Policy and Politics
tfk | January 7, 2011Wonk Room reports that Wichita-based Koch Industries is suing. Someone sent out a spoof press release in Koch's name, claiming they were going to stop funding climate change denial groups, and now:
Pollution machine Koch Industries is taking to court to defend its reputation as a cesspool of global warming denial. The right-wing carbon industry giant, owned by Tea Party billionaires David and Charles Koch, has filed a lawsuit in Utah to punish anonymous pranksters who claimed on the companyâs behalf that it was discontinuing funding to climate denial front groups. According to Kochâs lawyers…
tfk | January 4, 2011The sky is blue. Winter is cold. Jerry Coyne is upset with NCSE. These are the implacable truths anchoring us in reality. The interesting question is not whether Coyne is upset with NCSE, but what he's upset about this time.
Today, Coyne is upset that the award-winning, NSF-funded website Understanding Evolution addresses a common objection to evolution. (Full disclosure: NCSE assists Understanding Evolution and is listed as a co-organizer of the site. I've never worked on the site, but I work at NCSE. As it says in the sidebar, this blog is my own private thing, not NCSE's. Look…
tfk | January 4, 2011To be clear, my last post was not a defense of a phrase that I use. I searched my archives, and don't see any instances where I referred to atheists as "militant." Indeed, that post is the only one where I used the word "militant" without quoting someone else! I don't think it's the best term to use, I don't think others should use it, and I don't use it. I just don't like people redefining words because they don't like their implications.
I also wanted to point out a comment from Jeff Shallitt, who looked at the "militant atheist" meme back in 2007, including this gem of an observation:…
tfk | January 4, 2011PZ Myers points to a governor of Pakistan's assassination, and insists: "Don't ever call atheists militant, except where they do something like this."
Which is all well and good, and I suppose I wouldn't want to be called militant either. But I also wouldn't want to contradict the dictionary. Here's the OED on "militant":
A. adj.â¦3. a. Combative; aggressively persistent; strongly espousing a cause; entrenched, adamant.
b. Aggressively active in pursuing a political or social cause, and often favouring extreme, violent, or confrontational methods.â¦
B. n. 1. a. A person engaged in war or…
tfk | January 3, 2011Ophelia Benson has a post up looking at an interview between Benjamin Nelson (a sometime commenter here) and Chris Mooney. Nelson summarizes the interview, and the broader accommodation/confrontation conflict, by writing:
[Mooney's] stance is self-consciously political. At least to some extent, there is a âdifference in goalsâ between Mooney and the activist atheists â by which, I think, he means a difference in priorities. Mooney does not think that speaking out against religion is a priority, and that it is on the whole detrimental to science education; while others think it is a priority…
tfk | January 3, 2011Sandy Levinson makes a good case that Wednesday is the acid test for the Obama administration's commitment to "Change We Can Believe In." On Wednesday, the President of the Senate, Vice-President Joe Biden, will be asked to rule that the Senate is a non-continuing body, which he will do if he has any political instincts or a desire to accomplish anything in the next 2 years. That will allow the Senate to set new rules by a simple majority, new rules that would restrict the use of the filibuster and other obstructionist tactics.
This must happen. The last two years have seen a nearly-…
tfk | December 31, 2010Ed Brayton has been doing yeoman work to expose the overtly religious agenda of various parts of the armed forces, especially the Air Force. Today he posts the second part of a story about the Army's "Soldier Fitness Tracker," a survey which evaluates "spiritual fitness," and can require soldiers to undergo "spiritual remedial training" if they underperform. This is Orwellian and deeply offensive to atheists. It should also offend religious folks of other stripes, as the government has no business telling them that their spiritual life needs remediation. Given the military's long history…
tfk | December 28, 2010
Mark Cothren of Kentucky cannot recognize a raccoon with mange. This is noteworthy mainly because Texans can't recognize a dog with mange, either.
It's also noteworthy because it's possible Mark Cothren is related to Martin Cothran, and there's a new blogger at Martin Cothran's blog. He signs off as "Thomas Cothran," who is either an Oklahoman or a Tennesseean serving a 112 year sentence for vehicular manslaughter, or someone else entirely.
He asks: Is the Opposition to Climate Change Ecological or Technological?, and trips over himself right from the first sentence:
Let's set aside the…
tfk | December 25, 2010Attention conservation notice: A couple thousand words that can be summarized as: "Someone is wrong on the internet."
Jerry Coyne has a longish reply to my post yesterday. He seems quite upset about it. He seems to think I'm very, very wrong. And yet he cannot manage to characterize my argument correctly, and offers nothing at all that would refute my argument (or even refute his mischaracterization of that argument). It's odd. He's basically conceding that I'm right that no evidence was offered, and he knows of no evidence. He seems upset that I bothered to point out that lack of…
tfk | December 24, 2010The nice thing about being an agnostic is feeling comfortable saying "I don't know" when there's not enough evidence to say yes or no.
I mention this because I want to be clear that I mean no criticism by saying that I don't know if Ophelia is right about the positive effects of New Atheism. She's picking up on a study which yet again demonstrates that Americans overstate their church attendance. The latest is based on a study comparing churches' attendance figures with people's self-reported church attendance. Earlier demonstrations of this effect included researchers counting cars in…
tfk | December 24, 2010Rape Victim Refuses TSA Breast Grope; Handcuffed, Arrested by Police:
Claire Hirschkind couldn't go through the stripsearch scanner because of a pacemaker-type device in her chest. So she was taken to a female TSA officer to be groped.
