Policy and Politics
tfk | April 21, 2010I'm in the Washington Post's book review blog today, offering my take on a chapter from conservative pundit S.E. Cupp's forthcoming book. I haven't seen anything but the 4th chapter ("Thou Shalt Evolve"), but the book as a whole seems like an odd project. Not least that a book titled Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity would be penned by a self-described atheist. In other words, when the title calls it "our religion," she isn't including herself.
I first learned of Cupp's existence in January, from a Salon.com profile which presented her as a possible bright light…
tfk | April 20, 2010James Grimmelmann considers the Supreme Court's inability to understand the difference between the pager and the e-mail:
Reading about the Supreme Court oral arguments in City of Ontario v. Quon makes me sad and angry in equal measure.
Why so emotional? Here are the Court's questions, in a case about whether messages on an employer-provided pager are private or the property of the employee:
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Maybe â maybe everybody else knows this, but what is the difference between the pager and the e-mail?
â¦
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: What happens, just out of curiosity, if youâre â he…
tfk | April 19, 2010Long-time readers know I've been trying to reduce my the number of RSS feeds I monitor, so it takes a lot to make me add a new blog to my reading, but You're Not Helping is filled with win. The authors' take on the importance of tone is filled with win, for instance.
And their take on TFK? Dead on:
Josh Rosenau is an enigma, a chimera of sorts. That’s because, sometimes, he says some great stuff. Other times? Not so much. We guess you could say he’s kinda like us.
It's true. Sometimes this is a shitty blog, and sometimes it's less shitty. Sometimes the things I think make it shitty are not…
tfk | April 15, 2010From TfK's "Duh!" department, we learn via PZ that a federal judge did the only sensible thing possible about the National Day of Prayer. In a suit filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation:
A federal judge in Wisconsin ruled the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional Thursday, saying the day amounts to a call for religious action.
U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb wrote that the government can no more enact laws supporting a day of prayer than it can encourage citizens to fast during Ramadan, attend a synagogue or practice magic.
"In fact, it is because the nature of prayer is so…
tfk | April 14, 2010James Kidder is doing yeoman work. You see, Casey Luskin of the Disco. 'Tute took a look at the new Smithsonian Institute exhibit on human origins, and wrote:
Did you get that? Ignoring the fact that transitional fossils are often missing even among taxa whose records are very complete, now Darwinâs defenders argue that their theory âpredicts gaps in the fossil record.â How convenient!
Kidder then points out that this is a dumb argument by pointing to specific transitional fossils that we know about and that really do help us understand transitions in human evolution. Huzzah!
But that's…
tfk | April 14, 2010So there's no confusion, I'm entirely down with the skeptical movement. I'm on the board of Bay Area Skeptics (the oldest local skeptic group in the US), I'm helping organize SkeptiCal: The Northern California Science and Skepticism Conference (register now). I've hosted the Skeptics' Circle blog carnival. Yay skepticism.
I've also jumped on the recent stories about the Pope's role in covering up rape by priests. I do that not as a skeptic, not as a scientist, not as an agnostic, not as a Democrat, not as a fan of Firefly and The Wire. I do it as a person concerned about the wellbeing of…
tfk | April 14, 2010During confirmation hearings for Justice Alito, conservatives pooh-poohed his sketchy record on race by arguing that race wasn't an issue the Supreme Court would have to face any more. When the Voting Rights Act was challenged in the Supreme Court a little later, conservatives argued that its stronger provisions should be declared unconstitutional, and suggested that the Act was outdated anyway. We're post-racial and post-racism, they insisted.
Not so much:
A federal court has ordered the Walthall County, Miss., School District to eliminate policies that have resulted in significant racial…
tfk | April 13, 2010Remember a few months back when Kevin Padian was all "The two kinds people who believe that religion and evolution can not coexist are extreme atheists and extreme religious fundamentalists"? Then a buncha people said that Padian (an atheist) was making cracks about atheists, "othering" atheists, &c? Good times.
One of the arguments that emerged from that was just how many atheists really do claim some sort of broad incompatibility between science and religion. In the context of the current fighting over science's relationship to religion, this is actually not that interesting a…
tfk | April 13, 2010Michael at "The Bible is the Other Side" is upset. He's been reading about the suppression of research on evolution acceptance among the American public, and doesn't like what he sees. In particular, he doesn't like yours truly, and the way people like me talk about science literacy:
There is a myth propagated by radical left leaning evolutionists that you can have a PHD and have papers published in mainstream science journals and have discoveries that save lives but if you doubt evolution then your an illiterate in science.
Oh my stars and LOLcats! This is so adorable that if I had a…
tfk | April 12, 2010Shorter Ned Ryun, former Bush speechwriter and twin son of disgraced former middle-distance runner and Congressman Jim Ryun: An American Armada:
Conservatives must defeat the socialists who are propping up our banking system and forcing all Americans to pay money to private health insurers. To do this, they must form an armada of sorts, in which each sacrifices his or her own wellbeing for the greater good. An armada or cadre, if you will, of heavily armed, poorly defended attackers willing to destroy their enemy (the American government) at all costs, even their lives. Only through such…
tfk | April 12, 2010Shorter Sam Harris: FAQ :: How can you derive an âoughtâ from an âisâ?:
No.
