Posts Tagged ‘skepticism’
Ten Thousand Tuesday Links
* Susannah Bartlow has been writing about her side of the Assata Shakur mural controversy: 1, 2.
* Saint Louis University has removed a statue on its campus depicting a famous Jesuit missionary priest praying over American Indians after a cohort of students and faculty continued to complain the sculpture symbolized white supremacy, racism and colonialism.
* Ursula K. Le Guin Calls on Fantasy and Sci Fi Writers to (Continue to) Envision Alternatives to Capitalism. What Can Economics Learn From Science Fiction?
* Muslim fiction writers are turning to genres like sci-fi, fantasy, and comics.
* Slavoj Žižek’s Board Game Reviews.
* How to Advocate for the Liberal Arts: the State-University Edition.
* Post-tenure review: BOR-ed to death. Don’t believe the lies about UW and tenure. On Tenure and If You [Really] Want to Be a Badger. Upocalypse Final Update. Does Tenure Have a Future? An Open Forum. Twilight of the Professors. The End of Higher Education As We Know It.
* Now more than ever: “Privilege” and the rhetoric of austerity.
* Meanwhile: college presidents are getting paid.
* Counterpoint: I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all.
* How to Tailor Your Online Image, or, Don’t Go to Grad School.
* McKinney nightmare. Disciplining Black Bodies: Racial Stereotypes of Cleanliness and Sexuality. Memories of the Jefferson Park Pool. Summer heat.
* America is still incredibly segregated.
* You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History.
* Bernie Sanders: Let’s Spend $5.5 Billion to Employ 1 Million Young People.
* Meanwhile, Clinton advance the Canavan position on voter registration: just make it automatic. Now let’s talk about letting noncitizen permanent residents vote!
* And Chafee wants the metric system! This Democratic primary is truly devoted to Canavan demo.
* The Bureaucratic Utopia of Drone Warfare.
* NLRB: Duquesne Adjuncts May Form Union.
* Nice work if you can get it: Top Weather Service official creates consulting job — then takes it himself with $43,200 raise, watchdog says.
* You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History.
* The Apple Watch could be the most successful flop in history.
* Put this one in the awkward file: just hours after the EPA released yet another massive study (literally, at just under 1000 pages) which found no evidence that fracking led to widespread pollution of drinking water (an outcome welcome by the oil industry and its backers and criticized by environmental groups), the director of the California Department of Conservation, which oversees the agency that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, resigned as the culmination of a scandal over the contamination of California’s water supply by fracking wastewater dumping.
* The rules of Quidditch, revised edition.
* What’s Happening To Players At The Women’s World Cup, Where The Artificial Turf Is 120 Degrees.
* All about Fun Home: Primal Desire and the American Musical.
* Here’s what it would take for the US to run on 100% renewable energy. Bring on 2099!
* Calvin And Hobbes embodied the voice of the lonely child.
* The quick, offstage choreography of SNL costume changes.
* 100-year-old blackboard drawings found in Oklahoma school.
* How Clickhole Became the Best Thing on the Internet.
* Shocked, shocked: claw machines are rigged.
* Everything you know about wolf packs is wrong.
* Only known chimp war reveals how societies splinter.
* Sleuthing reveals Shorewood home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
* I’ve been spending too much time on recommendation letters.
* I also chose the wrong career: I should have been a psychic, or at least whatever this guy was doing before he managed to lose three-quarters of a million dollars to a psychic.
* Different People Have Different Opinions About Burning Their Own Children Alive, And That’s Okay.
* “What ‘Game of Thrones’ Can Teach Us About Great Customer Service.”
* Warp drives and scientific reasoning.
* The things you learn having a good editor: “Mexican Standoff” predates film by fifty years, and probably is participating in anti-Mexican prejudice.
* Language is like gymnastics.
* But keep hope alive: J.K. Rowling says there’s an American Hogwarts.
Wednesday Links!
* Great moments in CFPs: The Journal of Dracula Studies.
* There is nothing wrong with thinking concretely and practically about how we can free ourselves from social institutions that place such confining limits on the kind of society we are able to have. Because of one thing we can be certain: the present system will either be replaced or it will go on forever.
* CNN’s Van Jones says Keystone pipeline only creates 35 permanent jobs.
* How Colleges Flunk Mental Health.
* Tracking PhD outcomes at Penn State.
* IRS Suggests ‘Reasonable’ Ways of Calculating Adjuncts’ Hours.
* Marvel Body Mass Index Study Reveals Nearly 1/3 of Female Characters Are Underweight.
* College graduates are less likely to lose their jobs than workers with less education, but once they do they are actually a bit more likely than others to join the ranks of the long-term unemployed. And workers over 45 are especially likely to spend a long time unemployed.
* 80,000 March in North Carolina.
* NBC single-handedly pays for a fifth of all Olympic Games.
* When the CIA came to Iowa City.
* 3,863,484: The LEGO sublime.
* You don’t understand hipster post-irony, dad! But it’s true: I don’t understand what Fred Armisen is doing.
* Contact with the market can be hazardous to usability; nationalize Twitter.
* Adam Kotsko vs. the difference principle.
* NASA now accepting applications to mine the moon.
* “Americans are apparently less skeptical of astrology than they have been at any time since 1983,” proclaims the most depressing lede of all time.
* The sheep look up: The Sixth Mass Extinction Event. The Sixth Mass Extinction Event. 105 Winter Olympians Call for Climate Action. Another water disaster in West Virginia. The Fossil Fuel Industry Just Had a Really, Really Bad Day.
* Change we can believe in: Why Dragonlance should be the next fantasy film franchise.
