How not to be a good person

OK, kids, today I’m offering a simple lesson in basic human decency. I know most of you already know all this — I picked up on it when I was a child — but this is the internet, and a few of its resident have been raised by wolves or read too much Ayn Rand as a teenager, and they’ve lost some really basic principles.

  1. When someone is hurting, don’t spit on them because someone else is hurting more. It’s smart and sensible to invest your time and money wisely, and if you see two people in pain, you get to choose which one you’ll help first, and that’s fine. But it’s counterproductive and destructive to dismiss efforts to help the other person, and it’s particularly repellent if you choose to kick at the people who are helping someone you consider a lesser cause to the extent that you aren’t helping anyone at all.

    There’s a principle in medicine called triage—look it up. It does not mean “stick a knife in the patient you don’t want to help.”

    See? This is so simple. If you see someone donating money to prostate cancer research, don’t berate them because they should donate to breast cancer research instead, because you think it’s a more serious disease. Or vice versa. Both are bad, and it’s good that we have people supporting research into both.

  2. So you’ve decided to help someone — good for you. However, you shouldn’t then advertise your goodness and throw a tantrum if people don’t praise you enough. You especially shouldn’t then retract your offer of assistance because there wasn’t enough love given to you. You aren’t the one in trouble, and the situation isn’t about you at all.

    You see, that makes it obvious to everyone that you weren’t offering to help because you’re a good person: the offer was patently a bribe to win good will for yourself, and when you announce your refusal to help you’re really just trying to extort some flattery out of others. This is not good behavior.

    I hear a version of this all the time: don’t annoy the Christians with that atheism stuff or they might retract their support for science and science education. Well then, they weren’t really good supporters of science in the first place, were they?

I know, you’re all saying that was really obvious to the point of being stupid, but there are people on the internet who don’t understand these basic concepts. Sad, I know, but don’t get cranky if I occasionally reach out to help the ethically benighted in addition to bashing creationists and that sort of thing. There are many good causes we can all fight for.

Sunday Sacrilege: Free speech is not freedom from responsibility

I’ve been struck by the twisty complications of the recent outing of the creepy redditor Violentacrez as Michael Brutsch, a programmer for a financial consulting company, by Adrian Chen of Gawker. I’m particularly interested by the fact that the case has become a focus of concern by defenders of free speech — people who regard free speech as sacred and absolute.

Well, you know what I think of the sacred.

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The Amazing Atheist reveals his lack of humanity again

I’m sure you’ve all heard the tragic story of Amanda Todd, the teenage girl who killed herself after prolonged bullying. Normal human beings will read about her and be near tears; she was broken by callous sexual predators, her life made miserable, and she finally gave up on it.

The Amazing Atheist is not a normal human being.

Instead, The Amazing Atheist raged at the fact that this young woman was getting attention when other people have died, too. She was a well-off Western girl with plenty of privileges, so how dare we consider her story particularly tragic? There are so many other people who are worse off than she was!

Well, you know, we have a couple of choices in our lives.

We could, for instance, search the world for that one person who is in the worst circumstances of anyone; the person who is suffering the very most right now. We can do this while turning up our nose at each other afflicted individual who isn’t hurting enough for our standards; why, you’re a quadriplegic dying in a ditch? But you don’t have shingles! And both your eyes are intact! I’m sure we can find someone worse off than you. And then when we find that ultimate person in pain, we can promise to do everything we can to help them.

But I’ve noticed that people who make that kind of argument aren’t actually offering to help anyone. Their perversely inverted, demanding standards are really an excuse to turn away from the miserable they consider undeserving, to justify refusing to help…because that ultimate sufferer will never be found.

But you do have a choice. The other thing you could do is recognize deep pain in others and do what you can to help them. If one person had sincerely and honestly turned to Todd when she was being abused, and offered to help, maybe she’d still be here, and the world would be a slightly better place.

She wasn’t asking for much.

The Amazing Atheist begrudges her that much.

I don’t see any difference between him and the bullies who beat her up and mocked her on facebook and poured scorn on her in school.

And some people wonder why there is a growing rift in the atheist movement. All you have to do is look at people like the Amazing Atheist to see that some atheists, people who are convinced that there is nothing beyond ourselves, that we are dependent entirely on our fellow human beings and nothing more, lack that humanity that is our only source of unity and our only true reason for living.

Don’t be surprised that some of us want nothing to do with such sociopaths.

Terraforming the easy and fun way with desert plants

I spend a lot of time paying attention to threats to the organisms that live in the desert, and what with all the environmental bad news available online these days that can be pretty damned depressing. This past weekend, though, I was reminded that there is actually hope for the future. Centuries from now we may well find that desert plants, especially those that now live within a day’s drive of Los Angeles, have a vital role to play in making yet-undiscovered planets habitable.

I was reminded of this while re-watching a set of documentary films describing the terraforming of an entire complex system full of dozens of more or less habitable planets, in many cases using entire vegetative suites once native to the California desert. I’ve gone back and taken some screenshots of these films to illustrate some of the ways in which the terraformers used desert plants, and they — along with discussion of the terraformed vegetation –are below the fold.

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The best thing I’ve read today

I know it’s early, but I expect it to be the best thing for a few days yet. David Byrne writes about his love affair with sound, and I came away from it feeling like I’d both learned something new and that it fit well with other ideas I already had — it was a revelation to see how well music and evolution fit together.

Because music evolves. Byrne’s thesis is that it evolves to fit its environment (sound familiar?), and that you can see the history of a genre of a music in its sound. It’s all about the spaces it was played in, which shapes the kind of sound can be used effectively…and he makes the strong point that you can’t fully appreciate the music of a culture or a time when you transpose it to a different space. He goes through all kinds of music, from medieval chants (cathedrals!) to hip hop (cars!). The iPod isn’t just a passive delivery system for generic music, it influences how music will sound — ear buds represent a completely different sonic environment from a cluttered dance club.

Apparently, David Byrne is an Ecological Developmental Biology kind of guy. I like him even more already.

Because that’s what eco devo is all about. Development and environment are all intertwined, with one feeding back on the other — species are products of the spaces they evolved and developed in, and cannot be comprehended in isolation. It’s one of the weird things about modern developmental biology, that we preferentially study model systems, organisms that have been able to thrive when ripped out of their native environments and cultured in the simplified sterility of the lab. My zebrafish live now in small uncluttered tanks with heavily filtered water; their environment is like iPods, simple, streamlined, focused with relatively little resonance. The zebrafish evolved in mountain streams feeding into the Ganges, in lands seasonally flooded by great monsoons, a vast and complicated opera hall of an environment. A wild zebrafish and a lab zebrafish are two completely different animals.

Oh, look. I have a new metaphor for issues I’ve been thinking about for some time. Thanks, David Byrne!

I might just make his essay part of the readings for my developmental biology course next term.

SRS has more targets

ShitRedditSays, the subreddit that exposes the worst of Reddit, is going on the warpath. They’ve published a long list of sick subreddits and are asking that the news be spread far and wide. Here’s an example of the kind of subreddit they dislike:

Reddit also has subreddits which publish images of women’s and underage girls’ private areas, including "upskirt" and "downblouse" pictures, without the knowledge or consent of their subjects. The users of these subreddits trade tips on how to stalk and photograph women and minors and encourage each other to go out and take more such pictures.

I know exactly how people will fight back on this one. They will claim that it’s a bunch of prudes who don’t like sex who are trying to shut down the more risqué discussions. But it’s not about sex.

They already cite reddit management that makes the argument that it’s all about free speech. But the objections have nothing to do with free speech.

It’s about consent.

Look through their long list of nasty subreddits, and that’s the theme running through them: these are forums dedicated to obtaining revealing images of minors, of people in private situations, of people being raped or beat up, and making them public. Or dedicated to teaching people how to violate others. It shouldn’t be about taking down things some people find offensive, it should be about demanding responsibility and requiring permission before publishing photographs of someone’s breasts (oh, hi, Kate Middleton!) and making special efforts to shelter people who can’t give informed consent, like children.

That’s what makes the people who participate in those subgroups creepy. It’s not that they like to talk about sex, or that they’re defenders of free speech…it’s that they don’t give a damn about privacy or autonomy.

Arrest everyone who disagrees with me! Show trials for all!

R. Joseph Hoffman is a flaming authoritarian, about as illiberal as you can get without joining the Tea Party. He’s very, very upset at Terry Jones and that gang of blithering idiots who assembled that terrible movie slandering Muslims, provoking riots in Egypt and Libya. Oh, and also his comrades-in-arms, Jerry Coyne, Eric MacDonald, and me.

I have just one question for PZ: What are you thinking now? God save the First Amendment?

Actually, I suppose he could bothered to read what I wrote on the “work of a group of incompetent fundamentalist Christian assholes pissing on entire cultures”, but that would be too much too ask — R. Joseph Hoffman is very busy raging at the voices in his head. I don’t even know why he bothers to ask what I’m thinking, since it won’t matter what I say, what with his fantasies informing his perceptions. I mean, we went around on this before, and he interprets what I wrote as “Hoffman coddles Muslims”. Go ahead, read what I wrote; you’ll have a very tough time pulling that interpretation out of what I said.

But what do I think of this situation? May reason save the rule of law.

Terry Jones and his compatriots are idiots, but they have a right to say hateful, awful, evil things. I’d say the same is true of the Rev. Phelps, the KKK, the Catholic Church, the Mormons, and R. Joseph Hoffman. I should have the right to say how much I despise them all, and I should also have the right to tune them out and ignore them. I’d actually rather they spoke up and made their positions clear; the threats I get in email don’t trouble me so much as the worry that the ones who’ll actually do something dangerous aren’t so stupid as to open their mouths and announce their intent.

