Rebuttals of stuff

I’m sorry that I have not recently had the chance to address you with my fœbrile ramblings, but I’ve been recently struck low by a nasty strain of flu that was released in an evil conspiracy by the pharmaceutical companies caused by a combination of being stuck next to a violently coughing person on the train and overwork, and so have only had the energy to post inanely on RW, and spam Biblical quotations on the two B4Bs. I’m still in a convalescent stage, so if I begin posting random gibberish, then fish bicycle overlord tenderises somnambulist.

Anyway, the easiest target I can find would be the most recent racist and/or genocidal comments on the two Brownback blogs (here is a sickening call for the ‘extermination’ of the French nation by … well, you can guess; while here is a fear piece by our dear friend Mrs T. D. Gaines-Crockett about the fear that people speaking Mexican (her words) will soon come to encamp ‘near your [sic] Chrisitan homes’; if that wasn’t enough, she also objects to the casting of Morgan Freeman as God in the (admittedly fairly rubbish looking) film ‘Evan Almighty’, on the grounds that he is ‘a nasty talking, ghetto-acting, colored’ actor).

Our fellow internet-warrior ‘lanfranc‘ (according to Gaines-Crockett, a ‘terribly foreign’ name) has already succintly outlined several good arguments against the bigotry and prejudice expressed here (of course, these have to be Biblical ones, or they will be naught in the eyes of those right-wingers; but don’t get me wrong, there are enough arguments from science, logic, and culture to condemn racism a hundred times over without the following) -

(look away if you are a Dawkins-ite; the following passages may shock and disturb sensitive viewers)

• Revelations 7:9 – ‘…a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and the Lamb…’ – in other words, Christianity should welcome anyone (also, this would go against any rejections of Spanish or French from their grounds, if they’re following their scripture right)
• Matthew 24:14 – ‘…this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come’ -fairly obvious – to say that any one nation is unique in holiness would be wrong. 
• Galatians 3:28 – ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ – Again, fairly unequivocal – no difference or discrimination on any grounds.

The wisdom in using religious arguments against these people when there are perfectly good secular ones may be questioned, but I’m fairly sure that it’s the only way.

Sisyphus, for example, has repeatedly stated the quasi-solipsistic view that, contrary to scientific evidence, things don’t happen because of the interactions between (evil) protons and (angelic) electrons, but because God makes these things happen. Thus, any argument that refers back to stuff like, say, the real world, empirical data, or tried-and-tested theories, can be denied by him as an illusion. He has repeatedly used the Bible as a citation, however – since he believes this to be God’s direct word, that is the only thing he can rely on. Thus, to argue against him, we must beat him and others at their own game (although they fairly seldom quote from the whole Bible, preferring to use the Old Testament, rather than venturing into the New, where, as Skeptic sweepingly summarised, ‘God turned Buddhist’). There is certainly enough material to do this; the Sermon on the Mount alone provides a fairly decent refutation of the main points of the Brownback-backers’ beliefs. Even if you’re not a Christian, this argumentative technique still works; just remember, almost without fail, they are.

Anyhow, after all that, I think that we are in high need of some lulz -

This ‘blog is now one of the ’sinners of the week’, according to this; an honour we share with, among others, the illustrious ilk of Rationalwiki (‘an internet compund comprised of Liberals, atheists, and witches seeking to undermind Christians and Republicans’), Hillary Clinton (a ‘vile, treasonous woman’) and Barack Obama (whose name, with a master-stroke of wit and genius by Gaines-Crockett, sounds a bit like ‘Osama’, so she now calls him ‘Obama bin Laden’. D’yer see? What wit.). Just to cement her point, she also states that she would like our fellow contributor, Linus, ‘drown[ed] … in the blood of the Lamb’.

