The Global Atheist Convention has not begun yet; the Global Atheists have already begun

The official kick-off of the Melbourne Global Atheist convention is tonight, but we’re starting without the the officials.

I met Bride of Shrek (who is not green) and Rorschach (who wasn’t wearing the cool shifting pattern mask) for dinner last night. I can’t say I was exactly lively company — I was coming off something like 25 hours of total travel time with no sleep at all, and was feeling like I was staggering towards a brick wall of total unconsciousness — but I survived, mostly. Got a very good night’s sleep last night, too.

It’s now morning in Australia. I’m heading off to an atheist blogger/podcaster breakfast meetup, just to get my day started. If I can find the place. If not, I’ll be wandering the streets of Melbourne, somewhere down by the river.

At noon, I’m off to the Freethought University Alliance for a free lunch. I have to say a few words, too, but I aim to brief, because I am an old geezer and these are the Youth of Australia Who Will Change the Future. They should be doing most of the talking. They can run circles around me, too, which is why there is a rumor that I may have to fortify myself with some Jesus during the talk, just to keep up.

Then around 3ish, we’re having a Pharyngufest with a mob of foaming-at-the-mouth, militant, crude, rude, angry internet atheists and Pharyngulators at the Young and Jackson Hotel. Bride of Shrek tells me that we have the privilege of sharing the pub with Chloe, which, with the prospects of my first Australian beer, will probably help soothe the horrifying horde. A little bit.

Finally, at 6, after we’ve already had a full day to work ourselves up to a shrieking fever pitch, the official events begin. It should be fabulous. I’ll be looking for you all.

Small Town America and institutionalize hatred

Constance McMillen is a high school student in a small town in Itawamba County, Mississippi. She’s also gay.

I think you can guess where this is going. I can see the flames of someone’s personal hell from here.

It looks like Ms McMillen is a very confident person, though, so I’d guess that her situation has made her stronger. She decide to attend the high school prom with her girlfriend; Ms McMillen was planning to wear a tuxedo. Good for her: she’s proud of who she is, and was going to be respectable and decorous about the issue. The flames are licking a lot higher, you can tell already.

I think you can predict that Small Town Mississippi was not going to react respectably and decorously about it, though, and they didn’t. The ACLU informed them that they were violating her rights.

So the school cancelled the prom altogether, and let Ms McMillen’s fellow students know why.

Hey, I don’t think that’s just a small hellish fire on the southern horizon, that looks like a mushroom cloud now.

The mayor is saying the community thinks this was a good decision. People are talking about putting together a privately sponsored prom…probably one that could exclude faggots (although, wouldn’t it be cool if someone did put together a prom that was inclusive, thumbing their nose at the cowards in the school administration? It could happen — younger people aren’t quite so hidebound as the calcified upper crust of small town USA, and that cohort also includes a lot of people who are itching for graduation day and their opportunity to escape Itawamba County forever).

I predict that Constance McMillen will be one of the progressive young people who will be fleeing Small Town America as fast as she can, as soon as she can. And the old geezers and flea bag preachers will sit around in their shrinking, backwards-looking community and wonder why the young people are so anxious to abandon them.

A fine example of apologizing oneself right into a defense of the indefensible

Wow. Bill Donohue is going to love Andrew Brown. Brown has written a defense of the Catholic church titled “Catholic child abuse in proportion“; you can tell right away exactly where it is going to be going. ‘Only’ 4% of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse of a minor, and as much as 27% of American women report a history of childhood sexual abuse (to quote just a pair of statistics he uses), therefore, Catholic priests aren’t that bad. Which means…

Certainly the safeguards against paedophilia in the priesthood are now among the tightest in the world. That won’t stop a steady trickle of scandals; but I think that objectively your child is less likely to be abused by a Catholic or Anglican priest in the west today than by the members of almost any other profession.

He doesn’t mention any statistics on any other profession. So kids are more likely to be raped by your local policeman, college professor, grade school teacher, construction worker, farmer, dentist, carpenter, plumber, doctor, or whatever than your local priest? Brown hasn’t shown any evidence at all that that is the case. And I think he would have an even tougher job trying to demonstrate that rapists in these other professions do it while carrying out their duties, or while wearing a uniform of propriety in quite the same way priests do.

As for this claim that priests now have tight safeguards…I haven’t seen any evidence at all of that. The Catholic church doesn’t seem to be cleaning house at all, nor does it have any history of doing so; the pattern has been to hide and protect abusers in their ranks, until they are dragged out into the light by secular investigations.

