What else would you expect from royalty?

For some reason, this Oglaf cartoon seems particularly appropriate today.

Maybe an institution built around the notion of an intrinsic inherited superiority, which raises its members in a warm bath of entitlement and privilege, isn’t the best structure for producing an enlightened leadership? We should expect the products of such an upbringing to be, naturally, self-serving bigots?

I don’t know why that came to mind today.

(By the way, that Oglaf cartoon is a two-parter, but page 2 culminates in someone getting a good consensual pegging, as Oglafian humor tends to do.)

The banality of Jordan Peterson

Psst, wanna read a review of Jordan Peterson’s new book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life? It’ll spare you the trouble of reading the whole thing.

Russia got Stalin and Dostoevsky. Who’s Canada’s most dangerous thinker? Professor Dad over here, yelling up the stairs about William Blake and the “overwhelming mystery of Being” and, hey, would it kill you kids to clean up after yourselves once in a while? Some of us have tenured jobs to go to.

This disconnect between the way Peterson is advertised and what he in fact writes is the most deflating thing here. If this is what the enemy looks like to you, you’re going to have to find a new war. This one is too boring to fight.

That’s the impression I got from his first popular book, too — it’s a lot of trite, boring trivialities recited as if they were Deep Thoughts, and what needs to be fought isn’t Peterson, but the shallow wave of ignorance rippling among his devotees.

This requires a lot of explaining, and even, God help us, some poetry. The ratio of sociology-term-paper-gobbledygook to English runs at roughly 2:1, yet we are introduced to “the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates.” This is deep thinking slimmed down for people who aren’t totally sure whether Socrates was the toga guy or the gyro guy.

Here are his 12 new rules:

  1. Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.
  2. Imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that.
  3. Do you not hide unwanted things in the fog.
  4. Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
  5. Do not do what you hate.
  6. Abandon ideology.
  7. Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.
  8. Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible.
  9. If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely.
  10. Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship.
  11. Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.
  12. Be grateful in spite of your suffering.

I do not need to read the book to know that that is incoherent garbage. It’s like being served up a load of bad fortune cookies.

Like a meteor!

David Silverman’s fall has been spectacular. A few years ago, he was running the US’s largest atheist organization with panache — he was not uniformly beloved, but he had influence and a loud voice and was shaking things up. He was the face of atheism. He was regularly on Fox News, punching back at the buffoons running that crapshow. He was the brash, arrogant American at international conferences. Top o’ the world, Ma!

Then it is discovered that he’s using his position to pressure women into having sex with him.

Boom, that was it. He lost his job, he lost his family, he lost his platform, they aren’t inviting him on Fox News anymore. If he hadn’t been such a terrible abuser, I might be feeling some pity for him, just because the contrast was so stark. And now look what he is reduced to: desperately looking for affirmation from Republicans, who are mostly far-right Christian Evangelicals any more, and moaning about how so few atheist organizations want anything to do with him.

And now, in the name of skepticism, he is defending Donald Trump, trying to suggest that he didn’t actually incite an insurrection, because he didn’t literally use the words “storm the capital”. This is pathetic. You know, Hitler didn’t ever actually say out loud, “Round up all the Jews and murder them,” either. It’s the effect and the actions that count.

As a former friend to David Silverman, I would say…David, snuffling about in the garbage bin is not the way to regain honor and respect, but is only a way to foul yourself further. I know you want to make a comeback to some degree, but aligning yourself with Trump Republicans is not the path. You are especially not going to ever acquire the regard of humanists, intellectuals, progressives, and the kind of people who think all genders and races are equal. You are aligning yourself with bigots, racists, misogynists, and the worst kind of Christians.

Further, I would add that you’ve made no amends and obviously haven’t accepted that your past actions were wrong, or you wouldn’t be associating with the kind of people who would assure you that your abuse of power and treatment of women was appropriate and right, and that that kind of behavior isn’t a major obstacle to their acceptance of you, personally. In other words, hanging out with ignorant rat bastards doesn’t make you less of an ignorant rat bastard.

