This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly. That critter to the right is a baby river otter, recently born at the Portland Zoo.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
(Oops, I almost portcullised a long personal comment by mildlymagnificent that is now left dangling all alone on the previous thread. You might want to take a look at it.)
As pointed out by several in email, Daniel Fincke, whose last actual direct conversation with me consisted of a defense of his “Chris Christie is fat hur hur” jokes on Facebook some months ago, provides me with an opportunity to clarify something:
Also, I will note that where Chris Clarke completely unfairly attacked civility on the irrelevant grounds that you could order racist internment of people in a way that uses no abusive terms (as though just because bad things can be done civilly, routinized uncivil discourse is our only recourse to prevent that), he has not condemned Pharyngula’s routine use of the word “moron”, a word coined by racist eugenicists to justify equal atrocities against those deemed too intellectually inferior to have civil rights (even though he blogs at Pharyngula). There is an dehumanizing word that coined as part of a movement that did documentable damage to marginalized people and he is indifferent, apparently to the screams of those people while he paints me with no justification as a silencer of the oppressed simply because I advocate reason rather than bullying as the method of persuasion among professed critical thinkers and defenders of reason in the public square.
I’m ignoring the bulk of the paragraph: just shows the guy can’t read for comprehension when he’s upset. Which is an affliction a lot of us have. But he’s right about my not having offered my opinion on the use of the word “moron”.
And here it is: I don’t like it.
For my reasons, you can pretty much take this post and do the obvious find and replace.
I’ll confess I haven’t seen a whole lot of commenters in my threads using the M word, which may be because I don’t read every single comment. I also confess I slip up and use it myself on occasion, and “idiot” more often still.
Still, it’s about goals rather than perfection. I don’t like the word “moron” and wish we would all use something else non-ableist to express our disbelief at a person’s sheer wrongness. Suggestions for alternatives: doofus, fuckwad, jackanapes, buffoon, professional philosopher.
Can I go back to ignoring him now?
Michael Nugent speaks out on the incompatibility of science and religion.
I approve this message so hard.
Our latest, newest, bestest addition to the stable (so new he hasn’t even had time to post anything yet!) is Eric MacDonald of Choice in Dying. I’d tell you all to go say hello but you might want to wait a bit until he has something more relevant than the generic “Hello world!” post in place.
While others are working to send deserving people, I am selfishly sending only one person to the Women in Secularism conference: ME. I just registered. My greedy self-interest worries me…maybe I’m turning into a libertarian now.
It’s as if he’s happily digging the Republican party’s grave. His latest effort is masterminding a plan to scuttle Ashley Judd’s interest in running for the senate against Mitch McConnell by ridiculing Judd as a woman.
One can say that he is an equal opportunity smear artist, but there is a context and a history to Rove’s anti-Judd salvo. He routinely resorts to anti-woman insults and insinuations that cut deeper than his usual attacks – characterizing women in politics as having stereotypically negative female traits (subject to hysteria, too emotional, weak and weepy, bleeding heart, flighty or frigid, and lesbian).
On mainstream women’s issues, in the last year alone Rove claimed that Democrats “worship at the altar of reproductive rights,” compared President Obama to a “third-world dictator” for requiring insurance companies to cover birth control, and sneered at the White House’s priority to ensure equal pay for equal work as evidence of “unapologetic liberalism.”
I enthusiastically endorse the Republican Party’s plan to throw away the votes of half the country. Although, you never know — maybe they also have a cunning plan to end women’s suffrage, so it won’t matter. And then once they revoke the Emancipation Proclamation and have every brown-skinned family labeled illegal immigrants and deported, they’ll have a lock on politics. And then won’t I be sorry I encouraged Rove.
If nothing else, I want this asshole disarmed. BigDaddyHoffman1911 is some kind of gun freak from North Carolina who is proud to be walking around everywhere carrying deadly weapons…and here he is bragging about carrying a pair of Glock handguns equipped with 50 round ammo drums each.
