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September 16th, 2020
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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
...a philosophical confrère.
Jerry Coyne
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
...wonderfully brilliant and witty.
Miranda Celeste Hale
Too good for words.
Maryam Namazie
The Eric and Ernie of monotheism.
Tom Holland
The most impious double act since Sodom and Gomorrah.
Andrew Copson, Chief Executive, BHA
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
Jesus & Mo is my go to example of how to do tasteful, beautiful religious satire.
Eiynah, Polite Conversations
...humor is humor and this cartoonist doesn't have it. Karl Giberson
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Very nice. Postmodernism would argue in favour of Mo here and declare that reality is a fluid concept that depends largely on definition of words, themselves socially constructed. So…. we are truly f*cked, aren’t we? Welcome back magical thinking. We didn’t miss you btw.
As Phillip K Dick say Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. so you need to keep bending your mind…
Postmodernism…..even the name is complete bollox….
And the barmaid will be troll-mobbed as a TERF in 3…2…
So you’re saying that trans dogma mirrors religious dogma in its determination to deny reality in favour of Dreams in the Head.
Sounds accurate to me.
Oh boy, a can of worms has been opened and it won’t be long before comments get ugly.
Comparing trans people to delusional religious figureheads might seem like fair game if you want to stick to previously established views of what is reality, but that doesn’t change the fact that where trans people are concerned, reality isn’t as black and white as what was once thought. Once upon a time, people thought the same thing about just plain homosexuality, but their rights to identify as who they are as being nature and not a choice has now been established as the norm (oh wait).
And last I checked, nobody has nominated themselves as a transgender messiah, and I would scoff at them if they did, and those identifying themselves as different to how they were born was a personal identification. I have very high doubts anybody is going to seriously point to a newborn baby and label them trans; this is something that needs to be figured out with time and internal consideration.
Besides, who is worse for society at large, a psychotic child molester and proponent of genital mutilation, or a person who had surgery as a means of self-expression? Believe it or not, those examples don’t go hand-in-hand.
Can of worms indeed. I’m happy for people to self-identify as whatever they like. So long as I’m not accused of being a horrible person simply for disagreeing with their personal, idiosyncratic ideas of what ‘x’ is.
Good strip BTW author.
Oh, and also their insistence that everyone must agree with them….. just, like, because.
MattR, the fear of being labelled a “horrible person”, makes me ask …
Question: Which is the better position for me to have, to support feminists or to support trans-exclusionary feminists?
Answer: It doesn’t matter because either way, I’m wrong, a priori, as a cis male.
In conclusion, any system that forces a subset of its people into disapproval by virtue of what they are, is a bad system. (See also how Black people are treated in the United States.)
The anti-trans comments here are quite disturbing. The arrogance of those posters in a matter of self-determination illustrates egos over acceptance and fairness.
This website usually does better…
OK. Realistically? Who is really getting hurt here? and who needs help and protection? I don’t really care about people giving themselves names, pronouns etc. that may or may not seem appropriate to me. I do care about people facing difficult life choices and being forced into suicide by a hostile world; about rapists pretending to change gender in order to get access to a woman’s prison.
@Paul
Having met an interacted with a number of trans people and how much more comparatively difficult their lives are, the risks that one male will pass as female to attempt rape seems low. Statistics seem to support that – not to put a fine point into this, but if you want to sexually abuse a woman pretending to be one seems a very inefficient way when so much of that abuse goes on everyday on “conventional” terms.
As for gender issues: besides the scientific arguments that seem to place sexuality in a spectrum as opposed to a dichotomy M/F, and that is not even considering the social issues around gender which are even more murky (see the multiple societies that have more than two gender roles – the Waria in Indonesia, the Two-Spirit North American natives – or the Muxes from the Mexican Zapotecs amongst several dozen examples.
Does it really make sense to be “happy for people to self-identify as whatever they like”? Look at Donald Trump for instance – he self-identifies as a stable genius, as very very smart, as “your favorite president,” as much more intelligent than Obama. What people “self-identify as” in their own heads and nowhere else is one thing, but when they want to impose that identification on other people things can get tricky.
This smacks of the post modernist…all points of view are of equal validity…clearly the human brains ability to conceptualise virtually anything makes for some seriously complicated personality combinations….what about a person who decides that they will identify as a woman at weekends but as a man on weekdays? Or as a wolf during a full moon? And what about a middle aged man deciding he want’s to identify as an eight year old girl as Ricky Gervais parodied in a recent comedy show….
@Rodrigo Diaz I agree. It is a very rare, particularly compared to suicide of transsexuals. I know of one example only. And it is the only real harm that I know of cause by transexuals. Or one transexual Or one “transsexual”. And it is surely open to the prison governor of a women’s prison to keep any rapist or suspected rapist in segregation if needed.
I AM the son of god!
