Frank Ricci, meet Joe The Plumber.
( I told you to read this for a reason.)
more here…

Special needs blogging at the Huffington Post;

I was at the talk. It was packed with professional philosophers and graduate students in philosophy, most of whom sided with Dennett. I wrote live comments on the debate/session. I prefer to remain anonymous for various reasons, in particular because I am inclined towards Plantinga’s position over Dennett’s and were this to become well-known it could damage or destroy my career in analytic philosophy. This is something I prefer not to put my family through. I almost didn’t publish these comments at all, but as far as I could tell, this would be the only public record of the discussion.
Friends, if you can identify me, I request that you keep my identity secret. I am sharing my thoughts as a service to the philosophical community and all those who have an interest in such debates. But I prefer not to suffer at the hands of my ardently secular colleagues. This is not to say that all secular analytic philosophers are this way; they most certainly are not. But enough of them are that I cannot risk being known publicly.

Via

Via Ezra, who finds similar sentiments elsewhere on the roll.

Look: a small part of me loves this. The raw partisan within me is rejoicing at seeing the embarrassing degeneration of the Liberal Party.

And that’s where Ezra and I part company.
A large part of me loves this.

President-elect Obama chooses “eliminationist hate preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at Obama’s Inaguration”
Our plan is falling into place…

University!

To any experienced journalist there was always a strange subtext to the abrupt removal of Dr. Larry Reynolds from his posts as Head of the Department of Family Medicine and Professor at the University of Manitoba and Head of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority’s Family Medicine Program. Something rang wrong in the alleged reasons his contracts were not renewed. And why he was given all of one month’s notice to clear out.
It took a while, but now we can reasonably conclude the real reasons he was axed. (Yes, we know, technically his contract was not renewed, but essentially he was dismissed from jobs he didn’t want to leave without an explanation.)
Watching the university launch a campaign of character assassination against Dr. Reynolds was one thing. But when they breached his legal rights to privacy by leaking bits of his personnel record, it was clear something was up.

While children were inside.

And another victory for “tolerance”;

Campaign records show Scott Eckern contributed $1,000 to a campaign supporting Proposition 8, which wrote a ban on same-sex marriages into the California state Constitution.
Eckern, a 25-year veteran of the company, issued an online apology through the theater publication, Playbill. He is the company’s chief operating officer and has been its artistic director since 2002.

Eckern resigned his position today.
More on “the new blacklist” – “The bullies have published the names of other contributors, too. Welcome to 1984 — 24 years late.”
h/t Dwayne

“A Huffington Post writer stabbed her former lover more than 200 times with a screwdriver and then tried to conceal the slaying, PalmBeachPost.com reported.”

“While the media obsesses over a couple of isolated comments at McCain/Palin rallies, the angry left is busy throwing Molotov cocktails at McCain supporters.“
More insane rage!

“The StarPhoenix used ‘Mother-In’ in the headline’!”

About 70 mothers and children attended the event, prompted by a blog post in which NewsTalk 650 producer Tammy Robert commented on a politician’s choice to breastfeed during a press conference. Her entry, entitled Children and the Places They Don’t Belong, created lots of debate after it was posted last week. In it, she criticized Saskatchewan Green party Leader Amber Jones’s decision to include her six-month-old daughter in a media event.

The tolerant left strikes again. In response to Tammy Roberts’ criticism that a baby has no place as a political prop, 35 women arrived with 35 props to protest on her employers’ doorstep.
“I am mammal, hear me roar”.
What else can you say about a woman who would show up for a breast feeding solidarity march, other than that life must be pretty damned dismal if you have to resort to digging about inside your bra to find a sense of importance.

ISLAMIC CONGRESS AND LAW STUDENTS TO MAKE PUBLIC SETTLEMENT OFFER TO MACLEAN’S ON HUMAN RIGHTS COMPLAINTS
Jonathan Kay;

Come to think of it, it’s fair to say that the Maclean’s imbroglio has been one of the biggest shots in the arm to Canadian conservatives in general. It’s turned red-meat right-winger Ezra Levant into a star blogger and a free-speech hero with brand-name recognition in the United States, turned Steyn’s name into a household word, created a debate within the Jewish community over its traditionally doctrinaire support for blanket hate-speech laws (Ezra for CJC president, anyone?), shone a light on the amateurish shenanigans of Canada’s human rights commissions, driven a powerful movement for reform of said commissions, and generally served to marginalize the pro-censorship lobby to the point that its main defender is now a disgruntled former journalist who fills his blog with unhinged conspiracy theories about how everyone who favours free speech is a racist.

More – there’s a big round up of reaction at Shaidle’s place.

“I hope [Steyn] takes the letter, crumbles it up, and dips it in a cup of ketchup and then eats it right there on stage in front of them. Oh God, hear my prayer, please let this happen.”

Or, as Kathy Shaidle likes to say, “Journalists – our moral and intellectual superiors!”
(Great work, Richard)
Update: I’m told that CTV.ca has quietly cut the offending portion from the tape on their online site. Not that there was anything wrong with it! **** Update 2: Or did they? Others tell me the segment is now intact.

No thought-closet is complete without this year’s creative little insult – snark so trendy it deserves its own logo:

A linguistic toupée for the receding intellect! Use it today, and not even your friends will forget you’re stupid.

“The toxic response to the book, as some reviewers are noting, kind of proves his thesis . . . .”

Like a transgendered academic scorned;

In his book, he argued that some people born male who want to cross genders are driven primarily by an erotic fascination with themselves as women. This idea runs counter to the belief, held by many men who decide to live as women, that they are the victims of a biological mistake — in essence, women trapped in men’s bodies. Dr. Bailey described the alternate theory, which is based on Canadian studies done in the 1980s and 1990s, in part by telling the stories of several transgender women he met through a mutual acquaintance. In the book, he gave them pseudonyms, like “Alma” and “Juanita.”
Other scientists praised the book as a compelling explanation of the science. The Lambda Literary Foundation, an organization that promotes gay, bisexual and transgender literature, nominated the book for an award.
But days after the book appeared, Lynn Conway, a prominent computer scientist at the University of Michigan, sent out an e-mail message comparing Dr. Bailey’s views to Nazi propaganda. She and other transgender women found the tone of the book abusive, and the theory of motivation it presented to be a recipe for further discrimination.

A tale of the cherished freedom of academia to think as the left does.
The National Post weighs in.

Britain’s descent into a surveillance state has been one of the creepier developments over the last twenty years. Just when you think it can’t get worse it does.
Britons To Be Watched By Autonomous Hovering Police Drones.

An Insider’s Account of Friday’s Cairo Debriefing;

It is now abundantly clear that the core leadership of Canada’s so-called anti-war movement consists of obsessive Israel-haters, apologists for theocratic fascism, and admirers of the death cult Hamas and the totalitarian Hezbollah.
Nobody can accuse me of “smearing the peace movement” anymore. The leadership of the Canadian Peace Alliance, the Toronto Stop the War Coalition and other such groups now openly boasts of its progress in converting the “antiwar” movement in Canada into a joint venture with the Islamist far right.
Last Friday in Toronto, these people made a full and self-congratulatory accounting of themselves and the promises they made at the recent “anti-war” convergence in Cairo (“Towards an International Alliance Against Imperialism and Zionism”), attended by some of the world’s most foul jihadists, Islamists and Jewish-conspiracy fetishists.