The 21st Century United States has been cursed with two of the most appallingly inane “geniuses” so far, people who have cult-like followings that regard them as grand public intellectuals in spite of all the patent bullshit that spews from their mouths. They are, of course, Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk. Future historians will be mystified by their popularity, because there’s so little there there, and what there is so tainted by lunacy that it will persuade no one.

They aren’t even from the United States. Some ineffable aspect of American culture has drawn them in and allowed them to flourish here — maybe it’s atmosphere of oblivious ignorance and worship of money? We’re like the Burnt-Over District of countries, where con artists can flower and succeed.

Anyway, Nathan Robinson has already deconstructed Jordan Peterson (and also Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, and Ben Shapiro — he’s the wrecking ball we need), and now he turns his gaze to Elon Musk. A small sample:

Musk’s preference for hype and exaggeration over follow-through and diligence has created a great deal of dysfunction within Tesla, as journalist Edward Niedermeyer reports in Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors. Little that Musk says can be trusted. He has promised to fill space with his satellites to provide a powerful new alternative internet infrastructure—but this isn’t going to happen, though it may well massively inhibit the ability of actual scientists to do their work and ruin the night sky. His Neuralink company talks of uploading brains to computers and implanting chips that will be “like a fitbit in your skull”—but this is unlikely to happen either, and the MIT Technology Review says what has been revealed so far is “neuroscience theater” with little evidence to back up Musk’s astonishing promises. From the announcement that Tesla would switch to building ventilators to help COVID patients to the “mini-sub” that proved inferior to old-fashioned diving skill in the cave rescue, Musk comes up with flashy world-saving schemes one after another and rarely delivers. (Some of the schemes aren’t world-changing, just obviously doomed, as when he attempted to launch a competitor to the Onion called Thud.) Niedermeyer notes that, “Each of these announcements struggled to withstand close examination, ranging from mere exaggeration to quasi-delusional fantasy,” but “many outlets reported these developments unquestioningly,” contributing to Musk’s “legend as a twenty-first-century Renaissance man.” So many of these plans are from the “F.M.” world, and when you read analyses by science and tech writers from the “A.M.” world, you realize that the line between Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes is thinner than you might think. (When the Barnumesque B.S. is exposed, it can be extremely amusing, as when in a live demonstration, the “armor glass” windows on the Cybertruck were easily smashed.)

Niedermeyer documents the way that Musk’s claims sometimes border on outright fraud. Niedermeyer believes Tesla may well have pretended it could charge cars faster than it could in order to qualify for a state tax incentive scheme, and as he reported began to see that “potentially massive gaps existed between Tesla’s carefully cultivated image and reality—yet the company was capable of saying and doing whatever it thought it needed to maintain its reputation.” Tesla even required some owners to sign non-disclosure agreements when it agreed to repair problems with their cars, which created a minor scandal when it became clear that the agreement’s text would keep people from being able to tell government regulators if there was a safety issue. Niedermeyer also reports a shocking incident in which Musk personally called the employer of a blogger who had been debunking Musk’s claims online (the blogger was anonymous but had been doxxed by Musk’s fans). Musk threatened vague legal action, and the employer asked the blogger to stop commenting on Tesla, which he did. (Niedermeyer says the company has also repeatedly engaged in “blatantly defamatory smear[s]” of journalists who report critically on it.)

I’m glad we’ve got at least one real skeptic working in journalism, but of course, we’re all going to read the article and nod in agreement, and Musk will go on being the world’s richest spoiled 12 year old brat.

A great loss…Hector Avalos was a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Iowa State University, but also he was a great humanist and all around nice guy. We met several times; he made many trips up the road to Minneapolis to speak at Minnesota Atheist meetings, and he was always a pleasure to listen to. Here’s one recording of one of his talks (I think I was at that one!)

If only atheism had paid more attention to the example set by Hector.

I think Jesus has earned it — he’s a true eldritch horror.

Psst, wanna read a review of Jordan Peterson’s new book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life? It’ll spare you the trouble of reading the whole thing.

Russia got Stalin and Dostoevsky. Who’s Canada’s most dangerous thinker? Professor Dad over here, yelling up the stairs about William Blake and the “overwhelming mystery of Being” and, hey, would it kill you kids to clean up after yourselves once in a while? Some of us have tenured jobs to go to.

This disconnect between the way Peterson is advertised and what he in fact writes is the most deflating thing here. If this is what the enemy looks like to you, you’re going to have to find a new war. This one is too boring to fight.

