You have to listen to Rick Wiles pontificating on the death of Scalia. It’s free-form stream of consciousness in which he connects the dots on his own delusions to conclude that Obama sacrificed Scalia in a Luciferian
ritual.
You can be an engineer, too!
Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers are jabbering in Minneapolis tonight, and Lindsey and Ryan are liveblogging the event. It sounds dreadful, and I’m glad I didn’t even try to make the drive in. Highlights so far: Milo’s contribution was all of ten minutes long, in which he characterized feminism as nasty, bitter, ugly, lesbianic hate fest
, and Christina’s trying to criticize modern feminism by slapping around Andrea Dworkin. And then it’s over.
It was a free event, so I guess everyone got what they paid for.
Another fun moment in the Q&A. They were asked by one of the dudebros in the audience about how to defeat the affirmative consent requirement at the U of M (wait, why would anyone oppose that?), and Milo made some dismissive joke about it. Lindsey’s comment:
So. We now have 200 guys who have had a pundit they admire tell them that conversations about consent kills fun, and requiring affirmative consent is absurd. Women of the U of M, this is an appropriate time to be scared.
I also like this:
Hahahaha oh man, Milo just said feminism is hurting women because it’s chasing away good guys who are going to retreat into video games and porn instead of having a relationship with a woman given this climate. Don’t let the door hit ya, guys.
Now that’s a terrifying thought. Bruner is a retired teacher (!) running for the Texas School Board (!!) with a set of beliefs about science that ought to have gotten her fired long, long ago. Instead, she’ll probably find herself in that nest of loons with influence over textbooks all around the country.
Bruner, in fact, has written about the extinction of dinosaurs.
When the flood waters subsided and rushed into the oceans there was no vegetation on the earth because the earth had been covered with water. . . . The dinosaurs on [Noah’s ark] may have been babies and not able to reproduce. . . . After the flood, the few remaining Behemoths and Leviathans may have become extinct because there was not enough vegetation on earth for them to survive to reproductive age.Meanwhile,
Climate change has nothing to do with weather or climate, it’s all about system change from capitalism (free enterprise) to Socialism-Communism. The Climate Change HOAX was Karl Marx’s idea. It took time to ‘condition’ the people so they would believe such a HOAX!
We haven’t even gotten to her political beliefs, which are just about as nutty.
That a few kooks exist and think they’re qualified for high office is never surprising. What’s troubling is that there are a significant number of people who will vote for her.
It’s a surprisingly fraught issue, and it may get worse. The South Dakota legislature wants to pass House Bill 1008. The Republicans there seem to be obsessed with who is using the bathroom.
FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to restrict access to certain restrooms and locker rooms in public schools.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA:
Section 1. That chapter 13-24 be amended by adding a NEW SECTION to read:
The term, biological sex, as used in this Act, means the physical condition of being male or female as determined by a person’s chromosomes and identified at birth by a person’s anatomy.
Section 2. That the code be amended by adding a NEW SECTION to read:
Every restroom, locker room, and shower room located in a public elementary or secondary school that is designated for student use and is accessible by multiple students at the same time shall be designated for and used only by students of the same biological sex. In addition, any public school student participating in a school sponsored activity off school premises which includes being in a state of undress in the presence of other students shall use those rooms designated for and used only by students of the same biological sex.
I just signed on to do a half-dozen panels at Convergence, 30 June – 3 July in Bloomington. You should all come. You could boo me from the audience.
But a better reason to attend is that it also hosts SkepchickCon, which is busy raising money to fund all kinds of exciting events. It’s going to be a fun and exciting weekend!
It’s another of those stories.
Det. Sgt. Troy Gilleylen of the Battle Creek Police Department said Babick and her 25-year-old boyfriend, whose name was not released, were in their upstairs bedroom at the time of the shooting, lying on their bed watching television. The boyfriend’s .45-caliber handgun was on the bed, after it had just been cleaned and loaded.
Babick got up from the bed to answer the telephone, the boyfriend told police, and when she got back in bed, the gun discharged, sending a bullet through her left rib cage.
She staggered downstairs and collapsed in the living room, where she died.
That’s tragic and terrible. But this is what also makes me furious.
The man told police she may have lain on top of the gun, or somehow hit it with her hand when she got back on the bed, causing it to discharge. Gilleylen said the distraught man has been “100 percent cooperative” with police and he has not been charged in the incident.
Wait. He’s lounging about with a loaded handgun in bed, and it goes off and kills a woman, and the police do nothing? Isn’t there a charge like negligent homicide that would be appropriate here?
This man is an idiot who killed another human being with stupidity. At the very least, he ought to have his privilege to carry guns around taken away, especially since there are two children living there. Do we have to wait until an ‘accident’ kills one of them?
Nah. As we all know, a gun-fondlers right to be a danger to others may not be infringed.
Once again, Bill Maher (and his science expert, David Duchovny) went off on a tirade against vaccination on his show, full of ignorance and stupidity and lies. Time to read Orac some more.
Bill Maher and his apologists frequently gasp in indignation whenever someone like myself or other skeptics call him antivaccine. Unfortunately, as I showed last week, antivaccine tropes fly fast and furious out of his mouth. His misleading claim about the lack of vaccinated/unvaccinated studies is not only misleading, but objectively not not true. It simply isn’t. Also, whenever antivaccine organizations try to do such studies themselves, inevitably they’re utterly worthless and/or actually show the exact opposite of what antivaccinationists had hoped. When vaccinated/unvaccinated studies are planned, they are actually attacked by antivaccine groups because these groups know that the studies won’t show what they hope they’ll show.
Yes, the claim that there’s never been a “vaccinated/unvaccinated” study is an antivaccine trope, tried and true. What Maher said about it would have been perfectly at home on the websites of antivaccine groups, such as Age of Autism, SafeMinds, VaxTruth, and the National Vaccine Information Center. Ditto his analogies about the immune system “needing a workout” by combatting “real disease,” an analogy so breathtakingly ignorant of actual immunology and infectious disease that Maher should really just hang his head in shame.
Maher has zero credibility with me.
I think I’ve been trying to say the same thing for a few years, but it’s good to see Feminace say it clearly.
On the other hand, it’s the sort of atheism that we need so badly. An atheism that goes beyond “I don’t believe in gods”. One that goes past the dictionary definition and into “Now what do I do about it?”.
That’s the atheism I’m interested in. The one that tries to make the world a better place without god. If that’s not yours, fine (okay, not fine, but I’m not going to waste time arguing with you), but get the fuck out of my way.
It’s always depressing to see how many people will wax indignant at the thought that they might be expected to make the world a better place without god. How dare we?
It’s sort of the atheist version of this cartoon.
Uncommon Descent linked to my criticisms of the Biology of the Baroque
, Intelligent Design creationism’s latest misconception, that biologists believe every detail of every organism is the product of natural selection…but they didn’t bother to quote any of my criticisms. It’s weird. They could have quoted the gist of my complaint:
So evolution should produce only the biological equivalent of sterile gray Soviet architecture, and if you find something that is the equivalent of a Baroque church, then evolution is refuted. This entire argument is built around what Michael Denton calls the fundamental assumption of Darwinism…that all novelties are adaptive. To which biologists around the world can only say, “Fu…wha?” in total confusion. That is not one of our assumptions at all. Novelties are going to arise as a product of chance mutation; if they are not maladaptive (and sometimes even if they are), they can spread through a population by chance-driven processes like drift. And some elaborate fripperies can acquire a selective advantage, like that example of Soviet architecture, the peacock’s tail, which this video actually uses as an example of non-adaptive order.
