These hardened criminals and repeat offenders…Kent Hovind has been found guilty, guilty, guilty of domestic violence in the third degree for throwing his girlfriend/”wife” to the ground. He’s been sentenced to a year in jail, but will only have to serve 30 days, and pay a fine.

This is going to punch a hole in his daily YouTube posting schedule. I checked the one from yesterday — it contains a long rant about the US prison system in which he claims the system of Biblical punishments was better, that getting a fine and 40 lashes was more humane than locking someone up. I kind of agree with him — US prisons are all kinds of fucked up, but not with whipping people — but I didn’t hear him say anything about the injustice of beating a spouse up.

It’ll be interesting to see what he complains about when he gets out.

I’m going to call the relentless, performative celebration of something called “rationality” Pinkerism now. I’ve noticed it before: every YouTube channel that considers it a sufficient declaration of their worthiness to simply label themselves “The <insert adjective for “smart” here> Atheist”, all the lists of logical fallacies, the books about how everyone else is so stupid, the insistence that we get better by just being more logical (even when they’re contradicting themselves), the Mr Spock envy. It got old. It just seemed so joyless.

Well, you can trust good ol’ Steven Pinker to come along and dial it all up to 11. His new book is titled Rationality, and every smug wanker in the fading atheist movement will snatch it off the shelves. I won’t be one of them, so I’m going to have to rely on getting my impressions second hand, unfortunately. But oh boy, this review is stinging.

For someone who so frequently and serenely proclaims that he’s right, Steven Pinker can get curiously defensive. In “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters,” Pinker writes as if he’s part of an embattled minority, valiantly making the case that “the ability to use knowledge to attain goals” is so underappreciated these days that the reading public needs a new book (by Pinker) “to lay out rational arguments for rationality itself.”

He’s very disappointed that we aren’t all down on our knees praising Saint Steven.

Still, Pinker is troubled by what he sees as rationality’s image problem. “Rationality is uncool,” he laments. It isn’t seen as “dope, phat, chill, fly, sick or da bomb.” As evidence for its diminished status, he quotes celebrations of nonsense by the Talking Heads and Zorba the Greek. (Pinker is also vexed by the line “Let’s go crazy,” which he says was “adjured” by “the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.”) It’s precisely this cultural derision of reason, he says, that prevents us from appreciating rationality’s spectacular accomplishments. “Human progress is an empirical fact,” he writes. “‘Progress’ is shorthand for a set of pushbacks and victories wrung out of an unforgiving universe, and is a phenomenon that needs to be explained. The explanation is rationality.“

You know the Talking Heads is a rather cerebral band, right? That dadaism was an intellectual movement? And that Prince was a joyful celebrant of art? I guess we’re not supposed to be happy. We’re supposed to be like Martians, with “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic”.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

We all know how the Martians ended up.

Some of Pinker’s observations on racial issues are similarly blinkered. Are mortgage lenders who turn down minority applicants really being racist, he muses, or are those lenders simply calculating default rates “from different neighborhoods that just happen to correlate with race?” (A long history of racist redlining may “happen” to have something to do with this too, but Pinker doesn’t get into it.) He goes on to ask why “race, sex, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation have become war zones in intellectual life, even as overt bigotry of all kinds has dwindled.”

Anyone paying attention to what’s been happening in the last few years might wonder where he got his information. In support of his vague claim, Pinker directs the reader to a footnote citing two sources: a study, whose data ended in 2016, that measured a person’s “explicit attitudes” based on self-reporting (i.e. the respondents had to admit their bigotry); and a few (unhelpful) pages from “Enlightenment Now.”

It looks like he’s well on the path to self-referential insertion of his head up his own rectum. Perhaps the walls of his colon prevent him from noticing the increases in hate crimes in the US.

Poverty is also negligible in Pinker’s brain, and he’s always ready to indulge in the small pleasure of wagging a finger at fat people enjoying lasagna. He’s very petty that way.

