Scientology’s new enemy: Twitter

John Dixon is a councillor in Wales who, a year ago, and one day he wrote this on twitter:

I didn’t know the Scientologists had a church on Tottenham Court Road. Just hurried past in case the stupid rubs off.

Oh, deary me. What a blistering attack, what an in-your-face, vicious, horrible, bloody, nasty bit of savagery that was. Surely it fully warrants the Church of Scientology making an official complaint and trying to get him fired? The church claims that being called “stupid” “impinges on the right to religious freedom”.

No, it doesn’t. Everyone has a right to believe in stupid things, and everyone has a right to call them stupid.

If you’re on Twitter, practice your right to free speech and join in the fun: use the tag “#stupidscientology”. It’s Streisand effect time!

(Uh-oh. I’m being a dick again, aren’t I?)

(via Jack of Kent)

You might go blind if you watch this

You might want to skip this video. It’s Glenn Beck performing in Salt Lake City, when he claims to have macular dystrophy and might go blind — and it’s revoltingly mawkish, maudlin, and self-pitying. People are actually swayed by this bathetic BS? Amazing.

Next time I give a talk, I’ll have to try rubbing vaseline in my eyes before I get up on the podium.

(via Joe My God)

I write like…a mark ripe for plucking

There’s a devious web site called “I write like…” that is making the rounds — you paste in some of your text, and it claims to analyze it and tell you what famous writer you resemble. I, for instance, am a combination of Margaret Atwood, James Joyce, and HP Lovecraft. How flattering! Unfortunately, it’s garbage code that plucks out a few random parameters and hands you back a big name author.

Who would do such a thing, and why? You will not be surprised to learn that it is a front for a vanity publisher. Hey, you write like Shakespeare — give me money and we’ll publish your book!

The Dick Delusion

I’ve been getting slapped upside the head with this “dick” meme that’s roaring through the skeptic community lately, largely because it seems that any time someone makes a generic criticism of rude, abrasive, confrontational critics of foolishness, the audience all thinks of the life-size poster of PZ Myers they’ve got hanging on their bedroom door back home. It’s a little annoying. Everybody seems to imagine that if Granny says “Bless you!” after I sneeze, I punch her in the nose, and they’re all busy dichotomizing the skeptical community into the nice, helpful, sweet people who don’t rock the boat and the awful, horrible, bastards in hobnailed boots who stomp on small children in Sunday school. It’s just not right.

Of course, there’s a range of criticism, too. I think Rebecca Watson is hitting the problem about right: it’s about picking your battles, and making a scene over trivial customs practiced with charitable intent is not a good idea. So, really, I don’t have to punch Granny in the nose—I can just say “thank you!”, and that’s fine. But when Granny tells you to get down on your knees and praise Jesus right now or you’re going to burn for eternity in a lake of hellfire, then some dickishness is not only justified, it’s necessary.

The thing is, the dickishness practiced is not nose-punching, it’s not even howling four-letter words at Granny…it’s a flat statement of “That’s crazy, I’m not going to do that, and here’s why.” That, apparently, is the New Dickishness.

One recent flashpoint in this argument was Phil Plait’s talk at TAM 8, in which he asked a rhetorical question, “How many of you … became a skeptic, because somebody got in your face, screaming, and called you an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard?” And the Pharyngula switchboard lit up. Lots of people wrote to me via email or twitter, some gloating, some just unhappy, stating that Phil had just called me out.

No, he didn’t. He didn’t mention me at all. He opened up against a strawman New Dick, which is unfortunate, because there isn’t anyone who fits that description in the skeptical movement. There are people like that elsewhere: drill sergeants and televangelists come to mind.

A few people are speaking out against the talk. Stephanie Zvan points out that Randi is one of these ‘dicks’, that his willingness to sneer at charlatans was an important factor in her own acceptance of skepticism. Matt Dillahunty thinks Phil was making a bit of a dick move himself, which actually demonstrates the utility of the making people think with a little harshness. I also fear that one of the reasons for the popularity of Phil’s talk (it did strike a chord with many) is that it reassured many that certain aspects of belief were going to be walled off from skeptical criticism in the name of politeness and tone and courtesy.

