On every point. This debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye is a mistake. It’s a fundraiser for the Creation Museum. Bill Nye is going to be making profits for creationism.
That should give Nye pause. At least demand it be held on neutral ground and that all revenues be donated to a mutually acceptable charity.
Martin Robbins has a good guest post at Adventures in Ethics and Science on the Bora situation. I asked what is the path to redemption; he provides an answer. There isn’t one. If you’re looking for a way back to the previous situation, you won’t find it.
Because ultimately, getting your friends and your career back shouldn’t be the goal at all. The goal should be to fix yourself, and to do everything in your power to ensure that you never find yourself back here again. That means acknowledging everything that happened – not just the stuff people have found out about so far. It means accepting that there may be situations that you need to avoid in future. It means admitting just how bad things got, and beginning a process of real, honest change to make them better.
It isn’t easy, and it may not relaunch your career or win your friends back or repair your damaged reputation. It may mean sacrifice – changing career, moving cities, accepting that you’ll never regain certain friendships – but eventually you’ll be able to look at yourself in the mirror and know that you’ve grown and improved; that you’ve made genuine progress toward a better and healthier future; that you can be proud of your achievements in the months or years since you made the decision to change.
But he wouldn’t debate Aron Ra and me. I guess he was fishing for a bigger media bang for the buck.
I have a feeling this won’t go well. Neither Nye nor Ham have reputations as debaters (neither do I, but I was going to just be there to back up Aron Ra), and let’s face it, debating is a very specific and narrow skill. They’re probably going to bumble past each other for an hour. Nye will do a better job of explaining how the science actually works, Ham will just do his usual canned schtick for his friendly audiences, and given that he will pack the place with evangelicals, it will go over well there…but the rest of the world will see it and declare it stupid.
Ham has already announced that he’s going to school Nye on this “historical and observational science” bullshit that his cronies invented. I hope Nye is prepared to reject it.
It’s supposed to be a respectable newspaper, but it has always published the most awful trash — and the latest example is a paean to white people. Not just any white people, though, but specifically well-bred WASPs. He favors a hereditary ruling class defined by race.
The U.S. once had an unofficial but nonetheless genuine ruling class, drawn from what came to be known as the WASP establishment. Members of this establishment dominated politics, economics and education, but they do so no longer. The WASPocracy, as I think of it, lost its confidence and, with it, the power and interest to lead. We are now without a ruling class, unless one includes the entity that has come to be known as the meritocracy—presumably an aristocracy of sheer intelligence, men and women trained in the nation’s most prestigious schools.
It just gets worse and worse. The country has gone downhill to the point where mongrels like Obama and Ted Cruz can achieve high political position. He also sneers at education, other than the social primping done at Andover and Yale; but even they’ve gone to the dogs ever since they began dropping their age-old quotas on Catholics and Jews, lessening the number of legacies automatically admitted, and using racial preferences to encourage the enrollment of blacks
.
I know we’ve all been busy rolling our eyes at that racist misogynist homophobic shitbat, Phil Robertson, but maybe we should spare a moment to recognize that not just the A&E network, but one of the most influential newspapers in the US, loves its racism.
He confesses to criminal behavior. He smoked marijuana in high school, although he later stopped.
I think we gave it up, first, because we each had had a few embarrassing incidents. Stoned people do stupid things (that’s basically the point). I smoked one day during lunch and then had to give a presentation in English class. I stumbled through it, incapable of putting together simple phrases, feeling like a total loser. It is still one of those embarrassing memories that pop up unbidden at 4 in the morning.
I’ve read his essays in the New York Times, and given that response to smoking weed, I suspect he’s still lighting up a couple of times a day.
But here’s the weird disconnect in this particular story: He and his buddies smoked weed back in the day. It was fun.
They went at it for a while, and then It just sort of petered out, and, before long, we were scarcely using it.
I’ve never done the stuff myself — I have kind of a phobia about smoking anything, from growing up in a house with chain-smoking parents — but that’s what I saw in all my friends, too. There might have been a brief stoner phase, but then they gave it up, or maybe would just have an occasional joint at a party, but it was not a serious problem. I knew more people lost to alcoholism than to marijuana.
Yet the point of Brooks’ column is that Colorado and Washington have made a major mistake in legalizing marijuana! Apparently he was a wise and sensible human being who could try a drug a few times without harm, but all those kids in those Western states? Not to be trusted. And how dare the government abstain from scolding activities that he once enjoyed!
But, of course, these are the core questions: Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture? What sort of individuals and behaviors do our governments want to encourage? I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.
In legalizing weed, citizens of Colorado are, indeed, enhancing individual freedom. But they are also nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.
Right. Subtly discouraging lesser pleasures
involves throwing young people in jail.
It’s bizarre. Brooks really is a prim little snob; what he got away with should not be allowed for Youth of Today, and he’s got this weird thing going where he wants less government except that the government should be using threats and the police to make damn sure the kids like the arts rather than partying. So…does he also favor shutting down all state-run liquor stores? It would be the only consistent position to take, after all.
