Tag: freakshow

Fly, little bird

Fly! Beezle is all growed up now:

Well, you knew the day would come. The good news is that from here on I’ll probably blight your blog no more (or at least less). The bad news is that I’ve devoted another entire blog to you, and I’m planning to aim a little higher on the leg than your ankles. It’s going to be fun, and productive, and entertaining, and most likely will last no more than a month before I lose interest in it entirely and delete the whole thing. But we will see.

Needless to say, bets will be placed on the over/under for his next deleted comment here. I’ll take the under.

Bring me the head of Elizabeth Moon

The science fiction community is not just fat and unemployable, by and large, they’re also significantly less intelligent, educated, and informed than they think they are. Consider this ridiculous reaction to Elizabeth Moon’s perfectly reasonable statement about her lack of enthusiasm for the so-called Ground Zero mosque:

If you change the first paragraph to reflect the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (and make a couple of minor edits for clarity) you get something that highlights the assumptions made in the original post:

I know–I do not dispute–that many Christians had nothing to do with the attack, did not approve of them, would have stopped them if they could. I do not dispute that there are moderate, even liberal, Christians, that many Christians have all the virtues of civilized persons and are admirable in all those ways. I am totally, 100%, appalled at those who want to burn the Bible (which, by the way, I have read in English translation, with the same attention I’ve given to other holy books) or throw paint on churches or beat up Christians. But Christians fail to recognize how much forbearance they’ve had. Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children in Christian-defined clothing…but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities. More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting churches than synagogues–and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism. What I heard, in my area, after Oklahoma City, was not condemnation by local churches of the attack–but an immediate cry for protection even before anything happened. Our religious group, and many others (not, obviously all) already had in place a “peace and reconciliation” program that urged us to understand, forgive, pray for, not just innocent Christians but the attackers themselves. It sponsored a talk by a Christian from a local church–but the talk was all about how wonderful Christianity was–totally ignoring the historical roots of Christian violence.

This is a impressively stupid analogy, given that the reported OK City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was not a Christian. His religion, by his own attestation, was “science”, although strangely enough I have yet to hear scientists blamed for OK City. And it is downright bizarre to accuse Ms Moon of being a racist, given the rather obvious fact that Islam is not a race.

However, there can be no doubt that Ms Moon is clearly guilty of showing the greatest disrespect for Progressive America’s Most Favored Minority. Therefore, I disagree with those who call for her to be stripped of her status as Guest of Honor at WisCon. She should clearly be stripped of her SFWA membership, her books should be publicly burned, after which proceedings she should be stoned on stage at WisCon. I have written SFWA President-For-Life John Scalzi regarding this very serious situation and expressed my expectations that he will not only put this deeply appropriate punishment for holding an opinion contra the SWPLSFWA majority in motion, but throw the first stone himself.

UPDATE: “SF3 has withdrawn the invitation to Elizabeth Moon to attend WisCon 35 as guest of honor.”

I am SHOCKED and OUTRAGED by this action by the committee of SF3! Elizabeth Moon must not be permitted to hide from her hurtful and racist words! She must be punished! In PUBLIC! She must be stoned! On STAGE! Her books must be BURNED!

Mailvox: the difference between pico and nano

One would require the ability to detect interest measured in these units in order to discern my level of interest in what apparently has been an unhappy atheist outing on a television show. Nevertheless, DoCD writes:

I know you don’t write much about popular culture but have you caught any of the general atheist reaction to last night’s episode of Glee? Most of the observant ones are annoyed that their worldview wasn’t fairly and objectively represented and was defined by two prototypical angry atheists, one of whom ended up asking their sister to pray for them by the end of the episode, and another who is angry that he’s the subject of ridicule because of his sexuality and because of his mother’s death.

I watched the episode with my girlfriend — try not to judge — and I think the episode was pretty fair, even though I had to stomach through ridiculous lines of dialogue about the spaghetti monster and Russell’s teapot. I think the “religious side” ultimately won out, but I don’t think the atheists were presented nearly as unfairly as they seem to claim. In fact, most atheists I know arrived at their worldview due to an emotional reaction, not an intellectual one, but seek intellectual arguments to justify their atheism.

