“it’s afraid!”

A big-mouthed bully is afraid!

Oh, sorry. Wrong video.

That’s Christopher Cantwell, an American Nazi, blubbering in fear because there might be a warrant out for his arrest over the mess in Charlottesville. He claims they have done everything in their power to keep things peaceful, by which he means that they went through all the paperwork for their anti-semitic, anti-black hate march…not that their intent was peaceful.

With a sneer in his voice, he whines about Chelsea Manning.

Chelsea Manning, this tranny fanatic, has a picture of himself — herself — talking about curbstomping Nazis, with a picture of this boot coming down on somebody.

You mean this?

Terrifying. Then, weirdly, he goes on and on about his gun.

If I was a violent guy you would have heard about it by now.

Oh, OK, I guess we would have, guy who has a page on his behavior at the SPLC.

[M]y goal here is to normalize racism, he explained to Hatewatch in one of two interviews for this profile. I’m going to make a commercial enterprise out of saying things that people want to make illegal. I’m going to make a whole fucking bunch of money doing it. Anybody who gets in my way is going to find themselves in a very long list of people who regretted underestimating me.

My proposal, and in all honesty, I’m still working out the details, has been to resort to force. For free men and women to forcefully defend themselves against agents of the State. To kill government agents who would otherwise use force against them, until their jobs simply become so dangerous that they seek other lines of work.

It’s the right thing to be concerned about the immigration, because you see these fucking hordes of unwashed religious fanatics pouring across borders with no resources just thinking that they’re going to collect welfare and fuck our women and fucking breed us put of existence. That makes me want to bash people’s skulls open, I understand.

I’m carrying a pistol, I go to the gym all the time, I’m trying to make myself more capable of violence.

And now he’s terrified, as terrified as the black people, the Hispanic people, the gay people, the transgender people, the Jews, all the people he has tried to terrorize.

Feels good. Cry some more.

And do turn yourself in to the police and clear up your status. I don’t think you’ll have any problems, you’re white.

It’s hard to distinguish two flavors of absurdity, though

This is just odd. From WorldNewsDailyReport, a clickbait fake news site (hence no link), comes a story a lot of people are repeating.

Petersburg, KY | A leading paleontologist claims he has found evidence linking homosexuality and the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Anthony Othman, a renowned paleontologist and leading curator at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, firmly believes homosexuality, and not an asteroid colliding with Earth as is commonly believed, was the main cause of the disappearance of the dinosaurs more than 66 million years ago.

His evidence? He claims to have found a group of velociraptors that are all male, and to have selected for homosexuality in iguanas and found they lost all interest in heterosexuality in 3 or 4 generations. All made-up nonsense.

But here’s what I found odd. There are no leading paleontologists working at the Creation “Museum”. There is no one named Anthony Othman working there. The picture at the top of the page is this one, on the left; the one on the right is a photo of creationist Mark Armitage:

So even Answers in Genesis is targeted by fake news!

Also obviously fake because no AiG spokesperson would say the dinosaurs lived 66 million years ago (the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, silly), and while they might hate homosexuality as much as this imaginary guy, they know the dinosaurs disappeared in The Flood, except for the few that were on the big wooden boat, who went extinct when medieval knights hunted them down.

Anjuli Pandavar is no longer part of our network

I have been receiving complaints from readers and other bloggers for months — and recent posts praising Fox News and blaming black Americans for racism were the final straw. We do have an ethos here, laid out plainly.

We are skeptics and critics of dogma and authoritarianism, and in addition, we recognize that the nonexistence of deities entails a greater commitment to human values, and in particular, an appreciation of human diversity and equality.

We are for feminism, against racism, for diversity, against inequity.

It’s a general sentiment, but if you can’t meet any of it, you don’t belong here. We’ve been agonizing over rejecting Anjuli Pandavar all summer long, and the consensus of the active members of the FtB community was that her continued presence was a betrayal of our principles.

