Is Raif Badawi dead?

Raif Badawi is the Saudi blogger, atheist, and critic of the Saudi theocracy who was jailed and lashed, and who is currently in a horrible Saudi prison. He has been in communication with his family, though, with daily phone calls, until recently — Badawi has suddenly gone silent.

Jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, currently serving a 10 year prison sentence for criticizing the Saudi Arabian regime online, has not been heard from in more than a month, leaving his family fearful for his well-being, and unsure if he is still alive.

The last time Badawi’s family heard from him was on Jan. 14, his family’s spokesperson Elham Manea tells TIME. Since then, his daily phone calls from prison have suddenly and inexplicably stopped. Last week, prison authorities told Badawi’s wife, Ensaf Haidar, that he does not want to speak with her, Manea says.

People are fearing the worst.

This will not change our relationship to an unabashedly evil regime, although it should. The US has too many powerful people who profit off the oil, and no small number of ordinary citizens who are fine with torturing and murdering atheists and people who dare to criticize the government.

A timely exam…from Ken Ham

This weekend, I’ve been working on an exam for my introductory biology class. We’ve been covering basic principles of evolution so far this term, discussing multiple lines of evidence and examples. Then, what appears over the transom but an exam from a Kentucky middle school covering exactly the same material! What luck! This will make exam prep even easier, and it even includes the answer key!

Only problem is that the entire exam is total bullshit. Darn. I guess I’ll have to go back to composing my own.

Although, an exam consisting of the question, “What is wrong with each of these 13 creationist claims?” might be sort of useful. Except that I’d rather my students learn the real science.

Ugh. Maher.

Bill Maher soft-pedaled Mike Bloomberg’s racism last night. You know, this Bloomberg, who bragged about targeting minorities for selective policing.

Maher was addressing the tape of Bloomberg from 2015 that re-emerged this week, wherein the former mayor of New York City admitted—to a crowd of rich, white folks in Aspen—that his stop-and-frisk policy, which was unconstitutional, led to thousands of dubious marijuana arrests, and ruined many lives, was about targeting “minorities.”

“Ninety-five percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description and Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities 15 to 25…That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city in America. And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed,” said Bloomberg.

He continued: “People say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana who are all minorities!’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why’d we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you should get the guns out of the kids’ hands is throw them against the wall and frisk them.”

Bloomberg is terrible. He’s the worst choice among the Democrats, and I say that as someone who detests Biden. I’m still going to vote Democrat if Biden is the nominee, but if it’s Bloomberg…I might not. Allowing Bloomberg to buy his way into the presidency is the end of the party and democracy in general in the US. It means we’re a total plutocracy, and that our representatives have willingly sold out. Besides, Bloomberg is a stone cold racist piece of shit.

Maher joked about that, and got booed.

“Bernie Sanders won Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s also leading in the national polls, which means we have a new frontrunner… Michael Bloomberg? What the fuck?” offered Maher, adding, “Well, Bloomberg must be the frontrunner because liberals are calling him a racist.”

When the audience began booing Maher’s joke castigating liberals for calling Bloomberg a racist, he sniped, “Keep booing—that’s how you lost the last election.”

He’s not the frontrunner, no matter how much the media and rich phonies like Maher get starry-eyed over him, and liberals are calling him racist because he said racist things. Why is Maher glossing over the blatant, outrageous things a rich man with power said? Those remarks are not a minor issue.

What’s interesting, though, is that Maher has lost his audience. Part of that is almost certainly that revealing accusation: “you lost the election.” Maher does not identify with his audience, and does not identify with those of us who are suffering with the election of Donald Trump. Maher’s got his, he’s feeling no pain, and his audience of centrist liberals can go fuck themselves.

Why does Maher still have a show? Why do you (that’s right, I don’t identify with people who watch him) continue to watch his crappy program and his smug face? When will he find himself unemployed, so he can more righteously complain about his cancellation?

In the End Times, idiots can promise anything

I’m pretty sure that’s in the Bible somewhere, but I haven’t cracked one of those open in decades.

Anyway, Jim Bakker, convicted fraud, rapist, and shill for bulk food products, is now capitalizing on fear of the coronavirus to sell a “cure”, bringing on a naturopath to tout the virtues of colloidal silver.

