Speak louder, Catherine Deveny!

That Deveny…she’s always causing trouble. And good for her.

She recently appeared on a panel debate show on Australian TV, Q&A, with Peter Jensen, an Anglican bishop. Jensen is smug, smarmy ass: when he wasn’t whining that we need a respectful discussion about the issues, he was announcing that women should submit to men in marriage, that same-sex marriage is unbiblical, that homosexuality is a disease, and no, the homophobia of the church can’t possibly contribute to gay teen suicide rates. He’s one of those guys who puts on his politeness with his clerical collar, and thinks both make him absolutely right, and able to say the most vile lies with smooth confidence.

Catherine Deveny was brash, smart, and assertive, and openly atheist. She is also a woman. She spoke the truth — that the church is a medieval institution promoting homophobia and misogyny, and that the facts and an unbiased morality of equality do not support Jensen’s claims.

Guess which one got all the negative press?

…I should not have been surprised at the fall-out from Catherine Deveny’s appearance on ABC’s Q&A this week. Deveny’s opposition to Anglican Archbishop, Peter Jensen, resulted in an onslaught of vitriolic criticism and abuse – even from those who claim to support her positions on asylum seekers, same-sex marriage and women’s equality.

Even the Australian weighed in with an editorial reprimanding Deveny and the ABC for failing to show the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney ‘proper regard’ and ‘respect’.

While the Australian characterises (or more accurately, caricatures) Deveny as mocking, crude, crass and intolerant, Jensen is ‘frank, concerned and conciliatory on homosexual health issues’. Deveny, we are told, was guilty of ‘shouting down’ the Archbishop.

Don’t they realize that the proper regard and respect to show a leader of institutionalized dogma is to turn him away at the door, and to spit in his eye every time he demands a respect to his position that he won’t show to women, gays, the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised? Catherine Deveny, rather than being excesively rude, showed remarkable restraint at having to sit next to the poisonous old fraud.

But no, Chrys Stevenson documents the insults flung at Deveny — she was a crazy bitch who should shut up and brought down the whole tone of the event by dominating the conversation. What about that?

Curiously, as this was one of the rare Q&A’s where the women (Catherine Deveny, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Anna Krien) outnumbered the men, the male guests (Peter Jensen and Chris Evans) still managed to dominate the conversation 55 per cent to 45 per cent.

To the contrary of her critics, I think the other panelists were all dreary bores who said a range of things (some sensible, some odious) and Deveny was the only person who made the event interesting. But this attention that the public pays to mouthy women (even when she clearly gave everyone else a chance to speak their piece) ought to be recognized for what it is: being nice is a tool of the status quo; complaining about tone is an attempt to silence the passion and outrage of the oppressed; privilege perpetuates itself by labeling difference as deviancy.

Keep on speaking up, Catherine Deveny!

Why I am an atheist – James Yakura

Because of Santa Claus.

Yes, this is going to take a bit of explaining. I was raised by parents who encouraged creativity and curiosity, who had shelves upon shelves of books on all walls of the house. And I had access to books as well: science fiction, fantasy, nonfiction. I remember quite clearly reading and rereading a science encyclopedia aimed at young children. I remember regular trips to the museum in Denver. I remember learning about how science worked by observing the world, and rejecting a belief if what was observed did not match the belief.

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Kanazawa pushback

I mentioned that Satoshi Kanazawa has a new column on Big Think. Now I’ve got two flavors of responses for you!

  1. Flavor #1 is spicy! Adam Lee, who is also on Big Think, is indignant that standards have dropped so low.

    I can only speculate as to the lapse in editorial judgment that must have occurred for Big Think to extend this racist, sexist, genocide-advocating pseudoscientific bigot a platform. Were they unaware of his views? Were they aware, but went ahead anyway because controversy is good for traffic? (Racism can’t be good for traffic, can it?)

    I don’t want to be accused of giving any extra publicity to Kanazawa, so I won’t be writing to criticize him again. However, I want to make it clear in the most emphatic terms that I think him utterly vile and contemptible. And rest assured, I intend to follow up with Big Think’s upper echelons to find out who made this decision and why, and I’ll update when I know more.

    Apparently, he did talk to the upper echelon at Big Think, because a nameless editorial source posted a response, which is Flavor #2.

  2. Flavor #2 is oleaginous, lumpy, and full of sugar — it’s a kind of lard-flavored ice cream, with bullshit chunks (Hmm, what would Ben & Jerry’s call that? “Fecal Globsplosion”?). The editors support Kanazawa with many adjectives.

    Having tracked his thinking for years, including having him appear for an interview on Big Think, we cannot help but admire Satoshi’s convictions to freedom of thought, even if sometimes we too have cringed at his missteps . At its best, it yields wondrous new perspectives on confounding aspects of modern life, such as the challenge of dating in big cities. At its worst, it yields the intellectual equivalent of shock-jock antics which serve as a call-to-arms for the legions of self-righteous self-promoters eager to decontextualize and oversimplify matters into stark injustices they condemn into oblivion across the cable news airwaves.

    Our support for his approach to thinking, and intellectual purview, should not be confused with an endorsement of his conclusions and prescriptions, to the extent that he actually argues on behalf of any specific outcome or conclusion in any given instance. The best and fairest criticisms of his work are truly academic in nature and involve just how far his cross-cutting postulates (one might call them intellectual mash-ups) can extend on the backs of the (current) consensus theories that underpin them and the empirical data he marshals alongside them (often circumstantially).

    Whoa. Read the whole thing. It reeks of desperate justifications, but it’s entertaining to watch this person twist themselves into knots trying to simultaneously praise Kanazawa while also trying to make sure they don’t get splashed with the slime from his certain eruptions.

