Simple logic escapes them

Some of you old-timers may recall the days of yore when creationists would show up and make their sad little arguments in the comments here, and get thrashed around rudely until they squealed. Maybe you wonder where they went. Maybe you wish you had more opportunities to bash your head against a brick wall. Well, I can tell you: they’re on YouTube. The comments sections there are so much friendlier to fools.

I have an example for you, from one of my videos. Let’s see if you can figure out who is the creationist, and which one is me.

Is the space shuttle an example of intelligent design ?
Well a single living cell encompasses far more integrated functional complexity….so much so that after 150 years and billion dollar labs we still haven’t reverse engineered a single cell, much less duplicated even a single one of its proteins abinitio.

Thats intelligent design.

I could have gone after the low-hanging fruit of his bad examples and mentioned Craig Venter’s minimal synthetic cell, or maybe, you know, insulin, but I tried to get to the core of his logic. It was a painful exercise in head-butting.

If there is one stupid argument that I could get out of the heads of creationists, it’s this one.

The argument is whether organisms were produced by design or by natural processes. We have natural processes that generate complexity, no design needed, so complexity is not a factor in discriminating between the two hypotheses. You want to know whether A or B is the cause for an orange being orange, and both A and B are capable of producing orange pigments, then announcing that the object being examined is orange in color does not allow you to say whether it whether it was produced by A or B. Do you even understand that elementary logic?

But there’s always the dull, dumb yokels who proudly declare “duh, the space shuttle is complicated, and it’s designed, therefore because cells are complicated, they are designed.” THIS IS NOT A VALID ARGUMENT.

But you guys keep trotting it out. I’m embarrassed for you.

PZ Myers
“The argument is whether organisms were produced by design or by natural processes. We have natural processes that generate complexity, no design needed, so complexity is not a factor in discriminating between the two hypotheses. ”

Thats a straw-man PZ.
I said “integrated functional complexity” not merely complexity.
Living organisms and space shuttles are analogous in that both are machines requiring well defined integrated functional complexity to utilize an external energy source to preform their mechanical function.

“You want to know whether A or B is the cause for an orange being orange, and both A and B are capable of producing orange pigments, then announcing that the object being examined is orange in color does not
allow you to say whether it whether it was produced by A or B. Do you even understand that elementary logic?”

Circular reasoning.
Pigmentation is a property of a functionally complex thing you are trying to say arrived by random chance.

You don’t get it. Adding more words doesn’t change the problem.

The space shuttle has “integrated functional complexity”, and is designed.

Organisms have “integrated functional complexity”, and are evolved.

You don’t get to use “integrated functional complexity” as a criterion for distinguishing designed from evolved.

“You don’t get it. Adding more words doesn’t change the problem.”

If ” I don’t get it “, explain it with logic rather than insults.

_

“The space shuttle has “integrated functional complexity”, and is designed.”

That’s correct.

_

“Organisms have “integrated functional complexity”, and are evolved.”

That’s what you need to justify with blind chance.

_

You don’t get to use “integrated functional complexity” as a criterion for distinguishing designed from evolved.

I am not, I am stating “integrated functional complexity is indeed a property of design, not natural process based on repeated observation.

If you can show an example of a system of integrated functional complexity, a unique property of machines produced by natural process, then I can take you seriously.

The question is whether “integrated functional complexity” is solely a product of design. You cannot demonstrate it by merely noting the existence of “integrated functional complexity”.

You are stating “integrated functional complexity is a property of design”. That’s the point in contention. The existence of “integrated functional complexity” (which, I note you haven’t even defined) is not sufficient evidence for its origin.

But if there’s anything I know about creationists, it’s that you won’t be able to comprehend the circularity of your claim and will just keep going around and around.

And that’s where I gave up. If any of you want to practice educating the uneducable, you know where to find them now.

Jim Helton in Minneapolis

I skipped off to the big city yesterday (allowing a TERF to flood the comments, sorry — he has been dealt with now) to hear Jim G. Helton speak on the new directions American Atheists is going to take. Well, maybe. He’s AA’s Kentucky State Director, so I’m not sure how well his goals are shared with the national leadership, but I like his plan. I left hoping his ideas would be translated into real action, but at the same time, “hope” is an unfamiliar emotion when dealing with organized atheism, and I’ve been disappointed more than a few times.