"I told them, 'No, I'm not going to have my breasts felt,' and she said, 'Yes, you are,'" Hirschkind told KVUE in Austin.
After refusing to acquiesce, she was arrested.
"The police actually pushed me to the floor, and handcuffed me," she said. "I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security."
Hirschkind had planned…
tfk | December 21, 2010I'll be in and out of internet contact for the next few days, so I may or may not respond to any new wingnuttery from Michael Egnor. But it's worth making a few broad points.
First, nothing I've written should be taken to suggest that fetuses (especially in the third trimester) don't have moral status as people. My previous posts in this vein have been dedicated to showing that Egnor's criteria for making that judgment from the moment of conception are flawed and lead to pernicious and absurd results. I think I've succeeded there.
Second, in discussing abortion, I don't think the really…
tfk | December 19, 2010Michael Egnor is still upset. Earlier, he penned an inaccurate, misleading, and ⦠well ⦠egnorant defense of his views on abortion, responding to my critique of his claim that personhood is easy to define.
His earlier reply repeatedly and incorrectly attempted to associate the content of this blog with my employer. As the sidebar on every page makes clear, the opinions expressed here are not those of NCSE. People who try to tag content here as reflecting NCSE policy or views instantly lose a lot of credit in my accounting of their literacy.
Egnor continues that trend in his latest…
tfk | December 17, 2010Shorter Martin Cothran: More evidence for Global Warming:
English winters are cold and snowy, therefore Al Gore is fat global warming is a hoax.
Outside the fictional world of Martin Cothran â where Lost Cause mythology counts as history, as does Noah's Ark â scientifically literate folks know that 2010 is shaping up to be the warmest year on record.
For context, here's the 12-month moving average of global temperatures as of last June:
Note that the last measurement is the warmest 12-month average temperature in recorded history.
tfk | December 16, 2010Stephen Post tells Science & Religion Today that civility isn't the solution to the problems of modern politics:
civility rests ultimately on deeper notions of respect for and love of humanity. Love is an affirming love of the otherâs being, respect is a modulation of love, and civility is an expression of the respect, as is etiquette.
The problem in our politics, and across our culture, is deeper than the loss of civility. It is a problem of the loss of those things deeper than civility upon which civility rests. The sad thing about American politics today is that our politicians have…
tfk | December 14, 2010Having defended Holocaust deniers and crusaded against gay parents, I shouldn't be surprised that Martin Cothran, lobbyist for the Kentucky affiliate of Focus on the Family and occasional shill for the Disco. 'Tute, would defend treason. In defending the secessionist States, Cothran mostly just whales away at a straw man, offering but one real person's views to which he objects:
the comments of Bob Sutton, chief historian for the National Park Service, who reminds us that "Slavery was the principal cause of the Civil War, period."
That's it. Yes, there's much sanctimonious talk about…
tfk | December 13, 2010â¦And rightly so. He wrote, after a vote to allow debate on repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell failed to clear a 60 vote plurality: DADT didn't fail. The Senate did:
The bill repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell didn't fail: The Senate did. The bill got 57 votes, not 49. As Dylan Matthews pointed out, a procedural failsafe that's theoretically meant to protect the rights of minorities was just used to restrict the rights of minorities -- which is how it's always been, of course.
The various players are excitedly blaming one another. Anonymous aides to Harry Reid are arguing that Susan Collins's…
tfk | December 12, 2010Shortly after Michael Egnor launched his first defense of creationism at the Disco. 'Tute's blog, the wags at Panda's Thumb coined the term "egnorance," to describe "the egotistical combination of ignorance and arrogance." It was funny, and remains so years later, because it's true.
Which brings us to Egnor's reply to me, about the morality of abortion, etc.. His first basic error lies in the opening words of his title: "NCSE's Program Director Josh Rosenau: Human Dependency Obviates the Right to Life." It's true that I work at NCSE, but this blog is not an NCSE product, there's a clear…
tfk | December 8, 2010Steve Benen wraps up the late-breaking reactions to the tax deal, most surprisingly Sen. Mary Landrieu's vigorous opposition:
It seemed at least plausible to me that we'd see some Kabuki theater when it came to congressional Democrats' reaction to the tax plan agreement. Perhaps they'd feign outrage, knowing that if Dems publicly expressed strong support, Republicans would automatically balk at the deal. After all, we've seen this before -- if Democrats approve of a proposal, the GOP assumes there's something wrong with it.
At this point, however, I think it's fair it's fair to say the Dems'…
tfk | December 7, 2010I know Christopher Maloney is a quack because this is how quacks act. PZ Myers wrote a blog post way back when pointing out that Maloney is a quack, a naturopathic "doctor" in Maine. He urged parents to skip vaccinating their kids, and to have them drink berry juice and take garlic pills instead. That isn't how the real world works, alas. The flu vaccine really does stop the flu, while black elderberry has nothing like the clinical evidence required for this sort of recommendation.
Rather than taking that criticism to heart, Maloney had his wife, a lawyer, send nastygrams to the hosts of…