I am an atheist because I was born that way.
I grew up in a Catholic family. Not crazy fundamentalist Catholic or anything. We were a liberal family, but we went to church every Sunday, said grace at dinner, and all of the other calendar related business that I can barely remember. Outside of weddings and funerals I haven’t attended a church in over twenty-five years, so the rituals are fuzzy.
This sounds so familiar. You notice a bias in the speakers at a meeting (an obvious bias that everyone notices), and so you start suggesting to conference organizers that maybe it would be a good thing to do a little more outreach, get a little more diversity. I was doing that to atheist meetings 5 or 6 years ago, or perhaps longer…it’s been a longstanding issue. So now in 2012:
So here is a plea. Next time you are involved in organizing a meeting – make some effort to have a strong representation of diversity of speakers and participants. For example, if you invite lots of women for example and all say no – try to figure out why and see if you can fix the issue. Offer travel fellowships for students. Offer child care or child activity options (even if you cannot pay for it – at least make it easy for people). Make sure to advertise/promote the meeting to groups/institutions with a high representation of underrepresented groups. Don’t give up if your first efforts don’t work. Sometimes it can be difficult to make sure diversity levels are high. But keep trying … it will help make the conference better and also will help the field in general …
That’s Jonathan Eisen, talking about genomics meetings. I hope it works out for him. I can say that atheist meetings have gotten much, much better at representing more women (the race issue, not so much, but it is slowly improving there, even).
The next stage after that success, however, is pushback from the white men who had previously been the sole kinds of faces on the stage. They can’t quite start screaming at the women to get off the stage — that degree of bigotry is a little too naked, usually — but they will aim their fury at the people who brought them to the sorry state of having women equally represented with men.
The only answer to that, of course, is to keep on fighting.
I have completely tuned out the Olympics because the jingoistic, shallow American commentary makes me want to puke…but I was just sent this clip from the BBC coverage. Watch how it goes from Darwin to eugenics to Hitler to slavery in order to explain how so many black athletes excel at sprinting events…because, obviously, being able to survive shackling in a slave ship and a lifetime of menial stoop labor in the cotton fields clearly selects for genes of benefit in short foot races.
Who authorized that kind of drivel to even be made? It’s bad science and bad history.
The story so far: Thunderf00t/Phil Mason was invited to join our blog network last month. All he wrote during the short week he was here was incoherent, unprofessional rages against feminism and the whole network he was on; we could not understand why he even accepted the offer to join us if he hated us so much, and his inane rants certainly weren’t going to persuade us that we were wrong, so we kicked him off. And ever since he has been obsessed with howling about our perfidy.
The latest development is that it turns out that almost as soon as he’d been evicted, he snuck back onto our mailing list and has been reading all the confidential discussions we’ve been having. He has leaked these to third parties as well. When we shut down the security hole last week, he then tried to hack back in, to no avail. We have logs of all of this computer activity on his part.
He doesn’t have anything of actionable substance — we really haven’t been planning the overthrow of the government or any bank heists or anything nefarious — but he does have personal information about some of the contributors to FtB who want their privacy respected. That is his threat, and it’s not something we can trust him on, given that he’s already sent some emails to other people. And there was no legitimate reason for him to even need to be browsing our private email.
I’ll be compiling the responses to Thunderf00t’s lack of basic decency and ethics here, but first I have to highlight this, from Ed Brayton:
I really do find this outraged declaration that he does not “doc drop” to be almost laughably deluded. It’s like someone who breaks into your house because you forgot to latch a window. He comes into your house and steals your china and jewelry, then reacts in mock outrage when you suggest that he might steal your TV too. In fact, he screams “I do not steal TVs!” at the top of his lungs to the neighbors while he’s handing your other possessions out the door to someone else. And then he expects that declaration to be credible and to provide some assurance of his character.
Phil Mason also doesn’t seem to realize that his declaration that he broke in is in fact a confession. It’s not just that he’s violated our confidence, but that he’s so goddamn stupid that he’s announced it to the world.
Here’s the current list of blog posts protesting Thunderf00t’s inexcusable behavior. I’ll add to it as more come in, but I’m also going to be traveling a bit today, so my access may be spotty.
