Vox Popoli

Gail Collins worries about the collision of sexual cultures:

This sure sounds like trouble to me: A generation of guys who will settle for nothing less than a porn star meets a generation of women who expect their boyfriend to crawl through their bedroom window at night and just nuzzle gently until they fall asleep.

Never fear. Technology will keep the peace. We’re less than 20 years away from talking, moving pornbots that will outperform ninety percent of the female population. The real money, however, may turn out to be in the sexy, undead vampitrons; apparently a significant percentage of women are fantasizing about a cold, lifeless thing that looks like a man already. Especially since neither will model require much of an extensive vocabulary.

“I understand.” “Really?” “She didn’t!” and “Yes, of course I’m listening.” vs a series of prerecorded moaning and shrieking.

This will, of course, leave the Earth to the Mormons and the insignificant remnant of the evangelical community that remains steadfast in its opposition to robo-humpery.

In TIA, I established that the militant atheists aren’t anywhere nearly so bright as they would like to think they are. PZ’s latest shenanigans have neatly underlined this fact in a whole variety of ways, as this email I received yesterday from a government-employed Pharyngulan named CR demonstrates:

SIR,

I support P Z Meyers and the work he does defending Science in America. At what point did he loose his free speech rights? Is this not the land of the Constitution and Bill of Rights? Please READ the first amendment, the highest law in the land. PZ speaks for many of us who cannot speak for fear of reprisal. Does he now have to live in fear because he is able to say what is on his mind?

Since when has PZ ever defended Science? And against what? He can’t even bring himself to mention the most dangerous threat to science in America these days, namely, the application of Title IX to the science departments in American universities. The atheist persecution complex revealed here is also interesting. Reading this email, one would never know that atheists are not and have never been systematically persecuted by Christians, whereas atheists are actively murdering, jailing, and otherwise persecuting Christians in at least four countries around the world today! Jews and Christians don’t have a persecution complex, both religions have endured violent persecution for centuries and are experiencing it today.

Anyhow, the punchline is the title of CR’s email: Save PZ from stupidity. Based on the copious evidence available at Pharyngula, I’d say it’s decades too late for that.

The first dominoes begin to fall:

The federal government took control of Pasadena-based IndyMac Bank on Friday in what regulators called the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history.

Buckle your seatbelts. Even if you come out of it well, a lot of people you know won’t.

If religion is, as some scientists have conjectured, the physical product of human evolution, then regardless of whether or not it is a spandrel, it should be possible to fix those who lack god belief if fixing other forms of autism turn out to be treatable through gene therapy.

Three out of the five “autism genes” newly discovered in the lab are particularly intriguing. Unlike some other defective genes linked to autism that are permanently disabled, the new genes are simply idle — present, but not turned on for one reason or another.

“That gives us the potential, in the long run, to develop therapies that may be able to reactivate those genes that are silent,” said Walsh.

It would certainly be interesting to find out how many atheists would welcome such therapy if it became viable; how ironic it would be if science proved to be the end of atheism rather than religion after more than two centuries of Enlightenment propaganda insisting upon the opposite.

If you are atheistic or agnostic, would you seek out this hypothetical therapy? If so, why? If not, why not?

I lift weights from time to time with a Sicilian rapper upon whom I have affectionately bestowed the appellation “Gangsta”. He either shows up at the gym looking like one of Capone’s hit men from 1930’s Chicago, or like a basketball jersey-wearing Crip circa 1992, complete with the bandana. He’s a good guy, and introduced me to Marracash, a fellow Sicilian who is currently one of the leaders of the Milanese rap scene.

It’s no Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, but as rap goes, Badabum Cha Cha is pretty good. I find it interesting that Italians can’t do metal, but they can rap and do catchy dance music, while it’s the other way round with the Tedeschi. The video reminds me of Welcome to the Black Parade, which is one of my favorites, although the song isn’t as dark as the imagery would lead you to assume. Can you imagine an American rap song with straight-faced references to the rapper’s uncle and grandfather? I did like the line about how the world is a whorehouse under the stage, though. That’s a succinct summary of my perspective on law and politics.

Or, as is clearly far more likely to be the case, a suffering vampire with a soul:

Up to 40 rabbits have been killed in Dortmund and Witten – and in almost all the attacks the killer decapitates the pets and bleeds them dry.

Clearly this is the sign of a German vampire with a noble soul, who, unwilling to drink the blood of humans, has in his desperation turned to the degrading alternative of lapine blood in order to sustain himself and keep the deadly hunger at bay. Where, oh where, is the strong, independent woman who will, despite her pride and fear of losing control, heroically allow this dreadfully dangerous creature to drink the red nectar that he so badly needs? Is there no selfless female soul fearless enough to dare risking her life… and maybe her heart?

Pat Buchanan points out the obvious:

After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Austria got from Kaiser Wilhelm a “blank cheque” to punish Serbia. Germany would follow whatever course its ally chose to take. Austria chose war on Serbia. And World War I resulted.

On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a blank check to Poland in its dispute with Germany over Danzig, a town of 350,000 Germans. Should war come, Britain would fight on Poland’s side. Poland refused to negotiate, Adolf Hitler attacked, and Britain declared war. After six years, the British Empire collapsed. Germany was burnt to ashes. Poland entered the slave quarters of Joseph Stalin’s empire.

Lesson: No great power should ever give to a small ally or client state a blank check to drag it into war.

