Culture Wars
tfk | June 6, 2011John Pieret is a snark genius, and you should read his latest, especially checking his links.
And check out his recent WTF moment, not to mention his non-snarky, but moving and thoughtful essay on respect.
tfk | June 5, 2011Tom Rees reports on a smart new study which tests the effect of religiosity on attitudes toward torture in the US. Using two different large surveys, the researchers first simply examined the correlation between religiosity and support for permitting torture. Realizing that conservative political ideology can also induce greater support for torture and can itself be driven by religiosity, they then compared the direct impact of religion on torture support with the indirect effect as mediated through political ideology.
What they found is that religiosity (measured in one case simply by how…
tfk | May 27, 2011
In the video above, you can see my creation/evolution hero of the last school year. Zack Kopplin is a Louisiana high school senior (heading to Rice University next fall) who decided to fight the misnamed Louisiana Science Education Act. That bill, passed in 2008, opens the door to creationist materials in science classrooms. It is the only one of these so-called academic freedom laws that has passed a state legislature, though dozens have been proposed.
It passed the Louisiana Senate unanimously a couple years ago, but Zack found a Senator to sponsor his repeal bill, he got 43 Nobel…
tfk | May 23, 2011Reviewing Elaine Howard Ecklund's Science vs. Religion for the Washington Post last May, I noted:
Rice University sociologist Elaine Ecklund offers a fresh perspective on this debate in "Science vs. Religion." Rather than offering another polemic, she builds on a detailed survey of almost 1,700 scientists at elite American research universities -- the most comprehensive such study to date. These surveys and 275 lengthy follow-up interviews reveal that scientists often practice a closeted faith....
Fully half of these top scientists are religious. Only five of the 275 interviewees actively…
tfk | May 18, 2011Caroline Crocker taught creationism in some DC-area colleges, and the colleges didn't renew her contract, so she was put on wingnut welfare with a gig at the ID creationist IDEA center. There, she tells us, she helped create "safe houses" and fake identities so students could secretly come "out of the closet."
tfk | May 17, 2011Remember when Ben Stein, promoting his schlockumentary in Canada, dismissed the ADL's concerns about his mistreatment of the Holocaust by saying "it's none of their fucking business"? Classy, right?
Anyway, having been booted from the pages of the New York Times for violating the paper's ethics policy, Stein is now shilling in decidedly down-market conservative rags. Today, he takes to The American Spectator to defend accused rapist and IMF Managing Director. It is a paragon of the art of bad-faith arguments. The highlights of his 8-point defense:
1.) If he is such a womanizer and violent…
tfk | May 17, 2011Tomorrow (Wednesday), Bay Area Skeptics will be hosting the excellent Rebecca Watson for a Skeptics in the Pub Quiz. Watson is a founder of Skepchick, a host of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, and a force for skepticism and sensibility in a world that is too frequently senseless. As a member of the Bay Area Skeptics board, I'm pretty jazzed about this event.
You can play alone or, to improve your chance of winning awesome prizes, you can form a team of 5 or fewer. All questions will relate to science and skepticism, so there's no need to memorize obscure baseball stats prior to playing…
tfk | May 16, 2011Scientists Take Darwin on the Road | Miller-McCune:
"I want to send our scientists to rural schools and communities around the U.S. to talk about evolution for Darwin Day 2011." Jory Weintraub's words hung undigested in the silent air of the management meeting at our North Carolina center last July.
"You want to send our scientists where?" I jested. "On purpose?"
So begins Craig McClain's account of the Darwin Road Show, a project he and his colleagues at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center undertook last February. McClain, who also blogs at Deep Sea News, describes the enthusiasm the…
tfk | May 12, 2011In Ophelia Benson's writeup of the Ron Lindsay/Chris Mooney discussion, there's a passage about the Templeton Foundation that jumps out as deeply problematic:
Then they talked about the Templeton Foundation, and Mooney's "fellowship," and the fact that it was controversial. Would you accept a fellowship from the Discovery Institute? Lindsay asked. No. Liberty University? Probably not. But they interfere with science, and Templeton doesn't. Templeton, he said, "are generating a dialogue about the relationship between science and religion." He thinks that's a good thing.
I don't.
On its own,…
tfk | May 12, 2011PZ Myers responds to a podcast debate between Chris Mooney and Ron Lindsay about accommodationism and New Atheism. I haven't listened to the podcast, so I don't know who won or who lost, or what brilliant points were or weren't made. I do know that the title of PZ's post reflects the general New Atheist triumphalism about the podcast, and yet his post doesn't match the title.
The title is: "We aren't angry, we're effective, which is even scarier."
From that title, I'd expect some sort of clear statement of what effect PZ wishes to have, and then clear evidence showing that the strategy is…
tfk | May 11, 2011I can't say I've ever understood the adulation Noam Chomsky gets in some lefty circles. His arguments are generally fairly banal, drifting into a caricature of liberalism.. I don't doubt that at some point in his life he may have been an incisive political commentator, but I've never seen it.
