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Comments by emmet


1. Americans pray at the pump for cheaper petrol

Comment #179696 by emmet on May 13, 2008 at 2:11 pm

Canada, Australia, Russia, Niger, Namibia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, South Africa.

With the exception of the first two countries, I wouldn't consider the countries highly stable. …the U.S. will be have its kahunas in the hands of quasi-rogue states in Africa and the Asia. That may take 50 years or more, but it will happen.

So, how about this for an idea: the US spends $100 billion over the next 50 years on education and infrastructure in those of the above countries that need it, in the hope of not spending $5 trillion bombing them into the stone age in 50 years. As 50:1 bets go, it seems like a pretty good one.

2. Faith in Britain today

Comment #177504 by emmet on May 9, 2008 at 7:51 am

Have you ever met anyone who believes what Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in?

No because nobody could possibly believe all the things that Richard doesn't believe in, you old fool, because some of them are mutually contradictory.

I usually find that the God that is being rejected by such people is a God I don't believe in either.

True by sheer force of numbers: the number of gods I reject is approximately equal to the number of gods you don't believe in. Here's the mathematics for the hard-of-thinking: x ≅ x+1, for sufficiently large x. Here x is the number of gods you don't believe in, which has been measured and found to be precisely a metric shitload. I just reject one more.

3. Bill Good Interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #173631 by emmet on May 1, 2008 at 2:23 am

My favourite answer to the Stalin canard is that Stalin was a paranoid despot who sought to eliminate any possible challenge to his power, including the Orthodox Church. He knew exactly how powerful the Church was and exactly how they exercised power over the general population from spending his formative years in the Tiflis Seminary.

4. Anti-Evolution Film Misappropriates the Holocaust

Comment #172982 by emmet on April 30, 2008 at 8:13 am

Q: What do you call the useless bit of skin that remains after completion of a circumcision?

A: Ben Stein.

Or "When Ben Stein was circumcised, the rabbi threw away the wrong part."

5. Museums teach society lacking in science literacy

Comment #172760 by emmet on April 30, 2008 at 4:05 am

You have to laugh that the writer had to point out that the child lined up his toy dinosaurs - as if anyone might think he lined up his real ones! :o)

Obviously he couldn't because the real ones were being fitted for saddles at the time.

6. Anti-Evolution Film Misappropriates the Holocaust

Comment #172749 by emmet on April 30, 2008 at 3:32 am

I've been saying that the ADL should jump all over Expelled. I'm glad they have.

Other people I'd like to see publically condemning it include:

* Holocaust historians
* The curator of the concentration camp used in the movie (was it Dachau or Auschwitz?).
* Any rabbi, particularly a senior rabbi, a German rabbi, or Ben Stein's rabbi
* Groups representing the Roma people, gays, the mentally or physically handicapped, or other groups the Nazis murdered en masse.

7. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172726 by emmet on April 30, 2008 at 2:10 am

Vaal,

She lied, she got caught, she was ashamed, she left. She was not "bullied".

She was accused in (what is now) #58, rumbled in #75 and had already started deleting by #77. Everything after that is totally irrelevant to her decision. I fail to see how any of the posts between #58 and #77 could possibly be construed as "bullying".

8. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172691 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 11:15 pm

njwong@#291,

...and the horse you rode in on, mate.

#291 is utter bollocks. She was asked if she edited the post, she said she didn't, she lied. It's not like she just told one little white lie, she lied repeatedly and compounded the deceit: "You misread", "I didn't edit the post". She allowed other people to leap to her defence, pointing out what she "had really written", and she allowed al-rawandi to apologise to her for "misreading" what she had "originally written".

Her behaviour was dishonest and reprehensible. I categorically reject any suggestion that I erred in setting the record straight. I'm appalled that you see fit to take me to task for testifying to the truth. You would rather that I would stand by and let her dishonestly humiliate al-rawandi and make unwitting accomplices of the posters who defended her? NOT BLOODY LIKELY.

