Contra Mozilla

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

CMP's Editing

The Alliance Defending Freedom has a post about the "editing" of CMP's videos. Are the videos edited? Yes. Lots of stuff is cut from them. But "editing" is not the same as "doctoring". You can cut a lot of material without changing the meaning of the video. Editing is what CMP has done. Doctoring is what Planned Parenthood does with its abortion services statistics (though not to its patients).

Monday, September 28, 2015

Dear Lawrence Krauss

Dear Lawrence Krauss,

Just shut up man. You don't know what you're talking about.

Sincerely,
A fellow physicist.

Update: Edward Feser has a rebuttal to Krauss--no surprise there.

Friday, September 25, 2015

On a Related Note to My Last Post

Posting has been pretty light because I've been really busy around here. Anyway, the folks at Lutheran Satire have made a video which was too good not to share--and it ties in to my last post.

Enjoy:


Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Modern Pharisees

I've often mused on the pharisees of the Gospels. Jesus always seems to excorciating them, or at best holding them up as a standard of what not to be. Many today seize on this as yet another stick to beat conservative Christians with. The pharisees were, after all, religious leaders (or scholar, if their be much difference in that day and age). Well, at least they were one school of religious thought, if not actually the most conservative one.

I've wondered at times if it isn't the progressives who more nearly resemble the pharisees in modern times. They have many, many little rules which have crowded out the big rules. And these little rules are often byzantine: witness the fury of the social justice brownshirts against any minor infraction against their unspoken (and often capricious) code of ethics.

As if to provide more evidence for this, the progressives at Buzzfeed have made a "cringeworthy" (and link-unworthy) video "I'm Christian, but I'm Not..." As Mollie Hemingway points out, the video is rather bigoted, but the true irony is that the thing reads like a modern version of the parable of the publican and the pharisee found in Luke 18:
This weekend, BuzzFeed posted a video called “I’m Christian, But I’m Not…,” in which five women and one man said they were Christians but they weren’t, you know, like all the other men and women who are Christians. They cheerfully reminded God and others that they weren’t homophobic or closeminded, or uneducated, or judgmental, or placing themselves on pedestals. Featured respondents proudly announced they fasted twice a week were “queer” or “feminist!” or listened to Beyonce. One said she wished people knew that “Just because we prescribe [sic] to a faith that has some really terrible people in it doesn’t make all of us terrible,” followed by someone saying that “love is the most important thing.”

It was easily the most unintentionally hilarious, if shockingly bigoted, BuzzFeed video ever produced.
Buzzfeed may not be the worst the "viral vector" sites (I think that may be Upworthy), but it's still pretty risible.
I don't always link to Vox, but when I do, it's because they've posted something worth reading. This is such a time. I love my job in academia, and I especially love teaching (well, except maybe for the physical science classes, which are populated at best by the students who the guy in this article describes). However, I have heard plenty of gloom-and-doom speeches about the state of academia in general--including from the administrators who run my own university. I suspect that there will be a  reckoning in the next few decades, and I hope that I am able to keep my career when that happens.