I may have created a monster. I was sent this illustration by Martin aka Evader, with full permission to use it freely in any commercial venture…I have become kawaii!
I am curious what the characters at the bottom say, though — “PZ is a poopyhead”?
Sadly, an Indian health minister has gone on record calling homosexuality a “disease”.
For the Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, men having sex with men (MSMs) is not only “unnatural” but also a “disease.”
According to Azad, “this disease has come to India from foreign shores”, and Indian society needs to be prepared to face it. Unfortunately, he said, the number of “such people” is increasing by the day.
All gay people are alien immigrants from Gaydonia, I guess, and no natives of the subcontinent could possibly be gay. Unless maybe they’re from Pakistan.
I think we could make a legitimate case for calling homophobia a disease or mental illness, though. All you have to do is browse this sampling of homophobic comic books to see that there is something just wrong with those people. The bizarre, crude work of politician Brent Rinehart alone makes a disturbing case for institutionalizing the wackaloon.
I had no idea that gayness gave you superspeed and that rainbows trailed behind you wherever you went, but if it were actually true, it would be awesome. Except for the children of the corn who’d be pursuing you all the time.
Weird ideas can flourish if enough people share a false preconception, and here’s a marvelous article on the history and philosophy of widely held certainty that other planets were inhabited by people. Not just any people, either: good Christian people.
By the 1700s, there could no longer be any doubt. Earth was just one of many worlds orbiting the Sun, which forced scientists and theologians alike to ponder a tricky question. Would God really have bothered to create empty worlds?
To many thinkers, the answer was an emphatic “no,” and so cosmic pluralism – the idea that every world is inhabited, often including the Sun – was born. And this was no fringe theory. Many of the preeminent astronomers of the 18th and 19th century, including Uranus discoverer Sir William Herschel, believed in it wholeheartedly, as did other legendary thinkers like John Locke and Benjamin Franklin. How could so many geniuses believe in something so silly?
It’s a good read. The key idea that was leading everyone to this patently false conclusion was teleology, the notion that everything in the universe had a purpose, coupled to another belief, that that purpose had to be us.
Lest you think this is just ancient history and that we’ve moved beyond it, here’s a story about a contemporary crank with peculiar ideas about alien life.
Speaking at an international forum dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life, Finkelstein said 10 percent of the known planets circling suns in the galaxy resemble Earth.
If water can be found there, then so can life, he said, adding that aliens would most likely resemble humans with two arms, two legs and a head.
“They may have different color skin, but even we have that,” he said.
Andrei Finkelstein runs a program that resembles SETI — and if I wanted to start a real argument here I’d tell you that SETI is about as quaintly absurd as Herschel’s belief that people lived on the moon. So I won’t tell you that. Yet.
Now here’s a criminal abuse of my youth: the Archie comics were written for a time by a demented fundamentalist. How crazy, you might ask? Read his comic book explanation of the Rapture. That is some insane stuff.
This is moderately weird: it’s a periodic table of atheists, and I’ve been assigned an atomic number of 4, which makes me a rare, brittle, and highly toxic metal with a high melting point. Does anyone else look at these charts and try to draw inferences from chemical properties to the individual?
He’s written a wonderfully clear rejection of the Singularity nonsense. He’s right on, 100%.
I need to buy a few dozen of these shirts to prop up my self-esteem.
Probably a better question, but one that does my self-esteem no good at all, is to ask what they heck they’re for? I know they’re not actually for me — is there a place called PZ?
Minnesota has the lowest frequency of searches for “free gay porn” in all 50 states? Is it because we all already know exactly where to find it, so we don’t bother googling for it, or is it because we’re too busy snuggling up to keep warm all winter?
And why are Alabamans looking for god on the internet?
Come to think of it, I’ve never searched google for either “god” or “free gay porn”. I might be missing something.
(via Calamities of Nature)
It’s true, I couldn’t predict most of these entries, but I totally guessed the general subject of the #1 entry correctly, so that’s got to count for something.
Swim away! Don’t antagonize the shark!
You should also be afraid because the ocean is apparently full of literate predators.
