Some movie makers are trying to raise money to distribute their film, and it looks good and sends the right message. It’s titled Hug an Atheist.
I don’t mind an occasional hug, but remember, though: some people are very uncomfortable with personal contact, and being an atheist is not a label that says you have permission to cross boundaries.
Except at the mandatory Satan-worshipping orgies. Oh, wait, did I let that slip?
(via Lousy Canuck.)
My children are fortunate to all be fully grown, so I can’t warp them in their formative years by exposing them to children’s programming like this:
Actually, even as a grown up myself, I’m feeling a bit perturbed by all that. Perhaps it isn’t too late!
On the eve of the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, it’s nice of the Secular Coalition of Australia to apologize for sending Ken Ham to us. But, to be honest, I cannot accept the apology. Ken Ham’s ideas were forged in the crucible of raging American fundagelicalism — he has explicitly credited The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications by Whitcomb and Morris as his inspiration for the idiocy he promotes, and it really is the bog-standard Young Earth Creationism formulated in the 1960s by frustrated American creationists who were trying to appropriate scientific respectability for their religious cause. So we are ultimately responsible for poisoning the entire planet with this nonsense (you aren’t alone, either; Turkish creationism is really just regurgitated bilge from The Genesis Flood, too).
I do think the Australian suggestions for what Bill Nye ought to do to Ken Ham to be possibly acceptable, however — if only someone could translate them into English.
So on Tuesday, when you’re roasting the Ham and his patently ridiculous ideas on the rotisserie of logic, tell him you’ve got a message from Australia. Tell him from us that we used his state-issued Akubra hat to cover a hole in the national chookhouse shed, that he is no longer entitled to use his formal Australian name (Kenno) and that he is now forbidden any Tim Tams – ever again. Also, that whenever his name comes up at Christmas, while we sit around drinking white wine in the sun, there will be a formal awkward silence of twenty to forty seconds, until someone brightly offers everyone pudding. And if you could manage to kick him in the shins and tell him and his ilk to leave our kids alone, Bill – we’d owe you one.
This should be good: Jennifer Ouellette has a new book out, Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self 
No worries, everyone! You’re not going to have to make any sacrifices, change life styles, or invest in alternative energy sources, because there is a shortcut: just ask god to fix it.
The Utah Farm Bureau asked the public to join in prayer and fasting for moisture for livestock and crops as part of its Harvesting Faith event Sunday.
Utah dairy farmer Ron Gibson told the Deseret News that farmers "can’t go to the Legislature to ask for help, (so they instead) decided to go to the guy upstairs."
Think it’ll work?
Oh, you atheists, I know you’re all thinking that it’s not nice to pick on stupid ideas, especially since this was an interfaith service.
Rajan Zed, who organized the Nevada service, says it drew Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish and other faith leaders.
Don’t you know that if you gather together a diverse enough collection of idiotic ideas, they magically become sensible? If only they’d brought in the Satanists, the Scientologists, a mob of ghost hunters, some ancient astronaut fanatics, Bigfoot, and a crack team of dedicated UFOlogists, they would have reached critical mass and it would be raining buckets in the West right now.
Obama mentioned that women make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men. You know what that means? Cue the jerks making bogus statistical arguments to make the gap go away — in this case, wouldn’t you know it, Christina Hoff Sommers.
What is wrong and embarrassing is the President of the United States reciting a massively discredited factoid. The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents.
“When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration” is code for “I’m going to make excuses to justify the difference” — it’s not that the average woman is going to find herself 23% richer when Sommers is done, it’s just that she’s going to unthinkingly apply some fudge factors to the numbers to tell us that a yearly income of $23,000 is actually the same as $30,000. And of course there are people who will seriously believe that.
But she gives the game away in that paragraph. The 23 cent gender gap is actually real, because it’s an overall measure of the average man’s and woman’s earnings — Obama wasn’t wrong at all, he just wasn’t respecting anti-feminists’ dishonest manipulation of the data. When we appreciate that total earnings are a result of multiple factors, if we catalog all those factors and then dismiss all the ones that show discriminatory patterns of reward in society, then we can explain the difference as fair and natural.
So what factors does she list as contributing to women’s lower income?
