Sometimes, people suck

As Ophelia has discovered, there is a facebook page titled Should Miri Mogilevsky be murdered? It claims

This page does not advocate any violence, or the breaking of any laws. It is, rather, an exercise in Free Speech.

It also asks,

Is Miri Mogilevsky, who blogs at Brute Reason at Freethought blogs! a loyal American ?
Has she ever had sex with PZ Myers ?
Has she ever had sex with Rebecca Watson ?

Because, obviously, all of those are offenses that warrant execution. It’s revealing, though: this is a person who does not understand the concept of free speech at all (it is not an idea that encourages harassment or intimidation), and also has the usual anti-skepchick/ftb obsession.

Anyway, as Ophelia suggests, if you have a facebook account, go to the page, click on the the gear icon just beneath the cover photo at the top, and select “report page”. As a bonus, you’ll discover how pathetic Facebook’s reporting mechanism is!

Oh, god, you suck

Another crank is haranguing me on twitter. This one’s conceit is that he’s writing emails from God. They’re bizarre: they’re anti-clerical and pro-god, and from them we learn that God has lousy grammar and spelling, and despite being anti-religion, is still pushing the same old tiresome patriarchal beliefs that religion does. Take, for instance, GOD eMails.info: eMail III, Subject: Women.

My dear women, I made you with pre-existing matters. I created you to honor, nature, share, and preserve life. I made each one of you with your own unique beauty. Nothing that walks on earth is more admirable than you women. Men of wisdom and science would respect you and protect you. And there is nothing men can do to stop him from falling in love with you women.

You noticed that your bodies will experience a change when you become pregnant, and your vagina would go through a painful trauma at the time of giving birth. The pain caused is something you women would never forget after you had experienced it. Its serves as a reminder not to choose as the father of your child any man insisting on you to fallow any organized religion.

Sincerely;

God. Your God.

It’s condescending bullshit that trivializes women by putting them on a pedestal and acting as if their great virtue is being beautiful for “men of wisdom and science.” And then leaps immediately into pregnancy, because after all, that’s what women are for and find most important in their lives.

What? The Genesis crapola about pain in childbirth twisted to be a reminder that you shouldn’t join a church? I’m going to have to have a talk with my wife; she sure put on a good act with all the sweating and straining and grunting and crying, but she couldn’t have felt any pain during labor, since the father of her children was consistently steering the family away from organized religion.

Religious kooks, please note: I despise you. God is now blocked.

TEACH THEM NOT TO MOCK THUNDERF00T!

Coming off of SomeGreyBloke’s brutal savaging of Thunderf00t’s logic, now Rebecca Watson shanks him in the kidneys and mocks him cruelly. Trigger warning for sad ex-paragon of anti-creationism being publicly exposed as a moral cretin.

Ouch. I am almost feeling pity for the guy (or is that acute schadenfreude? I always have trouble telling those apart), so I thought I’d follow his lead and dispense some advice: How to avoid having feminists rip you a new one.

  • Drop the patronizing tone. I know you’d like to believe you’re smarter than all women, but trust me on this: you aren’t.

  • Avoid far-fetched and inappropriate metaphors, like metaphors that rely on characterizing your critics as mindless beasts. They’ll bite.

  • Especially avoid metaphors that you use to claim that you understand exactly what a victim went through, and that you know better than they do how to avoid the problem. Especially camping metaphors. You don’t tell the burn victim, “Once, when I was toasting marshmallows around the campfire, it caught fire. I blew it out and it was OK. Did you try blowing yourself out?”

  • Don’t get in a battle of wits with people who have a better sense of humor than you do. I hate to break this news to you, but getting a Ph.D. in chemistry means you know more about chemistry than either of your two critics, but they did not confer a degree in comedy on you. Quite the opposite, I’m afraid.

  • Your video may have 5,240 upvotes, but it’s about as competently done as some piece of trash by VenomFangX. Do you know what all those upvotes mean? It doesn’t mean you win, or that you must be right. It means you have a lot of assholes following you. That should instill in you a sense of humility.

  • This is going to be the hard one to follow: don’t say such stupid stuff that everyone finds it irresistible to pile on.

Basically, follow your own advice to women. Shut up, cower at home, don’t drink, don’t interact with people who might criticize you, look at everyone else in the world as if they are mountain lions or wasps out to get you.

Bringing back bad memories

Thunderf00t has come out with some execrable video in which he makes a number of horrible, awful, stupid claims: that there is a gray line between rape and bad sex, that it’s pointless to tell men not to rape, that telling women that it’s not their fault that they were raped is depriving them of agency — yeah, it’s one long parade of victim blaming non sequiturs (in which he repeatedly says he’s not victim blaming, while saying women often have the body language of victims). It’s horrifyingly ignorant, condescending, and oblivious to his own arrogant attitude.

