Frat culture is rape culture

I attended a few fraternity parties a few decades ago — and even in my callow, impressionable state, I found them largely unpleasant: too much drinking, too much dudebro scorekeeping, too much stupidity. So I was neither surprised nor impressed by this letter advising frat brothers on how to party.

It starts out kind of…OK. It’s a bit gushy with dumb jargon, but all right, some bits don’t sound so offensive.

Midnight or after, if you have been talking for awhile and they’ve had a couple drinks, ask if they want to dance. If you see an untalked to group or a solo girl, go up to her and ask if she wants anything to drink. If she says yes, get her a drink and then ask if she wants to dance. If she says no, ask her to dance. DANCING IS FUN!!!!! Always try to dance. If she does not want to dance and is with friends, say “aw thats no fun” (or something like that) and then ask one of her friends.

Dance? Hey, I like that! Very sweet. Do more of that.

Uh, wait. Next sentence:

Here is how to dance: Grab them on the hips with your 2 hands and then let them grind against your dick.

And from there it’s all downhill, culminating in ejaculating and shooing them out of your room. And if they don’t go for it, MORE ALCOHOL.

Man, fraternities haven’t changed a bit since the 1970s.

That isn’t a compliment.

There’s a reason we need good science journalists

It’s because the bad ones are appalling hacks. Here’s an ad for The Sun looking for a scientist to give them the answer they want.

Media outlet: The Sun Freelance journalist: Matthew Barbour Query: Further to my last request, I also now urgently need an expert who will say tattoos can give you cancer. We can plug any relevant organisation, give copy approval, and pay a fee. Please get back to me asap if you can help.

Media outlet: The Sun

Freelance journalist: Matthew Barbour

Query: Further to my last request, I also now urgently need an expert who will say tattoos can give you cancer. We can plug any relevant organisation, give copy approval, and pay a fee. Please get back to me asap if you can help.

May I suggest that Matthew Barbour ought to be drummed out of journalism, and that any “expert” who is cited in his article promoting lies for cash ought to be similarly ridiculed?

If anyone sees this article appear, let me know.

Apply and compare!

Have you ever wanted to enter the seminary? (I know, this audience? Probably not). I was sent a copy of the application form to enter the Mount Angel Abbey and I thought I’d compare it to the application form to enter the University of Minnesota Morris (both of those are pdfs, by the way). It was enlightening.

Here at Morris we’ve got a bunch of questions about your academic status. There’s one section that asks about your ethnic background and sex, but it’s surrounded by red border and prominently states “Request for confidential information (Optional)”. It’s appropriate and focused.

The Abbey? It’s 16 pages long and asks for all kinds of details about your private life. Do you play video games? How much money do you have? Have you ever committed heresy? Have you ever had mental health issues? Have you ever impersonated a deacon, priest or bishop? (Wait, does that get you in trouble with the Catholics? Halloween is coming up…) It goes on and on.

The message is clear. You need to apply to the University of Minnesota Morris instead of the seminary. We don’t give a damn about what video games you like to play.

The wicked part of this burger is…?

badburger

A burger joint in Chicago is slapping a communion wafer on a burger to honor some heavy metal band from Sweden. I say, “meh” — it’s a flavorless garnish that is just going to add a bit more starch to a meal that’s heavy in fats. But of course some Catholics are annoyed.

Tobias said Kuma’s phones have been ringing off the hook, with some saying that putting a Communion host on a burger is like waving the American flag over a fire.

Jeffrey Young, who runs a podcast and blog called "Catholic Foodie," called the Ghost burger "crass and offensive."

"For us, as Catholics, the Eucharist is the body and blood and soul of divinity itself," said Young. "Although the Communion wafer is not a consecrated host, it’s still symbolic, and symbols are important."

Errm, waving an American flag over a fire is legal. You can also set it on fire, or pee on it, anything you want, as long as you don’t compromise public safety — so that’s kind of a pointless complaint.

“Crass and offensive” is in the eye of the beholder. I find Catholicism itself crass and offensive — well, actually, I find that of all religions — but guess what? Being crass and offensive is also OK.

Worse than crass and offensive, I consider this nonsense about magic divinity to be stupid. But again, as long as you’re not harming anyone, you’re allowed to be stupid.

So why is this news? I don’t know.

Oh, wait, I know. Because serving up big greasy slabs of cow, rather than a bit of cardboard-flavored styrofoam, harms the environment and is ethically suspect? That’s the only part of that meal I’d consider a newsworthy source of argument.

Some people find it easy to lie

People like Hamza Tzortzis, for instance. Here he is confronted with a statement he made claiming that Muslims reject the whole idea of freedom, and he promptly denies that he ever said it. Unfortunately for him, his statement was recorded on video, and here that earlier video is spliced in right after his lie.

