stcynic
Posts by this author
April 26, 2006
A reader alerted me to this letter to the editor in a St. Louis newspaper (correction: the op-ed piece that the letter responded to was originally printed in a St. Louis newspaper, but the letter itself was in a Kennewick, Washington paper) that contains one of the most bizarre statements I've ever…
April 25, 2006
This is one of those monumentally idiotic ideas that just makes me stare with jaw agape at the notion that a legislator would seriously propose it, much less that it would pass. A state rep in South Carolina by the name of Ralph Davenport has submitted a bill tha would ban the sale of sex toys:
The…
April 25, 2006
I want to call everyone's attention to an earlier essay that goes through ID arguments and traces them to creationist beginnings, written by Jason Rosenhouse. I had not seen this one before writing my post on the subject, but it makes some of the same points and adds several that I did not bring up…
April 25, 2006
I saw this post on Volokh the other day and intended to comment on it, but it got lost in the shuffle and I forgot. Thankfully, a reader sent me the link, wondering why I hadn't written about it. It seems the Bush administration has changed the standards for the funding of "abstinence-only" sex ed…
April 25, 2006
Over at Dembski's Home for Wayward Sycophants, crandaddy has made a rather curious claim that provides an excellent pretext for analyzing further the links between ID and creationism while simultaneously providing a case study in the ability of ID advocates to ignore evidence that they wish didn't…
April 25, 2006
Nat Hentoff, long one of my favorite writers despite his surprising and indefensible position on the Terri Schaivo situation, has a column in the Village Voice about the importance of civics classes in public schools. He points to the abysmal ignorance that study after study has shown about some of…
April 24, 2006
Steve Reuland, the author of the No Free Hunch ID satire that I posted the other day, has just finished successfully defending his dissertation and has now been awarded a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from the Medical University of South Carolina. So I guess that increases the number of…
April 24, 2006
Eugene Volokh, a respected first amendment scholar, has a follow up post on the subject of the ruling I discussed yesterday and how it doesn't seem to square with some of Judge Reinhardt's earlier statements on free speech in schools. In the Harper ruling last week, Reinhardt argued that there is…
April 24, 2006
Jon Rowe has been having an exchange on the WorldMag blog with a guy named Joel Mark on the subject of unitarianism and some of the leading founding fathers. In particular, he has argued that John Adams was a Unitarian who rejected the trinity, the divinity of Jesus and the notion of hell and the…
April 24, 2006
Pat Hayes of Red State Rabble has written a nice post about Barbara Forrest that is partly a biographical sketch and partly an analysis of the sometimes ridiculously over the top reaction to her from the ID crowd. I've had the pleasure of working with Barbara for many years now and Hayes is…
April 24, 2006
Here's the scenario: a high school student, fed up with what he perceived as the school district's official anti-gay stance, wears a t-shirt to school that says "Be ashamed. Our school has embraced what all decent people should condemn" on the front and "Homophobia is shameful" on the back. The day…
April 24, 2006
The hit parade of creationist responses to Tiktaalik roseae continues with this article about the response of Ken Ham, founder of the American wing of Answers in Genesis. Like the rest, it's amusing for the almost total lack of any substantive response to the facts.
"If you look at a platypus, a…
April 22, 2006
Some of you may be interested in an exchange of comments at Positive Liberty in response to the posting of my essay on the ACLU and legal fees on that blog. I just finished a long and detailed response to someone named PurpleThink concerning the Dover case and the legal fees.