Way to go, Baltimore

Quietly, in the dead of night, the city of Baltimore took down their confederate monuments. A statue of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was removed, as well as…

Other statues being removed included the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue, the Confederate Women’s Monument on West University Parkway and the Roger B. Taney Monument on Mount Vernon Place.

Wait — they had a monument to Roger Taney? This Roger Taney?

[African Americans] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.

What took so long, and why was such a slap in the face to American citizens put up in the first place?

They really are bullying cowards

So this is what happens when you confront nazis. They collapse.

Good grief. It’s just kind of a fun idea, being able to say ‘white power’. I love to be offensive, it’s all. What a pathetic child.

And then there’s this: Joe Love flies a Nazi flag from his home. A woman stopped and politely asked him about it; he starts ranting and insulting her. I guess he’s a big man when it’s a woman talking to him, but he changes his tune when a local newspaper contacted him.

Love says he bought the flag several years ago, but that he doesn’t believe in the symbolism Nazis attached to the swastika, the meaning most have of the flag in the decades since World War II.

That used to be a religious symbol in India until Hitler got ahold of it, Love said. A lot of people don’t know that… I agree with the symbol as it started out as a religious symbol. But as far as backing Hitler and being a white supremacist and Hitler, I’m not into that.

Oh, bullshit. Or should I say, chickenshit.

You can count on coal 24/7. You can’t always depend on the sun!

The coming eclipse is a sign of the unreliability of solar power, I guess. Kentuckians are planning to protest.

If you’re planning to visit Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to see the total eclipse of the sun on August 21, 2017, be prepared. Hopkinsville (a.k.a. Eclipseville) is globally recognized to be the epicenter of the eclipse. Hundreds of thousands of spectators will converge on the town to see it. Among them “Kentuckians for Coal” will be in the vanguard protesting the eclipse.

Kentuckians for Coal is an ad-hoc coalition of miners, union officials, family members and coal users created to defend the Kentucky coal industry against encroachment from renewable energy industries and from economic development initiatives aimed at lessening America’s dependence on coal. Kentuckians for Coal stands against the eclipse and those who worship it.

Hopkinsville is actually calling itself “Eclipseville” now, and apparently has a number of reasons to be proud of itself.

Hopkinsville, with a population of 33,000, has two other great claims to fame. One is as the birthplace of the world-renowned psychic Edgar Cayce. He made his home in Hopkinsville, and died there in 1945, after predicting the date of his own death. The other is the notoriously pagan annual celebration of extra-terrestrials, which commemorates a terrifying landing by space aliens in 1955, 62 years ago to the day, known as the Little Green Men Festival.

Awesome. It’s true: a nearby farm was the site of extraterrestrial invasion, or maybe, owls.

The press release takes pains to make Hopkinsville sound hellish for the day of the eclipse.

When more than 250,000 people descend on the town for four days in August, including busloads of Amish from Pennsylvania and rumored Arab royalty, hucksters will peddle overpriced souvenirs as area hotels jack up their room rates by 400%; gas stations run out of gas; and cell phone service crashes due to demand. Traffic jams, a run on available food, an invasion of prostitutes, and rowdy crowds will test the patience of both local residents and the extra law enforcement brought in to maintain order. In addition, there is the serious threat to spectators’ eyesight if they look at the sun without special eclipse-viewing glasses.

It’s going to be full of coal miners, too! Horrible, dirty coal-miners shaking their fists at the sun! I think I’ll pass.

That’s how it’s done

It made me laugh to see Jason Kessler, organizer of the Charlottesville hate march, get heckled so fiercely he had to run away.

Even better is watching the memorials to traitors come down.

It’s classic. Remember how everyone cheered when the statues of Lenin and Stalin were toppled, or the gleeful destruction of Saddam’s monuments? Only difference is that these Confederates were the losers who should never have had statues put up in the first place.

