Christian News Network fundies

[BobRumba]

I hope the same forces that got Royce kicked will do the same with Guest.

Royce's single most annoying thing was thanking you for something you never said or did.  And he did it at least once per message.  Has anyone taken the time to look at his Facebook/Twitter pages?  His FB avatar says "I support the Biblical definition of marriage" and there are assorted photos of him hunting/camping and wearing camo.  He is also divorced (big surprise) and it says he studied at "The old school of hard knocks" (of course...and why did I want to read that in an Archie Bunker voice?).

Oboehner has gone nuts lately.  I can't even keep up with him.  But all his plays are the usual ones.  Attack "sodomites", make evolution out to be a religion, make atheism out to be a religion, compare homosexuality to pedophilia, bestiality, incest, etc.  He makes me wonder mostly about MYSELF, specifically why I find myself NEEDING to respond to his posts.  I'm like a moth to flame.

[BobRumba]

Jason Todd is getting on my last nerve too.

Oh and to those who can't tell the players without a scorecard, I get banned pretty frequently at Christian News Network.  These days I am Parodyx.  I was Jenny Ondioline but that one was banned. I have been many others in the past.

(also I'm a man...sometimes I use female aliases because they seem to get away with more, but in fact a "Jenny Ondioline" is a vintage keyboard instrument meant from the sixties and a song title by the band Stereolab.  Jocasta McF is a name that showed up once in my spam filter.  So now you know.)

[KingOfRhye]

Ah, Jason "Blocker" Todd.  I haven't had much of a tangle with him yet, but he is pretty damn annoying.  Not much point in talking to him, he'll just block you anyway.

[BobRumba]

Ah, Jason "Blocker" Todd.  I haven't had much of a tangle with him yet, but he is pretty damn annoying.  Not much point in talking to him, he'll just block you anyway.

I always confuse him with Jason Blue who's actually really awesome.  I need to watch my downvoting more closely.

Speaking of which, I recommend downvoting the doofuses at every opportunity.  It doesn't do much but it looks good.  Incidentally if downvotes don't show up for you, use Google Chrome and download the Disqus Downvote extension.  I think there's one for Firefox now too.

[CrowFood]

I browse the arguments when they make it to FSTDT sometimes. The people who continue to debate on those forums, my hat is off to you.

[BobRumba]

I browse the arguments when they make it to FSTDT sometimes. The people who continue to debate on those forums, my hat is off to you.

I realize it's mostly just an exercise in frustration to a lot of people.  A few of us crazy people keep going back for more.

[Ambulance Chaser]

I "love" the ongoing arguments about whether Supreme Court rulings matter, or whether they can be ignored (spoiler: they do, and they can't).

This is a "debate" that could only be had among people completely and totally uneducated in the law. No lawyer, not even the worst lawyer in America, would ever put forth such a ridiculous argument. It simply isn't done. You learn, literally on Day 1 of law school, that case law in your jurisdiction is binding, and that SCOTUS is binding everywhere. It's as simple as that. This is not some fringe, esoteric issue that only a few brilliant people, leading in their field, are capable of having. This is literally Law 101 (and really, let's face it, it's high school civics).

Oboehner thinks that court rulings only affect the parties in the case before them at that very moment (they don't). Jason Todd thinks that SCOTUS rulings are only valid if they're "constitutional" (a decision that, in his mind, is up to him). Royce thinks that "the Constitution overrides the Supreme Court" which is like saying that you don't like sandwiches, you like bread.

One of my most head-smashingly frustrating arguments was when Oboehner announced that he doesn't read any prominent lawyers' articles, any law reviews, any practice commentaries, or any treatises. I asked him what secondary sources DOES he read, and he sneered, "I'll stick with the primary source. The Constitution."

Again, this a ludicrous thing to say. No lawyer in his right mind would ever NOT read treatises or follow seasoned experts in a field. We're REQUIRED BY LAW to keep up with educational requirements every year to two years. And we don't know everything about every field. You need to research, you need to read, and you need to take classes by the eminent practitioners in your field. If you walk into a lawyer's office and he proudly announces that he doesn't read treatises, law reviews, journal articles, or practice commentaries, you need to turn right around walk straight out and into the nearest attorney disciplinary office!

