Faith Over Facts

From Down with Tyranny:

Just the Facts, Ma'am

One:  Nothing inside a woman's body that is not outside that body and breathing air is a baby, a child, an infant, a precious life, an unborn fucking anything.

Two:  It's a clump of cells, a fetus, a tumor, and none of your fucking business.

Three: Until a single legislative body in the United States of America passes a single fucking law regulating anything a man does with his own body, no legislative body in the United States of America has any right to pass a single fucking law regulating anything a woman does with her own body.

Four:  It is none of your fucking business.

Five: Abortion is a simple, safe, effective medical procedure, and none of your fucking business.

Six: Abortion. On. Demand.  Free of Charge. No Questions Asked.  No Requirements. Available to Everyone, 24-7, on Every Fucking Street Corner in America.

Seven: Because it is None of Your Fucking Business.

Eight: Questioning, much less challenging, the above facts, should result in felony charges of Violating Civil Rights, International Human Rights Violations and Felony Conspiracy to Enslave Female Citizens.

Nine:  Attempts to restrict a woman's bodily autonomy have nothing to do with pregnancy, abortion, childbirth, babies, children, or morality.  They are about denying civil and human rights to women.  They are about restricting civil and human rights to white, straight, xian, rich, conservative, repug  men.

Ten: The rest of us are subhuman, fit only for slavery.

Disagree?  Fuck off and die in a fire.

Still think making abortions illegal will lead to a child-happy paradise?  Yeah, you're a moron.

Complainers About "Political Correctness" Are Just Afraid to Debate

PZ Myers:

“Political correctness” is a bullshit term used to disparage something important: thoughtfulness and honest discussion. Complaining about political correctness just means you’re admitting that you have zero interest in listening to the other side.

 Of course not; they never have the facts on their side, so they will lose any reasonable debate.  They just scream "political correctness" and run away.

Force Them to Pay

Rude Pundit:

Conservative beliefs are utterly delusional and fly in the face of all facts and all aspects of human behavior. We know that gun control works because it works everywhere gun laws are strict. We know that limiting access to abortion and birth control ends up harming women. We know that use of a private email server isn't a major crime. We know that football players protesting by kneeling during the National Anthem is protected speech. But conservatives have to keep the rubes at bay. The only way to reconcile the abject, fucked-up hypocrisy that conservatives live with is that they know. They just don't fucking care because there has been no cost to not caring since 2008 (and much longer in some congressional districts).

And so nothing will be done when it comes to guns in the wake of Las Vegas (and Orlando and Newtown and...). Until they are forced to pay for their hypocrisy, for the complete and utter fraud they have perpetrated (including the support for Trump), nothing is going to ever happen.

Witness

Divine Irony:

Existence

Divine Irony:

(Source: iamatheistgirl)

If It's Not Breathing Air, It's A Tumor

Kevin Drum makes a heroic effort to expose the mendacity of anti-woman freakazoids who talk about blastocysts as if cell clumps are kindergartners, but in trying to be "reasonable," he drops the ball.

 

Science Fact: Fetuses are not human beings.  This is not a question on which reasonable people can disagree.  It is a science fact.  Shame on supposed pro-choicers who claim otherwise.

Over at The Corner, Alexandra DeSanctis is unhappy that Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood’s executive vice president, refuses to say whether she considers a fetus to be a human being:

She avoided the questions because the abortion industry is built on the lie that the unborn child isn’t a living human, and if they acknowledge that this claim is fiction, their entire system will collapse.

....People on either side of the abortion debate can disagree on what rights that human being has. We can argue over the relevance of fetal viability, and we can differ on whether a woman’s right to “bodily autonomy” is more important than her child’s right to life. But these two fundamentally contradictory positions about the child’s humanity cannot both be correct; either each unborn child is a living human being, or it isn’t.....Until pro-abortion leaders such as Laguens are willing to admit to this humanity, it will remain impossible to have an honest disagreement about the competing rights at stake in this debate.

