Posts Tagged ‘ FTB ’

Oh no, a street sign!

May 12th, 2013 5:24 pm | By

The Audacity of being public post was mostly about this, but I was being cryptic for the time being. I’ll stop being cryptic now: it was about Justicar doing a video to call Jen a fucking nitwit for not totally concealing her location from creeping stalking peering thugs like Justicar – who takes very good care to keep his particulars secret, so that he can creep and stalk and peer and call names with impunity.

I watched it and it made me fucking furious, for the reasons mentioned in The Audacity of being public. I was disgusted by his fake rage at Jen for daring to tweet a picture that included a street sign, and by his starting … Read the rest

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Preferences

May 12th, 2013 4:10 pm | By

This thing about feminism and skepticism, and the idea that they make a natural pair…

I don’t think they do, really. I think they can be compatible, but I don’t think they’re made for each other.

You can be skeptical about any given social arrangement, but since feminism can be a social arrangement, that means you can be skeptical about feminism too. Or to put it another way, you can be skeptical about social arrangements and about proposed alternatives to those social arrangements.

Of course most of the justifications for social arrangements in which men as a group are above women as a group are stupid and don’t stand up to interrogation, and in that sense skepticism and critical thinking … Read the rest

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The audacity of being public

May 12th, 2013 12:34 pm | By

There’s a weird trope out there – it’s been out there for awhile but it’s getting more and more so (more weird and more out there). One form of it is to complain of “threat narratives” and in the next breath to assert that we are the most vile awful loathsome abominable people ever. In other words, to pour scorn on the idea that there is any whiff of threat at all, while at the same time working hard to create the very threat that is the object of scorn.

Another form of it is to call us fucking morons for not hiding our names and locations, when in fact it never crossed my mind to hide my name and … Read the rest

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Because of Templeton

May 12th, 2013 11:31 am | By

Brian Leiter hosted a discussion of the Templeton Foundation the other day.

Jason Stanley (Rutgers, moving to Yale) started a lively discussion on Facebook with this comment, which he gave me permission to repost here:

Because of Templeton, we may expect a huge number of papers and books in our field taking a religious perspective at the very least extremely seriously. This is not why I entered philosophy, and it is incompatible with my conception of its role in the university. I will not take any money from Templeton or speak at any Templeton funded conferences. Reasonable people may disagree, but I hope there are others who join me in so doing.

In the discussion that followed, the neuroscientist John

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We’re back!

May 12th, 2013 11:22 am | By

Back, I tell you, back!… Read the rest

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Meet the neighbors

May 11th, 2013 2:57 pm | By

The greetings committee has certainly wasted no time making our new colleague Yemi welcome. She wrote a post on What are Anti-Atheists+ afraid of? and along came Damion Reinhardt and “pitchguest” and john greg to respond.

john greg is as shy and sweet as ever.

Yemisi, you are indeed a perfect fit with FfTB. Dogmatic; poor English skills; poor reading comprehension; vigourous defensive posture; misrepresentation of commentor’s comments.

Yes, you will do well on this dying network of mad ideologues.

Thank you so much, and do you want the casserole dish back?

 … Read the rest

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You think

May 11th, 2013 2:35 pm | By

Jesus and Mo get serious with the barmaid – too serious.

Pass the crisps.… Read the rest

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Bruce Gorton pummels the idea that it is better to be unified than correct

May 11th, 2013 1:39 pm | By

Guest post by Bruce Gorton, originally a comment on Then the community can embrace

Jamy Ian Swiss is precisely what is wrong with society, if the reaction to his last talk on Skepticism and ‘identity politics’ is anything to be believed.

I haven’t watched the talk, so recognise what I am talking about is how other people perceive what he said.

Now I had watched his previous talk at TAM and figured that Swiss isn’t a skeptic’s backside – mainly because he took one of his measures of being a skeptic as knowing who James Randi is.

