Monthly Archive

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 »

I am not an advocate of violence. I firmly believe in Isaac Asimov’s assertion that “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”.

However: This emphatically does not mean that when one is attacked, it is necessary to passively sit there and allow oneself to be pulped. The young lady who writes the Violent Acres blog learned this at the tender age of six years:

Armed with my new tips and tricks, I laced up my skates and headed out to face the jungle that is childhood. When the boys confronted me again, I dared them to mess with me. One ballsy kid lunged towards me with the intent of pushing me down. Quickly, I kicked that kid squarely between the legs with my skate. He crumpled to the ground as I hysterically screamed at his friends, “I’LL EAT YOUR EYES I’LL EAT ALL OF YOUR EYES” Terrified, those boys got up and ran like Hell. I’ve never felt so empowered in my entire life.

You go, girl.

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.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan: scientist, humanist, author, novelist, and champion of rationality. His PBS television series Cosmos stands as perhaps the most brilliant achievement in explaining science and the scientific method to the layman that our civilization has ever seen.

In honor of one of the truly great minds of the twentieth century, blogger Joel Schlosberg has organized the Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon. I find that I cannot do better than to present to you Sagan’s own words, taken from the end of his book The Demon-Haunted World:

One reason the Constitution is a daring and courageous document is that it allows for continuing change, even of the form of government itself, if the people so wish. Because no one is wise enough to foresee which ideas may answer urgent societal needs — even if they’re counterintuitive and have been troubling in the past — this document tries to guarantee the fullest and freest expression of views.

There is, of course, a price. Most of us are for freedom of expression when there’s a danger that our own views will be suppressed. We’re not all that upset, though, when views we despise encounter a little censorship here and there. But within certain narrowly circumscribed limits — Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous example was causing panic by falsely crying “fire” in a crowded theater — great liberties are permitted in America…

The system founded by Jefferson, Madison, and their colleagues offers means of expression to those who do not understand its origins and wish to replace it by something very different. For example, Tom Clark, Attorney General and therefore chief law enforcement officer of the United States, in 1948 offered this suggestion: “Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States shall not be allowed to stay in the United States.” But if there is one key and characteristic U.S. ideology, it is that there are no mandatory and no forbidden ideologies. Some more recent 1990s cases: John Brockhoeft, in jail for bombing an abortion clinic in Cincinnati, wrote, in a “pro-life” newsletter:

I’m a very narrow-minded, intolerant, reactionary, Bible-thumping fundamentalist… a zealot and fanatic… The reason the United States was once a great nation, besides being blessed by God, is because she was founded on truth, justice, and narrow-mindedness.

Randall Terry, founder of “Operation Rescue”, an organization that blockades abortion clinics, told a congregation in August 1993:

Let a wave of intolerance wash over you… Yes, hate is good… Our goal is a Christian nation… We are called by God to conquer this country… We don’t want pluralism.

The expression of such views is protected, and properly so, under the Bill of Rights, even if those protected would abolish the Bill of Rights if they got the chance. The protection for the rest of us is to use that same Bill of Rights to get across to every citizen the indispensability of the Bill of Rights.

What means to protect themselves against human fallibility, what error-protection machinery do these alternative doctrines and institutions offer? An infallible leader? Race? Nationalism? Wholesale disengagement from civilization, except for explosives and automatic weapons? How can they be sure — especially in the darkness of the twentieth century? Don’t they need candles?

...

Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don’t have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen — or indeed a citizen of any nation, the moreso to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.

For a far more original take on Sagan, it would be hard to do better than John Scalzi’s contribution.

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

Cao blathers:

Contempt is what there seems to be for John Kerry nowadays. And why would that be?

Well, that’s a damned silly question. Cao (who, it should be noted, is a strident advocate of genocide) and her ilk harp endlessly on John Kerry because doing so serves as a distraction from their inability to rationalize the utter failure of Bush’s Iraq war.

That’s why. Duh.

