That Christian love

From AoM:

We’re having our third Atheists of Maine meeting this Saturday in the Auburn Public Library from 11am-1pm and it looks like we’re going to have a decent turnout. Bolstering us at least a little will be the presence of a few of our members’ kids (who, sometimes, are also active members themselves). One person, however, wanted to be sure it would be fine if he brought his 14 year old son. Of course, we’re always delighted to give anyone and everyone an honest introduction into what atheism is (something Christians seem to routinely fail miserably at doing), so we let him know that. Unfortunately, one of this person’s distant in-laws saw that he had posted on our page and…well, see for yourselves:

AoM

And, lo, the Lord did say, “He who hath doubted me is not only a fool, but too is he retarded.” And, hail, Jesus did that thing kids do with their hands against their chests to indicate retardation. Later, some bears attacked a bald guy for some reason, but the Lord doth digress.

~KJV, somewhere in the back

“It’s no skin off my nose.”

One of the things I like to do when one political party falls on its face is go to its primary outlets and see the freak-out. In 2008 that meant watching Sean Hannity explore every possible way the polls could be wrong. In 2010 that meant watching the sullen faces on MSNBC. And now in 2012, I am once again back to FOX and the like. Let’s take a look at “the like”, shall we?

I took a screen capture for what I called my favorite part of election night on Tuesday. It was a shot from a post by Jack Hudson predicting a “decisive” Romney win and I took it because, aside from the fact that he was so wrong, I know Jack well enough to know that it would needle him to not only be wrong, but to have his wrongness so overtly displayed. I didn’t expect him to respond to my post (nor did I care if he did), but I was really hoping someone would say something. I mean, the reaction would have to be priceless, wouldn’t it? Answer: Yes.

As it turns out, the person who said something was Mike and, as always, he kept it succinct and entertaining:

So Romney lost pretty soundly, there were several victories for marriage equality, Todd Akin got trounced, a couple states passed laws legalizing weed, and we’ve elected our first openly gay senator.

Oh well. The Lord works in mysterious ways that are indistinguishable from non-existence.

This post was 44 words long. Now look at Jack’s:

I did say I wasn’t a prognosticator.

But I appreciate your magnanimity Mike. :) I think it gives us a pretty good indication that the next four years will go pretty much like the last four years with regard to political dialogue (as well as everything else).

The irony is that it’s no skin off my nose. I have done quite well the last four years and actually stand to benefit from Obama’s reelection oddly enough. And I am old enough where all the entitlements you will be paying for will probably be available to me the remainder of my life. So I and my family are going to do fine because I have planned and provided for a variety of possible events. Others will pay for the debt which grows by the second, and I can guarantee it won’t be ‘the 1%’ who have the means to escape the pickpockets.

And while I prefer that things get better for everyone, I also know that some people (perhaps an increasing number these days) only learn when a bat is applied to the side of their collective heads, metaphorically speaking. As we start off on day one with the stock market dropping over 300pts, the country facing a fiscal cliff and absolutely no indication anything will improve or go ‘forward’ it isn’t going to be me facing regrets. I am old enough remember this all being done before, folks wading through the malaise, poverty, and violence of the seventies which followed the last attempts to remake our society according to secularist ideologies. It simply proved to that generation how bereft such ideologies are of any meaningful solutions. Of course they knew enough not to re-elect Jimmy Carter. This generation of useful idiots come along worshiping their political leader, who is supposed to move them ‘forward’ to some imagined panacea and they end up where large swaths of Europe are today.

So enjoy it while you can, you are going to be paying for it for a long time.

336 words, or over 7.5 times longer.

Oh, the butt-hurt.

Let me interpret:

Your political discourse is liberal and I sneer at it.

By the way, you fucking liberal, my bank account is almost as fat as I am. Are you impressed? You should be. I mean. I’m pretty fat. Oh, and I’m old. God damn it, I’m so old! Fortunately, despite my impending death (which is being rushed by my fatness), I will benefit from all the entitlements that I don’t think any should get. Na-na na-boo-boo! Don’t you wish you were part of the upper class? We don’t have to pickpocket people (because the government has been doing it in our favor since Reagan). But again, I wish you would raise the level of political discourse, you idiot.

Now, I know I just spent all that time bragging about how my fat bank account lets me buy all the fat guy clothes and fat guy food I could ever want, but I care about the little guy. I really do. Also, I think he is an idiot and I wish he would get smacked with a bat. Metaphorically. (Maybe.) Look, the election was well over 24 hours ago and the stock market had a bad day. That has to be that black fella’s fault. (He gets no credit for the stock market being near record highs, by the way. Don’t be an idiot, you 47%er.) But again, I’m so fucking old, so that makes my opinion way more valuable than yours. And I’ve seen this before. It’s like the 70’s when Jimmy Carter was elected to office once. Just like Barack Obama. WE’RE BECOMING EUROPE! Forget that our growth is going in the right direction, outpacing much of Europe, and we haven’t implemented austerity measures as the Republicans want. I DON’T LIKE FACTS! You idiot socialist, Nazi, communist.

So in closing, I’m really butt-hurt, but I want to make myself feel good by telling you just how awful your life is going to be. Also, bald eagles, Real America, Karl Rove, Ronald Reagan, the Founding Fathers, Christian nation, abortion is murder, gays lead to bestiality, and wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

Dear Catholics,

That darned science

In which I admire Matthew Inman

Matthew Inman is the creator of the wonderful site TheOatmeal. He routinely makes hilarious, intelligent comics and that’s why he’s one of the three comic-based websites I have in my bookmarks (the other two are memebase.com and xkcd.com). He has recently found himself in a bit of legal trouble from the horribly ugly, punch-me-in-the-balls-so-I-don’t-feel-the-pain-in-my-eyes-anymore website FunnyJunk.com. Apparently he complained awhile ago about how much of his material the website had stolen. He got a fundamentally dishonest response, but basically moved on from there. As he said:

I realize that trying to police copyright infringement on the internet is like strolling into the Vietnamese jungle circa 1964 and politely asking everyone to use squirt guns. I know that if FunnyJunk disappeared fifty other clones would pop up to take its place overnight, but I felt I had to say something about what they’re doing.

