Are you writing a vampire novel, too?

Last night before bed, I downloaded and started to read a light piece of fluffy fiction, one of these urban fantasy novels that are so popular right now. I won’t name it because I really just want to complain about a phenomenon I’m seeing a lot of in this whole genre, as much as I’ve read, anyway.

The driving conflict of this story is supposed to be the horror of the undead: the protagonist is both tainted with the curse of partial undeadness and trying to protect friends from being similarly afflicted. This is a reasonable premise for a fantasy novel, and could make for a good story.

However, there is one little problem. The taint (vampirism, in this case) makes the victim inhumanly strong, with lightning reflexes and acute senses, and also immortal and immune to mundane threats like bullets, poison, knives, and suffocation — decapitation and being burned to ash are the only serious threats (and granted, her enemies know this and are trying to chop her head off). Meanwhile, the traditional weaknesses of vampires — sunlight, garlic, wooden stakes, holy water, etc. — are all dismissed as superstitious misconceptions of the Middle Ages. They don’t affect her.

Also, it turns out, vampirism gives its victims a hypnotic glamor that makes them irresistible, and also an awesome sexual stamina. There is a cost, in that they have to drink blood, but it turns out that nipping a pint from a willing and enthusiastic partner once a week, preferably during the throes of orgasmic ecstasy, is enough to fuel all those superpowers.

So I’m having a little difficulty getting into the story. Every time the protagonist moans about her curse and these evil, rotten vampires who must have their heads ripped off before they eat her baby sister or whoever, I’m thinking the story should be about getting this poor crazy woman into a mental hospital to address her self-esteem issues, and about how she should be joyfully trying to share her gift with her family and friends. It’s very confusing.

Just a suggestion if you’re writing one of these stories: could you either make the curse a real curse that generally puts one into an undesirable situation, or could you write a story about happy, enlightened, lucky people who are overjoyed at their amazing new abilities? ‘Cause the whiny gripey moaney stuff over objectively glorious circumstances is gettin’ old.

This is not a case about abortion

I have been receiving lots of triumphant mail from anti-choice people claiming vindication, that abortion is wrong, and demanding to know how I can possibly support abortion rights after hearing about the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell ran an abortion mill in Philadelphia, and was a hack who maimed and killed women while doing abortions on demand, for a substantial fee. He was unqualified, uncertified in obstetrics and gynecology, and his facility was unmonitored and relatively uninspected. He gave untrained, inexperienced staff critical jobs in the surgery — he allowed a 15 year old high school student to handle anesthesia. He killed a patient by overdosing her on drugs, and is also charged with killing 7 babies in late-term abortions.

Gosnell is precisely the kind of butcher the pro-choice movement opposes. No one endorses bad medicine and unrestricted, unregulated, cowboy surgery like Gosnell practiced — what he represents is the kind of back-alley deadly hackery that the anti-choice movement would have as the only possible recourse, if they had their way. If anything, the Gosnell case is an argument for legal abortion.

It is entirely appropriate that this monster be shut down and charged with serious crimes against women. This isn’t the first death for which he’s responsible; another woman died of a perforated uterus, others suffered from punctured internal organs, others were left sterile by his botched work. The most shocking news is that this guy has been chopping up poor women since 1979, and that the last time the state actually inspected his facilities was in 1993. Why have people looked the other way and allowed this to continue for 30 years?

He has also been charged with the murders of seven babies, and there I have to disagree. There has to be a difference in degree, or the mothers of those infants would also have to be charged as collaborators (they were all willing volunteers for this medical procedure, and they knew the result would be termination of their pregnancy). They haven’t, and they shouldn’t. Much noise is being made about the “horrific” killings, but late term abortions, even the ones done in clean, properly maintained facilities with well-trained personnel, are always necessarily bloody and unpleasant affairs, like most surgeries. The important word there is “necessary”. Late term abortions should be carried out when it is essential for the life and health of the woman, who is the most important participant in these circumstances, and opening the door to accusing doctors who perform necessary operations as murder is a dangerous precedent.

Gosnell committed many crimes. He posed as a qualified practitioner of his art, when he wasn’t. He did not maintain a medical facility in an appropriate manner. He had even less qualified people do life-threatening work. He lied to women about their pregnancies. He mutilated and killed women. He did harm. That should be what generates public outrage, not the fact that he did abortions.

