Is there some kind of epidemic of stupidity right now?

OK, I’ve dealt with creationists. I’ve bumped into flat-earthers and walked away moaning. But now, people are claiming that there’s something suspicious about the snow in Texas? That it won’t melt? Do they think liberal agents of the lizardoid government were dumping millions of tons of artificial snow on good Republican states? Rebecca Watson is on it.

She links to a clip of a Texas dumbass using a lighter on an icy snowball made of wet snow (I couldn’t do that when it’s really cold, for instance — the snow is too dry and powdery). He seems…impressed. My opinion of Texans plummeted. Sorry, all you Texans reading this, I’m sure you are exceptions.

Like I have any clout with American Atheists at all

For some reason, some atheists write to me expecting that I will agree 100% with their atheism uber alles views, and that in particular, my knee will jerk and that I will oppose anything American Atheists tries to do. But that isn’t true! In the past, AA has pissed me off — especially in the David Silverman era — but there are other things where I see AA supporting a progressive agenda, and I support them totally.

For instance, Alison Gill, their vice president, has declared support for the Equality Act.

By ensuring protections for LGBTQ people under national civil rights laws, the Equality Act would strengthen protections for everyone. For example, the bill expands the meaning of “public accommodations” to include retail stores; transportation services like airports, taxis, and bus stations; and service providers like accountants.

The Equality Act would also protect youth in child welfare services by preventing state-funded religious foster care and adoption agencies from discriminating against LGBTQ people. Currently, 11 states have laws on the books that allow discrimination in adoption and foster care on the basis of religion, and other states are considering this issue.

Stop more states from adopting discriminatory legislation in the name of religion! Support the Equality Act!

Well, yes, obviously. Supporting civil rights and strengthening protections for everyone is a good and righteous position for an atheist organization to take.

But would you believe I get email complaining about AA’s position?

The membership of AA is becoming increasingly
alarmed re Alison Gill’s role and activities in AA
which openly favor the LGBTQ cause.
We members feel this is a dereliction of duty
toward the Atheist cause, which, as a paid
employee of AA, Alison Gill is obligated to
support and promote solely and primarily.

Please note that this person does not speak for the “membership of AA”, or for even just the “AA Life Members”, as the letter is signed (I happen to be an AA Life Member), or particularly for me. Supporting the LGBTQ cause should be a natural for atheists, since this strengthens protections for everyone.

But that isn’t even the worst complaint.

What has the LGBT community done to support the rights of Atheists? Not a damn thing. When the Boy Scouts ended its ban on Gays but continued its ban on Atheists, did Gays stand behind Atheists and protest the continued bias against them by the BSA? No, of course not, although the LGBT people have demanded the support of Atheist and Humanist groups for their own narrow interests.

What the fuck…? Whatever happened to the golden rule, and doing things because they’re right, not because we expect immediate reciprocation? This is not a transaction. Civil rights are not something you fight for for one group, but not another.

I don’t even know why they’re complaining at me, I have zero influence with any atheist organization, and if I did, I’d be telling Alison Gill and American Atheists to keep it up and do more.

A defense of Adnan Oktar

It’s not a very good defense, but Oktar’s allies have put together a long, long series of webpages trying to argue that Oktar was railroaded — I link to it here in the interests of fairness, although I don’t believe any of it. The core of their claim is that evidence against him was illegally obtained (probably true, in part — I don’t think Erdogan’s government respects the idea of justice — and that he was not part of a criminal organization, but rather, they were just an open-minded circle of friends, which I do not believe for an instant. It was, maybe is, a cult, with Oktar at the top. There was a tremendous flow of money through his organization that allowed him to create international conferences and publish books of propaganda that he sent around the world.

Also, most strangely, throughout the defense they assert that the accused are all well-off, from wealthy families, therefore they couldn’t possibly be guilty of criminal activities! Yeah, right. For instance, one set of charges is that Oktar was a sexual abuser, and several of the women (the ones he called “kittens”) stepped forward to testify against him. This can’t be!

The women who claim to have been sexually abused are well-educated and capable of expressing themselves very well; among them are a doctor of medicine, even a lawyer. None of them are people who would remain silent in the face of harassment that continues for years. They are not people who can be made to comply with such a thing with various suggestions either, because they are of high socio-cultural levels, have university degrees, they are not ignorant. There is no question of corrupting their will through various explanations.

Women of high socio-cultural levels can’t be victimized, I guess, and can’t possibly be persuaded to submit to an oppressive influence. Except, of course, when the police pressure them to turn on Adnan Oktar, then their will can be quickly corrupted.

