Culture Wars
tfk | December 4, 2010Dave Bruggeman, whose blog on science policy I find generally indispensable, has an odd distaste for the idea of a Republican war on science. Most recently, this emerged in response to a review by the Department of Interior's Inspector General into a report on the post-BPocalypse oil drilling moratorium. The original report was found to have implied inaccurately that scientists reviewing the moratorium itself, rather than that they had simply reviewed specific scientific claims in the report. The IG concluded that this was not an intentional misrepresentation, and that the inaccurate…
tfk | December 1, 2010Eric Cantor, Republican whip and soon-to-be Majority Leader has a horrible idea. He wants to cut government spending (which is not necessarily the best choice right now), and he thinks the place to start is the NSF.
To top it off, he's too lazy to do his own research. So he put up a website where teabaggers can search NSF grants and report the ones that make them feel stupid. Here's the guidance he gave on finding wasteful grants:
In the "Search Award For" field, try some keywords, such as: success, culture, media, games, social norm, lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus, etc. to bring up…
tfk | November 30, 2010Recent news events require a repost of this Classic TfK from March, 2007:
As art or as political statement, I have no beef with the installation shown here. It is an artwork produced by John Sims entitled "The Proper Way to Hang a Confederate Flag."
Neo-Confederates disagree. The Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science refused a request to remove the artwork:
The request was made by Bob Hurst, commander of the Tallahassee camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Mr. Hurst said the exhibit violated a Florida law that makes it illegal to "mutilate, deface, defile or contemptuously abuse" the…
tfk | November 28, 2010Via Ophelia, we get this comment by Christopher Hitchens, addressing the Catholic Church in his debate about religion with Tony Blair:
if I was a member of a church that had preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms, I would be putting some conscience money into Africa too, I must say. Iâm not trying to be funny. If I was trying to be funny, you mistook me. It wonât bring back the millions of people who have died wretched deaths because of that teaching, that still goes on.
What strikes me about this, aside from a deepening of my hatred for debates as means of addressing interesting…
tfk | November 24, 2010Turns out slacktivist and I share a pet peeve:
I want to mention a pet peeve of mine -- a phrase frequently employed by Al Mohler and other proponents of creation-ism. It's a phrase that bothers me as a lover of the Bible and of stories and of words.
That phrase is "the creation account" or "the creation account in Genesis."
The book of Genesis offers no such account. It provides a creation story -- more than one, in fact, the first 11 chapters are nothing but origin stories. But it most decidedly does not provide an account of creation.
An account is testimony, witnesses telling what they…
tfk | November 24, 2010There's been a running discussion among a group of journalists about what to call folks who do not accept the scientific finding that the earth's climate is changing and has already changed because of human activities. "Skeptic," "denier," "denialist," and other contenders are all considered, and generally rejected by the journalists. "Skeptic" is the preferred self-identification, while those who accept the scientific finding tend to prefer calling their opponents "deniers."
I favor "denier." I think they fall into a broad trend of science denial which encompasses creationism and anti-…
tfk | November 15, 2010I travel a lot for work, and to see my family on the East Coast. As such, I keep a fairly close eye on changes in TSA screening, and have always been a bit squicked by the backscatter machines (or porno scanners, as I've seen them called). My issue is mostly discomfort with some random person looking at me naked; it's an invasion of privacy that I don't appreciate. The health arguments against them seem dubious, but then again, the security argument seems little better. No terrorist plot has been detected at the checkpoint. How large a risk of cancer should I tolerate for no obvious…
tfk | November 9, 2010
Nothing should surprise me any more, but the video above (via Juan Cole) is just shocking. In it, Rep. John Shimkus, who wants to run the House Energy and Commerce Committee, explains his reasons for rejecting the existence of climate change. He starts by citing Genesis, in which a post-Flood God promises never again to "destroy all living creatures," then cites Matthew's claim that humanity's end will only come by God's hand, not by our own doing. He then argues, implausibly, that carbon dioxide was persistently around 4000 parts per million during the age of the dinosaurs. It's true…
tfk | November 3, 2010There's been some debate among the climate hawks about last night's election returns. Politico posted a story suggesting that the toll was especially hard on Democrats who supported the landmark climate change legislation passed by the House last summer. Kate Sheppard observed that quite a few of the Democrats who opposed the bill also lost their seats, and Chris Mims (formerly of Scienceblogs, now at Grist) argues that the election wasn't a referendum on climate change, pointing to the significant numbers of bill supporters who survived last night. NRDC finds the same thing.
The tricky…
tfk | October 25, 2010I'm in DC doing meetings and stuff, so regular blogging will return later in the week. Meanwhile, via Ed Yong, a paper On Angry Leaders and Agreeable Followers, which finds:
[T]he two studies we conducted showed that agreeableness moderates the effects of a leaderâs emotional displays. In a scenario study, participants with lower levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to an angry leader, whereas participants with higher levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to a neutral leader. In an experiment involving four-person teams, teams composed of participants with lower…
tfk | October 18, 2010Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, considers the confrontationalist/accommodationalist disagreement:
Hereâs the difference between the two sides: You know that courtroom phrase, âtell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truthâ?
