As I mentioned in the Wikonspiracy post a few days ago, I recently got into a knock-down drag-out fight on Facebook. I don’t want to expose you to blog drama, but it involved me falling prey to one of my weaknesses — assuming that people who act like they have an ulterior motive for repeatedly asking a question that gets repeatedly answered satisfactorily, actually DO have an ulterior motive. It also involved the repeated assertion that Julian Assange was accused of “sex by surprise”, rather than any actual rape charges, and despite several links stating otherwise, it took one specific link stating that the charges were read out in court to finally get my sparring partner to apparently realize (though not admit, mind you) that line of argumentation to be specious. It also ended with me being called a lying sack of dog shit. In front of a number of people I would like to count as my regular readers.
That notwithstanding, despite the conversation going that way (and not, certainly, in any direction wherein the participants were inclined to dialogue), I can’t help but continue to think that people who claim the charge against Julian Assange was “sex by surprise”, are just trying to pull something. Continue reading “There’s no such thing as “Sex By Surprise”.”→
From an infosec perspective, the US losing over a gig and a half of classified material to a mid-level military goon with a CD-RW labeled “Lady Gaga” is nothing short of a bloody nose. It means several things: the database is unprotected and/or the database was available to people who had no business with it; there are working CD burners (and probably working USB ports, allowing for more easily concealable USB drives, for that matter) on computers with access to this database; and no physical screening is done on the military personnel entering and exiting the building to audit for what data is being transferred over the premises’ borders. It means that military security is nowhere near as invasive as has been recent TSA airport security changes. It means that military informational security, to put it bluntly, fucking sucked. Continue reading “Wikonspiracy”→
Via Jezebel, apparently some heteronormative kids in the majority have taken to wearing t-shirts showing those minority gay kids how proud they are of being in the majority and position of privilege:
One unnamed official’s words explained that the students weren’t punished because the incident was a way to show kids that “while there are two sides to an issue, you can hold onto your side of the issue and advocate it, but you also have to be respectful of people who hold the opposite opinion.”
When the opposite opinion to “I am proud of who I am” is “you should die for who you are”, that’s in gross violation of that “respect” clause, and is therefore less so much a matter of being two sides to the issue as it is a matter of attempting to cow a minority into silence. And yes, THAT Bible quote is in fact present on the “straight pride” t-shirt. Frankly, that doesn’t pass muster to me. I don’t think the mere fact that some Arabian goat herders disliked homosexuality enough to say “put to death people who ‘lay with women as with men'”, is some kind of excuse for your own rampant bigotry — not with over 1600 years since the words were written. These words didn’t come down from on high, they came from some bigoted people in a very nomadic and insular part of the world, and even if your creator deity exists, those words (and probably every word of the Bible) were put into its “mouth”. That means you’re worshiping a decidedly evil parody of your own divine postulate, and choosing hatred over love in direct opposition to the very morality you claim a monopoly on.
Joe Miller, Republican candidate in Alaska, hired a paramilitary unit — actual active-duty military members moonlighting as security detail — to defend him from, of all things, reporters. A reporter was detained by this paramilitary. For asking questions.
This has nothing to do with how our civil liberties “could” disappear. They have disappeared. We did nothing about the Patriot Act except cheer it on. We did nothing about warrantless everything except reelect Bush. We did nothing about TSA security theater except look suspiciously at our seatmates. We did nothing about “Free Speech Zones” except frown at the people at conventions clambering for their voices to be heard. We did nothing about police abuses of power except suggest that anyone who was abused had something to hide or asked for it.
This is the world we’ve bought ourselves. The fact that most of us have yet to pay for it personally is beside the point.
What are these people afraid of, if not the cleansing daylight of public scrutiny?
They need a big, swaggering military because we’re otherwise at the mercy of…those little countries on the other side of the world whose governments have massive contracts with ours. They need to keep immigrants out of the country, because otherwise, their job skills and way of life aren’t attractive enough to compete. They have to deny anthropogenic climate change, because otherwise, they have to find solutions that are beyond their ingenuity and willingness to sacrifice. They need guns, because otherwise, they’re at the mercy of all and sundry who happen along.
