by Jen Paton

Chimamanda Adichie has a talk called “the danger of the single story.” She says, the “single story [that] creates stereotypes…that are not untrue…but incomplete.”

Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture

I watched three stories about American women this weekend: Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture (2010), the Diablo Cody written Charlize Theron “comedy” Young Adult (2011), and the blockbustering, blistering Hunger Games (2012). I suppose the latter is only tenuously about an American woman, as it takes place in a dystopian post war America called Panem where teenagers fight to the death on national television. But anyway.

Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture takes place in the now, and is about a girl named Aura who rather than fighting to the death posts semi-nude videos of herself on Youtube in a bid at artistic expression. Aura, who comes home from college in Ohio to crash in her artist mom's (amazing) Tribeca apartment and figure out what to do next. (Artist Mom on film is Dunham's IRL Mom, as is the apartment her IRL apartment). Aura has her liberal arts degree, and in college made aforementioned arty Youtube videos where she undresses in fountains. Now she finds work as a restaurant hostess and flirts with lackluster dudes. Tiny Furniture is, as Glenn Kenney put it, “a largely adroit film concerning largely insufferable people.” Not a lot happens. But it does rather capture a certain kind of inertia of a certain kind of kid, someone really smart who doesn't really have the tools to get their act together because the consequences of not doing so are minimal. Dunham contends that her friends say the apartment looks smaller in real life, but in spite of this, she rather gets the smallness of the world she portrays, and pokes some fun at it.

And yet, and yet – it is so hard to get beyond our single stories. Dunham, whose TV show, Girls, about young women in Brooklyn premiered yesterday, made the Girls characters from Ann Arbor because “I was trying to choose places that felt like they weren’t New York but had weirdly analogous intellectual communities, so that if these girls appeared and they were quipping their heads off and they’d watched certain kinds of films since they were three, it would make sense.” Because of course, nobody else watches “certain kinds of films” or experiences culture except New Yorkers, and those lucky enough to live in a distant archipelago of college towns.

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Topology

I love the space of your soul
the way it tends up and out
like that wide field in Conway
near the sugarhouse
which one spring blossomed
with dandelions
so dense and profuse
its rising hump
in the morning sun
was a mound of gold
whose brilliance
was more fabulous
than that most coveted ore

I love the niches and coves
of a soul that billows
like vapor through a sugarhouse roof,
through its cupola

—your sugarhouse soul
its volumes and transformations
its rich continuity
sweetens the shape of me

I love a soul that pushes
envelopes…. . …. I love
the edgy ellipse of your
horizon harrowing soul

a soul both
now and soon
here and there
turned in turned out
which, if I follow its piper's
Mobius band,
will lead me round

not to the place I was
but to the better side
of where I am
.

by Jim Culleny
4/12/12

by James McGirk

The rocket had failed. Kim Jong-un snapped off his the monitor and turned to face his advisors. What could they possibly tell him? This was total failure. Five ashen men in uniform glittered in the gloom. They groveled and made excuses. Kim lifted a hand and batted the air as if to shoo a fly, and the men backed away slowly, heads bowed deeply in shame. He waited for them to leave and left the control room for his private chambers. The hallway smelled of sandalwood and cognac. Portraits lined the walls. That empty feeling that had welled up inside as he watched the explosion gradually filled with something more acrid and painful. Americans were sneering at his failure. Millions of skinny, eager peasants were depending on him and he had failed. His father and grandfather’s wide friendly faces peered down at him from the walls. Would he ever be as deft as his father at wriggling past the tentacles of the great powers? And if it came to it, would he be as a strong a warrior or as a grand marshal of industry as his grandfather? The thought of holding a Russian rifle and charging a line of American soldiers seemed too horrible to contemplate. He heard a rustle of fine fabric and footfalls approaching on the thick carpet.

