I know Tim Minchin wants to tour the US, maybe this summer, but his agents weren’t exactly frantically lining up the gigs for him just yet. Now you can light a fire under their butts and tell Tim Minchin where he should play. Vote for your home town! Vote for the nearest place with a giant arena!
I voted to have him come direct to Morris, Minnesota, but I’d be fine with Minneapolis.
The Ms magazine blog has an awful little article on the New Atheists that completely misses the point. It’s about the sexes and atheism, of course, but it has little to say except to whine that the New Atheism is just like the old religion, and gosh, look at all those Old White Guys in the fore. Yes, we know; the visible leadership of atheism right now is largely male, but it’s not because they pushed aside the women. The New Atheism is really dominated right now by senior academic types, which means that we are the lucky survivors of the old all-pervasive sexism that we’re seeing so well-represented in the senior cohort now, but it’s shifting, have no fear — the next generation is going to be where the women in charge, as I can see by looking at the younger faces behind this movement now.
So don’t blame the Old White Guys, and don’t regard their gender and age as a debit. What we need to do is promote more equality, and make a positive case for freethought. The Ms article could have explored that by talking to some of the many people involved, and could have even talked to the many prominent female atheists out there, and said something about the direction we’re going, rather than where we come from. It chose not to do that, and instead invented a myth of sexist complacency.
Sadly, there’s little indication that atheists are receptive to the suggestion that they might benefit from diversifying in color or gender.
What a crock. We want to expand, we want to be more welcoming to a wider demographic than only Old White Guys, and I’ve seen it happening: you should have been to atheist meetings 15 years ago. It’s what gives me considerable hope for the future, that I’m seeing increasing numbers of women and minorities and especially young people participating. I still see a lot of grey beards in my audiences, but we don’t want them to go away, and we are advocating greater diversity.
But I’m an Old White Guy myself. The best way for me to make my point is to sit down and let the underrepresented speak. Jen McCreight takes that Ms article apart, and lists all those activist atheist women Ms forgot to consult. Ian Cromwell has a series of videos on race and atheism.
You know, these diverse voices are there — you just have to listen. I’m disappointed that someone at Ms magazine hasn’t learned that yet, and chooses again to perpetuate the idea that all that matters are the Old White Guys.
We have a bit more than a week to go on our fund raising drive for DonorsChoose, which puts money directly into the hands of teachers who need it, and the pace of donations is slowing way down. Are you tapped out? Do I need to go all NPR and beg for money in every other post? I’ve been so restrained and only putting out these reminders once a week.
Look! Sandra Porter has joined the Scienceblogs team! Maybe I should be nagging the other bloggers here to get it together and join in.
When the animal is a squid, of course, which are beautiful even in death. Here’s the dance of dying chromatophores:
(via Arthropoda)
It’s a serious question. You’d think a crude thug who thinks assassination is the way to solve the world’s problems would not be gainfully employed as a columnist anywhere, but no—he’s still pumping out the stupid schlock.
I’d like to ask a simple question: Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?
So again, I ask: Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?
you’d think Assange, super-whistle-blower of the international left, would be a greasy stain on the Autobahn already.
I think Assange is an asset. I wish we had serious journalists who were willing to ask serious questions and confront the public and the government with the truth — once upon a time, I had the delusion that that was what principled journalists were supposed to do. I still have the idea that knowing the truth is always a better guide to productive action than propaganda. If our military in Afghanistan is worsening the problem, if it is killing civilians and creating new terrorists faster than it is containing them, I want to know that, so I can tell my government that I want them to change policies. Building plans on false fantasies is always a bad idea.
I also think that we’ve got a lot of problems in the United States that can be easily personified and reduced to a scattering of figureheads who fuel the fires of our own destruction. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin…even Jonah Goldberg. But I do not advocate their murder. I don’t think it would solve the problems they cause (or more accurately, represent), and trying to resolve conflicts like that with blood just leads to more and more destruction. If someone shoots Glenn Beck, then someone else will feel justified in shooting Rachel Maddow, and the insanity will proceed until someone shoots Goldberg, and they retaliate by shooting me.
Assassinations don’t change the truth. It’s not an answer.
And calls for murder by lard-ass militaristic conservatives who dream of someone else doing their dirty work for them are nothing but rabble-rousing cowardice.
So why is the Chicago Tribune publishing the violent fantasies of a jingo-chanting coward?
If you haven’t voted for Christie Wilcox yet, get on over there and help! She’s got the lead, but it’s slipping right now.
Think of it as practice for tomorrow, when all you Americans will get out and vote for the good guys. Right? Right?
Or at least the not-so-evil guys. We’re just trying to keep the riff-raff out of control.