Men and women differ in their college majors. Does she stop and ask why? Why are women more likely to major in social work than engineering? Why should women be less likely to enter engineering? I know women who are engineers, physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists — it’s not as if breasts get in the way of doing factor analysis, or as if a penis makes one incapable of caring about human beings.
The professions favored by women pay less well than the professions favored by men. Does she stop and ask why? Why are social workers paid less than engineers? Why should we consider social work less important than engineering? In Sommers’ list of majors and their average earnings, does even give the briefest consideration to the curious fact that most of the top ten most remunerative professions are men dominated, while most of the bottom ten least remunerative professions are women dominated?* No, not in the slightest.
Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones. In the pursuit of happiness, men and women appear to take different paths.
Even if we take that as a given (I don’t; I think social pressures push people into jobs they may not desire as much as Sommers thinks), it leaves unanswered the big question: why does society reward “people-free” jobs more than it does caring ones?
There is a point to working out all the contributing factors to average income: it’s to identify where the inequities are being generated, so that we can correct them and reward people fairly for their work. Not to Christina Hoff Sommers, though:
Much of the wage gap can be explained away by simply taking account of college majors.
That says so much. She’s looking for ways to explain away the differences. She’s not looking for answers, or ways to more fairly treat human beings, or any understanding of the very real economic differences between men and women. Here’s a shorter Christina Hoff Sommers: women get paid less because their work is less valuable.
And she isn’t even aware of how profoundly sexist her entire rationalization is.
What if we lived in a world where equal education and training and investment in preparing for a job led to jobs where the pay was equal? A social worker with a masters degree and ten years of experience should be getting roughly the same pay as an engineer with a masters degree and ten years experience, in a just world. We should appreciate that we need functional communities about as much as we need bridges and pipelines.
And why shouldn’t some men find social work a better fit to their personality than engineering? Or what are women with an aptitude for engineering doing in jobs that don’t fit their personality — because peer pressure tells women that math aptitude is manly?
Grr. Every time I read anything by Sommers, I come away appalled at how superficial and self-serving her analyses are. She’s a true champion of the status quo.
*By the way, she uses a really sneaky tactic in her lists: for the richest professions, she tells us what percent are men; for the poorest professions, she tells us what percent are women. The numbers may be perfectly accurate, but you can tell exactly how she wants to bias our perception of them.
Actually, I’m always appalled at any position taken by the anti-feminists — they rarely think in any way beyond justifying their prior views. This comic catches that attitude perfectly.
Seattle won the game part.
The commercials were won by Coca Cola.
Apparently, right wing nuts are having a meltdown over the desecration of using non-English lyrics. I don’t know why, they ought to be overjoyed to see a megacorporation cunningly using diversity and natural beauty to sell people sugar water and making patriotic music an ode to capitalism.
I’ll be hosting a session on Spiritual Abuse at FtBCon 2 at 9am. I’m just convening the event: the real work will be done by Vyckie Garrison, Ania Bula, Jamila Bey, and Heina Dadabhoy, who will be talking about…
What is spiritual abuse? What distinguishes “spiritual” abuse from regular forms of physical, emotional, and mental abuse?
In spiritual abuse, a person’s faith and ideas about God, the supernatural, and the afterlife, get intermingled and entwined with relational and behavioral choices so that the situation is not only about the way a person thinks, acts, and relates – it is primarily about the condition of your soul.
It’s hard to imagine a more crystal clear example of institutionalized racism than a racist football team owner giving his team a racist name, and then a generation later refuses to make a trivial change. Nothing big; just change the name to something a little more respectful…and apparently the right to use this slur is more important than respecting human beings.
Change the name. It’s obviously the right thing to do. Every day that the Washington football team delays is a day that their stubbornness and stupidity and bigotry becomes a more notable part of their history.
After I botched it last night, the Lovecraftians have regrouped and we will be having Cthulhu panel at FtBCon 2. It’s tonight, at 10pm Central (in about 2 hours). Confirmed: Michael Davis, Robert Price, Toren Atkinson, and me. A few others have been invited and might show up. If you’re desperately excited about shambling horrors from the outer darkness and really, really want to join in, email me, maybe I’ll squeeze you in. Also, we might need sacrifices.
And…here we are.
