That’s not a meme, it’s a maiming.

The last time I saw David Silverman was in October of 2016, in China. We’d both been invited to speak at a small conference in Beijing, and we were treated like royalty. For an hour of talking, we got swept off to fantastic restaurants, to guided tours of the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, and basically treated like heroes. For me, it was something of the last gasp of the glorious atheist movement, but it had started dying years before. Silverman was a dead man walking, guilty of betrayal of our goals even then, and I was so irrelevant I had no idea of the stories swirling around him that would lead to his abrupt downfall.

All I knew was that, despite his bombastic style, he was effective at getting attention for American Atheists. I was annoyed by his efforts to woo conservatives to atheism at CPAC — I considered their values antithetical to the egalitarian, pro-science views an atheist movement ought to endorse — but at the same time he was a prominent atheist leader openly (one could even say bombastically) promoting feminist ideas of social justice. He was an annoying combination of good words often said badly, and lip service to high ideals contradicted by his courting of people who opposed them. But hey, it got his face on the news.

All that fell apart when he was fired by American Atheists, and suddenly (to me) all the behind-the-scenes unsavoriness was exposed. He was accused of financial malfeasance, using the organization’s money to promote his book, and worst of all, of an ugly history of sexual abuse of women, including young students. He was unemployed and unemployable, his false front was exposed, he was a meteor falling from the sky with his ass on fire, in possibly the most spectacular act of self-destruction I’ve ever witnessed. He’s gone and nobody wants him back.

But he’s still trying, still the eager self-promoter. If respectable organizations won’t give him the time of day, well, there’s always the bottom of a barrel to scrape for sustenance for his ego. He has announced that he’ll do anything for anyone who’ll give him air time.

I'll take that under advisement. In the meantime please be prepared for me to go on any show that brings me on. Because I have stuff to do and a word to spread.

Goodnight all.

— David Silverman (@MrAtheistPants) September 23, 2019

Anything. So now he’s appealing to misogynistic fascist YouTube. He has appeared on Sargon’s channel.

I’m sorry, but as you can see, I’ve only listened to one second of that poison. The blurb was enough for me.

After falling victim to the #MeToo movement, ex-leader of American Atheists David Silverman had his life totally destroyed by false allegations made by feminists in the atheist movement.

His life totally destroyed! That seems to be a common refrain by all the Harvey Weinsteins and Louis CKs and Lawrence Krauss’s who got wrecked by their own selfish, self-destructive acts. How dare well-off abusers and exploiters get exposed? It’s all the women’s fault.

As for “false allegations”, ask the women. Silverman’s depradations have been documented.

She and Silverman had known each other for years, and he flirted with her throughout the evening, she wrote in the complaint. After the other guests left, R. wrote that Silverman asked her to join him in smoking marijuana on the roof. But before they left the room, he suddenly forced himself on her.

“He physically pressed me to the wall and began to kiss me forcefully, grabbed my breasts, and put his hand into my leggings where there was actual penetration of my vagina,” she wrote.

R. believed Silverman knew she was interested in BDSM and wrote that he began using insulting language, calling her a “dirty little whore.” He then pushed her to her knees, “where his penis briefly made contact with my mouth,” she wrote.

R. got her feet and said “no,” she wrote. Silverman then lightly slapped her face and said, “You don’t get to say no to me.”

At that point, R. said the widely used BDSM safe word, “red,” which stopped him, and then she left. The next day, R. took photographs of bruises where she said Silverman had grasped her, and these pictures were included in her complaint to American Atheists.

Or how about this?

The third allegation reviewed by the American Atheists board involves a student, Rose St. Clair, who alleged that Silverman used his position of power to pressure her into having sex with him. “At several points during this encounter, I hesitated to continue,” she wrote. “I believed that if I did anything to upset him, my chances at being involved in the secular community, especially with American Atheists, would be ruined.”