Both Mooney and PZ want to tell the truth about science and evolution.
Only PZ is willing to tell the whole truth â that the logical conclusion of accepting science fully is that you must dismiss any notion of gods, miracles, and the supernatural.
Mooney thinks itâs bad PR for us to admit that â and he may be right â but itâs wrong to let Christians keep…
tfk | October 14, 2010Attention conservation notice: 3200 words attempting to correct what may be a fatally flawed analogy between New Atheism and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s approach to the civil rights movement.
In replying to Jason's post the other day, I skipped over some important issues that were peripheral to my main point. But I want to double back on a comment he made that I've seen New/Affirmative/Extreme/gnu atheists toss out rather too often. The claim is that they are, in some sense, analogous to Martin Luther King, Jr. Jason, being sophisticated and smart, and knowing that using analogies on the…
tfk | October 14, 2010Shorter former Census Bureau director and current Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman (author of a book with this blog post's title) â The Futility of Polling:
Numbers are stupid.
Slightly longer:
It's better to predict the outcome of elections based on conversations with some guy on the street, rather than through statistically validated models parameterized with stratified random samples.
Actual concluding line:
Relying on polls is like an intelligence agency resting its judgment on data intercepts rather than "Humint", the human intelligence gathered by old fashioned spies. We don'…
tfk | October 13, 2010Jason Rosenhouse has a long post up claiming I missed the point in my post a few days ago about the lessons communication science can teach us about the accommodationism spat. The two things I came away from his post thinking were: 1) wow, did he miss my point! and 2) we're talking about very different things.
First, to the question of whether I "missed the point," the question posed by Jerry Coyne was not about how to promote atheism. The question I was answering was about whether emphasizing spirituality could help more people accept evolution. At least, that's what I take Coyne's "come…
tfk | October 12, 2010Disco. Inst head honcho Bruce Chapman is confused. "What is more powerful," he wonders, "altruism or the survival instinct?" The question, he explains, is raised because of Watergate felon Chuck Colson's ramblings about the trapped Chilean miners. Colson, in turn is confused and amazed by Chilean health minister Jaime Manalich's report that miners "were fighting with [authorities] yesterday because everyone wanted to be at the end of the line, not the beginning." Colson continues:
A news man from the scene choked up while reporting it. You know who else should be surprised: Darwinians.…
tfk | October 11, 2010Last weekend, Chris Mooney and Genie Scott squared off against PZ Myers and Vic Stenger at the Council for Secular Humanism's 30th anniversary bash. The question was something to do with whether accommodationism is teh awsum or teh lamez0rs. You know my opinion, and from what I saw of the discussion, I don't think anyone emerged the undisputed victor, and thus the internet will never run out of flamewars.
Anyway, in reading the L.A. Times report on the event, Jerry Coyne wonders:
How can Mooney, The Great Communicator, think that if atheist accommodationists and atheist non-accommodationists…
tfk | October 6, 2010Via This Is Not Helpful, a review of creationist movie Dragons or Dinosaurs: Creation or Evolution. The reviewer is concerned that teachers presenting the view that dragons are really dinosaurs might get fired from public schools, "loosing 4-8 years of collage."
My greatest fear is that this blog cataloging unhelpful Netflix reviews will turn out to be a work of sockpuppetry and be withdrawn from the intertubes in disgrace.
Whether those reviews would still be unhelpful if that transpired is left as an exercise for the reader.
tfk | October 5, 2010The opening of Sam Harris's End of Faith, like several essays he wrote at HuffPo, focus on suicide bombing. He argues that suicide bombing is absurd, and only exists because of religion. A footnote to EoF acknowledges that suicide bombing was first deployed on a large scale by the Tamil Tigers, who were not fighting a religious war, but rather were part of an ethnic and nationalistic conflict. He waves this objection away at HuffPo by writing: "it is misleading to describe the Tamil Tigers as 'secular' ⦠While the motivations of the Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who…
tfk | October 5, 2010When Sam Harris first broached the topic of his latest book in a YouTube video, Sean Carroll made a thoughtful criticism of the talk, and Harris replied via Twitter: "Please know that I will be responding to this stupidity." He did reply, though never successfully addressing the arguments offered against his position. He's studiously ignored the most salient criticisms of his thesis since then (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here, and here), perhaps hoping no one would notice the giant hole in the middle of his argument.
Now that his book's come out, it turns out he didn't address those…
tfk | October 4, 2010Senator Jim DeMint clearly hates America for its freedoms. As a local paper reports:
DeMint said if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn't be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who's sleeping with her boyfriend â she shouldn't be in the classroom.
â(When I said those things,) no one came to my defense,â he said. âBut everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn't back down. They don't want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion.â
Perhaps no one came to his defense because he's dead wrong.