What do you know…I am reminded that this weekend was the anniversary of the #creozerg, our invasion by 300 rabid secularists of the Creation Museum. Phil Ferguson offers a retrospective, if you want to relive the fun.
I’ll be whipping out another talk at the Critical Thinking Club in St Paul this morning, and another in Stillwater on Monday. Just in case some of you locals want to stop by.
It’s always a struggle between the difficult solution that actually would accomplish something, and the ridiculous, easy, superficial idea.
Math pink? How absurd.
Everyone knows that putting math in cute shoes would work better.
If I’d seen this before, I would have posted it at the start of the summer: Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. This is incredibly useful advice for people who live in a state with more than ten thousand lakes, or people who live on the coast, or people who live in places with swimming pools, or places with water, period.
Key point: drowning doesn’t look the way it’s portrayed in TV, with thrashing and splashing and gurgling cries for help. It looks like this:
- Head low in the water, mouth at water level
- Head tilted back with mouth open
- Eyes glassy and empty, unable to focus
- Eyes closed
- Hair over forehead or eyes
- Not using legs – Vertical
- Hyperventilating or gasping
- Trying to swim in a particular direction but not making headway
- Trying to roll over on the back
- Ladder climb, rarely out of the water.
You know, somebody ought to publish that in the Minnesota newspapers every spring. It might save some lives.
(via Making Light)
I remember seeing sporadic bursts of activity here when Digg, one of the big aggregator sites, would link to something here, but I haven’t seen that in a while — but now I learn that there is a fanatically active group of conservative haters at work over there. They call themselves Digg Patriots (“patriots” is one of those words, like “family”, that usually get appropriated by people with an extremely narrow view of what it means.) They take advantage of a feature of Digg: in order for an article to get elevated to the front page, where it will get a lot of attention, it has to be voted up; however, Digg also allows people to vote down, or bury, articles. The Digg Patriots take advantage of this to organize what amounts to poll-crashing to suppress views they dislike. Obviously, I think poll-crashing is a fine and fair activity, except that in this case they take advantage of a Digg mechanism to bury their opposition, which isn’t exactly in the spirit of free speech. And they’re picking on me!
The DP group searches Digg for any articles from websites they want to drown out, sites such as Salon, News Junkie Post, Talking Points Memo, FreakOutNation, Five Thirty Eight, ThePublicRecord, Rawstory, The Nation, Media Matters for America, PoliticusUSA, Alternet, Fire Dog Lake, Political Carnival, TruthOut, DailyKos, The Joshua Blog, The Brad Blog, Huffington Post, Science Blogs, Smirking Chimp, Down With Tyranny, Crooks and Liars, MarioPiperni, Buzzflash, Bob Cesca’s REALLY AWESOME Blog, and The New York Times.
The Digg Patriots are rather sleazy — they use multiple aliases, violate various Digg rules, and actively work to get around bans — and they do try to suppress some good blogs and news sites, but I don’t think they can have that much influence on everything, and are mainly a threat to individuals they target, which makes them nothing more than petty bullies.
One thing we can do to counter them rather easily is to use those aggregators ourselves. You’ll notice that every site at Scienceblogs has this little bar across the bottom of each article:
Use it now and then, if you’re familiar with how those aggregators work. Clicking on the “Reddit” button, for instance, will pop up a window with the URL and title of the article filled in for you (that is, you are a registered Reddit user), and a button allows you to submit stuff to that site. Digg is tucked away under the “email+more” button.
The other thing you can do is browse those sites and search for the sources conveniently listed by the Digg Patriots above, and if you like them, vote them up. It’s a good way to help promote good sources, and as we all know, the NY Times needs as much help as it can get.
I’m not too concerned about the general effects of a group of know-nothings reflexively voting down liberal sites — they will be drowned out by the rising tide. But where they can do real damage is when they concentrate their activities on single groups or individuals. There is one fellow called R.J. Carter or CaptCarrot who went on a YouTube crusade against a youth group accusing them of promoting pedophilia and otherwise just generally trashing them with libelous accusations, and got accounts shut down and hurt innocent people, and that’s serious.
What’s this? Mike the Mad Biologist posted on the same thing at the same time?
Harriet Baber is a philosopher, and I say that with the most sneeringly disparaging tone I can muster. I don’t normally dislike philosophy, but there are a lot of philosophers I detest, and Baber exemplifies why. She has a remarkable article in The Guardian in which she says a series of astonishing things — which is often one of the good things philosophers do, surprising me with weird ideas that make me think. In this case, though, she makes some stupid pronouncements, doesn’t explain why she thinks she’s making a good argument, and then thoroughly undercuts her own credibility.
She starts by announcing that she’s a Christian who arrived at that idea via Pascal’s Wager. I know Pascal was a brilliant fellow, but his wager is bollocks — it’s built on the premise of the unreliability of reason and the deficiencies of evidence, reducing our choices to desperate gambles, where we make decisions only on the basis of the desirability of outcomes — a strategy, by the way, that makes casinos rich and gamblers paupers. Accepting Pascal’s Wager is admitting the defeat of reason, a very peculiar position for a philosopher.
But then Baber says something really bizarre, that actually does explain why she falls for the Wager. She declares that the truth is overrated.
People in any case overestimate the value of truth and underestimate the difficulty of arriving at it. There are a great many truths in which I have abolutely no interest – truths about the lifecycle of Ctenocephalides felis, (the common cat flea) or the extensive body of truths about the condition of my teeth that my dentist imposes on me. I see no reason why I should bother with these truths or make a point of believing them.
This is actually a consistent position with her appreciation of Pascal’s Wager, but she’s also sawing off the limb she’s standing on. Why should I care what she says when she admits the truth is unimportant to her? The title of her article is “My faith is an informed choice” (I’ve chosen to retitle her article more accurately for this post) — what does “informed” mean when you’ve confessed that truth is irrelevant and information is not to be bothered with? And what kind of scholar dismisses curiosity about the world with such casual contempt?
Although she did get me wondering about one thing, which is a virtue of fools: I wonder how much misery and death has been caused by dental disease in human history? I suspect that it has been a significant player, but I don’t have any sources of information on that — but there must be a forensic anthropologist or two out there who has some idea.
Oh, wait, sorry — curiosity, an interest in the evidence and the truth, and an expectation that truths about the condition of people’s teeth actually matter assumes that the truth actually does matter. Forgive me.
(The gang at Ophelia Benson’s place are also discussing this strange article.)
Look at this: a colossal squid washed up on a beach near Wellington, and all the little kiwis came out to play.
I’m jealous. This never happens in Morris, Minnesota.
I got cornered by Carin Bondar in Vancouver, and the conclusion of her interview is that I’m the nerdiest non-believer of them all. First teddy bear, now nerd — someday I want an interview to end with the idea that I’m fierce, heroic, and manly.
Not going to happen, I know.
Oh, and I got the dreaded dinner guest question, and I picked Lenin (architect of the Russian Revolution), Darwin (you know him), and Charles XII of Sweden (probably the most impulsive and ferocious leader ever), because they’re all interesting fellows, and the battle at the dinner table would be epic. Charles XII would win, of course. If I just wanted a quiet dinner conversation, it would have been Darwin, Peter Kropotkin, and Aldo Leopold, but my 3 initial picks were designed for maximal chaos.
No, wait…there would be more chaos if I substituted Richard Goldschmidt for Darwin. Need to revise my dinner list now.
Skatje is revealing all of the family secrets! I’m going to have to track her down in far-off Madison and superglue her fingers together…right after I track down all the disgusting boys who are calling her “hot” and thump ’em up a bit.
