Quickies

Skepchick Quickies 6.7

Amanda

Amanda works in healthcare, is a loudmouthed feminist, and proud supporter of the Oxford comma.

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33 Comments

  1. “The road to Hell is paved with religious exemptions”

    ?!?

    From a Jewish group?!?

    I think some people are still unclear on the concept.

    1. I have heard right-wing Jews dis religious tolerance before. I have a hard time believing that stupidity alone could account for them not seeing the obvious consequences of a lack of religious tolerance in a country where they are a religious minority; something else must be going on.

  2. No surprise to find out that Andrew Klavan’s load of BS is hosted on pajamasmedia. That’s the same website that hired Sam “I’m not actually a plumber, or named Joe” Wurzelbacher as a war correspondent.

    It’s always hilarious to hear right-wingers blame all women for their own inability to get a date. These are the same people who tell the poor and the destitute to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and stop blaming the world for their problems. Klavan is just another graduate from the Newt Gingrich school of Do As I Say, Not As I Do, with a Masters in Misogyny and a minor in Being a Hopeless Dickhead Loser.

  3. So if I’m understanding that article correctly, if I get a pony then that will cancel out my atheism when it comes to attracting girls, right?

    1. Keith – yes. Yes it probably would. The question is – do you *want* to date an equestrian? She’ll probably like the horse more than you. (That’s a reflection of equestrians, not you per se)

  4. Is that Conservapedia article a joke? I’m assuming they must have some kind of sense of humor on that site, so maybe this is their unfunny expression of that?

    1. Yeah, I’m certain that it’s an example of Conservative humor. For something more humorous though, check out the citations at the end of that essay and note how many of the citations are just links to other Conservapedia articles.

      1. Yeah, what convinced me that the pony article wasn’t a Poe was that wasn’t all that funny. That and the fact that the underlying message was “atheists aren’t going to get laid.”

    2. Conservapedia is the poster child for Poe’s law. Check out the following entry, and try to determine of it is sincere or satirical:

      http://conservapedia.com/Unicorn

      “The unicorn is generally held to be a horned member of the horse baramin, however a growing number of Creation researchers are theorizing that the unicorn is actually a member of the ceratopsian baramin.”

      You gotta love the doctored illustration of the triceratops skeleton that accompanies this text. Early on, there were some jokers posting to Conservapedia, but they eventually caught on and got a lot stricter with posting rights.

  5. > most ponies are not obese!
    That’s because obesity in horses / ponies causes laminitis/founder, which, if not treated will kill them in short order. No foot, no horse.

    Also, ponies generally are a pain in the ass. I’d bet my bottom dollar that pony with the young lady in the red shirt is 2 seconds away from dumping her ass. He doesn’t look happy.

    Ponies and the 12 year old girls who ride them are generally as tough as nails. Both will mess you up if you mess with them.

  6. Hey guys, did you know that black padded bras can actually make preteen girls pregnant? And showing their midriff at the beach will magically make them have sex, and without condoms? It’s not actually sperm that fertilizes eggs; it’s red lace.

    Ugh, a lot of things mentioned in that article are great suggestions. I’m a big fan of reducing all kinds of advertising to young people. But I am so sick of people thinking that forcing girls into certain types of clothing will somehow prevent them from becoming sexually mature. Band geeks in granny panties can get have sex and get pregnant just as easily as mean girls in miniskirts.

    1. How those burkas workin’ out?

      They want internet tech to block children from content they deem inappropriate, but the problem is children can lie about their ages… Don’t they know there is a much more fundamental problem on the Internet? Not only can users lie about their age, they can lie about their species! So when they claim to be 54, what you don’t know is that’s in dog-years.

  7. The report that is mentioned regarding the “sexualisation” of young children was made by the chief executive of the Mothers’ Union, a man called Reg Bailey.

    That’s right, a man is the chief executive of the Mothers’ Union.

