Books Lying Open
¤ Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides
¤ The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams
¤ The Color of Magic, Terry Pratchett

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ The impending rainy season.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because sleeping nearly 8 hours at once is quite the rare treat.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your cat's bug-catching skills begin their inexorable wane.

oday brings yet more of the ongoing correspondence with Mr. CAP Alerts. Below you'll see his 2nd nitpicking reply to me, with a few comments of my own added in, and then my 3rd mail to him below that. Did he mail me back a 3rd time, after saying he would not even look at any more of my emails? What do you think?  Find out about that and where I'll be posting it (not on this page) down below.

As for this part up here, I'm going to embarrass myself with fashion and fitness talk, and then mention something or other in the news, just to fill up space.

 ¤ This may make me sound like the biggest girl on the Internet, but I must admit that while sorting through the closet Tuesday night, trying to find something to wear for a quick shopping trip, I tried on a pair of cargo pants that haven't fit me for over a year, and derived great satisfaction from finding that I could now wear them comfortably.  And then I squealed in delight and leaped up and down and clapped really fast with open hands and shrieked, "Ohmigod ohmigod!" over and over again!

Well, not so much that last part.

I did put on the cargo pants and wear them proudly on our quick shopping run (bottled water, light sour cream, garlic hummus, fresh hot salsa, and 1 pound of fried chicken strips), and yes, it's entirely likely that I could eat my way back out of those pants very quickly, given the stuff we bought to eat. I won't though, since I've been steadily, if slowly, losing weight since the MC diet kick started me with a pound a day over a week. According to the MC diet blog page, that ordeal ended just over 2 months ago, at which time I weighed 164 first thing in the morning. I now weigh 160ish, so I've lost a pound every two weeks. As I said, steady, but slow.

The odd thing is that I've really gone down in waist size in just the last week (my shorts are just hanging off of me and I've had to go in a belt notch), and I think it's due to the big increase in situps I worked into my work out. I've been doing situps at least once a day forever, but over the past couple of weeks, since I started going to martial arts class and feeling how weak and slow I really was at some things, I've increased my exercises away from class. Not much of a change in my cardio workout (hill running) but I've been doing several minutes of situps 4 or 5 times a day every day, and just like those situp machine commercials you see on TV, it's making a difference. I don't think I've changed my diet, I'm not doing more cardio, and I don't think I'm eating less... if anything, I've eaten worse lately, since we ate out most every meal last weekend when my mom was visiting. Yet my waist has gotten narrower, and my abs are really showing through, so I can only surmise that it's due to the sit ups. I must recommend them to everyone, for that reason.

I'm also getting back to doing regular pullups, since we finally got a drill which enabled me to finally hang my pullup bar out back. I'd been doing 40 or 50 pushups every night before bed, and sometimes in the day when I remembered, but those always hurt my wrists and shoulders, and they take a while. Pullups are faster to do, and far more tiring, so I get my workout done very quickly, and I like doing them, so I do them more often.  No real results from those yet, but it's been less than a week, and with the bar outside I just do them a few times a day, rather than every other time I got up from my desk, as I did back in San Diego when I lived alone and could hang a large, ugly metal bar from the living room ceiling without anyone to object to what it did to the decor.

I might get into a real weight-lifting routine this winter though, since the local health club Malaya works out at was recently purchased by 24 Hour Fitness, and as part of that it's gone from being women-only to co-ed. It's a small place, but it's cheap, convenient, and I'll probably join up and start going regular once the winter arrives, and brings rain with it. My trail runs are great cardio, but it rains a lot here from December through April, and while I went out several times last winter/spring and ran after rains, coming home with mud up to my knees and shoes that I had to hose off with a scrub brush wasn't all that much fun. Not to mention the sheer physical difficulty of getting a good workout running up and down steep hills when they're covered in mud.

I'm not that eager to trade my fun outdoor hiking and jogging for a stationary bike or a treadmill or an elliptical machine, but when the alternative is slipping around in the mud or getting no exercise at all, and when I can spend some time working the weight machines as well, it's probably worth $20 a month.

Speaking of food and fitness and such, while I was just looking over the MC Diet blog to see what my weight back then was, I read this passage with some amusement. It's the last entry I made on Day 3.