The other weird thing here: note how the audience cheers and claps at his denial. Like the creationists, Islamic fundamentalists also make the effort to pack the venue’s seats with their mindless followers. I’ve been in similar situations; it’s like trying to talk to an auditorium full of zombies.

“You people”

You can hardly blame Hobby Lobby for refusing to serve Christ-killers on Christmas, now can you?

Beginning your shopping list for Hanukkah gifts and decorations? If so, make sure to avoid Hobby Lobby, a swiftly growing U.S. crafts store with 561 stores, which sells zero Hanukkah merchandise, and hires Jewish intolerant employees.

On September 27th, Ken Berwitz took to his blog to explain what happened when a friend of his entered Hobby Lobby seeking Hanukkah goods. To the customer’s surprise, a sales associate callously replied, “We don’t cater to you people.”

Understandably, Mr. Berwitz had to hear this supposed truth for himself, and quickly made a call to Corporate to ask why Hobby Lobby didn’t put Hanukkah goods on their item list this year.

The response: ”Because Mr. Green is the owner of the company, he’s a Christian, and those are his values.”

My values involve never setting foot inside a Hobby Lobby store.

Martin Luther College looks like a total waste of time and money

New Ulm is a town in Minnesota. It hosts Martin Luther College (MLC), which, as you might guess from the name, is a religious school. An acting group in New Ulm planned to put on the play “Inherit the Wind”, but now they won’t be — MLC refused to allow them to use any of their facilities for practice, and also pressured the actors to drop out because evolution is contrary to their teachings.

MLC is the college of ministry for the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), which believes in creationism that teaches the Genesis story as a factual, historical account. Schone said MLC was concerned about making it absolutely clear to its students, WELS members and the public about its beliefs and teachings on creationism. He said he recognizes the subtext of the play, but feels it is unfairly critical of creationism and that most people would only see the criticism.

"We felt it was not compatible with what [the school] teaches the Bible says about the universe and the world,"? said Schone. "This is a ministerial school. People employing our students need confidence about their views."

It is not unfairly critical to the bankrupt fairy tale of creationism, it is unfairly generous. I really like that last line, though. Apparently, one of MLC’s selling points is that they work hard to keep their students safely and confidently ignorant of any perspective outside the Wisconsin synod’s accepted interpretations.

That’s not an education. That’s carefully nurtured stupidity.

Now they want to poison knowledge

We all know that the creationists have been busily trying to redefine science so that they can call Bible-based faith that the earth is 6000 years old “science”, while empirical research and validated theories are relabeled “dogma”. But now they’re going to reach deeper into the educational process and redefine “knowledge”.

While most of us think that it is ignorance that needs to be stamped out, advocates of Kentucky’s new unapproved and forcibly implemented science standards are targeting … knowledge.

Just take a gander at the responses to my opinion piece in the Louisville Courier-Journal which were published on Monday. According to Brad Matthews, former director of curriculum and assessment for the Jefferson County Public Schools, one reason we need these unapproved and forcibly implement standards is to extirpate that bane of all modern permissivist educators: memorization.

"Science education has moved away from the memorization of many facts," says Matthews, "and toward understanding how the laws and principles of science are applied."

That’s right: students have memorized too many facts. Their heads are bursting with scientific facts. There is not enough room in their tiny little brains for an understanding of how these facts should be applied because all the room us currently taken up by scientific facts which these students have memorized. There is simply no space in those fact-crowded little heads for scientific concepts.

The solution is obvious to people like Matthews: clear all that knowledge out of there so they will be able to apply the knowledge they will no longer have under these standards.

Knowledge is now the rote memorization of “facts”, and educators who try to get students to understand concepts are now enemies of knowledge. I’m sure the taskmasters who run madrassas are now nodding their heads in complete agreement.

Brad Matthews’ statement is entirely reasonable, and does not warrant one iota of the hyperbole Cothran applies to it. The worst classes in the world are the ones where we sit students down and force them to memorize strings of data and then regurgitate them onto an exam. That does not imply that kids shouldn’t have to master some basic rote skills; sorry, gang, knowing your times tables is still important as a basic life skill.

But you still have to understand how to apply that knowledge. For instance, in cell biology, I expect my students to memorize the structure of a peptide bond (that’s not hard) and the basic properties of the classes of amino acids (only slightly harder), and we talk about some basic chemical reactions, like hydrolysis. They should be able to figure out how you break a peptide bond, without memorizing all the pairwise combinations of amino acids and how they’re split chemically. Once you know the general principle you can apply it everywhere!

Also, if you’re learning science, you have to learn how to fit new facts into an existing body of knowledge, and memorization won’t cut it.

What these guys are really afraid of is that deep ideas like evolution are natural inferences from all the data and facts floating around in science — if you learn how to think, you’ll inevitably figure out that creationism is bullshit, evolution actually works and makes sense, and that all those religious cranks have been lying to us. So in defense they want to truncate education: memorize what we already know (and even that they will tightly circumscribe), but don’t you dare teach kids how to think.