Smug twit

I’ve never had any respect for Alister McGrath, but apparently he thinks I’m a credible source on atheism. He has a book titled Coming to Faith Through Atheism, containing 12 essays about how people returned to religion after a dalliance with atheism, driven by how much they disliked Dawkins and the New Atheism. That sounds incredibly cliched — it’s practically a joke how often theists claim that they used to be an atheist, but then they saw the light.

Fine. More pedestrian pablum from a conventional Christian who doesn’t like Dawkins. I even have some sympathy with the thesis that Dawkins has become a detriment to atheism. However, an argument against one particular flavor of atheism is not an argument for the ridiculous Christianity McGrath favors. I also mildly resent that he cites me (and Ashley Miller) some kind of supporter of his ideas.

Yet it wasn’t just that Dawkins and others set out to make religious faith a badge of shame. The “New Atheism” encouraged a discriminatory rhetoric of denunciation and demonisation directed not primarily against religious ideas, but against religious people. Many were alarmed at this trend. The feminist atheist blogger Ashley Miller distanced herself from those who suggested that “people who are religious aren’t worthwhile and are certainly too stupid to be respected”. The debate ought to be about assessing ideas, she insisted, not about publicly ridiculing religious people: “We dehumanize people who disagree with us instead of arguing about ideas.” It didn’t exactly help with the public face of atheism.

Today, the “New Atheism” is generally regarded as having imploded, increasingly (though perhaps unfairly) being seen as the crystallisation of the cultural prejudices of old white Western middle-class males. Many of its former members, disenchanted by its arrogance, prejudice, and superficiality, have distanced themselves from the movement and its leaders.

Of course he’d think it unfair to view the failure of the New Atheism as a result of the cultural prejudices of old white Western middle-class males, since he is one, and his stodgy Christianity is the epitome of Western middle-class bullshit. His religion is not an improvement on atheism!

What he doesn’t acknowledge is that neither Ashley nor I have abandoned atheism, which is something rather different than the peculiarly assertive, aggressive style of Dawkins’ atheism. We aren’t Christians! It’s a little rude to pose two people who oppose his position as somehow backing up his new book.

Why didn’t he link to my assessment of Alister McGrath?

That’s McGrath. Incoherent and contradictory, vacuous and vapid, and bumbling along, triumphantly making fallacious arguments that he thinks are irrefutable.

Jebus, but I love “sophisticated theology”. It makes its practitioners look like such hopeless dolts.

I’m still a bit assertive and aggressive, and I still categorically reject McGrath’s weird beliefs.

But look at the craftsmanship, the beauty, the awesome skill in the work!

Unbelievable. I can’t imagine this. NFTs are worthless.

A new report shows that the non-fungible token (NFT) market has essentially collapsed, and nearly all NFTs are practically worthless.

As seen on Insider, dappGambl’s study investigated 73,257 NFT collections, 69,795 of which have a market value of zero ETH.

“The hype around NFTs peaked in the 2021/22 bull run that saw nearly $2.8 billion in monthly trading volume recorded in August 2021. From this, NFTs captured the collective imagination worldwide with multiple news reports of million-dollar deals for sales of certain NFT assets,” writes dappGambl.

You mean that hype and histrionics don’t add immense intrinsic value to abstract vapor? So many capitalist entities just shuddered with the sensation that someone is walking over their grave.

Oh god. Avi Loeb waxes philosophical, and he sounds like a crackpot theologian rather than a crackpot scientist. He wants to claim that aliens exist because it will make him feel good while simultaneously arguing that his critics disagree with him because they want to unique and special. It’s an amazing load of very special bullshit.

First he tries to persuade his readers that our existence is pointless because the universe is so very large and ancient, making us a tiny inconsequential speck in the immense cosmos. And somehow, thinking that we’re all alone gives us comfort?

We do not know what happened before the Big Bang, so cosmic history could have extended well beyond our experience, making our existence even less significant in the grander scheme of things. Given this perspective, the Copernican realization that Earth is not at the center of the observable Universe pales in comparison to the realization that our cosmic existence is pointless.

With this humbling backdrop hanging over our head, the possibility that we might be the only intelligent species gives us existential comfort. Our pride stems from our intellectual superiority relative to other natural species on Earth. The emergence of large-language-models of artificial intelligence (AI) with more connections than the number of synapses in the human brain, might bring us back to the sober realization that human intelligence is not the pinnacle of creation. If our technological products might be smarter than we are, who is to say that there are no others out there who are even smarter?

As of now, most of my academic colleagues argue that that the notion that we are not alone in the Universe is an “extraordinary claim” that requires “extraordinary evidence”. However, my common sense argues exactly the opposite: it is extraordinary and arrogant for us to assume that we are special.

