Holy Shit! BillDo and I Agree on Something!

BillDo has a post entitled “Is the Met’s Tosca Sacrilegious?” (except that he has it in all caps because it’s shoutier.)

He concludes with

So, no, “Tosca” is not sacrilegious. It’s just a bore.

Cats and dogs living together! BillDo and I agree on something!

Also noteworthy:

The only reason I went was because of reports that at the end of Act I there was an obscene sexual act that took place between Scarpia, the bad guy chief of secret police, and a statue of Our Blessed Mother.

I guess he’s into virgins. Or statue-fucking. Or, like so many Catholics, he has erotic fantasies revolving around schoolgirl uniforms, nuns, the virgin Mary, etc. That’s cool, though I wouldn’t sit through a whole opera just for one sex scene. That’s what the Internet is for.

But now I have this urge to make a virgin Mary statue out of a blow-up doll.

Headline O’ the Day

Takoma Park Man Beats Ex-Girlfriend with 18-Pound Crucifix

And the article contains this tidbit:

The victim bought herself time during the attack by telling the man to stop long enough to turn on a Barbie DVD for their two girls to watch in another room so they wouldn’t see the assault, authorities said.

Despite the implement in the headline, this appears to be a case of ordinary craziness, not religious craziness.

Activist Judges Uphold Prop 8

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the California Supreme Court
upheld
Proposition 8, which took away gays’ right to get married in that
state. This sucks, which obviously means that it constitutes judicial
activism. (Update, May 27: Yup: BillDo
describes
the suit as “homosexual radicals sought to do an end-run around the
democratic process and have unelected judges overrule the express will
of the people.
“)

Okay, I realize that the question before the court wasn’t “should gays
be allowed to marry?”, but something more narrow, about whether the
referendum was phrased properly, in a way that doesn’t require the
legislature to intervene. I know nothing about California law, so I
can’t comment on whether I agree with the court on this more narrow
question.

While the court was debating this, of course, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, and
Maine moved to legalize gay marriage, and DC voted to recognize
marriages from other states. So I’m pretty confident that California
will follow suit soon enough.

Meanwhile, in Bizarro World the Weekly Standard, Sam
Schulman
presents
a novel argument against gay marriage. And by “argument”, I mean
“words and sentences furiously and randomly strung together in the
despearate hope that some of it might form an argument.” I can’t even
summarize it. Though if I had to, it’d probably be “`gay’ means happy,
and married people shouldn’t be happy”.

The fact is that marriage is part of a
much larger institution, which defines the particular shape and
character of marriage: the kinship system. […]

The first [effect of marriage within the kinship system] is the
most important: It is that marriage is concerned above all with female
sexuality. The very existence of kinship depends on the protection of
females from rape, degradation, and concubinage. This is why marriage
between men and women has been necessary in virtually every society
ever known. Marriage, whatever its particular manifestation in a
particular culture or epoch, is essentially about who may and who may
not have sexual access to a woman when she becomes an adult, and is
also about how her adulthood–and sexual accessibility–is
defined.
[…]

This most profound aspect of marriage–protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex–is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage.

That’s right, folks: if you’re a woman, and you marry another woman,
you’re not allowed to tell your wife that she’s not allowed to sleep
around. Glad that’s settled.

Second, kinship modifies marriage by imposing a set of rules that determines not only whom one may marry (someone from the right clan or family, of the right age, with proper abilities, wealth, or an adjoining vineyard), but, more important, whom one may not marry. Incest prohibition and other kinship rules that dictate one’s few permissible and many impermissible sweethearts are part of traditional marriage. Gay marriage is blissfully free of these constraints. There is no particular reason to ban sexual intercourse between brothers, a father and a son of consenting age, or mother and daughter. There are no questions of ritual pollution: Will a hip Rabbi refuse to marry a Jewish man–even a Cohen–to a Gentile man? Do Irish women avoid Italian women? A same-sex marriage fails utterly to create forbidden relationships.

Oh, noes! If teh gays are allowed to marry, we might get Irish and
Italians marrying! The horror!

