You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2007.
As true in the US as it is in Australia:
Kevin Andrews also says that critics are soft on terrorism. And here’s the nub of the matter. We aren’t soft on terrorism – that is a (excuse my French) fucking stupid thing to say. Does Andrews really believe we critics want a bombing in Sydney? We aren’t soft on terrorism, we are hard on rights. If he had evidence of Haneef’s involvement in a plot, then why was it not brought out in court? It need not have been open court if there were security issues. In camera proceedings are permitted under special circumstances, and if public knowledge of the details of an investigation might jeopardise it or people, that is a reason to hold them.
More background here and here.
If we cannot protect ourselves within the legal structures we have set up with which to govern our society, then our society is fatally flawed and deserves to fall. Either we act within the ideals that we have proclaimed for centuries, or we admit openly that we are discarding those ideals and allow the government to go to any extremes, to violate any principles, just to protect our sorry asses.
The parade of moral incompetence continues. Over at the cesspool known as ‘And Rightly So’, Raven gives us another example of the eliminationist rhetoric that pervades the right-wing’s online hatefests. Expressing her mindless hatred of Congressman John Murtha, she says:
Dumbo surely realizes the US Capitol Building is a high value target; the only good thing that might come of a suicide mission-attack on this building would be that Murtha is in his plush office when the hour arrives.
Yeah. That’s right. I hope he gets blown up. He deserves it.
Now, the wingnuts back a big, big deal about how the “enemy” (aka Terrifying Brown People™) wants to take away our freedoms. One of those freedoms, perhaps the freedom Americans prize most highly, is freedom of speech. Raven herself has even said that "Freedom of speech is great and I don’t want to see that change either". But it seems that Raven only wants freedom of speech when the speaker doesn’t piss her off. When someone says something that she doesn’t like, then Raven decrees that person’s freedoms must be ended by ending his life.
Unfortunately, Raven isn’t an oddity on her end of the spectrum. Read the far right blogs, listen to the far right radio talk shows — so many of the rightwing whackjobs believe that the penalty for disagreement is death. They’ve become just as morally twisted as the Islamic jihadists they profess to hate.
‘coffeeandink’ provides a handy guide on How to Suppress Discussions of Racism:
- Control what your audience sees.
- Attack the person, not the argument.
- Argue against straw men.
- Deflect attention away from the specific criticism.
- Racism, however ugly, is better than the alternative.
- Prove your opponent has mistaken some other quality for racism.
Every single one of these is a tactic that you will see the far right use to shut down all discussion, again and again.
I’ve caught wingnut wonder Justin Higgins lying several times: about a 9/11 hijacker, about embryonic stem cells research, about Amnesty International’s statements on Darfur, and about Valerie Plame’s confirmed covert status. So it is no surprise to find him lying about the situation in Iraq:
It seems like Democrats in Congress, and even the talking heads that frequent the Main Stream Media’s various cable news shows, are going to ignore all evidence that the surge in Iraq is working. Iraqi casualties are down, Al-Qaeda in Iraq is on the run, and the changing political landscape in al-Anbar Province is a promising start to the complex problem of curbing sectarian violence and convincing the Iraqi population to stand up and fight against al-Qaeda.
Now, of the three reasons Justin gives to think that “the surge in Iraq is working”, the only quantifiable claim is that “Iraqi casualties are down”. Predictably, Justin is lying about this.
Back in June , the Pentagon released a report entitiled “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq” [PDF]. Among the data in that report, one finds a graph on page 24 labelled “Average Daily Casualties, April 1, 2004 — May 4, 2007”. I reproduce the graph below.
Notice the tall dark blue bar at the far right — by far the tallest bar on the graph. It represents daily civilian casualties in Iraq since 10 February 2007. What does it tell us?
That’s right. Average daily civilian casualties in Iraq have peaked since the start of the ‘surge’. That number now stands at just over 100 per day. As noted by the Washington Post, violence is down in Baghdad, but has escalated throughout the rest of Iraq. The total number of attacks on military forces, police, and Iraqi civilians have also increased.
It’s very easy to fool yourself into believing something that isn’t true, just by ignoring the facts. Justin does this all the time, and it is his right to do so. Of course, that isn’t enough for Justin: He wants others to share his delusions as well. That’s why he lies to his readers.
