Category: Uncategorized

A portrait in godless courage

Unsurprisingly, British atheists are discovering that snark and striking a superior pose happens to be less effective against some religions than others:

A student Muslim group is demanding the ‘offensive’ image of Jesus and Mo having a drink at the bar, taken from an online satirical sketch, be removed from the social networking site. The president of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society at the prestigious University College London (UCL), Robbie Yellon, has stepped down over the controversy….

Secretary for the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies, Michael Paynter,said: ‘Robbie stepped aside because he signed up as president to organise events and run a student society.

‘He did not appreciate the stress he would be under when dealing with a controversy like this, so he wanted to make way for someone else.’

I’ll bet he didn’t. It would appear that being an antagonistic little prick isn’t quite as much fun when the targets are inclined to hit back with vigor. I wonder how long it will take before the more intelligent European atheists begin taking the long view and arguing on behalf of re-establishing Christendom. By now, it must be fairly clear to even the most optimistic atheist that the shiny secular scientific society of their dreams isn’t in the cards and they have leaped from the frying pan into the fire.

Christians may not always succeed in loving their enemies, but they have been remarkably tolerant by historical standards. Now the atheists of the West are beginning to discover what real intolerance looks like.

The evil of Apple

The technocancer is metastasizing post-Jobs:

I have never seen a EULA as mind-bogglingly greedy and evil as Apple’s EULA for its new ebook authoring program. Dan Wineman calls it “unprecedented audacity” on Apple’s part. For people like me, who write and sell books, access to multiple markets is essential. But that’s prohibited:

“Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented.”

Exactly: Imagine if Microsoft said you had to pay them 30% of your speaking fees if you used a PowerPoint deck in a speech.

I’ve downloaded the software and had a chance to skim the EULA. Much of it is boilerplate, but I’ve read and re-read Section 2B, and it does indeed go far beyond any license agreement I’ve ever seen:

“B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:

(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.”

And then the next paragraph is bold-faced, just so you don’t miss it:

“Apple will not be responsible for any costs, expenses, damages, losses (including without limitation lost business opportunities or lost profits) or other liabilities you may incur as a result of your use of this Apple Software, including without limitation the fact that your Work may not be selected for distribution by Apple.”

The nightmare scenario under this agreement? You create a great work of staggering literary genius that you think you can sell for 5 or 10 bucks per copy. You craft it carefully in iBooks Author. You submit it to Apple. They reject it. Under this license agreement, you are out of luck. They won’t sell it, and you can’t legally sell it elsewhere. You can give it away, but you can’t sell it.

Well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. This isn’t so much a walled garden as a concentration camp for the creative. When your actions are being compared disfavorably with Microsoft’s, then the dot is a line to you.

If they fail biology, it’s probably my fault

“Daddy, what animal are you most scared of?”

“The platypus.”

“The platypus? I thought you were scared of meerkats.”

“Everyone is scared of meerkats.”

“They are? But they’re so cute!”

“That’s just what the meerkats want you to think. They don’t call them the Piranha of the Serengeti for nothing, you know. Even lions are scared of them. They can strip a grown lion to bones in just two minutes.”

“I bet meerkats would be scared of the real piranha, though, in the rivers.”

“Sure. On the land, the meerkats would win. In the water, the piranha would. But the platypus would beat them both, by land, sea, or air.”

“PLATYPUS CAN FLY?”

“Sure, that’s why they’re so scary. They have little jets in their hind legs.”

“But they’re so fat!”

“It’s all muscle.”

Shutting them down

The US government takes down Megaupload at the behest of the RIAA, so Anonymous is striking back:

Update: Anonymous says they’ve also knocked off the RIAA’s site—looks down for us at the moment as well.

Update 2: Universal Music Group has also fallen off an e-cliff.

Update 3: Goodbye for now, MPAA.org.

Update 4: Affected sites are bouncing in and out of life, and are at the very least super slow to load. Anon agents are currently trying to coordinate their DDoS attacks in the same direction via IRC.

