nonsense


alexgabriel

FTB’s Godlessness In Theory – or “why you are all stupid”

Keep falling for that old, tired assumption that freefromthoughtblogs can no longer surprise me with its stupidity. This is so thoroughly gob-smacking that my bruised and battered mind refused to apprehend it fully on a first pass, probably as a self-preservation auto-response. It really makes the Prune look like a rocket scientist. I am at an absolute loss as to how a mind could become so degenerate and so immune to well documented reality. This is how a relatively new loser on the FfTB block defines Freethought, en route to earning brownie points by engaging in groupthink pissing on the latest witch of the week, Pat Condell

‘Freethought’ has always been a left traditionby Alex Gabriel

Objections to Freethought‘s place in our masthead are among the laziest, glibbest soundbites our critics have, but more than that display a failure to grasp even the term’s most basic history. Freethought is not ‘free thought’ or uninhibited inquiry – to think so boasts the same green literalism as thinking a Friends’ Meeting House is a shared beach hut or that Scotch pancakes contain Scotch  – though even if it were, it’s silly and inane to assume one’s critics are automatons or say loose collective viewpoints mean dictatorship. Freethought is a specified tradition, European in the main, whose constituents have by and large been countercultural, radical and leftist, everything Condell and cohorts viscerally despise.

Were it posted anywhere other than FfTB, I would at first assume it was a well crafted Poe designed as flame bait. Depressingly, the cretin appears sincere.

“Freethought is not ‘free thought’ or uninhibited inquiry”

Just read that back to yourselves a few times. Savour its exquisite barnyard aroma.

It beggars belief. I have to wonder precisely what kind of education process is responsible for churning out such a brain dead parrot. Or more importantly, who is responsible for embedding this kind of rote learned tape loop in his mind. Freethoughtblogs has more in common with Pol Pot than The Enlightenement. I have vivisected precisely why FfTB is the antithesis of Freethought previously, and no more needs to be said –

Ask PZ Myers: How Is It That You Can Claim To Be A Freethinker?

It is a credit to freeze peach that imbeciles like this exist and have blogs. Dining tables, as Barney Frank would put it. But it is a two edged sword. While dingbats like Alex Gabriel provide an endless source of mirth for the few actual Freethinkers that remain, consider the poor kids out there that are making their first lunges to free themselves from religions and cults. The likelihood is that they will do so online, and there is a high probability they will stumble on FfTB. And thus have their minds poisoned by a fresh brew of snake oil that the likes of Gabriel peddle…

This is where the real damage gets done. Do your duty. Save the kids from these charlatans. If you don’t, no one else will.

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There are no good pics… [image from Sydney Morning Herald]

[From the “the more things change, the more they stay the same” files.]

The time was 1994 and, downunder at least, it was when the last great wave of gender feminist lunacy was peaking before sanity once more prevailed and it disappeared back up its own asshole to hibernate for a decade or so.

Reclaim the Night rallies were still drawing enough numbers to embolden some to splash porn stores with red paint and the great fear-n-loathing du jour was date rape…

The mood of the time, and the surreal deformation of conventional reality that accompanied it, was captured quite creepily in this passage from Christina Hoff Sommers in Who Stole Feminism?(more…)

150px-Thought_Reform_Lifton

Cesspit of lies link

I’m going to pull an Ophelia Benson and just do a block text dump, add a line or two and pretend I’m a huge intellectual.

Loading the Language

The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliche. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. In thought reform, for instance, the phrase “bourgeois mentality” is used to encompass and critically dismiss ordinarily troublesome concerns like the quest for individual expression, the exploration of alternative ideas, and the search for perspective and balance in political judgments. And in addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these cliches become what Richard Weaver has called “ultimate terms”: either “god terms,” representative of ultimate good; or “devil terms,” representative of ultimate evil. In thought reform, “progress,” “progressive,” “liberation,” “proletarian standpoints” and “the dialectic of history” fall into the former category; “capitalist,” “imperialist,” “exploiting classes,” and “bourgeois” (mentality, liberalism, morality, superstition, greed) of course fall into the latter. Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, “the language of nonthought.” (more…)

His royal überness

Myers’ Law – In its simplest form Myers’ Law states a baboon has no capacity to either receive or transmit information without corrupting that information. In practical terms this equates to there being no realistic relation between what you communicate to a baboon and what that baboon actually hears. This communication loses even more of its original meaning in the event that baboon then communicates a response back to you. Further, when information enters the baboon echo chamber it loses all relation to reality altogether in a very short time via baboon to baboon retransmission. See cunt kick.

