I ought to be getting used to atheists embarrassing me

One of the ways religious offenders defend themselves is by falling back into the arms of their co-religionists. “Why, when they attack me for molesting that girl, they are attacking the sanctity of Jesus Christ and his Holy Church!” It’s a way to gather allies by telling them that the criticisms against you are actually assaults on your entire belief system and all of your fellows.

Keep that in mind while reading Krauss’s response to accusations of sexual harassment. He is openly recruiting us atheists and skeptics to side with him.

On February 22, reporters from BuzzFeed published a libelous story defaming me specifically, and by association the skeptical and atheist community in general. To those friends, colleagues, and others who have written me kind notes of support, I want to thank you sincerely. To those who have expressed anger, I understand the disappointment you may have experienced upon reading the story. It has been very hard to remain silent thus far as my integrity and the integrity of the academic and skeptical communities, which I care about deeply, have been impugned.

My first thought is to defend myself — #NotAllAtheists, Dr Krauss! It’s you that is being accused, not me or my friends, so how dare you drag me into your community.

But then…damn. I think I’m being too optimistic about the quality of this community. I have to stop that. It ought to be easy to be cynical, since atheists are so happy to help. For instance, self-labeled atheists are proud to step forward and pull this kind of crap.

Some of you will dismiss this blatant sexism by saying it’s just one guy, one particularly repulsive guy. That’s true. Except…

TJ Kirk AKA the “Amazing Atheist” has been around for over a decade, and he’s been this repugnant since he first popped up. He has over 100,000 followers on Twitter. He has a million subscribers on YouTube.

You want to defend the skeptical and atheist community? We’re going to have to face up the fact that the popularity and persistence of terrible people who wave the banner of atheism has already compromised us, and realize that when some of our ‘heroes’ go further and commit sexual harassment, that doesn’t mean that they’re exceptional, but are perhaps more representative than we like to admit. At the very least, we have to recognize that being a misogynistic scumbag does not disqualify you from claiming to be an “amazing” atheist.

Further, that so many atheists insist that no moral stance can be assigned to atheism means that the awful people can not be repudiated as atheists; we can do so as individuals, as human beings, and as humanists, but the lack of any principle but “there is no god” in atheism means there are no grounds for forswearing or dismissing these people within the atheist movement.

So what’s the point of the atheist movement? There is none. It’s killed itself.

So, atheism is becoming a refuge for people who learned biology in kindergarten?

Some days I feel like I’ve spent one quarter of my life learning oversimplifications, and the remaining three quarters trying to encompass all the wonderful complexity out there. And then I have to deal with all the people who have turned the beginning stuff they learned in grade school into rigid dogma, rather than the first step in learning. I appreciate learning I’m not alone, like from this Stanford blog from a few years ago.

The simple scenario many of us learned in school is that two X chromosomes make someone female, and an X and a Y chromosome make someone male. These are simplistic ways of thinking about what is scientifically very complex. Anatomy, hormones, cells, and chromosomes (not to mention personal identity convictions) are actually not usually aligned with one binary classification.

The Nature feature collects research that has changed the way biologists understand sex. New technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that chromosomal sex is a process, not an assignation.

As quoted in the article, Eric Vilain, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Gender-Based Biology at UCLA, explains that sex determination is a contest between two opposing networks of gene activity. Changes in the activity or amounts of molecules in the networks can sway the embryo towards or away from the sex seemingly spelled out by the chromosomes. “It has been, in a sense, a philosophical change in our way of looking at sex; that it’s a balance.”

Two very nice words: process and balance. Those are so much more accurate than bang, your sexual identity was determined by a collision of two gametes in your Mom’s fallopian tubes, and don’t you argue with me. Or this: a fascinatingly perverse video from a guy who has been banned from playing the card game, Magic: The Gathering for harassment.