UPDATE 07/29/07 5:12 PM EDT: Justin continues to practice blatant dishonesty. Citing the same Pentagon report I mentioned above, he is careful to cite a graph that displays sectarian murders, but not all civilian deaths, as evidence that casualties are decreasing.
High school students interested in a career in the sciences should take as much math as they can, according to the results of a recent study published in the journal Science. PZ Myers has more.
Through a cross-post at Stop the ACLU, I found yet another spewer of utter inanity by the name of Todd Anthony. Todd has chosen to either advertise his abysmal ignorance or deliberately lie to his readers… it’s not yet clear which.
Todd chooses to bloviate about the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretaps, and the ACLU’s opposition to same:
This sham of an institution is now bellowing on about the Bush administration’s NSA electronic surveillance program, stating that the program is 1.) illegal, and 2.) steeped in fear.
So what would the ACLU have the government do? The answer is simple: sit on its collective hands while terrorists plot and foment violence. Let’s apply common sense to their argument.
Here we have the first two turds in Todd’s pile. Warrantless wiretaps carried out against American persons, as defined under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (aka FISA), are indeed illegal. A warrant must be obtained under the provisions of the law. Further, the ACLU has never suggested that wiretaps be halted altogether — only that they be carried out in accordance with the law. Read the rest of this entry »
U.S. sets 2008 goal for Iraq security:
A revised U.S. military plan envisions establishing security at the local level in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq by summer 2008, leading one year later to security conditions nationwide that Iraqi forces are capable of sustaining, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
Huh. Wasn’t that the point of this year’s “surge”? Watch them goalposts move, folks!
(hat tip: Daily Kos)
Let’s see… Lying halfwit manchild Justin Higgins tells us that...
I didn’t watch the YouTube Debates,
...and yet he knows that…
This whole thing looked idiotic.
Talk about having made up your mind in the absence of any facts whatsoever. Justin admits he didn’t watch the debates, yet he just knows they were “idiotic”.
Can you say “dogmatic and close-minded”, boys and girls? I knew you could…
What can you say about a “man” who openly agitates for the murder of a judge?
Is such a “man” stupid?
Morally incompetent?
Simply unfit to live in a civilized society?
All three?
Misha has already made it clear that when the police do not do what Misha wants, they should be murdered. Now he wants a judge killed as well.
This is simply more of the eliminationist rhetoric of the sort that Dave Neiwert has been cataloging for years. Things like Misha are simply animals who have learned to type at a computer. When its rantings inspire someone to actually go out and commit a murder, will Misha accept even the slightest responsibility for the actions he prompted?
Not likely. Responsibility, like all other characteristics of a moral human being, are beyond the understanding of the repulsive subhumans that are the Mishas of this world.
UPDATE 07/29/07 4:03 PM EDT: And the lunacy continues. Misha has now issued a call to murder an Oregon district attorney.
It is astonishingly easy to get a wingnut blogger to reveal his or her abysmal ignorance. Just ask a question.
Take our old buddy Ogre. Now, Ogre is already a proven liar, and we’ve seen before that he refuses to answer simple, direct questions about his views. Now we have fresh proof that Ogre is ignorant, and prefers to stay that way.
Ogre complained yesterday that the Democratic leadership in the Senate blocked “legislation to increase troop pay, to increase money for military healthcare, to increase benefits for military widows and families, to increase the safety of our troops” by “pull[ing] the bill from the floor”. He claims that this shows that Democrats don’t support the troops.
I asked Ogre why the Bush administration also opposes the bill. Not unexpectedly, he didn’t know. He could easily have found out — it is not a secret that Bush has threatened to veto the bill because it includes a 3.5% pay raise for the troops, which amounts to an additional $6 per month for the average service member. That’s apparently too great a price to pay for “supporting the troops” in the eyes of Our Sainted President™ George W. Bush.
Instead of finding out the facts, Ogre did what one would expect of a craven coward: he avoided answering the question altogether, thus demonstrating simultaneously his intellectual dishonesty and his ignorance.
As I said earlier, it’s not hard at all to get lying cowards like Ogre to reveal their utter ignorance. I should feel bad about making fun of someone with Ogre’s multiple handicaps… but I just can’t work up any pity for him. He did it to himself, after all.
