The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why Everybody Hates Atheists

Posted on | December 4, 2013 | 112 Comments

It’s not just because atheists kill babies, because not all atheists do. But let’s admit that, in a universe of accidental randomness, there is nothing particularly special about a little clump of cells.

Or a bigger clump of cells, for that matter. So if the atheists who don’t kill babies have a good argument against raping babies . . .

Look, I’m not saying all atheists are like Mark Newton and Peter Truong, and probably, some atheists are against raping babies.

But that’s not the reason everybody hates atheists, anyway.

It’s the pushy, arrogant self-righteousness. And I’m not even talking about atheists like Kim Jong-un. Not all atheists are brutal communist dictators. Some atheists are against communism, dictatorship and brutality. On the other hand, 70 percent of those who stated their religion as “none” voted for Obama. Just sayin’ . . .

Tuesday evening, I noticed Gabriella Hoffman was under attack by Twitter trolls. Gabby complained about “militant atheists who thrive on souring the holiday season while behaving like tyrants.”

Ah, the War on Christmas — and the same obnoxious atheists who have spent years waging the War on Christmas now claim that this is something that Fox News and Bill O’Reilly are just making up. In fact, it was Peter Brimelow who first described the “War on Christmas” in 1999 — four years before the Southern Poverty Law Center branded him a “white supremacist.” Probably just a coincidence.

Anyway, atheists trolls were attacking Gabby Hoffman, because they hate women. That’s not merely cheap sarcasm, because the atheist movement’s problem with women is rather notorious:

[Karen] Stollznow says that, when she told friends about her situation, many were unsurprised, regarding [Benjamin] Radford as “creepy … a weirdo … sexist … perverted.” Her accusation was made in the context of a general complaint among women in the atheist movement that they are victims of sexism, discrimination and harassment. These complaints caused a stir a couple years ago when a young atheist, Rebecca Watson, got into an Internet dispute with Richard Dawkins, a famed Darwinian opponent of Christianity.
Watson told how women didn’t want to attend atheist conferences because “they felt uncomfortable in a room full of men” and “were hit on constantly” by seemingly desperate atheist men who “try to get in the pants of every woman who walks through the door.”

It’s not me saying this, you see.

As I say, however, it’s the pushy arrogance of atheists that makes everybody hate them, because the atheist cherishes the notion that his disbelief makes him intellectually superior to those whom he disdains as being in the thrall of ignorant superstition.

Atheists therefore cannot keep silent, but must constantly mock and scoff, publicly disparaging Christianity and the Bible, supporting every measure to marginalize and stigmatize Christian belief, so that no Christian can ever enjoy a moment’s peace.

Because . . . Science!

Ace of Spades has commented on this tendency:

If atheists are so logical and rational and sensible — which is the key point of atheistic evangelism, of course — why are they behaving in counterproductive, emotional, cult-like ways? . . .
What it seems like is a lot of teenager-ish acting up, a lot of anger over hurts in the formative years, a seething need to get payback against faceless oppressors. . . .
If freeing yourselves from religion has really made you more rational and all-around better thinkers, why do I see not only no evidence of such increased rationality and overall brainpower, but what I’d mark as a net decline?

Indeed, it’s like people who aren’t intellectuals, but use a lot of fancy jargon because they want to seem intellectual — a narcissistic desire to see oneself as superior to others, to be regarded as belonging to The Intellectual Club, from which inferiors are excluded.

This craving for a sense of superiority is a central focus of Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, and is closely related to the phenomena described by Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcisissm: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. (These are books, by the way, which a lot of soi-disant “intellectuals” can’t be bothered to read.) Religion is an obstacle to self-worship, and the honest confession of ignorance — to say that we are mere mortals who don’t know all the answers — is a humiliation that the atheist arrogantly refuses to accept.

Barrett Brown promotes atheism on Fox News, January 2009

Pride goeth before a fall, and the first thing I ever knew about Barrett Brown was that he had been the communication director of the atheist group Enlighten the Vote, also known as the Godless Americans Political Action Committee, as I have remarked:

Brown’s atheism and his insuperable arrogance were hand and glove: Assuming that religious people are ignorant bigots, to whom he was infinitely superior, Barrett then proceeded to a series of assumptions that seemed to him equally plausible, ultimately including the erroneous assumption that he could get away with threatening to “destroy” an FBI agent’s life.