I’m not really sure what they expected to see, guest appearances by Dawkins and Hitchens mebbe? A soda cracker being defiled? I suppose the fact that the creator of the show is a former Catholic who still goes to church and is openly gay might be swaying their perceptions, but the truth is that I just don’t get what they’re whining about.

Now, I have seen part of one episode of a show in which twenty-somethings attempting to look like high school students dressed up like Lady Gaga in order to perform an improbably professional cover of an exceedingly banal pop song. It struck me as MTV meets the Donny and Marie show; no doubt it will be popular with the vacuous set. Needless to say, it takes considerably more than that to draw my attention away from my technotopian existence, so no, I was not aware of this dramatic little – if you will excuse it – tempest in Mr. Russell’s teapot. But KE enlightened me when he sent subsequent email.

“My wife revealed to me that the TV show Glee had an episode dealing with atheism this week, where the two characters were (this is what made me laugh since the stereotype fit perfectly), a self-righteous, uncaring, feminist coach and a flamboyant, gay kid.”

Because the New Atheists are explicitly working off the lavender model as per Richard Dawkins’s strategery, it shouldn’t be surprising that they are upset that they are not being given the conventional Saint Gay treatment on television, where every stand-in for the community is happy, healthy, handsome, popular, and behaves in a manner almost exactly opposite to the way the vast majority of the represented community is known to behave.

Anyhow, there is little of interest on the religion/atheism front these days; as I expected, the New Atheists are already a spent intellectual force. The only real point of interest in that area for me at the moment is to learn how heavily Sam Harris leaned on Marc Hauser’s fraudulent morality research in what is sure to be a philosophical trainwreck of a book on science-based morality. While I am well-disposed to skeptics and contrarians in general, it is unfortunate that Sam hasn’t yet learned that taking contrary positions to established and easily verifiable facts instead of consensus opinion founded on false assumptions is a sure means of rendering your arguments not only ridiculous, but ineffectual. So, without further ado, I shall return with some relief to Cicero, Divine Right, and the technotopia.

Worst boss ever

I blame a deeply homophobic society. Clearly poor Mr. al Saud snapped under the pressure of the repression, prejudice and social rejection he had experienced:

A gay Saudi prince beat and strangled his male servant to death in a frenzied sexual assault at their luxury London hotel suite, a court heard on Tuesday. Saud Bin Abdulaziz Bin Nasir al Saud, 34, who is a grandson of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, killed Bandar Abdullah Abdulaziz on February 15 after abusing him for weeks, the court heard.

The 32-year-old victim was found with severe injuries including bite marks on his cheeks in a bloodstained bed in the suite at the Landmark Hotel, which he was sharing with the prince, prosecutors said.

Needless to say, this incident doesn’t exactly provide evidence of the psychologically healthy state of the orientaionally challenged that a few commenters asserted the other day. On the other hand, I tend to doubt that we can conclude that Mr. al Saud strangled and semi-cannibalized Mr. Abdulaziz out of shame and remorse over his orientation either.

That didn’t take long

When I saw that a number of hypersensitive orientationally-challenged individuals in faux mourning for someone they never met were visiting in order to emote in their inimitably dramatic fashion over my dispassionate observations on the Clementi suicide, my first thought was, “I wonder how long it will take before someone sees fit to strike a blow for truth, justice, and the Sodomite Way by vandalizing Wikipedia?” It turns out the answer was 19 hours and 46 minutes. It was surprisingly calm and measured in comparison with the militant New Atheists, actually.

“…according to this ethic, “only a woman who is not entertaining the possibility of sex with a man can be considered a wholly innocent victim”, rape is nevertheless “really fun,” and that “[n]either the Jew nor the Christian need hesitate before asserting the act of rape to be just totally awesome and justly giving the rapist bitchin’ high fives.”

I rather like that version; pity someone has already reverted it. But to paraphrase Norman Mailer, thank you, predictable bitches! I note that despite 300+ comments still no one has yet managed to answer the perfectly straightforward question: by what recognized moral or ethic does one conclude that a) homosexual activity is moral, and b) rape is immoral?

I ask merely for informationpersonal amusement, you understand.

The aliens will save us!

Witness testimony from more than 120 former or retired military personnel points to an ongoing and alarming intervention by unidentified aerial objects at nuclear weapons sites, as recently as 2003. In some cases, several nuclear missiles simultaneously and inexplicably malfunctioned while a disc-shaped object silently hovered nearby. Six former U.S. Air Force officers and one former enlisted man will break their silence about these events at the National Press Club and urge the government to publicly confirm their reality.

