Pangburn going down in flames

Pangburn Philosophy, you know, that guy who has been putting on talks all over the place featuring alt-right heroes, was going to have an event in New York this weekend called A Day of Reflection. It’s been hemorrhaging speakers for quite some time — Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz backed out of it a while back, they couldn’t meet Jordan Peterson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s demands, and then Bari Weiss cancelled. They were reduced to booking actual progressive speakers, like Rebecca Watson and Cara Santa Maria.

Well, now that’s all done.

Apparently, the problem was gross mismanagement: speakers weren’t getting paid, people who bought tickets ($300 for the NYC event!) to events that were cancelled weren’t getting reimbursed, and with that news, you’d have to be nuts to buy a ticket to any Pangburn event, given its odds of getting dropped or its speaker roster changing radically, leaving you holding the bag.

Bye bye, Travis Pangburn. I don’t think we’ll be hearing much of you polluting the skeptic/atheist movement anymore.

Just for the sake of recording this, here is their original announcement for the event:

Notice the featured speakers: Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson, Maajid Nawaz, Glenn Loury, and it was to be held at the Lincoln Center.

Here’s the web page a few minutes ago: they lost all but Loury.

If you look tomorrow, it’ll probably be a blank page, or an error message.

An interview with Tchiya Amet

You accuse one skeptic of rape, and next thing you know you’re the guy who’ll accuse anyone of rape. I get mentioned in this article about Tchiya Amet, the woman who is saying Neil Tyson raped her. She sounds credible. I can believe something happened. She definitely experienced some trauma around that time that led to her dropping out of grad school. She definitely believes she was the victim of a non-consensual sexual assault by Tyson. But…

I expect a little bit of corroborating evidence. Unfortunately, there isn’t any. A friend who testifies to her distress at the time, signs of a pattern of abuse by Tyson to others, anything. There’s nothing. Apparently, a news organization (Buzzfeed, maybe?) tried to investigate, but hit a wall where there was a complete absence of any indications that he’d been a predatory dudebro back in the day. That was where I was stuck, too. I don’t have any investigatory ability, and all I had was this one person’s words.

She doesn’t help her case with her willingness to invent patterns where there are none. She confronted him at a talk; she interprets him talking about black holes in an astronomy talk before the Q&A as some sleazy reference to having sex with her, even before she asks a question. When she gets to the microphone, she’s wearing a feathered headdress and Indian warpaint, and she raises a foot-long ankh before saying,

Today is national sexual assault awareness day, during national sexual assault awareness month, and I’m here because when I was a grad student at UT Austin in 1984, you raped me. I’m here to speak for all the people you’ve raped, assaulted, molested, violated, denigrated…and all the pain and suffering you’ve inflicted on them, and their parents and families and their children, including myself.

The presentation does not inspire confidence. When she says, “all the people”, I’d like her to name names to an investigator, because if it’s true that he perpetrated all these crimes, there’d be more evidence than a lone woman in an Indian costume waving an Egyptian symbol to support her accusation.

David Gee thinks there should be an investigation. It seems he’s even hired a private investigator to look into it.

Reporters could be hesitant to talk about this because of their love for Tyson, or because of their distrust in spiritual individuals, but no matter what, it is completely unacceptable. I’m not saying you should believe Amet 100% and take her story at face value because I’m not doing that. All I’m asking for is a real investigation, so we can find out what really happened.

If you knew Tyson and/or Amet during this period, or you have information about similar allegations, please contact me at: davidgeecontact@gmail.com. You never know what information might help.

Well, yeah, it should be looked into. But the first thing that should be examined has got to be offered up by Amet herself. She says that there were multiple instances of rape, assault, molestation, etc., and is willing to say so publicly. So who, when, where? Provide some leads. If she can’t, it sounds like she’s willing to throw around wild and false accusations with nothing to back them up, which hurts her credibility further.

Even people with weird beliefs get raped, but even people with weird beliefs ought to be able to provide some tangible clues if we’re to act on their accusations.

I think Peterson is cracking up

Sorry, buckos, it’s another comment on Jordan Peterson. But I think he’s losing it. He’s on a lengthy world tour and is posting delusional missives about his mental state.