You know it doesn’t work, right? Bakker is selling quantities ranging in price from $40 to $300 to gullible old Christians who tremble in fear at every paranoid theory Fox News trots out.

…similarly marketed products also include colloidal silver which according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) provides no known health benefits. Ingesting it can cause side effects including argyria, or discoloration of the skin or other tissue, and poor absorption of other medications by the body.

Whoa. When the NCCIH, an organization of quacks designed to funnel federal grant money to other quacks, says this snake oil has no health benefits at all, then you know it’s bad. Of course, knowing NCCIH, they’re probably only saying that because colloidal silver isn’t part of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and they’d rather you got acupuncture to cure your viral disease.

I rejected them, so they’re coming to get me

The other daaaay, I was asked to do a YouTube debate with an Islamic group, and I told them no, with this email.

I dislike debates, and find them to be nothing but rhetorical games. If you’d care to send me a written summary of your best argument that “the Quran is a scientific miracle”, I’ll consider addressing it. I have a few conditions: you should define what you mean by “scientific miracle”, and I would prefer that any examples you use discuss it from the perspective of biology, since that is my area of expertise.

They replied. This has gotten worse.

Yes you bring up a good point. The Quran and science argument has evolved
significantly since your discussion with Hamza Tzortis. A great deal of care
was given to refutations provided by skeptics.

We can send you a pdf of the new arguments, perhaps you can look them over.

We are planning to do an event at Univ of Minnesota at Morris via Muslim Student Association,
in which we talk about Quran and science. Once you reviewed the material, perhaps you can
provide some feedback/discussion during the question and answer period?

First, do I really believe their argument has evolved in any substantial way, or that they actually deal honestly with skeptical arguments? No, I do not. The fact that they’re trying to argue that Quran is a scientific treatise rather than a social, political, historical, and cultural document is revealing. Still, I’d be happy to look over their “new” arguments.

Second, I am not happy that they are trying to corrupt our Muslim students. When I first came to UMM, there was a fairly loud contingent of Christian creationists openly trying to undermine biology classes, specifically, and I do not welcome the idea of our Muslim students taking over that role. They’re smarter than that. But yes, I would definitely attend their event and point out the flaws in using the Quran as if it’s a science textbook.

Maybe I’d convert them to the joys of secularism…

I just got this invitation.

Hi Dr. Myer,

Our Global Islamic outreach organization, Mercy4Mankind.com
shares the message of Islam across the world and especially
on college campuses. We also make presentations on why
the Quran is a scientific miracle.

However, we would very much like to hear from you on why you feel
the Quran is not a scientific miracle.

We would like to arrange a panel discussion on an Atheist youtube
channel called Modern-Day debate

It’s on a site called Modern-Day debate (it’s run by a Christian, not an atheist, by the way), and I hate debate with a passion, so I’d normally just say no.

On the other hand, discussion is good, and I like discussing things with people I disagree with. So that tells me that maybe the right thing to do would be to talk with them, in a non-competitive format.

On the third hand, that is a stupid topic. There’s nothing miraculous or scientific about a holy book, so I ought not to waste my time.

On the fourth hand, is there an intelligent audience for this sort of conversation? Do people want to hear me talk with these dogmatists? Let me know in the comments.

I do have four more hands, if necessary. They’re also mix of yesses and nos.

I sent them this reply.

I dislike debates, and find them to be nothing but rhetorical games. If you’d care to send me a written summary of your best argument that “the Quran is a scientific miracle”, I’ll consider addressing it. I have a few conditions: you should define what you mean by “scientific miracle”, and I would prefer that any examples you use discuss it from the perspective of biology, since that is my area of expertise.

If they answer, I’ll make my answer here.

Oh…Goop Lab is on Netflix

I’m not even tempted to watch a single second of it, but I can tell I’m going to be entertained by the people who suffer through it to criticize it.

Although I can see where I might find it good if I need an anger rush, although the state of the country is doing that for me right now.

You know, Netflix raised their prices last spring to “allow the company to invest in more original content”. If this is their idea of quality content, I’ll unsubscribe at the next price increase.

Am I the only one who thought The Good Place finale was BS?