This is a sad trend. Mary picks these out, you know, and lately there’s been a notable lack of chelicerae, chitin, slime, and compound eyes in this series, and now she’s found red pandas to be irresistible. If she doesn’t stop, you’re going to think this is Jerry Coyne’s blog or something.
Darn it. I have to keep suppressing the “squee” noises in my throat, and it hurts.
You all know them: those awful loud little men who travel from campus to campus to preach apocalyptic hateful nonsense on the sidewalks, who rant and howl and condemn everyone who passes by as a sinner, damned to hell, and reserving a special hatred for women and gays. One of the virtues of being on a small campus in a remote rural part of my state is that we don’t get many of those jerkwads here, but they infest the main campus and any other college that is more conveniently located.
What do we do about them? Tarring and feathering is illegal, and you can’t just silence them because you don’t like what they say. I think James Dimock at Minnesota State University Mankato takes exactly the right approach.
“The answer to speech you don’t like isn’t to suppress it. The remedy is to speak back,” said James P. Dimock, associate professor of communication studies at Mankato State. “That is what those kids did and why I am proud of them. They could have gone to the university administration and fought to keep this guy off campus — a fight they would probably have lost. But instead they answered speech with speech. I support what they did 100 percent and I think that they should be a model for how people should respond to these preachers everywhere.”
What he did was encourage students to politely protest the noise of a gay-hating preacher going by the name of John the Baptist by taking him up on his invitation to attend his church services. They did. They sat in the front row, quietly, with signs showing gay people who had committed suicide, thanks to homophobic bullying. They didn’t interfere with his preaching at all, but no one could look at him in the pulpit without also seeing the victims of his hatred. It’s perfect. It’s the kind of peaceful protest that makes people think.
Of course preacher John Chisham doesn’t see it that way. He’s angry about it all, and is whining that the university is promoting anti-Christian attitudes (anyone want to bet against the idea that many of the students who were protesting were also Christian?)
But Chisham said that was unfair. “If a professor said ‘Why don’t you come and attend my class?’ I would take that to mean I’m going to go into the class and sit, and listen respectfully, and I would expect the same kind of decorum.” (Both Chisham and those who protested agree that while the students held signs in front of the room, making it impossible for the congregation members to see their pastor without seeing images of gay youth who have killed themselves, the protest was a silent one — and did not stop the prayers or any other part of the service.)
Chisham said he has filed a complaint with the university, asking it to impose sanctions on Dimock, the professor who advised the students and who attended the service with them. But Chisham said he does not believe Dimock is being punished. “I think there should be sanctions,” he said, “unless Mankato State doesn’t mind being associated with someone disrupting a service of worship.”
Oh, the hypocrisy, it burns.
They did not disrupt the service. They silently highlighted his message. They also listened to every word he said, they did not shout him down at all. When creationists come to Morris, I’ll often encourage my students to attend and listen, too, and I’ll tell them to be polite and non-disruptive (although I’ll also assure them that good, calm questions are also a good idea). The creationists don’t particularly like this, because it means some of their audience are there to think and criticize rather than affirm and gullibly swallow whatever they say, but there’s not much they can do to stop us without looking blatantly hypocritical.
There’s also the fact that Preacher John sees no problem in proclaiming his message, but is offended that anyone would quietly reject it. There’s this whole evangelical principle of, well, evangelizing … but any pushback, no matter how mild, is regarded as wicked. We’re not supposed to ask questions in church, but there’s a whole evangelical literature praising the idea of promoting Christianity in the science classroom — see Chick’s “Big Daddy” for the classic example.
Despite Big Daddy’s puffery, one thing I’ve learned is that fundagelical Christians are typically cowards. They fear and hate being criticized. I occasionally get protests at my talks, and my response to the sign-bearing chanters lined up outside the auditorium is always to invite them to come in and feel free to ask questions in the Q&A. They rarely do. I’d actually welcome a mob of creationists who showed up and sat up front and quietly listened, and might even make sure to keep the talk a little more brief than usual, because I’d expect a lively post-talk discussion. It just doesn’t happen, much as I’d like it to, and here’s Preacher John complaining because he’s got an audience with specific issues to debate. If he’s so sure he’s right, he ought to be overjoyed to have an opportunity to publicly rebut specific questions.
Just in case the opportunity comes up, any time I give a public talk, the creationist versions of Professor Dimock are welcome to show up, take a front row seat, and carry signs that object to evilutionism. I shall joyfully address any concerns that you might have at the appropriate part of the hour, and all you have to be prepared for is the laughter of myself and the rest of the audience.
In case my fellow Americans have forgotten where it is, it’s nestled down below Belgium, with borders on Germany and France…and there are Luxembourgian atheists!
This is probably the nerdiest thing I’ve been sent in oh, two or three days.