UPDATE 07/23/07 8:16 PM EDT: Ogre has, like most of his gutless kind, chosen to accuse someone who disagrees with him of being mentally ill, rather than actually discuss the issue at hand. He is afraid of any such discussion, as his deletion of a recent comment to his site clearly illustrates.
No, this isn’t going to become the All Cao All The Time Channel, I promise. But really, the poor woman is such high-quality example of the sort of disjointed, barely-coherent arguments one gets from the Fudd Brigade (hat tip to Kevin Beck for that one) that her babblings fairly scream out for some much-deserved ridicule.
This time, as usual, she reacts to a challenge to back up her claims with facts by going into her patented Wingnut Whackjob Screeching Rage Mode™:
Truly, the thumping sound is the echo from last night…the reverberations in your mind of the lonely and tragic sound of your headboard as you were wacking your meatbrain because you can’t get any.
Yes, kids, you read that right. Cao actually believes that the appropriate response to being asked to produce evidence for her assertions is to imagine her opponent engaging in the act of masturbation, and then posting her sexual fantasy about said opponent on a website for all to see.
You can’t make this stuff up. You just can’t.
Ah, poor Cao is again doing her damnedest to provide still more evidence that she is one of the most clueless, cognitively impaired bloggers on the planet. And she’s doing a terrific job of it, too.
She posted this vacuous screed this morning, regarding a recent ruling in the matter of the Bush administration’s profligate use of warrantless wiretaps. Let’s look at it carefully; studying this hogwash provides a fascinating insight into the far-right capacity for self-delusion.
Looking at the headlines, you just have to laugh. Look at the leftist hysterics.
Federal appeals court overturns wiretap ruling (Detroit Free Press)
Panel Dismisses Suit Challenging Secret Wiretaps (New York Times)
US Appeals Court Orders Surveillance Case Dismissed (Update3) (Bloomberg)
Court dismisses suit over wiretaps (Fort Worth Star Telegram)
Now, normal people reading those headlines would see simple, straightforward statements of the court’s recent action. Cao sees “hysterics” where none exist. Self-delusion, pure and simple. Read the rest of this entry »
Over at Salon (free day pass required if you are not a subscriber), Tom Tomorrow gets the media’s endless cycle of willing complicity exactly right…
Cao asks three questions about global warming, and then states outright that she does not want any answers.
She wants to be ignorant. She craves ignorance. Just about everything she posts demonstrates that she has been wildly successful at achieving her goal.
There’s a saying that “in an infinite universe, all things, no matter how improbable, will eventually come to pass”. And so it happens that, entirely without realizing it, Cao has told the truth… about herself.
She apparently took one of those ubiquitous Internet quizzes, and it told her that she “live[s] in [her] own world”. This much is true. In Cao’s world, she can help spread lies about science, and when someone calls her on it, it’s perfectly okay to lie about what her opponent has said. Not only that, but after crapping out her own lies, she gets to make accusations of “intellectual dishonesty” against other people.
Yup, it’s definitely a private little world of moral inversion and rank hypocrisy that Cao lives in. Wonder what color the sky is there.
The oh-so-pious piece of crap that calls itself Nathan Bradfield writes that prayers in the Senate are OK, but only so long as those prayers are to his “God” and no other.
Read his bullshit and tell me that he isn’t arguing outright for government-sanctioned religious discrimination.
Here’s what happened when a Hindu priest tried to offer an opening prayer in the Senate. Notice that for all his mealy-mouthed lip service to the idea of diversity, Bradfield doesn’t have word one to say about the actions of his fellow hatemongers:
Take your sanctimonious sneers and shove ‘em where the sun don’t shine, Bradfield. Like the “Christians” in the video, you are a bigot, pure and simple.
UPDATE 07/13/07 12:14 PM EDT: As usual, John Scalzi gets it entirely right: what we have here are Jesus’ Dickheads:
Some people really and truly believe that what Jesus wants is for them to be dicks to everyone who isn’t their particular, mushy-headed stripe of Christian. And if it’s what Jesus wants, then it can’t be wrong. Now, I’m entirely sure that in their minds they can come up with a better explanation for their activities than “Jesus wants me to be a dick” — they may actually be able to find some internal calculus that has them being a dick out of love for us godless idolaters and saving our worthless heathen souls, even — but the rest of us can call it for what it is.
