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The accusation that one is “closed-minded” is usually more accurately interpreted as someone saying, “You don’t agree with me, so you must not have considered my position since what I believe is so right and there’s just no way what you believe is right.”
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: Closed minded, Thought of the day | 2 Comments »
I found this blog post by Stephen Fry fascinating and well done. I’m going to reproduce some sections of it here, but do read the whole thing:
There was a right old Twitter barney last week. It started with me defending Richard Dawkins –– always a difficult thing to do since he seems to be everyone’s least favourite atheist. Even atheists often express the wish that he’d “tone it down a bit”.
The usual hail of insults at Richard (and some at me) came down from the holier side of the twittersphere, followed by the inevitable “Ah, but Dawkins and you and your type never dare attack Islam, do you?”…
Anyway, I made the fundamental mistake of tweeting (just to show I wasn’t the coward they assumed I was) that of course I was against those Muslims who slaughtered, bombed and treated women in such charming ways.
Now the entire seesaw tilted and I was bombarded with tweets saying mostly stuff like”:-
“Disappointed that you are an Islamophobe, Stephen. Thought better of you.”
Huh?
Sometimes it’s just a reflex tweet from someone who hasn’t put any thought into it, on other occasions the tweet claims that my saying a single word against any kind of Muslim is Islamophobia of the kind that feeds the vilely racist bigots of the EDL and BNP.
The squeezed liberal finds himself in the position that he cannot criticise Islamofascism because it’s somehow “racist” (although Islam encompasses many many races) or because it encourages acts of violence against innocent law-abiding honourable Muslims, which I would never for a second endorse. It is a topsy-turvy smothering of debate and an Orwellian denial of free-speech to declare that speaking out against violence will cause violence. I’m all for insult, as it happens, as long as it’s funny. But I have no time for assault. Only a few letters’ difference, but the two are a world away…
Ah, but do I believe that all Muslims want to see my civilisation destroyed? That they are all bombers in the making? Of course I don’t.
The fact that I need to go through this absurd liberal court of inquisition in which I have to repeat these mantras is what, as Peter Griffin would say, really grinds my gears:
“I promise I do not think all Muslims are fanatics.”
“I go out of my way to smile at them when sitting opposite them on the tube.”
“I think it is terrible the way a whole community is distrusted because a fanatical few.”
This is the game we see played so often. Western New Atheists, largely facing a Christian-dominated culture, criticize that which is most prominent to them, to their lives. In defense and as a sort of sneaky red herring, some Christians will demand equal criticism be leveled at Islam. Or, at the least, the New Atheists will be taunted as cowardly for not saying something impolite about Mohammed. Of course, the moment we say anything, we’re verbally attacked for saying being “racist” (even though, as Fry points out, Islam is not a race) or Islamophobic. It’s all just a cute shell game: “You think violent, seemingly routine riots protests are a bad thing?” Why, yes. “Look everyone! A racist!”
It’s all quite tiresome.
At any rate, I do highly recommend giving that blog post a few minutes of your time. Stephen Fry’s talent is impressively strong; I wish I had become familiar with his work earlier in life.
Filed under: Religions | Tagged: Islamophobia, Stephen Fry | 1 Comment »
I was reading a post at Why Evolution Is True that led me to Pharyngula. At the top of the blog right now is this post:
New Commenting Rules
What are they?
The ongoing meltdown in Thunderdome and the departure of Chris tell me we’ve got something that needs to be fixed. I don’t quite know how to fix everything, so let’s crowdsource it — you people leave comments here telling me what rules you think might work to get the knifey-bitey-smashy atmosphere to lighten up a little. Just a little.
I have no idea what Thunderdome is and I don’t know this Chris fella. However, I do know the answer to PZ’s issue: More free speech. Of course, FtB (and feminism as a general rule) is highly censorious, so this will never happen, but it’s the only reasonable solution. Let people duke it out until they get tired of it. It’s fair, it’s free, and it’s desired amongst those who value variety in ideas.
Filed under: Blogging | Tagged: Free Speech | 2 Comments »
Remember that asshole dad everyone loved? He was the guy who managed to access his teenage daughter’s private Facebook page, read a post where she complained about him and her mother, then he took her computer and shot it to show her the value of a dollar or something. Well, I came across my post about him (linked above) the other night when I was meandering around FTSOS, so I decided to send him a message on Facebook. This was something I wanted to do a month or two after the hoopla died down, but I forgot, so here it is now. First is my initial message:
Now that the hoopla around your video is more or less gone, I want to make a few points.
