A pox on all of their houses

I hate this article from the very first paragraph.

Public discussion of evolution often turns into a nasty debate between young-earth creationists on one side and atheists who believe science disproves the existence of God on the other. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s a dishonest setup. It’s a game: let’s pretend that scientists only criticize young earth creationists, and then we’ll set up a bunch of Christian absurdity as the moderate position! Scientists never think of attacking the positions of reasonable Christians, you know.

It’s a lie. We criticize the follies of soft and fuzzy Christianity and old earth creationism all the time, as well as that young earth creationist nonsense. And do you know why we so often have to jump on young earth creationism?

Because the ‘moderate’ Christian jackasses won’t do it.

The article is an excellent example of that: it describes a discussion and joint publication of a book via Biologos between a diverse group of Christians, including young earth creationist Baptists, the Intelligent Design creationist Bill Dembski, and the gang of mushy apologists from Biologos…and how is their interaction described? As “gracious dialogue”. Please. If you’re going to sit there with a bugnutting freaky cultist with a literalist interpretation of every word of the Bible, and not be strongly critical of their freakin’ idiocy because you both believe in Jesus, then yes, I’m going to lump you all together.

Yes, it has to be that way. I see no point in regarding intellectual cowards with greater respect than I do the total fruitloops they associate with.

And further, it is no saving grace that the Biologos crowd can believe in an old earth, when at the same time they are arguing for the existence of a literal Adam and Eve, for the logic of salvation from original sin, for the blood pseudo-sacrifice of a god-man as somehow freeing me from guilt about a disobedient distant ancestor. It’s all garbage, through and through.

We get a succession of bullshit claims that we’re supposed to regard respectfully.

Keathley also points out that for some Christians, evolution presents a problem because it implies that suffering and death have been with the world from the beginning, rather than resulting from rebellion against God.

Right. Reality is a problem for some Christians. So?

“I think everybody recognizes this is an important topic and it’s not going to do any good to simply yell at each other across the fence,” he said. “They need to hear from us on the nature of Scripture, the nature of the fall and of salvation. And we need to hear from them on the nature of modern science.”

The only thing that makes it important is that it is a set of delusions held by powerful and influential people. Otherwise, the “nature of scripture”, the “fall”, and “salvation” are simply incredible and absurd concepts given weight by repetition and dogma.

I don’t just despise the blatant stupidity of young earth creationism. I also despise the equally blatant stupidity of Christian dogma and ‘sophisticated theology’.

I don’t want to deal with this any more

It’s too stupid. It turns out TAM had an anti-harassment policy after all (good for them), except that it was secret and implemented by hidden cameras and disguised security goons who would turn their entire focus on victims of harassment, rather than harassers.

I don’t understand at all.

All I can guess at is that this policy was kept secret so it wouldn’t discourage any creepy guys from attending. Their money is just as good as any woman’s, after all! TAM wants to be open to everyone, including gropers and PUAs and drunk fumblers, and doesn’t want to send any messages that might inhibit them. And I think it’s perfectly fair that there be a skeptics’ convention that caters specifically to frustrated, privileged men — I just didn’t think that TAM, with its history of inclusivity, was going to elect to be that conference.

Camille Marino is probably going to jail

Marino is a demented fanatical animal rights activist who runs a website called “Negotiation is Over”. NIO is notorious as the site of some of the most frothingly furious denouncers of all animal research. Marino is from Florida; she was arrested and extradited to Michigan in March to be tried for words she wrote on the internet.

Whoa. That ought to give one pause — arrested for free speech, you’re thinking? That does cause one’s knee to jerk.

But then she was also arrested in May when she chained herself to a library door to protest being banned from the Wayne State campus in Detroit. She’s been ordered to stay away from the researchers she threatens, but then she travels to their university to harass them — that sounds like stalking to me.

The situation here is that Marino’s got nation-wide bands of dedicated followers, those followers have in the past shown a willingness to undertake violent, destructive action on behalf of their cause, and Marino has been actively inciting others to kill researchers. You want an example? Here’s an example, and it’s also a great example of her incoherent state of mind.

The image on this page [a chalk outline labeled “animal abuser was here”] is not a cute logo. It is my personal belief that if you are a sadistic animal torturer, that is all you deserve – a chalk outline. That’s my opinion, not a threat. It’s not even inciting anyone because, unless you read my words and run out and murder David Jenstch (sic) (an idea that amuses me immensely), I’m not responsible. If you have time to think about it and form your own conclusions, my words cease being the impetus. Eh, that used to be the law at least. Who knows? Who cares? We have a job to do and that’s all that matters…. NIO is no longer mincing words. This is war!… Nothing is off limits at NIO!

