Wingnuts
emjohnson | July 6, 2010At ScienceBlogs we value our independence. Just consider the recent posts over the laughable PepsiCo nutrition blog to see how seriously people take this. But one thing that would never happen is for anything we write to be edited without our consent.
As I wrote yesterday, I am disappointed in the Huffington Post's decision to grant a public stage to David Klinghoffer, Senior Fellow at the intelligent design "think tank" known as the Discovery Institute. DI is a self-avowed propaganda vehicle seeking to "wedge" religion into public schools. Once HuffPo handed him the megaphone…
emjohnson | July 6, 2010My response to David Klinghoffer's piece in the Huffington Post has just been published:
Creationists are fond of laying the blame for Nazi eugenics on Charles Darwin. They insist that his materialist argument that humans evolved from animals and his conception of natural selection inspired the Nazis to implement a widespread policy of artificial selection within the Fatherland. However, these claims are as baseless as was the so-called "science" that the Nazis employed.
The latest example of this ignorance disguised as revelation was recently published on The Huffington Post by a Senior…
emjohnson | July 6, 2010Image: via PZ Myers
PZ Myers has a new post condemning Discovery Institute ideologue David Klinghoffer's recent post connecting Darwin to the eugenic policies of Hitler. He trots out some of the same points that have been refuted time and again.
Darwin elaborated a picture of how the world works, how creatures war with each other for survival thus selecting out the fittest specimens and advancing the species. In this portrait of animal life, man is no exception. Any animal that strives to preserve the weak, as man does, is committing racial suicide. "Thus the weak members of civilized…
grrlscientist | April 27, 2010tags: The Truth About HSUS, pets, animals, animal rights, wingnuts, cults, Wayne Pacelle, Humane Society of the United States, HSUS, streaming video
The real agenda of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is to remove money from your wallet and put it into their CEOs' retirement funds, to ignore animal shelters, and to forever destroy your ability to live with animals.
grrlscientist | April 21, 2010tags: The Truth About HSUS, pets, animals, animal rights, wingnuts, cults, Wayne Pacelle, Humane Society of the United States, HSUS, streaming video
The real agenda of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is to remove money from your wallet and put it into their CEOs' retirement funds, to ignore animal shelters, and to forever destroy your ability to live with animals.
emjohnson | March 24, 2010Ann Coulter is a vicious and mean-spirited demagogue and I'm ashamed that I share more DNA with her than chimpanzees or bonobos. She represents the worst kind of reactionary partisanship and should be condemned by all quarters in the spirit of basic decency. That being said, however, I don't believe a government should have any role in prohibiting her speech, regardless of how offensive it is. And it's pretty offensive. Just after the Sept. 11 attacks Coulter wrote, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." This got her fired from the column…
grrlscientist | February 28, 2010tags: comedy, humor, funny, fucking hilarious, self parody, wingnuts, hate group, religion, cults, institutionalized mind-control, Westboro Baptist Church, streaming video
If this video doesn't scare you, then this piece of information might: this video is by the Westboro Baptist Church hate group of Topeka, Kansas. After you see the title of their homepage, I think you'll start wondering about these people and whether their "God is Love." This group of religious wingnuts and haters also enjoys protesting at pop concerts, Kansas City Chiefs football games, the funerals of soldiers and of…
emjohnson | February 21, 2010
The creationists have done it again, first it was bananas and now it's peanut butter. It seems they do all of their heavy thinking while shopping for groceries. Ray Comfort saw mutant bananas forged through artificial selection as evidence of God's presence (little did he know that wild bananas are inedible to humans). Now creationists seem impressed that pasteurization works. If this is the sort of thing that can persuade people, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that so many in the United States aren't able to understand the science of climate change.
emjohnson | January 29, 2010 Goldberg shown here (right) "gangbanging" with a guy who enjoys making fun of the dead.I must have done something very, very wrong. Jonah Goldberg, that noxious, infected man-tit of a human being, has just praised my work at the National Review. Referring to my series on Deconstructing Social Darwinism Goldberg writes:
This is a very comprehensive assault on the prevailing understanding of "social Darwinism." Eric Michael Johnson's essay is a bit too rambling at times, but it is very welcome and good reading nonetheless.