1. You didn’t like that your daughter embarrassed you on Facebook. So what did you do? You embarrassed her on Facebook (and beyond). First, that’s overtly hypocritical. Second, it demonstrates a greater immaturity than your daughter did. Third, the embarrassment a high school student gets from something like this is more significant than the embarrassment you suffered. How many of your friends mocked or would have mocked you upon seeing your daughter’s post? I bet none. How many of her friends do you think mocked her?
2. You were clearly motivated to improve your daughter’s attitude, but you were also motivated by revenge. That’s petty and immature, and it’s the only reason you sought to embarrass her. Sit her down next time and talk. You’re suppose to be the adult.
3. In an interview you said you wanted to teach your daughter the value of a dollar. I find this fascinating since you clearly don’t have a clear concept of what wealth even is. If you did, you wouldn’t have destroyed a thousand dollar machine into which you just invested $130. You may as well have sold the computer and burned the cash you got from it. It’s exactly the same thing – YOU destroyed wealth. Your actions betray a deep misunderstanding of the “value of a dollar”.
I think these are all pretty strong points. He did seek to embarrass her, he was clearly motivated by some petty feelings of revenge, and he did ironically destroy wealth. Here’s his response:
Hey dipshit.. it’s been a year and a half. No one cares what your opinion of me is, especially me. There is a very short list of people whose opinion matter to me or my family. Let me consult my list to be sure… yup, just as I thought, your name isn’t on it.
Go stalk someone else, idiot. If you insist on feeling like you want to hurl your opinion around to people that will listen, I suggest you use your own wall, not my inbox. I’ve got better things to do.
What a class act, huh? Name-calling, accusations of a serious crime, and, well, more name-calling. Here’s my response:
Oh, I’m glad you ‘consulted your list’. I was worried you were going to be witty.
My opinion clearly matters to you enough to get you riled up, prompting you to respond. So you lose that point.
As for who the “dipshit” is, Tom, I’m not the one who wanted to teach my daughter the value of a dollar by destroying a thousand dollar machine. You did that, and all because you aren’t very clear on the concept of what “wealth” is. So you lose the “dipshit” point.
And as for who the “stalker” is, if your definition of stalking is so loose as to include people talking to each other, then I’m surprised you haven’t turned yourself into the authorities for your more egregious stalking. After all, you’re the one who invaded his daughter’s private Facebook wall. (What would your defense be? Insecurity? Were you afraid of being embarrassed in front of your daughter’s high school friends?) And so you lose yet another point.
Unsurprisingly, that appears to be the end of the exchange, but it turned out better than I had thought. I figured he wouldn’t even see my post for months since it went to his “Other” inbox on Facebook, then I figured even if he did see it, he wouldn’t respond. But I’m glad that he read what I had to say. He has clearly been fellated to heaven with praise for his immature, asshole-ish behavior; I doubt he’s received very much criticism at all. It’s just too bad that there are probably a boatload of people out there willing to do the same sort of childish garbage-parenting he practices.
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: Tommy Jordan is an asshole | 17 Comments »
Sometimes I hear theists defend the lack of science on their side by noting that ‘science only deals with material things, not immaterial things’.
What a meaningless statement. That’s like defending one’s beliefs about mythical beasts by saying that science only deals with material things, not unicorns dancing in the aether.
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: Thought of the day, Unicorns | Leave a comment »
This is hilarious.
Filed under: Humor, Science | Tagged: Postmodernism, Richard Dawkins | Leave a comment »
I was considering reading PZ Myers’ new book “The Happy Atheist” so I could do a brief review of it here. However, I have decided against it after reading the user reviews on Amazon. Here are a few random excerpts:
“The Happy Atheist” is just a collection of blog posts cleaned up and converted into a book format, arranged in an order so they make sense. Unfortunately this leads to a lack of substance on some of the chapters, as it doesn’t appear anything new was added. In some cases this is a serious problem, because a book is not a blog – and it’s not unreasonable to expect a book to cover issues in more depth than a two page blog post would. There are some chapters just screaming out to be expanded on so that more info could be presented, more sources cited, more angles covered, more caveats added, etc. Reading along you can pretty much guess where the links to other blog posts or news stories would have gone in the text – but this is a book, so I can’t click them, and all that extra info is lost.
and
Hoping this would be entertaining, as it didn’t appear more than a series of essays, I figured it wouldn’t be a scholarly book or researched tome. Instead, it was a collection of essays that I realize much have been part of his blog. The Introduction, About the Author and next couple of chapters really had me interested. By the 7th, I was pretty bored.