Barrett was a “Special Snowflake” to whom the rules did not apply, so that dropping out of college and “doing . . . a ‘heroic’ amount of Ecstasy and acid” was entirely acceptable, as was heroin, to which he became addicted. None of these failures was enough to convince Barrett Brown that he was less superior than he imagined; the belief in your own superiority is an article of faith in the Cult of the Self.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

Barrett Brown ranting on YouTube, September 2012

Well, not every atheist has a paranoid meltdown that lands him in federal custody facing more than 100 years in prison, but Barrett Brown’s fate seems rather symbolic of what Ace described as “teenager-ish acting up, a lot of anger over hurts in the formative years, a seething need to get payback against faceless oppressors.”

Not every militant atheist is a raving lunatic or a baby-raper, nor do all atheists vote Democrat. But all atheists deny God, and are contemptuous of Christians, whom they regard as ignorant bigots.

It is this arrogant attitude that makes atheists so obnoxious in their behavior, so that everybody hates them — except Christians, whom Jesus commanded to pray for their enemies.

That Jesus — always spoiling the fun!

 

 


Category: Christmas, Culture, Intellectuals, Religion

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.04.13

Posted on | December 4, 2013 | 13 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Detroit Officially Bankrupt

An abandoned public housing project north of downtown Detroit

Judge supports city’s planned reduction in pensions

Thai PM Yingluck Shinawatra Dismisses Calls To Step Down
Court issues arrest warrant for protest leader


VP Biden Arrives In PRC
Will talk with Chicom leaders about reducing tensions



POLITICS
President’s Illegal Alien Uncle Allowed To Stay In US

Uncle Onyango: the fix was in

Ignored 1992 deportation order

Military Analyst Christine Fox Nominated For #2 Defense Post

Administration Failing To Sign Up Young “Invincibles” For Obamacare


Bill Clinton Claims Damage To Dems From Botched Rollout Will Be Minimal

Illinois Legislature Approves Historic Fix For $100B Pension Crisis

Notre Dame Sues Over Birth Control Mandate

Chamber Chief Laments “Avalanche” Of Obama Regulations



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Crude Boosted By Pipeline News: NYMEX $97.11, Brent $112.58
Amazon’s Drones Set To Take Out UPS, FedEx
US Stocks Fall For Third Day On Taper Worries
Krispy Kreme Stock May Melt Further
Diners Not Biting On KFC’s China Revival Campaign
Applebee’s To Install 100,000 Tabletop Tablets In 2014
Dual-Display Yota Smartphone/E-Reader Goes On Sale In UK
Windows XP End-Of-Life Migration Guide
Andy Rubin’s Next Google Moonshot Project? Robots
Square Buys Photo-Sharing Startup Viewfinder
Chrome Apps Could Be Coming To Android, iOS Next Month



SPORTS
Bronx Bombshell: Jacoby Ellsbury Signs With Yankees

Seven years. $153 million.

Shin-Soo Choo to replace him?
The Yankees overpaid like they always do


Nuggets Blow Out Nyets For Seventh Straight Win


Kings Beat Ducks In Shootout

Bobcats Lose Game To Mavs, And Kidd-Gilchrist With Broken Hand

Islanders’ Skid Reaches Seven As Crosby Leads Pens To OT Victory

Rockies Agree To Two-Year Deal For Morneau

Blue Jackets Edge Bolts 1-0, Lose Goalie

Nationals Sign Ross Ohlendorf, Avoid Arbitration



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Something Fishy Going On

Gillian Anderson with a finned friend

“X-Files” star leads host of stars posing with fish for charity


No, Paul Walker’s Teenage Daughter Didn’t Witness His Fiery Death

Chris Hemsworth’s Wife Elsa Pataky Provides Stunt Lips For Natalie Portman In “Thor: The Dark World”


Victoria’s Secret Not Firing Jessica Hart Over Taylor Swift Diss

Olympian Tom Daley’s Oscar-Winning Boyfriend Revealed

Sherri Saum Of “The Fosters” Expecting

Katy Perry, John Mayer Pose Together For Romantic Cover Of “Who You Love”

“American Hustle” Named Best Picture By NY Film Critics Circle

Oscar Isaac, J.C. Chandor Team Up For “A Most Violent Year”

Orlando Bloom Opens Up About Miranda Kerr Split

CNN Boss Zucker Plans Big Changes: More Shows, Less News

Elan Gale Hoax: “Bachelor” Producer Admits He Faked Airplane Feud

From “New Girl” To Mean Girl?