I think al-rawandi often delivers messages on a flaming arrow that would be better sent by mail. I've called him a "condescending bastard", amongst other things, had heated disagreements with him, we often disagree, but there'll be a cold day in hell before I let someone humiliate anybody with a stinking lie when I know the truth.

Some people understood her post one way. Some people understood it another. It was ambiguous. She could have clarified her meaning without being dishonest, but she just couldn't let go of the petty little "win" of squeezing an apology out of al-rawandi, and let integrity be damned. Maybe she was piqued that he'd been harsh about her rashly-chosen words. So what? That makes her deceit OK? No way!


She could've just said "yeah, you know, that could've been clearer, I was upset when I wrote it" and it would've been dropped instantly. At the point where she'd edited out the content of all of her earlier posts, it was dropped: al-rawandi had dropped it and left, I had no dog in the fight. It was over at that point. I haven't mentioned it since then except to answer questions about it or discuss the pros and cons of having the editing facility. You're the one who's brought the damn thing up the last two times! It was all but forgotten until you put the big shit-stirring spoon in.

To defend her deceitful post-morphing with reference to inveterate self-confessed pedants changing punctuation or a dyslexic guy correcting his spelling beggars belief. Other posters, including myself, edit their posts a dozen times or more to correct punctuation, grammar, or spelling, not to deceive. Big, big, BIG difference. I'm flabbergasted that I have to point this out.

Anyway, since Bunny has quitted the RD.NET site, please consider yourselves victorious.
Awwww... boo hoo! Is that supposed to make me feel bad? She lied, got caught, and erased all record of her misbehaviour, now I'm supposed to feel bad? Not a chance, mate. I'm totally unapologetic about my conduct: I absolutely did the right thing. If I witness anyone perpetrating post-morphing deceit to embarrass, humiliate, or disadvantage another poster, I'll damn well expose them. I know where I stand, I know what's right, I'm proud of what I did, and no feeble attempt at laying a guilt-trip on me is going to change that. So you can take that one, wrap it 'round a pineapple, and stick it where the sun don't shine... crown first.

To her credit, I think she's thoroughly ashamed of herself, and that's why she went. If so, good for her, she learned something. No harm.

9. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172522 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 4:53 pm

Timeouts can be used very carefully on different pages to deal with issues of resource use by sessions on high-traffic websites, like this one. On the other hand, I can't imagine there is much session state to be maintained.


There should be no resource issue at all with using session cookies rather than persistent cookies with the expiry time explicitly set a short time in the future. My appeal to authority is that I've written database backends for dozens of sites, some of them with high traffic levels, over a period of about 10 years (admittedly a long time since I did such a big job and I'm out of the web programming business entirely now). There is quite a bit of oddness here. For example, (it doesn't seem to be so bad now) for a long time if you reloaded the home-page, all the images would reload too, which made it look like there was a no-cache pragma sent even with static content (or a very short expiry time). Another example: Firefox won't fill the login boxes, which is a double PITA when sessions expire so readily. I could pick out more odd things, but it just seems to me that, on the whole, "the principle of least surprise" is quite often violated.

10. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172485 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 3:49 pm

On the off topic of posting, does anyone else have a problem of being logged off while typing a comment? I know I type slow, but at times, after I hit submit I seem to get logged off, thus losing my comment.

Didn't there use to be a warning above the comment box advising one to copy their comment before submitting?


I think they've set the timeout on the login cookie to be a lot longer than it used to be, which ameliorates the problem somewhat, probably enough so that they felt the warning was not necessary any more. I don't understand why there's a timeout set at all, if there's no timeout specified, the cookie is a session cookie which lasts until the browser is closed or it's explicitly removed (e.g. via a "logout").

There are quite a few very peculiar things about the way the commenting software works here, that's just one of them.

11. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172470 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 3:31 pm

Sorry, he did ask you. I just had to get in the fun after all the serious stuff.
Serves me right for taking so long over the post and "lithium" was funnier anyway :o)

12. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172459 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 3:21 pm

What I hate is when I think I see the static avatars move. How do you bock that?!
Therapy?


Edit: Dammit, beaten to the punch :o)

13. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172442 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 2:59 pm

I can still change it if I get more complaints :)
No, it's not a complaint. I don't mind people having animated avatars, it's just that I block them so they don't distract me. It's the same with animated ads: I have no desire to block static ads or text ads, but I use Adblock Plus to get rid of the distracting animated ones and the other ones get killed as a side-effect.

I do feel sorry for the people who find animated ads/avatars as irritating as I do, but don't know of Adblock Plus as a solution. If you hit escape over GIF animations, that stops the animation in most browsers, but it's not practical to do that for a pageful of ads/avatars prancing all over the screen.

That said, if I ever meet the guy who decided to put animation support into GIF 89a, I'll punch him in the face :o)

14. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172429 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 2:49 pm

Okay then, how about a compromise?
I find animated avatars very distracting, except for slow/subtle animations, so I block them as a matter of course. If it were up to me, I'd ban GIFs and only allow PNG or JPEG avatars.

It can take me ten gos to get the punctuation right. Oh, the public humiliation.
Me too: pedantry is a harsh mistress. That --- and the fact that the comment submission software here f**ks things up when you submit them, but not when you edit them (like links) --- would make me reluctant to forego the ability to edit. The other thing, of course, is that merely having an edit count would admit a "oh, I edited earlier to put in a comma" defence: if people are going to be dishonest, it's pretty hard to stop them.

15. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172400 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 2:19 pm

Phil@#231,

Yep, I like being able to edit posts to correct punctuation or grammar, but it's definitely a double-edged sword, particularly when it can be abused so easily. I don't think it'd be practical to have a complete history of every post (it'd require a fairly significant software and database changes), but it should be very easy to tag a post has having been edited (i.e. every time a post is edited, an edit counter is incremented, if the edit counter is non-zero, the number of edits is displayed). That would at least tell us if a post had been edited, although not what the exact changes were.

TBH, I think the "moral of the story" is to copy/paste and blockquote in responses.

16. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172359 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 1:55 pm

I can't see any of them, unfortunately. They must be on imageshack which, for some reason, always times out on me.

17. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172339 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 1:43 pm

Fortunately, I am not a 300 lb man with a beard...today

Well in any case, it's better than one of those annoying animated avatars. I thank his Noodliness for Adblock Plus every time I block one.

18. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172325 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 1:25 pm

Everyone picks the very very very best picture of themselves. It is almost a ruse.
I don't have a recent halfway decent photograph, which is why I use my "Southpark" character (a pretty good likeness): it makes me look less like a scruffy demented troglodyte. There is a pic of me online, but it's a few years old.

I am glad you caught the editing of the post, I had actually issued the apology.


Yep. When I saw the "I did not edit the post" line, I was so shocked that I immediately copied and pasted it for the one where I just quoted it and said "Liar". That overwrote her unmutated original post on my clipboard. I had just posted my "FWIW, #23 was edited to change 'they' to 'people like this'" post and moved on to the 2nd page (the thread was moving very fast). If I hadn't reacted that way out of surprise, it would've been much better: just post what she actually wrote with "From my clipboard" in front of it.

So you think that pic is a good representation of me?
All we can say for certain is that the girl in the photograph is very pretty. But whether it's a good representation of you? I dunno, what do you really look like? You could be a 300lb man with a beard for all we know :o)

19. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172308 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 1:02 pm

al-rawandi,

The commandment link didn't work unfortunately.


I went back and edited it ;o)

I find that the commenting system tries to hyperlink my hyperlinks and screws them up, so I always have to edit to get rid of extra <a href=""... stuff. Sometimes threads move very fast, so I haven't had time to fix the links before somebody finds that they're broken.

20. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172297 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 12:54 pm

al-rawandi,

Seems like she's deleted all but one of her posts, not just in this thread, and deleted her profile picture. I think this indicates that she's thoroughly ashamed of what she did. I hope for her that it reinforces the 9th Commandment rather than the 11th :o)

21. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172261 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 12:03 pm

Colwyn@169,

Bunnyboiler went back and edited a post (was #23) in the middle of an argument with al-rawandi, tried to screw an apology out of him on the basis of "misreading" the post, was asked if she edited the post, lied repeatedly, got caught, and went back and deleted all her posts (about 10 in total), so the numbering of posts is wrong and referred-to posts are gone. At a guess, the most relevant posts are now probably between about #45 and #65, or thereabouts. You'll probably get the picture from the 2nd page of comments.

22. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #172191 by emmet on April 29, 2008 at 10:23 am

njwong:

However, what gets my gall is your constantly taunting her as a LIAR in all your follow up comments harping about her edit of her original post as being dishonest - without bothering to accept her explanations.


The only person to actually call her a liar straight up was me. I absolutely unreservedly and unapologetically stand behind that statement.

She went back and edited a post and was trying to wring an apology out of al-rawandi based on his "misreading", she and other posters said things like "If you go back and look at what I/she actually wrote". At one point, al-rawandi even apologised to her for unfairly characterising her "original" remarks as racist. When she was asked if she had edited the post, she lied. She persisted in lying until she was called on it by me.

She was not "taunted", she was held to account for her lies, and screw her "explanations": they were post-hoc justifications of her gross dishonesty.

If she'd said "OK, I was angry and my post wasn't clear, I changed it to clarify my intended meaning", nobody would have batted an eyelid, but she didn't, instead she lied repeatedly in order to extract an apology from another person for "misreading" a post, which he had not misread. She even admitted that what she had done was dishonest herself before she went and deleted all of her posts.

23. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #171603 by emmet on April 28, 2008 at 3:44 pm

There's absolutely no question that #23 was edited as I said in #63. I agonised over my own #39 for a long time, where I had originally block-quoted #26 and read it several times. I then decided for something shorter. I reloaded the page a couple of times, but I hadn't noticed that the thread had gone on to a 2nd page. I saw the evolving disagreement at the end of p.1, when I scrolled back up to #26 and noticed it was different, the original version was still "on my clipboard" (actually the X-Windows "auto copy" thing: I use Linux). I then posted what became #63 and noticed that there was 2nd page. I went to the second page, saw #64 and immediately posted what became #65.

IMHO, changing "they" to "men like this" very substantially changes the meaning because it removes the ambiguity. I also read "they" to mean "Iraqis" rather than "the perpetrators" in the original version, an interpretation which is not possible in the edited version.

Edit: bunnyboiler subsequently removed the content from, rather than deleted, some of her earlier posts referred-to above. The numbering has not changed as I had previously put in this edit notice.

Edit: It seems bunnyboiler decided to delete all of her posts after all: the numbering above is now wrong!

24. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #171579 by emmet on April 28, 2008 at 3:27 pm

And I replied that you misread my comment. I did not edit the post.


Liar.

25. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #171577 by emmet on April 28, 2008 at 3:26 pm

FWIW, post #23 was edited to change "they" into "men like this" since I last read it.

26. Girl, 17, killed in Iraq for loving a British soldier

Comment #171543 by emmet on April 28, 2008 at 2:47 pm

For FSM's sake, people, get a grip! It's horrifying and disgusting and the perpetrators deserve to be punished, but turn that fucking country into a sea of glass? sub humans? human filth?

I understand the anger and frustration, but this not the language of rational moral people! I'm less disturbed by the fact that people can murder one of their family and get away with it than by members of the reality-based community calling for genocide in response.

