It feels like cartoon day on Pharyngula, but this one is so good I had to mention it. Tom Tomorrow takes on Saint Thomas DeLay.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It feels like cartoon day on Pharyngula, but this one is so good I had to mention it. Tom Tomorrow takes on Saint Thomas DeLay.
Imagine your childhood haunts turned to dust and ash.
Man, I step away from the ol’ blog for a day, and what do I get? A rash of the right-wing dingleberries. Come on, everyone, ignore them, they’re nuts.
I do notice a few things, though. My post was about the concern that we would use nuclear weapons against Iran in an unprovoked attack. Read the wingnut comments, and what do we see?
As for those demands that the Left needs to provide constructive solutions…did you people even read the Hersh article? He talks about the diplomatic solutions right there, all the stuff that the sensible people are proposing. As turnabout is fair play, what I’d really like to see is the right-wing solution that does not involve large bombs and tens of thousands of dead civilians. If anyone has a dearth of solutions in this situation, it’s the knee-jerk warmongers.
Everyone has read Seymour Hersh’s exposé of our government’s plan for Iran by now, I’m sure, and today there is an article in the Washington Post backing it up. Our leader is pushing for a fast strike to cripple Iranian military capabilities.
Eric Pianka is eccentric, opinionated, and outspoken; many people might disagree with specific bits and pieces of his position. But I don’t think that he is a eugenicist, a hate-filled fan of the Third Reich, an advocate of planned genocide, anti-human, or a crazed scientist planning the death of humanity. Nick Matzke has compiled a list of the slander that’s been aimed at Pianka. It ain’t pretty.
Transcripts of his talks are beginning to emerge; he has given this same talk, “The Vanishing Book of Life”, seven times now, and the only time it has received this level of vituperation is when a creationist in the audience distorted its message. It’s an entirely manufactured controversy, to no one’s surprise: that’s what creationists do.
Two carnivals under my purview are coming up next week, both on Wednesday, 12 April, so let’s get rolling on bringing in exciting links.
The Tangled Bank will be held at Discovering Biology in a Digital World, under the care of Sandra Porter. Send links to interesting science writing to her, to me, or to [email protected] by Tuesday.
For the first time, I’m going to be hosting the Carnival of the Liberals. The hosting guidelines for this one are interesting: it’s competitive. I’m only going to post what I think are the ten best submissions. You can guess what I like: uncompromising liberalism. Strong words. No apologies. Secularism (Steven Waldman and Amy Sullivan need not bother sending me anything, but that does not preclude Christian contributors). I’ll look especially favorably on anything about science and science policy. Send the links to me by Tuesday to make me happy.
There has been an oddly evasive struggle going on in Washington DC for the last several years. We have a safe, easy method of emergency contraception that has been turned into a political football, with Republicans playing their usual role of criminally stupid thugs, trying to crush a simple idea: Plan B contraception. It illustrates exactly how the Religious Right is trying to intrude on your private life, and in particular, how they want to control women.
I’ll explain how Plan B works, but to do so I’m going to have to explain some basics of the hormonal control of the menstrual cycle.
Please, please, please…I want to cast my vote for Al Franken in 2008, and I want him to be my representative in the Senate.
Why don’t our official news media ever dig into the truth as plainly as our comedians?
Pianka speaks out. Nick Matzke has a good post on Pianka at the Thumb, addressing the smear campaign against him*. He links to an interview with the good Dr—what he’s saying is simple sense, common in the biological community, and he’s not endorsing mass murder…he’s talking about conservation and planning ahead. Mims is a “crazy kook” who distorted the story and turned it into screaming match.
Get used to it. This is part of the right-wing strategy to attack the academy: when scientists honestly state bad news (and there is much bad news, and it’s growing), they are going to be rabidly accused of all kinds of outrageous crimes. It’s the new McCarthyism. The majority of us do not support short-sighted policy, we don’t endorse jingoism, we are going to urge people to think before acting, we are going to predict the consequences of bad policy, and we are generally going to be critical of demagogues and fools…and that is being treated as a crime.
*Quite unlike the situation with Paul Mirecki; I can’t help but interpret this to mean you’re going to be left twisting in the wind if the right-wing mobs try to lynch you, and you admit you’re godless.
The Pianka situation is getting very, very ugly. I’ve been chatting with a member of the Texas Academy of Science, and people there are getting death threats over it. Here’s one example of the kind of email they’re getting:
