Lessons learned from Breitbart and Sherrod

So there I was on strike, and this appalling news story flew by and I had to choke on my tongue. I’m late, but I have to say something.

The story, as you probably all know, is that Shirley Sherrod gave a talk on her work assisting poor farmers hang on to their land, in which she confessed to being less enthusiastic about helping poor white farmers early on. Andrew Breitbart, professional pseudojournalist and teabaggin’ hack, ran just that excerpt of her talk and made it sound as if she and her audience at the NAACP were flaming racist hatemongers who were chuckling over making Whitey pay.

He lied. He lied outrageously by editing out the context (or, as he claims, his source did the editing), and making it sound like racism when it was exactly the opposite, and Tom Vilsack, the Democrat at the Department of Agriculture rushed to appease Breitbart and had Sherrod fired.

Afterwards, the full video of the talk was revealed, and it’s discovered that Sherrod was making the point that her early biases were wrong, and that she learned that it was important to get over the false barriers of racism and realize that this is a problem of the poor of every color. Then the farmers who she’d been initially reluctant to help came forward to say that Sherrod had been a wonderful person who’d saved the family farm for them. It’s quite a story: it’s the complete annihilation of a right-wing lie, and the emergence of a real hero, Shirley Sherrod.

I’ve learned a couple of things.

  • Andrew Breitbart is beneath contempt. He’s not a journalist at all: he’s a partisan hack who will make up stories to fit his biases (he was also guilty of faking the ACORN scandal). I’m hoping the news media will recognize his name as purest poison from now on. I don’t have high hopes, though; people seem to be swallowing Breitbart’s excuses, lame as they are.

  • Our Democratic leadership is spineless. They fired this woman at the command of right-wing attack dogs? For shame. They didn’t even try to investigate and figure out if this was a genuine problem. Please learn: when the wingnuts bark, don’t jump, because they are little yappy dogs who never shut up. Fire Vilsack and put Sherrod in his place — she seems to have a moral compass.

  • Racism isn’t dead, and the Republican party seems to be its bastion. This was an effort by Breitbart to punish the NAACP because it had been accusing the teabaggers of racism; it has soundly backfired, because trying to damage an organization working to end racism is simply another manifestation of racism. Sherrod is fighting back, pointing out what the right-wing media is actually trying to do.

    “They were looking for the result they got yesterday,” she said of Fox. “I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person.”

  • The right-wing political base is truly vile. I looked at a few of their blogs, and despite the thoroughness of Breitbart’s credibility implosion and the way this story has blown up in their faces, they’re still trying to defend it. I’m not going to link to them, but instead, look at this brief and effective deconstruction of one such apologia by John Cole. Are the teaparty promoters racist? Hell, yes. Either that or they’re just brain-damaged idiots, I can’t tell.

  • There’s another minor lesson to be learned here, too. Glenn Greenwald said something of Breitbart, who is still refusing to explain how he got this dishonestly edited tape:

    “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

    Oh, yes?

  • The important lesson, though, is that this is about class politics and class warfare — not the phony kind the Republicans decry, which is all about the horrible way the obscenely rich are hindered from becoming pornographically rich, but the real one, the one fought in an America where children still go to bed hungry and everyone has to worry about the porous social safety net. This is a country where a middle-class person can be completely wiped out by a serious illness in the family, where the poor are kept paddling in place trying to make ends meet and never get an opportunity to advance themselves. Sherrod said that, too.

    Sherrod delivered an address on race, class, and government that wove together reflections of the murder of her father at the hands of white man, her early-life misgivings about the American South, her work organizing the community in the face of violent racism, and her eventual recognition as a government official working with local farmers that class, not race, was the dominant matter. “It’s not just about black people, it’s about poor people,” Sherrod said. “We have to get to the point where race exists but it doesn’t matter.”

    That should frighten Republicans more than their phony race-baiting story: when Americans wake up to their common cause despite Republican efforts to sow divisions by race, then we might have some progressive politics again (beyond the weak and unprincipled of Democratic Republican-lite politics, that is.)

But most of all, we’ve got to treat the Republican hate machine appropriately: Drudge-acolytes like Breitbart, phonies like Beck and Limbaugh — all are pariahs that our news media must stop treating respectfully.

Skepchicks never learn

The Masala Skeptic reviews the latest Twilight movie. How dare they offend twee & morbid teenagers? This review will make them mope some more.

This one is personal, too. Our local theater booked this movie a couple of weeks ago, and it is still playing. I doubt that it’s because it’s popular here, but more because of the restrictive contracts some first-run movies impose on theaters. We have one single-screen movie theater, and the next nearest is a 45 minute drive away, so this decision has created a great black hole in our entertainment options around here.

CellCraft, a subversive little game

A lot of people have been writing to me about this free webgame, CellCraft. In it, you control a cell and build up all these complex organelles in order to gather resources and fight off viruses; it’s cute, it does throw in a lot of useful jargon, but the few minutes I spent trying it were also a bit odd — there was something off about it all.

Where do you get these organelles? A species of intelligent platypus just poofs them into existence for you when you need them. What is the goal? The cells have a lot of room in their genomes, so the platypuses are going to put platypus DNA in there, so they can launch them off to planet E4R1H to colonize it with more platypuses. Uh-oh. These are Intelligent Design creationist superstitions: that organelles didn’t evolve, but were created for a purpose; that ancient cells were ‘front-loaded’ with the information to produced more complex species; and that there must be a purpose to all that excess DNA other than that it is junk.

Suspicions confirmed. Look in the credits.

