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While the Jehovah’s Witnesses may be most famed for refusing life-saving medical treatments like blood transfusions for their children, their doctrine also ruins lives in smaller ways. And they’re determined to get their message out. See below for a message to the Deaf community, setting a Biblical foundation for forbidding masturbation. (The soundtrack was added later by somebody else.)
The main thing I personally learned from this video is that the ASL signs for male and female masturbation are different, and whoever made up the sign for female masturbation didn’t know about the clitoris.
Below the fold, subtitles for what the guys are actually saying.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Pope is getting his own weekly fanzine! We’re not talking some stodgy relic to buy at the Vatican gift shoppe to prove you were there, oh no! This is something that’s going to be coming out every week on newssstands all across Italy, and being produced by a regular capitalist magazine publisher, not an official Vatican source. This presumably means that somebody has market research to suggest the Italian marketplace has enough demand for Pope Junk that they’ll keep paying for pages and pages of it, week after week after week, or the publisher wouldn’t be bothering.
The 68-page Il Mio Papa (My Pope) will hit Italian newsstands on Ash Wednesday, offering a glossy medley of papal pronouncements and photographs, along with peeks into his personal life. Each weekly issue will also include a pullout centerfold of the pope, accompanied by a quote.
source: New York Times
One thing that could cut into their profits: apparently the Holy See owns the rights not only to the Pope’s writings, but also his “figure and personal identity.” Says Rev. Giuseppe Costa, director of the Libreria Editrice Vaticana, which administers the copyright, “In the case they publish the pope’s words, I will have to intervene.”
Religion as commodity much?
I will lead it to the loyal commentariat to make the jokes involving the words “Pope”, “Centrefold”, and “Junk”.
Hat tip to Melissa McEwan, Shakesville
In the spirit of the holidays we here at DWR are going to go easy (for one week at least) on the religiously deluded, thus today’s disservice is a gift, only for religious emergencies mind you. :)
Browsing the time sink known as Reddit today I came across a very cool comic showing someone building a chat-bot to debate a theist. I googled the title of the comic and found the original as well a very awesome comic called Bag of Toast. I highly recommend checking it out.
The comic in question:
This made me think that I would love a chat bot to debate the theists, global warming deniers, anti-vaccine advocates, scumbags MRAs, or anyone I disagree with but constantly have to have 101 level discussions with. It would be wonderful. But then the Reddit community came through and proved there is such a thing already!
Christopher Mims at MIT Technology Review writes:
Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.
Sadly this chat bot has since been suspended, but given how easy it is to create twitter accounts I’m sure it is out there somewhere, debating science deniers so that we don’t have to. Finding out this bot existed has made today a good day.
The West Wing, ever so often, managed to perfectly capture the crazy paradoxical nature of the human condition. Watch and experience the juxtaposition so masterfully done in this short clip.
How can any day be a day of joy when some 20,000 children will die of preventable causes. Oh sure, we pull it off – we ignore, we distance, we glaze over the baleful reality that would ‘ruin’ our festive spirits. It is a supposedly happy time year, yet the rate of suicide always spikes during the holiday. We entertain ourselves, ostensibly to be happy, but what is this happiness that is procured while fleeing headlong from the misery that defines the condition of collective humanity. The (un)funny thing about the whole situation is that unless one takes the time to think about the paradox of the season (and life) it un-gently fades into the background; yet, the dissonance remains, like a middle C and F# played repeatedly without resolution (try it on the next keyboard that crosses your path, it is really a henky sound).
Why should one bother with those grating notes in the background, when so much is done to wash them away? I mean, why not subscribe to the ‘life is great for me, let’s live in moment’ and all that. We should insert the cliche examined vs. unexamined life bit here to make this sappy holiday soliloquy complete. :)
(ed. Funny, I made a typo in that last sentence instead of “let’s live” I had produced “let’s lie”… )
This, like much of my writing, is vaguely contemplative, but mostly hot air generated in one of the many cavities in my skull. Given my predilection to rage-hate philosophical word-wanke I hope, gentle readers, that I have not strayed to far into that particular territory.
Rather; let us together find some small sliver kinship and solidarity with our tri-tone reality (that C/F# thingie), and try to reconnect with those qualities that make us good human beings – empathy, altruism and charity – for every season.
And yes, a Happy Holiday wish to all our readership here on DWR, and all the best in the New Year. So sayeth the happy cat.
Religiously deluded, bigoted, right-wingnuts say the darndest things. Just the other day, Manitoban PC leader Brian Pallister wished the very best to “all you infidel atheists out there”.
Say again?
“All you infidel atheists”
He didn’t say that.
He really did. On camera. Check the vid.