I found myself skipping over whole passages, as they were just repeating themselves. It was chapter after chapter of stories outlining arguments and disagreements between him and different people and organizations. It just didn’t keep my interest.
and
If you read his blog,this books adds nothing. It breaks no new ground, offers no new perspective and has no insight. It is a very insular work, reflecting the experiences and thoughts of someone trying to “jump in late” with an atheist book – but not really having any justification or reason to do so. You get the sense he is like a “little kid” on the atheist schoolyard. His heart is usually in the right place but he’s immature (which you can also see on this blog sometimes). He’s just out of place on the basketball court where the older kids like Harris, Dennett, Hitchens and Dawkins play.
Dr Myers is intelligent, and some of writing here is worth being read – but there is no coherent whole or central idea. Nothing here justifies a book.
and
Almost word for word, sometimes with a different intro or ending, and perhaps a few other very small changes, here are the chapters, er blog posts, that I found online with the same titles:
4) The Great Desecration
11) The Top Ten Reasons Religion is Like Pornography
13) Happy Easter! is from an original post titled “Sunday Sacrilege: The Silliest Story Ever Told.”
17) Imagine No Heaven
18) Daughters of Eve
19) Prometheus’s Sin
20) So Alone
21) One Nation Free of Gods
22) An Embryo is Not a Person
23) The Courtier’s Reply
28) We’re Happier out of a Straightjacket Than in One
31) The Active Hand
32) The Proper Reverence Due Those Who Have Gone Before
33) Niobrara
34) We Stand Awed at the Heights Our People Have Achieved.If someone is putting out a series of blog posts as a published book for a price, readers would want to know so they can make an informed choice before laying down the required money to read it. A publisher would most definitely want to know. They surely paid him a huge advance, probably in the tens of thousands of dollars. Did they know?
So, in short, it appears that I have basically already read the book by virtue of having read most of these blog posts. It looks like PZ was just looking to get some of his more popular or contentious ideas into the public sphere as a way to make an easy buck. I see no reason to purchase this book.
In other news, Richard Dawkins has a new book coming out in a few weeks. I will be devoting a bit of money towards that purchase.
Filed under: Atheism/Humanism | Tagged: pz myers, Richard Dawkins, The Happy Atheist | 4 Comments »
My job is in making math and science textbooks available to blind students, so basically they get the ever-so-great honor of learning from how I choose to interpret and present the material. Right now I’m working on an engineering mechanics dynamics book. It’s a lot of pre-calc and physics, but in a relatively difficult context; I certainly wouldn’t want to take a course on this stuff, even with my ability to see all the diagrams and examples, so I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to do this stuff while blind.
I know this isn’t interesting to anyone else, but I find it incredibly impressive that there are blind students who are able to master this stuff.
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: Blind, Thought of the day | Leave a comment »
Take a quick look around a world map and you may just figure out the location of a magma hot spot. The island chain of Hawaii, for example, was born via this way. 
As the Pacific plate moves, hot magma beneath the Earth’s crust pushes through, forming new land over millions of years. This process has given us the 4 main Hawaiian land masses in addition to well over a hundred tiny islands. Other areas of the world where we see this include the Galapagos islands and the peaks of Kilimanjaro.
Filed under: Science | Tagged: Fun fact of the day, Hawaii, Volcanic hot spots | 1 Comment »
I’m a big believer in fighting speech with more speech. That’s why it’s so easy for me to explain to people why I don’t like people like PZ Myers and the thought-police at Freethoughtblogs:
There is a facebook page called The Patriot Nation, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: people raging against an America that isn’t white. And it is on facebook, so hell no, it’s never going to get taken down, even when it lies.
and
I just got a comment on twitter about this post:
@Miserere22: @pzmyers hopefully she gets raped. no offense.
Hopefully their account gets reported by people all over the world. No offense.
and
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
Status: Heavily Moderated
I found all this within the first 4 pages of his blog.
Filed under: Blogging | Tagged: Censorship, pz myers | 2 Comments »
For the Sake of Science 