And then Brown goes ahead and lists a series of reasons why the pattern of Catholic abuse has been regarded with an especially deserved horror. Doesn’t he even read what he writes?

So why the concentration on Catholic priests and brothers? Perhaps I am unduly cynical, but I believe that all institutions attempt to cover up institutional wrongdoing although the Roman Catholic church has had a higher opinion of itself than most, and thus a greater tendency to lie about these things. Because it is an extremely authoritarian institution at least within the hierarchy, it is also one where there were few checks and balances on the misbehaviour of the powerful. The scandal has been loudest and most damaging in Ireland, because it came along just at the moment when the church was losing its power over society at large, and where it was no longer able to cover up what had happened, but still willing to try. Much the same is true in the diocese of Boston which was bankrupted by the scandal.

Hmmm. Andrew Brown is a member of a beleagured institution, journalism, which by his own argument should have just as large a proportion of people who carry out child rape in the execution of their responsibilities as do Catholic priests. I think he therefore has a responsibility to turn whistleblower and report all of his colleagues who have gone out to interview children and abused their authority to obtain sex. Surely, the Guardian must be harboring nests of pedophiles that the newspaper protects by shuffling them out to distant assignments when their crimes become excessive.

Stop protecting child-raping journalists, Brown, and come clean. You’ve convinced me, they must be just as bad as the Catholic priesthood.

I have landed!

After a long confinement in a cramped metal tube, the guards stewardesses have finally released me in Melbourne. I’m going to have to figure out what I’m doing next — I think the University of Melbourne Secular Society is going to wrangle me out to a wildlife sanctuary, but I haven’t connected up with them just yet. I’m just sort of savoring the sense of freedom right now, and making fiendish plans.

But the important news is that I’ve survived, mostly. You might want to stay upwind of me, but otherwise I’m feeling pretty good right now.

Stop using the lens of your preconceptions

Well. There’s another paper out discussing science blogs, which is a good thing, I suppose. I just find the conclusion a bit disappointing. Bora has an exhaustive dissection, and both The Panda’s Thumb and Cosmic Variance have briefer (they’d have to be! Bora got loquacious) discussions of the topic.

Where the author loses me is with this summary.

To become a tool for non-scientist participation, science blogs need to stabilize as a genre or as a set of subgenres where smaller conversations may facilitate more meaningful participation from members of the public. Science bloggers need to become more aware of their audience, welcome non-scientists, and focus on explanatory, interpretative, and critical modes of communication rather than on reporting and opinionating.

We don’t need to ‘stabilize’ on anything: the virtue of this medium is unfettered diversity. Pharyngula is not to everybody’s taste (really!), but is just right for some others — the wonderful part of the science blogosphere is that we have so many different ideas bouncing around out here. Why, there are even people who disagree with me!

I also think I am pretty aware of my audience, and if you look at the comment threads here, they aren’t just scientists. This is the gladiatorial arena of the science blogosphere, and we don’t restrict attendance to the prissy ol’ patricians — everyone likes a good bloody rhetorical battle now and then. I know my readers like it when the bestiarii take on those animals, the creationists, and they also like the gladiatorial competitions between equals. And then we often break into homilies and tutorials. If that isn’t appealing to a wide audience, I don’t know what is.

I can’t help but think that the author had some preconceptions about how a science blog should be (which usually means antiseptic, pure, aloof, esoteric, and technical) and found that they are rarely that way at all. And was a bit disappointed.

The Frog Scientist

I just got my hands on a very interesting book for the younger set: it’s aimed at kids in grades 5-8, and it’s a description of the life and work of a real live scientist, someone who does both field and lab work, and studies development and the effects of environmental toxins on reproduction. The man is Tyrone Hayes at UC Berkeley, and the book is The Frog Scientist(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Pamela Turner. It’s excellent stuff — it humanizes the scientist and also does a very good job of letting kids see what scientists actually do in their research, and why they’re doing it. If you’ve got a young one who’s thinking about being a scientist when she or he grows up, you might want to grab this book as a little inspiring incentive.

Plus it has lots of fabulous photos of frogs. You can’t go wrong.

One other thing: the School Library Journal is having a battle of the books, with a poll to bring a book up into the final round of voting. There’s a shortage of science books in the listing: there’s The Frog Scientist, and another one about Darwin, Charles and Emma, but otherwise, while the other books may be very good (I have heard good things about The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, and it’s not because it has the word “evolution” in the title), there isn’t much in the way of kid’s books on science. If you’re familiar with any of these, vote!