That’s the impression I got from his first popular book, too — it’s a lot of trite, boring trivialities recited as if they were Deep Thoughts, and what needs to be fought isn’t Peterson, but the shallow wave of ignorance rippling among his devotees.

This requires a lot of explaining, and even, God help us, some poetry. The ratio of sociology-term-paper-gobbledygook to English runs at roughly 2:1, yet we are introduced to “the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates.” This is deep thinking slimmed down for people who aren’t totally sure whether Socrates was the toga guy or the gyro guy.

Here are his 12 new rules:

1. Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.
2. Imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that.
3. Do you not hide unwanted things in the fog.
4. Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
5. Do not do what you hate.
6. Abandon ideology.
7. Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.
8. Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible.
9. If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely.
10. Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship.
11. Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.
12. Be grateful in spite of your suffering.

I do not need to read the book to know that that is incoherent garbage. It’s like being served up a load of bad fortune cookies.

David Silverman’s fall has been spectacular. A few years ago, he was running the US’s largest atheist organization with panache — he was not uniformly beloved, but he had influence and a loud voice and was shaking things up. He was the face of atheism. He was regularly on Fox News, punching back at the buffoons running that crapshow. He was the brash, arrogant American at international conferences. Top o’ the world, Ma!

Then it is discovered that he’s using his position to pressure women into having sex with him.

Boom, that was it. He lost his job, he lost his family, he lost his platform, they aren’t inviting him on Fox News anymore. If he hadn’t been such a terrible abuser, I might be feeling some pity for him, just because the contrast was so stark. And now look what he is reduced to: desperately looking for affirmation from Republicans, who are mostly far-right Christian Evangelicals any more, and moaning about how so few atheist organizations want anything to do with him.

Flying to Florida to table at @CPAC for @AtheistsLiberty . Good to be an atheist activist again. Sad as fuck that the rest of the atheist movement (save @atheistalliance and @AtheistRepublic) has abandoned the non progressive and the ex Muslim. Stupid stupid stupid.

— David Silverman (@MrAtheistPants) February 24, 2021

And now, in the name of skepticism, he is defending Donald Trump, trying to suggest that he didn’t actually incite an insurrection, because he didn’t literally use the words “storm the capital”. This is pathetic. You know, Hitler didn’t ever actually say out loud, “Round up all the Jews and murder them,” either. It’s the effect and the actions that count.

Hundreds of thousands were peaceful. A hundred were crazy. He told his crowd to go home, he loves them, and you call that evil.

You ARE trying.

Did he say " storm the capital" or "peacefully march"?

Try to prove yourself wrong. If you fail, you're right.

— David Silverman (@MrAtheistPants) February 24, 2021

As a former friend to David Silverman, I would say…David, snuffling about in the garbage bin is not the way to regain honor and respect, but is only a way to foul yourself further. I know you want to make a comeback to some degree, but aligning yourself with Trump Republicans is not the path. You are especially not going to ever acquire the regard of humanists, intellectuals, progressives, and the kind of people who think all genders and races are equal. You are aligning yourself with bigots, racists, misogynists, and the worst kind of Christians.

Further, I would add that you’ve made no amends and obviously haven’t accepted that your past actions were wrong, or you wouldn’t be associating with the kind of people who would assure you that your abuse of power and treatment of women was appropriate and right, and that that kind of behavior isn’t a major obstacle to their acceptance of you, personally. In other words, hanging out with ignorant rat bastards doesn’t make you less of an ignorant rat bastard.

This whole mess…if they made it into an opera, I’d say it was a little too overblown, melodramatic, and histrionic.

Way to lean in hard into the stereotypes, Karen from Texas. She has written a two-part column for the Orange Leader, a newspaper in Texas, and the editor accepted it, which tells you the paper has no standards.

It’s interesting because I’m sure that if you asked her, she would tell you that she worked hard on this essay, doing lots of “research”, or rather, her idea of research. I can tell how she approached it: she started with an a priori commitment to the idea that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, fired up Google, and searched for stories that affirmed her belief, and then packaged up a list of anecdotes and sent it in. This is not research. That’s not how any of this works.

Every semester I get assigned a group of students to shepherd through a senior thesis assignment. I always tell them the first thing to do is ask a question, and that the purpose of their research is to explore the world of potential answers that have been discussed in the scientific literature, and compose a synthesis of the information from quality sources to suggest the most likely answer. Along the way, they are supposed to discuss how those answers were reached and assess the methods used.