Typical blunderthud, then. So don’t watch it.

Instead, read SomeGreyBloke, who has thoroughly deconstructed the video at length, in a 7 part series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7. It’s good. It reveals Thunderf00t, and all the other clueless men (Joe Rogan, I’m looking at you) who think that they should not be held accountable if they have sex with someone whose ability to consent has been compromised, as total moral idiots.

One killer insight is that Thudordud simultaneously tries to claim that there is a gray line between bad sex and rape, while arguing that educating rapists won’t work because they’re like Ted Bundy. I don’t think Fubberf00t is anything like Bundy, nor are most rapists, but they do have one trait in common: an inability to use a mirror.

When people like Zerlina Maxwell advocate teaching kids not to rape, they’re not talking about trying to get through to serial killers like Ted Bundy. Of course it’s "bloody obvious" that sociopaths are not about to listen. 

But most rapes aren’t committed by sociopaths. Most rapes are committed by men who are simply too selfish to think beyond their immediate gratification.

It is interesting that this subject bothers Thunderf00t so very very much.

Jebus. To think that we briefly had Dundert00t on this network at all…it’s embarrassing how bad he is.

Uh, bacon?

Ray Comfort, king of non sequiturs and nonsensical arguments, is at it again. Apparently our menus are dictated by God.

Ray Comfort: There was a big fuss recently in Sweden about lasagna and burgers containing horse meat. Sweden is atheist heaven, and so there shouldn't be any hard and fast table manners—other than "if it tastes good, eat it." So why aren't cats and horses on restaurant menus in most countries? It's because Judeo/Christian nations base what is right and wrong to eat on the rules God gave to the Jews. But if atheism has its way, we can expect restaurants to expand their menus to include eagle-wings, double-double whale burgers, fresh cat casseroles, and tasty little kitten fingers. When any nation forsakes God, it defaults to mob rule (what society dictates) and that can go anywhere it wants.

Ray Comfort: There was a big fuss recently in Sweden about lasagna and burgers containing horse meat. Sweden is atheist heaven, and so there shouldn’t be any hard and fast table manners—other than “if it tastes good, eat it.” So why aren’t cats and horses on restaurant menus in most countries? It’s because Judeo/Christian nations base what is right and wrong to eat on the rules God gave to the Jews. But if atheism has its way, we can expect restaurants to expand their menus to include eagle-wings, double-double whale burgers, fresh cat casseroles, and tasty little kitten fingers. When any nation forsakes God, it defaults to mob rule (what society dictates) and that can go anywhere it wants.

If America bases what is right and wrong to eat on God’s rules, what are we to say about bacon, mussels, crab, pork chops, catfish, calamari, baby back ribs, steamed butter clams, ham, lobster, pork loin, and oysters? And you know that the avoidance of eating horse meats is primarily a habit in English speaking countries, and that many other European countries have no problem with it (although it may be regarded as a low quality meat, since horses aren’t typically raised for slaughter — they have too many other uses)?

Rabbits and squirrels are also not kosher, but we don’t have any other proscriptions against eating them.

We don’t eat cats and dogs, not because the Bible says we can’t, but because we’re uncomfortable with eating pets. I mean, come on, unless you’re orthodox Jewish or a member of a few other sects that takes Old Testament dietary laws very seriously, food preferences are determined by a broader cultural tradition and we simply ignore antique religious demands entirely. When you get rid of phony god rules, you get to make eating decisions based on flavor, availability, and ethics, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Besides, everyone knows that when we fully forsake the gods, we default to veganism.

Own goal!

I just wanted to share some fun tweets I got today. I was waiting in the airport, and some loon took offense at my criticisms of Pat Condell, and just had to vent…and managed to flame himself beautifully.

@J77Crazy
@patcondell @pzmyers the clown isn’t worth a response. #PZMyers is an embarrassment to white men everywhere. He is a faux feminist. #dhimmi

To “white men”? He’s a bit concerned with preserving the dignity of the White Race.

@J77Crazy
@pzmyers @patcondell You are disgusting. You represent every self loathing white in the world. You’re disgusting excuse for a white man

Gosh. Was that racist? I think it was.

@J77Crazy
@reggiereggie66 @pzmyers @patcondell anyone who sides with leftist theory, PZMyers BS or any other antiwhite parties are sick in the head.

For not being a racist, Pat Condell sure seems to attract some wild racists.

But — get ready for it — I agreed completely with this!

@J77Crazy
@pzmyers @patcondell calling Pat Condell a racist is like You saying you’re a feminist. #Fail

Yes, #Fail. Booyah!