Here’s the gist of his talk. He put up a slide of “Atheist Issues”, the stuff we’re all familiar with and that has nearly 100% support from atheist organizations.

  • Government Prayer
  • Bibles
  • 10 Commandments
  • Crosses
  • Religious Funding
  • Religious Exemptions
  • Creationism

If you’re like me, you recognize these as standard separation of church and state concerns, and maybe, if you’re like me, you automatically assume that the government should not be promoting sectarian religious views. This is kind of a core set of ideas for atheism in general, but it’s often stuff that has to be handled by lawyers. It’s good to have lawyers on your side, but it’s not really stuff I can get directly involved in, other than donating money to pay lawyers and making pissed-off comments.

And then he asked, “Are these atheist issues?”

  • Dying with Dignity
  • Sex Education
  • LGBT
  • Abortion
  • Women’s Rights
  • Science & History
  • Racial Justice

He asked this of possibly the most sympathetic audience he could find: Minnesota Atheists are so socially justicey at all times for all of history that the entire membership enthusiastically agreed that all of those were important atheist issues. I certainly think they are, and have been saying so for over a decade (not that anyone listens).

Then he gave his rationale for why all these issues ought to be on the agenda of an atheist organization. When you get down to it, most of the opposition to all of them is religiously motivated — if religion vanished tomorrow, so would creationism, and all of those Bible in the schools bills, and the opposition to all those other issues would be greatly attenuated. There’s no doubting that religion is a major contributor to the world of bad ideas plaguing us.

I like the direction he’s going, but I fear he’s too optimistic. I know that if I could snap my fingers in a kind of atheist Thanos-gambit and selectively make every religious person on the planet crumble into dust (it would be far more than half, I’m afraid), I’m confident that all the items on his first list would immediately disappear as well. Poof, easy.

But the items on the second list? Not so fast. A lot of their opponents would vanish, as would much of their financial base, but unfortunately, there are a lot of fanatical atheists who oppose LGBT and women’s rights, for instance. Those TERFs that have been making bad, incoherent arguments against transgender rights here on the blog in the last few weeks…near as I can tell, they’ve all been skeptics and atheists. Go browse the atheist channels on YouTube, and you’ll find a sordid mass of knee-jerk misogynists thriving there. The alt-right is full of people whose racists beliefs rest on a religious conviction that they are objectively, factually, scientifically correct. Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins just declared at CSICON that the people who support those issues are extremists who belong to the regressive left.

The space between the two lists above is precisely where the fault line that has created the Deep Rifts in the atheist movement lies. You can’t just claim that the division is between the religious and the non-religious, because there is no shortage of atheists who will fight tooth and nail against all the issues on the second list. These aren’t purely atheist issues, even if Jim Helton and Minnesota Atheists and PZ Myers are consistently aligned in favor of them. If and when American Atheists adopts that list as an important component of their organization’s activism, there will be howls of protest.

Are they prepared for that? I don’t know. Helton’s personal enthusiasm is great, but I have my cynical, pessimistic doubts.

I asked one question and didn’t get a solid answer. American Atheist’s national convention is in April in Cincinnati, Helton’s own backyard. For years I’ve seen them chase the elusive celebrity atheist to headline their events, often without regard for their other views. I can sympathize with why they do it — a celebrity headliner is great for improving attendance. But are they going to continue to lust after the kind of celebrity atheist who labels people who promote the items in that second list as “extremists” and the “regressive left”? He skirted the question, because speakers for that event haven’t been lined up yet.

I fear, though, that the planners for that conference would be eager to sign up one of the usual Big Name Atheists — a Dawkins or a Harris, for instance, or a Stephen Fry — and would commit to them in a flash, no matter that their views often contradict the values in that hopeful list. The problem is that the celebrity atheists all turn out to be such assholes.

One glimmer of hope: part of his proposed strategy is to make deeper alliances with organization like Planned Parenthood or the LGBTQ community, in part because they’re a new member pool, but also because there are smart, talented people among them who could be great speakers at atheist events. I think that’s an important idea, not the least because a lot of those people would be alienated by the kinds of racist, misogynistic ideas that way too many atheist big shots like to endorse, and maybe atheist organizations would stop drooling at the idea of bringing in yet another popular cis-het white man who wants to pander to nothing but their fellow cis-het white men.

