Glenn Greenwald has a great long piece tearing Sam Harris’s ideas apart. It was so satisfying to see my own opinions reflected with such clarity and reason — I have to agree with it all. Read it. It is a thing of beauty.
I have to say one thing for Obama’s announcement of a new immigration policy: it has really smoked out the inhumane and vicious Republicans. There have been so many things said that reveal the core values of the Republican party, but this comment from a Fox News host captures the attitude perfectly.
It looks like that’s what I’m going to get, though. Mother Jones sent a reporter to the Urban Shield conference, a gathering of cops and their new toys. It’s chilling.
Every year in my intro biology course, I try to do one discussion of bioethics. One lecture is not much, but this is a course where we try to introduce students to the history and philosophy of science, and I think it’s an important issue, so I try to squeeze in a little bit. So we spend one day talking about eugenics and the Tuskegee syphilis study, and I have them read Gould’s Carrie Buck’s Daughter, and I try to provoke them into arguing with me, or at least questioning a few default assumptions.
This semester, though, I’m going to have them read something with some subtler concerns. I’m going to ask them to read about the invention of the modern speculum. It was surprisingly problematic.
People still want to discuss the ongoing ghastliness in Ferguson, MO, but the thread dedicated to that in Good Morning, America is getting old…and as a spam defensive measure, commenting on posts older than three months is automatically shut down. No exceptions allowed.
So here’s a fresh new post to accumulate comments!
There’s something deeply wrong in the world. The New York Times is reporting that the rich are stratifying into the merely obscenely rich, and the absurdly pornographically rich.
Philip Rushton has been selling private jets to the global rich for more than three decades. In just about every economic cycle, sales of small jets and big jets tended to move together — rising and falling with financial markets and fortunes of the wealthy.
Now, however, the jet market is splitting in two. Sales of the largest, most expensive private jets — including private jumbo jets — are soaring, with higher prices and long waiting lists. Smaller, cheaper jets, however, are piling up on the nation’s private-jet tarmacs with big discounts and few buyers.
Richard Dawkins tweeted something yesterday (cue foreboding music, cawing of ravens, the rumble of distant thunder):
Oh NO. Just checked my privilege. Turns out I'm a white heterosexual male. http://t.co/3I1J1dWRrq How can I atone? Hair shirt? Flagellation?
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) November 8, 2014
It was a painful 50 minutes, but I listened to the entirety of Peter Boghossian and Stefan Molyneux patting each other on the back, in this video, Feminists vs. Atheists: The Death of Rational Discourse. I think you can tell from the title that there is not much hope for rational discussion here, and from the two speakers, you know it’s going to be awful. What I did was listen while I was engaged in some other work, and just extract a few paraphrases of the conversation now and then, when they said something particularly tiresome.
And really, that’s what it’s all about: reciting cliches at each other without thought, repeating bogus accusations we’ve all heard a thousand times before. These are not people who think very deeply about much of anything.
So what I’ve done below is scribble down the general tenor of the discussion. This is not a transcript. I’ve included some time points so if you really want to, you can go back and check on all the context.
Tauriq does a marvelous job raking #gamergate over the coals on the issue of ethics — which they know nothing about. We already know it’s not about journalism, or they’d be targeting journalists and ‘zine publishers that have a cozy relationship with game publishers, and we can also see that the foaming-at-the-mouth GG advocates haven’t got even a passing acquaintance with the content of a first year philosophy of ethics course, so what can we conclude?
It’s almost Halloween, and people are decorating their houses and yards. One person in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, put a display up that elicited this mild reaction.
Fort Campbell Public Affairs officer Brendalyn Carpenter said that it was "her understanding that the display was not intended to be offensive, but authorities deemed it could be interpreted as such. She said the occupant did extend an apology about the decorations."
Oh, not intended to be offensive, but could be interpreted, possibly uncharitably and unfairly, as such. Where have I heard that kind of notpology before? It seems to be a fairly common sentence construction in English.
Of course, then you see a photo of the display and wonder how anyone could possibly see it as inoffensive.