“Brandy? Swiss chocolate? Pepsi Cola?” She was a sixteen-year-old drum majorette plucked from a parade by his father the year before. He shook his head and felt her enormous eyes slide off his face. It was so strange to be able to have anyone he could possibly want, even one of his brother’s wives if he so desired, even a foreigner, though the hard-faced Ukrainian blondes looked nothing like the sleek international students he remembered from high school. After three months in control, he was glutted and as bored with sex as anything else in his life. Besides there was so much else on his mind, he couldn’t focus: The six powers were pressing in, seizing assets, squelching vital inflows of capital, motor oil, and the luxurious necessities for living a civilized existence, and his near-neighbors in Burma, SLORC, their junta was loosening their grip and so far it hadn’t all gone to hell the way it had in Libya or Tunisia or Syria, or Cuba even; all over the world people were clamoring for self-determination, it was getting lonely, and he himself was lonely, his own brothers and sisters were frightened of him, and he couldn’t get much more out of them than sniveling and venomous little squibs of gossip about one another. The rocket would have been a fist streaking through the sky, eventually carrying a payload of instrumentation into outer space or delivering a deadly blow against distant foes.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

It had been a perfect Fall day: Clear, crisp, and sunny. Then there was one of those moments (like Kennedy's assassination or 9/11) where you never forget what you were doing. A student had asked me a question that I did not have the answer to, but knew where to find, and I was pulling a book off the shelf in my office, when the phone rang.

“Hi, you don't know me, but your wife asked me to call you: She has been in a bad accident outside of town. There were four people in the van. Paramedics will call you in a few minutes.”

From his tone, I knew this wasn't a prank, so I waited. My mined raced: Had my wife picked up all three kids after school and headed out of town? The paramedics called and told me to go the local hospital, which I did. A few minutes later an ambulance pulled up and a friend of my wife (covered in blood and screaming in pain) and her daughter were carried in on body boards. Oh, that's right, they had talked about going shopping together. Thankfully, my older two kids were not involved, but where were my wife and four-and-a-half month old son? They had been life-flighted to a major hospital an hour away. I got in the car and drove.

When I arrived at the hospital, a helicopter was on the pad and a receptionist instructed me to wait for a minister in a room down the hall. Fearing the worst, my jaw dropped and my face fell. “Oh, don't worry, we do that for all the life-flight families,” she assured me. After a few minutes, the clergyman came in and took me to the ER, where a team was huddled around my wife. She was conscious, but clearly shaken-up. We both have pretty dark senses' of humor so I said “If you wanted a new minivan you could've just asked.” She looked back with total incomprehension, at which point I realized the severity of her concussion.

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by Hasan Altaf

The poet Kabir died in 1518, so it is jarring to open a translation of his writings and read the following line: “O pundit, your hairsplitting's/so much bullshit.” It is even stranger to look up and realize that the poem bears an epigraph (“It take a man that have the blues so to sing the blues”) from the American musician Lead Belly, who was not even born until 1888. A quick scan through the volume reveals more epigraphs (Pound, Coleridge), a dedication (one poem is for Geoff Dyer) and vocabulary that Kabir himself could not have come up with: “Smelling of aftershave/and deodorants/the body's a dried up well…” Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Songs of Kabir is not, it is safe to say, your father's Kabir.

We have certain expectations when it comes to literature of this sort – the literature that we call “classical” or “ancient” or “historical” (to say nothing of that literature we call “sacred”): We want grandeur, pomp and circumstance; we want even a touch of the archaic – no thee-ing and thou-ing, necessarily, but some whiff of the past, something epic, removed from the mundane and the modern. Those translators who subvert this expectation and leave that desire unfulfilled are not always looked on kindly: A review of Anne Carson's An Oresteia, for example (Carson's, and indefinitely-articled, because she took one play each from Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides to refashion the story of the house of Atreus; call it a remix) took umbrage with her diction, her use of the word “car” rather than “carriage.” Agamemnon comes home from Troy in a car; what, did he roll up in a Volvo? Did he have to stop somewhere for gas before reaching Mycenae?

Mehrotra's Kabir has, at first, a similar effect. It's jarring to hear this poet speak in a language that is so simple, modern, familiar; Kabir should sound old and wise, like the saint he was, like a holy book or, at the very least, like Yoda. This Kabir, though, calls the pundit out on “bullshit” and ask the muezzin the simple question, “What's your problem?” In another poem, we get this: “I fucked young men/too numerous to count/and stayed a virgin” – it's like hearing your grandmother start speaking like your friends, using curses that could put them to shame.