“the outworking of the corrosive nihilistic amorality that is inherent to evolutionary materialism”

The IDiots at Uncommon Descent are horrified and appalled by my ideas about the status of fetuses and babies … so horrified, in fact, that some of them want to make me the poster child for the fall of Western Civilization into a godless, nihilistic chaos in which babies are casually destroyed, and there are of course, a few comparisons to Hitler. But then, they are IDiots, after all.

I was amused by this remark from one of the deathcultists:

Sad to say, what we just saw from PZM, is the outworking of the corrosive nihilistic amorality that is inherent to evolutionary materialism. Hopefully, sufficient of us still have enough moral sensitivity to see the absurdity and the danger if this agenda is allowed to triumph in our civilisation.

Anyway, they found this list of the 25 most influential atheists, and fired off a questionnaire to all of them, looking to see if all atheists are as evil as I am, or whether I’m just the most evil of them all.

(a) Do you believe that a newborn baby is fully human? Yes/No

(b) Do you believe that a newborn baby is a person? Yes/No

(c) Do you believe that a newborn baby has a right to life? Yes/No

(d) Do you believe that every human person has a duty towards newborn babies, to refrain from killing them? Yes/No

(e) Do you believe that killing a newborn baby is just as wrong as killing an adult? Yes/No

As you can see, they’re blinded by an assumption that you can reduce a continuum of potential and actuality to black & white answers, which is the whole problem I’ve complained about before, and what they’ve written is actually a confirmation of my complaint about pro-lifers: they don’t think, and they don’t comprehend. They’ve gotten a few replies from those influential atheists, and most have fallen into the trap. I have to give James Randi credit for making the best answer:

I will not respond to such a heavily biased set of questions, and I could not do so without providing extensive explanations for my answers. The “quiz” is short, but the answers would be far too involved and lengthy.

I will simply repeat what I’ve said before, and not bother with their stupid poll. We all understand “being human” to mean something more than being a eukaryote with a certain assortment of genes: there are “fully human” cells that I will unconcernedly dump into the toilet and flush away every morning, and there are fully developed individuals in my life who I will revere and honor, and everything in between. The dehumanizing aspect of the so-called pro-life position is the flattening of the complexity of humanity and personhood, and its reduction to nothing more than possession of a specific set of chromosomes. To regard a freshly fertilized zygote as the full legal, ethical, and social equivalent of a young woman diminishes the woman; it does not elevate the zygote, which is still just a single cell. It is that fundamentalist Christian view, shallow and ignorant as it is, that is ultimately the corrosive agent in our culture, since it demands unthinking obedience to a rigid dogma rather than an honest evaluation of reality, and it harms the conscious agents who actually create and maintain our culture.

My position is one that demands we respect an organism for what it is, not what it isn’t. It recognizes that an epithelial cell shed from the lining of my colon is less valuable than a gamete is less valuable than a zygote is less valuable than a fetus is less valuable than a newborn. It does not imply that one must still adhere to the black & and white thinking of the IDiots and draw a line, and say that on one side of the line, everything is garbage that can be destroyed without concern, and on the other side, everything is sacred and must be preserved at all costs.

A seed is not a tree. That doesn’t imply that I’m on a crusade to destroy seeds.

Thank god for Ricky Gervais

It sounds like Ricky Gervais was wonderfully caustic in his turn hosting the Golden Globes awards last night — so brutally acerbic that I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t many celebrities lined up to complain about their treatment to the organizers. I wonder if he’ll ever host an award show ever again?

Among the amusements, though, was his closing thank yous. God finally gets the credit he deserves.

I have a new hero

It’s Tracey Spicer, a commentator on an Australian radio show. If you do radio or TV, you must listen to her interview with Meryl Dorey, the wicked anti-vaxxer crank. There are no mealy mouthed pleasantries, there is no downplaying of the evil Dorey has promoted, Spicer simply rips into her and points out all the legal and scientific facts against her. Then, at the end, Dorey is asked about the fact that a legal judgment has been made against her requiring that she post a disclaimer on her website, which she has not done, and Dorey begins to give the address of her website instead of explaining why she’s flouting the law, Spicer cuts her off cold and kicks her off the air.

