stcynic
Posts by this author
January 2, 2005
I love having two of my favorite writers posting on the same blog. Rowe is guest blogging at Sandefur's Freespace this week and the two of them have really been cranking out some great stuff. Sandefur takes on conservatism (real conservatism, not the political variety) and points out the classical…
January 2, 2005
Carl Zimmer has another stellar post on his blog, this one about the evolution of the immune system. It's a review of this article (PDF format) by Klein and Nikolaidis, entitled The descent of the antibody-based immune system by gradual evolution. This article points up a very important point that…
December 31, 2004
So says the BBC:
The Spanish government has approved a draft law which will legalise homosexual marriages.
The bill gives same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexual couples, including the right to adopt children.
The Roman Catholic Church and conservative opposition have fiercely opposed the…
December 31, 2004
Jon Rowe is guesting on Sandefur's blog this week and has this essay on the dual influence of Christian and Pagan sources in American history. I think he nails the issue almost completely. Like him, I thought the ACLU's lawsuit threat against LA County over their seal was pretty silly. But in most…
December 31, 2004
Paul Musgrave has written a response to some of the same statements I commented on in my recent post that has gotten so much controversy. Though Musgrave is himself a Christian, he has some of the same problems with those responses that I do:
One Christian website writes that the tsunami affected…
December 31, 2004
Sandefur points to this article in Reason, responding to this article in the Washington Times about American popular culture's dominance over the rest of the world. Sandefur is quite right to point out that Bork has far more in common with the Taliban than he or his followers would like to admit.…
December 31, 2004
For those who think that my article using the tsunami (that is, using scientific explanations for the tsunami, not the fact that it killed people) to make a point is tasteless and inappropriate, let me show you what a real tasteless response to it might be. I'm sure there will be a great wailing…
December 31, 2004
I have to confess to being amused to no end by the reaction to my tsunami post on ARN's message boards. They've all got their panties in a bunch because of how horribly insensitive I am, though I frankly think this outrage is entirely fake. It's just easier to focus on that rather than on the…
December 30, 2004
You all should definitely be keeping up with the conversation going back and forth between Richard Posner (posting on Leiter's blog), Timothy Sandefur, Larry Solum and others. Follow the links. I like Sandefur's phrase "mass moral relativism", and it looks to me like Posner is getting thrashed…
December 30, 2004
In the wake of a deadly earthquake-triggered tsunami that has killed at least 77,000 people in southern Asia, brave scientific dissenters are standing up to the Wegenerian Orthoxody that has for so long censored and belittled anyone who dares to question the validity of Naturalistic Seismology. For…
December 29, 2004
The Panda's Thumb currently features two essays thoroughly fisking attempts by pro-ID pundits to defend ID. The first post, by Timothy Sandefur, deals with an article from Hugh Hewitt, the religious right talk show host (and ironically, Sandefur's con law professor in law school). The second, by…
December 28, 2004
Okay, here's an odd story, perhaps. The Alliance Defense Fund, the same religious right legal group that is representing Steven Williams in his lawsuit against the Cupertino School District (the group that sent out the utterly dishonest "Declaration of Independence Banned from Classroom" press…
December 28, 2004
Dean Esmay never replied to my post explaining why ID should not be taught in science classrooms, but in checking back at his blog for a response I'm beginning to think that the real problem is that he just doesn't understand evolution well at all. For instance, notice this post, where he says:…
December 27, 2004
I should also note that Judge Richard Posner is guest blogging this week at Brian Leiter's page. Judge Posner is one of the true giants of the legal field, and certainly one of the most unusual judges around. While sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit, he still teaches law at the…
December 27, 2004
Jon Rowe is guest blogging at Sandefur's place this week, which is great because I only have to go to one place to find both of their posts for a while. Already, Jon has a great post up about Harry Jaffa and his views of homosexuality, and Timothy has a follow-up to it extending one of the…