So it’s 2:39 a.m. in Oslo, Norway. I woke up in a too-hot hotel room out of a fitful nightmare, which I can only partially remember. I haven’t had a dream that I could recall even that clearly in a very long period of time. The last one was about traveling and speaking and not getting enough to eat. That was about six months ago. It occurred just before I embarked on what has now been a nine-month, 85-city world tour. I am on a very restricted diet, eating only beef and water, as a consequence of what appears to be a rather intractable auto-immune disease. I was concerned at some deep unconscious level about what might go wrong if I set out to talk with 250,000 people: If I could not eat, then I could not think and then things would not go well. Hence the nightmare. It was a warning of what might go wrong (and has not).

Has too.

I don’t remember my dreams very often, either, but when I do, they tend to be surreal and sort of playful (I’m one of those lucid dreamers). I don’t think I’ve ever had a violent dream about beating people up — maybe it’s because I eat a healthy diet — but it seems to be one of his themes.

In this dream I was speaking to a young man. He was very garrulous and irritating; he was unkempt, poorly put together, and he simply would not shut up. Everything he said was designed to provoke and to test. He finally pushed me beyond my limit of tolerance. I grabbed him, physically, and threw him against the wall. It was like wrestling with dough.

In my dream, I wrestled my opponent to the ground. He was still talking, mindlessly, mechanically, rapidly, nonstop. I bent his wrists to force his knuckles into his mouth. His arms bent like rubber and, even though I managed the task, he did not stop babbling.

You’d think a psychologist would be able to provide some insight into all this. But no. It was because he had a bad experience with a French journalist the day before. He was resentful because the journalist wouldn’t swallow the bullshit he peddles, so he had a dream about forcing him to accept what he said. His response is to dehumanize someone who disagreed with him.

I hadn’t spent two hours talking to a person. The person wasn’t there, or was barely there (even though the journalist had the makings, I would say, of a fine young man). I couldn’t reach him. Instead, I had a very irritating discussion with an ideologically possessed puppet and that was both too familiar and too unpleasant. I had a shower, and we went for a steak, and we tried to put the episode behind us, as we must, under such conditions, when the next city and the next audience beckons, the very next day. But the part of me that lurks underneath, dreaming, still had something to say.

And that something was SHUT UP!, and also to regurgitate that NPC meme that’s making the rounds of the right-wing trolls.

He’s not holding up well under the strain of his diet and finding out that a lot of people can see right through him. Poor man.

Jupiter is a big fan of Ayn Rand, I hear

Jordan Peterson was asked to write a foreword for a new release of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is truly by Jordan Peterson. It is straight-up raging capitalism.

Here’s some thoughts—no, some facts. Every social system produces inequality, at present, and every social system has done so, since the beginning of time. The poor have been with us—and will be with us—always. Analysis of the content of individual Paleolithic gravesites provides evidence for the existence of substantive variance in the distribution of ability, privilege, and wealth, even in our distant past. The more illustrious of our ancestors were buried with great possessions, hoards of precious metals, weaponry, jewelry, and costuming. The majority, however, struggled through their lives, and were buried with nothing. Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their intense competition for quality living space and reproductive opportunity—even among plants, and cities—even among the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies contain the mass of thousands, millions or even billions of average, dispossessed planets. Inequality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspired retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world. The only systems that have produced some modicum of wealth, along with the inevitable inequality and its attendant suffering, are those that evolved in the West, with their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition; precisely those systems that emphasize above all the essential dignity, divinity and ultimate responsibility of the individual. In consequence, any attempt to attribute the existence of inequality to the functioning of the productive institutions we have managed to create and protect so recently in what is still accurately regarded as the Free World will hurt those who are weakest and most vulnerable first. The radicals who conflate the activities of the West with the oppression of the downtrodden therefore do nothing to aid those whom they purport to prize and plenty to harm them. The claims they make to act under the inspiration of pure compassion must therefore come to be regarded with the deepest suspicion—not least by those who dare to make such claims themselves.

There will always be poor people, just as there is an unequal distribution of mass in the planets, where the biggest planets strove the hardest to be magnificently big. So what if Pluto is so small it got kicked out of the planet club? It should have tried harder.

Unfortunately, I predict his fans will defend this lunacy fanatically, rather than recognize that the guy is one of a minority of colossal loons who have hoarded all the crazy for himself, leaving only faded scraps for the Peterasts to feast upon.