We did change our diets after the MC ordeal... for about two weeks. We then got steadily lazier about eating so many salads and cooking so much different stuff, and we've now reverted pretty much to our pre-MC diet, and yes, we've eaten everything mentioned above at least once in the past week. Well, everything but the nachos supreme.

The difference now is that since the MC, the total amount of food we take in is still much less than it was in the old days. We used to eat more per meal, snack more, and eat more meals a day, and we were still hungry. Somehow, after going 7 days without any solid food at all on the MC program and then just nibbling on crackers and OJ and such for a couple days after that, we got used to eating much less, and we've managed to stick to that. It's a rare day that either Malaya or me have three meals. Most days it's like 1 light meal, a few small snacks, and a larger meal for dinner, with something for dessert late at night. And it's not like we're starving ourselves or anything; we just don't get as hungry get the food cravings like we used to.

The oddest thing for me is that since the MC, I hardly ever eat breakfast. I don't eat that much less during the rest of the day, but for most of my adult life I simply had to eat something when I got up. If I was in a hurry I'd just gobble a granola bar or something, and then feel hungry and weak for hours afterwards until I got some real food. But usually I ate a full meal, just like I would have for dinner, and I really needed it.

Since the MC, a usual eating cycle for me is dinner with Malaya around 11pm, some sort of dessert around midnight (lately it's been a small bowl of light ice cream over fruit with some cereal as a crunchy topping), a snack around 3am, then bed at 5-6am. I sleep for 6 or 7 hours, get up at noonish, and I'm not hungry. I'll have some grapes or something, and drink water, but very seldom do I eat anything of substance until the late afternoon, at the earliest. Often we wait until dark to have a large meal, and sometimes that's Malaya's only meal of the day. And she's really active, working, going to the gym every day when she gets up. I eat more than she does, and I'll often have a meal around 6pm, then another one near midnight, and just a couple of snacks the rest of the time.

And on that schedule, with the same old tasty food we used to get fat on, we're both still losing weight, slowly but surely. It's not really a diet plan I'd recommend to everyone, but it's working for us, apparently.

 ¤ CBS News broke some new memos about Bush's Vietnam Era National Guard AWOL issues, and as part of the story released what they said were some new memos from that era. The only problem is that, as it turns out, they weren't authentic memos from the 1970s; they were modern reproductions. Forgeries, and not very good ones at that, apparently, though they were good enough to fool CBS news. CBS stonewalled initially, insisting they were good, based largely on the source of the memos. CBS then apologized and admitted that they weren't authentic, and said they were "fake but accurate." which would be an interesting slogan for a news channel. Sort of the opposite of FOX News' practices?

CBS' story is that even though the memos weren't actually typed by who they said they were typed by, when they said they were typed, the content of the memos is accurate, as reported by several people who were around Bush and Jack Killian at the time. I'm not doing a very good job recapping things since, as I admitted, I really didn't pay this whole thing much attention coming or going.

The reason I didn't pay it any attention is simple; the new memos were basically irrelevant when they were real, and they're irrelevant now that they're fake (except when it comes to what they say about how CBS handled the whole thing). My take on the larger issue is pretty aptly summed up by the second panel in this week's This Modern World cartoon. Click it to see the whole thing:

As the caption mentions, there is a ton of evidence and eyewitness testimony that Bush got strings pulled to get into the National Guard and into flight training despite not being very good at it, when he had the option to go to Vietnam he chose not to serve overseas, and he then vanished for many months towards the end of his five year commitment. I didn't actually think that was still an issue of debate, which was why I assumed the Republicans were trying to hard to smear Kerry's voluntary and highly-decorated service in Vietnam. If they could keep Kerry on the defensive with all those Swift Boat accusations, regardless of the fact that their charges were contradicted by all official Navy paperwork and records from the time, then that was a way to keep people from talking about how Dubya barely served at all.

