Heh…I knew it wouldn’t be at all difficult to get a feminist to back me up on my wild and crazy claim that feminists didn’t mind getting rude. There’s a nice photo of a long-skirted lady in a big hat teaching a British bobby the delicate ways of politesse, too. Maybe the critics can wait until we start roughing up the police before accusing us atheists of bad manners now.
Darksyde has just announced a few details about the science panels that will be held at the YearlyKos Convention. One relevant piece of information is that I’m the guy in charge of the science caucus, and I have to organize something. If Darksyde had ever seen my office, organization is not a word that would have come to mind…
Let’s support the troops! I always thought those stupid yellow ribbon magnets that people stuck on their cars were insulting in their triviality, but I did not know how low we could sink in the insipidity of token nods to those who are making sacrifices in the services. Mike Dunford received some helpful email from the military:
Effective immediately, the word “Families” will be capitalized in all Army correspondence. Please ensure wide dissemination of this change. Thanks for your continued efforts to do all you can to provide steadfast support to our Army Families.
There’s an “F” word on the tip of my tongue that would be appropriate here…
You’re bored with it? I’m bored with it. All bored now. But since the discussion is still going on everywhere, and I’m frothing rabid (as everyone knows) and always ready to snarl and bite even when (especially when?) I’m beset with ennui, I’ll call your attention to Greg Laden again. He’s pointing out that Nesbit/Mooney have poorly framed — I swear, I never want to use that word ever again — their argument for the evolution-creation conflict, which might explain why they are being so poorly received by some of us who are focused on that ugly mess. That, and the fact that parts of their report read like a pious Discovery Institute press release, which sets our jangled immune systems on fire like a bee sting triggering anaphylactic shock, and no one’s slinging any epinephrine our way.
It looks like they talking about approaches more like we find in Kennith Miller’s “Finding Darwin’s God: A scientist’s search for common ground between god and evolution.” This needs to be clarified, and if this is in fact what they are talking about, then there is something very important that they don’t get, and they need to be flogged, then ignored. If, on the other hand, they are just kind of talking vaguely about this issue and are not explicitly arguing for a god/science chimeric view, then they should be very eager to be educated on this and then to move on with framing but using a very different approach.
We can’t use an approach that brings god into the evolution picture. This is not because of atheism (though that position would make this same argument). It is because it is a) bad science; b) a wedge for bringing various forms of creationism into the classroom and c) illegal.
OK, Greg has put up some very specific issues and questions that fans of the f-word should deal with it. Please do.
Now, since I’ve bored myself again, but since I did mention “rabid” and “flogging”, I’ll recommend that everyone read this article. It’s much more entertaining, even if the thought of 103 literally rabid Christian fanatics gives me the heebie-jeebies. It’s alright if you’d rather talk about that than the f-word, too.
Crud. Laden has added a link to an interview with Nisbet. How would you f-word the idea that the earth goes around the sun for Copernicus? He gives an answer I guess I should have expected.
He should be so proud — he has taken first place in the 2007 Jefferson Muzzle Awards. These are awards given for “egregious or ridiculous affronts to free expression in the previous year”, and little Georgie won it for:
For its unprecedented efforts of discouraging, changing, and sometimes censoring the reports and studies of government scientists in order to make them more supportive of political policies, a 2007 Jefferson Muzzle goes to… the Bush Administration.
It’s a well deserved honor. The description goes on to list several specific instances of Bush administration manipulation of scientific assessment, particularly in areas of climate and environment where scientific conclusions conflict with Republican bidness ties.
To my dismay, even after a good night’s sleep and a fresh perusal of the paper, after reading both of Greg Laden’s thorough articles, Mooney’s latest summary, Orac’s claim that it’s nothing but tailoring your message to your audience, and Nisbet’s roundup of responses, I’m still hopelessly confused. What the heck is this paper telling me to do?
Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney have a short policy paper in Science that criticizes scientists for how they communicate to the public. Mooney says that “many scientists don’t really know what they’re up against when suddenly thrust into the media spotlight and interactions with politicians” — I agree completely. We are not trained to be glib and glossy, and we simply do not come across as well as we could. We’re also not really that interested, generally speaking, in the kind of presentation that plays well in 3 minutes on a news broadcast. It’s more than a cosmetological failure, though; as Nisbet says, “scientists, without misrepresenting scientific information, must learn to shape or ‘frame’ contentious issues in a way that make them personally relevant to diverse segments of the public, while taking advantage of the media platforms that reach these audiences.” I can go along with that, too.
Well, I’ve been wrong all this time. It’s always been my opinion that if someone says they’re a Christian, they’re a Christian — I’m not going to nit-pick fine theological distinctions with someone, and if they want to claim the soiled and tattered title of Christianity, they’re welcome to it. An important figure in American religion and politics, James Dobson, has shown me to be wrong. He has his own special definition of “Christian”.
“Everyone knows he’s conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for,” Dobson said of Thompson. “[But] I don’t think he’s a Christian; at least that’s my impression,” Dobson added, saying that such an impression would make it difficult for Thompson to connect with the Republican Party’s conservative Christian base and win the GOP nomination.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Thompson, took issue with Dobson’s characterization of the former Tennessee senator. “Thompson is indeed a Christian,” he said. “He was baptized into the Church of Christ.”
In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson’s claim. He said that, while Dobson didn’t believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless “has never known Thompson to be a committed Christiansomeone who talks openly about his faith.”
“We use that wordChristianto refer to people who are evangelical Christians,” Schneeberger added. “Dr. Dobson wasn’t expressing a personal opinion about his reaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to ‘read the tea leaves’ about such a possibility.”
Thompson has said he is leaving the door open for a presidential run and has won plaudits from conservatives who are unenthusiastic about the Republican front-runners. A Gallup-USA Today poll, released Tuesday, showed Thompson in third place among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, behind former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Sen. John McCain.
I have to marvel at that. Suddenly, the ranks of the un-Christians have swollen immeasurably; a lot of the people I honestly like who go to church but aren’t jerks about their religion, i.e., they don’t proselytize, have been excommunicated by Pope Dobson, and are on my side in the War Against Religion. I have suddenly learned that none of the members of my family are Christians anymore — they may be a bit shocked to hear that, since they still go to church, but heck, High Authority, the Word of God’s Holiest Representative in North America, is not to be gainsaid.
Any of you readers who are not true Christians in the eyes of Dobson might as well give it up now and join me in total godlessness. When the Republic of Gilead is established and the Dobsonites run the country, you’re going to be up against the wall with the rest of us heretics, anyway.
You may recall my earlier complaint about the corruption and waste and profligacy of the head of the Smithsonian, Lawrence Small. A non-scientist, he spent the last few years padding his own nest by drawing on the resources of the Smithsonian, and was basically a typical Republican appointee.
The good news: Small has resigned, hopefully in disgrace. The bad news: he wasn’t frog-marched out of his office and thrown in jail. Still, let’s hope that many more Friends of Republicans are thrown out on their asses soon.
That phrase is a perfect summary of the influence of the Bush administration. It comes from an article in which a prosecutor explains how the office of the Attorney General undermined the tobacco lawsuit.
Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s office began micromanaging the team’s strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government’s claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.
She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.
“The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said,” Eubanks said. “And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public.”
The last few years make sense if you see them as a prolonged exercise in treachery at the highest level: a betrayal of the American public to benefit American corporate interests. Gonzales must go. Bush and Cheney must be impeached. Let’s not make the mistake we made with Nixon, letting a corps of criminals escape unscathed, even allowing them to continue their pernicious influence on government for another generation.