— Jesus
And I am god’s final prophet, the perfect role model to all mankind.
— Mo
And I’m the Czar of all the Russias!
— Ensign Pavel A. Chekov
And just between you, me, and the lamppost, I’d be more inclined to believe Pavel Andreievitch, myself.
Well of course a man can transubstantiation himself into a woman simply by believing that it is so. Oh yea of little faith! However a white person must never pretend to be black, like this person, or this one, or this one. That’s impossible. And horrible. Horrible I tell you! The gulf between black and white is far wider than that between man and woman, and impossible to cross via mere self-identification. All good people understand this.
Also, race doesn’t exist.
Yeah, pretending to be People of Color.
Well, caucasions do not need to pretend.
In spring, they are Pink.
Comes the sun, they burn Red.
Burning heals, they are Brown.
Autumn comes, they turn White.
A good winter, they turn Blue.
…and who do we call People of Color?
Well, we were clearly all black once. So its ridiculous how cultural tribalism has seemingly replaced religious tribalism as the population of homo sapiens causes more and more friction over diminishing resources that is fought over by the greedy primate self named as intelligent when clearly most are as thick as pig shit….
We were clearly all monkeys once. And fish for that matter. Don’t see how it’s relevant to anything though. That was then and this is now. What matters is how much change has occurred since then.
It is relevanr because most people don’t know that white skin is a favourable mutation in response to less sunlight in the northern hemisphere…so white people are mutants in terms of skin pigmentation….and that’s a fact…the current problems are more cultural than racial because we are clearly all one species….and people are very parochial when it comes to their way of life and unfortunately religion tends to reinforce prejudice….sadly…
Come, let Us go down and confuse their language (Genesis 11:7).
Thanks, God(s).
M27Holts: “White” people are actually a minority ethnic group
– from a worldwide viewpoint.
SOG. True…my point exactly….default homo sapiens are black….all other skin colours are selected for by natural selection….if earth had been consistently bathed in sunlight we would have been far more homogenous in skin pigmentation…
M27Holts — Yes, of course “white” skin is a mutation. (SLC24A5 has the biggest effect, but other genes are involved as well). So what? Mutations are what differentiate us from fish! And yes, we are all one species. Again, so what? All dogs belong to a single species, yet different breeds still manage to differ in rather important ways. Eurasians and Africans have been separate breeding populations for at minimum 50,000 years, and probably longer. That is plenty of time for different mutations to appear — and just as important, plenty of times for the frequencies of common alleles to shift in different ways. Such differences are what allow companies like 23andMe to be so accurate in determining the “continental ancestry” of their clients. Whether or not genetic differences between continental populations affect traits that we care about — temperament, intelligence, etc. — is an open question: we don’t (yet) know that they do, but we also don’t know any reason why they couldn’t. But pointing out that at one time all of our ancestors lived in Africa and had black skin, while true, sheds no light on any questions that matter.
JB. It makes a difference to a very large section of people who believe the bullshit dogma that is FUNDAMENTAL to their blinkered, ignorant lives….if they opened their closed minds they may throw away their chains and help mankind to prepare for colonization of the galaxy…..
M27Holts, about “most are thick as pig shit”: we can quantify that.
See this IQ percentile chart: https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx
Reading the first two columns, 15 SD. Results are only slightly different with 16 SD.
About 9% are below 80 IQ, people with cognitive disability.
But about 54% are between 80 and 105. These are dull normal to normal.
About 11% are between 115 and 125. Those aren’t really all that intelligent, and may not achieve great things without working very hard. But many have discovered that that can do well by manipulating and cheating the group that is below 105. (e.g. used car salesmen, grifters of all kinds, populist leaders of countries, some of them blond.) One way of manipulating and cheating for profit is to convince the fools in group A that their miserable state is due to the fools in group B: racism. And the fools are amenable to being cheated because it’s more pleasant to believe that it’s someone else’s fault, rather than that one is “thick as pig shit”.
The Nobel Prize winning level, I’ve heard, is 160 and above. It appears that only 0.0032% of humanity is in that group, and not all of them put in the work needed for great achievement.
So I’d say that “most” really amounts to the vast majority. If you look simultaneously at intelligence, good intentions, and the will to act them, we’re down to a tiny fraction of the human race.
We’re doomed to a Malthusian outcome, because we’re not smart enough to avoid it.
Laripu. I did an IQ test in 1983 when 18 with my form group members at sixth form college. I dug out my diary for 1983 ( i have kept a diary since 1975) and I scored 138…mind you I have just failed miserably to mend my en-suite toilet by buying an incompatible part….so I am clearly far from omniscient…
Laripu: Surely the very concept of IQ is based on the assumption that “intelligence” will show the same sort of variation in a population as say height or body mass, ie the classic “bell-shaped curve”, so the number of highly intelligent geniuses must be balanced by an equal number of those who are thick as pig shit, (as M27Holts so elegantly put it) and the average IQ must be 100, by definition!. The comparison table you cite is very like the sort of argument that god exists because the bible says so and the bible is the word of god, ie a circular argument.