The Good Place was a comedy show about the afterlife that took philosophical questions seriously — in fact, much of the action involved placing interesting characters in difficult situations that required them to think through their choices. It featured characters with broadly exaggerated, but mostly endearing, flaws who had to cope with a complex afterlife that kept confronting them with meaning and purpose and conflict, which they generally overcame with good humor. It was a kind of Sesame Street for beginning philosophers.

They recently aired their grand finale, ending the season and the series definitively. It was an entertaining, sweet, charming episode in which characters we’d grown to know and love moved on (or beyond) their afterlife. I enjoyed watching it, and it was quite nice to see a show wrap up four years of build-up in a consistent, satisfying way (Game of Thrones, I’m giving you some side-eye there).

But here’s my problem with it: shouldn’t a show that is wallowing happily in its philosophy at some point question its premises? The show concludes nicely within the self-contained bubble of its own conceits, but it never tries to go outside of them — instead, it builds a complex set of rules that sort of work together and provide a framework for coming up with answers that fit its universe, but never steps outside of itself.

The premises of The Good Place are

that people have an essence that persists after death,
that there are higher powers that judge your behavior,
and that the universe is ultimately kind.

Accept those ideas, and you have a set of rules within which characters can operate and drive a story. These are also premises that are as old as sentient beings’ attempts to find meaning in their existence, and they are also the premises that people want to be true, which ought to immediately throw up a red flag on the play. I distrust those ideas. I can see how they are necessary to drive a commercially viable, relatively long-running narrative, but there are alternatives that aren’t addressed.

It’s a kind of anti-Lovecraftian show, for example. The premises of a Cthulhu story would be

that people are insignificant, ephemeral specks moving into the void,
that there are greater beings who are implacable and unsympathetic,
and that the universe is ultimately cruel in its uncaring nature.

There isn’t a lot of room for humor or plot development there. My show, The Meaningless Place, which I ought to float for some network executives, would begin with Eleanor Shellstrop dying an unexpected, arbitrary death, and then…credits. We could maybe linger over her decaying corpse for a bit, but otherwise it’s over. There are no amusing hijinks, no character development, no dilemmas for Eleanor to think about, because she has ceased to exist and there is no one there to think anymore. The universe would roll on, unperturbed. Viewers would receive no comfort or consolation in a heart-warming finale.

It would be cheap and quick to make, at least.

I can understand why the show made the decisions it did — it was one of the few ways to set up propositions that would allow dead people to move within a framework interesting to living people — but its premises are also its greatest limitations. I can still enjoy The Good Place as a thought experiment or metaphor for a humanist ideal of a well considered life, but the finale only works within its own conceits, and none of its solutions are applicable to me. I’d been maneuvered into an improbable scenario with its own internal logic that had placed it outside of any useful experience.

Which is fine. You can still enjoy a fantasy novel, even if dragons and magic aren’t real. It’s just hard to find a real-life situation where dragon-slaying skills matter.

Conspiracy theories never die, but maybe they can be penalized

We’re going to have to deal with the rotting excreta of Info Wars for a long time, I fear. But at least one pile of shit has been shoveled up: Wolfgang Halbig has been arrested.

Halbig, in case you’ve happily forgotten, was one of those conspiracy zealots who was convinced that the murder of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School was faked, and who harassed parents and administrators endlessly. He is a revolting human being.

Mr. Halbig, 73, a former Florida public school security administrator, has sent hundreds of public records requests to Newtown and Connecticut officials, demanding documents that include photographs of the murder scene, the children’s bodies and receipts for the cleanup of “bodily fluids, brain matter, skull fragments and around 45 to 60 gallons of blood.”

Soon after the massacre, Mr. Halbig appeared multiple times on Infowars, which aired his false claims to millions of people and gave him a platform for raising tens of thousands of dollars to fund his obsession.

Alex Jones was so happy with his delusions that he sent a film crew to accompany Halbig on a tour of Newtown, Connecticut as he pestered grieving people with his lunatic accusations. Recall that InfoWars promoted bizarre ideas about chemtrails, aliens, evil immigrant hordes, pig-human hybrids, pedophile rings in pizza parlors, etc., etc., etc., and at its peak was bringing in $20 million/year. It’s lost some of its more popular outlets, but it still exists: right now Jones is preaching that the coronavirus outbreak is really just a rehearsal for forced vaccinations.

We can only hope he and his minions fade into obscurity. Paul Joseph Watson, fuck off.