They are also the victims of a conspiracy by orthodox Muslims to destroy Oktar’s liberal, enlightened organization. Let’s not forget that this was an organization dedicated to an anti-science position, promoting creationism, with a creepy collection of women made up to look like dolls and recite the writings of Adnan Oktar. Liberal, it wasn’t. OK, maybe it was liberal compared to fundamentalist Islamic clerics, but that isn’t saying much.

But I do think the defense has a point when they bring up the magnitude of the arrests. The Turkish police rounded up everyone in a massive sweep.

Through this scheme, Adnan Oktar and 200 of his friends, men and women who have no past convictions, and are university graduates from respectable families, were collected from their homes in totality, kept in police custody for eight days under very harsh circumstances and then sent to prison.This court case has been underway for 2 years in Turkey, with a number of violations of international human rights and the Turkish Constitution.

This is a very unique case with 226 defendants, 167 of whom were detained for a term of 17 months until December 2019, when 91 of the defendants (including 3 lawyers), and 4 more in February 2020, were released by the court, which ruled to execute judicial control measures of an “international travel ban” and “ban to leave the house” (house arrest) for all. 78 defendants, including Adnan Oktar, are still in Silivri High-Security Prison, Istanbul.

I’d add that a sentence of 1,075 years is excessive and vindictive for someone who was a non-violent offender (although he did have a cache of guns, so maybe there’s more to that). If you want to make a case that Turkish justice is brutal and unfair, I’d be receptive. Trying to argue that Adnan Oktar was just one of a casual circle of friends who promoted enlightenment ideals…well, that’s just bullshit and you’ve gone too far.

Also, although as an American I shouldn’t complain about corrupt prison systems, Silivri High-Security Prison isn’t exactly the kind of white-collar country club prison where you can do easy time.

Grrrr, goddamned atheists

I really don’t like hearing from this atheist organization, ever, but here they come with more petty, ugly news.

Possible theft of AAI subscriber data
AAI employed Courtney Heard and Bridget Gaudette as Co-Executive Directors starting January 16, 2020. They resigned 32 days later and immediately set up their own organization named the International Association of Atheists, IAA.

Months after they left, we received complaints from some of our newsletter subscribers who had received marketing emails from IAA but had not signed up for them. We launched an investigation and invited IAA to explain how their emails had been sent to our subscribers.

IAA admitted they had a file in their possession which is held securely. We asked them to delete the file and certify it has been deleted and not shared with any third party but we have been unable to reach an agreement with IAA on how this should be done.

Consequently, tomorrow we will issue a public ultimatum to IAA: either they destroy our data and certify that, or we will report the incident for law enforcement authorities to investigate.

We are very sorry this has happened. Please reply to this email if you have received unsolicited emails from IAA or if you have any questions.

If this happened, I condemn it strongly. Some of you may recall that I cussed out Answers in Genesis, because Ken Ham also did exactly this, walking off with the mailing list from the Australian parent organization. This would be the same thing.

I will note, however, that I get email from AAI all the time, usually bragging about some ghastly regressive executive promotion or appointment, while I’ve never seen a single message from IAA.

I don’t find this BS soothing, either

I’m up at 4:30, and I don’t even have the excuse of going fishing. I’m just a jangly ball of stress right now, and also, we’ve got the bathroom taps open a little to prevent freezing, so all night long it’s drip-drip-trickle-gurgle, and it gets to you after a while. So I gave up trying to sleep and got up to get some work done and check my email.

Oh boy, the Noah’s Ark/DNA guy sent me more email about his “theory”.

On Rosh
Dear PZ Meyers,

A few weeks ago, I sent you a copy of my theory on human genetics and Noah’s Ark. Today, I am sending you a second part to my theory that gives special attention to the Scythian Horse Riders that I believe descend from Rosh the son of Benjamin. The theory will only take a few minutes of your time and could dramatically alter your view of the world. Next week, I plan on uploading my theory to youtube and I hope that it will get a lot of views.

This is what he sent me.

Sorry, I’m not going to bother uploading the “figures”, which seem to be random images extracted from various publications. This is not a theory. This is a guy plucking something out of Bin A, the Bible, and something out of Bin B, various scientific publications he barely understands, and declaring “Ha ha! They fit!” even if they don’t.

My view of the world continues on unaltered, my idea that there are a lot of loons out there sadly unperturbed. Confirmed, even.

