Make plans for ReasonFest now!

reasonfest-LOGO

On 19-20 September, cool things will be going on in Winnipeg — you all should come! I’ll be there…OK, you’re unimpressed. Hector Avalos will be there! And Stephanie Zvan! Greta Christina, too! All kinds of Canadians! And it should be well before the first snow! (That is, chances of being snowed in and trapped in Manitoba for the entire winter are fairly low. Also, the polar bears don’t usually come down that far south. And just the average fraction of Canadians live in igloos there.)

This is also far enough ahead that you can tell me in the comments what I should talk about. Go ahead, anything goes.

Ashamed of atheism

What’s widening the rifts? The fact that growing diversity within movement atheism is tearing away from a bitterly misogynistic core. A core that is becoming the fringe.

Harassment and excluding people from your movement will be your downfall, atheism. Please take this as a warning, and an attempt to right the wrongs within your movement before it collapses. From now on, I’m a secular humanist, feminist, mangina-loving, vegetarian socialist, and nothing else, until you clean up your act.

Jenny McDermott

Becoming one with John Galt

mahakala

Here’s a weird mashup for you: Dark Buddhism, one man’s attempt to fuse Buddhism with Randian Objectivism. To his credit, he’s quite clear on the flaws in the Cult of Ayn Rand, but it’s still strange to care so much about Rand’s bogus philosophy that you want to rescue it by stitching it up: building a hybrid of selflessness and selfishness is a contradiction sure to spawn deepities.

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Damn it! Don’t make me agree with Andrew Brown!

rdf

Brown has always been a strident defender of religion, and over the years he’s said a lot of incredibly stupid things. But now I have to partly agree with him on this problematic Cult of Dawkins. This is getting embarrassing.

At the RDF website, there is a fundraising page. Fundraising is fine, organizations do have to do that, and so I don’t chide them for having a necessary function on the web; but I do criticize them for two things. What the money is for, and how they are raising it.

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Hurtling towards a clickbaity singularity

click-bait

Oh, how I despise Salon. I was an early adopter — I was an avid reader from the day they first opened their doors. A news site with a politically progressive slant? Yes, please. And then they turned evil. It was the same with the Huffington Post, although I think they were evil from the very beginning.

Unfortunately, people still send me links to their crappy crap. The latest is this abomination: 9 “scientific” facts about breasts. At least they had the kindness to slap scare quotes around the word “scientific”.

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