…

if there are no consequences, there is no threat. If you spill blood, your blood should be spilled as well…. Some of the more high profile pacifists have said that I am “violent” and “unbalanced”. I think they finally may be right about something!

If I have my way, you’ll be praying to us for mercy!

It’s just her “opinion”, she’s not inciting anyone — she would just be amused by David Jentsch being murdered by someone who read her suggestion to go murder him. She’s not responsible, she’s just telling everyone that researchers’ blood should be spilled, and that nothing is off limits.

She’s a danger to others. It’s good news that she’s being constrained to protect the citizenry.

Ed Clint has been working hard

I agree. Ed Clint deserves the reputation he’ll acquire from his hard work.

If only he had some talent or a sense of humor, it wouldn’t have required quite so much work…but I’m glad he’s found a way to compensate for his shortcomings with obsessive diligence.

Ed Clint now denies having anything to do with that site. I guess I’ll have to accept his word.

Ed Clint also says Paula Kirby’s “Sisterhood of the Oppressed” was a fair and reasonable document. Calling people Nazis is OK when it is carefully justified.

I get email

Wow, the things I have been missing. All that hateful email I’ve been getting over the years? Turns out that was the upper echelon of the scum. Put up a few videos, and you discover the youtube commentariat:

To use my “freedom of speech” (which PZ Meyers HATES more than the KKK hates black people):

EAT MY WHITE, STRAIGHT, CIS, NON-FEMINIST MALE COCK, BITCH! OR I WILL RAPE YOU!

C=======================3

I’m still kind of marveling at the sudden surge to the bottom of the canyons of dimbuggery I’m seeing.

And everyone gets a robot pony!

Oy, singularitarians. Chris Hallquist has a post up about the brain uploading problem — every time I see this kind of discussion, I cringe at the simple-minded naivete that’s always on display. Here’s all we have to do to upload a brain, for instance:

The version of the uploading idea: take a preserved dead brain, slice it into very thin slices, scan the slices, and build a computer simulation of the entire brain.

If this process manages to give you a sufficiently accurate simulation

It won’t. It can’t.

I read the paper he recommended: it’s by a couple of philosophers. All we have to do is slice a brain up thin and “scan” it with sufficient resolution, and then we can just build a model of the brain.

I’ve worked with tiny little zebrafish brains, things a few hundred microns long on one axis, and I’ve done lots of EM work on them. You can’t fix them into a state resembling life very accurately: even with chemical perfusion with strong aldehyedes of small tissue specimens that takes hundreds of milliseconds, you get degenerative changes. There’s a technique where you slam the specimen into a block cooled to liquid helium temperatures — even there you get variation in preservation, it still takes 0.1ms to cryofix the tissue, and what they’re interested in preserving is cell states in a single cell layer, not whole multi-layered tissues. With the most elaborate and careful procedures, they report excellent fixation within 5 microns of the surface, and disruption of the tissue by ice crystal formation within 20 microns. So even with the best techniques available now, we could possibly preserve the thinnest, outermost, single cell layer of your brain…but all the fine axons and dendrites that penetrate deeper? Forget those.

We don’t have a method to lock down the state of a 1.5kg brain. What you’re going to be recording is the dying brain, with cells spewing and collapsing and triggering apoptotic activity everywhere.

And that’s another thing: what the heck is going to be recorded? You need to measure the epigenetic state of every nucleus, the distribution of highly specific, low copy number molecules in every dendritic spine, the state of molecules in flux along transport pathways, and the precise concentration of all ions in every single compartment. Does anyone have a fixation method that preserves the chemical state of the tissue? All the ones I know of involve chemically modifying the cells and proteins and fluid environment. Does anyone have a scanning technique that records a complete chemical breakdown of every complex component present?

I think they’re grossly underestimating the magnitude of the problem. We can’t even record the complete state of a single cell; we can’t model a nematode with a grand total of 959 cells. We can’t even start on this problem, and here are philosophers and computer scientists blithely turning an immense and physically intractable problem into an assumption.

