other “odd behavior” were also part of the charges, Deputy District Attorney Robert Schwarz said at the time.
We’re in a sad state when making a joke about a religion is regarded as interference with free exercise of that religion. Especially when the religion itself is a colossal joke.
Although one could also argue that it is no joke that Scientology is populated with such scumbag losers, and has successfully convinced the apparatus of the state to do their dirty work for them.
Here’s a tragic story: a teacher convicted.
The six-person jury Friday … convicted Amero, 40, of Windham of four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child. It took them less than two hours to decide the verdict. She faces a sentence of up to 40 years in prison.
Her crime? A computer in her classroom got caught in a porn spam pop-up loop (you know what they are, especially if you’re using that awful MS Internet Explorer—windows automatically open to spam sites as fast as you can close them). It’s easily fixed by using a decent browser or resetting the computer or even yanking the cord out of the wall, but Amero was apparently not very skilled with a computer, and was flustered as well. And for that, she may serve a few years in prison.
It is the 21st century, after all — lack of expertise with a computer is a crime, here in the future.
Oh, hang on—she isn’t being punished for computer illiteracy, it’s for impairing the morals of a child. That is, a bunch of seventh graders.
I know seventh graders. I remember being one. Middle school kids are a bunch of confused, sneaky, dirty-minded little bastards, and it would take a lot more than punching up internet porn to impair their morals; I suspect a fair number of the kids in that classroom knew more about the computer than Ms Amero, had been peeking at easily available porn before and after this event, and some of them are probably snickering about sending a teacher up the river for something they do routinely.
It takes a real prude to think flashing nude pictures at a seventh grader is going to corrupt them.
Let’s assume, though, that the entire classroom was occupied by naive little angels, perfect children with tousled curls who say their prayers at night and have been chemically neutered by their parents to suppress those burgeoning hormones. Then what? Do they get turned into sex maniacs by exposure to a bare breast or crotch? That’s an awfully low opinion of children these jurors had, or perhaps they just assumed a greater fragility than I can imagine.
This is a case of insane anti-porn hysteria, a grossly uninformed jury, and incompetence—the school district had let their filtering software lapse, and the police hadn’t even bothered to check the computer for adware. I am appalled that such a trivial error would have the consequence of sending someone to prison for years. This is not justice, this is lunacy.
I suggest that if the jurors really need a scapegoat for the uncontrolled spread of internet porn and the existence of sloppy and easily hijacked software, that it would be more appropriate (and perhaps just as injust) to send Bill Gates to jail.
Maybe I should plan on steering clear of the place—they do seem a little trigger-happy. The must-reads of the day are Bruce Schneier and Teresa Nielsen Hayden on the ridiculous over-reaction of the mayor and police in Boston to a trivial (if obnoxious) ad campaign.
We went round and round on this well over a year ago. Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, wrote a shallow and ignorant argument that sort of shilly-shallied over a pro-creationist argument; I pointed out how stupid his reasoning was. The response was insane; criticize Adams, and his horde of Dilbert fans will descend on you like a cloud of pea-brained locusts. Adams took a stab at the subject again, proposing that at least we ought to teach it as an alternative to evolution, an old and tiresome argument that I thoroughly despise. Basically, Adams just outed himself as a feeble hack making tepid arguments that only a creationist could believe.
Oh, and the most common lame defense: Scott Adams shouldn’t ever be taken seriously, because he’s always just joking to get a rise out of people. That would be acceptable, if ever he’d said anything intelligent on the subject, if his whole argument wasn’t based on common creationist canards, and if his fanbase weren’t taking his every word so damned seriously, as if he’d given them some deep insight.
That’s the history. I hadn’t read the Dilbert blog in ages, so I don’t know if Adams has since continued his wishy-washy creationism. Now I see on OmniBrain that yes, Scott Adams has written another post on intelligent design, and yes, if anything, Scott Adams has become even more stupid in the intervening months Here’s his key argument for assigning intelligence to the universe.
