Month: December 2020

 

From PZ Myers:

You know that movie, God’s Not Dead? One of the ridiculous aspects of that movie was a professor who demanded that his students sign a statement of disbelief in gods. We don’t do that. It’s the antithesis of good teaching, actually, and also, chattering about metaphysics and theology is a waste of time in a science class. There is simply no debate here.

But in this essay, the author annoyed me from the very beginning. She points out that many of our students think they do have to be an atheist to accept evolution. She writes

Does someone have to be an atheist to accept evolution? According to the philosophy of science and many science educators the answer is no. However, my recent study has revealed that over half of college biology students in the United States think that in order to accept evolution fully, they would have to be an atheist. This is a challenge if we want to increase acceptance of evolution in a country were almost half of the residents do not think humans evolved.

Fine, although I think these students are equating “atheism” with the rejection of certain narrow tenets of a particular religious dogma. Unfortunately, her solution to this misperception by students is…to bring more religion into the science classroom. We are supposed to accommodate the believers, and reassure them that their superstition is just fine.

No. This is going too far.

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From The Onion:

Nation’s Oppressed Christians Huddle Underground To Light Single Shriveled Christmas Shrub

At great personal risk, the Christians were said to have smuggled in a few strings of colored mini lights, tinsel, popcorn garlands, Hallmark Keepsake ornaments, and other contraband in order to trim the shrub inside the subterranean chamber, the last place in America where they were safe to celebrate Christmas.

“We have come together today to observe a Christian holiday that has been all but stamped out on the surface,” said a man who wished to be identified only as “Greg,” after hanging a figurine of Mickey Mouse dressed as Santa Claus from one of the shrub’s boughs. “I can’t say this humble bush is much of a Christmas tree, but it was the largest we could manage to get here, given the circumstances. Let us remember, though, that to merely celebrate Christmas—to exchange gifts and eat our candy canes in peace—without the government or the powerful secular elite coming in and destroying it is a blessing in itself.”

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From The Propaganda Professor:

In the episode called “Patterns Of Force” on the original Star Trek series, the Enterprise crew beams down to a planet that is modeled after Nazi Germany, complete with swastikas and “heil Hitler” type salutes. When they hear the supposed charismatic leader (who actually is being controlled by others) deliver an oration to rouse the rabble, Spock comments that the speech really makes no sense; it’s just a string of ideological soundbites — which nonetheless have the effect of stirring their hearers to carry out the ideology’s nefarious agenda. This aptly epitomizes the nature and the effect of emotionalizing, the next in our series of propaganda props.

If Spock was surprised to discover the vacuity of the Fuhrer’s rhetoric, then he was unduly naive. Ideologically charged rhetoric seldom if ever sounds rational. It’s not supposed to. Indeed, the less sense it makes, the more likely it is that the audience will take the bait — provided it’s delivered in an emotionally charged style.

It makes no sense, for instance, to characterize a campaign against gay marriage as a “defense of marriage” because it’s trying to do just the opposite — i.e., make marriage inaccessible for certain individuals. But that’s exactly how the crusaders frame it, and their supporters buy it.

Likewise, Republican efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election were branded as an attempt to protect “election integrity” by eliminating “fraud”. They actually did exactly the opposite. But the frenzied MAGA cultists who howled to “Stop the steal”, while in fact supporting an attempted heist, didn’t bother with getting the facts or rationally analyzing the cockamamie conspiracy theories they were swallowing. They didn’t need to — they had powerful feelings about the topic, so they just “knew” they were in the right.

The gist of the matter is simple, obvious, and unsurprising: emotionalizing bypasses reason, and tempts the brain like a drug to join in the chorus.

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From Michael John Scott in MadMikesAmerica:

It’s a sad fact that more than 20,000 people have died of COVID-19 in Florida, but a spokesman for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is downplaying it in a shocking fashion and traditional Republican style.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, Fred Piccolo responded to a photo gallery about the pandemic on Twitter with this callous comment:

“I’m wondering since 99% [of] Covid patients survive shouldn’t you have 99 photos of survivors for every one fatality? Otherwise, you’re just trying to create a narrative that is not reality.”

