Is this the 21st century, or what?

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.

The desperate plea of a defeated man

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.

Anyone can get on a school board

Why, just look at the Brainerd school board. Sue Kern even made president!

During a recent meeting of the board, President Sue Kern asked two educators why evolution is being taught, reported the Brainerd Dispatch.

“Darwin’s theory was done in the mid-1800s and it’s never been proven,” Kern asserted to Director of Teaching and Learning Tim Murtha and Craig Rezac, a high school science teacher. “So I’m wondering why we’re still teaching it.”

To their credit, Murtha and Rezac remained poised and professional, calmly explaining to Kern that evolution has been documented, that it serves as the foundation of modern biology and, furthermore, its instruction is mandated by the state’s science standards.

Kern then went on to ask, “And with regard to Christian students – how do you do that? They’re taught not to agree with that, so.”

Rezac’s reply could not have been better: “This is science, and science deals with facts. It doesn’t deal with belief. It doesn’t have to be a dilemma or a concern for someone to choose between Christianity and evolution – that’s not what this is about. You can actually embrace both. It’s my duty as a teacher to teach science and not teach religion. That’s the separation of church and state.”

I’m sorry, my brain shorted out at the claim that Darwin’s theory was done. Theories are never “done”. Evolution has so much evidence behind it that it is ludicrous to deny it anymore.

How she arrived at that bad idea is clear, at least. She thinks Christians are taught that evolution is false! Some Christians are taught that, unfortunately, and usually they are the vocal, obnoxious ones who run for school board president and represent Christianity badly. I think. Although, realistically, I’ve noticed that most Christians will sit quietly and not object to characterizations of their faith like that by Kerns.

Is there an impeachment process for school boards? And if there is, is it as timidly executed as the one at the federal level?

Refusal to debate…reinforced

After that last post, I realized there is another problem I have with doing debates with creationists. For a proper debate, you have to respect your opponent, and in fact, there should be mutual respect.

I don’t respect creationists at all. Not one bit. Rather than debating, I should be spitting in their face, throwing them out of the lecture hall, and presenting the honest truth to the audience, because creationists won’t.

And now I have to ask my good colleagues who still debate people like Ham, or Hovind, or Comfort, or Craig: Why? Do you respect these liars for Jesus? How can you stand on a stage with them and not throw a lectern? Where the fuck is your self-respect? (I say this as someone who used to debate creationists, too.) How can we continue to dignify these frauds with the right to stand on an equal footing with real scientists?

Ken Ham and the spiders

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.

So what is — or rather, who is — the problem with New Atheism?

We should face the facts: New Atheism is dead. Time for a post-mortem.

New Atheism itself was a rather slight intellectual movement and thus fizzled out quickly…

Ow. Ouch. Hey, that stings. Gettin’ personal there. But why was it slight, and why has it fizzled out? I think we can blame that on the refusal of leading figures to get at all deep, on their shallow understanding of philosophy, and how they only used atheism as a tool to promote a regressive and ultimately racist ideology. The representative of that self-defeating side of the New Atheism is…

…but not before Harris had cemented himself as the arch critic of fundamentalist Islam—a figure willing to challenge the progressive shibboleths of tolerance and multiculturalism that are, as Harris has put it, getting us killed by the thousands. This contrarian stance has steadily intensified over the years (it went into overdrive in 2014 after Ben Affleck famously suggested that Harris is an Islamophobe on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher) and today encompasses much more than the simple critique of “Islamism” that made his name.

Harris’ association with the Intellectual Dark Web, his constant focus on “identity politics” and “liberal delusion,” and his obsession with his own “bad-faith” critics, just to name a few examples, have made him the bête noire of the left. And this open break with the liberal class of which he has been a member throughout his career has made him more popular than ever. Well over a million people follow Harris on Twitter and listen to each of his podcasts. But as his platform has grown, he has ventured into areas far outside his core competencies, which are limited to mindfulness/meditation and perhaps (though this is debatable) certain subdisciplines of neuroscience and philosophy of mind. As a result, Harris often finds himself in avoidable confrontations with experts on controversial topics about which he knows very little.

I agree. Harris has been a disaster. Dawkins stuck his foot in his mouth a few too many times, and has kind of receded into the background. Dennett avoided most of the problems his peers dragged in, but he is even more retiring now, and does a good job of avoiding entanglement in conservative culture wars. Harris, on the other hand, is still in there, obstinately slugging away, sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand of the alt right, and representing the failure of his ideology loudly and persistently.

The article tries to explain what’s wrong with the guy. I partly agree.

This means that much of the criticism of Harris currently out there is misplaced. In recent years he’s been repeatedly assailed as a bigot and racist. He is neither. The trouble with Harris is more prosaic: he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The Diamond episode is just one example of how Harris’ issues are mostly the result of his own ignorance. The problem isn’t that he’s not an expert at everything—obviously no one is. The problem is that Harris is deeply assertive, outlandishly so, in precisely the areas that are thorniest for non-experts to meaningfully wade into.

Don’t be so quick to excuse his racism! This is like the argument that you can’t be a racist unless you join the KKK and participate in a lynching — nope, we white people have a lot of easy ways to be racist, and Harris is happy to exercise all of them.

But otherwise, yes, that is correct. Harris is an erudite ignoramus. He’s very good at mouthing the platitudes of scholarship while ignoring the principles. The article goes on to cite his catastrophic encounters with Jared Diamond, Ezra Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Bruce Schneier, all incidents where his shortcomings and his egotistical inability to overcome his own prejudices were brought to light.

It sure would be nice to be able to point to Sam Harris and say that the embarrassment of the New Atheism was all his fault, but he had partners in crime, and worse still, commands an audience of millions of atheists who worship his ‘wisdom’. The real failure was that the New Atheism failed to inspire people to be better, and instead simply reassured them that their biases were “logical” and “rational” and “enlightened”.

Sadly, “apnotheriopia” is a word I might have to use in the future

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.

Ugh, Al Seckel’s name floats to the top again

I’ve mentioned Al Seckel before — he was a self-serving fraud who slithered his way into the skeptic community, taking advantage of their gullibility in the face of of any phony who knew the right sciencey buzzwords.

What I didn’t notice before was how entangled Seckel was in another problem: he was associated with both Jeffrey Epstein and John Brockman. He actually organized a “science” meeting on Epstein’s orgy island! He gave TED talks! He was married to Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister! Viewed with hindsight, knowing how unsavory Epstein was, Seckel’s history looks even more horrible now.

Also of note, one of Seckel’s tools to suppress anyone who might question his credentials (he had none; he failed out of everything, but that didn’t stop him from claiming to be a physicist) was the frequent use of lawsuits and threats of lawsuits. He seems to have been suing someone or multiple someones at all times, and people were afraid to talk about his dubious claims because he’d drop a lawsuit on you if you didn’t reward him with honors for his nonexistent skills. It reminds me of some other people who use the courts as a blunt instrument.

A remarkably delicious exposé

I’ve probably seen the name “John Glynn” around — he was prolific, and was getting published all over the Rightosphere and elsewhere. He even got published in the Huffington Post, so some left-leaning pubs had stuff with his byline. But I would have sailed right over it, because his work was all bumblingly ideological and built on evolutionary psychology BS, which immediately flagged him as a charlatan, despite his claimed status as holder of a doctorate and professorships at several universities. Really, people, saying you’re a professor doesn’t make you infallible!

But some people, especially those gullible enough to favor EvoPsych and conservative positions, were taken in, including Michael Shermer.

To his slight credit, Shermer exposed the guy as a fraud. He became suspicious, not when Glynn submitted glib garbage to his magazine, but when Glynn asked for a loan. You can lie about science all you want, but when you start eyeballing a right-winger’s wallet, their ultra-sensitive sensors start pinging. Anyway, it turns out with a few questions it was determined that Glynn did not have an advanced degree, and did not work for any university. Everything was a lie. He’d persevered in publishing crap all over the place, successfully, and fooled Skeptic magazine for three years. The key was offering to write stuff that catered to the biases of publishers, leaping right past any critical evaluation.

Look where else Glynn published! Areo, where the “grievance study” nonsense was published, where Helen Pluckrose is an editor. Quillette. The American Thinker. The Federalist.

The credibility of Skeptic magazine and Shermer has been nonexistent for years, and they’re cruising along on the support of people who still buy into the garbage Glynn was peddling, so they’ll be fine — in fact, they’ll probably be praising Shermer as a true skeptic for identifying the fraud, ignoring the fact that he’d been publishing him for years. John Glynn will be fine, since he’s an insubstantial, lying wraith. He’ll just invent another pseudonym and another set of fake credentials, and continue making contributions to the trash heap of bad media. So I’m chagrined to say that, while this revelation is amusing, it’s not going to make a speck of difference.

An addendum to the previous two posts

This, exactly.

The far-right conservatives and the deeply stupid (but I repeat myself) have mastered one art of discourse: regurgitating nonsense so rapidly that more sensible people can’t keep up.