FOREIGNERS
RBA Says Aussie Dollar Still Uncomfortably High, Keeps 2.5% Rate
Tesco UK Sales Slump 1.5% In Third Quarter
Hezbollah Commander Gunned Down Outside Beirut Home; Jihadis Blame JOOOOOS
No Surprise As OECD Ranks Wales Education Worst In UK
Brisk Voting In Delhi State Assembly Elections
Polonium Poisoning Ruled Out In Arafat’s Death
India Refuses To Budge On WTO Trade Deal
Ukraine Government Survives No-Confidence Vote; Rage Boils Outside



BLOGS & STUFF
Tony Katz: Fast Food Thursday – Because Big Labor Bullies Need A Beatdown
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Mother Jones Understands Markets Better Than It Lets On
First Street Journal: The Not-So-Enigmatic Pope Francis
Michelle Malkin: Obama’s Illegal Alien Deportation Evader Uncle Omar Gets His Amnesty
Twitchy: “Admitting Defeat” – Web Site Developer Live-Tweets Struggles With Healthcare.gov
American Power: The Exploited Laborers Of The Leftist Media
American Thinker: Grooming Gangs And Sharia
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obamacare Watch – Pointless Lies
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, December 3
Jammie Wearing Fools: Hacker Says No Security Was Ever Built Into Obamacare Site
JustOneMinute: And Later Obama Will Blame The Evil Insurance Companies
Pat Dollard: Polls Show Anti-Obamacare Wave Building Against Senate Democrats
Protein Wisdom: Manufacturing Intolerance
Shot In The Dark: 36 Encores
The Jawa Report: Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller Banned From UK For Supporting Israel
The Lonely Conservative: Government Shakedown Of JP Morgan Includes Slush Fund For Radical Leftist Groups
Megan McArdle: Detroit Goes Down


Category: Live at Five

Taylor Palmisano Hates Her Some F**king Mexicans, and Loses Her F**king Job

Posted on | December 3, 2013 | 55 Comments

This is unfortunate in several ways:

Taylor Palmisano is having a bad week.
First, she wrote a fundraising email that was widely mocked for being tone deaf and weird. It recommended parents skip buying presents for their kids on Black Friday and send the money to the Walker campaign instead. That was bad.
Next, according to a report from Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Palmisano finds herself on the chopping block for a couple of racist tweets she sent from her personal Twitter account years ago. That’s even worse.
The first of the tweets in question, sent out in January of 2011, reads: “This bus is my worst fucking nightmare Nobody speaks English & these ppl don’t know how 2 control their kids #only3morehours #illegalaliens.” The second tweet, sent in March of 2011, reads: “I will choke that illegal mex cleaning in the library. Stop banging fucking chairs around and turn off your Walkman.”

And now the worst part:

“Taylor Palmisano has been immediately removed from her position with the Friends of Scott Walker campaign,” said spokesman Jonathan Wetzel. . . .
Palmisano shut down her Facebook account and Twitter account on Tuesday.

She shut down her Twitter account? No!

She could have been a folk hero — a social media legend!

Also, Scott Walker could have used her for his widely anticipated 2016 presidential campaign staff. Trust me, there are plenty of GOP caucus voters in western Iowa who, while perhaps not sharing her enthusiasm for f-bombs, certainly share Taylor Palmisano’s sentiments about busloads of illegal aliens who don’t speak English.

 

Category: Immigration

Anarchy in the UK: Guardian Editor Admits Endangering British Agents

Posted on | December 3, 2013 | 30 Comments

OK, that’s not the headline at the Daily Mail, but their headlines are always so ponderously long, aren’t they?

