Well, he did it: the Digital Cuttlefish found a novel argument against evolution. It has to be seen to be believed — this creationist is claiming that the X-Men disprove the theory of evolution.
Already you should be saying “It’s a comic book and a movie! It’s not real!”, and for a bonus you might point out that the biology of the X-Men franchise is ludicrously awful, and in general, the mass media don’t understand evolution, but let’s give him a chance. Let’s see this argument.
That’s one of the surprising revelations from her new book of essays. It caught me by surprise; I’ve seen her speak and I’ve read her books, and she always seemed like a woman, but her point is that she was born in a time when women were subsidiary to men, and the goal was always to be manly, even in ersatz way. It’s a strange twist on a familiar stereotype, and Le Guin goes out of her way to force me to think, which is clearly a very manly thing to do.
I enjoyed her characterization of that manly paragon, Ernest Hemingway, who was everything a writing man should be. She’s really bad at being Hemingway, and she knows it.
I hadn’t wondered about this question at all — I just assumed feminist was synonymous with feminazi — but that just shows how much I know. I was very helpfully sent a cartoon to help me tell the difference.
Kenny boy takes exception to an op-ed written by biologist David Barash, and takes a moment from lecturing God about how Christianity works to instead lecture biologists on how biology works. It’s a whole cascade of wrong.
They’re so nice. But they still have the same problems with sexual abuse.
Over the past month, a number of disturbing revelations have come to light within the Canadian literary community. I use the term “come to light” deliberately, because many of us were already fully aware of how dangerous it can be to be a woman in this particular culture.
At great risk to herself, Toronto poet Emma Healey penned a thoughtful, candid and scathing condemnation of the sexual and psychological abuse that exists in our own backyard. On the website TheHairpin.com, she detailed a relationship she had at 19 with an unnamed prominent Canadian writer and English professor. He was 34. The alleged ensuing dynamic was inappropriate at best, and entailed sexual assault at worst.
I would like everyone to read this wonderful twist in perspective on American history — I think this kind of thing ought to be taught in public schools. The United States of America is exceptional: in the ferment of the 18th century, we invented both an inspiring political document, our constitution, and we invented white people. Not the people themselves, but the abstract distinction that set up “whiteness” as a mark of a privileged class. It was brilliant: it was a strategy that immediately divided those lower class rabble rousers who were screaming for equality, and set them to fighting among themselves, and half of them fighting for the wealthy upper class.
As time went on, the labor needs of the land holders continued to grow, and desperate to cultivate the land, they were loathe to let go of their bond servants and the bondsmen and bondswomen’s children (whom they kept in bondage for a legally defined time as well). In the mean time, a growing American peasantry was proving as difficult to govern as the European peasantry back home, periodically rising up in riot and rebellion, light skinned and dark skinned together. The political leaders of the Virginia colony struck upon an answer to all these problems, an answer which plagues us to this day.
The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America.
…
This plan worked gorgeously. It broke all efforts of the majority of people, African or European, to fight for civil and political rights in America against a landed class that literally ruled everything. It reduced a portion of the people to the status of the negro slave, and gave the poor but now white people a precious and entitled inch to stand above the permanently enslaved on the social ladder. The next thing the politicians did sealed the deal: they paid poor whites a bounty for runaway slaves, and often made them overseers for slaves, turning every poor white in America into a prison guard against the people who had once been their neighbors and allies.
It’s simple improvement: every vice president should have an octopus on their head. And I don’t just mean in the paintings, I mean at every public appearance.
We should also judge their fitness for office by how healthy they keep their head octopus.
All right, this is ridiculous. Obama has appointed an Ebola Czar. By the most pessimistic speculations, we might have “as many as two dozen” infected people by November — right now, it’s a tiny handful. But we need an “Ebola Czar”. We had almost 2000 cases of malaria in 2011, do we have a “Malaria Czar”? We have at least 3000 deaths per year from flu — where is our “Flu Czar”?
I just learned that the Blogess has “giant squid phobia”.
Several people are aware of my severe giant squid phobia and lovingly (?) sent me this video of a giant squid attacking a Greenpeace submarine, and that’s unsettling enough, but WHY IS THERE ANOTHER SQUID BEHIND IT SPITTING OUT FIRE? Is that a real thing? Because I was scared enough without adding: “Oh, and also they can shoot a blinding inferno out of their butts like a tentacled, aquatic bonfire.” It’s like half giant squid and half underwater maritime flame-thrower, and that’s not natural and is a sign that all giant squid are literally demons from the depths of hell.
Atheists, be ashamed.
I find it ironic that self-described “atheist” men are far more hateful and awful towards me online than conservative Christians are.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 17, 2014
I find it ironic that self-described “atheist” men are far more hateful and awful towards me online than conservative Christians are.
No, I’m not annoyed with Sarkeesian: I’m annoyed that the atheist movement has gotten this bad.
Here’s a lovely representative response:
@noelplum @pzmyers I'm annoyed that anyone is still asserting the atheist labels implies anything other than a lack of belief in gods.
— Miles Grimes (@TheDecentTech) October 17, 2014
I’m annoyed that anyone is still asserting the atheist labels implies anything other than a lack of belief in gods.
Right. ‘The dictionary doesn’t say atheists have to be decent human beings, therefore I’m going to be more annoyed that you have this expectation than at the fact that some atheists are hateful numpties.’
Whatever happened to the rational idea that we should look at our failings honestly and strive to correct them? You know, when Francis Bacon set out to tell the world about how science should be done, he didn’t just pull a sentence out of a dictionary and be done with it. “Inductive reasoning is best, rah rah rah!” No — he wrote at length about the pitfalls, and spelled out the preconceptions to which we are prone.
The idols and false notions which have already preoccupied the human understanding, and are deeply rooted in it, not only to beset man’s minds, that they become difficult of access, but, even when access is obtained, will again meet and trouble us in the instauration of the sciences, unless mankind, when forewarned, guard themselves with all possible care against them.
The idols of the tribe are inherent in human nature, and the very tribe or race of man. For man’s sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things. On the contrary, all the perceptions, both of the senses and the mind, bear reference to man, and not to the universe, and the human mind resembles those uneven mirrors, which impart their own properties to different objects, from which rays are emitted, and distort and disfigure them.
But I guess atheists have moved so far beyond mere scientists that self-awareness and recognition of their own errors of perception no longer matter — “There is no god!” is the great All of their philosophy, and no other consideration need be made.
Well, at least we’re better than the theists in one thing: our dogma is shorter and easier to memorize.