I get all my clothes off the internet

I repeat: Skepticon II was a blast, and I think what really contributed to the fun was that there was a lot of young people organizing it and in the audience, and no stodginess was allowed. Make sure you go next year — it really was one of the more entertaining and enthusiastic meetings I’ve gone to this year…and it was held in the heart of the Bible Belt, in the city otherwise best known as the capitol of the AssGod church.

I have to answer a couple of questions I was asked repeatedly. I dazzled everyone with my sartorial flamboyance, and on the first night I wore my infamous crocoduck tie. I’m sorry, you can’t get it, at least not yet. Josh Timonen had it made, and so far, only Richard Dawkins and I have one. Maybe it will show up in the RDF store someday, or maybe it won’t.

On the second day, I was asked about the Creation “Museum”, and ripped open my shirt to reveal a portrait of the epic battle that was waged on our visit. People asked where they could get that, too (although one audience member showed me hers — she’d already got one). This one is easy.

i-dc0c48ebec8fcf1be01603904156496b-pz_dj.jpeg
PZ Myers, DJ Grothe

Just go to Jen‘s store, and you can order them right now. You can also get it on a black shirt, too.

You’ll have to get your own boy toy, though.

By the way, the photograph is by Ziztur — who has a nice blog.

Great bathroom reading?

I have mixed feelings about this: a first-edition copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species has been discovered, which is, of course, great — I do wish I had the pocket change to drop £60,000 to buy it for myself.

The weird part is that it was found in the guest bathroom of an old house in Oxford. Apparently, someone thought the Origin was perfect light, occasional reading for visitors attending to certain private physiological functions, which is nice, if a little trivializing. It’s a bit odd, though, that they put the book there and no one seems to have bothered to notice it for 150 years. I am really curious to know what other books were on that toilet shelf — I’m imagining guests ducking into the bathroom for a few minutes of managing the necessaries, scanning the shelf for a little light reading to pass the time, and skipping over the rare and valuable antique Darwin volume to read…what? A couple of scrolls of the lost plays of Aeschylus, the handwritten manuscript copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and a copy of the Arzhang, the mysterious holy book of the Manicheans? Or was it a yellowed copy of the Daily Mall, a couple of dog-eared editions of the Readers’ Digest, and last week’s TV Guide? This must have been a very curious and neglected bookshelf!

Women Of Worth

Every year, L’Oreal selects women who have made significant contributions to community service and awards their organization a substantial grant of $5,000. There are ten honorees this year, and they’ve all got good stories to tell. You also have a chance to vote on one of the ten, and the winner of that popularity contest will get an additional award of $25,000 — read their nominations and you’ll see that they all could use it, and you should vote for whatever cause you find most worthy.

However, I will gently nudge you in one direction, suggesting that if you don’t find that any one cause speaks to you, you should consider voting for Shannon Lambert, who manages a local service called Pandora’s Project, which helps survivors of rape and sexual abuse. We’re a little bit biased, though, since Shannon is a graduate of the University of Minnesota Morris. Just take a look, and if you think her work is good, take just a second and leave one vote for her.

You shoulda been here

It’s strange…I was offline all day yesterday. I’ve been at Skepticon II down here in Springfield, Missouri, and unfortunately, I had no internet access while I was in the meeting, which went on all day Saturday late into the evening, and then, once the talks were over, the socializing began. The party went on at a bar until 1:30am, then moved to a hotel room until sometime around 4am, and then DJ Grothe, Rebecca Watson, and I kept it going until 6am, at which time the lesser two beings conked out, and I was the last one left standing (Rebecca will seethe at that)…when I had to take off to the airport for my flight home. And that’s where I am now.

I expect to be home by early afternoon, and back online full time again. Maybe I’ll take a nap, too.

There will be a Skepticon III next year, and you should plan on going! Good speakers and a very enthusiastic crowd makes it an excellent event. The late night parties are a bit much for an old geezer like myself, but they’re fun, too.

