That’s a good question
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I’m going to try a different approach to Sam Harris’s accusations. Since one of the problems with grappling with the objectionable ideas Harris has thrown out is that they’re fuzzily presented and laced with caveats to hide behind, I’ll just state my position as clearly as I can on a couple of the contentious issues, and why I think that way. Maybe contrasting them with Harris’s arguments will at least clarify the differences.
It’s going to be so much fun for them. “Hi, little girl. Piss in this cup for me.”
Although they never seem to get around to catering to my fantasies. “Hey, mature and intelligent woman, the law says you have to play with my squid.” Maybe if they did, more people would sit up and question the invasion of privacy.
I haven’t even glanced at that awful Instahack’s blog in years, and now I am reminded why. Here’s what he has to say about the recent murders at a Sikh temple:
The 6 Sikh temple shooting victims identified; Satwant Singh Kaleka died trying to fight off shooter. Heroic. But it’s too bad he didn’t have a gun.
What? So it’s Kaleka’s fault because he wasn’t carrying a gun? In a temple?
In Instahack’s world, are we supposed to be armed everywhere?
In an obvious ploy to appear erudite and well-read, Mitt Romney recently cited Jared Diamond to support his ill-informed opinions on culture. It’s really a bad idea to misrepresent a living scientist, because they tend to come back and expose you as a dishonest fraud.
It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”
That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore, which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized my book in his memoir, “No Apology: Believe in America.”)
Oops. Didn’t read the book, huh? I’ve had a few student papers like that.
The real stinger is in the conclusion.
Mitt Romney may become our next president. Will he continue to espouse one-factor explanations for multicausal problems, and fail to understand history and the modern world? If so, he will preside over a declining nation squandering its advantages of location and history.
Too often, he softballs truly odious guests on his show, and sometimes he practices that annoying false equivalency, but I have to admit, he’s exactly right here.
Abdi Jeylani Malaq Marshale must have been an awesomely brave person. He lived in Somalia, he was a comedian, he made fun of Islamists, and he worked to dissuade young people from joining the insurgency.
So someone shot and killed him.
And it’s not just comedians!
So far this year, at least one Somali journalist has been targeted and killed each month.
I would have thought that it was a relief, a minor bit of unconcern, that Mitt Romney nominally supports evolution (he’s one of those waffly theistic evolutionists, so he doesn’t really…but at least he wouldn’t be brazenly contradicting all of the evidence). But there’s a potential problem looming: who will he pick for vice president? Who does he turn to advice on education? Ken Miller discusses the situation, and points out that his key advisor on education reform and potential VP pick is…
Bobby Jindal, creationist governor of Louisiana.
Jindal has an elite résumé. He was a biology major at my school, Brown University, and a Rhodes scholar. He knows the science, or at least he ought to. But in his rise to prominence in Louisiana, he made a bargain with the religious right and compromised science and science education for the children of his state. In fact, Jindal’s actions at one point persuaded leading scientific organizations, including the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, to cross New Orleans off their list of future meeting sites.
What did Jindal do to produce a hornet’s nest of “mad scientists,” as Times-Picayune writer James Gill described them? He signed into law, in Gill’s words, the “Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), which is named for what it is designed to destroy.” The act allows “supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials” to be brought into classrooms to support the “open and objective discussion” of certain “scientific theories,” including, of course, evolution. As educators who have heard such coded language before quickly realized, the act was intended to promote creationism as science. In April, Kevin Carman, dean of the College of Science at Louisiana State University, testified before the Louisiana Senate’s Education Committee that two top scientists had rejected offers to come to LSU because of the LSEA, and the school may lose more scientists in the future.
And now Jindal is poised to spend millions of dollars of state money to support the teaching of creationism in private schools.
But don’t panic! Jindal is currently just one possibility for VP, and there are plenty of other Republicans Romney might pick…like Nikki Haley, or Rick Santorum, or Michele Bachmann…
OK, panic. There’s no way we’ll be happy with anyone he chooses.
He just praised a universal health care system.
"Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the G.D.P. in Israel? Eight percent,” [Romney] said. "You spend eight percent of G.D.P. on health care. You’re a pretty healthy nation. We spend 18 percent of our G.D.P. on health care, 10 percentage points more. That gap, that 10 percent cost, compare that with the size of our military — our military which is 4 percent, 4 percent. Our gap with Israel is 10 points of G.D.P. We have to find ways — not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to fund and manage our health care costs.
Why does Mitt Romney hate America?
That man is a dangerous lunatic. He’s got a theological dedication to insisting that the US must be run exclusively by the 18th century principles of the Founding Fathers — even when he’s willing to consider limitations on the ownership of weapons, he gives it an unbelievable twist.
The justice explained that under his principle of originalism, some limitations on weapons were possible. Fox example, laws to restrict people from carrying a "head axe" would be constitutional because it was a misdemeanor when the Constitution was adopted in the late 1700s.
What the hell is a “head axe”, I wondered. So I looked it up. Here’s a picture:
OK, that looks nasty. I’m glad the Supreme Court will think that casually carrying around a deadly looking thing like that is not reasonable behavior.
But then look where his reasoning takes him:
"What about these technological limitations?" Wallace wondered. "Obviously, we’re not now talking about a handgun or a musket, we’re talking about a weapon that can fire a hundred shots in a minute."
"We’ll see," Scalia replied. "Obviously the amendment does not apply to arms that can not be hand-carried. It’s to ‘keep and bear’ so it doesn’t apply to cannons."
Oh, good. We can restrict people’s ownership of cannons…because he interprets the Constitution with a Ken Ham-like literal-mindedness that says the only weapons that count are carried.
"But I suppose there are handheld rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes that will have to — it’s will have to be decided," he added.
So no head axes, and no artillery…but the right to keep and bear arms can be extended to fucking rocket launchers.
I give up. Our legal leadership consists of brain-damaged, narrowly literal-minded amoral morons who worship an 18th century scrap of paper.