Tucker Carlson, xenophobic bigot and dumbass

I’m incapable of watching Tucker Carlson — it’s not just the dumb things he says, but that face he makes when someone he disagrees with says something smarter than he is. The knitted brows, the slightly parted lips, he looks like a yokel trying to puzzle out whether he likes this strange new experience, although he’s pretty sure he doesn’t.

But fortunately, some people do suffer through his shows to figure out what he’s doing, and it’s not pretty. It’s pure white supremacist bullshit, although he cunningly avoids coming right out and saying it. Instead of saying the 14 words, he just cusses out immigrants of all kinds and praises Western Culture, whatever that is.

The last few seconds are ironic. On this one issue, Bill O’Reilly was slightly better than Tucker Carlson (which is not to say that on other issues, he wasn’t worse). The Fox News audience is invariably drawn towards the very worst people.

Where’s my magical truth detector? I’m sure it’s somewhere in my lab.

Last week, Mary Beard was getting sneered at because she agreed that the Roman Empire was ethnically diverse, and that — gasp, shock horror — there were brown people living in ancient Britain. She’s still getting sneered at, of course, because one thing racists really hate is being told their prejudices aren’t empirical facts. But at least the silly contretemps stirred up some excellent responses.

Jennifer Raff summarizes the complexities of ancient DNA analysis, and also makes an important point: it takes a village. There isn’t one unambiguous perfect path to the Truth™.

Framing this issue as a debate between hard science and fuzzy humanities is simply nonsense. Reconstructing the past is a multidisciplinary effort, and I can’t think of a single geneticist who wouldn’t candidly admit to many limitations in our approaches. To get around these limitations, and to improve the collection and interpretation of our data, we work closely with collaborators in other disciplines: archaeologists, linguists, osteologists, specialists in stable isotope analysis, and yes, even historians. Perhaps instead of fussing about whether cartoon characters conform to our beliefs about how the ancient world should have been, our energies would be better spent in learning more about how it actually was.

Yes. One of the hallmarks of the current round of Nazi pseudoscience is their claim of far more certainty than we actually have, and insistence that genetics and molecular biology, which they don’t understand, offer perfect clarity on race. The only perfect clarity we have is that it’s a complicated muddle.

Massimo Pigliucci goes after the philosophy behind these biases, and offers a good explanation of scientism.

It’s a good thing Mr. Taleb was being polite, I hate to imagine what he’s like when he’s not. Of course, so far as I know, he is no rocket scientist either, and he also operates under a “structural bias.” We all do, there is plenty of empirical evidence (not to mention good philosophy of science, but of course that’s just part of the humanities, which lack intellectual rigor anyway) that everyone is affected by personal cognitive biases. Moreover, any organized enterprise — not just the academic study of history, but also the practice of statistics, or population genetics, or whatever — is affected by structural constraints and biases. That’s just another way of saying that no human being, or organized group of human beings, has access to a god’s eye view of the world. All we have is a number of perspectives to compare. Which is a major reason, as articulated by philosopher Helen Longino, to work toward increasing diversity in the sciences: many individually biased points of view enter into dialogue with each other, yielding a less (but still) biased outcome.

The mistake of scientism is to elevate scientific knowledge and data crunching to a level of certainty and competence they most definitely do not have, while at the same time dismissing every other approach as obsolete nonsense. But human knowledge and understanding are not zero sum games. On the contrary, they work best when we expand, rather than artificially or ideologically limit, our methods and sources of evidence. The scientistic game is foolish not just because it is incoherent (what statistical, empirical evidence do we have that scientism works? What does that even mean??), but because it is dangerously self-serving. It makes a promise on behalf of science that science cannot possibly maintain. And this in the midst of an already strongly anti-intellectual climate where half of the American public, for instance, rejects the very notion of global warming and does not believe in the theory of evolution.

It really bugs me to see prominent people spreading a cartoon version of what science is — whether it’s Pinker to now, Taleb — and continued progress in science demands that we explore multiple perspectives on the evidence, and try our best to shake ourselves out of our comfortable biases.