He might actually succeed and get a lot of views on YouTube, since the YouTube algorithm is undiscriminating, except in the sense it seems good at launching talentless hacks into bewildering heights of popularity.

Yeah, I’ve told the Noah’s Ark/DNA guy to go away and stop sending me his lunacy, but another property of the deeply delusional is that they can’t imagine you wouldn’t be interested in their ravings.

It’s the Fallacy Abuse Fallacy!

Once upon a time, every good little skeptic had a chart of the names of all of the logical fallacies, and dutifully memorized all the latin names because it was so cool to be able to interrupt an argument with an obscure-sounding label. So definitive. So potent. And the cocky smirk on your face was just the thing to attract a swarm of enamored suitors. It’s a phase, though, and most of us manage to grow out of it, eventually.

Especially since any idiot can do it, and do it badly. It stops being impressive when some ill-trained clown starts sputtering “fallacy, fallacy, fallacy!” at you in defense of some godawful stupid belief. A buffoon like Bodie Hodge, Ken Ham’s sycophantic son-in-law, for instance.

I cited an article before that creationism is representative of deep well of ignorance and conspiracy-thinking in America. I knew the original article would make someone at Answers in Genesis furious. It did! Oh boy, did it! And Bodie Hodge was the clown they had to use to rebut it! His rebuttal is basically Hodge screaming “FALLACY!” while constantly falling back on Young Earth Creationist dogma. So when Paul Braterman points out that creationism is dangerously opposed to science, Hodge shouts out:

This is an equivocation fallacy combined with an emotive language fallacy (yes, it is possible to do multiple fallacies of logic in one sentence!). First, the authors equivocate on the word “science.” We love science at Answer in Genesis. In fact, it was a young-earth creationist, Francis Bacon, who came up with the scientific method. And most fields of science were developed by Bible-believers! So clearly, believing in YEC is not “dangerously opposed to science.”

Therefore, the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

Did anyone observe or repeat the rock layers being laid down over millions of years? No. That is a religious claim from this author interpreting rock layers in the present assuming his naturalistic and humanistic religion.

God, unlike Prof. Braterman, was there and eye-witnessed it, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, revealed it to us in Scripture. So by what authority can Prof. Braterman oppose the absolute and supreme authority of God’s Word that there was indeed a flood that covered everything under the whole heavens (Genesis 7:19)? A lesser authority—thus, this is a faulty appeal to authority fallacy (i.e., a false authority fallacy).

Yeah, the whole thing goes on like that at tendentious length. He even rejects an appeal to authority by claiming his authority, God, is bigger than science’s authority.

Look, this is silly. Non-scientists don’t get to refute science by redefining science to fit their desires, as AiG does routinely. Science does involve the interpretation of the evidence, but the evidence keeps growing and going deeper and farther. Francis Bacon and any other natural historian before the middle of the 19th century did not have the volume of evidence we do now, and lacked the information to form a more thorough and accurate understanding of the history of the earth, but what they did is to honestly and sincerely work on gathering that evidence, which later scientists would be able to synthesize into better and better models of the world. Francis Bacon was aware that he lived with the traditions and conventions of his time, but he also wrote:

Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed, but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world.

He understood that science was a cumulative process built on experience, observation, and experiment, that knowledge grows, that we can acquire new ideas and expand our understanding over time. He didn’t claim to know everything in that instant!

The reason Answers in Genesis is anti-science is that they have rejected the knowledge and evidence accumulated over centuries by people who also believed in the Bible, and the Koran, and various other holy books. The difference is that they did not turn their backs on all that we learned in order to deny anything that did not conform to their dogma.

Some of us have known that almost half of Americans are conspiracy theorists all along

I hate to say I told you so, but many of us have been aghast at the idiocy promoted by shady weird organizations for decades. Snopes has a good summary of creationism as a classic conspiracy theory.

Many people around the world looked on aghast as they witnessed the harm done by conspiracy theories such as QAnon and the myth of the stolen US election that led to the attack on the US Capitol Building on January 6. Yet while these ideas will no doubt fade in time, there is arguably a much more enduring conspiracy theory that also pervades America in the form of young Earth creationism. And it’s one that we cannot ignore because it is dangerously opposed to science.

In the US today, up to 40% of adults agree with the young Earth creationist claim that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve within the past 10,000 years. They also believe that living creatures are the result of “special creation” rather than evolution and shared ancestry. And that that Noah’s flood was worldwide and responsible for the sediments in the geologic column (layers of rock built up over millions of years), such as those exposed in the Grand Canyon.

