- Mother who allowed a cult to starve her son to death and pack his body into a suitcase pleads guilty; plea agreement includes clause that absolves her of responsibility when if god resurrects him. (In the event of zombie baby, Bigfoot will be charged.)
- Despite conspiracy nut claims to the contrary, proposed national service system doesn’t force people to stop attending church. (Attention psychiatrists; please consider adding Institutional Persecution Fantasy to DSM-V.)
- The Ten Commandments are fundamentally sectarian, and not actually that important to American law. (Especially since covetousness is inherent to capitalism.)
- Bush administration FDA ignored science, abused approval process to serve religious ideals when it refused over-the-counter distribution of Plan B contraceptive. (Because you’re all whores, and the only way to stop you being whores is to give you babies to raise.)
Links For Brains: 4/3/2009
April 3rd, 2009 by Oskar Kennedy
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Evidence: Creationists Are Doing It Wrong
April 6th, 2009 by Oskar Kennedy
We’re going to illustrate a common misuse of evidence by resorting to one of my favorite rhetorical tropes: the television police procedural, or the Law & Order example.
The tough but secretly sensitive detectives of Law & Order: Zoo Patrol are on the case. A rare primate, a librarian orangutan, has been found murdered in his book-filled enclosure at the Manhattan Animal Sanctuary. The orangutan was recently acquired by the zoo, after he was confiscated in a raid of an illegal animal smuggling ring.
The Zoo Patrol detectives have two prime suspects: the smuggler, who’s out on bail and looking for revenge, and the husband of the zoo’s head primatologist, who has exhibited increasing hostility toward the animals that are occupying all of his wife’s time.
During an initial interview, the animal smuggler is extremely hostile. It turns out that he was busted because the orangutan dialed 911. In response to the orangutan’s frantic “ook, oook,” the dispatcher sent police, who arrested the smuggler and confiscated his animals. The smuggler is looking at a 20 year prison sentence.
The detectives start digging into the smuggler’s life. They [long, boring description redacted], and discover that the smuggler has an airtight alibi. (Since this is Law & Order, he was probably cheating on his wife/boyfriend/Real Doll, and lied to keep her/him/it from finding out.) There’s no way he could have broken into the zoo and killed the orangutan.
The impossibly slim and beautiful Assistant District Attorney looks at the detective’s report. She knows the smuggler is innocent. She looks up, eyes narrowing. “Arrest Mr. Primatologist, and charge him with ape-icide.” The detectives hustle into the car and drive off, to surprise their new prime suspect and arrest him in a public place. Right?
WRONG. It’s wrong because of a logical fallacy called the false dilemma, and a related misunderstanding of evidence that is appalingly common. (more…)
New Twitter Feed
April 6th, 2009 by Oskar Kennedy
In order to better order my online life, I started a Twitter feed for website updates. You can follow @Suburban_Panic to get updated when a new post goes live, without any of those distracting updates about my personal bidness. Of course I’ll still be posting on my personal feed, @oskar_kennedy; if you’re excited about the personal updates, that’s where to find me.
EDIT: Now with links to the Twitter accounts, which should have been there all along.
(Easter) Sunday Soapbox: Sacrificing Logic
April 12th, 2009 by Oskar Kennedy
As I write this, the minutes are rapidly running out of Easter Sunday 2009. Arguably the most “holy” holiday on the Christian calendar, Easter is the celebration of the central story that underlies the entire faith; the death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The point of the resurrection story is that is represents a shift from the way sin was handled by the Bronze-Age Hebrews, from whose guilt-ridden ranks the Christians eventually emerged. If you were Jewish and you messed up, you had to slaughter and burn a bunch of livestock as an offering, to earn God’s forgiveness.
After a couple millennia of bitchin’ barbecue, God apparently decided he had to watch his cholesterol, so he came up with a compromise. He sent Jesus (who, according to conventional Christian doctrine was simultaneously God and his own son) to Earth as a sort of catchall sacrifice. Jesus died a horribly ghastly death, and this was sufficient to earn forgiveness for the sins of everyone who had ever lived, or would ever live in the future. Then, to prove his divinity, Jesus (God) rose from the dead and did some more preaching before went back to heaven to be with his father, who was also God. One supposes that he was literally beside himself.
I have a question about this. I know, you’re shocked.
For now, we’re going to ignore the squirrely math that says that three guys can be three guys and one guy at the same time, since Dr. Manhattan managed that in Watchmen. We’re also going to look past the wildly improbable claim that Jesus was raised from the dead. He could have been a zombie, or he could have gone to the same apothecary as Juliet. Either way, that’s a mindbender for another time. Instead, we’re going to focus on the internal logic of the story that God sent Jesus to Earth as a sacrifice, to forgive the sins of the whole world
My question is this. Who, or what, was Jesus sacrificed to? (more…)
I owe you one dollar, Mr. Kennedy. . .
April 22nd, 2009 by Waldorf Van Buren
I was worried about not having anything to rail against or satirize or just openly mock after Obama was elected. How wrong I was. It seems stupid is the new black. While I have been busy “working,” my mind has been stewing and mulling ideas about where to go to pick on the stupid, idiotic, and otherwise hurtful people of the world. It seems there are just too many to choose from.
So, now that the insanity of Teabagging Day has passed (I still can’t say it without chuckling), I present Waldorf’s Stupid of the Week Award. Yes, I know there is something grammatically wrong with “Stupid of the Week Award” and that is kind of the point. . .
For the week ending April 19th, 2009 –
I must, MUST give this award to the ten of tens of protesters with the “colorful” signs at the “protests,” ranging from the awful Photoshopped images of Obama’s head on Hitler’s body to the misspelled words scrawled out in black Sharpie on white posterboard. It’s obvious you’ve spent a lot of time (in between programming notes of Hannity, The O’Reilly Factor, and Glenn Beck’s Bat-shit Crazy America show) thinking about how repressed and under attack from the left and the government you are. Next time, however, I’d suggest doing just a little research from a “trusted” source, and I don’t mean the Free Republic. In fact, I think you’d do yourself a great favor by picking up a dictionary.
No, scratch that, you are doing fine without any help. Keep doing what you’re doing sunshine, you’ve shown us your true colors yet again. As long as you stay committed enough to publicly display your craziness, yet lazy enough to not do anything else, you are doing your country a tremendous service by showing just how wrong the right has gone.
Congrats, teabaggers, you showed us that you already had your mouth stuffed with Sean Hannity’s balls.
