Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Idolatry.

So, once again: Muslims are people, and as such they can be the targets of bigotry and racism. Islam itself is a set of abstract, philosophical ideas about theology, metaphysics, ethics etc. to which concepts like bigotry and racism don’t apply. It’s perfectly possible to be critical* of the ideas and practices of Islam (not to mention the political ideology of Islamism) for reasons that have nothing to do with what people look like, where they’re from, or who their ancestors were. It’s even possible to oppose Islamists and white racists at the same time.

Whatever’s legitimate about the term “Islamophobia” can be expressed better – because more precisely – … Read the rest

Ari Berman on voting rights in Texas:

Texas law makes it monumentally difficult to register voters…

And voting in Texas could soon get even harder. On Thursday, the GOP-controlled legislature is beginning a special legislative session that will revive a sweeping voter suppression bill that was blocked at the 11th hour in May when Texas House Democrats staged a dramatic walkout before a midnight deadline, denying Republicans the quorum needed to pass it. So Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session to pass new voting restrictions, along with far-right priorities like banning critical race theory and preventing trans-gender athletes from competing in Texas sports. 

He’s wrong on that last one, but anyway.

The voting bill, known as SB7, 

… Read the rest

The hotness was most likely because of hotness.

The searing heat that scorched western Canada and the US at the end of June was “virtually impossible” without climate change, say scientists.

In their study, the team of researchers says that the deadly heatwave was a one-in-a-1,000-year event. But we can expect extreme events such as this to become more common as the world heats up due to climate change.

If humans hadn’t influenced the climate to the extent that they have, the event would have been 150 times less likely. Scientists worry that global heating, largely as a result of burning fossil fuels, is now driving up temperatures faster than models predict.

That is worrying. If it gets too … Read the rest

But why is this political? Why is it right v left? Why is it Republicans v Democrats?

Fox News warns that anyone under age 30 should not get vaccine, attack the left and Fauci for being pro vaccine. https://t.co/3BgksRz4XT pic.twitter.com/7fSh2jwDec

— Angelo Carusone (@GoAngelo) July 8, 2021

It’s not political, it’s technical. The two shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. Either the vaccine protects against the virus or it doesn’t. General vaccination either slows the pandemic or it doesn’t. The vaccine is either safe or not. Those are not political questions. Nobody wants to get the virus, so why is anyone making the issue political?

Is it just because “fuck you, that’s why”? Because it’s so urgent to … Read the rest

Revisiting the quest for a new blasphemy law:

Just hours after Kim Leadbeater took her seat in Parliament, following a campaign dogged by questions about a Batley school teacher forced to go into hiding for showing children a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, [Labour MP Naz] Shah delivered an eyebrow-raising intervention likening such depictions to the vandalism of Winston Churchill’s statue.

This call from a frontbench spokesperson to treat cartoons of Mohammed as equivalent to actual public vandalism has caused something of a belated backlash, amid fears it would mean the restoration of blasphemy laws. Such restrictions were abolished in England, incidentally, by the last Labour government in 2008.  Shah told the Commons:

As a Muslim, for me and millions of Muslims across this country and

… Read the rest

Disgraced loser Donald Trump held a “press conference” today to tell an indifferent world that he’s suing Social Media for not letting him use its platforms to incite a civil war.

The funniest part is the photo, titled Let’s Pretend This Is Still the White House.

He’s at his New Jersey golf club.… Read the rest

Hah!

https://twitter.com/JessDeWahls/status/1412839434635120649… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Playing a skeptical maverick.

As I have said many times, I cut all ties to Movement Skepticism™ specifically because of the misogyny issue, but now I don’t even think the movement did very well on the science front. For example skeptics tended to let climate change denialists (some of whom were even considered “thought leaders” of the movement) off the hook far too easily, and enter false balance territory whenever the issue came up, while congratulating themselves on how clever they were for not believing in homeopathy or Bigfoot.

The Movement also includes some of the most staggering examples of the Dunning Kruger Effect ever seen. Even the smartest, best educated, most … Read the rest

Isaac Schorr at National Review:

Tracey Lambrechs is not quieting down.

Lambrechs — a female weightlifter from New Zealand who took bronze in the 2014 Commonwealth Games, silver at the 2015 Pacific Games, and competed in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — has retired from the sport. But that retirement appears to have lent her her voice back after several years of being cajoled into silence.

Those several years are the years when “Laurel” Hubbard was breaking records.

In 2017, Lambrechs was gearing up to compete in the 2018 Commonwealth Games when she was informed that if she wanted to participate, she would need do so in a different category than she was accustomed to.

“I

… Read the rest

David Gorski asks in 2006 why not just castrate them?

Ever since I found myself critically examining the claim that autism and autistic spectrum disorders are caused by mercury found in the preservative(thimerosal) used until recently in childhood vaccines, I thought that I’d heard of every dubious or quack autism therapy there is out there. Indeed, it is from that concept (that “autism is a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning,”, which is not supported by epidemiological or preclinical evidence) that flows all sorts of dubious therapies to “remove” the mercury. Foremost among these questionable therapies is chelation therapy, using a chelating agent like EDTA or DMSA to bind to and remove this supposed mercury excess. This therapy is touted

… Read the rest

Interesting discovery.

