Recent Blog Posts
-
12-year-old girl beaten after Christian youth meeting for “having a boy’s name.”
From Change.org: What’s in a name? A 12-year-old girl at Hernando Middle School in Mississippi was beaten by five fellow students — reportedly because they said her name, Randi, was “a boy name.” “They started talking about me like I was a man,” she told local news station WREG. “That I shouldn’t be in this…
-
Another snippet on dickishness
Comment from m5 in reply to this blog entry on Dispatches from the Culture Wars: I’m pretty sure THIS guy and his ilk are the ones Phil Plait was talking about in his Don’t Be a Dick speech, and I wish certain people would stop insisting criticism of THIS sort of shit is the same…
-
Atheism and (not) being a dick: a belated rant with copious footnotes
The “What would convince you that there is a god/supernatural/really weird thing out there?” argument continues. I didn’t read the whole thread. I’m feeling fatigued on the subject, honestly. It’s easy to demonstrate the existence of weird things (even really weird ones), rather more difficult to prove the supernatural (depending on how you define it),…
-
What would convince you that God exists?
This isn’t a new question, that’s for sure. I’ve been asked it more times than I can recall, starting roughly ten years ago when I thought it would be fun to go online and argue at length with strangers about whether it makes sense to believe in God or not. But apparently it has become…
-
The trickiness of characterizing empathy in politics, part 1
So as mentioned, I’m working my way through Frans de Waal’s book The Age of Empathy. On my drive I also listened to the audiobook of Michael Shermer’s The Mind of the Market, and it was almost comical to expose myself to both at the same time and read/listen to how both drew on the…
-
The trip home
Our session at AAR yesterday was really interesting and I’ll try to post about it later, but don’t really have the time right now. I’m just waking up in Oxford, Alabama, and will be driving through that state and Mississippi today listening to In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan. Most likely…