December 2006

I’ve been involved in a small debate with Ric Ottaiano on his plan to institute officially sanctioned religious discrimination against Muslims — which he apparently sees as the ultimate solution to the terrorist threat. Early in the discussion, Ric said that he favored

…greater scrutiny across the board if you’re an Arab or Muslim within a certain age range (e.g. pull each one out of line for searches as opposed to randomly)…

Today, he tells us that

…i’m not saying and haven’t said “pull them out of line”…

Now, here comes the truly hilarious bit. In his parting shot, Ric informs me that

…you clearly are not my intellectual equal…

Ric chose to lie about his own statements… and in his view, this makes him intellectually superior to the person he told the lie to.

Obviously, Ric has done the world a tremendous service by revealing this amazing correlation between intelligence and dishonesty. We can all raise our IQs to tremendous heights just by lying — exactly as Ric has done. Isn’t that wonderful?

Many thanks to John Amato of Crooks and Liars for the shout-out on my comment this morning to the lies posted by ‘Midwest Jim’ at Gateway Pundit.

John has his post categorized exactly right: “Wingnuts, Right Wing Stupidity, Liars”. It is not possible to give a more succinct, or more perfect, characterization of ‘Midwest Jim’ and the other deliberately mendacious imbeciles who claim — absent the slightest evidence — that the left is “mourning” Saddam’s passing.

Saddam Hussein has been executed. The many right-wing blogs that are heralding this as some sort of victory have conveniently forgotten to ask who helped Saddam become the dictator he was in the first place. Juan Cole has the chronology.
 

Because Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson is lying again about his own views:

…I do not in any way endorse violence against any ACLU lawyers…

Patently false. Jay has said he wants to hang ACLU lawyers. He’s pissed because he got caught doing it. And once he was caught, of course, he tried to pass it off as a “joke”. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, Ogre. What would the blogosphere be without your precious, self-absorbed ignorance to make the rest of us glad that we are at least not as oblivious to reality — and as egregiously dishonest — as you are?

In another of his fits of oblivious exhibitionism, Ogre claims that…

So now, New Jersey has given [gays] the same benefits and rights as every other family (which they already had).

It is reassuring to know that the natural order of the Cosmos is as it should be — which is to say, that Ogre is once again spectacularly (and unsurprisingly) lying. Gays have most emphatically not had “the same benefits and rights as every other family” in the past. Read the rest of this entry »

The hardcore, wingnut Islamophobes won’t be affected by this at all. They’ve decided to be terrified of Muslims, because they need their terror to feed their hate. And they want the rest of us to be terrified so that we will hate along with them. Hatred, it seems, breeds the need to spawn more hatred.

But for those who are teetering on the edge of hatefulness, perhaps there is hope — if only they can be made to see the foolishness and uselessness of hate: Read the rest of this entry »

Jack Cluth nails it in one:

…[W]ithout someone to hate, Evangelicals seem almost lost and adrift, their lives seemingly without purpose or meaning. Without being able to point out how decidedly pious and superior they are to mere mortals and heathen unbelievers, most Evangelicals seem not to know what to do with themselves.

This is what Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson and his fellow religious nuts don’t understand about mixing government and religion. You start with prayers at the school board meetings, and you end with a high school teacher telling his students to believe his way or risk going to hell:

Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United States Constitution this fall, he was accused of violating it.

Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.

“If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,” Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. “He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell.”

The student, Matthew LaClair, said that he felt uncomfortable with Mr. Paszkiewicz’s statements in the first week, and taped eight classes starting Sept. 13 out of fear that officials would not believe the teacher had made the comments.

…

In this tale of the teacher who preached in class and the pupil he offended, students and the larger community have mostly lined up with Mr. Paszkiewicz, not with Matthew, who has received a death threat handled by the police, as well as critical comments from classmates.

That’s what “religious freedom” means to the wingnuts: freedom to proselytize schoolkids, and freedom to make death threats against anyone who points out how wrong it is to do that.

Go post a message of support for Matt LaClair. He’s not out of high school yet, but he understands the US Constitution far better than many of his elders.

Hat tip: PZ Myers