Update 5: The US Copyright Office joins the list.

It should make for some interesting reading when all the personal information concerning the various RIAA lobbyists ends up being released.

Vibrancy in the USA

Immigrants are helpfully supplying the beheadings Americans won’t do:

Three beheadings in two different states and they happened here in the United States, not Mexico. Former DEA supervisor Phil Jordan says all three beheadings have cartel written all over them. They happened in Arizona and Oklahoma in the past year. A murder mystery is now unraveling on a stretch of North Reservation Road in Tucson, Ariz. County workers found a headless man lying on the side of the road Jan. 6. The man’s hands and feet were reportedly missing, too.

Of course, there are some fantastic Mexican restaurants now in downtown Iowa, so one has to keep that in mind when considering the cost-benefit balance of immigration. You can’t expect great burritos without a few beheadings. Besides, they’re mostly beheading each other anyhow, right? No harm, no foul.

It really doesn’t get better

Another young gay propagandist kills himself:

After nineteen years on this planet, throughout which he endured shocking levels of ostracism, abuse and rejection, this week gay filmmaker Eric James Borges decided shit actually wasn’t getting better and took his own life. In the It Gets Better video he shot one month ago, Borges describes his lifelong odyssey through various rings of hell-on-earth: he’d been teased since kindergarten, his parents tried to perform an exorcism on him when they learned he was gay, he was bullied throughout high school.

Borges was the second young gay propagandist to kill himself in recent months.

14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer didn’t have many male friends. He hung out with girls, and he hung out on the internet, where he proclaimed and celebrated his love for Lady Gaga on his tumblr, wrote a personal blog, used twitter, opened a formspring account (like many people who open a formspring account, Jamey realized quickly that doing so was “a mistake”), and made videos for YouTube. In May 2011, Jamey Rodemeyer even made an “It Gets Better” video, in which he tells us that despite the bullying, his real friends were very supportive of his coming out. He thanked Lady Gaga for helping him learn to love himself…. This past Sunday, Jamey Rodemeyer was found dead outside his home in an apparent suicide.

It is said that the mark of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. Given that it is now 43 years since Stonewall and the present generation of children is the second in succession to have been subjected to nonstop, preschool-to-graduation pro-homosexual, anti-bully brainwashing, I think it is safe to conclude that no amount of repeatedly insisting that “gay is okay” and “homophobia is a mortal sin” is going to have even the slightest impact on reducing the amount of gay suicide.

In fact, it is entirely possible that the endless propaganda is actually more to blame for what Ellen Degeneres has described as a “gay teen suicide epidemic” than the anti-gay bullying itself. If the propaganda is encouraging more borderline young men to experiment with a deviant lifestyle that has long been known to correspond with various health-related disorders, including mental health, then it is contributing to an increasing suicide rate rather than decreasing it.

The core problem is that by focusing on the bullying of these gay teenagers, those wishing to reduce the suicide rate may be entirely missing the causal factor. While it is a reasonable assumption that the bullying is the cause, the failure of the propaganda tends to suggest that it may not be. There are other groups that are similarly bullied, for example, the small, the unattractive, and the retarded, and yet they do not appear to commit suicide at the same rate.

If people genuinely wish to discourage gay teen suicide, they very much need to rethink their basic assumptions concerning the subject and look at whether gay suicide has increased or decreased with its increased societal visibility and if there is even any direct relationship between the amount of bullying an individual receives and the likelihood that he will kill himself. While I’m sure it must feel very satisfying to blame everything on “homophobes” and insufficient societal admiration, the weight of observable evidence doesn’t presently tend to indicate that they have much, if anything, to do with the actual problem.

In the meantime, whoever is behind the “It Gets Better” program should do a much more careful job vetting its spokesmen, since at the moment, it looks an awful lot like an inadvertant homosexual suicide campaign straight out of the movie Heathers. All they need is a video featuring a cheesy 80s band singing “Gay teen suicide, don’t do it!” Recruiting unstable young men to lie to teenage boys simply isn’t a long-term prescription for success.

