Catholics really do despise women

If only I’d read this information before I sent my daughter off to college! Apparently, it was a bad idea — according to Fix The Family, I shouldn’t have done it, and they have six seven eight absolutely solid reasons. (It’s so well-written: the title is “Six reasons to not send your daughter to college”, but it actually lists eight.)

  1. She will attract the wrong types of men. Apparently, the universities are full of “lazy men who are looking for a mother-figure in a wife are very attracted to this responsible, organized, smart woman who has it all together along with a steady paying job with benefits.” I think it’s nice that this web site is so egalitarian: not only do they want to deprive women of an education, but they also have nothing but contempt for the men who are getting one.

    Clearly, I’m going to have to have a little talk with my daughter’s boyfriend.

  2. She will be in a near occasion of sin. This is my favorite excuse: sex produces hormones that befuddle the female mind, making them overlook the faults in those horrible lazy college men.

    Catholic OB-GYN Dr. Kim Hardey notes that a woman is naturally very observant of a man’s faults as long as she is in a platonic relationship with him. Once she becomes sexually active with him, she releases hormones that mask his faults, and she remains in a dreamy state about him. We can see why God would arrange things in such a way so that when in a proper state of holy matrimony, she would be less sensitive to his faults and thereby less tempted to be critical of him.

    I have relied on surges of estrogen, progesterone, and oxytocin to keep my wife in a confused state for years. How else would she stay with me? So this must be true.

  3. She will not learn to be a wife and mother. Yep, that’s right: we don’t offer college courses in cooking, cleaning, changing diapers, all that womanly work. So what good is it?

  4. The cost of a degree is becoming more difficult to recoup. “Like anything that is subsidized by the government, the cost of a college degree is inflated.” Wait, what? Subsidized education is more expensive? That makes no sense. Besides,

    It makes much more sense for a young couple to have a husband with a skill that brings value to the marketplace that has reasonable compensation to go along with it and a wife who is willing to be frugal especially during the early years of starting their family.

    So send the man to school to acquire skills that have value, but don’t send the woman to school because schools don’t teach skills that have value. Mmm-k.

  5. You don’t have to prove anything to the world. Women only go to school to show off.

  6. It could be a near occasion of sin for the parents. School is so expensive, you know. “So parents may avoid having more children with contraception, sterilization, or illicit use of NFP to bear this cost.” Investing in your children compromises your ability to have more children.

  7. She will regret it. In years to come, they will be so sad about wasting their most fertile child-bearing years improving their minds instead of their uteruses.

  8. It could interfere with a religious vocation. This is the most terrible one of all: Catholic seminaries will not accept you if you have a load of college debt!

And there’s more! If you watch this video from Fix the Family, you also learn that “We have a little problem with depopulation, and we need these young ladies to be havin’ babies.”

Avicenna beat me to it!

It’s going to be very popular, I fear

I was stunned by Rebecca Watson’s account of the promotion efforts of a new show that looks like a drunk version of Mythbusters. Then I watched a couple of their videos, which were garbage, and I heard this tag line:

You’ll know stuff your friends don’t, which will give you a temporary feeling of superiority, and might just get you laid.

And I thought, that’s brilliant. They’ve identified exactly what the modern skeptical market wants. And it’s all schlubby guys with women in bikinis as props.

The creator, Jon Hotchkiss, has a horrible blog post bragging about his show on HuffPo, and he also reveals his intellectual lineage: he’s worked on a number of shows I’ve never heard of, but also with Bill Maher, Penn & Teller, and Playboy TV. It shows.

I’ll skip it. It’ll probably thrive anyway.

This crap is everywhere

One question I got at my CFI-DC talk was about the prevalence of sexist/misogynistic scumbags in the atheist movement — aren’t they just a minority? And my answer was that I don’t know what percentage they are, but that it’s a mistake to dismiss it as a fringe phenomenon; it’s too common, and the people who are doing it aren’t some bizarre handicapped aberrant group, they’re people you wouldn’t look at twice if you saw them in the street. And some of them are your friends and family.

And then I get home to discover the latest misogynistic screw-up in the tech industry: a conference called TechCrunch which features presentations about quick hacks had a couple of, to put it generously, inappropriate presentations, including one called “Titstare”. This is the entirety of the talk.

Let me just say that not only was it grossly sexist, but it was unimaginative, uncreative, incompetently done, and terribly presented. These two guys ought to be deeply embarrassed to have thrown up such a pathetic joke on a public stage — even if it hadn’t been a sad attempt at a breast joke, it was a total failure.