Beyond that, the bigger picture is what's been so lost in all the minutia of who did and didn't serve... why are we spending half the election cycle talking about a war fought 30+ years ago, when there's one going on right now? It will be so nice in another 10 years when the politicians are young enough that they won't have been of age to serve in Vietnam, and we don't have to have another endless round of who did and didn't go and why and so on, when it couldn't be less relevant to the issues of today. True, it's amusing to see Vice President Dick "sought five student deferments and had a baby 9 months and 2 days after policy changed to draft single husbands" Cheney run around attacking Kerry for maybe not being wounded all that badly when he earned one of his three Purple Hearts, but how does that sort of nonsense really help people make an informed choice as to who the next most powerful man in the free world should be?

Another similar site is ENWhore.com, though they don't have such a convenient video ranking or display system. I'm sure you could easily waste a few hours there anyway.

Yet more videos, hundreds of them, can be found on MuchoSucko.com. I recommend that you go right to the most popular videos, since there is a lot of chaff per wheat ratio.

The movies on all three of these sites, and numerous others like them, can be pretty easily categorized into four groups: porn/model nudity/bloopers, amateur extreme sports mishaps, things (cars, trucks, planes) blowing up, and random humorous movies. If those sound like fun to you, go for it. As always when surfing, a high speed connection will help a lot.

I will give him credit for something though; he realizes I'm toying with him. He's lost in his mania, but he is aware enough to tell when someone (me in this case) is engaging him in argument without any personal involvement. I think he's used to mails like the one I posted from a reader in the July 2003 mailbag, where people get so incensed by his particular brand of holier than thou Christianity that they just curse him and yell at him. I did nothing of the sort in my mail, since I see him as a sort of science project, and an intellectual exercise. His opinions are entirely meaningless to me, (As, I suspect, mine are to him.) so I'm able to argue against him from a scientific point of view without getting upset or angry or passionate at all. And when I don't rise to his outrageous comment bait he doesn't get the satisfaction of seeing another sinning pro-gay atheist (as he likely sees most of the world) lose his cool when faced with Biblical-based arguments. And so he tells me never to email him again and that he won't read it if I do.

I'm actually glad he said that, since I got sick of this whole exercise about an email and a half ago and it's nice to have an excuse to stop.  I never would have mailed him at all if not for this blog, since I knew I could post it here as a day's update, and once he replied once I only carried on through a second mail to see what he'd do when I ignored his misdirection arguments.  Not that my arguments were perfect (I should have proofread and gotten my wording and logic tighter.) but I was curious to see if he could keep on track even when it meant making painfully weak arguments and basically admitting that everyone else who interpreted the bible was wrong, while he was right.

And as you'll see, he sure did.  As I did before, my email comments are double indented, his Fisking replies are single intended, and my current comments are in black with no indentation.

Thanks for taking the time to reply in such depth. Unfortunately, I still don't see that you've addressed the core issues of my email, which were perhaps not stated clearly-enough.

Your core issues were addressed perfectly. That you did not like the replies does not make them erroneous.

My point was simply this:

Your point was clear. Trying to modify or amend it now is nothing short of Delphi manipulation.

Then why did you do nothing but go off topic with rants about homosexual pedophiles and avoid my actual questions?

You can't compare a hate crime (murder of Matthew Shepard) to a case of pedophile murder/child abuse (murder of Jesse Dirkhising) in a direct fashion. They're both horrible crimes committed by horrible people, but that's where the parallels end.

Jessie's murder was also a hate crime, son. What you said is like trying to deny comparison because Jessie was 14 and Matthew was adult.

From these two emails, it's clear that one of his diversionary tactics is to deny that there is any such thing as a "hate crime" by expanding the definition so widely as to make it meaningless. He's not an idiot, so he surely knows that "hate crimes" are actual things, and as our legal system defines them, they are crimes motivated by bigotry of one kind or another. More on this in a bit. I'm not defending the definition of "hate crimes" or attacking them as bullshit of the "thought police" or anything like that. I'm simply using the term as it's used in debate. He's refusing to do that, in order to try and obscure the issue.

Your response seems to be:

1) Most (50% was your at least figure)

I am not of the ones who choose to practice homosexual pedophilia. So it is not "my" figure. And that you say I said 50% of homosexual practitioners are pedophiles makes you one of those who would reword a failing argument just to try to capture argumentative superiority, the truth notwithstanding.

Well actually yes it is "your figure," since you slapped into an email without attribution.

homosexuals are pedophiles and the media should pay far more attention to this, especially when an especially horrible crime such as Dirkhising's demonstrates it.