Well, I'm not on TV and nobody cares what I think, so I can say what Laguens wouldn't: a fetus is not a living human in any sensible way. I can't prove this. It's like asking whether a beanbag is a chair. It's an opinion, not a fact. 

As for why Laguens wouldn't answer, it's not because she's dishonest. Certainly no more so than pro-lifers who refuse to say whether women who get abortions should be thrown in jail for murder. In both cases there are arguments to be made either way, but none of them really matter. The real reason for reticence is that neither side wants to make scary-sounding statements that might drive moderates away from their side. 

In any case, it's not as if this is a bewildering mystery. "Life," in anything other than a technical biological sense, is a matter of human judgment.¹ We decide when it starts and when it ends. Both of these are gray areas, but they're gray areas where we set up semi-arbitrary rules: 20 weeks or viability or third trimester or EEG flatline or lack of retinal response or something similar. What other choice do we have? If you're going to have the government involved, you have to create a reasonably bright-line rule for people to follow.

Speaking personally, I offer up this hypothetical. On your left you have a baby. On your right you have a vial with an embryo in it. At the end of 60 seconds, one of them will be randomly crushed unless you make a choice of which to save. So which is it?

I don't think anyone, pro-life or otherwise, would hesitate. You'd save the baby even if the vial had two embryos in it. Or a hundred. Or a thousand. There's simply no visceral sense in which we genuinely feel that a fertilized egg is a human being. You can make an intellectual argument for it, but not one that will survive contact with the real world.

¹Needless to say, none of this applies to religious arguments. Dogma is not open to debate with nonbelievers.

Also, there is no such thing as an anti-abortion argument that does not boil down to freakazoid stupidity.  It's religion all the way down.

Just a Theory

Divine Irony:

The Resistance: Fact-Correcting To Their Faces

No, you do not have to sit there and seethe or scream obscenities when trumpies repeat the lies and fantasies they have been fed by wingnut media.  Give 'em facts and watch them deflate.  A lady in a focus group teaches you how.

Wonkette:

What we didn’t think we’d see today was a whole mess of “regular people,” as focus grouped by none other than Frank Fucking Luntz, who had a hell of a lot more to say — correctly — than the pundits did. They were not buying his bullshit! Not even for a second! (Well, a few guys did, for a second, and they were SHOUTED DOWN by people who KNOW THE SCORE.) We know you never watch the videos, but make like an Abba song and Take a Chance on this one! It’s FUN! 

OOOH BOY they are SPITFIRES! Whenever any of them are incorrect, the others hoot and shout him down with FACTS! Like, one dude says “hey, he gave an olive branch to the Democrats,” and they are like NO HE DID NOT, HE SAID THEY HAD TO WORK WITH HIM, and then another guy claims the Congressional Black Congress wouldn’t even meet with poor President Trump and the big black woman is all NUH UH UH and she backs it up with the real facts of the matter — that they had sent him a letter in JANUARY and he STILL HASN’T RESPONDED TO IT, and she is not having that dude’s JIVE. (She didn’t say “jive,” but she didn’t even need to, she was so rad and good and loud and facty.)

Frank Luntz: “OKAY, WE’RE NOT ALL GOING TO JUMP ON MARK AT ONE TIME.”

No, they will TAKE TURNS.

And this is how we must all be, every single fucking day, when we are met with half-baked alternafacts from people who get their info from Alex Jones or Trump (same thing) and shout them all down with TRUTH, and also #RESIST.

Freakazoids Stealing Public Rado Waves

Yes, stealing.  I don't care how much they paid for it.  That's a public radio station using broadcasts bands owned by the public. Public radio stations are the sole source of unbiased radio news in almost all the communities they reach.  Now that's gone in Northern Kentucky.

And it's being replaced by freakazoid propaganda, indoctrination and lies about creationism and the property status of women and children.

From the Herald:

The Northern Kentucky University Board of Regents on Tuesday approved the sale of campus radio station WNKU.