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by Quinn O'Neill

Last Monday I posted a piece that compared two approaches to protecting the science curriculum from corruption by creationists. The first entailed promoting debate, providing facts and arguments, and appealing to reason, and the second, ridiculing and mocking religious people's beliefs in face-to-face interaction. For many moral people, the less hurtful choice is intuitive, but I argued for the more civil option based on its better evidentiary support and its less risky nature.

At the Reason Rally held last month in Washington, DC, Richard Dawkins advocated displays of contempt and ridicule for religion. It isn’t clear exactly what he had in mind. When he said “Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!” maybe he meant “Question them! Challenge them! Where appropriate!” As far as the effects of his actions are concerned, however, what he meant is less important than how it's received and put into practice. With the recent passing of an anti-evolution bill in Tennessee and Dawkins's association with Darwinism, I questioned what effects his increasingly hostile anti-theism might have on public attitudes toward evolution and anti-evolution bills.

Jerry Coyne at his blog Why Evolution is True responded to my piece. Coyne begins by defending Dawkins’s remarks, insisting that he meant for us to mock religious people’s ideas and not the people themselves. Coyne considers the distinction between people and their ideas to be important, but apparently only when it comes to theists. He accuses me of “dissing Dawkins” when I question his advocacy for contempt and ridicule.

If Coyne objects to ridiculing people, it didn’t stop him from portraying Robert Wright as an annoying and humorless “faitheist” in his response to Wright’s piece in The Atlantic. Coyne wrote:

“And it doesn’t help that he seems to totally lack a sense of humor. Once Wright sat next to me at a meeting in Mexico, determined to get me to admit that I had unfairly maligned him in my review of his book, The Evolution of God. I was so shaken by his relentlessness that I approached Dan Dennett afterwards and asked him for a hug.”

Coyne, who’s traumatized by insistent, yet undoubtedly civil, criticism of his own ideas nevertheless defends ridicule and mockery when dealing with religious people. I haven’t read Wright’s book, so I can’t comment on the accusation that Coyne misrepresented his views, but I will say that he misrepresented mine. He writes:

“If Quinn wouldn’t mind, I’d love her to give evidence for her statement that criticizing religious views is much less effective than coddling the faithful in bringing acceptance of evolution.”

I’d like Coyne to provide some evidence that I said this.

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by Akim Reinhardt

I don’t believe in gods. I believe in metaphors. Once upon a time, people all around the world had many gods, lots of metaphors for the experiences of their lives. And by sacrificing or praying to each god, they acknowledged the forces that shaped their existence. Gods of luck, of thunder, of death, of water, of fertility, of the sun, of air, and on and on and on, covering every nuance of human perception.

From the ancient Mediterranean, the Greek metaphors are most familiar to us today. Zeus represented the patriarchy, Apollo the sun, Aphrodite love, Artemis nature, Demeter the harvest, Hera envy, Athena wisdom, Hades death, Poseidon the seas, Aries war, and so on. Each one of them reflected the universal human values that people crave to control, understand, and express. In choosing a patron god, one could reflect themselves as they were or whom they wished to be. In fearing another god, one could find a mechanism for coping with life’s scary uncertainties and mournful inevitabilities. And through offerings to various gods, one could hope to raise into being the metaphors that might shape their destiny.

But a revolution was already brewing. Several related tribes of Middle Eastern herdsmen did something radical about 4,000 years ago. They came together and combined all of their metaphors into a single god. For them there would no longer be a pallet of distinct emotions. Instead, they would all be wrapped up into one glorious rainbow. These people would give their allegiance to a single, monotheistic metaphor, one god to define the full extent of the human experience.

It was a big change and a tall order. There were some hiccups. One side effect was that their god showed himself to be rather schizophrenic. At one minute he would be a kind and loving god. The next he would be full of wrath and vengeance. Very often, he would be silent, as if saying too many things at once were best countered by saying nothing at all.

But despite his inconsistencies, the new one god would endure. Because in its totality, this combination of all metaphors produced a new single metaphor: the vast unknown.