27. Religion a figment of human imagination

Comment #171513 by emmet on April 28, 2008 at 2:29 pm

I think there's evidence that orcas have imagination. See this YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxDZW4k8tCY

In the clip, orcas collaborate (three swimming together) in order to swim under an ice floe, creating a wave to upset the floe and knock a seal off. This requires some or all of having the idea, planning, communication, an expectation of what will happen, some kind of "model". I fail to see how this could be done without something that could reasonably be termed imagination.

28. Investigating Atheism

Comment #167555 by emmet on April 24, 2008 at 6:57 am

"Investigating" atheism on the other hand seems to be suggesting that atheism is a criminal case that needs to be solved.

Their definition of atheism as "denial of the existence of God" is equally telling. "Denial" carries a negative connotation of contrarily rejecting something true (as in "holocaust denial") or belligerently withholding something which is due (as in "denial of a right"). It subtly suggests both that God definitely exists and that atheists are doing something bad in not accepting this as true.

29. Investigating Atheism

Comment #167508 by emmet on April 24, 2008 at 5:39 am

How extraordinarily badly written!

Since the publication of Sam Harris' The End of Faith in 2005, the English speaking world has seen a spate of books on atheism, [...]. The publication of [...] Sam Harris' The End of Faith (2005) [... has] added and expanded the debate.


Huh? SH's TEoF not only started it, but added the debate, how interesting. How do you "add a debate" anyway? "Added to the debate" is surely what is intended.

If the second reference to SH was to "Letters to a Christian Nation", and they added a "to" it would be OK, but in the first two sentences from Cambridge?

I wrote better than that when I was 12.

30. Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital

Comment #167491 by emmet on April 24, 2008 at 5:23 am

I don't see how people, who have no education to speak of, believing in penis-snatching witches is more deserving of laughter and derision than people with a college education believing they're personal friends with a magic iron-age Levantine zombie.

Since we have no reason to believe that their ignorance is wilful (unlike Western flat-earthers, geocentrists and creationists), I think they are more deserving of pity than disdain.

31. Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

Comment #167355 by emmet on April 23, 2008 at 11:47 pm

David Robertson et al point to him and say, 'See! Scientists do believe in god!

I wouldn't count him, or any other clinician, as a scientist. Remember that the threshold for publication in a peer-reviewed medical journal is "Patient X had Y, we did Z, he didn't die" and statistically insignificant results are regularly published and then make their way into the public domain where they cause panic. There's plenty of woo in the medical profession too: doesn't the UK's NHS have homeopathic units?

32. Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions

Comment #163524 by emmet on April 18, 2008 at 1:06 pm

I did not get anything like an answer to my question, so I will ask it again.
I suggest purchasing a fully working keyboard. Yours appears to be faulty. In particular, the "h" and "e" keys don't appear to respond after the "t" key has been pressed.

After that, maybe you could rewrite your question in English and people could read it without feeling like they've had a fork stuck in their eye every other word.

33. Religious education as a part of literary culture

Comment #160870 by emmet on April 14, 2008 at 1:54 pm

Robotaholic, spoken like a true engineer.

Oi! Spinoza! *blows whistle* Yellow card!

:o)

We'll have less of your stereotyping engineers, thanks. Someone says they don't like a particular kind of art and that makes them an engineer? I'm an engineer who's spent more than his fair share of time in art galleries and I resent the insinuation that my profession makes me some kind of cultural Philistine.

I'm not a culture vulture, I admit, but someone saying they don't like a particular kind of art doesn't allow one to infer their profession. If someone says "Unmade Bed" is execrable (and Tracy Emin generally), what does that make him? A diesel fitter, perhaps? What if cubism doesn't blow his skirt up? Maybe a lawyer? If I think that every painter who ever held a brush did an "Ecce Homo" and most of them are pretty unremarkable, does that make me an accountant?

All of the above to be read in Michael Palin's "Parrot Sketch" accent.

34. Lungless frog discovered in Borneo

Comment #158835 by emmet on April 11, 2008 at 5:16 am

It's on YouTube: All Things Dull and Ugly

Seems it's Python: I'm amazed I never heard it before!

fretmeister, MrPickwick: I know a chemist who was called to the bar at 68. Why not the other way around?

