My contribution to Thinking Towards Humanity: themes from Norman Geras, Manchester University Press, 2012.

What is it like to be a blogger?

Hume famously observed that it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of his finger. He wasn’t expressing a whimsically inflated sense of his own importance, but pointing out that logic doesn’t determine how we weigh the world versus our finger. We have to love the world in order to be able to weigh it properly. Looking it up in a table of weights and measures won’t do the job – we could see the arithmetic and still shrug and say yes but it’s my finger, the world … Read the rest

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Norm Geras 1943-2013… Read the rest

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Laura Helmuth wrote about it in Slate yesterday.

I take back every bad thing I have ever said about Twitter. It’s fast, responsive, and efficient, and it’s the medium of record when gossip breaks. Like pretty much every other science journalist in the world, I’ve been glued to Twitter for the past several days. It all started when a biologist named Danielle Lee, who writes a blog called the Urban Scientist, tweeted that some minor-league editor had called her an “urban whore.”* Really, that is what he called her. To show support for her, people started renaming their own blogs with the word whore using a #WhoreItUp hashtag. The insult was infuriating and the response

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Press Release October 18, 2013

Following recent events, Bora Zivkovic has offered his resignation from Scientific American, and Scientific American has decided to accept that resignation.

The Scientific American Blog Network is a vibrant group of voices who challenge, educate and widen the discussion about science and science communication, and Bora played an important part in that. The bloggers who write on the Scientific American Blog Network are important to us, as is the science online community. We will be in regular contact with members of the Scientific American Blog Network over the coming days. Learning from recent events, we are also looking at how we support our bloggers in future.

Scientific American has an anti-harassment policy. We offer live … Read the rest

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Acharya S has had her Facebook account shut down, apparently because she posted a photo of “virginity testing” of little girls in Nigeria. She needs our help pushing Facebook to reinstate her account.

My Facebook account has been permanently disabled because – I’m guessing here – I shared a photo of little African girls suffering a “virginity test.” After I contacted Facebook, I received the following form response, in which, naturally, FB doesn’t give the specific reason:

Hi,
Your account has been disabled because you violated the Facebook Terms.
Unfortunately, we won’t be able to reactivate your account or respond to your email directly.
For more information about our policies, please read the Facebook Community Standards: https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/

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Remember what Mariette DiChristina @mdichristina said a week ago about why Danielle Lee’s SciAm post was taken down?

Re blog inquiry: @sciam is a publication for discovering science. The post was not appropriate for this area & was therefore removed.

Kate Clancy, one of the SciAm bloggers, wrote a post the other day that was not about discovering science. You can tell this if you look closely.

This is not a post about discovering science. This is not a post about discovering science. This is not a post about discovering science. This is not a post about discovering science. This is not a post about discovering science. This is not a post about discovering science. This is not

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From Andy Borowitz at the Borowitz Report -

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Acknowledging that the government shutdown was coming to an end, an emotional Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took to the Senate floor today to make an impassioned speech, telling his colleagues, “The dream of keeping poor people from seeing a doctor must never die.”

His eyes welling up with tears, Sen. Cruz said, “I embarked on this crusade with a simple goal: to keep affordable health care out of the reach of ordinary, hard-working Americans. And while this battle was lost, that dream—that precious, cherished dream—will live on.”

What could make Ted Cruz a better human being? Skepticism?

No.

 … Read the rest

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My friend Author of Jesus and Mo did an interview with the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain Forum a couple of days ago.

CEMB started with a summary of the recent nonsense over Jesus and Mo at LSE, then linked arms.

In a spirit of solidarity, the ex-Muslim forum would like to praise Jesus and Mo and state our admiration for his empowering, important and deeply progressive, not to mention hilarious cartoon.

And then the interview.

Could you tell us a little about your influences as a cartoonist and stylist, and in a wider sense, who influenced you in terms of your sense of playfulness towards the conceits of religion, and your satirical sensibility?

I’m still a bit reluctant to

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I’d better go back to the beginning, and explain very carefully, for the inattentive. (Not you, obviously.)

There is such a thing as skepticism about morality. There really is. There are people who ask why we should care about [the poor, immigrants, people who fall through the cracks, victims of natural disasters, all of the above in Bangladesh or Ethiopia or DR Congo, animals, climate change, future generations, other people's children, schools, famines, droughts, factories that collapse, slave labor, forced marriage, stonings, for example]. There are people who ask why we shouldn’t just take as much as we can of everything for ourselves or for ourselves and our families or for ourselves and our tribe. There are people who say … Read the rest

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Chris Clarke has 10 reasons you should stop being so irrationally upset about your hair being repeatedly set on fire.

