Too bad …

there is no hell for the scant few Westboro Baptist Church members that are still left. Margie Phelps, who has 6,300 followers, only managed two “retweets” of her toxic tweet yesterday morning, and one of them was from the pastor of this “church,” Fred Phelps (cult is more accurate).

I won’t dignify her message with a repost, but it called for picketing in Connecticut of all places. Sick fucks.

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Robert Griffin III, blackness and race

If you don’t know by now, ESPN analysis Rob Parker was suspended this past week — and rightly so — because of the comments he made about Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III. Here is a video of Parker’s odious remarks:

Now, watching this, several questions immediately surface. First, as one of the other announcers wondered: Why was Parker even asking the question about whether RG3 was a “brother” or a “cornball brother.” What difference does it make? Would Parker be less of a fan if it was, in fact, the case that Griffin was a “cornball brother” — I understand that to mean a black guy who is not authentically black, whatever that means.

Examples here would be Tiger Woods or TV‘s Carlton Banks from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” Parker raised this particular concern based only on these two assumptions: that Griffin might be a Republican and that he has a white girlfriend. Parker also said that the braids in Griffin’s hair were a plus in his book toward authenticating his blackness. Braids. Really? Parker does realize that white guys are perfectly able to don braids themselves. Does this make white people who have braids black poseurs? What about Adam Duritz (pictured at right)? I’m pretty sure Duritz would scoff at being called a black poseur.

Second, what the hell is “the cause? And is it asking too much of a 22-year-old freshman quarterback to even have a “cause?” In any case, I agree with Stephen A. Smith, another black analyst on the show who, after Parker’s nonsensical and borderline racist comments, said he was uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation:

First of all, let me say this: I’m uncomfortable with where we just went. RG3, the ethnicity or the color of his fiancee is none of our business, it’s irrelevant, he can live his life in whatever way he chooses. The braids that he has in his hair, that’s his business, that’s his life, he can live his life. I don’t judge someone’s blackness based on those kinds of things. I just don’t do that. I’m not that kind of guy.

In fact, Griffin’s actual comments on race, to which Parker was referring, actually sound more intelligent and grown up than Parker’s. Here is Griffin:

For me, you don’t ever want to be defined by the color of your skin. You want to be defined by your work ethic, the person that you are, your character, your personality. That’s what I strive to go out and do. I am an African-American in America. That will never change. But I don’t have to be defined by that.

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The Neofeminists, ctd

Here is a video from YouToube user NoelPlum99 discussing a similar topic that was addressed in my last post:

I don’t think it matters terribly whether skeptic conferences are represented equally among women and men and attempts to do so seems to only politicize a topic that doesn’t need politicizing. To take Jim’s (NoelPlum’s) example above, more men seem to be interested in cars and mechanics, whereas more women seem to be into fashion. Similarly, more men seem to be engaged in philosophical pursuits, and thus, the perception is that males are generally more likely to be nonbelievers. While it is difficult to measure any of this, simply stating that perception doesn’t suggest in the least that women are any less capable of critical thinking than men. Quite the contrary, and history bears this out. We can outline a long list of skeptics who also happen (or happened) to be women and great thinkers: Susan Jacoby, Hypatia, Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Wollstonecraft, Julia Sweeney and many others.

Here is YouTube user, buybuydandavis, who I think gets it right in his/her characterization of these skeptic conferences and the perceived need for equal representation:

The point of pushing equal representation isn’t the representation, it’s to turn an atheist conference into another revival service for Progressivism.

Instead of discussing atheism and theism, you can spend all day discussing racism, sexism, and homophobia. That’s the wonderful thing about Progressivism – a meeting about anything can be turned into a meeting about who is at the meeting and how they will be forced to behave if they want to avoid expulsion.

This is one of the many problems I have with the AtheismPlus crowd and neofeminists, groups who in most cases overlap. Atheism never was and never should be associated with progressivism or any other actual political movement. Some atheists are progressives; some may be conservative. As I’ve said previously, if a person wants be considered as a progressive skeptic, adopt secular humanism. AtheismPlus is redundant, and as we are seeing, neofeminism is increasingly counterproductive to the cause of women’s rights. This is evidenced by the fact that more and more nonbelieving women and self-professed feminists want nothing to do with either.

