Atheists for Liberty flying their colors

Atheists for Liberty, that horrid far-right reactionary organization, is now campaigning at CPAC. At long last, David Silverman (he’s on their advisory board) has got his wish, finding a front that will support his dream of an atheism that reeks of conservative values. Take a look at the books they are selling!

Those authors are all on their board of advisors, except Hitchens, who is dead. Also on board: Ron Lindsay, to my disappointment. They seem to be recruiting anyone who shows the slightest right-wing tendencies. I wonder why they haven’t invited me to join their board?

Also no surprise: they’ve gone anti-vax. Their argument is that there are religious exemptions, and rather than working to end them, they want to expand them to include atheist exemptions.

Hisss, boo

It wasn’t easy becoming a nasty wicked atheist…oh, who am I kidding. It was really, really easy. Obvious. Barely an inconvenience even. This short video premieres tonight at 6pm Central, follow the chat on YouTube. Bring rotten fruit and vegetables to pelt the ungodly.

Transcript down below, for those who like to read.

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Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb

There’s a new movie in town. Batman! The first Batman movie I saw was the 1966 version with Adam West. I thought it was wonderful. Still do.

Will this new one be as good? The second one I saw was in 1989, with my 5 year old son in tow.

The boy liked it, I enjoyed it, despite the controversy over casting Michael Keaton, he was excellent. It was grimmer, though.

There have been many Batman movies ever since, and they seem to demonstrate a terrible entropy, getting darker and grimmer and less enjoyable. It seems to be a trend.

I think I’m going to skip this one. The other movie playing in the Morris Theater is something called Dog. It looks rather less gritty and dark and grim and bleak. I might just go see that.

Three stupid sources ought to be an automatic rejection

I shouldn’t have even started drilling down to the source. I started at Answers in Genesis, a mistake I know, but at least the ridiculed (for the wrong reasons) the next article in the chain, which was in The Daily Mail. Here’s the Daily Mail headline:

Hey, how about if you demonstrate the existence of intelligent space-faring aliens before you start speculating about their motivations? But they’ve got a scientist who’s doing the speculating, and the Daily Mail loves scientists who agree with their biases.

Sci-fi films and TV shows have routinely depicted a brutal race of aliens visiting Earth in their spaceships and enslaving unfortunate Earthlings.

But according to one expert, extraterrestrial life may actually be too scared of ‘dangerous’ and ‘violent’ humans to want to come here.

Dr Gordon Gallup, a biopsychologist at the University of Albany, argues that humans are ‘dangerous, violent and ceaselessly engage in endless bloody conflicts and war’.

How do you become an expert in alien biopsychology, I’d like to know. We’re about to bottom out, though, since we’re about to learn where he published these claims.

Dr Gallup has presented his argument in an open access paper published in the Journal of Astrobiology this month.

Oh god. AiG, the Daily Mail, and the Journal of Astrobiology? Is this Dumpster Diving Friday or something? Have mercy. Here’s the abstract for the paper.

We evaluate claims for extraterrestrial intelligence based on the logic behind assertions such as the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. To assess intelligence elsewhere in the universe we outline two of the principle scientific claims for intelligence on Earth. One involves the idea that intelligence involves working out the reasons for our own existence. The other involves self-awareness and the capacity to make inferences about what others know, want, or intend to do. The famous quote from Rene Descartes “I think; therefore, I am” needs to be revised to read “I am; therefore, I think.” Some of the conclusions we derive about intelligence include the idea that most species on planet Earth have clever brains but blank minds (no self-consciousness); humans are the only species where what you know could get you killed; if humans become extinct it is highly unlikely that human-like intelligence will re-emerge on this planet and the odds of human-like intelligence evolving on other worlds is infinitely small. However, if intelligence exists elsewhere in the universe it may not have revealed itself because humans are dangerous and are perceived as posing too great a risk.

I’d reject it out of hand for the blatant human exceptionalism and the false claims right there: most species on planet Earth have clever brains but blank minds (no self-consciousness). Most species on Earth don’t have brains, for one, but additionally, have you met my cat? Not very clever, but definitely full of herself and quite aware of herself. There are a lot of claims in this abstract that the author does not adequately justify in the remainder of the opinion piece (it is not a scientific paper).

Then, in the first paragraph of the introduction, he cites Rhawn Joseph three times. Ugh. He’s an affiliate member of the Panspermia Mafia, I think we’re done.

I couldn’t help myself. I took a quick look in the table of contents to see what ol’ Rhawn was up to now. He’s still poring over NASA’s Mars photos, drawing circles and arrows on them, to claim now that there are tube worms and crustaceans on Mars.

At least he’s got the Daily Mail and Answers in Genesis to continue pretending he has any credibility at all left!

