And if you want to hear New Year’s greetings from a collection of godless geeks and weirdos, listen to the Two Smokin’ Hot Freethinkers Podcast.
Here at the Pharyngula Phortress, we’ll be ringing in the New Year with delicious root beer floats before toddling off to a good night’s sleep.
Casey Luskin once again complains about the fact that the propagators of intelligent design creationism are not regarded kindly, and in fact, are frequently disparaged. He takes it very personally, even.
On a personal note, I am familiar with these kinds of attacks. In one single forum at Antievolution.org, created and owned by a former National Center for Science Education staff member, I have been called no less than “Bizarre ignoramus,” “retarded,” “suck-up,” “Pathetic Loser,” “attack mouse, gerbil, rat, or clockwork powered plush toy,” “an orc,” “Annoying,” “a miserable loser with no life,” “an idiot,” “dishonest,” “ignorant cheap poxied floozie,” “fanatic and lunatic,” “A proven liar,” “incompetent,” and many other far more colorful attacks which are probably best left unprinted here on Evolution News and Views.
Well, Casey, I will concede this: I don’t think you’re retarded at all. The rest…heh. Those are pretty darned accurate, especially “incompetent”. You might want to consider that when someone like you, who knows nothing at all about biology, stands up and makes ignorant comments about the subject and sends them out as press releases all over the country, you’re going to get noticed, and you are going to get assessed. And, Casey, I’m sorry to say — you fail.
I’ll note that I also stand up and say what I think (with rather better qualifications as a biologist than you), and I also get a lot of flak, including many exceptionally insulting characterizations from your side of the fence. Here’s another difference between us, though: I don’t keep a running tally of all the names, adjectives, and adverbs applied to me.
So, what have you got? A great big Oracle database with urls and citations and photographs and addresses, tracking everyone who insults you? It would have to consume a substantial chunk of the resources of the Discovery Institute to store them all.
Get out there and vote on this recommendation to Obama to create nationally required science standards. This is your last chance; it needs to be bumped up to 3rd place to make it into the next round. All it needs is a few hundred more votes!
Get ready for the War on New Year.
Apparently the forces of darkness are mounting an attack, this time on the Christian holiday of New Year’s Day, which commemorates and worshipfully celebrates the anniversary of the day on which a Romanian monk miscalculated the year in which our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was born. In addition to the anticalendricals, it seems that the Chinese, Jews, and Muslims are all opting out and deciding to celebrate other days as their new year. More recently the ranks of these heathen have apparently been joined by the ancient Babylonians. Worse still, countless American companies are yielding to the pressure from these groups, and instructing them to wish people “Happy New Years Day” rather than “Happy New Year’s Day”.
This is just a warm-up. Next we make an assault on that pagan festival of lust, Valentine’s Day, and then comes the big push to reconquer Easter in the name of the ancient fertility goddess. That one will be tricky — they keep moving the date around to confuse us.
The Molly Award for the month of November goes to Emmet Caulfield. Buy him a beer, someone.
Now we have to pick one for December — leave your nomination in the comments!
When last I mentioned Terry Pratchett, it was unfortunate news: he’s been afflicted with embuggerance. Now, though, there is cause for some jubilation, since a certain godless humorist and fantasy author has been awarded a knighthood for his services to literature. Three cheers for an honor well deserved!
He also has a new book, which I’ll have to pick up. He must not be too deeply embuggered.
They have a vision. They have a dream. They know what shape they want America to take. And they have formed an “organization inspired by the principles of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the Evangelical and Christian Reconstruction movements”. And completely oblivious to the irony, with no hint that they understand the associations it will inspire, they have named this organization…the PALIBAN.
2012 is going to be so much fun.
And by “fun”, I mean “loaded with despair and exasperation and disappointment in my fellow citizens.”
(Read their blog and you might suspect a Poe, though. It’s just a little too all that.)
I had a gentle and uncontroversial deconversion from a fairly liberal church, so I’ve never suffered for atheism — which is as it should be for everyone. Not all Christians are tolerant enough to let people have their own beliefs, though, as you can discover in these stories of ostracization (add to them if you’ve experienced it), and in particular, this nightmarish story of one man’s abandonment of his faith.
He declares a bicycle to be irreducibly complex because it can’t function if you remove one wheel.
You can guess where this is going.
Queue up the redefinition calliope, Casey! ‘But it’s not a bicycle anymore, now is it?’
See—there’s an official list and everything.
But wait…what’s this? Tied with the Bad Astronomer? What has he done, besides write a book and become president of the JREF and pose naked? I ought to win for keeping my clothes on!
