Recall that I sneered at this new book coming out, The War on Science, edited by Lawrence Krauss. It’s a strangely focused book, given that it’s quite clear that it is the Republicans who have accelerated their attacks on education and science, yet Krauss is trying to blame any problems on DEI, the Woke, Leftists, and everyone but MAGA, Trump, RFK jr, Musk, etc. He has rounded up a real rogues gallery of awful and disreputable people to contribute articles to his patently bogus book.
Dorian Abbot, John Armstrong, Peter Boghossian, Maarten Boudry, Alex Byrne, Nicholas Christakis, Roger Cohen, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Janice Fiamengo, Solveig Gold, Moti Gorin, Karleen Gribble, Carole Hooven, Geoff Horsman, Joshua Katz, Sergiu Klainerman, Lawrence M. Krauss, Anna Krylov, Luana Maroja, Christian Ott, Bruce Pardy, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Richard Redding, Arthur Rousseau, Gad Saad, Sally Satel, Lauren Schwartz, Alan Sokal, Allesandro Strumia, Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan, Jay Tanzman, Abigail Thompson, Amy Wax, Elizabeth Weiss, Frances Widdowson
The one virtue of Krauss attempting to step out of the shadows of his shame is that Rebecca Watson was roused to bring receipts and stomp this guy right down into the ground. I mean, really, if there were any justice in the world, Larry would be crumpled into a puddle, wheezing and begging for mercy through broken teeth, and would be crawling into a snake hole to bleed out and fade from public attention forevermore.
I recommend that everyone try to stay on Rebecca’s good side.
I was going to express amazement that Krauss can even find a publisher for this drivel…but it’s being published by Post Hill Press, a company that specializes in right-wing conspiracy theories. Krauss is now rubbing elbows with Tyrus and Dan Bongino and Kirk Cameron. His peers!
Superb from Rebecca.
I have books by many of these bozos. Are they not self-aware enough to see that they are now in the same camp as those they used to skewer? Embarrassing.
coyne! coooooyne! i had no idea about his sheisty reversal in this. wow. zero principles.
@ 3
Search the back catalog of posts, if you dare. Coyne’s ben a real shithead for quite a while.
During the Dubya-era, these two disparate factions of New Atheists & right wingers respectively would’ve been at each other’s throats.
Now they’re on the same book, literally, together because of their shared hatred of trans people & cancel culture.
“The War on Science” It’s a cookbook!
I think Krauss is also trying to scam people by stealing the name of a honest and successful book from ten years ago:
The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It Paperback – May 17, 2016
by Shawn Lawrence Otto (Author)
Amazon write-up: (but don’t buy it from Amazon)
Winner of the MN Book Award for Nonfiction. “Wherever the people are well informed,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “they can be trusted with their own government.” But what happens when they are not? In every issue of modern society–from climate change to vaccinations, transportation to technology, health care to defense–we are in the midst of an unprecedented expansion of scientific progress and a simultaneous expansion of danger. At the very time we need them most, scientists and the idea of objective knowledge are being bombarded by a vast, well-funded, three-part war on science: the identity politics war on science, the ideological war on science, and the industrial war on science.
The result is an unprecedented erosion of thought in Western democracies as voters, policymakers, and justices actively ignore the evidence from science, leaving major policy decisions to be based more on the demands of the most strident voices.
Shawn Lawrence Otto’s provocative new book investigates the historical, social, philosophical, political, and emotional reasons for why and how evidence-based politics are in decline and authoritarian politics are once again on the rise, and offers a vision, an argument, and some compelling solutions to bring us to our collective senses, before it’s too late.
@5 Thornapple
If I had to wager, though, I’d bet that the hacks who built their brand on places like Salon by incessantly whining about atheism (incidentally using the term “New Atheist” far more often than any New Atheist ever does) are the ones who are on the same page with the fascists today. Or at least they have the same goals and they’ll pretend to keep fascism at arm’s length, in line with the ineffectual liberal ruling class.
every time I see a celebrity/popular figure called out for sexual assault/abuse/harassment allegations, it seems there are countless randos in the comment threads defending them; complaining about how unfair the court of popular opinion is, “libel”, “slander”, etc…
And I can’t help but think, how many people have these “defenders” raped/assaulted/harassed, or do they just hope to rape/assault/harass people at some point in the future? Why else would someone be so invested with defending someone accused of such offenses?
akira – i knew he sucked, but the show of actually giving a shit about women by distancing himself with that blog post, followed by deleting it and doing this book? didn’t know that part.
@9 lochaber
Some people take “innocent until proven guilty” seriously. And a few others are aware of the historical utility of false rape accusations to fan the flames of a lynch mob.
Accusing them all of being closeted rapists is almost certainly a false accusation itself.
beholder, you don’t have to wager, whatever the stakes may be.
Or to vaguely allude to putative “some people”.
&
No names named, no specifics to the vague insinuations whatsoever.
(Such a modus!)
@Thornapple
Trans people: bringing dickheads together to hate us since fucking forever
@Beholder
You might want to look into the research here. People who are sexually assaulted often don’t bring it up later, and a lot of men will admit to sexually assaulting others if you ask confidentially
That you ignore all that to bring up lynchings (also ignoring the racialised sexual violence done to black women by white men) makes this seem like a bad faith argument
Also what people will accept as sufficient evidence to prove guilt is so dependent on who the accused it. As a trans woman you can convince people that I’m abusive just by saying that I’m a trans woman, meanwhile dickheads like the one discussed above can have a decades long history of abuse and people will still bring up “innocent until proven guilty”. Guilt is a function of how much society cares about you rather than anything you’ve actually done
We need a different system for preventing these situations, punishment doesn’t work. Especially when people get focused on the punishment happening to the “correct” people
dangerousbeans @14:
QFT
“Some people take “innocent until proven guilty” seriously.”