But it doesn’t matter. Brooks needs to be jailed, just to encourage a nurturing moral ecology for the rest of us and to get him off the pages of the NYT. If they can’t get him on drug charges, how about arresting him for wanton cruelty to logic and reason?
According to Fox News, that respected source, marriage died in 2013.
Marriage is over.
It was always at least a little funny that a huge percentage of people swore to stay together until death, then divorced and remarried.
But, now, it is, officially, judicially, a joke.
If two men can marry, and three men can marry, and five women and a man can marry, and three men and two women can marry, then marriage has no meaning.
It’s over. Go get rings, go get lawyers, go rent a nice hall, but City Hall should bow out.
I really wasn’t looking for a divorce, but I guess Mary and I will just have to live in sin from now on. Hmm. Maybe it will add a little thrill of the forbidden.
Bora Zivkovic is back, and he’s tweeting and blogging as if nothing happened…which rankles. I have to wonder what he has done or better yet, could do to make amends for the violations of trust, but a few months’ hiatus doesn’t quite seem adequate. I’m not a judge to levy a penalty, either, so I don’t know what to say, and it seems to me we lack any means of determining what is a sufficient price to pay.
Loss of widespread respect and of a good job does seem to be a substantial cost, but you’d think he’d come back with a little more humility…
Not that I was ever much of a booster, but this behind-the-scenes look at how team management operates by Chris Kluwe is disappointing. He was fired from his position as a punter after he’d achieved some notoriety for his progressive positions and lack of religiosity — and he now explains that it’s likely that it was because of those positions. And man, it sounds like he was working in an ugly environment.
Throughout the months of September, October, and November, Minnesota Vikings special-teams coordinator Mike Priefer would use homophobic language in my presence. He had not done so during minicamps or fall camp that year, nor had he done so during the 2011 season. He would ask me if I had written any letters defending "the gays" recently and denounce as disgusting the idea that two men would kiss, and he would constantly belittle or demean any idea of acceptance or tolerance. I tried to laugh these off while also responding with the notion that perhaps they were human beings who deserved to be treated as human beings. Mike Priefer also said on multiple occasions that I would wind up burning in hell with the gays, and that the only truth was Jesus Christ and the Bible. He said all this in a semi-joking tone, and I responded in kind, as I felt a yelling match with my coach over human rights would greatly diminish my chances of remaining employed. I felt uncomfortable each time Mike Priefer said these things. After all, he was directly responsible for reviewing my job performance, but I hoped that after the vote concluded in Minnesota his behavior would taper off and eventually stop.
My limited experience with football coaches suggests that this isn’t an unusual attitude they take. Kluwe also stirred up concern because he said a few harsh things about the Catholic Church — I can relate.
On Feb. 11, I received a message saying, “Please fly under radar please,” from a phone number I would later learn belonged to Rick Spielman. The text message presumably concerned several things I had tweeted that day regarding Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to step down. Spielman later called me and asked me to stop tweeting about the pope because angry people were ringing up team headquarters in Winter Park, Minn. It should be noted that my tweets concerned the lack of transparency and endemic institutional corruption of the Catholic Church, which among other things allowed child abuse to flourish. I also pointed out how that applied equally to financial and government institutions, and reiterated that I had nothing against anyone’s religion, only against the abuses of power that institutions allow. Nonetheless, I complied with Spielman’s request and did not tweet anything else about the pope that day, or in the future.
Now I’m really looking forward to the American Atheists convention in Salt Lake this April — Kluwe is the keynote speaker. I hope I can meet him there, and shake his hand.
But then there are a lot of good people who will be speaking there: Barry Lynn, Maryam Namazie, Matt Dillahunty, Greta Christina, Sikivu Hutchinson, Vyckie Garrison…you should register now!
Six of nine is too many, I think, especially when their religion is beginning to shape court decisions. Even the judge we’d hoped would be a little more progressive, Justice Sotomayor, bent over backwards to pander to weird Catholic views on contraception. It’s even worse than that: she granted an injunction to allow Catholic employers to not fill out a form stating that they were not providing coverage for contraception.
Late on New Year’s Eve, Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted a small number of religiously affiliated groups a temporary injunction from a provision in the Affordable Care Act that allows them not to cover contraception in their health care plans if they fill out a form that states that they want an exemption from the law for religious reasons. Go ahead and read that sentence again. These Catholic non-profits that wanted an exemption from covering their employees’ contraception needs—and got an exemption from covering their employees’ contraception needs—are now fighting the provision (that exempts them from covering their employees’ contraception needs) simply because they don’t want to have to fill out a form that states that they are exempt. Why? Because their employees need that form in order to get birth control directly from their insurers (which they need to do because their employers—these Catholic non-profits—are exempt, as they want to be).
Those wicked people! Their bosses told them that they weren’t paying for their condoms, so it’s perfectly reasonable for the bosses to also dictate that they can’t go anywhere else to get support for contraception.
That church really is an evil and controlling organization, through and through.
