weatherbeaten hollows of snow

"But if you’re going to argue that something women are freely choosing to do with our bodies is still..."

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:42:31 +1200

“

But if you’re going to argue that something women are freely choosing to do with our bodies is still harmful to other women, and that we ought not to do it, you need to actually make a strong positive case for that position. The default assumption should be that women are free to do with our bodies whatever the hell we choose, and that feminists ought to not only accept and tolerate each other’s right to make those choices, but actively support it. This should be the default assumption… unless you can make a strong positive case for why a particular choice is harmful, and we ought not to make it.

And you haven’t made that case. All you’ve done is re-state your conclusion, again and again, using hyperbolic language that makes it sound as if you’re making a case. All you’ve done is say, again and again, “It’s always bad to offer pictures of naked women for money, in all circumstances, because… it just is. By definition.”

Now. It is certainly the case that my choice to participate in this calendar was made in the context of a sexist culture: a culture that treats women as sexual objects rather than subjects, a culture that treats women’s bodies as commodities, a culture with a strong tendency to value women primarily as ornaments, sexual playthings, and babymakers. My choice to pose naked for this calendar and let the photo of my naked body be (a) disseminated for free on the internet and (b) sold to raise money for feminist causes… yes, that choice was made in the context of this sexist culture. It was in some ways influenced by that culture, and in some ways it contributes to it.

And your choice wasn’t?

Your choice to scold me, and the other women who posed in this calendar, is somehow magically free of this sexist culture? It somehow has not been tainted by the sexist culture that treats women’s bodies as shameful, the culture that reflexively abjures women to cover our nakedness, the culture that demands that women share our bodies only with the men who rightfully own them, the culture that reflexively slut-shames women for enjoying our bodies and our sexualities and making our own decisions about it? My selling photos of my naked body to raise money for a cause I believe in is automatically part of the commodification of women… but your attempt to enforce the standards of modesty has nothing to do with women’s physical and sexual suppression? I am a cog in the machinery of this culture… but you, magically, have freed yourself from it?

And as a result, you have earned the authority to tell me what I should and should not do with my own naked body?

I have heard arguments like yours many times, aimed by women at other women. “You should never sell images of your naked body — we live in a culture where female bodies are commodified, and even the consensual display of female nudity contributes to that.” “You should never have consensual sadomasochistic sex — we live in a culture of violence against women, and even consensual SM contributes to it.” “You should never have sex with men — we live in a culture of deep power differences between men and women, and even a consensual heterosexual relationship can’t escape them and contributes to them.” And yet the women passing these judgments, the women demanding that other women make complicated choices about their bodies based on someone else’s rigid ideology, never seem to say to themselves, “You should never shame other women about their consensual choices with their bodies — we live in a culture of relentless slut-shaming, in which women are not seen as having physical and sexual agency, and these judgments contribute to it.”

”

- Greta Christina’s Blog - What I May Do With My Naked Body: A Reply to Azar Majedi About the #NudePhotoRevolutionaries Calendar (via eddieatthegov)

This is a really great blogpost.

(via notevensurewhy)

dammitjean: zombify: Jesus ? A lich ? OH...

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:33:08 +1200

dammitjean:

zombify:

Jesus ? A lich ? OH no…

nyquilontherocks:

Finally, somebody gets it.

Important information for my fellow heathens.

Criticising a lack of respect serves what purpose?

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:45:00 +1300

Criticising a lack of respect serves what purpose?:

Those criticising Dawkins for lacking respect seem to be confused about the definition of respect. There is no reason Dawkins should show respect to beliefs which he finds patently absurd. He should probably tolerate them, and he does, but there is no reason to give them any more respect than they deserve. Some say he is strident. I really don’t see it. He is very measured and polite, but he is critical, and incisively so. Such claims about him lacking respect or being strident are silencing tactics.

What also concerns me about the footage is that the people criticising Dawkins on such specious grounds (as opposed to criticising his argument) seem to be in positions of power. Julie Bishop, deputy leader of the opposition in Australia, in her comment about the neo-Darwinists and neo-creationists uses a false equivalence fallacy - which “occurs when someone falsely equates an act by one party as being equally egregious to that of another without taking into account the underlying differences which may make the comparison patently invalid” - by equating those who believe in evolution (a theory with significant evidential backing) to creationists (a theory with no solid evidential backing), stating both are extremes. Furthermore, in equating both to be extremes she implies the truth lies in the middle - another logical fallacy known as the argument to moderation. Tony Burke, the Minister for Agriculture, appears to be in complete agreement. These people are either stupid or they are cheap hacks who use glib rhetoric in order to win an argument. Why have they been given power? Why do they continue to be given power?