We love Britain, insists Guardian editor
as he is accused by MPs of breaking the law
for leaking secrets which endangered UK spies

And then the stack of bullet-point subheads:

• Debate rages about dangers of Edward Snowden leaking US secrets
• MI6 said terror groups in Afghanistan and ‘closer to home’ are using leaks
• But Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger tells MPs only 1% of files published
• Insists the left-wing newspaper’s staff are ‘patriots’ who ‘loved this country’

Leaving aside the Daily Mail‘s weird approach to headlines, Louise Mensch points out that Parliament got the editor to admit what he had previously denied, that the Guardian shipped abroad the names of agents at Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters:

MPs today got Alan Rusbridger to admit a number of things he, and his paper had previously denied.
Firstly, that he shipped the names of GCHQ agents abroad to newspapers and bloggers. Mr. Rusbridger was reminded that this was a criminal offence, and said he had a public interest defence. He also, however, kept arguing that he hadn’t published any names, which rather blows up his public interest defence — it’s self-evident that you don’t need the names of intelligence agents to report on GCHQ spying, so why not redact them? . . .
Perhaps worst of all, Rusbridger confirmed my very worst suspicions, which were that he hadn’t even read through the top secret files before shipping them. He redacted no names; he redacted no operational details; he didn’t even read them. And by “he” I mean any employee of the Guardian. Nobody at that paper read the 58,000 documents through, not even once, before sharing them in bulk. . . .
Because no Guardian journalist even read the files, they do not know how many agents’ names are now out there.

Look on the bright side, Louise: The Guardian‘s losing $50 million a year, so maybe they’ll go bankrupt in the process.

 

Category: Great Britain

It’s Official: Detroit Is Bankrupt

Posted on | December 3, 2013 | 35 Comments

Decades of control by labor unions and Democrats:

The struggling metropolis of Detroit, overwhelmed by debt and groping for a path forward, on Tuesday became the largest American city ever to qualify for bankruptcy protection.

That’s from the New York Times which has also been controlled for decades by labor unions and Democrats, so they can sympathize.

Category: Economics

The Great Conflation

Posted on | December 3, 2013 | 36 Comments

Just got through watching President Obama lying on TV, and the method of his dishonesty is what fascinates me. He (and other liberals) engage in a sort of rhetorical prestidigitation, whereby health insurance is conflated with health care. In other words, the Democrats would have you believe, if you don’t have insurance, you just get sick and die. But what they never mention is that most people are healthy, and the vast majority of Americans — whether healthy or sick — had health insurance before ObamaCare was enacted.

If you were part of the X-million who did not have health insurance (those numbers were always estimates, and there was serious disagreement about how many were in the supposedly pathetic legion of The Uninsured), that didn’t mean you were doomed to die a painful death without benefit of medical care.

Most people without health insurance were healthy young people. But by relentlessly hyping the allegedly widespread misery of The Uninsured, liberals  sought to justify a complex new federal regulatory apparatus that changed health insurance for everybody — including people who already had insurance with which they were satisfied.

The President therefore promised that everybody who already had insurance could keep it, and further promised that their rates would not go up as a result of the new law. But he lied.

Now, the President is attempting to convince us that everything is just hunky-dory. People who continue to oppose this law, the President would have us believe, are against health care — that is to say, he is conflating this legislation with health care per se, so that if you are against this particular law, you’re pro-cancer or something.

That’s right: Republicans want people to get sick and die, because illness and death are the only alternatives to the President’s policy.

And we all remember what life was like before ObamaCare: Everybody was either sick or dead, except greedy Republicans, who made lucrative profits from their investments in Death, Inc.

As I say, the method of his dishonesty is fascinating.

