Somebody give that man a geography lesson

Who in their right mind would trust Romney with foreign policy? In last night’s debate, he claimed that Syria was “Iran’s route to the sea”, which is just plain weird.

Making it even weirder, he has made this claim multiple times while campaigning, and has been told many times that it makes no sense, but he’s never bothered to look at a map?

Using MittLogic, Central America better watch out, because Canada is eyeing Mexico as its route to the sea, too.

My worry is that Romney is preaching his garbled version of geography to Americans who are about as ignorant of what a map looks like as he is.

Dario Maestripieri needs to both learn and apologize

Sometimes this crap is pretty blatant.

Dario Maestripieri was facebooking from the Society for Neuroscience meetings. Does anybody see anything wrong with this observation?

My impression of the Conference of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. There are thousands of people at the conference and an unusually high concentration of unattractive women. The super model types are completely absent. What is going on? Are unattractive women particularly attracted to neuroscience? Are beautiful women particularly uninterested in the brain? No offense to anyone…

“No offense to anyone”…oh, yeah, that makes it all better. But man, am I ever glad that I personally have super-model good looks so that all those years I was attending SfN nobody would have cause to criticize me. Fortunately for him, too, Maestripieri is drop-dead gorgeous, or his membership in the society might have to be rescinded for failure to meet the beauty standards (which I don’t recall seeing mentioned in the application, but it’s been a few years.)

I wouldn’t worry, though. Apparently Dr Maestripieri is chairing a search committee at his university, and I’m sure he’ll be doing what he can to improve the attractiveness of the pool of neuroscience faculty attending this meeting in the future. (Ladies! If you get an interview, you might want to think about some cosmetic surgery ahead of time, and be sure to use cosmetics and wear something sexy — these are important criteria for studying the brain.)

DrugMonkey, Janet Stemwedel, and Dr Isis have all posted on this incident, and the wonderful thing is that all three already have sexist dolts in their comment threads telling them that they’re over-reacting or that what Dr Maestripieri said wasn’t so bad.

A billion ghosts immanentized

You should go read this excellent post on Technosociology, which makes two points, one that I’ve written about before and one that I’ve been meaning to write. The first is a rebuke to the free speech fetishists of the internet who regard their ability to shout at someone as an absolute right rather than a responsibility.

…the common equation between not wanting governments to regulate offensive speech on the Internet and the position “therefore everyone should be allowed to post whatever they want” is not just wrong, it is likely going to be the end of the kind of free speech we want to protect because sooner or later, most governments who do want to ban speech on the Internet for political reasons are going to be able to legitimately point at these sites and most parents and other sane people will come down for strong regulations on the Internet. Yes, I believe that these regulations will then be used to crack down on “unwanted” political speech but be assured that most people in the world, including the United States, will choose “less speech” criticizing the powerful if they are convinced that without such restrictions, there is no way to stop predation of children and violating women’s dignity and privacy from proliferating on mainstream sites. (There is high-quality poll data from the General Social Survey which confirms this–free speech as an absolute value is a minority position in the United States). It is up to the Internet community to make this a false equivalence and this requires that “but it’s free speech” is not the first, intermediate and last and only phrase we utter when faced with offensive or intimidating content.

The internet has an abundance of freedoms and a dearth of accountability and responsibility. Somehow we’ve acquired the notion that because it’s possible to create throw-away accounts and use pseudonyms, it is therefore good to create them at will and discard any sense of identity while still pretending to be a good faith contributor to online discussions. And then we get people who are outraged that you won’t listen to them when they rant under an obscene pseudonym that they will change again when you ignore them; and in fact, they get particularly outraged when you do ignore them, because they think they have the right to speak while everyone else has the obligation to listen. The petty obsessives of internet free speech all have a bit of Dennis Markuze in them.

And further, the Violentacrez case has highlighted another mistaken idea: their privilege to abrogate all other rights held by others in the name of their right to free speech. Suddenly, anonymity also becomes their right and no one else’s — they can splatter the faces of teenagers in their underwear on the web to serve their right to masturbation material, but if you dare to reveal that they are human beings with identities in the “real” world, you’re violating their rights.

That’s the second thing I appreciate in this essay. It’s time to stop thinking of stuff we say on the internet as somehow not part of the real world. For many of us, the bulk of our communication with others is through this medium; we have more friends who we know well and talk to regularly here on our screens than we meet face-to-face.

Another variant of the argument has been that “it’s just the Internet.” Chill. This, of course, rests of on something I’ve long been railing against, the notion that the Internet is somehow not real, that it’s virtual or that it is “trivial.” (My friend Nathan Jurgenson coined the phrase “digital dualism” to refer to this tendency). In fact, a reddit contributor makes the argument that Gawker, by publishing the real name and location of the person behind “creepshot” did real harm they have “purposefully taken this off the internet and into real life” and this affects “violantacrez’s future employment and immediate safety.”