A message for those considering voting

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 15:38:07 +1300

“if you do decide to vote, you have a duty to not reduce the quality of the median vote.”

Making the informed choice is what democracy should be about, as opposed to merely ticking boxes for the sake of it. Don’t vote unless you’ve put some serious thought into it. That doesn’t mean picking a party or local politician because you identify with their branding. It means looking at the policies and thinking about the potential effects they are likely to have. It means looking at what the local politician you vote for is going to do for your area. It means raising the standard of discourse to that which has substance. It means holding the elected representatives accountable after they are elected, regardless as to whether you voted for them, because they (at least ostensibly) represent your interests.

If you aren’t going to do this, don’t vote. You are the problem with democracy. You lower the standard of discourse, policies, representatives and accountability. You are the problem.

If after putting serious thought into the policy options bundled amongst the parties and candidates you find the least worst is bad or even worse, don’t vote. If you vote for bad policy, you will get bad policy.

Bad policy can have significant impacts and if you vote for it, you will be giving it an implicit endorsement. You will forfeit your right to complain. And by “will forfeit”, I mean you can still complain, but I see no reason to care about your specific complaints because by voting for bad policy you are the problem.

As well as this, without a gap in the vote market indicated with a non-vote, the likelihood of good policy being used to capture votes in the future remains extremely minimal because the parties don’t have to work for the vote. You need to make the parties work. Correspondingly, if you don’t vote, you should also get your view out there as to why you haven’t and promote what you want to see from the people who claim to represent you. If you’re not proactive, you won’t see change.

Relevant:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/11/political-puzzles.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/01/rulers-are-far.html
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9464.html
http://twitter.com/#!/CanMedianVoter

Government intervention

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 15:15:00 +1300

The questions I ask when the idea that government should do more things comes up are “Do I trust the government?”, “Am I still likely to be able to trust the government in the future?” and, most importantly, “Will the government intervention be better than it not intervening?”. Where the benefits of government intervention are not clear and large, it is likely that the risk of government intervention is too high due to the costs that such intervention is likely to have, both intended and unintended (unintended effects are a significant problem for a government lacking perfect knowledge).

Relevant:

http://mungowitzend.blogspot.com/2011/11/test-your-economics-knowledge.html

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2434&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+smbc-comics%2FPvLb+%28Saturday+Morning+Breakfast+Cereal+%28updated+daily%29%29

http://elmoiscariot.blogspot.com/2011/11/libertarian-metaphor-government-is-like.html

"Dance like you’re stamping on a human face forever, love like you’ve been in a serious car crash..."

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 09:36:31 +1300

“Dance like you’re stamping on a human face forever, love like you’ve been in a serious car crash that minced the front of your brain, stab like no one can arrest you, and live like there’s no such thing as God.”

- Warren Ellis (via digitalyn) (via notevensurewhy)

kateoplis: Just a friendly reminder that the Qu’ran isn’t the...

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 09:13:33 +1300

kateoplis:

Just a friendly reminder that the Qu’ran isn’t the only holy book the ignorant take literally.

When does it stop? Can we stop it?

Pricing goods in times of scarcity

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 12:28:00 +1300

I was intending to write about other ideas first, but I think this is an important idea to try and get people to understand. I was at work the other day, strangely enough - yes, I have a job so my life now revolves around that - and of late much discussion has revolved around the recent earthquake in Christchurch. It is the second high impact earthquake in the last six months and was a lot more damaging than the first despite being weaker on the richter scale: 6.3 as opposed to 7.1. This is likely because the second earthquake occurred during a much busier time of day where people and vehicle density in the centre of town was much higher than in the first earthquake, Christchurch infrastructure and buildings were already in a weakened state due to the damage of the first earthquake and the second earthquake was shallower and in closer proximity to the city.

Nonetheless, that is just the background. The precise discussion I am concerned with is one that was had regarding prices as apparently some retailers have been raising prices to much higher levels than they previously had been. There was a level of disgust around this from some people and as I was pretty exhausted yesterday, I did not quite manage to formulate precisely why I had little problem with such behaviour, so I would like to explain here why such pricing is actually positive.

