Jun 18 2013

A child can see through it

Categories:

Ethics

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Seth Kurtenbach is on CFI’s Course of Reason, an On-Campus blog. He wrote an essay using very simple words, and he wrote it as A Fifth Grader’s Response to the CFI Board’s Statement. It’s a wee bit elliptical, but read carefully…it’s actually rather seditious.

Sometimes the person being mean or bad is really smart, and will pretend that what he is doing is no big deal. He will say, “hey, let’s be respectful about our disagreement.” This can make the mad person look like the unreasonable one. This will make the mad person even more mad, because they are not the ones being disrespectful, it is the bad or mean person! It is a mean trick that bad smart people play sometimes. You should be careful about this if you ever disagree with someone about something. If you are the bad or mean person, you should try to not be so bad and mean, and you should also apologize for being bad and mean.

Sometimes it is really hard for a person to admit that he was disrespectful. The best thing to do is to do the right thing and apologize for being disrespectful. The worst thing to do is to pretend you weren’t disrespectful, or to ignore the other person’s feelings. This will never make things better. You should keep this in mind if you ever accidentally disrespect someone and make them mad.

I get the impression some of CFI’s people are a little bit displeased.

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32 comments

Jun 18 2013

Darn UK show-offs

Categories:

Atheism, Equality

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The Girl Guides, which is the original name for the Girl Scouts, have just made an amendment to their policies to be inclusive to non-believers.

Girlguiding UK has announced a new version of its Promise – ‘the core expression of values and the common standard that brings everyone in guiding together’ – which is inclusive for the first time of those who don’t believe in any god. The British Humanist Association, which responded to Girlguiding consultation and met with Girlguiding in the course of their work to reformulate the Promise, has welcomed it.

The new formulation will have Guides promise to ‘be true to myself and develop my beliefs’, in place of the previous formulation to ‘love God’. It is the twelfth amendment to the Promise in guiding history, but the first version to open guiding up fully to non-religious girls.

It’s not clear in the article whether this change will translate to the American Girl Scouts, although they stopped discriminating against atheist girls 20 years ago — but I think they still have to promise to “serve God”. I know the Boy Scouts had to be dragged with great drama and breast-beating into allowing gay kids to enroll, and still reject atheist boys.

But good work, Girl Guides. Now we just need to fix America.

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13 comments

Jun 18 2013

Say goodbye

Categories:

Environment, Organisms

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Oops, too late. The Western Black Rhino has been officially declared extinct.

In case you were wondering how that happened…

deadrhino

In happier times:

western-black-rhino-with-calf

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26 comments

Jun 18 2013

Failing upwards

Categories:

Entertainment

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Great. They’re going to make a Prometheus 2.

I’m going to be doing this Prometheus MSTKing thing at CONvergence, you know — I had no idea it would have the potential to turn into a perennial gig.

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45 comments

Jun 18 2013

“Not for all tastes”

Categories:

Books

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Uh-oh, another review of The Happy Atheist, this time from Booklist.

Myers’ exploration of his atheism is brilliantly designed and executed to entertain and enlighten, but also to be shocking; for some, it will surely be hurtful. He uses words almost as weapons, calling religion “a kind of parasite of the mind,” calling God “a lazy invisible man in the sky.” But he’s not just doing this to be insulting; Myers has a plan. He wants us to be appalled, to be angered—to be so steamed that we’re compelled to try to refute his arguments, which are, it must be said, usually cogent and well presented. (Heaven, he says, no matter which way you look at it, would strip us of our humanity.) Readers of the author’s popular blog Pharyngula, from which many of this book’s chapters are drawn, know him to be outspoken and a bit on the antagonistic side, but even they might be surprised at the linguistic and thematic extremes he goes to here. This is a very entertaining and thought-provoking book, but it’s definitely not for all tastes.

What do you mean, “not for all tastes”? Does that imply I’m not going to get the seal of approval from Oprah and Chopra? I was writing for everyone! There go the sales, plummetting into the dumpster.

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41 comments

Jun 18 2013

Do the creationist shuffle and twist!

Categories:

Creationism, Genetics, Science

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Don’t you hate it when you get up in the morning and the first thing you read on the internet is the news that your entire career has been a waste of time, your whole field of study has collapsed, and you’re going to have to rethink your entire future? Happens to me all the time. But then, I read the creationist news, so I’ve become desensitized to the whole idea of intellectual catastrophes.

Today’s fresh demolition of the whole of evolutionary theory comes via Christian News, which reports on a paper in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution which challenges the ape to human evolutionary theory. Wait, that’s a journal I read regularly. What did I miss?