Any non-baboon that has ever attempted to participate in the 24×7 dung fights that constitute what passes for “discussion” on the baboon board knows intimately the feeling that they have walked into some kind of Twilight Zone where ordinary reality has ceased to carry any weight whatsoever. This sense of surreality is followed sequentially by amazement, then by a sense of denial that “this isn’t really happening”, then exasperation and finally overwhelming resignation and despair. (more…)

Usually, when you talk about the intellectual incoherence of Watsonistas to those that are unfamiliar with the Borg-like horde, they are naturally skeptical and are prone to assume you exaggerate.

I wish it were true. But it’s not. Yes they are that incoherent. No, you are not likely to find any kind of relevant argument in any of their babbling. No, they are not really indistinguishable from one another either. Yes they are legion and yes, they have frequent flyers that throw regular flouncy fits after a final parting insult, swearing never to return, only to be back a few days later regurgitating the same gibberish.

So for the unbelievers, I have collated ~3 months worth of Watsonista commentary deposited right here, discarding only the completely incomprehensible mouth-full-of-baked-beans-sneeze type gibberish (which is all still here if you really want to look for it). (more…)

The Watsonista spiritual mentor

I wrote this in an earlier post, but did not expand –

It reminds me of an observation made by Peter Sloterdijk in his Critique of Cynical Reason

“The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an intellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy

This is what we are seeing here – all language and communication reduced to strategy. This is the precursor to all communication is propaganda, or more simply, when communication itself, a two way transfer of unfiltered information1, ceases.

This nonsense dissection of language has nothing to do with discourse or exchange of ideas, and everything to do with finding strategic advantage.

What you say is not relevant. How what you say can be reframed for advantage is.

Communication is reduced to propaganda. It ceases to be communication with any value. (more…)

deviantart.com

My first alarm bells about what I term new, new atheism began going off several years ago when the phenomenon of atheist social sites began surging in popularity.

Belief may be the death of intellect for the armchair philosopher, but for the realist, it is popularity, and populism, that does the real damage. And having experienced the heartbreak of watching some of these sites from point of inception, where they were amazing hotbeds of dissident discourse amongst some of the brightest on the ‘net, slowly degrade, as the masses arrived, into a toxic miasma of faux moralism, ideological axe grinding, Gollum inspired “don’t be a dick” censorship and witch hunting, it is difficult to not succumb to despair.

Figureheads which should have acted with integrity and shown clear leadership to maintain intellectual and ethical standards instead succumbed to the lure of chasing ratings and audience numbers at any cost. So hope got drowned in a bucket and what we ended up with instead was a bunch of godless Oprah Winfrey shows. (more…)

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– War is Peace –

– Ignorance is Strength –

– Freedom is Slavery –

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This is at least convenient – having all of the faux morality fascists congregating under the one roof.

The Naked Emperor’s brave new world in the oxymoronically, and pompously, entitled FreethoughtBlogs is growing in leaps and bounds. Recent additions to the tenants list have been –

Butterflies and Wheels – an oasis of tolerance and the epitome of non-threatening environments for women of all philosophies to speak their minds openly, free from fear or intimidation – (more…)

Probably the greatest delusion of the 21st century is that secularism is somehow less insane around its fringes than theism.

And now that 9/11 is being remembered a decade on, it is as inevitable as night following day that the Truthers will come slithering out of their dung piles to rub our noses in their nonsense all over again.

So there is no surprise finding this gem deposited on my ‘tardbook news feed –

What dumber than dogshit looks like

(more…)

na·ive·té

noun

1. the quality or state of being naive; natural or artless simplicity.

2. a naive action, remark, etc.

Darren points to a rather amusing Rationally Speaking blog entry from waaaaaay back in 2005 –

Skepchicks International

Monday, November 21, 2005

No, this isn’t a sexist post on my part. There really is a group of women who call themselves Skepchics, Intl., and they are really cool. The word “chick” is demeaning, of course, only if used by a man (and even then, it depends on the context), and these women are most certainly not into politically correct nonsense […] (more…)

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