After 16 years of NO WARMING, Lord Christopher Monckton returns to Australia and NZ for a speaking tour late January – April 2013
Tour Title: “Carbon tax, climate scam, Agenda 21: can democracy survive all three? Lord Monckton does due diligence”.
Umm…
Even if you cherrypick the last 16 years, it’s STILL a clear warming trend. But to try to do damage control in Australia, where the Australian Board of Meteorology had to put a new color on their maps to represent the 51-54°C range… that’s chutzpah. Or dedication to your delusion. I don’t know which.
Update: Made it! Any further donations will go to helping someone else get there, likely through the Surly Grants program. Cheers!
I hate fundraising for things other than charities. I hate that I do not make enough money that I could pay my own way to these events. But I’m going to swallow my pride and hold out my hat, because I really want to be at WIS this year, given their fantastic lineup.
Lauren Becker educator, organizer, director of marketing & promotions, Center for Inquiry
Guy starts playing more video games and paying less attention to his wife. Son worries about his parents, writes to Pat Robertson for advice. Pat, naturally, blames the wife.
“Pat, how are you gonna blame the mother?” “Easy!”
Yeah, when your worldview is that the man is the head of the household and can do no wrong, obviously it has to be the wife’s fault. And in this case, it’s her fault because she’s ugly. Surely the number one cause of divorce is women becoming less bonerrific, amirite guyz?
Wonder how I became a feminist through atheism, as I’ve described previously? Well, this is a prime example of religiously-motivated gross injustice, right here, and religion is rife with such rank misogyny. Becoming attuned to it in religious teachings also opened my eyes to the myriad secular injustices against women. So now I’m a feminist, through atheism, despite some antifeminist atheists’ cries that they don’t overlap.
When even FOX News personalities scoff at the headlines they’re forced to read, you know there’s a problem with the network. At least pretty well everyone present guffawed heartily at the assertion that the Constitutional Law Professor-In-Chief doesn’t believe in the Constitution. I’m guessing because there’s an amendment to the constitution that forbids sensible regulations applied to your civilian militia? As though the 2nd Amendment was so hard to interpret!
Yeah.
And that’s not to mention the mockery of Te’o at the beginning of the clip.
What do you get when you take a haunted house, add a dash of racist “curse from deepest Africa”, a handful of horror tropes that get paid lip service but never actually make the screen, then mix in a bunch of barely-pubescent teens, and totally neglect to include any character trait that might ever make any of the characters sympathetic? Well, except for that last bit you might end up with Scooby Doo or Johnny Quest, but with that last prerequisite, you evidently end up with House of Fears.
I’ve been calling it a “gritty reboot of Killer Klowns from Outer Space”, but that may have been giving it all too much credit after I actually tried watching the trailer and not just snarking based on Stephanie’s post’s title. It looks like this 2008 stinker isn’t just about clowns, so much as a bunch of delinquent teens’ actual fears coming to life when they trespass in a Haunted House that’s scheduled to go live the next day.
So, murder by inappropriate erections and pop quizzes AMIRITE?
So tonight, we’ll be mocking this SCARY SCARY MOVIE WHAT MAKES YOU JUMP AND STUFF. Make sure to have your alcohol in appropriate spill-proof containers. It’ll be my first attempt at actually running the timing too, on top of doing the transcript. This is one of those ones you may have to have a paying service or physical DVD to obtain, so that limits its audience unfortunately. Next few we do will be on free services, to be fair to everyone.
“These all sound awful!” I hear you cry. Yes, yes, they do. “These must be mocked mercilessly”, you say. Well, then you’re in the right company. The instructions for playing along:
Start watching the movie on the appropriate Wednesday at 9 p.m. EDT.
Once you’ve got the movie going, tweet your snarky comments to @MockTM. Directing our tweets to @MockTM will keep our followers from being overwhelmed with our snark!
Set up a search for @MockTM on Twitter for the duration so you can follow along with everyone else sharing your pain.
If you have suggestions for other movies that can and should be mocked, send them to @MockTM. Preference will be given to movies that are free or stream on the major media delivery services. Watch the feed, and we’ll set up the calendar for more terrible, mockable movies.
Be there or… be someone who doesn’t much care for mocking stupid movies!