Just to explain the context a little bit: the banned player is quite irate, and has discovered a horrible thing that the makers of his favorite card game have done that is ruining the game. You only have to listen to the first 30 seconds of this excerpt, but you can continue if you enjoy listen to a growed man ranting about SJWs wrecking his fantasy game.

“Magic has adopted “they” as the preferred third-person-singular pronoun for a player, replacing “he or she”.”

This on the 25th anniversary of the world’s most popular card game is a fucking disgrace. Gender is real.

Then he goes on to whine about the low frequency of transgender people in the US, as if the number makes any difference, and is if the only possible reason to make this change is to satisfy transgender men and women (hint: there’s a larger spectrum of individuals who don’t identify by those pronouns). It’s a 12 minute video. All that’s in it is this guy complaining about how a card game company wasted all this effort making a grammatical change via one sentence in an internal document about some upcoming card releases, listed in a section titled “various nonfunctional changes”. The sad thing is that over 20,000 people have watched this performance.

I don’t know about you, but I think I’m going to pay more attention to the views of experts in reproductive and developmental biology, published in Nature and by Stanford, than the angry ravings of a bigoted game player who doesn’t like these new people sneaking into his gaming community. But what do I know? That whiny gamer has been invited to speak at an atheist convention in Milwaukee. Remember when atheism used to try to associate itself with science?

Just when you were thinking the skeptic movement couldn’t get worse

Ooh, 16 September? I’m sorry, I think I have an appointment to scald my skin off with a bucket of boiling hot vomit that night. I guess I’ll have to pass.

Lawrence Krauss should look at that and be reassured that this too shall pass. You can be an alleged rapist and still be invited to share the stage with one of the Big Names, and that Big Name will still welcome you. It’s quite the cozy little boys’ club.

It’s not just the internet

I was listening to Monette Richards and Steve Shives talking about #MeToo this morning while preparing for my class. It’s a good discussion, and I only objected to one thing: they talk for a bit about how social media, YouTube, Facebook, etc. was enabling a bold new wave of rotten people. I’m old enough to remember a time before any of those things, and before the internet even.

It was bad then, too.

But it was different. Case in point: look at the John Birch Society. They were thriving in the 50s — they were more mainstream then — and the 60s, and they were peddling some heinous, hateful shit, even without a YouTube channel. They were recruiting racists, they were putting together marches, they were setting up their own private conferences. Even as a pre-teen I was exposed to their horrid dogma (and was repulsed by it — you know you’re pushing bad propaganda when even an 8-year-old can see through it). They were a minority, but they were influential, in a very bad way, and they were more cloaked.

I think the difference is that back then, if you supported an evil organization, whether it was the KKK or the John Birchers, you would proudly tell them, but you didn’t have a bullhorn to announce to the public at large that you were signing on with the bad people. It was more of a surreptitious growth, just as damaging, but you weren’t seeing it flamboyantly displayed. Nowadays when you think the alt-right is just peachy, you openly support it with an upvote or repost on Facebook, or you leave an ugly misspelled comment on YouTube, and everyone knows, oh yeah, those assholes have another fan.

But the point is that those supporters were doing the same thing way back when. It was just quieter. Nowadays the big difference is that everyone is wearing big bold colors that declare where you stand. I don’t know whether that’s better or worse, because the awful reactionary conservatives were pretty pernicious even without their own Facebook fan page.

You can also wear big bold colors that say you are on the side of righteousness by supporting the conference Monette is organizing, Secular Women Work. Attend or get a t-shirt by donating to their kickstarter.

Ken Ham has some peculiar ideas about taxonomy

He kind of wants to throw it out.

How odd. You know, the classification system he’s complaining about was formulated by Carl Linnaeus, who happened to be a pre-Darwinian Christian who also believed in a literal creation of different “kinds” by a god, just like Ham, but without some of the dogmatic stupidity. He’s the one who put humans in the animal kingdom.