They need to keep gays and lesbians shamed and marginalized, because otherwise, what incentive would they have to refrain from all the gay sex they want to have (instead of just some of it). They have to keep power out of women’s hands, because otherwise, what woman would want them? They have to make abortion illegal, because otherwise, what woman would put up with raising their demon spawn without help? In the women’s case, because otherwise, how can they make up for having their own abortions? And oh, how many things must they do because otherwise, they stand no chance of being good enough to be accepted by their gods?
Most of all, for the broad swath of people who vote movement conservative, they need to side with the bullies, because otherwise, the bullies will turn their attention to them. It’s a somewhat effective strategy, and one the movement relies upon for support. It still isn’t good for anyone.
This bully-ism was especially in evidence at a Rand Paul event where a MoveOn.org protester tried to present Paul with a sign to make him look foolish. This tactic has been carried out by MoveOn protesters elsewhere, to other candidates, and the goal is to, as stated, make the politician look foolish. This particular 23-year-old woman, for daring to make Rand Paul look foolish, was manhandled, then curbstomped by a husky Paultard.
And that ain’t all. An Eric Cantor event saw a Democrat intending to ask him questions wrestled to the ground and arrested. After having “RSVP’d” to the event ahead of time.
Why is this happening, with every politician on the Republican side treating questions as dire threats? Why, when someone shows up with a gun at a political rally, is it an infringement of their rights to ask them to leave that gun at home, in violation of their second amendment rights, while simultaneously treating any exercise of the first amendment as an act of terrorism? What are you afraid of, if not being shown to be as foolish as you are, that you have to perpetrate violence on dissenters?
Remember this when your demoralized Democratic base leads to Tea party victories across your country by default, and ushers in this new era of tea-colored brownshirts. Or, you could do what you can right now, and get out the vote, so you have a chance to head this nastiness off at the pass.
I haven’t done any atheist posts recently. I’ve been so wrapped up in the astrology nonsense that I just haven’t had the concentration to split off onto other topics, like my rampant heathenism. This is a sin, in my books, so I aim to rectify that — by pointing to a few other people’s interesting posts.
Greg Laden discusses the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Minnesota Museum of Science, which Jodi and I had the opportunity to see but opted not, given the high price and the low level of interest we had in the actual archaeology behind it. A few jokes were made about the religious folks who would flock to it only to discover that most of the stories in the Bible took a much different form in their original incarnations. None of the jokes were anything to do with the authors being ignorant shepherds.
A while ago I asked on my Facebook page whether anyone had seen the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota. As one might expect, a couple of people, who possibly thought I was joking, noted that the Dead Sea scrolls were part of the bible, and all that stuff was implausible stories handed down by ignorant shepherds over the generations, etc., etc., etc.
My first reaction to that, as an anthropologist, was this: “Hey, Imma let you say that now, but if you diss my Pygmies like that I’ll kick your ass.” In other words, I do find it rather condescending when western occidento-hetero-caucasoido-normative types take it on themselves to make blanket statements that some other group of people of which they know nothing are stupid. I understand the whole being annoyed at the bible thing, but this is where modern-day new atheists can be thoughtless when unpracticed in their philosophy and its application.
I want to point something out that I don’t think many skeptics familiar with this discussion have paid enough attention to: nobody (save some career civil servants in the Bush Administration and Dr. David Nutt in the UK) ever lost their job due to skepticism. Nobody’s been threatened in the US military because they didn’t believe in Bigfoot. There is no wording in US state constitions prohibiting people from holding office if they don’t believe in reflexology. People don’t pound on your door at 8am on a Saturday trying to convert you into believing NASA didn’t really land on the moon. No US president has ever said that people who don’t believe in UFOs aren’t really citizens. Dowsers are not trying to prevent women from consulting with geologists. Chiropractors are not taking over state boards of education to ensure subluxation theory replaces the germ theory of disease in high school biology class. Spoon-benders did not spend tens of millions of dollars trying to deny non-psychokinetic Californians their right to marry.
