There’s always Austin.
Check out the nice and lucid op-ed against Intelligent Design creationism published down there: it points out that ID is on a fool’s errand that will always allow it to be defeated in a scientific argument.
ID will be trapped in a morass of implausible and unscientific rationalizations, trying to explain why a designer did this or that, whereas evolution does not ascribe purpose to the process called “natural selection.” As Gould emphasized in his final public appearance here (in February 2002), it is unscientific and self-centered to think that our species—perhaps 160,000 years old, after 3.8 billion years of mostly microscopic unicellular life—represents the goal of evolution.
From the article:
” why not call it “MD” (“Miraculous Design”) instead of using the misleading and blatantly anthropomorphic word “intelligent”?”
And since “creation” is implicit in their use of “design,” just go all the way and call it what it really is (or at least what its proponents wish): “Miraculous Creation Theory.”
Texas isn’t that bad – home prices are good and I have the opportunity to try (again) to vote Tom DeLay out of office. That has to be worth something.
There are a few of us here, PZ, come on down some time and we’ll show you a good time! I’ll even take you over to my neighbor’s house and you can see the huge dinosaur footprint in the middle of his fireplace from some tracks by the river on his property. Pretty cool.
Austin’s frankly not all it’s cracked up to be. As I remarked to a friend in Lubbock who asked me what I thought of my first trip to Austin: “Same shit. Different hole.”
FU, Sean.
Austin’s frankly not all it’s cracked up to be. As I remarked to a friend in Lubbock who asked me what I thought of my first trip to Austin: “Same shit. Different hole.”
Sean, I suspect your inability to distinguish between Austin and Lubbock has something to do with your personal charm.
PZ, I’m sure we could show you a fine time here in Austin; I’ll bet you could tell the difference. And if you’d ever like to give a talk to the Atheist Community of Austin, or go on our cable access TV show, or just drop by our happy hour, please let us know; I’d guess we could arrange dinner or something with James Dee, the op ed writer, too.
(But then, I’m guessing you’ve already got friends & fans here we’d be competing with; it is that kind of town.)
PZ
Just to be fair to Sean, if you you make it down to Texas, make sure to drop through Lubbock on your way to Austin just so you have a nice point for comparison. Go check out Prarie Dog Town for a lesson in good ole Lubbock entertainment and don’t forget to take note of the hundreds of churches while you are there. If you go in the spring, maybe you’ll get lucky and see a red martian dust storm blot out the sky for a few days. It is truly god’s country…provided god is a sadistic asshole.
How irksome. I signed up on the old site and now have to start all over again!
Anyway, it’s apparent you have a following of more than just my husband and me here in Austin. We moved here from the coasts (yes, I lived a bicoastal life for a long while) and there’s a lot going for it.
It’s not like the rest of TX for one thing. ;-)
Based on a vote of the comments, Texas is more interesting to discuss than Miraculous Creation Theory.
Hook ’em Horns!
As long as we’re promoting anti-ID editorial/op-eds, here’s one from my hometown paper, the San Antonio Express-News from a month ago.
Texas is a great state in many ways (albeit the politicos who run the government these days are hopeless).
In particular, I don’t see any of these force-ID-into-public-schools fights happening in Texas.
Austin is great! It is Febuary 2nd and it is 74 degrees and sunny! We have the most recent college National Champions in Football, Baseball and Women’s Track & Field, (basketball looks unlikely at this point, but I still have hope). The weather is great, home prices are moderate compared to the coasts (they are the highest in Texas) and the population is significantly more educated than the rest of Texas and the country:
http://www.austin-chamber.org/DoBusiness/GreaterAustinProfile/population.html#table2
Plus we have 6th street, Lance Armstrong (and Sherl Crow), Michael Dell, Andy Roddick, Sandra Bullock, Matthew McConaughey, Willie Nelson, cartoonist and filmmaker Mike Judge, directors Terrence Malick, Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez, and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling.
Actually, Bruce has moved to California. But he’s here in (ahem) spirit. We do however still have SF/crime writer Bradley Denton.
P.M. writes: Texas is a great state in many ways (albeit the politicos who run the government these days are hopeless).
In particular, I don’t see any of these force-ID-into-public-schools fights happening in Texas.