35. Commentary: Democrats finally getting religion on religion

Comment #158462 by emmet on April 10, 2008 at 2:51 pm

Since the triumph (and tragedy) of Laika I`ve been a romantic about space but the practical in me says that only a tiny minority have got any benefit from anything higher than 36000km.

Well, if you think modern technology and computers are a benefit, then I have to disagree. The moon-shot really jump-started modern technology, particularly in electronics and computing and, for a while, made science and technology sexy.

I read a similar argument the other day against the LHC, I just hope that poster remembers his objection to fundamental research in physics when he needs a PET or MRI scan.

The benefits aren't always immediately apparent, but they're there.

36. German Church admits aiding Nazis

Comment #158441 by emmet on April 10, 2008 at 2:12 pm

But this sounds like the same argument that occurred when people found out that Pope Benedict XVI was a Hitler Youth. It's impossible to know exactly how anyone would act in that situation. I would probably have a hard time giving up my life for a cause that had no chance.


This much is certain: by his own admission, Ratzinger was conscripted into the Hitler Youth and, later, the Wehrmacht as an AA gunner. When he was sent to active service, in the final throes of the regime, he had no stomach for it, deserted and fled home. We can say with certainty that he hadn't the courage either to fight against Nazism or fight for his country, whatever he believed.

Like you, I don't know how I would react under those circumstances, being pretty spineless, I'd probably have done the same as he did, but then I don't claim to have been chosen by God to be the moral leader of a billion people, nor do I ever claim to be infallible (even when I'm sitting in my magic chair). One would have thought that the Holy Spirit would have chosen someone with a little more moral backbone when he entered the College of Cardinals.

37. The simple falsehood at the heart of Expelled

Comment #158432 by emmet on April 10, 2008 at 1:57 pm

It would be an extremely interesting experiment to slightly change those extracts from Mein Kampf so that they appear to denigrate atheism, post them to a blog/website, and see how long it would take to accumulate a following of Fundies.

38. Hitchens vs. Hitchens

Comment #158365 by emmet on April 10, 2008 at 11:53 am

Pao Chang@158193,

Mr.(prof.? doctor?lol) Hitchens

Yeah, actually I wondered about that. AFAICT, Hitchens does not have a doctorate, nor even a master's. He was/is a visiting professor at the New School in New York, which perhaps caused the confusion, but he has himself said things that muddy the waters.

39. Hitchens vs. Hitchens

Comment #158044 by emmet on April 10, 2008 at 2:53 am

To a large degree, I think that Christoper Hitchens and many others put the cart before the horse when they argue for atheism. It seems to me that the positive argument should be for empirical evidence, science, and critical reasoning with atheism as a necessary but not sufficient condition. Merely being an atheist does not make one a member of the reality-based community and does not make one ethical or moral. Nobody can argue that Stalin or Mao were burdened by an excess of secular moral philosophy and critical thinking. That they happen to have been atheists is a side-show, but we fall into the trap of having to justify these monsters when we argue purely for atheism on its own outside the context of the evidence-based rationality and secular moral philosophy that seem, to us, to go so naturally alongside atheism that we sometimes forget they're not part of it.

We err if we make a claim positively as a consequence of atheism alone. Religions, on the other hand, claim to provide complete moral frameworks (at least) and sometimes complete frameworks of knowledge and for government. The difference between the Crusades and the Inquisition, on the one hand, and the atrocities of Stalin and Mao, on the other, is that the former were justified in terms of the complete moral frameworks provided by Christianity whilst the latter cannot have been justified in terms of atheism, because atheism does not, and should not claim, to provide any moral framework at all.

