The winner of the Molly Award for the month of April kept having the same thing said about him over and over: he was overdue, that people were voting for him month after month. Finally, persistence pays off: you can now refer to Bill Dauphin, OM.
Notice that it is now June — you need to tell me who should win it for May. Leave a comment below that says who your favorite commenter for the month just past was.
Simon Singh, the science writer who had the temerity to say that chiropractic treatment for ear infection was “bogus”, and who was found guilty by a British court of libel, has decided to appeal the decision. That takes real guts — libel law over there really stacks the deck in favor of frivolous complaints of libel — but if he wins it could help enable future open criticisms of quackery.
Sometimes, it just takes a little sharp humor to clarify our current situation.
Well, to understand the Sonia Sotomayor fracas you have to realize that the timespace confundulum has actually fractured into two frozen moments, one having to do with the sudden appearance of emotional, abrasive Latinas and their strange cuisine amid the eating clubs of Princeton, and the other having to do with ungrateful women of color getting named to positions where they can dole out their reverse-racist versions of “justice.” Yes, that’s right, it’s always 1972 and it’s always 1993–and at the same time.
I didn’t get admitted to anything in 1972. But in 1974, I was a freshman at Regis High School in New York, where I heard one of my more conservative classmates say, in the course of a discussion about affirmative action, that he had been the victim of reverse discrimination for too long. Exasperated to the point of flummoxation, I noted in reply that (a) affirmative action showed up only yesterday, (b) you’re thirteen years old, d00d, and (c) you’re attending an elite, tuition-free Jesuit high school that does not admit women. And the reason I remember that moment 35 years later is that it has never gone away: guys like Stuart Taylor and Fred Barnes are still thirteen years old, still the victims of reverse discrimination, and still questioning the credentials of smart women while campaigning for the protection of conservative white men under the Endangered Species Act. Taylor graduated from Princeton in 1970; Barnes from the University of Virginia in 1965. Neither of them had to compete with women for admission; Princeton started opening its doors to that half of the population in 1969, Virginia a year later. That’s why guys like these worry so much about the decline of standards in college admissions since 1970, you understand. Because things were tougher and people were smarter when white guys only had to compete with 44 percent of the population for admission to elite colleges, positions of power and influence, and so forth.
He also reminds us that Clinton caved in when faced with a similar situation during his presidency. Let’s hope Obama is made of sterner stuff.
One more joins the ranks of states on the side of goodness: the New Hampshire legislature has passed the last few bills needed to legalize gay marrriage in that state. Unfortunately, part of the compromise is a set of exemptions for religious organizations, who won’t need to do the right thing. Just remember, no one can point to the atheists and claim they tried to hinder civil rights here…we didn’t ask for the privilege to discriminate.
(via Digital Cuttlefish, who naturally has a poem to go with it)
Oh, how I despise PETA. Now they’re putting up new billboards in Kansas —can you guess why?
Lindsay Rajt, campaign manager for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the billboards were prompted by the recent shooting death of abortion doctor George Tiller, who was killed Sunday at his church.
“The discussion of the value of life is front and center right now in the public conversation,” Rajt said today.
“We think we would be irresponsible if we don’t talk about how we’re all guilty of extreme cruelty to animals every time we sit down to a meal that includes meat.”
They have two billboards: one that says “Pro-life? Go vegetarian” and the other says “Pro-choice? Choose vegetarian”. PETA reminds me of the undertaker in Yojimbo: a town is tearing itself apart, and the only one prospering is the ghoul who’s happily selling coffins to both factions. I can only hope their ham-handed campaign repulses both sides.
As you should know, John Wilkins has left the enveloping (and sometimes stifling) womb of Scienceblogs to strike out on his own, and is also laboring as an underpaid postdoc. He has entered that realm familiar to philosophers everywhere: poverty. It’s good for the soul, John! Calorie restriction is also good for longevity!
Unfortunately, spiritual and intellectual rewards do not pay web hosting bills, so Wilkins would appreciate any donations towards the continued solvency of Evolving Thoughts. Help him out if you can. Oh, and when his book becomes available, buy it. I know I will, even if specialized books by philosophers tend to be more extravagantly priced than us poor college professors can spare.
(Hey, the price isn’t as bad as I feared. Let’s turn it into a weird best-seller!)
The Intelligent Design creationists have done it again: thrown together another piece of sloppy scholarship to defend themselves from a non-argument. John Lynch is lazing in the balmy Mediterranean, and casually demolishes them in an afternoon in a Cretan cafe. It sounds like hard work, philosophizing.
Anyway, the gist of the Discovery Institute claim is, oh, no, we didn’t invent intelligent design creationism in response to recent American court cases — it’s an old argument with roots in antiquity. Which, of course, is something no one has ever argued against. We know the argument from design is ancient. We’ve said it repeatedly: a 20th century right wing think tank in Seattle had merely plucked an old rationale that Paley had made in the early years of the 19th century and recycled it, ignoring the logical refutations of design made even earlier by Hume and the empirical argument against it deployed by Darwin. I can’t imagine anyone familiar with the DI ever suggesting that they might have been original or creative.
Lynch goes into considerable more detail on the philosophical foundations of the idea, but again the lesson is the same: the DI is pretty much incompetent at everything they do.
This is a sad story: Dahl’s daughter Olivia, to whom he had dedicated James and the Giant Peach and The BFG (I remember reading both of those to my kids when they were little) died at the age of 12 of measles encephalitis. He wrote a short piece urging everyone to immunize their children 20 years later, after a reliable vaccine had been developed.
We’ve benefited in these recent years from good medicine that prevents serious childhood diseases. It wasn’t that long ago that children were dying fairly often from illnesses that nowadays parents cavalierly expose their children to in ‘exposure parties’, rather than using good medicine.
(via Goldacre)
People were complaining that that last pointless poll was too easy to knock over. Here’s a tougher one.
What’s your reaction to Barack Obama’s proclamation designating this month as ‘LGBT Pride Month’?
It is a well-deserved celebration – 1.81%
No big surprise from this administration – 21.56%
Sin gets a whole month – National Day of Prayer barely gets a presidential nod – 56.07%
What next? Adultery Adoration Week? – 20.56%
You’ll need some bigger numbers to overcome this one — it’s got 19,000 votes already.
Although, I must confess, I rather like the choice that’s winning so far. Yay sin! Let’s have a whole national year of sinnin’! A decade! A century of guiltless, happy hedonism!
