Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert. Full disclosure: I like Dilbert. In fact, when looked at in comparison to the other comic strips my newspaper provides, I’d be willing to say it is my 3rd favorite strip. (Once again, out of the limited choices my paper provides. And that isn’t counting Doonesbury, since my newspaper spares the feelings of God fearing conservative kids by putting Doonesbury on the opinion page instead of the comics page. Of course, they also run rightwing propaganda comic Mallard Fillmore on the Sunday Comics page. Which I guess is my newspapers way of saying that ducks spouting rightwing talking points is acceptable children’s fodder while humans with progressive views are strictly adults only. But I digress….)
The Chicago Sun-Times has hired the queen of the “mommy instinct,” the graduate of “Google U,” the fear-mongering, evidence be damned, “vaccines do to cause autism because I say they do” face of the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny “Too Crazy for Jim Carrey” McCarthy as a columnist and blogger. That sound you just heard was the entire scientific community slamming their heads against their desks. From Reportingonhealth.org:
McCarthy may be famous for a lot of reasons – Playboy playmate, actress, ex-girlfriend of Jim Carrey – but she is roundly criticized by health experts and many journalists for her views on autism. As a celebrity parent of an autistic son, McCarthy is a leading and sadly influential voice in the discredited movement to blame vaccines for autism. Public health experts fervently wish that she would just shut up.
Predictably, the online reaction to her hiring was swift and brutal:
Jenny McCarthy Signs Deal to Endanger Children via Chicago Newspaper – goo.gl/YeLRf via @patheos
But … But … What incendiary printed matter are we going to flip through at the dentist’s office now? On Thursday, editor Tina Brown and CEO Baba Shetty announced on the Daily Beast that Newsweek is going all digital. The Dec. 31 issue will be the final issue to roll off the presses.
It is, as most things Tina Brown–related are, a breathless, truly fabulous statement of intent. “Newsweek Global, as the all-digital publication will be named,” the announcement reads, “will be a single, worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context.” I feel like there might be a test to get a subscription. Godspeed, readers, who will now have to access your Muslim rage and your racist baby and your gay Obama who needs to hit the road in your highly mobile, sophisticated context way. Whatever that is. Not mentioned: declining ad pages and the fact that as recently as last March, Brown was admitting, “We aren’t making money yet and we won’t make money for another couple of years.”
There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.
Got that? No Scientific Explanation! What more do you need, silly heathen!
While his experience is certainly interesting, his entire premise is flimsily based on a single word in the above paragraph – “while.” He assumes that the experiences he remembers after waking from the coma occurred while his cortex was completely inactive. He does not even seem aware of the fact that he is making that assumption or that it is the central premise of his claim, as he does not address it in his article.
Of course his brain did not go instantly from completely inactive to normal or near normal waking consciousness. That transition must have taken at least hours, if not a day or more. During that time his neurological exam would not have changed significantly, if at all. The coma exam looks mainly at basic brainstem function and reflexes, and can only dimly examine cortical function (through response to pain) and cannot examine higher cortical functions at all. His recovery would have become apparent, then, when his brain recovered sufficiently for him to show signs of consciousness.
Alexander claims there is no scientific explanation for his experiences, but I just gave one. They occurred while his brain function was either on the way down or on the way back up, or both, not while there was little to no brain activity. During this time he would have been in an altered state of consciousness, with different parts of his cortex functioning to different degrees. This state is analogous to certain drug-induced mental states, or those induced by hypoxia and well documented, and there is even some overlap with the normal dream state. All of these are states in which the brain’s construction of reality is significantly different from the normal waking state.
Documented features of these altered states (and features commonly experienced by everyone during dreams) include a sense of oneness with the universe, a sense of the profound, of being in the presence of a godlike figure, and of automatic knowledge with absolute certainty. The latter is not uncommon during dreams – you just know things in your dreams that were not communicated or directly observed, and you have no doubt about that knowledge.
But Alexander’s account is so bad—his reasoning so lazy and tendentious—that it would be beneath notice if not for the fact that it currently disgraces the cover of a major newsmagazine. Alexander is also releasing a book at the end of the month, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, which seems destined to become an instant bestseller. As much as I would like to simply ignore the unfolding travesty, it would be derelict of me to do so.