For instance, if Karen were to phrase this as “Did dinosaurs and humans live at the same time?”, well, it’s a silly question because that’s been definitively answered with a strong “no”, but if it were asked sincerely and she reviewed the breadth of the good literature honestly, she might learn something. She did not. All of her “research” was focused on gleaning the minority response of “yes”, and she never cared that she only got that answer from low quality sources at the bottom of the barrel, and she doesn’t even try to analyze how they reached their conclusions.

I include the whole thing so you can see what I mean — it’s a litany of assertions that she has compiled, all of which support her beliefs, not one contrary perspective among them.

I believe that Dinosaurs walked this earth but not 140 million years ago like scientist claim.

Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, according to the 2010 University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

The question was asked “Did humans live at the same time as the dinosaurs?” Three in ten Texas voters agree that they did live at the same time; 41 percent disagree, and 30 percent don’t know.

Evangelical Christians make up approximately 25% of the U.S. population. A majority of them think the Bible should be read literally and that evolution is false.

In Kentucky there is a Creation Museum, which promotes a very specific version of this belief, which holds that God made the universe in six 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago. (A lot of Christians say 6,000 to 10,000 years). And yes, they have dinosaurs in this creation museum.

[An appeal to popularity only tells me that the Texas educational system is bad.]

According to the Hindustan Times on March 2, 2021, “Scientists have unearthed in Argentina’s Patagonian wilderness; fossils of what may be the oldest-known member of the dinosaur group known as titanosaurs, that includes the largest land animals in Earth’s history”.

They say it is a group of long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs, and is supposed to be 115 feet. They do state the skeletal was incomplete, but they haven’t finished digging it up since it was just recently found.

Many Scientist have poured cast of missing bones and constructed an animal, only to put it in a museum and call it factual.

Most people are not refuting the fact that there were dinosaurs, but they refute the fact that they didn’t live with humans.

[Inconsistent. She says she believes dinosaurs existed, but then she casts doubt on the one story about finding a dinosaur fossil that she cites. Why don’t you accept the reality of this fossil, Karen?]

I recently watched a video on dinosaurs, and a school teacher of Science was the one sharing the facts. But this Science teacher got it right. He stated that dinosaurs waked the earth with man. How else would they know what pictures to draw on cave walls that look exactly like dinosaurs? They have found drawings of Woolly Mammoths, Triceratops and men, drawn together fighting.

This is a classic hunter, posing with a 10-point deer these days, showing off his trophy, except they didn’t have cameras then.

[She watched a video. By whom? This sounds like a Kent Hovind story, and no, he is not a credible source. This is all vague and poorly sourced, but I’ll quote the Smithosonian’s assessment of one set of supposed dinosaur pictograms:

While certainly the most prominent, the supposed sauropod was not the only dinosaur carving creationists thought they saw on the bridge. Three other dinosaur depictions have been said to exist, but Senter and Cole easily debunked these, as well. One of the “dinosaurs” was nothing but a mud stain; a proposed Triceratops was just a composite of petroglyphs that do not represent animals, and what has been described as a carving of Monoclonius was nothing more than an enigmatic squiggle. There are no dinosaur carvings on Kachina Bridge.

Or you can read this analysis of a supposed pterosaur painting published in Science. Sorry, Karen, these don’t hold up.]

In 600 BC, under the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar, a Babylonian artist was commissioned to shape reliefs of animals on the structures associated with the Ishtar Gate. Many centuries later, German archaeologist Robert Koldewey stumbled upon the gate, and was rediscovered in 1899.

The animals appear in alternating rows with lions, fierce bulls, and curious long-necked dragons (Sirrush). The lions and bulls would have been present at that time in the Middle East, but on what creature did the ancient Babylonians model the dragon? Koldewey believed that the Sirrush was a portrayal of a real animal and in 1918, he proposed that the dinosaur Iguanodon was the closest known match to the Sirrush.

Both the description there, and the image on these walls, which are now displayed in a Berlin Museum, appear to fit a sauropod dinosaur.

[I’ve seen paintings of the Balrog. Does that make it real? Ancient art illustrates all kinds of chimeras, centaurs, mermaids, dog-people, etc. Is this evidence that they actually exist, or that humans have an imagination?]

In Glen Rose, Texas there are huge dinosaur tracks in the limestone. I’ve been there, and have walked in those tracks. There are man-tracks in the limestone as well. The historical plaque states the tracks were formed 100 million years ago which is incorrect, but they do recognize them as dinosaur tracks.

What they don’t recognize is the man tracks in the same limestone? As a matter of fact, there are three different types of dinosaur tracks located there.

[The man-tracks are fakes.]