Analyze this statement

I am accused on YouTube of being a liberal snob and parroting the radical left’s blank-slate narrative that everything we do is socially constructed by someone who offers up his ironic credentials: he’s a STEM student in a major university.

Dave Bloom 1 day ago 12 Subscribers
@PZ Myers By the way, your general undertone of ‘you plebs lack the intelligence sufficient to grasp my brilliance’ is just more liberal narcissism. I’m a STEM student in a major university. Someone apparently thought my logic was adequate.

I just found that hilarious. He is valid because he’s on the bottom rung of a socially constructed hierarchy! Apparently, that hierarchy is genetic and evolutionarily deep, because Lobsters.

By the way, everything is socially constructed. Everything is genetic. You can’t separate the two.

When will people learn that debate is just noise to distract you all?

This week, an organization calling itself the “Munk Debates” hosted an event in Toronto. Even knowing that much, I would have rolled my eyes — these public debate shows, whether it’s Munk or Pangburn or whatever otherwise tedious troll has decided to stake their reputation on hosting assholes arguing with each other — are a waste of time. This one in particular was a debate between David “Cheerleader for Bush & the Slaughter of Muslims” Frum and Steve “Proud Racist” Bannon on the subject of “Be it resolved, the future of western politics is populist not liberal”.

This was rather like inviting Ken Ham and Kent Hovind to debate on whether the future of science is creationism or evolution. That, too, could be presented as a “public service” by allowing ideas to be “vigorously contested,” but it would be a lie. Debates never accomplish anything. I very much like this summary of the process by Tabatha Southey:

The truth is that while debates can be fun to watch and some people are very skilled at doing them, debates very seldom change anything, especially minds. In fact, in the real-life debates, the audience vote found that “opinions remain entrenched—neither side wins,” as the Munk Debates tweeted, after announcing that Bannon had won. It’s fitting that the Munk masquerade ball ended with fake news. These kinds of things are mostly advertisements for the people involved. Debates are the exhibition basketball of academia and politics.

Regardless of whom public opinion deemed the “winner” of our all-too-real Bannon vs. Frum debate, merely placing Steve “Camp of the Saints” Bannon up on that stage only boosted his rightly flagging mainstream influence. People like to endlessly chide that “Sunlight is the best disinfectant”—but the truth is, no one ever chased off a desperate showman with a spotlight.

Yeah, it was a ridiculous conclusion: the Munk Debates announced that, on the basis of a comparison of pre- and post-debate surveys, Bannon had swayed the most attendees. It turned out that they’d counted wrong, and no one had changed their minds in the debate. No one should be surprised, especially when it’s a couple of conservatives differing only in degree debating liberalism.

I have a suggestion for all the debaters out there, happily riding the gravy train provided by impresarios selling tickets to on-stage conflicts between opposing views (it’s great! They get to milk both sides for money!): just tell them no. That’s hard when they’re waving big money at you, but we’ve got to kill this debate culture, which is really just a pretense masking reactionaries finding excuses to present the illusion that their ideas are equally credible with their opponents. Tell them no, but give them an alternative: you’ll give them a talk or discussion with the audience on their stage, but you’re just not going share a platform with racists or religious lunatics.

Skepticon is baaaaack!

The shiny new Skepticon has re-emerged. It’s going to be held on 9-11 August 2019, which is great for me, since it doesn’t fall in the heart of the Fall Semester anymore, and it’s moving from Springfield, Missouri to the big city of St Louis. You can reserve a room already. So mark your calendars and start saving pennies for the trip this summer.

Now we just have to watch for the inevitable tease as they release the speakers’ names one by one. They always have new and interesting voices on their schedule, so you can trust that it’s going to be good.

Testy, condescending, oblivious

Oh, the pain: I sort of listened to this new interview of Jordan Peterson by Helen Lewis. I skipped around a bit, because there is only so much Peterson I can stomach, but I saw enough to get the gist.

He talks about lobsters at around 40 minutes. He hasn’t learned a thing. He’s still babbling about how lobster hierarchies refute the idea that much of human behavior, including hierarchies, can be socially constructed. That there is so much variation in animal behavior says that you can’t accept a single fundamental principle regulating behavior; that we use serotonin in our brains just means that there is an ancient signaling pathway that has been liberally repurposed by evolution multiple times.

