Empower Health: Week 1

So last week I noticed, with more than a little consternation, that the Vancouver Sun has begun publishing a feature it calls Empower Health:

Better health is not a destination. Your health is a journey of small steps, things you can do to improve your mental and physical well-being.

Empowered Health is a new locally produced television program that shows you the path to better health with weekly tips on eating better, improving your fitness and navigating the minefield of the health care system and the dozens of complementary and alternative therapies and practices.

Those of you who don’t know much about Vancouver aside from the excellent work that the Vancouver Skeptics do here may be unaware that it is a city full of woo-woo nonsense. One can’t walk a city block without stumbling over a reflexologist or a chiropractor or some other snake-oil peddler trying to separate fools from their money. Because Vancouver has a large population of young, well-educated and upwardly mobile people, it has succumbed to the stereotypical west-coast syndrome of buying wholesale into “alternative” practices. Add to that a large immigrant population bringing practices from their countries of origin and a well-developed sense of fascination with anything “exotic”, and you have a perfect recipe for this kind of hucksterism.

Now, ordinarily the only thing I read the Sun for is local news and Canucks coverage, but I figured I wouldn’t be doing my duty as a local skeptic if I didn’t take a swing at the glass jaw they’re dangling out there. So I will try, every week, to digest the claims made in these articles. [Read more…]

Kiva Project update

I received this e-mail last night:

This is an update on your loan to Gulshan Mammadova in Azerbaijan.

Thanks to you and 95 other Kiva Lenders, the $2,550.00 loan request in Azerbaijan has been 100% funded.

This loan will be used for the purpose of: to purchase cleaning solutions

Over the 20 months of this loan, Kiva’s Field Partner in Azerbaijan, Komak Credit Union, will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Thanks for lending to the world’s working poor on Kiva!

Start dreaming up plans for the next project, Cromrades! I will have information about how much revenue your hits have generated coming in the next couple of weeks.

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Welcome a new friend

It brings me great pleasure (and no small amount of personal satisfaction) to welcome Natalie Reed to the FTBorg collective:

My name is Natalie Reed, and I’m newly arrived here to Freethought Blogs. Before this move, I was a writer for the Skepchick network, and managing editor for sister siteQueereka. I’m young and grossly unqualified, but people seem to enjoy what I do. “What I do” generally being posts on trans and queer issues, gender, sexuality and so on from a skeptical, secular perspective.

I’m probably just going to go right on doing more or less the same sort of thing here at FTB, though the fact that I now have my own little niche, and will be posting on a more regular basis, will allow me to quickly start branching out into other areas as well. I’d love to start discussing LGBTQ issues in a more general sense, and also start covering other areas of particular interest to me, such as addiction and mental health issues, Canadian stuff (helping out my lovely colleagues Crommunist and the Lousy Canuck), feminism in general, some of my “hobbies” like linguistics, literature and neuroscience, and also some of my own takes on atheism, skepticism, humanism and related subjects. Maybe even some “traditional” skeptic topics like alt-med, God, conspiracy theories and cryptids, too!

Natalie is a fellow Vancouverite (I can already hear the mid-western USA contingent quaking with fear and anger as the left coast crew makes its presence known), and a personal friend of mine so I’m thrilled to have her as a colleague here. Warning: she is very good at what she does. Second warning: if you desert me for her I will be very sad.

Anyway, it’s a good day for FTB, a good day for Natalie, and a good day for all of you. Go say hello AND THEN COME RIGHT BACK BECAUSE I WILL MISS YOU WHILE YOU’RE GONE *pant, pant*. Wow… went a lil’ nuts there.

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Economists and Ethics

It’s something of an inevitability that when the various heinous acts of corporations are brought to light, the Economists march out in lock-step to explain to the dissenters A) how emotional and irrational the dissenters are acting and B) sure, isn’t this the best possible thing that could be happening for ‘those people’?

This line of thinking was most recently articulated by Paul Krugman in The Slate. I want to focus on the two main points of this article: 1) the lie being presented that this is the best possible choice we could make given “the alternative”, and 2) the objection to this is being made on purely emotional grounds (i.e. there are no rational grounds to this objection) [Read more…]

Standing on the shoulders of assholes

First of all, I need to apologize for the visual that is now in your head (or will be shortly) of an asshole with shoulders. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of colliding metaphors. Here’s something to cleanse your mental palate:

Many of us (myself included) have had the decidedly unpleasant experience of expressing the unpopular opinion in the room and getting just piled on by dissenters. You think that there may be a position that deserves exploration, that isn’t being discussed or considered. There’s a gaping hole in the logic of the room, and you’re apparently the only person who sees it. This group-think, by circumventing your clear counter-example, is leading people to draw erroneous and potentially harmful conclusions about the topic at hand. It’s up to you to show the room the error of their ways, so you carefully craft a bulletproof refutation of the central tenets of the argument, or provide an insightful counterexample that is sure to immediately change everyone’s minds. Then you sit back and let the accolades for your erudite and clear thinking roll in. [Read more…]

Getting by with a little help from my friends

One of the coolest thing about being at FTB is getting to know many of my co-bloggers as people. Before moving here, I knew of pretty much everyone here, but through our extremely silly back-channel e-mail threads, I am getting to know what everyone’s like as a person (for example, behind his tough-as-nails exterior, JT is actually much tougher than nails #jtmeme). I don’t usually consult with my fellow FTBorg on issues of content, but I felt like I was leading with my chin a bit with Monday afternoon’s post and I wanted to make sure I hadn’t ignored anything important.

