We’re only three days away from the big day. Probably a good idea to turn off the news and play videogames, or watch creepy old episodes of Space 1999 or something.
Today’s Final Countdown cover isn’t the worst cover I’ve ever heard, but it’s definitely the one with the most tubas.
The bonus video today involves three layers of pug.
Must tubas?
I’m not sure. To cover all your bases you should count the basses in this one:
@Pie
Yeah, the athiest community is full of misogynists, too, but with religion people refuse to listen to anything that goes against the scripture (or their church’s interpretation of it). It makes it that much harder to get them to listen. And a lot of the misogyny that exists currently in our society has religious roots. I’m not saying that religion is the only source of misogyny, but it’s a huge one.
@Kupo and Pie
The trend of misogyny in atheist communities is super troubling. Many like the “Amazing Atheist” are racist too. And I read that AA is voting for Trump. I don’t get it. You think atheists would be against a man who wants to break down church and state.
@number sequence
Thanks for the NY Times link. It calmed down my anxiety a bit. 🙂
Happy day!
I’ve been very sad since my Sarracenia plant was murdered by voles. I just found a new one at Lowes. Hooray!
This one won’t be allowed anywhere near the voles.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/alabama-sorority-college-females-women-republican-trump-1.3838359
Quote: “You go to a party any day, and there’s fraternity guys — any guys — grabbing girls, doing this and that,” said Kosick, 21, a junior. “I don’t think it’s out of the normal realm of things. I don’t think it’s as big a deal. ”
…
…
Can someone please stop the world and let me off?
Wow. This explains so much. As a single adult woman, I live in a home without a head. The idea that I am not subject to any authority in my own home suggests I need to be – who knows what my unconstrained, uncontrolled adult femininity may do! That my household is without a head also suggests it is without reason, logic, prudence, sense.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, women could not own property. Even more recently, women could not borrow money without a male co-signer. I never understood that, but now it all makes glorious sense. No wonder we are heedless, reckless, feckless – we are headless!
That makes things simple, and leaves me a whole Sunday of happy zombieing. There is blue sky and sunshine in my little valley this morning!
I think everyone here knows this but I’ll repeat it as a starting point: polls are accurate to the extent that their sample population reflects the people that actually turn out and vote. So polling, in a nutshell, relies on correctly predicting who will vote. Most polls rely on what has gone on in the past, but Trumpster is such a non-traditional candidate, and nobody knows how many voters of both sexes won’t be able to bring themselves to vote for a woman as President but don’t want to admit it, that it’s not difficult to think that the polls could be off significantly. Remember, last time we were dealing with a President who was black but an incumbent and therefore someone who had a known track record — that is, it was unlikely that anyone who had voted for him the first time would vote against him the second time because he was black. We had an opponent who was a bumbling plutocrat but generally well-meaning (as he understood “well”), and it was unlikely that huge numbers of people were going to turn out just to vote against him. Where Mitt was somewhat offensive to Latinos (“self-deportation”), Trumpster has been outrageously so, and it looks like many Latinos are coming out to vote largely to vote against him. The black vote may be a bit less — in part due to serious voter suppression efforts — but it will be solidly anti-Trump.
I still think Hillary will do significantly better than the polls show. I think there will be a lot of women who are not willing to be publicly pro-Hillary, because that invites getting a verbal whacking from pro-Trumpster men in their lives, but who have been antagonized enough by his past and present behavior that they will vote for her.
This is a very strange election. Hillary is a fairly standard moderate liberal who happens to be a woman, much like Obama who instead happened to be black. I’m sure being black cost Obama some votes but not enough to defeat him, and he certainly energized black voters. Undoubtedly being female will cost Hillary some votes, but also there will be some women who will say, “I’m not totally sure about her, but she’s a woman so she can’t be that bad, and it’s time one of us gets a chance to run things.” Trumpster, on the other hand … well, I’m sure I don’t need to say much about him.