My tentative take-away from the talk: I like the direction he’s going, hope he succeeds, but am afraid he’s a little naive about the forces within atheism that are going to make life difficult for him. I can already predict all the complaints he’s going to get, because I’ve been getting them for years.

Just when I thought I was out…they pull me back in

It’s no secret that I am greatly disillusioned with organized atheism — it usually seems to organize around the idea of the status quo minus churches, and not much else. It leaves a great big gap where ethics and equality and social justice ought to be, all in the name of not alienating the unctuous asshats…and there are a lot of those in atheism. So I’ve just stayed away, which is very depressing, because I still think the core truth that there are no gods is important.

Tomorrow, Sunday at 2:00, Minnesota Atheists (which is a good group, one of the exceptions that is strongly committed to social justice activism) is hosting Jim Helton of American Atheists, one of the big orgs that has burned us all fairly recently, and he promises that things are changing. Here’s the topic for the day:

What is an “atheist issue”? American Atheists redefines what that is. They challenge the status quo. In doing so, they lay out a plan to fight for equality and the true separation of religion and government. If you are not happy with the way things are, then the time is now to make a change.
Jim G. Helton, the National Field Organizer for American Atheists, will be visiting freethought groups in Minnesota over the course of four days in mid-October to bring us up-to-date on what American Atheists is doing, how they can help us, and how we can help them.

That’s a bit vague, but August Berkshire, who is one of the good guys, vouches for him. He is correct that I am “not happy with the way things are”, but I don’t know if he’s referring to the way atheism is, or if he’s talking generically about the rising power of evangelical Christianity. Do I really want to get my hopes up and attend? I’m thinking about it. AA has the power to change a lot, I’ve just been disappointed so many times before.

The latest Vitamin C scam

True facts about Vitamin C:

  • It is an effective antioxidant, and can donate electrons to free radicals to neutralize them.
  • Topical Vitamin C is helpful in providing photoprotection.

  • It’s also a depigmenting agent — it can decrease melanin formation in the skin.

  • Vitamin C can neutralize the chlorine in chlorinated water.

  • It’s hydrophilic and readily soluble. It can also be absorbed through the skin.

  • Vitamin C inhibits pro-inflammatory cytokines, so you will sometimes see it in creams and patches to treat conditions like acne.

  • It is unstable and degrades rapidly on exposure to light.

  • Vitamin C has some downsides in topical application: it can discolor the skin (the effective molecule (LAA)is transparent, but it breaks down rapidly to DHAA, which is ineffective and yellowish, and it can cause skin dryness.

  • The dose makes the poison: taking over 100 times the recommended daily dose causes cellular apoptosis and is toxic. It’s really, really hard to take that much Vitamin C.

That mostly sounds great, doesn’t it? It is an essential vitamin, it’s good for you, and it has a really good safety profile. It’s easy to get the required dosage from a healthy balanced diet, so, honestly, taking megadoses does nothing, no harm and no advantage, and only, as they say, helps you make more expensive pee.

But you know what’s totally pointless? This new product of selling people Vitamin shower filters. You attach it to your shower head, and then get an extremely dilute solution of Vitamin C topically applied, most of which then runs off into your sewer. If the dose makes the poison, it’s also the case that you need a minimally effective dose to get the benefit, and this mainly looks like a new way to get money to bleed out of your wallet. Have an orange, eat some strawberries or broccoli, all far more effective at getting the vitamins you need.

If you want to remove chlorine, these filters simply can’t do the job — you’d have to reduce the flow rate to a trickle, optimistically. They’re a scam. They take a little bit of truth and amplify it non-quantitatively and with no empirical analysis, and try to sell it to you with phony promises. Don’t fall for it. If you have a condition that would benefit from topical Vitamin C, see a dermatologist.

I agree with this review of the Ark Park

This article on the Ark Park is exactly right, and hits on all the same impressions I had when I visited it.

  • It’s grossly overpriced.
  • “It’s just a large building in a shape you don’t typically see large buildings in.”

  • The “extremely optimistic queueing area” — you wend your way through a maze of fences intended to restrain a mob…and you’re one of the few people there.

  • “The first proper exhibit on the Ark is a room containing lots of wooden cages with model animals in them.” It’s another pointless waiting area. A lot of the cages don’t bother to have fake animals in them — they just play animal noises.