Texas is actually quite important in the evolution wars. Texas has tremendous clout in textbook standardization—like California, it’s a huge market, and if Texas guts textbooks, those same gutted Textbooks end up in many other states. Every few years we have a huge and important fight over biology or social studies textbooks. (Which come up for review in a staggered seven-year cycle.)
And our State Board of Education is a terrifying thing to behold, with a bunch of fundie Republicans. (Especially Terry Leo.) Last time around, the swing voters all voted against the fundies, and we got an unexpected victory. (Or at least, not the thorough gutting we expected.)
This is a chronic and vicious fight, because the right-wing loons are very good at getting right-wing loons on the SBOE. (SBOE members are popularly elected; the fundie churches are good at getting out the anti-evolution and anti-liberal vote, and stacking the board, while remaining under most people’s radar.)
The SBOE got so embarrassingly out of control a decade or so ago that the legislature limited their authority. (When the Texas Legislature thinks the right-wing loons are out of control, it’s pretty bad.) The right-wingers are currently challenging that so that they can go back to censoring and gutting textbooks.
What the fundie conservatives can’t do by legal means, they attempt to do by under-the-table means of questionable legality, like corresponding with publishers and pressuring them to gut and censor textbooks before the official evaluation process begins, so that the damage is done before the official process begins.
The only reason the Texas textbook situation isn’t the national disaster it could be is that organizations like the Texas Freedom Network fight the fundies and conservative revisionists tooth and nail. Last time biology books came up for review, TFN did a stellar job of enlisting other organizations, organizing expert reviews and expert testimony, etc., so that the swing voters could not vote with the fundies in anything like good conscience, or without serious public embarrassment. (Our Atheist Community of Austin helped, but it was largely liberal religious folks responsibly opposing truly crazy right-wingers.)
SBOE elections are coming up, and that’s pretty scary. The fundies are pissed about having lost the last round, and we expect them to organize and fight with a Biblical vengeance.
Since this seems to have become the official Texas cheerleading zone, I didn’t want to be left out. Having lived in both Lubbock (two miserable years of undergrad) and Austin, I can affirm that while the two cities are a scant 415 miles apart as the crow flies (thank you Mr. McNally), they are light years apart in any other relevant category.
While we’re at it, let’s compare Salt Lake City with Las Vegas–they’re only 416 miles apart.
OK, someday I have to visit Texas and especially Austin. You’ve all convinced me.
I’ve never been to Vegas (but will be there in June), and it’s never appealed to me in the slightest. I lived in Salt Lake City for 6 years, and despite the oppressively weird theocracy in that state, it’s actually a terrific place to live and raise a family.
SBOE elections are coming up, and that’s pretty scary. The fundies are pissed about having lost the last round, and we expect them to organize and fight with a Biblical vengeance.
Paul W, thanks for the summary of the textbook wars. Perhaps I have been lulled into complacency by the quiet on this front in recent years. But if, after more than a decade of fighting, the fundies have failed to make progress, even in a right-wing-GOP-dominated state, then it doesn’t look too promising for them.
Nonetheless, I will resolve to avoid complacency on this issue!
Sean, I suspect your inability to distinguish between Austin and Lubbock has something to do with your personal charm.
Doubtless. If I had any friends, they would be happy to testify to the fact that I am a bitter husk of a man incapable of joy. I wouldn’t say that the two places are indistinguishable, but Austin partisans who paint the town as a sort of Boston-on-the-Colorado are full of it. Sure, it’s nicer than anywhere else in Texas, but given that the competetion is, well, the rest of Texas, that’s not much of an accomplishment. And yes, there are plenty of good things about Texas, but for my money, they’re pretty well outweighed by the bad.
The only thing I like about Texas is that it’s not cold. It’s most certainly not cold enough for that liberal media myth known as “snow.”
You know, we should try to salvage Austin by digging it up and moving it. Kind of like they did with Atlanta in the early 2000s. And then it sank under the ocean, became the stuff of legends, and a Coca-cola factory accelerated the people’s evolution into merfolk…
What was I talking about, again?
Sean: Sure, it’s nicer than anywhere else in Texas, but given that the competetion is, well, the rest of Texas, that’s not much of an accomplishment. And yes, there are plenty of good things about Texas, but for my money, they’re pretty well outweighed by the bad.