Read the rest of this entry »

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38 comments

Jun 18 2013

Sarah who?

Categories:

Irrelevance

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Good plan.

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26 comments

Jun 18 2013

Amazon did what?!??

Categories:

Crime, Personal

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Greg Laden alerted me to a surprising message that I then found in my spam mail: Amazon has unilaterally terminated their contract with associates in Minnesota. They have a program called Amazon Associates which bloggers could take advantage of: we registered with Amazon, they gave us a little personal code to imbed in links to books, and in return for promoting Amazon with our linkage we got a little gift certificate every month, a small percentage of the profit. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was a handy revenue trickle. For instance, I cashed out a couple of months worth of certificates from them and the money is being used to buy all the widgets (many of them through Amazon!) for the laboratory fish facility we’re building here.

So when you click through a book link here and it took you to Amazon, and you bought something, you were actually contributing a few pennies to undergraduate research at the University of Minnesota Morris.

But no more. Here’s the letter I got.

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account will be closed and your Amazon Services LLC Associates Program Operating Agreement will be terminated effective June 30, 2013. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional Minnesota state tax collection legislation passed by the state legislature and signed by Governor Dayton on May 23, 2013, with an effective date of July 1, 2013. As a result, we will no longer pay any advertising fees for customers referred to an Amazon Site after June 30 nor will we accept new applications for the Associates Program from Minnesota residents.

Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to July 1, 2013, will be processed and paid in full in accordance with your regular advertising fee schedule. Based on your account closure date of June 30, 2013, any final payments will be paid by August 30, 2013.

While we oppose this unconstitutional state legislation, we strongly support the federal Marketplace Fairness Act now pending before Congress. Congressional legislation is the only way to create a simplified, constitutional framework to resolve interstate sales tax issues and it would allow us to re-open our Associates program to Minnesota residents.

We thank you for being part of the Amazon Associates Program, and look forward to re-opening our program when Congress passes the Marketplace Fairness Act.

Sincerely,

The Amazon Associates Team

So…all the Amazon links scattered throughout my site will still be contributing to Amazon’s revenue stream, but I no longer get any reward for them. That’s fai…wait, no, that’s totally unfair. Is this the kind of treatment we can all expect when the New World Order of Amazon achieves complete domination of the planet? That’s worrisome.

Hey, legal people: if I were instead to have my daughter, who lives out of state, set up Amazon Associate status, and then replace the code in my links to redirect income to her, would that be reasonable? I have no interest in evading state taxes and would happily pay those, but I would be interested in evading Amazon’s punitive behavior.

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85 comments

Jun 18 2013

CFI response roundup

Categories:

Atheism

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Despite all my purported attempts at mind control and cunning psychological manipulation, we don’t get all that much unanimity here on freethoughtblogs. Sure, we occasionally get some outrage on the far right wing or the Catholic Church or the wacky patriarchal Religious Right that get a bunch of us fired up, but rarely do we get so many similar posts expressing outrage at one of our own.

But then, a sense of betrayal will do that.

Here’s a collection of FtB posts made in the last day about that astonishingly brief and empty statement from CFI. I have no idea what they were thinking; it was absolutely the worst PR effort since the BP oil spill. Ron Lindsay playing Tony Hayward would have been a better response.

Here’s what the locals had to say:

Be sure to read Dana’s post — she’s an under-appreciated warrior around here.

Center for Inquiry has really blown it, and I’m getting so much email and seeing so many comments from people who are abandoning the organization. It’s terribly sad. Please don’t forget that the staff at CFI are a fine and dilligent and dedicated and aspirational group of people who have always impressed me, and that this is a failure at the top — they could still rebound from this when Lindsay retires (as long as bad leadership doesn’t perpetuate itself, that is).

In the meantime, there are plenty of other organizations that haven’t gone full metal asshat on us. Throw your support in these directions, as your temperament suits you:

Also, a matter of significant importance: build your own local groups. It’s fine to have national organizations that provide leadership, but what really counts is your community. Build one. You don’t have to bow in obedience to any pope of skepticism, you know, and we biologists know that building networks from the bottom up rather than top down always produces more complex and rewarding results.

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35 comments

Jun 18 2013

Well, I do like oranges…

Categories:

Environment

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See, if bees go extinct, we’ll be fine. We don’t need that many choices anyway.

WHOLE FOODS MARKET PRODUCE DEPARTMENT

Why when they tell me I could lose all hope of ever eating one again, do I suddenly have a craving for apples?

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27 comments

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