Jason Thibeault (includes technical evidence for Mason’s hack)
Matt Dillahunty
Richard Coughlan (NSFW, and very sarcastic)
I was raised alternately in general Protestant and Lutheran churches, and my parents can’t be blamed for a lack of trying. I can’t claim ignorance, so I’m among the worst of the damned in the eyes of some. I started out believing, right up until I got a less than satisfactory answer to the doctrine of ignorance and original sin and salvation. I came from an abusive home, and obsessed over fairness since punishment in my home was often disproportionate and arbitrary. It was at that moment I recognised God as he’d been described as an abusive parent. I could not believe that such a being as my stepfather ran the universe, or rather one so apparently powerless as my mother stood by and allowed suffering and death. I was eight. This was the beginning of my doubts. I realized that the people claiming to know God’s will were like me claiming to know when I’d be yanked out of bed over a dirty dish, or yelled at for literally doing nothing. Whatever there was, they had no idea when it would act or why.
Fuck Thunderf00t/Phil Mason. The accounts that Zinnia and Natalie and Ashley have revealed are true: for the past month, Thunderf00t took advantage of a security exploit to hack into our private mail server; when the hole was closed, he tried multiple time to use the same exploit to get back in. He knowingly and willfully violated a confidential email list. And worse, what he has since been doing (and this is how we discovered the security flaw in the first place) is disseminating some of this email to third parties.
Yeah, this is the guy who expressed such outrage at people ‘dropping docs’ on him, but he has absolutely no qualms about breaking legally binding confidentiality of an LLC, and thinks it’s just fine to hold hostage personal information on pseudonymous posters who, under the promise of privacy, had discussed personal matters and job-related issues. He is a colossal hypocrite.
Just to make matters even worse, I woke up this morning to find some reassuring email from some friends of his, who had basically staged an intervention, trying to get him to back off from his unethical behavior. I was told that he had listened and agreed, and piously assured everyone that he thought the goals of the freethought movement were most important, and that we should all step away from the petty divisiveness and concentrate on education, science, secularism, and politics. His friends wrote to me and they sounded quite convinced that he was sincere and high minded.
And then he turned around, no doubt chortling to himself, and posted another slimy, sneering, lying article about freethoughtblogs. It’s appalling. Not only has he stabbed FtB in the back, but he has no qualms about lying to and betraying the people he still regards as friends.
Yes, we want to make Thunderf00t/Phil Mason a pariah in the atheist movement, and for good reason: he’s a dishonest scumbag. The nice thing for us is that he’s making it easy: Phil Mason is destroying his own reputation with his sleazy behavior. Who in their right mind would ever trust that guy with any confidence at all?
A while back, I wrote a couple of articles on near-death experiences: The NDE delusion and Near-death, rehashed. It’s a topic I’ve been following off and on for quite a few years.
So I was quite surprised to see this name popping up in the news lately: Melvin Morse. Morse is one of those gullible paranormalists who has a couple of sloppily breathless books out about NDEs — he gets mentioned a couple of times in this nice article debunking a couple of well-known cases. His specialty is describing NDEs in children.
Yeah, children. Which adds a little extra disgust to the news.
He has been arrested for waterboarding his own daughter, punishing her by holding her head under a running faucet so she couldn’t breathe.
The daughter told police she “could never understand what she did to be punished” and felt scared, court documents reported. Once, she said, her father told her he “was going to wrap her in a blanket and do it so that she could not move.” In another instance, she said Melvin Morse told her that “she could go five minutes without brain damage.”
…
After her father did these things, the girl said she would “go outside and cry,” prompting Melvin Morse to come outside and then “hold her nose and mouth with his hand,” police said in court records.
“He would tell her she was lucky he did not use duct tape,” police said in the documents. “He would not let go until she lost feeling and collapsed to the ground.”
It sounds like he was trying to do a little “research” on his own child. There’s good money in almost-dead children
It’s time for a ball game tomorrow evening: the Mr Paul Aints vs the Amarillo Sox, sponsored by Minnesota Atheists. A few people in the Texas media are a bit concerned about participating in a godless game, and they’ve put up a poll about whether the Amarillo team should forfeit rather than throw their ball around while atheists stand around and watch.
Do you think the Amarillo Sox should still participate in the game?
Yes 58%
No 42%
To their credit, the team is not considering abandoning their responsibilities, so they’ll be there. It’s sad that about half the Texans would boycott us.
I’ll also be there! Minnesota Atheists will be having a tailgate party beginning at 5 in the stadium parking lot. Midway Stadium is at 1771 Energy Park Drive St. Paul, MN 55108. I’ll be there in my official Mr Paul Aints jersey, stroll up and say hello.
Be sure to watch all the way to the end to find out.