As to the War with Russia thing — one of the ways the Trumpsterites have tried to counteract the threat of Trumpster’s obvious lack of self-control applied to military and foreign policy matters is to claim that Hillary is some kind of uber-hawk who wants to go to war with everybody. As a woman, Hillary has to walk a fine line between being perceived as too hawkish and being weak because women are weak and always back off from a fight, doncha know. I think she’s done a fairly good job of it, but the other side really wants her to be too pacifistic and too belligerent at the same time. I personally think she’s not that more hawkish than Obama, and that both of them have been forced to be more hawkish than they really are because of the pro-military permanent foreign policy establishment, many of whom want war with Iran. And remember — I’m a pacifist who went to prison as a Vietnam era draft resister, so I’m generally opposed to any military action. But I am also opposed to letting Putin swallow up Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, among others.
Unrelated, stay safe lux and Venezuela <3
Trumpism and alt-right ideas have a lot in common with a lot of the non-progressive ideology going around in the atheist community for a while. More or less, some atheists rejected progressivism either because they thought it was too moralistic or because they thought it had the characteristics of a religion.
The anti-progressive atheists, in particular, thought that the idea that people have universal and objective rights didn’t make sense (or they didn’t like it because it places moral demands on them). So they decided that rights only exist as part of a political system that’s an expression of a culture. Cultures supposedly only become more “humane” (women’s rights, anti-racism, disability rights, etc.) with technological development and economic growth and people’s moral awareness has nothing to do with it (note the consistent bias against moral values).
It turns out all this thinking lends itself well to defending hierarchical society. It also means what’s “humane” can be whatever your personal preference is, so you can be a white nationalist or MRA based solely on your personal preferences. Again, they saw morality as a bad thing, so that eventually led to antipathy towards the “humane” reforms in society that don’t directly benefit you.
Part of me wonders if people like the guy who believes in AI gods and the rationals were around in the 60-80’s would be calling things like commies in every place as part of their authoritarian mindset.
Last time I checked when people call themselves logical mister roboto it has been and always been saying that backwards thinking that older bigots say its just common sense. Sargon “I can’t remember to read”, Armored “feminist is totally a religion guis” Skeptic, Thunderf00t and Repzion “I can’t stop talking about Anita Sarkeesian”, Tl;dr “I don’t know a damn thing”, Amazing “Spouts racist pseudoscience but really not a racist” Atheist, shoeonhead, mr bearington “i bully people online and only nudge people to doing so.” are yet another on that infamous list of people every generation who keeps trying to keep things the way they are.
Make no mistake coming the end of this election I’m probably going to troll all day long just to continuously point pit to everyone possible that these people are damnable bigots who need to pick on the literal dregs of religous groups to look better. I really don’t see myself as the only one who wants to make sure they can’t weasel their way out of their candidate pick. What these people are capable of being against literal terrorists, good job gold star.
(Banjo heals the soul.)
That is the dumbest shit I’ve ever read.
@Nerd: Religions have always claimed that there’s no way to have a moral society without God to tell people what’s right and wrong, and it’s sort of ironic that atheists are coming to the same point from a different direction.
As an agnostic, I’ve always believed that you could develop reasonable moral values without God. They won’t be absolute and perfect, of course, but I’ve never seen any religiously developed morality that doesn’t have very serious flaws from my point of view. I’ve never thought very kindly of the “Big Daddy in the sky tells you what’s right and wrong” shtick.
You said it better than me History Nerd, but I just wanted to heartily agree with you. I believe this is the true root of YouTube atheism/misogyny. They hate anything that requires them to consider the consequences of their behavior, especially in regard to how it affects others. Instead of being concerned about the negative effects religion has on society (prejudices against lgbtq and women, anti science, patriarchy, etc.) They only care about how it will affect them, and how it restricts their freedom to be unmitigated asshole s, just like feminism. Out of everything in the Bible it’s “love thy neighbor” that they have a problem with.
From FBI Director Comey:
Thanks for the past week asshole.
Did someone say banjo?
@History Nerd
A lotta atheists, (mostly also right-libertarians*), are what Altemeyer describes as highly Social Dominance Oriented types. Basically they want society organised in a firm hierarchy, with themselves at the top of it.
Many theists like to claim that atheists are only atheists because they reject all moral strictures and don’t want to be answerable to anyone for their actions. These jackasses are the ones they’re describing.