What war does he expect to erupt around him so that he’ll need that many rounds? Or does he just have 100 people on his kill list?
Jeez. Gun nuts. There really is something wrong with them.
(via Kick!.)
I had dinner with the Amazing Randi this weekend — see, I have proof! — and I was reminded what a pleasant and entertaining fellow he is. I also remembered that this is the time of year when they announce their annual fundraising event, The Amazing Meeting, to be held in Las Vegas on 11-14 July.
They have a couple of excellent speakers this year. Susan Jacoby is their keynote speaker (you can also see her at Women in Secularism), and evolutionary biology is well-represented by Jerry Coyne and Massimo Pigliucci — it would be great if they talked about biology, but it would also be worth seeing to have Coyne address the ‘scientific’ skeptics with his arguments about the incompatibility of science and religion, or for the two of them to butt heads over science and philosophy.
I’ll have to miss it again. I’m mostly staying right here in Minnesota through July and August, playing the game of administrator of our undergraduate research program. Jebus, I’m getting responsible in my old age.
Ross Douthat wrote a column for the New York Times on Sunday…wait, hold it right there. How does that guy even get the privilege of a regular column in one of the biggest papers in the country? It’s a marvel.
OK, but anyway, he wrote this ridiculous column in which he moaned about the decline of Catholic influence in American politics. I would have just said “good!” and moved on, but this analysis made me worry.
The problem for authoritarian conservatives like Douthat is that the GOP is wildly out of step with the US Catholic Bishops and the Vatican on just about every economic issue: wealth inequality, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unions, universal health care — even global warming (not to mention the death penalty and immigration).
The other problem he has is that American Catholics overwhelmingly reject the bishops’ stance on the sex stuff the GOP obsesses about and a whopping 60% of them want the Church’s leadership to focus on social justice issues — which are of course anathema to the Republican Party.
Do you get that? American Catholics find the Catholic bishops too conservative, and the Catholic bishops find the Republican party too conservative. The Republicans are worse than the Catholic hierarchy, and we all know in what contempt I hold Catholicism.
When Catholic bishops find you too stony-hearted and callous, you know you’ve got a problem.
Just a warning: if you only visit the sites that I describe with the word “sex”, all future editions of Around FtB will have to have the subjects of all the blogs twisted to be sexual. Don’t make me have to do that.
So, Stephen, is your message that conservatives aren’t as negative about oral sex as we thought?
I think Digital Cuttlefish’s brain hates his brain.
I’m as reflexively monogamous as a prairie vole, so Greta Christina sounds like an alien to me.
I also have a vanilla brain with no known diagnosable illnesses, so Stephanie scares me with stories of what can go wrong.
Ophelia missed Ben Goldacre’s visit to Seattle! I missed him too because he just flew over the middle of the continent and ignored us (Ben’s schedule: he’s in New York next).
We had a blizzard last night. Dana is spotting flowers. Maybe Goldacre made the right decision to avoid the middle of the country.
Theology schools are pestering Kazim with questionnaires. The godly move in mysterious ways.
The Canadians, like Crommunist, seem to be a teensy bit unhappy with their prime minister.
Beheaded for blogging while godless? Maryam is outraged; so is Taslima. The defenders of Islam have descended on Taslima’s comment section as well, neatly demonstrating that her accusation of fucked-upedness is precisely correct.
In happier news, Sikivu is interviewing activist teachers in South L.A. Making a difference!
February 24th is a Day of Solidarity for Black Nonbelievers. Richard writes in praise of Frederick Douglass.
For a change, Brianne finds that the anti-choice fanatics took a day off.
Bigfoot Aron speaks in Dallas.
It’s Minchin’s Pope song on ukelele, sung by Ashley!
Miri wants you to know that negotiating for sex doesn’t have to be sexy. But I try to make everything I do sexy!
