Here’s a cuisine for a SF con.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Here’s a cuisine for a SF con.
Man, it’s so annoying when the little sites take a poke at me, hoping to trigger a strong reaction so that I’ll send lots of traffic their way. It’s pathetic, and you know I can’t resist. This particular site is trying to yank my chain by complaining about my lack of support for Barack Obama, and along the way they confirm my point.
What’s interesting to me about all this is that when you get down to it, Obama presents conservatives with a category error. Democrats are liberal, and therefore cannot be religious, q.e.d. It simply fries their circuits that Obama won’t stick in the pigeonhole they’ve constructed for him. It’s going to be a hard election season for them: As Grillmaster pointed out to me the other day, Edwards, Gore, Clinton, and Obama are all comfortable with the language of religion. The Republican front-runners – McCain, Guilliani and Newt – not so much.
And just for fun, allow me to point out that many folks on the left share the same perspective, albeit from a different angle. A real Democrat can’t be religious!
To be fair to Prof. Myers and those who agree with him, what they’re saying is more properly, “a real Democrat shouldn’t be religious.” They’re entitled to their opinion, whether or not we agree with them.
I’m glad he tried to be fair, although he completely blew it on both attempts. What I said was that I will not support Obama because he is too pious for me, and Pastor Dan is rather freely admitting that the Democratic front-runners are all a squad of name-droppers for God. This is a disaster. When will people learn that the demagoguery of appealing to non-existent super-beings will not do a single thing to correct any of our problems?
While he’s chuckling over how Obama fries Republican circuits, he’s also reinforcing the view that one of the major reasons he is getting a lot of play is precisely because he is a happy god-bot. He’s also glossing over my other complaint about Obama: he hasn’t accomplished much of anything. If he had a commendable congressional record, I’d be willing to overlook his reliance on phantasms and spirits, but he doesn’t have one, and he doesn’t seem willing to work for one, preferring to jump on the shortcut to the presidency that a felicitous charisma and the appeal to superstitious ignorance gives him.
It amuses me that an article called Obama’s Religion Problem proposes to deal with the issue by admitting that he does represent Religion with a capital “R”, but that it isn’t a problem. Wrong. Foolishness is always a problem.
There’s a whiff of armchair psychoanalysis to this article on why religiosity has become such an epidemic in this country, but I think there’s a strong strain of truth running through it.
The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.
This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker’s paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.
Promises of glory and paradise are always cheaper than actually doing anything about worldly problems.
I have been sent official confirmation that Phil Plait has carried through on his promise, and has testifed to the teeming hordes at The Amazing Meeting to the glory that is Pharyngula.
Hooray!
I had sushi with John Scalzi (some guy), Skatje (some girl), and Matt Arnold (a Pensacola Christian College graduate) last night, talked with people for a long time, hung out with noisy nerds, and stayed up later than I usually do. Today is my big day of scheduled panels: alternate patterns of evolution at 11, an evidence for evolution Q&A at 2, Squidblogging at 3, and we’ll attempt to answer the question of where the aliens are at 4. Then it’s partying all night long.
Who knew skiffy geeks could be such wild and crazy party animals?
The squid-blogging confab with Bruce Schneier has been tentatively scheduled for 3:00 Saturday in the con suite on the 15th floor.
Shelley the Republican says:
We conservatives have grown accustomed to liberal activist judges perverting justice for their own evil ends. Last year Judge Jones betrayed us all when he passed his verdict in the Dover school-book case. Shortly afterwards, our dear friend Kent was convicted of tax evasion.
U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers will sentence the Hovinds at 9 a.m for the alleged crime of tax evasion. They claim that he and his lovely wife Jo owe the state almost one million dollars in unpaid taxes. A quick review of the case show that the federal court unfairly denied Hovind’s sensible and truthful defence: Kent owes no tax because everything he “owns” is really property of God. This is a fact that we would all do well to remember!
So please dear friends, join me in prayer this morning. Let us pray to Jesus that Kent and Jo will be allowed to continue their important ministry and continue teaching young scientists about the many flaws in Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Prayer doesn’t work, I guess.
Pensacola evangelist Kent Hovind was sentenced Friday afternoon to 10 years in prison on charges of tax fraud.
After a lengthy sentencing hearing that last 5 1/2 hours, U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers ordered Hovind also:
— Pay $640,000 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service.
— Pay the prosecution’s court costs of $7,078.
— Serve three years parole once he is released from prison.
Hovind’s wife, Jo Hovind, also was scheduled to be sentenced. Rodgers postponed her sentencing until March 1 to allow her defense attorney an opportunity to argue possible discrepancies in sentencing guidelines.
Prior to his sentencing, a tearful Kent Hovind, also known as “Dr. Dino” asked for the court’s leniency.
“If it’s just money the IRS wants, there are thousands of people out there who will help pay the money they want so I can go back out there and preach,” Hovind said.
This is very unseemly, but … BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Maybe God just doesn’t answer Republican prayers anymore.
Bioethics is an important subject—it’s too bad it gets sidetracked with nonsense driven by religious dogma and ignorance. One issue is the use of human-animal chimerae in research, which was enough to get our flibbertigibbet idiot of a president incensed, but I don’t see the problem. It’s not as if having weirdly modified experimental mammalian embryos in a dish is a danger to people—some devout Christian woman does not have to worry that she might bump into a lab cart and have a swine-man zygote splash into her vagina and crawl into her womb, but that’s exactly what the hysterics seem to fear. Ophelia has a good rant on the subject.
Why, exactly, does the creation of a certain kind of egg, which will be destroyed within fourteen days, undermine respect for human life? I want to know. What’s the thinking here? That thirteen-day old embryos might end up being dressed up in little outfits and enrolled in school? That they might start marrying people’s children? That they’ll make all the buses and movie theatres and supermarkets too crowded? That they’ll jostle us off the sidewalk and humiliate us? That they’ll want to spend the night in our houses and have their horrible unthinkable disgusting squelchy sex right there with us in the next room listening in fear and horror?
Somebody give me a real reason this is an ethical concern, other than that it conflicts with certain sects weird and absurdly wrong ideas about species purity.
Bioephemera not only shows off a chandelier to die for (if I had one installed, my wife would make sure I died for it), but has announced that she needs a cephalopodmania category. It’s infectious.
Another blogger with a reputation for Friday Squid blogging is Bruce Schneier. Rumor has it that he will be here at ConFusion, and the organizers are going to try and arrange an ad hoc session with the two of us, on squid.
I forgot to set up a Friday Cephalopod post before I left, and I don’t have my scanner with me! Don’t panic. Deep breaths. We can cope with this, by being as flexible as a cephalopod.
Here’s what I’ve done. I’ve reposted an article on Gonatus onyx, which has lovely photos of a squid and its babies. If you saw that beautiful movie of a squid releasing larvae as it was suspended in the deep, you’ll recognize it—this is one of those resonantly moving behaviors of certain species of squid: they produced huge numbers of eggs, and then just hover, completely alone and isolated in a deep layer of the ocean, brooding their young.
Also — and this will blow your mind — I will be putting up a MONDAY CEPHALOPOD!!! This is what happens when you think out of the box: you get these earthshaking, radical ideas that might change the whole nature of the blogosphere as we know it. I’m tempted to say there will be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday Cephalopods, but no, I must step back from the abyss, and just take baby steps. One Monday Cephalopod, then we will return to the traditional Fridays, and hope the wobble induced in the Earth’s rotation will have stabilized by then.