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Finger sandwiches, I think. @momwino98 enjoys Christmas dinner:
 

• Max’s Dad misses his dad, loves a Beatles tune his father shared, and mourns a bit of religious bigotry that kept the song out of the funeral.
   
• Damn, I’m old. nojo remembers carols that are way out of my memory. See how many you recall.
   
• The Moderate Voice applies Trump standards to a transformative event in my own religion.
   
• In MadMikesAmerica, Michael J. Scott explores the myth of Bethlehem. The star, the wise men, Bethlehem itself. Could be none of it is true.
   
  Michael has been my friend for years. He would have no mission concerning my faith. Indeed, such details probably bounce harmlessly from the beliefs of most Christians. Still, my brothers and sisters in Christ do share with me a vulnerability. It is that ours is an historically based belief.
   
  This comes from what I have written in the past.

  I do love the idea that God would come to earth as human, experiencing more temptation, pain, and struggle than most of humanity. So my faith would be shattered if it was proven to me that Jesus died running in panic from Gethsemane with a Roman spear in his back.

• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz vividly describes the fight-against-death struggles and the constant care, naming health care workers as bruised angels struggling to lift victims out of nightmarish hell.
   
• Nan’s Notebook illustrates, with stories from those she knows, how we tend to regard the pandemic as a sort of theoretical, perhaps good citizenship, thing. That is until a friend or family member gets hit with COVID. It was real for me from the start. Got more real when family, those I admire, got hit.
   
  This thing is deadly dangerous, folks.
   
• Not to worry. Reductress proves that COVID is not real. Three spirits have not visited to provide important life lessons. Okay, that beats other COVID-denialist arguments I’ve heard.

Continue reading “Hand Munch, Max’s Dad’s Dad, Carols, Bethlehem, Trump, COVID, McConnell”

 
From @SinnamonS:

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Update: Young man is Isaiah Jordan, from Las Vegas

 

 

I’ve been anchoring on Xmas for years. It’s usually a mix of news on travel, weather, sports, movies & tracking Santa

Today, I’m covering pardons of war criminals, record pandemic deaths, mutating COVID-19, starving Americans and a coup on democracy.

2020 can’t end fast enough

— Ayman Mohyeldin (@AymanM) December 24, 2020

 
     [Image from ]
From Frances Langum:

Keith Olbermann used his YouTube channel to list the names of people hanging out in the White House, plotting with Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Matt Gaetz was on the list. Matt retweeted Keith and Cavuto’ed the whole thing.

See, Matt says he is just “debating.”

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From Heather Cox Richardson in Letters from an American:

Trump is turning to this group of misfits rather than advisers like his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, or White House counsel Pat Cipollone. The new advisers are encouraging him to declare martial law or to seize state voting machines to examine them for fraud or to appoint a special counsel to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Trump has floated the idea of naming Powell as a special counsel inside the White House Counsel’s office to investigate the election. Meadows and Cipollone argue, correctly, that this is crazy.

Nonetheless, far right House lawmakers met with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on Monday to strategize challenging Congress’s certification of the states’ electoral votes on January 6. While several House Republicans are on board with the scheme, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is trying to stop senators from signing on, since challenges in both the House and the Senate would force Republicans to vote against Trump, publicly. The challenges do not have the votes to stop the certification of Biden’s ballots.

Previous loyalists are opening up water between themselves and the president.

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From driftglass:

By Axios:

Trump turns on everyone

President Trump, in his final days, is turning bitterly on virtually every person around him, griping about anyone who refuses to indulge conspiracy theories or hopeless bids to overturn the election, several top officials tell Axios…

This is Trump in the here-and-now: a cornered, raging madman stalking the hall of the White House, looking for some way to claw himself out of a pit that he dug for himself. And the very worst of the hateful, remorseless, paranoid inner gears and mainsprings that have driven him his entire life — that his defenders swore were never there at all — now spilling uncontrollably out into the open.

This is Trump in the here-and-now. But what about a year from now? Two years from now? History provides us with some clues.

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