Comments on: Success and Failure

By: Blake Stacey

Blake Stacey — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:14:35 +0000

Good question, manigen. It’s like the “framers” never expect to be challenged on logical or evidentiary grounds. Oddly enough, in a blog post once, I referred to Nisbet, Mooney and Kirshenbaum as “framers” or “framists”, and somebody got all over me about it, accusing me of “giving them names to deny them the power to speak” (or some phrasing close to that). I was, predictably, baffled and bemused, not least by the irony: I get yelled at for a tame and neutral phrase, yet Nisbet’s placement of me within the “New Atheist Noise Machine” went unquestioned.

By the way, I still think “New Atheist Noise Machine” would make a great name for a band.

By: manigen

manigen — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:58:26 +0000

I know this has been asked before, but: Why are the framing crowd so shit at framing? If they have such great insight into how to sell ideas to the many, how come they can’t sell their insights to the few?

By: Blake Stacey

Blake Stacey — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:54:49 +0000

Fuck the heck?

Don’t these people have jobs, or something?

By: SLC

SLC — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:48:26 +0000

Now Dr. Kirschenbaum has another post up on the intersection blog and has her knickers in a twist over PZ Myers use of the f word. “They’re getting sillier and sillier over there.

By: SLC

SLC — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:13:04 +0000

It should be noted that the delectable Dr. Kirshenbaum has joined Prof. Nisbet and his sockpuppet Chris Mooney in the Myers and Dawkins should shut up brigade.

By: Blake Stacey

Blake Stacey — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:26:55 +0000

If all publicity really were good publicity, Osama bin Laden would be President of Earth by now.

When “moderate” religious folk hear of disgusting acts performed by the Westboro Baptists or pedophile priests or whomever, you know what their natural response is? Often, they’ll say, “Those people aren’t real Christians.” Now, you and I know that both the moderates and the extremists — the sensible and the revolting — are picking and choosing their favorite passages of Holy Writ. On secular, empirico-rationalist grounds, there’s just no way to tell who is a “real Christian” or a follower of the “true Islam.” But hey, it’s still progress. A baby step in the right direction.

Like a report of a Catholic priest playing Michael Jackson, this is the kind of news which makes the modest faithful and the Christmas-and-Easter churchgoers say, “Those people are not good Christian folk.”