These people are all over the place. There’s just something wrong with the culture.

My theory: boys are brought up with a lack of sexual responsibility. The aggressive aspect of male sexual behavior is celebrated and treated as entirely natural, and therefore excusable, while girls are brought up with all of the responsibilities. Crude sexual humor is an outlet or venting, rather than a mistake or exhibition of ineptitude.

You know that right now those two guys are back with their bros, who are not telling them, “you fucked up.” They are being told that bitches are crazy, women have no sense of humor, grim somber feminists are ruining everything because they hate men and don’t know how to laugh. All blame is being placed on women because men are not accountable for what their testicles make them do.

You know who else ought to be really outraged at that spectacle? Comedians. Because boys are also brought up to think the most stupid crap is hilarious, as long as it’s about getting sex (see also that crass young man who was yucking it up on camera about the Steubenville rape), and it really lowers our expectations for humor.

Kronar writes

You must read this overheated paean to his semen by a pickup artist (or if you prefer, you can have Saruman read it aloud to you). This guy literally thinks his seed is so wonderful that women ought to be begging him for it.

But, excuse my bio-pedantry, there’s one part that I found factually annoying. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of basic reproductive biology and genetics.

kronar

My salty essence and genetic code is a gift from my father, and his father, and his father, and on it goes.  Its the sticky genetic code of self-sufficient men who have protected and provided for family, women and children.  Its the haplogroup of men who built civilization.  I have the genetic lineage of warriors, business owners, firefighters, blacksmiths, farmers, herders, poets, politicians, soldiers, artists and even chefs.  Hard jobs that help build the world, thinking jobs that help build a culture, they’ve all been done by men in my bloodline.  My ceiling for accomplishment is limitless.

That leaves out a significant fact. Approximately half of the genetic sequence in Mr Raving PUA’s sperm comes from his mother, and from her mother and his father’s mother, etc. Half of it is from the women who built civilization. I think that’s a fine thing, but I wonder; does he believe it dilutes the quality of his semen that it isn’t exclusively passed on from father to son?

(Sorry, passing semen from father to son is a really icky image.)

Further, half of his glorious seed will generate mere daughters. Clearly, his proud man-juice is weak and tainted with the poison of femininity.

Also, for some reason, I couldn’t help thinking of the Kronar stories on Oglaf (NSFW!).

I’m tired of Fox News Christians

What awful, horrible people. And they’ve got a whole network full of them! Here, they’re commenting on the Massachusetts case to have “under God” removed from the pledge of allegiance.

All the news is about the first woman speaking, but really what astounded me was that they took turns going around the panel, and every single one of them said something incredibly stupid. They’re 0 for 5.

Dana Perino: I’m tired of them…they don’t have to live here.

Neither do you, lady.

Eric Bolling: It was added, but it doesn’t matter. It’s on our currency…they can choose not to take it.

It was also added to our currency in the 1950s, guy, at the height of Cold War fervor that couple religiosity to patriotism. It’s a relic of the same phenomenon that fostered McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist. It’s not a history to be proud of.

Greg Gutfeld: they can…give thanks for giving us the freedom to be an atheist.

Oh, yeah, I should also get down on my knees and praise Jesus for allowing me to be an atheist now.

Kimberly Guilfoyle: Why should they be catered to? It is offensive that a few people…inflict their belief system. It is incredibly selfish, small-minded…

Guilfoyle was furiously indignant. She seems to think it is OK if a majority of small-minded people use their kids as pawns to force their Christian belief system on others, but if the minority resist, they must be ignored.

And finally, Bob Beckel. I despise Bob Beckel. When conservatives go looking for a nominally liberal person they can prop up as a figurehead who will reliably agree with them, they search for the dumbest person around, and there’s good ol’ Bob.

Bob Beckel: interesting that it’s in Massachusetts, where the Salem witch trials, remember that’s when there was an intolerance about not being religious.

I don’t think the women were hanged for being atheists, Bob. Retire, Bob. You’re too stupid to be humiliating yourself this way on TV.

Losing the will to live

World, you aren’t helping. It’s been a long, long day, I thought I’d just browse the news on my brief break, and I run across this.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Monday said that it was a “scary thought” that elites could be culling the population with vaccines to preserve the Earth’s resources.

The Texas Republican spent part of his five-week break from Congress this week by interviewing conservative activist Alan Keyes while filling in as a guest host for Tony Perkins on Family Research Council’s Washington Watch.

Gohmert + Keyes and the Patriarchy Research Council, all in one story. Why didn’t the earth open up in revulsion beneath them and launch them towards Mars in an explosive eruption of lava?

By the way, what prompted that accusation against the liberal elites was that some Texas megachurch was responsible for a measles epidemic because they discouraged their followers from vaccinating their kids. If Gohmert blamed ignorance for a disease, he’d have to take the fall as the Typhoid Mary of stupidity.

The New Age can be as deadly as Catholic ignorance

Read this story about abortions: it’s not anti-choice. It’s anti-science and anti-medicine. It’s appalling. She contrasts brutal “Western Science” with its machines (and also its caring people: ignore her colorful descriptions of the technology, and her experience with people in the abortion clinic was one where she was asked if she was sure she wanted it, and a woman who tried to help her afterwards) with “natural healing” in which she takes a few gentle herbs and just visualizes shedding the walls of her uterus, and magically her pregnancy disappears.

Then she babbles about how it is just fine if the “fundamentalist dickheads” burn down all the women’s clinics, because they’ll just be able to use organic natural herbal chemical-free machine-free medicine-free abortions using the magic power in women’s heads.

Jesus.

This is one of the nice things about FtB. Now you can go read Miri as a warm-up, finding parts of the essay that are worthwhile, while others suck.

Then go read Avi’s total destruction of the dangerous anti-medical quackery in the story.

It’s all good.

You know it’s agony for me to listen to Christian talk radio, right?

You are a cruel readership. One of you — I won’t name names to protect the guilty — told me to go listen to this radio program out of Colorado Springs called “Generations With Vision”, by some guy named Kevin Swanson, and in particular to an episode called The Secular Hold is Slipping. He’s a very cheerful, confident fellow, and I listened to several minutes of him lying blithely and loudly. It was…painful. It was a happy idiot gloatingly making stuff up to make himself feel good.

Here’s their summary of the episode.

It’s getting harder and harder to “shut up” the little boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes proceedings. And evolutionists and the secularists aren’t happy about it. Ray Comfort’s Evolution vs. God video is going viral. Kevin Swanson also questions the McMillan new dictionary definition for marriage on this episode of Generations.

It starts off with this assertion that the holy trinity of the humanists consists of evolution, feminism, and homosexuality, and that we’re on the run in all three areas. To claim that, though, they have to mangle all three ideas. Here’s their short summary of feminist social theory, for instance: get rid of all men, get rid of marriage, kill all the kids, and have lots of sex. Abortion is the sacred sacrament of the feminists.

I wish I were joking. That’s literally what they said, in a tone of absolute certainty. How can you even begin to argue with people who are that wrong?

But then they spent most of their time laughing at evolution from a position of unassailable ignorance. They are inspired by Ray Comfort (you know their credibility is shot right there), who is making everyone so mad. They claim he’s interviewed “the big shots”: Richard Dawkins [no, he hasn’t] and PG Myers [who?]. They actually believe he has exposed an absence of evidence for evolution, when all Comfort has shown is his zeal in chopping out evidence that contradicts him.

And then comes the babble of creationist buzzwords and assertions. There is no evidence or data for evolution; there is no evidence for how a non-heart non-lung animal turned into a heart-lung animal. That, at least, is a novel constructed claim, but…have they looked? If anyone mentioned Tinman/Nkx-2.5/csx to them, would they have the slightest clue what we’re talking about? There’s been a lot of work on the molecular evolution of heart-related genes, for instance. That they are ignorant of it all is not evidence that the data is not there.

Their biggest lie: they claim “We would love to know how it happened.” No, they wouldn’t. They believe they already know, that an invisible superbeing simply zapped hearts and lungs into existence, and they deny the truly wonderful explanation backed by the evidence and aren’t even interested enough to try and learn. They are smug little jerks sitting in a puddle of their own urine, unwilling to wash themselves of foolishness.

They make a host of weird claims. “Punctuated equilibrium is where a prince kisses a frog.” What? “Richard Dawkins isn’t a scientist.” They keep talking about all the “honest scientists” who are leaving evolution, but they don’t bother to name them.

Then they try to dazzle their audience with the intimidating authority of math. They trot out Fred Hoyle’s example of 20 amino acids assembling into a protein having impossible odds — wrong. It’s actually quite trivial, and they’re making an error of invalid assumptions. By their reasoning, every bridge hand is a triumph of the impossible coming into existence.

