No thinking please we’re Texas, says the Republican Party of Texas. It says it in its party platform.

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Not only no thinking. Worse than that. No thinking because no challenging of beliefs. Thus no learning, no changing of mind, no change, no progress, no education.

The Texas Republican party has come out in favor of stagnation and ignorance and dogmatic, fixed beliefs.

Boy, there’s a program. Less curiosity and progress and … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Stephanie Zvan made a crucial point yesterday about inviting a certain kind of (contrarian or “controversial” or anti-consensus) speaker to give a talk. She started from something LeftSidePositive said in a previous comment.

(or indeed if the audience should be expected to have the tools to critique it thoroughly if it is not in their field)

QFT. If you have a speaker who is willing to misrepresent the conclusions of a paper, how does an audience who’ve never seen the paper properly question the speaker?

Charlotte and Amy amplified the point today on the Leeds SITP Facebook page. In response to a suggestion that

The only way SITP can come out on top is if the members take

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It was at a UCL debate on the question: Is Feminism Sexist and does the MRM even exist?

They went to dinner together. Isn’t that convivial? They totally know each other. More surprising, they’re not the same person. They sure sound like the same person.

The debate ran as I would have expected and there were no surprises. Tom Martin gave a good account of himself; Steve Moxon attempted the impossible and tried to explain the complexity of evolutionary psychology in under 1 minute (please read his book); there were a number of “can’t we all just get along?” types; a couple of male-feminists who were disappointed in the comments from men (hell, let’s be more honest;

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More Steve Moxon.

The Guardian’s Northern Blog on why even UKIP didn’t want him.

Moxon’s opinions have now cost him his place as UKIP’s candidate in Sheffield‘s local elections, where he is standing for the Dore and Totley ward, a Liberal Democrat stronghold in Nick Clegg’s constituency. The party has dropped him after attention was drawn to a post he wrote on his blog last August which endorsed the reasoning in the testament of the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik.

He wrote, inter alia:

That pretty well everyone – myself not excluded – recoiled at his actions, does not belie the accuracy of Breivik’s research and analysis in his ‘manifesto’, which is in line with most scholarship

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I understated the awfulness of Steve Moxon. Google turns up more.

Like the fact that he was dropped by UKIP because he said nice things about Anders Breivik.

Steve Moxon, author of the classic anti-feminist book ‘The Woman Racket‘, was dropped as a candidate for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in this week’s local elections over comments he made on his blog previously regarding Anders Breivik. Whilst stressing how appalling and insupportable Breivik’s actions were, Moxon had noted that his manifesto presented an accurate account of the spread of political correctness in Europe. This was picked up by a local paper in the city that Moxon was standing in (Sheffield), forcing UKIP to drop him as a

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and punch them in the mouth.

Upcoming event July 21: a talk by a dude called Steve Moxon on Y women R so dumb.

Talk by Steve Moxon. Leeds psychologist Dr Gijsbert Stoet finds no evidence that women under-perform through internalising false stereotypes, a recent major review reveals no sex-discrimination in academia, and ground-breaking field research shows that it is actually in favour of women in recruitment; so why is it women tend not to ‘get to the top’?

It iz becoz they R so dumb.

Recent science confirms the sexes to be not just different but dichotomous, albeit that confounds with other factors often obscures this, and on many measures there is more variation within- than between-sex.

Some … Read the rest

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Paul Fidalgo has a post on the next Women in Secularism, and how the last one didn’t actually eat your baby.

By now it’s clear, I’d say, that the Women in Secularism conference put on by CFI this past May was a milestone event in the secular movement’s history, as it raised consciousness for all in attendance—men and women—about all manner of issues affecting women both in and outside the secular and skeptic communities. Discussions and debates were spurred on a huge variety of subjects, from the personal to the political, and even if you had only been able to attend one session, you could not have walked away without a deeper understanding of what was being discussed.

It

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Ken has a nice post at Popehat on the strangely hyperbolic reaction to discussion of harassment at conferences.

I am not a feminist.  By that I mean that I am completely uninterested in whether or not I deserve the label “feminist” or “anti-feminist.”  I believe in the legal, formal, and social equality of men and women, I am interested in the ways that laws and social norms interfere with that equality, and I am open to discussion of approaches to changing laws and social norms.

I gotta tell you, Ken, that means you are a feminist. A non-feminist doesn’t believe in those things and isn’t interested in those ways and isn’t open to that discussion. Arguing about definitions isn’t what … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)