Perhaps you’ve heard about the disgraceful spectacle of extraordinarily dogmatic Jewish men refusing to be seated on an airplane next to a woman. It’s a revolting exhibition of religiously-sanctioned bigotry, but there you have it…people are allowed to be bigots. We don’t usually make special accommodations for bigoted ideas, though.
But I have a solution. A simple solution.
Greta Christina deservedly excoriates Sam Harris for his sexist remarks, and does a magnificent job of shredding him and his doubling down. It’s brutal.
The NRA wouldn’t allow stupid people to handle a deadly weapon, would they?
Good question.
Somewhere in the midst of my usual Monday swirl of work, I’ll be making time for a few events with a visiting scholar: Peter Agre, Nobel Laureate, is spending the day at UMM. He’ll be giving a couple of open lectures: at 10:30, he’ll be telling us about aquaporins, and at 7 he’ll be giving a less technical lecture on science education. Maybe I’ll see you there!
Some of the best evidence against dualism is the experience of stroke victims — in an instant, a small biological incident can completely change who you are. This story by Christina Hyung-Oak Lee, about her stroke at the age of 33, is fascinating and terrible. Also a bit scary, since her stroke symptoms didn’t fit any of the standard easy diagnostics, and it was days before she went in for treatment.
I have been down the rabbit hole. I got sucked down into a prolonged web search on the matter of pre-WWII eugenics, which is more than a little squicky, but was fascinated to discover a thriving community of correspondents which reminded me precisely of the various flavors of blog commenters today — that is, opinionated, sometimes pretentious, and often liberally sprinkled with asses. I started picking out names and searching for their contributions.
It’s the Kinabalu Giant Red Leech of Borneo! This foot long beast isn’t satisfied with merely sucking blood, it swallows its prey whole.
I promised that all donations to Pharyngula for a couple of weeks would go to the Ada Initiative, less the price of taking my wife out to a nice dinner; I’ll be sending them the money on 1 October. I figured I’d fill you in on how things are going.
OK, I splurged. I took my wife out to the fanciest restaurant in Morris, Minnesota, and we just went nuts and ordered a fabulous meal. I hope you’ll all forgive me: dinner for two was -$21.18. A little extravagance was acceptable, I think.
The sum remaining is $1756.82. You could add more to that anytime — just click on that big “DONATE” button on the sidebar.
It’s reassuring to know that it’s not just other atheists who hate me, but that I also still piss off the creationists. In addition to the mob of atheist dudebros howling at my door, there has been a recent resurgence of creationist loonietarianism in my email. It seems to have been triggered by a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, Doug Batchelor.
