Kevin Bollaert is one of these sleazy, cowardly types who saw a market in getting other sleazy, cowardly types to send in naked pictures of their ex-girlfriends, and then he made money both in running the porn site and in demanding that his victims pay him money to remove the pictures. It’s a brilliant racket if you’ve got no sense of decency at all. He was convicted of the crimes, and has now been sentenced: 18 years in jail.
The slate of Hugo Award nominees has been announced, and it contains a sorry collection of right-wing has-beens who put together a set of Vox-Day-approved candidates and then went cruising through #gamergate, gathering assholes who would vote for them simply to poke Social Justice Warriors in the eye, rather than on the basis of the quality of the writing. They called it the “Sad Puppy slate”. I’ll just point out that there was no comparable effort to assemble a bloc of ideologically liberal authors and then ask people to vote for them sight unseen — which I would have also said was ethically questionable and rather undermines the purpose of a writing award.
The best take yet on the problematic nature of ballot-stuffing comes from Patrick Nielsen-Hayden.
Greta Christina has followed up on EbonMuse’s challenge to theists, listing the kinds of evidence that would convince them that their beliefs were true.
If I’m such an open-minded atheist — if I really am an atheist because I think the God hypothesis is unsupported by the evidence — what evidence for God would I accept? What would it take to change my mind?
I’m going to take a rather different approach: I’m going to tell theists to not bother.
There’s this obsessed Bigfoot prof at Oxford — no, he’s not a Bigfoot at Oxford, he’s a professor at Oxford who claims to study Bigfoot — who’s treated as a serious guy by the London Times. He just got shot down by the science editor, though, who rolled his eyes at Syke’s “evidence” and also got a revealing quote from him.
That’s a bit unfair — this is something that’s wrong everywhere. It’s called faith. But Indiana did have one ghastly cult led by Hobart Freeman, called the Faith Assembly. They were serious about that word, faith — turning to a doctor for material help was a betrayal of your trust in god. You can guess what happened: people died.
But I’ve seen their little chats; they’re going to be promoting these dangerous games instead. Randi Harper was SWATed. Somebody is going to get seriously hurt in one of these false alarms.
I’m following the twitter conversation about the American Atheists convention this weekend, and in particular Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s talk. She’s reported to have said this:
If you are gay the worst the Christian community can do in America is not serve you cake.…I just want you to think about being Muslim and gay today…the worst case scenario…bullies throw you off a building.
Larry Moran quotes this closing paragraph from an actual, published paper in a respectable journal. I don’t understand what it means. Can somebody explain why these terms are mashed together in this way?
We close this essay by postulating that there has been a pervasive influence of the gene centrism inherent in the Modern Synthesis in conjunction with the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology on biomedical thinking. We believe that this influence has now become counterproductive. Thus, it is critical for new ideas stemming from evolutionary biology highlighted in this special issue of The Journal of Physiology and elsewhere to more fully inform biomedical thinking about the complex relationship between DNA and phenotype. The time has come to stop chasing Mendel.
Amidst all these indignant Christians in Indiana and elsewhere insisting that it is their right to be uncharitable snots to people who don’t obey their orders about who to love, there are some good stories, too. The Oakland A’s baseball team is having an LGBT Night.
That’s not the good part, although it is mighty decent of them.
A bunch of Oakland A’s fair-weather fans are upset about that, and are trying to sell off their tickets for that night.
That’s definitely not the good part, either.
