As is my custom, my upper level courses have an expectation that students will do this blogging thing. They’re just now getting set up so there isn’t a lot of content yet, but here’s the current list of student web pages. Cruise on by and talk to them!
If you’re feeling generous, you might send a few bucks Avicenna’s way — he’s an impoverished blogger whose laptop just died. What good is a blogger who can’t blog? He’d have to just do that doctorin’ stuff for a living.
[Revised at the request of one of the subjects.]
This is a bizarre excuse: because the men might be demoralized by learning that women poop and sweat.
Many Marines developed dysentery from the complete lack of sanitary conditions. When an uncontrollable urge hit a Marine, he would be forced to stand, as best he could, hold an MRE bag up to his rear, and defecate inches from his seated comrade’s face.
Oh, horrors! Marines are psychologically delicate and would be deeply traumatized by the presence of a woman who might see them poop, or worse, might have to witness a woman pooping.
Then there’s the usual hygiene argument.
When we did reach Baghdad, we were in shambles. We had not showered in well over a month and our chemical protective suits were covered in a mixture of filth and dried blood. We were told to strip and place our suits in pits to be burned immediately. My unit stood there in a walled-in compound in Baghdad, naked, sores dotted all over our bodies, feet peeling, watching our suits burn. Later, they lined us up naked and washed us off with pressure washers.
Yes, a woman is as capable as a man of pulling a trigger. But the goal of our nation’s military is to fight and win wars. Before taking the drastic step of allowing women to serve in combat units, has the government considered whether introducing women into the above-described situation would have made my unit more or less combat effective?
I have big news for the Marines: women are animals, just like they are; they are hairy sweaty mammals, just like they are; in the absence of opportunities to groom and clean themselves, they get filthy, too.
I am surprised that Marines can be comfortable with the fact that other people are blood-filled meat sacks who can be blown apart and mangled and killed, but that their morale would crumble if they learned that women have sebaceous glands and colons.
Ryan Smith, the author of that piece, must be a real wimp.
This American Secular Census thing is actually asking some good questions — insightful, even. It’s trying to get a fine-grained perspective on various factors in our involvement and sometimes comes up with some revealing data. This bit, for instance, about women’s perspective on the movement:
Regardless of gender, all respondents who are or have been involved in the secular movement are asked: Have you ever felt unwelcome, discriminated against, or harmed in the secular movement? Women outnumber men 62%/34% in responding “Yes.” It is worth noting that women do not outnumber men when asked the same question about religious organizations with which they’ve been associated. It appears they are less comfortable in secular groups than in the churches they left.
This is what a lot of us have been saying for quite some time. You have a choice of a few responses to reality: one is to deny it, one is to implicitly approve it, and one is to try and change it. Put me in the last category. Also note that I am shocked at how many skeptics/atheists are in the first, and disappointed at all the ones in the second category.
No matter your position, though, think about signing up for the American Secular Census (it does require registering and giving a valid email address). I approve of more information about the state of this movement…even if some of it does leave me shocked and disappointed.
Nobody will be surprised by this at all: L. Ron Hubbard cobbled together Scientology from various bits of old pseudoscience, as well as by inventing things out of thin air.
The source calls them “lies”. This is an ongoing problem: we don’t have a good word for what these people (scientologists, creationists, Christians, Muslims, whatever) are doing. They are making stuff up, they are telling things about the nature of the world that are not only false but contrary to all the available evidence, yet they often fervently believe it all; even the scam artists have to half-convince themselves that they’re doing good. And if we call it lies, some pedant will start complaining that it lacks the element of intent.
So what’s a good word for malicious mind-fuckery backed by devout good intentions? I struggle with this all the time.
Nicely done! Rebecca Watson rebuts a recent article by Michael Shermer that tried to claim there was a liberal war on science. It was a very silly article; it’s not that I would ever claim that the liberal side is flawless — antivaxxers and proponents of quackery are found on both sides of the aisle , we had Tom Harkin throwing money down the drain of ‘alternative medicine’, and there are New Age notions of ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ that defy reason — but the pathology isn’t usually a matter of policy on the left, where it is on the right.
