Pharyngula is about to add a co-blogger

Are you ready for this? Chris Clarke now has authorship privileges on Pharyngula.

Those of you who know his work will be awestruck. Chris is a phenomenal writer, a true progressive, and a committed environmentalist. I’d been thinking about bringing in an additional contributor, because let me tell you, this semester is going to kick my butt and I am already stressing out, and when I thought about who I would just dream of partnering with, Chris was right at the top of the list…so it was a tremendous honor when he accepted.

This is going to be awesome.

I’m ready to be divisive

I can understand how the strain gets to people. I’m a white guy; I’ve got it easy. I do get a steady stream of hate-mail and vituperative noise in my in-box, but I’ve been getting that for 20 years (usenet gave me a leg up on most of you) and my skin is pretty damned thick by now. But what gets me most right now is shame. Embarrassment at being associated with some of these ‘skeptics’ and atheists — a painful shame at being male. Even the polite ones who think they’re making a rational point make me cringe. Look at this little note from JoeNietzsche:

PZ, you’ve clearly misrepresented the function of his “forms in triplicate” argument. What he is doing there is called exaggeration for effect. No one, not him, his readers or anyone else actually believes this is what anyone at FTB would demand of him. He is simply making the point that obtaining consent would ruin the moment. Social interaction is messy, even the deeply conscientious sort. Now, I had no dog in this fight but this, along with your stream of ad homs, have made up my mind. :(

My nonexistent freakin’ deity. “Obtaining consent would ruin the moment.” For whom? How oblivious can you get?

I can understand why Jen is taking a break. These assholes are exhausting. It’s not just the vileness, it’s the godawful stupidity of people who otherwise claim to be on my side. They aren’t. I’m on the side of humanism, of men and women, for science and the environment, for equality and justice, and I’m against the troglodytes who make excuses for treating women as ambulatory receptacles for their “moment”. Screw ’em.

So one thing we can do is let people cycle back away from the front and take a little R&R, and then those of us still on the line can follow Rebecca Watson’s suggestion: double-down, everyone.

I suspect that if everyone steps up and speaks just as loudly as Jen did, there’s no way the assholes would have enough time in their day to bully all of us. But I get that not everyone can do that. I can do it, though, so until everybody steps up, I’ll just try to be twice as loud in the hopes of acting as some kind of asshole lightning rod.

Battle on, horde!

Holy crap. Via Ophelia, Marty Robbins brings up an interesting point: some of these assholes show a greater level of obsession than Dennis Markuze. Look at the pile of stuff one jerk, “Elevatorgate”, compiled in one day. Get help, Chris. You’re sick.

The Clinton ‘Nightmare’

If you didn’t see it last night, watch it now: Bill Clinton’s speech to the Democratic National Convention. Wow…it’s what I want from a political speech, tons of policy and specifics and evidence.

In case you’re wondering whether he just made it all up, FactCheck.org just called it Our Clinton Nightmare…because they had to do so much checking of details and data, and because it kept turning out that he wasn’t making any juicily dishonest claims. The worst error they found was that he oversold the effect of Obamacare, because most of its provisions aren’t yet in effect; the real reason health care costs are slowing right now is because people are too broke and too uninsured to go to the doctor.

FactCheck did not report on his other gigantic error, though. The closing line of Clinton’s speech, and of every other speaker, was that tedious, stupid “God bless you, and God bless America.” I’ve got to learn to hit the mute button on the remote faster, because that pointless piety was really getting on my nerves.

Despite his flaws, Clinton really is a politician’s politician, talented and undeniably brilliant. If only Al Gore had turned him loose to campaign for him…and now, I seriously hope that Obama is planning to put Clinton to work on his re-election.

Unleash the Bill! Romney doesn’t stand a chance.

Now, of course, Obama has to give a speech tonight that is at least its equal. Romney just had to top a rambling old geezer and an empty chair (and he failed). Obama has to show why I shouldn’t just write Bill Clinton’s name on my ballot.

If you’d like to just read it rather than watch it (although you’ll be missing a master rhetorician at work), here’s the text.

Why I am an atheist – Brian

Truth.

That single word has defined my existence from birth until this moment, and will likely continue to dominate it for as long as it lasts. I was born into a devout Jehovah’s Witness household. My father was a church elder, I gave my first sermon when I was eight years old, and I became a full member of the church at fifteen when I got baptized (unlike other churches, baptism and confirmation are not two separate things). 

[Read more…]

Phase II of the new Molly awards

Man, you’re a ferocious and mouthy bunch. You gave me links to a lot of excellent comments, and I pared them down to these eight (next time, I might cut them down more). The next step: vote by leaving a comment with the number of the nomination you like best. These are just short excerpts, you’ll have to click on them to read the whole thing.

  1. Anyway, respectful transgender people and transsexual people alike wanted to organize around the common ground that does exist (which is plenty). So they/we needed a word that we could agree *did* represent everyone.

  2. This is fucking serious: A man just made a joke about raping a woman who he’s never met, who never did him any harm, who he doesn’t know at all, and he did this without considering how the fuck it might impact her or people like her.

  3. I’ve done a bit more reading and thinking, and feel more than ever that the 2nd amendment was intended to facilitate well-trained militias, and had diddly to do with personal gun ownership.

  4. Why are you so damned insistent on finding that one special circumstance when it’s morally OK for you to do something horrific to me? Why is it so unacceptable to you that I have bodily autonomy in all circumstances?

  5. That hard truth being: torture is, as many, many competent professionals are telling you, close to useless for getting timely and precise intel. Rather: its only particularly reliable value as a tool of statecraft is as a method of terror and suppression.

  6. The demands religion makes on human sexuality are unreasonable. There has literally never been a human society on the face of the planet, no matter how thoroughly crushed under the thumb of theistic tyranny, where people actually consistently restricted themselves to monogamous marital sex.

  7. BTW, keep your Oogedy Boogedy death cult religion away from my kids and pets.

  8. Playing devil’s advocate does not require lying about your own position. Indeed, that term is generally used only if a person agrees with others in the discussion, but wishes to present the position of someone who disagrees.

Some days, it doesn’t pay to read the blogs

OK, I’m neck deep in work, and I browse Freethoughtblogs for a little light relief, and what do I find? Cuttlefish tells me this ghastly (but familiar) story about a man who murders his ex-partner and children because she spurns him. Then Stephanie has another horror story about the nightmare a woman suffered when she dared to tell a man “no”.

I think I’m motivated to go back to the books now.