A contemptible pseudoscientific scam

Grrr. I was sent a link to these lying, sleazebag scammers at mygeneprofile.com, and it’s the kind of thing that pisses me off. What you’ll find there is a long video where the lowlife in a suit talks about how your children have in-built genetic biases (“from God”, no less), and how if you want them to be truly happy and successful, you should tailor their upbringing to maximize their genetic potential. And he blathers on about how they will do a genetic test to determine whether your child has genes for science or art.

It’s a complete lie. There is no such test. There can be no such test. That’s not how genomes work, that they translate DNA in a comprehensible, measurable way into discrete traits for such abstract abilities as playing the piano.

They claim that “The Industry is Featured by CNN, CBS News.” I wonder what that means? That there were news reports about the human genome project? That they bought commercial time?

Anyway, it’s fraud. Don’t fall for it.

KKMS, always quick to defend the fools

KKMS is a Twin Cities Christian talk radio station which has long been on my list of disreputable people and organizations peddling lies to the populace. They really pissed me off a while back when they brought me on to debate Geoffrey Simmons, and after I smacked him down hard, they invited him back for an unopposed free hour of lies. No, of course they didn’t invite me back for a similar hour of discussion.

They’re doing it again.

After that bizarre debate on Monday, KKMS is having Bergman on today to make excuses. I think their invitation to me must have gotten lost in the mail…maybe because they still can’t spell my name correctly.

4:00 Hour -“Debate Follow-up: Should Intelligent Design Be Taught in Science Classes?”  
Dr. Jerry Bergman, Professor and Author will tell us what he experienced in his debate last Monday night with P.Z. Meyers, Professor at the University of Minnesota – Morris.

It should be amusingly unreal. Unfortunately, I’m going to be out of touch at that hour — somebody else will have to listen and fill us in on the delusions and lies and distortions that Bergman will spin out.

The problem of the oblivious white male atheist

I have to recommend this criticism of sexism in the skeptical community: skeptifem points out that while we’re quick to outrage when someone like Bill Maher violates science norms, we seem to shrug off the fact that he’s been rudely anti-woman at times.

When someone does try to share the perspective of being a person of color or a woman in skeptic communities the majority of people in the groups I have encountered dismiss their viewpoint on extremely typical grounds. This article from richarddawkins.net has some really disturbing comments that illustrate exactly what I am getting at; an automatic opposition to the voices of people of color and women. Disagreeing isn’t the problem here, it is the outright dismissal and unwillingness to ask questions in order to understand the point of view she puts forward here. Having an actual discussion, or an actual willingness to understand her and then disagreeing would be a very different picture.

It’s a strange phenomenon. I don’t think the leaders of the atheist movement are consciously anti-feminist at all; it’s more a matter of being confident that equality is the right answer, appreciating everyone, male or female, working to promote rationalism in society, and then smugly assuming we’re done when we’re not. The Big Catches to bring in to an atheist meeting are people like Dawkins and Dennett and Hitchens — people who deserve their popularity and their reputations — but the women of atheism seem to be semi-invisible. Why aren’t we reaching out to, for instance, Susan Jacoby, and making her a more prominent face in atheism? She’s a wonderful writer, produced a book, Freethinkers, that was part of the early wave of godless writings, and every time I’ve heard her speak, she says interesting and challenging things.

The problem isn’t dismissal. It’s casual disregard. It’s being just enough pro-feminist that we lose sight of the real problems that women and people of color face.

One thing that would really help, I think, is if the grassroots spoke out a little bit more to remind us. Tell us who you want to hear who isn’t pale-skinned and full of testosterone; I’m not an organizer of meetings — I just get roped into these things — but one thing we noisy voices of atheism can do is name-drop when we get called, and ask if the inviting organization has considered X, Y, and Z for a lecture, too. So tell me in the comments: who are the deserving voices of the godless community who should be heard as much as the heterogametic ones who get all the press?