 

Category: Barack Obama, Health Care

The Left’s ObamaCare Desperation

Posted on | December 3, 2013 | 43 Comments

You know they’re desperate when they invoke “McCarthyism”:

When House Republicans unveiled a proposal in the fall aimed at avoiding a dead-end government shutdown over Obamacare, the conservative backlash was swift and brutal: they called it a surrender, a betrayal, an appeasement of the health care law they all abhor.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) decried it as “procedural chicanery” that would make House Republicans “complicit in the disaster that is Obamacare,” should they go along with it. FreedomWorks called it a “bait and switch to give the Senate a hall pass to fund Obamacare” and accused House GOP leaders of wanting to “cave and run.”
Since then the phenomenon has grown and taken hold in the 2014 primaries as Republicans accuse their opponents of privately harboring sympathies for Obamacare. . . .
In a way, the phenomenon is reminiscent of McCarthyism, named after Sen. Joe McCarthy, who in the 1950s accused U.S. government officials and others of secretly sympathizing with communism.

This is just crazy-talk which ignores the underlying political reality. Democrats rammed ObamaCare through Congress on a straight party-line vote in 2010, with Nancy Pelosi declaring “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” and, in the next election, Republicans scored a historic landslide victory. President Obama was re-elected last year in a campaign that basically ignored the new health-care legislation, which had not yet taken effect. When the policy did take effect, it was an unmitigated disaster — not merely because of the glitchy web site, but because millions of Americans had their policies canceled, contrary to what the president had repeatedly promised. Also, contrary to the promises made by Democrats, ObamaCare is causing health insurance rates to go up, not down.

The only people who really benefit from ObamaCare are those who did not previously have health insurance and are now going to get it free because of Medicaid expansion — but pretty much all of those people are from hard-core Democrat constituencies, whereas the key “swing voters” are the middle-class taxpayers getting cancellation notices or rate increases. And this is nothing like “McCarthyism.”

ObamaCare isn’t about some shadowy threat of foreign subversion, it’s about a bad domestic policy that is directly hurting the pocketbooks of ordinary Americans who are smart enough to realize that they’re getting the shaft because Democrats wanted to give away “free stuff” for which hardworking taxpayers will foot the bill.

As policy, this is bad for everybody. As politics, it’s bad for Democrats, and it’s only going to get worse. No wonder they’re desperate.

 


Category: Health Care

The Science Is Settled: Feminism Is Wrong

Posted on | December 3, 2013 | 36 Comments

Men and women are not the same:

By analyzing the MRIs of 949 people aged 8 to 22, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania found that male brains have more connections within each hemisphere, while female brains are more interconnected between hemispheres. . . .
By analyzing the subjects’ MRIs using diffusion imaging, the scientists explored the brains’ fiber pathways, the bundles of axons that act as highways routing information from one part of the mind to the other. After grouping the image by sex and inspecting the differences between the two aggregate “male” and “female” pictures, the researchers found that in men, fiber pathways run back and forth within each hemisphere, while in women they tend to zig-zag between the left, or “logical,” and right, or “creative,” sides of the brain. . . .

I’d quote more of the article, but it’s written by a woman and therefore cluttered up with a lot of silly irrelevant “creative” stuff.

This is something you learn to deal with as a news editor: It’s not that female writers can’t write straightforward just-the-facts journalism, but they tend to be better at feature-style writing — generally speaking, I hasten to add, because if you don’t add that qualifier, people will accuse you of stereotyping, which hurts women’s feelings, and we all know how they are about that, right? Anyway . . .

Contrary to the Archie Bunker stereotype of myself, I actually try to help female journalists and one way to help female journalists is to encourage them to WRITE MORE LIKE A MAN.

Ladies, don’t let yourself get trapped in the ghetto of “soft” journalism and, for God’s sake, avoid that awful Feminist Pundit racket.

There are women who get paid to be feminists. We call these people “Women’s Studies professors.” Writers who aspire to bring “the feminist perspective” to journalism are, without exception, tedious bores — and constantly angry. Why are they angry? Because their lives are miserable and their career opportunities are drastically curtailed by their self-selected niche. If all you ever wrote about was rape and abortion and income inequality, you’d probably be angry, too.

LADIES, DON’T DO THAT TO YOURSELVES!

Here’s a better role model for you: Christina Bellantoni, who just got named editor of Roll Call. Bellantoni was a Capitol Hill reporter for the Washington Times when I worked there, and never let herself get shoved off into the feature-writing ghetto. She does good work.

 

Category: Feminism, Journalism, Science
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