I’ve been working every hour Dawkins sends on http://wearradio.co.uk for the past 3 weeks and it is finally ready for primetime.

The big headaches were getting it to look as intended in Microsoft Internet Explorer, surprise surprise, and of course all those little things you come across now and then that are sent to try you—like why certain graphics refuse to load and why the site occasionally takes more than 3 seconds to load on an empty cache.

All in all though I’m happy I plumped for WordPress as the main platform—although I can see how further down the line we might want to expand into a more dedicated CMS—but that’s the job for someone else.

For now I’m looking forward to actually getting “on air”. We have a soft launch of the site and other back-room management type information we need to share with the presenters and DJs at this Thursday’s first full staff meeting and other than the fact we don’t have any content yet, everything is going GREAT!!

I mean this in no small way, but what a dumb cunt that underfed idiot is. That’s not a sexist thing at all, by the way—or even anything particularly to do with her pro-idiocy agenda, it’s just an observation based upon her demeanour, words, actions and all round miasma.

There’s a growing and very worrying trend here which defies belief. The more illogical and ignorant you are—the more you can lie through your perfectly straight white teeth and get away with it, so long as you’re “in favour of strong women” or against the “liberal media”. What in the name of Sam Hill is that supposed to mean, exactly?

Who in their right mind would be in favour of bias in the media, or against the empowerment of women? Do these ultra conservative brain donors never stop to ask themselves even the most basic of questions about the role they played in creating the mess we’re all in right now? Does this mouth breathing glorified coat hanger ever wake up in the night and realise how ugly on the inside she really is?

They trot out their imaginary fears about “fair and balanced” opinion forming, as if they’re uniquely charged with highlighting the hidden agenda of some mysterious, sinister force, from beyond the antenna of honest investigative journalism—and behave all offended and indignant when asked simple questions about their own reprehensible behaviour.

They’re a parody of a satirical farce within a hoax of themselves. Paranoid, deluded cretins with nothing better to worry about than bronze-age myths and beauty products.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/12/carrie-prejean-threatens_n_354891.html

I recently had a long and “interesting” exchange with an individual on a Reddit.com story about the Yes / No on 1 vote in the American State of Maine.

You can read the entire debate here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/a0ty0/the_faces_of_the_yes_on_1_campaigners_in_maine_as/

..and my particular conversation thread here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/a0ty0/the_faces_of_the_yes_on_1_campaigners_in_maine_as/c0fcl3z

Needless to say I wasn’t very happy about the result of the vote, whereas my main opponent took the opposite stance. But I was reminded in the course of our conversation about cognitive framing biases—as is so often the case in matters where one side blindly argues X is a valid reason for turning reason Y on its head—such as arguing night is day, black is white or that old favourite, which is in-fact a corruption of something Bertrand Russell once said about mathematical axioms, 1 + 1 doesn’t always equal 2. Because these kinds of mental gymnastics are the only way a deeply misinformed opinion might begin to make some kind of sense, in the mind of the person who holds onto it, they are very easy to spot in someone else, but very difficult to identify in oneself.

Then, thanks to the power of the internets, this little gem came to my attention and things started to become a little bit clearer…

From Wikipedia:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than relatively more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”

Kirk Cameron, Ken Ham & Ray Comfort

AIGBusted has done some digging into Comfort and Cameron’s creationist screed and discovered some considerable evidence of plagiarism.

Read more: aigbusted.blogspot.com

Just a quick note to say I am starting a new job on Monday. I don’t know how much time I’m going to have to blog as regularly as I have over the last 2 years, but hopefully I will be still able to start new topics and follow-up discussions as and when they come along.

Day to day I am more likely to be twittering than posting full-on blog entries and so I’ve made a widget of my last three tweets more visible in the side-bar opposite.

Thanks for all your messages of support and, once again, this isn’t goodbye – just a note to say I might not be as available for answering private emails and topic replies as I once was.

The “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist” meme is a very popular tract among people who don’t read books. Which makes the title of the book currently being promoted on crossway.org/blog/ at the very least an interesting experiment in confirmation bias.

I sent the below comment and as of 5 o’clock GMT it is still “awaiting moderation”.

Having faith in human beings, despite a wealth of evidence to suggest this trust is misplaced, is the ultimate act of faith. It is one which is performed by believers and non-believers every single day. We trust each-other despite our fears. Saying that it takes this same kind of rational, functioning faith to be confident of the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever of a supernatural aspect to reality—i.e., a non-physical realm beyond space-time where a creator judge might reside, fundamentally misrepresents the definition of the word faith and the definition of what it means to be a positive atheist, in the tradition of Bertrand Russell, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Voltaire and so on.

These kinds of books borrow the word faith on behalf of an emotional reaction to criticism and give it back as an insult to intellectual honesty. They appeal to the already convinced and seek solace in the rightful criticism of dishonest discourse from the same quarter.

There is nothing unreasonable about non-Yahweh worship to non-Christians, anymore than there is anything unreasonable about non-Sun-god worship to Evangelical protestants. What the religious community has to begin to demonstrate, if extremism of all kinds is to be truly stamped out, is that it recognises the mountain of evidence against its truth-claims, but continues to believe in belief regardless, because of an emotional commitment to cultural and ceremonial traditions. In so doing, then we might all begin to abandon, in the name of simply honesty, these particularly insidious brands of special pleading which insist the bible to be something it is trivial to prove for a fact it is not.

Prop. 8, was widely supported by religious organisations because it defines marriage as between a man and woman, clarifying certain ambiguities in the law which had briefly afforded same-sex couples in certain States of the union, equal human rights with heterosexual couples.

This is a film about hate activism masquerading as religious piety and the giant sums of money raised by the Mormon church to make it impossible for millions of ordinary people, who happen to be gay, to enjoy the same human rights as heterosexual couples.

I’m not new to this topic or alone in my disgust at the organisation that has even scientologists scratching their heads in disbelief. Read more:

Joseph Smith was a liar and a fraud
Mormon machine working against unions in Illinois
How religion bought and paid for ‘Yes’ on Proposition 8
The Mormon money trail to proposition 8