And Shermer does such a poor job of supporting his claim! He repeatedly does a sneaky switch of throwing out statistics about the ignorance of the rank and file on science on both sides, and then pretending that these views reflect what the leadership is doing. In the US, we have a general problem of widespread ignorance of science; every party, every subgroup is going to be afflicted with a large number of clueless people. The real question is whether the ignorant people are effective in shaping policy. In the case of the Republicans, they are: the religious right and the Tea Party have had a profound influence on their representatives. Look at the House Subcommittee on the Environment and the Economy, for instance; it’s chaired by Republican John Shimkus, a born-again evangelical Christian who fervently believes that global climate change is a hoax. Can you name a comparably deluded Democrat who is undermining serious scientific concerns?
We liberals do not have a Broun, or an Inhofe, or an Akin, or a Jindal in our ranks. Republicans do, and even take them seriously as potential presidents.
Or look at the last roster of Republican presidential candidates. Fortunately, the least anti-science of the bunch, Mitt Romney, got the nomination…but look look at the rest of those bozos, evolution deniers and anti-environmentalists everywhere. Democrats tend to be almost as pro-corporate as Republicans, but you simply don’t see those fringe anti-science beliefs making as much headway among them. Furthermore, Democrats tend to favor pro-education policy more than Republicans — they at least do not express a desire to destroy public education.
Among the worst of the presidential candidates, though, was Ron Paul, who was one of those who does not accept evolution and also desires the elimination of the Department of Education.
Maybe Mr Shermer’s next article should be about the Libertarian war on science and reason? Now there’s a mob of delusional idiots who deserve a serious dressing down.
I’ve figured it all out, it’ll be easy! I’ll be a screenwriter for action movies. Sinfest points the way.
All I have to do is write page after page of “I AM HETEROSEXUAL!”. I know, there is also emoting with grunts, but I figure I can let Bruce and Arnold and Sly just ad lib those bits.
Imagine all these people in the same room. It would be a madhouse, I tell you!
Stephanie is cringing at some very bad acting.
Avicenna is inviting gays to a dating site.
Aron is mystified by the Texas educational system. Aren’t you?
Ashley is playing the ukulele.
Heicart doesn’t think it makes sense.
Hank is being operated on by a robot.
Ophelia is going around in circles.
Ed is outraged that everyone is outraged at the wrong stuff.
Dana is laughing at men in agony. Laughing! Oh, these feminists.
Greta is arguing about the harm done to atheists by prejudice.
Jason is mangling text on the web.
Reasonabledoubts is not preoccupied with sex, no sir.
Mano is marveling at people’s excellent gun-handling skills.
Darksyde is bragging about how his heart attack was bigger than yours.
Let’s have a big drawn-out fight over something that really matters, that will draw in lots of comments, and will infuriate some readers.
Let’s argue over the Oxford Comma.
Line up and take sides. I am most definitely PRO-Oxford Comma, and if you think otherwise, I’ll beat you up.
A campaign to raise donations for real cancer research on a Houston Cancer Quack’s birthday has resulted in a $13,000 donation.
This morning, a group calling itself Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients (SPCP) has delivered controversial cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski a birthday present: a $13,000 donation in his honor to St. Jude Children’s Research hospital. The SPCP says that St. Jude’s is a well-respected, compassionate institution that does real research into childhood cancers, unlike the Burzynski Clinic, which has never produced the results of a single large scale peer-reviewed clinical trial in a reputable journal in over 30 years, despite apparently having treated thousands of patients with so-called “antineoplastons”.
They’ve now asked Burzynski to match that donation.
Unfortunately, Burzynski bilks so much money from his victims, hundreds of thousands of dollars from each, that he’s going to be able to lift a butt cheek and fart out that much money. The question is whether he’ll even bother to exert himself that much.
I’m predicting he won’t, since that would involve actually acknowledging the rebuke, not because he’s unable to afford that much.
