Link round-up for 28 September 2014
Smartasses make the world a bit more fun (found via Mendip).
Netflix seems to be going down the tubes.
Art beats oil companies.
I would have called this 22 Christian moments (sent by Ahab) -- how many have you experienced?
An 11-year-old girl shoots a man in Oklahoma, but you won't see this one being trumpeted by the anti-gun crowd.
Some fundie nutjob is creating a godawful Christian Right re-write of Harry Potter.
Here's a huge round-up of Republican quotes on women.
Are you mentally strong?
If you doubt that a large part of the right wing is totally nuts, read how they reported on the climate march in New York. Maybe they're just mad that it drew so many more people than their events do.
Fundie ministries posing as pregnancy clinics use deceptive tactics, sometimes with government funding (found via Republic of Gilead).
Since 2012 Kansas has been testing right-wing tax-cut-mania in practice. It's a failure.
New Age bullcrap is damaging a centuries-old Indian relic in Ohio (found via TYWKIWDBI).
Rabbits suffer and die, not even for food, but for fashion (and who the hell pays $15,900 for a coat, anyway?).
Here's more on the armed thugs planning to intimidate voters in Wisconsin.
Why is it so hard to believe that people can lie?
Sam Wang looks at why the margin of victory in Scotland was so much larger than polls predicted.
This is Norway (found via TYWKIWDBI).
Don't let recent barbarities in Iran undermine the normalizing of relations -- that's what the theocrats want.
Some say Muslims from the West who went to fight for ISIS/Islamic State should be allowed to return and given counseling. Others, me among them, think differently.
The US isn't the only country where the right wing rants against the "liberal media" and pushes a warped view of history -- in Japan it's worse.
Chad votes to make homosexuality punishable by 20 years in prison.
The leader of Boko Haram may be dead, though the reports are confusing.
The CDC warns that Ebola cases could reach 1.4 million by January, while the discoverer of the virus is even more worried. The fact that a major Liberian newspaper is pushing idiot conspiracy theories isn't encouraging. 4chan has even anthropomorphized the disease as the anime goddess Ebola-chan. The actual virus is rather less cute.
Somali Islamists enforce religious law.
This vehicle needs new tires, but it's rather a long way from the nearest tire-repair shop (NSFW blog).
Want to know how rainbows work? Here's a thorough explanation, including a very cool graphic of how light is refracted when it hits a water droplet.
Maven will study how a world died.
Here's a good discussion of transitional forms in evolution, cutting through the nonsense creationists spread on the subject (the spectrum strip analogy is particularly useful).
[Image at top found via Progressive Eruptions.]
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Country other than the US from which I got the most page views this week: France
posted by Infidel753 at 3:58 AM
13 Comments:
Thanks for the 'Christian moments' and the videos.
Woody
Those ads from the past explain a lot of the thinking by the men of the GOP. They never moved past the idea that the little woman is a weakling who can't think for herself and is there to serve him.
The Abraham and Isaac ad was darkly amusing and spot-on. I hope it prompts some conversations about scripture.
I'm disappointed that Chad has joined a menagerie of African states with draconian anti-gay laws. LGBTQ people in Chad must be alarmed.
The list of misogynist Republican quotes reminds us just how much work needs to be done. Yikes!
The "Christian Harry Potter" is almost certainly satire written by a Harry Potter fan, and not an actual fundie. The fact that it's on fanfiction.net ought to be the first hint.
Looking at some of the comments on that link you gave regarding those travelling from other countries (including ours) to fight for the islamic state, i'm in a number of minds about the punishment that should be carried out on such soldiers attempting to re-enter their own country.
In a way, saying that they should be executed straight away is promoting a killing, but I do wonder how many other killings that might prevent.
Do we just kill that bastard, who went from our country to fight alongside islamic state in an old fashioned kill, rape & torture campaign, thereby saving the possibly many he may have killed, raped & tortured in the future?
Or do we lock them up, throw away the key and pay for their food, power, water, clothing and security for the rest of their life?
Or do we give them free counselling?
As cosy and kind is the intention of rehabilitation, is this the kind of crime that we want to spend more than the price of a bullet on punishing?
I don't know, you tell me.
All the best,
Woody
Regarding that General Pershing meme, one could reasonably ask what gave us the right to invade their lands and kills them. The Sulu Sultanate had resisted the Spanish attempts to conquer them for centuries. Whatever we might think of their religious beliefs, they understandably did not wish to be annexed to a Spanish Catholic colony, an American colony and subsequently a majority independence Catholic Philippines.
