stupidity
pharyngula | May 17, 2010In 2002, 15 young girls burned to death in a school fire because firemen were not allowed by their religion to enter and rescue females who might not be covered head-to-toe in concealing clothing. In fact, religious police had actively hindered the escape of the girls, with reports that they were hitting them and pushing them back into the building, because they were trying to run out without putting their head coverings on first.
Now, in 2010, the religious ministry has given orders to the religious police to allow even male rescue workers to enter girls' schools in an emergency.
Wow. So it…
sastyk | April 16, 2010Hat tip to Rod Dreher for pointing out what he deems the most depressing toy ever - yes, your little one can have his or her own cubicle! Has your two year old been falling down on the hard, tedious job of being a child - here's a way of ensuring that she's ready for a life of dismal monotony!
Now you can make home more like the office, enhance the number of hours of screen time (children between 2 and 5 years old only get a measly 32.5 hours of screen time per day on average, gotta get those numbers up!) and bring Dilbert to life for your child.
It is every parent's dream!
Sharon
stoat | March 31, 2010Some while ago - probably about 15 years ago - there was a good Steve Bell carton showing the US airforce dropping "ozone friendly" bombs on the ragheads (or the gooks, or the commies, or whoever the enemy was then). It was quite funny, unlike Obama, who isn't.
pharyngula | March 24, 2010Wow, I thought Cardinal George Pell was thick…but his second-in-command, Bishop Porteous, sounds like he could be even crazier. They're hiring an exorcist for Australia, and he's full of ominous warnings about evil things.
The appointment of a new exorcist by Sydney's Catholic Church precedes a warning by a senior clergyman that generation Y risks a dangerous fascination with the occult fuelled by the Twilight and Harry Potter series.
Julian Porteous, the auxiliary bishop of Sydney, warns that pursuing such ''alternative'' relaxation techniques as yoga, reiki massages and tai chi may…
tlambert | March 15, 2010The Australian has been conducting an uncompromising and unrelenting war on science, scientists and the scientific method, but if anyone criticises them for it, they react like scalded cats. So you could predict that they would whine when John Quiggin, in his column in the Australian Financial Review, wrote:
The Australian newspaper has campaigned against science and scientists so consistently that picking a single example would be misleading. Blogger Tim Lambert, who maintains a running series on The Australian's War on Science is now up to installment 46.
And sure enough their editorial…
pharyngula | March 4, 2010This is old news. The NY Times has an article on the expanding agenda of creationists to include denial of lots of other phenomena that make them uncomfortable. We've known this for years! It isn't just creationism; those beliefs have a surprisingly high correlation with denial of climate change, denial of HIV's role in AIDS, anti-vax nonsense, rejection of the Big Bang, dualism, etc., etc., etc. At the root of these problems is discomfort with modernity and change, resentment of authority, anti-intellectualism, and of course, goddamned religion, which is little more than a rationalization…
pharyngula | February 25, 2010The South Dakota senate has been wrestling over an important resolution, HCR 1009. Here's the original text. It will look rather familiar to anyone who has seen creationist bills roll through a legislature.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to global warming include the following:
(1) That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;
(2) That there are a variety of…
pharyngula | February 25, 2010Good grief. This ridiculous study is making the rounds of the atheist community, with its claim that liberals and atheists are smarter than conservatives and religious people. Look at the numbers!
Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as "very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.
Seriously? Show me the error bars on those measurements. Show me the reliability of IQ as a measure of actual, you know, intelligence. Show me that a 6 point IQ difference matters at all in…
pharyngula | February 25, 2010A lot of people don't like Lyndon Rush, the Christian zealot who also happens to be a bobsledder in the Olympics. I think he's wonderful. It's so helpful to have someone like him openly demonstrating that Christians are morons.*
You know there's no atheist in a foxhole, right? There's no atheist at the top of a bobsled run, either.
But there are atheists in the military. I don't know about any specific godless organizations dedicated to the plight of unbelievers in bobsleds — bobsledding is a rather trivial issue to focus on, anyway — but there probably are some. They're just smart enough to…
pharyngula | February 25, 2010The Canadian government is planning to help a fundamentalist Christian group, Youth for Christ, to proselytize. They've offered to contribute several million dollars to the construction of a youth center in downtown Winnipeg, which sounds like a wonderful, useful idea…except for the fact that the group building it has this as their mission:
To impact every young person in Canada with the person, work and teachings of Jesus Christ and discipling them into the Church.
They also openly admit to their plans:
Sharing the person of Christ with every young person within our target group in Canada (…
pharyngula | February 8, 2010Sarah Palin gave a $100K speech to a convention of teabagging wankers, she faced a few pre-screened, prepared questions, and what did she need? She had to have the answers written on her hand ahead of time!