The trouble arrives when he tries to gussy up his psychologist’s hat with his more elaborate public intellectual’s attire. The person who “succumbs” to the “small pleasure” of a lasagna dinner instead of holding out for the “large pleasure of a slim body” is apparently engaged in a similar kind of myopic thinking as the “half of Americans nearing retirement age who have saved nothing for retirement.” His breezy example elides the fact that — according to the same data — the median income for those non-saving households is $26,000, which isn’t enough money to pay for living expenses, let alone save for retirement.

So what’s the source of these “problems”? If you’ve read any right-wing media in the last few decades, you know the answer: education. I’m a little surprised that a Harvard professor would so readily find common cause with Prager U.

He repeatedly says that by promoting rationality he’s promoting “epistemic humility,” but you’d be hard-pressed to find much humility here, as he pronounces that among the biggest barriers to rationality’s triumph is “the universities’ left-wing suffocating monoculture.”

Oh, I know. I’ve noticed that biology departments across the country suffer from a suffocating monoculture of evolutionists, and math departments still persist in suffocating students with calculus, and chemists, those old fuddy-duddies, still strangle students with stoichiometry and bonds and thermodynamics. I dare not look across campus to the humanities and social sciences, where everyone is in zombie-like lockstep, there is never any dissent, and no one has any ideas, other than ones that might make comfortable Harvard professors uncomfortable, and which may therefore be ignored and belittled.

Has he ever considered that maybe left-wing philosophies thrive on college campuses because a) we like diverse ideas, and b) we like to challenge those ideas, two principles that are anathema to conservatives? And, apparently, anathema to Pinker, who has The Answer to everything. Rationality. Don’t you dare go crazy or question the status quo. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. That’s “epistemic humility”.

But don’t worry. Pinker is a smart man who will make a good sum of money out of his schtick. And that’s what matters, although I have to recommend that he put on Remain in Light or Purple Rain and listen for a while. He’d be a better person for it.

I got out of Facebook, but the stench still follows me. Yesterday, a reader told me about a new Facebook group that was recruiting. It’s called “Skeptic Revival”, and its aim is to resurrect the old skeptical movement, you know, the kind of antique skepticism that existed before the Deep Rifts shredded everything, the kind of skeptical organization that Don Draper would have loved to join. The first problem is that Barbara Drescher is leading this effort, and I couldn’t imagine a worse person to rally a modern skeptical movement…until I saw the rogue’s gallery she’s assembled in her big tent.

There’s DJ Grothe, former president of the JREF who ignored sexual harassment complaints and lied about them.

There’s Ben Radford, creepy litigious sex pest who believes that girls have an evolved preference for pink.

Russel Blackford, generic philosopher and waffler in the middle ground who dislikes all those SJWs.

Abbie Smith, deranged hate-blogger (I thought Drescher despised those?) who started the Slymepit.

Just seeing these few names has me throwing up in my mouth a little bit — I wouldn’t want to be seen in public with any of these people, let alone join the same club. These are the people the rifts formed to separate us from their regressive brand of conservative skepticism, but there they are, standing on the far side of the chasm.

If you want to join them, feel free: here’s a link to Skeptic Revival. I will think less of you for joining, but I won’t know, I won’t be following their shenanigans, I’m not on Facebook, so you can secretly join the narrow-minded skeptic harasser’s club. No one who matters will know. Except yourself, of course.

Been there, been accused of that. It’s such a familiar story I’m surprised it was worth a story in Religion & Politics. “Creationist!” is an extremely common accusation against anyone who disagrees with racists — they sincerely believe that their bigotry is as well supported by the science as evolution, which tells you right there how well informed they are about evolution and racism. So, yeah, I get a lot of this crap in my inbox.

Mark Looy, one of the cofounders of Answers in Genesis (perhaps the largest creationist organization in the world today), acknowledges that viewpoint diversity, stating “creationism is a very broad term with multiple definitions.”

