Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed. What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- Framing Children’s Deviance
- Against “Asking For It”: Another Anti-Rape Ad Aimed at Men
- A science section on Huffpo? Sweet Jebus, no!
– “So I think this terribly sad story of Latarian is showing us how children learn to think of themselves as deviant and bad from the society around them. Latarian, remember, is seven, just like Preston. They’re both children, but they are being treated very differently, as these programs illustrate, and it is already starting to sink in.”
– Another teaspoon hoisted
– “That’s wrong on multiple levels. First, a debate is not won by sound argument; it’s by persuasive rhetoric. Many creationists have that skill (I have to repeat a mantra I’ve got: creationists are not stupid, just ignorant and misled by ignorant arguments), so it is a serious tactical error to think that because all the facts and science are on your side, you’re going to win debates. That’s a recipe for consistent failure.”
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
Hoyden About Town 
As a former Creationist, this rings so true. There are some charming public speakers out there, like my father, who have a power with words, who make it all seem so Obvious. It’s so very easy to get sucked in if you don’t know the science before hand.
I watched a show about religion late Sunday? evening on ABC 1 with one of those lovely English actors whose name I can never remember – Nigel something maybe? He interviewed an Astrophysicist at the Creation museum about why he believed in Creation. The guy replied that the Bible was the infallible word of God (not in those exact words but that’s pretty much what he was saying) and that if the science disagreed then you just fall back on the infallible word of God because it’s the gospel truth. There is nothing that you can do in the face of that type of certainty. When asked why he was a scientist, he replied because he believed that the Bible encouraged people to be open minded and to be open to learning new things. Hmmmm.
Actually it was Compass, and it was a scientist, not the English actor I thought it was. I must have been half asleep.
Never underestimate the power of compartmentalised thinking, especially in clever people.
PZ’s point about the rhetorical skills of Creationist figureheads is not made often enough – many of them have actually had a fair approximation of a traditional classical education, with all the actual teaching of rhetoric that this entails.
This is why Science is never settled by town-hall debates – measured back and forth written communication, analysed and critiqued by peers taking whatever time is necessary rather than limited by a timekeeper, gets to the facts of the matter much more reliably.