The thing is, we know some of these people, because we used to go to conventions with them, and we know some of the stories of what went on there too. There’s a pattern.
@beholder: For professional consequences rather than criminal convictions, why would it make sense to follow criminal law standards of evidence rather than civil ones? Is the Carroll trial outcome not enough to consider Trump to be a sex offender?
beholder, proof is for mathematicians. In every other area of life, the level of evidence that is sufficient to take a claim seriously varies a lot. Even for the same would-be believer in the claim, the level of evidence varies depending on the stakes. There is (or was, until recently) a difference between the level of evidence required to send an accused to prison and the level required to say ‘OK, that person looks sketchy, I will avoid them and warn my friends from them’.
Coyne kicked me off his facebook page when I repeatedly asked him why he avoided the term “gender” when it was appropriate to his topic. He has morphed over the last decade into spitefulness as the diversity of his topics have narrowed to “two sexes, two sexes, two sexes.
I love this so much.
@ 12 Morales
When quoting something, even in your grandpa circa 2009 Gumby text, it is customary to link to whatever the fuck you are quoting, rather than leave readers guessing.
#19: At least his “two sexes” obsession sometimes distracts him from his hatred of Palestinians.
#11: “Lynch mob” and “witch hunt” are some of the favorite phrases of abusers who don’t like it when anyone points out the repulsiveness of their behavior. As Rorschach pointed out, we’ve known these people for decades, have interacted with them personally multiple times, and we know in detail what they’re like. No one is suggesting criminal penalties against them (let alone hanging or burning at the stake), but only social penalties for social misbehavior.
@22
Indeed. I’m in broad agreement with what most people have been saying here, with the exception of @18 anat who pretends at pedantry while misunderstanding the usage of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, or @12 John Morales who loves to hear themselves talk without really saying anything. But mostly I disagree with @9 lochaber’s batshit allegation that all defense attorneys are rapists, and that was the bait I responded to.
@beholder: Interpreting Lochaber’s post as referring to defense attorneys seem ridiculous.
I was referring to commenters on posts/articles about people accused of sexual assault, harassment, and similar predatory behavior.
It’s a trend I’ve noticed on almost any article/post with comments, that there is almost always several commenters going to absurd lengths to defend the accused.
I’m not saying the accused shouldn’t have their constitutional right to legal defense removed, I was merely talking about comment threads and online discussions, and I have trouble understanding the motivation of those commentors.
argh, should have been “I’m not saying the accused should have their constitutional right to legal defense removed…”
Too many people here like arguing more then thinking or discussing
Contextualizing the spot-on @6 bcw bcw.
https://youtu.be/dk01eeKMD_I
@20 unfortunately, you can also now use that catch-phrase with the Washington Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
rather late, but for further explanation, I frequently see accusations of fraud, plagiarism, theft, other misconduct, and plain old non-sexual assault, and rarely see the same amount of anonymous randos popping off in the comments defending the accused, etc.
So, to me, this seems to be a thing unique to accusations of sexual assault/abuse/harassment/etc.
Which is why I have suspicions towards the motivations of people randomly defending people accused of sexual offenses (or, more often/accurately, attacking the victims of sexual assault/harassment/abuse…)
And, on a tangent, wasn’t Christina Rad (?) part of this network at some point?
@29, lochaber
yup yup yup:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221207140925/https://freethoughtblogs.com/cristinarad/
and apparently the blog is still here…just the link was removed from the side panel
Brian Pansky@30
Thanks.
And, well, her last post is rather depressing. :(
I’ve never seen Hemant Mehta on camera before. I was a semi-regular on his blog like 10-15 years ago, before there was an FtB.
He’s really good!
@32,
“I’ve never seen Hemant Mehta on camera before.”
He wasn’t very well liked in these here circles. But I can’t even remember why now.
rorschach@33d>
Was it plagiarism? And wasn’t he on this network for a short while?
“But I can’t even remember why now.”
Swung towards accommodationism, not newish atheistic enough. As I recall.
@lochaber:
I think the main complaint about him was more along the lines of ‘too willing to allow horrible people to make a mess of his comments section without calling them out’. Basically he wasn’t like Coyne in actively enabling horrible people, more a little too much ‘accomodationist’ and ‘both-sides’ with the result that there were some regular commenters who probably would have been banned in a number of other places.
I wouldn’t know personally: I stopped reading over on Patheos for other reasons and never really read the comments anyway (primarily I hate that resource-hogging Javascript monstrosity known as DisQus with the fury of a thousand suns, and running NoScript keeps it from polluting my browser) and while I know he isn’t there anymore, I never really picked him back up again.
@ ^ jenorafeuer : Yes, that sounds about rght to me.
ah, thanks all, I felt there was a bit of a disconnect with this community and attitude and such, but no idea how to phrase it, and wasn’t even sure if I was remembering correctly.
I may be completely wrong about the plagiarism thing, or being involved with FTB, maybe that was someone else? In all fairness, there have been a lot of people in the atheiest/skeptic community who have popped up in FTB for a bit, and it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of everything a few years or so down the road.