So where are you from, asshole? Besides Assholeland, that is.
So where are you from, asshole? Besides Assholeland, that is.
I was born in Columbus, and grew up in Boston, Denver, and Hartford CT. I went to college in Chicago and lived there for eight years. I spent a few months in a small town in upstate New York before moving to Lubbock, where I lived for the last two and a half years. So I suppose the Greater Assholeland Area.
And what’s with the personal invective, Martin? Why does a negative comment about what I’m assuming is your hometown spark such animosity?
Maybe we should pass legislation making it a crime to insult or ridicule home towns – the ‘Hometown Hatred Bill’. And no mean cartoons either. After all, a lot of peoples’ identities are intimately connected to their home town, and being rude about it may cause much psychological trauma!
Sean: And what’s with the personal invective, Martin? Why does a negative comment about what I’m assuming is your hometown spark such animosity?
Unless your selective memory disallows such reflection, you started with the invective by calling Austin a shithole. No one’s hometown is perfect, but as other comments have shown, those of us who live here think the place is all right and don’t like unsolicited insults any more than anyone else. Especially in such a bizarre context: here’s a post from PZ talking about the Austin paper doing something cool that you wouldn’t see in a shithole town — printing an anti-ID editorial — and it provokes a “same shit, different hole” comment from you. And you wonder why Austinites are unappreciative of (as Paul put it) your “charm”?
If there’s a single city or state in the U.S. about which both good and bad things cannot be said, let me know, and I’ll retract the “invective”. Until then…
…here’s your fortune cookie, courtesy of the dining car on the clue train: “Act like an asshole. Get called one.” Have a nice day.
Ian: Maybe we should pass legislation making it a crime to insult or ridicule home towns…
Or maybe people should just, you know, not be assholes.
Martin, in my trips down to Austin, I saw the same anti-intellectual pride, the same gleeful ignorance, and the same bullshit I saw in Lubbock. Less of it, to be sure, but enough of it. My experiences with your town are at odds with the conventional wisdom about the place, which is that Austin isn’t really like the rest of Texas. Hence my comment. Sorry if it pissed you off, but in my experience, Austin’s a pretty far cry from a new Jerusalem in Texas’s green and pleasant land.
Apology graciously accepted, and mine are offered for coming across so reactionary (my fuse isn’t often lit to that degree). I’m also sorry to hear you hung out with the worst people Austin had to offer. But let’s be honest. Name a city or town in America where you won’t find anti-intellectual pride, gleeful ignorance, and bullshit. New York? Uh, nope. Washington? Heck no! LA? Are you kidding me? Butte, Montana? Mmmm, probably not. Does the whole place merit being dismissed with the epithet “shithole” on that account? I’ll be the first to concede there are such deserving places in Texas. (KKK stronghold Vidor, for instance.) But for all of Austin’s flaws you mentioned above, I can name dozens of things that offset them. I wouldn’t have lived here 19 years if the place sucked that bad. Obviously you can only speak from your experience, but as even you ought to be aware of how limited that experience is, you shouldn’t be so quick to slag the whole place. It’s like calling all Mexican food crap from having only eaten at Taco Bell. Consider, perhaps, that there’s a big wide world outside your experience.
Martin:
Thanks, and I’m not denying that every place in the country has those problems. Hell, I saw more open racism in my three months in Loch Sheldrake, NY than I did in two and a half years in West Texas. And it’s true that there are wonderful, intelligent people all over Texas (admittedly, I only met the ones from Austin when they came to Lubbock, but as you said this has got to be sampling error). And there are good things about Texas in general: the state university system, Cadillac Ranch, St. Arnold’s beer. But I didn’t like living there because for me the negatvie aspects of the state outweighed the positive, and that seemed to be true wherever I went down there. I suspect that in some areas you see positives where I see negatives (I’d be willing to be that you like the weather down there; I was miserable in the heat. In the winter). And that’s to be expected, but what can I say? I just don’t like Texas very much.
Oh, and William, you left academic horror novelist/satirist James Hynes off your list of Austin notables.
Lubbock’s got Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock. Austin’s got Twisty. If Twisty did more festival tours, I’d call it a wash.