How Kloor gets the environmental movement wrong

Keith Kloor has stumbled on an innovative way to combat climate change: he’s sequestering carbon by stuffing as many straw environmentalists as possible into his writing. A piece Kloor published in Slate Wednesday morning purports to analyze an emerging Deep Rift in the environmental movement, that of the competing conceptions of Nature held among different environmentalists, but the piece is riddled with unsupported logical leaps, ahistoricality, and unwarranted lumping of different, often quarreling environmental tendencies into the same rhetorical trope.

And nothing prompts me to write 2,000-word essays faster than unwarranted lumping of different, often quarreling environmental tendencies into the same rhetorical trope.

[Read more…]

Welp, I’m all convinced and stuff now

The ongoing dispute about sexism in the secular community has been settled at last by one incredibly insightful post.

Atheism is a ‘guy thing,’ I would say, like needlepoint is a ‘girl thing.’

We don’t have to consider why the sexes fall (or are pushed) into these particular roles; they just are. And with that simple argument, we’re done. By golly, we ought to make the guy who said it some kind of leader of the atheist movement. We wouldn’t want to have him wasting his time on things like needlepoint, you know.

“Usul, we have wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen.”

I must take a brief break from grading to bring you some snowblower porn.

That strange moan you hear right now is the sound of a thousand Minnesotans moistening the crotches of their jeans. In a moment you’ll hear a faint sigh as they all go out to their garages to gaze disappointedly at the suddenly insignificant machinery stored there.

Well, except for the Minnesotans who are watching the whole ten minutes of this video a second time.

Jeez, Harding, ease up on the equivocating, OK?

Jezebel justifies its existence every now and then, and today is one of those days. The publication is celebrating a first instance of what will likely become a hallowed tradition, and it starts off with a post by Kate Harding wwith the people-pleasing title Fuck You, Men’s Rights Activists. I really hate when my militant friends start to pull their punches. You know?

Excerpt, with emphasis added for local interest:

 

So fuck you, MRAs. Fuck you for showing up every time women speak, especially about rape and abuse, and trying to make it all about you. Fuck you for derailing threads about the victims of Marc Lépine, a man who screamed about his hatred for feminists as he murdered fourteen women and injured many others, because you also hate feminists and want a fucking cookie for not killing anyone. Fuck you for making rape and death threats against young women who dared to protest a speaking engagement by a man who thinks little girls would enjoy being raped by their fathers if it weren’t for society telling them it’s dirty. Fuck you for whining about how unfair it is that women might wonder if you’re a rapist when you approach them out of nowhere, while completely ignoring how unfair it is that women feel the need to be on guard all the time in public. Or that if we relax and behave normally—drinking, dancing, dressing however we want—you will be the first motherfuckers in line to blame us for getting ourselves raped.

Done!

The last student has turned in the last final exam of this semester! I’m done!

Wait, what’s this?

A pile of papers?

I have over a hundred exams and term papers to grade now.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

NOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

<curls into fetal position, sobs pathetically>

Oh, no, I’ve been exposed!

This video is going around twitter among the usual suspects right now. It’s by Reap Paden, and it’s about how I’m not a feminist. Well, it’s also about “hypocrisy…and a dream”, but it never gets around to showing either. And while it’s by a known idiot, it really is just clips of me and Rebecca Watson at Skepticon 3, with titles that say more about Paden than either of us.

Hmmm. You could argue that I’m a bad comedian, but there’s nothing anti-feminist in any of those clips…that is, unless you think that humor and joking about sex are somehow incompatible with feminism.

It gets worse, though, and Paden left it out — I did have that woman come up on stage so I could have sex with her. Of course, it was in a talk about sex and genetics, where I used a deck of cards to illustrate recombination, so it was a little less provocative than you might think — we swapped cards for a bit. Lasciviously.

And the clip with Rebecca is a bit that John the Other didn’t understand, either — it was Rebecca yanking JT’s chain, and the handler she was “abusing” was in on the joke from day one.

It’s revealing when this is the worst dirt he can dig up on us, isn’t it?