Hmmm. Does your moral compass face Mecca, Rome or Salt Lake City?
Mine faces the University Library in Iowa City. And PZ helps us all find ways of pointing out that god is spelled in lower case letters.
Reality is not decided by a vote. The basic flaw of faith is the notion that you can make something true by believing it really really hard (see previous strip).
Having said that, the number of believers versus unbelievers is still important when it comes to politics because in a democracy politicians have to aim policies at what they perceive to be what the public want.
Me and my sister once “hacked” a vote for Danish Idealist of The Year, which we pretty much handed to Kurt Westergaard (the Muhammed-cartoonist) by promoting a piece of software that cleared cookies and ran a loop, that kept on voting. Then we had counter-hackers, and everything went a bit haywire until finally me and my sister was decried as right-wing hackers in the media. Obviously neither me or my sister are or were right-wing, but hey… If you support Kurt Westergaard, you have to be right wing or something…
Anyway; just wanted to say “Been there, done that”.
And I’ve gotten used to Jesus and Mo’s new faces. They work for me now.
Look. It’s really simple. If you want to hack web polls in a non-amateur way, you have to have a script that votes for all the candidates in a random order, but throws extra votes to your preferred candidate. You’ve got to make the votes follow the browser distribution pattern (so the headers say IE, Firefox, Safari etc. in the right order and for the right operating systems). You’ve got to vary the amount of time they take to vote, and to have them click around the site a bit before voting. You’ve got to vary the amount of time between votes. Basically, you’ve got to do everything you can to stop the people running the poll to see any pattern in the voting – make it seem like noise.
Obviously, even better, hide it all behind proxies, institutional networks, open wifi hotspots, cloud computing hosts and Tor/darknet.
All hypothetical of course. Too much bother if the stakes aren’t high enough.
“…politicians have to aim policies at what they perceive to be what the public want…”
And therein lies the problem. The public are too stupid (as a whole) to know what’s good for us and the politicians aren’t adept enough at reading the public.
@WilliamJensen – removing cookies to vote endlessly online is not exactly malevolent hacking, but it’s still _cheating_ and it makes the voting worthless. Don’t you have a moral compass? I wonder how your idealistic brain works around that cheaty-sneaky part.
Moral compass? Pots & kettles, author. PZ describes these types of polls as ‘pointless’, directs his minions to rig hick-town newspaper polls to vote God out of existence, then gets struck down in Massachusetts. Ha!
@MercedesCorrosive. Oh. Didn’t you notice the fuss Muslims made (and are still making) over the Danish cartoons? About 140 dead, embassies and private homes attacked, boycotts, death-threats made, OIC calling for UN to enforce anti-blasphemy legislation? And Christians have done what about ‘blasphemy’ recently, a few fuddy-duddies complained about Life of Brian…sheesh!
Crusader Rabbit, yes, religion and lack of education is a powerful cocktail, as fundies of all types bear testimony to every day. I pray to St Fu that at least you may mend your ways.
@ Mercedes, you ask: removing cookies to vote endlessly online is not exactly malevolent hacking, but it’s still _cheating
WJ: That certainly depends on how the vote is set up. On a programme like X Factor, you are actively encouraged to vote multiple times. In a national election, you are barred from voting more than once.
With that being said, I can see how we did cheat. Here was our reasoning behind it:
This particular vote, that we disabled our cookies for was presented as a fair and objective measure of public sentiment, but the newspaper were performing all sorts of tricks to favor their preferred candidate, which was one of our motives for disrupting it.
We were very public about what we were doing, and tried to use it to debate the merits and limits of online-polling. We publicly stated, what we would do, before we went ahead and did it, and we communicated with the online-editor throughout the process. We succeeded to some extend to create a debate, but the newspaper itself just shot us down as political acitivists with a right-wing-agenda.
If you read Danish, it is all documented on my blog, which you find by clicking my signature.
Wow, Coyote Trax, I realise now I was wrong. Your intelligent, reasoned and supremely witty input has convinced me that – hallelujah! – god does exist. How could I ever have doubted?! Praise be!
And, Richard Dawkins! – yes! ‘ass-hat’!
Ha ha! ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!1!!.!
I never once said there was a god. I don’t believe in a god, I doubt I ever will. I’ve got a shiny (yet entirely worthless) biology degree to back that up.
