How depressed do you want to be?

Sean McElwee has been excerpts from a recent book about the Koch Brothers. What happens when cunning, obscenely rich fuckwits get it into their heads to promote their ideas by sinking money into miseducation programs?

kochs

They fill students heads with bad history, grossly oversimplified economics, and the worship of destructive policies. Well, destructive to the country, but great for billionaires.

Lesson plans and class materials obtained by The Huffington Post make the course’s message clear: The minimum wage hurts workers and slows economic growth. Low taxes and less regulation allow people to prosper. Public assistance harms the poor. Government, in short, is the enemy of liberty.

darkmoney

The book is Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer. Now I’m wondering how masochistic I am to want to read it. Talk me out of it, or so help me, I’ll download that Necrokochicon to my iPad and suffer the consequences.

He thinks this is a good thing?

I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, ok? It’s, like, incredible.

And his audience laughs?

Now that is chilling. The man thinks he’s above the law.

Of course, if he did shoot somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue, he might not lose any voters, but he’d be arrested and tried, right?

Right? Tell me he’d go to jail for a crime.

Please.

Memories!

A while back, I posted a scan of my daughter’s fractured elbow — Skatje had gone on a trek across Siberia and broken it, but soldiered on. In case you were wondering, she’s now had it treated: doctors broke it again, put her through surgery, bolted it all up, and she’s now recovering, with drugs and a sling and a supportive husband.

Just think: every time her joints ache, every time alarms go off as she goes through airport scanners, she’ll be reminded of her glorious Russian adventure on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The Trumpification of atheism

Amy Roth makes me sad with her perspective on the history of involvement with skepticism and atheism. How do you destroy a movement? By making enemies of the people who care about it.

Then Richard Dawkins made fun of Rebecca in the comment section of another blog. Literally within moments of that happening all of the women on Skepchick who were active writers at the time (most of them long gone now) became targets of an online hate campaign. It literally happened so fast that I didn’t have time to process it. One day I was a Dawkins and SGU fan who was dedicated to making the world better by encouraging more people to get involved with organized skepticism, atheism and critical thinking and then the next day I told I was part of a clique of radical feminists who should be raped and killed.

Atheism as a movement suffers from some serious internal contradictions. Atheism is largely an intellectual position, but the movement has aspirations to become popular and common, so it has to appeal to a broad base. Unfortunately, rational evaluation of an idea is rarely the key to popularity. You need to associate this one idea with something deeper, more universal, and more applicable to every day life. Morality. Humanity. History. Community. There are a thousand ways we could make reason and evidence-based decision making a part of our lives.

But you aren’t allowed. A significant fraction of atheists have looked at a dictionary and decided that atheism means denial of gods and absolutely nothing more. We have a noisy contingent that denies any consideration of broader meaning. But how did you come to this conclusi…HUSH! But doesn’t the absence of higher beings mean we…QUIET! Doesn’t this mean the human community is even more…ZIP IT! But there are deep implicati…SHUT UP! I AM AN ATHEIST BECAUSE THE DICTIONARY SAYS SO, AND IT DOESN’T SAY I HAVE TO DO NOTHIN’!

[Read more…]

Contracts? What?

Lyz Liddel is answering questions about the Reason Rally. It’s been off to a slow start, with only a small number of speakers, so there have been some concerns about what’s going on behind the scenes. But she still can’t give out any names.

I wish I could give you specific names right now! Alas, we’re still negotiating contract details and I have been sworn to utmost secrecy until those contracts are finalized (because leaking that information at this point could cause the speakers to back out, and that would be no fun).

What I can say is that if even a few of the speakers we’ve received preliminary “yes” responses from come through, our lineup for 2016 is going to knock the socks off the 2012 rally. We have mainstream musicians (in two rather surprisingly different genres), nationally known celebrities, and some very high-profile politicians who are interested in speaking.

Ooookay. It’s still a little odd. I was in the first one, and there were no “contracts” for many of us, I couldn’t imagine on insisting that the organizers hold off on naming me once I’d agreed, and I especially couldn’t imagine changing my mind if I were listed on a program before my “contract” was signed.

Maybe they’re signing really big names who live in a different kind of world than peons like me, but none of this rings true. Say there are some people who are more demanding than I was; hold off on them, but there must be lots of others who are eager to see this thing take off. I’ve been holding off on committing to attend because I want to see more reason to go to the Reason Rally, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

I hope Robyn Blumner will soon express her current position on divisive issues

I have some hopes for the new leader of CFI, Robyn Blumner, so I’ll look forward to her future commentary. In particular, I’d like to know if she still thinks women no longer need the Equal Rights Amendment, as she wrote in 2001, or whether we can expect more dismissals of responses to sexist remarks as hysterical political correctness, as she wrote in 2005.

To be fair, she also wrote stuff about being an atheist in 2004 and about torture in 2008 and about feel-good culture in 2009 and most recently, her opposition to religion in politics…and I can agree with her comments there.

But man, some of the old stuff on record is troubling.

Things to do in the frigid North

Those trend-setters in Minneapolis have been freezing pants and posing them outside their homes.

frozenpants

I have not witnessed such phenomena here in our primitive back country outpost, but it seems like a sensible shortcut, preferable to making snowmen, which tends to have painful, dangerous consequences here, in addition to requiring snow with properties that don’t exist in the icy powdery stuff we’ve got.