UPDATE 07/15/07 8:35 AM EDT: To no one’s surprise, Nathan deletes comments rather than engage in actual debate. Here are the comments that terrify Nathan. Drop by his blog sometime and remind him what kind of craven coward he is.
Somebody explain this to me… if, as the wingnuts claim, it is Democrats who do not support the troops, then why is it that it takes a Democrat to ferret out the fact that the military is putting our soldiers’ lives at risk with corrupt procurement practices? Why do we never see an upstanding red-blooded morally-superior Republican doing this?
A study completed in late June by the Pentagon’s Inspector General concludes that the Department of Defense (DoD) has risked the lives of U.S. troops in Iraq due to malfeasance in awarding and monitoring contracts for badly-needed armored vehicles.
The study, which was requested by Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter of New York, found that since 2000 the DoD has awarded “sole-source” contracts valued at $2.2 billion to just two companies, Force Protection, Inc.(FPI) and Armor Holdings, Inc (AHI).
Inspector General auditors found that the Marine Corps Systems Command (MCSC) made these two companies the sole providers of armored vehicles and armor kits for troops, despite knowing that other suppliers may have produced the equipment so desperately needed in Iraq substantially faster. Both manufacturers fell far behind delivery schedules, while AHI also produced inadequate and faulty equipment.
(Hat tip: Crooks and Liars)
Nicky over at Conservative Dialysis has a very strange take on the way the American justice system works. He’s been parroting the same tired ‘there was no crime’ and ‘what about Richard Armitage’ blather that the wingnuts use to excuse the perjury committed by Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby. In one of his comments, he reveals that crimes are committed only after the defendant has been charged:
Until Armitage is charged and prosecuted, there was no crime.
Wow. Just… wow. In Nicky’s little topsy-turvy world, the prosecutor chooses someone to charge with a crime, prosecutes the case, and only then does the accused commit the crime.
Good. Freaking. God. The cesspool of illogic and denial that one has to immerse oneself in to be an American conservative these days truly has no bottom.
Hey, Nicky… as long as you are going in for dialysis, have them hook the machine to your brain, as well. It’s badly in need of a good flushing.
Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming… “WOW! What a Ride!”— attributed to Bill McKenna, professional motorcycle racer
Presented without comment:
Too many Iraq deaths, so Fort Lewis consolidates memorial services
Associated Press – May 30, 2007 1:35 PM ET
FORT LEWIS, Wash. AP – So many Fort Lewis soldiers are being killed in Iraq the Army base will no longer hold individual memorial services.
Starting next month Fort Lewis says it will hold one memorial a month for all the dead soldiers.
Nineteen Fort Lewis soldiers have been killed this month—the most of the war, so far.
(hat tip: Daily Kos)
From the ‘Wikipedia Knowledge Dump’, which apparently rescues useful bits of Wikipedian knowledge that for whatever reason doesn’t make the cut, comes this brilliant riff on Clarke’s Third Law:
“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.“
Hoo boy. Can anyone look at the last six years in this country and not understand the truth of this statement?
For some strange reason, I immediately thought of noted cephalopodophile PZ Myers when I saw this chess set...
I can’t imagine why.
via ectoplasmosis
There must be a gene that codes for being a right-wing whackjob. An immunity to facts and fact-based debate must be buried deep in the genome. Not only that, but as is the case with so many genes, it may carry other traits as well, such as an abject terror of being exposed to the aforesaid facts, and a burning need to ensure that no one else sees those facts.
Our old friend Cao (evidently it is pronounced “cow”, as in “coward”) has generously provided a textbook example of how this whacko gene expresses itself. I posted yesterday about the recent column by one James Taylor, who tried hard to debunk a part of Al Gore’s recent presentations on the phenomenon of global warming. Unfortunately, in a doomed effort to give his arguments some undeserved scientific weight, Mr. Taylor chose to create a quote out of thin air and attribute that quote to a recent article in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate. It’s an easy task to look up the article and show that Mr. Taylor was lying about its contents.
I decided to mosey over to Cao’s place and rub her nose in this fact:
Great post, Cao! One little problem:
James Taylor is lying. The quote he used doesn’t come from the Journal of Climate at all. Nope. It’s a complete fabrication.
Funny, how easy it is to sucker you into helping to spread a lie, isn’t it?