That’s all nonsense. Speaking for most biologists, I think we generally agree that life is probably common in the universe — it’s just chemistry, after all. Our expectation that that is so has nothing to do with the idea that being alone would make us special, which is just Loeb’s own special brand of twisty illogic.

He doesn’t seem to realize that his critics are not arguing that the idea we are not alone in the universe is an extraordinary claim — we are arguing that his assertion that a transient observation of a rock passing through the solar system, or of tiny metal spherules at the bottom of the ocean, is piss-poor evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial intent. Loeb is making an extraordinary specific claim on the basis of weak evidence, and dragging a sledge through mud is not the kind of work needed to justify it.

Here’s a counter-example. The JWST has found a planet with emission spectra that suggest the existence of chemical products characteristic of life.

It may have detected a molecule called dimethyl sulphide (DMS). On Earth, at least, this is only produced by life.

The researchers stress that the detection on the planet 120 light years away is “not robust” and more data is needed to confirm its presence.

Researchers have also detected methane and CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere.

Detection of these gases could mean the planet, named K2-18b, has a water ocean.

Prof Nikku Madhusudhan, of the University of Cambridge, who led the research, told BBC News that his entire team were ”shocked” when they saw the results.

“On Earth, DMS is only produced by life. The bulk of it in Earth’s atmosphere is emitted from phytoplankton in marine environments,” he said.

But Prof Madhusudhan described the detection of DMS as tentative and said that more data would be needed to confirm its presence. Those results are expected in a year.

Are scientists freaking out an claiming that this can’t be so, that the data must be rejected because we have a prior certainty that alien life cannot possibly exist, we have to be alone in the unverse? No. That’s a really interesting result, cool stuff that ought to be pursued, but we also need to consider other alternative explanations. Madhusudhan is practicing a kind of cautious interpretation of the data that is totally alien to Loeb.

Scientists don’t seem to have the kind of knee-jerk hostility to the premise of extratrerrestrial life that Loeb imagines. Instead, we’re hostile to bad evidence advanced in service of half-assed hypotheses.

But he worked so hard on gathering ‘data,’ how dare anyone criticize him.

Traveling to the Pacific Ocean for two weeks to retrieve millimeter-size spherules that melted off the surface of IM1 and settled on the ocean floor at a depth of 2 kilometers across a ten-kilometer region, and analyzing these spherules by a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer at Harvard University for two months, was hard work that culminated in a 44-pages-long scientific paper. Tweeting superficially about the findings was an easy escape route for all the naysayers who chose to behave unprofessionally and harass our research team for following the scientific method.

In the imagined reality of cosmic loneliness, our cosmic significance is self-declared. We can ignore packages in our backyard by not searching for them or by ridiculing any search made by the true scientists among us. But irrespective of what some of us tweet, an objective observer of IM1 or `Oumuamua would repeat Galileo’s words: “E pur si mouve” (and yet it moves).

No one is claiming that `Oumuamua didn’t move. That was an observable fact. Rather, those superficial tweets he finds objectionable were by people disagreeing with his claim that its movement was intentional and planned by an extraterrestrial intelligence. Rocks move through space all the time. Spaceships, especially spaceships from an extrasolar origin, are considerably more rare, and you need to be prepared to demonstrate why you attach such an extraordinary cause to it.

And there he goes, trying to hide behind the “scientific method.” His whole research program is a collection of slipshod rationalizations for his a priori biases, backed with haphazard observations that don’t actually support his ideas. His version of the ‘scientific method’ is damned sloppy.

But it gives him meaning, he says.

My second important point is that finding interstellar senders would bring a meaning to our meager cosmic existence. In our personal life, finding a partner often gives us meaning because it channels existential sentiments back to us, providing us comfort. And this comfort is better than that afforded by arrogance and loneliness. The sense of pointlessness brought by comprehending the Universe must have resulted from the focus of cosmologists on lifeless entities, like elementary particles or radiation. If we find a partner out there, the cosmos might not be pointless anymore.

That’s a religious argument — just replace “interstellar senders” with “god,” and it’s the ordinary ravings of a thousand clueless preachers who really, really want you to believe. How can you find meaning in your pathetic, lonely existence if you don’t have Jesus, I mean, Aliens?

His logic doesn’t even hold up internally. If humans are but brief, insignificant specks in a gigantic universe, how does finding another tiny speck suddenly bring us cosmic significance? Oh, but it would make Avi Loeb feel better about his speckiness if he could imagine sharing it with another speck.

And yet, the tininess of my speck neither causes me regret nor makes me seek out bigger, more powerful imaginary specks. Funny how that works.