Of particular interest is the fact that Linnaeus classified the human species in the animal kingdom. In different editions, he made numerous modifications to the details, but “man” was now part of the natural world, though distinguished by “his” soul. The term “homo sapiens” to describe our species (literally: “know thyself”) is due to Linnaeus, in the third edition.

The reasoning was straightforward. He thought all organisms were created by his god, beetles, camels, and salmon as well as humans, so he had no reason to separate out Homo sapiens as a distinct, exceptional creation event, unlike all those other species.

I think Ken Ham’s religious purity has been tainted, and he’s leaning towards accepting a natural history for animals, and is desperately shoring up human exceptionalism as a refuge for his incomplete beliefs.

He’s probably going to burn in hell for that.

How decadent is your aristocracy?

Ours is getting pretty creepy. They’re buying blood from healthy young people to inject into sickly old fucks, and they’re gathering at ritzy gala events to learn how they too can become techno-vampires.

It’s called The Young Blood Project — that’s a nice ghoulish name, at least. A Florida doctor is carrying out a “clinical trial” which you can pay to be part of (a warning flag is already being thrown), in which you, if you’re old enough (hey, I qualify!) will be transfused with plasma obtained from young men and women. While I’m the right age, though, it’s apparently going to cost $285,000 to sign up. I dunno, man, get a bunch of blood or a Porsche 911 R? Decisions, decisions.

This “study” also has some serious design flaws.

Mixed but intriguing evidence in mice doesn’t yet justify testing this idea in humans, much less charging them a huge sum to sign up. And the study uses neither blinding nor a placebo group, design elements considered essential for rigorous medical research.

“There is no way under heaven that they will be able to convincingly show whether this works or this doesn’t work. It’s a trial that is designed and destined to provide no valuable information,” said Dr. Steven Joffe, a pediatric oncologist and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who performs bone marrow transplants. He called the scientific hypothesis “incredibly far-fetched.”

Really, it probably isn’t going to work.

Maharaj has not published any animal studies testing the procedure he’s proposing to try in humans. He did, however, publish a paper last year documenting a study in which he infused three cancer patients with white blood cells from young donors who had been injected with G-CSF. The trial was originally intended to enroll 29 patients, but Maharaj did not answer questions about why the paper featured results from only three of them.

Asked by STAT for citations in the published literature that provide the scientific basis for his new trial, Maharaj pointed to six studies. One was conducted on human cells in lab dishes. The other five were conducted in mice; they found that, after being exposed to the blood of young mice, old mice had less abnormal thickening of their heart, grew more nervous tissue, and saw improved cognitive function, among other changes.

Man, in the old days all you needed to become a vampire was to get bitten by a creepy old fuck in a cape. Now you gotta be rich, you’ve got to shuttle to Florida once a month, you have to get all these needles, and then at the end you get to hope that maybe you’ll be able to name the camel on a cognitive assessment test.

That settles it, I’m going for the Porsche. Can one of you break the news to my wife that I’m planning to spend 10 years salary on a penismobile?

Would someone care to write a standard inclusion rider for conference speakers?

Frances McDornand gave a speech at the Oscars in which she asked everyone to include an “inclusion rider” in their contracts. Like most people around the country, I had to google it to find out what an “inclusion rider” is.

What the heck is an inclusion rider? It’s a way to make Hollywood more equitable. Actors sign contracts when they are cast in films, and they have the ability to negotiate for riders, or additional provisions. An inclusion rider is a stipulation that the minor roles of a film reflect the demography of where the film takes place, including a proportionate number of women, minorities, LGBTQ individuals and people with disabilities. Big name actors who have leverage in negotiations could put this stipulation into their contracts and drastically change representation in film.

Hey! Why don’t we have such a thing for speakers at atheist cons (maybe you do, and I just don’t know about it)? This would be so useful. You want me to speak at your event? Great! But part of the deal is that I don’t show up and discover that I’m one among a big roster of nothing but old white men.