Now to live in such a system, in which sexual intercourse can be illicit, is a great nuisance. Many of us feel that licit sexuality loses, moreover, a bit of its oomph. Gay lovers live merrily free of this system. Can we imagine Frank’s family and friends warning him that “If Joe were serious, he would put a ring on your finger”? Do we ask Vera to stop stringing Sally along? Gay sexual practice is not sortable into these categories–licit-if-married but illicit-if-not (children adopted by a gay man or hygienically conceived by a lesbian mom can never be regarded as illegitimate). Neither does gay copulation become in any way more permissible, more noble after marriage. It is a scandal that homosexual intercourse should ever have been illegal, but having become legal, there remains no extra sanction–the kind which fathers with shotguns enforce upon heterosexual lovers. I am not aware of any gay marriage activist who suggests that gay men and women should create a new category of disapproval for their own sexual relationships, after so recently having been freed from the onerous and bigoted legal blight on homosexual acts. But without social disapproval of unmarried sex–what kind of madman would seek marriage?

(emphasis added)

Do I detect someone with unresolved issues?

Few men would ever bother to enter into a
romantic heterosexual marriage–much less three, as I have done–were
it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are
unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our
mom.

Oh, and guess who’s going to be sleeping on the couch tonight:

Every day thousands of ordinary heterosexual men surrender the dream of gratifying our immediate erotic desires. Instead, heroically, resignedly, we march up the aisle with our new brides, starting out upon what that cad poet Shelley called the longest journey, attired in the chains of the kinship system–a system from which you have been spared. Imitate our self-surrender.

(emphasis added)

Believe it or not, there’s even more where that came from. As far as I
can tell, Schulman’s point is that marriage means something, and
people who choose to get married aren’t allowed to decide what their
marriage means or should be like, because… well, he doesn’t really
say. History, presumably. Or maybe quantum.

Furthermore, marriage is an unhappy affair, and gays should feel
relieved, rather than discriminated against, that they have been
spared it.

(via Tom Smith
and Sadly, No.)

Poe’s Law Strikes Again

I’m going to perform a magic trick for you. Think of a card, any card. Got it? Okay, now click on the awesome magic hat of awesome magic stupendousness:

Top hat

Ta-da! I told you I was going to do a magic trick, but I gave you two for the price of one: not only did the hat turn into your card, I also made your card look just like the hat! Isn’t that amazing?!

“No,” I hear you mutter, “what would be amazing would be if someone with a double-digit age actually fell for that.”

Read More

No Point in Gitmo Anymore

The BBC reports:

Foreign suspects held in Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their detention in US civilian courts, the US Supreme Court has ruled. […]

The Military Commissions Act (MCA) passed in 2006 removed the right of habeas corpus and set up tribunals to try detainees who were not US citizens.

This is, of course, excellent news for human rights, and I’m glad the SCOTUS has done the Right Thing. Presumably this also means that the original reason for keeping these people in Guántanamo—in Cuba, and therefore outside the jurisdiction of US law—is gone.

Now, I’m sure that even now, a bunch of people are complaining about how the detainees in Guántanamo are terrorists and how we shouldn’t be coddling them.

I don’t doubt that a lot of the detainees are, in fact, enemy fighters, or terrorists, or generally supporters of America’s enemies, people who ought to be locked away for a long time. But the thing is, we’re supposed to have this thing called justice. And justice, being blind, applies to everyone, whether they’re pillars of the community or murderous scumbags. It’s one of those things that defines a civilized society.

As I understand the article, this ruling simply restored the right of habeas corpus to prisoners in Gitmo. For those who’ve forgotten, habeas corpus is when the government has to show that it has a good reason for keeping someone locked up. Basically, if a cop arrests you for looking like a drug dealer, he then has to prove that there’s good reason to believe that you really are a drug dealer, or else let you go.

Which brings me to the part that blew my mind:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who voted against the ruling, warned that “it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving in a civilian court … that evidence supports the confinement of each and every prisoner”.

WTF? Did he just say that it’s too much trouble to have to show to a court that every person currently locked up, should be locked up? I hope the reporter got this wrong, because the alternative is that we have an insane Supreme Court justice.