I’m sure there’s a few historical examples that ended better than the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and British empires, but it’s a sobering reminder of the fragility of empire. Republican “National Greatness” advocates are foolish to so easily dismiss the wisdom of George Washington’s advice to avoid “entangling alliances”. What’s thought to be good by the little dog is seldom good for the big one it recruits to fight on its behalf… and it seldom ends well for the little dog either.

Should you wish to show your support for PZ, he would like you to write to the University of Minnesota:

Instead, I would appreciate it if you would write a short note to President Robert Bruininks in support (he’s going to hate me for this). I have to ask for a few constraints, though: only do so if you are willing to sign a real name to it — most of the complaint mail I’m getting uses fake names, making it much less persuasive — and that, unlike the religious screeds I’m seeing, you take the time to proofread and send him something that at least looks like a high school graduate wrote it, which will put you way above the level of the hate mail. Be polite and rational, too!

If you really want to impress, send him regular mail at this address:

President Robert H. Bruininks
202 Morrill Hall
100 Church Street S.E.
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Perhaps someone with a stronger stomach than me would care to wade through the stinking muck of Pharyngula and provide us with some shining examples of Prof. Myers’s polite and rational discourse. As for myself, I have very little regard for the University of Minnesota and the fact that it should choose to employ an egregious buffoon given to performing stupid atheist tricks and publicly insisting that he “must commit sacrilege” at one of its lesser campuses strikes me as par for the course. It strikes me that PZ is already serving out his well-merited punishment; I find it hard to think of many hells much worse than being forced to spend one’s life on the campus of a public Minnesota university.

The funniest thing about this whole affair thus far is the intellectual debacle presented by one particularly stupid Pharyngulan who quoted the dictionary definition of tolerance in an attempt to claim that Pharyngulans are tolerant, which only managed to highlight the extreme intolerance of their maladjusted crowd. Regardless of how you feel about Pharyngula, you must admit that the very last thing that can be said of it is that its host and commenters exhibit anything that can be reasonably described as a “fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions and practices that differ from one’s own.”

Miss Lucas spots the salient point in Obama’s recent Spanish kerfluffle:

Obama’s insistence that we all learn Spanish tells me a few things, not least of which is that he has no intention of doing anything about rampant immigration.

Anyway. Back to the Europe thing, it reminds me of a girl I knew in college who was a big flaming Euro-humper. You know the type – Europeans are smart, well-traveled, and worldly, while Americans are a bunch of homebody dumb hicks.

Unfortunately, McCain won’t do anything about the third world migration – it’s not immigration – either. This is only one of the many, many reasons that I won’t be voting for either man, or for Hillary Clinton should one of Obama’s skeletons come to light before November.

Speaking as someone who has lived in Europe for close to half my adult life, rest assured that there are just as many European homebody dumb hicks as there are American ones. I have one teammate from Calabria, and he is every bit as unintelligible in Italian as the thickest-tongued backwoods Alabaman is in English. I’ve been in places where no one even speaks anything that is recognizable as a genuine language; they only speak a dialect called, appropriately enough, dialetto. (It means “dialect”.) The only difference between a European hick and an American hick is that the European hick is far more inbred, since his family has probably been there for at least 500 years.

Speaking of which, it’s kind of weird at times living in a small European town because all your neighbors kind of look alike. It’s as if every community has it’s own Innsmouth look… on several occasions, I’ve been able to guess where someone lives without them telling me first. A few years ago, a neighbor was asking me if I’d found it hard to fit in, since we’re such obvious stranieri. She said she still found the people of our town rather cold and unwelcoming, even though she’d lived there for 20 years. The punchline came when I asked her where she and her husband were from… and she named a town that is about a ten minutes walk away.

It would be rather amusing if this little incident proved to be the end of Pharyngula:

Paul Zachary Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist. He is responding to what happened recently at the University of Central Florida when a student walked out of Mass with the Host, holding it hostage for several days. Myers was angry at the Catholic League for criticizing the student. His post can be accessed from his faculty page on the university’s website.

Here is an excerpt of his July 8 post, “It’s a Frackin’ Cracker!”:
“Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers?” Myers continued by saying, “if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web.”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:

“The Myers blog can be accessed from the university’s website. The university has a policy statement on this issue which says that the ‘Contents of all electronic pages must be consistent with University of Minnesota policies, local, state and federal laws.’ One of the school’s policies, ‘Code of Conduct,’ says that ‘When dealing with others,’ faculty et al. must be ‘respectful, fair and civil.’ Accordingly, we are contacting the President and the Board of Regents to see what they are going to do about this matter. Because the university is a state institution, we are also contacting the Minnesota legislature.

The question of desecrating the Host aside, there’s little question that there is very little, if anything, respectful, fair, or civil about PZ’s nasty Internet morass. This should also explode once and for all the myth that Pharyngula is a “science” blog; it’s little more than the public soapbox of a mediocre individual with a mild form of Asperger’s Syndrome who happens to hate religion. Which is fine, but if PZ wrote about blacks, Jews or gays the way he writes about Christians, he’d have been fired long ago.

Now, I’m not Catholic and I am not terribly concerned about the fate of crackers either, but unlike PZ, I am not socially autistic, and so I understand the importance of respecting the symbols that are important to others. And you know, I highly doubt PZ would be so blase about it being “just a sheet” or “just a crooked cross” if people were exhibiting KKK and Nazi symbols on his campus.

Of course, PZ has the right to write whatever he wants and offend whomever he wants, but as a public employee he also has a responsibility to his public employers, who may or may not wish to fund these sorts of anti-religious antics. Andrew Stuttaford’s response is amusing, though, since he suggests that debating PZ instead of calling for his job might be a better idea.

Yeah, that’s not so much an option….