Anyway, I leave you with her prayer that you should have said before coming here (and if you haven’t, PWND!), which has made me laugh and laugh (more like wheeze and wheeze, but still) (bold parts are ones that I particularly enjoyed) -
‘IN JESUS NAME, I BIND UP EVERY DEMON COMING ACROSS THE COMPUTER LINES, AND I RETURN THEM AND ANY CURSES.IN JESUS NAME, I COVER MYSELF IN THE BLOOD OF JESUS. I COVER THIS COMPUTER AND THE INTERNET ROAD I TRAVEL IN THE BLOOD OF JESUS. I TAKE AUTHORITY AND DOMINION OVER ALL WEB SITES, WEB MASTERS, WEB DOMAINS, AND DEMONS OF THE INTERNET SUPER HIGHWAY SO THEY DO NOT CROSS MY PATH. I DISPATCH ANGELS AHEAD OF ME TO PROTECT ME.

IN JESUS NAME, I CUT ALL UNGODLY SILVER CORDS AND LAY LINES.

AS YOUR WAR CLUB AND WEAPONS OF WAR I BREAK DOWN, UNDAM, AND BLOW UP ALL WALLS OF PROTECTION AROUND ALL HOMOSEXUALS, WITCHES, WARLOCKS, WIZARDS, SATANISTS, ATHEISTS, LIBERALS, DEMOCRATS, SORCERERS, AND THE LIKE, AND I BREAK THE POWER OF ALL CURSES, HEXES, VEXES, SPELLS, CHARMS, FETISHES, PSYCHIC PRAYERS, PSYCHIC THOUGHTS, ALL WITCHCRAFT, SORCERY, SATIRE, PARODY, MAGIC, VOODOO, ALL MIND CONTROL, JINXES, POTIONS, BEWITCHMENTS, DEATH, DESTRUCTION, SICKNESS, PAIN, TORMENT, PSYCHIC POWER, PSYCHIC WARFARE, PRAYER CHAINS, INCENSE AND CANDLE BURNING, INCANTATIONS, CHANTING, UNGODLY BLESSINGS AND HOODOO, CRYSTALS, AND EVERYTHING ELSE BEING SENT MY WAY, OR MY FAMILY MEMBER’S WAY, OR ANY CHRISTIAN MINISTRIES WAY, AND I RETURN IT, AND THE DEMONS TO THE SENDER, TEN FOLD.

AMEN.’

Wow. Note the fact that, as the prayer is in caps, it should not be thought, whispered, or spoken aloud, but rather SHOUTED).

Also, for a professed Christian, she sure believes that a lot of decidedly non-Christian stuff needs to be warded off, doesn’t she?

This is madness!

It’s not even funny (OK, it is quite funny) when Sisyphus plays into our hands so easily.

300. One of the worst films released this year, purely because it tries so hard to be serious, and so hard to have a message, and then … a farce. Connoiseurs of youtube will already have discovered about a million permutations of the trailer (my favourites – Hamlet, lego, and PG-rated), so I trust you need no more explanation.

Anyway, the content of Sisyphus’ post -

‘ This one has no immediate political relevance, other than showing that Iran can be beaten, and has been beaten in the past.’

Pardon me while I laugh hysterically, but since when were the actions of a 2500 year old empire relevant to today? Oh, and one more thing which Sisyphus seems to have forgotten – the Spartans (and their 4900 allies; another point glossed over in the film. When looking at those figures, and seeing that Opuntian Locris only sent 13 people, I just wonder how badass they must have been, to send such a small number ‘in full force’) lost the Battle of Thermopylae. They all died! Classical Greece was (just slightly) outlived by the Persian Empire (both fell to Alexander the Great, who, as we know, was not Greek, but Macedonian).
‘Plus, I think this was a really good movie.’

I’m not going to argue this point, suffice to say

• Historical accuracy any one? I don’t remember that Persians having a cave troll on their side, at the very least, nor that just about all Persians were either

1. Mr T. (the messengers )
2. Lepers (the immortals)
3. Mutants (Xerxes’ harem)

• The film would probably be a good hour shorter if it didn’t gratuitously go into slow motion, just so we can see more gore.

‘The Spartans were Pagans, but I still respect the values of their society. Very enlightened Pagans.’

Oh dear. Must I really list to you some bad things that the Spartans did?

• refused to take part in the League of Corinth unless they could pillage, loot and plunder unrestrainedly
• were, according to Aristotle’s Politics (iii. I285a) governed by ‘a kind of unlimited and perpetual generalship’. A military, fascist regime, basically.
• practiced slavery (the είλωτες) on a massive scale
• practiced eugenics (children, if not up to the Spartans’ exacting physical standards, would be left on Mt. Taygetus to die)
• practiced state- and religion- sanctioned paedophilia.

