At first glance, I thought it was an epiploon or omentum, but no, it’s a lovely octopus mother tending her brood. Go hug your mom right now, or if she’s not nearby, hug a mollusc instead.
Good god. I was just sent a link to this disingenuous youtube video by the above named scumbag in which he lectures Jen McCreight on “security”, claiming that she has revealed clues to her location on twitter, and that she’s either put herself in great danger, or she’s been lying about her concerns for her safety, given all the abuse she gets from wretched skeevy pieces of internet offal. And in the process, he displays all the clues he has!
You know, if he were sincere about sending her a message about security, he wouldn’t have essentially been pointing to her location and announcing to the world how to find her. To add to the hypocrisy, here are his final words to Jen:
Congratulations, you fucking nitwit. If it is the case, that there is a legitimate concern for your safety from the internet, good job posting to more than 9,000 people on the internet exactly how to find out where you commonly are.
Jebus, you hypocrite. You just broadcast the same information in the guise of “helping” someone with their security. This is the act of a coward intentionally taunting others to go do the harm to Jen that he would like to have occur.
I’m also fed up with the binary thinking these vermin propagate. You know, there are more possibilities than that you live like Salman Rushdie, hiding from a fatwah urging religious fanatics to murder you, and living in complete anonymity, unknown to wackjobs. One can also be moderately well known and take simple precautions like not posting your home address, without serious concerns that a determined hit squad is trying to track you down. That someone doesn’t have armed guards around their house does not imply that they haven’t been threatened. But apparently, even a grad student who blogs now and then is considered fair game for veiled threats by the slymers.
Isn’t it amazing that the anti-social justice atheists are now coming full circle to be almost as threatening to those they oppose as the Islamists? Same silencing tactics, same cowardly threats.
It’s a very familiar story: atheist student sits in class, looks up, notices the school administration has plastered the walls with pious Bible nonsense, and sics the FFRF on ’em.
The usual response occurred: the town is up in arms, local churches whine about “Christianity under attack!”, bullies begin lashing out at those who don’t go to church, Christians start claiming that the majority rules, therefore they get to violate the constitution.
The amazing thing is that Pulliam is still optimistic that he’ll be able to finish up his last year of high school there without serious repercussions. He has high hopes that the students and teachers will not hold his actions against him. I hope he’s right — not just for his sake, but because it would be good to see signs that the religious fanatics can back down when they’re clearly in the wrong.
There is but one word that can describe this website.
Let us not speak of it ever again.
I love expanding my vocabulary, and this article on the modern history of swearing has a number of interesting words for obscene acts that should come back — no one would understand what I was talking about until they reach wider currency.
Gary Marcus, the psychologist who wrote that most excellent book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
Marcus goes after two representatives of this fuzzy-thinking concept. Schmidhuber is an acolyte of Kurzweil who argues for a “computational theology” that claims that there is no evidence against his idea, therefore the universe could be a giant software engine written by a great god-programmer. Eagleman is a neuroscientist who has gotten some press for Possibilianism, the idea that because the universe is so vast, we should acknowledge that there could be all kinds of weird possibilities out there — even god-like beings. “Could be” is not a synonym for “is”, however, and science actually demands a little more rigor.
Some people love to claim that an absence of a single definitive test against an idea means that it is perfectly reasonable to continue believing in it. Marcus will have none of that.
In particular, Eagleman, who drapes himself in science by declaring to “have devoted my life to scientific pursuit,” might think of each extant religion as an experiment. Followers of many religions have looked for direct evidence of their beliefs, but (by Eagleman’s own assessment) systematically come up dry. And, crucially, statisticians have shown decisively that a collection of failed efforts weighs more heavily than any single failed effort on its own. The same thing happened, of course, when scientists looked for phlogiston, and cold fusion, too. Nobody has proven cold fusion doesn’t exist, but most scientists would assign a low probability to it because so many attempts at replicating the original have failed. Any agnostic is free to believe that his favorite religion has not yet been completely disproven. But anyone who wishes to bring science into the argument must acknowledge that the evidence thus far is weak, especially when it is combined statistically, in the fashion of a meta-analysis. To emphasize the qualitative conclusion (X has not been absolutely proven to be false) while ignoring the collective weight of the quantitative data (i.e., that most evidence points away from X) is a fallacy, akin to holding out a belief in flying reindeer on the grounds that there could yet be sleighs that we have not yet seen.
That’s why I’m an atheist. Not just because there is no evidence for any god, but because all the available evidence points towards natural processes and undirected causes for the entirety of space and time. I wish people could get that into their heads. When we atheist-scientists go off to meetings and stand up for an hour talking about something or other, we generally aren’t reciting a religious litany and saying there’s no evidence for each assertion; rather, we go talk about cool stuff in science, how the world actually works, what the universe really looks like…and our explanations are sufficient without quoting a single Bible verse.
My version of science is puttering around quietly in an air-conditioned lab. Peter Ward’s version involves travel to exotic oceans, pirates, death, and crippling risks to life and limbs. And cephalopods.
Excuse me, I have to go curl up quietly in a dark corner and feel inadequate for a while.
How else is Google Maps going to get coverage of the 70% of the planet underwater?
(via Cephalove)
I read this and thought, “but you’re alone either way!”
It tells you all you need to know about the people who endorse that kind of message, anyway.
(Sharing because I disagree!)
Ray Comfort is a very nice person in person, but there’s a price to pay: Heina warns us all of the deceptive uses of politeness. I agree, but then I’m from Minnesota, where assassination by niceness is endemic (we transplants are fully aware that “nice” is a wicked backhanded compliment when used properly, which native Minnesotans seem to be able do unconsciously and effortlessly).
Don’t worry, I’m not likely to forget that while he’s smiling at you to your face, Comfort is also disgorging toxic waste and ignorance out of his ass.
