Archive for November, 2008

I know, I know, I shouldn’t even pay attention to what’s going on at WorldNutDaily, but a listener forwarded this to us and it pisses me off. A New York man is linking the suicide of his 22-year-old son, a military veteran who had bright prospects in college, to the anti-Christian book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins after a college professor challenged the son to read it. “Three people told us he had taken a biology class and was doing well in it, but other students and the professor were really challenging my son, his faith. They didn’t like him as a Republican, as a Christian, and as a conservative who believed in intelligent design,” the grief-stricken father, Keith Kilgore, told WND about his son, Jesse. A few things about this story. First of all, no persuasive case has been made that his son killed himself because he read “The God Delusion.” His dad says he did, sure, but as I once pointed out in a post titled “Anatomy of a propaganda attack,” the fact of these stories tend to be extremely malleable and gradually change as more information is discovered. As far as I can tell, there hasn’t even been a suicide note yet, and there are all kinds of things that could have contributed to the suicide, starting with the volatile dad. Which is my other point — second of all, there are a lot of ways one can “frame” this story, even if the stated motivation is true. NATURALLY the minister dad and the evangelical leaning WND want to make it sound like the horrible atheist book killed the good Christian son by killing his faith. On the other hand, I’ve been an atheist all my life and haven’t killed myself. My son hasn’t killed himself. Why not, instead, say that being raised in a fundamentalist household makes you especially prone to suicide when you are exposed to competing points of view? I’m not trying to dogpile on the dad, who is...
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Word is making the rounds that the reactionary right’s own personal Ilsa and card-carrying Joe McCarthy fangirl— yes yes, I’m talking about Ann Coulter — has somehow broken her jaw, requiring that it be wired shut. Really! I wonder how much her doctors would ask for to leave it that way… Shall we enjoy a little schadenfreude pie along with our pumpkin tomorrow?

I had a whole lot of fun hosting the show yesterday, and I’m glad I get to do it more, but there’s one new thing that’s really dangerous for me. It’s the chat room. Now that we are streaming live and have an associated chat, first of all we’re going out live to an international audience and getting instant feedback as well. This may be very bad indeed. The Non-Prophets chat room has always been something I wished I could pay more attention to, but even during peak times I’ve never noticed more than, say, 50 people in there during a show. Yesterday I’m told that there were more than 200 people at one point, the control room tells me. Since I had my laptop with me on the set, I tried to just occasionally glance in the chat room and measure the mood in there. You may notice from the video that the chat became more and more interesting to me later, and it was hard to tear my eyes away from it. At one point I mentioned what was being said in chat, and the room went nuts. Text started scrolling by at a dizzying pace. I think I got humorously propositioned at least three times during the show, and that was only during the few minutes when I was watching. Then I saw a chatter remark that Jen was looking at me for feedback and I had my head buried in my computer. So I stopped, reluctantly. You see, I freely acknowledge that I have an enormous ego. I love attention. So it’s a lot of fun to get instant reactions as it happens, and this may be to the enormous detriment of the show. So as much as I wish I could, I think I’d better not pay much attention to the chat in future episodes.

Here’s a distant shot of Clare Wuellner of CFI-Austin in The Dress, giving testimony at Wednesday’s SBOE hearings. This comes from Steve Schafersman’s own blog. If you’d prefer a more journalistic, detailed, play-by-play account of the day’s events — you know, who spoke and what they said — and not just my indignant ranting, Steve’s got it. Tons of photos, too. He stayed all day, like a true battle-hardened veteran. I’ll see if Clare can’t send along an even better picture of herself.

I’ve just returned from the Texas SBOE hearings on Science TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) standards, and I’m so full of disgust and dismay that I’m at a loss for words to express it with enough rancor. You can, however, expect me to go on at length anyway. The whole thing was such a goddamn farce from the outset that I’d had more than enough after only one hour, at which point I could only roll my eyes and walk out the door. If you haven’t encountered the gall and dishonesty of creationists on their own turf before, and even if you have many times, it’s always the kind of experience that leaves you feeling worse about humanity in general. As I write this, people are still speaking, and will be for a few hours yet. I saw no point in sticking around, but for all I know there could be, at any time, a real first-rate speaker who could get across the points that needed to be gotten across, and who would call out the creos on the disingenuous rhetoric they repeatedly spewed. As it is, I left the whole charade with two key observations: 1) That the big pitch the creationists are using isn’t merely the weasel phrase “strengths and weaknesses,” but their defense of that phrase as an expression of support for “academic freedom” that the scientific community apparently opposes; and 2) that the pro-science side, at least as I saw it today, is singly unaware of how to respond to that rhetoric properly and forcefully. This cannot be understated: Just as the anti-gay contingent of the Christian right sells its opposition to gay marriage as a “defense” of “traditional” marriage that can in no way be compared to opposition to interracial marriage or anything of that sort, so too are the creationists now abandoning the overt, lawsuit-bait language of “intelligent design” for “academic freedom” language that makes them seem like the ones encouraging...
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