I hope that when Sisyphus said that he admired the values of the Spartans, and called them ‘very enlightened’, he was merely being ignorant, and didn’t know the above.

Defies Thought

http://blogs4brownback.wordpress.com/2007/06/21/angels-and-atoms/

Wow. I don’t think there’s anything more to say.

All your problem are belong to us

Liberal Atheism is to Blame for All the Problems

I’d love to live in a world where stuff is that simple. Liberal Atheism. All the problems. Not just some of them, like poverty, gun crime, etc, but all of them. Internet slow today? It’s because that moonbat Al Gore ‘invented’ it wrong. London Olympics way over budget? Dawkins did it. Oil running out? Ban Ki-Moon, step forward. Plague of flesh-eating, rabid, zombies? Blame Monbiot!

While making snide puns at their titles is fun, it doesn’t address the underlying issue; as LIEberals, we should be entitled to a bit of deceit, but we’ll overcome that to look at what the guy said:

 ’Finally, some clear-cut evidence that American atheism was on the rise just before Hurricane Katrina! If reading the Bible teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that God punishes the unrepentant sinner more harshly for his very stiff-neckedness. It was this same quality which has led God to punish us over and over again this decade, for despite our pious President, our nation wallows in iniquity. Do you think the Almighty wouldn’t notice? He has, and has punished us accordingly. Hurricane Katrina is but one of many examples. Who knows, but that worse may yet come, unless we turn away from this secularist flirtation with perdition. Therein lies madness, my friends. Therein lies madness.’ (madness? This is Sparta!)

And as evidence, he cites this.

We can neatly summarise his argument, therefore, as this:

‘Observations

1. Between 1990 and  2000, the number of people saying that they were affiliated with ‘no religion’ increased. (ok)
2. In 2005, there was a fairly destructive tropical storm – Hurricane Katrina. It was, as far as massive disasters go, not too major – killing 2541 people, compared to the 328,752 who were killed in the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake several months before, but it was an important event for Americans, since it occurred on their own soil.

Conclusions

1. This is one of many examples of a vengeful God.
2. Convert to my interpretation of Christianity, or suffer serious smiting.’

Some quick points for issue with that -

• Again, I don’t want to get into a Scripture duel, for fear of scaring off anyone who isn’t أهل الكتاب, but I seem to remember something about God’s unconditional love, which would sorta cause problems with both conclusions.
• As the user Second Coming remarked, those who were hurt most in the storm were the poor black communities, who were fairly religious. Obviously not the right type of religious for Sisyphus.
• So, atheism increased in the 90s. Was that the first decade atheism increased there? No. So, what is the correlation between Acts of God, and atheism (I could make a histogram, but it would be a bit ghoulish).
• Why the delay? As God in most Christian traditions is omnipotent, why was there a five year delay between the event which ‘demanded smiting’, and the smiting itself.

Feel free to answer these points, Sisyphus.

Interesting

Have a little look at this. I don’t know what to make of it; is it the real WP Admin (please let it be; some of the postings are just way too extreme), or a fake? We don’t have access to the IP, and it wouldn’t be too hard to just disguise the name, so we can’t find out, but we can look at what they say -

‘With regard to recent press reports about WordPress hosting a blog entitled “Blogs 4 Brownback”.

WordPress has received some worrying comments with regard to this blog through our admin site. The “Blogs 4 Brownback” site is a parody. Please do not forward any comments with regard to racist language, personal abuse or civil action suits to WordPress as we are not responsible for the content on the blog, merely as a host for the site.

Please use the “Blogs 4 Brownback” blog as it was intented: for entertainment purposes only.

Thank you,
The WordPress Team.’

It confirms that B4B is a parodic website – discussion about this aside, I don’t know how they would know.

Also, I can’t find any of those press releases that were talked about.

I really wish this was true; it would make me feel happier about the human race – but I’m going to be cautious for the moment.

EDIT:Breaking news – Sisyphus rebuts this attack, and reaffirms that he isn’t a parody.