I've never met a group of people so proud to be so stupid. Again, I literally cannot overemphasize how stupid an argument this is. It's not even done among far-right attorneys who work for Christian legal organizations. It's just not a thing in any way, shape, or form. No lawyer, anywhere, believes this. It would be like telling physicists they don't need to do math.

[BobRumba]

I share your frustration, AC.  Every single time, believe me.  But I like that you're taking Oboehner to task because being proven wrong is anathema to him.  He knows law better than lawyers, he knows science better than scientists.  And as for the APA?  Well, they just caved to pressure from perverts back in the 1970s.

They come from different places, that's the interesting thing.  You will rarely, if ever, hear Oboehner say a single thing about God, or Jesus, or scripture (unless he's quoting it to beat someone over the head with).  That almost makes him the "un-fundie".  But it also shows his motivation.  He's not there to proselytize.  He's there to sneer at atheists.  He wants to level the playing field.  He knows all he has is faith, and so he'll tell you until you're blue in the face that evolution, science, all of it, is just "faith" too.  If you consult a science text, to him, you're just "appealing to authority".  I have had this conversation with him a million times, I know all his plays. 

With Royce and Amos, all roads lead to God.  Eventually.  With Royce, he doesn't mince words very much.  He's in there with every single message about hellfire and God and justice.  You just sense him clasping his hands together in anticipation and delight of all the people who've disagreed with him that he gets to watch delightedly as they burn in hell forever.  Amos is a little different.  He'll talk in circles and make references to "truth" here and there and when you corner him over and over, you just find out that his "truth" is his Bible, and it trumps everything else you can throw at him since it's superior to science.

Then you get Guest, not a soldier of God as much as a troll.  You catch him with his hands in the cookie jar over and over, and point out how he's being dishonest and deliberately editing and bending information to suit his story, and he ends up smiling and mocking you.

I talked to another guy on Disqus yesterday who actually said these exact words in retaliation to me:  "The dictionary?  HA HA HA".

The mindsets are distinct and the playbooks are all different.

[dpareja]

Jason Todd and Royce have a point, though probably not with regard to the cases they're thinking about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Baseball_Club_v._National_League
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toolson_v._New_York_Yankees,_Inc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_v._Kuhn

In Federal Baseball Club, in 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that the Sherman Act did not apply to Major League Baseball, a decision that, especially in the context of the time, may have been correct. The decision did (I believe) leave the door open for Congress to pass legislation specifically regarding Major League Baseball, but Congress declined (and to this day continues to decline) to do so.

However, 31 years after the Court heard Toolson. That Court came to the conclusion that, essentially, Federal Baseball Club was decided incorrectly, but chose to uphold their prior ruling in preference to the Constitution. 19 years later, with Flood, they did it again (this time with a paean to baseball), with even the majority conceding that their previous holdings had been contrary to the Constitution but preferring stare decisis to the Constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radovich_v._National_Football_League

However, in 1957, the Court heard Radovich, in which they were faced with essentially the same facts as the baseball cases but ruled in the opposite way from those cases: that professional football is subject to the Sherman Act.

This has made baseball's antitrust exemption a weird, inconsistent, sui generis matter in the law, and the justices in the majorities in the latter two baseball cases (and possibly in the dissent in Radovich) arguably in violation of oaths of office for upholding a previous judicial order that they themselves said was contrary to their understanding of the Constitution.

[Ambulance Chaser]

Dpareja:

While those cases do indicate that the Supreme Court can come to certain messy outcomes in various types of cases, it doesn't really apply much to the idea that the rank and file, or the general public, can simply ignore rulings they don't feel like following.

[Ambulance Chaser]

OMG we have a new one. Someone named John Love has announced that, to be "fair," judges should "go back to the original text of the Constitution." This doesn't make sense. The "original text" is written in sweeping, broad strokes. You can't "go back to the original text," because doing so simply isn't possible. What he's suggesting is A) not how we practice law and B) tantamount to saying "judges should just interpret the Constitution however they please in whatever circumstances are before them." Patently ridiculous. There would never be a single legal question that ever got resolved.