Pretty amazing, right? But it gets even better. This video spurred an understandably unfavourable response from the secular community. Pallister did have some defenders though. They suggested that it was a joke, albeit in bad taste. Damn liberal media sheep, they whine that the poor conservatives are too uptight, but as soon as one delivers a little joke, they get all offended. Except that it wasn’t a joke – not that it would actually excuse this if it was.
Later, in a response to the fallout of his holiday greeting, Pallister defended his wording by stating that, according to the dictionary, ‘infidel’ means ‘non-believer’. He was just being inclusive. “I’m always disappointed when people misrepresent the meaning of the words. What I was trying to do there is include everyone in my best wishes over the holidays” Riiiiiiiight. Let’s explore why this is total bullshit.
First, no one identifies as an ‘infidel’. Quite a few non-believers don’t even identify as an ‘atheist’. I mean, sure, I’m also a non-stamp-collector, but it has no inherent meaning to me. However, if people were being ostracized, abused, discriminated against, and even killed because they didn’t collect stamps, I’d have to speak up as a non-stamp-collector too. So saying that he was trying to include ‘infidels’ when the only people who think the term means anything are non-infidels, is beyond suspicious. It is a blatant affirmation of the religious ‘us vs. them’ mentality.
Second, whereas ‘atheist’ is purely descriptive – absence of theism, ‘infidel’ is riddled with negative overtones. Sure one of the definitions listed in the dictionary is simply ‘one who doesn’t believe’, but dictionaries aren’t known for deep explorations into connotation or social context. ‘Infidel’ is the name that members of an in-group call members of the out-group. It is a term meant to belittle, demean, and undervalue. An atheist is a non believer, period. An infidel is a non believer, understood as an unworthy subhuman piece of filth. Pallister’s comment is analogous to someone attempting to be “racially inclusive” by using the word ‘nigger’ then defending the slur by saying that it just means ‘people with dark skin’. No, it’s offensive, divisive, and hateful, I don’t care how happy the surrounding message is. And Pallister knows it.
If he really thought ‘atheist’ and ‘infidel’ were as synonymous as he claims, then there would be no reason to use both words. Pallister’s defence is that all he meant to say was ‘non-believing non-believers’. There is no justification for such a redundancy. The negative hateful baggage is jammed right into the word ‘infidel’ and it is the only reason for Pallister to have used it. I am willing to concede that it may not have been a conscious decision, not that it would be a redeeming admission. It would mean that his religious elitism is so ingrained that he automatically demeans the irreligious without thinking about it.
If he was just some guy, Pallister’s words would just make him an asshole in need of good chewing out. But the standards for our elected officials is higher than that. Especially in a country that thankfully separates church and state, such a slur should be met with much harsher repercussions. Manitobans, please see too it he is not re-elected. Manitoban conservatives, get him evicted from your party. If you ever want to be in power in Manitoba again, step 1 would be to distance yourselves from ignorant jackasses like Brian Pallister.
Pakistan announced that Malala Yousafzai’s book “I Am Malala” was banned from private schools. From the CBC:
Officials say they have banned teenage education activist Malala Yousafzai’s book from private schools across Pakistan, calling her a tool of the West.
It isn’t about religion, holiness, or allah, god (etc.). It’s not about defending the country from Western influences or even polishing allah’s knob at exactly the correct speed as mandated by the Qur’an.
This book banning is about charlatans and courtiers defending their privileged status against the radical notion that women are people.
Adeeb Javedani, president of the All Pakistan Private Schools Management Association, said Sunday his group banned Malala’s book from the libraries of its 40,000 affiliated schools. He said Malala was representing the West, not Pakistan.
The Deluded will go to any length to defend their fetid bullshit. See the christian analog (among many examples)in the the United States of christian loons shaming women as they attempt to shame women for legally ending a pregnancy.
Malala has become an international hero for opposing the Taliban and standing up for girls’ education. But conspiracy theories have flourished in Pakistan that her shooting was staged to create a hero for the West.
Because getting shot in the face is the most reliable way to become a hero? It is outrageous how far the religious will go to defend their mythology. Isn’t it enough that Malala was gunned down for the crime of being female and seeking an education, but now the same authorities (the ones ‘responsible’ for her security) are banning her book.
The Pakistani religious authorities are confabulating a grand story about the West’s plot to overthrow their country and religion – hero for the West, indeed! The only theory that is being consistently applied here is Patriarchy. It is patriarchal misogyny reinforced by religious tradition and implicit cultural norms that makes the banning of Malala’s book possible.
*ed. Wow, misspelling the name of the blog and forgetting what syntax is, all in the same post – sadly, this was after “proofing”. The dangers of early morning posting.
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