“JoelDavis” on Reddit: The reason that axiom [It’s Just the Internet] has taken hold is because the idea is that even if a website gets bogged down in even the worst trolling imaginable, all you have to is realize the website’s no longer worth going to anymore and stop going. Problem solved. With this, a formerly anonymous reddit user has to worry about physical attacks in real life by someone who would view a person like that as a target. In other words, Adrian Chen has purposefully taken this off the internet and into real life so it’s no longer “just the internet.” This affects violentacrez’s future employment and immediate safety. All so Chen could make some money, and no other reason.

This snippet is very revelatory in how it reveals how the construction of what is real, trivial or virtual is indeed an assertion of power & privilege. “JoelDavis” considers predatory photos of children to be “just the Internet” but a person’s name –just their name linked to real acts they committed—to be “real life.” (I again refer to Lili’s great post about what this reveals).

It’s an odd phenomenon, too. When the printing press allowed newspapers to appear, when people sent correspondence around the world through the mail, did anyone suggest that this process was insignificant and that the discussion was less “real” than talking? I don’t think so. I have the opposite impression, that people felt that writing made the ephemera of conversation have more substance and permanence — the act of weighing words carefully and making the effort to lay them down in print made them more powerful, and publication was a conjuration of great power.

The internet made publication trivial. It apparently diminished the substance of communication — no more crackling bits of paper that pile up on your desk. Media like twitter and facebook encourage you to blurt casually, with little attention to the words you write. It leads to the illusion that communication online is as insubstantial as the conversation you had with your cat.

But it isn’t. In the vast howling noise of the internet, what you say has become more important — voices that babble and shriek don’t rise to prominence and become regular draws (they can be brief freak show sensations, though, and we do see a tendency for voices of minimal talent or intelligence striving to become louder through more extreme viciousness or stupidity). Because something is written in the intangible pattern of electrons doesn’t make it less substantial, but instead makes it easier to distribute, copy, and archive — you could burn an incriminating letter, but once it is on the internet, it is spread far and wide and, while not completely unerasable, is harder to remove…and actively trying to remove something tends to make it more noticeable and more widely disseminated. Meanwhile, I’m finding hardcopy to be less useful — I get dunned with so much junk mail, all those crackling bits of paper that offer me new credit cards at low low rates and advertisements for big screen TVs on sale and sweepstakes I must enter to win millions of dollars, that I increasingly devalue stuff that is written down. I used to photocopy journal articles every week and file them away in a cabinet — I’ve still got a huge pile of these things from 20-30 years ago — but now I rarely print anything, it’s far more useful to have a searchable, indexable, archived PDF that I can also instantly email to students and colleagues.

Just because some old fogies don’t comprehend or appreciate the volume and content of all the communication that goes on by this medium doesn’t make it less real. The internet is not the place where a billion ghosts chatter over matters of no consequence — it’s the new reality, the tool that many of us use to make connections that matter. It’s the greatest agent of information and communication humanity has yet invented, and it deserves a little more respect than dismissal as something “unreal” where trolls can roam unchecked.

(via Stephanie Zvan)

FtB Party!

One of the best of the godless skeptic conventions is Skepticon (also one of the cheapest, at a registration price of $0), and it turns out that a huge number of FtB bloggers will be there: me, Aron, Jen, Stephanie, Brianne, Matt, Richard, traitorous ex-FtBer JT, etc. So Ed Brayton has announced that there will be an official FreethoughtBlogs party on Saturday, 10 November, in the Farmers Gastropub, a most excellent venue.

Everyone is invited, even JT (although he will be expected to grovel and beg admission). I should warn you, though, that Skepticon has a sensibility to it: it’s marvelously synthetic, bringing together hard-nosed skepticism, fiercely open atheism, and humanist optimism in one great celebratory mish-mash. Assholes don’t fit in very well, so if you’re one of those, you might have to miss our big party.

Bad argument #3: Science says what?

(This is part of a list of bad arguments I heard at the Texas Freethought Convention.)

I save the worst for last: the pro-choice (Matt Dillahunty) vs. “pro-life” (Kristine Kruszelnicki) debate on Saturday. Poor Ms Kruszelnicki, a recently declared atheist who opposes abortion, was hopelessly outclassed and outgunned at every point, and relied entirely on bad arguments.

Dillahunty went first, and he staked out a clear and narrowly focused position: that the personhood or “human” status of the embryo/fetus were totally irrelevant to his argument, and that he was building his case entirely on the right to bodily autonomy of the woman. Even if the fetus was judged entirely deserving of consideration as a person (a point he personally does not accept), it would not matter: a woman must retain the right to control her own body.