I told him that any judge who tossed precedent aside would get overturned. Any judge who did it repeatedly would probably be facing impeachment. He smugly responded, "Ah ha! So you AGREE that judges can be impeached! Sounds like you actually agree with me but you're arrogantly denying it!"

Um, wut?

He also said I'm "advocating for an oligarchy." Except, I'm not putting forth a position here. I'm not "advocating" for anything. I'm telling him how it works. I'm not making arguments, I'm stating facts. Facts he doesn't like, but facts.

Seriously, do these people walk into operating rooms and tell doctors how to do their jobs too?

[BobRumba]

I told him that any judge who tossed precedent aside would get overturned. Any judge who did it repeatedly would probably be facing impeachment. He smugly responded, "Ah ha! So you AGREE that judges can be impeached! Sounds like you actually agree with me but you're arrogantly denying it!"

Has Guest been banned, and back with a new name?  That sounds EXACTLY like one of his troll posts.  Or Royce with his "thank you for admitting" posts.

But speaking of Guest, I need to get to the bottom of this one because he's tenaciously holding on to it like I've never seen him do before.  I'll summarize what I'm talking about using direct quotes, it's probably easiest:

Guest: We've been through this before. The court already ruled that atheism is a religion.
Colin Rafferty: Which court cited this? Do you have a case name?
Guest: Torcaso v. Watkins.
Colin Rafferty: Wrong. In fact, that case proves exactly the opposite. That case is based around the fact that Torcaso did not have a religion, and that this should not bar him from holding public office.
Guest: It's in the footnote. Judge Black called secular humanism a religion. Then there was this WI decision that ruled "Atheism is religion, and the group that he wanted to start was religious in nature even though it expressly rejects a belief in a supreme being.
Colin Rafferty: I see where your mistake was. Secular humanism is not atheism. As for a different case, Kaufman v McCaughtry, they said that atheism is a religion for the purposes of First Amendment claims, because it takes a position on the existence of god. "Atheism is, among other things, a school of thought that takes a position on religion, the existence and importance of a supreme being, and a code of ethics.   As such, we are satisfied that it qualifies as Kaufman's religion for purposes of the First Amendment claims he is attempting to raise."
Guest: Sorry, but you're wrong. In both cases, atheism was ruled a religion. You have your quote.

And then we get into Guest just being tenacious without offering anything more.  Later on he tried to change the wording of an exact quote which he gave as this:

"Atheism is a religion, and the group that he wanted to start was religious in nature even though it expressly rejects a belief in a supreme being."

I searched the text of Kaufman vs. McCaughtry for this text and found nothing, because Guest altered it.  The original quote was:

"Atheism is Kaufman's religion, and the group that he wanted to start was religious in nature even though it expressly rejects a belief in a supreme being."

So clearly he's got something to hide here, but I am wondering what the official word is on atheism being considered a religion in court cases.

If you have the stomach to wade through it all, the thread is here (and has been curiously uncensored by the bastards at Christian News Network):

https://disqus.com/home/discussion/christiannewsnetwork/atheist_activist_group_sues_trump_over_order_allowing_electioneering_from_pulpit/

[dpareja]

Dpareja:

While those cases do indicate that the Supreme Court can come to certain messy outcomes in various types of cases, it doesn't really apply much to the idea that the rank and file, or the general public, can simply ignore rulings they don't feel like following.

I know what they meant by what they said. I'm just pointing out that they're technically not wrong, they're just not right in the way they think they're right.

[BobRumba]

Careful at CNN lately guys, the wolves are circling.  Even Colin's had some of his comments removed.  The censors there are complete bastards.

[KingOfRhye]

I looked back through my old posts, nothing's gotten removed in a while.  I seem to be pretty good at avoiding that for whatever reason.

I've found it pretty funny, all these people lately saying atheism is a religion because the courts said so....when it's probably most of the same people who would say Obergefell isn't valid or whatever.