“Reputable and professional historians do not suppress parts of quotations from documents that go against their own case, but take them into account and if necessary amend their own case accordingly. They do not present as genuine documents those that they know to be forged just because these forgeries happen to back up what they are saying. They do not invent ingenious but implausible and utterly unsupported reasons for distrusting genuine documents because these documents run counter their arguments; again, they amend their arguments if this is the case, or abandon them altogether. They do not consciously attribute their own conclusions to books and other sources which, in fact, on closer inspection, actually say the opposite. They do not eagerly seek out the highest possible figures in a series of statistics, independently of their reliability or otherwise, simply because they want for whatever reason to maximize the figure in question, but rather, they assess all the available figures as impartially as possible in order to arrive at a number that will withstand the critical scrutiny of others. They do not knowingly mistranslate sources in foreign languages to make them more serviceable to themselves. They do not willfully invent words, phrases, quotations, incidents, and events for which there is no historical evidence to make their arguments more plausible to their readers.
“At least, they do not do any of these things if they wish to retain any kind of reputable status as historians.”(more…)
The kind of activism undertaken when you “do something” about a problem by tweeting or posting links to Facebook, without any intent of ever actually doing something. Nothing more than a nonsense feelgood gesture so that one can say they “did something about” whatever trendycause they’re pretending to care about. Usually only lasts a week or two before the cause is completely forgotten (i.e. it stops being cool to forward / retweet on the subject).
EXAMPLE: “I forwarded a video about some unspeakable atrocities in a country I didn’t know existed until I watched the video. My hashtag activism is going to accomplish something!” – [UrbanDictionary]
When my partner Richard and I joined the Kings of Code Hack Battle at the Next Web Europe Conference in Amsterdam last week, we knew that we wanted to make an app that would stand in stark contrast to the infamously misogynist “Tit staring app” from TechCrunch Disrupt last year. It’s about time that we change the “dude” culture of programming into a progressive group that builds apps for social change […](more…)
Unfinished blog I’ll never finish, presented as is –
You can take the man out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the man.
Not as though there is a shortage of things to dislike the Vatican about, but at the top of the list of persistent, relentless annoyances has to be the continual caterwauling against the concept of gay marriage, as though it would bring about the collapse of civilisation itself – whilst turning a blind eye to, and denying, the existence of homosexuality within its clerical cloisters and, unforgivably, not only denying the existence of rampant paedophilia, but effectively providing a safe house network for paedophile priests to evade criminal prosecution and continue molesting children to their hearts content as they are shuffled from diocese to diocese.
Ireland, according to the cesspit of lies, is 84.2% catholic. And if you place credence in urban folklore, 98% drunk. Certainly, St. Patrick’s day – which rolled around again just recently and is something to either celebrate or fear, depending on your liver and tolerance for belligerent and incomprehensible assholes – does nothing to dispel this figure. (more…)
The harassment must cease, the shameless harassers must be named.
Anonymous asked: “to the people asking for evidence on these accusations: missing the point. Believe survivors.”
“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.” — Douglas Adams
I admit I have been very lax in my baboonology for the bulk of this year. This is a combination of mostly having better things to do coupled with what I guess can be called cognitive RSI – the gibberish at freefromthoughtblogs and skepchick, for me, is a cumulative toxin and repeat exposure does not allow for immunisation, but rather the nausea has steadily increased to the point that it is now actually painful to see. Nevertheless, I have maintained a reasonable level of awareness of their relentless psychodramatics and 唱板板 via private channels and various news feeds.
