Quickies

Quickies: Asteroid Rights, Koch Money, and Misogyny in the Atheist Movement

  • Will Misogyny Bring Down The Atheist Movement? – “The continuing debate over a murky sexual encounter at a 2008 convention for cheekily anti-establishment skeptics underscores a broader dilemma: How can a progressive, important intellectual community behave so poorly towards its female peers?” (If you haven’t already read this, you should.)
  • The Death of Adulthood in American Culture – “In suggesting that patriarchy is dead, I am not claiming that sexism is finished, that men are obsolete or that the triumph of feminism is at hand. I may be a middle-aged white man, but I’m not an idiot. In the world of politics, work and family, misogyny is a stubborn fact of life. But in the universe of thoughts and words, there is more conviction and intelligence in the critique of male privilege than in its defense, which tends to be panicky and halfhearted when it is not obtuse and obnoxious. The supremacy of men can no longer be taken as a reflection of natural order or settled custom.” From Sarah.
  • The Afghan Girls Who Live as Boys – “In a society that demands sons at almost any cost, some families are cutting their daughters’ hair short and giving them male names.”
  • Who Owns Asteroid Rights? – “Congress is back in session and getting right down to work on pressing science and technology issues like education funding, Net neutrality and … oh wait. Actually, the House is holding a hearing on Wednesday to discuss a new law to manage resource mining in space: the ASTEROIDS Act.”
  • Koch Foundation to College: We’ll Give You Millions—if You Teach Our Libertarian Ideology – “It seemed like a generous gift to a university that needed it. Then came the demands for ideological purity—and hand-picked staff.” Haha, who could’ve known this plan was going to go awry?? 

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Mary

Mary Brock works as an Immunology scientist by day and takes care of a pink-loving princess child by night. She likes cloudy days, crafting, cooking, and Fall weather in New England.

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9 Comments

  1. I find the juxtaposition of the “Death of Adulthood” and “Afghan Girls” articles to be … interesting.

    Oh, the writer of “Death of Adulthood” is a white, cis, and likely straight male. That’s not surprising.

  2. From the misogyny article.

    “Shermer has been a bad boy on occasion — I do know that,” Randi told me. “I have told him that if I get many more complaints from people I have reason to believe, that I am going to have to limit his attendance at the conference.

    “His reply,” Randi continued, “is he had a bit too much to drink and he doesn’t remember. I don’t know — I’ve never been drunk in my life. It’s an unfortunate thing … I haven’t seen him doing that. But I get the word from people in the organization that he has to be under better control. If he had gotten violent, I’d have him out of there immediately. I’ve just heard that he misbehaved himself with the women, which I guess is what men do when they are drunk.”

    Oh Randi. Randi, Randi, Randi. SMH
    Et tu Randi?

    I wonder how many times Randi would look the other way if Peter Popoff, Uri Geller, or Sylvia Brown (oops, don’t need to worry about that anymore) were to start making bullshit claims before speaking up?

    But then that would be about something important…

    That wouldn’t effect his bottom line.

  3. The Koch brothers buy our government, but apparently that’s not enough, they need to buy our education system too. I wonder how many other schools are having their curriculum bought like a commodity?

    1. Sevlevboss,

      I would hope not too many. Someone ought to get in big trouble for this. Basically bribing a university to promote your ideology at the expense of everything else is not acceptable. The people in charge of Florida State University ought to be ashamed of themselves. Ideally collage professors, like scientists should reach their conclusions based on the facts, not ideology, and what they teach shouldn’t be limited to that which helps a particular belief system.

      I wouldn’t be surprised if the Koch Brothers are also trying to bribe universities into getting them to hire professors would teach things like climate change denial as fact.

  4. Unfortunately, one possibility is that “The Atheist Movement” isn’t as “progressive”, “important”, “intellectual”, or “community” as you wish.

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