…….
Everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science. Perhaps he has saved a more persuasive account for his book—though now that I’ve listened to an hour-long interview with him online, I very much doubt it. In his Newsweek article, Alexander asserts that the cessation of cortical activity was “clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.” To his editors, this presumably sounded like neuroscience.
……
Again, there is nothing to be said against Alexander’s experience. It sounds perfectly sublime. And such ecstasies do tell us something about how good a human mind can feel. The problem is that the conclusions Alexander has drawn from his experience—he continually reminds us, as a scientist—are based on some very obvious errors in reasoning and gaps in his understanding.
Let me suggest that, whether or not heaven exists, Alexander sounds precisely how a scientist should not sound when he doesn’t know what he is talking about. And his article is not the sort of thing that the editors of a once-important magazine should publish if they hope to reclaim some measure of respect for their battered brand.
Goodbye print Newsweek. And good riddance.
If you have any interest in either the Newsweek article or the criticisms of it, I urge you to read the whole Sam Harris piece. It is a very entertaining and effective destruction of a shoddy piece of pseudoscience trash. As for the Novella piece, I always recommend that you read every thing he writes, either at NeuroLogica or at Science Based Medicine.
Those of you familiar with the evolution/creationism debates are no doubt aware of the term “Gish Gallop.” It is a debating style made famous by creationist Duane Gish, who would unleash such a torrent of lies, half-truths, and strawman arguments upon his opponent that they had no hope of ever adequately dealing with each point.
….while making a statement is quick and easy, convincingly refuting it takes time regardless of how inaccurate the statement is. (RationalWiki)
So did you watch the “debate” last night? Let’s get a few things out real quick. Jim Lehrer was the true loser of the debate. He lost control early and never came close to regaining it. Romney won the debate. Obama seemed defensive and while he did come out with a few nice lines, the outcome of last night really isn’t in question. Is it a “game changer?” We’ll have to wait for that answer, but everything I know about politics tells me it didn’t change anything, no matter the hysterics coming from Andrew Sullivan.
It’s not just that debates rarely change the makeup of a presidential race. It’s how Romney won. As good as he sounded last night, he won with a Gish Gallop, and now he is stuck with the things he said.
Let’s look at taxes first. The Daily Kos has a good summary here, and yes, I know it is the Daily Kos but the numbers are from the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. You can find a transcript of the debate here at the NY Times.
First off, Romney said:
I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about.
Which is a lie. The Tax Policy Center‘s estimates the cost of Romney’s tax cut at $5 trillion dollars.
Romney said:
I want to bring down the rates down, at the same time lower deductions and exemptions and credits and so forth so we keep getting the revenue we need.
Once again, reality begs to differ. Romney says that he can pay for his tax plan this way without raising taxes on the middle class and without increasing the deficit. But the Tax Policy Center shows that even if Romney would eliminate every single deduction for high income tax payers, that still wouldn’t raise enough revenue to pay for his rate cut. So either the deficit goes up, or the middle class gets the shaft.
Then Romney blew my mind and said the following:
I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.
Seriously, I thought my head was going to explode. Tax Policy Center, please:
The Tax Policy Center calculated that under the Romney plan, even assuming elimination of all deductions and exemptions, under the Romney tax plan, the top 0.1 percent would see an average tax cut of $246,652.
Then Romney doubled down on the falsehoods:
[M]y plan is not like anything that’s been tried before.
Dude. We tried your plan the last time a Republican was president. How did that work out? And it’s not just taxes, as Erza Klein notes:
Lower taxes, fewer regulations, more domestic energy production, promises of deficit reduction that are quickly overwhelmed by increased defense spending and reduced tax revenues, and glossy rhetoric about economic freedom pretty much defined the Bush administration’s economic policy. And how did that economic policy work out?
It was a disaster.
…….