There is a fair point being made, that there are multiple strategies that work to convince people to rethink bad ideas, and they don’t all involve punching people in the face…and many of the best strategies do involve politely listening and criticizing. But I think the best ideas involve a combination of willingness to listen and politely engage, and a forthright core of assertiveness and confrontation — tactical dickishness, if you want to call it that.

I don’t, actually — it also seems like a dick move to try and associate a strategy with gender, since some of the most wonderfully dickish skeptics I know are female. But that’s a separate issue.

Rage rising…rising…rising…

Now Bora has left ScienceBlogs. And all is still quiet from Seed Media Group.

A lot of the bloggers here are talking behind the scenes, and I can tell you what it feels like. Bora compares it to Bion’s Effect, where the departure of a few people at a party triggers a sudden end to the event. He’s wrong (Bora wrong? It happens sometimes). This is a situation rather more fraught. The ship is sinking. The Captain stands at the wheel, saying nothing, doing nothing. All of us on board are edging towards the lifeboats, completely baffled by the paralysis up top, and wondering when some action will happen, when the crew will show some life, when steps will be taken to address long-standing complaints amplified by the current crisis.

And the eerie silence continues.

At some point, there will be a loud noise, a sudden lurch (Bora’s departure may even be it), and everyone will abruptly turn and run screaming for the lifeboats. I personally may trample a few women and children to get a good seat. There may be riots and recriminations. Shots will fired, flares will go off, people will be thrown overboard, boilers will explode.

This doesn’t feel like a dinner party. It’s beginning to feel like the goddamned Titanic.

Seed desperately needs to WAKE UP. And hope it’s not too late.

Mel Gibson is a product of his sick ideology

Christopher Hitchens addresses the latest media meltdown by Mel Gibson. It’s great stuff; people are making all these excuses for him, that he’s not really a racist, he’s not really violent, he’s not really a misogynist, he’s not really a loathsome wackjob…but Hitchens cuts through it all.

This is extraordinary. We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.

And then he follows up with damning examples from Gibson’s father and Gibson’s own actions.

It adds a fresh new perspective to all those fans of Gibson’s labor of love, The Passion, a sadistic piece of bloody anti-semitism. What Gibson rages about in (imagined) private and what he put on the screen in that movie are awfully hard to separate. One of Gibson’s most ardent defenders is right-wing Catholic kook Bill Donohue:

Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? And I’m not afraid to say it. That’s why they hate this movie. It’s about Jesus Christ, and it’s about truth. It’s about the messiah.

And Donohue is still flogging this line against anyone who criticizes Gibson:

[Frank] Rich is particularly angry at anyone who dares to mention the role played by secular Jews in fomenting anti-Catholicism. I am one Catholic who will not run from this charge. It is painfully obvious, that most of the anti-Catholicism that exists today comes from two major sources: ex-Catholics (and those with one foot out the door) and secular Jews.

It’s a disorder that isn’t restricted to Catholicism, though; the other recent expression of these anti-semitic views is none other than Glenn Beck.

Jesus conquered death. He wasn’t victimized. He chose to give his life. He did have a choice. If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would have come back from the dead and made the the Jews pay for what they did.

Any day now they’ll be talking about blood libel. Isn’t it time now to stop pussy-footing around? These people are anti-semitic proto-fascists, their prejudices propped up by truly weird religious beliefs.

Eyes without a mind

Everyone should read the Washington Post’s recent effort in investigative reporting, Top Secret America. It’s distressing. Since George W. Bush, we’ve had this reckless, ridiculous, uncoordinated expansion of intelligence agencies, all sucking up tremendous sums of money, all with little oversight, and all producing floods of data…and it’s all a waste because the emphasis is on sucking in lots of data, and little is done about comprehending it all.

The terrorists really have been effective. They’ve turned us into bloated clowns stumbling over our own feet and doing ourselves far more damage than any hijacked plane could do.