Brandenburg is back

In case you’re curious, JE Brandenburg, the fellow who claims to have evidence of nuclear war between intelligent aliens on Mars, is commenting at length on my article criticizing his silly hypothesis. His arguments so far are 1) he’s a physicist, 2) there are radioactive deposits on Mars, 3) there was once lots of water and oxygen on Mars, 4) the mediocrity principle and the Fermi paradox, therefore…aliens.

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New Age rape-blaming

I really can’t help it — when astrology is mentioned, my lip curls into a sneer, my gorge rises, my vision is clouded over with red, and I start snarling out profanity. But you can’t even imagine how outraged I can be when astrologers start predicting and blaming rape on the stars. Seriously. I think I cut my tongue on my newly erupting fangs, which is why I started spitting blood.

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Troll logic

Alanah Pierce has been responding to trolls who harass her with threats, abuse, and sexual slurs in what I would have thought was an effective way: she retweets their comments to their mothers. Does your mother know what you’re saying with that mouth?

I thought it was brilliant. But I’ve never understood the mind of a troll, and now some of these boys, with their mothers’ approval, are suing her for defamation. That’s nuts — the only defamation is exposing their own public words to another member of the public. But look how they rationalize it:

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Let’s point and laugh at the libertarian!

They really are the dumbest people in America, and most obnoxious, too. Here’s an example: police in Texas set up a DUI checkpoint, where cars were stopped and drivers quickly checked to make sure they weren’t driving with a blood alcohol over the legal limit. That’s a nuisance, I’m sure, but a minor inconvenience compared to sharing the road with drunk drivers.

Kory Watkins, a Texas libertarian and open carry proponent (so you already know he’s an idiot) objected to the police doing this job, so he was protesting at the check point, and apparently also somehow warning drivers approaching the check point so any drunkards could avoid it (a truly civic-minded fellow), when irony struck.

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I thought it was football that caused the brain damage

So what’s with all the nutty baseball players? First there was Curt Schilling, raving creationist, and now it’s Jose Canseco, space cadet. Fresh off the embarrassment of shooting off one of his own fingers in an accident while cleaning his gun, he’s now twittering about taking over the entire galaxy by riding on comets, and Galactic Beings have used comets as star taxis for eons.

I don’t think he knows much about comets.

I get email

Do you ever get that kind of email that makes you want to compulsively wash your hands? The kind that makes you think, “Well, this computer is completely soiled, time to get a new one”? I do. Here’s an example, and this is how it starts:

Rape is a controversial topic, i get that. But we need to keep a sober mind and try to analyze rape in a way that is rational and objective.

A lot of people are against rape and the reason why they are, are well-known to almost anybody. But i have to offer a different perspective on this controversial topic

You’re probably done already. Just that announcement that they’re going to “analyze rape in a way that is rational and objective” is puke-inducing…you know they’re not, but are instead going to try rationalizing abusing human beings. You are excused if you have no desire to read further, because I guarantee you, it gets worse. Much worse.

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Quackery in my back yard!

Oh, great. Orac just has to tell me that the University of Minnesota is going to host an anti-vaccine conference on 24 January.

First, let me say this, though: they get to do that. Presumably they’ve rented out (or possibly obtained student or faculty sponsorship) Cowles Auditorium at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and just about anyone can do that. They may be fraggin’ morons, but they’re part of the public, and it’s a public university.

Still, this is painfully stupid and a disservice to the public trust. It’s a conference in which a train of pseudo-experts will lie, lie, lie in order to sell books — in fact, I suspect it’s a bit of a con to peddle their books, since the $99 admission fee includes dumping a pile of crap, the garbage these guys have written, in your lap. That $99 is also one reason I won’t be attending, much as I’d like to document the dishonesty; of course, another reason I won’t be going is that I doubt this gang of propagandists will be entertaining, much less informative.

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Two white dudes spend an hour talking about how racist and sexist it is to criticize other white dudes

It was a painful 50 minutes, but I listened to the entirety of Peter Boghossian and Stefan Molyneux patting each other on the back, in this video, Feminists vs. Atheists: The Death of Rational Discourse. I think you can tell from the title that there is not much hope for rational discussion here, and from the two speakers, you know it’s going to be awful. What I did was listen while I was engaged in some other work, and just extract a few paraphrases of the conversation now and then, when they said something particularly tiresome.

And really, that’s what it’s all about: reciting cliches at each other without thought, repeating bogus accusations we’ve all heard a thousand times before. These are not people who think very deeply about much of anything.

So what I’ve done below is scribble down the general tenor of the discussion. This is not a transcript. I’ve included some time points so if you really want to, you can go back and check on all the context.

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