The media should pay accurate attention to the "other side of the fence" and not ignore it because it may shame someone who chooses to practice a hate crime. The mainstream media certainly ripped the heterosexual perpetrators of Shepherd's murder apart, but even mention of Jessie's murder by two homosexual practitioners was rarely mentioned.

Note his regular grammatical errors or wording mistakes. Saying "mention" twice here, for instance. I wouldn't consider pointing this out, since after all, this is email and I'm not running a grammar site.  You'll see why I mention this shortly.

2) Matthew Shepard wasn't a hate crime anyway,

Yes, it was. ALL contemplated murders are hate crimes. That the victim is a homosexual practitioner makes him no more special than a victim who is not.

Here's his, "there are no hate crimes/all crimes are hate crimes" argument, which is fine for an opinion, but he's clearly doing it here just to avoid the issue, when there are clearly-stated legal definitions of "hate crime" in the US, and quite often there are heavier punishments for such crimes. Since gay bashing is quite often prosecuted as a hate crime, it's clear why he wants to pretend hate crimes don't exist.

I only brought up "hate crimes" in the first place since as I said in the first email, the media always pays more attention to crimes that have those sorts of extenuating circumstances. Remember that black guy who was dragged to death behind a pickup a few years ago in Texas? Remember that the drivers were three white guys?  How much media coverage do you think that would have gotten if all the people involved had been of the same race?

Again, I'm not making a value judgment with this, I'm just bringing it up as an example of the disproportionately heavy coverage hate crimes receive by the media, which was part of my initial argument to Mr. CAP Alerts. He obviously doesn't want to address that argument, which is why he's just ignoring it and trying to confuse the definition of a "hate crime" in order to further his misdirection.

since his murders were "street punks" and they would probably have beaten and left to die anyone in that situation and the media shouldn't have paid so much attention to his death.

They should not have given it (to use your word) disproportionate favor *because* he was a homosexual practitioner.

3) Homosexuality is a horrible thing

Practicing homosexuality is a sin. So are some of my own behaviors. And so are some of yours.

So is working on Sundays and eating swine and wearing certain types of mixed textile clothing. The bible is full of ancient moral codes; a large part of being an intelligent adult is deciding which parts of those ancient writings you're going to pay attention to.

and we know this because the Bible says so.

It's infinitely better and more reliable than "the news media says so."

Yes, after all, verifiable facts simply get in the way of pre-conceived notions based on ancient literature.

#1. Are you serious? You honestly believe that as many as 50% of all homosexual (men? what about lesbians?) are pedophiles?

No. I believe the facts that reveal the adult male homosexual practitioner is as much as 40 times more likely to commit child sexual abuse with a boy than a male heterosexual practitioner is likely to commit child sexual abuse with a girl.

Do you mean that in terms of a gay 25 year old thinking a 17 y/o guy is hot, and since virtually every heterosexual man alive does that when he sees an attractive teenaged girl, 

I mean what I said. And the lust heterosexual men express when oogling at teenage girls does not excuse the practice of homosexuality. One sin does not give authority to another.

Note this one? He's acting as if I'm trying to excuse one thing by saying something else is not as bad. I didn't say that, I just included that as an example while trying to get clarification of his point. (You'll see him doing exactly what he accuses me of shortly.) 

it's not much of an argument.

I just shot down your "It's not much of an argument." And that you feel it is not much of an argument does not make it so. "It's not much of an argument" more sounds like grasping to recover a failing argument.

Or do you mean that 50% of the gay men out there, no matter their jobs, personalities, criminal records, etc are potentially going to snatch up and sodomize any 12 y/o they can get alone with? That's just comically ridiculous.

Why don't you ask the North America Man-boy Love Association these questions.

Because that organization doesn't exist in any real sense, other than as a bogey-man for right wing Christians such as Mr. CAP Alerts and a thing for antisocial gay men to claim they sympathize with just to get a rise out of people. Besides, this is another attempted diversion. I'm questioning Mr. CAP Alerts' statement to see if he's serious. I somehow doubt a representative of NAMBLA, if one could be located, would have much of an informed opinion on that matter.

