South Carolina has made it illegal to transmit “material containing words, language, or actions of a profane, vulgar, lewd, lascivious, or indecent nature”.
Well, darn. Dang it all to heck.
Actually, it looks like it doesn’t take effect until approved by the governor, so we have a little grace period. After that, though…they’re going to have to sweep up everyone on the internet and imprison us for 5 years.
Here’s a phenomenal suggestion you can promote to the Obama administration: shut down the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It’s a huge boondoggle, a fat earmark for low-quality pseudoscience, and it’s money that would be better spent on real science and medicine. Sign up at change.gov and vote it up!
I just don’t get it.
I just got a long, whiny, self-serving email from a Mr John Buford, in which he claims that I was in error for banning him, because he once took a 4-credit course in anthropology, and his comments about race are therefore credible.
You may recall Mr Buford by his pseudonym, “hahajohnnyb”. He’s a racist moron.
I won’t bother with posting the whole of his letter, which is mostly a lot of chest-thumping about how smart he is, but I will share with you his closing threat.
It is your blog, and you certainly have the right to ban whomever you choose, and I shall respect your ban, but I intend to post a link to your site on Stormfront, which gets 10s of thousands of hits a day and has 100s of thousands of members, so you will get to hear from an ever increasing number of racial realists. I shall not stop only at your site, but will also have my people inflitrate the entire Dawkins Network with realism about race. Maybe, we will be able to open the minds of a few of your co-religionists or maybe we will make the Dawkins movement look like a bunch of Nazis, either way. You lose.
Woo-hoo! More traffic! Maybe I’ll be able to cover my daughter’s tuition payments this term, after all!
More likely, a few thugs and rednecks will straggle over and leave a few illiterate comments, but be prepared. I’ll also be ready. One of the nice things about our recent software update is one-click comment deletion.
The other day, I pointed out that tasteless web design is a hallmark of crazy web sites, and used this Overcompensating comic to illustrate it…and you all scurried over to Timecube to see one of the best examples on the web.
I got this email today.
Dear Mr. Meyers,
Putting aside any offensive criticism of our website on your web page at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/contact.php, we found many of the comments extremely humorous, even though at our expense.
We comment on your page at http://lfnexus.com/scumbagwebsites.htm.
Thank you for the good laugh!
Oh, yes, you can share this email with anyone you wish!
PS: There is method in our madness.
Cordially,
Dr. Michael Bisconti
President
The L. F. Nexus
They got the url of my “offensive criticism” wrong: it’s at an article called “How can you tell when you’re a kook?” I think he shows all the signs.
Here’s what’s really funny. I originally laughed at a whole series of insane arguments he made against evolution, homosexuality, and women, and look at what he considers the most offensive thing I said, that warrants rating me as a “medium scumbag”:
This website incorrectly reported that we believe that Gay “activity” can be sinless. However, this was due to an editorial problem on one of our web pages, which has since been corrected.
I guess my sin was that I accurately reported on a comment that was less than damning of homosexuality.
But now, you must see this: their updated website. Behold, and tremble in fear. This is getting up there pretty darned near Time Cube territory. It may get even better, since up near the top they prominently mention that they have a new site under construction by WebPsyops, Inc.. Yeah, that’s who we all ought to turn to for our professional web design.
Fans of classic SF will be grieved to learn that both Patrick McGoohan, AKA The Prisoner, and Ricardo Montalban, AKA Khan Noonien Singh, will now only be accessible on DVD in the movie room of your local SF convention and on late night television.
We want information. Did Montalban quote Moby Dick on his deathbed?
People are telling me that my blog entries are getting sprinkled with creationist ads in the RSS feeds, like this:
Heh. I think it’s great. This is an old and familiar game that has been played for years, where creationists buy up lots and lots of ad placement on searches for topics in evolutionary biology, and I think they should continue to throw their money down that sinkhole. It seems like an entirely ineffective tactic, to try and dun people who are already willing to look at the evidence with appeals to their dogma.
Shall I start taking out ads in the local church bulletins, perhaps?
The intelligent design creationists are jubilant — a paper has been published that shows that organisms were front-loaded with genes for future function! It describes “‘latent’ or ‘preexistent’ evolutionary potential” in our history, they say.
One small problem. The paper says nothing of the kind. It does mention latent potential, but it means something entirely different from something that is ‘front-loaded’, which is a sneaky little elision on the part of the creationists. There isn’t even the faintest whiff of a teleological proposal in the paper at all, which makes me wonder if they even read it, or if, as seems more likely, they’re simply incapable of comprehending the scientific literature.
So let’s take a look at what the paper is actually about, and you’ll see that it in no way supports the self-serving cheering of the creationists.
Perhaps you’ll appreciate this little ditty for Roy Zimmerman and family.
Some of you have noticed some little instabilities around here since the software upgrade. Well, fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to get a little more rocky tonight. Our crack technical team is going to be ripping into the database and shaking some more bugs out of the system overnight, and while everything should still be usable, it may be slow, and there may be a few glitches now and then. It should all be fixed by the morning.
I think they chose to do it starting at midnight New York time because they hate all the Australian readers. Or maybe it’s because they trust you to be tough enough to cope with a few rough hours.