April 22, 2006
I have been effusively praising the president of Northern Kentucky University, Jim Votruba, for his understanding of the true nature of free speech and the way he handled the situation where a teacher led her students in destroying an anti-abortion display on that campus. But FIRE, which is rapidly…
April 22, 2006
Steven Voigt, writing at RenewAmerica, is complaining about the ACLU being able to collect legal fees when they win a suit against a government agency (you may remember Voigt from my earlier fisking of his terrible 14th amendment arguments). This is nothing new, of course; innumerable voices on the…
April 21, 2006
I just posted the following comment on Chen's blog:
I've been an ID watcher for a long time and I've seen a lot of funny things get said. But I have to say, this performance may take the cake. It's at least on the level with Dembski's nonsense last fall where he claimed that our side pulled Shallit…
April 21, 2006
The whole Samuel Chen thing reminded me of this brilliant satire of ID arguments that was compiled by Steve Reuland. The project was a collaborative effort of a bunch of folks, most of them associated with the Panda's Thumb now. I'm not going to include all of the footnotes, which show actual…
April 21, 2006
A couple years I wrote an essay called Intelligent Design as Roman Mythology, in which I noted that the most appropriate symbol of the ID movement was that of Janus, the Roman god of gates that is generally portrayed as having two faces. Here is a bust of Janus that can be found in the Vatican…
April 21, 2006
This keeps getting funnier. In this comment on his own blog, he says the following about the Wedge Document:
Cody, you are quoting from various parts of the "wedge document" and so forth. These are documents that we, including DI, do not necessarily agree with. Meaning, we have seen certain errors…
April 20, 2006
Samuel Chen is a Baylor undergrad poli sci major who posted the DI's objections to being called a "conservative Christian think tank" on his blog. As the conversation there in the comments has developed, it's become fairly amusing to watch. Someone from here posted a quote from Barbara Forrest that…
April 20, 2006
Yesterday, the Baylor student newspaper printed an article that referred to the Discovery Institute as a "conservative Christian think tank". The DI, as you can imagine, didn't like that description one bit because, frankly, they've spent so many years selling the silly notion that they're not a…
April 20, 2006
I came across this column on Agape Press called The Serpent of Porn and had to laugh when it began with a Biblical lesson about the importance of avoiding sexual temptations from - of all people - Solomon!
Solomon intimately understood how powerful sexual temptation can be for a young man. It was…
April 20, 2006
The Kirk Cameron video isn't the funniest thing I've seen on the web lately. This is. It's DaveScot's rendering of Martin Niemoller's famous poem "First they came...", written in response to the horrors of Hitler's Third Reich. He begins by citing a poll that says 48% think that people who have…
April 20, 2006
This blog has some very funny stuff about Scott McClellan's resignation. For instance:
"I have given it my all, sir, and I have given you my all, sir, and I will continue to do so as we transition to a new press secretary," McClellan said to Bush as the President tried to remember to whom he was…
April 19, 2006
It's gotta be in the running. Here's William Dembski commenting on Allen MacNeill's upcoming course on ID at Cornell University:
Dembski, a former professor at Southern Seminary in Louisville, doubts the course will accurately portray intelligent design. "Given that I regard myself as a fair-minded…
April 19, 2006
Very interesting. The professor who led her students in destroying a display has been placed on leave and will retire from the university, apparently as a result of a vote of the faculty senate at Northern Kentucky. Unversity President James Votruba has sent an email message to the entire campus,…
April 19, 2006
The president's press secretary, Scott McClellan, resigned today. I've been pretty hard on McClellan over the last couple years, but I'm hard on anyone who does that job. I simply can't imagine why anyone would be a press secretary. Their entire job is to lie; it is all they are paid to do. The…
April 19, 2006
Ken Brown has a post pointing to Joe Carter's essay on the subject of theocracy and the fear of it that is often expressed by those on the left. Carter argues that accusations that the religious right is pushing for theocracy are empty political rhetoric. While he admits that "some conservative…
April 19, 2006
As I've mentioned recently, there is a case going on right now in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Winkler v. Rumsfeld, involving the question of whether the Federal government can fund events and activities of the Boy Scouts of America in light of their discrimination against atheists and…
April 19, 2006
Is the subject of an article in Slate. Count me squarely in Olbermann's corner on this one. There are few people on the planet I find as loathsome and ridiculous as Bill O'Reilly and I love watching Olbermann consistently taunt him into making an even bigger ass of himself. I think the Slate…