Politics
razib | October 5, 2006Radio Open Source had a show about Islam & The Netherlands. They mention one of my comments in the last 5 minutes (the download should be up tomorrow). I have cut & pasted my first comment below.
And what better place for this flourishing multicultural paradise than the tolerant Netherlands of the Church-baiting Erasmus and the Portuguese-Jewish rationalist Spinoza?
Let me be frank, this makes great rhetoric, but the reality was far less peachy. The Calvinist confession dominated Dutch society and tolerated a level of dissent, it did not accept or celebrate it. Baruch Spinoza was…
j7uy5 | October 5, 2006Rupert Murdoch is a damn liar. Is there a journalistic board
of ethics? Can Fox's broadcasting license be revoked?
src="http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/upload/2006/10/foxoreillymarkfoleydem100306uy5.jpg"
height="300" width="302">
I know
href="http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/10/fox_turns_foley_into_a_democra.php">Ed
and
href="http://scienceblogs.com/smoothpebbles/2006/10/in_the_fair_balanced_view_mark.php">David
are already all over this, but it is just so offensive, I had to join
the echo chamber.
clock | October 5, 2006'Hip Happy Prof' teaches over MySpace, bosses protest:
N.C. State Professor Tom Hoban is offering Sociology 395-M, "Social Movements for Social Change," on the popular social networking site that claims to have 100 million active users worldwide. But administrators say it's the wrong space for teaching a university course.
Hoban says he received approval over the summer from his department head to teach via MySpace. But last week, Katie Perry, senior vice provost for academic affairs, told Hoban to move the course to university servers.
Hoban has refused.
"N.C. State's distance education is…
clock | October 5, 2006Prince George and the return of the Sheriff of Nottingham
People are working harder, earning less, and the rich are raking it in. Where's Robin Hood when we need him?
By Hal Crowther
There was a time when no one could be elected president of the United States without representing himself as the nemesis of Wall Street and Park Avenue, the champion of the dispossessed and downtrodden. A century ago, this was no perfunctory nod to the bleacher seats. On Labor Day 1906, House Speaker Joe Cannon rallied his Republican troops with a speech praising President Theodore Roosevelt: "He is honest and…
clock | October 5, 2006Seven women are to be stoned to death for "crimes against chastity". Amnesty International is asking for your help. Read about it here. Sign a petition (or submit your own letter) here. If we do not act fast, this is what will happen:
Under Shari'a law, a prisoner is buried up to her breast, her hands restrained. Rules also specify the size of the stones which can be thrown so that death is painful and not imminent. Both men and women can be sentenced to die by stoning. In practise, however, an overwhelming number of women receive that penalty.
Death penalty is always bad, but this method…
pharyngula | October 5, 2006
We're hoping he'll announce that he's going to run against Coleman in 2008 from the stage here at Morris—he was playing coy with Jon Stewart because, pffft, you want to make such important statements in places that matter, that have resonance.
clock | October 5, 2006Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, will chat onliine on DefCon blog at 7pm EST tonight. You can post a question right now, if you register.
pharyngula | October 5, 2006Drinking Liberally is cancelled this week in Morris. If you're really hard up, you could go to the DL in Minneapolis, but really, why would you want to? We've got Al Franken, star of TV and radio, founder of the Midwest Values PAC, and best-selling author entertaining us at a DFL fundraiser here in our little town, so we're a much more exciting place than that urban mess to the east. I think there are still tickets available, but I know they were going fast a few days ago—call Jeff Lamberty at (320) 585-5646 if you're interested. Nope, sorry, you were too late. Sold out! Good for the Stevens…
pharyngula | October 5, 2006
Ultrasound imaging technology is coming along so fast that you can now get a near-real time, moderate resolution image of a living fetus. Unfortunately, this new technology is also having an unfortunate consequence.
Sophisticated ultrasound scans that show foetuses as early as 12 weeks appearing to "walk" in the womb have had a dangerous impact on the public debate over abortion, leading doctors and scientists said yesterday.
The emotive photographs, taken with new fourdimensional imaging technology, have created a misleading impression that foetuses become viable and potentially self-aware…
evolvingthoughts | October 4, 2006What with Islamists being called "Islamofascists" these days by, ironically, the right wing, it pays us to consider to what extent any modern political movement is fascist. Bear with me, because this is an essay about historical relations.
Terms in history are used in one of two ways. Either you are referring to a historically connected sequence of ideas and institutions, or you are using a measure of similarity. A third alternative, popular but unhistorical, is to specify some group as an Evil Demon or Adversary, and to label all who you dislike as being the latest in that demonological…
pharyngula | October 4, 2006More like this, please.
I got this delightful Nietzsche/Family Circus mash-up from Holbo…
Keith Olbermann is not insipid, oh no. Would that we had more fiery critics of the Bush/Cheney kleptocratic clown show.
clock | October 4, 2006 Mark Foley and the unmasked Republican Party
Also, welcome to the readers from Leiter Reports (coming here to read this but also hopefully looking around).
pharyngula | October 4, 2006Just read Leiter.
So the record had been mixed, even before Bush & his bestiary of madmen, but describing the U.S. as a nominally democratic society seemed to make some sense. Yet even that status officially ended last week. The legislation known as "the Military Commissions Act of 2006" (usefully described by Professor Balkin here)--approved by what might be called, euphemistically, "the supine Congress" and which is sure to be signed by the alleged President (on orders from the actual President, Dick Cheney)--is the stuff of totalitarian societies, pure and simple. (As Stephen…
clock | October 4, 2006...on the suspension of habeas corpus. A Must Read.
...and on a lighter note....
oracknows | October 3, 2006Getting back to politics one last time, founder and fellow RINO The Commissar is jumping ship from the Republican Party this fall. Read why here.
Although I'm a fair bit closer to the center than The Commissar, his thoughts echo mine to a large extent. Personally, I'm a big fan of divided government. The checks and balances work far better when no one party is in control of the legislative and executive branches, and legislation has to have broad bipartisan support to pass. Whenever one party controls both Houses of Congress for too long, it inevitably becomes corrupt, leading to the…
jrosenhouse | October 3, 2006Jennifer Senior has this essay, reviewing new anti-Bush books by Lewis Lapham and Sidney Blumenthal, in a recent issue of The York Times Book Review. Her verdict?
Now, just in time for the midterm elections, the collected columns of two passionate Bush critics, Lewis H. Lapham and Sidney Blumenthal, are landing in bookstores. Both, to varying degrees, suffer from a distorting case of Bush-phobia.
Of Lapham specifically she writes:
People who are serious about politics don't just preen. They report, explain, explore contradictions, struggle with ideas, maybe even propose suggestions. If…
pharyngula | October 3, 2006While everyone seems to be hammering on the GOP for their love of child-molesters, we're all forgetting that the Republicans are compensating for that with a bold foreign war to save Iraqis and their children. Why, look at the selfless summary by Mike DeWine:
"We're not in Iraq for the Iraqis; we're there for us."
Uh, whoops. Never mind.
Maybe "We're there for us!" could be the new GOP slogan.
evolvingthoughts | October 3, 2006On the one hand, we have the father of a student killed at Columbine blaming evolution for moral decay. On the other the killer in the Amish shooting was a home schooled Christian with sexual abuse issues. On the gripping hand, America has more murders per head than Japan, Australia, and the other nations that teach science to their kids (many of them actual democracies unlike the United States, which is a republic that, like ancient Rome, is turning into a tyranny) but which are less religious. So, what causes what? You decide...