Culture Wars
tfk | July 8, 2010Shorter Senator David Vitter:
What has abortion got to do with women?
After reporters asked why Vitter assigned a women's issues portfolio to an aide who had been charged with domestic violence after threatening his girlfriend with a knife. Vitter told the reporters: "he handled issues including abortion issues, including several other issues, but not women's affairs."
tfk | July 2, 2010So Chris Hitchens canceled his book tour in order to get cancer treatment, and some douchebag is crowing about it, saying that it's all part of God's great plan. You see, it's a slow-growing cancer, which will give Hitchens time to recant his neocon imperialism atheism. PZ's response is exactly right:
your god is clearly a dick, and so are you. I don't see why you're worshipping him, except that dicks seem to like other dicks an awful lot.
I mean, assume an all-powerful deity who can change human physiology in order to bring people from atheism to theism. Now religious belief is a property…
tfk | July 1, 2010In February, Penn State issued a report clearing climatologist Michael Mann of 3 charges of academic misconduct arising from the theft of emails from a server at a British university. More recently, a British parliamentary report dismissed claims that climate scientists had behaved improperly. And now, the fourth charge against Mann has been dismissed as well.
Penn State's press release explains: "A panel of leading scholars has cleared a well-known Penn State climate scientist of research misconduct, following a four-month internal investigation by the University." The first charges were…
tfk | June 29, 2010PZ is unamused. I criticized his criticism of prayer vigils in the Gulf, and he responds:
It's strange how the people who most advocate sympathy and rapprochement with religion are blind to what religious people really think. Here's another case where Josh Rosenau complains that I misunderstand what the faithful were trying to do with their prayers for the Gulfâ¦and then goes on to do exactly as I said the apologists should stop doing. He ignores the religious part of these prayer events. He says, as if it is refuting anything I say, that prayer reduces stress, has positive physiological…
tfk | June 29, 2010
Via ClimateProgress (who got it from Barefoot and Progressive), we get Kentucky's Republican nominee for the US Senate, Rand Paul, at an event for local homeschoolers. At the top of the Q&A, he's asked when he became a Christian and how old the earth his.
Paul has no trouble giving a detailed account of where his Christianity came from, giving a careful timeline of not just the origins of his Christian faith, but his anti-abortion position. When it gets time to answer the second part of the question he gets tongue-tied, answering:
Iâm gonna have to pass on the age of the earth. I think…
tfk | June 26, 2010PZ Myers is disappointed. There's a massive oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is incapable of stopping it, as is the federal government, and the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida (and soon on to Georgia and the Carolinas) are being coated in a chocolatey rainbow of crude oil. This is bad, and there's nothing that people who live in these areas can do about it, so there've been occasional calls for folks there to get together and pray.
Now it's indisputable that PZ is unhappy with all of that, but he seems somewhat more vocal in his unhappiness with the people praying than he is with…
tfk | June 24, 2010Martin Cothran, scourge of all deviation, whether from his ideal of "classical education," from his creationist beliefs, from his homophobia, from his misogyny, from his aversion to women who assert their own sexuality, or from his conservative ideals, wants us all to know:
My mother still keeps peacocks on her form in Kansas.
Thanks for sharing.
tfk | June 21, 2010Remember when Disco. spinner Casey Luskin rolled out this silly attempt at refuting critics of irreducible complexity?:
Car engines use various kinds of bolts, and a bolt could be seen as a small âsub-partâ or âsub-systemâ of a car engine. Under [Ken] Miller's logic, if a vital bolt in my car's engine might also to perform some other functionâperhaps as a lugnut--then it follows that my car's whole engine system is not irreducibly complex. Such an argument is obviously fallacious.
He wrote that in April of 2006. Little did I know at the time that the Department of Homeland Security had…
tfk | June 21, 2010Casey Luskin, Disco. 'Tute spinner, has recently relaunched a fight over whether and how textbooks use embryological drawings from Ernst Haeckel's 19th century popular works. In his two posts (excerpting from a jumbled essay he wrote for a law review), he repeatedly claims that those drawings are fraudulent. To wit:
textbooks in use today, in arguing for evolution, still use Haeckelâs fraudulent embryo drawings
That Haeckelâs drawings were fraudulent and have been used in textbooks is essentially beyond dispute
Stephen Jay Gould recognized that Haeckelâs drawings ⦠fraudulently obscured…
tfk | June 18, 2010You may recall a small brouhaha among science fans some time back when the clowns in Insane Clown Posse released a video of a song declaring their hatred for "scientist[s], y'all motherfuckers lying and getting me pissed." The offense of scientists? Trying to answer bog-simple questions like "fuckin' magnets, how do they work?"