Next week we will look at Job, and how God tells Job to behold these mighty creatures. How could Job behold these mighty creatures if Job had not seen them? We will also talk about why this is important in the Christian realm.

[Behold! The starship USS Enterprise! How can you behold that if it does not have material, physical reality?]

Yeah, I don’t think she made a reasonable case there, but it is a fairly representative example of creationist “research”.

One of my major problems with Christianity, a problem that has become increasingly vivid in recent years, is the cultish refusal to dissent from their own extremists — there’s an attitude of servile “getting along” with leaders who have become more and more deranged. We’ve been seeing that for years, with people like Pat Robertson and the Falwells and every one of those horrible organizations with “family” in the name, all certifiably hate-filled and determined to stamp out every deviation from their pale ignorant angry norm. It’s gotten so bad that the derangement has become the point, rather than the Christianity, so that the flock went ga-ga over a paranoid narcissist who has never exhibited the feeblest spark of religious devotion. Their new Jesus figure thinks he is the god and the Christians must lift every voice and sing his praises.

There have been many great Christian dissenters, people who believe in the religion with every fiber in their hearts, but who also see charity and reducing human suffering as the true great mission of Jesus Christ. I can disagree with their theology while respecting their goals and methods. Their priority is to be a good person and help others. Unfortunately, we don’t have a Cult of Jimmy Carter, but we do have a cult of Donald Trump.

So yes, I respect Christians who are willing to stand up and reject the Christianity that fuels armed mobs of “militias”, that reject the Christianity that says LGBT folk must be shunned and punished, that reject the Christianity that treats women as chattel, the Christianity that has wed itself to white supremacy, even if they do believe in gods and prayers and ancient mythology. What matters isn’t the poems they love, it’s the actions they take. Right now, the important thing is that they take a stand against the religion of conservative hate that is hijacking their faith.

We atheists have a similar responsibility. It’s not as if we’re somehow immune to the unreason and poison of the far right ideology. We should look at this and be appalled.

I’ll let James Croft explain it.

Yes, Atheists for Liberty were at CPAC to hobnob with fellow true believers in the anti-social justice cult which has captured US conservatism – and, to be fair, where better? CPAC is not a normal political conference, after all. In the range of acceptable, rational political opinion, it is not so much to one side of the scale as outside the scale entirely. CPAC brings together the vilest conspiracy theorists and hatemongers in the GOP and the conservative movement, and gives them a massive megaphone. It has consistently promoted false and harmful political ideas: this year it promoted the conspiracy theory that Trump won the presidential election, as well as transphobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric that wouldn’t be out of place at a neo-Nazi rally. It is a cesspool of the worst elements of American politics, and everyone who swims in that cesspool gets covered with slime.

A consistent theme of this year’s CPAC – as well as in conservative spaces more broadly – is the idea that social justice warriors are trying to “cancel” everything they disagree with. A great tide of illiberalism is washing over the USA, they claim, generated by angry Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist activists. Some of the biggest cheers of the evening were against “cancel culture”, something you’d think would be a boutique interest in the time of a massive global pandemic. But this seems to be what US conservatism has fixed on as its new bête noire, and Atheists for Liberty agrees.

This is an example of a new and growing phenomenon: the lines between religion and nonreligion, and even conservatism and liberalism, are becoming less important compared with the line between the “woke” and the “anti-woke.” Where you stand on the approach and concerns of contemporary social justice culture is becoming the signifier of political allegiance in the USA, and since Atheists for Liberty are anti-woke, they will happily dive into the CPAC cesspool.

I took a look in my archives, and I think I first started writing about the Deep Rifts in Atheism way back in 2009. I notice, though, that what I was saying back then was that we’d find our strength in the arguments over our goals, that internal dissent was the force that would drive us to be better atheists. I was so optimistic back then! Looking back over a dozen years, what I can see is that I was wrong (about so many things), and that there was no resolution, and that there could be no resolution. Atheism is a granfalloon. For those of you who aren’t great fans of Kurt Vonnegut (also an atheist and humanist!):

A granfalloon, in the fictional religion of Bokononism (created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle), is defined as a “false karass”. That is, it is a group of people who affect a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is meaningless.

In that spirit, I repudiate “Atheists for Liberty” and all who find common cause with their opposition to justice. I will and always have criticized the atheist movement, and will not be one of the sheep who follow the worshippers of authoritarianism and prejudice and oppression into their hell on Earth.

Besides, look at that photo: smug assholes happily wallowing in the insanity of CPAC. How could anyone think that is behavior to admire or emulate?