The return of the epic

After reading some of my past posts related to the degraded state of epic fantasy, it is a pleasure to be able to say that there are still writers who harbor sufficient regard for the genre to write it more or less straight rather than attempting to subvert it in some tediously predictable manner. While there is always a place in any genre for an interesting subversion – and few have ever done it better than Tanith Lee’s supremely dark take on various classic children’s tales – once the subversion becomes the norm, the novelty aspect is gone and the new sub-genre must stand or fall on its own merits rather than upon the borrowed merits of the genre it is subverting. And at this point, the antihero in epic fantasy, or to put it more accurately, the villainous protagonist, is about as novel and intrinsically interesting as the creaking Hollywood chestnut featuring the grand climactic mano-a-mano confrontation between the hero and antagonist in which the hero is all but vanquished when a last taunt enrages him and inspires him to battle back to ultimate victory. Yee-hee-hee-awwwwwn.

Read the rest at Black Gate.

Look, they’re just not funny

When evidence cited proves the precise opposite of the claim it purports to support:

Look – in the era of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman, Kristen Schaal, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Lisa Lampanelli, Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee, Whitney Cummings, Melissa McCarthy, Anna Faris, Kathy Griffin, Chelsea Handler – are we really still having this stupid discussion? As this list shows – and this is, of course, just a random and minor sampling – not only are there lots of funny women around, but they’re being funny in many different ways.

That’s it. That’s what is supposed to prove that female comedians are as funny as male ones?

Tina Fey – not funny
Amy Poehler – not funny
Sara Silverman – so not funny
Kristen Schaal – who?
Kristen Wiig – all right, she’s moderately funny
Maya Rudolph – not even a little bit funny
Lisa Lampenelli – who?
Amy Schumer – who?
Samantha Bee – who?
Whitney Cummings – She’s attractive. She’s not funny.
Melissa McCarthy – She’s fat, which is admittedly funny. Otherwise, no.
Anna Faris – She’s cute and amusing in certain roles.
Kathy Griffin – Actually anti-funny.
Chelsea Handler – Not funny.

The easily confirmable fact is that all of them in their entire careers combined haven’t produced half the amount of humor as Frankie Boyle does in any given five minutes on Mock The Week or in ten minutes of standup:

Mock the Week is great and you can always tell the best comedians, because they are the ones who regularly crack up the other comedians. What I found particularly amusing about the various collections of his most offensive jokes is that they don’t even include his ruthlessly offensive explanation for why Katie Price dates cage fighters. Number eight was edited out at some point, but it was this joke:

“I’ve been studying Israeli Army Martial Arts. I now know 16 ways to kick a Palestinian woman in the back.”

Another thing to like about Boyle is that he can take it as well as dish it out.

Climate change is the new evolution

I couldn’t agree more, considering that they’re both most likely little more than pseudo-scientific fiction.

Is climate change education the new evolution, threatened in U.S. school districts and state education standards by well-organized interest groups? A growing number of education advocates believe so, and yesterday, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) in Oakland, California, which fights the teaching of creationism, announced that it’s going to take on climate change denial as well.

NCSE expects this task to be much harder than fighting creationism. “The forces arrayed against climate science are more numerous and much better funded,” Scott says, and are better able to get their message across in the mainstream media than creationism supporters.

The reason the task will not only be much harder, but impossible, isn’t because of the more formidable nature of “the forces arrayed against climate science”, but because it is significantly harder to lie to people about something that they can readily observe, at least in part, for themselves. That is why I am merely deeply skeptical about evolution by natural selection whereas I completely reject the observably false assertion of anthropogenic global warming.

That is why AGW/CC will go the way of phrenology, the global Ice Age, the food pyramid, and other past scientific consensuses sooner than TE(p)NS. I’m confident that genetic science will eventually shoot down the latter, but it’s going to take a considerable weight of incontrovertible evidence to finally root out the die-hard Neo-Darwinian dogmatists, considering how they are still clinging so desperately to their evolutionary epicycles.