    But anyway, it is perhaps worth knowing a little about this organisation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers%27_Union

    Incidentally, I’m not sure if it made it into the final report or not, but one of the early proposals was to ban same sex kissing on TV before 9pm. That probably gives you an idea as to where this guy is coming from.

    The government claims this was an independent review, but this guy’s record shows that it was never going to come to any other conclusion.

  8. SGU could devote an entire podcast to “name that logical fallacy” for each paragraph in the ponies article. Actually, this is not true; they would start repeating the same fallacies after the first few paragraphs. Maybe a drinking game instead?
    .
    Is all of Conservapedia that stupid, or is this just an attempt at humor?

  9. Girls love to dress up like adults, and from what I remember non of it was at all sexual. Part of the growing up process, explorationa and finding out who they area, I don’t see that the sexualisation of children is anything other than an attempt to wind up parents and get them to focus on things other than the goverment doing a crappy job. More of the “nanny state” imosing archaic morals onto society as a whole.

  10. Girls love to dress up like adults, and from what I remember non of it was at all sexual. Part of the growing up process, explorations and finding out who they area, I don’t see that the sexualisation of children is anything other than an attempt to wind up parents and get them to focus on things other than the government doing a crappy job. More of the “nanny state” imposing archaic morals onto society as a whole.

  11. eek, double post, sorry guys, please feel free to remove the one with the typos (first one).

  12. So I checked some other articles on Conservapedia and found a delicious morsel of fact (however unrelated it may be).

    To Conservapedia’s credit, their summary of the Japanese system of postpositions (more commonly called “particles”) is pretty spot on.

    Then they go on and say that it is a more “Conservative” language in terms of feminism, which is simply not true. They’ve stunned me with their ability to drop the figurative ball.

    “You see, what you’ve done there is you’ve not understood.” -J.Carr, QI

  13. Regarding the pony article: Sometimes, I can’t tell the difference between Conservapedia and the Landover Baptist Church (the living embodiment of Poe’s Law). In defense of Conservapedia, I did read one article that was factually accurate and interesting: An exchange between Andy Schafly and Dr. Richard Lenski, who performed a study showing adaptation of E. coli strains in a laboratory setting. I don’t know why it’s still on Conservapedia, because it shows Andy Schafly and his conservative drones to be the ignorant, intellectually dishonest cretins they are. Highly recommended: http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Lenski_dialog

  14. I’d like to read your response to the claims in the following pdf entitled “What Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Has Done to Massachusetts”: http://www.massresistance.org/docs/marriage/effects_of_ssm.pdf

    (Taken from http://www.massresistance.org/region/newyork/index.html)

    Personally I wouldn’t be surprised to find out, after some investigation, that much of this stuff is exaggerated. But some of it seems pretty wild, such as the part about “The Little Black Book: Queer in the 21st Century”. Is that stuff really true?

    1. I didn’t read the whole thing[1], stopped when they got to the David Parker[2] thing, which is a bit of utter lying about which I happen to have personal knowledge.[3] Although his is the fourth Parker was not arrested for demanding to be informed in advance of when the subject of homosexuality was going to be discussed in his kid’s kindergarten class. He was arrested for refusing to leave when the school was being closed for the night. It was 6:24 PM, an hour and a half after the school was closed for the day, the janitor was off the clock and had to lock up, but Parker refused to leave. He was invited to come back the next day or any other time at his convenience during normal school hours, but he refused. The school authorities had no choice but to call the police and given that he refused to leave escorted by the police, have him arrested.
      .
      Obviously, the wingnuts don’t understand civil disobedience. If you want to force the authorities to arrest you to call attention to the issue, fine, but don’t go about afterwards lying about it or claiming that they should not have arrested you.
      .
      His issue was bogus anyway. The school had a series of supplemental material packets called “book bags” that the kids could bring home and look at with their parents. I think they were stored in Bean Bags or something similar. They consisted of books, CDs, DVDs, sample materials, notes, and cover letters for parents, on all sorts of subjects, history, science, medicine, construction equipment, and so forth. One of the packets was about diversity. Included was a book (written at a kindergarten level, of course) that had a page and picture of many different sorts of families, single children, twins, older and younger siblings, single parents with and without involvement from the other biological parent, step-siblings, live-in grandparents, kids living with foster or adoptive families, or with other relatives, such as aunts and uncles and cousins, and so on and so forth. (See how many you can think of.) Exactly one of the families had a kid with two moms. So it wasn’t even a matter of classroom discussion.
      .
      I could spend several hours going through this list claim by claim, refuting all of them (except the examples of bigotry not being pandered to, which I hope are true), but I have better things to do with my life. I’ll leave for the
      SPLC, which already lists MassResistance as a hate group.
      .
      [1] I have since scanned the rest of the list. Most of the items that aren’t lies or deliberately misleading are good things.
      .
      [2] WBC Warning!
      .
      [3] One of the founders of the company I work for, and a good friend, was on the Lexington School Committee at the time, which is why I know so much about this.