#2. The 2 guys who killed Matthew Shepard were petty criminals, and certainly losers, but they had no serious crimes on their records. They were in the bar that night, drinking for hours, and only started talking to Shepard when they didn't have enough money to cover their bill and used him to pay it, from the news reports I've read. Does that sound like the behavior of coolly

"Coldly."

I was puzzled by his comment here, until it became clear in a moment. He's playing Mr. Grammar Police!

calculating criminals?

Yes.

Since all thieves/murders like to be seen in a public place, for hours, in the location of their intended victim, and allow numerous witnesses to see them leave with him.  Right? On the bright side, we don't have to worry about Mr. CAP Alerts getting away with murder when he eventually snaps, if this is any indication of his criminal acumen. 

No one's arguing that Shepard's murderers went in there specifically to pick up a gay man and rob him and beat him to death;

Premeditation is not the only parameter of a hate crime.

neither man had any more history of gay bashing than you'd expect from typically homophobic hick-state rednecks. 

Neither is one's criminal history the only defining element of a hate crime.

Ahh, and suddenly there are hate crimes!  When it suits his purpose, at least.

But they obviously used his gayness against him to get him to pay their bar tab and leave with them, and most damning of all, they tried to use the "gay panic" defense in their trial, saying that he came onto them and they freaked out and killed him because of that. Isn't that basically an admission that it was a "hate crime?"

Yes. I am not arguing that Shephard's murder was not a hate crime. But so was Jessie's.

It's not as bad as neo-nazi skinheads grabbing random guys in the street and stomping them,

Oh? That sounds quite hateful to me.

Yes, I'm saying the 2nd crime would be more hateful than the 1st. He's confused a bit.

but by their own admission, in their court defense, the 2 guys who killed Shepard did so because he was gay.

And if asked now would they still say the same? If that is true, I did not know that. And, if true, I must change my understanding of the incident. But that does not steal thunder away form the homosexual hate murder of Jessie.

And the jail house recanting of convicted murders is to be trusted because...? Also, God forbid CAP Guy spends 5 minutes reading up on the actual court case he's so often quoting as an example of those horrible pedophile homosexuals. Those pesky facts again. 

 

#3. I'm not going to go into detail about this one, since it's way out of the scope of this email, and nothing anyone ever says to discredit or point out the contradictions in the bible

No one could. People have been trying for a very long time.

would change your mind on that front anyway.

Our inability to grasp the meaning of something in the Bible is not a revelation that the Bible is unclear, contradictory or inconsistent but is a matter of our perception of it. In other words, there is nothing unclear about what God tells us. But since some of His statements do not fit some of our expectations, we attempt to make His Word suit our understanding, which distorts our perception of the Truth. Indeed, thinking the Bible contradicts itself is very convenient for those looking for freedom from accountability. 

Just as his reply is a very convenient way to dodge paying attention to the thousands of obvious errors and contradictions in the Bible. 

 

I do have 2 comments though:

Just out of curiosity, and this is obviously hypothetical -- if scholars unearthed and translated a new hunk of the dead sea scrolls that were obviously written at the same time and by the same people who wrote what's in the bible today (leaving aside the numerous translations of the old scrolls, editing over time, deletion of much of it, etc) and the new scrolls said clearly and unequivocally that homosexuality was okay and not a sin and Yahweh was fine with it... would you change your opinion on homosexuality?

I do not play Delphi games. And I could ask you whether you would accept that the practice of homosexuality was indeed sinful if those same scroll fragments repeated that the practice of homosexuality is sinful.

I'd be happy to answer that question. Since I base nothing in my belief system and morality on what any of the various, millennium-old " holy" books say, such a discovery would have no impact on me whatsoever.

Secondly,

"Second." Saying "secondly" is like saying "nextly." The next subject is a noun now an adjective.

you 

"Do you."

Yes, he's really trying to critique my email grammar here. Twice. The fact that he's wrong in both cases is irrelevant. It's just a sign of how desperately he's trying to restore his happy superior feeling, I guess. If I'm ever in an email argument and find myself resorting to spell-checking and typo-counting, feel free to just tell me straight out that I've lost. I'll try to take it like a man.

 

realize that virtually everything bad in the history of Western civilization has been defended by the powers that be with biblical citations?

No. 