Bush has the worst record since Herbert Hoover. Every single measure we might want to track — jobs, growth, median household income, poverty, uninsurance, new firm creation, participation in the labor force — goes in the wrong direction. And yet Romney can’t explain how his policies differ from that of George W. Bush.One of my frustrations with campaign coverage is there’s a tendency to look at substantive deficiencies in ideas as political problems. So this gets talked about as a messaging issue: Romney needs a better answer to the question, ‘how do you differ from Bush?’
But it’s not a messaging problem. Romney doesn’t need a better answer to how are your policies different than Bush’s. He needs policies that are actually different.
This is the whole deal. Romney lied through his teeth about his tax policy, which would give huge cuts to high income earners and big increases for most middle class families. He just said it wasn’t so. But it is so. It’s just math. Big tax increases on almost everybody except the wealthiest folks.
He also straight up lied about pre-existing conditions. His top advisor admitted his plan doesn’t cover those people just a few minutes after the debate.
The political question is: Can the Obama team put that reality and Romney’s lying back in the center of the debate. The next few days will tell us.
So yes, Romney won the debate last night. But by winning with a gallop, he has opened himself up for attack. You can get away with a lie in a 90 minute debate with a non-existent moderator, but reality is waiting the next morning. And it looks like the Obama team is ready with that dose of reality.
Obama senior strategist David Axelrod characterized Romney’s debate strategy as “effective in the short term, vulnerable in the long term.”
“Governor Romney came to give a performance and he gave a good performance and we give him credit for that,” he told reporters in a conference call. “The problem with it was that none of it was rooted in fact.”
…..
Romney told the debate crowd, for example, that despite his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, “pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan.” But his campaign immediately walked the statement back afterwards, with Romney strategist Eric Ferhnstrom clarifying to TPM that it would be up to states to pass laws guaranteeing insurance coverage.
Axelrod called the pre-existing conditions pledge “an assertion that was so audacious the Romney campaign had to send someone into the spin room after the debate to say ‘Well, he really can’t do that.”
…..
“Much of [Romney’s performance] was rooted in deception, from his very first answer when he tried to disown his $5 trillion dollar tax program which would skew to the wealthy and for which he has no way to pay,” Axelrod said.
Finally, he dinged the “serial evader” Romney being unable to “name one regulation that he would keep” after repealing Wall Street reform despite the governor’s professed support at the debate for regulating the finance industry.
“I think what you’re going to see from the campaign … is our effort to make sure that every voter out there understands exactly what the positions are that Romney danced around last night,” OFA press secretary Ben LaBolt told reporters.
1. Birth control will make it so no man wants to have sex with you.
This is because chemicals in hormones interfere with phermones, which render women ugly to men. That’s why no one has sex anymore. Because men are just totally turned off by women, because of birth control.
2. Contraception confuses men and has led to an exponential increase in sluttery.
“Studies have shown that men are more attracted to more average, fertile women than they are even to super models,” according to the video. Studies! Can’t argue with studies!
To make up for the dearth in female attractiveness, women have to try extra hard to attract a man, painting themselves up like Whores of Babylon and opening their legs to whoever. The video, again,
Contracepting women degrade themselves through immodest dress and action in an attempt to attract men who are confused from a lack of fertile women.
“Contracepting” Is that a word anyplace but deep in the heart of Wingnuttia?
3. Whore pills will cause your monkey husband to divorce you, and then turn gay.
Unfortunately, because of the confusing chemicals in birth control significantly reducing the number of attractive women, men are really having a rough time. “What is a man to do when the majority of women are contracepting, and he no longer finds them desirable?” laments the concerned lady voiceover.
Are you ready for another science bomb brought to you by that historical bastion of science known as the Catholic church? Someone did a study in the 70’s that found that giving monkey women the Depo Provera shot caused the alpha monkey male to stop being attracted to them. After all of the females in his cage area were given Depo shots, the alpha male started having sexual intercourse with boy monkeys.
Ergo, birth control will turn your boyfriend gay, because humans are exactly like monkeys in every way.
…..
5. Those harlot-enablers you’re taking once a day? The same thing as baby murder.
That’s right. You are MURDERING CHILDREN by preventing pregnancy. But, uh, first let me get the fine print out of the way: “baby” means fertilized egg. And we’re also going to pretend that there is scientific evidence to prove that fertilized egg implantation is prevented by the Pill. Which there isn’t.