Also thanks to Dr. Jed Macosko at Wake Forest University and Dr. David Dewitt at Liberty University for providing lots of support and biological guidance.

Those two are notorious creationists and advocates for intelligent design creationism. Yep. It’s a creationist game. It was intelligently designed, and it’s not bad as a game, but as a tool for teaching anyone about biology, it sucks. It is not an educational game, it is a miseducational game. I hope no one is planning on using it in their classroom. (Dang. Too late. I see in their forums that some teachers are enthusiastic about it — they shouldn’t be).

Jon Stewart, you let me down

Last night, Stewart interviewed Marilynne Robinson. I do not expect attack dog tactics from Stewart, ever, but I also didn’t expect him to so totally buy into her premises. It was very disappointing.

The low point came as Stewart tried to justify Robinson’s nebulous argument that science and religion need each other, and he offered stock apologetics.

The more you delve into science, the more it relies on faith.

No, it doesn’t. The less you delve into science, and the more superficial your understanding of the evidence, the more likely you are to ascribe its more difficult concepts to faith. Faith is the product of ignorance.

When Stewart strained to give an example of faith-based conclusions in science, he came up with one: anti-matter. He’s never seen it, so obviously it must not be real, but only the imagined fancy of some egghead physicist somewhere.

Unfortunately for Stewart, anti-matter exists. It’s been observed, measured, analyzed. Its existence is not a matter of faith, but of knowledge and experiment.

Marilynne Robinson was no better, of course, just mumbling the usually feeble platitudes and complaining that the atheists represent science poorly, as if she’d know. And at the end, she offered up this little jewel, unchallenged by Stewart.

We need insights from religion.

Name one. Name one insight religion has ever given us that could not have been made by secular philosophers, that was also useful and true.

HuffPo adds cowardice to their résumé

We’ve known for a long time that the Huffington Post is a stronghold of anti-scientific, anti-medicine woo. They’ve also recently added Discovery Institute propagandists to their roster. I’ve given up on them as a lost cause, but Eric Michael Johnson of the Primate Diaries has been trying to swim up the sewer, posting articles on HuffPo that are pro-science and reason. It’s been a noble but futile effort.

The latest revelation is that being a columnist on HuffPo does not mean you have any independence to write as you please: they have editors who censor content. Write something critical of HuffPo’s lunatic woo side, and swish, that gets conveniently sliced out of your article.

Write ’em off. HuffPo is not on our side.

Henry Gee is probably chortling happily right now

He’s tweaked the noses of those ‘New Atheists’, for sure! One of Gee’s roles is as the editor of the Futures science fiction section in Nature, and he’s proud to have published a story by Shelly Li, which actually is a well-written short dystopian fantasy, titled The End of God. Gee really detests those obnoxious atheists, though, so I think one of the reasons he picked it was that it so perfectly conformed to his idea of militant atheists as fascists.

The story is about a future in which satellites can somehow pick up on activity in the parietal lobe of the brain in individuals — amazing resolution and sensitivity, that — and detect when people are praying. And when they do, naturally, the godless thought police whoosh into action, take the faithhead into the hospital, and zap that lobe of their brain so god won’t talk to them anymore. And then they’re so lonely. Aww.

Taking away faith is a bad thing, don’t you know.

“Faith means believing in something when common sense tells you not to,” I reply, looking around. No one is moved. “And faith gives me a warmth that no amount of common sense ever will. Don’t take this away from —”

Of course, it’s science fiction in multiple ways, not just in the unlikely technology, but in the weird idea of a godless world state enforcing anti-religious mind control with surgery. It’d be a bit more potent if it was something we could do, or if anyone had ever endorsed such a hypothetical procedure as desirable.

I don’t think Henry Gee would have accepted this story if the plot had been inverted, so that it was a member of an atheist minority that was zapped to induce warm, happy feelings of the godhead — so just a hint to SF writers hoping to get published in Nature: Gee wouldn’t compromise on writing quality, so it had better be good stuff, but your odds of acceptance will probably be improved if your Bad Guys are cartoonish Dawkinsites with a penchant for doing evil things to the religious.

Just so I’m not being too vicious, although I would argue that it’s very hard to be too vicious, I’ll mention that I did rather like Gee’s review of the iPad, and he has my sympathies for his back pains, which I’m currently sharing with him to a lesser degree. But please, less unbelievability in Futures in the future, OK?

“Climategate” slowly deflates

After the computer break-in that revealed so-called ‘damaging’ emails in the East Anglia Climate Research Group, after all the media hysterics and errors and misrepresentations, now at last some newspapers are coming out and admitting that they screwed up. Any idiot could just look at the released emails and see that they didn’t call the substance of the data into question, but the media took the profitable way out and fanned the flames of denialism.

It’s rather like the Andrew Wakefield story. Take a very weak story, puff it up a bit to appeal to fringe kooks, and before you know it, you may be selling newspapers, but you’re actually hurting people.

Kilstein will kill

Jamie Kilstein is putting on a comedy show in New York on 2 July, titled No War, No God, No Nickelback. You should go if you can. He’s recommended by that polite, soft-spoken gentleman AC Grayling, so you know exactly what to expect: calm, cerebral, gentle humor, quietly skewering social mores.

Yeah, right. Watch out for a GOATS ON FIRE level of outrageousness. Everyone should go and make him rich and famous, because he’s the one comedian I trust will aspire to someday having a comedy tour featuring a giant inflatable vulva*. He does need to get really rich and famous first, though.

If I were in NY on that day, I’d go.

*He doesn’t actually have such a thing, and hasn’t even mentioned wanting one, but as a fan I think it will eventually be a necessary appliance for his stadium tour.