Remember, folks… if you listen to the wingnuts of the right, every single prisoner being held at Guantanamo is there because they are a known terrorist. Except when they’re not:

Police say a Bangladeshi man held for five years at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay has been flown back home after investigators there found no evidence he was a terrorist.

They say Mubarak Hussain Bin Abul Hashem, 32, has been flown to Dhaka on a special flight by US officials and handed over to local law enforcement officials for more interrogation.

...[T]he former detainees father, Abul Hashem, says his sons life has been “destroyed”.

“My son is innocent,” he said.

“He is neither a Taliban, nor a militant. He is a victim of the American war on terror. Why did they arrest him?

“His life is finished. They destroyed his life for nothing.

“In the name of fighting terror, Americans are in fact fighting Muslims like my son.

“I want justice. But where shall I get justice?”

The US ignored its own laws and principles to deny justice to Abul Hashem. Why would he expect to find justice anywhere else, when the United States has given up on the very idea of justice?

Go read Kit Jarrell’s breathless hysteria as she tells us of being hounded by mysterious forces, and have a good laugh at her massively overinflated sense of her own importance in the cosmos. Gads, what a freak show that woman is.

Holy CRAP… Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson really got his ass handed to him on a silver platter.

In a post hilariously entitled “Judge Copied ACLU Text in Dover Intelligent Design Ruling”, Jay claims that Judge John Jones’ ruling in the Dover-Kitzmiller ‘Intelligent Design’ case “was a straight up “copy and paste”” and that he “question[s] how much effort the judge put into weighing the facts of both sides in his final decision”. (The title is hilarious because the bulk of Jay’s post is itself a copy-and-paste job from a recent “study” released by the Discovery Institute, a so-called “think tank” that promotes creationism. I have to question how much effort Jay put into even looking for the facts before he posted his screed.) Read the rest of this entry »

Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson proves (again!) that he advocates murder as a solution to all the world’s problems:

I’m allowed to kill people I don’t like, aren’t I?

How morally corrupt does someone have to be to think this way, much less say this kind of thing out loud? I guess there are few depths of eliminationist fantasy that wannabe murderer Jay will not plumb.

UPDATE: 12/13/06 3:30 PM EST: ‘Learn To Tell The Truth’ points out in the comments that Jay was, in fact, quoting another blogger named ‘Ace’. I stand corrected — but I note that Jay was simply echoing Ace’s wild-eyed, fact-free argument (“Killing people is a Constitutional right of free expression, you know”).

Euphoric Reality – What NOT To Do:

How do you know when you’re senile, incompetent, and completely irrelevant? When your Iraq Study Group is dubbed the Iraq Surrender Gran’pas – and the name sticks.

The ISG – a study in what NOT to do.

That’s Heidi Thiess all over: when the thought of a rational discussion is just TOO TOO SCARY, call someone a name and pretend you’ve “won” an “argument”.

Stay stupid, Heidi.

Ed Brayton points out the hilarious contrast between the prior behavior of cowardly lying dipshit Andrew ‘Gribbit’ Richardson and his new oh-so-pious persona:

[I]t includes an admonition from Paul on “how you should conduct yourselves to please God” and he ends it with “peace be with you all.” Bear in mind that this is the same guy who, just a few months ago, was saying things like this:

I’m off to Cleveland this afternoon to see if a couple of my favorite trolls have the intestinal fortitude to show up and take the ass beating they deserve. So if I don’t post for a day or so, that’s because I’m in jail.

When I was growing up, you refrained from using the liar moniker because to allow that to fly indiscriminately was grounds for a fat lip. Well there are a couple of trolling moonbats who, like Al Franken, have a “liar” fetish and I’ve invited them to meet me this evening to get what they deserve. Although, I have a feeling as though all I’m going to get out of this trip to Cleveland is a good dinner.

If they don’t have the stones to show, it will be apparent. I’ll post something when I get home to prove it to you all.

Yep, that’s just what Jesus would do, threaten to beat someone up and make fun of them as cowards if they didn’t show up to have their ass kicked. Today’s award for rank hypocrisy goes to you. Wear it in good health.

Nice catch, Ed.