Let me tell you, in a climate as polarized as ours, especially in a contentious topic of discussion as our current, it’s refreshing to have an intellectual giant such as Michael Shermer tweet something like this:
People who equate America with gun control to Nazi Germany do not know anything about history. Read Richard Evans 3-vol history Nazi Germany
Right on, Michael! I’m so glad you said —
To date, I have stayed out of this witch hunt against our most prominent leaders, thinking that “this too shall pass.” Perhaps I should have said something earlier. As Martin Niemöller famously warned about the inactivity of German intellectuals during the rise of the Nazi party, “first they came for …” but “I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a….”
In a move I can only characterize as rank unvarnished hypocrisy, the National Rifle Association has just released a gun range game where you can shoot at “coffin-shaped” human silhouette targets. The ink isn’t even dry on reporters’ dutiful relaying of the NRA’s last attempt to blame video games for the Sandy Hook shooting, and the game-burning fires are barely quenched, and there they are, releasing a video game of their very own!
I’m not going to pretend that this petition by Rocko 2246 from Australia is going to succeed, but it merits discussion at least. In fact, unless we have a crowdsourced effort by people at this blog and others on “our side” of the great rift, I seriously doubt they could get 100 unique signatures per their current goal, which is at 21 signatures (at time of writing).
If any part of this petition were unequivocally true, I would throw my full weight behind it because the picture it paints of our community… oh, it is dire. It is evidently a response to Adam Lee’s petition to the leaders of our communities, asking them to not fall for Thunderfoot’s framings on certain issues — given that the Foot has apparently spread a few of these videos around to the leaders of our communities asking them to “shun” the feminists “pouring poison” in the ears of said communities. This petition is apparently the third motion in a back-and-forth that started by Thunderfoot.
Stephanie alerted us to this petition’s existence, otherwise I’d never have known it was created. It is vitally important that we know, though. Considering we’re the subject matter, and if they succeed in getting a hundred signatures FtB will be the recipient of an email that reads as follows, I figure I should make sure everyone’s absolutely aware what 21 people (at time of writing) want us to do:
To:
Skepchick.org, FreeThoughtBlogs
Return to critical thinking and respectful free exchange of ideas
Sincerely,
[Your name]
So, if this petition fails in its goal, I want to make absolutely certain that it does not fail as a result of being underpublicized. Basically, I want to make sure it doesn’t fail on account of me. And I will consider it, in its entirety, on its merits. Because that is what one does with the respectful free exchange of ideas: thinking critically about them. Continue reading “The Petition to Ask Freethought Blogs and Skepchick to "Return to Critical Thinking"”→
This is a fantastic video — and, honestly, Sex+ is a fantastic series as a whole.
What gets me about it is how apologetic Laci has to be to Jenna Marbles while criticizing her for engaging in slut-shaming, just to prevent a blood feud between them. I suspect that’s exactly what we’re seeing in our skeptical and atheist communities — we are insufficiently deferent while criticizing ideas and attitudes, therefore we are creating “witch hunts”. Here, Laci takes issue with Jenna’s slut-shaming, and says so, and I’m pretty sure there’s been no real blood feud to speak of. Nobody is crying that Laci is making Jenna a “witch”, nobody’s claiming that she’s trying to drum her out of the community. It’s like people can disagree on things without trolls getting all hyperbolic!
The funny thing is, she stopped posting atheism videos when the community kept disappointing her over and over again. She’s still an atheist, and we approached her to join Freethought Blogs a while back because she’s awesome, but she declined because, I guess, she’s over the atheist community. You know, like how Natalie Reed and Jen McCreight have been let down so often by these communities and have stopped trying to take part in them. Considering both of them are still blogging here, and are still atheists, even though they don’t explicitly blog about atheism any more, I might want us to ask Laci again.
Of course, even if Jen and Natalie aren’t really part of the atheist “community” any more, the assbags in said community have no problem with approaching — and attacking — both of them. Because how dare they be atheist and talk about feminism or trans* rights or intersectionality. It really makes me sad that asking Laci to join us here at FtB would probably get an “I have enough trolls of my own, thanks” sort of response.
Besides, why would she want to invite the sort of troll who would call her “Sex+” title an attempt at co-opting the entirety of sexuality to her dogmatic religious movement?