Her response was as predictable as it was hysterical:
Prove it. I don’t believe anything you say because it’s you who’s saying it. You are like a feces flinging monkey with the word ‘liar’. It is meaningless when it comes from you…it only means you’re having a fit over something someone said. You’re like a child sitting in a high chair, banging his spoon.
So I did as Cao requested, and provided the evidence she asked for. You won’t find this comment on her site, because she immediately deleted it. That’s her terror of informed debate expressing itself:
Here’s the article Taylor claims to be quoting:
http://tinyurl.com/2t23v7 (HTML)
or
http://tinyurl.com/3d2qcz (PDF)
Find the quote (“Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains…”).
It’s not there.
Taylor is a liar.
This feces-flinging monkey knows how to check the facts, Cao. This is a talent you apparently do not possess.
(Bonus points: What is the actual source of the quote Taylor used? Do you even have the faintest idea how to find out?)
She did post a follow-up comment, showing that she didn’t understand, or just didn’t read, my response. She seems to think that I claimed that the article couldn’t be found:
Your argument is an invalid fallacious argument because picking on one thing because it’s not online doesn’t make it a “lie”. All three contentions; that the one thing you picked on is false because you didn’t find it online, and the presumption that it renders the rest of the article and sources cited a ‘lie’, plus the writer of the article a ‘liar’ make all three of your premises false, therefore your conclusion is false.
Note that I made no claim “that the one thing [I] picked on is false because [I] didn’t find it online”. In fact, I did find the article online, and provided Cao two links to that article. I guess she’s so afraid of the facts that she simply invents a comment I never made, and excoriates me for a claim I never made.
Fear makes people do funny things. In Cao the Coward’s case, it moved her to make herself look like a complete fool.
UPDATE 07/12/07 06:22 AM EDT: Cao is now railing against the “intellectual dishonesty” of other people. Check your own blog, Cao… it’s a veritable textbook example, day after day, of the intellectual dishonesty you yourself champion. Hilarious.
It’s soooo easy to bamboozle a wingnut.
Just make up a semi-scientific-sounding quote, attribute it to people who never said it, and they lap it up like it was a triple fudge nut sundae.
Case in point: A recent opinion piece in the Chicago Sun-Times, by one James Taylor of the Heartland Institute, contains the following statement:
[Former Vice President Al] Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate reported, “Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame.”
This has been leapt upon by dozens of shrieking wingnut blogs, including Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Moonbattery, Cao’s Blog, and Flopping Aces, as some sort of “proof” that Gore is wrong. Cao, for instance, triumphantly bellows “It’s all a pile of horse hockey!” after reproducing the excerpt above.
There is, of course, one teeny little problem. James Taylor is lying.
As Tim Lambert has pointed out, Taylor’s quote does not appear in the article in the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate that discusses the Himalayan glaciers. (The full text of the article is available in PDF format, or see the HTML version in Google’s cache.) Search the article… you will not find the quotation in there anywhere.
So who is Taylor quoting? Why, he’s quoting James Taylor! That’s right: Taylor took the first line of an article he wrote himself back in November 2006, attributed it to an article that doesn’t contain that quote, and then claimed that the quote he himself manufactured bolsters the case against global warming. (Thanks to commenter Abe G at Tim Lambert’s site for catching this.)
And the wingnut bloggers who trumpeted this? They could have checked the sources Taylor cites and uncovered his lies as easily as anyone else — but they are either too stupid to do this, or they are perfectly happy to help spread these lies. Or both. Invariably, one finds that facts just plain do not matter to the likes of Misha, Cao, and their ilk. They much prefer being shills for lying propagandists like James Taylor. They positively flock to be shills for lying propagandists like James Taylor.
Remember this: Being dishonest is a way of life for the far right wingers. They see nothing wrong with lying to achieve their goals.
The wingnuts are in full celebration mode today after Bush commuted the sentence of Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, essentially letting him go free after he was convicted of lying to a grand jury. The one thing that stikes me is that the rightwing howler monkeys insist — insist! — that the laws on the books be enforced with respect to illegal immigrants, and that said immigrants must suffer the punishments prescribed by the law.
But… when it comes to a man who served the political agenda of the Bush administration, and who lied under oath about what he had done, well then, the laws are just too too draconian, and he should be allowed to go free.
That’s what we are dealing with, folks, when it comes to the radical right in this country: people who believe that the law should come down as hard as possible on criminals — if they have brown skin and no political connections.