This applies in spades to Chomsky's reaction to Osama bin Ladenâs death. Terming the operation which killed the mass murderer and seized a trove of information about al Qaeda's operational plans "a planned assassinationâ¦violating elementary norms of international law," and decrying that there was "no…
tfk | May 5, 2011Christopher Lane has a fascinating history of agnosticism in the New Humanist, an ode to doubt. :
Then [in the Victorian era] as now, doubt requires strength - it is not an easy or straightforward position to maintain.
The impact of such doubt grew on both sides of the Atlantic, with subscription rates for freethinking journals rising substantially and a growing number of articles appearing on the topic. ... The idea that doubt was a sin and a moral failing, still widely held in the 1850s, gave way to a new and different emphasis: doubt was instead an intellectual obligation, even an ethical…
tfk | May 5, 2011Greg Laden suggests A multiplicity of strategies is better than infighting when addressing creationism and related problems. That seems reasonable, and I'm intrigued by his diagnosis for the conflict over accommodationism and New Atheism:
I have always thought, naively and probably incorrectly, that what defined Accommodationist is what they think, not how they argue. At the same time, I have always thought that what defined a "New Atheist" is how we argued, and not what we think.
This strikes me as potentially right, and that the distinction between what one thinks and what one argues is a…
tfk | May 3, 2011Cosma Shalizi, 11/4/2007: "The object of torture is torture":
The point of this torture is not to extract information; there are better ways to do that, which we have long used. The point of this torture is not to extract confessions; there are no show trials of terrorists or auto-de-fes in the offing. The point of this torture is to exercise unlimited, unaccountable power over other human beings; to negate the very point of our country, to our profound and lasting national shame.
This, it must be emphasized, is all that torture has ever been good for. Torture did not lead us to Osama bin…
tfk | May 2, 2011It's a running joke that any time some horrible person is in the news, Discovery Institute fellow David Klinghoffer is sure to pen a piece trying to link that person to the nefarious ways of evolution-defenders. He's written such pieces about Hitler, the Columbine killers, the Holocaust museum shooter, and many other modern monsters.
Today's headlines are dominated by talk of Osama bin Laden, so we get, on the DI twitter feed:
David Klinghoffer explains the connection between Osama bin Laden and "junk" DNA
And indeed, the post over at the Disco. 'Tute complaints department is titled "The…
tfk | April 26, 2011The hijab and niqab worn by some Muslim women have hit the news lately, especially after France's ban on the veil worn by some Muslim women (niqab) went into effect, and after death threats against a British imam who held that wearing hijab (a scarf covering the hair) was a woman's choice (he also held that evolution and Islam need not be at odds). Some sort of headcovering for women is a common feature of Middle Eastern cultures (orthodox Jewish women cover their hair, too, and the men wear a hat or yarmulke at all times), which doesn't make it automatically good or bad, but it does make it…
tfk | April 25, 2011Chad Orzel says Support the National Center for Science Education:
I try not to do any shilling for political groups on the blog, but I'll make an exception for the National Center for Science Education. Why? Three reasons:
1) They do good and important, if not always glamorous work, supporting the teaching of evolution in public schools, both in the classroom and in the courts.
2) Josh Rosenau has a really good blog, one of the best on science-and-politics issues, and his day job is with NCSE.
3) Jerry Coyne is a jackass, whose latest bit of jackassery involves sending an open letter to NCSE…
tfk | April 25, 2011'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
Ophelia Benson thinks I've misunderstood New Atheism when I say:
New Atheism is hardly the only way for atheists - or nontheists more generally - to get the word out that they're here and want to be taken seriously.
She insists…
tfk | April 21, 2011Chris Mooney reports on Psych Evidence that Supports New Atheism, writing:
In general, I believe what we know about human psychology runs contrary to the New Atheist approach and strategy. However, I do my best to follow the data, and here's a study that suggest at least one aspect of their approach may work. The tactic finding support here is not necessarily being confrontational-that would tend to prompt negative emotional reactions, and thus defensiveness and inflexibility towards New Atheist arguments-but rather, making it more widely known that you're actually there-as "out" atheists try…
tfk | April 21, 2011A few days ago I was over at Jerry Coyne's blog and got into some conversations that regular readers here might be interested in. In the course of one of his regularly scheduled whinefests about how people are too mean to gnu atheists, Coyne wrote:
we're not McCarthyites with a secret "list". Here are some professed atheists who have been unusually (and I'd add unreasonably) critical of Gnu Atheists: Julian Baggini, Jacques Berlinerblau, Andrew Brown, R. Joseph Hoffmann, Jean Kazez, Chris Mooney, Massimo Pigliucci, Josh Rosenau, Michael Ruse, and Jeremy Stangroom.
There were two things that…