A Defence Of Thunderf00t (sort of)

http://benfromcanada.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/benfromcanada

THINGS I SHOULD HAVE MENTIONED BUT DIDN'T!
1: The video Thunderf00t made of Kent Hovind is far more defensible as "satire" than the porn images of Thunderf00t. The former is telling a stock joke (about rape in prison being the real punishment) and by making the rapist have a "Jesus" tattoo, it adds the idea of Jesus punishing Kent for his sins. Also, if I recall correctly, he juxtaposes that with Kent telling his congregation about punishment for sins if they don't repent. Meanwhile, the closest thing to "satire" a photoshopped picture of a dude masturbating comes is calling the dude a "wanker". It may gain an extra bit of mileage if TF was an anti-porn activist, or preached about the evils of masturbation...also, while the Kent Hovind one doesn't count as porn, the TF pictures certainly do.

1a: Context also helps. The Thunderf00t images were posted on an adult dating website (if I interpret what was said properly) and on their own website. TF's Hovind video was on youtube, after Hovind got convicted of various criminal activities. The Hovind picture was fairly clearly photoshopped. I haven't studied the images of TF masturbating, but I doubt they were as clearly shopped as TF's Hovind image

2: People have been painting Thunderf00t as some sort of major anti-muslim bigot. The dumbest case of this comes in BoundlessEyes' parody of Cee-Lo Green's "Fuck You" where her boyfriend mentions how muslim scholars contributed much to science...something Thunderf00t brought up in one of his earlier anti-Islam videos. He described how "fundamentalist Islam" essentially destroyed the golden age of Islamic scholarly pursuits, something that others like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Neil DeGrasse Tyson have argued, and something that can be verified. While I understand that Europeans (and if you pay attention, nearly all TF's outspoken critics are from Europe) are used to having the most outspoken anti-Islam types be racists who hate Islam because it's the religion darker skinned folk follow, Thunderf00t hasn't, to my knowledge, crossed over into actual bigotry yet.

3: The quran burning thing was clearly explained as an exercise to show how, in a digital age, destroying a copy of a book isn't a form of censorship at all. Really, he burned a hard drive with several .pdf files that happened to contain the text of the quran. He created all those files, and destroyed them. Had he simply clicked "delete" on all of them, it would have destroyed exactly as many qurans.

4: Draw Muhammad Day 1 was at least somewhat justifiable as a protest against muslim attempts to silence free expression, and in response to a real death threat lodged against real people for portraying Muhammad in a cartoon (South Park) that got away with extremely vulgar portrayals of other religious figures (the year before, they had an episode about a statue of the Virgin Mary shooting blood out of her anus, which drew protests from the Catholic League, but no death threats, despite its severity...yet a walk-on part of Muhammad dressed as a bear got censored? That's mad). DMD2 is a bit of a stupid move, I agree, but give credit where it's due.

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[loveofphysics]

Thunderf00t crossed into bigotry when he assaulted the freedom of expression of American Muslims within some yet to be determined radius from ground zero.

[BENY0HAMA]

@loveofphysics Um, what? He specifically said they should be allowed to set up the building there if they have the proper permits.

[KevinSolway]

1. You should ask FF why he said "we". He has a reasonable explanation.

2. TF has in the past been let off the hook and given the benefit of the doubt because of his science. Those days are long over and his credit is worn out.

[BENY0HAMA]

@KevinSolway 1. Oh I'm sure he does, just like christians have "reasonable explanations" of the trinity.

2. Huh? Was that why I was giving him the benefit of the doubt? Was I giving him that benefit?

[greenelf12]

Yeah but i'm not xconvinced by this "we" argument considering that surly it dosen't take more than one person to photoshop somone.

[BENY0HAMA]

@greenelf12 Weren't there multiple photoshops? Wasn't there a whole website?

[integralmath]

My main problem with their having done this is that in the process, they were representing themselves in the creation of the account as being tf00t. This is actually a violation of the law. Tf00t's videos are at the very least in accordance with the limits imposed by law.

[Elenkhos]

@DawahFilms You really can dance though Dawah... you had allot of the ladies very hot over that... one even went out and bought the whole bookstore on Islam, remember that? Lol... that's shak'n and bak'n brother

[zarkoff45]

I've had my criticism of TF, I tried to be constructive, not insulting:

watch?v=J8SpuejSIC4

watch?v=iaU7Z5KLx8I

[Elenkhos]

@DawahFilms At least you laughed and did not beat your girlfriend or blow someone up

[DawahFilms]

@Elenkhos

LOL

[greenelf12]

@BENY0HAMA I'm not sure how many photo shops they were but even if they were 10 I still insist they only need to be done by one person, The website is an existing website that hey uploaded to They hardly created a whole gay dateing website.