Slavery, anti-Semitism, genocide against the native peoples, witch-burning, the inquisition, innumerable religious wars, the crusades, and on and on?

...are all the result of our freedom of choice. Men did those things. Men who thought they could manipulate His Word into self-serving madness to fill their own bellies. Not God's will. Don't try to blame the evils we ourselves create on God's Word. That is shallow and reflective of closed minded thinking: closed minded in favor of excusing one's self from any manner of authority.

This is my favorite part. Everyone else is wrong in how they use the Bible. Centuries of Christian scholars and religious leaders; all misguided or incorrect or their interpretations. Only Mr. CAP Alerts, in his nearly-infinite wisdom, can correctly apply the nearly-infinitely contradictory Biblical verses with accuracy.

 

Just taking recent American history; slavery was defended with biblical citations, as was the denial of equal rights for non-whites and women.

Again, the result of man's attempts to make the Bible say what he wants it to say.

This is an old argument, and yes, it's possible to find biblical scriptures to back up almost anything,

Only if it is the truth. And apparently you have done too little or too one-sided research about Christians being killed just for being Christian:

Wait, I just said that people have used the bible to excuse and justify innumerable hateful and horrible things, and he said they were all wrong. But then, a paragraph later, he says that biblical scriptures can only be used to back up the truth.  Um... could we keep the complete contradictions in your logic more than once sentence apart, sir?

April 27, 2003: In the twentieth century, Communists persecuted Christians horribly. During the height of Communism, an average of 330,000 Christians were killed every year (Foxe's Book of Martyrs, op. cit., p. 326). Although there are still a few Communist countries, like Cuba and China, where Christians are persecuted and tortured, it is Muslim countries that are responsible for killing the most Christians today. Between 155,000 and 159,000 Christians are currently being killed throughout the world each year - simply for being Christians (ibid.).

Remember earlier when he tried to say I was excusing pedophilia by mentioning heterosexual underaged lust? He's doing the exact same thing here; dodging the "Christians kill while saying the bible tells them to do it" issue by bringing up off- topic "other religions kill Christians too" arguments.

I said nothing about Christians being the biggest persecutors, (though I think historically it could be proven) or Christianity being an evil religion, or no one ever doing anything good based on what they thought the Bible was telling them, or anything like that. He's not real good at addressing my actual arguments, since it's much more fun to just go off topic with his pre-rehearsed arguments.

To address his argument anyway, Muslims, Hindus, and Zoroastrians could be killing 5,000,000 Christians a year on live television and it still wouldn't have anything to do with my comment about a long historical precedent of Christians in positions of power using biblical quotations to self justify their evil acts and repression, racism, sexism, and homophobia. It also doesn't mean modern day Christians are doing the same thing, though I certainly think they are when it comes to gay issues and abortion, but the fact that Mr. CAP Alerts doesn't even bother trying to address this pretty much concedes the argument to me, eh?

As for those outrageous numbers of dead Christians, they've been completely debunked, though to pull a CAP Alerts, I'm not going to go dig up the URLs I read about them. As best I recall, they're basically counting every single dead Christian in areas where there was any sort of ethnic cleansing or religious warfare, and every single person killed by any group who ever killed a single Christian.  Over-counting in every way possible, in other words.

Just do a web search on "Christians killed" and you will get a perspective of the issue of more Christians being killed by non-Christians than non-Christians killed by Christians. About the "religious wars", I am in one right now, fighting the father of lies and his apparent hold on you.

but is the aforementioned company, all on the wrong side of history, 

Where they placed themselves.

So again, in case you missed it the first time; everyone else in history who interpreted the bible to back up their acts was wrong, if their acts disagree with Mr. CAP Alerts' modern sensibilities. No matter that in their time they had 100% agreement among the Christians, complete approval of religious leaders, etc. Quoth Mr. CAP Alerts, "I'm right, everyone else, even devout Christians, is wrong."

Must be nice to live in that sort of a cocoon, eh?

really a group you want to place yourself in?

I am not placing myself in any such "company." I have not killed any witches. I don't have any slaves. I am not fighting in defense of my property and family against those who would steal them such as when the Christians fought back against such oppression in Crusades (I'll bet you didn't know that). Indeed, you sound as one of them who would put me there just to fortify your claims. A typical technique of they who do not have an argumentative leg on which to stand.