This is not quite how he'd probably shorter himself, but that's not the immediately important issue. The immediately important issue is that he thinks we could get from "is" to "ought" by saying that actions which produce the worst possible suffering for all sentient beings are bad actions, and we ought to do something else. In other words, the "ought" Harris manages to derive (by various assumptions) is that we should not do the very worst thing possible.
As a reply to his critics (cf.), this goes nowhere special…
tfk | April 12, 2010PZ asks "Am I to be the next enemy of the NCSE?":
No.
This has been your April 13, 2010 edition of simple answers to stupid questions.
Most of the rest of the piece is not really worth addressing, but I'll note a rather serious error in PZ's opening paragraph:
I'm a little worried. Jason Rosenhouse wrote about this new paper by Peter Hess, the Faith Project Director (I'm already rolling my eyes) of the NCSE, and I learn that the first failing of Intelligent Design creationism is that it is blasphemous.
No. Hess asks, "What are the central theological failings of intelligent design?" and…
tfk | April 10, 2010Not a joke: How are the heads of the Catholic Church and Massey Energy similar?
Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, is in trouble. Increasing evidence is emerging that he quashed internal investigations and discipline of priests accused, and even convicted, of pedophilia. This is very bad. Every new revelation about then-Cardinal Ratzinger's actions have had him closer and closer to the circle of people stating directly that the Church should not defrock abusive priests. The most recent documents including his signature underneath the argument (written in Latin) that a priest should…
tfk | April 10, 2010Shorter Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal:
Wah!
I mean, can you imagine how the Republicans would react if a Democrat said this:
Speaker Pelosi likes to call the Republicans the âParty of No.â Some of us, we donât like the way that sounds. It hurts our feelings. ⦠Speaker Newt Gingrich said yesterday the Republicans need to be the âParty of Yes,â and he is right.
If he'd stop saying "no" to evolution (then working to attract biotech industries), "no" to economic stimulus (then touting his ability to attract stimulus funds), and even "hell no" to health insurance reform, maybe people would call…
tfk | April 9, 2010At Bill Dembski's blog, Clive Hayden reads my law review article and finds it to be "inaccurate," "prideful," and "a kind of disconnected cluster of arguments that reads like a brainstorm (concerned with quantity of arguments over quality), that could only persuade the uninformed."
Meanwhile, an email correspondent affiliated with a natural history museum writes:
I wanted to write and congratulate you (and thank you) for the very concise and well-written "legal" paper on the trajectory of ID after Dover (in the Saint Thomas Journal). Very nicely done!
Given that Hayden inaccurately describes…
tfk | April 9, 2010Atrios is confused:
One thing I've never quite figured out about the wingnut brain is whether their readiness to kill tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people with nukes is because they see the nukes as a giant external penis or if they just have psychotic death cult psychology and like the idea of lots of people dying.
As Homer Simpson once wondered: "Can't [they] be both?"
tfk | April 9, 2010Science magazine reports:
In an unusual last-minute edit that has drawn flak from the White House and science educators, a federal advisory committee omitted data on Americans' knowledge of evolution and the big bang from a key report. The data shows that Americans are far less likely than the rest of the world to accept that humans evolved from earlier species and that the universe began with a big bang. â¦
"Discussing American science literacy without mentioning evolution is intellectual malpractice" that "downplays the controversy" over teaching evolution in schools, says Joshua Rosenau…
tfk | April 2, 2010I've never written a law review article, and my first stab at the genre turned into a bit of a beast to wrangle. While most of the papers in the journal ran to perhaps a dozen pages, mine weighs in at 68, in which I offer a brief exploration of evolution for the lawerly set, a review of creationism's legal and social history, a short defense of the Kitzmiller decision striking down ID in public schools, and a review of current anti-evolution efforts, especially so-called academic freedom laws. For all that, I think it hangs together nicely, a tribute to the students at the University of St…
tfk | April 2, 2010The Discovery Institute Media Complaints Department issues a missive about a University of Arizona panel on creationism. Amidst the usual whinging about the failure to include the mainstream scientists and historians who totally support ID, we get Disco. hanger-on David Klinghoffer's insistence that:
whatever else may be said for or against ID, it's clearly at odds with a literal reading of the Bible.
This is interesting. Bill Dembski has insisted that ID is simply "the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated," after all, and Dembski is purported to know something about ID.
I'll also note…
tfk | April 1, 2010So the other day Sam Harris was asked to speak to the TED conference, and he presented what he believes to be a basis for scientifically validating morals and values. This is interesting, as most people who've studied the issue have concluded, for pretty compelling reasons, that this is not the sort of thing that's really possible.
Now, I haven't seen Harris's talk, as I don't care for watching YouTube and it's not a form well-suited for evaluating what would be, if true, a fairly radical discovery. The thing is, skepticism gives you a toolkit for addressing such circumstances. When…