You give atheism a bad rep son, you don’t care about other people’s opinions, you don’t think for yourself. You just choose a side and defend it. You don’t even care.
I do care about other peoples opinions, and I care so much that I show religious people highest respect possible: I criticize their ideas. Critique and satire are forms of dialogue and engaging with others, and I consider Jesus&Mo, Richard Dawkins, myself and the majority of vocal atheists to be very respectful of religious people. We take it very seriously, unlike people who do not wish to hear both sides of the religion-debate.
One of my few English-language-pieces explores this form of respect in detail, and if you click my signature for this comment you will be taken directly to it.
Mmm… You’re certainly arrogant enough to be a religionist, not to mention a stranger to logic.
Let’s see:
‘…there’s no punchline‘
‘Where’s the funny?!‘
‘…isn’t even any decent artwork…‘
‘….retarded attempt at humour…‘
‘…drawn by a kid with palsy…‘
‘Dawkins… is a gigantic ass-hat‘
‘Because, atheists‘
Opinions? – Looks more like a string of peurile insults to me. Especially that last one – ‘Because, atheists‘ – and you now claim you are one! Do you really have so little respect for something you claim to be? Hard to believe. You sound more like a typical trolling, low-life religious mentalist.
But apparently I ‘just choose a side and defend it‘, and somehow that means I’m ‘not thinking for myself‘. What the fuck?! I disagree with everything you’ve written, and made that clear in as polite and reasoned a way as your original post – and now you’re bleating about it? Grow up. Thinking for myself in this case means, yes, I and a lot of other people find the strip funny, there clearly is a punchline, the artwork is fine – it mocks the simplistic view of religious idiots, and what the fuck you think Richard Dawkins has to do with it I don’t know and you don’t explain.
Grow up, and get over yourself. You don’t like something; a lot of people do. If you actually do have opinions, spell them out, instead of just vomiting crap onto the internet and then whinging that people who disagree with you say so.
You’re right, there is a punchline from time to time. It’s not funny, but it’s there.
As for the artwork being fine? No. Just no. You, sir, must lack eyes or something. This is really bad. If it were drawn in crayon, it might get away with being a parody or, at the very least, a poor social commentary on the availability (or lack thereof) of art supplies in schools.
There’s so much irony in your attitude though. Why the ‘holier than thou’ stance? Why not just let people believe in their little gods and things and just sit back with a nice cup of tea and call it a day? I don’t see why some atheists have to be so contentious.
If you look at the fourth panel of each strip, you’ll see there’s a punch-line each time. Sometimes they’re obvious, but sometimes they are very dry and subtle, and can go over the head of the more simple-minded. To an extent, this is a shame, but if you concentrate you might spot a few more. And as you might work out from the large number of people who enjoy the strip, many people do find them funny.
I’ve always taken the naive, childish, simplistic style of the artwork as reflecting the naive, childish and simplistic world-view of the religious. It serves as a counterpoint to the written content. Or would that be too subtle also?
Please explain how am I stopping anyone from believing in ‘their little gods‘? Show me one example of how I (or the author) is preventing anyone doing this.
If you really don’t see why atheists should say publically that religion is bullshit then you’ve obviously never really considered it. Or would you say the same to a theist? ‘Why not just let people not believe in the things you believe in, don’t enjoy tax-breaks funded by ordinary tax-payers, don’t proselytise, don’t try to influence government policy or public opinion, don’t indoctrinate children with your irrational, toxic superstitions – after all, it’s just your little fantasy. Enjoy it yourself, but why try to get anyone else to accept it?‘
– can you see yourself saying that? Can you post a link to a religious website where you’ve posted that? If you can oppose religion as strongly as you oppose lack-of-religion, then congratulations – you’re not a hypocrite. Otherwise, try thinking a bit more.
J&M occasionally lacks a punchline, but it’s usually there. Today’s is one of the more obvious ones. I liked it. I very rarely read a J&M strip I don’t like.
Ugh, online voting– the very worst of ad populum.
I wouldn’t mind them so much if you could write in votes like they do in some places where no suitable candidate is running so the voters write in the town dog or a dead guy.
Jesus & Mo (the characters) are absurd, blinkered, and oddly very sweet. J&M (the cartoon) is brilliant: sharp, delicious, irresistible. Salman Rushdie
Jesus and Mo cartoons are wonderfully funny and true. Richard Dawkins
Jesus and Mo make the world a better place, bless their little hearts. Ophelia Benson
In a world defined by outrage and offence and liberal spinelessness, Jesus and Mo is a treasure, whose value we should never fail to recognize. Read them. Laugh. And think. Kenan Malik
The brilliant, celebrated, freaking hilarious atheist comic strip ... Greta Christina
...rays of sanity in a befuddled world. Keri Hulme
The liveliest depictions of Muhammad currently available... Malise Ruthven
J & Mo is the funniest and most consistently thought-provoking cartoon strip on the Net. In a saner world, it would run in a major newspaper. Nelson Jones, Heresy Corner
Consistently amusing, frequently thought-provoking and often heart-warming. New Humanist
Jesus & Mo is one of the most wonderful things on the internet.. JT Eberhard
Wittily captures much of the absurdity of religious apologetics. Mano Singham
I love jesusandmo.net cartoons - witty and sharp! Katha Pollitt
Often hilarious, frequently wry, these cartoons do what all the best cartoons do: they tell the truth through humour. Terry Sanderson, NSS President
...a wonderfully acid British cartoonist... Nick Cohen
I love the scrappy mockery of Jesus and Mo. Freedom of speech
includes the freedom to mock any person, any thing, any activity, and
any belief -- and J&M stands up for this unflinchingly Richard Stallman
...empowering, important and deeply progressive, not to mention hilarious... Council of Ex-Muslims
July 26, 2017
I voted only to discover that J&M have 0%! What happened, has no one got a moral compass?
Should one of them be on a Mac and another on a PC?
Voted and sticking in on Facebook.
Heh, is this a PZ tribute?
Welllllll, you are going up against xkcd. The best I could honestly do for you was not vote at all.
Hmmm. Does your moral compass face Mecca, Rome or Salt Lake City?
Mine faces the University Library in Iowa City. And PZ helps us all find ways of pointing out that god is spelled in lower case letters.
is mo using an old white ibook? has he no technological compass?
Phayngulated! Ha!
Hi, my name is Don and I a Pharyngulatoholic.
[…] section of the site where drinks will be served. Right? Right. Jesus and Mo Original cartoon at: http://www.jesusandmo.net/2010/01/26/click/ Shorty Awards […]
Author – I voted for you. Percentage didn’t change (still 0%). Guess my vote isn’t worth a lot. Sorry.
Still at 0%! WTF! Have Jesus and Mo resorted to their superpowers?
1% now… we’re getting there!
Perhaps the bump from PZ’s minions will turn the polling around…
Reality is not decided by a vote. The basic flaw of faith is the notion that you can make something true by believing it really really hard (see previous strip).
Having said that, the number of believers versus unbelievers is still important when it comes to politics because in a democracy politicians have to aim policies at what they perceive to be what the public want.
Voted. Figured xkcd’d do OK w/o me, so J & M it is. Hope someone Pharyngulates this–I can’t stand clearing cookies…
Me and my sister once “hacked” a vote for Danish Idealist of The Year, which we pretty much handed to Kurt Westergaard (the Muhammed-cartoonist) by promoting a piece of software that cleared cookies and ran a loop, that kept on voting. Then we had counter-hackers, and everything went a bit haywire until finally me and my sister was decried as right-wing hackers in the media. Obviously neither me or my sister are or were right-wing, but hey… If you support Kurt Westergaard, you have to be right wing or something…
Anyway; just wanted to say “Been there, done that”.
And I’ve gotten used to Jesus and Mo’s new faces. They work for me now.
And neither are we hackers. Disabling cookies is not hacking, but try telling that to the mainstream-media.
Well and truly Pharyngulated with my vote, which has rocketed J&M up to 0%.
Look. It’s really simple. If you want to hack web polls in a non-amateur way, you have to have a script that votes for all the candidates in a random order, but throws extra votes to your preferred candidate. You’ve got to make the votes follow the browser distribution pattern (so the headers say IE, Firefox, Safari etc. in the right order and for the right operating systems). You’ve got to vary the amount of time they take to vote, and to have them click around the site a bit before voting. You’ve got to vary the amount of time between votes. Basically, you’ve got to do everything you can to stop the people running the poll to see any pattern in the voting – make it seem like noise.
Obviously, even better, hide it all behind proxies, institutional networks, open wifi hotspots, cloud computing hosts and Tor/darknet.