The radio station, which began broadcasting in 1985, will be sold to the Bible Broadcasting Corporation for $1.9 million, reported The Northerner, NKU’s independent student news organization. The university also sold WNKE for “$700,000 to Educational Media Foundation, which syndicates Christian programming through Air1 and K-LOVE,” The Northerner also reported.

WNKU was sold due to dwindling state funding and the $1 million subsidy the university expected to pay at the of this year for the station, said university spokesperson Amanda Nageleisen. The station had about 20 full and part-time employees.

WNKU will remain on the air until its sale is approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Citymusic.com organized a rally early Tuesday at the Northern Kentucky University Student Union Hall to decry the sale.

“While the executive session is closed to the public, we hope to send a message to the board before and after the session that the over 3,000 member stakeholders who fund WNKU will not stand idly by while NKU’s Board of Regents determines the fate of our station,” Citymusic.com wrote on Facebook.

The motherfuckers have already bought up every public hospital in the state, ensuring that medical values will adhere to those of Bronze Age desert goatfuckers.

Now it's the broadcast band.  Public schools are next, with libraries and bookstores to follow.


The motherfuckers started by buying

Beware the Shallow State

 I am old enough to remember when people who were educated, knowledgeable and experienced were respected rather than denigrated.  When becoming educated and knowledgeable and experienced were common goals among children of all classes and races, strongly encouraged by their less-educated parents.

Yes, the Know-Nothings have always been with us, but they have never been championed by a major political party.  Until now.

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

At Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf writes that it is not the "deep state" Americans need to worry about, but the emergent shallow one that "actively eschews experience, knowledge, relationships, insight, craft, special skills, tradition, and shared values." With Trump as its avatar, the shallow state believes:

... knowledge is not a useful tool but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man and woman. The same is true for experience, skills, and know-how. These things require time and work and study and often challenge our systems of belief. Truth is hard; shallowness is easy.

If this is greatness, it is not the kind lovingly preserved in museums as a cultural legacy. If this is greatness, it will not produce classic works of art treasured for celebrating "What a piece of work is a man!"

Rothkopf writes:

Art is not an adornment to society. It is not a luxury. It is the purpose of society. It becomes our legacy. It is also, however, our teacher; it helps us consider that which is around us and what we want to be. It makes demands on us that in turn lead us to place demands on ourselves and those with whom we live and work. And that is precisely why these programs have been targeted by Trump. They are the enemies of the shallow state. So, too, of course, are the members of the press whom Trump has mislabeled as “enemies of the people.” The only people they are the enemy of are those who are at war with truth and thought: Trump and his supporters, the champions of the shallow state. That is why, while it is easy to simply be angry or to laugh at a president who doesn’t read or to be distracted by half-baked conspiracy theories like the deep state, we must recognize that the shallow state is much more pernicious. This administration has come to power because America has allowed public discourse, the quality of education we give our kids, and the standards we set for ourselves to decline. Trump seeks to institutionalize that decline. He is at war with that which has made our society great. He seeks to eviscerate the elements of our government and discredit those within our society who are champions of the depth on which any civilization depends.

Your Beliefs

Divine Irony:

• ↵ Reblogged from cure-your-delusions

The War on Facts and Truth

Political Animal:

For those of you who questioned why I hit the theme of Trump as chaos agent so hard yesterday, this is the kind of environment I see this administration creating. It’s also why so many writers lately, including Mike Lofgren, are using the term “gaslighting” for what is happening. He spells out the effects on the public with this:

Aside from reinforcing the Trump base, the next four years of non-stop gaslighting could erode the basic standards of discourse in a healthy civil society. The truly horrible thing about propaganda in authoritarian regimes is not that it convinces the true believers, but that it demoralizes opponents by saying in effect: “Yes, we know that you know we are lying, but we don’t care! We do it because we can and you can’t stop us!” As for the majority of apolitical citizens, it infects them with a corrosive cynicism and dissuades them from all forms of public engagement. Apathy may be a more powerful silencer of dissent than overt physical coercion.