What this means is that the tired old question "If you are an atheist, where do you get your morality from?" is actually a perfectly legitimate and reasonable question. To say, "I don't believe in leprechauns and that provides me with a complete morality" is clearly ridiculous. If I am honest, I must admit that I don't know what the foundation of my own morality is: evolution, culture, tradition, and reasoning all in some measure. All I can say with certainty is that it is not helped by accepting as absolute the teachings of bronze-age zealots who didn't know either. I believe that atheism intensifies my committment to certain moral principles, like not harming or killing others, but I don't think it can originate those principles. As Hitchens points out very well, religion doesn't either: the age of our species means that basic moral principles predate Abrahamic religion at least.

That said, I think Christopher Hitchens is very weak on the whole "Stalin and Mao" thing. His stock "turning it around and making it into religion" answer is not at all persuasive or compelling; on the contrary, its slippery and dishonest casuistry is transparent. His followup "show me the country who abandoned theocracy in favour of the teachings of Spinoza, Paine [...] and went awry" is far stronger, but he doesn't articulate it particularly well because it appears evasive to answer a question with a question and smuggle in Jefferson. It would be much better, in my view, to simply say: "I don't claim that atheism provides a complete basis for running a country or anything else (religions like Islam are not so modest). I am arguing for secular reason and critical thinking, for which atheism is merely a sine qua non. I don't have to answer for Stalin because neither of us believe in God any more than you have to answer for Hitler because neither of you believe in Santa Claus" --- the whole "Stalin and Mao" question is based on an entirely false implicit premise that atheism makes claims which it does not, and is batted out of the park easily. I don't understand why Chrisopher Hitchens makes such a dog's dinner out of it with unecessary sophistry.

If you're arguing positively for science and reason, as Richard does, with atheism merely as part of it, the answer to "Stalin was an atheist!" is "So what? Your point?".

40. Richard Dawkins on The Big Questions

Comment #157065 by emmet on April 8, 2008 at 2:24 pm

Someone remind me again what century we're living in please!!!!

Well, we are living in the 21st century.

They have chosen to live bodily in the 21st century and intellectually somewhere between the bronze age and the mediæval period.

41. Pastor attacks scientist's talk

Comment #154776 by emmet on April 3, 2008 at 5:37 pm

Can't "we" (the reality-based community) stop tacitly acknowledging that "Darwinism" and "Evolutionism" are scientific terms? These terms are used solely in a theological context and, this being the case, actually have no place in a discussion about science.

Next time someone says "Darwinism" or "Evolutionist", I'd love to see the scientist on the other side say "Excuse me?" or "Sorry, I don't know what you mean". It's long past time that we stopped engaging with them on their turf and, instead, insist that they use the terminology of science when (pretending that they are) discussing science: "Oh, do you mean natural selection?"

I'm not a biologist, but isn't it the case that we can assert that "evolution" is NOT a theory, just an empirically observed phenomenon like "gravity"? I know that, technically, the phenomenon is "massive bodies are attracted to each other" and that "gravity" is a label given to a kind of meta-abstraction on the way to an explanatory theory, but isn't the same also true of evolution: that it's more a label for the phenomenon than it is a part of the explanation? In this sense, evolution exists beyond any doubt and variation subject to natural selection is the explanation. Wouldn't it be more difficult for these nutjobs to deny natural selection as the explanation for the observed phenomenon of evolution, which seems quite intuitively obvious and easily explained, rather than continue to allow them to redefine and obfuscate terminology in an ad-hoc manner with woolly, ill-defined, and loaded terms like "evolutionism" and "Darwinism" unknown to the bona-fide scientific lexicon?

42. Thy will be done

Comment #154283 by emmet on April 3, 2008 at 4:02 am

I propose a reasonable compromise: say the prayer, then the councillors who assent to the prayer may say "Amen!" at the end, and the councillors who dissent may say "Bollocks!"

More seriously, a one-minute plea from the chairman asking the councillors to remember the purpose of their meeting and try, at all times, to deal with each other constructively and in the best interests of their constituents would be of far greater value than a formulaic recitation of "The Lord's Prayer".

