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Let me paint a landscape for you as 2012 ceased to be…

On November 12 2012, Russel Blackford, in a rare moment of absolute exasperation, tweeted what most folks actually feel, but restrain themselves from articulating –

I will NOT be attending any convention / conference that features Rebecca Watson as a speaker. What were the Australian Skeptics thinking? smh

— Russell Blackford (@Metamagician) November 12, 2012

dilbert_ignorance

dilbert.com

On November 10, Rebecca Watson took her very own brand of air-headed cluelessness to new heights in a talk at Skepticon 5, dragging evolutionary psychology through the mud as some kind of tool of patriarchal oppression. Whether Blackford’s tweet was a direct result of this exhibit of buffoonery or not is not known, but doesn’t seem likely given the video was not posted until November 20. If by some chance it did, it only vindicates Blackford’s outburst as Watson now consistently paints a picture of skeptics and atheists to the outside world as a bunch of ill-educated, poorly read, perpetually squabbling clowns. Remember Galileo Becky? No, that was not an excusable “slip up” – it’s basic junior high school level history/science knowledge. It reeked of the pig ignorance of a stupid girl-child that fills her vast expanses of idle time between booze ups playing video games and tweeting snark instead self-education – the latter being what many folks would assume came as a minimum responsibility for someone that feeds at the teat of the community and claims to represent it. (more…)

Skepchick issue notice to Richard Dawkins

There has been an appalling amount of nonsense spewing out of the Center for Inquiry (CFI)/ Committee For Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) since some inner turmoil saw the less than amicable departure of founder Paul Kurtz.

The full story will probably never be public knowledge, but the popular reasoning seems to focus on Kurtz’s known attitudes of accommodationism as regards to religion clashing with those of successor Ronald A. Lindsay1 – who, allegedly, has definite anti-theistic attitudes and fondness for superficial irrelevancies such as the Blasphemy Challenge2.

The problem with this “official” version is that it doesn’t really have any reflection in reality. Ever since this changing of the guard, CFI / CSI have been churning out a pretty steady stream of accommodationist nonsense, far in excess of anything that preceded it. Perhaps the pinnacle of this idiocy was from CSI fellow Gollum and his now incurably pathogenic don’t be a dick sermon-on-the-mount3, but it is far from the only example. Other notable outbursts include one from Michael De Dora on the CFI site itself – (more…)