In 2012, St. Clair was an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary in Virginia who hoped to make a career in the atheist movement. At the annual convention of the Secular Student Alliance in Columbus, Ohio, she was invited to go to a bar with a group of speakers at the conference, including Silverman.

St. Clair said that she quickly became drunk, but remembered Silverman flirting with her and then suggesting that they go to his hotel room. “I don’t believe I was in a position to be able to give consent. I was very intoxicated,” St. Clair told BuzzFeed News. She said that Silverman did not have any condoms, and pressured her into having anal sex.

Afterward, St. Clair said that Silverman told her she would have to leave early in the morning because his wife would be arriving at the hotel. She said he told her not to apply for an internship with American Atheists because appointing her could be seen as preferential treatment.

“I felt my interest in working for the organization was used as a way for him to have power so that I would have sex with him,” St. Clair said.

Silverman has admitted that these events occurred, has even elaborated on the unsavory details in interviews, but is trying to claim that they were entirely mutually consensual.

“I certainly behaved sometimes in a manner that was unworthy of the office of president of American Atheists,” Silverman, 52, said in a phone interview this week, the first time he has spoken publicly about being accused of nonconsensual sexual contact with two women, one of them a student, at atheist gatherings.

Silverman denies the women’s allegations that their relations were nonconsensual, and American Atheists say he was not fired due to sexual relationships.

I’ll say that he certainly was unworthy of the office, with the caveat that if American Atheists did not find those particularly incidents sufficient to fire him, then the office wasn’t worth much. What actually got him finally fired was this:

American Atheists placed Silverman on paid leave while it investigated a complaint from staff concerned that he had not disclosed financial and personal conflicts of interest relating to the promotion of his book, Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World, and the appointment to a senior position of a woman with whom Silverman was allegedly having a sexual relationship. (That appointment has been rescinded.)

These scummy activities had been going on in 2012-2015, at least, so when Silverman and I were being good buddies on a junket to China, all of this was playing out in the background, and this ugly history was a missile waiting to explode on him. One of our touristy events was a tour of a silk factory, and I remember him ordering a set of gorgeous silk sheets that I would never be able to afford (although they really were a bargain) that he thought his wife would love, but all the while he had betrayed his family and the cause I thought we were both working for, and the whole thing was a charade.

And now he’s pandering to anti-feminist YouTube. Sargon and Silverman deserve each other, and perhaps the best and most appropriate use of Silverman’s talents is his current occupation, selling insurance. Although I would never buy insurance from him.

My disillusionment with the atheist movement continues.

I got an email ad from the Mary Sue shop. I am very disappointed in them, and think they should be ashamed. It was an ad for this:

Jesus fuck. Cupping “therapy”?

This Premium 32-Piece Massage Cupping Therapy Set by Onetify contains high-quality plastic cups that can be used to treat several various ailments. Aiding in moving static blood, relieving pain, lymph, and toxins that are present in the body, these premium cups promote relaxation and healing from injuries and improves digestion, blood circulation, and respiratory issues. These massage cups provide you natural relaxation and healing at the comfort of your home.

• Massage & improve the treatment of several different ailments
• Promote relaxation & healing from injuries
• Improve digestion, blood circulation, respiratory issues & carpal tunnel syndrome detoxifacation
• Relieve pain, lymph & toxins that are present in your body

Note: The purpose of this unit is for relaxation and NOT for medical treatment of any kind. Please consult your doctor for medical advice, if needed

Madness. The first line says can be used to treat several various ailments, and at the end it says NOT for medical treatment of any kind. Make up your mind, you quacks. It’s for moving static blood…what the hell? That’s an imaginary ailment. If you’ve got static blood, cupping ain’t gonna help. I am also interested in the fact it relieves pain, lymph, and toxins. Is lymph now considered a bad thing?

Just the fact that it mentions toxins and detoxification tells me it’s garbage.

I think I once bought a USB flash drive from them — it was a good deal — and now I’m on their bullshit mailing list. I’m beginning to wonder if that drive is at all trustworthy.