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by Joy Icayan

Stepping inside the Marcos Museum in Batac, Ilocos feels like stepping into a different time capsule. The museum, which also houses the remains of the late dictator, resembles more a shrine for a person deemed half human, half god. The walls are decorated with framed notes, fragments of letters and Marcos’ personal history, intricately tied to the history of the country. Personal virtues and achievements are extolled, such as Marcos’ topping the bar exam. Everywhere one turns, there are pictures of Marcos the hero, sought after by ordinary folk—Marcos with peasants, Marcos with the arms of those outstretched, reaching out to him.

For every tear you shed, there will be victory, a plaque read.

On September 21, 1972, citing threats of communist insurgency and civil disobedience, then President Marcos declared Martial law, effectively suspending civil rights and what activists would then call ‘plunging the country into its darkest times’. What followed could not quite be described by the available statistics: 30,000 cases of human rights violations according to Commission of Human Rights, 21,000 documented cases by the nongovernmental organization Task Force Detainees of the Philippines. A country paralyzed by debt while its neighboring countries in Southeast Asia boomed economically. A country with its citizenship in constant mistrust of the government. The images and stories that haunt, haunt in their universality—a replica of a famous dissident’s cell in a museum in Quezon City—bunk beds and toilet cramped together, countless pictures of men and women in the streets being sprayed on by water cannons and tear gases, skeletons that still turn up in the most remote of regions, stories of friends, comrades dead, missing, families broken, the individual voices that speak of torture, loss.

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by Sarah Firisen

There once was a candidate, Mitt
Who was rich, smart, handsome and fit
No extremist here
Clearly not much to fear
The perfect choice you'd have to admit

He'd been governor of a blue state
Brought in health reform with a mandate
Moderate through and through
The job now seemed his due
After losing to McCain in '08

With just a few things in his way
There seemed no real cause for dismay
An inconvenient fact?
Then past words he'd redact
There's no principle he couldn't betray

He's backpeddled from past positions so hard
Finding beliefs to quickly discard
But while the sight's quite surreal
He still can't seal the deal
The easy way forward is barred

He can keep swinging hard to the right
He can denounce immigration with might
Change on Roe vs Wade
Play the healthcare charade
And pretend climate change is no plight

But it seems that the right won't comply
God has told them he's just not the guy
He's not Christian they say
To which god does he pray?
He's a faux conservative they all cry

So it's been a painful primary slog
A slow hike instead of a jog
But an end's now in sight
It's the last rounds of this fight
And now Mitt must escape from this bog

Yes the fun is about to begin
When much to the far right's chagrin
Romney turns on a dime
Wipes off the primary slime
And flip flops right back for the win

Easter

I should be devotional
in my mother’s way
standing at the mouth of a tomb
with its rolled stone
empty as the night sky between stars
empty as the space within atoms
because, they say, a man died
but beat death and would
bequeath immortality
to those who believe
death can be beat entirely
so that bodies may embrace in heaven
so that what was so finally scattered
when death came with its scythe
to slide between two lives
setting one adrift to sobs and cries
—so entirely that death would be shown a fool

to believe
against one’s belief
is one way
one dies
.

by Jim Culleny
4/8/12

by Liam Heneghan

Urban ecology, the environmental sciences youngest and most rambunctious cousin, is in a position to influence the design of the cities of the future. Its clout comes from its willingness to think big, to think about the ecology of entire cities as if they were just any other ecosystem. Urban ecologists call this big picture view the “ecology of the city”.

From this disciplinary perspective, Chicago is just another savannah, one where admittedly the commonest species is the human animal.

However, by taking this bird’s eye view of cities, is urban ecology losing sight of the bird-on-the-ground? I mean this quite literally. Is urban ecology losing it roots in natural history? Will the successful cultivation of relationships with decision makers, municipal authorities, city planners and other governmental powers-that-be, come at the expense of urban ecologists’ knowledge about birds, wildlife, beetles and the other creeping things inhabiting the city?

Are we (and I count myself in this troupe) urban ecologists, forgetting the world-fascination, the intense delight, that comes from direct encounters with nature in the city?

***

Urban ecology is not the first discipline to encounter the tensions accompanying distinctions between the bird’s-eye view and the bird-on-the-ground view of the city. An instructive example found in the work of Michel deCerteau (1925-1986) who makes of this tension a theory of the everyday interactions of people who both conform to and resist the strictures of the culture to which they belong.

In their entry on deCerteau the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes him as “a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, [who] was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America.”[1] To describe him as peripatetic is apropos in two senses as the adjective describes a follower of Aristotle, and also signifies one who moves about quite a bit. Etymologically it comes from the Greek patein which is to tread. Followers of Aristotle are referred to as Peripatetics, though the term refers not to a supposed habit of wandering in the Lyceum after the lecturing Aristotle, but to the practice of teaching in a colonnade (a peripatos). Whatever about the Aristotelian influences on his work, deCerteau, a Jesuit priest, was certainly a wanderer both intellectually and physically having taught in many places and written on history, mysticism, everyday life, spiritual life, literary history and so on.

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by Edward B. Rackley

Why didn’t the momentum and exuberance of last year’s “Arab Spring” extend to African countries south of the Sahel? Sub-Saharan populations, many immediate neighbors of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, followed the drama with fascination and some envy. When we spoke, I was surprised how few colleagues and friends in sub-Saharan Africa were optimistic about a counterpoint “African Spring.” They claimed their societies “weren’t ready” to rally widespread discontent towards a political tipping point.

Historically, my friends were wrong—SSA has much experience with successful opposition movements, from colonialism to apartheid. But I took their resignation to mean that social fragmentation had secured the upper hand, proof that poverty and cynical governance were not just misanthropic but bitterly divisive as well. The process of overcoming deep social, generational and political divisions, with their common denominator of skepticism and self-interest, cannot simply be ignited like the proverbial box of tinder.

Internet connectivity was clearly an enabler for the Arab Spring, and SSA still lacks reliable connectivity and familiarity with social media. But coastal North African countries are different from their southern neighbors in infinite other ways as well. Despite non-western culture, values and religious beliefs, North Africa’s Mediterranean exposure imposes a definite political and economic orientation towards Europe, for ill or good. Solidarity in any form—security, economic, ideological—is almost non-existent between countries divided by the Sahel. Few North African countries look south for constructive economic or political opportunity. Exploitation of less developed southern countries (human trafficking, resource predation) is more the norm.

I’ve written here before about the Nile Basin Initiative, an internationally-funded effort to negotiate equitable use rights for the countries of the great river, killed by mutual mistrust in 2010. The late Colonel Gaddafi led Pan-Africanism, the only other north-south unification effort. His utopianism managed to defy open ridicule thanks to his hefty wallet, but never commanded serious attention. In hindsight it proved far more effective at ensconcing the dinosaur club of out-of-touch leaders, like Gaddafi himself, for decades. This retrograde model of leadership, widely practiced among newcomers to power, is arguably the continent’s greatest impediment to modernity.

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by Misha Lepetic

Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.
~ John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath”

Received wisdom relies on simple categories to survive and persist. In this sense, certain numbers are repeated until they are virtually canonical. If we could come up with a taxonomy of success for statistics, we might consider the convenience of numbers that freeze flows of population, money or goods into easily retained averages, devoid of the nuances of space or time. I may, for example, agree with the statement that “500 people arrive in Mumbai every day” if whoever responsible for this statement could point me to the set from which this average was derived – was this from 2000 to 2008? Or maybe it was from 1997 to 2011? Let’s consider other aspects that the datum is implying: Are these people migrants who are truly moving to the city, or are they on a long, seasonal loop that takes them back to their villages, or, even more inconveniently, other cities? And could someone please tell me where the city of Mumbai begins (or ends)? Inconvenient truths are both temporal and geographical, but when we are attempting to impress our audience we tend not to speak in graphs but in talking points. This is the peril of a successful statistic.

By the same token, “255 people born every minute” is a nice, smooth number, and not difficult to remember for those uncomfortable moments when the cocktail party conversation needs a nudge. The lazy acceptance of such a statement demonstrates our contentedness with the notion that this is something that is happening consistently, not unlike the comfort we get from looking at a flowing stream: every time we go back to the stream, there it is, still flowing. In a Heraclitean sense, if I dip my toe into that stream of newborns today, they will certainly be different than yesterday’s stream, but it will still be 255. This is comforting. Until, of course, it becomes 256, or 325. But we will have to wait to be told that, too.

Was the seven-billionth person born in Manila on October 31^st, 2011? Absolutely – if you are the parents of Danica May Camacho. Declared so by the United Nations, the organization did her the further favour of swooping down on her delivery room, scholarships in hand for the lucky newborn, like an international development version of Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. (Danica’s parents may want to take heed of the experience of Adnan Nević, the title-holder of Six-Billionth Person of this particular celebrity circuit, whose cradling by Kofi Annan at his birth hasn’t exactly led to a silver spoon in his mouth). But for those paying attention to the vagaries of demographic estimation,

Even the best individual government censuses have a margin of error of at least 1 percent, said [Gerhard Heilig, chief of the population estimates and projections section of the United Nations Population Division], which would translate in the global aggregation to “a window of uncertainty of six months before or six months after Oct. 31.” An error margin of even as little as 2 percent would mean that Monday’s estimate of seven billion actually was 56 million off (which is more people than were counted in South Africa).

By the same token, I am wholly prepared to believe the notion that, “as of 2008, 50% of the global population lives in cities,” if the United Nations could only define for me what constitutes a city (or was that fateful moment set to happen in 2005, as reported in 2005?). Is the city defined as its urban core, or does it involve the surrounding metropolitan area? Richard Saul Wurman famously defined Tokyo in (at least) six different ways, including boundaries determined by postal delivery, utility service, administrative districts, or population density, among other measures that, our intuition tells us, ought to line up together somehow, but instead lead to radically different geographic delineations. At least we can agree that Tokyo is a proper city – a mega-city, even. Ought we then define a “city” by the density of its population? In that case, Tokyo ranks only 50^th, and Mumbai reigns supreme – at least by some measures. But at what point does a city stop being a city?

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by Quinn O'Neill

At the Reason Rally held recently in Washington, Richard Dawkins made a rather provocative suggestion. He encouraged the crowd to ridicule and mock religious people for their beliefs.

Exactly how far he’d have his followers go with their ridicule isn’t clear. Jerry Coyne of the blog “Why Evolution is True” presumably considers Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion to exemplify the approach that Dawkins is advocating. He offers the converts' corner of Dawkins’ website as evidence of the approach’s effectiveness. It’s a collection of anecdotes from atheist converts who most commonly credit The God Delusion.

The book certainly can be credited for many conversions to atheism, but I think it constitutes an appeal to reason more so than an example of ridicule. In any case, what Dawkins advocated at the Reason Rally goes beyond what he’s done with any of his books. Ridicule can take many different forms, including well-crafted satire and cartoons like South Park, but Dawkins is suggesting that we make fun of people face-to-face. “Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!” he instructs.

Ridicule can be an effective tactic, but it’s risky. J. Michael Waller makes this clear in a White Paper for the Institute of World Politics, in which he endorses ridicule as a tactic in the “war on terrorism”. Distinguishing ridicule from humor, he says:

Laughing at someone – ridicule – is another matter. It is the use of humor at someone else’s expense. It is a zero-sum game destructive to one of the parties involved. Like a gun, it is a dangerous weapon. Even in trained hands, it can misfire. Used carelessly or indiscriminately, ridicule can create enemies were there were none, and deepen hostilities among the very peoples whom the user seeks to win over.

Robert Wright, in a piece in The Atlantic, questions what effect Dawkins’ advocacy of such a hostile approach might have on support for anti-evolution bills like the one recently passed in Tennessee. It’s a good question. It is a well-established marketing tactic to associate what you’d like to sell to people – be it a product or an opinion – with the values of the target group. Being a well-known advocate for evolution, Dawkins’ advocacy of hostile anti-theism may have an undesired effect. For some people, he may be reinforcing an association between evolution and a threat to something that they value. From a marketing perspective, this would be an obvious blunder. It’s like reminding people that Coke promotes tooth decay when you actually want them to buy Coke.

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