In what seems like part of a deliberate attempt to make me hate them less, Huffington Post is reviving the brilliant Get Your War On series in video format. The most recent one pokes fun at Donald Trump, and it reminded me of what seems like a neglected aspect of the Donald’s jackassery.
“Gimme all your money!”
One of the many divisions among skeptics is on where we place blame for the proliferation of the woo industry. When a psychic makes a living doing cold readings, is that the fault of gullible people doling out cash or is it the fault of the fraud raking it in? I usually fall in the former category. But in this case I’ve gotta side more with the free market libertarian enthusiasts and blame the moron who gave a few thousand dollars to a palm reader halfway across the country because she thought she was cursed.
Back when I first wrote about Wikileaks, I hadn’t even heard of Julian Assange. Not many people had. Those were the days.
But within a few months, the organization decided to install a figurehead at its helm. Assange said he would be a “lightning rod” for WL criticism. And within a few more months, Wikileaks became something of a force field for Assange, shielding him from the legal consequences of some pretty serious rape allegations and enabling some of the dumbest conspiracy theories of the past decade.
The state of Arizona is not allowing the Van Tienderen family of Valley, AZ to take foster children because their biological daughter isn’t fully vaccinated for “philosophical” reasons.
Reddit’s kind of impossible to pin down to one stereotype. It’s just too big. There are a few popular characteristics lots of redditors share (liberal politics and a love of smoking marijuana), but there are also entire subreddits devoted to their polar opposites.
So it’s kind of insincere for someone to say they love or hate Reddit as a whole since the people are all over the map on pretty much every issue out there. There are, however, subreddits that are just devoted to assholery on an epic scale. And that’s what this series is about.
Jersey Shore Psychic is one of those shops on the boardwalk that rips off drunken teenagers by selling them touristy junk and, obviously, phony psychic services. Guess which one of those two lines of products got them into trouble with the law?
It’s been a bad week for homeopathy, which translates to a good week for science-based medical policies.
There’s an article in the Guardian about how how climate change deniers tend to also believe in conspiracy theories, such as the idea that humans never landed on the Moon. It’s a mixed bag of awesomeness and a few parts that make me cringe.
You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, and if you’re sneaky you can pick your friends’ noses while they’re sleeping. But you can’t pick the most prominent atheists who get lots of media attention.
The thing about atheism is that it barely tells you anything at all about a person. Atheists can believe in ghosts, demons, racism, sexism, alien abductions, or any other number of other weird things just as well as theists. I once had a conversation with a young woman who told me, all in the same conversation, that she knew for certain that God didn’t exist and that fairies were real. Like, they have a type of habitat and certain environment where they thrived and there are foods they prefer and all that. In another conversation I learned that organized religion was horrible, but also that astrology wasn’t total bullshit.
Short of untimely deaths, there’s really nothing stopping bad proponents from speaking out on atheist issues on major media networks except for conversion. So here are some prominent atheists who would do better work making the other side look like idiots instead of doing the same for us.
So I’ve finally gotten my first personalized letter from a serious religious nut. And I don’t mean email or blog comments. No, this is an actual letter that arrived via the US Postal Service in my actual mailbox, printed on real paper in an envelope.
I’ll get to some of the text of the letter later, but it looks like he actually wrote it to me personally. The introductory paragraph refers to some of the stuff I had written about in the Humanism At Large column in the current (June/July) issue of Free Inquiry, which is available at fine bookstores near you. The envelope this guy sent me was forwarded from the Center For Inquiry. I guess he just sent it to their PO Box, and they sent it to me.
Atheist Hobos 