I take the practical approach — that something is intelligent if it unambiguously performs tasks that require intelligence. Writing Moby Dick required intelligence. The Big Bang wrote Moby Dick. Therefore, the Big Bang is intelligent, and you and I are created by that same intelligence. Therefore, we are created by an intelligent entity.
It’s a wee bit circular, don’t you think? He’s defining intelligence by assuming that the only process that can create intelligence is driven by intelligence; I’d simply rebut him by challenging his assumption, and say that the process that created the being who wrote Moby Dick did not require intelligent guidance (as we already know—the processes that drive evolution do not require active intervention by any intelligent agent), therefore there is no reason to call a prior process like the Big Bang “intelligent”. He’s also managed to put together an argument for an intelligent designer that requires us to conclude that everything in the universe is intelligent: phosphorylation is intelligent, sperm are intelligent, carrots are intelligent, bacteria are intelligent, interstellar dust is intelligent. I suspect that there’s a self-serving motive involved—he had to really reach to come up with a definition that would allow him to claim that Scott Adams is intelligent.
It’s nice to see that one constant on the internet is that Scott Adams is still a babbling idiot. If any of his defenders want to claim that “hey, he’s just being funny!” that’s fine, as long as you’re willing to admit that his chosen style of humor is to pretend to be a colossal boob…and that he’s suckered many of his readers into thinking that his intentionally absurd ideas are brilliant.
So predictable…
Here’s a lesson for you: criticize Scott Adams, and you will receive a deluge of Dilbonian hate mail. Virtually all of it is saying exactly the same thing: “You failed the humor test”; “Adams was being ironic”; “Adams isn’t a creationist, he’s pulling your chain”. Part of it is taking a different, overtly creationist tack: “The Big Bang didn’t happen, so you ought to be able to tell it’s a joke”; “You professors don’t understand anything”; and then there are the long-winded discourses on why Adams is exactly right, and that he has seen the mind of God, and his argument is irrefutable.
Listen, Dilbonians: you can stop telling me I have no sense of humor. I know it already. I also know that Scott Adams has a piss-poor sense of humor, too. I’d be more inclined to believe that he was mocking creationist thinking if a) everything he has written on evolution, creation, and science hadn’t had exactly the same tone and advanced the same point of view, which seems to be, basically, that Scott Adams knows better than every scientist on the planet, and b) his fans were a little less enthusiastic in supporting every turd of faux-wisdom that drips from his mouth. Read the comments; his readers aren’t treating this as a hilarious send-up of religious thinking. Maybe Adams is a true cynic who has purposely cultivated a collection of acolytes who are stupid enough to believe the amazingly stupid things he writes, but I don’t think that is an accomplishment that would insulate him from criticism.
Oh, and those of you complaining that Adams is not a creationist: look up David Berlinski. There is a lot in common there: the same supercilious and inflated sense of intellectual self-worth, the same mocking tone, the same knee-jerk rejection of anyone else’s expertise, as if the fact that some people know much more in some discipline than he does is a personal insult. He’s an anti-science hack who probably also rejects authorities on the creationist side because they do not defer to his superior intelligence, either.
Grrr. This story pisses me off beyond all reason. It’s a trumped up contretemps generated by one of our local Minnesota Republican hacks, griping about a UM faculty member using her campus email.
I thought this sad case of a woman dying of water intoxication was the result of mere ignorance, but it turns out it was an act of willful, criminal stupidity.
In an online recording of the show, the DJs can be heard making comments joking about people dying from water intoxication, even discussing a case in Northern California two years ago in which student Matthew Carrington, 21, died after drinking too much water during a fraternity pledge.
One of the DJs even admitted they maybe should have done some research before the contest.
One female caller, who identified herself as Eva, also phoned in to warn the radio station that drinking too much water can kill.
That certainly puts a different complexion on the whole case, doesn’t it?
