Do you recognize this description of the American Humanist Association?
The American Humanist Association, which hates all religion with much fire and brimstone, has launched a national campaign to inspire Americans to refuse to say the entire Pledge of Allegiance everywhere, all the time until Congress officially removes the famous phrase “under God” from the patriotic, 31-word oath.
Seth Andrews did a fine job of dismantling creationist Josh Feuerstein’s claims in a video I posted a while back. Now an apologist for Feuerstein has sent me (and Andrews) an email. This one is from Ed Neeland, a creationist chemistry professor at the University of British Columbia.
I learned something this evening that explains a lot of human phenomena.
People are stupid. Young people in self-reinforcing groups are especially stupid. Would you believe that teenagers are taking something called the “fire challenge”: they douse themselves with an accelerant, like rubbing alcohol or gasoline, and set themselves on fire. This is egregiously idiotic — kids have suffered serious burns and even died playing this game. At least his is people harming themselves, although if you’re someone who has taunted friends into risking severe injury, you are a very bad person.
It’s an overwhelmingly busy day for me, but I just want to remind you all that events in Ferguson are still being actively discussed in the Good morning, America! thread.
He just gets worse and worse. He’s now defending Mel Gibson and Passion of the Christ (hey, it made lots of money!) and he just casually mentions something damned ugly.
After a long hiatus, I am attempting to rejuvenate the online gender workshop just in time for the US/Canadian school year.
In the past, we’ve focused on questions and reports back. Last time, we looked at some definitions. The initial exercises needed to be done in a state of gender naiveté. But more in depth exploration can only be done in the context of a common language and common intent. These are never naively assumed; they must be consciously adopted.
Now that we have these, let’s look at some aspects of gender in particular. Most educational focus is on gender identity and gender identification. But I find it more helpful to start with gender attribution. All of us attribute gender to others very frequently, but the process of attributing gender to ourselves is typically limited to childhood. Long before adulthood, cis* folks’ genders are assumptions living in the background of cis* lives. So let’s start by examining an activity with which we all have more practice and more familiarity: telling other people what there genders are. [Un/]Fortunately for you, I have a piece of creative writing that contains a number of good examples of gender attribution: how it happens, when it happens, and what it looks like. As a bonus which will help us segue into future discussions, it also touches on what it feels like when we are conscious of others’ efforts to attribute gender to us. This piece is called Stares. [Read more…]
Charlie Stross just tweeted about Julie d’Aubigny, a 17th century swordswoman and opera singer, who hit the road when her lover killed a man in an illegal duel.
This time, it’s Albert Einstein, who endorsed a psychic in 1932. Einstein said “She told me things no one possibly could know,” the standard cry of the credulous upon encountering a persuasive con artist. He got scolded by a writer for The New Republic.