Why I am an atheist – Ruthy McCoy

I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist during my childhood, but I certainly was un-churched and if someone had asked me about my opinion of god I would have shrugged my shoulders and said “I don’t know.  Maybe”.  But my friends believed in him and he seemed important to them, so I decided to test his existence by asking for him to show me a tornado because I had always wanted to see one.  I mean, he was supposedly all powerful and such, so that shouldn’t be such a difficult task, right?  I lived in Colorado where tornados were fairly common and I found that even under what should have been easy circumstances to produce a tornado (inclement weather), god could not do it when I asked.  I mean, god, god, you couldn’t even give me a god damn tornado when it was like all windy and lightning-ing and thundering everywhere?  Pathetic.  And so I decided there was probably nothing out there.

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Come to think of it, I did have a gannet appear in my toast yesterday

A wildlife photographer gets a lucky break and captures an aerial photo of a flock of flamingos that’ has spontaneously assembled into a rough wading-bird shape. Cool enough, a nice example of pareidolia in wildlife form, and then the photographer has to go and ruin it:

“The reaction to this photo has been remarkable. Some people have actually said that the image is divine intervention and proof that there is a God.”

That’s a pretty remarkable reaction right there, first crediting the Ultimate Patriarch for a happy accident and then distancing yourself from it, FoxNews style, with the “some people say.”

I don’t stampede my herd of pronghorn through your cathedral, guy. Please keep your God out of my Wonders of Nature.

Death Valley and Temperature Records

Death Valley, January 2005

Death Valley on a much cooler day in January 2005, with Pleistocene Lake Manly reemergent at Badwater.

I say more about this over at KCET, but I’ve found it kind of surprising that today’s barrage of coverage of the World Meteorological Organization’s official dethroning of the 1936 El Azizia, Libya temperature record didn’t mention this fascinating work that came out a few months back.

The short version of today’s news: a global group of meteorologists, including Libyan scientist, Khalid El Fadli, climate director of the Libyan National Meteorological Center, went over the old records that secured El Azizia’s spot in fifth-grade geography texts as the site of the world’s highest recorded temperature. That much-memorized datum, an air temperature peak of 136°F (or 58°C for those of you in civilized countries) 90 years ago today on September 13, 1922, turns out to have been an artifact of difficult-to-read equipment combined a newbie weather technician working at an Italian Army post. The peak actual temperature that day was likely 7°C cooler, putting it well within the range of normal hellishly hot for the neighborhood I just moved out of. That puts Death Valley’s July 10, 1913 reading of  134°F/56.7°C back in the first place spot it ought to have enjoyed for the last 90 years.

El Fadli, by the way, had to go underground for a bit during the revolution. His colleagues lauded him today for taking risks to get this study done, and we wouldn’t have had this info without his taking significant personal risks as Qaddafi’s regime went through its death throes.

The thing is that those official records have a bit of built-in sampling error: namely, they derive from the places where we’ve managed to maintain weather stations for long enough to keep records. The WMO has more than 11,000 weather stations worldwide, but “worldwide” is a big place, and that works out to an average of one weather station for every 13,000 square kilometers of land surface. Admittedly, much of the really underrepresented land surface is in Antarctica, where it’s unlikely any high air temperature records will be set anytime soon. But that’s still a lot of potentially hot land not being monitored, in the deserts of Asia, Africa, and even the Sonoran Desert in North America.

The research that made the press a few months back involved measuring Land Skin Temperature (LST), which I’d embarrassingly typoed as “Land Sin Temperature” at KCET until just now, via infrared satellite monitoring of the Earth’s surface by way of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers on two NASA satellites. The researchers, led by Steve Running of the University of Montana, found a number of places well away from the nearest WMO-approved weather station that had astonishingly high surface temperatures. The record? A dark and gravelly spot in Iran’s Lut Desert, where on one particularly warm day in 2005 the LST reached 159.3°F/70.7°C. The place on Earth with the second-hottest LST was an unspecified spot in the bush in Queensland, which will no doubt delight the Strines in the crowd. That temperature: 156.7°F/69.3°C. The Turpan Basin in Xinjiang, China took third place at 152.2°F /66.8°C.

Of course air temperature and LST are different animals. The WMO requires that air temperature measurement be taken 1.2-2 meters off the ground in the shade, which means comparing air temps and LST is kind of comparing apples with the sun-baked soil at the base of the apple tree. Think walking barefoot on the beach on a nice day with air temperatures in the 80s. Differences of 50°F between air temperature and LST aren’t unheard of. And until we plant a WMO-approved weather station out on the Lut Desert, we probably won’t have a good idea how those temperatures compare with Death Valley’s.

But we do know one thing: when Running’s team listed the places on Earth with the hottest Land Skin Temperatures, Death Valley didn’t make the list. So the hottest place on Earth, according to the news today, probably isn’t. It’s just the hottest one for which we have a recorded air temperature. Which doesn’t make as snappy a headline. But that’s okay: the California Desert still has that 767 straight days without rain at Bagdad, about 40 miles north of where I’me sitting right now. It’s at most in second place after the Atacama Desert, which has some places where rain’s never been recorded, ever. But we’re’ good at being in second place around here.

Things to do on Sunday in Minneapolis

Come to a book reading! the Minnesota Atheists are sponsoring a reading at the Southdale Libary at 2pm from our anthology, Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories. I’ll be reading from my chapter, and a heap o’ other people will read their godless stories, and then afterwards we’re heading over to Q Cumbers Restaurant for a healthy meal of fresh salads and fruit and various other things (use your imagination).

It will be fabulous. And it will be the most exciting thing happening in Minnesota all day long! You must come!