Glenn Gruenhagen is a horrible, dull little man who is somehow a state senator. I decided to post a bit about this clown. It also helped me get back into the swing of making videos.
Transcript below the fold.
I’m back! I think. This youtube channel has been languishing in neglect for about the last year, and if you’re wondering what happened, it wasn’t something terrible. I’ve been fine, the family is fine, my grandmother has been dead for a few decades, and while it still makes me sad, I can’t use it as an excuse. No COVID problems, my wife isn’t divorcing me, the cat is annoyingly healthy, I ought to be out here vigorously complaining about bad science and promoting really cool science. So what’s been going on?
It’s my job. I try to explain that I’m old and slow and not fit to take on new responsibilities, but I find myself on a couple of new committees and teaching new courses, and all the prep time requirements have sucked much of the life out of me. You don’t really want to hear about grading rubrics and student engagement strategies, do you? This year I’ve had a shortage of free time, and also I’m teaching another completely new course in the Fall, and I’ve been promoted to chair of one other committee, so the 2024-2025 school year doesn’t look so great either.
But it’s summertime! I’ve got a little break with some chores I’d better do before the school year hits in late August, but I can occasionally take a breath and inflict myself on you all.
While I try to figure out all the buttons again and hook up the cables and refresh my knowledge of Final Cut Pro, here I am with an easy but aggravating topic to talk about.
I’m in Minnesota, an enlightened Northern state, but we do have some amazing asshats in our legislature. You may recall Michele Bachmann, who is thankfully out of office now, but that thick suburban ring that surrounds Minneapolis, and the rural outstate MAGA part of Minnesota still spawns some truly terrible ignoramuses that get elected to high office.
Allow me to introduce you to Glenn Gruenhagen — I’ll ask for your forgiveness later. Gruenhagen is a pastor and an insurance agent from Glencoe, Minnesota who got himself elected to the state senate by a healthy margin. 70% of his district voted for him, so we can’t just blame him, the blame has to be shared with the electorate of District 17.
He has the usual right wing syndrome. He’s a conspiracy theorist who thinks climate change is a “fraud and a lie” and thinks wind power and solar power are dirty solutions. He wants to ban the COVID vaccine — the pandemic as another fraud and lie. He tried to outlaw same-sex marriage and instead wanted to promote conversion therapy. Of course he denies the 2020 election results.
Last year, he tried to introduce a bill that would require schools to
To advance critical thinking skills in history and science, a school district must provide
instruction to students in grades 9 to 12 exploring the contrast between the scientific facts
on how sickness, disease, pain, suffering, and death relate to the existence of complex living
organisms, and how sickness, disease, pain, suffering, and death are a consequence imposed
by the Creator of complex living organisms.
That’s a strange perspective, and I don’t know what he intended with it. So we’re supposed to contrast the idea that complex organisms can break down vs. all of our suffering is a consequence of a benevolent deity intentionally inflicting pain on us? As an atheist, I approve of that message, which would turn all rational people against god. The proposed bill did not get anywhere, which I like even better, since schools shouldn’t waste any time discussing the absurd mythology of any religion, except maybe in a history class.
Today, though, I’m going to focus on just one aspect of the multifaceted idiocy that is Glenn Gruenhagen. He is a creationist. He has made youtube and twitter videos promoting his silly view that the Earth is a construct built with intent.
In science, I find a lot of censorship, lies, and deceit.
You know, I can’t deny that there are dishonest scientists who cheat. They’re human, after all, and science is affected by some perverse incentives that have made the problem worse. But at least science also has incentives and methods to catch and correct errors, intentional or otherwise, and can make some progress. Religion lacks such mechanisms, and generally gets increasingly worse.
If I had to target deceitful liars, I’d have to say that pastors and insurance agents have the problem to a greater degree.
You know, there’s lots of scientific evidence that points to a creator or God and I’ll just give you two.
