Bad arguments are bad arguments

Amidst all the chaos of the self-proclaimed atheist leaders exposing their flaws, it’s easy to forget that they’re right about atheism. There is no god. The arguments for god are pathetic and silly. Many religious beliefs are self-destructive and poisonous. I’ve been seeing a few articles lately that are basically gloating that atheism is dead or dying because Richard Dawkins said something stupid about women’s equality…but they ignore the fact that he also said many smart things about god-belief, and the regressive nature of one guy’s antipathy towards feminism does not discredit atheism, or provide any comfort to religious advocates. It’s also particularly ironic when Catholics wag a finger at a few atheists who are blinded by privilege, while studiously ignoring that one of the biggest threats to women’s rights in the western world has been Catholic doctrine.

But as far as arguments for religions go, Dawkins doesn’t matter, and neither do the criminal activities of the Catholic church. What matters on the topic of god-belief are the qualities of the arguments. and really, they are appallingly bad. I’m not talking about just the goofy crap that comes out of lackluster minds like that of a Hovind or a Comfort, but the Big Guns of religion, like Aquinas. They are impossible to take seriously, unless one is doped to the gills with bad theology.

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It’s not just astronomers

Add molecular biology to your list of fields that have a sexual harassment problem. A biologist at the University of Chicago (where only a quarter of the senior faculty are women, the article points out) has resigned in the midst of some damning accusations.

The professor, Jason Lieb, made unwelcome sexual advances to several female graduate students at an off-campus retreat of the molecular biosciences division, according to a university investigation letter obtained by The New York Times, and engaged in sexual activity with a student who was “incapacitated due to alcohol and therefore could not consent.”

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Clinton/Sanders expose American innumeracy

So Clinton and Sanders were in pretty much a dead heat in the Iowa caucuses yesterday, with Clinton edging out Sanders by a few votes. Now I’m watching people freak out over a couple of stupid facts.

  1. A few of the caucuses were settled by flipping a coin. Yes? So? The votes were tied. The rules require representatives to be selected. A coin flip is a fair way to settle which candidate will be represented, when there is a tie. I have no problem with using a chance distribution to decide, but some people are just horrified at this ‘primitive’ way of making a decision. How else do you propose to do it? Trial by combat?

  2. Most annoying are the people who are shocked that there were 6 precincts where there was a tie, and in all 6 the coin flip favored Clinton. Again, that’s to be expected, that occasionally you’ll get a run of consecutive identical results. It would be curious if you never got a run of 6. But now we’ve got all these reporters earnestly explaining trivial outcomes.

    The Iowa Democratic caucus vote count was so close last night that at least 6 precincts were decided by flipping a coin — an obscure procedure in the Iowa caucus bylaws. And in all 6 instances, the last remaining county delegate went to Hillary Clinton. Winning 6 coin tosses in a row is extraordinarily rare, and only has a 1.6 percent probability of occurring. As journalist Ben Norton explained, that’s broken down by calculating (1/2)^6, which is 1/64 — or 1.6 percent.

    This needed explaining? No wonder casinos and lotteries do so well — and no, that’s not an extraordinarily rare frequency.

    Maybe this is why so many people have difficulty grasping evolution. Small probabilities with many trials adds up to a significant likelihood.

  3. It is absurd to try and spin this into a ‘win’ for either side.

    If Bernie Sanders had won half of the coin flips and split the six county delegates three and three with Clinton, he would have finished at 698.49 delegates to Clinton’s 696.57, effectively giving him an Iowa victory. According to a live map of all Iowa precincts, Clinton has a razor-thin 0.3 percent lead over the Vermont U.S. Senator with 99.9 percent of precincts reporting.

    The race was close enough that it could wobble one way or the other on the basis of a couple of coin flips. As far as I’m concerned, it was a statistical tie, and I don’t care how many ifs you concatenate to shift it into an imaginary win for your favorite candidate.

Also, it was Iowa, and a primary. Who cares? We’ve got two Democratic candidates who are equally appealing to motivated voters in one state. This does not settle the election, and a good case could be made that it is completely irrelevant to the final outcome, which is going to hinge on far more variables.

I swear, watching pundits overanalyze this one result is almost as infuriating as the Republican slate. Stop it.

Jebus. Look at this headline at The Blaze: Hillary Clinton Has The Most Statistically Improbable Coin-Toss Luck Ever. NO IT’S NOT.

Why is Kasich still running?

I think it’s because he’s profoundly delusional. Here’s Kasich praising Pink Floyd and Roger Waters specifically.

But…but…but we know what Waters thinks of the Republican party.

