Poetry July 30, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in Poetry.2 comments
In the recent theme of poetry on war and violence, I give you Thomas Hardy’s
“Channel Firing”
Mel Gibson: Humanitarian July 29, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in News and politics, bigotry, wingnuts.3 comments
A little tip for you, Mel. If you’re going to continue to make millions of religious folks, it’s probably best not to be caught drunk driving. And if you’re interested in distancing yourself from your Holocaust-denying father, perhaps you shouldn’t make anti-Semitic slurs so ugly that even WorldNutDaily brings them up. Just be glad that you’re famous, because those remarks, along with calling a female officer “sugar-tits” would likely get anyone else quite the beating.
Don’t worry, though, you won’t be the first self-righteous asshole revealed as a bigot and a hypocrite. You’ll just join the massive list.
Israeli attacks kill UN observers again July 29, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, News and politics.3 comments
For the second time, Israeli airstrikes have killed UN workers, both times at official–and marked–UN monitoring stations. After the first attack, the UN said the attacks appeared to be intentional. The second attack, which brings the death toll of UN observers to 6, may hamper the peace process (such as it is):
But even before the latest UN casualties, the UN had warned that the deaths of the four monitors could deter countries from contributing to the proposed peacekeeping force.
UN deputy chief Mark Malloch-Brown also said the organisation still had “serious concerns” about the incident, which happened despite repeated UN pleas for the Israelis to stop firing.
It doesn’t please me to suggest this, but perhaps “deterring” a peacekeeping force is precisely the point. Israel doesn’t want to stop this war, and they know they may have to do so once peacekeepers arrive. They don’t trust the UN to disarm Hezbollah (and not without some justification) so it seems possible that these attacks are not accidents. After all, the American-armed Israelis may have the world’s best Air Force, and as they’ve routinely been targeting and destroying fleeing cars and ambulances, it doesn’t seem like they miss often.
Meanwhile, roughly 600 people, “a third of them children,” have been killed by the Israelis. I’m sure they, like the tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, will be written off as “collateral damage.”
A match made in wingnut heaven July 26, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in News and politics, wingnuts.add a comment
Judge Roy Moore and Worldnutdaily, together at last. Now Moore can continue his press to make America into a theocracy while publishing his views on a website so extreme he’ll seem relatively sane compared to those around him.
That slurping sound you’re hearing is Ed Brayton licking his chops.
Juan Cole on academics blogging July 25, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in Blogging, News and politics.1 comment so far
Juan Cole has responded to this Chronicle of Higher Education piece about the dangers blogging might present to one’s academic interests. Cole writes:
Some implied that I am misbehaving out here, to which I reply with this anecdote.
Henry David Thoreau refused to pay the poll tax put in to support the immoral American-Mexican War, and was sentenced to a night in jail. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson came to visit him and asked him “David, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?” If intellectuals aren’t misbehaving in the sense of dissenting and critiquing the collective grounds of our political being, then they aren’t doing their jobs.
That’s just the beginning. Read the rest.
Zombies != Clowns July 25, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in Blogging, News and politics.1 comment so far
Now there’s a headline I never expected to write, but as PZ Myer’s explains, now’s the time to use it.
Doug on the Israeli/Lebanese conflict, take 2 July 25, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, News and politics, wingnuts.add a comment
You have to hand it to blindly Israel-loving right-wing extremists. They just don’t quit. The latest example is this post where he elaborates on his previous post with even more logical fallacies and simplistic reasoning. The fun just doesn’t stop over there, folks.
He starts with anecdotal evidence about murdered Israelis, for the anecdote is friend to the uninformed and illogical everywhere. He’d like to get us on his side by talking about murdered Israeli kids. But in pointing out this obvious atrocity, he ignores the many Israeli atrocities, and the fact that far more Palestinians have died in the conflict over the region than have Israelis.
But then we get to the really good stuff:
You’re like Hitler too, probably July 25, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in News and politics, language and lit.1 comment so far
After all, basically everyone else is.
Evidence for evolution #7,852 July 25, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in Religion, Science, wingnuts.4 comments
James Downard has posted part three of his response to Ann Coulter’s “science.” It’s a great read, and I suggest you check it out. Meanwhile, in the interest of continuing to point out the overwhelming evidence for evolution, I bring you this excerpt:
And remember those teeth [in Archaeopteryx] that Coulter also mentioned, and which (like the tails) disappeared among the Mesozoic birds? By some curious coincidence, modern birds still retain the genetic mechanisms for making teeth, as evidenced by Kollar & Fisher (1980), Chen et al. (2000), Narayanan et al. (2001) and Mitsiadis et al. (2003). If modern toothless birds were created independently of their ancient toothed counterparts, why would a designer have deliberately (maliciously?) equipped them with unnecessary genetic systems for making teeth? Was the fellow a dimwit, or perhaps again it was a case of the designer admiring Darwin so much that he liked making 21st century evolutionary geneticists as happy as possible?
Such evidence perfectly fits with the evolutionary model. It presents huge problems for a creationist model (though none truly exists and no real predictions have been made from such a “model”), though, because creating the genetic material for teeth in a species that does not have teeth is wasted design. It’s like giving humans the genetic material for feathers.
Of course, if species share a common ancestor, it makes perfect sense.
Distopian Futures and the rise of the radical right July 24, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in News and politics, reproductive rights, wingnuts.4 comments
Some time ago, I wrote about what happens to the conception of life in countries where this “culture of life” bullshit is taken seriously. Basically, in the rush to make sure that fetuses only get aborted by God, El Salvador has made it dangerous indeed to provide an abortion in almost any circumstances.
But surely such a thing would not happen in the US? Well, of course it would: once you’ve bought into the logic that abortion isn’t a woman’s control over her own body, but rather a murder, it’s not hard to take the next step and start calling doctors murders. In fact, it’s likely to happen here if the SCOTUS overturns Row:
Doctors who perform illegal abortions under the terms of HB1215 could face a first-degree murder charge under revised homicide provisions in South Dakota law, a lawyer for the South Dakota State Medical Association says.
Pierre lawyer Dave Gerdes said in a legal memo written for the association that if HB1215 survives challenges at the ballot and, possibly, in court, it could combine with a revised state homicide statute to pose an ominous legal threat to doctors charged with violating the law.
“It is at least possible that a prosecutor or a court will decide that a physician performing a procedure qualifying as an abortion under the language of the new statute can be prosecuted for first-degree murder,” Gerdes wrote in the memo.
