It’s 7:30am, I’m about to plunge deep into the twin cities, and at 9am I’ll be live on KTNF 950am, Progressive Radio, and Atheists Talk. Wake up to some sweet, sweet heresy…or roll over and snuggle up to a loved one while my voice enters your ears and does strange provocative things to your brain.
Or don’t. These things are archived somewhere on the Minnesota Atheists site, so you could just sleep through the whole thing and catch up at a less bracing hour.
They’re everywhere. I hate them. There are entire networks dedicated to creating goddamned lists, trusting in the human compulsion to go through each entry in the list…which are usually on separate pages, with separate ads, all calculated to increase advertising clicks. And at the end, they’ll present you with a list of more lists, with provocative titles, and they try to get you on the obsessive mindless click trail. They’re evil, manipulative, and almost always vapid. They’re the slot machines of the web. I’m looking at you, AlterNet, Salon, Huffpo, Gawker, whatever — you’re all padding miniscule content and increasing the noise level on the internet.
Even sites that are fun play the devious SEO game. The Oatmeal is one of the worst. I’m not talking about the content, I’m condemning the psychological trickery of the presentation.
The latest example that got me was on Salon: it’s an article titled “9 scientific facts about breasts”; it was originally on AlterNet as “The 9 weirdest facts about boobs”. Notice the linkbait title? (Linkbait that worked, by the way.) And as usual, when you actually read the article, it’s nonsense through and through.
Here are the 9 “facts”.
Poor men like big breasts while financially secure men prefer smaller breasts.
Simplistic reductionist drivel which regards people by a single parameter and draws decisive conclusions from it. Source: Psychology Today. Anytime you see “science” presented in Psychology Today, just ignore it and throw the magazine in the trash. It’s a garbage source, a kind of pseudoscientific Daily Mail.
Hungry men desire big breasts while satiated men prefer a smaller chest.
More of the same. Source: Psychology Today.
Fuck you, Psychology Today.
Men not interested in fatherhood find large breasts less attractive.
An evolutionary psychology study based on asking 67 college men about their preferences. In Psychology Today. Goddamn, Psychology Today, but you suck.
Squeezing breasts may prevent cancer.
Not from Psychology Today! An actual scientific source! COMPLETELY MISINTERPRETED AND MISREPRESENTED. There’s this thing called contact inhibition, and cells also respond to distortion with changes in their cytoskeleton that can cause changes in activity. This study was done on cultured cells, confining them tightly with an artificial matrix. It has no relationship at all to the mechanical factors in squeezing breasts.
Women who get breast implants are three times more likely to commit suicide.
OK, this is one I can believe. It’s based on a statistical analysis of women who’ve undergone plastic surgery and committed suicide.
What it means, though, is the question. Women with self-esteem problems that try to solve them with surgery are more prone to suicidal thoughts? Women compelled by financial burdens to acquire more appeal by breast augmentation are more prone to suicide than economically secure women? Who knows. You’re not going to find out on a blitz through a link farm!
Sexist men preferlarge breasts.
British white men showed cartoons of breasts have a preference. Whoa, I never saw that one coming.
Reported in the Huffington Post. Fuck you too.
Bras accelerate sagging.
Based on one 15-year old study that has not, as far as I can discover, been replicated, women who stopped wearing bras saw “their nipples lifted on average seven millimetres in one year in relation to the shoulders”. Strangely, while I was easily able to find 23 papers in the databases which had Jean-Denis Rouillon as an author, none of them say anything about bras or breasts. Exercise physiology, yes; massive studies applying calipers to hundreds of women’s breasts, no.
Men who like small breasts prefer a submissive partner.
“You may get the psychological hint that she’s not trying to compete with other women who have larger breasts, and therefore she’ll be loyal to you. Or maybe the very first girl you had a crush on had small breasts, and if she constructed your earliest example of what’s sexy, her memory may still lead you to find small-breasted women exciting.” Barf.
Published in Men’s Health. There’s another one to toss on the fire.
Staring at boobs extends a man’s life by five years.
A discredited urban legend, and the article admits it. They knew the story was garbage, but hell, no one will care…throw it in the list.
“Clearly, not all online “scientific studies” are authentic or even convincing, for that matter,” they say.
Well, duh. And this article is an example.
Join me in vowing to never again follow a listy link trail. Just say “no”. Recognize that they’re very, very bad and represent the worst of manipulative SEO tricks.
Also, unsubscribe from Psychology Today, Men’s Health or any of these ghastly pop psych and trendy “health” magazines. They’re lying to you.
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
Tomorrow! At 9am Central! I’ll be interviewed on Atheists Talk radio about The Happy Atheist.
One warning: in order to get to the radio station on time, I’m leaving Morris at 5am and driving across the state. Happy, my ass…this might be the morning of the grumpy atheist.
Alex Gabriel is deploring the use of euphemisms to mask our desires, and reading it reminded me of my one gay date.
This was ages ago, in 1979, in Eugene, Oregon. I was a fresh new graduate student, living all by myself (I wasn’t married yet) in a strange new town. For socializing, I fell in with a bad crowd: grognards. There was a group of people that met once a week to play wargames.
This was in the days before everyone had computers. I’m talking paper maps, cardboard chits, dice and tables of numbers. That’s how old I am.