Yeah, they actually say it’s impossible. They trot out the familiar creationist claim that odds of one chance in 1050 can never happen, this magic number of 10 to the 50th power representing an absolute boundary. It’s wrong, and it’s ridiculously wrong.

To crown their demonstration of the power of lying about mathematics, they then announce that “People are not very good at math”. They did manage to prove that claim by example.

And of course they’re making claims that “Honest scientists are abandoning the theory left and right, because there is no evidence. They have no data.” and that “Evolutionists are going away — they’re very desperate.”

I would ask how they know that. They certainly don’t have any evidence for it. The subject of evolution is placed solidly in the core of every competent college biology curriculum; every week new papers come out testing and demonstrating the power of the theory; all of the biologists I know — and I think I’ve got more inside knowledge than a couple of obscure evangelical radio guys in the heart of fundie-land — are advocates for evolution who use it routinely in their work. They might try looking at the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE), or the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), just for a start. Ask them about the people abandoning evolution: they’ll give you an odd look, wonder what the hell is wrong with you, and walk away.

But then, that requires actually peeping out of their little bunker of isolated, ignorant Christianity and actually talking to a real biologist, rather than listening to a lying fraud like Ray Comfort. That’ll never happen.

Can we fire Richard Cohen yet?

Richard Cohen, tenured columnist at the Washington Post, is one of the worst. He recently blamed Miley Cyrus and twerking for the Steubenville rape, which he doesn’t think was a “classic rape”…and he thinks the two most important things you should know from it is that 1) there was no intercourse, and 2) only two men were involved. Really, the man is a world-class ignoramus. I rather enjoyed this beat-down.

But I’ve despised Cohen for years, ever since he wrote a column telling a young girl that she never needed to know algebra, because he’s so fucking stupid he’s never had to use it.

Unfortunately, as we all know, once a big-name newspaper hires some derpwad as a columnist, they’ve got a sinecure for life, and no matter how stupid their columns, nothing will evict them. Brooks, Douthat, Friedman, Cohen…awful writers, poor thinkers, and disgraceful human beings, all set up forever.

Homogamy?

A bakery in Gresham, Oregon that refused to sell a wedding cake to a lesbian couple has gone out of business. There is no explanation why — small businesses fail all the time, especially in this economy — but of course, everyone is guessing that they lost business thanks to their bigoted stand.

It would be nice to live in a world where everyone was so principled and knowledgeable that they’d avoid giving their custom to a business run by homophobes, but I don’t think we can credit that here. The article claims that all of the comments the bakery has received on their facebook page have been supportive; they also tied their denial of service to their religious principles, which is usually a successful strategy. Of course, Gresham is a Portland suburb, where weird culty religious attitudes that don’t involve organic food and saying “Namaste” don’t thrive so well.

It’s complicated. I think the most likely simple explanation is that stupid behavior is correlated with poor business practices, and multiple factors led to the business contracting. But guess who is convinced that it was the gays fault?

Vox Day, unsurprisingly.

So, we now know that in addition to being bad for marriage – in Britain a woman will soon no longer legally become a “wife” while in France women can no longer become “mothers” – we know that homogamy is bad for jobs and the economy. This is precisely why free association – or as its opponents call it, discrimination – is a Constitutional right.

It is a sign of considerable societal decline that such a fundamental human right is no longer recognized in the USA.

We don’t know that homosexuality is bad for jobs or the economy. I would think that discriminating against a substantial part of the workforce on the basis of anything other than efficiency would be sort of anti-capitalist and anti-libertarian, though, so I don’t understand why these far-right conservatives have anything to complain about. Except that it’s religious dogma.

What also irks me here though is that word, “homogamy”. This is another case of clueless twits appropriating a word because it sounds sciencey, and getting it wrong. Homogamy has a botanical sense: it refers to the timing of maturation of male and female reproductive organs. It also has a general meaning in reference to assortative mating: homogamous mating patterns are non-random mating relationships. You could say that my wife and I are homogamous, for instance, because we’re both of Western European and specifically Scandinavian stock — like most members of our society, the structure of social events promotes less diverse associations that are not accurately representative of the distribution of genotypes in the whole. We also tend to gravitate towards sexual relationships with people who “look like us”.

That’s homogamy. Using the term for biologically non-reproductive relationships like gay marriage is really, really stupid.

Oh, right, I already said this was from Vox Day.