Well, lookee here – the esteemed Mrs Gaines-Crockett went a staggering 22 hours and 13 minutes (approx. – the time that a post is made is for some reason not given, but comments are) from the time at which the  rules are added to the time in which they are broken; note the first word of that title. Yes, she used the word ‘rag-head’, which, as far as I know, in the former US Satrapy in which I reside, is a term of racist abuse, and thus criminal under race hate laws, which means that she’s breaking her own rules,  basically here (in bold):

‘4. You agree, through your use of this service, that you will not use this Blog to post any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person’s privacy, or otherwise violative of any law.

5. The use of profanity will not be tolerated under any circumstances. This includes sexually explicit, vulgar, or other profane language or usernames as well as any any signs or symbols that suggests such. Do not post sexually explicit, vulgar or offensive website addresses (URL’s) to the forum. (Eph. 4: 29)’

Yeah, OK, those are all subjective things, and I’m fairly sure what the response is going to be -

    ‘Oh no, they’re not offensive/abusive , MISinterpreted, you LIEberal DEMONcrat moonbat! Why, I have many friends of < insert slighted ethnic group >, who don’t mind me calling them < insert appropriate term of racist abuse >. If you think so, you’re going to hell!

Of course, this is different -

 ’or otherwise violative of any law’

There are race hate laws, ergo anything that violates race hate laws is banned, ergo using terms of racial abuse is banned, ergo using it without being banned, especially by one of the blog’s founders, is deep hypocrisy.

Watch this space for any more confirmation of what we already know and probably don’t need to be told again – either Gaines-Crockett and the rest are deeply and scarily divorced from reality, or they’re parodies who are beginning to push it a bit.

Anyway, now that that’s over, some random screed -

Point 1 of my random thoughts – do we change the CSS for the page?  I’m bored of its current look, and something with more mad stylin’ might liven it up. I’m thinking of modeling it on this fine example of the websmith’s craft. You’ve gottta admire Zefrank’s work in bring us some of the finest stuff on the internet.

Point 2 of my thoughts – I’ve found someone new to have a go at! Bring on Melanie Phillips!

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.

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.