I watch the workings of politics [in the US] and particularly the Republican Party. They work with the axiom that you can tell as many lies as you want – and often the bigger the better – and eventually they will believed.

Or this:

Because your electorate, and it’s only the Republican electorate that we’re taking about now, are kept entirely in the dark by a malignant mainstream media lead by Fox News, but closely followed by all the other talking heads that just want to kind of smile at you and toe the party line and never question anything seriously, especially about the United States or what it is and what its aspirations are or what it wants to be, except that it wants to be a major imperial power all over the world. You have bases in 135 countries, which is extraordinary, though nobody ever seems to question it.

You pour huge amounts of your national resources into the Pentagon and use it, basically, to push around the rest of the world and make yourself unpopular with everybody else. And nobody seems to address any of this. This is a silence hovering over this great nation, and I think it’s a silence that is about to be broken.

This is not to say he approves of the Democrats — he’s such a strong pacifist I imagine he looks on all American politicians with disgust. Have you seen Kasich’s positions on the military? I would like to see Waters’ response to an invitation from a Republican to get Pink Floyd back together again.

#UnMinnesotan

This ad was run in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I’m pretty sure it’s a damning example of what UnMinnesotans call the regressive Left.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a Minnesotan Pop, “Up North” and snow days all mean something to you. So do the values we’re raised with: everyday, sleeve-worn courage, goodness and kindness. Though we may be a soft-spoken bunch, we know better than to be silent or still in the face of bigotry shown to Muslims. Our fellow Minnesotans. Every intolerant social post, every prejudiced comment aimed at Muslims needs a response. Your response. We must lead people to a place of tolerance and understanding. We must come together as a diverse and vibrant community. Our values don’t take days off and neither should we. If you’re Minnesotan, you know this to be true. We know better. We can’t be tricked into betraying our values. It’d be so very, very un-Minnesotan of us.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a Minnesotan
Pop, “Up North” and snow days
all mean something to you.
So do the values we’re raised with:
everyday, sleeve-worn courage, goodness and kindness.
Though we may be a soft-spoken bunch,
we know better than to be silent or still in the face of
bigotry shown to Muslims. Our fellow Minnesotans.
Every intolerant social post,
every prejudiced comment aimed at Muslims
needs a response. Your response.
We must lead people to a place of
tolerance and understanding.
We must come together as
a diverse and vibrant community.
Our values don’t take days off and neither should we.
If you’re Minnesotan, you know this to be true.
We know better. We can’t be tricked into betraying our values.
It’d be so very, very un-Minnesotan of us.

Online Sudoku Workshop: A little trail of logic

As ever, even though it’s the very first in the series, Online Sudoku Workshop is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.

This is a strange turn, I’m sure. Gender and sudoku? Well, yes. But not yet. Mostly I’m doing this because it’s fun to talk logic and sudoku and just how exciting it is to learn new things, but I will use this as a metaphor in discussing gender later. Come for the sudoku, stay for the sudoku. Come back again later for the gender. If you’re only in it for the gender metaphor, this will certainly be too long for you. In fact, it’s too long for a single post. I’ll start my puzzle-solving with some of the puzzle already done, and still I have to break this up into 3 posts. [Don’t worry, though. If the merchandizing revenues are good enough, I’ll go back and do the prequels so you can see how we arrived at the point we’ll begin our exciting puzzle-solving together.]

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A calm, rational reaction to the Zika virus

Peter Doherty explains the likely outcomes of the Zika virus pandemic.

What we are seeing in the Americas is a classic “virgin soil” epidemic. Enormous numbers of people and mosquitoes are being infected, the virus is transmitting at a very high level, and there may be as many as 4×106 cases. Apart from affected neonates, all will likely recover, with increasing “background” immunity progressively limiting the number of new infections in subsequent years. The current molecular technology is such that making a protective vaccine should be technically straightforward, but the process of safety testing and evaluation could take several years.

…

The long-term prospect with Zika virus is that we will live reasonably comfortably with it, especially if there is a vaccine to protect women of reproductive age. The principal decision for responsible authorities, like National Governments in endemic areas and the WHO, is whether there is a case for fast-tracking, then funding, a vaccine to protect all young women. For the present, pregnant women are advised not to travel to these countries and, for those where this in not an issue, insect repellant also offers some protection against much nastier viruses like dengue and Chikungunya.

It’s spreading rapidly, and one contributor to that is the ridiculous attitudes of conservative Christianity, but this one, tragic as its consequences can be, isn’t the big pandemic that will kill us all. And the answer to it lies in natural properties of adaptive immunity and vaccines.