  • “But, unfortunately, with the exception of three dioramas, all of that is depicted using a bunch of pictures and text on boards stuck to the wall.” There are virtually no real exhibits inside.

  • “Once you’re done reading the signs on the wall of the pre-flood world section, you head on to the next attraction: a bunch of signs on walls.”

  • “The Ark has two screening areas that, during my visit, played two movies on loop.” I skipped the movies. From the description, I didn’t miss anything.

  • Did I mention the signs on the walls? “Room after room after room of signs. More signs than have ever been gathered in one place before.”

  • They have a new addition! “One of the newer additions to the Ark is an exhibit made to look like a graphic novel that tells the story of some college kids questioning their faith (spoiler alert: God turns out to be cool, actually).” Unfortunately, it’s just another variation on a theme. “Ken Ham described the exhibit as “like walking through the pages of a book.” An alternative description would be “like reading a bunch of signs stuck to a wall.””

Aside from the incompetent, boring collection of didactic exhibits, they note another feature of the content: it’s all written by regressive, homophobic Christian fundamentalists.

Anti-LGBTQ bigotry is a big attraction at the theme park, and is smattered generously throughout.

All people who volunteer or work at the park are required to sign a “statement of faith” which explicitly prohibits them from employment if they’re gay, bi, or a person who has “attempt[ed] to alter [their] gender by surgery or appearance.”

During my visit, I saw multiple ads for something the Ark is hosting called “Sacred: Embracing God’s Design for Sexuality” which appears to be some sort of transphobic gay conversion event.

It’s no wonder that attendance has been declining, but there’s an interesting tension here: they are catering to narrow audience that doesn’t want information or entertainment, they want nothing but affirmation that their rotten beliefs are valid, and the Ark Park is a massive, expensive false signal that they’re right. It hasn’t collapsed as fast as it should if it were judged on its merits as a museum and a park, but that’s not what it is or ever has been. It’s a costly signal for a dying, contemptible culture. It will continue to draw in revenue from the fading tatters of that group.

What goes with anti-vax, flat-earth, and cancer quackery?

Classic conspiracy theories galore at this facebook page, United 4 Truth. But also this:

Do you want the explanation that goes with this? No? Too bad, I’m going to inflict it on you anyway.

How does human DNA in vaccines contribute to the rise of gender identity confusion?

WI-38 is the cell lines from a FEMALE aborted fetus, used to cultivate viruses used in vaccines. When you inject the DNA from a FEMALE (carrying two X chromosomes) into a MALE (who already carries one X chromosome and a weaker Y chromosome) you now have an overload of the X chromosome.

Now we have an onslaught of BOYS who think they should be GIRLS.

Do we have male DNA in vaccines? YES! MRC-5 is the code given to the fetal cell line also used to cultivate vaccine viral components, and it comes from a MALE aborted fetus. Do we have girls thinking they are boys? YES! Is it as prominent as boys wanting to be girls? NO!

Why? Because girls have two dominant X chromosomes. When they are injected with a vaccine containing MRC-5, they aren’t just getting a Y chromosome, but yet another dominant X chromosome, on top of the two they already have. That’s why you don’t see as many girls wanting to be boys as you do the other way around.

These vaccines contain negligible amounts of human material — the cells are used to produce the viruses that are purified for injection. Also, even if you are injected with fragments of human chromosomes, that doesn’t imply that your cells will incorporate them into their genome, so chromosome dosage is irrelevant.This is like suggesting that if you drink milk, you’re actually swallowing whole cows, and this explains why some people say “moooo.”

Labels, and the saga of Cornerstore Caroline

Related to my previous post, the latest tale of a white woman calling the cops on black people is the story of Cornerstore Caroline. A video went viral of her on the phone, calling the police on a black child, accusing him of grabbing her sexually in a bodega. We since have the surveillance video from the store that shows that, at most, a child brushed against her while walking by. She berated the whole family for this imaginary offense so loudly that the kids were crying.

Well, now she’s got an excuse. Or rather, multiple excuses.

The self-described unemployed “feminist and a humanist” variously insisted she was groped in the bodega and acknowledged the boy had only touched her accidentally — and accused his mom of pretending to be a cop, then later leaving a threatening message for her.

