Fear of a bad election

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So there’s this election tomorrow, and the Republicans have consistently screwed the pooch for years, and people are starting to wake up and get more vocal about the incompetence, corruption, and dumbassery of this administration…but I am not sanguine about our prospects for getting rid of the villains. Tom Tomorrow explains why: even if these people were shown to be literally demons from hell, we’d still have to cope with…the undecided voters.

I lost all confidence in the American electorate in 2000 and 2004. I’ll be doing my part on Tuesday, voting and helping to turn out the vote, but I anticipate the election returns with a sense of dread.

I don’t think he’s going to help

There’s a group in the UK called “Truth in Science” (it’s not just Republicans who title things ironically) which is pushing creationism in the schools there. A recommendation in Parliament is trying to dismiss these silly people as something that should be treated very cautiously by the schools, and one blogger wrote his member of Parliament asking for support. He got a curious reply.

I would be very happy to act on this matter as soon as you can prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Creationism is not true, and I look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible.

My first thought is that our blogger is being blown off. Seriously, anyone who makes such an overweening demand is not looking for a genuine answer—he’s looking for an excuse to pretend to have evaluated the evidence, but his mind is made up. The brave blogger is going to try and persuade him otherwise, and has a draft letter online. It’s not bad; take a look and make suggestions.

They really don’t like me

I’m still getting flamage from Dr Mike S. Adams’ fans. This one just happened to tickle me, for some reason. I wonder if I can get that title engraved on my office door?

YOUR WEB TREATMENT OF DR. ADAMS WAS DISCUSTING…

OBVIOUSLY, YOUR REAL TITLE SHOULD BE “ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF LEFTIST INDOCTRINATION”! TYPICAL OF “HIGHER????” EDUCATION.

I think the funniest part of this all-caps, misspelled, strangely punctuated rant and sneer at “HIGHER????” EDUCATION is that the guy’s signature proudly says, “Employee of University of Wisconsin”.

Time bobbles the God and science debate

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The cover of Time magazine highlights the current struggle: it’s God vs. Science, or as I’d prefer to put it, fantasy vs. reality. I have mixed feelings about the story; on the one hand, it presents the theological sound in such a godawful stupid way that it gives me some hope, but on the other, stupid seems to win the day far too often. It sure seems to have won over the editors of Time.

The lead article covers a debate between the forces of reason and dogma. They picked two debaters and pitted them against each other, and on our side, we have Richard Dawkins. Dawkins talked to us a bit about this on our visit, since he’d just recently gotten back from a quick flight to NY to do this. Time says they’d had to consider a number of possibilities for this argument: Marc Hauser, Lewis Wolpert, Victor Stenger, and Ann Druyan (speaking for Carl Sagan, who has a posthumous book on religion coming out), so they had a competent collection on one side, and they just needed to find a good representative for the other. Unfortunately, here’s how Time characterized the search.

[Read more…]

Freethought symbology

There will be no poll. It’s presumptuous of me to even suggest coming up with a symbol for freethought, and seriously, this is a small corner of the internet, with a small subset of godless people, and the ones who’d respond to a poll would be such a tiny fraction of the possibilities that it would be meaningless.

So instead, we’ll have discussion. Reason with each other.

Here’s the agenda: make an argument for your favorite, and sway me. Whatever symbol gets the most persuasive argument (and actually, the argument that larger numbers of people will like your symbol will have some weight with me), I’m going to use. Look ever to the left sidebar, where it says “Profile”—at the top of that, the symbol will appear at about the same size as the box with my face in it, and it will link to some godless manifesto (Russell’s? My own? I’ll think about it later). That’s all I’m aiming for at this point.

If it is successful, that means that some other bloggers start using it, putting a discreet or blatant symbol somewhere on their pages that link to an explanation. The hope is that readers will wonder what that odd squiggle is, click on it, and learn something.

If it is wildly successful, it will achieve fairly general recognition so that readers won’t bother to click on it anymore—they’ll get used to seeing it and know that the author is one of them goddamned freethinkers, and they’ll scurry off or settle down and read for a while. This is the most hopeful scenario, and I’m not counting on it; attempts to make that kind of widely recognized association fail much more often than they succeed.

So, what I did was simply skim through the suggestion thread and pick those symbols that generated some degree of repeated interest, and that also met my general criteria of being reasonably simple and easy to scrawl out. I stripped out colors and shading as well as I could and reduced everything to a high-contrast gray scale, and then scaled them all to about the same size…and show here some large ones and some tiny ones. If people want to get fancy and produce elaborate, full color versions with the flayed skin of Hypatia stapled to the sides and Robert Ingersoll’s happy face peeping out of some space, that ornamentation can be done later and on your own—the goal now is to get a framework that is recognizable.

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affinity i-80fc7668e0d9b6472e8ada9562a78253-affinity.gif
asterisk i-f936bb2404d764ddbaf389d9f28f35c0-asterisk.gif
circle i-d6123a7d144c8479a8d6bc5d29fca05d-circle.gif
dna i-318a2b98d5443e17a945c5f2f0bf75f1-dna.gif
empty i-2ce2a9264d328489a915cf73482e9e6b-empty.gif
galaxy i-87d4725ba19cb548847d4b2bb9c1124f-galaxy.gif
infinity i-812252774b29955ada096b1c16a9a677-infin.gif
natural i-ae3e7021f28a28a46c0913cc18e46908-natural.gif
phi i-4c0ddd48380558d07f7089bae820dcac-phi.gif
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So, talk about it. Please don’t get hung up on details of the rendering—think of this as something that ought to be recognizable if it were chalked onto a sidewalk, for instance, and the final version that would go on a website can be cleaned up and made sharper—and let’s avoid new suggestions, unless you’ve got something utterly stunning and brilliant. Let’s just hash these out right now.

Another useful datum would be to let us know if you would use such a symbol on your weblog, or some other place. That’ll help us get a feel for the potential for wider use.

South Dakota sleaze

Don’t ever claim that the little people can’t influence the course of government. Don’t assume that you need “credentials” or “knowledge” in order to make a difference. Read the inspiring story of the Unruhs and the South Dakota abortion ban.

Leslee Unruh, a person with no legislative or medical qualifications, drafts a law governing the medical care of female patients in South Dakota. She is also the the chief of the pro-ban campaign.

Alan Unruh, Leslee Unruh’s husband, a chiropractor, sits on the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortions, and is tasked with studying and evaluating medical evidence, reporting the findings, and making recommendations on the need for any additional legislation governing ob/gyn medical procedures.

See? This little family of unqualified, ignorant people possessing nothing but zeal and faith were able to make an entire state a laughing stock and put thousands of women at risk. Follow your dream, people! It doesn’t matter if it’s crazy or vile or requires you to misrepresent your abilities—just do it!

Of course, it also helps if you wangle one of those incestuous little deals where lazy legislators let proponents write the laws and stock the review committees with ideologues rather than competent experts, but you know what? That’s incredibly common nowadays.