The idea that rights have any objective or intrinsic existence doesn’t make any sense. Rights only exist insofar as people believe that they do. Which is not to say that people shouldn’t agree to believe in universal rights, of course. People have got to believe that, or what’s the point
They’re not wrong about that one. Just unwilling to think through the consequences. Since we can’t just look at some list, we can’t just wave our hands and bleat about ‘natural rights’, we have to look at what the effects that guaranteeing a right has on people. For instance, guaranteeing a right to medical care will improve and lengthen a lot of people’s lives; guaranteeing a right to carry guns will do the opposite. So, taking as read that all things being equal, most people would prefer to have a long, healthy, happy life in a safe, peaceful and prosperous society**, we can see that, e.g. equal rights for everyone is a good thing, and furthermore that rights like medical care, shelter, and food are equally as important as rights to say what you want.
Well, that’s provably wrong, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of history could point out. Of course, these clowns never bother actually learning or studying anything except sometimes formal Aristotelian logic. Everything else they think they can work out from first principles with their mighty white brains and manlogic.
Well, yes.
Thing is, the only benefit they want is to have someone to kick around. On any other level, progressive reforms benefit everyone.
*Right-libertarians tend this direction in general, but aren’t all atheist.
*People who do want to be unhappy or unhealthy can take care of that themselves, and people who don’t want a safe, healthy, prosperous society are a danger to everyone around them, not someone whose beliefs should be taken on board.
After looking over those articles about Nate Silver, I come to two possible conclusions:
1. Nate Silver doesn’t understand the difference between national and state polling.
2. Nate Silver is deliberately making the race seem close for reasons of his own.
I think I can discard 1. The man is not a fool and he’s not uninformed. He knows perfectly well that a 3-point national lead and a 6-point lead in Florida alone are not mutually exclusive. So I am left with the idea that he is doing this purposefully.
This might work in Clinton’s favor. People are more likely to get out and vote when they think a race is close, and therefore their votes matter. Clinton has a tremendous GOTV machine in operation right now, and Trump does not so much. High overall turnout will favor Clinton in all battleground states.
It’s possible Silver is “unskewing” his polls in order to goad people to get out and vote. It’s also possible his motives are different. I can’t read his mind. But i think the overall effect will be to boost turnout, which will favor Clinton.
He’s said it’s because his model is built to be more conservative (in the sense of the level of certainty it’ll show) and treats errors in state polls as highly correlated when most models treat them as being more independent.
So I guess I agree with 2, but it’s for apolitical reasons, just how he thinks it’s best to do things.
And they tell me that rape culture isn’t a thing…
@Dalillama
Thank you for the baaaanjoooooo.
Honestly, I think we all need it in this trying time.
Welp, my favorite RP site is down and I can’t get a good, sharp knife to cut open my spaghetti squash with. Looks like I’m in limbo.
I don’t think those people are really coming from a skeptical mindset. They have an antipathy towards some of the more positive features that religion can sometimes have like making people happy and making them treat other people well. They definitely prefer being near the top of a strong social hierarchy over personal happiness.
It’s similar to preferring a highly micromanaged Stalinist society. They can’t stand people getting along without a strong hierarchy based on power.
@History Nerd
They don’t think there’s a difference.
There are so many YouTube atheists and “sceptics” who think that feminism is bad because “it’s a religion”. Amazing Atheist has been mentioned already; there are also Thunderf00t, Armoured Skeptic (who has even made videos defending Trump), Logicked, CoolHardLogic, (the last three of whom I used to enjoy) and innumerable others. As an atheist myself, I find it very distressing. For my YouTube atheist and sceptic fill, I prefer people that are neutral or friendly to feminism, like AronRa, Martymer 81, and The Atheist Experience.
@Troubelle: Moonbeam Malcontent
You know what you need?
Banjo.
@HJ
I’m currently derping around with Dunc’s AlgoMusic, a little program where you plug in a word or words and it makes an infinite song. It’s…well, perhaps I should give the banjo a turn for being less repetitive.
ETA: Ah yes, bluegrass as befitting my state. Now if only it would actually go blue.