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It’s not just a figment of my imagination, it seems atheists truly are socially autistic by their own report. Asperger’s Syndrome is a disorder described as “autistic psychopathy” by its discoverer, Dr. Hans Asperger. Those with the disorder tend to be intelligent, socially awkward and difficult to converse with. They are also likely to be male.

Based on Wired Magazine’s observation that atheists tend to be quarrelsome, socially challenged men, to say nothing of the unpleasant personalities of leading public atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Michel Onfray, one could reasonably hypothesize that there is likely to be a strong correlation between Asperger’s and atheism. It’s by no means a scientific test, but it is interesting to note the coincidence that 59 of the virulent atheists over at Dr. PZ Myers place report an average score on the Asperger’s Quotient test of 27.8. And this does not include the two individuals who actually have Asperger’s but did not report any test results.

The test notes that “Scores over 32 are generally taken to indicate Asperger’s Syndrome or high-functioning autism”. The average male score is 18, the average female score is 15. By way of comparison, I scored 14.

I was amused by one of the questions, which states: “Other people frequently tell me that what I’ve said is impolite, even though I think it is polite.” This one topic accounts for about 15 percent of the collective New Atheist texts, and involves various forms of complaining about how they can’t understand how anyone could possibly take any offense at being called stupid, ignorant, deluded and poisonous, and attempting to justify their reasons for their unprovoked insulting of 4.5 billion people in this manner.

Here’s an object lesson that perhaps might be capable of penetrating the skulls of even the most autistically psychopathic. (1) Do you dislike being described as a socially autistic asshole? (2) Would you like it any more if that description was scientifically proven to describe you accurately? (3) Would you consider it polite and/or socially acceptable for me to insist on always describing you to others as an autistic psychopath were this proven to be an accurate description of you?

Obviously, more comprehensive and scientific tests would be advised before any definite conclusion can be reached, but these initial observations do appear to indicate a possibility that atheism could be nothing more than a minor mental disorder.

UPDATE: I encourage you to take the test – as honestly as possible – and then post your results here in the comments along with your identification as theist, atheist or agnostic.

The collapse of the bridge over the Mississippi is pretty bizarre, I’ve probably driven over it more than 500 times myself. It’s one of the bridges linking downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul, so everyone in the Twin Cities travels across it from time to time, if not every day.

Fortunately, it wasn’t wintertime or it could have been a lot worse. Hope everyone’s all right.

GP doesn’t think through the numbers:

“Bad analogy. Abortionettes pose no threat to the broader society the way convicted murderers do.”

Actually, an average of 750,000 annual abortions has created the apparent need for mass immigration of around 30 million legal and illegal immigrants. This has had a far greater, more ultimately fatal effect on American society than 16,000 annual murders.

In fact, allowing murderers to go unpunished by the government is almost surely a smaller long-term social problem than permitting abortion.

The answer is an obvious one:

Anna Quindlen’s column in Newsweek this week is titled “How much jail time?” and argues that pro-lifers are dodging the issue of jail time for women who seek abortions. She concludes: “there are only two logical choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can’t countenance the first, you have to accept the second. You can’t have it both ways.”

An ideal judicial punishment for a woman who has an abortion is to jail her until she hits menopause. That kills two birds with one stone, creating a significant disincentive for killing unborn children as well as helping Natural Selection breed the maternal baby-killers out of existence.

But that’s in an ideal world. In this one, I’d settle for a fine in lieu of jailtime in return for testimony against the abortionist.

I have no sympathy for abortionettes whatsoever. They are more disgusting than the SS-Totenkopfverbände, whose victims at least had the opportunity to defend themselves. And yet, it must be admitted that like most of the historical death camp guards, they are only accomplices, the chief guilty party is the one that actually does the killing and profits from it.

Not that one has ever heard them mentioned with the same worshipful awe that men regard Brazilian, Thai and Hungarian women, but things appear to be going increasingly downhill for the daughters of those who gave birth to the Empire on which the sun never set:

It seems that British women couldn’t care less after a survey showed they are the least likely to put effort into their appearance for the sake of men. They have the lowest levels of concern in the world for what husbands, boyfriends and other male observers might think, with only 51 per cent caring whether men liked their appearance, the study said.

Japanese women were second bottom with 53 per cent followed by Americans at 56 per cent. Indian, Spanish and Korean women were far more worried about having a man’s seal of approval, but it was Russia which topped the poll of 10,000 women, with 77 per cent saying that they cared what their men thought.

One must admit that British women are not a complete disaster, after all, they do include Elizabeth Hurley, Kate Beckinsale and Victoria Beckham in their number. Still, if one sees an attractive woman in England these days, the chances are that she’s Polish.

I don’t think that self-regard is an inherently negative thing, but if you do happen to have any interest in a relationship with the opposite sex, it really does behoove you to pay an amount of attention to what they appreciate.

I’m not sorry to see KG leave the Wolves, not because he isn’t a great player that I very much like, but because I would like to see him get the chance to play for a championship. KG will not ever be considered one of the all-time greats, he was never going to be considered a killer in the clutch like Jordan, but he never stopped playing hard even when the team around him was markedly inferior.

Some of the media doesn’t seem to understand that Minnesota fans like KG so much that they don’t resent his leaving at all. It would be nice if Kevin McHale hadn’t been a complete disaster as a general manager and put a competitive team on the floor, but it didn’t work out that way. It won’t be hard at all to cheer him on as a Celtic.

It’s an interesting thing to learn third-hand that you are now officially a child of divorce. I do hope I’ll hold up under this devastating emotional blow. I’m at a very impressionable age, you know.