6. Because some people prefer their hair bright red, and they deserve respect and not shaming.

7. Because that man’s head is cold and he says that if someone set his hair on fire he would take it as a compliment.

8. Because if we just start putting out every fire we see without going through a calm and measured deliberative process in which we consider all the facts at hand, we will eventually be unable to cook food or smelt useful alloys.

9. Because you really ought to be used to it by now. It’s just the way

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Hmm. American Atheists is having a hard time finding a billboard company in Salt Lake City willing to take one of their billboards to run during next year’s convention. This one for instance:

 So it’s taboo, apparently, to say (conspicuously) that you were once a Mormon and are now an atheist.

Well if it’s taboo, how voluntary is the religion then? If you can’t do something as simple (and, admittedly, visible) as announce that you have left a particular religion…is that religion really fully voluntary? It seems to me it’s not. If there’s that much social disapproval, then it’s not.… Read the rest

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Manboobz tells us that mainstream media in the form of ABC’s 20/20 is airing a long-awaited show on the manosphere tomorrow.

It’s here at last! After numerous delays, the 20/20 story looking at the manosphere — and the part it plays in the online harassment of women — will be running on ABC this Friday, October 18, at 10 PM EST. Among the featured participants: the always charming Paul Elam of A Voice for Men; Anita Sarkeesian, the much-harassed feminist video game critic; and Jaclyn Friedman, the ass-kicking founder of Women, Action & the Media.

Here’s a teaser story on the ABC website which suggests that the 20/20 piece isn’t exactly going to be a triumphant moment in

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One of the comments on The Troublemaker really stood out for me, because I’ve been thinking the same thing. It’s by one ADHDJ:

There is a huge overlap between skepticism and mansplaining.

I find cowardice in so much of what skeptics spend their time on — writing a 20 page article debunking a photo of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster and believing you did something intellectually valuable, like that makes you some kind of big thinker.  Considering whether or not fairies exist is worthy of great study and serious analysis, but whether some drunk dude acted like a creepy asshole at 3AM is so unlikely as to never merit a thought.

To quote the great Harry Frankfurt, “one

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Oh, please. Oprah.

Winfrey asked Nyad: “You told our producers you’re not a God person, but you’re deeply in awe?”

Nyad replied: “Yeah, I’m not a God person. I’m an atheist”, prompting Winfrey to question: “But you’re in awe?”

Nyad said: “I don’t understand why anyone would find a contradiction in that. I can stand at the beach’s edge with the most devout Christian, Jew, Buddhist and weep at the beauty of this universe, and be moved by all of humanity. So to me, my definition of God is humanity, and is the love of humanity.”

Winfrey, who has spoken about her Christian faith on television before, replied by telling Nyad that her beliefs did not fit with traditional

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The Guardian published the not yet released Ofsted report on Al-Medinah school. It’s grim.

Overall effectiveness: Inadequate.

Achievement of pupils: Inadequate.

Quality of teaching: Inadequate.

Behaviour and safety of pupils: Inadequate.

Leadership and management: Inadequate.

The Guardian sums up:

An Ofsted report, due to be published imminently, declares that the Al-Madinah Islamic  school in Derby is “in chaos” and has “not been adequately monitored or supported”.

The report, which has been leaked to the Guardian, says teachers at the faith school are inexperienced and have not been provided with proper training.

Pupils are given the same work “regardless of their different abilities” and the governing body is “ineffective”, according to the report which was commissioned amid reports of irregularities

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Things that are not good in coffee:

• olives
• anchovies
• cauliflower
• shrimp
• pineapple
• mustard
• onions
• smoked salmon
• pumpkin

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Hannah Waters has been where Monica Byrne found herself.

At the time of posting a year ago, Monica didn’t call Bora out by name. But she updated her blog post this week with his identity after recent unprofessionalism on Scientific American’s part, seemingly linked to unrealized sexism and racism. Bora didn’t deny what happened.

The reaction on Twitter was one of disbelief and anger from his network of science bloggers and friends. “Science blogosphere, I am tweetless… I can’t even retweet what has left me so stunned.” “Enraged children with a persecution complex are out on a witch hunt, it’ll blow over eventually…” “My closest friend is @boraz. I know him better than almost everyone. I

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