Such beliefs derive from the doctrine of biblical infallibility, long accepted as integral to the faith of numerous evangelical and Baptist churches throughout the world, including the Free Church of Scotland. But I would argue that the present-day creationist movement is a fully fledged conspiracy theory. It meets all the criteria, offering a complete parallel universe with its own organisations and rules of evidence, and claims that the scientific establishment promoting evolution is an arrogant and morally corrupt elite.

This so-called elite supposedly conspires to monopolise academic employment and research grants. Its alleged objective is to deny divine authority, and the ultimate beneficiary and prime mover is Satan.

Creationism re-emerged in this form in reaction to the mid-20th century emphasis on science education. Its key text is the long-time best seller, The Genesis Flood, by John C Whitcomb and Henry M Morris. This provided the inspiration for Morris’s own Institute for Creation Research, and for its offshoots, Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International.

Ken Ham, the founder and chief executive of Answers in Genesis, is also responsible for the highly lucrative Ark Encounter theme park and Creation Museum in Kentucky. As a visit to any of these websites will show, their creationism is completely hostile to science, while paradoxically claiming to be scientific.

There is something about the United States that is very good at fostering wacky obsessions. We’ve been afflicted with a succession of “Great Awakenings” (I hate the name — “Dreadful Paroxysms of Cultishness” would be more appropriate), so the recent unpleasantness of QAnon & Trumpism & militias are just ripples of chaos from enduring poison in our population. We’ve been running a fever for a few centuries that occasionally flares up into a wave of horrid stupidity, and we’ve been in one of those for the last few years.

Just sayin’ — if you’d been paying attention to those of us who’ve been disgusted with the way we treat religious inanity (I know many of my readers have been quite aware), you wouldn’t be surprised at the recent eruption. There’s not much difference between Answers in Genesis and QAnon. Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christianity is just the worst.

The Christian Right poisons everything

I know Christopher Hitchens’ motto was that religion poisons everything, but maybe we should be smarter about parceling out the blame. Here’s a fascinating thread by Jane Carnall about the history of splitting out the “T” in “LGBT”. In Scotland, the alliance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people was basically taken for granted; in the US, the hate campaign against gay marriage was stopped cold by a Supreme Court decision. The Religious Right needed a new way to spew venom over non-cis non-heterosexual people, and they consciously decided that one way way would be to splinter the alliance.

So in 2017, at the Values Voter Summit held by the FRC (Patriarchy Research Council), they said it explicitly.

As Right Wing Watch also mentioned in their coverage of the same panel, a trend emerged during the session, as various speakers wrapped their opposition to nondiscrimination measures in rhetoric passing as progressive: transgender rights were depicted as anti-feminist, hostile to minorities and even disrespectful to LGB individuals. This seems to be part of a larger strategy, meant to weaken transgender rights advocates by attempting to separate them from their allies, feminists and LGBT rights advocates.

In her presentation, Kilgannon [a conservative activist] mapped out three non-negotiables in the fight against the so-called gender identity agenda, a conspiracy theory touted by anti-LGBT groups that disavows sexual orientation and gender identity. The first is to “divide and conquer. For all its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them.” In other words, separate trans activists from the gay rights movement, and their agenda becomes much easier to oppose. As Kilgannon explained, “Trans and gender identity are a tough sell, so focus on gender identity to divide and conquer.” For many, “gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success.”

I’m rather impressed at how readily the Religious Right adopted feminist rhetoric to use against the open, tolerant views of LGBT feminists. Strategically it’s brilliant, even if it is hypocritical and morally repugnant, since they hate LGBs as much as they do Ts. They are consciously allying with a group they plan to stab in the back, once LGBT unity is weakened.

Kilgannon identified a wide coalition of potential allies outside the Christian Right who could confront trans friendly measures. Here’s her advice on how to draw them in:

Explain that gender identity rights only come at the expense of others: women, sexual assault survivors, female athletes forced to compete against men and boys, ethnic minorities who culturally value modesty, economically challenged children who face many barriers to educational success and don’t need another level of chaos in their lives, children with anxiety disorders and the list goes on and on and on.

The list could almost read like a manifesto for intersectionality, if it weren’t for its exclusion of some key groups, most notably transgender people themselves.

For Kilgannon, an example of effective coalition building includes the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition (HATAC), a group that unites religious and non-religious women to oppose transgender rights.

Yeah, good work, secular Americans. You were duped.

