Oh, the things you’ll learn about “Science” from the interwebs!

Far right wing talk show host Kevin Swanson has a few things to say about birth control.

I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

I am astonished at the specificity of that citation: “some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists”. If anybody can track down the scientific paper in which that was published, I’ll not only post the verification, but I’ll reproduced the illustrations of the uteruses with the little tiny baby graveyards in them.

For now, this is the best I can do. I’ve taught histology, we even have slides of sections of uteruses (which, unfortunately, do not have the information about whether the source was a godless fornicator on the label), and this is what they look like.

Uterus

What Swanson said wasn’t science. It’s something different. I think the technical term is making shit up.

Stupid is as stupid does

One of the points made in that discussion yesterday is sometimes the “trolls” are just people trying to make an argument contrary to our own, and that they should have a right to express themselves; I was also told that dismissing disagreement as stupid or wrong was a prejudicial value judgement.

I would agree that there certainly are boundary conditions where that might be true; we’re looking at a continuum, not a sharp black and white world, where one side is uniformly bright and stellar and the other is dark and dim. But even on a continuum there are extremes; sometimes one side really is stupid.

Free speech is not an automatic good. Stephanie Zvan has done a fabulous job of documenting the tactical mode of some of our opponents, the ones who claim to dwell in “a bastion of the most free of free speech”, where they are totally free to say whatever they like, and where the shoddy operations of their lazy, slimy brains are openly exposed for all to see. These are the people who think the argument “YOUR FAT AND UGLY” is cogent, and who think spicing it up with a photoshopped image makes it more persuasive.

There’s a reason I automatically ban those people. They’re assholes, as they demonstrate over and over again.

Another really stupid argument from William Lane Craig

Craig is not one of the clever ones. He’s one of the glib, superficial ones, and he impresses a lot of superficial people. Here’s one of his latest, the Argument for God from Intentionality.

God is the best explanation of intentional states of consciousness in the world. Philosophers are puzzled by states of intentionality. Intentionality is the property of being about something or of something. It’s signifies the object directedness of our thoughts.

For example, I can think about my summer vacation or I can think of my wife. No physical object has this sort of intentionality. A chair or a stone or a glob of tissue like the one like the brain is not about or of something else. Only mental states or states of consciousness are about other things. As a materialist, Dr. Rosenberg [the interlocutor] recognizes that and so concludes that on atheism there really are no intentional states.

Dr. Rosenberg boldly claims that we never really think about anything. But this seems incredible. Obviously I am thinking about Dr. Rosenberg’s argument. This seems to me to be a reductio ad absurdum of atheism. By contrast, on theism because God is a mind it’s hardly surprising that there should be finite minds. Thus intentional states fit comfortably into a theistic worldview.

So we may argue:

1. If God did not exist, [then] intentional states of consciousness would not exist.

2. But intentional states of consciousness do exist!

3. Therefore, God exists.

The link is to a philosopher’s debunking, pointing out the obvious fallacies and some of the more subtle arguments against it from serious, non-superficial philosophers. It doesn’t bring up the first counter-argument that came to my mind, though.

We know what the physical nature of intentional states are; they are patterns of electrical activity in a network of cells with specific physical properties. We don’t know how to read that pattern precisely, but we can measure and observe them: stick someone in an MRI and ask them to think about different things or engage in different cognitive tasks, and presto, blood flows shift in the brain and different areas light up with different levels of activity. These are properties not seen in chairs or stones, which lack the neuronal substrates that generate these patterns.

Intentional states are ultimately entirely physical states; they are dependent on organized brain matter burning energy actively and responsively in different patterns. There is no evidence that they require supernatural input, so Craig’s first premise that these could not exist without supernatural input is not demonstrated.

One way to deal with a troll

John Scalzi had a troll infestation from someone he’s now calling the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit; Scalzi is one of those notoriously liberal egalitarian people, and RSHD would whip up his Racist Sexist Homophobic followers and send them off to rampage through Scalzi’s comment threads.

So what he’s done is announced that he’ll donate money to non-racist non-sexist non-homophobic non-dipshit organizations every time RSHD issues one of his calls to arms against Scalzi. He encouraged other people to join in: he now has pledges for $26,000, all going to organizations RSHD hates.

It’s very amusing. It probably won’t silence RSHD at all, but at least all the hate gets churned into dollars for good causes.

Actually, I know it won’t shut RSHD up, because it’s easy to find out who RSHD is. It’s Vox Day, or Theodore Beale, and Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit is an extremely accurate title for the guy.

I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into

At 4pm Eastern today, I’m getting into some kind of online discussion with these guys:

These are the questions we’re supposed to address:

  1. The role trolling has played in what the internet has become and what it will one day be (with the caveat that we must first define what a “troll” is).

  2. How free is our speech on the internet and how free should we expect it to be?

  3. Who should be behind determining how free our internet really is?

I’ve got a good idea of what I’ll be saying, but I thought I’d throw it out here and steal see what great ideas you all have.

Oh, and this will be a Google+ hangout, live streaming, all that, and they will be taking questions on youtube while it’s in progress.

Here’s the final video. For some reason, I didn’t get the invite, so I don’t show up until about 15 minutes in.