Anyway, one evening I was teamed up with a new guy. We were the Russians, trying to hold the line near Smolensk, against the invading Nazis. Our opponents were a pair of grim veterans of the gaming community who were nearly perfectly silent the entire time, carefully and precisely setting up their panzers, while we were just having a good time, chatting and laughing while we were shuttling masses of ill-trained farm boys in box cars to hold the line in unruly ranked masses. We were slaughtered. Sorry, Russia!
But it was just a game, we had fun, I was mainly there to get to know people and have someone to talk to, and my partner was about my age, another student, and we had a lot in common.
Afterwards, he invited me to the cafe downstairs. For coffee.
I know. I was naive. I said sure — I was enjoying our conversation.
We talked for an hour or two, it was getting late, but we were getting along grandly. And then when the bill came, he swept it up and paid for both of us. That was odd, I thought, as my brain slowly began to make associations and recognize that this situation seemed strangely familiar.
And then he said, “My apartment is just around the corner, would you like to come up for a bit?” and it all suddenly sank in. There were alarm bells going off in my head, my ponderous brain was slowly waking up and thinking, “oh, yes, that’s why this is so familiar, only last time I was sitting in his chair, and the person in my chair was a young lady.” I was in a panic.
Not because my friend had done anything wrong. He was a nice fellow and he’d been sending me signals all night long, and I was the stupid one who failed to recognize them, and here I’d gone and led this pleasant young man along. I felt awful because I had missed all the cues.
I stammered out something about having to go home and get a good night’s sleep, my girlfriend from Seattle was coming down to visit (I really did have a girlfriend in Seattle! But she wasn’t actually going to visit any time soon.) It was awkward for both of us.
You know what was worst about this, though? He was polite, he showed no disappointment, but when I bumped into him a few times afterwards, he was civil but we never got into a good conversation again — I think he felt a little embarrassed, too, and he might easily have misread my clumsiness as distaste. And he was a good guy, I liked him and enjoyed our one gay date, and we could have been good friends.
It was an opportunity lost because signals were misunderstood. And you know, it also struck me that many women who have the potential to be my good friends could be feeling exactly what I felt that night — that good company can be made awkward by unreturned desire, and that while there’s nothing wrong with desire, there’s also nothing wrong with lacking it, while sharing other interests.
Ray Comfort has been doing a great job of stirring up his minions on twitter, who, without exception, seem to be as ignorant as he is. I already mentioned one, Republican Mom, who combines dismal stupidity with chipper smugness, but there are others. And they seem to be going after everyone with a reputation for defending evolution. I’m not feeling besieged, though: it’s more like a swarm of fluff.
They’re also going after Carl Zimmer (and a bunch of the names he mentions are familiar — there aren’t that many of them, but they’re all really noisy and each one is peppering lots of people with the stupid). He’s now written a very nice post explaining their error.
Here’s what creationists like Comfort always do to deny evolution: they demand an example of a new feature evolution, of evolution in action. Then we give them one (we have many) in some species of bacterium or fish or whatever. They ignore it (seriously, they promptly wave it away and pretend that what we’ve told them isn’t what they asked for), and immediately turn to all the other traits of the organism that are still unchanged, and announce, “Well, it’s still a bacterium.”
It’s infuriating. Here’s a single-celled organism that evolved two tails; “it’s still a single-celled organism.” Here’s a fish that evolved armor plating; “it’s still a fish.” Here’s a fruit fly that evolved a whole new mating signal; “it’s still a fruit fly.” Notice what’s common in every case: the conscious denial of what you just told them. It’s not just ignorance, it’s willful ignorance.
There’s no way around this game. They demand something that evolution does not predict, and claim its absence falsifies evolution. If I had an experiment in which a population of single-celled bacteria evolved into a multi-cellular mouse while recorded by a video camera (which would falsify all of our evolutionary theories, by the way), they’d ignore the miracle and say, “Well, they’re still both made of cells, aren’t they? It’s still cells.”
Once upon a time, a population of apes evolved an upright, bipedal stance — but they still had hairy ape bodies and binocular vision and grasping hands — they were still apes, but they were on the long road to us. And we are still apes with a host of shared attributes with chimps and gorillas and orangutans. When you see Ray Comfort and he denies that he is an ape, point out that by his “they’re still just X” argument, he has scapulae and hair follicles and a liver and jaws and an autonomic nervous system just like a chimp, and if he’s going to deny the evolved differences, he’s still just a chimpanzee. He’s still got a spine, just like a fish, so he’s still just a fish. And he’s bilaterally symmetric, just like a worm, so he’s still just a worm.
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
In case you can’t tell, that’s a Cthulhoid me careening through the cosmos on a space hopper.
Yesterday, Martin Manley turned 60, and killed himself. Before he did so, he left a long, indexed web site with answers to any questions people might ask. He made the decision rationally: he despaired at the state of the world, particularly the violence and bloodshed, and decided that he’d just end it while he was still able to do so. (In case you’re wondering, no, he wasn’t an atheist.)
I have to respect his decision — it was his to make. When I look at his reasons, though, I think…he’s right, there is a lot of misery in the world, and it’s not going to end soon, but there’s also a lot of beauty and promise. I guess personally I’d see that as good enough reason to keep living. It wasn’t enough for him.
It must be Ray Comfort Day on twitter or something, because he has his followers whipped up into a fine froth. Among the recent noisemakers was someone called Republican Mom (I already dislike her) who said this to me:
The atheist scientists are richer than Ray is silly little boy! Big business evolution is! $$
Then I did nothing, but someone else looked it up. In case you’re curious, here’s Ray Comfort’s worth in 2008. I’d have to say he’s doing quite a bit better financially than I am.