It’s beautiful.

I never listen to AM radio, and I rarely tune into television news. If we had a few announcers like Tracey Spicer over here, though, I’d actually use my radio.

The universe conspires to make me humble

Earlier I had claimed that cable networks had bottomed out by conspiring with the Catholic church to make an exorcism show.

I was wrong.

TLC is making a reality show with Ted Haggard.

I will refrain from saying that now they’ve hit bottom, because if I do, some cable executive somewhere will step forward to plumb depths I can’t even imagine.

I think I understand why religion is so successful

It’s because it is the absolute bottom floor of any descent into crepitude. That’s all I can conclude from looking at the fate of various cable television channels: they all seem to start out well with commendable goals, and pretty soon they’re all selling out to the cheapest, sleaziest advertisers and producing the worst shows they can imagine, all to pander to the lowest common denominator. Look at The Learning Channel (you won’t learn anything watching it anymore), the History Channel (yeah, if your idea of history always has Nazis in it), and the SciFi channel, which now isn’t even trying and has renamed itself the SyFy (what?) channel and hosts what I once thought was the lowest of the low, Ghosthunters.

But the Discovery Channel has out-bottomed even the SyFy channel: they have made a deal with Satan the Catholic Church and will be producing a show on exorcisms.

This is why NetFlix will conquer the home entertainment universe: all the broadcast and cable channels have become the domain of the dumb.

Conservative self-identifies with single-celled brainless organism

Among my usual flood of daily email, I frequently get tossed onto mailing lists for conservative think tanks. Why? I don’t know. I suspect that it’s for the same reason I also get a lot of gay porn in my email: not because I follow it or asked to be added, but because some tired d-bag with no imagination thinks its funny to dun me with more junk. The joke’s on them, though: I might keep it around and skim the stuff now and then to get inspiration for a blog post, and then click-click — a few presses of a button and I add the source to my junk mail filter, and never see it again.

No, I didn’t get inspired by gay porn today, but by drivel from some freakish conservative think tank called the Witherspoon Institute, about which I know next to nothing except that they’re another of those organizations that cloak themselves in the Holy Founding Fathers of America to promote illiberal non-freethinking anti-government BS. This latest is by a philosopher criticizing a book about modern reproductive biotechnologies. He doesn’t like ’em. Not one bit, no sir.

But you know an essay from a philosopher is going to be pretty much worthless when it opens and closes with references to… C.S. Lewis. I don’t know why that man gets so much happy clappy press from believers. I suspect he must have sold his soul to the devil.

Anyway, the bizarre part is in the middle, where Justin Barnard is poleaxed by the author’s, Steven Potter’s, willingness to destroy human embryos. Potter apparently considers several of the sides of the debate, but fails to come down on the side of the Religious Right, that is, that embryos are absolutely and undeniably full human beings from the instant of fertilization, instead espousing the dreadful notion that the definition of personhood falls into a huge gray area.

Potter’s own attempt to wrestle with the morality of destroying human embryos is philosophically, if not biologically, confused from the start. He begins by claiming that “each egg and sperm has the potential to make a person.” Biologically, this is simply false. Gametes, by themselves, have no intrinsic developmental potential for human personhood. Of course, Potter knows this. So his use of “potential” is likely more latitudinarian. Still, three pages later, Potter describes the zygote as having “remarkable potential.” “It can,” he explains, “turn itself into a person.” Ironically, Potter fails to recognize that this potentialist understanding of human personhood is at odds with his rather surprising admission of the embryological facts. Potter writes, “Of course we all began as a zygote. Everyone does.” What is shocking about this concession is what it so obviously entails–an entailment that seems lost on Potter. If I, the human being I am today, “began as a zygote,” then the zygote that began the-human-being-I-am-today was me–i.e., it was a human person. It was not merely a cell with “remarkable potential” to become me. It was me.

If anyone is confused here, it’s Barnard. Of course each egg and sperm has the potential to form a person, especially when we throw biotechnology into the equation, as the book he’s reviewing explicitly does. We already have techniques to revert and differentiate a sperm cell into an egg. For that matter, given time and research, we’ll be able to reprogram just about any cell into a totipotent state, and clone someone from a cheek swab. Does Mr Barnard regard every cell he sheds as a potential person?