      1. Please give us back a preview/edit function! Bad link close tag (I think), but the huge red italic section above, starting with “book” and ending with “SPLC” is supposed to be two separate links consisting only of the 1st and last words. The links work, but the paragraph and a half between them isn’t a link.
        .
        BTW, the book bags of supplementary material were entirely voluntary; the teachers sent the parents a list of available bags, and the parents could then request one to be sent home with their kid. It worked kind of like Netflix; you couldn’t get another bag until you sent the current one back, intact.

  15. Yeah, I kind of figured the guy must have caused a scene, given the fact that he was arrested. They made it seem like he was arrested for simply requesting to be told in advance what the child was to learn in school.

    Still, I’m really surprised to see this:
    “…the Massachusetts Department of Public Health helped produce The Little Black Book, Queer in the 21st Century, a hideous work of obscene pornography which was given to kids at Brookline High School on April 30, 2005. Among other things, it gives “tips” to boys on how to perform oral sex on other males, masturbate other males, and how to “safely” have someone urinate on you for sexual pleasure. It also included a directory of bars in Boston where young men meet for anonymous sex.”

    I find it hard to imagine that being true. But if it’s not, how could the real events be exaggerated into a description like that? Either something completely unbelievable has happened or someone has exaggerated (or flat out lied) to a never-before-seen level of reckless dishonesty.

    1. You are commenting on blog post that is over 2 weeks old, so it is unlikely many people will ever see this.
      .
      Be that as it may, I’ve done some googling for you. I couldn’t find anything on the Mass Dept of Public Health web site (not surprising since it turns out not to have created this pamphlet, just provided information to the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, which published it. Follow the link for their version of the story. For more background, on about the 4th page of Google results (after dozens of links to various Jebus, right-wing and/or clearly homophobic sites) I finally found someone who wasn’t clutching his pearls, so to speak. (Note that this isn’t exactly breaking news; it all went down over 6 years ago.)
      .
      So, yes, MassResistance is lying through its teeth.

    2. Okay, let me make this clear since you don’t seem to have gotten this from the MassResistance website: They are a hate group. Would you trust anything that the KKK said about African Americans? That’s how you should treat anything said by MassResistance about LGBT people.

      Of course they lie, they have every reason to! And to give you an example of their level of sophistication: A friend of mine was volunteering recently at a local gay youth event, staffing a table with pamphlets about sexual health. A member of MassResistance (known from having seen her at other events) came up with a camera and a piece of notebook paper with “Press Pass” written on it safety pinned to her pants. She then talked with my friend about how “these events are usually so threatening to the press” and how it was nice they weren’t being threatening this year.

      What she meant was, members of MassResistance have previously tried to “infiltrate” gay youth events and when they were turned away for being adults (it was a teen-only event, the only adults allowed were the chaperones) they threw a huge fit, followed by a very nasty write up on their site.

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