Wrong interpretation, but the real thing is just as bad

I have to point out that Crooks and Liars got something wrong. They point out that an Alaska Republican said something incredibly stupid (surprise!), but they got what Charlie Huggins said wrong.

Huggins hails from Wasilla, and he wants middle schoolers subjected to DNA testing to see if they’re going to grow up to be criminals.

No. We can’t do that, obviously, because there is no genetic signature for criminality, so it would be stupid to suggest that. But Huggins wasn’t stupid, he was mainly wicked. Here’s what he actually said:

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Revenge porn doesn’t pay

justice

Kevin Bollaert is one of these sleazy, cowardly types who saw a market in getting other sleazy, cowardly types to send in naked pictures of their ex-girlfriends, and then he made money both in running the porn site and in demanding that his victims pay him money to remove the pictures. It’s a brilliant racket if you’ve got no sense of decency at all. He was convicted of the crimes, and has now been sentenced: 18 years in jail.

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Desperately stuffing the ballots

snarlpuppy

The slate of Hugo Award nominees has been announced, and it contains a sorry collection of right-wing has-beens who put together a set of Vox-Day-approved candidates and then went cruising through #gamergate, gathering assholes who would vote for them simply to poke Social Justice Warriors in the eye, rather than on the basis of the quality of the writing. They called it the “Sad Puppy slate”. I’ll just point out that there was no comparable effort to assemble a bloc of ideologically liberal authors and then ask people to vote for them sight unseen — which I would have also said was ethically questionable and rather undermines the purpose of a writing award.

The best take yet on the problematic nature of ballot-stuffing comes from Patrick Nielsen-Hayden.

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It is not close-minded to demand reasonable kinds of evidence

Close Up Of Smoking Black Candles

Greta Christina has followed up on EbonMuse’s challenge to theists, listing the kinds of evidence that would convince them that their beliefs were true.

If I’m such an open-minded atheist — if I really am an atheist because I think the God hypothesis is unsupported by the evidence — what evidence for God would I accept? What would it take to change my mind?

I’m going to take a rather different approach: I’m going to tell theists to not bother.

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Fatwah envy, again

I’m following the twitter conversation about the American Atheists convention this weekend, and in particular Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s talk. She’s reported to have said this:

If you are gay the worst the Christian community can do in America is not serve you cake.…I just want you to think about being Muslim and gay today…the worst case scenario…bullies throw you off a building.

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A sciencey word salad

gibberish

Larry Moran quotes this closing paragraph from an actual, published paper in a respectable journal. I don’t understand what it means. Can somebody explain why these terms are mashed together in this way?

We close this essay by postulating that there has been a pervasive influence of the gene centrism inherent in the Modern Synthesis in conjunction with the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology on biomedical thinking. We believe that this influence has now become counterproductive. Thus, it is critical for new ideas stemming from evolutionary biology highlighted in this special issue of The Journal of Physiology and elsewhere to more fully inform biomedical thinking about the complex relationship between DNA and phenotype. The time has come to stop chasing Mendel.

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