This whole mess…if they made it into an opera, I’d say it was a little too overblown, melodramatic, and histrionic.

No spiders today 😢

The sun is shining! It’s warm outside! My lab spiders are busily constructing new webs! But I have vowed that I shall get completely caught up on grading my introductory biology class, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development. Yes, I shall clear that nagging notification in Canvas that I have this one long assignment to complete grading.

Then, tomorrow, by Grabthar’s Hammer, I shall get totally caught up on Genetics grading! Indeed, it shall be done. I want to have one day with no pending grading left to do. On that day I shall wallow in spiders all day long.

And then I will assign more homework. It never ends.

But for now, yeesh but it looks nice out there, like I ought to strip down to shorts and a camera bag and dive into some tick-infested brush, or something fun like that.

That’s how you do it

I am lukewarm on Biden, but I have to say this: he was really smart in his choice of press secretary. Jen Psaki is a star.

You would think a journalist would know better than to claim “a lot of Americans are saying” — especially when it turns out she has her notes in front of her that translates “a lot of Americans” into one stupid, dishonest, inept and particular American.

And her name was…Karen?

Way to lean in hard into the stereotypes, Karen from Texas. She has written a two-part column for the Orange Leader, a newspaper in Texas, and the editor accepted it, which tells you the paper has no standards.

It’s interesting because I’m sure that if you asked her, she would tell you that she worked hard on this essay, doing lots of “research”, or rather, her idea of research. I can tell how she approached it: she started with an a priori commitment to the idea that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, fired up Google, and searched for stories that affirmed her belief, and then packaged up a list of anecdotes and sent it in. This is not research. That’s not how any of this works.

Every semester I get assigned a group of students to shepherd through a senior thesis assignment. I always tell them the first thing to do is ask a question, and that the purpose of their research is to explore the world of potential answers that have been discussed in the scientific literature, and compose a synthesis of the information from quality sources to suggest the most likely answer. Along the way, they are supposed to discuss how those answers were reached and assess the methods used.

For instance, if Karen were to phrase this as “Did dinosaurs and humans live at the same time?”, well, it’s a silly question because that’s been definitively answered with a strong “no”, but if it were asked sincerely and she reviewed the breadth of the good literature honestly, she might learn something. She did not. All of her “research” was focused on gleaning the minority response of “yes”, and she never cared that she only got that answer from low quality sources at the bottom of the barrel, and she doesn’t even try to analyze how they reached their conclusions.

I include the whole thing so you can see what I mean — it’s a litany of assertions that she has compiled, all of which support her beliefs, not one contrary perspective among them.

I believe that Dinosaurs walked this earth but not 140 million years ago like scientist claim.

Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, according to the 2010 University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

The question was asked “Did humans live at the same time as the dinosaurs?” Three in ten Texas voters agree that they did live at the same time; 41 percent disagree, and 30 percent don’t know.

Evangelical Christians make up approximately 25% of the U.S. population. A majority of them think the Bible should be read literally and that evolution is false.

In Kentucky there is a Creation Museum, which promotes a very specific version of this belief, which holds that God made the universe in six 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago. (A lot of Christians say 6,000 to 10,000 years). And yes, they have dinosaurs in this creation museum.

[An appeal to popularity only tells me that the Texas educational system is bad.]

According to the Hindustan Times on March 2, 2021, “Scientists have unearthed in Argentina’s Patagonian wilderness; fossils of what may be the oldest-known member of the dinosaur group known as titanosaurs, that includes the largest land animals in Earth’s history”.

They say it is a group of long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs, and is supposed to be 115 feet. They do state the skeletal was incomplete, but they haven’t finished digging it up since it was just recently found.

Many Scientist have poured cast of missing bones and constructed an animal, only to put it in a museum and call it factual.

Most people are not refuting the fact that there were dinosaurs, but they refute the fact that they didn’t live with humans.

[Inconsistent. She says she believes dinosaurs existed, but then she casts doubt on the one story about finding a dinosaur fossil that she cites. Why don’t you accept the reality of this fossil, Karen?]

