Monthly Archives: April 2010

Massimo Pigliucci is a childish, raging, foaming at the mouth fundamentalist with a cavalier attitude toward the substance, rationality and coherence of his arguments

Posted by Chris Hallquist on April 16, 2010 9 comments

Yesterday, Massimo Pigliucci wrote a post titled “PZ Myers is a witless wanker who peddles pablum.” Pigliucci says he didn’t really mean it, but was just imitating PZ’s overblown rhetoric to make the point that it’s a bad thing. My title is an imitation of Massimo’s approach to post-titling, since he uses all the words [...]

Is the Catholic Church done for?

Posted by Chris Hallquist on April 11, 2010 1 comment

So we have the Pope’s signature on a letter saying that the Church had to be careful in deciding whether to defrock a confessed child rapist because of the need to “consider the good of the Universal Church.” In other words, Ratzinger was having trouble deciding whether or not the need to kick out slimeballs [...]

On hating evo psych

Posted by Chris Hallquist on April 8, 2010 Comments Off

A criticism of evolutionary psychology that literally centers on insulting the opposition’s mating fitness and social status? Now that’s irony. –A comment on BoingBoing Also: the people in the comments who say feminism isn’t monolithic are absolutely right. Some definitions make you as “they have a word for that?” while in other contexts feminism seems [...]

Report on the Hitchens-D’Souza debate

Posted by Chris Hallquist on April 8, 2010 8 comments

Overall, I’m very happy to have attended the debate. The amount of real interaction between Hitchens and D’Souza was far less than I was hoping for, in part due to the format of the debate. Still, Hitchens made for a very good representative of atheism, and actually I was pleasantly surprised by the approach he [...]

Carnivalia, and off to Hitchens-D’Souza

Posted by Chris Hallquist on April 7, 2010 Comments Off

New editions of the Philosopher’s Carnival and the Humanist Symposium are up. And Symposium has a Superman comic! I haven’t mentioned this before, but Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza are debating on campus in about half an hour, so now I’m off to that. I’ll return with a full report.