Let’s not forget that the Religious Right had reciprocal assistance from TERFs.

In many ways, there are possible allies to this pivot toward anti-trans secular movements: trans-exclusionary radical feminists, dubbed TERFs by some activists, have made waves in recent years. Some TERFs have reclaimed the term and redubbed themselves PERFs, penis-exclusionary radical feminists. Their rationale is that people who are assigned male at birth can never experience the same conditions as women do, and still hold on to their male privilege. (The latter becomes harder to prove in the face of the discrimination experienced by trans and gender non-conforming people.) As reported by Political Research Associates, trans-exclusionary feminists “may actually be guilty of drafting [the Christian Right’s] talking points, adding fuel to the fire of this dangerous anti-trans frenzy.”

I feel clarity coming on, like a nice cool draft of water. The barbarians who want to destroy our civilization and remake it in the stifling raiment of theocracy hate me for my atheism and science, despite the fact that I’m conventionally cis and hetero. They hate my friends who might be gay, or trans, or anti-authoritarian, or black, or liberal Christians, or Muslim, or any other that doesn’t conform to their views, and they are having remarkable success at picking off one narrow demographic at a time and weakening the bonds of our unity. We should know better here in the US, where the Religious Right has used single-issue rhetoric like an icepick against the body politic, splintering us into deeply divided blocs that they can manipulate. They’ve been using abortion, for instance, as a tool to get people to vote against their own interests, and now they’re gearing up to use anti-trans ranting to break us up further.

Stand strong, everyone. Don’t let disunity allow the Robertsons and Falwells and Copelands and all the other parasites to win.

The Oumuamua ‘controversy’

A few years ago, an unusual object zipped through the solar system. It flew through on a straight trajectory at high speed and vanished into the depths of space; it was also unusual in shape, flickering in intensity as it tumbled through. It was named Oumuamua, and astronomers had a great time trying to figure out what it was, where it came from, and how it came to be moving so fast.

And then one guy, a Harvard astrophysicist named Avi Loeb, came up with the Intelligent Design explanation: aliens built it and launched it at our solar system. It was a perfect example of Intelligent Design thinking. He had no evidence for his hypothesis, he automatically rejected all other explanations, and spends most of his time complaining about other people’s hypotheses while not proposing observations or experiments to support his claim. The reaction by everyone else was typical, in that Loeb got all the attention in the tabloids and newspapers and television, while the scientists were left to do the unheralded real work, as reported in a maybe too even-handed New Yorker essay.

“No, ‘Oumuamua is not an alien spaceship, and the authors of the paper insult honest scientific inquiry to even suggest it,” Paul M. Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University, wrote.

“Can we talk about how annoying it is that Avi Loeb promotes speculative theories about alien origins of ‘Oumuamua, forcing [the] rest of us to do the scientific gruntwork of walking back these rumors?” Benjamin Weiner, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, tweeted.

By the way, the essay title is a question, “Have we already been visited by aliens?. You know the answer. No.

You will not be surprised to learn that Loeb has now written a book that asserts that Oumuamua is an intelligently designed object. Ho hum. Maybe double the ho-hums, because of course he also compares himself to Galileo, one of the most common symptoms of terminal crackpottery.

Loeb has now dispensed with the scientific notation and written “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). In it, he recounts the oft-told story of how Galileo was charged with heresy for asserting that Earth circled the sun. At his trial in Rome, in 1633, Galileo recanted and then, legend has it, muttered, sotto voce, “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves”). Loeb acknowledges that the quote is probably apocryphal; still, he maintains, it’s relevant. The astronomical establishment may wish to silence him, but it can’t explain why ‘Oumuamua strayed from the expected path. “And yet it deviated,” he observes.

One of the better parts of the essay, though, is that it concludes by comparing the book to “Chariots of the Gods?,” by Erich von Däniken, and predicts that he will most likely end up ranked with von Däniken, not Galileo. Unfortunately, that means that while it ends up as pseudoscientific trash, it will also be profitable and spawn all kinds of pseudodocumentaries, and that Loeb will be very popular on the space alien lecture circuit.

Can we have another sigh of despair, everyone?

Revisiting Islamic embryology

I seem to be famous in the Muslim world for disagreeing with Keith Moore and Hamza Tzortzis on the validity of the brief embryology lesson in the Koran — and for being utterly crushed by Tzortzis. So let’s take another look at that, at the lovely hour of 6am Central time on Sunday, the 24th.

Hey, don’t complain, it’s a good time of day for me!