Given that he’s stating that ‘with faith in our hearts and God on our side, decent Americans will prevail over you moonbat scumbags’, he probably means it, too.

Also, note this – signing off with ‘May God be with you all’. Is this the Sisyphean version of the Aschlaflean ‘Godspeed‘?

Sisyphus the Manichaean

Have a look at these statements:

‘As a Christian are you suggesting we compromise with evil? No friend, there can only be war between the righteous and the wicked. To tolerate evil is to become evil oneself.’

and

‘We don’t hate our neighbors, we only hate the evil inside them. With love in our hearts, we must cleanse the planet of it.’

EDIT:and

‘As a Christian I am commanded by God, at the risk of my very soul if I don‘t obey, to kill homosexuals, pagans, atheists and heretics.’

Do they strike you as odd? A ‘debate’ is currently ‘raging’ over at this thread of discussion, in which we are told that it is our duty as Westerners to ‘cleanse’ the world of our religious enemies. At the risk of turning into that esteemed Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, I must say that I am disgusted. Christian principles of άγαπη, and such-like aside (reams about this could be written, but they’ld have me fiddling around with unicode for ages; boring!), this sort of language should be ringing alarm bells in the heads of rational people.

So why isn’t it for Sisyphus, Marcia P., BJ Tabor, and their ilk?

What are the possibilities?

• (I apologise for the bullet point; RWers and CPers will now have an almost Pavlovian horror of it). The first is simply that they are parodic. This would be simple, and, as discussed elsewhere, Sisyphus is a little too extreme some of the time to be utterly credible. This runs into difficulties, however; if he is parodic, then he is very good at what he does, as he hasn’t let his guard down once, and the other posters haven’t caught him up on anything. Even if he was a joke, there are many others who seem to share the same beliefs; unless they are all sockpuppets (and we certainly know that, although it is possible, it’s very hard to keep track of who’s who), some of them still believe this, and so the argument still stands: some people still think that there is a Manichaean struggle between the righteous (them) and the evil ones (foreigner/political opponent du jour).
• The second option would be that they are hiding behind their words.  This is certainly a very plausible option; people are very good at distancing the logical conclusion of their ideas (murder, war, genocide) behind ‘reasoning’ for it, be it a distorted element of religion, as here, neologisms and euphemisms, as in ‘extraordinary rendition’, ‘enhanced interrogation’, etc, or merely an authority figure, as Milgram’s most famous experiment shows us; approximately 64% of us would kill just because the nice smiling man in the white lab coat told us that it would be for science. So, this is a certain option.
• The third, and most horrifying idea, is that they have gone away to their pleasant little houses in some American idyll, and calmly and logically decide that it is right. I’m no psychologist, but I’m not sure how the human mind can start with the same facts that we all have, and then reach such monstrous conclusions.

For all our sakes, I hope it’s the second answer. The third is too depressing.

But seriously…

I don’t see how anyone can take Sisyphus seriously. It would be difficult for anyone who was this ignorant, if they were actually thus, to actually stay alive. Claiming that heliocentrism is an atheist doctrine was sufficiently inane, but still believable, but things have progressed far beyond that point. Sisyphus is now claiming that household appliances function by direct divine intervention. No one from a region that has an education rate anywhere near what is had in the United States, which I use simply as a reference point, should be able to believe this. Sisyphus has actually quite reasonable writing skills, so he obviously is rather well educated.

I know this is all old hat, so to speak, but the really disturbing thing is the people who actually seem to believe some of what he says. Now that is frightening.

Those wacky moonbat Wikipedians

Over at that bastion of liberalness, Wikipedia, they have an article which purports to explain how blogs work. How ridiculous can you get? Everyone knows that blogs are caused by little gnomes carrying tiny pictures called “packets” sliding down the tubes that make up the “internets” from your keyboard into the reader’s computer, where they glue the packets onto the screen! The “servers” – what else – serve the gnomes food and water on their journey.

Greetings from RationalWiki

Greetings, all.

Welcome to Blogs 4 Moonbats. Our name comes from the rampant overuse of the term “moonbat” on Blogs 4 Brownback, whether it is a parody or not. So, sit back, read, and enjoy!