Terry Jones is an intolerant ignoramus, but I don’t worry about him. What bothers me more are the intolerant ignoramuses who riot and murder when they’re offended; I’d rather they went out and made an incompetent propaganda film, for instance. I worry that our president might actually listen when Egypt calls for world-wide censorship, as when the White House explored the idea of having an offensive video removed from youtube (Google said no, fortunately — but they do assist in local censorship efforts).

Decide that a Terry Jones must be silenced, and who is next? I can tell you: atheists. Egypt has arrested Alber Saber for the crime of atheism.

On Wednesday, September 12th, a Muslim friend and neighbor using Saber’s computer reportedly discovered that he was the admin for the Egyptian Athiests Facebook page, which is the largest of several such groups online with over a thousand “likes”. On September 10 the notorious “Innocence of Muslims” had been posted on the site. Over the next two days crowds began to gather outside his house, threatening Saber and his mother.

On Thursday night Saber’s mother called the police, hoping for protection. When the police arrived however, rather than fending the threatening mob outside, they arrested her son.

The charge according to his lawyer and supporters, focuses on videos in which Saber discusses his own Coptic faith or lack thereof. This makes sense as to charge anyone for posting the “Innocence of Muslims” video would set an impossible precedent. Even conservative broadcasters have also shown the video, or sections of it on their shows. It is not yet clear however, which materials will be included in the case against him, which is currently in the hands of the General Prosecutor. The next hearing is expected in four days.

After talking with Saber’s friends it seems likely to me that Egypt’s Islamist leaders are hoping to create a local issue where they can be seen as the tough guys, to distract Egyptians from how the furor in the international arena, in the context of which they seem impotent.

There is no difference between what the Egyptian government has done to this man, and what R. Joseph Hoffman asks the American government to do to Terry Jones:

Arrest him without delay. Deploy the National Guard. Surround the Church.

No. That’s totalitarianism. Free speech isn’t free if you’re only allowed to speak government- and church-approved opinions. It’s surprising how many people cannot comprehend that.

(via Why Evolution Is True)

A curious bit of frivolity

There’s this game called Minecraft (oh, have you heard of it?) which is a kind of world-builder game — you gather resources like wood and ore and meat, and you craft stuff out of it. I’ve learned something odd about it.

You gather wool from sheep. You can make colored wool with dyes.

Nice revelation: you can dye whole sheep and harvest colored wool from them. That was unexpected: it grows back in the color you dyed it. That’s not physiological!

And then…if you dye a sheep and then breed it to produce more sheep, the color breeds true. Dye two sheep lime green, and you can generate a whole flock of lime green sheep.

I don’t know whether to be appalled or delighted. It opens the door to exploring rules of Lamarckian inheritance, except there doesn’t seem to be any room for any kind of selection or predation or variation in anything that affects survival or reproduction. Someone tell the game makers to get a biologist as a consultant, there are possibilities here!

(I hear I can breed wolves, too, but I haven’t tried it. Do they vary in any interesting ways? Can I select for sheep-eating wolves?)

Tom Holland is censored

Channel 4 in the UK made a program called “Islam: The Untold Story”, and got so many complaints and threats that they have cancelled the screening of the show. This is a disgrace: the program is a serious, historical look at Islam, and the protesters are complaining because it takes an objective look at the evidence. We must be able to scrutinize Islam. If they’re going to hide their origins in obscurity, lies, and threats, then their beliefs should be dismissed.

I haven’t seen the program (and at this rate, I never will!), but I can make an informed guess at the content. It’s presented by Tom Holland, author of In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, an excellent and entirely sympathetic review of the history of Islam. He discusses the deep roots of Islam, formed in a culture that was shaped by its proximity to the frontier between the two great empires of the ancient world, Rome and Persia. He traces the origins of the Islamic holy book, and discovers that no, it didn’t simply appear in 7th century Arabia (although he does think there was a singular original text), but that Islamic thought coalesced long after the time of Mohammed…and he points out that there is no contemporary evidence at all of this person Mohammed — which sounds awfully familiar to those of us who are more exposed to the Jesus myth — and that there is a long history of self-deluding Islamic ‘scholarship’ that has a lot of similarity to the self-serving confabulations of Christians.

It doesn’t make negative judgments about Islam at all, unless, of course, you find reality offensive. I thought it was an excellent book to explain the complexities of Islamic history, and it made Islam more human and more interesting. It’s well worth reading.

It would also be worth watching, if Channel 4 would grow a spine. And if Channel 4 can’t manage it, I don’t know how we can ever hope to see it in the US.

Those of you living in the UK can watch it here. They block us Americans, I’m afraid.