Fast forward a year and FunnyJunk still hasn’t let things go. (That reminds me of someone.) Now they want $20,000 in damages. Take a look at the website. (It’s in image form, so I can’t just copy and paste excerpts. And I’m too lazy to type it all out by hand.) It’s one of my favorite responses to anything ever. In fact, I think it’s only second to Richard Lenksi’s slapping around of Conservapedia.

For people too lazy to click links, here’s the summary: Inman tore apart the details of the threatening letter he received, drew a picture of the owner’s mother seducing a Kodiak bear, then asked for $20,000 in donations so he could take a picture of it to send to FunnyJunk’s lawyer before donating the money to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.

via theoatmeal.com

via theoatmeal.com. Because citation is not that difficult.

So how has the donation request been working for Inman? Let’s see:

Monday afternoon, he posted to Facebook that his fundraising campaign reached $20,000 in just 64 minutes. At the time this blog post was published, donations had almost reached $53,000 with over 3,700 funders.

And how about now? He’s nearing $113,000. It’s been about 21 hours as of now and he has 15 days left of fundraising to go. I think he’s earned the last word:

I’m hoping that philanthropy trumps douchebaggery and greed.

Thanks for being wrong

I am finishing up the final portion of a paper concerning HIV and circumcision. Normally this would be a pretty big endeavor since it involves reading a lot of papers, but I have an advantage. Commenters like Ichthyic and Roxeanne have forced me to correct so many stupid things they’ve said on the issue that I’m already fairly familiar with the material. So I would like to thank those two: I really appreciate the utter wrongness with which you have each approached science. Your ideological commitments have really made this project of mine a breeze. Thanks.

Schrodinger’s Romney

More rhetoric losses

I just wrote about the RNC losing the rhetoric battle on women. Now I have a personal example of someone losing the rhetoric battle to me.

Look around at some of my recent posts and Roxeanne de Luca will show up. She’s an angry little person who really wants me to know just how mad she is. For a little while, though, she only wanted me to know that (and, I suppose, FTSOS readers). She hid a few of my comments from her readers due to her pattern of cowardice, but once called out on it, I guess she re-thought things. (At least, she re-thought them a little bit; some of my posts are still missing.) She recently allowed this post of mine:

You probably won’t post this, but I’m sure you’ll see it: Your cowardice is astounding, Roxeanne. Not only have you run away from debates when you were trounced on my blog, but you have the gall to write about people you’re too afraid to let respond.

I know you like to take the “I’m older than you, therefore I’m a smart adult and you should listen to me by default” route, but methinks it’s fair to say you’ve fully lost the right to that (boring) strategy through your childish cowardice.

I didn’t think reverse psychology would work since her blog presumably isn’t a kid’s sitcom from the 90’s, but here we are. She responded:

Learn the difference between having a life/not feeding the trolls and cowardice. You aren’t brave; you’re bored and you’re boring.

This is when I know I’ve beat her. She’s the little kid who dropped her ice cream and everyone laughed at her. Now in order to make herself feel better, she wants to slap the cone out of my hand by reflecting my rhetoric and calling me boring.

It looks like, as usual, Roxeanne’s anger has gotten the best of her. At least she’s giving me a reason to fill up my “Humor” category a little bit more.

Roxeanne de Luca is also a coward

In addition to being an angry little person, science-ignorant Roxeanne de Luca is also a coward. When I made my recent post about her and her difficulty with thinking even moderately deeply, I mentioned this:

Anyway. I’ve run across plenty of angry people on the Internet. I’ve even become angry plenty of times. But what I’ve never seen is a person get this angry this quickly. It isn’t like she isn’t responding to me on her blog. Despite doing that ever-so-annoying bullshit where comments are kept in moderation (thereby forcing me to copy them for future reference in case she makes alterations), she is allowing my posts.

It’s a hallmark of so many conservative and/or Christian blogs to put comments in moderation. These people are petrified of being embarrassed, so they feel the need to monitor every little thing that gets said about them. Given just how many things Roxeanne has gotten wrong in my interactions with her, it’s no surprise that she would just start deleting my new comments on this post. Of course, as I said, it’s predictable cowardice like this that makes me copy my posts. Take a look at Roxeanne’s final comment and then come back here to see my response:

According to you,

1. This couple cannot love their child and favor her abortion under certain conditions.

2. You don’t call people liars, just me.

These are interesting if only due to how glaring they are. This couple is claiming that they love their daughter. That is a statement of fact from their point of view. You say that it is not true. How are you not calling them liars?

Couple: “We love our daughter.”

Roxeanne: “No, you don’t.”

Are you calling them liars? Are you contending that they don’t know what love is? You’ve been muddled on this.

I normally would have made a much longer post, going point-for-point, but in addition to getting that cowardly-feeling from this schmuck of a debater, I could tell Roxeanne isn’t the sort of person who is detail-oriented (hence why philosophical thinking is so foreign to her); anything that wasn’t short and direct would have garnered a slew of garbage rhetoric and evasiveness. Well. Assuming she had the guts to defend her inane beliefs.

FYI, Billy