“I would like to apologize to her daughter and her son but not to her. She could have walked away, but she didn’t. I’m also a Buddhist, [but] I let my temper show,” Klein said.

“I’ve been called racist before, and I’m not.”

So…she couldn’t be bad because she’s a 1) feminist, 2) humanist, 3) Buddhist, 4) not a racist. OK. We all know no member of those tribes could possibly be wrong. I guess the camera was lying.

I’m going to get a button that says “GOOD HUMAN” to cover all my bases and get exempt from all accusations of wrong-doing.

Why I banned Andy Lewis, Maria Maclachlan, and Alan Henness

Last week, I banned Andy Lewis, Maria Maclachlan, Alan Henness and a few of their friends. Oh, the weeping and wailing and rending of robes! The grief at this cosmic injustice! I have received so many messages of concern: Lewis/Maclachlan/Henness are so nice, so rational, such good skeptics and humanists, such upstanding members of the community, how could I possibly do this? And there lies the problem. Once someone joins a tribe, all the other members of the tribe are expected to assume that they’re good and nice and rational, and bugger all the evidence.

Andy Lewis is not nice and not rational. As evidence, I give you this: his response after being banned.

No one was banned for being in a relationship, which is simply stupid and absurd. I only noted that they were using the same IP address when I was trying to untangle the snarl of strange people brawling in the comments. Likewise, no one was banned for being the victim of a crime. This is all blatant dishonesty intended to stir up sympathy for these poor, innocent people who did nothing at all but love each other and get beat up by bad people. It’s hard to believe that anyone would fall for it, but they did — they were stumbling all over themselves in a rush to tell me what good skeptics they all are and gosh, aren’t they just the sweetest couple?

I’ll just point out that that tweet is such an obvious lie that it calls your judgment into question if you accept it.

Here’s what really happened. An anti-transgender activist (TERF) who has never commented here before found a post he didn’t like, and started trolling the group with aggressive and fundamentally dishonest comments to stir up conflict. His very first comment was disingenuous and misleading: Are we all so devoid of scepticism and full of misogyny that all here cannot bring themselves to accept the objective, material existence of women?

This was a thread about acceptance of transgender individuals, not about debating the existence of women. It is not misogyny to recognize the rights of transgender men and women. But Lewis just barreled in with misrepresentation as his opening gambit.

Note also: he kept this up, making 72 comments over less than a week, constantly stoking the flames and bloating the thread up to over 350 comments, many of which are addressing bogus issues he brought up. It’s a classic example of trolling. Andy Lewis is a troll, and also kind of an obsessed bigot about transgender people.

Furthermore, he recruited his friends to join in. It was a boiling wrangle with multiple TERFs raging when I finally stepped in and shut it down.

So, for instance, we quickly got mariamaclachlan jumping into the fray, and it’s an excellent representative of the fallacious arguments used throughout.

Oh for crying out loud, PZ! The word ‘woman’ means adult human female. Women do NOT have penises.

No, women don’t stop being women if they lose their ovaries any more than you stop being a man because your dick gets lopped off. Your sex is defined according to which of the two reproductive classes you were born into – you KNOW this really but you’ve drunk the ideological kool-aid and are in denial.

Thankfully, there are still some like Angelos who haven’t.

ALL SWANS ARE WHITE! If you find a black swan, we’ll just use our definition to exclude them from the category of swans. It’s an argument as old as Aristotle, and you would think that a skeptic would be familiar with the dangers of an argument from false premises. You don’t just get to blithely wave away counter-examples by referring to a cherry-picked definition.

I also don’t accept the automatic equating of “female” with “woman”, of confusing sex with gender. It also baffles me that anyone would do that: are they in the habit of checking the genitalia of every person they meet? There are almost 7½ billion people on the planet; I’ve met thousands of women; I work regularly with hundreds of them. I have never once asked any of them to show me that they don’t have a penis before accepting their gender. In fact, I’ve only seen the genitals of a handful of human females in my life; should I be skeptical of the identity of every other woman on Earth? How awkward.

I also don’t ask for a karyotype, or a demonstration of what kind of gametes they make.