But, shh. It’s way more convenient to build an anti-birth control straw man when we pretend that we’re uncomfortable with BABIES DYING rather than women having and enjoying sex without punishment.
A fertilized egg doesn’t look like a tiny homunculus as it swims doggedly for the uterus. It’s more like a drifting bundle of undifferentiated cells so small you can’t see it in a microscope.
Beware the scrolling Star Wars text of DOOM. All of these horrible things will happen to you thrice if you are one of the 99% of women who have at some point used hormonal contraceptives.
With all this crazy going on, racism can’t be far away can it?
8. Let’s just come out and say it: birth control means not enough white babies.
This is some pretty bold dog whistle racism. Instead of using a dog whistle, the video’s just like, “Psst… white babies.” It’s not really a dog whistle as much as a dog hand signal that everyone can see.
Anyway, according to the video basically, if people in “good” countries like Russia and Germany and Amurrica don’t start having more babies, soon the world will be overrun with mud-people. As it stands right now, the American birth rate is barely high enough to sustain a healthy population, and that’s only because of immigration (psst: MEXICANS).
Most racist nuns ever or what?!
Anyway, the kicker, with explanatory asides added: “We (whites) are contracepting (lol; that’s not a gerund-able verb) ourselves (again, whites) out of existence.” And there’s no such thing as global overpopulation, because all humans could conceivably live in a space the size of Texas.
…..
11. Contraceptecons are leading to beastiality and sex with children.
OK, I know some of the stuff from the video has been a little “out there,” but just try to follow the logic here: birth control is making us like animals because it’s allowing us to have sex whenever without getting pregnant, just like animals (oh, um… wait…). Anyway. So we’re like animals now because we have sex all the time, sometimes even whilst listening to popular songs by The Bloodhound Gang, which is leading a man named Brian in California to have sex with his dogs. Additionally, birth control-crazed men have even formed a club called “NAMBLA,” which works to make having sex with children legal.
See? It’s all coming together. Birth control made Brian rape his dogs. Having sex while on birth control is exactly like doing it with a person or entity that can’t consent.
12. Sterilization bad because people are more important than racehorses.
“If you had a valuable racehorse, because of its worth, you’d want it to have as many offspring as possible. But the value of a horse is nothing compared to the infinite value of each and every person.”
This is a real quote from the video.
Game. Set. Match. No wonder female racehorses are constantly pregnant!
Too much crazy packed into 13 and a half minutes. Go to Jezebel and read the full take down.
Then all together we can loudly say “Wait, What?!”
Zinnia Jones linked to this story on Man Boobz that documents a Reddit thread where a woman — the same woman in the video hereat Cristina Rad’s blog — actually defends men who beat women on the grounds that the woman might be nagging him and, besides, the men think of the violence as foreplay and that it leads to better sex. Think I’m exaggerating? I’m not.This was written in response to an article that defended violence against women, concluding:
Women should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.
And girlsayswhat has this bizarre take on that article:
“I used to live under a young couple with a baby. I’d listen as she followed him from room to room upstairs, stomping, slamming things, throwing things, screaming. After about an hour, he’d eventually hit her, and everything would go quiet. An hour after that, they’d be out with the baby in the stroller, looking perfectly content with each other.
A man I know who has experience with men in abusive relationships would get his clients to answer a questionare. Things like, “after the violence, did you have sex?” “If so, how would you rate the sex?” 100% of men in reciprocally abusive relationships said “yes” to the first, and “scorching” to the second.
He also posited that the much-quoted cycle of violence–the build-up, the explosion, the honeymoon period–correlates with foreplay, orgasm and post-coital bliss.
Erin Pizzey called it “consensual violence”, and said in the main, that was the type she’d see at her shelter. It is also the type that results in the most severe injuries in women, surprise surprise, likely because our “never EVER hit a woman” mentality has those men waiting until they completely lose control of their emotions before giving their women what they’re demanding.”
“Before giving their women what they’re demanding.”
If I wasn’t so sick after reading that, I’d have to say “Wait, What?”
