This may not go well

I was asked to join a discussion about Islamic embryology by a fellow named Kenny Bomer (he has a YouTube channel), and I foolishly agreed, since it’s a topic I know well — well, the embryology part, at least — and I’m willing to try and educate. I’ll be on his show at 6:30pm Central time on Friday, 28 August. I see that a lot of his videos go on for hours, but I can’t see that happening here, since all the Quran has on embryology is a scant few lines cribbed from Aristotle and Galen…but then, the Christians go on for decades about a few lines on just the first page of the book of Genesis, so I’ve learned to never be surprised at how much religious folk can obsess over the exact interpretation of tiny fragments of text.

Oh well. I’ll be on for as long as I’m having fun. We’ll have to see how long that will be. Bring a stopwatch!

Tomorrow is #ApostasyDay

It’s not exactly a day of celebration. Apostasy Day is a time to reject oppressive dogmas.

22 August is being chosen as Apostasy Day because it is the UN Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief. Moreover, late August marks the start of a second wave of mass executions of apostates in Iran in 1988 after brief “trials”. Thousands who responded negatively to questions such as ‘Are you a Muslim?’, ‘Do you believe in Allah?’, ‘Is the Holy Qur’an the Word of Allah?’, ‘Do you accept the Holy Muhammad to be the Seal of the Prophets?’, ‘Do you fast during Ramadan?’, ‘Do you pray and read the Holy Qur’an?’ were summarily executed.

On the newly established Apostasy Day, we renew calls for the:
• commemoration of the victims of apostasy laws
• an end to the criminalisation and the death penalty for apostasy in countries under Islamic laws
• an end to shunning, threats and honour-related violence from families of apostates
• affirmation of freedom of thought, conscience and belief as well as opinion and expression in compliance with the United Nation Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 18 & 19).

Speak out! You can add your name to the list of signatories, at the very least.

I’m only halfway there, I guess

I stopped believing in gods, but I haven’t yet acquired an appreciation of the cunning work of Satan. I’m kind of liking the view from the intermediate point of evolution, so I don’t know that I’ll ever move on to satanism.

You know the arguments against design are pretty good at defeating Satan, too, right? Maybe we should use that as a selling point more often: “Get an education, Satan hates science!”

Sam Harris won’t care

Recently, Harris was skewered in Salon, as he’s been skewered everywhere else — his Ezra Klein interview made his inadequacy obvious, and that weird exchange with Bruce Schneier in which he just waved away the words of an internationally known security expert so he could continue to support racial profiling exposed his racism. This story just sums up everything we already knew.

But over time, Harris withdrew from expressing his opinions through platforms designed to ensure a minimum level of intellectual integrity. He began blogging and then started an enormously popular podcast, his principal medium for the past seven years. He stopped publishing peer-reviewed research papers. He opted not to submit articles to media outlets that imposed some editorial control over what they publish. Instead, he created a small media empire that enabled him to say whatever he wants, whether or not the message is misleading, the claims are factually erroneous, the reasoning is fallacious and so on. In other words, he figured out a way to bypass intellectual accountability — to opine as much as he wants about topics he doesn’t understand without peer-review, editorial oversight or other quality-control measures.

Like Trump, Harris seems wholly uninterested in getting things right. He claims to care about intellectual honesty and good scholarship, yet he consistently spouts misinformation on his podcast that could easily be corrected if only he were to engage — sincerely, and in good faith — those who disagree with him (very often actual experts on the topics of racism, feminism, social justice and so on). Indeed, so far as I can tell, Harris has become one of the greatest sources of misinformation on social justice issues in the United States today. His contribution to scientific racism — his boosting the visibility of claims like Black people are almost certainly dumber than white people for genetic reasons — will no doubt be one of his greatest, and darkest, legacies.

There’s good news and bad news here, though. The bad news is that yes, he’s a terrible, shallow person with a large audience — he’s sharing a niche with Joe Rogan — who promotes bad information. The good news is that over the years he has retreated into his own personal safe space, a hug box for racists.

Years ago when we were both on the atheist conference circuit (on different tiers, he was the high-priced speaker who demanded a security detail, I was the guy who was happy to be there and didn’t charge a fee), he was annoyingly ubiquitous. You couldn’t escape him. He was at every con, he was in every atheist magazine, I’d turn around and there he’d be with a big guy in a dark suit and sunglasses, glowering.

But now he’s got his podcast and a dedicated fan base, and I haven’t seen him or read anything by him in ages. You have to make an effort to find him and listen to his words, and I don’t, so that’s nice. I picture him as an unpleasant cyst that has become encapsulated in fibrous connective tissue, still there and it still hurts when you poke at it, but at least it’s not oozing pus all over everything else anymore. We should probably get it removed surgically some day.

Oh, jeez, remember when every time you pointed out some racist, stupid thing Harris said, there’d be some slimy fan boy showing up in the comments to complain that you’d taken him out of context? Let’s hope those days are over.

You have two things to look forward to this weekend

It’ll be my last weekend before classes come crashing down on my head, so I’m going to take advantage of it.

Skepticon starts tomorrow! Tune in!

I’m looking forward to this as well: Lovecraft Country airs on Sunday!

It’s a great book, and it looks like HBO is doing right by it. There’s a write-up in the LA Times about that horrible racist, HP Lovecraft, and why he is surprisingly popular.

Lovecraft helped create a genre now known as “cosmic horror,” stories filled with dread and terror at the knowledge that humans are not the most important things in the universe.