How very ironic, that John Derbyshire, the author of the mathematical treatise Unknown Quantity should screw up a basic mathematical equation:

However, the main premise here—that you should support the candidate you most agree with, regardless of your estimate of his chances of victory, and that to do otherwise is contemptible trimming—is surely wrong.

If candidate A has positions I agree with 97 percent, but, in my cool estimation of the U.S. electorate & current political environment, only a 0.1 percent chance of winning; while candidate B has positions I agree with 67 percent, but a 40 percent chance of winning; should I support A or B?

Seems to me I could honorably, with a clear conscience, take either choice.

First, if Derb’s going to bring the math into it, then he obviously should support B, who has a 26.8 favorability product versus the .097 product for A. Of course, this means that he would have to support Hillary Clinton if he has more than a 29.9 percent affinity for her given her 90 percent chance of winning.

Really, most Three Monkey Republican voters should vote for Hillary, given the logic they cite in providing excuses for why they can’t support Ron Paul. If your primary concern is to vote for a winner, she’s your girl.

Anyhow, Ron Paul has a better chance of beating Hillary than a Republican who shares two-thirds of her positions and is indistinguishable from her on the major issues of this campaign.

I’m a big fan of Fred Reed, but he’s wildly off on this one:

The history of Christianity has been one of murder, torture, and Stalinism, of witless intolerance of things not intolerable and an utter refusal to mind its own business. Look at the record. Look at almost any part of the record. The question is how to choose.

During the witch hunts of 1450-1700, god knows how many tens of thousands of women were tortured savagely and then burned alive, for the sin of having a wart. This demonstration of God’s love and Christian charity was perpetrated not just by Christians, but by the church.

Fred obviously didn’t actually look at the record. Witch burnings almost never involved the church. As with the Inquisition, scholars will no doubt reduce the number of witches burned by several orders of magnitude once they stop relying on the fiction of the following era and dig into the local documentation. As for Stalinism, that was the end result of a revolution primarily made up of secular Jews, as a perusal of the Bolshevik roster will confirm.

Then there was the Inquisition, run by that infamous Jew Thomasberger Torquemadastein. (For recent graduates of American universities, there wasn’t really a Jew by that name.) For centuries countless people screamed for days as their shoulders were torn from their sockets, before they were burned alive, in Jesus’ name, amen. This too was a church operation, supported by such as their Most Christian Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella.

Countless? It’s really not that hard to count to 5,000, which is the high end of the well-documented estimates for the 345 years of the Spanish Inquisition. Fred would do better to complain about the evil lethality of backyard swimming pools and children’s bicycles. Furthermore, torture never lasted for days, one session that could not shed blood, cause death or inflict injury was permitted. Fred is more than fifty years behind the secular historical consensus here.

I’m making a list of thousands of Christians tortured to death by Jews. Wait. I’m thinking….

Again, Fred might want to have a closer look at Soviet history and the birth names of individuals such as Leon Trotsky. And given how Grigori Naumovich Voitinsky is listed in the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia, the comparison might be even less favorable to Jews than one would think, as Voitinsky founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1920.

Much of this churchly barbarism has had Jews as its target. Christians were always trying either to kill Jews or to convert them.

Actually, far more often, they were kicking them out of their kingdoms. And despite this incessant evil treatment, Jews were always quick to return, so either they were significantly less intelligent than science indicates them to be, or their treatment wasn’t so awful for the most part.

Blaming hatred on jealousy is a shallow and thoughtless argument. When people are uniformly hated by everyone, there is usually a good reason for it. Being a Christian, I believe that anti-semitism is at root a spiritual issue, the desire of the prince of this world to destroy God’s chosen people. And being a habitual observer, I note that a small minority which has historically made a habit of attempting to obtain governing influence over much larger majorities is not one which is ever likely to be well-regarded.

If one considers the growing number of Jews in the House and US Senate combined with the increasing number of immigrants from countries with no historical love for them, one will discern that the patterns of history suggest the United States may be heading for some anti-semitic ugliness a few decades hence.

The desire of women to control the men in their lives never ceases to amaze:

A new phenomenon in New Zealand is taking the idea of you are what you eat to the extreme. Vegansexuals are people who do not eat any meat or animal products, and who choose not to be sexually intimate with non-vegan partners whose bodies, they say, are made up of dead animals.

The co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Human and Animal Studies at Canterbury University, Annie Potts, said she coined the term after doing research on the lives of “cruelty-free consumers”….

Many female respondents described being attracted to people who ate meat, but said they did not want to have sex with meat-eaters because their bodies were made up of animal carcasses.

Do women really have so few self-confidence problems that they want to set up a situation where they’re bound to find themselves getting dumped for a hamburger? Considering that their great-grandmothers believed that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, this strategy seems likely to guarantee women a lot of lonely evenings home with the carrots.

On the other hand, it would certainly be useful to know ahead of time which women are ultra-controlling lunatics and therefore not candidates for a long-term relationship. This just makes it easy for the cruelty-free-free. Eat salad for a few weeks, bang her until you’re bored, then take her to dinner at a top-flight steakhouse and break up with her over a nice filet mignon.

Her: “You’re ordering meat? You know how I feel about that!

Him: “I certainly do, so you should be able to infer that your services are no longer required. Would you like those Brussels sprouts to go?”

You’ll probably want to bring something to read after she storms out in martyred fury.

I can’t help but note that the picture in the linked article is a timely one which appears to support the recent news that homo sapiens did, in fact, interbreed with Neanderthals.