The fact is that “woman” is a rich cultural artifact with many cues used to designate that aspect of their identity — I accept the reality of girls’ names, women’s styles, women’s manner of speaking, women’s traditional roles, women’s typical careers, women’s make-up — all the signals that people use to mark their gender. I don’t freak out when a girl is named “Mike”, when a woman is a fighter pilot, when a man uses eye shadow, when anyone uses vocal fry, when a woman interrupts a man. We’re seeing people break out of the stereotypes we impose on men and women in many ways, and I think that’s a great step forward. Let’s treat people as individuals rather than representatives of only two allowed gender classes.

The presence or absence of a penis is possibly the worst gender signal ever, because we keep those hidden in almost all of our social interactions. I’d have to be really close, very intimate friends with a woman before she’d show me her penis.

And then, in that comment, one of the most annoying, bullshit argument tactics ever: the declaration that she KNOWS exactly what I know. I’ve heard this from creationists, too, the claim that since I’m a biologist, I must know that all the evidence for evolution is false, and I must deep down agree with them except that I’ve drunk the ideological kool-aid, or possibly, am in the thrall of all the money from Big Science.

You are incorrect, Ms MacLachlan. I am a developmental biologist, which means I know that sex is not a unary operation. It is not decided by a single gene or chromosome, or a single hormone, or a single organ, and is a layered complex process of interlinked interactions. The path from SRY to brain development is not linear and fixed, and other genes and environmental factors can shift the pathway both subtly and profoundly. Sex is not one decision that splits the population into precisely two types. It is a multitude of decisions that modify a multitude of traits and produces a range of complex outcomes. That this process is strongly canalized developmentally to produce a majority of two reproductive types does not mean that variation is excluded, or that we should simply ignore or discriminate against anyone who differs. Biology doesn’t say what you claim it says, and it’s extremely obnoxious to claim the authority of science for your bigotry.

I’m not even getting into gender. That’s the domain of psychologists and sociologists, and to even pretend that human beings emerge from the complexity of biological sex determination to then find a binary simplicity and clarity in psychology and culture is ludicrous. The only reality behind that is that there exist some gatekeepers who are deeply committed to the idea of there being only two allowed types of people, and who try desperately to enforce their narrow preconceptions by harassing people at transgender events or by trolling blogs. Or, I suppose, in some societies or in history, setting the deviants on fire.

So please, don’t tell me what I “KNOW”, and imply that I secretly agree with your anti-scientific bullshit. I don’t. It’s a great way to antagonize me and get yourself banned, unlike, for example, being married.

The whole is like that: the TERFs interject their standard bad arguments, equating sex and gender, insisting that transgender individuals believe they have gametes corresponding to their professed gender, suggesting that transgender women are trying to violently oppress “True” Women, bringing up anecdotes of criminals who dressed as women, etc., etc., etc. The regular commenters here were ably responding to it all, so I just stayed out of it, and they also seemed to take my absence as cowardice on my part and permission for them to amplify their lies. That led to me finally shutting them down.

Let me be crystal clear on this. TERFs tend to be assholes, and I’m not particularly impressed when you try to tell me that this particular set of TERFs are “nice” or “rational”. Biology does not support your gender essentialism, so quit pretending it does. Your species is specified by your genetics (and sometimes even that is fuzzy), but it is not the entirety of your identity, and the people who claim that who you are is a product of a chromosome or a single organ are simplistic to the point of simplemindedness, and given that these same people are often quite intelligent, I have to assume that they are motivated by prejudice or malevolence, and I don’t want them hanging around here.

I’m also not impressed by your membership in a particular tribe, whether it’s skepticism, atheism, humanism, or Catholicism.

Harris’s devious rhetoric dissected

Uh-oh. Brace yourself for waves of outrage and rationalizations from Sam Harris and his fan boys. Eli Massey and Nathan Robinson tackle Sam Harris, and oy, it is not gentle. One quick sample:

Each time Harris said something about Islam that created outrage, he had a defense prepared. When he wondered why anybody would want any more “fucking Muslims,” he was merely playing “Devil’s advocate.” When he said that airport security should profile “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it,” he was simply demanding acknowledgment that a 22-year old Syrian man was objectively more likely to engage in terrorism than a 90-year-old Iowan grandmother. (Harris also said that he wasn’t advocating that only Muslims should be profiled, and that people with his own demographic characteristics should also be given extra scrutiny.) And when he suggested that if an avowedly suicidal Islamist government achieved long-range nuclear weapons capability, “the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own,” he was simply referring to a hypothetical situation and not in any way suggesting nuking the cities of actually-existing Muslims.[6]