When ICP did a show in San Francisco, folks from the Noisebridge technology/hacking collective took to the streets. They brought posters explaining science, labcoats, and ICP-style facepaint. And by all accounts, they were well received by the assembled ICP fans ("…
tfk | June 7, 2010For reasons passing understanding, people continue to listen to the Thomas More Legal Center. Listening to their nonsense cost the Dover Area School District a cool million, and now some buffoons in Michigan have taken TMLC's help in a suit challenging the Affordable Care Act. TMLC litigator Robert Muise defended the suit challenging the individual mandate by arguing:
Never in our history has the government sought to acquire for itself the authority to force someone to engage in a commercial transaction they wouldn't otherwise engage in. The government has very broad authority, but it's not…
tfk | June 7, 2010You remember Kris Kobach, right? Once a Congressional candidate with ties to white supremacists, before that a Justice Department staffer on a since-abandoned racial profiling scheme, after which he bankrupted the Kansas Republican Party, and is lately famous for authoring Arizona's "show me your papers" law. He's running for Kansas secretary of state, where he'd regulate state elections. At a recent event organized by the "Patriot movement" (which previously spawned domestic terrorists Timothy McVeigh, and Scott Roeder), Kobach made some rather remarkable claims, not least that:
terrorists…
tfk | June 6, 2010Never let it be said that I don't acknowledge error. Ophelia Benson, responding in part to my earlier posts on the World Science Festival's science and faith panel, points out amistake I made:
Meanwhile â Josh Rosenauâs claim, in his post on why there shouldnât be any atheist scientists on the panel
Whoa, there. I can see how what I wrote implies that, but it wasn't what I meant, and thus I need to apologize and correct myself. My point was about Affirmative/New Atheists, not about all atheist scientists. Frankly, Francisco Ayala's religious views are fairly obscure, and according to some…
tfk | June 6, 2010Steve Matheson writes An open letter to Stephen Meyer:
Dear Steve:
â¦Yes, it would be great to follow up on our brief meeting onstage, and to find ourselves in situations in which topics of mutual interest are discussed by knowledgeable and intelligent people (at conferences, for example, or in multidisciplinary working groups). â¦
Right now, I don't see how you could be a thoughtful contributor to such an effort. It's not because you're stupid, or because you have "bad relationship skills," and it's not because you prefer ID-based explanations for biological phenomena. It's because you seem…
tfk | June 3, 2010Ophelia and Larry are upset. In particular, they are upset that Chad Orzel and I thought it was OK to have a panel about how scientists reconcile their religious faith and their scientific work but not to include panelists who reject the panel's premise.
This was the point that Chad and I were raising, at least, but it is not quite clear that Ophelia and Larry realize what we were saying. Thus, Larry writes:
Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles [Extremists Aren't Interesting] and Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas [Talking Sense] take the same position. Non-accommodationist atheists shouldn…
tfk | June 2, 2010Chad Orzel, responding to Sean Carroll, is absolutely right. The question is whether a panel at the World Science Festival (funded by Templeton, ZOMG!) should include incompatibilist atheists in a discussion about science and religion. Chad argues that doing so would derail the discussion:
In the end, I'm not convinced you need anyone on the panel to make the case that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. That idea is out there, coming from both sides of the science-religion split (and you'll notice they don't have any young-earth creationists on the panel, either). The…
tfk | May 31, 2010Daily Kos asks 1200 voters:
Most astronomers believe the universe formed about 13.7 billion years ago in a massive event called the Big Bang. Do you think that's about right or do think the universe was created much more recently?
Saints be praised, 62% of the public accepts the Big Bang and a 13.7 billion year old universe. Democrats are the most positive, with 71% accepting that, while only 44% of Republicans agree (38 think it's more recent, the rest are undecided). I've said it before and I stand by it: conservative Republicanism is incompatible with science.
But looking at the finer…
tfk | May 31, 2010A year ago today, George Tiller was murdered in cold blood. Tiller was a Wichita OB/GYN known for being one of the few doctors who would perform third trimester abortions. Scott Roeder came into Tiller's church, where Tiller served as an usher, and shot him to death before his family and friends.
In memory of Tiller's death, here's a repost from a year ago.
Medgar Evers was a civil rights activist in Mississippi. Growing up black in a state where dark skin was a crime, he had the courage to stand up for his rights and the rights of his friends and family. He organized boycotts, sued for…
tfk | May 30, 2010Shorter Billy Dembski: BEACON comes home with the bacon!:
Why doesn't the NSF give meeeeee $25 million?
"Wah!" would've been even shorter, but would limit my ability to distinguish this whine from every other post at Dembski's blog.
tfk | May 28, 2010My review of Elaine Howard Ecklund's Science vs. Religion is online and will be in the print edition of your Washington Post this Sunday. I'm unaccustomed to reviewing books in 300-400 words, so there's a bunch I'd have liked to say but couldn't, and I felt like I should wait to blog the book until the Post review was out.
The very short version of the review is that the book is good. It's written mostly as guidance for scientists trying to sort out to deal with science and religion in their own lives, but there's valuable insight for nonscientists as well. I rather like the opening:…