“He was beginning to write at a time when science was making vast and profound discoveries,” says Klinger. “What he came to believe, I think deeply and honestly, was that human beings were insignificant little dust motes in this enormous universe and that eventually we would discover that we were not particularly significant.”

Science has been spending a few centuries working to move the center of the universe away from us, so it fits with an ongoing trend. Now we just have to dislodge that center from white people, which is proving to be the hardest step of them all. Lovecraft Country, though, does its part in the decentering. Don’t read Lovecraft, read the more recent authors that have been bringing us cosmic dread without the petty racism. (Another author I’d recommend: the work of Ruthanna Emrys, who takes on the perspective of the fish men of Innsmouth.)

Hey, can we pretend Skepticon is taking place in Lovecraft country?

Not the humanists, too!

Even the Canadian humanists! Here’s a conversation between two old cis guys about what to do about the trans folk, featuring Carey Linde, a divorce lawyer and activist for men’s rights (I say it that way to avoid implying that he is an outright MRA freak) and Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson, a psychologist and member of Humanist Canada. I don’t know why they’re even talking about trans rights, but they had to stake out their claim. I’ll just post a few excerpts to let you get the flavor.

First, Linde explains the source of the problem. It’s those darned trans people becoming conspicuous!

If you mean for the trans community, it was the developing collectivity of community. This increasing conspicuous collectivity in the public eye caused the very phobia from which the community wished to escape. As with acceptance of blacks and gays over time, gender identity issues and people are ubiquitous in the media. It is all less sensitive to a growing progressive set of the population. At the same time, the faith based right is rallying and dangerous. Gender radical feminists are under literal attack by the trans warriors.

There’s the usual bafflement about allowing trans women to compete in athletics, and the usual expectation that this is all a ploy to allow rapists with penises into women’s locker rooms, from Robertson.

Relying on recent federal legislation, the Ontario courts have forced the Ontario Minor Hockey Association to allow adolescents with female bodies to change in male change rooms. This is the kind of social experiment no university ethics committee would ever approve. One of two outcomes is possible. Either a number of people with girl’s bodies will be sexually assaulted by adolescent boys, or they will not. If we don’t see sexual assaults flowing from this experiment then we may reasonably decide that we do not need separate facilities for males and females at least for safety reasons. We are beginning to see this change with respect to the washroom issue. If, on the other hand, we see a number of sexual assaults, the logical conclusion would be to end the experiment; however, I don’t think that will happen. I think politically, the politicians behind the experiment will refuse to accept its failure. They will double down with increasing expensive measures to protect the genetically female while engaging in male-blaming, perhaps with references to “toxic masculinity.” But we as a society do not need to follow them down this hole.

He has another rationale for why the trans folk are getting more riled up.

One of the new phenomena fueling the panic is the increasing number of young girls and women deciding that being a boy in this world is a safer bet than being a girl. And the medical profession and big pharma is right their to enable this delusion.

Uh, what? Is there a single trans man on the planet who made their decision because being trans was safer than being a woman?

Then we get some ad hoc evidence-free evolutionary psychology and cultural anthropology.

We have the situation of men being more accepting of transmen than women are of transwomen. The hypothesis that men are more accepting of diversity would require more study across different groups; however such an explanation would be more acceptable to feminists than the obvious alternative, that biological women are protecting their privileges from competition while men have no such privileges to protect.

If men are more accepting of diversity, it would have to be a function of socialization. The testosterone that gives men their sexuality also translates into stronger bones, more muscle mass, and increased aggression and competitiveness. These latter two traits were necessary in traditional hunter gathering societies to fearlessly challenge competitors, both predatory and human, to protect bands that were essentially extended families. But aggression and competitiveness needs to be controlled or channelled if civilization is to work. Religion played a pivotal role in controlling and channelling male aggressive instincts in the formative years of our human civilizations. We have largely transcended religion by secularizing our ethics and expanding their application to all humanity, as for example, with the establishment of universal human rights. And we have been incredibly successful. Steven Pinker has meticulously documented how we now have fewer homicides, fewer deaths due to war, more gender equality and lower poverty than ever before in human history.

The argument would be then that the history of civilization is, at least in part, a history of controlling and channelling male testosterone. That aggression has been channelled into business, sports, politics and protection of the nation-state. Men have been conditioned to increasingly ignore minor or insubstantive difference, but of course there are numerous variables that also influence behaviour in particular contexts. Of concern to me is that tribalism has been increasing with a recent focus on ideological, cultural and racial identities and that this will result in breaking down the more universal humanist ethic. To take the argument full circle then, if the process of civilization included the aspect of controlling and channelling male testosterone-linked behaviours, then we would expect that women would have been less affected by this aspect of socialization. This would have left women more susceptible to ancient xenophobic fears including fear of “the other.”

Men more accepting of diversity. Yeah, right; men’s locker rooms and clubs are such hotbeds of sensitivity. Men, conditioned to ignore minor differences…I guess it’s true that there are no Republicans in Canada. It’s a bizarre set of evidence-free rationalizations to simultaneously suggest that men are roiling cauldrons of fierce hormones (to protect us from bears, don’t you know) and that men are therefore better socialized to be accepting and less xenophobic. That’s all nonsense, including their belief that humans needed big muscley aggressive warriors in their evolution — if that were really the case, how ever did gracile Homo sapiens ever succeed where Neanderthals died off? It’s almost as if there were more complex factors beyond the usual cartoon caveman trope.

Atheists have been embarrassing me for years. Don’t you humanists start!