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The Neofeminists

How to describe this “new wave” of hypersensitive, reactionary, dogmatic and witch-hunt brand of feminism that has surfaced in the last year, with Ophelia Benson, Jen McCreight, Rebecca Watson and others carrying the banner?  As I’ve said before, I think the term neofeminism is about right.

Here is Benson at her accusatory best, this time accusing Michael Shermer, of all people, of believing that women are, at least implicitly, “too stupid to do nontheism:”

Don’t laugh: Michael Shermer said exactly that during a panel discussion on the online talk-show The Point. The host, Cara Santa Maria, presented a question: Why isn’t the gender split in atheism closer to 50-50? Shermer explained, “It’s who wants to stand up and talk about it, go on shows about it, go to conferences and speak about it, who’s intellectually active about it; you know, it’s more of a guy thing.”

It’s all there—women don’t do thinky, they don’t speak up, they don’t talk at conferences, they don’t get involved—it’s “a guy thing,” like football and porn and washing the car.

What Benson didn’t mention was that Shermer’s remarks were lifted out of context. Here is part of Shermer’s response:

First of all, Benson shortened the quote. What I prefaced the above with is: “I think it probably really is 50/50.” Benson also left out my follow up comment moments later that at the 2012 TAM (The Amazing Meeting) conference of skeptics and atheists, there were more women speakers than men speakers. I misspoke slightly. According to D. J. Grothe, the TAM organizer, there were an equal number of men and women speakers (the roster on the web page is incorrect) until, ironically, Ophelia Benson herself dropped out.

Whatever reason Benson had for dropping out of the conference, this is telling. So, she is calling for more nonbelieving women to get involved in the conversation but was absent herself. Nice. As it turns out, a brief browse through the Twitter secular community will reveal that many women have spoken out against this new wave of feminism that seems more about exclusion and frantically thwarting contrary arguments than really enacting societal change. The us against them dichotomy, which seems to include most everyone, couldn’t be stronger.

According to Shermer’s blog post, even Harriet Hall, who was instrumental in the “first wave” of feminism, has even been put off by this new brand of nuttiness:

Harriet Hall, M.D., the SkepDoc columnist for Skepticmagazine (one of two women columnists of our three, I might add, the other being Karen Stollznow), who lived through and helped bring about the first-wave feminist movement, told me she “was vilified on Ophelia’s blog for not following a certain kind of feminist party line of how a feminist should act and think. And I was attacked there in a disturbingly irrational, nonskeptical way.” I asked her why she didn’t defend herself. She wrote in an email (12/08/12):

“I did not dare try to explain my thinking on Ophelia’s blog, because it was apparent from the tone of the comments that anything I might say would be misinterpreted and twisted to use against me. I have always been a feminist but I have my own style of feminism. And I have felt more oppressed by these sort of feminists than by men, and far less welcome in that strain of feminism than in the atheist or skeptical communities.” (Italics mine)

There you have it. Straight from a feminist that these folks are overtly confrontational and misguided.

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Feeling gravity’s pull

Here is a map showing the wide fluctuations in gravity concentrations on the surface of the moon:

compared to gravity levels on Earth:

ESA's GOCE mission has delivered the most accurate model of the 'geoid' ever produced. Red corresponds to points with higher gravity, and blue to points with lower gravity. CREDIT: ESA/HPF/DLR

For further reading:
Best Gravity Map Yet Shows a Lumpy, Bumpy Earth
Violent past revealed by map of moon’s interior

And now for R.E.M. on the subject:

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Cue the white fear

After the U.S. Census Bureau reported earlier this year that white newborn babies were now in the minority camp, the agency is now indicating that whites as a whole in America will be a minority by 2043, a reality that, while it certainly shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, will no doubt raise anxieties among some white folks, especially in the South.

Witness some of these odious responses on the News-Sentinel website:

TOLDYOUSO: Oh goodie, then we can race bait like jesse and al.

GOJO: Then whites will get preferential treatment as a minority.

transplantedhillbilly: There goes the neighborhood! Now they will be burning crosses on OUR lawns!

activehollow: white history month…finally!

ragebucket: When whites are no longer the majority, can we have white pride month?