There is a strong consensus among experts that IQ tests measure something that is real, and is correlated with what we commonly think of as “intelligence”. Even experts who are bitterly opposed to the idea that the racial IQ gap is genetic generally acknowledge this. For example, from this article in Vox, written by three prominent psychologists:
Intelligence is meaningful. This principle comes closest to being universally accepted by scientific psychologists. Every clinical psychology program in the country trains students in IQ testing, tens of thousands of IQ tests are given in schools every year, and papers in mainstream scientific journals routinely include information about intelligence, even when IQ is not the main object of study. On a more basic level, who doesn’t notice that some people have larger vocabularies than others, can solve harder math problems or organize more complex projects? IQ tests reliably assess these individual differences. Moreover, people who do well on one kind of ability test also tend to do well on others, a phenomenon that is referred to as g, as in general intelligence.
A supporter once called out, “Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!” And Adlai Stevenson answered, “That’s not enough. I need a majority.”
Son of Glenner, I took a 3 hour IQ test around 12 years ago. It tested for many skills: linguistic, geometric, numerical, memory, and a few others. They have found that the scores in those tests are indeed normally distributed. That’s not superstition, that’s based on evidence, namely the results of thousands of such tests. The 100 isn’t a gospel number, is just the average of those kinds of tests.
If you think the word “intelligence” is the problem, define the IQ number to be “the level of ability demonstrated in passing certain kinds of standardized tests”. Then it isn’t about intelligence, but about how well one does in these tests.
It doesn’t test for every single kind of intelligence. It leaves out emotional understanding and the kind of brilliance displayed by top sports athletes. (I guarantee that those skills are more than merely physical.)
Despite the obvious flaws, it is the case that the ability to do very well in those tests correlates pretty well with ordinary success. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, extreme success takes effort and will. That isn’t necessarily correlated with intelligence.)
One thing is clear. On average, people with IQs significantly lower than 100, even with great determination, aren’t going to be able to educate themselves nearly as well, about anything, as people with higher IQs.
And that was my point: conmen work on easy marks. And those make are numerous, going by the “test taking ability quotient”.
And that explains two blond conmen that have used con artist techniques to come to power. One is completely obvious. If you doubt the other,c read this: https://reaction.life/jeremy-vine-my-boris-story/
Son of Glenner, I took a 3 hour IQ test around 12 years ago. It tested for many skills: linguistic, geometric, numerical, memory, and a few others. They have found that the scores in those tests are indeed normally distributed. That’s not superstition, that’s based on evidence, namely the results of thousands of such tests. The 100 isn’t a gospel number, is just the average of those kinds of tests. The average changes slightly, year to year. That’s why age is considered.
If you think the word “intelligence” is the problem, define the IQ number to be “the level of ability demonstrated in passing certain kinds of standardized tests”. Then it isn’t about intelligence, but about how well one does in these tests.
It doesn’t test for every single kind of intelligence. It leaves out emotional understanding and the kind of brilliance displayed by top sports athletes. (I guarantee that those skills are more than merely physical.)
Despite the obvious flaws, it is the case that the ability to do very well in those tests correlates pretty well with ordinary success. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, extreme success takes effort and will. Those aren’t necessarily correlated with intelligence.)
One thing is clear. On average, people with IQs significantly lower than 100, even with great determination, aren’t going to be able to educate themselves nearly as well, about anything, as people with higher IQs.
And that was my point: conmen work on easy marks. And those make are numerous, going by the “test taking ability quotient”.
And that explains two blond conmen that have used con artist techniques to come to power. One is completely obvious. If you doubt the other, read this: https://reaction.life/jeremy-vine-my-boris-story/
Laripu: Do you have an identical twin?
Son of Glenner, no I don’t.
Ah, I just saw why you asked. A post by Anonymous. 🙂
My error, sorry!
The posts aren’t exactly identical. I fixed some errors in the second. I never knew the first was there.
S.O.G. you can safely apply the dunning cruger effect to most blathering idiots….intelligence leads to uncertainty…and anybody who has physics envy is prone to misunderstand just how the predictions of the standard model fit with current reality very accurately indeed…if only we could get equations to create anti viral drugs we would be laughing….
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. Bertrand Russell
At one extreme, you get some folks who are so white they seem almost translucent and have a bluish hue. At the other extreme, some Sudanese people, for example, are so dark they are almost blue-black.
I’ve got it! Adam & Eve were smurfs!
Is suffolk blue a type of cheese? I like blue cheeses….
M27Holts, me too. Although I wouldn’t go so far as to say I worship Cheeses. I’m definitely not a Mozzlim!
M27Holts – sadly not
I thought Mo was a body double??