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

July 2014
"Israel and Hamas are Both Just Winging It." Well this will end well. The dysgenics of Idiocracy. Why Can’t the Banking Industry Solve Its Ethics Problems? Richard Dawkins, please STFU. We have a problem with child refugees because the government of the United States is serious about you staying clean and sober. The Texas Tank delivers yet again with a new series teaching science at a middle school level. With Maureen Dowd's assured blessing, The New York Times publishes a five-part editorial to end the War on Drugs. Ophelia Benson and Richard Dawkins (really): Dear atheists, please desist from acting like dicks. "Disagreement is inevitable, but bullying and harassment are not." Greta Christina has a few choice words for those who see fit to defend the Amazing Atheist. "As Reason's editor defends its racist history, here's a copy of its holocaust denial 'special issue'." Slate discovers Roko's basilisk and the LessWrongians. "I worry less about Roko’s Basilisk than about people who believe themselves to have transcended conventional morality." End the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency. Thomas E. Ricks: Good god, I'm turning into a leftie! It was bound to happen eventually. Dr. Steven Novella, et al., are currently being sued by Dr. Edward Tobinick and the so-called "Institute of Neurological Recovery" over a May 2013 article on Science-Based Medicine outlining his clinic's dubious practices. Jon Stewart explains that the only winning move in the Israel-Palestine debate may be not to play. The Scopes Trial as drama. The only explanation for The Orange Overlord's "sue Obama" gambit that makes sense. Well, other than pettiness. How the Israel-Palestine peace process died. Again. (Commentary) "Slavic George W. Bush" may have been an underexaggeration. (Especially to the oligarchs.) Government by moral panic. "I still hear about how I’m destroying gender relations, I still get told I’m unintelligent and ignorant, I still get threats of assault and rape. Let me repeat that: Men threaten to rape me, while telling me misogyny isn’t real. So why should I feel bad for hating the culture that allows this to go on?" How 65-million-year old geographic formations affect contemporary US voting patterns. IO9: The Fine Line Between Conspiracy Theory And Rational Skepticism. Right-wingers and their hatred of economics, grrr... Horseshoe theory comes to the Levant: Neocons suggest cutting off aid to Israel because Obama is sticking his evil filthy hands everywhere. While the chickenhawks persist in their delusion, the military quietly prepares for global warming. A story of TERFs stalking two trans women and their cis friend. "I write this post as that this isn’t some sort of intellectual parlour game." "Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless." Why Do We Need Labels Like “Gay”, “Bi”, “Trans”, and “Cis”? It's called the American Dream 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it.

A Brown University professor became skeptical of the use of weasel words and vague numbers in mainstream media reportage of satanic ritual abuse in daycare sex abuse cases. So he did a fifteen year study of these cases and found that in many cases the allegations of satanic rituals originated with various defense teams to make the public believe that prosecutors were conducting crusades based on moral panics and not on the actual evidence. Yet another Cracked article recommendation - this one is on conspiracy theories Tea Party Founding Father Rick Santelli: Wrong about everything. Let's sing the praises of L. Ron Hubbard and auditing. And make CDs and videos of our sung praises. No, this is not a joke. (WARNING: contains the actual music.) Oh, look. SomethingAwful.com just found the Left Behind film trilogy -- the Kirk Cameron version, that is; not the upcoming it's-gotta-be-totally-awesome-'cause-Nicolas-Cage-is-in-it version -- and decided to dedicate three webpages to an analysis of the awfulness. George Clooney: The problem with the Daily Mail. Show this to anyone dumbfounded on why Iran is itching to fight ISIS (and avoid the Flying Carpet Fallacy). Neil deGrasse Tyson is, sadly, the latest to hop on board the philosophy hate train. Will this be the cause of the third Intifada? "Many people who would not dream to claim they understand how antibiotics, microprocessors or immunisations work seem happy to wax lyrical on their views on climate change." "We allow ourselves only two major political parties. One of them is completely out of its fcking mind." Russian priest says soccer is homosexual because of the colored shoes. "Wearing pink or blue shoes, [the players] might as well wear women's panties or a bra." (The original article in Russian.) Two years before a Democratic primary and we're already getting bullshit on whether Obama will pick Clinton or Warren. A FOTL asks the British government if membership of society is compulsory, and, surprisingly, gets a comprehensive answer. "Indeed, many people seek solitude, and there are a number of hermits living in Britain today..." Your time is running out, Lockheed Martin. Who needs a psychic Octopus (or whatever it is this year) when you have the protozoic parasite Toxoplasma gondii? "Instead of saving the GOP, reformers risk being consumed by the Republicans' ongoing identity crisis." It helps when the word 'reformer' actually means something. The greening of Islam. The lunacy of the Austrian school. ("The years 2011 and 2012 were to Austrians like sunrise is to a vampire. It was simply amazing to sit there and watch Austrians writhe and contort under the pure, burning light of extant reality.") Note to Islamophobes: It is, to put it lightly, difficult to claim that Muslims are terrorists when the majority of people those terrorists kill are Muslims. Jeffrey Stacey contends: Putin is losing the current round of the Ukraine crisis