John A. Davison: fool in his own words

This simpering sycophant to John A. Davison has been spamming the site recently, yammering away to get everyone’s attention despite the fact that he has been banned. Please do not reply to V.Martin, or anyone who is babbling about Davison — their posts will be deleted as soon as I notice them. This particular irritating fool has not only been morphing his username to get past my filters, but has at least once imitated a regular here, a particularly obnoxious and contemptible strategem that guarantees that I won’t ever be lifting the ban.

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The other dangers of non-anonymous blogging

People who have seen your photo and know your name might notice you when you pick up two-dollar hookers in the seedy part of town.

Another useful hint: when said observers later mention this fact, it is not a convincing disavowal to state that you do not hang out in the red-light district “on a regular basis.”

(Hat tip to Zeno for providing this fabulous PSA. I note that Zeno is pseudonymous and does not have his picture on his blog.)

Take a stand, or watch it all slide away

First the ideologues came for evolution, making it uncomfortable for teachers to teach it, even when it is not only legal, but mandated by state education standards. What will they suppress with indirect social pressure next?

How about those bits of history the fascists and the religious find objectionable?

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government-backed study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

As I said in the previous post, this struggle in which we’re engaged is more than a fight against a few specific clowns — it’s for a broader ideal of striving towards a truth, against those who want to twist perception of reality to support short-sighted, selfish, and silly beliefs. It’s not just science, it’s history, politics, culture. If you side with the primacy of faith over reason in science, there is a long list of other virtues you will also be sacrificing on your altar.

Mike’s Weekly Skeptic Rant has a good rant on the subject.

The Pope is not our friend: he is the friend of irrationalism, dogma, and superstition, so treat him appropriately

Here is a criticism of evolutionary biology:

…it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory … We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory.

If a Bill Dembski or a Michael Egnor or a Ken Ham had said this — and it is exactly the kind of thing they would say — we’d be throwing rotten fruit at them and mocking their ignorance of how science works. Nothing is proven, it’s all provisional, but we do have an incredible amount of evidence in support of biology. This fellow is also deeply wrong about what we can do in the lab, and is overlooking the fact that not all science is something you do on a bench. Those statements are the kind of destructive nonsense the Discovery Institute uses, propaganda sown explicitly to spread excessive doubt where we should have very little, so that their vapid and useless ‘alternative’ theory looks a little more attractive. That quote is a stupid statement that ought to be ripped apart on the evolution blogs.

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So it goes

We all have a request from Kurt Vonnegut.

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, “Isaac is up in heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.

Kurt is up in heaven now.

I think it is also only fair to give him Kilgore Trout’s epitaph: “We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”

Skatje beat me to it. Vonnegut is one of her favorite authors, after all.

Peter Cushing criticizes the Mummy’s religion

Abject fan of the old Hammer Horror movies that I am, I was thrilled to see this bit from the 1959 version of The Mummy. Our hero, John Banning (played by the always wonderful Peter Cushing), has gone to the home of the suspected villain, Mehemet Bey (George Pastell), to see if this recent arrival from Egypt is the person who dispatched the Mummy (Christopher Lee) to kill his father and uncle, and attempt to kill him. The way he chooses to probe for clues is to talk to Bey about … religion. And by golly, he sounds just like me. Bey gives the usual theistic excuses: but people are devoted to him! You just can’t comprehend the god! You don’t know anything about him! And then come the threats. It’s very familiar.

Obviously, the apologist for religion turns out to be the murderous master of the Mummy. The rest of the movie involves a beautiful young woman who is the spittin’ image of the dead Egyptian priestess the Mummy loved, slow motion chases through a swamp (they at least set it up early that the hero is partially lame, so it almost makes sense that the lumbering Lee and limping Cushing are in a fair race), and big guns.

While Cushing’s sneering dismissal of foolish religion does remind me of me, I’m pleased to say that none of my critics have yet managed to reanimate a dead guy and send his plodding corpse my way. They’re welcome to try, and mummies are especially welcome—they never seem to be particularly effective, you know.