Fish in Space

Last night I had the most fascinating exchange on reddit with a variety of self-described conservatives. While I keep Poe's Law in mind when dealing with people like that, I'm not willing to assume that all of them were trolling . The topic was health insurance and the conservative argument that religious freedom means employers cannot be required to fund birth control in health insurance if they have a religious objection to it. I find this positively absurd at face value; how on earth does your position as an employer entitle you to dictating what an employee can or can't get through insurance? The response I got was nonsensical: to do otherwise is to force my values on the employer and besides I can buy health insurance elsewhere. There are so many problems with this argument it's hard to know where to begin. But to each I posed this question: if employers can deny birth control to employees through health insurance on religious grounds, what about religious object...

Conor Friedersdorf posted an article in today's online Atlantic with the title The Most Dangerous Myth: That Liberals Are Peaceniks . The short reply to this is "Duh!" However, I felt compelled to write a longer answer as follows. Naturally I can only speak for myself but I've had a few people congratulate me for providing a succinct description of liberal attitudes toward war. Of course we aren't [peaceniks], and never have been. I object to unnecessary wars and wars of adventure. I object to war by proxy and the use of force before all diplomatic venues have been exhausted. I agree with the necessity of war for common defense and honoring our treaties. I agree with the use of military force to intervene when we're invited to do so. I agree with joining in a military coalition where there's broad support to stop attempts at genocide or similar crimes against humanity. I do not agree with invading a country because we're greedy for their re...

We're rapidly approaching a world of post-scarcity, at least within the developed parts of it. We control vast amounts of wealth and resources and produce enough food and material goods to supply the entire world. This is a major achievement for our species; we have effectively mastered our planet to make it comfortable for us as we choose. It's not perfect of course, and many areas lag behind unacceptably but because of artificial boundaries we place on regions and cultures we shrug it off as not our problem. In the developed world our advancement has progressed to the degree that we're starting to revert to service jobs rather than production. We're creating work for people so they can work rather than providing a specific purpose for that work. Particularly in the US we're skeptical of public support programs that allow people to live without slaving away at a job because we consider it an abuse of the system. But how do you define abuse? This is a ridiculous P...

We're approaching the end of the new pope's first year on the throne and he seems to be a popular guy. A genuine ascetic who sneaks out of the Vatican at night to minister to the poor. This is good stuff that looks really good in the papers. In the meanwhile he's reaffirmed the Vatican's policy on homosexuality and homosexuals , women's rights and pedophile priests . The Vatican's problems are legion. They're hemorrhaging members , mostly among the younger generations and they're plagued by corruption . Thanks to the Age of Information we live in they can't hide these problems like they once could, so they hired a Fox News reporter (I can't call anyone from Fox News a "journalist") as a media adviser to manage their image. Ponder that a moment. They hired someone from one of the most demonstrably dishonest media organizations to manage their image. Consider what this means for their intentions. Obviously there's a great dea...

A former pastor's journal A Year Without God has been generating some buzz so I took a look around. On the whole I approve of his approach. He starts out with some misconceptions, but the religious community clings to those misconceptions so I can't say I blame him for it. Not everyone who gives atheism a try is going to find it to their liking. It is a genuinely scary outlook. There are no gods to offer comfort, no afterlife in which to reunite with loved ones, no divine plan to ease our confusion in this messy and complicated world. Of course an atheist would point out that this was always true, it's just that we now acknowledge it. The world is the same whether or not we worship one of the thousands of gods we've invented over the millennia, the only thing that's different is the solutions we construct to address our problems. Let's start with some misconceptions. There are atheists who still pray, believe in ghosts and other supernatural phenomenon and ...