Archive for the 'Media'

Joan Walsh doesn’t speak for me. I mean, I get her. I get the fear, the desire not to be lumped in with those bad other people who do the bad things. I get the desire to continue to enjoy the privilege of not having to think about my race day to day. I’ve been a straight person in the group of LGBT folks, the man in the group of feminist women, the cis guy talking to transfolk. Hell, I’ve been the only white person at the dinner table more often than I can count. I get that desire to start out each interaction with a pat on the back to assure me that I’m “one of the good ones.” Don’t do me that favor. I’ve been exceedingly fortunate in this life to have met people who have been willing to school me when I get something wrong, when I make assumptions about people’s lives based on my own experience. I’ve been fortunate to have people willing to instruct me out of my ignorance about the world outside my skin, and to do so mostly patiently, but not always. Sometimes that instruction came with justifiable peeve, or even anger. And like Walsh, I’ve occasionally wanted to wave my lefty bonafides in front of my critic of the moment to defuse the topic, to make it more academic and a bit less uncomfortably about me. I’ve protested that just because I’m white doesn’t mean I’m conservative, or rich, or racist — and if I am racist, it’s at least not the kind that prompts me to drag people behind my truck. Like Walsh does somewhat academically in her essay, I have protested that far from being a racist, I am in fact a Nice White Guy. But I’m learning that that criticism, as has been said here before in other contexts, is a gift. That the person taking the time to engage with me is, to appropriate a phrase from this important 2007 essay by the blogger Nanette, giving me the benefit of the doubt. Like I said, I get Walsh’s desire to protest that...
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I was mean to the History Channel yesterday — I mocked them for portraying Satan as a dark-skinned man with a resemblance to Obama. But you know, that wasn’t fair. It’s not as if that show about the Bible is full of coded racist references to appeal to the yahoos of America. Why, look here: they also include European white dudes! Racial diversity for the win! That’s Jesus, by the way. After the Sermon on the Mount, I think he took a break to go surfing off Malibu.

This ought to be on Skepchick’s Bad Chart Thursday. The Daily Mail — hey, why are you already groaning? — put up a graph to prove that global warming forecasts are WRONG. They say: The graph on this page blows apart the ‘scientific basis’ for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. These moves have already added £100 a year to household energy bills. … The estimates – given with 75 per cent and 95 per cent certainty – suggest only a five per cent chance of the real temperature falling outside both bands. But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely. Now here’s the graph. Let’s see if you can detect where they mangled the interpretation. (Note: I haven’t looked to see whether the underlying data is correctly presented. I’m only examining the Mail’s ability to read their own chart.) One error of interpretation is the claim that the ‘predictions’ were plotted in retrospect…as if the scientists had just made up the data. That’s not true — what they did was enter the same kinds of measurements available in the past as we have now, plug them into the computer as inputs, and let it generate predictions. This is an important part of testing the validity of the model — if it gave a poor fit to past data, we’d know not to trust it. That it worked well when giving the past 50 years worth of data is a positive result. The big error of interpretation is to look at that graph and claim it demonstrates a “spectacular miscalculation.” To the contrary, it shows that the predictions so far have been right. As Lance Parkin says, It’s an argument presented entirely in their...
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Sorry for the excessive hyperbole, but I had to counter the sniveling sycophancy in this Fox News puff piece. Atlanta News, Weather, Traffic, and Sports | FOX 5 They’re impressed that it took “only a month” to teach him to paint like that? It shows. He’s going to go down in history as a great artist? Judging by what is shown in that clip, this is a retired guy with a nice hobby. That’s about it. Good for him — at least he’s not ripping the hearts out of virgins and kicking puppies for a hobby like Dick Cheney — but come on, American Pravda, let’s not lay it on quite so thickly.

American Atheists have put up a new set of billboards, with a “go godless” campaign theme. What’s interesting, though, is the media response: Atheists ratchet up rhetoric, use billboards to attack Republican politicians Hang on there…”Go godless instead” is ratcheting up the rhetoric? It seems like a rather mild suggestion to me — presenting an extremist religious position and then offering an alternative is an entirely reasonable approach. As for attacking Republican politicians…has CNN noticed that the religious right has staked itself out in the Republican party? If Democrats were saying things as stupid as the Republicans, I’m sure Dave Silverman would be ripping on them just as aggressively. And if the Republicans were not basing bad policy on religious dogma, there wouldn’t be much concern about them and they wouldn’t be appearing on those billboards.