Interesting term

I wouldn’t have thought this possible, but it’s happening: the rise of the I-Love-Jesus atheist. I’d qualify it a bit, though, because this isn’t the generic benign Jesus, but the immigrant-hating white Jesus of American evangelical Christianity, and it’s also a Jesus divorced from any religious tradition. They’re accepting one religious figure to spite women and people of color. It’s revealing that many atheists weren’t in the movement for freethought or a rejection of dogma, but for the anti-feminism, anti-Muslim side of atheism, and they’re now enthusiastically joining forces with the regressive right, no matter their views on gods, to exercise that hatred further.

Not surprising. None of the chaos within atheism has been about our beliefs (or lack thereof) in gods, but about our beliefs about how other human beings should be treated.

Making an eye

How timely! We just started talking about evolution in my first year intro biology course, and next week we’re getting into eye evolution, and this video comes out.

I assigned it to my students, naturally. That and some reading.

What has Adam Corolla been up to lately?

No good and getting worse, I guess. He’s teamed up with right-wing fruitcake Dennis Prager to promote something called “No Safe Spaces” which is…I don’t know what it is. An opportunity for conservatives to whine about higher education, or something? Anyway, here’s a promo for it.

Warning: the first third of this video is set on “Utopia University”, of which Corolla says, That campus doesn’t really exist, does it? That doesn’t even look like parody to me. You could run that after Don Lemon’s show on CNN, and it would just play like a commercial. I think you’re going to see that Corolla has a bit of a credibility problem.

No university looks anything like that. I don’t understand the logic of proclaiming the importance of free speech while striving to silence all those liberal voices that make narrow-minded bigots uncomfortable.

Also, further statements that question Corolla’s credibility: in explaining their pairing, he says that Prager has more wisdom than anyone he knows (which might well be true), and that…he’s funny. I think we can safely say that statement is false.

Jon Del Arroz tries so hard to promote himself

Jon Del Arroz bubbled up in my news again — you may remember him as the self-aggrandizing fellow who bills himself as the “Leading Hispanic Voice in Science Fiction” and who last rose to my attention as yet another rabid puppy whimpering about SJWs with made-up statistics and bad analyses. He’s making noise again, not for the excellence of his writing, but because he had his membership to WorldCon revoked.Oops. It’s hard to lead from the rubbish bin.

But his complaining provoked Jim Hines to catalog all the reasons he was banned. That’s going to leave a mark. I can’t say that I’m sorry to see an anti-feminist, anti-social justice friend of Vox Day get a public spanking, but it’s kind of sad to see someone who works so dang hard at self-promotion accomplish the reverse of what he intended.

There are more Stephen Millers out there

That a young racist asshole like Miller has risen to become the man in charge of immigration policy in America is scary enough, but there are still more Children of the Corn waiting their turn. Take a look at Cory Carnley. All you need is this one picture to know he’s a terrible human being.

Yeah, he’s proud of reporting a fellow student to ICE, because turning in race traitors is what the Hitler Youth do. He also likes to get on social media and argue that he ought to be allowed to say the “N” word, recite nonsense from The Bell Curve, threaten to murder immigrants, and say “Merry Christmas” as offensively as possible.

He’ll go far, I’m afraid.

Well, being expelled from high school for being a ranting jackhole might put a brief glitch in his plans. Having his name spread far and wide may also slow him down a little, until Trump sees him and makes him a duke or something.