He also uses his strawman argument that those damn social constructionists believe humans are infinitely malleable. I don’t believe that, but I also believe Peterson is full of shit.

He talks about gender roles, too, and how girls ought to be raised to look forward to making babies, and boys ought to be raised to have careers. Lewis mentions the obvious problem there: careers are the only thing you get paid for under capitalism. Peterson laughs condescendingly about an hour in.

How can you say something like that? It’s so cliched.

It’s not capitalism, for god’s sake. You have to invest into a child for 18 years before they have any economic utility. t’s a consequence of delayed economic utility. We don’t know to monetize it. It’s not a consequence of capitalism! It’s a consequence of the fact that humans have an 18 year dependency. How do you monetize that?

It’s not capitalism, he sneers, and then his defense of that claim is entirely about the “economic utility” of children and how difficult it is to monetize kids. That’s about the most capitalistic argument ever: he’s only able to see the world through the lens of capitalism. It was kind of amazing how little he’s able to examine his own premises.

Then, shortly after that he goes full-blown psychopath. He sees other people with different views as not fully human — as robots or NPCs who’ve been narrowly programmed by their ideology. It’s creepy how he dismisses Lewis.

I’m not hearing what you think. I’m hearing how you are able to represent the ideology you were taught. And it’s not that interesting because I don’t know anything about you. I can replace you with someone else who thinks the same way, and that means you’re not here. That’s what it means. It’s not pleasant. You’re not integrating the specifics of your personal experience with what you’ve been taught, to synthesize something that’s genuine and surprising and engaging in a narrative sense as a consequence. That’s the pathology of ideological possession. It’s not good. And it’s not good that I know where you stand on things once I know a few things. It’s like, why have a conversation? I already know where you stand on things.

You know, I could say the same thing about Peterson fans: they’re ideologically obsessed and extraordinarily predictable. I’d say the same thing about Peterson himself — he’s a thoughtless ideologue.

He also says that climate change is probably happening, and that he’s got no opinion on it, but then he goes on to say he read 200 books on ecology and that climate change has been hyped, and that he really admires that fraud, Bjorn Lomborg.

The conversation turns to Count Dankula, that loon who trained a pug to give a Nazi salute. Peterson thinks that’s fine, because it was just a joke (oh, god, the “just a joke” excuse is so tiresome). Lewis disagrees.

I don’t fundamentally believe that it was a joke. I believe it was camouflaged as a joke, and it comes across as…

Peterson: Well, that’s exactly what you would believe if you were inclined to persecute comedians.

OK, I was done at that point. What a dishonest sleaze. Fuck him.

Why are people still interviewing that loon?

Don’t count the Ark Park out yet

There’s something you have to remember when you see those headlines like, “Attendance collapses at Creationist Ark museum!” It’s true that their numbers are constantly dropping — attendance was around 83,000 September last year, down to about 70,000 this past month — but they’re charging about $60 per head, so that’s about $4 million income per month, from a cheesy stupid wooden box in the middle of nowhere. So I wouldn’t exactly call it a collapse, more of a steady decline. We’d have to balance that income with their expenses for the full perspective. The real question is whether they are running in the red yet, or when will that happen? I think they’re currently probably turning a profit, but the operators are almost certainly planning ahead for what they can do to boost the numbers, if they’re smart. And let’s not pretend otherwise: they are stupid bad at science, but cunningly unscrupulous at making money.

I will point out that several years ago, the Creation “Museum” was fading, and I believe they were losing money on it (AiG has multiple revenue streams, though, as well as a horde of gullible people making donations), and they came up with the grand idea of building the Ark Park as a stimulus. That worked, it’s making them lots of money, and it also brought more attendance to the Creation “Museum”, making it profitable again.

What we ought to be concerned about, as attendance drifts gently ever downward, is what gigantic scam they’re planning to pull next to kick their numbers upward again. The $100 million grift of the Ark Park helped them pretend to be relevant again, but the ever-escalating math of the big con means their next project has to be an even bigger boondoggle, and they might have to move up from bilking one state, Kentucky, to getting mega-money from…the federal government.

If you think our federal government is too smart to fall for a far right-wing, evangelical religious con job, that they aren’t a bunch of Kentucky hicks, you better look again.