All hypothetical of course. Too much bother if the stakes aren’t high enough.
I just made one clean vote for J&M!
I voted just the once, as usual, and voted for J&M as of course I would have, even without having seen the poll at Pharyngula first.
David B
@Stonyground
“…politicians have to aim policies at what they perceive to be what the public want…”
And therein lies the problem. The public are too stupid (as a whole) to know what’s good for us and the politicians aren’t adept enough at reading the public.
My moral compass just went “Spoing”,
now what am I supposed to do?
Relax, morality-less voters! Snuggling betwixt Perry Bible and xckd we’re all winners! Hooray!
🙂
@WilliamJensen – removing cookies to vote endlessly online is not exactly malevolent hacking, but it’s still _cheating_ and it makes the voting worthless. Don’t you have a moral compass? I wonder how your idealistic brain works around that cheaty-sneaky part.
i voted J&M off course. the one that´s winning is ridiculous…
This is strange. It seems the poll has been inverted – the worst comics are winning.
My fav’s from the poll:
J&M – 0%
Questionable content – 1%
xkcd – 7%
order of the stick – 1%
sinfest – 0%
… none of them doing that well.
Moral compass? Pots & kettles, author. PZ describes these types of polls as ‘pointless’, directs his minions to rig hick-town newspaper polls to vote God out of existence, then gets struck down in Massachusetts. Ha!
‘Pots and kettles, author‘ – What, P Z Myers is the author of J & M? Shit! I’d never guessed!
@Slater
Agreed. :/
Votebot, thy name is Perry Bible Fellowship.
“This is strange. It seems the poll has been inverted – the worst comics are winning.”
No, no, xkcd isn’t winning anymore.
flummoxed by internet polling. popularity almost never indicates quality. more often the opposite hold true.
susan boyle’s album comes to mind…
@ Toast. author would never allow his real identity to be revealed… surely he knows what Muslims are like..
@Crusader … or Christians..
@MercedesCorrosive. Oh. Didn’t you notice the fuss Muslims made (and are still making) over the Danish cartoons? About 140 dead, embassies and private homes attacked, boycotts, death-threats made, OIC calling for UN to enforce anti-blasphemy legislation? And Christians have done what about ‘blasphemy’ recently, a few fuddy-duddies complained about Life of Brian…sheesh!
Crusader Rabbit, yes, religion and lack of education is a powerful cocktail, as fundies of all types bear testimony to every day. I pray to St Fu that at least you may mend your ways.
This comic. This comic right here. Is. The. Worst. Comic. Ever.
I get the whole “oh yeah down with religion” theme that’s going and “think for yourself people” but dammit there’s no punchline. Where’s the funny?!
There isn’t even any decent artwork to make up for this retarded attempt at humour. It looks like it was drawn by a kid with a palsy.
Further: Richard Dawkins, while being a brilliant scientist, is a gigantic ass-hat. Thought I’d say that here. Because, atheists.
@ Mercedes, you ask: removing cookies to vote endlessly online is not exactly malevolent hacking, but it’s still _cheating
WJ: That certainly depends on how the vote is set up. On a programme like X Factor, you are actively encouraged to vote multiple times. In a national election, you are barred from voting more than once.
With that being said, I can see how we did cheat. Here was our reasoning behind it:
This particular vote, that we disabled our cookies for was presented as a fair and objective measure of public sentiment, but the newspaper were performing all sorts of tricks to favor their preferred candidate, which was one of our motives for disrupting it.
We were very public about what we were doing, and tried to use it to debate the merits and limits of online-polling. We publicly stated, what we would do, before we went ahead and did it, and we communicated with the online-editor throughout the process. We succeeded to some extend to create a debate, but the newspaper itself just shot us down as political acitivists with a right-wing-agenda.
If you read Danish, it is all documented on my blog, which you find by clicking my signature.
“Further: Richard Dawkins, while being a brilliant scientist, is a gigantic ass-hat. Thought I’d say that here. Because, atheists.”
I fucked your mum.
Wow, Coyote Trax, I realise now I was wrong. Your intelligent, reasoned and supremely witty input has convinced me that – hallelujah! – god does exist. How could I ever have doubted?! Praise be!
And, Richard Dawkins! – yes! ‘ass-hat’!
Ha ha! ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!1!!.!
You’re so clever.
Genius.
Cock-end.
Kristian – ‘St Fu‘ – nice.