First things first. Violence is not the answer. I condemn in the strongest possible way any act of terrorism, be it by Muslim, Christian, Secularist, or (insert group here). As I wrote earlier in the week:
But no matter how strongly I feel about the FRC, I would never advocate violence against them. This attack on their offices and the wounding of their guard is tragic. I am thankful that no one was killed. If the attack was indeed committed because of the stances the FRC takes on social and political issues, then it disgusts me even more. Violence is not the answer
Is that clear? Good.
With that being said, the Family Research Council is still a hate group. A lone psycho with a gun does not suddenly give you a free pass on all the hateful rhetoric you have spent years spreading. Nor does it give you the right to hypocrisy, ‘tsk tsk’ing your opponents for calling you on your hate while continuing to spew forth incendiary propaganda.
Is that also clear? Good.
In the wake of the vile shooting, the FRC held a press conference that attempted to place partial blame for the shooting on their critics. As Dispatches from the Culture Wars reports:
In the aftermath of the vile shooting at the offices of the Family Research Council in Washington, DC, the FRC is working overtime to convince people that those who criticize their rank bigotry are at least partly to blame for the shooting. They held a press conference to make exactly that argument:
In a news conference outside the Family Research Council’s building addressing the incident and the arrest of the alleged shooter, Floyd Corkins II, Perkins said: “Let me be clear that Floyd Corkins was responsible for firing the shots yesterday that wounded one of our colleagues … but Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center that have been reckless in labeling organizations ‘hate groups’ because they disagree with them on public policy.”
Perkins, the group’s president, added that he “appreciates” those LGBT organizations that issued a statement of condemnation for the shooting but asked those groups “to join us in calling for an end to the reckless rhetoric that I believe led to yesterday’s incident.”
Also from Dispatches, here is Tony Perkins of the FRC assigning partial blame to ….. Obama?
Perkins: What I would call an attack on religious freedom is trickling down in our country. It’s not just isolated to the administration but it’s as if the President and his administration’s indifference towards religious freedom has really created an open season all across this country.
….
Perkins: Well I think as we witnessed this past week at the Family Research Council, clearly linked to that same atmosphere of hostility that’s created by the public policies of an administration that’s indifferent or hostile to religious freedom and groups like as I mentioned the Southern Poverty Law Center that recklessly throws around labels giving people like this gunman who came into our building a license to take innocent life.
From RightWingWatch, here is Janet Mefferd suggesting that groups should stop their criticism:
Mefferd: I was reading through for example what the Human Rights Campaign had posted the day before the shooting and they had a whole list there that was very inflammatory about the Family Research Council, ‘they want to export homosexuals from the US’ and ‘they equate homosexuals with pedophiles’ and all this stuff. I thought: if you were somewhat of an unstable person and you read this sort of stuff and you were in line with what they believe I think it could drive somebody to violence.
Anti-abortion rhetoric not only could drive people to violence, but has multiple times. Yet anti-abortion groups keep pushing out the reckless rhetoric.
That being said, calling groups out on their hate is not “reckless rhetoric.” It is the truth. If the FRC doesn’t want to be labeled a hate group, then stop being a hate group!
At the recent National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama took the podium calling for greater civility in Washington, which in my opinion is a laudable goal. However, his comments quickly turned to his preoccupation with defending homosexuality.
The President criticized Ugandan leaders for considering enhance penalties for crimes related to homosexuality. The press has widely mischaracterized the law which calls for the death penalty, not for homosexual behavior which is already a crime, but for acts such as intentionally spreading HIV/AIDS, or preying upon vulnerable individuals such as children, which has been a problem in Uganda for years because the large number of orphans.
The President said that “We may disagree about gay marriage, “but surely we can agree that it is unconscionable to target gays and lesbians for who they are.” Mr. President as long as you characterize efforts to uphold moral conduct that protects others and in particular the most vulnerable, as attacking people, civility will continue to evade us.
That’s almost funny. He says that President Obama, who spends almost all of his time on issues like the economy, foreign policy and spending, has a “preoccupation with defending homosexuality.” Meanwhile, Tony Perkins has an actual occupation that does little other than find ways to demean gay people and deny them equal rights. Talk about projecting one’s own obsessions.