A few other people commented on his meltdown, prompting, unsurprisingly, the sexist side of Mr @J77Crazy.

@J77Crazy
@DrJaneChi no one cares what you think. That’s why feminists and beta males hate everything. Go get some dick, you look like ya need it

See? Fun!

I should probably just block this guy because he’s evil and stupid, but he keeps coming back with jewels like this:

@J77Crazy
@thedxman @SpokesGay @pzmyers @patcondell no one here mentioned race, just a religion. You ppl are hopeless. Fuck all Whites like all of You

Now they want to poison knowledge

We all know that the creationists have been busily trying to redefine science so that they can call Bible-based faith that the earth is 6000 years old “science”, while empirical research and validated theories are relabeled “dogma”. But now they’re going to reach deeper into the educational process and redefine “knowledge”.

While most of us think that it is ignorance that needs to be stamped out, advocates of Kentucky’s new unapproved and forcibly implemented science standards are targeting … knowledge.

Just take a gander at the responses to my opinion piece in the Louisville Courier-Journal which were published on Monday. According to Brad Matthews, former director of curriculum and assessment for the Jefferson County Public Schools, one reason we need these unapproved and forcibly implement standards is to extirpate that bane of all modern permissivist educators: memorization.

"Science education has moved away from the memorization of many facts," says Matthews, "and toward understanding how the laws and principles of science are applied."

That’s right: students have memorized too many facts. Their heads are bursting with scientific facts. There is not enough room in their tiny little brains for an understanding of how these facts should be applied because all the room us currently taken up by scientific facts which these students have memorized. There is simply no space in those fact-crowded little heads for scientific concepts.

The solution is obvious to people like Matthews: clear all that knowledge out of there so they will be able to apply the knowledge they will no longer have under these standards.

Knowledge is now the rote memorization of “facts”, and educators who try to get students to understand concepts are now enemies of knowledge. I’m sure the taskmasters who run madrassas are now nodding their heads in complete agreement.

Brad Matthews’ statement is entirely reasonable, and does not warrant one iota of the hyperbole Cothran applies to it. The worst classes in the world are the ones where we sit students down and force them to memorize strings of data and then regurgitate them onto an exam. That does not imply that kids shouldn’t have to master some basic rote skills; sorry, gang, knowing your times tables is still important as a basic life skill.

But you still have to understand how to apply that knowledge. For instance, in cell biology, I expect my students to memorize the structure of a peptide bond (that’s not hard) and the basic properties of the classes of amino acids (only slightly harder), and we talk about some basic chemical reactions, like hydrolysis. They should be able to figure out how you break a peptide bond, without memorizing all the pairwise combinations of amino acids and how they’re split chemically. Once you know the general principle you can apply it everywhere!

Also, if you’re learning science, you have to learn how to fit new facts into an existing body of knowledge, and memorization won’t cut it.

What these guys are really afraid of is that deep ideas like evolution are natural inferences from all the data and facts floating around in science — if you learn how to think, you’ll inevitably figure out that creationism is bullshit, evolution actually works and makes sense, and that all those religious cranks have been lying to us. So in defense they want to truncate education: memorize what we already know (and even that they will tightly circumscribe), but don’t you dare teach kids how to think.

How can you call him a racist? He says he isn’t!

For some strange reason, this tirade by a guy laying out his criteria for a girlfriend reminds me of Pat Condell and his friends.

I am NOT racist. Just because I don’t like the appearnce of black people does not make me racist. Just because I don’t like a particular painting, does not mean I dislike the medium of Art as a whole!

But I will say this, Blacks do make up the majority of the inmates in the prisons in the country.

And I think it’s White people that make up the majority of white collar executive types of positions in America. Probably more Whites are 1 percenters than there are blacks.

When I think of all of the classical composers like Mozart etc that were pure genius, I don’t recall many of them being Black.

This is the 1st black president we’ve had so far and look what a horrible job he has done.

So in the grand scheme of things, it appears the scales are tilted in favor of Whites being the superior race, after all we weren’t the ones that were enslaved workinf cotton fields for 40o years..

Just pointing out that history seems to show whites as always rising to the top and dominating all other countries and cultures and taking what they want and doing as they please, being the dominant, most powerful, most intelligent race….

I’m not saying I personally believe whites are superior to blacks, I am not a scientist, and I have not studied it to any great depth…

Just pointing out some observations.

But, again, for the millionth time, I may be a jerk, but I’m not a racist, there’s a big difference.

My best friends are black and I have no hatred for them.

If you follow the link, you’ll also discover that he is not a sexist pig, nosir, not him.