Concerning the rainbow, see also page 147 in:
http://books.google.com/books?id=TwhbAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Optics+by+newton&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZIspVMXnDIbroASCmoH4Cw&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=rainbow&f=false
from long ago.
I don't know if I've brought this up before here, but this skit from That Mitchell and Webb Look about Abraham and Isaac is a classic and pretty much sums up everything I think about the Bible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDfoJ29CR4E
As for being mentally strong, well, I write a blog so of course I don't expend my mental energy wisely! But the one thing on there that really is critical for any kind of success is being willing to fail. I'd go further and say one must embrace it. Of course: consider the source...
I love the photo comparison at the top and the article at Green Eagle. I look forward to FAIR or someone else doing an comparison of the coverage of Tea Party events (or maybe Glenn Beck's 80,000 person event) and this one. They did say on CounterSpin this week that only one network even mentioned it in the nightly news. The problem with the mainstream media seems to be their bias against their own expectations. Since it is obvious that hundreds of thousands of people would demonstrate our lack of action on climate change, it is no big deal -- not worth covering. But upper middle class white people saying the president is a Muslim communist from Kenya?! Get several dozen camera crews out there!
After reading the Netflix article I looked at my account I have with them; 104 items in my queue, only 4 can be viewed through streaming. Another 4 list "unknown" under availability and several in the queue list "very long wait".
Of course there are titles I have searched in their catalog that come up empty.
It concerns me where, and from whom, not only cinema, but text content may soon be controlled and restricted. I already find it obnoxious to have to wade through trailers of other films on DVD's that I rent. How long will it be before streaming content becomes no longer worth watching due to the creeping infusion of advertising makes online streaming like network television is today: practically unwatchable?
I think you guys don't understand the story of Abraham and Isaac. Some points to consider:
1. The text says that God tested Abraham. It does not say what the test is nor does it ever say that Abraham passed the test.
2. At the time of the test, Abraham is 137 years old and Isaac is 37. It is clear that, however years were counted, that Isaac was a grown man passed age of Bar Mitzvah.
3. God says that Isaac should be "offered up," He never says to kill Isaac. While many English versions say something like, "Offer as a sacrifice," the actual Hebrew only says "Offer up."
4. When Abraham arrives at the mountain, he tells his servants that he and Isaac will go up the mountain and "then return to them."
5. After Abraham lifts the knife to slay Isaac, the angel comes and tells him not to do it. As a matter of fact, after Abraham lifts the knife, God never talks to him again.
6. Abraham then returns to his servants. What happened to Isaac?
Now reread the story and determine who the real hero is and what the real moral is.
Just a little followup. Media Matter did a comparison of the coverage of Climate Week on the three cable news channels:
Cable Coverage of Climate Week
Woody: Thanks for reading.
Shaw: Yes, many of them quite explicitly want to go back to the 1950s, with all that implies.
Ahab: Most of sub-Saharan Africa seems to share that mentality. South Africa has more enlightened laws, but that's a quasi-Western country.
AWJ: It didn't look that way to me. If it's a satire, it was a lot of work and not very funny. And believe me, plenty of fundies are naïve and obnoxious enough to do such a thing.
Woody: We shouldn't deform our legal system with extrajudicial killings. Hopefully as many of them as possible will be killed by the US-British-French airstrikes and the Kurdish offensive now under way. If they try to return to Western countries, well, I'm pretty sure that enlisting in a hostile foreign army means renouncing citizenship. If we can assemble evidence that specific individuals participated in atrocities, put them on trial for it and/or extradite them to the relevant countries.
Tommykey: I posted that picture (I hate the word "meme" being used in that context) in reference to what to do about people who are citizens of Western countries who left in order to fight for a foreign jihadist force which has been committing atrocities, mostly against other Muslims and Middle Easterners. It's a rather different situation.
Blurber: Yes, Newton was the original discoverer of most of what we know, even now, about these phenomena.
Frank: One does have to be willing to risk failure. That applies to many areas of life.
The MSM's decisions about what to cover can seem strange, but remember that most of the media widely followed in the US are now owned and controlled by just a few corporate conglomerates.
Robert: It's aggravating and worrisome. But if they limit content too much and clog everything up with too much advertising, they'll just drive the culture to normalize and accept accessing content through the extra-legal sources which will proliferate to meet demand.
Joseph: The meaning of the story seems quite clear to me. I'm not sure quite what you are trying to imply, but the common interpretation is accepted by everyone from laymen to most Bible scholars. In any case, the beliefs of modern Christianity are what they are, and they're what Christianity should be held answerable for, even if the Bible might have originally meant something different.
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