In a world where Netflix is streaming a show about underage sexpots, it’s hard to imagine what the Valley’s problem with this stuff could be. But a friend suggests that at roughly the 7-minute mark, the discussion turns to anti-Christian bias in Google search and recommends—whoops!— alternative services. Okay, so LIKE the vid and find a non-Google search service.
Intellectual freedom
A fond remembrance of the 2005 book, “On Bullsh*t”
Gunderman: As discourse moves from television to Twitter, it can be further degraded into mere flamboyance. What matters is no longer speaking the truth but simply attracting and holding attention. Getting it right gives way to getting noticed.
Forrest Mims honored in dedication of new electronics book
Readers may recall that Forrest M. Mims III, despite his gifts in electronics and citizen science, was denied a column in Scientific American because he was not a Darwinist or a supporter of live baby dismemberment.
The Philadelphia Statement: Some scholars are fighting Cancel Culture
They probably don’t like the war on math or the war on science much. Or campus thugs.
Pos-Darwinista asks us to be aware of censorship in Brazil
The popular Portuguese-language ID blog sent us this YouTube vid, explaining the situation.
Veteran journalist leaves major paper before anyone cancels her
She might be pointing a way forward, to fight back against Cancel Culture.
On Cancel Culture, Jerry Coyne gets a clue too
If people like Coyne feel free to call out Huffpo for claiming the problem doesn’t exist, well… what are WE each doing to drive Cancel Culture back to their scream therapy providers, where they belong?
COVID-19 and the need for skeptics in science
St. Onge: For COVID-19, Ferguson predicted 3 million deaths in America unless we basically shut down the economy. Panicked policymakers took his prediction as gospel, dressed as it was in the cloak of science.
ID folk know a fair bit about how Cancel Culture works
As more and more normal people are Canceled for doing normal things, it will become progressively clearer that the nasties of Cancel Culture are at direct odds with the welfare of any normal enterprise they attach themselves to, whether it is a newspaper or a science. Finally, one must choose between catering to them and tending to the welfare of the enterprise.
Larry Krauss returns as a free speech champion
What does it mean, not to feel “safe” sitting across the table at dinner—at a university hall in Toronto—with someone with whom you disagree on a current issue? As noted above, these people are not scholars and they should not be listened to in any forum other than an anxiety recovery group.
If eating offspring helps the selfish gene, what doesn’t?
If the whole colony is acting as a single organism to eat offspring and live, what becomes of the individual selfish gene? Oh, never mind. The heresy consists in wondering.
Do universities still need intellectual freedom? Why?
At one time, a university education was a prized opportunity to be part of an intellectual elite. Academic freedom was a club rule because it served well in the days when Einstein and Bohr, to name just two, provided us with a much better understanding of physics by overturning all that we thought we knew in certain areas. But maybe things have changed.
If ID is dead, why are some obsessed with shutting it down?
Ah yes. Mutterings about the need for censorship. When we don’t have a reasonable response to a troubling topic, first, we self-censor. Then we censor anyone who raises it. Sure, guys. That’ll work. The questions are still there but only for those capable of addressing them.
At Skeptical Inquirer: Thinking outside the box is called the “Nobel Disease”
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor doesn’t agree. In reality, he says, unorthodoxy helped the unorthodox scientists win the Prize.
At STAT: Ioannidis’ differing COVID-19 views shouldn’t be demonized
Demonizing differing views is a characteristic of superstition, not science. It says a lot about “science” today that its practitioners choose such methods.