This is another of those social, community threads. Introduce yourself, say what your interests are, what brings you here, whatever you feel like. No arguments, no wrangly discussions, no debate, no crankiness allowed. Consider this a chance for newbies to say something where they won’t get pounced on, and for the regulars to leave a calling card.
Status: Heavily Moderated
Whatever it was, it was noteworthy enough to get a brief mention in the Star Tribune.
As a child, Christianity never made sense and seemed unfair and rather limiting. After learning about mythology and how people believed the Gods to be real and the source of phenomena that can now be scientifically explained, I made the connection that the same could be said for Christianity. My parents weren’t non-believers, but they had no interest in religion. And when I felt the inevitable social pressure to go to church, my dad flat out said “No, church is for people who need it. They go in on Sundays and act holy, but the rest of the week they are assholes.” And after witnessing numerous examples of such behaviour over the years, I decided he had a point.
Romney has chosen Paul Catholic Randroid “Tax Cuts for the Rich” Ryan for his running mate? I guess the American Plutocracy has decided there is no point in pretending anymore.
It’s official: Ken Ham’s Ark Park will include…fire breathing dragons. They’re quite definite. Because people have mentioned dragons in the past, and because the Bible specifically says that all air-breathing creatures were on Noah’s Ark, dragons must have been aboard. No other conclusion is possible.
Using this same reasoning, though, they’re also going to have to pack Bigfoot, chupacabras, chimeras, Greys, and unicorns on their big wooden boat. It just gets sillier and sillier.
Just think of them as little armored cats. With much bigger litters.
(via Freethinking for Dummies)
I am an atheist because I was born that way.
I grew up in a Catholic family. Not crazy fundamentalist Catholic or anything. We were a liberal family, but we went to church every Sunday, said grace at dinner, and all of the other calendar related business that I can barely remember. Outside of weddings and funerals I haven’t attended a church in over twenty-five years, so the rituals are fuzzy.
This sounds so familiar. You notice a bias in the speakers at a meeting (an obvious bias that everyone notices), and so you start suggesting to conference organizers that maybe it would be a good thing to do a little more outreach, get a little more diversity. I was doing that to atheist meetings 5 or 6 years ago, or perhaps longer…it’s been a longstanding issue. So now in 2012:
So here is a plea. Next time you are involved in organizing a meeting – make some effort to have a strong representation of diversity of speakers and participants. For example, if you invite lots of women for example and all say no – try to figure out why and see if you can fix the issue. Offer travel fellowships for students. Offer child care or child activity options (even if you cannot pay for it – at least make it easy for people). Make sure to advertise/promote the meeting to groups/institutions with a high representation of underrepresented groups. Don’t give up if your first efforts don’t work. Sometimes it can be difficult to make sure diversity levels are high. But keep trying … it will help make the conference better and also will help the field in general …
That’s Jonathan Eisen, talking about genomics meetings. I hope it works out for him. I can say that atheist meetings have gotten much, much better at representing more women (the race issue, not so much, but it is slowly improving there, even).
The next stage after that success, however, is pushback from the white men who had previously been the sole kinds of faces on the stage. They can’t quite start screaming at the women to get off the stage — that degree of bigotry is a little too naked, usually — but they will aim their fury at the people who brought them to the sorry state of having women equally represented with men.
The only answer to that, of course, is to keep on fighting.
I have completely tuned out the Olympics because the jingoistic, shallow American commentary makes me want to puke…but I was just sent this clip from the BBC coverage. Watch how it goes from Darwin to eugenics to Hitler to slavery in order to explain how so many black athletes excel at sprinting events…because, obviously, being able to survive shackling in a slave ship and a lifetime of menial stoop labor in the cotton fields clearly selects for genes of benefit in short foot races.
Who authorized that kind of drivel to even be made? It’s bad science and bad history.
The story so far: Thunderf00t/Phil Mason was invited to join our blog network last month. All he wrote during the short week he was here was incoherent, unprofessional rages against feminism and the whole network he was on; we could not understand why he even accepted the offer to join us if he hated us so much, and his inane rants certainly weren’t going to persuade us that we were wrong, so we kicked him off. And ever since he has been obsessed with howling about our perfidy.
The latest development is that it turns out that almost as soon as he’d been evicted, he snuck back onto our mailing list and has been reading all the confidential discussions we’ve been having. He has leaked these to third parties as well. When we shut down the security hole last week, he then tried to hack back in, to no avail. We have logs of all of this computer activity on his part.
He doesn’t have anything of actionable substance — we really haven’t been planning the overthrow of the government or any bank heists or anything nefarious — but he does have personal information about some of the contributors to FtB who want their privacy respected. That is his threat, and it’s not something we can trust him on, given that he’s already sent some emails to other people. And there was no legitimate reason for him to even need to be browsing our private email.
I’ll be compiling the responses to Thunderf00t’s lack of basic decency and ethics here, but first I have to highlight this, from Ed Brayton:
I really do find this outraged declaration that he does not “doc drop” to be almost laughably deluded. It’s like someone who breaks into your house because you forgot to latch a window. He comes into your house and steals your china and jewelry, then reacts in mock outrage when you suggest that he might steal your TV too. In fact, he screams “I do not steal TVs!” at the top of his lungs to the neighbors while he’s handing your other possessions out the door to someone else. And then he expects that declaration to be credible and to provide some assurance of his character.
Phil Mason also doesn’t seem to realize that his declaration that he broke in is in fact a confession. It’s not just that he’s violated our confidence, but that he’s so goddamn stupid that he’s announced it to the world.
Here’s the current list of blog posts protesting Thunderf00t’s inexcusable behavior. I’ll add to it as more come in, but I’m also going to be traveling a bit today, so my access may be spotty.
Jason Thibeault (includes technical evidence for Mason’s hack)
Matt Dillahunty
Richard Coughlan (NSFW, and very sarcastic)