Randi is awesome, and you really should look up his stuff, but it isn’t like he brought down two tablets from mount Sinai … Read the rest

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Getting the names right

May 11th, 2013 11:08 am | By

Via Ron Lindsay at CFI blogs, Leah Libresco posts about “A new forum for Catholic/atheist dialogue.” 

Brandon Vogt, author of The Church and New Media has opened a new site called Strange Notions, that’s meant to be a forum for debate and discussion between Catholics and atheists.  For some reason, it seemed like the readers of this blog might be interested.  Here’s how Brandon describes the site (and explains the name):

StrangeNotions.com is designed to be the central place of dialogue between Catholics and atheists. The implicit goal is to bring non-Catholics to faith, especially followers of the so-called New Atheism. As a ‘digital Areopagus’, the site includes intelligent articles, compelling video, and rich discussion throughout its comment

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Churning out soldiers for the culture war

May 10th, 2013 6:05 pm | By

Katherine Stewart takes a look at homeschooling. (I met Katherine at the American Atheists conference; she was one of the speakers.)

When he was growing up in California, Ryan Lee Stollar was a stellar home schooling student. His oratory skills at got him invited to home schooling conferences around the country, where he debated public policy and spread the word about the “virtues” of an authentically Christian home school education.

Now 28, looking back on his childhood, it all seems like a delusion. As Stollar explains:

“The Christian home school subculture isn’t a children-first movement. It is, for all intents and purposes, an ideology-first movement. There is a massive, well-oiled machine of ideology that is churning out soldiers for

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Then the community can embrace

May 10th, 2013 4:05 pm | By

I know of two people who heard Jamy Ian Swiss say this before his talk at Orange County Freethinkers. One source is a comment on Unity through shouting.

A person asked him: “Do we like Matt Dilahunty?”. His response was that Matt was OK but that the biggest asshole there was PZ Myers and he was planning to “call him out” in his talk. He also stated that Greta Christina is a “fucking asshole” too as she’s involved with Atheism +.

Well. That’s blunt. We know where we are with that.

So I just listened to a few minutes near the end again, where he talks about unity and how to get unity, in order to transcribe it.… Read the rest

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They rang our fathers anonymously

May 10th, 2013 2:19 pm | By

Campaigning against FGM can be dangerous work, at least in the UK.

The Guardian has spoken to women who have received death threats, been publicly assaulted and who have had to move house after speaking out about FGM, which involves cutting away some or all of a girl’s external genitalia and can include sewing up the vagina. It is mostly carried out on girls some time between infancy and the age of 15.

Nimko Ali, a 29-year-old British-Somalian, was taken to Somalia for the procedure when she was seven. “I never told anyone I had FGM, not even my best friend, because I saw what happened to women in the UK who did speak out and saw it as

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Die in your bed full of shit, says Giles Fraser

May 10th, 2013 11:50 am | By

Giles Fraser notes that choice in dying has a lot of public support. He bravely dissents from this public support. He says why.

These days, people say they want to die quickly, painlessly in their sleep and without becoming a burden. Apparently, this is what a good death now looks like. Well, I want to offer a minority report.

I do want to be a burden on my loved ones just as I want them to be a burden on me – it’s called looking after each other. Obviously, I know people are terrified of the indignity of dying and of being ill generally. Having someone wipe our bums, clean up our mess, put up with our incoherent ramblings

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But we just don’t see it that way

May 9th, 2013 6:03 pm | By

Aratina pointed out a guest post at Friendly Atheist March 14 last year – shortly before the Reason Rally. The guest poster is none other than Lee Moore, the guy who kept trying to push me to “discuss” things with the people who harass me, including his friend Reap Paden. Mr Diplomacy, Mr Peace, Mr Supergood at HR.

Oh really?

Here’s how that guest post starts:

Our recent invitation to the Westboro Baptist church has sparked a bit of controversy. Kelley Freeman described our invitation as “[poking] a rattlesnake with a stick,” but we just don’t see it that way.  Reactions from others have been a mixed bag. Some have patted us on the back and thanked us for

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Sylvia Browne says god’s a better psychic

May 9th, 2013 5:39 pm | By

Yes, things are looking grim for Sylvia Browne. She might have to settle for however many millions she’s already made by telling credulous people that she’s a psychic, and not collect any more suitcases full of money.

“The [Ariel Castro abduction] is a test case for all psychics,” said Joe Nickell, editor of Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine that encourages science-based analysis of paranormal and fringe-science claims. “Why didn’t one psychic wake up in the middle of the night and know where they were?”

Ummmm…interference on the astral plane?

Browne responded with an official statement to The Huffington Post earlier this week that included this line: “Only God is right all the time.”

       For more than 50 years as a

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How about nine? Is that young enough?

May 9th, 2013 2:03 pm | By

An item from the Onion?

A prominent barrister specialising in reproductive rights has called for the age of consent to be lowered to 13.

Barbara Hewson told online magazine Spiked that the move was necessary in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal to end the “persecution of old men”.

No, the BBC, but the source is Spiked, so it might as well be the Onion (except the Spiked crew think they’re serious).

Let’s create an age of consent for murder, to end the persecution of murderers.

She argues for an end to complainant anonymity, a strict statute of limitations to prevent prosecutions after a substantial amount of time has passed and a reduction in the age of consent

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Progress in fundamental ontology

May 9th, 2013 12:38 pm | By

Hey remember the Templeton Foundation? Sean Carroll says (not for the first time, but perhaps hoping it will be for the last) what he thinks of it.

I don’t think that science and religion are reconciling or can be reconciled in any meaningful sense, and I believe that it does a great disservice to the world to suggest otherwise.

That’s all I need to know. Next subject?

No seriously. There’s more. The question is just how nefarious Templeton is.

I don’t see much evidence that the JTF is actively evil, in (say) the way the Discovery Institute is evil, actively lying in order to advance an anti-science agenda. The JTF is quite pro-science, in its own way; it’s

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Unity through shouting

May 9th, 2013 10:04 am | By

I’ve watched the whole thing now.

In the last part he gets more and more shouty and angry about all these pesky interlopers trying to change his “movement” – he shouts angrily about how wonderful TAM is and how important it is that we all stick together - and he never says one word about the ongoing harassment of a few chosen women in the three overlapping “movements.” Not one word.

Unity? Stick together?

No.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyLULErf_6E

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What is a testable claim

May 9th, 2013 9:16 am | By

I’m watching the Jamy Ian Swiss video from last Saturday (Orange County freethinkers; you know the drill), trying to figure out what all the fuss is about – his fuss among other fusses.

One claim of his that I don’t understand, though it’s possible that I will once I’ve watched the whole thing. At 23:42:

If you believe in god based on faith, that in and of itself is not a testable claim. We have no debate with that.”

Yes it is. If you “believe in god” then “god” must have some meaning. Once you know what the meaning is in the particular case, then it becomes a testable claim. Even if you say “god” means something large and abstract … Read the rest

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If you don’t want abuse, get off the internet, India edition

May 8th, 2013 5:42 pm | By

It’s so familiar. Sagarika Ghose, an Indian journalist and tv news anchor, got threats to herself and her daughter.

“Targeting me for my journalism is fine. But when it is sexist and foul-mouthed abuse which insults my gender identity I get incredibly angry. In the beginning I used to retaliate, but that would lead to more abuse.”

Ms Ghose says women abused on Twitter in India tend to to be “liberal and secular”.

“The abusers are right wing nationalists, angry at women speaking their mind. They have even coined a term for us – ‘sickular’.”

So many people are angry at women speaking their minds.

Kavita Krishnan, a prominent Delhi-based women’s activist, was attacked viciously during a recent online

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