Daily Blend: Sunday, August 19, 2012 – I’m back!

I haz returned! Sadly, I do not come bearing gifts, if only because of pesky laws of physics making it astonishingly difficult to transmit physical objects through computer screens. But I do have a few links I was able to save up over the last week, along with a few individual posts I’m saving up for a little later, so enjoy:

I know insurance companies are assholes, but it takes a special kind of soullessness to defend in court a man who killed a woman after running a red light to try and avoid paying her full insurance policy. Fuck you forever indeed, Progressive. ^[pictured]
(via @pattonoswalt; RT: @ebertchicago)

Fitting: Christian revisionist David Barton will re-release his bullshit-ridden and recently yanked book The Jefferson Lies through Glenn Beck’s publishing company.

Former Michigan assistant AG Andrew Shirvell finally ordered to pay damages for his ludicrously bigoted campaign against gay U-M student body president Chris Armstrong.
(via Wonkette)

In which top geek John Scalzi encounters the bottomless pit of charm and entertainment that is Vox Day.

Awesomeness: A brand-new (ie. less-than-three-year-old) Martian impact crater.

And finally, those sounds you just heard were Bill Donohue, Pam Geller and other Islamophobes popping a few aneurysms:

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Progressive • insurance companies • Matt Fisher • Katie Fisher • David Barton • The Jefferson Lies • Mercury Ink • Christian dominionism • Christian nationalism • U.S. Founding Fathers • Thomas Jefferson • Thomas Nelson • Andrew Shirvell • Chris Armstrong • University of Michigan • homophobia • Chris Armstrong • Chris Armstrong Watch • Vox Day • Theodore Beale • John Scalzi • misogyny • Mars • impact events • Ramadan • Islam • Muslims • Empire State Building

David Barton’s bad week gets worse: Book pulled from shelves

David Barton

It’s a bad time to be Christianist pseudo-historian David Barton right about now. Not only are more and more actual experts lining up to tear him a new one every other week, and not only did NPR just publish an absolutely devastating profile examining Barton’s fraudulent history and pathologically dishonest responses to his critics, but to top it all off, the publisher of his recent compendium of historical falsehoods, the ironically named The Jefferson lies, has now announced they are yanking the book only five months after publication:

The Thomas Nelson publishing company has decided to cease publication and distribution of David Barton’s controversial book, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson, saying it has “lost confidence in the book’s details.” […]

Casey Francis Harrell, Thomas Nelson’s director of corporate communications, told me the publishing house “was contacted by a number of people expressing concerns about [The Jefferson Lies].” The company began to evaluate the criticisms, Harrell said, and “in the course of our review learned that there were some historical details included in the book that were not adequately supported. Because of these deficiencies we decided that it was in the best interest of our readers to stop the publication and distribution.”

Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving Liar for Jesus^TM.

(via Right Wing Watch)

Tags: David Barton • Christian nationalism • Christian Dominionism • U.S. Founding Fathers • The Jefferson Lies • Thomas Jefferson • Thomas Nelson

Joe the Plumber is not very bright – or honest [updated]

Joe the Plumber

I haven’t written much about (not-)Joe the (not-)Plumber, if only because my tolerance for brainless inanity is still recovering from the few times I’ve spent chronicling Sarah Palin’s babbling. But he’s growing harder to ignore lately, particularly as he’s ramping up his loopy bid for U.S. Congress in order to let voters at large know what kind of representative he’d be.

It turns out, predictably, a Kafkaesque one. Firstly, here’s his latest campaign ad, wherein he blames the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide on gun control:

Transcript: (click the [+/-] to open/close →)

[−]

Joe the Plumber loads his shotgun.

JOE THE PLUMBER (v.o.): In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were exterminated.

Joe pumps his shotgun and starts shooting fruit.

JOE (v.o.): In 1939, Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, six million Jews and seven million others, unable to defend themselves, were exterminated.

Joe stops shooting and turns towards the camera.

JOE: I love America.

Because the only reason why all those Armenian and Jewish civilians were slaughtered in the first place is because the government took away their rights to own enough guns to take on entire armed forces … or something. I mean, it’s obvious, innit? (Well, I’m sure something is. No idea what, though.)

Better yet, as people began voicing their discontent with the assertion that Hitler would’ve been totally stumped of only German Jews had access to some Mausers, Joe’s spokesman tried to calm the storm, assuring everyone that “Joe is a student of history” who was simply conveying the Founding Fathers’ ideals about the people having the power to defend themselves against a tyrannical government … and that some Jewish gun nuts agree with him, anyway, and that gun control was also responsible for slavery in the U.S.:

Daily Blend: Thursday, June 14, 2012

From the file of awesome surprises: Comcast ^[pictured] takes a stand for its clients’ privacy, refuses to cooperate in BitTorrent “shakedown” lawsuit.
(via The Agitator)

Two Alabama public TV managers fired after protesting Republican official’s demands to air revisionist Christian-nationalist program from pseudo-historian David Barton.

“He is not the pastor of the United States, he is the President of the United States.”

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Comcast • ISPs • Internet Service Providers • BitTorrent • filesharing • David Barton • Alabama Educational Television Commission • Alabama Public Television • Allan Pizzato • Pauline Howland • Rodney Herring • Frederick Haynes III • Friendship-West Baptist Church • Barack Obama • gay marriage • same-sex marriage • marriage equality

Attack of the atheists! … on Canada’s version of Fox News

There’s a reason why Canada’s Sun TV News is commonly nicknamed “Fox News North”, and it appears that it even has its own version of Bill O’Reilly in the form of Brian Lilley, who hosts a program called Byline. Having never watched anything on that channel, I didn’t know this – and I’ve also just learned that the same anti-atheist talking points found south of the border are apparently equally as pervasive here:

My transcript: (click the [+/-] to open/close →)

[−]

BRIAN LILLEY: Faith and society: That is the topic of tonight’s Byline. It is Easter weekend. Tonight is the night Christians mark the day when Jesus Christ held the Last Supper with his apostles. Tomorrow, Good Friday, is a statutory holiday, as is Easter Sunday.

Yet, in spite of all of this, we’re forever told by our better-thans that Canada is not a Christian nation. Some even want to push any mention of religion, any attempt for people to live out their faith, completely outside the public square. They want people of faith to be silent, to give up their rights, whether teaching their own children, running their own schools, or in matters of conscience when it comes to certain jobs. I wonder how many of those people will be at work tomorrow, slaving away at their desks.

While the new, militant atheists seem to want to push religion completely out of the public square, they have no problem living in a society that was built on a Judeo-Christian foundation. And make no mistake: Our society is built on that foundation. Our laws, our customs, our court system all stem from that.

Do you know why we don’t execute people that are mentally ill? It actually goes back in ages quite a way. It was established because, well, those not in a proper state of mind would not have been able to make a proper confession of their sins, but therefore, killing them would also be condemning them to Hell. It was seen as the compassionate thing to do. Today, in those places that still has the death penalty, they still don’t execute the mentally ill. And if, as it is suggested – if it’s even suggested that happens, people even here in Canada are horrified at it.

Those that want nothing to do with religion will claim, “people have died in the name of religion,” “wars have been started,” and “it’s a source of pain, so we should just get rid of it.” It’s true, wars have been started, including the Crusades, but wars have been started for all kinds of reasons, including women. Think of Helen of Troy. And despite all that, we haven’t done away with women, have we?

Now, about the killing and violence, the claim is that, well, if we just did like John Lennon suggested and imagined there was no religion, then there would be no violence. Let’s examine that. The most vicious regimes of the 20^th Century were officially atheistic and also committed more mass killings than anyone else in history. Stalin, the Communist leader in Soviet Russia, oversaw the slaughter of countless citizens, tens of millions. Mao Zedong, the Communist revolutionary who took over China, is responsible for an estimated 60 million deaths.

Look, I’m not saying that if you’re an atheist, you’re in favor of murder, or are steps away from going on your own killing rampage. I’m just pointing out the fallacy of the lazy arguments passed off as deep thought these days. In fact, while as a Christian, I believe that everyone should join my religion, if you don’t, I don’t have a problem with that. I believe in the theory of live and let live. I can put forward my views, you can put forward yours, we can all make up our own minds.

But with the new militant atheist, the militant secularist, that doesn’t appear to be an option. From pushing for God to be dropped from our national anthem, trying to make sure you can’t mention Easter, or Heaven forbid, Christmas in a school, to now the issue of conscience rights and trying to force doctors who have religious convictions to perform abortions against their will, there is no rest for the other side. Except for tomorrow. And Sunday, of course. I hope they do rest, and I hope they consider that there may be room for more than one worldview in our society. And that’s the Byline.

Holy Spot-the-Fallacy fodder, Batman! I implore that no-one make this into a drinking game for the sake of innocent bystanders and hospital ER staffs everywhere. Here’s just a small list of the usual canards that jumped out at me:

• “Militant secularists” want to end religious rights and traditions! – Myth A13

• Atheists want to silence people of faith! Except – no, they don’t. They just want Christians to stop pretending they have a monopoly on social policy, or else that their privileged religious status grants them immunity from ever being offended or criticised.

• Christian Nation^TM! I guess this revisionist silliness isn’t limited to the U.S., either. The Crommunist Manifesto explains in detail why Canada is not, in fact, a “Christian” nation.

• Stalin and Mao! – Myth A17

Fail Quote: US Founding Fathers opposed teaching Evolution

From Christian Dominionist and pseudo-historian David Barton, sending the largest nail yet through his own credibility by actually claiming that the US Founding Fathers had “already had the entire debate on Creation/Evolution” and endorsed teaching Creationism in public science classrooms:

My transcript:

Everybody thinks that’s a new debate in the ’60s – ’cause that’s when the court ruled on it, ’68 – well, you go back to Darwin, that’s not a new debate, because you go back to Founding Fathers; as far as they were concerned, they’d already had the entire debate on Creation/Evolution; and you get Thomas Paine, who’s the least religious Founding Father, saying, “You’ve got to teach Creation Science in public school classroom. Scientific method demands that!” Now, we’re opposite today.

I know it’s par for the course for conservatives to hold the Founding Fathers in an almost fetishistic form of idolatry, but Barton is taking it one step further in apparently believing they actually had the ability to travel through time and debate whether to teach Evolution or Creationism nearly a century before Charles Darwin even published On the Origin of Species, the first work to bring Evolutionary Theory to light, in 1859.

And yet, this is the man who’s gaining momentum amongst the US religious-Right as a supposedly credible expert in history. The mind boggles.

(via Right Wing Watch)

Tags: David Barton • US Founding Fathers • Christian Dominionism

Publisher removes bad words from Mark Twain compilation

Mark Twain

And the defilement of historical relics in the name of modern caprices continues:

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Mark Twain wrote that "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." A new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" will try to find out if that holds true by replacing the N-word with "slave" in an effort not to offend readers.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who is working with NewSouth Books in Alabama to publish a combined volume of the books, said the N-word appears 219 times in "Huck Finn" and four times in "Tom Sawyer." He said the word puts the books in danger of joining the list of literary classics that Twain once humorously defined as those "which people praise and don't read."

"It's such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers," Gribben said.

You know what’s a far bigger shame, Gribben? That fools can decide to desecrate literary masterpieces for the sake of appeasing the lowest common denomination of whiny pissants who apparently can’t stomach the fact that terms like “nigger” were simply how people spoke back in Mark Twain’s day (and until much more recently, too). This is little short of historical revisionism, wherein unpleasant aspects of a people’s cultural past are revised and cleaned up in an effort to appeal to modern audiences, the same as with all those fools who erase cigarettes from photos of past celebrities and the likes. It’s cheap and dishonest, trying to sell a lie about a past that wasn’t.

Thankfully, people have been quick to react to this nonsense. Unfortunately, Gribben is sorely missing the point:

The book isn't scheduled to be published until February, at a mere 7,500 copies, but Gribben has already received a flood of hateful e-mail accusing him of desecrating the novels. He said the e-mails prove the word makes people uncomfortable.

"Not one of them mentions the word. They dance around it," he said.

Guest post: On Holocaust Denialism

This is a guest post by my good friend Gene Burmington. I wanted to diversify my blog content a little, and we arrived upon the horrible subject of holocaust denialism; I forget whether he offered or I asked, but regardless, here’s what he sent me, in full and unedited, save for a few spelling fixes (because those red underlines bug me). (Obligatory disclaimer: the views and opinions expressed in the guest post content are the writer’s and do not necessarily reflect my own. Though, considering I accepted to show this on my blog with my recommendation, they tend to align.)

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Unidentified painting of internees at a labor camp

Holocaust Revisionism is defined as any definite action to either deny or curb the seriousness of the event everyone understands as the Holocaust.

This is an important thing to bear in mind because there are few events in history that should not be diminished in meaning and scope, and the holocaust is one of them. It is a black mark on history to remind all of us that horror and cruelty is entirely possible even in civilized countries.

Before world war two, Germany was just as industrialized a nation as any other country in Europe. Sure, they were reeling from the consequences of the Great Depression, but overall Germany was held on par with France and Britain as far as sophistication was concerned even despite the fact that there was much blame on Germany for starting the first war.

That aside, yes, this was the proof that not merely lawless countries can perpetrate genocide. Thanks to the wonders and organization of bureaucracy, though, the process of killing people was made much simpler and organised-sort of how we slaughter cattle nowadays, unfortunately.

The problem is that this system of death was so efficient that deniers claim that if the Nazis wanted to kill all the Jews as soon as possible, then there would be none left. By that logic, there was no Holocaust because the Nazis did not do so, so genocide was not their final solution.

I'm sorry to say that this is incorrect; If German bureaucracy was so efficient, it would have all the supplies and fuel that Rommel or Paulus needed and they could keep on pushing the Allies back. Fortunately, Germany only lost because they didn't know how to allocate their resources or how to use them. If Germany had focused on building fighter planes instead of bombers or V-1 rockets, there would be no Battle of Britain and the Nazis would control all the islands of the U.K..

There have been a number of different arguments used by revisionists, but they all fall into the same cache; the Holocaust either didn't happen or wasn't as bad as people portrayed it to be. Here's a question-why are there no revisionists claiming that the Holocaust was WORSE than it was, or claiming that Sudan is perpetrating a modern Holocaust?