Jessica Williams vs. Gordon Klingenschmitt

The man is totally outclassed.

The most telling exchange is when Klingenschmitt tries to justify oppressing transgender people because all of them are sexual predators.

That is perversion. it’s people who label themselves as transgender for the purpose of getting that access to violate the rights of others.

“Is it fair to say that because you’re a priest that you’re a pedophile?”

Well, of course not.

“Why, ‘Of course not’? Why?”

Because some people are criminals and some people are not criminals.

“Could you take that logic and apply that to the transgender community?”

They’re apples and oranges.

“By apples and oranges do you mean apples and apples?”

David Klinghoffer whines about an imaginary foul

fakeinjury

Uh-oh. I’ve disappointed David Klinghoffer. I should probably put that on my CV.

You see, the other day he praised a fellow named Tom Gilson for a post in which he provided a succinct summary of Intelligent Design creationism, and I took that summary apart, point by point. You might think, perhaps Klinghoffer finds fault with my analysis? He doesn’t provide any rebuttals. Did I get something wrong in using Gilson’s definition of ID? Nope, he doesn’t say…that would be hard to do anyway, since Klinghoffer praised it as exactly accurate!, exclamation point and all. Even in his title he declares that Tom Gilson Nails It.

So what’s his complaint? That I corrected the wrong person.

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A new hope?

rogueone

There’s going to be a new Star Wars movie in December. Really new, not like that recycled plot line we saw in the last movie.

It’s a Star Wars story that has escaped much of the baggage of the characters and plots of the George Lucas movies? Yes please. Also, the smaller scope (“steal some plans!” rather than “save the galaxy!”) is welcome, as is a character with more personality than “hero”.

I also look forward to the angry tears of the fanboys who discover that it’s another movie that puts a woman protagonist front and center. Don’t you all know that a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, gender roles were identical to the traditional expectations of 1950 America?

It’s Paul Nelson Day, again

wafflehouse

Solemn greetings, all. Today, as the more reverent among you know, is Paul Nelson Day. Today is the 12th annual feast day of St Nelson, patron saint of obtusity and procrastination, and we honor his contributions to science by…well, by not doing much of anything at all. You could make grandiose claims today and promise to make good on them tomorrow, a tomorrow that stretches out into a decade or more, I suppose, but that’s too much work. Instead, maybe we should all just shrug and say we’ll think about celebrating later.

Oh, jeez, shrugging? I don’t have time for that. How about if we don’t and just say we did.

I also thought about suggesting waffles as the perfect food for this day, but nah, I’d have to cook them, or go to a restaurant. I’m just going to say “waffles!” and put it off to some other day.

Anyway, if you don’t know the story, Paul Nelson is a creationist who attended the Society for Developmental Biology meetings in 2004, with a poster in which he claimed to have developed this new evo-devoish parameter, Ontogenetic Depth, that supposedly measured the difficulty of developmental complexity to evolve. I quizzed him on it, and specifically asked him to explain how I could measure it in my zebrafish, for example, and he couldn’t tell me, even though he seemed to be saying that he and a student had been doing these ‘measurements’. But he promised to send me a paper he was working on that explained it all. Tomorrow! A tomorrow that never came.

So now we remind him of his failure every year. It’s a good thing to point out to Intelligent Design creationists that they don’t seem to be very good at fulfilling their grand promises.

He seems to sometimes notice that he’s being mocked, at least. Last year, he tried to trot out Ontogenetic Depth 2.0, which was just as impractical and ill-conceived as the first non-existent version. Maybe he’ll have a new beta for us this year, too?

Unlikely. Too much work. Not in the spirit of the day.

Allahu akbar!

bangladeshprotests

Another atheist has been murdered in Bangladesh, for atheism.

Nazimuddin Samad, a 26-year-old atheist who had taken part in protests against Islamist leaders, was attacked late on Wednesday near his university in Dhaka by unknown assailants carrying machetes.

“They hacked his head with a machete. As he fell down, one of them shot him in the head with a pistol from close range. He died on the spot,” deputy commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police Syed Nurul Islam told AFP.

They shouted “Allahu akbar” as they butchered a human being — a human being they presumably believe was created by Allah, whose body is an astonishing work of God, whose mind is the most wonderful thing in the universe. It’s a strange form of praise and worship, I think. Do they also stroll into museums and enjoy the artwork by destroying it?

Oh, yeah…I guess some of them do.

Maybe it’s not so much that they are obsessed with their gods, as they are besotted with the thrill of wanton destruction and sanctimonious self-validation.

Projection! Projection everywhere!

projection

Isn’t it weird? There are all these clueless people telling people like me what we’re thinking, and getting it so wrong. Just this morning, Ken Ham announced…


Secularists are fearful of @ArkEncounter cause they don’t want people hearing the Christian worldview they’re vehemntly intolerant of

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Brain done

Today, I…

  • Spent half a class hour working step by step through a cunningly clever linkage problem that most of my students didn’t get…

  • Spent the rest of the hour trying to explain imprinting, slowly and carefully, with diagrams, and left everyone looking like they’d been pole-axed…

  • Tried to race through Beadle-Tatum, Hershey-Chase, Watson-Crick, and Meselson-Stahl (at an introductory level) in the next class.

My head hurts. Need a nap. A civilized country would put naptime in our schedules.

Oh, yeah, Stephen Hsu responded to me, too, and man, ignorance makes my brain hurt even more. I’ll reply to that later.

I’d say “after my nap,” but I have committee meetings to attend instead.

Woo kills

goop

Gwyneth Paltrow always makes for a hilarious story: is there any New Age nonsense she won’t swallow?

For someone of even the slightest scientific inclination, Goop [Paltrow’s web site] is a veritable cornucopia of What-The-Fuck? There’s “spirit truffles”, which contain “spirit dust” which apparently “feeds harmony and extrasensory perception through pineal gland de-calcification and activation”. In fairness to Goop, those are definitely all real words. They’ve got us there.

There’s the “morning smoothie” which lists as an ingredient Cordyceps, the parasitic fungus which genuinely turns insects into zombies by infecting their brains. Gwyneth Paltrow is literally telling her fans to consume brain-controlling fungus!

At least things have an actual psychical presence. The less said about the products that work by being infused with positive vibes and good intentions, the better. Same goes for vaginal steaming.

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