Politics
emjohnson | January 10, 2010
Image: Atheistcartoons.com
Of course, you can always count on World Nut Daily to explain the illogic of celebrating a victim of capital punishment while supporting its practice:
The reason capital punishment was necessary, God explained, was because human life was so special. There had to be a blood atonement for the death of an innocent man or woman.
There's a much longer and detailed explanation of the absolute requirement for the death penalty in God's economy in Numbers 35. That's where we learn that the land is actually polluted by the unatoned shedding of innocent human blood. There's…
drorzel | January 10, 2010There's a Kenneth Chang article in the New York Times this morning on the ever popular topic of "If the globe is warming, why is it so darn cold?" It's a good explanation of the weather phenomenon that's making the morning dog walk at Chateau Steelypips so unpleasant.
This reminded me of something I've wondered about the public perception of climate change. There was a good deal of hand-wringing on blogs over some recent polls showing depressingly low numbers of Americans believing in global warming (see this one, for example). This was mostly attributed to the successes of the right-wing…
aardvarchaeology | January 8, 2010I support labour unions. Worker solidarity is the only way to keep wages above the barest subsistence level when you're working for an employer who wishes to maximise profit. I haven't been a union member myself for many years, though. The reason is that there is nothing a union can do for me. On an over-saturated labour market there is no way to organise a large enough percentage of the work-force to get any traction in negotiations with the employers. For each archaeologist who makes demands, there are always ten newly graduated young ones eager to work for peanuts. No union can improve our…
emjohnson | January 8, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
English sociologist Herbert Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest" in 1852.As I pointed out in Deconstructing Social Darwinism, Part I scholars have begun to seriously challenge the usefulness of the term as a political theory. For example, Gregory Claeys calls the political framework of social Darwinism "a misnomer," Paul Crook states that the ground on which it rests is "decidedly shaky," Robert Bannister calls it a "myth," Donald C. Bellomy refers to it as "heavily polemical, reserved for ideas with which a writer disagreed," Thomas C.…
grrlscientist | January 7, 2010tags: politics, terrorism, economics, social psychology, Red Brigades, Italy, TEDTalks, TED Talks, Loretta Napoleoni, streaming video
Loretta Napoleoni details her rare opportunity to talk to the secretive Italian Red Brigades -- an experience that sparked a lifelong interest in terrorism. She gives a behind-the-scenes look at its complex economics, revealing a surprising connection between money laundering and the US Patriot Act.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their…
oracknows | January 7, 2010I've been criticizing the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, for her cowardly attempt to shut up vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit and to intimidate journalists into not writing exposes of the anti-vaccine movement by suing Dr. Offit, Amy Wallace, and WIRED Magazine for Wallace's excellent article in which Dr. Offit was quoted as saying "She lies" about Loe Fisher. Such is her commitment to free speech that she is trying to shut down criticism through legal bullying.
That's why Barbara Loe Fisher's latest screed overloaded yet another of my irony meters and sizzled that…
drorzel | January 7, 2010A number of people have commented on this LA Times op-ed by Steve Giddings about what physicists expect to come out of the Large Hadron Collider. It includes a nice list of possible particle physics discoveries plus a few things that will annoy Peter Woit, and also includes the obligatory note about spin-offs:
All this may seem like impractical and esoteric knowledge. But modern society would be unrecognizable without discoveries in fundamental physics. Radio and TV, X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, PCs, iPhones, the GPS system, the Web and beyond -- much that we take for granted would not exist…
jstemwedel | January 6, 2010Coming up with a good definition is hard. And it's not obvious that people are even really talking about the same thing when they identify an action or a situation as displaying civility or incivility.
So I'm wondering what kind of insight we can get by looking at some particular situations and deciding which side of the line it feels like they belong on.
Before I put the situations on the table, let me be transparent about how I'm making my calls: I'm going to be asking myself whether it feels like the people involved are showing each other respect, and I'm going to make a special effort to…
emjohnson | January 6, 2010To everyone on the political right who is now calling for an invasion of Yemen, take a breath. Reflect on the words of one of the few Presidents in history that actually commanded troops in the field before becoming Commander in Chief:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at…
catdynamics | January 5, 2010helvítis fokking fokk!
this is why you should never go with the 2.0 - always wait for 2.1
so, er, funny thing happened...
the Icelandic President vetoed the law passed by Alþingi right at the end of 2009. The one that acceded to all UK and Dutch demands in the IceSave fiasco.
This is a first.
As you know, faithful reader, Iceland, as usual, lead the world last year,
into catastrophic banking crisis this time.