There is no scientific evidence for a supernatural being outside of nature and science.
One is the law of cause and effect. For every effect, there’s a greater cause.
There is no “law” of cause and effect, and further, he mistates the idea. I’m of the mind that the principle of causality is an inductively derived hypothesis generated from observations of interactions. There is no “law”. In particular, science will not fall apart if we observe a phenomenon that lacks a cause. We don’t understand the nature of the Big Bang; if we were to learn that it had no causal agent behind it, we’re not going to freak out and conclude that internal combustion engines or GPS or that Muhammed Ali never actually knocked anyone out.
I am not a physicist, but I have read about quantum fluctuations. Is the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs in a vacuum an “effect”? What is the cause? Is it necessarily caused by an intelligent agent? I don’t think he has evidence of that.
There is no assumption that every effect has a greater cause. If Gruenhagen suffered the health effects of a tapeworm infection, does that imply that the tapeworm is greater than Gruenhagen?
OK, that’s a poor example, but you get the idea. He’s intentionally exaggerating the principle to reach a fallacious conclusion.
There’s more. He lapses into a common creationist cliche.
So you have a computer. Did somebody make the computer? If you’ve never seen it before, did somebody make the computer? Or did wind, rain, time and chance blow the computer into existence? Well, the logical conclusion is that someone made the computer.
Here is a baby bunny rabbit. The only logical conclusion is that someone made the rabbit.
We’ve been dealing with this bogus idea since Paley in the late 18th century. It’s a stupid argument that implies that the only possible causes are human-like phenomena, and that every unknown cause can be explained by analogy with human activity…so of course they infer the existence of a great anthropoid in the sky doing all the creative processes!
Somehow he works complexity into his argument.
Well, your eyeball is millions of times more complex than that computer and therefore the law of cause and effect has never been contradicted.
Atmospheric circulation and the formation of hurricanes and tornadoes is too complex for the human mind to comprehend, and even our best computer simulations are only flawed approximations. Therefore, tornadoes must have built computers. The law of cause and effect has never been contradicted.
I do not understand how he connected those two thoughts.
Get ready, here comes the creationist litany:
You have this building. Somebody built it. You have the Earth. Somebody made it. You have the universe. Somebody created it. That is a repeatable, observable, scientific fact. And yet we censor that from our students.
We don’t know that somebody made a building because of the mere fact that a building exists. We know that it was built by observation, by historical records, by knowledge of the understanding of how architects and engineers and construction workers operate. We understand the processes that built the Earth, and at no point was an intelligent being involved — in fact, the forces were so immense and so slow, usually, that a human-like entity could not have been involved, and therefore, the analogy collapses.
We do teach the process behind the construction of the Earth and the universe as well as we understand them, on the basis of repeatable, observable, scientific facts. Gods do not fall into that category of facts, so we leave them out of the story. That’s not censorship, that’s principled and reasonable.
This clip ends at this point, but you may recall from the beginning that he promised us TWO scientific facts that proved the existence of god. I had to dig into his YouTube channel to find the second fact, and it wasn’t worth the effort. He has a 41 minute video full of his pomposity, which I’m not going to dive into, because he opines on everything, including his homophobia, transphobia, climate change denial, MAGA nonsense, and so forth. His one minute extract took too much of my time already.
But his second argument is that “Life comes from Life,” and it’s the usual citation of Pasteur’s experiments demonstrating that spontaneous generation does not occur. You’ve all heard it a thousand times before from creationists who are just as stupid as Gruenhagen, and it does not apply. We know that life arose on Earth about 4 billion years ago. His explanation is that his deity conjured it into existence, which also violates Pasteur’s principle, so we can tell that he doesn’t care about any scientific explanation.
I would just reply with my own explanatory principle: Life is chemistry. No contradictions. No notes.
