Or, stupid thought for the day, or, your moral reasoning machine is broken.

Another tweet, less interesting than the one I quoted earlier today.

I rarely use it myself but I see a liberal use of the word cunt to be a healthy reaction to those who seek to ban the word.

Of course you do. Bullies always do think that. If your younger sister told you to stop pinching her, you pinched harder, because that’s a healthy reaction to those who seek to ban pinching. If that skinny kid in glasses complained when you punched her in the playground, you kicked her for good measure, because that’s a healthy reaction to those who seek to ban punching. If your mother told you to stop calling her a bitch, you called her a cunt for good measure, because that’s a healthy reaction to those who seek to ban sexist name-calling.

Actually I too think liberal use of the word cunt, in the right context by the right people, is a healthy reaction to people who use it as an epithet to degrade and belittle women or to insult men by comparing them to women’s genitalia. Kate Smurthwaite convinced me of that when I saw her perform in Dublin. But “liberal use” as an epithet by bullies is another matter.

Speaking of the CFI Summit, anybody here going to be there? It’s October 24-27, in Tacoma, Washington, which is about 40 miles south of Seattle, on Puget Sound like Seattle, with a much better view of Mount Rainier than Seattle.

It has the Chihuly Bridge of Glass.

The schedule for the conference.

An aphoristic little tweet got my attention an hour or so ago –

Think like a skeptic, act like a humanist

That might seem like a good recipe, but it isn’t. You can’t act like an X unless you also think like an X. Thinking and acting don’t bifurcate that cleanly – how could they?

No, it’s more difficult than that. Life isn’t easy. You have to combine the two, in thought and action.

I think about this in general a lot, and in particular especially right now because I’m on a panel discussing the two at the CFI Summit weekend after next. [Read more…]

Here we go again. High school football players. Important relatives. Small town. Party, alcohol, rape…and it’s the girl and her family who are punished.

The Kansas City Star details how the small town of Maryville turned against a newly-arrived family after 14-year-old Daisy Coleman reported that an older athlete had sex with her while another older male videotaped, after she was given an alcoholic drink at a party that left her barely able to stand. Her friend, a 13-year-old, was also made to have non-consensual sex.

After a thorough investigation by the local police however, clearly implicating 17-year-old Matthew Barnett in the sexual assault, charges were inexplicably dropped by the prosecuting attorney. Barnett, coincidentally, is the grandson of a prominent former Missouri state representative. [Read more…]

Wow. She’s still at it. Obsessive-compulsive blog-monitoring.

Sara E. Mayhew @saramayhew

The copy/paste bloggers at #ftbullies are now block quoting block quotes. pic.twitter.com/WBvpbo0cIj

The picture is of a quoted passage on my post Hold that pose, now pout from the day before that tweet. I quoted John Holbo and included a bit that he quoted.

Yes, and? So what? Is Mayhew so sub-literate that she’s never encountered internal quoted passages before? It’s normal. It’s not some loopy thing that only I do because I’m one of the #ftbullies, it’s just a normal thing to do.

They go rooting around like Périgord pigs looking for truffles, digging through every post to find something to rage about. I must be very important!!

 

Government waste – bad thing, right? Well here’s some government waste for you.

More than 10 years of planning, $10 million of government funding and  tireless work from the team that discovered life in a lake buried beneath an  Antarctic glacier earlier this year may largely go to waste because of the  government shutdown.

Oh that kind of government waste… [Read more…]

Ken White at Popehat takes a slightly different angle on the SciAm-Ofek-Danielle Lee train wreck. He agrees that it’s sexist but adds that it’s also marketerist.

Many bloggers have written about this as a clear example of how sexism is pervasive in the sciences.  After all, how else can you explain the interpersonal dysfunction of someone demanding free content from a female scientist and then calling her a whore when she refuses?

But I think sexism is, at least, an incomplete explanation. [Read more…]