No, I’m not going to spend $44 on your crap pseudoscience, The Mary Sue. You should be ashamed.

Why does it always come down to lashing out to do harm to others? It’s another lawsuit by a man who lost prestige over his acts of sexual harassment, now thinking he can recover his dignity by punishing someone else. It won’t work. He won’t win, and even if he did, it’s not going to make him more employable.

That whole thing just makes David Silverman look pathetic and crushed.

I’m kind of happy that my name isn’t on the list of defendants.

Ken Ham is writing about spiders and evolution, and my first thought was ha ha, that’s funny, he’s talking about two obsessions of mine, this should be good for a laugh. Creationist ignorance is always a great joke, right? But then I’m reading it, and…

Jesus fucking christ, this man is a lying fraud.

I don’t feel like treating this as a light bit of goofy news. Ken Ham is running a commercial empire in which he rakes in money for explaining that evolution is false, in addition to defrauding the state and his community, and his arguments can be rebutted with obvious logic and trivial examples. You’ll see; no one who reads this blog will have any trouble seeing the flaws in his complaint, and explaining where he’s wrong is like trying to explain basic evolution to a four-year-old child.

I can be patient and gentle and fun with a child, but dear god, this is a grown adult man several years older than I am who claims to have spent a lifetime studying the ideas of biology. He’s able to tie his own shoes, so he ought to have the maturity to comprehend the scientific position, even if he is ideologically opposed to it; I expect him to be honest enough to appreciate what he is criticizing as sincerely held and based on evidence, and present valid counter-evidence. He never does. And what he does say is obviously false.

Here’s what prompted him to dump his idiocy on the net: an observation that populations of spiders in storm-prone areas survive better and produce more offspring if they are aggressive. Sure, fine, I haven’t looked at the original papers so I don’t know how good the study is, but I don’t need to, because, as usual, Ken Ham’s analysis is so superficial and contradictory that there aren’t any nuances to consider. I mean, he doesn’t even understand the terms.

But it’s not evolution. The spiders remain spiders—there’s been no change of spider kind. Some behaviors are simply more beneficial than others under certain circumstances, which may drive a change in the population. This is natural selection, not evolution. Even though news items and scientific journals frequently equivocate the two, they aren’t the same thing.

Right there, from the first sentence, my rage grows. Yes, this is evolution. If the paper has demonstrated differential reproduction is related to a behavior, that is most definitely an example of evolution. This is an internally consistent application of the scientific meaning of evolution to an observation. Deal with it, Mr Ham. You can argue about the importance of this example, or you could, if you were able, try to address any problems in the study, but claiming “it’s not evolution” is just wrong.

Of course the spiders remain spiders. This is an example of an incremental change in a population. No one expects spiders to turn into beetles in one storm season, or even in a million years.

Ham says beneficial behaviors may drive a change in a population…yes. That is natural selection. He’s just admitted that it occurs, and even takes it for granted.

Natural selection is a subset of the mechanisms that drive evolution, so he’s technically correct that they should not be equivocated, but still — natural selection is an evolutionary process. When selection is observed, you are seeing evolution.

Now look. Everyone reading this knows all this. It’s basic. I’m repeating stuff I’ve explained multiple times on this blog and in the classroom for decades. You’re all sitting there, out there in the blogosphere, smug and reassured because Myers is simply re-affirming the stuff you already know. It feels good, doesn’t it? We’re all happy to share our understanding, and there’s a bit of the ol’ mean-spirited “let’s pile on the ignoramus” sentiment uniting us.

But you shouldn’t feel good at all. You should feel sick at heart and angry. Ken Ham is a man who lies to children about the simplest concepts in science, and he was handed hundreds of millions of dollars to build a stupid fake boat in the middle of Kentucky. He’s a liar and a con artist, and he is economically rewarded to a degree most of you are not (definitely more than I am). He gets to mumble inanities that we’d be embarrassed to see in a miseducated child, and then he gets to go count the gate receipts.

I am tired of just laughing at these clowns. Get angry. Get angrier.

You know, he’s not done.

Natural selection works on already existing genetic information, whereas evolution requires the addition of brand-new genetic information to form new features that never previously existed. (Something that has never been observed!) Information always comes from other information and ultimately a mind, and in this case, the Creator’s mind.

Yes, we have observed the addition of new genetic information and the generation of new phenotypes. It’s called mutation. It’s another of those processes, like natural selection, that work together to produce evolutionary change. It’s been seen and measured and recorded over and over again, and Ham can just lie and dismiss it all.

After stumbling through some transparently stupid evolution denial, he moves on to equally stupid arguments against climate change.

Are these storms (such as Hurricane Dorian, the storm that devastated the Bahamas and parts of the United States in recent weeks) really the result of man-made climate change? Well, climates do change—that is observational science. But the cause of climate change isn’t straightforward. Some scientists have suggested that it may be dependent on the sun and cycles of the sun (such as sunspots), with humans only playing a very minor role.

Some scientists and sunspots. Goddamn you to hell, Ken Ham. You’re a liar for Christ, you contemptible, shallow little man.

Of course, then he goes on to plug his upcoming Easter conference with Ray Comfort on climate change that you too can attend for the low price of $149, plus travel and hotel costs. Celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ with four days of shit from a bevy of smirking dishonest assholes. Christians ought to be outraged, but then one lesson I’ve learned is that Christians are really good at excusing the worst behavior from their fellow Christ-fuckers.

Are you angry yet?

Join me and the spiders.

It comes from Philip Senter, in a book reviewed by Darren Naish.

The early chapters of this book evaluate and discuss the creationist contention in general and the relatively young history of the entire movement. The impact of John Whitcomb and Henry Morris’s 1961 book The Genesis Flood is obvious, as is the fact that their arguments fail evaluation (Senter 2019). Nevertheless, their influence was such that – from the early 1970s onwards – a number of like-minded individuals were promoting Whitcomb and Morris’s vision, and were in particular arguing that ancient and medieval writings and works of art make explicit reference to dinosaurs and other long-extinct animals. Senter (2019) uses the term apnotheriopia (meaning ‘dead beast vision’) to describe the tendency of creationist author to interpret monsters in literature and art as long-extinct reptiles.

If apnotheriopia is one of your guiding principles, it ‘follows’ that the fire-breathing dragons canonical to Eurocentric, Christian mythology should be interpreted as dinosaurs or similar reptiles, and that such creatures were dragonesque fire-breathers. So integral has the whole fire-breathing thing been to these authors that they’ve proposed fire-breathing for dinosaurs of several sorts (most frequently hadrosaurs) as well as for pterosaurs and the giant Cretaceous crocodyliform Sarcosuchus (Senter 2019). You might know of one or two cases in which this idea has been mooted. Senter’s book shows that numerous authors have engaged with this vision and written about it. The sheer quantity of this literature is daunting – I was going to say ‘impressive’ but this absolutely seems like the wrong word – and Senter has clearly gone to some considerable trouble to obtain it. He must own a pretty hefty personal library of creationist volumes, and I’m reminded of a statement he makes in one of his papers, wherein he notes that collecting and reading creationist literature on dinosaurs and other extinct animals is one of his “guilty pleasures”.

It’s as ridiculous as it sounds, and it is promoted by the inexplicably popular version of creationism favored by Ken Ham and Kent Hovind. If it’s written down in an old text, the older the better, it must be true, because no one in the past had imagination or creativity, or was ever mistaken in an observation, and they must have been literally describing something that actually existed. Therefore, there were dragons, and they breathed fire. Now let’s steal some observations from paleontology and crudely reconcile them with dragons, and voila!

I’ve got my own little library of creationist nonsense, and they do this all the time. Answers in Genesis still pushes this ridiculous idea as essential to justify their dogma that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.