Egnor’s at it again, trying to support his idea of dualism. His latest example is much less insane than his last one, so this won’t be as entertaining. There’s actually a serious question imbedded in it.
Call it a cheap shot, call it easy laughs…but why is it that it’s so easy to find crazy preachers on your TV?
This is the last day to donate to the “Send Scalzi to the Creation Circus” game. Come on, people: if ever you’ve read one of his books, you know you want to torment him. Go ahead, get even. (Hmm…appealing to the extremely tiny population that has ever read a Scalzi book may not be the most potent strategy for mustering contributions I’ve come up with.)
Normally, I can’t be motivated to read economics—no offense, economists, but I think the economics part of my brain got left behind on one of my many moves around the country, and it was locked in to one particular latitude and longitude anyway—but maybe adding a little swashbuckling and really bad puns in the title would help. Hilzoy has found some interesting examples, anyway. Here’s the abstract to one:
This paper investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To effectively
organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation,
minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit. I argue that pirates devised two
institutions for this purpose. First, I analyze the system of piratical checks and balances that crews used to constrain captain predation. Second, I examine how pirates
used democratic constitutions to minimize conflict and create piratical law and order.
Remarkably, pirates adopted both of these institutions before the United States or
England. Pirate governance created sufficient order and cooperation to make pirates
one of the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.
Maybe I should read that more carefully. If a group as anarchic as pirates could find a way to stably organize, maybe there are some hints for us atheists.
No, gang, boarding churches and looting them of their wealth probably isn’t a viable strategy to give us a unifying profit motive. We’re going to have to think about something more abstract. Although I do confess that a viking lifestyle does have some appeal…
Most people who are planning to attend YearlyKos in Chicago are planning to do so because of all the politicians and wonks wandering around. Now there’s a better reason to go: The Field Museum is going to have an exhibit you won’t want to miss — Darwin!
Can you imagine how peeved I am that I can’t go now?
This site has its heart in the right place, but it’s more for theistic evolutionists than my kind—all the bowing and scraping to a creator god leaves me cold (especially since it seems to substitute hearty encouragement and reconciliation over actually discussing the evidence). But if that doesn’t bother you, take a look at The Epic of Evolution. It’ll probably make somebody happy.
It’s mid-month, and all you regulars know what that means: it’s time to poll you guys for the winners of the Molly award for June. It’s easy: just leave a comment with the name of the person you most enjoy stumbling across in the comment threads, I count ’em up, the winner gets the grand prize of getting his or her name entered on the Molly roll call. You might want to review that list before casting your vote, so you don’t nominate someone who has already won one.
If you’ve been wondering who the grand prize winner for last month was, it was a tie between Kseniya and BronzeDog. That means you have to read their comments with a special reverence now, and you also have to cast a vote for someone different.
Michael Egnor, tiresome little lackey of the DI that he is, is asking his readers to help me find out where altruism is located. I’m not going to link back to him—sorry, but I’m afraid it would only encourage him, and I don’t want to be an enabler—but I will try to address his flawed question.
He wants to know precisely where altruism resides, and he bizarrely illustrates his question with this diagram.
That makes the answer easy.
Inside Higher Ed is reporting on a new sociological study that shows a greater frequency of rejection of religion by young people who don’t attend college. We college professors aren’t responsible!
