Three for the Money… I Mean For Free… Uh Just Read It
I’ve been completing ignoring a few topics of interest for this blog which I don’t want to completely ignore but which weren’t important enough to have their own post. So on when the show:
I’ve become a vegetarian. It’s been over two years since I decided there weren’t any good reasons for me to eat meat but it wasn’t until much more recently that I started to feel cognitive dissonance when eating it. I did it to feel better about myself and I do. I’m sure at some point in the future I’ll make the case here for being vegetarian.
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I’ve also not said anything about TAM 2012, which is going on right now, mostly because all I could say is I wish I was there. Again I’m sure some talks from TAM will end up being posted on my blog in the future. Hopefully I’ll be blogging from there next year.
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Lastly in the latest in the never-ending atheist blogadrama there was a kerfuffle between Thunderf00t, PZ Myers and Freethought Blogs. Now I usually don’t comment on drama, and when I do I’m always the last to do so as I am now, but if you don’t think there needs to be a sexual harassment policy in a conference setting with hundreds or thousands of people you are kidding yourself. Similarly if you don’t think the availability heuristic can have an effect when speaking about issues like this you too are kidding yourself. However, as Richard Carrier pointed out, it is the responsibility of the listener to take account for the availability heuristic. Perhaps what should be most taken away from this particular drama is the flamboyant, and frankly often belittling, styles of both Thunderf00t and PZ Myers might not be suitable for rational discourse on any topic, let alone for a very sensitive issue like where the line is for sexual harassment and what we should do about it.