I recently watched a video on dinosaurs, and a school teacher of Science was the one sharing the facts. But this Science teacher got it right. He stated that dinosaurs waked the earth with man. How else would they know what pictures to draw on cave walls that look exactly like dinosaurs? They have found drawings of Woolly Mammoths, Triceratops and men, drawn together fighting.

This is a classic hunter, posing with a 10-point deer these days, showing off his trophy, except they didn’t have cameras then.

[She watched a video. By whom? This sounds like a Kent Hovind story, and no, he is not a credible source. This is all vague and poorly sourced, but I’ll quote the Smithosonian’s assessment of one set of supposed dinosaur pictograms:

While certainly the most prominent, the supposed sauropod was not the only dinosaur carving creationists thought they saw on the bridge. Three other dinosaur depictions have been said to exist, but Senter and Cole easily debunked these, as well. One of the “dinosaurs” was nothing but a mud stain; a proposed Triceratops was just a composite of petroglyphs that do not represent animals, and what has been described as a carving of Monoclonius was nothing more than an enigmatic squiggle. There are no dinosaur carvings on Kachina Bridge.

Or you can read this analysis of a supposed pterosaur painting published in Science. Sorry, Karen, these don’t hold up.]

In 600 BC, under the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar, a Babylonian artist was commissioned to shape reliefs of animals on the structures associated with the Ishtar Gate. Many centuries later, German archaeologist Robert Koldewey stumbled upon the gate, and was rediscovered in 1899.

The animals appear in alternating rows with lions, fierce bulls, and curious long-necked dragons (Sirrush). The lions and bulls would have been present at that time in the Middle East, but on what creature did the ancient Babylonians model the dragon? Koldewey believed that the Sirrush was a portrayal of a real animal and in 1918, he proposed that the dinosaur Iguanodon was the closest known match to the Sirrush.

Both the description there, and the image on these walls, which are now displayed in a Berlin Museum, appear to fit a sauropod dinosaur.

[I’ve seen paintings of the Balrog. Does that make it real? Ancient art illustrates all kinds of chimeras, centaurs, mermaids, dog-people, etc. Is this evidence that they actually exist, or that humans have an imagination?]

In Glen Rose, Texas there are huge dinosaur tracks in the limestone. I’ve been there, and have walked in those tracks. There are man-tracks in the limestone as well. The historical plaque states the tracks were formed 100 million years ago which is incorrect, but they do recognize them as dinosaur tracks.

What they don’t recognize is the man tracks in the same limestone? As a matter of fact, there are three different types of dinosaur tracks located there.

[The man-tracks are fakes.]

Next week we will look at Job, and how God tells Job to behold these mighty creatures. How could Job behold these mighty creatures if Job had not seen them? We will also talk about why this is important in the Christian realm.

[Behold! The starship USS Enterprise! How can you behold that if it does not have material, physical reality?]

Yeah, I don’t think she made a reasonable case there, but it is a fairly representative example of creationist “research”.

Mark your calendars for this Friday

The Ethical Society of St Louis is holding a free online event:

From some of the insurrectionists who laid siege to the US Capitol, to the angry politics of conservative leaders like Senator Josh Hawley, Christian nationalism is on the rise in America. But what exactly is this dangerous ideology; what is its relationship to mainstream Christianity; and how can we face the threat it poses to our democracy and our communities?
ZOOM MEETING ID: 384 422 5785
Join the Ethical Society of St. Louis and Center for Freethought Equality to learn from a panel of distinguished experts who will help us understand–and confront–the threat of Christian nationalism.
Panelists:
– Dr. Sabrina Dent, Senior Faith Adviser at Americans United for Separation of Church and State;
– Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism; and
– Amanda Tyler, Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty

I’ve heard Stewart speak, and she’s very good. I’ll look forward to getting the perspectives of the others. Friday at 7pm Central, hope to see you there!

The spider routine

In case you were curious, here’s the boring routine for maintaining a colony of cute little Parasteatoda juveniles. Teenagers! Always demanding your time.

Right now I’ve got a sink full of dirty spider containers. I’ll have to get those cleaned up this week.