It was the latter that pointed me to a link containing the first quote above, which leapt out from the surrounding sea of yet another pernicious, well poisoning, muckraking, pro-baboontumblr page. The statement in itself maligns no one directly – its real repugnance lies in what it expects of the reader. It is perhaps the most succinct précis I have seen to date that represents what, ultimately, is freefromthoughtblogs’ and skepchick’s true mission statement –
“scrutinise and question everything; ‘everything’ of course, does not include us. Us you believe, always and without evidence, for we are faith based organisations. Every time you doubt anything we say, no matter how preposterous, we drown a kitten”. (more…)
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…)
Let me paint a landscape for you as 2012 ceased to be…
On November 12 2012, Russel Blackford, in a rare moment of absolute exasperation, tweeted what most folks actually feel, but restrain themselves from articulating –
I will NOT be attending any convention / conference that features Rebecca Watson as a speaker. What were the Australian Skeptics thinking? smh
On November 10, Rebecca Watson took her very own brand of air-headed cluelessness to new heights in a talk at Skepticon 5, dragging evolutionary psychology through the mud as some kind of tool of patriarchal oppression. Whether Blackford’s tweet was a direct result of this exhibit of buffoonery or not is not known, but doesn’t seem likely given the video was not posted until November 20. If by some chance it did, it only vindicates Blackford’s outburst as Watson now consistently paints a picture of skeptics and atheists to the outside world as a bunch of ill-educated, poorly read, perpetually squabbling clowns. Remember Galileo Becky? No, that was not an excusable “slip up” – it’s basic junior high school level history/science knowledge. It reeked of the pig ignorance of a stupid girl-child that fills her vast expanses of idle time between booze ups playing video games and tweeting snark instead self-education – the latter being what many folks would assume came as a minimum responsibility for someone that feeds at the teat of the community and claims to represent it. (more…)
Quite amazing. Ophelia “crazy cunt lady” Benson is an unstoppable machine. Only days after posting the comprehensive study on her linguistic barbarism, she manages to hork up this fur-ball of incoherent snarling in what is pretty much her standard format nowadays, stolen“fair use” quoted text outnumbering her “original” words by ~2:1 (124:72 to be precise in this instance). Here she is spitting and cursing about Saudi plans to electronically monitor the movements of their women, much as privileged westerners track house pets. The article she cites, and others elsewhere, are short on detail as to exactly how the Saudis are going to implement this, but it looks like they are falling short of implanted microchips – (more…)
Quantifying the incidence of gratuitous snarl and fear/pity language on Butterflies & Wheels
Dr. Franc Hoggle
Department of Gyno-Podiatry, Universidad El Toro Caca Grande La Habana Vieja, Cuba 10100
-= ABSTRACT =-
Westernised professional wailing (唱板板, or “singing the banban”1) as a career and lifestyle choice is one of the most challenging, yet least known, branches of the classical performing arts. It distinguishes itself from its eastern roots – that of professional mourners hired for funerals as public showing of the social status of the deceased – by being far more entrepre’neurial and a business model in its own right. It is a complex, multidisciplinary form of expression that distills the finer subtleties from Munchausen Syndrome and certain aspects of HPD into its own unique brand psychodramatic theatre. Notable laureates of this school have been Glenn Beck, Anita Bryant, Joseph McCarthy, Jenny McCarthy (no relation), Catharine MacKinnon and Fred Phelps – those that have taken the mundane, the nonsensical and the nonexistant and, through applied hyperbole, hysteria and robotic repetition of fear-mongering and artificial “us and them” division, have escalated non-problems to the status of cancers that threaten to undermine society itself, thus ensnaring and captivating an audience of the feeble and the powerless that are incapable of articulating their bottled up angst unassisted. As with all styles of thespian expression, language is the primary tool and here the language of demonisation and persecution is the key to establishing a stage presence and an unforgettable persona in the eyes of the target audience. Yet this language is too seldom analysed, let alone quantified. This paper attempts to enumerate the frequency with which the language of demonisation and persecution occurs in one particular contemporary ideological ghetto – that of the collective that has formed around freefromthoughtblogs, Skepchick and it’s mutant offspring Atheism+.
Mere logical fallacies are no longer sufficient to capture the full scope of the collective derangement that pours unchecked out of freefromthoughtblogs, Skepchick and now it’s brain-damaged crack-baby Atheism+. Their cocktail of rabid witch-hunting, indoctrinational disinformation and the nouveau theology of Oppression is birthing its whole own schema of perfidious gobbledygook that defies classification as simply fallacy and deserves its own sub-section in the Skeptics Dictionary – that of logical incoherencies.
A couple, such as ad himinem and reductio ad Watsonum, have been mentioned previously. A broader principle, that of Myers’ law – that what you say to any denizen of their sheltered workshops never has any realistic relation to what they actually hear – has also been postulated and covers the origin of much of the baboons’ general incoherence. Myers’ law is easy enough for anyone to verify by simply attempting to initiate a discussion in any of their forums (degree of difficulty: like falling off a toilet drunk). (more…)
grey lining 