But it would have to get a lot broader to include someone like Holly Dunsworth, a biological anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island who studies human evolution—and a self-described atheist. Nonetheless, earlier this year, Dunsworth and other scientists were somewhat surprisingly described as “cognitive creationists” in the first article published by the Journal of Controversial Ideas, a new publication that accepts anonymous peer-reviewed research on contentious ideas. The piece on creationism, credited to the pseudonym “Shuichi Tezuka,” targets these scientists’ criticisms of recent publications claiming that IQ is genetically determined and that different nationalities or ethnicities score differently on IQ measurements of mental abilities. What Dunsworth and other critics call a dangerous reprise of racist (and often sexist) tropes corrupting scientific research, Tezuka likens to the creationist practice of rejecting scientific truths because the results are morally or ideologically distasteful.

Happens all the time. I understand what they’re trying to do, ‘“creationism” is being used to describe and delegitimate arguments against a reductive genetic definition of race and identity’, but it’s not very effective.

In both these cases—of intelligence testing and Indigenous identity—“creationism” is being used to describe and delegitimate arguments against a reductive genetic definition of race and identity. While few scientists would claim that genetics play no role whatsoever in one’s identity, the idea that cultural or ethnic identity can be assessed solely or primarily by DNA is frequently criticized. Dunsworth pointed me to a recent article she co-authored arguing against the idea that race is a primarily biologically constructed. “‘Race’ is far more than ancestral/inherited DNA and is far more than geographically patterned morphological variation like skin color,” she said via email. It’s only by treating race as a genetic/biological category—and ignoring the role that history, culture, law, and environment play in how ideas of race are used—that make possible claims that intelligence can be genetically correlated with certain ethnic types or that authentic Indigenous identity can be found though a blood test.

The catch is they’re trying to dishonestly accuse a critic of a belief they definitely do not hold, so it undermines any trust we might have in their honesty, and turns the debate into a joke full of their lies.

I know, I should be grateful. Unfortunately, Sturgeon’s Law applies, maybe especially to free books.

So I got one yesterday, and the back cover was simultaneously tantalizing and repellent, which much I agree with, and other bits that sound like nonsense, and I think the author’s confidence is unwarranted.

I don’t know what the hell the book is about, or who it’s for — it seems to be trying to get an atheist audience, with a little sop thrown in for theists. I gave it the benefit of a quick glance, and opened it to see…

Oh, no. Not this creationist nonsense. I tried to figure out the context — is he arguing that this is wrong or right? (It’s not right.) Is he just trying to present different perspectives? I couldn’t tell. If you can’t be clear about your intent and meaning, I’m not going to work extra hard to extract it for you. All I know is he has a great fondness for logic games, frequently breaking into numbered syllogisms that left me bored.

I tried to find the bit where he explains how he knows a god is the energy source for the universe, but I gave up.

You get a reputation as an atheist, and suddenly everyone is sending you bad proofs. It gets wearing.

Mano quotes a study that shows that creationism is in decline.

The public acceptance of evolution in the United States is a long-standing problem. Using data from a series of national surveys collected over the last 35 years, we find that the level of public acceptance of evolution has increased in the last decade after at least two decades in which the public was nearly evenly divided on the issue. A structural equation model indicates that increasing enrollment in baccalaureate-level programs, exposure to college-level science courses, a declining level of religious fundamentalism, and a rising level of civic scientific literacy are responsible for the increased level of public acceptance.

I believe it. I’ve been seeing the same phenomenon — there’s a declining overall interest in creationism. It’s also creatively dead. I rarely see any new arguments, and even the recent books, like the crap from Nathaniel Jeanson, are not original at all, just rewarmed Genesis Flood nonsense spiced up with science buzzwords, poorly explained. It’s a dying cult…just, unfortunately, a slowly dying nonsense.

However, the quantitative decline is made up for with increasing fanaticism among a shrinking minority. The ignorance is being distilled into ever more toxic forms. For instance, Tucker Carlson might once have fit into a model of semi-secular conservativism, is now finding common cause with Ken Ham and QAnon, and accusing the Left of being Satanic. Meanwhile, Ken Ham thinks the movie Cats is some kind of evilutionist plot.

It’s all converging on anti-vax/anti-immigration/anti-climatology/transphobic/anti-science BS. So while the absolute numbers of these dangerous loons are declining, they are becoming increasingly nasty and stupid. We’re not going to be rid of this poison for some time to come.