Basic economic theory suggests that an exogenous shock which decreases supply will lead to an increase in the price of the good being supplied. This is because the good being supplied is now more scarce and as such is more difficult to supply. In short, the cost of actually supplying the good has risen, so the price the supplier asks the consumer to pay will also be more. This price rise affects the quantity demanded. While demand for the good itself at any given price will not decrease as consumers preferences have not changed, the quantity demanded will decrease as the price has risen.

Basic economic theory, however, also suggests that an exogenous shock which increases demand will lead to an increase in the price paid for the good. This is because consumers now prefer the good more and as such are willing to pay more in order that they can have it. As such, demand will increase - the consumer is now willing to pay more for the same good - so price will rise.

The Christchurch earthquake was likely both an exogenous shock to supply and demand, decreasing supply and increasing demand. In terms of supply, there are added costs of supplying goods: an increased risk to life of actually staying around to supply the good, scarcity of actual goods, scarcity of inputs used in the supply, for example, available employees, money floats for giving change and so on. As such, supply has decreased and become more costly, so in theory prices should increase. In terms of demand, preferences are likely to have changed as there is now increased scarcity in the short-to-medium term which means the value of purchasing goods in the present while they are still available has risen. As such, demand has increased and there is greater willingness to pay, so in theory prices should rise.

The people I was discussing this with were disgusted with retailers who responded to the pricing mechanisms and increased their prices. They seemed to see it as a triumph of greed on the part of the retailers, but what they failed to consider was that retailers have increased costs and that there are negative ramifications to ignoring the pricing mechanism or attempting to implement alternatives. I understand that some believe that there are better alternatives to the pricing mechanism with regard to allocating resources efficiently and fairly, the most common in this kind of situation being supplier enforced quotas, so I will give some thought to the problems around them and follow that up with consideration of the ramifications.

Quotas have much less ability to counteract increased demand and have a large number of loopholes which the pricing mechanism does not. For example, there is nothing to stop a person going to multiple stores as early in the piece as possible and purchasing as much as a possible. There is also nothing to stop a person going in and out of the same store and doing the same, except for observation of suppliers which is likely to be unreliable particularly as many will be under a lot of stress. As well as this, there is nothing to stop multiple members of a family unit going in and all individually purchasing the same good that has a quota on it. As such, quotas are less effective than the pricing mechanism and they still disproportionately benefit the better off.

It is true that the pricing mechanism will disproportionately benefit the well off as well but under a quota system, because of the loopholes, those who are richer are still likely to be able to access a disproportionate amount of goods. At least with a pricing mechanism, there is something curbing the quantity they will demand. Furthermore, in the context of the Christchurch earthquake, those who are worse off can apply for Civil Defence payments to help with food, bedding and potentially other goods. The Civil Defence payment, however, goes through to a bank account overnight. Without a pricing mechanism curbing demand, the likelihood is that by the time the payment comes through, the needed goods will be far scarcer than they otherwise would.

When the pricing mechanism is ignored is when greed truly triumphs. Those consumers who get to the supplier first where the pricing mechanism has been ignored still have increased demand. As such, because prices have remained the same while their demand has increased, they purchase far more than they otherwise would. With scarcity, this means that supply is exhausted far faster than it otherwise would be and a potentially large number of those who need the goods more than those who got the goods earlier are left with far less than they need or even nothing. This is why retailers should respond to the pricing mechanism and this is why people need to change their attitudes about raising prices in times of scarcity.

If your political position can be defined with one word, you’re not thinking hard enough. I...

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 07:20:16 +1300

If your political position can be defined with one word, you’re not thinking hard enough.

I saw words to this effect a few days ago and I agree. It is also frustrating seeing and hearing people make comments on politics (or any issue really) without considering the ramifications of what they are proposing:

x is bad/not enough therefore we should support y

Sure y sounds lovely, but what happens if you follow through with it?

Don’t know? Then shut the fuck up until you do.

Scott Adams had a good post, “Philosophy versus Plan” , which covers similar ground and is pretty spot on.

I hope to post around this later.

Anybody see a problem here?