More importantly, he’s lying about what the Ugandan bill does. He pretends it’s just about intentionally spreading HIV, which is absolutely false. That bill also prescribes the death penalty for anyone who is a “serial offender” — that is, anyone who engages in homosexuality multiple times. That means pretty much every gay person. But to Perkins, apparently, that’s just an effort to “uphold moral conduct.” And they wonder why they’re called a hate group.
You don’t like reckless rhetoric, Tony? Really? You run an organization that has spent the last few decades calling gay people child molesters who only want to get married in order to destroy the institution of marriage and probably American civilization too. Your group put out a pamphlet that said:
“One of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order.”
You have no problem lying about and dehumanizing gay people, portraying them as monsters who want to devour people’s children. Your group continues to cite the research of the completely disgraced Paul Cameron, whose entire career has been devoted to inventing lies to foment hatred of gays. You continue to argue that gay people are so broken that they should get failed “reversion therapy” to turn them straight.
Jesus Christ on a bike, you just hired Jerry Boykin as your executive vice president. Boykin can’t open his mouth without saying something absolutely batshit crazy. The guy thinks that public school textbooks are written to bring about a “Marxist revolution” and wants to ban the building of mosques in America. And “reckless rhetoric” bothers you? Give me a fucking break.
Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is not the answer. Everyone should be against the shooting at the FRC’s offices.
But the FRC is still a hate group, and we still need to work against them at every opportunity.
From VictoriaJackson.com via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, I present to you all the words of either the most brilliant Poe in modern day America or the craziest person to ever play a ukulele, Victoria Jackson!
Suddenly, the gym CNN is blasting a story of how a homosexual man is helping other homosexuals adopt children. He speaks about the personal, passionate sacrifice of his time for this cause as if he were Mother Theresa. I’m appalled. Homosexuals-adopting-children is child abuse. No, it’s pedophilia and sexual molestation. Teaching a young mind, a clean slate, an innocent soul that homosexuality is a natural, normal and moral lifestyle is evil. How is gay adoption different from the recently jailed Penn State Jerry Sandusky, child molester case?
Wait, what?
With all the TV shows, Modern Family, Glee, etc., and today’s Huff Po video of straight guys kissing at Chick Fil A “to make a statement,” I’m getting really tired of the topic. And then, my husband tells me an Army Brigadiere General brought her wife to her promotion ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery! What?! A wife can’t have a wife?! Who’s the insane person here? Is this a Twilight Zone episode?
Silly homosexuals. Wives are for guys. “Who’s the insane person here?” I love it when people answer their own questions.
Oh, did you know that CNN is the propaganda wing of the Democratic party? And CNN also claims that Obama has a 99% approval rating?
At the gym today, I plugged my ear phones into the state-of-the-art-Elliptical machine and the only news channel out of the 23 TV’s hanging from the ceiling, was CNN. So, I watched the enemy. It’s fun to see how they distort things, to watch their blatant propaganda. I’m sure some CNNies don’t know they are propagandists. They were the kids in high school who copied the captain of the cheerleader’s hairdo without asking questions. 12″ beehive. 12″ beehive. Side bangs in your eye. Side bangs in your eye. No questions asked. They are pod people. They have no soul, so they copy whatever they believe is the “in” thing. Some of the CNNies know they are brainwashing the ignorant masses.
…..
CNN says, “The Emperor is a “Christian”, he has a 99% approval rating, and gay people are heroes!”
I say, ” Only 50% like him- the 50% he supports financially, and CNN is the propaganda arm of O’s communist regime.”
Hmmm. This rant needs a martyr complex, don’t you think?
The people and CNN spit on me and walk away. I see a few faces across the street with spit on their faces. I am not alone.
Victoria? People aren’t spitting on you on purpose, they are just doing spit-takes over the batshit insanity that comes out of your mouth
Jane Lynch just announced publicly, “F**K Chick Fil-A!” I publicly stood up for Chick-Fil-A, and I don’t use the F word. Jane believes her morals are just and loving. I believe my morals are just and loving. We can’t both be right.
The lines are clearly drawn. Which side are you on? Or, are you one of those people who say nothing and sit on the fence, the “moderate,” the lukewarm? Jesus said in Rev. 3:15, “So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I vomit you out of My mouth.” Pastors who preach nothing. People who won’t put a sign in their yard, or a bumper sticker on their car. Christians who don’t vote.
Victoria Jackson, everyone. Stark raving mad or the creator of a long term performance art political satire? I report, you decide!
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.
”
Poe’s Law is an axiom suggesting that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between parodies of religious or other fundamentalism and its genuine proponents, since they both seem equally insane. For example, some conservatives consider noted homophobeFred Phelps to be so over-the-top that they argue he’s a “deep cover liberal” trying to discredit more mainstream homophobes.
…….
Be back after work tonight with some more Foster Disbelief Goodness!
Back in 2007, Barton delivered a message entitled “America’s Godly Heritage” right before Memorial Day where he made the case that God was pro-war, so much so that He even “gifted” certain people with the skills necessary for battle just as some people are gifted in the arts or sports.
One of those people, Barton said, was Congressman Sam Johnson whom Barton called “maybe the most godly man I have ever met.” While discussing the seven years Johnson spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Barton made an aside in which he asserted that intelligence now shows that had the US just done one more bombing run, the Viet Cong would have surrendered
Last year, David Barton released a six DVD program entitled “Building on the American Heritage Series” in which Barton, along with co-host Rick Green, “navigates our nation’s unique religious, moral and constitutional heritage and answers the questions Americans are asking today.”
Today, we noticed that a few of these programs had aired on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and were archived on its website. And so, being gluttons for punishment, we set about watching them.
In the episode entitled “Revival And Reformation,” Green asked Barton just how people would know if a revival was taking place in the nation and Barton stated that the spiritual changes brought about by revival lead to political changes, so one of the signs of revival is that society stops tolerating homosexuality:
Wouldn’t it be interesting to do a study between those that are on welfare and see how much and how often they read the Bible. You know, if Booker T. Washington is right that Christianity and reading the Bible increases your desires and therefore your ability for hard work; if we take that as an axiom, does that mean that the people who are getting government assistance spend nearly no time in the Bible, therefore have no desire, and therefore no ability for hard work? I could go a lot of places with this. I would love to see this proven out in some kind of sociological study, but it makes perfect sense.
David Barton: But we talk about it today because it is a principle of free market. That’s a Biblical principle, that’s a historical principle, we have all these quotes from Ben Franklin, and Jefferson and Washington and others on free market and how important that is to maintain. That is part of the reason we have prosperity. This is what the Pilgrims brought in, the Puritans brought in, this is free market mentality. Net Neutrality sounds really good, but it is socialism on the Internet.
…
David Barton: This is the Fairness Doctrine applied to the Internet, and I’ll go back to what I believed for a long time is: fair is a word no Christian should ever use in their vocabulary. Fair has nothing to do with anything. What you want is justice, you don’t want fairness. Fairness is subjective, what I think is fair, what you think, what happened to Jesus wasn’t fair. That’s right, but we needed justice so God did that for us.
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David Barton: This is really, I’m going to use the word wicked stuff, and I don’t use that word very often, but this is wicked stuff.
(Um, just to be clear, David Barton obviously has no idea what Net Neutrality actually is, so who knows if he actually thinks the Bible is against it. But his ignorance didn’t stop him from condemning it, so it isn’t stopping me from putting it on this list.)
Barton: Yeah, that’s one of those many things that historians will looks back upon and say ‘look at the correlation.’ But I look back over the last few years at Sonny Perdue of Georgia who called, in the middle of their drought – that was an unprecedented century drought that they had there – he called for prayer and within three days they had rain falling in Georgia again. They’re back in good condition.
I recall what happened with the oil spill in the Gulf, how all the Gulf governors except for Charlie Crist of Florida got together and called for a time of prayer that God would mitigate the damage of that and cause that thing to be sealed. And guess what? All the expected damage along the shorelines to all the wildlife, it didn’t happen.