The grossly corrupt, overleveraged, Icelandic banks did a classic domino collapse, triggered in some sense by the Lehman Bros collapse in the US, through a classic bank run, and capped…
jrosenhouse | January 5, 2010Of course, the focus of that last post was a development in New York City, which is considerably more civilized than most of the country. In rural Mississippi things do not seem quite so cozy. This is from a reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog:
If you travel down any road, you will see churches popping up everywhere. I've lived here my entire life, and it used to be that each community had one church, usually Baptist, with a place name. Now they have names like Bread of Life, The Living Water, and By Faith; single-word names like Cornerstone, Compass, and Centricity.
They pop up in the…
catdynamics | January 5, 2010NASA Administrator Charles Bolden addressed a packed room filled with anxious astronomers at lunch today.
It was interesting, both in what he said and in what was omitted.
I'll get to actual science at the AAS Real Soon Now , so more politics in the meantime.
Bolden's talk was primarily a scripted speech, and he acknowledged as much.
There were no announcements of new initiatives, mission commitments or statements on funding - evidently the White House has not yet settled on a plan for NASA, in particular how to handle "Exploration" - ie human spaceflight.
The preamble anecdote on HST…
emjohnson | January 5, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
Social Darwinism is one of those concepts that everyone knows what it is but few can define. I myself have sometimes reflexively used the concept without fully knowing the history of the term or its use as a political theory. In this series it is my goal to raise some questions about the usefulness of social Darwinism and the way it has been applied. This is a history that is full of contradictions (as history often is) and I encourage people to both challenge and offer suggestions as I develop these ideas.
It is first important to point out that Darwin…
drorzel | January 5, 2010Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean's been taking a beating over his negative comments on an atheist anti-Christmas sign. There's no small irony in this, given that Sean is a vocal atheist. His sentiments, which basically boil down to "it's good to promote atheism, but there's no need to be a dick about it" strike me as perfectly unobjectionable, but as he's learning first-hand, that's not enough for a lot of people on the Internet.
The difference between an unjustly accused "accommodationist" like Sean and a real one like myself is here:
The problem with accommodationism isn't that its adherents…
emjohnson | January 5, 2010 Recruitment poster calling for defense of the "Soviet Motherland." Woman holds a document that translates roughly to "military oath."My grandmother sends me a lot of chain e-mails. Many of them are of the right-wing Evangelical Christian variety that have been resent so many times that I have to scroll down several pages just to get through the history of everyone it's been sent to. I've received a video about how Muslims are out-breeding Europeans and how this will be the death of Christianity. Another celebrated the anti-Muslim Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders who claims "there is…
milhayser | January 4, 2010
Galileo transformed Western knowledge, but the Catholic Church vehemently opposed his "heretical" heliocentric observations. Inspired by author Thomas Dixon, ScienceBloggers debate whether the Church's beef with Galileo was motivated by political power or by the competing principles of science and religion. On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse writes that while the conflict was "played out in the political arena," it was actually ideological in nature since it pitted the Pope's "privileged relationship with God" against science's popular means to knowledge. On The Questionable Authority,…
pharyngula | January 4, 2010Perhaps you thought Texas' malign influence was confined to corrupting science teaching in their own state. It's far, far worse than that.
Until recently, Texas's influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation's largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.
Read the rest and tremble. It's not just evolution, it's…
pharyngula | January 4, 2010I tend to think that most religious people are not interested in flying planes into buildings or making themselves a belt out of dynamite, but that doesn't excuse them: they still make irrational decisions with evil consequences, they are simply a bit more remote and indirect. The same people who would be horrified at the idea of personally lynching someone for blasphemy have no problem with praying that someone else will do the job for them, as we all saw in the reaction to that little cracker incident last year. One of the most revolting examples of this principle at work is the recent…
emjohnson | January 4, 2010 Dolphins, such as this individual caught and used by the US Navy, could be granted personhood rights that protect them from such abuse. Image: United Press InternationalIn Douglas Adams' series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy it turned out that dolphins were super intelligent beings from another world who felt protective of the hairless ape creatures that were dithering about feeling self important:
On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--while…
jstemwedel | January 3, 2010Two weeks from today, at ScienceOnline '10, Dr. Isis, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and I will be leading a session called "Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents". In preparation for this, the three of us had a Skype conference last night, during which it became clear to us that there are many, many interesting issues that we could take on in this session (and that we come to the subject of online civility from three quite different perspectives).
To try to get a feel for what issues other people (besides the three of us) might want to discuss in this session (or on blogs, of whatever),…