That’s why, for an authoritarian regime, “If nothing is true, then anything is possible.”

Our Anti-Fact World

Robyn Pennachia at Wonkette:

How do we come to terms with the fact that we are moving towards a society in which a large segment of the population would take the Weekly World News seriously if it were to come back into print? Where actual facts are met with more suspicion than bizarre speculations based on no evidence whatsoever? The people who believe in things like Pizzagate are supposed to be wearing sandwich boards and too many sweaters and hollering at you while you wait for the bus, not on the nightly news. But here we are!

Keep It To Yourself

Divine Irony:

(Source: reasonable-atheist)

Beliefs vs. Facts

Divine Irony:

The War on Religion

Divine Irony:

Nobody "Believes" in Climate Change

Nobody "believes" in gravity, heliocentrism or evolution, either.  Either you accept the scientific fact or you're an irredeemable moron.

Everybody who claims to not "believe" in scientific facts, please report immediately to the roof of the closest 10-story building and then jump off. 

Opinion vs. Theory

Every time I hear some repug or freakazoid say she doesn't "believe" in a scientific fact like global warming or evolution - or even the non-existence of biological "race" - because it's just a theory, I want to ask if she "believes" in the theory of gravity. 

 

Juanita Jean:

I have a theory, too.  My theory is that creationists are people who did not do well at science in school and want the answer to every question on the science test to be, “You know, God.”

PZ Myers:

I sure wish more people understood the meaning of theory in science, but at least Piers Sellers does a good job of explaining the concept. I try to hammer into my students (as my teachers hammered into me) the primacy of evidence — observation and measurement — but evidence always has to be for or against something, and that something is theory. You can’t have a theory without evidence, and you can’t have evidence without a theory to give it meaning. So I’m always happy to see another explanation of this core concept of science.

Fundamentally, a theory in science is not just a whim or an opinion; it is a logical construct of how we think something works, generally agreed upon by scientists and always in agreement with the available observations. A good example is Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation, which says that every physical object in the universe exerts a gravity force field around itself, with the strength of that field depending on its mass. The theory—one simple equation—does a superb job of explaining our observations of how planets orbit around the sun, and was more than good enough to make the calculations we needed to send spacecraft to the moon and elsewhere. Einstein improved on Newton’s theory when it comes to large-scale astronomical phenomena, but, for everyday engineering use, Newton’s physics works perfectly well, even though it is more than three hundred years old.

One danger of the public misunderstanding of this idea is that they do equate theory and opinion; they tear down successful theories with rhetoric and ignorance, and they also elevate nonsense by labeling it, without comprehension, a theory. And I could piss in the snow and call it a book, too.

But theories are abstract, after all, so it’s easy for people to get tricked into thinking that because something is based on theory, it could very likely be wrong or is debatable in the same way that a social issue is debatable. This is incorrect. Almost all the accepted theories that we use in the physical and biological sciences are not open to different interpretations depending on someone’s opinion, internal beliefs, gut feelings, or lobbying. In the science world, two and two make four. To change or modify a theory, as Einstein’s theories modified Newton’s, takes tremendous effort and a huge weight of experimental evidence.

This is something that should be explained to everyone visiting Answers in Genesis and their horrible dishonest “museum” and “ark park”. The central argument Ken Ham always makes is a demolition of the whole concept of theory — he claims that any alternative explanation, no matter how much it ignores the evidence, is a theory, and all theories are equal, and therefore, his bizarre, highly subjective and ideologically driven interpretation of the words of his holy book are just as much deserving of the title of “theory” as the hard-earned, constantly tested, well-supported by evidence theory of evolution.

And that’s dangerous. Ken Ham uses the degradation of theory to peddle nonsense to the rubes and make money and promote his narrow religion, but as the article explains, it’s also being used to corrupt decision-making about climate that endangers every human being on the planet.

Your Feelings Are Irrelevant

Via Divine Irony: