Shit that Pissed me Off This Week – 9/27
Popular Science Shuts off Their Comments
Hey, I don’t really care if anybody comments on a Popular Science article ever again. Comment threads on the internet are typically the realm of madness.
Which is precisely the point. Popular Science shut off comments on their science articles because people are more likely to believe the comments than they are to believe the article.
Yeah. That’s right. People read an article with citations and evidence and they are less likely to believe that than a one paragraph rebuttal that is basically nothing more than someone saying “oh yeah? I know you but what am I?”
Everyone KNOWS that you can’t trust results from experiments that use beakers! Some guy said so on the internet!
We benefit from scientific research every day of our lives but somehow, in spite of everything science does for us, we are more inclined to believe FrankNFurther2098 than someone who is publishing a researched and peer reviewed article. The practical result is that Popular Science is turning off their comments so people will pay attention to the science and not the bullshit.
Shit that Pissed me Off – 9/6
DC Comics Won’t let Batwoman get Married
It seems odd that DC would object to the marriage of Batwoman on the grounds that she is getting married to a girl. Honestly, it is probably more likely that they don’t want Batwoman to get married because it limits the story line and we’d rather have superheroes be miserable. They can’t be miserable if they are happily married.
Still, when you have a high-profile openly lesbian character who can get married (seeing as she proposed to her girlfriend and everything), why wouldn’t you go ahead with it? Especially given popular opinion on such matters?
Is it likely that there is a large contingent of homophobes currently reading Batwoman? I mean, she’s also Jewish so Neo-Nazis clearly would want nothing to do with her.
DC is pretty quiet about the whole thing but it appears their decision to stop the wedding was part of the reason the current writing team has decided to leave the comic.
Apparently, lesbian kisses are fine. Just so long as they don’t lead to lesbian weddings.
Reading the article, I’m actually more concerned at the level of creative control DC has been exercising over the title. They don’t seem to trust their writers all that much.
I think they should have trusted their writers about letting Batwoman get married, though. Something tells me that issue would have sold a lot of copies.
Shit that Pissed me off this week- 8/23
It’s actually been a pretty boring week. Not too much that really annoyed me. Perhaps I’ve been looking in the wrong places.
They Cut Down a Grand Old Tree at the Renaissance Festival
This is not a “fuck the management of the Renaissance Festival” screed. While I sometimes feel that way, the issue here is not one of any idiot running the festival but rather the cost of our human needs.
Near a group of rocks at the MRF grounds, there was an oak tree that provided shade for years. That tree stood over the old peasant banquet and sing-along and it even provided some shade to the old juggling booth. All of those things were long gone but the tree remained. Until now.
The tree wasn’t sick (so far as I know). They cut it down because they had to run new power lines on to the site and it was in the way.
I don’t know if they could have run the lines somewhere else. Even if they could have done so, it probably would have resulted in some other tree being destroyed.
But that tree had history for me. That tree meant something to me.
That tree there. They one right between these two lovely ladies (photo by Eric Knight).
And it is the inevitable cost of human progress that we destroy things that get in our way. Over and over and over again. It isn’t a problem with the Renaissance festival. it is a problem with the way the world works.
I guess it doesn’t piss me off. It makes me sad.
Shit that Pissed Me Off This Week – 6/14
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is Off the Rails
Kennedy has long been an Anti-Vaccine crusader and I dislike the anti-vaxx movement with only slightly less zeal than the creationist movement.
I have two children on the autism spectrum. They were both vaccinated and I know two things:
1) Vaccinating my kids did not make them autistic
2) Even if it did (and it didn’t), I would rather have autistic children than children with Smallpox or Polio
You think this guy was happy he wasn’t vaccinated?
Kennedy and others like him have been pushing misinformation and, as this article proves, they are willing to name names. They people they name, however, never actually said what they are claimed to have said. Nor do the studies they cite actually say what they claim those studies say.
So all he is doing is engaging in character of assassination.
I get that big pharma is theoretically evil but here’s the thing – vaccines are not. Yes, pharmaceutical companies make money off vaccines. I guess that’s a price I’m willing to pay to ensure that my kids don’t get the measles.
Claiming vaccines cause autism is to make the claim that you understand a shitload more about autism than all the folks out there researching the condition.
And in the meantime, making people afraid of vaccines is contributing to the rise of diseases we thought had been eradicated. That’s what I call a lose-lose.
Shit that Pissed me Off this Week – 5/31
Arizona State Representative was so Upset an Atheist Rep. Didn’t pray, he Prayed Twice
I missed this one last week, sorry.
So here’s what happened. Arizona State Representative (and secular humanist) Juan Mendez gave an invocation that did not include God. They take turns giving the invocation, it was his turn and he gave an invocation based on his beliefs. Which is totally his fucking right.
Representative Steve Smith was so upset about it, he offered up a special prayer the next day for “repentance of the previous day.” In addition to a prayer he’d already given. Because he had to make up for Mendez, I guess.
Oh god, please forgive my fellow legislators for being tolerant of beliefs other than their own. As I’m the only one of them without sin, I’m going to cast the first stone.
Now let’s step back for a moment and ask what the appropriate response would be had Mendez given a Hindu prayer. Or a Jewish one. Or an Islamic one. Would that have been OK because he’d mentioned a god or gods (even if they weren’t the right one)?
Assuming Smith’s response had been the same (two prayers to make up for the lack of a Christian one), would he have taken flak for choosing to disrespect any belief system other than humanism?
I’ll bet people would have been pissed as hell. Not just Muslims or Jews or whatever other religion he’d chosen to disrespect but Christians as well.
As it is, Smith will be applauded by the religious right for standing up to the godless left even though the godless left has had to tolerate Christian prayer in the Arizona state house for every day except one.
Shit that Pissed Me off This Week – 5/24
Florida Teenager Faces Felony Charges for Being a Lesbian
Actually, she isn’t facing felony charges for being a lesbian. She’s facing felony charges for statutory rape because she was having a consensual relationship with a girl who was 14. When she was 17, that was (at least according to the articles I’ve read), legal.
But she turned 18. And her girlfriends’ parents immediately had her arrested.
Update: Apparently it wasn’t legal when she was 17 because if you are under 16, you can’t have consensual sex with anyone in the State of Florida. It would seem they waited until she was 18 so she could be charged as an adult. Classy.
And the county prosecutor is going for it. Because the law is all about protecting the innocent and that fourteen year old was clearly being corrupted by her girlfriend the second she turned 18. There is, apparently, no nuance in statutory rape laws that takes the age of the offender into account. ‘Cuz an eighteen year old may be older than a fourteen year old but she is just as much of a child.
Oh sure, you can hold her hand now. But you’d better let it go before you turn eighteen!
If she had been a boy, I’ll bet this would not have happened.
Hey, you folks who are against same-sex marriage and who still think that you aren’t bigots – don’t you think getting an eighteen year old girl expelled from school and possibly putting her in prison because she’s a lesbian seems just a little bit bigoted?
Update: There is a lot more nuance to this case. I checked my sources before I posted it but bias is always a risk. I’m still annoyed by any situation that could have a child (and yes – an eighteen year old is still a child) sent to jail for fifteen years because of sexual curiousity. If there is one thing that scares the piss out of us in this country, it is human sexuality.
The Truth is worse than the Joke
There was an article floating around the internet yesterday that got a lot of people pissed off. If it had been true, I would have been right there with them.
Thing is, it wasn’t true.
The original article appeared on The Daily Bleach, which is a parody site. I can’t link directly to the article right now because the entire site appears to be down but here’s what it said:
A Southern Carolina couple have made national news by being the first parents to put their child up for adoption due to their sexuality. Usually parents give up their children because they can’t raise them due to finances or because they are young and don’t have the mental ability to bring up a child. Kids are also usually given up for adoption at a young age, but April Chadwell is barely 16 years old and has been listed as legally adoptable by the state of Southern Carolina. Mrs. Chadwell released a statement saying “It was a tough choice to give up our daughter to the state, but we don’t know how to handle someone who decides to live a lifestyle that we do not agree with”. The Chadwells said they had help from their local church, who prayed for weeks seeking guidance for the couple and came to the conclusion that it would be best to let the child go in hopes of being adopted by a gay friendly family.
There were no links to provide a source. Just the text.
I was initially unaware that it was a parody site, but the article set off alarm bells right away. No links to a longer article. No sources quoted at all. It just looks pretty flimsy.
Shit that Pissed me off This Week – 4/5
New York’s Cardinal Dolan wants to Improve the Catholic Church’s Message about Gay Marriage
Oh that’s great Cardinal! I’m glad to see that a high-ranking member of the Catholic Church finally realizes that the Church has no right to make moral judgements for those individuals who aren’t Catholic and you’d stay out of the political arena and…wait a minute.
No. That’s not what he thinks at all. He wants gay people to know that sex is only OK if you are trying to produce offspring so while it is totally OK to be gay, you can’t actually have sex or be married or anything like that. Gay people are totally entitled to friendship, though.
He also wants gay people to know that the Catholic Church is not anti “anybody.” They don’t hate gay people. They just want to make sure that gay people know they aren’t permitted to sexual fulfillment the way straight people are.
I came up with a new message! What do you guys think?
So basically, the difference between gay guys having male friends who are gay and me having male friends who are gay is a lifetime of unresolved sexual tension? I bring this up an awful lot but you know what? If that is really what god wants for gay people, god is a dick.
How about you work on improving that message, Cardinal?
Shit that Pissed me Off this Week – 3/29
Woman Complains about Sexist Behavior at a Convention and she gets Harassed and Fired
I just don’t get it, really. A couple of guys were making sexist jokes while sitting in the audience for a panel about women coders and an audience member thought they were in the wrong. Yeah. I agree.
She asked the conference organizers to tell them to stop. They were asked to stop and they did.
Then all hell breaks loose because one of the guys loses his job.
Look, I don’t think the guy should have lost his job for that but I wonder if it was really just for that? Isn’t it possible he was shitty at his job already? Even he was “just” fired for sexual harassment (oh the humanity), the logical response should not be for other people on the internet to attack the woman’s place of work and get her fired.
Hey guys! Let’s use our computers to teach this uppity bitch that she shouldn’t complain when we call her an uppity bitch!
That’s the sort thing dicks do.
Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of dicks on the internet.
Update: Clarifications in the comments below. And in this article. She did send a tweet to the conference organizers, not a public one (at least according to what I read). I question any firings happening and the harrassment is completely unacceptable.
Mea culpa on this one, though. I usually research the articles better before I comment on them. I didn’t look into this one deeply enough. If I had, I would still have commented on it but been more clear about all of the details.
The results of this situation – both firings – look to be classic overreactions by both companies and that still pisses me off.
Grail Diary 
Shit that Pissed me off – 11/1
Fox News Lies with Statistics
Normally I don’t bother writing about Fox news because they are a biased source and who really cares when they say stupid shit? The people who watch and believe Fox news will continue to watch and believe Fox news no matter how often the bias is shown.
But bad graphs really annoy me, you know?
Take this one:
HOLY FUCK! Look how many more people are on Welfare than have full time jobs! That’s a huge amount of….waitaminnit.
Actually, that’s only about 900,000 people but it looks like a whole lot more than that because of the scale they chose for their Y axis. When you look more closely, you will see there is actually no scale on their Y Axis. If we assume the bar on the right is equal to 101.7 million, the bar on the left, which is five times as big, ought to be equal to over 500 million. But it isn’t.
Because the axis doesn’t have a scale. They just picked a bigger bar and a littler bar and slapped numbers on them.
Their numbers, by the way, are also total bullshit. Even if they got the numbers right, though, this graph would be a travesty.
Being biased is one thing. Being biased and stupid is unacceptable.
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