Well, wouldn’t you know, several of them not only liked the post, but posted about it themselves. If you don’t read all of FTBlogs (and you really should, because they’re all quite excellent), you may have missed some of these:

  • Mano Singham offers another anecdote and his perspective on identifying and dealing with racism
  • Richard Carrier talks about his own experiences with accommodation for the fear in others
  • Stephanie Zvan summarizes her reactions (and the reactions of a couple of others) to my piece and explains why diversity is of value
  • Greg Laden shares a post he had previously written on a similar topic
  • Daniel Fincke does his usual meticulous job exploring the topic (and, as an aside, I so wish I had thought of the phrase “Schroedinger’s Racist”)
  • PZ sends his horde (school? do squid travel in schools? is it ‘squid’ or ‘squids’?) my way
  • Hank Fox bigs me up (and by the way, if you haven’t read his post Thank you Mr. Darwin. Again. you need to. It’s an eye-opener. I have it bookmarked)

This is in addition to a bunch of back-channel encouragement through e-mail from other co-bloggers. Words are insufficient to express how privileged (in the good way) I feel to be part of the FTBorg, especially when I am made to feel welcome with such an overwhelming show of support.

I should also point out that the folks over at The Good Men Project have cross-posted Monday’s piece. The comments are… not encouraging, to say the least. But hey, people are reading it. Sort of. Parts of it.

And my final thanks go out to the legion of commenters, particularly those who have been around for a while, who have been policing the threads. I was not expecting that kind of flood, and was not equipped to deal with it. Y’all stepped up big time to help smooth out the wrinkles for me, which I appreciate. I’ve left a present for you below the fold.

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Shuffling feet: a follow-up

Okay, first of all: wow. I have written more than 700 posts on this blog, and I have never seen a response like I had on Monday afternoon. At the time of writing, my post about my objection to anti-black racism being used to deflect the “Shroedinger’s Rapist” argument has elicited 330 comments, and received nearly 20,000 hits. I’ve been quickly outed from my quiet little obscure hideaway at the middle-bottom of the FTB frontpage, and have been placed in front of many fresh pairs of eyes.

So, hi.

Second of all: there is apparently a need for some clarification. I was trying to make two separate points in that piece, and there seem to be a number of people who simply did not pick up on them. The first point is that connecting Shroedinger’s Rapist to anti-black racism fails to address the central question of whether or not we want women to feel more comfortable in freethinking circles; if we do, then we need to make some changes. Men being aware of how their (our) seemingly-benign behaviour may be seen as threatening is one specific change we can make.

The second point is that linking the argument to anti-black racism ignores many of the experiences of black folks who are constantly making similar adjustments to make white folks feel more comfortable. Failing to recognize this fact only highlights the ignorance of the speaker, and it is not particularly pleasant to have my story used in the service of an argument I despise by a person who will never experience it.

There were a number of other comments and misconceptions that I will attempt to clear up in this post. [Read more…]

#SOPA/#PIPA blackout post no. 4

In solidarity with the sites (including FTB) that are down for the day, I will not be providing original content today. I encourage you to poke around the archives. There’s nearly 2 years of quality posts to rummage through. Instead of writing myself, I have compiled a few interesting articles that I think you should read. Regular posting will resume tomorrow.

Racism ‘happens’: Inexplicable events haunt GOP primary

Trigger warning for Santorum

It’s the darnedest thing. Republicans have zero tolerance for anything racist. They’ll tell you so at the drop of a hat. It’s liberals and Democrats who are the real racists. Just ask Herman Cain, he’ll set you straight. After all, if a pizza CEO isn’t an expert on racism, then who is?

And yet, in recent weeks, all manner of seemingly racist things keeping popping up all around the GOP presidential primary campaign, which can only be explained in terms of mysterious and malevolent forces, out of movies such as The Exorcist, or Men in Black, or more recent low-rent fare, like the SyFy channel’s Ghost Hunters “reality show”.

First there was the matter of Ron Paul’s racist, homophobic and otherwise bigoted newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s. Of course he never read them. (“I never read that stuff. I was probably aware of it ten years after it was written,” he told Gloria Borger on CNN the week before Christmas.)

Read the rest of the article, leave your comments here.

Like this article? Call your senator, call your congressperson, tell them that you oppose SOPA and PIPA, and that ze should too. Not American? Neither am I.