Posts Tagged ‘ Michael Shermer ’

You should feel anxious!

Jan 27th, 2019 11:30 am | By

This time Michael Shermer has annoyed his fellow academics.

Last term I received 3 letters from my uni’s disability office excusing students from taking tests in class, participating in discussions, & giving a talk (they all have to do an 18-min. TED talk in my class). Disability? Anxiety. My response: Good. You should feel anxious!

That’s so Shermer, isn’t it? Smug, clueless, dismissive, and sadistic, all … Read the rest



Shermer devotes entire issue to lobster man

Aug 15th, 2018 10:43 am | By

Oh lord – just what the world needs.

Marsh – part of the brilliant team that organizes QED – remarks:

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“Losers”

Dec 18th, 2017 11:01 am | By

Michael Shermer is reduced to channeling Trump.

And he’s really really angry about anti-feminism because he’s such a feminist himself as any fule kno.

To be fair, the context of these tweets was more hassling of Lindsay Shepherd, who was told to stop using her laptop in a lecture.

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Shermer tries to fix feminism again

Dec 6th, 2016 3:56 pm | By

Shermer’s on a roll with the feminism thing. He’s not saying anything you could call new, but…well by golly he’s saying it. He’s got a theme. His theme is that the degenerated feminists of today are whiny weaklings compared to their awesome get-it-done predecessors many decades ago. I still say it’s suspiciously convenient to admire feminists who were active more than a century ago while pouring scorn on the ones who are around now to make nuisances of themselves. I’m pretty sure there were plenty of men more than a century ago who didn’t find their contemporary feminists quite so inspiring.

Be that as it may – it’s familiar stuff, and it’s clueless. It’s Ben Carson – pull yourselves up … Read the rest



The higher skepticism

Dec 3rd, 2016 9:47 am | By

Wisdom from Michael Shermer:

Identity politics warriors-if you want people to stop judging individuals as members of a group then stop identifying people by their group!

Who knew it was that easy?! If I don’t want people to judge me as a woman, all I have to do is stop identifying women as women.

Wait, what? What does that even mean? Stop using the word “women” at all? Like Planned Parenthood and the National  Network of Abortion Funds? But if I did that, how would it make other people stop … Read the rest



He was introduced as a Trump supporter

Mar 5th, 2016 10:50 am | By

I thought perhaps it was a joke. I was reading Paul Fidalgo’s Morning Heresy from yesterday, and the surprise module in my brain was activated. The surprise-activator is at the end of a slew of Trump-reporting:

The Christian Post (which I should say has been pretty good and fair to us) pulls a Romney and makes an un-endorsement of Donald Trump (an “undorsement”?):

This is a critical time in American history and we call on all Christians to pray for personal repentance, divine forgiveness and spiritual awakening for our nation. It is not the time for Donald Trump.

Oh! Oh! Guess who is supporting Donald Trump! Like, publicly! Michael Shermer. Ron Lindsay said on Twitter, “So The

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“I’ve just heard that he misbehaved himself with the women”

May 28th, 2015 9:19 am | By

What was it that James Randi said about Michael Shermer? Oh yes…

Shermer’s reputation really does precede him, and it predates the recent wave of attention given to sex crimes and sexual harassment. I reached the movement’s grand old man, 86-year-old James Randi, by telephone, at his house in Florida. Randi is no longer involved in his foundation’s daily operations, but he remains its chair, and he is a legend of the movement, famously not fooled by anybody. He seems not to be naïve about Shermer — although he’s not so troubled by him, either.

“Shermer has been a bad boy on occasion — I do know that,” Randi told me. “I have told him that if I get

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The creep list

Sep 22nd, 2014 12:31 pm | By

PZ has some new information from Alison Smith. It’s…not exculpatory of Michael Shermer, to put it mildly.

It wasn’t actually the next day that I left Shermer’s room. The entire amount of time that passed between me asking someone to come get me after leaving the party and me calling again to say please come get me I need help and don’t know where I am was around two hours. Some commenters seem to think that I had some kind of morning after regret or something, but in actual fact I was calling it rape immediately.