It’s not necessary to use “Islamophobia” or the r-word in order to conclude that Harris was doing something both disturbing and irrational here. As James Croft of Patheos noted, Harris would follow a common pattern when talking about Islam: (1) Say something that sounds deeply extreme and bigoted. (2) Carefully build in a qualification that makes it possible to deny that the statement is literally bigoted. (3) When audiences react with predictable horror, point to the qualification in order to insist the audience must be stupid and irrational. How can you be upset with him for merely playing Devil’s Advocate? How can you be upset with him for advocating profiling, when he also said that he himself should be profiled? How can you object, unless your “tolerance” is downright pathological, to the idea that it would be legitimate to destroy a country that was bent on destroying yours?

Yeah, that’s the man. He is incapable of speaking plainly because he knows his ideas are patently ugly, so he’s got to wrap them up in layers of plausible denial. I’ve just given up on him, because wading through glop to get to the heart of his arguments, which he’ll always deny, just isn’t worth it anymore.

If only he could show the slightest glimmering of change and growth in response to criticisms…but no, instead he has a cuddle-party with his fellow right-leaning dickheads to reassure each other they’re right and everyone else is a big meanie.

Where is all this BS coming from?

I was introduced to another good take-down of that silly anti-“grievance studies” campaign. What I particularly appreciated is that this one recognizes the role of a key disseminator of bad science: Steven Pinker.

The obscure venue of choice for their account of the hoax, Areo Magazine, models itself on the magazine Aeon but in fact contains low-grade content obviously too petty or pedestrian even for Quillette (“Not All Men is Not a Fallacy. It is Humanism”). Yet what generated the Areo article’s viral lift were strong endorsements from the usual suspects—Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson, both senior psychology professors—and the budding reactionary Yascha Mounk, a Harvard lecturer in government but also head of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. The orthodoxy these men represent is not an orthodoxy of scientific legitimacy but rather the emerging consensus of tech bros, Davos billionaires, and alt-right misogynists. Each of these groups has its own reasons to hate feminist and other critical scholarship—whether for ideological reasons, positivist data fetishism, or the perception that they are uncommodifiable and hence worthless.

I hadn’t heard of Mounk…but the Tony Blair Institute? I distrust him already. But we haven’t gotten to the real skewering yet.

It is hard to imagine a form of scholarship less rigorous, more motivated by nonscientific concerns, and more warped by political hobbyhorses than what these men practice. Steven Pinker routinely misrepresents the scholarship he relies on in his books; a 2013 meta-analysis of the burial sites he studies in his argument on the decline of violence reveals that nearly every one of them has been misunderstood or distorted, without any noticeable impact on its popularity. Yet he can never be effectively corrected by any fellow scholar, because the outsized power he wields due to his media platform will always give his views more visibility. Peterson is even worse, a neo-Jungian fantasist whose basic ideas about animal and human behavior are so egregiously wrong he no longer even bothers to justify them through standard scholarly practice. Mounk catapulted to media prominence entirely on the basis of a conveniently-timed claim that recent survey data showed an alarming collapse in support for democracy in Western societies; though critics soon called his analysis cherry-picked and inaccurate, his reputation as the premier pundit of the liberal-technocrat class remains untarnished. In each of these cases, it is celebrity, status, and money that immunize a would-be scholar from criticism and disincentivize any revisions to their views. These extra-academic factors have a much greater effect on shaping our own daily lives than the private politics of most fat studies scholars, for they spread incorrect conclusions to a very wide audience and give it the imprimatur of elite academic institutions.

It doesn’t even mention his efforts to prop up that bullshit discipline, evolutionary psychology. Why didn’t the hoaxers target the evo psych journals? They’d be an easy get, because so many of the papers in them are already garbage.

Apparently, the key to fame, fortune, and glory is to always support the status quo and tell the wealthy of the world what they want to hear. Dammit. I keep missing the money train because I’d rather dynamite the tracks, so I only have myself to blame.

As for Peterson, have you seen the The Wisdom of Jordan Peterson, a word salad generator? He’s as easy to dismiss as Deepak Chopra.