And occasional commenter and an ex-roommate of mine, Mitchell, sent along a link to a brilliant application by paleontologist Paul Senter of the techniques that creationists use to show that the various “kinds” of life, or “baramins”, are correctly classified, in order to prove that dinosaurs and birds share a common ancestor.
I used a statistical technique called classic multidimensional scaling, which creation scientists use to quantify morphological gaps between species. I wanted to determine whether morphological gaps separated Archaeopteryx – the earliest known bird – from the various non-avian coelurosaurs, the group of predatory dinosaurs ranging from tiny Microraptor to giant T. rex. I showed that within this group there is too much similarity to indicate separate baramins. Contrary to the previous creationist view that these animals were separately created, their own pet technique shows that these animals shared a common ancestor (Journal of Evolutionary Biology, vol 23, p 1732)
The technique could theoretically be used to systematically show a common origin for most, if not all, life, thus forcing creationists to either accept a common origin or abandon their technique of classic multidimensional scaling. It would be a small victory, but an amusing one nonetheless.
So, what interesting news in atheism do you have to share?
On July 27, 2010, Facebook removed the Our Porn, Ourselves Facebook campaign page. After the page was removed, anti-porn organization Porn Harms claimed victory and thanked Facebook for the deletion, on the organization’s Facebook page and their Twitter feed. Our deleted group had roughly 3,500 members, most of whom were women (I combed through the member logs frequently). Our page had over three times the members of Porn Harms’ anti-porn page.
According to Facebook the deletion was in response to reported violations of Facebook’s Terms of Service, among which include obscenity. As I am an active and high-profile figure in the online social media space, I am not a newcomer to social media, or implementing Terms of Service. I also knew that someone was persistently trying to get every piece of art removed from our gallery — regardless of the content, nearly every user-uploaded photo was mysteriously being flagged and removed.
Wanna place bets that Facebook’s censorship (and yes, deleting something as obscene that has absolutely no obscenity is very likely a specious excuse, and therefore outright censorship outside the boundaries of the terms and conditions of use of the site) was done entirely at the behest of the anti-porn folks whose proverbial lunch was being eaten, judging by the member counts of the two groups?
Hat tip to @antiheroine (Skepchick Jen) for tweeting about this — yet another example of someone cheating at the rules of the intertubes to get their way when reality contraindicates their favored positions.
Homosexuality is very likely biological, an emergent property from a confluence of genes that were selected for other reasons. That doesn’t make the people who are homosexual any less fully human, and my heart sings out that a federal judge in San Francisco has struck down California’s infamous Proposition 8 as unconstitutional in that it abridges the rights of those fully human individuals to marry, and to benefit from the same legal protections afforded by the institution as heterosexual couples. Not only did he strike it down, but he wrote several pages explaining all the ways Prop8 is horrid:
Proposition 8 places the force of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians, including: gays and lesbians do not have intimate relationships similar to heterosexual couples; gays and lesbians are not as good as heterosexuals; and gay and lesbian relationships do not deserve the full recognition of society.
Well-known stereotypes about gay men and lesbians include a belief that gays and lesbians are affluent, self-absorbed and incapable of forming long-term intimate relationships. Other stereotypes imagine gay men and lesbians as disease vectors or as child molesters who recruit young children into homosexuality. No evidence supports these stereotypes.
Proposition 8 perpetuates the stereotype that gays and lesbians are incapable of forming long-term loving relationships and that gays and lesbians are not good parents.
Our Lady of Perpetual Win, patron saint of internet awesomeness, has written a post on a topic I bet is near to the heart of most male geeks, discussing inequality in how relationships are defined before both parties actually get to weigh in on their intentions.
This is the phenomenon in which a (generally young) woman dismisses her behavior around a guy as “Oh, that’s just so-and-so. He’s safe.” It always sounds like it’s meant to be a compliment, but there’s very little like it to bring out the bitter in a guy even decades after the fact. It took explaining the concept of “safe” to the wife of one of these friends for me to really figure out why.
[…]
The men aren’t being asked whether they have any sexual interest and whether they’re okay with it being put on hold. They aren’t being asked where the limits of their comfort with the women’s behavior are. They don’t have an option to say, “No,” except by walking away from the situation. These guys might still choose to engage in flirtatious relationships for the fun, but the choice should be theirs every bit as much as it is the women’s. With the unilateral declaration of “safe”-hood, it isn’t.