So what does Kruszelnicki do? Announce right at the beginning that her entire argument was that the embryo is fully human from the instant of conception, and therefore abortion is wrong. She made it clear that she opposes a whole gamut of basic rights: birth control methods that prevent implantation are wrong, because that’s just like strangling or starving a baby; no abortion in cases of rape or incest, because the baby doesn’t deserve punishment; she did allow for abortion in cases that threaten the life of the mother at times before fetal viability, simply because in that case two fully human lives would be lost.

So right from the beginning she was building an argument that entirely ignored anything Dillahunty would say, while Dillahunty would spend the next hour and a half directly refuting the relevance of her case. It was a humiliating rout.

What made it worse, though, was the quality of Kruszelnicki’s arguments. Would you believe that at one point she showed us a grisly video of the outcomes of abortions? Bloody severed body parts, slack gooey limp bodies, puddles of blood with twitching bits of flesh, that sort of thing. There were several different reactions from people I talked to afterwards. Many were just repulsed, and had closed their eyes or walked out of the room when it was shown (oh, yeah, that was an effective tactic in a debate: disgust the audience). Everyone was appalled that such a blatant and logically irrelevant emotional appeal was being made; that’s another brilliant move, insult the intelligence of the audience by assuming that they won’t be able to detect the patent emotional manipulation being practiced.

I had a somewhat different response. I’ve seen surgeries (and done surgeries on animals), and let me tell you, they are unspeakably violent: bodies being cut into and violated, bones broken and cut, torsos cracked and wrenched open — from a naive perspective, every surgery, no matter how benevolent, is terrifyingly brutal. I was unimpressed by a movie that showed the reality of our biological condition. We are full of blood and slime and squirming guts and twitchy tissues, and you aren’t going to sway me by telling me that an invasive surgical procedure is messy and gross.

But the part that really annoyed me is that she repeatedly announced that SCIENCE had declared the conceptus at the moment of fertilization to be fully human. To demonstrate this, she cited several familiar names: O’Rahilly and Moore, for instance. These are people who have authored descriptive embryological texts that take a phenomenological approach, describing the different stages of development. They are not sources that are good for understanding mechanisms or processes, and they definitely do not represent a deep modern understanding of the progressive and emergent properties of development. What she was relying on is that these kinds of texts will state simple facts, like that fertilization produces a zygote with the complete human genetic complement, which they’ll summarize with some shorthand statement that it is a human embryo (rather than a mouse, or a frog, or a fish). From this, the anti-choicers have spun out unwarranted extensions of reductionist statements to claim that they are making definitive statements about personhood or that they’re discussing something as complex as humanity rather than a minimalist statement about genetics.

And they’ve been doing this for decades. That Kruszelnicki is an atheist does not change the fact that she’s using a ridiculous canard that has similarly been used by religious anti-abortionist zealots; she was basically lying about what deveopmental biologists say, and trying to use an unfounded argument from authority as the basis of her debate performance. Bad move.

I actually got to ask her about that. I told her that she was using old descriptive sources and inappropriately extending the implications; I asked her if she had more modern sources with a little more depth, and she waffled and told me that she had lots of recent papers on the subject and that embryologists all agreed on this point (obviously, no they don’t) and she waved a few papers in my direction.

I went up to her after the debate and asked if I could see those sources she waved at me. Suddenly, she couldn’t find them any more. She mumbled something about a “white paper” by an author whose name was unclear, and that she’d find it for me later. She never did, although she and I were both there at the conference for at least 3 more hours. I also mentioned that a “white paper” is not the same thing as a scientific reference; it would be an advocacy statement from an organization with an agenda, and would have very little weight with me.

Here’s the truth: SCIENCE does not make a definitive statement about the moment at which personhood is acquired. It is a product of a complex process with multiple inputs and interactions and no sharply defined transitions that can be pinned to anything as difficult to define as consciousness, identity, and independence. All we can say is that none of those things are there at conception, and all of them are there are sometime after birth, and that anyone who tries to tell you that they are all there unambiguously at some discrete instant in development is lying to you.

Bad argument #2: No more Poes

(This is part of a list of bad arguments I heard at the Texas Freethought Convention.)

There were a couple of fundagelical fanatics picketing the event. I got a few pictures taken posing with this one guy, and he was standard-issue boring creationist: he kept telling me “Darwin was a big dummy” and otherwise sneering at evolution. I just politely asked him what he’d read by Darwin, and for specific points Darwin made that he rejected, and he shut up hard. He was reduced to muttering “I’ll pray for you, brother” — trying to pin them down to specifics is usually a good tactic for exposing the vacuity of their position.

But the creationist is too obvious a source of bad arguments. I want to complain about a few of the atheists.