OK, that’s enough. I’m hoping Gruenhagen doesn’t appear in the news again, but he probably will. His latest escapade is that he was investigated for an ethics violation — he sent bloody videos of gender affirming surgery to his colleagues, who did not appreciate getting gross videos of operations in their mailbox. Yeah, he hates trans people and wants to shut down any health care for them. It’s like sending videos of cancer surgeries to demand that scalpels be banned.
He’s a dumbass. I guess that’s a plus for getting elected in his district.
Thanks again to my Patreon supporters who stuck with me through this long dry spell.
There’s a turd in the toilet. Someone shat it. Science!
Who’d a thunk science can be so simple??
I’ll take your word for it, but if so, it’s remarkably silly and self-contradictory.
If “Life comes from Life”, it follows that God came from life, so that God is a creation of another life.
(The infinite regress problem is something such people are careful to ignore)
@1
Maybe it’s a Milky Way.
@ 2
This is where the special pleading starts. e.g. “God is eternal and exists outside of space and time!”
Down here in Deep Red Texas, the creationists are trying to get creationism into our schools. A popular creationist tactic is to claim that in Texas schools we need to teach the controversy. I think this is a good idea. Scientists for the most part do not believe in special creation. Besides the fact evolution is overwhelmingly supported by the facts, Genesis 1 and 2 are nonsense. I think teaching the controversy, why science rejects creationism should be taught in schools. For example, the two contradictory tall tales of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. Students need to understand why creationism is nonsense. Not arguing FOR evolution, but AGAINST the Genesis tall tales. Teach that controversy!
Rant over.
The thing i don’t get about these bigots obsessively sharing gender affirming surgery videos is that they aren’t really different from any surgery video. Like most people find surgery videos gross, the fact that it has to do with genitals has nothing really to do with it. And post surgical woulds are also gross, you got plenty of effluvia and damaged tissue in a healing wound. Like I know that they are just weirdos who are trying to shock others, but I just can’t seem to grasp what they are going for in their own minds. As a side note, the like 2 year post surgery images of gender confirmation procedures are really stunning, it’s absolutely fucking amazing what the human body can do and how medicine can get it there.
P.S. I actually enjoy surgery videos, I find them fascinating in an academic sense, I sometimes wonder if I should have become a surgeon.
crimsonsage @6: Also, so many cisgender people have gender affirming care. Plastic surgery to make your face or breasts or any other body part better conform to your idea of feminine? Gender affirming care. Cisgender women removing facial hair – gender affirming care. Cisgender men taking testosterone to look more masculine? Gender affirming care. etc etc.
@anat
Most of the techniques were developed for cis people too. Or possibly for doctors to do on intersex kids without consent
Gender affirming care is just health care
“You will not believe how ridiculous a Minnesota state senator can be”
…sorry, PZ, but I didn’t even find this guy’s ridiculousness to be even mildly difficult to believe, let alone impossible. I was looking forward to hearing about how he did all his public speaking in a bright green plastic fake mustache and falsetto voice while referring to himself in the third person, or never showed up on the state senate floor without a pet monkey who was trained to tapdance on his head, or maybe stuffed his pants with live eels every Thursday at noon. He’s just an ignorant creationist huckster? Tame. Very tame. It’s been done.
@ ^ Vicar : The problem of the normalisation and Overton window drift exemplified there. Yeah, Glenn Gruenhagen is typical or easily seen as such anyhow but he and his views and should be shocking and seen as beyond the pale.
@OP
I’m no expert on physics, but afaik radioactive decay is non-causal. There may be more examples.
@Akira MacKenzie #4
Which contradicts the original premise that life comes from life. That’s just cheating.
It’s not anything, because it’s complete fiction. A ‘pretty picture’ manufactured to let people think they can visualize or understand certain phenomena (vacuum polarization, the Casimir effect, Hawking radiation). Sadly, it’s been used over and over in pop-sci (it even appears in some text books), to the point people think it’s an actual thing. It has no basis whatsoever in quantum field theory. Yes, there are vacuum Feynman diagrams. They are static contributions to vacuum energy density, not stuff “popping in and out”.
rietpluim @11:
No. Beta decay is caused by the weak interaction. Alpha decay is caused by quantum tunnelling.
