There is a place for academic arguments — but in the real world, we have an obligation to take arguments that harm people seriously, and advocate honestly for what we really believe. If you’re talking about torture, for instance, you do no one any favor by inventing improbable-to-impossible scenarios and then making justifications that will be used in far less justifiable situations.
Last year, there was a rather ridiculous tempest in a tea cup in which our local conservative “alternative” student newspaper, the Morris North Star, published some sick racist crap, and I suggested that the campus ought to throw the paper out, and then they threatened to sue me. Nothing happened, except that the North Star stopped publishing for the rest of the semester — I think they probably ran out of money.
This year, I thought we might be rid of them. Their lawyers had gone silent, and no more crappy editions appeared. Unfortunately, our luck has run out, and new slimy stuff has appeared.
I thought I’d do them a favor. Since they’re so touchy about people taking their paper — they now say on the cover, First Copy: FREE. All subsequent copies are $5
— I thought I’d encourage you all to take zero copies. But if you’re really curious, I thought I’d be nice and summarize the content for you.
You must read her discussion of the ‘Kool-Aid Point’. There are a lot of interesting insights there.
This is ugly, and it pains me to spread these lies further, but I see it as the only way to expose them. This is a post on facebook that is all about me — it was apparently made in retaliation for me pointing out to Michael Nugent that his blog is a haven for slymepit scum, so one of those scum had to vent his fury.
I think the vindictive nature of this nonsense, and the absurdity of the lies he is spreading, will be obvious.
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I promised that all donations to Pharyngula for a couple of weeks would go to the Ada Initiative, less the price of taking my wife out to a nice dinner; I’ll be sending them the money on 1 October. I figured I’d fill you in on how things are going.
OK, I splurged. I took my wife out to the fanciest restaurant in Morris, Minnesota, and we just went nuts and ordered a fabulous meal. I hope you’ll all forgive me: dinner for two was -$21.18. A little extravagance was acceptable, I think.
The sum remaining is $1756.82. You could add more to that anytime — just click on that big “DONATE” button on the sidebar.
Too busy admiring the vast piles of completed grading on my desk. It’s like my little conquered empire.
I thought those didn’t exist! The countdown clock for Emma Watson, which was supposedly a 4chan effort to attack her for her pro-feminism speech at the UN, has now been revealed to be a marketing stunt by a PR company hired to discredit 4chan.
I have foolishly scheduled the exams in my two classes back-to-back…so it’s therefore twice the usual size. Furthermore, like a good liberal-artsy professor, my questions include a couple of subjective, explain-why-you-think-this-answer-is-right sort of questions that are going to be hellish to grade. How do you humanities professors cope?
Now sinking into a sea of red ink…
