reasonable and humanistic

I find it hard to imagine something I’d want to do less than listening to a conversation between David Smalley and David Silverman, two awful people associated with the dying atheist movement. So I didn’t. Chris Johnson did, though, and came away with some of the choice wisdom of Silverman, who is considering voting for Trump because because of his position on race.

I don’t get upset when felons get the shit kicked out of them by cops
George Floyd was human garbage. It’s not such a terrible thing that he’s dead
My point was that all people are not of equal worth, and I care a Lot less if a felon dies in the act of committing a crime than an innocent or child. That is reasonable and humanistic.
Denying this is not humanism because it protects felons.

I was paired with David Silverman in a session at Oxford of a humanist conference, and I witnessed the reaction of the audience to his tirade. Let me just say — David Silverman is no humanist, and doesn’t have the slightest understanding of the philosophy of humanism. To say that humanism puts the value of human life on a variable scale in which you get to judge whether someone is allowed to live or die is not humanism. Furthermore, describing the actions of leftists in protesting racial inequity and police criminality to be “race-baiting” to a degree that you’ll vote for Donald Jackoff Trump does not make you a humanist — it makes you a racist, plain and simple. Those are not synonyms.

I wasted a decade of my life on this terrible gang of atheist assholes, why do they keep oozing up out of the muck to remind me? I have this dread that I’m either going to get killed by COVID or by the Republican lackwits that surround me here in Red Minnesota soon enough, and that’s what I’ll be thinking of as I go down. It’s depressing to be mired in regret at being both an atheist and an American, neither of which I can change.

Somebody else’s legal drama

I’m weirdly happy to see that I’m not alone in suffering from weird obsessed narcissists abusing the legal system, especially since I’ve never gone through anything this twisted. Lindsay Ellis explains the hot mess of a lawsuit over unbelievably sexual/violent fan fiction, and how someone who claimed to have invented “wolf rape heterosexual erotica fiction” sued to protect her “intellectual” “property”. It’s an hour long. It requires that long to unravel it all.

I’d never heard of the Omegaverse, let alone read any, and guess what? I am totally cured of any curiosity about it!

Atheists & Christians learn to tolerate the right kind of hate

This does seem to be the new axis upon which YouTube spins: Heartwarming: Christian and Atheist YouTubers Used to Hate Each Other But Now Agree the White Race is Under Attack.

Most people think Christians and Atheists get along like cats and dogs! But these two YouTubers are smashing stereotypes by showing you can get along with someone who has different views on religion, so long as you both think America is for Europeans only.

Oh, wait — there’s another axis, atheists joining hands with Christians to hate trans people. That one has led to many a schism recently.

But…it’s a satire site! Hasn’t anyone told them that satire is dead?

I will judge a book by its cover

And this cover reaches out with a supple and sexy tentacle to wrap around my neck and draw me in closer, where it whispers “buy me.” It helps that the author is very, very good, so I can trust the content will be excellent, but oh what a hook.

Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis will be available on 22 September. You can get in line now.

Finally! A book that will truly understand the male condition.

This is just the tackiest pseudoscientific ménage à trois ever, someone turn off the soap opera

Perhaps you’ve forgotten, but the Discovery Institute, that spider hole of bad science and pseudo-scientific religious apologetics, is actually just another conservative think-tank that milks rich capitalists for funding. The DI was founded by George Gilder and Bruce Chapman — Phil Johnson was just the charismatic Christian babbler who was the front — and from the beginning, it was really all about promoting conservative values, supply-side economics, and Republican politics. The creationism was the attention-getting garnish on the story, but just one side. They also have a wing that focuses on policy issues in the Pacific Northwest, the Discovery Institute Center on Wealth and Poverty. Aren’t you cheered to know that they’re going to take the same insight and detailed appreciation of knowledge that they brought to biology, and have been focusing it on economics?

Recently their representative made an appearance on Tucker Carlson (oh god the idiocy is converging) to opine on the protests in Seattle and Portland. OK, the topic is definitely within their geographic remit, but no, a far-right arch-capitalist money-grubbing institution crusted with a patina of religiosity is not the authority we need right now, even if Fox News thinks so.

But the real amusement here is to see who else is jumping in bed with them: Quillette!

Yep, the Institute of Advanced Craniometry, Phrenology, and Evolutionary Psychology, AKA Quillette, is absolutely jubilant about joining forces with the Discovery Institute’s “Kill the Poor” department to find common cause with Fox News and the poor little rich boy, Tucker Carlson. Really, I’m not at all surprised. In this hell year, it’s exactly the right little touch of flavor to enhance the whole experience.

Oy, so much work

Just so you know, this is a terrible week (has there ever been a good one?). I’m doing this big deal faculty seminar at my university tomorrow, which has my anxiety jacked to 100, and I’m giving an exam on Friday, increasing student anxiety, and I have students who have been exposed to COVID and are quarantined, and I haven’t been able to go out spidering as much as I would enjoy. It also didn’t help to have FtB suddenly crash out. Things are happening, though. We’re making real progress on getting the apparatus for some behavioral studies running, and even have a backlog of data piling up from nightly time-lapse runs. Here’s another one.

We’re slowly clearing away bottlenecks. We’re still uploading data as we collect it on our Raspberry Pi to a Google Drive (that was about 2 gigabytes of frames for that video), and then downloading it to our personal computers. One catch is that Mac makes me unhappy again, choking on the download. Linux makes me happy because it has absolutely no problem smoothly downloading data from Google, but then it makes me unhappy because it doesn’t have the sweet easy video tools I want. But then Mac makes me happy because it does, so I just use a flash drive to move the data to my Mac, which can instantly convert everything. So the data is flowing from Raspberry Pi → Google Drive → Linux → Mac, and then to YouTube. It’s nice to see everyone getting along, but if we had a way to bypass one step of that pathway, I’d probably take it. Especially since at some point I might want to have a couple of Raspberry Pis chugging away at observations.

Yay! We live again!

Our glitch that killed the site for over a day has been corrected, and we’re back online. Of course, that means I have to find time this late in the day to create content.

Probably doable. I usually find something to say, although right now I’m all distracted with saying stuff about cell biology to students.