43. CEAI Action Alert for Science Teachers

Comment #154280 by emmet on April 3, 2008 at 3:35 am

Would that be belly button lint or clothes dryer lint? I feel we maybe on our way to a major schism.

No need for a schism: good cdesign proponentsists will teach the controversy.

44. 'We Make Our Own Heaven'

Comment #152778 by emmet on March 31, 2008 at 2:32 pm

Atheism by itself has no stuff.

Yep, true, and I don't understand all the negativity surrounding the idea of having some kind of "community" of like-minded (i.e. atheist/agnostic) people, like if you're not some kind of smelly antisocial troglodyte, you're not a real atheist.

I don't have any kids, but if I had, I think it'd be nice to have a group of the ungodly to cooperate on certain things. For example, I'd like to have access to a reasonably good microscope and telescope, both of which are pretty expensive items for one person/family, but easily affordable for a dozen, or two-dozen, like-minded persons/families. I can think of worse things to do on a Sunday than bring the kids down to some kind of "Community Centre" to look at snot or toenail clippings under a microscope.

45. Iowa county board gives initial OK for ghost hunters to investigate asylum

Comment #152767 by emmet on March 31, 2008 at 1:52 pm

I check out the local pub if I want to see spirits. After a while I might even see God. LOL

Lay off the mescal and switch to regular tequila.

46. Saudi Arabia Leader Calls for Interfaith Dialogue

Comment #150265 by emmet on March 26, 2008 at 4:18 pm

Now, I realise that in saying this I might get flamed mercilessly, but everyone appears to be assuming the worst. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps King Abdullah has a progressive agenda, but the realpolitik dictates that he take things one step at a time: he can persuade the Grand Mufti to go along with extending some tolerance of monotheisms now; maybe in ten years, he'll be able to abolish the religious police; in twenty years, he'll be able to extend the established tolerance of other religions to polytheism; in thirty, perhaps even atheism might be accepted.

Insofar as we care at all, I'm sure we'd all like to see Saudi change, but it's not going to happen overnight unless there's a revolution. If there was to be a gradual transition, the first step would be something very much like this.

47. Expelled Overview

Comment #149962 by emmet on March 26, 2008 at 11:12 am

REGARDING the Computer Animation:

This was discussed over at Pharyngula at some length. It is now certain, based on published stills, that the animation in Expelled! is not the Harvard animation: it is very similar (almost shot-for-shot in places), but was independently produced. DI speakers had previously used the Harvard animation, and when something strikingly similar appeared in Expelled!, some people assumed the creotards had ripped it off again.

Of course, we should ram home the message that it wasn't the creotards who made either the discoveries that informed the animation or the original version of it. If molecular biologists had been satisfied with "goddunnit" as an answer, we wouldn't know that motor proteins even existed.

48. Sue Blackmore debates Alister McGrath

Comment #149010 by emmet on March 24, 2008 at 11:38 pm

I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!



Sorry, couldn't resist the reference.

49. No Admission for Evolutionary Biologist at Creationist Film

Comment #148957 by emmet on March 24, 2008 at 6:50 pm

I'm just glad it will be ignored mainly here in Ireland and I presume the rest of Europe too (hopefully).

Undoubtedly. I'll be hat-eatingly surprised if it ever makes it to Filmstaden in "downtown Uppsala". I'll probably end up watching a low-quality rip off somebody's laptop... like Richard.

50. The Secular Conscience

Comment #147307 by emmet on March 20, 2008 at 6:14 am

Judge theology it by its fruits: three thousand of years of Judaeo-Christian theology has yielded nothing; a lot of rubbish about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or bogus calculations of the age of the earth, but not a single useful artifact. Not a steam engine, a lightbulb, or a medicine. In one tenth of that time, rational enquiry and science have given us everything in the modern world from NSAIDs to MRI to sat-nav.

Theology is bunk. A theologian deserves no more respect than an astrologer.

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