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:45:00 +1300

Anybody see a problem here?:

So in recent times, Bobby Franklin, a Georgia state representative said of homosexuality:

The Bible says it’s a capital offense. You want someone with unrepentant criminal behavior? And it’s not just that, neither should adulterers, neither should thieves, neither should a lot of things. The church is full of sinners, but we’re told in 1st Corinthians it rattled off the homosexual, the adulterer, the thief, the liar, and such were some of you, but you’ve been washed, you’ve been justified and so forth. It’s not what you were. You’re not punishing a thought. But do you want an unrepentant drug dealer in the military? Same thing.

(source: http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2011/02/09/Pol_Compares_Gays_to_Drug_Dealers/)

How does it come to pass that a US lawmaker doesn’t understand there’s a difference between Biblical law and US law? Or that he’s in a country which has a constitutionally mandated separation of church and state? Do Cobb County voters not understand this either? Is that why they (presumably) voted in such an idiot?

Of course, it wouldn’t be at least partially the result of a disconnect between religion, religious belief and observable reality, and if there was it wouldn’t be problematic anyway. And if one were to get annoyed at people making decisions which adversely affect them and others because of such a disconnect, that would be totally unjustified, right? Because religion’s not an insidious public bad at all.

Cantona, hero:

Sat, 05 Feb 2011 17:25:00 +1300

It has come to my attention that upon being asked as to his best moment in 2007, Eric Cantona said this:

My best moment? I have a lot of good moments, but the one I prefer is when I kicked the hooligan.

If you don’t know the incident to which he is referring, it’s about 56 seconds into this clip.

The press conference after this event is also notable.

He later went on to say he was essentially talking crap.

Fucking tumblr. Why won’t you let me embed?

Age of Reason: 10 Misconceptions of Atheism by Sam Harris

Sat, 05 Feb 2011 12:20:00 +1300

Age of Reason: 10 Misconceptions of Atheism by Sam Harris:

ageofreason:

Several polls indicate that the term “atheism” has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.

Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.

Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was “not at all to be tolerated” because, he said, “promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist.”

That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims “never to doubt” the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.

Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.

1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.

2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

3) Atheism is dogmatic.

Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity’s needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn’t have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.

No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the “beginning” or “creation” of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.

The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, “The God Delusion,” this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don’t know precisely how the Earth’s early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase “natural selection” by analogy to the “artificial selection” performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.

5) Atheism has no connection to science.

Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.

6) Atheists are arrogant.

When scientists don’t know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn’t know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn’t arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.

7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don’t tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.

There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.

8) Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding

Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature’s laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.

From the atheist point of view, the world’s religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn’t have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.

9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.

Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as “wishful thinking” and “self-deception.” There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.

In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?

10) Atheism provides no basis for morality.

If a person doesn’t already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn’t make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.

Shit journalism files: The Guardian, not Wikileaks, the reckless releaser of harmful information: who knew?

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:59:00 +1300

Shit journalism files: The Guardian, not Wikileaks, the reckless releaser of harmful information: who knew?:

Wikileaks got the blame for putting a US embassy cable regarding Zimbabwe into the public domain. They were soundly condemned by the media and various pundits for endangering Morgan Tsvangirai and the potential for some semblance of democracy in Zimbabwe. As it happens, Wikileaks did not choose to release the cable into the public domain and publish it. It was the Guardian newspaper which made the decision.

UPDATE: Here’s Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the issue.

"It is the very finitude of my existence that brings forth the honey. That I exist at all is nothing..."

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 18:55:13 +1300

“

It is the very finitude of my existence that brings forth the honey. That I exist at all is nothing short of miraculous-I am awestruck by the very improbability yet here I am. Every thing around me is impermanent, whether it be the clouds currently wreathing themselves over the mountains, the glint of sunlight on the water in the creek, or the very mountains, even the Sun itself. It all came into existence, it was, and it will (if it hasn’t already) cease to be. I’ve buried both my parents and one of my siblings; I myself am not the healthiest kid in the county. I know and embrace my mortality. As I look around me I know this is the pattern of all things and realize that my physical degeneration in the end will bring forth new and wondrous things upon this Earth that I so love and admire, yet I know even the Earth is finite, that one day, perhaps five billion years hence, it to will cease and will return to its component atoms.