The book looks at how teenage girls are being prescribed the drug Lupron in never seen before numbers to stop their developing puberty. These girls are reporting dysphoria about their emerging sex and sexuality and want to 'transition' to be 'boys'.

17/x

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) July 7, 2021

This cased a stink at the blog as it was seen as 'transphobic'. The trans activist movement acts as if children have a *right* to Lupron and doctors have a *duty* to prescribe it. Any deviation from this "affirmation' is 'transphobic'. This is not how SBM works.

19/x

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) July 7, 2021

The next was by an "expert" who had just graduated ihn family medicine a few days

… Read the rest

It’s not just “viewpoint.” At all.

Eric Kaufmann at National Review thinks willingness to fuck a Trump fan is an index of political open-mindedness. Come on. The vast unexplored foulness of Trump goes way beyond the political, and anybody who can’t see that is, to put it delicately, not desirable.

When a sample of nearly 1,500 female Ivy League students was asked whether they would date a Trump supporter, only 6 percent said yes (after excluding the small minority of the sample who support him [huh?]). So finds a survey of 20,000 university students that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) conducted in 2020. While people are free to discriminate however they wish in dating, this attitude

… Read the rest

I didn’t know until today that Bret Weinstein is an anti-vaxxer. When worlds collide, yeah? He’s one of those Intellectual Dark Web people, which surely ought to be enough to keep anyone busy, but no, he finds the time to tell people not to get vaccinated against Covid too.

Bret Weinstein is, simply, a right-wing media grifter in the vein of conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro and Canadian professor of psychology Dr. Jordan Peterson. Part of the “intellectual dark web,” (a term his brother Eric coined), Weinstein has risen in prominence over the last year as other members of the IDW have lost relevance.

Weinstein made his reactionary right wing guru bones after he left his evolutionary biologist

… Read the rest

I don’t find it particularly shocking or alarming that an Edinburgh school doesn’t want to teach To Kill a Mockingbird. There are a lot of better books, and schools can’t teach all of them, so…so what?

A Scottish secondary school will no longer teach the classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird after teachers claimed the book promotes a “white saviour” narrative.

Well, it does. I like the book, but more for its picture of childhood than for the Atticus Finch part. I don’t hate that part, I wouldn’t urge anyone not to read the novel because of that part, but it is there.

Now if it were Huck Finn it would be a different story, because that is a … Read the rest

Ken Zucker on that “science-based” review:

https://twitter.com/ZUCKERKJ/status/1412318648249860097 https://twitter.com/ZUCKERKJ/status/1412318650154037248

Sheer silliness is chronic in this ideology.

https://twitter.com/ZUCKERKJ/status/1412161378689953797

Facts are transphobic.… Read the rest

Jesse Singal notes some rather large mistakes in That Review at SBM.

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1412131345665609729 https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1412131349402734597

Jeez. That’s quite a howler, and it’s a howler that is damaging to Zucker, i.e. a perceived Enemy of the Cause. That’s not how one is supposed to do these things.

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1412146534267904004

“Science-based.”… Read the rest

Maryam rejects Naz Shah’s attempt to invent a crime of “emotional harm.”

Neither statues nor your prophet or anyone else’s need protection. Human rights do. Imprisoning people for 10 years for defacing a statue or executing people for blasphemy or apostasy as in Islamic states is the real harm, not free expression & your fragile sensibilities.

— Maryam Namazie مریم نمازی (@MaryamNamazie) July 6, 2021

Notice that Shah says the bill is to “protect emotional harm.” She says it throughout her speech, too. She means protect from emotional harm…by sentencing people to 10 years in prison for damaging statues (and, apparently, for “blasphemous” cartoons).

What a revolting plan.… Read the rest

Well, you know…”they” is only doing what so many others do. Why can’t Oli do that?

'I just felt trapped…'

We meet Oli London, who has caused controversy around the world after undergoing what they describe as 'racial-transition surgery' because they 'identify as Korean'. pic.twitter.com/8woBllb6kG

— This Morning (@thismorning) July 6, 2021

They says they feels like “someone that feels like they’re born in the wrong body so for the last nine years I’ve felt like I’ve been trapped – since I lived in Korea I feel like I identify as Korean”…and so on.

Of course nationality isn’t in the body, but it doesn’t do to point out what makes sense and what doesn’t, because that gets you into the … Read the rest

Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley and Thomas Chatterton Williams in the NY Times on laws banning Critical Race Theory:

In recent weeks, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa, Idaho and Texas have all passed legislation that places significant restrictions on what can be taught in public school classrooms, and in some cases, public universities, too.

Tennessee House Bill SB 0623, for example, bans any teaching that could lead an individual to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” In addition to this vague proscription, it restricts teaching that leads to “division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class or class of people.”

In … Read the rest

Well…

'How irresponsible can you get?'

Iain Dale's fiery clash with Tory MP Miriam Cates, who won't wear a face mask on public transport after July 19 because 'freedom is very important' and 'showing our faces is part of being human'.@IainDale pic.twitter.com/7qAR1HwTXY

— LBC (@LBC) July 5, 2021

…yes freedom is very important, but so is not spreading a lethal pandemic. Lots of things are important, and some of them are incompatible with each other, so we have to choose among them.

As for “showing our faces is part of being human” – other things being equal, yes, but when showing our faces=risking the spread of a lethal pandemic, not so much.

Freedom is a good, no question, but … Read the rest