Burly brawn doesn’t win wars anymore

Among the many things Ted Cruz would like everyone to forget is this tweet from this fall:

Right-wing media were orgasming over a Russian army recruitment ad which portrayed Russian soldiers as these manly masculine macho dudes, and were contrasting that with the tolerant, diverse American army. The word “woke” got thrown around a lot, in a disparaging way. A lot of Republicans weren’t embarrassed to show off their authoritarian views at that time.

Unfortunately, nothing has really changed. Now Ted Cruz is simultaneously saying we need to get tough on Russia, and blaming the Ukraine war on Biden.

A truly Russian-style government would have Cruz arrested instantly for criticizing the Maximum Leader. I don’t think he (and I) want to replicate Russian militarism.

Better to suffer with Shaun than with any more Rowling

Whoa, this is a long video, an hour and 45 minutes long. It’s worth it, though, and it’s not so much a video as a monologue, so you can just plug in your earbuds and listen as you get other work done, like I did.

Anyway, it’s Shaun talking about the Harry Potter universe. I’ve never much cared for Potter — I appreciated that it got my kids reading — but I struggled myself to get through just the first couple of books, before they got so long and even more tedious. I also only got through the first few movies before giving up, and found them awfully unforgettable. It sounds like Shaun had the same impression of the stories that I did, but to research the video, he read all the books, watched all the movies, including that terrible Fantastic Beasts crap. Only then did he dig into this analysis.

The basic message: Rowling is inherently conservative, opposed to any kind of systemic change, a neoliberal Blairite, and it shows in her stories. The most telling point is that she created a fantasy world with slavery, and none of the ‘heroes’ even try to change it, except for Hermione, who is treated as an obsessive joke. In fact the whole arc of the whole series ends with the status quo preserved, only different players in charge.

Well, now I know why her books left me so cold, and I’m glad I didn’t push on to try and read them all. Poor Shaun.

We didn’t “come from rocks,” Matt Powell’s brain is just an example of convergent evolution

It’s unfortunately true. He is now straining to defend creationist caricatures of evolutionary biology. He has a new video exercise in sophistry in which he claims to have scientific support for the claim that “we evolved from a rock”. He excerpts Aron Ra pointing out that evolution does not argue that we are descended from a rock, and tries to refute him by finding a paper in Science that says we did. Only it doesn’t. He’s relying on colloquial use of terms to confuse the issue.

The paper says this:

Thank goodness for granite. If not for the formation and subsequent erosion of large quantities of metal-rich granite on a supercontinent that formed billions of years ago, the evolution of multicellular life—including us—could have been stifled or delayed, according to a new study.

For much of its history, life on Earth existed as only single-celled organisms. Certain proteins critical for multicellular life, and presumed to have been equally critical for its evolution from single-celled ancestors, require heavy-metal elements, especially copper, zinc, and molybdenum, says John Parnell, a geoscientist at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom. Previous studies suggest that multicellular life evolved sometime between 1.6 billion and 1.2 billion years ago. Researchers thought that before that innovation, these vital metals were locked away from environments where life thrived—either sequestered in the oxygen-poor depths of the ocean or held in ancient ore deposits in Earth’s crust, waiting to be eroded.

This is not saying we evolved from granite, or descended from granite, or even came from granite. It’s saying that some metal elements that living organisms use as catalysts in chemical reactions eroded out of granite, and further, it’s a paper specifically about the origin of multicellular life, not all life.

To explain it in Biblical terms, here’s Genesis 4:22.

As for Zillah, she also gave birth to Tubal-cain, the forger of all implements of bronze and iron; and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.

Or Exodus 31:

Now the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “See, I have called by name Bezalel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. I have filled him with the Spirit of God in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all kinds of craftsmanship, to make artistic designs for work in gold, in silver, and in bronze, and in the cutting of stones for settings, and in the carving of wood, that he may work in all kinds of craftsmanship.

If I were to now claim that the Bible says we “came from” bronze, iron, wood, gold, and silver, that would be as deliberate a misreading as Powell’s claim that evolution says we “came from” rocks. Life arose from energy-rich molecules in solution in the ocean. That early life used essential metallic elements in promoting chemical reactions does not imply we “came from” rocks, any more than when the Bible proudly declares in Joshua 10:28 that Joshua captured Makkedah that very day, and attacked both it and its king with swords, utterly destroying it along with every person in it, leaving no survivors, it is implying that the Israelites were made of swords.

Clearly, though, followers of the Abrahamic religions can thank goodness for iron. If not for the presence of mineral deposits that allowed them to forge killing weapons, they might have gone the way of Makkedah and Jericho, and the Jewish and Christian religions might have been stifled or delayed.