I became aware in the middle of the turning of the wheel; when I dissolve I know that that wheel will still be in the middle of its gyre. The stars will continue to shine, the winds to spread forth the bouquet of the warming spring soil, and the newly beloved to fall into the infinitude of each other’s eyes. Against all odds, I have been invited to the dance, life clasping me joyously to her bosom as we whirl about these few brief years. Tim, this isn’t nihilism, this is rapture! I am bathed in the fountains of wonder and awe. By nature curious (as I believe we all begin) I have come alive at a rare time when I am free to pursue answers, and when the answers as often as not come forth. That for every answer there arise more questions only increases my joy: it isn’t only the religious who find themselves summoned toward the infinite! Nor am I bitter because I will not live to see the end of the story, to hear the last question answered-this is a story without end, or still better, to conclude with William Blake:
To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.

”

- Robert H commenting in response to Fr. Tim at the Pharyngula piece, “Bad Diagnosis”

Irony is dead. John Morris is a Roman Catholic Priest. Watch the...

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 23:45:00 +1300

Irony is dead. John Morris is a Roman Catholic Priest. Watch the above video to hear what he says. I have noted a couple of relevant comments below, the first for the irony factor and the second for the honesty factor:

“I don’t think it’s very healthy to have an imaginary friend.

…

If you have an imaginary friend there is something wrong with you.”

I think my irony-meter just broke. I know what I’ll be asking Santa to bring me for Christmas.

When queried about prayer being helpful in general, Morris also says, “All the studies say that it’s helpful.” This is a direct quote. He is lying. Here is a piece about prayer from a Christian blog for those who can’t access the actual studies. For those who can, there are studies mentioned in the piece and PubMed is your friend.

"Why don’t you believe in God? I get that question all the time. I always try to give a sensitive,..."

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:13:08 +1300

“

Why don’t you believe in God? I get that question all the time. I always try to give a sensitive, reasoned answer. This is usually awkward, time consuming and pointless. People who believe in God don’t need proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary. They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me” and “it’s faith.” I still give my logical answer because I feel that not being honest would be patronizing and impolite. It is ironic therefore that “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe,” comes across as both patronizing and impolite.

Arrogance is another accusation. Which seems particularly unfair. Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. If it did, you wouldn’t get a shot of penicillin, you’d pop a leach down your trousers and pray. Whatever you “believe,” this is not as effective as medicine. Again you can say, “It works for me,” but so do placebos. My point being, I’m saying God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.

Why don’t I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call security or throw me out of the window and shout, ‘’F—ing fly then you lunatic.”

”

- — Ricky Gervais, “A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I’m an Atheist”

I’m not a big fan of Ricky Gervais’ comedy but this is a serious piece and a good read even if his story as to when he became an atheist seems a little glib. (However, that’s probably more a reflection of how I’m used to people placing such a big deal on that kind of realisation than actual glibness. It’s not like it should be a particularly big deal, but people’s sense of importance is skewed to allow such trivialities a big part in their own lives and they usually try to impact other people with such trivialities as well).

Those silly dinosaurs.

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:00:25 +1300

Those silly dinosaurs.

Photo

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 11:21:14 +1300

"I could start a math-based religion devoted to finding “the solution."

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 13:09:00 +1300

“I could start a math-based religion devoted to finding “the solution.””

- Zeno in the comments of the Pharyngula post The Latest Ark News from Kentucky. The conversation between Zeno and hyperdeath that follows is amusing.

“This is exactly what my body looks like. So why am I not happy with it?”

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 10:51:07 +1300

“This is exactly what my body looks like. So why am I not happy with it?”:

syntheticpubes:

This is a reblog from a few days ago. It’s a statement I see regularly.

I was pleased when I first started hearing this sort of thing. The goal of Synthetic Pubes is to highlight the beauty and animal magnetism of ‘normal’ bodies that have not been twisted and shellacked in Photoshop. I feel like we need to publicly acknowledge that not all areolae are perfectly circular and the size of a fifty-cent piece. Stretchmarks are the norm, not the exception. Bodies have so much variety. Shit be crazy!

I suppose the quoted sentiment—recognizing that body images are irrational—is a good first step, but I wish we could all just skip to the part where we’re happy with our bodies. Our equipment.

You only get one life, one body. Take care of it of course, but throw out that list of things you wish you could change. Stop giving a fuck and just get naked. Get all the mileage that you can out of this amusement park ride. I want us all to join together in laughing Maxim & Playboy off the face of the planet.

You have better things to do than worry. Party naked.