Kiva Project: Second Donation

Hello Cromrades,

Once again, we have the opportunity to spend some of our money to make the world a slightly better place. We’ve already made our first loans, and now we have another chance to do it again. So fly, my pretties! Go to Kiva.org, pick out your favourite loan (please keep it to a single loan per person, otherwise it’s way too much for me to comb through). I will make a decision and an announcement next Friday.

For the month of October (the first month this site went live), we made $46.38, and loaned $50.
For the month of November, we made $65.81

Total amount loaned so far: $50
Total loan funds repaid: $0
Fund balance: $62.19

Let’s see your wish list, folks!

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Movie Friday: TACOS!

There is a brilliant moment in an episode of The Simpsons where a group of treasure-seekers are digging in a hole, when one of them realizes that they have no method of getting out. Homer, without a moment’s hesitation, triumphantly announces the solution: “We’ll dig our way out!” The digging then resumes at a feverish pace. One of the characters is heard to mutter “No, no, dig up, stupid!”

“Dig up, stupid” has since become one of my favourite lines to use whenever I see someone double down on an ignorant or otherwise brainless statement. When someone calls you out on something moronic you’ve just said or done, you have to fight the urge to keep digging, and start digging up.

In East Haven, Connecticut, the Department of Justice found evidence of widespread racial profiling and abuse by police:

The allegations first surfaced in early 2009 after the Rev. James Manship, pastor of St. Rose of Lima Church in New Haven, was arrested at My Country Store while videotaping what he called police harassment. The charges were eventually dismissed and The Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School filed a complaint alleging racial profiling with the U.S. Department of Justice.

The justice department launched an investigation in December 2009, which is ongoing. In April the department released a preliminary report criticizing East Haven police for having outdated and inadequate policies and limited training. Police Chief Len Gallo, who had led the 53-member department for 12 years, subsequently was put on administrative leave by Mayor April Capone Almon.

When asked by a reporter what the new mayor, Joseph Maturo, was planning on doing to mend the injured ties with East Haven’s Latino community, the mayor replied (and no, I am not making this up):

I might have tacos when I go home. I’m not quite sure yet. [Read more…]

CFI greases your palm

So who’s looking for a little nudge to get them to attend Imagine No Religion 2? Michael Payton sends this:

Dear Members,
Imagine No Religion 2 is one of the largest and best freethought conventions in North America, bringing together voices from across the world to discuss issues in science and religion for a special three day event.
Speakers include:
– Lawrence Krauss
– Chris DiCarlo
and many others!
CFI Canada is proud to be an active sponsor to this event and to in return we are offering our Members a special discounted rate for a limited time.
CFI Canada members in good standing as of February 1, 2012 can purchase a fullregistration ($280) at a discounted price of $200.00. This gets you full access to all sessions as well as the Banquet and Comedy Show on Saturday Evening.  This is a LIMITED TIME offer for CFI Canada members only so hurry before this offer expires: http://imaginenoreligion2.com/imaginenoreligionkamloops/CFI_Members.html
If you have already signed up for the event CFI will be offering a free renewal of your existing membership as our way of saying thank you for attending the
conference.
Please spread the word and help to make this conference a success!
–Michael Payton
Interim National Executive Director | Centre for Inquiry Canada
2 College Street | Suite 214 | Toronto, Ontario M5G 1K3 | CANADA
Follow CFI Canada on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/cficanada

Silly Michael forgot that I will be there too, but that’s fine. I’m not speaking; just hanging out and being awesome.

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Stupidity, conservatism, and racism: more than meets the eye

So this morning I scrutinized a study by Hodson and Busseri that purports to show that the link between low cognitive ability and prejudice is moderated largely by political ideology; namely, that stupidity makes you conservative, and conservativism makes you racist. They conducted two experiments to test their model, and the results of their study supported the hypothesis. Hooray! More science with which to thrash conservatives, right?

Well, as you may have guessed from the title of this piece, the results of this study may be a bit Decepticon deceptive.

Racist Starscream sez: I'm not Racist, I just think Autobots need to be taught to value work instead of energon stamps

Okay, enough of that. Welllll… maybe just one more:

Racist Starscream sez: I'm not racist, I very clearly said that I hate "Auto-blah"

Starscream 2012!

As much fun as it would be to simply say “case closed, conservatives are racist cuz ur dum”, it would be decidedly un-skeptical. There were a number of things that jumped out at me about this paper, and I’m going to try and detail where I think the authors over-step their conclusions. [Read more…]

Does stupidity make you racist?

If you read the other FTBlogs (and you should), you may have noticed discussion of a study about cognitive ability, conservative ideology and outgroup prejudice. JT talked about it, and so did Jason. Basically, to read the coverage of the study, a team of psychologists from Brock University in Ontario have demonstrated that a lower level of cognitive ability is predictive of negative attitudes toward other races and gay people, but that political conservatism plays a significant role in that pathway. In a nutshell: conservatives are a bunch of hateful dummies, and now we can prove it!

While I would certainly love for that to be the case, I have spent far too much time wading in the muck of junk science about racism to hop so readily on board. I can certainly confess to my own non-trivial amount of outgroup antipathy toward ideological conservatives. Knowing what I know about confirmation bias and the difficulties associated with measuring intelligence (and how those exact same problems have been used to justifiably discredit studies of scientific racism), I suppressed my “nanna nanna boo boo” instinct and actually took my skeptical scalpel to the paper.

A link to the article, which may be behind a paywall for some of you, is provided here. [Read more…]

Are we ‘getting it’?