All your base are belong to us….

Never be nice

I’m totally serious, men.  Never, ever be nice to a woman to whom you are not related by blood or are not married.  Be polite, gracious, and civil, by all means, just as you would to but don’t ever be nice in search of female approval or make the mistake of thinking that they have a mindset that is anything but completely alien to your own.  They can not only rationalize anything that they perceive to be in their own interest, but will quite readily resort to the use of third party force to do so.  Roissy provides an informative example of this.
 

A futile CYA attempt

It appears that those of us who have been pointing out that Krugman advocated a $600 billion stimulus only two months before claiming a $787 billion stimulus was too small have finally force the man to address the issue. Unsurprisingly, he does so both dishonestly and incompetently:

Oy, it seems that another out-of-context quote of mine is being used to claim that I thought the Obama stimulus plan was just dandy. So: back in 2008, I wrote this piece in which I called for stimulus of 4 percent of GDP, or $600 billion. Didn’t we get that, and more?

No. If you read the actual argument — which explains in detail how I arrived at the number — you’ll see that I was thinking in terms of a one-year program; $600 billion is 4 percent of one year’s GDP. I wasn’t clear about the issue of stimulus spread out over 2 years; but if you apply the math in that post, you’ll see that it implies a two-year program twice that size, which was just about what Christina Romer concluded was appropriate.

There is one little problem here, which should be obvious to everyone. Krugman never said anything about a multi-year stimulus package. The fact that the $787 billion stimulus package covered two years has no bearing on the length of the $600 billion stimulus he was advocating. He can no more claim to have advocated a $1.2 trillion stimulus package over two years than a $6 trillion stimulus package over ten.

Furthermore, as one of his commenters pointed out, he used the specific $600 billion figure – indicating a one year stimulus – only four days later: “All indications are that the new administration will offer a major stimulus package. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations say that the package should be huge, on the order of $600 billion. So the question becomes, will the Obama people dare to propose something on that scale? Let’s hope that the answer to that question is yes, that the new administration will indeed be that daring.”

He was wrong, he was busted and no amount of equivocation on his part can demonstrate otherwise.

It took them long enough

From the Onion:

At 4:32 p.m. Tuesday, every single resident of New York City decided to evacuate the famed metropolis, having realized it was nothing more than a massive, trash-ridden hellhole that slowly sucks the life out of every one of its inhabitants.

With audible murmurs of “This is no way to live,” “What the hell am I doing here—I hate it here,” and “Fuck this place. Fuck this horrible place,” all 8.4 million citizens in each of the five boroughs packed up their belongings and told reporters they would rather blow their brains out with a shotgun than spend another waking moment in this festering cesspool of filth and scum and sadness.

The fact that one of the chief accomplishments of science and technology is to permit people to live in their own filth like factory chickens without dying like flies should tell you all that you need to know about city life. And spare me the blather about the wonderful museums and so forth. No one actually goes there.

Consider: the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the top ranked museum in the country. It has all of 4.9 million visitors per year. If we assume that absolutely none of those visitors were tourists who don’t live in New York City, that means that the average New Yorker visits the museum 0.58 times per year.

Don’t get me wrong, being a libertarian I fully support the right of moronic urbanophiles to live in ludicrously over-priced and over-regulated squalor. I simply don’t find it sophisticated, enviable, or even fathomable.

Dr. Darwin Award

The most surprising thing about this is that the intrepid stalker was an actual doctor as opposed to a mental health specialist:

Dr. Jacquelyn Kotarac had been missing since last week, a day after she went to the house of a man whom she had been dating, Bakersfield police Sgt. Mary DeGeare said…. Bakersfield firefighters spent five hours dismantling the chimney and flue from the outside of the home from Saturday to early Sunday to get to the body, DeGeare said. Detectives initially investigated the death as suspicious, but police said Monday that all the evidence indicates Kotarac voluntarily went to the roof, removed the chimney cap and slid down the flue feet first.

Apparently they don’t teach spatial relations at med school. The tragedy is that she didn’t even need to do herself in to win a Darwin award, her odds of NOT being an evolutionary dead end dropped considerably the day she applied to medical school.