The other part is – me asking Shermer to be on that panel for the Sex workshop wasn’t a reaction based upon victimization (like,

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Waiting for the magic

Jan 17th, 2013 12:37 pm | By

Ed has a good post on Michael Shermer’s exaggerated outrage at my criticism of him.

His comment on the bit where Shermer says I turned the inquisition on him and that we inquisitors are trying to force him to defend himself -

What does innocence until proven guilty have to do with any of this? That is a legal concept and you are not on trial, no matter how much you imagine yourself to be. You said something dumb and sexist in a public forum and someone else pointed out that it was dumb and sexist in a public forum. And the truth is that you are defending yourself, primarily by going on the offensive and accusing your critics of

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In which I get closer to Shermer’s word count

Jan 15th, 2013 2:53 pm | By

Ok so now Shermer’s “response” is online, so I can look at a couple of other details I omitted because I didn’t want to retype the whole damn thing.

By the way I get to respond in the next issue. I’m going to do that. I’ll be briefer, and more polite, and I won’t pretend to think anyone is going to “come for me.”

When self-proclaimed secular feminists attacked Richard Dawkins for a seemingly innocent response to an equally innocent admonishment to guys by Rebecca Watson (the founder of Skepchicks) that it isn’t cool to hit on women in elevators, this erupted into what came to be known as “Elevator­gate.” I didn’t speak out because I figured that an

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Epidemics of accusations

Dec 16th, 2012 5:34 pm | By

I re-read some of Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things this morning, to refresh my memory. I’ve read that and Why We Believe and the odd article here and there. I’ve never liked his writing much. It’s not bad, but it’s a little loose and lazy. Characterless. Journalistic.

I was interested to see that chapter 7 is titled Epidemics of Accusations: Medieval and Modern Witch Crazes. The modern ones are the panics about “Satanic” abuse in the 1980s and about “recovered memory” in the 90s. They’re interesting subjects and ones I’ve read a fair bit about, thanks to Frederick Crews and Elizabeth Loftus among others. It’s terrible stuff – people’s lives ruined by ridiculous beliefs about Satanic rapes … Read the rest

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Michael Shermer was not quoted inaccurately

Dec 14th, 2012 6:03 pm | By

Shermer’s unleashed a lot of assholes on me (because I didn’t have enough of them before). I’m getting pretty tired of people saying I lied, I must say. I did not lie. I quoted Shermer accurately.

“Atheist Revolution” is pretty shameless about calling me a liar.

In his response, Shermer notes that he was quoted inaccurately and out of context.

He was not quoted inaccurately. That is not true. I don’t consider it out of context either, but that of course is always debatable. But inaccurately, no. I’m tired of people calling me a liar.

And he takes the additional step of pointing out the problems with some of
Benson’s more common tactics regarding labeling those with whom

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Morning clean-up

Dec 13th, 2012 10:21 am | By

I see that thanks to Michael Shermer I’m going to be having to do extra clean-up of falsehoods and misrepresentations for awhile. That’s skepticism for ya.

Here are some.

Jacques Rousseau@JacquesR

On the @michaelshermer talk where he’s allegedly sexist: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/12-12-12/#feature … – ‘it’s more of a guy thing’ seems descriptive, not normative.

No. I didn’t allege that he’s sexist. I didn’t draw any general conclusions about him at all. I quoted what he said as an example of dopy stereotypes about women; I did not go on to say “therefore he is a sexist.” The column wasn’t about him.

Also, since the column was about stereotypes, it doesn’t really matter all that much whether Shermer’s remark … Read the rest

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Part deux

Dec 12th, 2012 4:16 pm | By

Where was I? There were some things I didn’t get to in the post this morning.

One of the things. Shermer is indignant about what I said about him. Here’s what I said about him.

You would think that nontheism and feminism should be a natural combination. Women have the most to gain from escaping religion, after all: monotheism gives men higher status, starting with their allegedly being made in the image of God.

But atheism hasn’t always been very welcoming to women. Maybe there’s an idea that men created God, so men should do the uncreating.

Mostly though, it’s just a matter of stereotypes, the boring, stubborn, wrong stereotypes and implicit associations that feminism has been battling since,

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Zuckerberg’s business card

Dec 12th, 2012 10:00 am | By

 … Read the rest

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