Here's what gets me the most, though. She didn't have a cheat sheet of wonky little details, stuff that would be hard to keep straight and important to get exactly right. No, she had to write down the three most important goals for a conservative majority. What, she's shaky on that?
EnergyBudget cutsTaxLift AmericansSpirits
Man, next time I go off to give a talk, I'm going to get a…
stoat | January 4, 2010"Part I" is very presumptuous. I might never write part II. Ah well, I press onwards in hope.
I'm going to take my text from Climategate: the corruption of Wikipedia and see what we can learn about wiki's workings from the way people misunderstand it. I should warn you that blog is mostly recycled Solomon.
Before I go on (well actually I wrote this *after* I went on, but I came back up here, that is one of the marvels of modern tech) I'll point out that the LS/JD article is riddled with amateur errors that a moments time from someone competent at wiki could have fixed. This is genuine modern…
pharyngula | December 23, 2009Last night, Larry King Live (without Larry King, who was off getting his internal organs stuffed into canopic jars or something) was all about life after death, and guess who they brought on? Deepak Chopra, new age nutcase; Dinesh D'Souza, dithering moron; and Sanjay Gupta, their usual token MD, who was completely ineffectual and didn't say one word to criticize the pair of loons sharing the screen with him. They did bring out Michael Shermer in the middle of the show to say a few words, but again, he was too busy being nice to actually hammer on the Chopra/D'Souza BS.
They have a poll. I'd…
pharyngula | December 22, 2009Salon has a peculiarly defensive article by a Christian confessing to being embarrassed about her beliefs, which seems like a good start to me. She should be embarrassed. As a fun exercise, though, try reading her article while categorizing its statements in the Kübler-Ross stages — there's a bit of denial in there, some bargaining, and a faint hint of depression, but mainly what she's got is anger. She lashes out at atheists a fair bit, but it's in a revealing way.
Writers like Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Victor J. Stenger -- and, of course, performers like…
pharyngula | December 15, 2009I am often chided by morons.
Consistent
Dear Mr. Myers,
To be wrong is always acceptable, because we are human. But, to be consistently wrong, especially when you call yourself a Professor, is going way beyond the bounds of good sense. Anyone who even gives ear to people such as Dawkins and Kitchens is no less than a fool. There is nothing wrong with being a fool, but teaching others to be one is unacceptable and irresponsible, at the very least. Furthermore, to have a degree or degrees in biology and to still believe in Darwinian theory, shows ignorance in the worst degree. Macro…
ddobbs | November 4, 2009
Just heard of a neat article about why feeling stupid on a regular basis is actually a good sign if you're doing serious scientific research. The article is by a fellow named Martin Schwartz, a professor of microbiology and biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, and it was published in April of 2008 in The Journal of Cell Science. Here's an excerpt:
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it…
pharyngula | October 19, 2009I happen to be male. I found myself unable to read the following story without feeling an urge to double over and cup my crotch, which was really awkward when sitting in a public coffee shop. So stop here if you are prone to sympathetic pains.
A man in British Columbia decided that he and his four year old son needed to be circumcised.
Already, half my readership has decided to flee to less cringe-inducing websites. That's OK, just leave quietly, and close the door behind you.
All right, so he decides they both need to be circumcised. He tries it on himself first, and it's a botch — only…
pharyngula | September 26, 2009It's a fine story, taken from the press conference I gave on Thursday, except for two things.
The comments are a mix of the sane and the deranged. Fargo has some interesting people living up there—a lot of smart, sensible, rational people, and some some very noisy lunatics. It's strange how the lunatics rarely show up for any of my talks, however, but they always have the most vivid opinions of them.
The other problem is the end. The writer just had to do the usual thing of looking for a dissenting voice and giving them the unquestioned last word.
The Rev. Jeff Sandgren, pastor at Olivet…
pharyngula | September 1, 2009Which makes this video very, very smathy.
That's Carl Baugh, by the way, who appears regularly on the Trinity Broadcast Network to teach viewers about creationism. It's a good program to watch (I do, now and then) if you want to see how flinking bugnuts insane young earth creationists can be.
This particular episode has all the standard tropes. They bring on a guest gomer, and they go on and on about his credentials — this one is a 'prominent mathematician' who teaches at a high school and part time at a trade school. They puff him up good; creationists really want the Voice of Authority,…
tlambert | August 20, 2009
Because Tim Blair gets political commentry about Australia from Taiwan, it comes as no surprise that he gets his commentry on the States from England, from one Gerald Warner who reckons that Obama's attempts to create a "Union of Soviet States of America" will fail and that he will be a one-term president. I think it is more likely that Warner has his fingers on a gin and tonic than on the pulse of the American people, but this claim intrigued me:
The one glimmer of realism [Obama] displayed was when he recently told an audience in Montana that, with regard to health care, he was "not in…