Or maybe you don’t want me anyway, and that’s fine — but what would be really powerful is if all those popular old white men also had an “inclusion rider” in their contracts that would motivate conference organizers to be a bit more balanced in their lineups if they want Big Name Atheist to join their meeting. It might also be revealing to find out which Big Name Atheists don’t want to leverage greater inclusivity in the events they grace.

My one obstacle is ignorance. We made a big push to have reasonable harassment policies at cons a few years ago. Maybe this would be a good next step: if someone who knows the legalese to craft a basic boilerplate conference speaker contract, I’d be happy to use it and would include it in any of my agreements to speak somewhere as a requirement. If enough of us start using such a thing, conference organizers would have to accommodate to them and figure them into the speaker lineups they put together.

Or they could just start automatically rejecting speakers who expect an appropriate gender and minority balance. That would be good to know about a conference, too.

(Psst. Science conferences, too. Any event where there exists a more desirable class of speakers — use your power to promote more diversity.)

EST+Scientology+Ayn Rand? Sign me up!

If I wanted to build a horrible chimeric religion to get rich, that would probably be a profitable combo…but I’d have to be totally rotten at the core to be able to do it. Just like Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman, who founded a cult called variously NXIVM or the Knife of Aristotle.

There are innumerable articles on NXIVM and Raniere that are worth your time, including this 2010 piece in Vanity Fair that claims Raniere took advantage of several wealthy heiresses, among other alleged victims. What everyone seems to agree on is that NXIVM shares DNA with Scientology, but mostly appears to be a direct descendant of the ‘70s self-investment movement EST. Most in my age range know about EST from its appearance in recent seasons of FX’s The Americans. NXIVM goes a step further than either, with ex-members reporting harems, color-coded hierarchy dress codes, deep sexism, and other assorted basic bitch cult moves—especially litigation against journalists and anti-Raniere voices. There’s also a website devoted to tracking the group, which seems like it shouldn’t be alone in this. After all, Raniere has been on the cover of Forbes magazine. He’s not hiding from anything.

So NXIVM focuses on internal truth and a re-prioritized set of internal ethics, mostly ripped from the objectivist pages of Ayn Rand, which I think solves the mystery of “Why fake news?”

Talk about your unholy hybrids…it’s terrifying that people actually fall for this kind of poison.

I despise quacks

I can sort of see the twisted logic behind the claim that cancer is good.

  • If cancer were an indicator of an underlying systemic problem, rather than the problem itself;

  • If cancers were easily treatable;

  • If cancers weren’t a massive cause of pain and death;

Then yes, cancer would be great! You get a lump in your breast, you start pooping blood, you have been coughing up slime and can’t catch your breath…why, happy day, that means you have to go take a big swig of orange juice and all your problems would go away, breasts would be instantly perky, rainbows will shine out of your ass, and you’ll be off running marathons.

The only problem is that none of those premises are true. Just ask someone who has cancer. Cancer isn’t a symptom, it’s the disease. Only quacks claim that cancer can be easily cured. And if all it took was changing your diet to cure it, how do you account for the millions of people who died in terrible agony from it?

The person spreading these damnable lies is a Canadian naturopath, Brittany Auerbach, who calls herself “Montreal Healthy Girl”. Her article on this is a case study in the arrogance of ignorance.

Cancer is not a disease that came from ‘out there’, you did not ‘catch it’ and there is no need for the powerless self-pitying of ” how can this happen to me, I am so unlucky!”. By understanding the actual physiology behind what cancer really is, it makes knowing the true ‘cure’ pretty simple and straight-forward.

She thinks she understands the physiology of cancer. In the next paragraph, she demonstrates that she doesn’t.