And I can tell this in the U.S. Capitol. When I walk from the House side to the Senate side, I cross the middle line of the Capitol, I can feel a different principality because they have jurisdictions over different things. And there are principalities that sit over different government entities that cause them to think really goofy and you can’t get prayers through, they get delayed twenty-one days because the principalities are up there fighting in the Heavenlies.
Because we’re not fighting flesh and blood. And if you don’t understand this is a spiritual battle, and if you don’t understand there are really big principalities and powers sitting over places of power, whether it be banking, or education. There’s principalities that sit over schools to keep those kids from getting knowledge, there’s principalities that sit over financial institutions. They sit over households. That’s why you have principalities in powers, that gradation, you have the corporals, and you have the sergeants, and you have the lieutenants, the captains and the generals, and the generals have a bigger principality and those little corporals may have control over the house but it’s a spiritual battle.
There’s a passage that I love in Romans 1 – I don’t love what the topic is – but it talks about homosexuality and it says that they will receive in their bodies the penalties of their behavior. And the Bible again, it’s right every time, and studies keep proving that and that’s why AIDS has been something they haven’t discovered a cure for or a vaccine for, because it’s the fastest self-mutating virus known to mankind. Every time they just about get a vaccine discovered for it, it transmutes into something new and they have to start over again. And that goes to what God says, hey you’re going to bear in your body the consequences of this homosexual behavior.
David Barton got the festivities underway by explaining to the audience that all of our economic and tax policies ought to be dictated by the Bible … and that means getting rid of the minimum wage because it was opposed by Jesus (Barton didn’t actually cite the passage he uses to support this claim in this presentation, but it is Matthew 20:1-16):
“If you consider that life begins at conception … and I have to consider that Biblically, life begins before conception because it says “before you were in your mother’s womb I knew you.”
Yes, all are patently absurd, but with Darwin’s On The Origin of Species not being published until the 24th of November, 1859, the top of the list has to belong to:
Barton, who says that the Founding Fathers like Ben Franklin opposed Net Neutrality, claims he also knows the views of the Founding Fathers in the debate over whether schools should teach Creationism alongside evolution in public schools. Naturally, Barton says that the Founding Fathers “already had the entire debate on creation and evolution,” and sided with Creationism. Of course, Charles Darwin wrote On The Origin of Species in 1859 andThe Descent of Man in 1871 – but apparently the Founding Fathers knew about evolution science:
If David Barton wasn’t serious, he’d be the best comic in the nation.
Ed over at Dispatches posts yet another example of ghouls using the Colorado tragedy to score points in the culture war. This time it’s R. Emmett Tyrell of The American Spectator, appearing on Bryan Fischer’s radio show.
Tyrrell: A country that is being forced to turn away from God because of the liberals gets things like the Colorado massacre in abundance, and we will have more of them if we don’t return to God.
As Ed points out, there are a couple of gaps in that reasoning:
Okay, let’s test this against the evidence. The U.S. is by far the most pervasively religious country in the Western industrialized world. Nearly all the nations of Europe have far lower rates of belief in God than we do, yet they also have far lower rates of violent crime (not to mention far lower rates of teen pregnancy and many other ills) than we do. The correlation clearly goes in the opposite direction. And yet they continue to make this ridiculous claim.
Fischer’s interview with Tyrell also contains this jewel of projection, worthy of one of Brayton’s Bryan Fischer Awards:
Tyrrell: These liberals are bloodless, they are just cold-blooded people. They ought to open their hearts to conservatives, frankly. In writing this book, ‘The Death of Liberalism,’ I came to the conclusion that they are dead—they are brain dead—they simply can’t look at anything that contravenes their value system, they turn their back on it…
Fischer: It’s been interesting to me in talking to liberals, and I’m sure you’ve had this same experience, the conclusion I’ve come to is that they cannot be reasoned with because logic means nothing to them, facts mean nothing to them, history means nothing to them, reason means nothing to them. They just have these very strong feelings and the strength of those feelings in their minds is all they need to validate the positions they take.
That is some Olympic-grade projection. Is it any wonder Ed named the award after him?
Foster Disbelief 