So this morning I lamented openly about the seeming inability of my fellow Canadians to notice the extremism and hypocritical, bullying nature of our current government. I may have oversold the argument a bit – it may not be that people don’t notice; it may simply be that they don’t care. Whatever the reason for the lack of national outcry over a series of should-be-scandals that are much larger than the one that played a role in unseating the previous government, we do not seem particularly concerned with the incompetence and malice that characterizes much (but certainly not all) of the current regime.

There is another potential explanation: the data may just take time to hit home. I will confess that I probably pay more attention to politics than the ‘average’ person. I find the discussion of competing alternative explanations for the same issue fascinating, and I find the foibles of humanity displayed proudly in the halls of power to be endlessly diverting. I also care passionately about the direction of my country (and the world in general), so I am always hungry for new information about the political system. There are, believe it or not, people who are even more passionate and motivated than I am, and it is to them I go when I need the cracks in my understanding filled in a bit.

So I suppose it is likely that what I might see as apathy or purposeful indifference may simply be an entirely-understandable ‘lag time’ between when I get fired up, and when the rest of the country comes around: [Read more…]

So what kind of week has it been?

Have you ever noticed that sometimes things seem to happen all at once? You know how it is – your boss compliments your work on the same day that you find a pair of jeans that fit perfectly on the same day that the radio plays all your favourite songs? Then a week later, your boss forgets your name, you spill bleach on the jeans, and your radio stabs you in the kidneys with a switchblade*.

You all know what I’m talking about, right?

Some times we have really good weeks, and some times we have terrible weeks. Most of the time it’s a mixed bag, but there’s those occasional periods where the scales seem to be tipped predominantly in one direction. So… what kind of week has it been?

Costly federal appointments office has nothing much to do

In the six years since the Harper government came to power, Canadian taxpayers have spent millions of dollars on supporting a federal appointments commission that doesn’t exist. The money has disappeared into a bureaucracy set up to support the commission — a bureaucracy that seems to have just about everything except a commission to support.

So you know the old trope about conservatives being in favour of ‘small government’ and cutting ‘wasteful’ spending (by which they mean things they are ideologically opposed to)? Yeah… it seems as though the evidence continues to mount that the supposed fiscal restraint associated with the right wing is as illusory as the moral superiority their base keeps talking about. This isn’t the only ghost department that the Harper government has created, mind you:

A federal agency created by the Harper government with great political fanfare in 2008 is costing millions of dollars to achieve pretty much nothing. The Canada Employment Insurance Financing Board has just about everything a budding government agency could want.

So far, it has spent over $3.3 million for new offices, computers and furniture, well-paid executives and staff, travel budgets, expense accounts, board meetings, and lots of pricey consultants. All that’s missing is a reason for it to exist at all. [Read more…]

We Are African Americans for Humanism

I am very pleased to provide my modest signal boost for a new campaign called ‘We Are African Americans for Humanism’ launched by my colleague and (new) friend, Debbie Goddard:

Today I’m proud to announce the new African Americans for Humanism campaign, just in time for Black History Month!

Billboards and transit shelter ads fearing historic and contemporary black humanists are going up—in black neighborhoods!—in New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington DC, and Durham NC. The ads highlight historic black humanists Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as eight contemporary activists and organizers representing local AAH-affiliated groups in each city.

I’m very excited to see how this campaign takes off. There is a chance that I will become a contributor to the project’s blog (I’ve already expressed my interest), so I will keep you updated if that happens. For now, go check out the website and say hello.

Incidentally, it has not escaped my notice that this announcement comes right on the heels of Be Scofield’s completely moronic swipe at “New Atheists” for promoting racist ideology. I am deliriously happy that Frederick Sparks over at Black Skeptics is on the case and does a great job blasting a hole right through Scofield’s central straw-man. The timing of these two events is entirely coincidental, but it’s nice that the ground for this discussion came pre-softened.

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Empowered Health: Week 2

So the Vancouver Sun is still forging ahead with it’s largely useless feature called Empowered Health. The general bent of the pieces seems to be that a healthy diet and an active lifestyle are good ideas (whoops, spoilers!), but as is the pattern with woo-friendly journalism, they sneak in a bunch of counterfactual nonsense in there as well under the guise of “alternative” practices. They are an alternative – an alternative to stuff that might actually work.

Let’s forge ahead, shall we? [Read more…]

#Occupy: Not down, not out

One might think, based on the much-diminished news presence and the absence of physical encampments, that the movement known as Occupy has ended, or at least lost some steam. After all, they’re not really ‘occupying Wall Street’ anymore, and the police have chased away all of the physical presence of the protests here in Canada. We haven’t even heard a decent “mic check” make the news recently.

Of course, we must remember that most of the media attention has been focussed on the ongoing Republican presidential circus, and it takes a decidedly uncharacteristic (un-Occupy-like) debacle to warrant any media attention:

Officials surveyed damage Sunday from a volatile Occupy protest that resulted in hundreds of arrests the day before and left the historic City Hall vandalized after demonstrators broke into the building, smashed display cases, cut electrical wires and burned an American flag.

Police placed the number of arrests at about 400 from Saturday’s daylong protest — the most contentious since authorities dismantled the Occupy Oakland encampment late last year.

For the record, Occupy Oakland is telling a very different story than the police are. Of course they would, but there’s no reason to believe that they are any less biased than the cops, especially given the shockingly bad behaviour that the Oakland Police Department has displayed in the recent past. [Read more…]