Legitimate Rape = The Kind God Likes

Yesterday the Republican politician Richard Mourdock got real mad about them there uppity women wanting abortion rights and all. So he went on Facebook and wrote this:

More of This, Please

At the risk of possibly contradicting my colleague here, this is the kind of violence in the Middle East I can get behind:

‘Sovereign Citizen’ Runs for Sheriff

A ‘Soverign Citizen’ named Frank Szabo is running for Sheriff of Hillsborough County, NH.

The Sovereign Citizen movement is this pseudo-legal phenomenon popular among militia types and Alex Jones fans. Basically they think that laws don’t apply to them and they come up with some amusing ways of justifying that stance.

The Idiocy of the Julian Assange Conspiracy Theories

Back when I first wrote about Wikileaks, I hadn’t even heard of Julian Assange. Not many people had. Those were the days.

But within a few months, the organization decided to install a figurehead at its helm. Assange said he would be a “lightning rod” for WL criticism. And within a few more months, Wikileaks became something of a force field for Assange, shielding him from the legal consequences of some pretty serious rape allegations and enabling some of the dumbest conspiracy theories of the past decade.

Scumbag Subreddit: r/mensrights

The men’s rights subreddit (r/mensrights) has the dubious distinction of being the only subreddit (and there are *lots*) that has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Here’s how they describe it:

5 Atheists Who Need To Just Find The Jesus Already

You can pick  your friends, you can pick your nose, and if you’re sneaky you can pick your friends’ noses while they’re sleeping. But you can’t pick the most prominent atheists who get lots of media attention.

The thing about atheism is that it barely tells you anything at all about a person. Atheists can believe in ghosts, demons, racism, sexism, alien abductions, or any other number of other weird things just as well as theists. I once had a conversation with a young woman who told me, all in the same conversation, that she knew for certain that God didn’t exist and that fairies were real. Like, they have a type of habitat and certain environment where they thrived and there are foods they prefer and all that. In another conversation I learned that organized religion was horrible, but also that astrology wasn’t total bullshit.

Short of untimely deaths, there’s really nothing stopping bad proponents from speaking out on atheist issues on major media networks except for conversion. So here are some prominent atheists who would do better work making the other side look like idiots instead of doing the same for us.

Excessive Nerdrage

Bane, trolling Gotham, about to be permabanned.

Yesterday the first reviews showed up for the final installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. It’s to be released this Friday – or Thursday night, if you are one of those dorks who go to a midnight showing. So unless you are a respected critic or actually involved in the making of the movie, you probably haven’t seen it.

Sexism is Woo

One of the themes I keep revisiting when I write about skepticism is how often people get into several different, seemingly unrelated types of woo. Biblical creationists sometimes dabble in conspiracy theories. Some believers in psychic mediums think Bigfoot is hiding out in the Pacific Northwest. There’s some overlap between racists and anti-vaccine activists.

One of the weirdest collisions of batshit crazies is between belief in the Illuminati and misogyny.  It’s pretty easy to see how misogynistic religious nuts justify their hatred of women. But there are also lots of conspiracy nuts who constantly whine about how feminism offends their delicate sensibilities. Also, it’s part of the elites’ plan to enslave us all, eventually. Kind of like everything else that happens in modern society.

 

God’s PR Squad Lies Again! Alex Jones! Stoned Angels Ordering Pizza!

STOP THE PRESSES: Alex Jones is being stupid again, you guys! He has exposed the secret atheist agenda, and can you guess what it is? You get one guess. If your guess was a mishmash of Jonesian buzzwords like “New World Order,” “conspiracy,” “Luciferian,” and “occult,” then you win!

Alex Jones does this “research,” OK? He doesn’t ever cite any sources because usually his research involves just making shit up. But according to his research, everyone funding atheist groups are secretly occultist Luciferians, like pretty much everyone else who doesn’t believe everything published on InfoWars.

God is Not a Fan of the Ladies

Earlier in the week I had the opportunity to interview Melody Hensley from CFI-DC about a conference she’s organizing about women’s issues and the secular movement. Hopefully we got a few more people to attend it but if nothing else it’s gotten me thinking about these issues a little more. So check out these weird sexist dudes I’ve learned about this week.