It is imperative that we understand one point: the human body is alkaline by design and acidic by function. It fights for homeostasis and works every minute of every living moment to keep our blood Ph at an alkaline 7.2-7.4. The body is meant to thrive on oxygen and alkaline minerals, we cannot survive without them. All foods and substances that are healthiest for us leave an alkaline residue and alkaline minerals in the body. Healthy tissues are oxygen-rich and loaded with alkaline nutrient stores that the body can use to neutralize the acids that are produced by everyday activities like walking, having sex, digestion, breathing, etc. When the body is rich in alkaline nutrients and rich in oxygen, it is disease-free and optimally functional. When the body becomes too acidic, the cells close themselves off by encasing themselves with alkaline minerals to protect the blood from becoming very acid (which would result in death). By closing themselves off, these cells begin to be unable to absorb alkaline nutrients or oxygen and basically turn anaerobic and cancerous. It is the same process that a bacteria undertakes: when blood supply and oxygen is cut off and acidity increases, they morph into ‘superbugs’, ones that can thrive and grow in the even the most undesirable of environments. AH thanks to acidic antibiotics!

I’ve seen this before. There’s a whole industry of quacks who reduce every ailment to one simple thing, pH, and make these silly arguments about an imbalance of hydrogen ions. At least the ancients argued for four humors that needed balancing, these loons have reduced it to just one. The “pH Miracle” scam has been going on for decades.

This horrible person also doesn’t just claim that cancer is a minor inconvenience, she’s also going to blame antibiotics for magically morphing bacteria into antibiotic resistant superbugs.

In fact, she has a treatment for everything! She can cure cancer, all viruses, all bacterial infections, alcoholism, ADD, and a whole raft of imaginary problems! She’s a fraud, but she’s got a successful scam going.

I was reminded of the Dunning-Kruger effect while browsing Brittany’s website. Ignorant people do not have empty minds; rather, their brain is filled with inaccurate information they believe to be true. And the Dunning-Kruger effect is the fact that many of these people actually think they have superior knowledge. If a fool knew they were a fool, they would not be dangerous. But a fool who thinks he is a genius, that is problematic. With videos that can reach up to half a million people, Brittany “MontrealHealthyGirl” Auerbach can do a lot of damage. She has more YouTube subscribers (over 106,000) than the Food Babe (38,566), though her Facebook and Twitter followers are dwarfed by her American counterpart.

If you’re listening to these lying phonies, you need to stop. She may be a fool, but she’s successfully milking a hundred thousand other fools.

I’m sensing a theme here

I just noticed something on Facebook. They have this pane titled “Suggested Groups” where they recommend stuff based on your browsing habits, I guess, and there were two of them being pushed at me. Here are their logos.

Is it just me, or do you see it too?

Several of those guys pictured are dead. One, Neil deGrasse Tyson, doesn’t want to be associated with movement atheism. But that isn’t what bothers me most.

One problem is that they’re all guys, every one, except for Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They couldn’t be bothered to copy and paste a picture of Susan Jacoby or Annie Laurie Gaylor or Madalyn Murray O’Hair or Margaret Downey in there — heck, not even Ayn Rand, but maybe that would be too revealing of their political philosophy. If you wanted to demonstrate that atheism is a boys’ club, all you have to do is look at how they advertise themselves.

But another big problem is how much of a cult of personality this whole movement is becoming. All that matters is who you know, how compatible you are with that gang of 5 to 10 men who are the big names, and your ideas don’t matter otherwise. It’s all about conformity. You need to be centrist or right of center (or dead, if you’re liberal), and if you’re not, you’ve got to accommodate yourself to the status quo. You’ve got to be a man. It helps to be vigorously anti-Muslim, again part of that right-of-center bias. You should be white, but they’re happy to bring in a few tokens, even if they don’t ask to be part of this mess. It’s all part of the marketing of establishment atheism, which is going to be built around people you like, rather than ideas that challenge the culture. It’s a brand now.

It’s also focused on the past. Aww, aren’t you pinin’ for the days of George Carlin and Carl Sagan, when the atheist boys’ club could be all rational and shit without some girl or social scientist or somethin’ coming along and putting a damper on the party with complexity and exposing your underlying assumptions?