His first comment is just foolish; I'm obviously not saying he's literally doing those things; I'm pointing out that others used the bible exactly as he's doing, to defend practices we find abhorrent today.

Secondly, by putting me into a group I don't belong in, he's showing evidence of me doing that to him?

Eric

PS, and FYI, where do you get the "underwear soaked with gasoline" part about Jesse's death? 

From a source not a puppet of political correctness. I haven't the time to look it up just to feed this petty spitting contest.

Again, God forbid he gets his facts straight before repeatedly spouting them on his website. More on his insane logic below. And if there's any spitting going on, it's by him, as he Fisks my email up into half-sentence blocks in order to nitpick every little point, while avoiding taking on any of the larger issues.

Is that just an intentional lie to make it all seem even more barbaric and awful, or an honest mistake on your part?

Neither.

I hunted up a few articles on the case last night, and none of them say anything about that.

Typical of the mainstream media to minimize heinous crimes committed by their favored ones.

Calling his reasoning "logic" is a bit of a stretch, but just consider: There are hundreds of news articles online about the Jesse murder, most of which list the full catalogue of torments those two pedophiles inflicted upon the kid, the tools they used, how long it took, etc. Yet Mr. CAP Alert's logic is that they list all of that, but sneakily-suppress the bit about the gasoline-soaked underwear... for what reason exactly? Like it's okay that they raped and drugged and suffocated the kid, just so long as they didn't use gasoline also?

This page has a huge compilation of news coverage of the case, and the word "gasoline" appears nowhere on it. 

Then it is not likely "true-words."

He's just embarrassing himself here, playing a game with the name of the site that compiled the articles. Look for yourself; just at the top of the page I see long quoted stories from FOX News, CBS, The Seattle Times, and dozens from the local Bentonville, Arkansas newspaper. That's quite a conspiracy to keep the "gasoline" part out of the story, while reporting everything thing else.

And you thought CAP Guy was only right and everyone else was wrong when it came to interpreting the Bible?

Every news article I've seen says they drugged him with amitriptyline, which is apparently a strong sedative and the overdose of that was a contributing factor to his death. Even if you stick to the equivalency between the cases,

The equivalency of the cases being real makes "sticking" to the equivalency of the cases not an option.

you should at least remove this obvious factual error

...in your opinion.

Well no, there really aren't a lot of opinions about factual errors. They're wrong or they're not wrong. He's wrong, he cites no sources for his misinformation other than his own obviously failing memory, and he refuses to spend two minutes of online research time to educate himself.

Now tragically enough, there was another much-publicized pedophile murder of a young boy, and in that case the killers did use a gasoline-soaked rag to kill him. It seems likely that Mr. CAP Alerts read about that one and transposed it with the Jesse Dirkhising murder. I typed "gasoline matthew shepard" into google and immediately found a link to an article in much the same vein at Mr. CAP Alert's comments.  The fact that he's either too stupid or too lazy to do that himself (but can take the hour+ he spent nit picking over my emails) should tell you something about him. I'm not sure what it tells, but something, at any rate.

from your comments, since it only serves to discredit your argument.

Then don't listen to it. I am not going to listen to any more of yours. Indeed, I will see your email in our inbox no more. I do so abhor these spitting contests. They are such time-wasters. You go right ahead and believe what you want to believe and I will do the same.

Actually, by all evidence he dearly loves these spitting contests, since he's the one doing all the spitting. I have tried hard to stick to major points, theological and historical and have tried to cite facts and mainstream news articles and other things when I offered opinion. He does nothing of the kind; his only stats are from disreputable right wing sources, his opinions are his own or derived from his interpretation of the "most interpreted" and "most differed about in interpretation" book in human history, and his email responses are 

Of course he says that, but you know he'd be unable to read another mail from me, and would probably reply to it if he thought he could nitpick successfully again.

And yes, after trying to ignore it for a day, I couldn't resist mailing him again. Here's my mail #3, and yes, I got a bit snarkier as I saw that reasoned argument wasn't going anywhere and my patience with his evasions grew short.  Plus, since he promised not to read my email or write me back... though you can probably guess how well he kept that promise...