Perhaps he wants to argue that a sperm or egg cell doesn’t have the potential for personhood without a human assist. But then by that limitation the zygote has to be excluded as well — no human zygote can develop to term without the extreme cooperation of another individual. Try it; extract a fertilized egg and set it in a beaker by your nightstand, and wait for a baby to crawl out. Won’t happen. A uterus and attendant physiological and behavioral meat construct, i.e., woman, is also an amazing piece of biotechnology that is a necessary component of the developmental process.

But the real blow to this whole “potential” argument is damaged irreparably by Barnard’s last few sentences — was he going for a reductio here? Is the entire essay an exercise in irony? ‘Cause that dope was dumb.

Yes, Mr Barnard began as a zygote. That does not mean the zygote was Mr Barnard. My car began as a stack of metal ingots and barrels of plastics; that does not imply that an ingot of iron is a car. My house began as a set of blueprints and an idea in an architect’s mind; nobody is going to pay the architect rent for living in his cranium or on a stack of paper in a cabinet. The zygote was not Justin Barnard, unless Justin Barnard is still a vegetating single-celled blob, in which case I’d like to know how he typed his essay.

Since Barnard claims to be a philosopher, I’ll cite another, a guy named Aristotle. This is a quote I use in the classroom when I try to explain to them how epigenesis works, in contrast to preformation. Aristotle did some basic poking around in chicken eggs and in semen, and he noticed something rather obvious—there were no bones in there, nor blood, nor anything meatlike or gristly or brainy. So he made the simple suggestion that they weren’t there.

Why not admit straight away that the semen…is such that out of it blood and flesh can be formed, instead of maintaining that semen is both blood and flesh?

Barnard is making the classic preformationist error of assuming that everything had to be there in the beginning: I am made of bones and blood and flesh and brains and guts and consciousness and self-identity, therefore the zygote must have contained bones and blood and flesh and brains and guts and consciousness and self-identity.

It didn’t.

Why not admit straight away that the zygote is such that out of it selfhood may arise, rather than maintaining that the zygote is the self?

In that case we have to recognize that the person is not present instantaneously at one discrete moment, but emerges gradually over months to years of time, that there were moments when self was not present and other moments when self clearly was present, and moments in between where there is ambiguity or partial identity or otherwise blurry gray boundaries. This is a conclusion that makes conservative ideologues wince and shy away — I think it’s too complicated for their brains, which may in some ways be equivalent to the gormless reflexive metabolic state of the zygote — but it is how science understands the process of development.

How to cover doomsayers

If you’re disappointed in CNN, you can always turn to MSNBC…ooops, never mind, they’re solemnly reporting on the end-of-the-world nonsense from the Harold Camping Cult. They’re predicting the Rapture will come on 21 May.

I would like to propose a novel version of Pascal’s Wager for the news media. When apocalyptic cults come along and announce disaster and doom, ridicule them. Just rip into them, send your most sarcastic, cynical reporters to cover the story, and just shred all the followers as loons and gullible freaks. There will be two possible outcomes.

One, they’re right, and the world ends. Your business has nothing to gain or lose by taking them seriously before the big event — it’s going kaput no matter what. So have a grand time before the catastrophe and make money with laughter. It’s not as if listening to crazy ol’ Harold Camping will make a bit of difference in your fate.

Two, they’re wrong, and the world keeps rolling on beyond 21 May. We all win! It means your coverage was spot on perfect, and got all the right answers, while the cultists are going to have to go glumly back to living their miserable little failed lives. Follow up with a feature on all the broken-hearted crazies. Start looking for the next mob of nuts to mock.

See? That’s how to handle it. All this sober pandering to derangement gains you nothing.

Enhance!

Oh, man, my least favorite pseudoscientific cliche from movies and TV is the hackneyed “zoom in on that reflection in the eye of the guy we caught on the el cheapo RS-170 B&W surveillance cam and recorded on VHS…if we blow it up enough, we’ll be able to identify the killer!” It’s painfully common, too, as you’ll see in this montage of enhancing moments:

“Do you have an enhancer that can bitmap?” Somebody slap those writers.

(via Kevin Zelnio)