December 27, 2004
Here's yet another example of those "family values" we're always hearing about. In Florida in 1995, Judge Joseph Tarbuck ordered that Mary Ward's 11 year old daughter be taken out of her mother's custody and given to her father, based solely on the mother's lesbianism (as is normal in such cases,…
December 27, 2004
The legal scholar weighs in on the issues in the Steven Williams case and says that the real issue is whether the school administration has the authority to put reasonable limits on what a teacher can say to their classes:
But even assuming his proposed lesson plans that make reference to religion…
December 27, 2004
From the Washington Post:
On the Christmas fight, the American Civil Liberties Union, the group most often cited as the enemy of traditionalists, says it has not filed a single case blocking Christmas displays this year and cites half a dozen instances over the past year in which it has fought on…
December 26, 2004
In California, the first round of what will almost certainly be a long court battle over gay marriage has just wrapped up the trial phase. After the mayor of San Francisco began performing gay marriages last year (a bad, and politically motivated, idea), opponents of gay marriage appealed…
December 25, 2004
Ed. note: This is a guest post on the ACLU lawsuit filed against the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania by Dan Ray. Dan is an attorney and the director of the Paralegal Studies Program at Eastern Michigan University. He studied in law school under the esteemed Jack Balkin of the Yale Law School.…
December 25, 2004
Jon Rowe has a wonderful post about Christmas from his secular perspective. It really is a must-read essay on the subject of how the secular and the religious co-exist and blend in American culture. As Jon puts it:
Christmas perfectly exemplifies the larger phenomenon of the unique culture that is…
December 24, 2004
This pathetic webrag that publishes Robert Meyer is just full of lying idiots. Take one Charles Cole and his column on the entirely fake myth of Christian persecution and the "they're trying to kill Christmas" meme. And look at this stunning lie:
Have you noticed that this Christmas season seems…
December 24, 2004
Some of you may remember Robert Meyer, a former Robert O'Brien Trophy winner we had some fun with a few months ago (see also here and here). He wrote an abysmal article packed full of blatant falsehoods about Stephen Jay Gould. He repeated a number of hoary old creationist chestnuts. For instance…
December 24, 2004
Accuracy in Media is Reed Irvine's little cash cow, an organization that forever beats the media bias drum, all the while showing considerable bias itself. Well it seems that they have discovered the ID movement and their take on how the media handles it is quite amusing:
But those who believe in…
December 24, 2004
Marci Hamilton has an excellent column reviewing the situation with Ashley McKathan, Alabama's latest Robin to Roy Moore's Batman. She points out something that so many on the right want to gloss over when claiming that the judge has a free speech or free exercise right to have the Ten Commandments…
December 23, 2004
A lot of attention lately has been paid to Lakoff, a fairly obscure Berkeley linguistics professor, for a book he wrote suggesting that Democrats learn to use language to frame the debate as well as the Republicans have. Since I don't have much preference for either of those parties, I'm not really…
December 23, 2004
And no, I'm not talking about Tim Conway doing a video about evolution and intelligent design. I'm talking about Michael Dorf, professor of law at Columbia, and his latest article at FindLaw. Dorf examines the question of whether teaching ID in public school science classrooms is unconstitutional…
December 22, 2004
Jason Kuznicki is off to the Carolinas to spend the holidays with his in-laws and leaves us with a great post offering a history of Festivus that no true Seinfeld fan would need. But more than that, he also includes a link to this absolutely precious anti-gay rant, which has to be seen to be…
December 22, 2004
Hans Zeiger, the Hillsdale College student and budding right wing pundit, is the latest winner of the Robert O'Brien Tropy (formerly the Idiot of the Month Award) for this frontal assault on the intellect published, naturally, on the Worldnutdaily. It seems Zeiger has his panties in a wad because…
December 22, 2004
Continuing the Christian persecution theme, the Worldnutdaily is even taking President Bush to task for not being quite Christian enough in the White House. The top story on WND last night was Bush White House's Christ-less Christmas. The top story. On a day when 22 soldiers died in a rocket attack…