You were planning to come out to Morris and visit anyway, weren’t you? January and February are the best months to tour this part of the country.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
You were planning to come out to Morris and visit anyway, weren’t you? January and February are the best months to tour this part of the country.
Who else is Sean Hannity going to talk to when he needs an expert on Islam? Some brown-skinned guy?
That’s the good news. The bad news it’s in an article about rage-blogging, click-baiting, witch-hunting professional victimizers who profit greatly from online hate.
Oh, not us. I know those are accusations frequently leveled against freethoughtblogs, but the irony is that it’s the other side that has been doing a really good job of monetizing obsessive hatred. While we struggle with really ugly ads (we hate them too) just to keep a maintenance level of support for our small community of writers, the gamergate goons and people like Phil Mason have tapped into a much more lucrative income stream: misogyny pays.
Did you know there are actually a bunch of low traffic, negligibly interesting, obsessive web sites out there dedicated to hating me? I know. Weird. I can understand disliking me, that’s not at all surprising…but to really, really detest me, and then spend hours scrutinizing every post and every comment on Pharyngula to find things you don’t like, and then to spend more time scribbling up poorly written rebuttals on the most obscure website you can create, well, that’s what I find incomprehensible.
What I do sort of understand, though, is the desire to be noticed. Invariably, these same sad obsessives who have been toiling away at an utterly neglected blog will write to me, demanding that I notice them.
I do.
Imagine how you would feel if someone spent months gathering shit and then sculpting it into a crude bust of yourself (well, they say it’s you…but it’s more like a lump of sagging sludge), and then unveiled it to you and declared their intent to expand it into a monumental equestrian statue, because they hate you so much. “Look at me, look at me!” they scream.
OK, look at “Bob Jones”.
I found this picture on a site called “Wedding Flowers”, which is kind of interesting, since 30% of yellow evening primroses reproduce asexually. I think that means it’s the best wedding flower for marriages in which the partners intend to clone themselves.
A Florida county planned to allow religious groups to hand out Bibles in public schools. Atheists planned to take advantage of the required religious freedom to hand out secular material as well, and the school board was unfazed — yeah, go ahead, you can send out your tepid separation of church and state pamphlet while we give ’em a whole book of lurid sex and violence and gay stonings and babies smashed against walls.
But then the satanists offered to send out Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities, a little coloring book, and…
Perhaps you’ve heard of these absurd creationist challenges: Kent Hovind challenge of $250,000 for scientific evidence of evolution; Joseph Mastropaolo’s challenge of $10,000 to “prove evolution”; Ray Comfort’s challenge of $10,000 to show him a transitional fossil. They all sound like easy money, but don’t try: they’ve loaded the dice in every case.
Dana Hunter gives a 19th century example I did not know about before. Alfred Russel Wallace accepted a bet to show the curvature of the earth by a flat-earther, and he did it, too, with a simple and clever observation. You’d think he’d be wallowing in the cash — £500 — that he’d won, but you don’t know denialists. They never change.
Roy Edroso and Amanda Marcotte are discussing this remarkable example of right-wing false equivalence.
Indeed, the outpouring of support for free speech in the aftermath of the Paris attack coincides with, and partially obscures, the degradation of speech rights in the West. Commencement last year was marked by universities’ revoking of appearances by speakers Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for no other reason than that mobs disagreed with the speakers’ points of view. I do not recall liberals rallying behind Condi and Hirsi Ali then.
OMG! Condoleeza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were shot and killed? Then yes, we definitely should march in opposition to that criminal outrage…oh. They were just turned away from speaking engagements? Sorry, that isn’t the same thing at all.
Our senate is preparing to vote on whether climate change is happening. It’ll be interesting to see if the Republicans think they can vote it into non-existence.
At least someone has found a silver lining to the Charlie Hebdo murders: conservatives have used it to leverage censorship of a photo they don’t like.
After leaving the highly offensive photo titled “Piss Christ” posted for 26 years — despite decades of public Christian outcry over the image panned as art — The Associated Press finally removed the controversial and denigrating image, but only after a journalist called out its double standard brought to light when it touted its policy of not publishing potentially offensive Charlie Hebdo satirical cartoons of Muhammad, such as the ones that incited the deadly Paris attack.