* Duke’s Own™ Mitch Fraas in the New York Times, tracking libraries looted by Nazis.
* And rest in peace, Shirley Temple and Stuart Hall.
And That’s Before Getting Into the Whole ‘Roko’s Basilisk’ Mess
Here we see a real purpose behind lesswrong.com. Ultimately it doesn’t matter that people like Thiel or Kurzweil or Yudkowsky are pushing a crackpot idea like the singularity; what matters is that they are pushing the poisonous ideas that underlie Bayesianism. Thiel and others are funding an organisation that advances an ideological basis for their own predatory behaviour. Lesswrong and its sister sites preach a reductive concept of humanity that encourages an indifference to the world’s suffering, that sees people as isolated, calculating individuals acting in their self-interest: a concept of humanity that serves and perpetuates the scum at the top.
Stephen Bond on what’s wrong with LessWrong, with digressions into why all skepticism is neoliberalism and the rules of Fuck You, Buddy.
Amanda Marcotte vs. the Nice Guys®
I’ve avoided posting about Elevatorgate here in part because the skeptical community is not really my community, in part because it’s completely absurd, in part because I try to keep the blog relatively non-contentious, and in part because I already lost my mind once arguing about it over at MetaFilter—but Amanda Marcotte has one of the best step-by-step break-it-down explanations of the whole mess that I’ve seen. If you still don’t understand why it’s wrong to proposition trapped women, there’s really just no hope for you.
Friday Night
* Let a thousand Arizonas bloom: Puerto Rican Eduardo Caraballo was threatened with deportation from Illinois because he looks Mexican. Via MeFi.
* A bunch of neurotic, selfish, childish, insensitive and unimaginative, vicious bunch of jerks! Robert Heinlein v. fandom. Starship Troopers: no joke. Also via.
* Skepticism v. denialism. Also also.
* Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga is a new technological breed of journal that intends to take seriously the brazenly unserious shock pop phenomenon and fame monster known as Lady Gaga. You know what I’m gonna say.
Polygraphs
Like most junk science that just won’t die (graphology, astrology and homeopathy come to mind), because of the usefulness or profit their practitioners enjoy, the polygraph stays with us.
Thursday Night Links
* James Randi responds to the criticism he received yesterday for his stated climate change “skepticism.”
* The emissions cuts offered so far at the Copenhagen climate change summit would still lead to global temperatures rising by an average of 3°C, according to a confidential UN analysis obtained by the Guardian.
* The physics of space warfare.
* It turns out Joss Whedon significantly overbid for Terminator; James Cameron originally sold the franchise for a dollar.
* Avatar poised for a $200-million weekend.
* Point and counterpoint on Massachusetts as a model for health care reform.
Wednesday Roundup
* Skepticism fail: James Randi jumps the shark. Ugh.
* Health care reform continues its endless slide into oblivion. Steve Benen counts the five senators still not on board: Ben Nelson/Olympia Snowe from the “center,” and Feingold, Sanders, and Burris from the left. Meanwhile, Crooks & Liars and Firedoglake still argue the Liebermanized bill is worse than nothing, while Yglesias singles out Harry Reid for praise:
…the fact of the matter is that there’s almost no precedent for the legislative mission he’s been asked to accomplish of turning 59 Democrats, one loosely Democrat-aligned Independent, and two slightly moderate Republicans into 60 votes for a package that’s simultaneously a dramatic expansion of the welfare state and a measure that reduces both short- and long-term deficits.
Fair enough. But it’s Reid’s total rejection of reconciliation as even a theoretical alternative that has left us in this mess in the first place. Reid gets no special praise from me.
* io9’s 20 best SF films of the 2000s. Totally forgot Spider-Man 2 and Eternal Sunshine were from this decade; it’s been a long ten years.
* And meat-eaters finally win a round: “Meat may be the reason humans outlive apes.”
On Rehearsing One’s Own Prejudices
Here’s a nice video on open- and closed-mindedness from that paragon of skepticism, Candleblog.
Dying to Have an NDE
In the comments Ryan directs me to this piece in Viceland about both the experience of dying and near-death experience.
Next, you’ll experience what I think is the real moment of death. There are sensations of being surrounded by gentle beings and white light within which are figures that exude comfort, relief, warmth, release, and liberation.
Meeting dead people is a singular experience. I once met an acquaintance of many years who had died about a year prior. He looked casually at me and said, “Oh, no use talking to you yet. You aren’t staying.” I recall saying, “Shit, I hope the others know that,” meaning my hardworking rescue team, slaving away on my body somewhere else. I got the distinct impression that my friend was a guardian of some sort, not of me or of people, but of the realm his bulk (yes, there is an impression of substance) was maddeningly obscuring the view of. On another occasion, I saw a very dear friend who had died in a horrific car crash in which she had burned to death. This had happened some three years before. She did not notice me at first, so I called to her, “Hey, Donna, what are you waiting for?” She looked up without any surprise at seeing me and said, “My son.”
At that time this child, my godson, was a healthy little boy. Sadly, Max died in a house fire about a year after this encounter. I am always comforted that his mother told me she was waiting for him and that they are with each other now.
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
Alan Weisman, author of the key apocalyptic text of the moment, The World Without Us, was on The Daily Show last night. Here’s the video:
Ron Riggle’s Operation Fluffy Bunny report was also pretty excellent.
Meanwhile, just about all of The Colbert Report was mandatory viewing last night as well: here’s Stephen on the Freakonomics terrorism kerfluffle, skepticism, and (maybe my favorite news story of the year) corporate edits of Wikipedia.
Gerry Canavan 