OK, but who is the little man who kicks out those particles?
Schrödinger, I guess, since tunnelling is a consequence (an effect, one might say) of his equation.
If you haven’t had enough Gruenhagen, here he is arguing that beating kids will solve the bullying problem in the schools.
I’m a little unclear on how exactly we would repeat or observe that.
Incidentally, I recall a sportswriter, I think it was Dave Kindred of Sporting News, who covered boxing for many years, once writing that he wasn’t sure Muhammad Ali ever actually hit anybody. Just one of life’s mysteries, I suppose.
I noticed that for a while your beard was twinkling. Around the 12:00 mark, for example. I assume this has something to do with your “green screen” fake background generation.
Rob Grigjsnis @ 12
Is this wholly different from “virtual particles”?
Something about “energy loans” and popping out of existence before the rest of the universe notices.
It is four decades since I did physics.
Gruenhagen seems like a typical far-right dude. The red line for them these days seems to be belief in a flat Earth. But give it another decade of Murdoch media, and that may change.
People who say “Teach the Controversy” just want their own mythoes taught. It should include all of them or none.Tejas should start with the Comanche, while Minnesota the Dakota spreading out from there to all the worlds religions. This might turn into a multi semester thing even before they get to christain myths.
@ 20. birgerjohansson : After Trump – & maybe he just revealed what was already true – the Repugliklans seem to have no red lines at all. If Jan 6th and open fascism wasn’t a red line for them then what will be? At least when it comes to doing and spewing evil. Being compassionate, treating others with kindness and empathy, not being a douche unto others esp the already marginalised and suffering, that seems to be their red line if indeed they have one.
@21. muttpupdad (love your icon BTW.) Teach the Controversy?
Which one? Who says what’s “controversial” and what’s not? Which controverseries get taught and why and how? There’s so very many and some things are “controversial” to some and not others and some people find almost everything controversial and, ..subjectivity how does it work again?
birgerjohansson @19: “virtual particle” is another unfortunate term, since the referent is not a particle. Still, it can have a solid link to theory.
In this diagram depicting muon decay, the virtual W mediates between the initial real state (muon) and the final real state (electron plus two neutrinos). Note that the W doesn’t ‘pop out of the vacuum’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon#/media/File:Muon_Decay.svg
As for energy loans and the rest, that’s just more nonsense.
Red line located! Finally, Trump said something so awful that he deleted it rather than double-down.
Trump Deletes Video Mentioning the ‘Unified Reich’ to Come if He Wins Re-Election
Was it Michele Bachmann that came up with the ‘death panels’ lie?
Unified Reich… instead of USA or CSA you get the UR or maybe the URA. It is even shorter than MAGA, so it will fit easily on T-shirts and caps.
…schools shouldn’t waste any time discussing the absurd mythology of any religion, except maybe in a history class.
Or in a literature class. If they feel particularly gutsy, in a psychology class.
birgerjohansson @ # 26: Was it Michele Bachmann that came up with the ‘death panels’ lie?
The name most often associated with that hustle is Sarah Palin.
Speaking of whom, anybody know why she hasn’t lined up at Mar-a-Lago or Merchan’s courtroom to claim a ticket in the Trump ’24 Veep lottery?
@29:
If she’s at all smart (which I know is a stretch) she’d realize:
– she’s long since been outflanked on the extremist end of the spectrum,
– there’s no way Trump would accept a ‘loser’ like her,
– even if he did accept her, her history would make her a serious liability in any general election.
She already tried to get a senate seat in 2022 and failed at that, twice, despite Trump supporting her then, so the only one of the above three that could still apply is Trump not accepting a ‘loser’ like her. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d already told her as much.