It’s another one of those sociological minefields where I suspect the problem stems from blowback from feminists’ reasserting of control (not that I dislike that reasserting, on the contrary), but can sound far too much like whinging. Or sexist. Or merely anti-feminist. Or completely made up. It’s far too easy to dismiss that the inequality even exists, but as someone who’s been declared “safe” before even getting the chance to make any sort of effort at showing romantic or sexual interest, I’m sure it does. I mean, I certainly don’t want to be seen as unsafe. But I want a say in whether I get turned into a virtual eunuch right off the bat, right?
I’m glad Stephanie, yet again, “gets it”. Even if I’m not really sure what “it” is, exactly.
People wonder why I try to suck the joy out of life by destroying their deeply held beliefs when they are otherwise harmless. Then I point to stories like this one and those people generally shut up.
Three men, imprisoned in Vietnam since 2002 for gang-raping an 18-year-old girl, were released after an acupuncturist examined them and made some wholly unscientific claims that apparently nobody was around to debunk.
Pham Thi Hong, an acupuncturist at the national traditional medicine hospital, said prison officials had sent one of the men to her for treatment in 2006.
She said examination of a pressure point beneath the convict’s ear showed a small capillary was unbroken, which Vietnamese traditional medicine holds to mean that he was a virgin. Hong then examined the other two men.
“I recognised these three men had never had sex with women,” Hong said.
How a capillary in your ear could be broken via sexual intercourse, but not rubbing one out or even just having a wet dream, I’ll never know. No idea whether this is because of his training as an acupuncturist (which has no scientific validity outside of the endorphin rush that comes of small amounts of pain), or his training as a “traditional medicine” (read: witch) doctor. Either way, the capillary idea is fucking nonsense and three probable gang rapists are free because nobody said so. Whether there were legitimate issues in the original investigation or not, the presence of an unburst blood vessel that nobody has ever even linked properly with virginity is no grounds for reopening it. Present some real goddamn evidence before you question the investigation, is that so hard?
But “what’s the harm” from believing silly pseudoscience?
James Carey, whom I know from university out there in meatspace, asked a few questions that were well off topic on the prayer post, and questions about prayer itself that will be, I hope, adequately answered in the course of the series proper. I decided to post my response as a full blog post of its own because I don’t really want to derail the point of the prayer threads.
James:
I had a bit of an ephinay the other day.
Every once in a while I find two silverfish in my bathtub. Silverfish are very inoffensive little critters so I just usually let them stay for a bit. Finally I go to take a shower and I look at them and think to myself, you guys aren’t going anywhere, you aren’t going to do anything productive. Gave you time to get going, now it’s too late. Turned the water on and sent them down the drain all the while thinking “I bet the apocalypse will be something like this…”
I have read several of your articles and I feel that there is an underlying venom that you try to camouflage with all of your facts, links, and introspectives. I am not particularily religious but even I realize that “prayer” is synonomous with “hope”. You say prayer is usless, it might be, but in my experience thinking good thoughts is never a waste. It goes further beyond trying to appeal to some diety, it is searching for some personal comfort to ease pain, fear, anxiety, etc. When you crap on prayer, you are crapping on hope.
“My father is dying of cancer, rather than praying to ease his suffering, I’ll go shop for hats.”
“My little girl has been kidnapped by a pedophilr, instead of everyone out of reach to offer any help praying for her safe return, you may as well squeeze in an extra game of solitaire”
“My husband is a firefighter, instead of praying for him to come home safely, I cry myself to sleep everynight thinking that tonight will be the night he doesn’t come home”
So I have a few questions for you. Why are you doing all of “This”? And more importantly, what is your moral compass? The Bible, the book of mormon have all been provided to you to tear apart and criticize but have you provided us with any sort of literature of what has helped form your own morals and core beliefs for us to inspect and criticize? If so, send me the link and I will be happy to read it and give it the same consideration you would on my beliefs.
And for anyone who wants to know what my moral compass is:
