Whoops, spoke too soon

Sometimes I overextend myself and make statements preemptively before I have all the facts. It can happen to any of us, and from time to time I have to walk back something I’ve said in a post here.

This is one of those times.

Yesterday, I made a statement in a post that could be interpreted as me saying that the Pope wasn’t evil:

Apparently the world is quite willing to hand an abundance of cookies over to the Pope for finally saying something that pretty much everyone else had figured out already.

But hey, at least he figured it out, right?

I’m sad to say that I have to walk back even this grudging attempt to paint the Pope in anything other than a completely negative light:

Pope Benedict XVI praised efforts of the Filipino bishops in blocking any attempts to promote contraception in the Philippines. The pontiff said the Philippine Catholic leadership has reaffirmed its commitment to confronting any attack on the sanctity of life.

“I commend the Church in the Philippines for seeking to play its part in support of human life from conception until natural death, and in defense of the integrity of marriage and the family,” said Benedict XVI.

Hmm, perhaps I should translate:

Pope Benedict XVI praised the corrupting influence in the Filipino bishops in ensuring that poor people are doomed to sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy in the Philippines. The ancient decrepit virgin said that the religiotic busybodies in the Philippines have reaffirmed their commitment to preventing any attempt to improve the quality of life.

“I commend the assholes in the Philippines for seeking to dictate its beliefs to other people in defiance of human rights from conception until natural death, and in defense of bigoted and outdated definitions of marriage and the family,” said Benedict XVI.

So it is to my great chagrin that I must apologize for misleading you fine readers. The Pope is completely evil and has no redeeming qualities. He is happy to whine and cry about the “oppression” of religion in rich countries, and then cackle with Palpatine-like glee as his Church dooms entire countries to a cycle of abuse and unwanted pregnancy in the poor countries.

Tim Minchin, play us out…

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

My Wikileaks response

A friend messaged me yesterday to ask if I was planning on saying something about this unfolding Wikileaks saga. I was planning on steering clear of it, but since this is a blog that is in part about free speech, it might seem particularly conspicuous if I don’t say anything at all.

For the most part so far, it seems that most of the things that were leaked were diplomatic cables wherein people bitch about other world leaders. It’s the equivalent of someone printing out copies of a high school girl’s diary so that everyone finds out what she really thinks of them. I think Wikileaks is a good idea, since people in this hemisphere seem to be happy to ignore the hellscape that is our middle eastern foreign policy, but this particular document dump doesn’t seem to tell us much we don’t already know, and has instead raised people’s backs.

So much of diplomacy seems to be about appearance rather than substance, and it’s rather depressing to think that some of these leaked cables (which have little to no substance) will give recalcitrant states some puerile justification for throwing a tantrum on an international scale. Then again, it’s not like there’s a way for things to get much worse short of dropping actual bombs, and I saw very little evidence that things were getting any better.

But, as I am not a person with a background in international relations, or in possession of a great deal of knowledge about peace & conflict, I am happy to side-step this particular story. There are enough better commentators out there to give you an informed opinion on the subject, rather than my superficial from-the-hip analysis.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

Do me a favour?

I have heard that Ms. Tinkham has died of her cancer as of 3:30 pm PST. I am deeply saddened by this, more so because this death was, in all probability, preventable.

I enjoy blogging, I really do. However, sometimes it’s a struggle to find the inspirado to write. Since I started this for serious back in March, I’ve posted at least one new story every morning at 6 am (Vancouver time). Mondays I have reached deep into my psyche and pulled out a completely organic essay (what I’ve taken to privately referring to as my “think pieces”), and Fridays I have scoured the interwebs to find you a pithy or humorous video to entertain you.

I have yet to miss an update (I came perilously close this past Friday, but I still got it out).

I love blogging, but on those days when I just don’t feel like writing, I am spurred on by the thought that somewhere out there in the world, there is someone (maybe even a few someones) who read these things and get something from them. Maybe it’s just mindless entertainment as part of your morning routine, maybe it means something more than that; regardless, the thought of you going “where the fuck is today’s article?” is what chains my ass to the desk and gets my fingers a-typin’.

I say all this because the time has come for me to ask a favour from you. Over at Respectful Insolence, Orac has put out this plea:

I’m still perturbed that a cancer quack was able to convince a woman who had everything to live for that he could cure her of her breast cancer without surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. I’m still perturbed at this particular cancer quack’s attitude, where he tried to claim that he didn’t know the woman who is dying, Kim Tinkham, and imply that her cancer recurred because didn’t follow his regimen carefully enough, that she had stopped living the quack’s “alkaline diet.” I thought of my mother-in-law, who died in 2009 of metastatic breast cancer, and watching her decline.

And then I thought of Oprah Winfrey and her role in what ultimately happened to Kim Tinkham.

…

Oprah needs to know what can happen when people choose quackery and woo instead of effective science-based medicine.

Because I know how hard Orac works to get his lengthy and in-depth analyses of science-based medicine and medical skepticism out there, I was happy to contribute my voice to what I hope is a chorus of people saying the same thing: people who give bad advice about medicine have to live with the consequences of their words. This Kim Tinkham woman was told that cancer was an “acid” that was caused by feelings of resentment – a steamier pile of bullshit there has never been. Based on this faulty premise, the exposure and publicity that she got on the Oprah show, and Oprah’s whole-hearted endorsement of nonsense like The Secret, Ms. Tinkham eschewed conventional treatment and attempted to “alkalize” her body to get rid of cancer.

To be sure, with a stage III cancer she had roughly 50% odds of succumbing to the disease even with conventional treatment. However, that is a full 50% better chance than if she just slowly lets the cancer kill her. If we found some other treatment that improved your odds of surviving cancer by 50%, we’d be trumpeting it from the skies. Ms. Tinkham, with encouragement from Oprah, decided to opt instead for witch-doctor treatment from a quack who thinks that cancer is made up of acid. I have, with my own two eyes, seen a cancerous tumour – it looks nothing at all like acid. Furthermore, I have seen positive, happy, well-balanced people die of cancer – to suggest that it’s their own fault for having too much “resentment” is a disgusting insult to anyone who has seen a loved one die of cancer.

And so I am asking you, my dear readers, for whom I work so hard to provide regular (and hopefully interesting) content 5 days a week, to do me this favour: please write in to the Oprah show and tell them that it’s not okay to encourage vulnerable sick people to slowly commit suicide under the “care” of people who would exploit them first, then blame them later when their voodoo “cures” don’t work.

Please also feel free to copy and paste your submission to Oprah in the comments section.

Like this article? Write in to the Oprah Show then, dammit!

P.S. WordPress helpfully tracks the number of clicks the links that I post yield, so if you read this and don’t write the show, I’ll know.

Pope does something marginally decent

…and everyone loses their shit.

Of course this news is a bit dated now, and many of you have probably already heard this story:

Using a condom is a lesser evil than transmitting HIV to a sexual partner — male or female —even if that means averting a possible pregnancy, the Vatican said Tuesday, signalling a seismic shift in papal teaching as it further explained Pope Benedict XVI’s comments.

So the Pope has finally hit on the idea that it might be less evil to protect yourself and your sexual partner than it is to have sex without trying to make a baby. A few questions come to mind:

  1. What about papal infallibility? Were you wrong before, or are you wrong now?
  2. How is it that the moral “leadership” provided by the Catholic Church is about 100 years behind everyone else?
  3. How did it take you this long to figure that out?

Life is not a dichotomous state – there is no such thing as ensoulment or some kind of spontaneous creation of “life”. Ever since Friedrich Wöhler first synthesized crystals of urea, a feat that was supposed to be impossible (organic matter from inorganic components), the philosophy of vitalism has been rapidly dismantled. All of the evidence suggests that “life” is a continuum that reaches back millions of years to the first self-replicating molecule, which was itself made up of “non-living” materials.

In this way, wearing a condom is not “preventing life” anymore than masturbation is mass murder. You’re simply inhibiting a specific chemical reaction that will result in a fertilization. To even consider the suffering of a living, feeling human person equivalent to the prevention of a chemical reaction – to even put those things in the same moral ballpark – takes a particularly craven mind.

And so people began bending over backwards to congratulate the Pope on not being entirely boneheadedly evil:

Catholic reformers and groups working to combat HIV have welcomed remarks by Pope Benedict that the use of condoms might not always be wrong.

I’m reminded of a Chris Rock sketch, where he derides some black men for their perceived tendency to brag about things that aren’t accomplishments, like raising their kids and paying their bills. To this completely unwarranted bragging, Rock retorts: “what do you want, a cookie?” Apparently the world is quite willing to hand an abundance of cookies over to the Pope for finally saying something that pretty much everyone else had figured out already.

But hey, at least he figured it out, right?

Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi said the Pope was speaking about “an exceptional situation” in one of the interviews in the book Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times, which is being published on Tuesday.

“The Pope considered an exceptional situation in which the exercise of sexuality is a real danger to the life of another,” said Fr Lombardi. Benedict used the specific example of a male prostitute using a condom to illustrate his apparent shift in position.

Come the fuck on, Ratzinger! Condoms are only appropriate in exceptional situations? Apparently in the Pope’s world view, it is better for a woman to become pregnant with a child she does not want and cannot afford to raise than it is for her to protect herself during sex. It’s better for a man to become inextricably yoked to another person for the rest of his life than it is for him to use a piece of latex.

And why is it a male prostitute?

Not all sex results in pregnancy (and I thank my lucky stars for that fact), but there’s always a chance. Many people want to have a child, for whatever reason, and are in a position to provide for it. Using condoms, unlike implants or hormone therapies or other intrusive forms of birth control, do not prevent people who want to have children from doing so. It is a simple technology that harms nobody (unless you count sperm, which I don’t).

Whatever claim to some kind of moral insight or authority that the Catholic Church pretends to have is repeatedly undermined by the ethical stupidity that is repeatedly on display from the Vatican.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

An apology

Regular readers here (numbers have taken a spike in the past couple of weeks – anyone have some insight as to why?) may notice that, after a glut of posting, my posts are becoming less frequent and smaller. Please interpret this as a lack of free time, rather than a lack of interest. As I write this I am getting glared at by the instructor of the workshop I am attending for being the only person typing on his computer. I’m also writing this 6 days later than usual, thus running the risk of missing a post (due to a lack of my usual buffer).

I can’t promise that this will change soon – I will be on vacation over the Christmas break, but I may not feel much like blogging once my schedule changes. After the New Year I should be back to normal.

Why do all the black kids sit together?

I attended a conference in Ottawa last week that was related to work. I arrived early and picked a spot at the row of tables completely arbitrarily. Other people filtered in a bit later, and when I looked up from my computer, I realized that all of the black people in the room (well, there were only three so maybe ‘all’ is a bit misleading) were sitting in the same area as me.

It’s a phenomenon that you can observe pretty much anywhere, where members of a minority group tend to flock together. It even spawned the title of a book on racism and psychology.

Okay, and?

My job straddles a line between epidemiology, statistics and economics. While I can’t really claim to be an expert in any one of those fields individually, I can at least speak semi-intelligibly about them. A central concept in economics is the idea of an “incentive” – decisions are made by rational agents to gain something they value. By increasing the value gained by making a particular choice, you make that choice more appealing. For example, if you have the choice between two hamburgers, and I slap a piece of delicious bacon on one (but not the other), you’re more likely to choose the one with extra value.

The converse case of incentives are what are termed “disincentives” – additional features that make a rational agent less likely to make a choice. Suppose you are a vegan, and you are forced to choose between those same two hamburgers. All of a sudden, the addition of delicious bacon makes that sandwich less appealing.

This is an incredibly simplistic description of the concept, obviously, but hopefully it is clear.

Wait… what?

There is an illusion that we carry around in our minds that we have a “true self” – that we have a personality that is the “real me” version. The fact is that our personality is more strongly determined by the surrounding social environment and other external stimuli than it is by our intentions. As a result, when our environment changes, different aspects of our “self” become more apparent.

There is a classic example of this called “stereotype threat“, in which a person’s performance is (positively or negatively) affected by making a stereotype about them apparent. This is commonly seen when discussing the differential performance of women in science and mathematics. Women were inundated with a prevailing stereotype that “girls are not good at science”. As a result, when women are reminded of their gender before testing, they do worse than if they are not made aware.

What does this have to do with anything?

Social pressure exists. The presence of others is a real environmental cue, that will cause us to be aware of various aspects of our identity. As a direct result, we will switch over to one of our various “selves”. At this workshop, everyone in the room was similar in most ways – we all have similar careers, similar education, probably similar interests. However, my presence in the room reminded the other two black guys of their “black guy self”, creating an ad hoc group. This happened completely passively – I didn’t walk up to them and say “welcome, fellow black man.” It happened all by itself – all they had to do was notice that there was another black person around.

There’s another level that this operates on though. Imagine the converse – you are a physicist in a room full of actors. You are trying to have a conversation about beauty, but every time you slip into physics-speak, you are met by blank stares. Another physicist joins the conversation – your life immediately becomes easier. Even though you might not ordinarily gravitate toward this particular person, this arbitrary similarity makes her/him highly attractive to you.

It’s the same way for members of any minority group – when they feel different from the rest of the group, they are more likely to gravitate toward those who are similarly different.

So?

This ability to make certain identities more apparent can be used as an incentive to make decisions. If I would like you to donate to my women’s rights charity, I might do well to remind you that you have a sister, or a mother, or that you are a woman yourself. By bringing an aspect of your “self” to the foreground of your mind, I am able to influence you (as a rational agent) into making one decision (donating your money) rather than another (keeping it).

It is for this reason that things like the Atheist Bus Ads and the Out Campaign are useful – not for antagonizing the religious (although that is certainly what the faithful are claiming), but for bringing atheists out into the open. By making nonbelievers aware of their nonbelief, it brings that aspect of their “self” more apparent and helps motivate their behaviour.

Why is that good? Shouldn’t everyone consider themselves equal?

This kind of counterexample is appealing, and commonly used to blame those who talk about racism as “the real racists”. After all, by pointing out that there are treatment inequalities between different racial groups, aren’t you reinforcing the idea that races are different?

Describing reality is not the same as creating that reality. My usual go-to example is blaming someone for yelling “look out!”, and thereby causing a passerby to get hit by a bus. The bus was there to begin with, and would have hit the person regardless of the warning. The purpose of the warning is to make the passerby aware of the problem so she/he can take steps to avoid or fix it.

Atheists who are reminded of their atheism aren’t suddenly turned into atheists – they were already. Making that reality more apparent is not creating a difference, it’s just highlighting it for the explicit purpose of motivating people to consider their “atheist self”.

The bizarre thing about this whole phenomenon is that we often aren’t aware that these social forces play such a role. It was until I commented on our seating arrangement that the other two guys smiled and said “oh yeah”. Once aware of it, we can recognize it intuitively, but sometimes it happens without our even knowing.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

Movie Friday: NiqaBITCH

Satire has never looked so good:

The fundamental difficulty I have with the niqab is that it’s impossible to completely tease out the coercion and brainwashing that goes into religious and cultural education. I can’t understand why anyone would want to cover themselves with a thick cloth, but does that give me the right to pronounce it ethically wrong?

At least these women are showing that the debate shouldn’t be taken too seriously. There’s a bit more background to be found in The Guardian, but there’s not much more to be said about it.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

HIS will be done, dammit!

I’m kind of flabbergasted that anyone (let alone Tony Blair) would agree with the statement that religion is a force for good in the world. Every major civil rights, scientific, social and human achievement in the history of the world has been staunchly opposed on religious grounds. The fact that they were supported on religious grounds is largely unimportant to me – all it does is demonstrate the fact that religious texts and beliefs can be used to justify anything, thus disqualifying them as a force for anything.

However, look at any group trying to retard social progress, trying to hold back the passage of time, on the side of hate and intolerance, and you will always find the justification for such stupidity draped in the garments of the faithful:

Since its debut in 1978, the New International Version — known as the NIV — has been the Bible of choice for evangelicals, selling more copies than any other version. But a 2005 gender-inclusive edition bombed after being condemned as too liberal. Translators hope their latest edition, which debuted online this month, will avoid a similar fate. They’ve retained some of the language of the 2005 edition. But they also made changes — like going back to using words like “mankind” and “man” instead of “human beings” and “people” — in order to appease critics.

Ah yes, mustn’t give them wimmins any ideas about gender equality. As everyone knows, man is the head of woman the way that Christ is the head of the church, or some such nonsense. It obviously makes for a far better world when the deeply-entrenched sexism of the past thousand or so years of western civilization continue to be propped up as the immutable will of the invisible sky-ghost that makes football players miss catches.

Of course the delicious irony of this whole situation is that they’re discussing the immutable will of the sky-ghost… as revealed through His holy books… with those tasked to translate those very books!

They also broke a promise they’d made to James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, John Piper, pastor of Minneapolis megachurch Bethlehem Baptist, and other conservative pastors, not to produce a gender-inclusive NIV. In response, Dobson accused translators of distorting the word of God.

I can muster a grudging respect for those who have taken the time to learn the original languages of the Bible. They, at least, are willing to put in the effort to explore the full implications of their superstition. Most everyone, at least those who are relevant to this story, can only read English (if that). The hypocrisy required to tell the very people who make it possible for you to understand the book you’re referencing that they’re “doing it wrong” is so particular to the religious, I think it should have it’s own name. Hypocrigion, perhaps? Theopocrisy? I’m sure you can come up with something.

It is as I’ve long suspected – the Bible doesn’t make people sexist; it was written by sexists, and then used to propagate that bigotry for the future to enjoy. Thanks, guys!

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

Free speech vs… assholes with bike locks

I’m pissed off.

Chained by his neck to two female protesters, University of Waterloo doctoral student Dan Kellar was nevertheless in control of the situation at a campus lecture hall last week, as he sat on stage and chanted slogans to prevent journalist and author Christie Blatchford from speaking about her new book on the native protests at Caledonia, Ont.

I’m not just pissed off because the asshole in question is from my alma mater.

Ms. Blatchford, the Governor-General’s literary award-winning writer of Fifteen Days, was slightly delayed by traffic on Friday, and as university spokesman Michael Strickland announced this to the small audience, he was shouted down with calls of “racist, racist, racist.”

I’m not just pissed off because this asshole is trying to advocate a position that I consider similar to my own, or that I will be lumped in with his assholery.

I’m not just pissed off (although I am mightily pissed off) that free speech is being run over roughshod by a dick, using the principle itself to deny another person the right to speak.

No, all of that would be tolerable. I could deal with these insults and more. The reason I’m really pissed off?

Bike lock, $28
Rent-a-protest, $150 pizza bill
Suppressing the free speech of someone you don’t agree with, priceless.

This asshole has forced me to agree with Scary Fundamentalist. Come on, man! That’s beyond the pale. It’s like when the NAACP got all hot and bothered about Shirley Sherrod and I had to be on the same side as Glenn Beck. I had to take an extra-hot shower after that. Now I’m in the same camp as Scary? C’mon dude! Not cool.

I joke, of course. While pretty much everything that SF says makes me want to ragevomit all over my keyboard (I wear a bib when browsing his site), we are definitely allied on the cause of free speech. Free speech has nothing to do with left or right – it is the only way that a democratic society can work. Where we differ is on… well… everything else.

I don’t care what your position is, whether or not I agree with it, and I am absolutely not above criticizing the assholery of those who are on my end of the political spectrum. You don’t get to be a total douchehat and lock yourself to a podium to protest someone’s speech. Tearing down a building, maybe. Protesting against the government, sure. But to prevent someone from speaking? That’s bullshit.

Usually I’m a bit more articulate than this, but quite frankly, I’m too pissed off to be clever. I also try to have a pithy little signoff at the end of these things, but I can’t think of one, so here is a picture of Johnny Cash expressing exactly how I feel about Dan Kellar.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

That’s not what persecution means

I have had a few back and forth discussions with Christians in the short time I have been an open and notorious atheist (open to everyone, notorious to only a select few) regarding the current clime of opinion regarding Christianity in North America. In a nutshell, Christians in the United States (particularly) and Canada (occasionally) complain that Christians are being ‘persecuted’ for their faith. It is a ridiculous claim, and a poorly-disguised attempt to re-brand themselves as victims of some kind of concerted effort to stamp out Christianity. Even the friggin’ Pope buys into this nonsense.

As “evidence” for this claim, Christians often point to the fact that secularists and atheists talk most often about Christianity, when there are a number of other perfectly bad religions to complain about. The response to this claim is so trivially easy to supply, it honestly makes me question whether or not the people who repeat it have put any thought into their argument whatsoever – it’s because Christianity has been the dominant religion in this continent for generations. It is deeply entrenched in our history and our culture, so much so that people try to claim that it is the foundation of our heritage (a ridiculous claim I have refuted before).

If you look to another country where there is a different religious tradition, you’ll find the same kind of whining:

One of India’s leading Muslim groups has appealed against a ruling over the Ayodhya holy site, where a Hindu mob destroyed a mosque 18 years ago. Two months ago, Lucknow High Court said the land should be divided, and that the razed 16th century mosque should not be rebuilt. Jamiat-Ulama-i-Hind says the judgement appears to be based not on evidence but on the professed belief of Hindus.

The whiners, in this case, are the Hindus, who have tried to bring their totally ridiculous beliefs to bear in a land dispute. The Lucknow court appears to consider superstition worthwhile legal evidence. I want to try that – break into someone’s house and when the cops come to arrest me say “but I really believe I live here!” I’d be lucky to escape a mental institution, let alone jail.

I’ve made this point before, but the so-called “persecution” of Christians in this country is essentially just a reflection of privilege. They (though surely not all of them) complain that they’re being “oppressed”, when what’s really happening is that people are not letting them get away with whatever they want anymore. You’re welcome to believe privately that homosexuality is a sin, or that abortion is murder. You can even go out in the public square and scream your head off about it. However, you’re not allowed to impose the consequences of your personal beliefs on others, particularly if there is specific legislation against it.

Some people on the other side of this conversation will reply with something ridiculous like “well if a Christian gets discriminated against, nobody says anything!” Nobody says anything because that never happens! It’s like when men complain about being the targets of sexual discrimination because they aren’t allowed to make sexist jokes at work or when conservatives say that universities are “intolerant” of conservative viewpoints. It’s only by stretching the definitions of those words beyond what any reasonable person would recognize that these become even passably accurate claims. Not being allowed to offend others is not “discrimination”, it’s politeness. Not tolerating opinions that are based on fallacious reasoning and intentional twisting and cherry-picking of facts is not “intolerance”, it’s logic.

Not having your personal beliefs (founded on unprovable assertions and easily-recognized logical fallacies) recognized as legitimate is not “persecution”, it’s fairness.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!