You know, all those tubes and oozing liquids, it’s hard to know where my cerebrospinal fluid ends up.

During intercourse the woman absorbs the literal cerebral fluid and essence of the man, the fluid that contains the nutrients the man chooses to feed his brain; so don’t ever “it’s just sex, im free and liberated” me.

General Jack D. Ripper would be so proud. People who understand biology, not so much.

Bill Maher made an announcement.

I agree. That is very unfortunate.

He kept writing, and made it even worse.

He’s a scab. OK, it’s coming back, only now with no writers and just his trademark smarmy ignorance.

I haven’t watched his show in years, maybe a decade or so. I’m confident that it has not improved, and this will simply be another inflection point in which the quality of the show nosedives for the garbage heap.

I just waved goodbye to my daughter and granddaughter — they’re driving back to Wisconsin. We had an exhausting weekend with a 4 year old (soon to be five!) who was full of energy and was running circles around us.

No sooner had they left than I sit down and read about Ruby Franke.

Ruby Franke, the family vlogger behind the now-defunct YouTube channel 8 passengers has been formally charged with six counts of felony child abuse by a Washington County attorney in Utah, court documents show.

Franke and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were arrested last week after Franke’s 12-year-old son climbed out a window and ran to a neighbor’s house asking for food and water.

The neighbor, noticing duct tape around the child’s ankles and wrists, called the police. The responding officer said the child appeared severely malnourished and had sustained “deep lacerations” from being tied up with a rope.

When police searched Hildebrandt’s home, they found Franke’s 10-year-old daughter in a similar condition and transported both children to the hospital for malnourishment. In total, the four Franke children still living at home were taken into the care of Utah’s Child and Family Services. Her two other children are adults.

Hildebrandt was also charged with six felony counts of aggravated child abuse.

I am at a loss. I cannot imagine doing that to a child. But I can see three factors in the story that would drive a person to child abuse, not that it excuses it.

• Conservative bullshit. There is an old-time conservative tradition that children must be beaten — “spare the rod, spoil the child,” all that crap. Not in my immediate family, fortunately, but I knew kids who came to school with welts, and some of my relatives could be fierce with a switch. These people still exist.
• Religious sadism. If God says it’s OK, then swat that child. It’s even in the ten commandments, when it’s read as “Honor your father and mother…OR ELSE.” It’s especially strong in Mormonism, where so many children are literally thrown out of the house to fend for themselves if they don’t follow arbitrary Mormon rules.
• Capitalism. Family vlogging or mommy vlogging can be extremely profitable, but only if the kids are doing interesting things, and if the parents are willing to expose their private struggles to the world. If there isn’t enough drama in day-to-day life, then make some. And if they kids aren’t sufficiently profitable in their trained chimpanzee antics, well, then they must be punished.

Now Franke’s sisters have issued a statement.

“For the last 3 years we have kept quiet on the subject of our sister Ruby Franke for the sake of her children. Behind the public scene we have done everything we could to try and make sure the kids were safe,” the statement began.

“Ruby was arrested which needed to happen. Jodi was arrested which needed to happen. The kids are now safe, which is the number one priority.”

Oh, yeah? You knew about this for three years and said nothing?

Her neighbors commented.

The neighbors of recently-arrested YouTube family vlogger Ruby Franke were reportedly not surprised to see her Utah home swarmed by police. Some were just happy that the authorities weren’t pulling bodies from the house.

“Everyone is just breathing a collective sigh of relief because we thought they were going to come out of that house with body bags,” one of her neighbors told NBC News.

It was so bad that you were anticipating dead children, but you didn’t call CPS? This is just disturbing, that everyone knew and everyone kept kept quiet, and that Franke also had 2 million subscribers to her creepy YouTube channel, and all those people just watched.

That’s a little unfair. At least some of them complained enough that YouTube finally took the channel down. She just moved on to another inappropriate grift.

The channel was taken down earlier this year amid a growing chorus of criticism over Franke’s strict parenting tactics, which included threatening to take away meals.

In recent weeks, Franke had been collaborating with Hildebrandt on ConneXions, a mental health counseling service that also faced criticism for its parenting advice, including shame-based learning and shunning those who don’t share your values.

Hildebrandt is another piece of work, an ex-therapist who had her license revoked.

The founder of the company, Jodi Hildebrandt, is a therapist who had her license suspended in 2012 after she disclosed a patient’s “porn addiction” to his Mormon church leaders, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

It’s astonishing that anyone would take mental health advice from either of those two losers.

By the way, their Instagram channel, Moms of Truth, is still up and available if you are really interested in seeing a pair of hypocrites complaining about “woke.”