WTF, Bill?

The governor of Colorado just signed into law a bill that expands Colorado’s antidiscrimination laws to cover transgendered people.

Bill Dembski says that this

points up the lunacy that ensues in a world without design

To which I can only say, WTF?

Is he saying that this is the sort of thing that happens in an undesigned world? If so, isn’t that an admission that this is an undesigned world?

Or is he saying that the Unspecified Intelligent Designer—who may or may not be the god of the Bible, or might be space aliens—hates teh TGs? (Psst, Bill: your fig leaf for right-wing fundie creationism isn’t working.)

Read More

A Love Song

The What Have We Learned crew present a song about the very special love between a man and his aluminum picnic table:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcHVYCG6VRM&hl=en]

The guy on the right is Mike Argento, the H.L. Mencken of the Dover Panda Trial.

Dembski: Scientific Literacy = Assault on ID

Bill Dembski warns his fans:

Paul Kurtz’s Center for Inquiry is partnering with SUNY-Buffalo (the State University of New York) to offer an Ed.M. in “scientific literacy”

So? Private organizations team up with educational institutions all the time. What’s so bad about this program?

(which will include a whopping dose of Darwinism and an assault on ID).

It’s okay for the Center for Inquiry to promote atheism in the name of science but anything that even gets close to theism, like design, is streng verboten.

(emphasis in the original).

I couldn’t find the part on CFI’s page where it says that candidates will be required to eat the heart of a cdesign proponentsist while setting fire to a stack of Jonathan Wells books, but Dembski quotes an email message that lays out their nefarious plans:

Explore the methods and outlook of science as they intersect with public culture and public policy. Understand the elements of scientific literacy.

This unique two-year degree, offered entirely online, is ideal for students preparing for careers in research, science education, public policy, and science journalism, as well as further study in sociology, history and philosophy of science, science communication, education, or public administration.

Some of the courses required to complete this 33 credit hour master of education degree program include Scientific Writing; Informal Science Education; Science Curricula; Critical Thinking; History and Philosophy of Science; Science, Technology and Human Values; Research Ethics.

Honestly, I don’t see why Billy’s getting his panties in a twist over this. Does he really think that teaching people what science is and how to think critically constitutes an “assault on ID”? If so, doesn’t this constitute an admission that ID is made of fail and can’t withstand scrutiny?

Or does he think that CFI is a sort of atheist Disco Institute? That would justify his paranoia, since he presumably knows how the DI likes to distort the truth to advance its cause.

Highway of Holiness

Light the Highway is a group of people who apparently think that I-35, which runs from Laredo, TX to Minneapolis, MN, is God’s chosen interstate, because Isaiah 35:8 reads:

And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness. The unclean will not journey on it; it will be for those who walk in that Way; wicked fools will not go about on it.

(I-35, Isaiah 35. Get it?)

It’s unclear to me whether this is a Poe or not, but reading that site is like being beaten over the head with a stick made of frozen crazy.

OTOH, they may be onto something: the 495th line of Isaiah is 26:19, which reads:

But your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead.

which sounds a lot like I-495 (the Washington Beltway) to me.

(Tip o’ the tinfoil hat to Martin Wagner.)

I Don’t Get Creationist Humor

Over at the “playground” section of the Expelled site, there’s a video of a can-can where the dancers’ heads have been replaced by those of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Eugenie Scott, Sam Harris, and Charles Darwin. This was made with a tool at JibJab that allows you to replace people’s heads in videos they provide.

As humor goes, IMHO it’s on a par with Mad-libs, so I’m somewhat surprised to see it on the website of a serious creationist movie like Expelled. Unless, of course, it’s being marketed to people who think “Oh yeah?! Well you’re French!” is a biting intellectual retort.

I’d HT Chez Dembski, except that that post seems to have been removed (s’okay, it was basically just a link to this “review”). Oh, and just to give you an idea of where this video ranks in Dembski’s opinion, this video was removed, but “The Jude Jones School of Law is still up (albeit sans fart noises).