It looks like Orac has acquired a new fan. You see, yesterday I wrote a rather long fisking of Vox Day. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to continue it yet again; this dead horse has clearly been beaten enough). In it, I happened to make a brief mention of and link to an apparent admirer of Vox’s who goes by the ‘nym of MikeT, who defended Vox’s idiotic Holocaust analogy while calling him a “devilishly clever bastard.” I found his comments while doing a Technorati search to see what others were saying about Vox’s article, and my mention of MikeT …
Category: Politics
Vox Day: Too much of a wingnut even for WorldNet Daily
I’m sorry to do this to you again, kind readers, to subject you to Vox Day a second time in the same week. However, I just couldn’t let this pass. Hopefully my traffic won’t fall precipitously as people turn away in disgust at being subjected to too much Vox, but I have to take that chance. Besides, it is about bad historical analogies regarding the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, which I have a hard time resisting replying to when they’re bad enough. In retrospect, I almost wish I had sicced the Hitler Zombie on Vox a couple of days ago, …
Madness in St. Louis (a suburb of St. Louis, that is)
This has to be one of the most idiotic laws I’ve ever heard of. It’s so mind-bogglingly unjust that no further comment is really necessary other than that it would have been a minor matter indeed to fix the law so it could achieve its intended purpose (to prevent overcrowding) while not tearing families apart. The City Council had a chance to do just that that and explicitly voted not to. Afarensis has more. I tell ya, I have to stop with the political blogging and get back to something medicine-, science-, or skepticism-related. First the atheist Holocaust denier and …
Ward Churchill’s going down
Dang it all. I’m not a political blogger by nature, but this week I just can’t seem to help myself, and getting this e-mailed to me didn’t help. I suppose that I can console myself by reminding myself that this is about academic misconduct. I may not be in the social sciences, but certain practices just aren’t right regardless of academic specialty. It turns out that University of Colorado’s investigation of allegations of academic misconduct by Ward Churchill (famous for his referring to those in the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns”) has been published, and it’s way more scathing …
Religious nutjobs at their worst
While I’m being more political than usual, how about one more… I normally detest Sean Hannity. Basically, he’s Rush Limbaugh without the flashes of cleverness or humor. However, this time, he’s got it right on. I may be around three or four weeks behind the curve on this, but it’s worth looking at the video below of Hannity & Colmes interviewing Shirley Phelps Roper, of the Westboro Baptist Church, a group of religious loonies of God Hates Fags infamy. This is the first time I encountered this video, and, given that none of my fellow SB’ers seems to have mentioned …
Hey, it worked for Hitler
Immigration has been on a lot of people's minds lately with the nomination of Donald Trump for President by the Republican Party. In that spirit, I've resurrected a ten year old post that shows just how old and horrible Trump's promise to deport 11-12 million immigrants in this country illegally—also, just how ridiculously impractical it would be and how much it would require an authoritarian state.
Darby’s slipping into the Twilight Zone
The other day, I mentioned an atheist named Larry Darby who happened to be an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. I was perturbed because this clown was coming far too close to my neck of the woods for comfort, and the stench of his vileness offended me. Because Darby is an atheist, not surprisingly fellow ScienceBloggers PZ and Ed both noticed his making news lately, although Razib had the far more interesting take on this clown when he pointed out that the racialist radical right actually has more atheists in it than one might expect. He’s quite correct. Having waded into …
A Snow job on evolution
If you want to see how depressingly ignorant about science President Bush’s new Press Secretary Tony Snow is, you need go no further than this rant at Bad Astronomy about Snow’s assertions about evolution confidently made in obviously complete ignorance about science, what a theory is, what a hypothesis is, or what evolutionary theory actually says. Depressing. The spokesperson for our President is clueless about science.
Ten Amendments Day
You may not know this, but today has been designated Ten Commandments Day. It sounds pretty innocuous, right? After all, why would anyone object to a celebration of the Ten Commandments? And, of course, it’s every American’s right under the First Amendment to celebrate the precepts of his or her religion. Nothing wrong with that. So why do I have misgivings about this Ten Commandments Day? Could it have something to do with the rhetoric on the website? For example:
Communist “science”
Yesterday was May Day, and Catallarchy has posted its annual Day of Remembrance for for the victims of Communism. Of particular interest to readers of this blog is a rather extensive article about just what can happen when political ideology is allowed to warp science, specifically what happened to science under Communism because of Trofim Lysenko: Lysenko’s doctrines were an unholy merger of Lamarckism with Stalinism: the infinite malleability of man was mirrored by the infinite malleability of plants. (Lysenko claimed that if you grew plants incrementally further and further North each year, they would gradually adapt to the climate …