As Matthew Yglesias pointed out in May after the report on newborns, the actual figures related to demographics in America aren’t as black and white as we might believe. People technically of Hispanic origin but have lived in the United States since infanthood may be just as well feel comfortable checking the “white” box if other branches of their family tree find their roots in say, Eastern Europe, like Yglesias. What about people with Hispanic origins whose families have lived in the United States for multiple generations, and they have no immediate connection to Mexico, Cuba or elsewhere.

Here is Yglesias:

As books like How The Irish Became White and How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America make clear, whiteness in America has always been a somewhat elastic concept.

It’s conceivable that 40 years from now nobody will care about race at all. But if they do still care, it will still be the case that—by definition—whiteness is the racial definition of the sociocultural majority. If the only way for that to happen is to recruit large swathes of the Hispanic and fractionally Asian population into whiteness, then surely it will happen.

… The future of American whiteness will likely evolve to include a larger share of ancestry from Asia and Latin America, just as in the past it’s expanded to include people from eastern and southern Europe. The idea that every single person with a single non-white ancestor counts as non-white will look as ridiculous as Elizabeth Warren’s past claim of Cherokee identity.

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Aversion to feminism: a branding failure?

I sense a tinge of counterplay against the AtheismPlus crowd and modern feminism in this article. The ideals of equal rights and equal pay, etc., for women and men are something we should strive for, but perhaps Katy Perry and countless others have picked up on a new reality that feminism in its modern manifestation seems to be a sickly, timid, hypersensitive, reactionary shell of its former self:

Katy Perry accepted the Woman of the Year award from Billboard on Friday by declaring, “I’m not a feminist, but I do believe in the power of women.”

This isn’t an especially surprising statement. As a number of folks have pointed out, many young women—and a good number of not-so-young women as well—are uncomfortable with being labeled as feminists even though they embrace many feminist goals. Last month, for example, Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer eschewed the feminist label while simultaneously declaring that she “believed in equal rights.” It’s tempting to simply dismiss such comments as incoherent, but I think doing so risks missing out on insights and criticism that might be of value to feminism.

Understandably, many feminist writers don’t see things this way. Instead, they find such rhetorical contradictions infuriating. Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon, for example, explains with barely-restrained snark: “Let me just point out that if you believe in the strength of women, Ms. Perry, or their equality, Ms. Mayer, you’re soaking in feminism.” Madeleine Davis at Jezebel adds, with less restraint, “the ignorance and ridiculousness of Perry’s comments—especially in the context of accepting the Woman of the Year award—is enough to set the teeth of any feminist on edge.”

Again, the frustration is understandable—you’ve got people in the public limelight standing up, saying they agree with your principles in one breath and then denouncing you in the next. Getting kicked by your enemies sucks, but is at least expected. Being spit on by your friends, on the other hands, is a betrayal.

Still, as Slate‘s Amanda Hess points out, condemning women for not embracing feminism probably isn’t that helpful. As Hess says, “Here’s one reason some women might not identify as feminists: Whenever they begin to engage with the material, feminists condescendingly dismiss them as morons.” Hess adds, “I’m beginning to realize that the question “Are you a feminist?” tells us much more about the feminist movement’s own branding failures than it does the beliefs of the women prompted to respond.”

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We are stardust

Here are some fantastic images from a new children’s book titled, “You Are Stardust,” by Elin Kelsey:

© Soyeon Kim, from the book You Are Stardust by Elin Kelsey & Soyeon Kim, OwlKids Press

© Soyeon Kim, from the book You Are Stardust by Elin Kelsey & Soyeon Kim, OwlKids Press

© Soyeon Kim, from the book You Are Stardust by Elin Kelsey & Soyeon Kim, OwlKids Press

© Soyeon Kim, from the book You Are Stardust by Elin Kelsey & Soyeon Kim, OwlKids Press

© Soyeon Kim, from the book You Are Stardust by Elin Kelsey & Soyeon Kim, OwlKids Press

© Soyeon Kim, from the book You Are Stardust by Elin Kelsey & Soyeon Kim, OwlKids Press

I’m encouraged that there are children’s books being produced that actually embrace the truths of science on our origins. This book also has an online supplement that provides more details on why we are made from the stuff of stars.

Here is an eloquent and inspiring explanation from Neil de Grasse Tyson:

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