Yo, Toast Master General,
I never once said there was a god. I don’t believe in a god, I doubt I ever will. I’ve got a shiny (yet entirely worthless) biology degree to back that up.
You give atheism a bad rep son, you don’t care about other people’s opinions, you don’t think for yourself. You just choose a side and defend it. You don’t even care.
@ Coyote Trax:
I do care about other peoples opinions, and I care so much that I show religious people highest respect possible: I criticize their ideas. Critique and satire are forms of dialogue and engaging with others, and I consider Jesus&Mo, Richard Dawkins, myself and the majority of vocal atheists to be very respectful of religious people. We take it very seriously, unlike people who do not wish to hear both sides of the religion-debate.
One of my few English-language-pieces explores this form of respect in detail, and if you click my signature for this comment you will be taken directly to it.
Mmm… You’re certainly arrogant enough to be a religionist, not to mention a stranger to logic.
Let’s see:
‘…there’s no punchline‘
‘Where’s the funny?!‘
‘…isn’t even any decent artwork…‘
‘….retarded attempt at humour…‘
‘…drawn by a kid with palsy…‘
‘Dawkins… is a gigantic ass-hat‘
‘Because, atheists‘
Opinions? – Looks more like a string of peurile insults to me. Especially that last one – ‘Because, atheists‘ – and you now claim you are one! Do you really have so little respect for something you claim to be? Hard to believe. You sound more like a typical trolling, low-life religious mentalist.
But apparently I ‘just choose a side and defend it‘, and somehow that means I’m ‘not thinking for myself‘. What the fuck?! I disagree with everything you’ve written, and made that clear in as polite and reasoned a way as your original post – and now you’re bleating about it? Grow up. Thinking for myself in this case means, yes, I and a lot of other people find the strip funny, there clearly is a punchline, the artwork is fine – it mocks the simplistic view of religious idiots, and what the fuck you think Richard Dawkins has to do with it I don’t know and you don’t explain.
Grow up, and get over yourself. You don’t like something; a lot of people do. If you actually do have opinions, spell them out, instead of just vomiting crap onto the internet and then whinging that people who disagree with you say so.
You’re right, there is a punchline from time to time. It’s not funny, but it’s there.
As for the artwork being fine? No. Just no. You, sir, must lack eyes or something. This is really bad. If it were drawn in crayon, it might get away with being a parody or, at the very least, a poor social commentary on the availability (or lack thereof) of art supplies in schools.
There’s so much irony in your attitude though. Why the ‘holier than thou’ stance? Why not just let people believe in their little gods and things and just sit back with a nice cup of tea and call it a day? I don’t see why some atheists have to be so contentious.
If you look at the fourth panel of each strip, you’ll see there’s a punch-line each time. Sometimes they’re obvious, but sometimes they are very dry and subtle, and can go over the head of the more simple-minded. To an extent, this is a shame, but if you concentrate you might spot a few more. And as you might work out from the large number of people who enjoy the strip, many people do find them funny.
I’ve always taken the naive, childish, simplistic style of the artwork as reflecting the naive, childish and simplistic world-view of the religious. It serves as a counterpoint to the written content. Or would that be too subtle also?
Please explain how am I stopping anyone from believing in ‘their little gods‘? Show me one example of how I (or the author) is preventing anyone doing this.
If you really don’t see why atheists should say publically that religion is bullshit then you’ve obviously never really considered it. Or would you say the same to a theist? ‘Why not just let people not believe in the things you believe in, don’t enjoy tax-breaks funded by ordinary tax-payers, don’t proselytise, don’t try to influence government policy or public opinion, don’t indoctrinate children with your irrational, toxic superstitions – after all, it’s just your little fantasy. Enjoy it yourself, but why try to get anyone else to accept it?‘
– can you see yourself saying that? Can you post a link to a religious website where you’ve posted that? If you can oppose religion as strongly as you oppose lack-of-religion, then congratulations – you’re not a hypocrite. Otherwise, try thinking a bit more.
J&M occasionally lacks a punchline, but it’s usually there. Today’s is one of the more obvious ones. I liked it. I very rarely read a J&M strip I don’t like.
Pharyngulate that.
TRiG.
Ugh, online voting– the very worst of ad populum.
I wouldn’t mind them so much if you could write in votes like they do in some places where no suitable candidate is running so the voters write in the town dog or a dead guy.