Readers of my book might remember that I have nothing but…
emjohnson | January 24, 2010Image: Idiot Box / Matt Bors
And now, of course, Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network can interpret geological events as well. On January 13, just a day after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the reigning televangelist explained why God hates Haitians:
And, you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French." True story.…
grrlscientist | January 24, 2010tags: Mormonism, religion, cults, mind control, social phenomenon, moron, offbeat, beliefs, cartoon, education, streaming video
Just in case you think I think that christians comprise the only wingnut cult in the world, think again. Thanks to the aggressive policing policy of the mormon cult, it's not so easy to find videos that describe what they are about, but I finally managed to get to one video before the mormon thought police did, so you should watch this before it disappears (as its predecessors have);
If that cult doesn't read like badly written science fiction fanfic by pimply-faced…
grrlscientist | January 1, 2010tags: Right Wing Calls For More Profiling Of Muslims, terrorism, politics, public policy, religion, crackpots, streaming video
After you watch this video, you too, will fear for the future of America. It's simply amazing what passes for logic among the right-wing religious crackpots. In fact, the evidence suggests that religion -- any religion -- causes brain damage. Don't believe me? Watch this video!
"Nobody still hasn't [sic] refuted the fact that 100% of Islamic terrorists are Muslim."
emjohnson | December 14, 2009Image: Jesus! vs. Darwin! by The Searcher
It's a tired old routine, yet time and again the same argument is taken off the shelf, dusted, buffed and then presented with a sly smile as if it were something new. Evolution, it's asserted, is only progressive and builds on earlier adaptations in its march forward through natural history. Therefore, if there is any evidence that a species adapted "backwards" it must mean that natural selection is flawed. However, the fallacy in this argument is that natural selection has nothing to do with progress, it's merely one of the mechanisms by which…
emjohnson | December 8, 2009
(updated below)
Media Matters is reporting that on December 4th Fox News manipulated the evidence from a poll to suggest that 94% of the US population thinks that scientists falsified evidence to support their beliefs about climate change. As can be seen, however, their numbers added up to 120%.
What happened? Well, here's the Rasmussen poll Fox & Friends cited. They asked respondents: "In order to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, how likely is it that some scientists have falsified research data?" According to the poll, 35 percent thought it very likely,…
emjohnson | November 21, 2009Now that his plan has backfired drastically (his own website has removed the link to his "Introduction" of Darwin's book) and more people were offended by his distortions than anything else, let me briefly point out some useful information. Comfort makes the following assertions in his introduction:
Adolf Hitler took Darwin's evolutionary philosophy to its logical conclusions [and] the legacy of Darwin's theory can be seen in the rise of eugenics, euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion.
As the National Center for Science Education has pointed out:
This is simply hyperbole on Comfort's part.…
emjohnson | November 18, 2009PZ has information that Ray Comfort and his merry band of misfits have changed their plans and are passing out their Origin of Species propaganda today. You should go and get a copy right away. They're most likely located at the busiest part of your college campus between 11 and 1pm (or whenever it's busiest).
Go and get your copy and send me a photograph with it and I will post it here. But hurry, supplies are limited.
E-mail me at primatediaries [at] gmail [dot] com or post the photo on your blog or twitpic and put the link in the comments below.
emjohnson | November 7, 2009His birthday is actually on Monday, but today marks the first annual event initiated by Broward College in Florida. In honor of the event, here is Carl Sagan's final interview prior to his death. Amazing isn't it that the science vs. religion debate hasn't changed much after 15 years. But it must be the atheists that are to blame!
You may be interested in my earlier post discussing Carl Sagan's principled stance on nuclear winter that I wrote to accompany Seed magazine's interview with biologist Paul Ehrlich.
Think big thoughts today and take Sagan's message of skepticism and humble awe…
emjohnson | November 3, 2009By now everyone has heard of the high school English honors teacher, Dan DeLong, who was suspended for offering students the Seed magazine article "The Gay Animal Kingdom" by Jonah Lehrer as an optional extra credit assignment.
According to the Alton, IL based Telegraph newspaper, DeLong has now been reinstated at Southwestern High School after several hundred students and parents attended a six-hour long disciplinary hearing:
At Monday night's meeting, more than 200 people lined the stairs, sidewalk and office space at the district's small unit office at 884 Piasa Road in the Macoupin…