Sunday 21 August 2011

Burnee links for Sunday

Rick Perry and the scandal of prayer - On Faith - The Washington Post
This has to be said? Unfortunately yes, and Paula Kirby says it very well indeed.

The Rants of Cherry Black » Blog Archive » Meanwhile, back in the UK…
A sense of perspective.

Wait, what if idiocy is blood-borne? | Pharyngula
Disgraceful.

Case Study: How a notorious spammer was brought down via Twitter « Skeptical Software Tools
It's gone very quiet — at least in the spamland of David Mabus/Dennis Markuze.

Sick cat owner who microwaved his pet walks free from court - Law and Order - The News
What caught my eye in this story from the online version of my local paper was the implication in the headline that the cat-owner walked free because he was sick. I expected to read something about his schizophrenia, clinical depression or some other disorder.
Sick Stephen Stacey crudely named the cat ‘come on then’, an aggressive phrase used by people in a bid to start a fight.
He's described in the body of the report as "sick", but I don't think the journalist is using the word in its medical sense. Rather, the word is applied as an unsubstantiated value judgement. The accompanying photograph is captioned "YOB Stephen Stacey". Whatever I might think about Stephen Stacey's reported actions, this is poor journalism.

Liberal intellectuals are frightened of confronting Islam's honour-shame culture – Telegraph Blogs
Elucidating the problem with Islam — an unreconstructed fundamentalist religion still caught up in its relatively recent past. Hard-line Islam is clearly incompatible with contemporary global culture, therefore it must change or be defeated, or at least marginalized.