RationalWiki:What is going on in the blogosphere?/August 2014

August 2014
Milo Manara's Spiderwoman, rendered as a 3D model by Dino Ignacio. Dylan Avery, director of Loose Change, is unemployed and getting out of the Truther Movement. Chiropractic Abuse: An Insider’s Lament Zara fashion: After swastika handbags in 2007, this time: Children's pyjamas in concentration camp style. Dafuq? NY Times - the internet is One big circle jerk io9: This Classic Science-Denying Scandal Shows Why Too Much Testing Is Bad. "Bad", you say? This needs further study! Cracked: 5 Successful People Who Everyone Forgets Are Exposed Frauds Sorry, Republicans: going full-libertarian will alienate all your other bases. [http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/22/opinion/dawes-isis-evil/index.html?iid=article_sidebar “Should we call ISIS evil? — Evil is the most powerful word we have to prepare ourselves to kill other people comfortably.”] Reason magazine actually does something useful, says that the Bill of Rights isn't just for white people. You're writing a story and it's got a ... white character. How to describe them so normal people will understand. Somebody is using Lorem Ipsum to troll google translate. Salon: Why rightwingers hate smart people in general, and Neil deGrasse Tyson in particular. A recent review of court cases has shown that courts nearly always side with wind farms, finding insufficient evidence of Wind Turbine Syndrome. Fark bans misogyny in comments

From The Onion's new website: "My Doctor Told Me I Should Vaccinate My Children, But Then Someone Much Louder Than My Doctor Told Me I Shouldn’t" Facebook will now point out satire. Because people really are that stupid. The man who liked everything on Facebook has his counterpart: The woman who liked nothing. Alex Gabriel: To the atheist tone police: stop telling me how to discuss my abuse. The A-Z of what can give you cancer, according to the Daily Fail. "This time it's the Democrats who are united." (Just a matter of time now.) When Cracked delivers, it delivers. 6 Ways a Creationist Textbook Sabotaged Science. Strangely, the Electronic Frontier Foundation files an amicus brief against the National "Michael Mann is a pedophile" Review defamation suit. (VIDEO) "Humans Need Not Apply," a fascinating, yet somewhat harrowing, mini-documentary on the current state of automation, and its consequences for the future of our labor workforce. Why Twitter won't do shit to fix its harassment problem Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party The reality of the Middle East: The Cold War is over. Ferguson, the NRA and the hypocrisy of silence. "The libertarian dogma of our time is turning our polities, economies, and cultures upside down—and blinding us to this by making us even more self-absorbed and incurious than we naturally are. The world we are making with our hands is as remote from our minds as the farthest black hole. Once we had a nostalgia for the future. Today we have an amnesia for the present." Former Occupy activist turns to neoreactionary politics... that or trolling. Sex offender laws have gone too far. (Parts one and two of a series from Slate.) Reasons to Lose Faith in Humanity. Paul Krugman uses statistics to prove that scientists tend to be liberals. If you "like" everything on Facebook your feed will become [http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook-for-two-days-heres-what-it-did-to-me/ brands, clickbait and right-wingnut politics. No humans.] Your friends' feeds will also go to shit. A new study confirms everything we knew about anti-immigrant sentiment. New York Times Science writer Nicholas Wade publishes a "racial realism" book, which is met with condemnation by the majority of scientists he cites August 9th marks the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation. And as one HuffPo blogger reminds us, it also marks the 30th anniversary of "the stupidest thing ever written about Watergate." Namely, a Washington Post op-ed by Ben Stein that "was a screed so cretinous that even its author seems to have recognized what an embarrassment it was" by having all links to it scrubbed from the internet. On the different degrees of subtlety in a person's opinions and behavior: The Subtlety Illusion Daily Kos: Neil deGrasse Tyson makes important scientific discovery: Liberals can be just as anti-science about GMOs as Conservatives are about Global warming. Cherry Picking or Context in Bible Verse Selection The mind of a men's right's activist Juan Williams: "...I work at Fox News." The bizarre tale of how post-Soviet Russia descended into (nearly) every wingnut's wet dream. American discourse is now so dumbed-down that [http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/mr-tough-guy? it's become the equivalent of the POTUS talking to an Internet Tough Guy.] The Pundit-Polling Statistics War begins anew!