And then going on to make more ludicrous statements…

Axons carry spike signals at 75 meters per second or less (Kandel et al. 2000). That speed is a fixed consequence of our physiology. In contrast, software minds could be ported to faster hardware, and could therefore process information more rapidly

You’re just going to increase the speed of the computations — how are you going to do that without disrupting the interactions between all of the subunits? You’ve assumed you’ve got this gigantic database of every cell and synapse in the brain, and you’re going to just tweak the clock speed…how? You’ve got varying length constants in different axons, different kinds of processing, different kinds of synaptic outputs and receptor responses, and you’re just going to wave your hand and say, “Make them go faster!” Jebus. As if timing and hysteresis and fatigue and timing-based potentiation don’t play any role in brain function; as if sensory processing wasn’t dependent on timing. We’ve got cells that respond to phase differences in the activity of inputs, and oh, yeah, we just have a dial that we’ll turn up to 11 to make it go faster.

I’m not anti-AI; I think we are going to make great advances in the future, and we’re going to learn all kinds of interesting things. But reverse-engineering something that is the product of almost 4 billion years of evolution, that has been tweaked and finessed in complex and incomprehensible ways, and that is dependent on activity at a sub-cellular level, by hacking it apart and taking pictures of it? Total bollocks.

If singularitarians were 19th century engineers, they’d be the ones talking about our glorious future of transportation by proposing to hack up horses and replace their muscles with hydraulics. Yes, that’s the future: steam-powered robot horses. And if we shovel more coal into their bellies, they’ll go faster!

Atheists can be idiots, too

Oh, crap. You knew this was going to happen sometime: apparently, some atheists have vandalized a church with pro-“athiesm” messages.

Guys, don’t do that.

At least some atheists with integrity have set up a fundraiser to repair the damage. Chip in; I think lots of small donations would send a clear message that this was something not supported by the greater atheist community.

The most fluid art of Bible interpretation

It’s amazing how many rules Fundagelicals can dredge up out of a few Bible verses. This one organization has taken all of TWO verses from the book of Genesis to determine all kinds of stuff.

27So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

28God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.

There it is, 3 whole sentences. And what do they mean?

They tell us why:

• Abortion and euthanasia are immoral.

• Marriage is between one man and one woman.

• Sexual promiscuity and homosexuality destroy individuals, families, and society.

• Overpopulation is a myth, and population control is dangerous.

• Earth stewardship, not radical environmentalism, is the path to the flourishing of humanity and all life on Earth.

• People are the greatest natural resource of all.

And best of all, these verses open the door to explaining to a lost generation how we can be restored to true image-bearing through salvation in Jesus Christ.

Also, Obamacare is bad.

Man, that Bible covers everything. I understand that there’s a sentence in Acts that condemns the Smoot-Hawley tariff act, Revelation has a very informative section on gene regulation by Hedgehog, and surprisingly, Job is all about increasing subsidies to the beef industry. You have to learn to read between the lines!

You better watch out, though. I got a fortune cookie — “A warm smile is testimony of a generous nature” — that contains a complete set of engineering instructions for a doomsday device, and the philosophical underpinnings for a new unscrupulous morality that will allow me to use it.

Somebody is going to have to explain comedy to me

I know it’s often offensive; it’s supposed to be offensive, especially if it’s targeting people in power. When Michael Richards had his temper tantrum, calling black members of the audience racist slurs, he crossed a line by targeting a more vulnerable group, and echoing a sentiment that was the product of centuries of oppression. It’s not surprising that the audience walked out on him and that his career took a crippling hit.

But something very similar just happened. Another comedian, Daniel Tosh, uses the stage to tell rape jokes, and when a woman in the audience calls out that rape jokes are never funny, he has a totally inappropriate response.

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…” and I, completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening but knowing i needed to get out of there, immediately nudged my friend, who was also completely stunned, and we high-tailed it out of there. It was humiliating, of course, especially as the audience guffawed in response to Tosh, their eyes following us as we made our way out of there. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said about me.

And there’s what I don’t get. The audience laughed and stayed for that? Talking about raping a heckler is now a laugh line?

I don’t know, has his career taken a hit? It might be hard to tell — hosting a youtube clips show on basic cable isn’t exactly the pinnacle of comedy.

It’s just odd that people can have a sense of shame about racism, but it’s still considered hilarious to laugh at the idea of women being gang-raped (or, since I know it’s coming, that joking about prison rape is good for a laugh. Please don’t try to turn the joke around and make it about Tosh getting raped, because that isn’t funny, either.)