You didn’t get mad when . . .

This straight-forward list packs a wallop, in my opinion. It seems like that Tea-party advocates aren't really mad about "government" and they aren't really mad about government incompetence. If I had to make my best guess, I'd say that they are mad that they are losing their country to "them." Who is "them"? All of those people that the Tea Party people have come to see as different than they are. Outsiders. People who look differently and talk differently and dress differently. I don't think of it as racism, though Tea Party people tend to be noticeably race-conscious. But they are also mad about those who belong to the wrong religions and those who come from the wrong countries. But how odd that they think that they are part of the same ingroup as the rich guys who are screwing them. Maybe it's that skin color thing after all . . . They are feeling like they they don't control the country anymore--and they are throwing a huge tantrum. This is what I suspect.

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A Graphical History of the Vaccine Brouhaha

I got this Stumble from our own Hank over on FaceBook. A concise and accurate look at the origins of the currently imagined link between autism and vaccines. The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

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What’s In A Label?

Conservative. Liberal. We act as if we know what these labels mean. Conservatives are traditionalists, fiscally opposed to anything that smacks of gambling, private, often religious, and pedantic on what they consider “appropriate” in either government or personal conduct. Liberals, on the other hand, are often taken for progressive, willing to spend social capital to repair perceived problems, tolerant, agnostic if not atheist, and overly-concerned with a definition of justice that ought to be all-encompassing rather than what they perceive as sinecure for the privileged. Well. Over on Facebook I posted a brief quote (my own) to boil down the actual underlying distinctions. Conservatives are those who don’t like what other people are doing, Liberals are those who don’t like what other people are doing to other people. It was meant to be taken as humorous. But I’m not being entirely flip here. When you look at it, and try to define the common factor in much that passes for conservative posteuring—of any country, any background, anywhere—it always comes down to one group trying to stop another group from Doing Things We Don’t Approve. I heard a news report this morning (on NPR—I unabashedly don’t pay attention to any other news source, I find them all utterly biased) from Pakistan about the university scene there, and one bit caught my attention—at a campus in Punjabi, conservative students who find men and women sitting too close together interfere and move them apart. At a game of Truth or Dare, conservative students pulled participants out and beat them. How does this apply here? Well, here’s a clip from P.Z. Meyers’ Pharyngula to illustrate: Rising Sun School in Maryland has the standard default take-it-for-granted attitude that Christianity is just fine — there’s the usual well-funded and usually teacher-promoted evangelical groups, like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — and when one student tried to form a club for non-religious students…well, you can guess what happened.

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Steven Pinker on the American culture war

Marilyn Westfall of the Humanist Network News recently had an engaging chat with cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. The conversation first focused on why the north and the south differ so strongly on thing such as textbooks:

HNN: You've written a great deal on the impact of the political left and right in the United States. How does the political division figure into the debate over textbooks and especially the teaching of evolution? SP: Partly it really is a culture war. The country does have two cultures: the European Enlightenment and the Culture of Honor. The Scots-Irish settled into a lot of the South and West. What came of this was two different paths to civilization. One path was civilized by the law and government and the king, and the other by self-help justice, avenging wrongs and insults with the help of your own manly honor. They co-exist in one country, but they are different cultures. The civilizing force in the West came first from the church. A lot of the Western cowboy towns were first civilized by the women and the church--in cahoots. Churches have the talismanic role as the source of morals and decency and civilization. But part of the division is just sheer oppositionalism: if the liberals say x, we'll say y. Part of it is also an emotional affiliation with the church, and some of it is a disengagement from the wider world.
The conversation eventually turned to atheism. Why do so many people despise "atheists"?
[Atheism evokes] a very primitive emotional reaction in the minds of many people. Many people simply equate it with immorality, which is why I think they tell pollsters that atheists are people they distrust the most. Often when there is a disliked word--a word with a negative connotation--people find a euphemism, that's why what used to [be called] garbage then became sanitation and now its environmental services. And likewise atheism is constantly reaching for the untainted euphemism. Secularist, freethinker, humanist, bright and so on. I think each one is going to get infected in turn until the societal attitude changes. Atheism is merely absence of belief.

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Incident On A Country Road

Yesterday, April 29th, I witnessed people being great. Returning along Highway 50 from Jefferson City Missouri, I was passing through Osage County when I spotted a dumped motorcycle to my left. The bike—a newish gold something-or-other—lay on its side, trailing a scatter of broken parts back to a man who was on knees and elbows, clearly hurt. A FedEx truck was ahead of my. I pulled over just behind it. A house was directly across the two-lane from us. People were in the yard. The FedEx driver sprinted to the house to tell the folks about the accident. I ran toward the man. By the time I reached him two more cars had stopped and a group of people converged on him. He had gotten to the grass and rolled over. A bloody mess, at first glance he looked in very bad shape. He was still wearing his helmet, moaning and trying, ineffectively, to take it off. He kept saying “I can’t breathe…” An older man had his cell phone out, dialing 911. A woman, who seemed to have some training, possibly a nurse, helped him unstrap the helmet and pull it gently off, whereupon he lay on his back, legs pulled up, arms sort of help up, covered in blood. The “nurse” cautioned him not to move. Someone else had brought a plastic sheet, which she directed a couple people to hold above him to shield his head from the sun. I started asking questions—”Can you feel everything?” “Oh, yeah,” he said, “everything hurts.” “No tingling?” No. “Open your eyes and look at me.” His pupils looked normal, but that’s not always a reliable telltale. “Oh, I didn’t hit my head,” he said. “Everything else, but not my head.” I looked at his helmet. “Your helmet says otherwise,” I told him. Half of it was badly dented and scraped all along the faceplate. “What happened?” someone else asked. “I think a blow-out,” he said. “I tried to hang onto it and slow it down…” I went over to the bike. By now about eight people were there, two semis parked along the highway. One man was doing a good job of directing traffic through the momentarily constricted access. More cell phones were out. The debris appeared to be all peripherals—mirrors, plastic molding, packs of cigarettes, a cassette tape, mangled sunglasses. The rear tire was missing a long chunk of tread where it had blown. He was lucky in that it was the rear tire. If the front had blown he would have lost it immediately, at sixty-plus miles per hour, but there were no skid marks. He’d managed to slow it down a lot before it dumped and he’d dumped it on the shoulder. When I returned to tell him this, ambulances were on the way. He was laying on a rock and wanted to move off of it, but everyone kept him in place, not knowing what else might be broken. He was coherent. He was a good rider, evidently, and had controlled the spill marvelously from what I could see. The ambulance arrived, along with a truck from the local fire department. The crow began to disperse. As one of the trucks started rolling, the driver tossed the man directing traffic one of those bright orange and yellow safety vests. With nothing more to do (and having done almost nothing anyway) I took my leave. Traffic was slowed and obeying what I now saw were two men, one on each side of the slight hill where all this was occurring, directing. Those who had done whatever they could have and no longer needed to be there were starting their vehicles and moving out in an orderly manner. All those people had seemed to appear out of nowhere, and very fast, and just did this thing. They helped, if only by being willing to stop. It felt very good to be a human just then.

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