Content note: sexual assault, non-consensual sexual activities.
Been a while, I know. This story reignited the RAGE BLOGGER in me, and this is a good thing, because I’ll need the warmup for what I’ve got rattling around in my head the past few days.
Apparently, in Tokyo, a man responsible for ejaculating on non-consenting, unaware women over a hundred times on Tokyo’s train system has finally been caught.
A middle-aged man, Tetsuya Fukuda, 40 has been arrested for the attacks on crowded trains between Kinshicho and Akihabara stations in the capital Tokyo.
Brian Dunning issued a statement about his criminal acts and how everyone’s getting things wrong about him. However, people might find it difficult to copy and paste in order to rebut, or even to disseminate, because he included a little snippet of javascript that automatically kills your ability to select, copy or paste.
Update: The below is mostly nullified as the bill was sent back to the House with amendments, but died anyway. Thank goodness. Of course, all the other non-trolling-related nonsense mentioned below still stands!
Arizona House Bill 2549 passed both legislative houses last Thursday and is now awaiting approval from Arizona’s governor Brewer. The statute states that,
“It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use a ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.”
If the electronic devices and means are employed to stalk a victim, the penalty bumps up to a class 3 felony.”
Sadly, it looks like the religious folks with power to create laws are opening new fronts just about every day. While I was going crazy with work, there’s a bunch of news items worth highlighting that I simply missed. Continue reading “Dispatches from the Intersection of Law and Religion”→
Oh god damn it, today’s Blasphemy Day. I was already just reposting stuff today, so here’s one more.
Today is International Blasphemy Day. Atheists everywhere are insulting your invisible deity, whomever he or she might (not) be, in protest of the stripping of rights, in certain countries, to publicly and vocally disbelieve in anything that someone might find offensive. These countries include Canada, in a limited fashion thankfully, but the fact that Canada — one of the most progressive and modern countries in the world — has a blasphemy law is unreal.
Let’s make this perfectly clear. Blasphemy is anything up to and including publicly doubting the existence of a supposedly omnipotent, wrathful and jealous deity. The merest fact that such a deity would be well capable of punishing doubters (and in every religion’s foundational texts, does so!), obviates the need for a blasphemy law as not only redundant, but usurping your deity’s divine right to exact vengeance for slights against him.
Interestingly, in Canada, there’s a proviso that, according to Wikipedia, ‘is not an offence against this section to express in good faith and in decent language, or to attempt to establish by arguments used in good faith and conveyed in decent language, any opinion whatever on any religious subject.’ That, coupled with the fact that atheists are demonstrably better informed about religions than the religious, means only that I have to avoid swearing when debating religion in public in order to have a decent defense against a charge of blasphemy.
Fuck that shit, though. As far as I’m concerned, gratuitous swearing is good enough for television, so it’s good enough for me. There is not a shred of fucking evidence for the deity your dumb ass has postulated, and the burden of proof is on you motherfuckers. Anyone that thinks I should be put in jail for writing that sentence can go fuck themselves.