I heard several announce “He’s a poe” or “he must be a poe”. Dear god, but I’m sick of that stupid word. It’s become a standard response to batty stupidity — lately, it doesn’t matter how ordinary a comment is or who said it or how well verified it is — there’s always someone in the crowd who has to show off how insightful or cynical they are by declaring that it must be a pretense.

Look, people, we live in a country with Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Joseph Farah as prominent media sources; where Akin and Broun and Jindal get elected to high office; where every newspaper is full of common folk writing in to complain about those gays or those socialist commies or those egghead liberals. There is nothing unlikely or unbelievable about a down-home ministry that announces you’ll go to hell for believing in science. Bat-buggering bullshit is routine.

Declaring something to be a “poe” is a minimizing tactic; it’s a way to pretend that a real problem doesn’t exist. Are you really going to try to delude yourself and others into thinking that the Tea Party, Fox News, and the whole goddamned Repuclican party are an act put on by snarky liberals?

I’m hereby declaring the term “poe” to be anathema here. Don’t use it anymore. We don’t need denial, we need a confrontation with an ugly reality. I’ll probably start leaving rude remarks when I spot people throwing the term around in the comments from now on.

Oh, and for anyone who tries to mimic creationists, Republicans, or Christians as a clever mockery of their beliefs, if it isn’t clear what you’re doing, don’t try to dignify it as a “Poe” — all it is is bad fucking satire. Satire is a good and historically authentic method of speaking against power and foolishness, but if your schtick can’t be distinguished from the real thing, it’s contributing to the crapfest of idiocy we’re already drowning in, rather than opposing it.

So just stop it.

Bad argument #1: The Mormon exception

(This is part of a list of bad arguments I heard at the Texas Freethought Convention.)

Richard Dawkins gave a short speech on the Texas capitol steps, and for the most part, it was right on the money (or should I say, the Rmoney). He pointed out the bugfuck lunacy of Mormonism, and the patent charlatanry of its con-artist founder, Joseph Smith, as well as criticizing the media for failing to follow up on how nuts Romney’s religion is.

And he’s right! But some of his conclusions were, I think, a strategic error and simply wrong.

He came right out and said that he thought Mormonism was worse than the older, more established religions. That was the gist of his defense, actually: that Catholicism and Anglicanism and the various other protestant faiths were older, therefore less wacky…and that Mormonism’s clear mimicry of Elizabethan English, for instance, is a clear indicator that it was all fake. I don’t think that’s a good argument; I’d argue that Christianity could have been just as obviously bogus to a contemporary during its formation because they’d be as aware of its cultural context as we are of Mormonism’s origins; We benefit from sufficient proximity that the anachronisms leap out at us. But also, I think familiarity breeds complacency. Sure, Mormonism is nuts, but Catholicism is equally so. If you want deranged beliefs, I would merely cite the dogma of original sin — the pernicious doctrine that all people are born intrinsically evil, giving us a rich heritage of guilt and shame — as just as wicked and disturbing as anything Mormonism has come up with, and it’s far more pervasive, too.

Dawkins’ suggestion that the media should more thoroughly grill Romney on the details of Mormon belief has a germ of utility to it, but I don’t think he quite appreciates the depths to which the American electorate and the political process has sunk.

If you’re going to ask Romney if he believes Native Americans are descendants of the lost tribe of Israel, or whether Mormon underwear really stops bullets, or if Joseph Smith actually translated golden plates by staring at stones in a hat, you’re also going to have to ask Obama if he believes every line of the Nicene Creed. And when you start doing that, we atheists will be sitting smug and cocky laughing at both of them professing their faith, but the majority of the electorate will be seeing their religious identity challenged — and they won’t like it, not one bit.

Dawkins did mention Kennedy’s resolution of his Catholic problem, but I don’t think he really got it. Of course Kennedy’s views were shaped by his Catholicism, as Romney’s are by his Mormonism. But what Kennedy did was the only reasonable secular solution, since we can’t wipe our cultural influences out of our brains: he stated that he would not bring the papacy into the Oval Office, and would not entangle the institution of Catholicism with his duties as president. And that’s as much as we can ask of someone.

It is a question I’d like to see Romney smacked with, though. The Mormon church is a meddling church — witness their active interference in gay rights in states outside Utah, for instance. I’d like to see a clear statement from Romney that that scary office building just outside Temple Square in Salt Lake City will not be pulling the strings on a Romney presidency, and that he’ll be making political appointments on the basis of competence rather than religious cronyism (something Mormons are notorious for). Is he willing to stand up for the separation of church and state? Then I won’t make a big deal about his stupid beliefs.

And this goes for everyone. When the first atheist president is sworn in, I want evidence that he won’t simply be a puppet of the wizened, necrotic husk of David Silverman, Atheist Pope of 2060.