The ghost of Gish

It’s depressing how much the right wing of politics owes to creationists. Madhusudan Katti speaks a well-recognized truth.

Veterans of the evolution wars have been alarmed at how some of the figures driving the antiscience and anti-intellectual agenda of the modern Republican Party emerged from the creationist movement. A prime example is Manhattan Institute’ Christopher Rufo, who rose from Seattle’s Discovery Institute (birthplace of “intelligent design”) to become a leading conservative intellectual; his attacks on universities have taken on dangerous proportions, linked to attacks on academic freedom in states like Florida. Such mastery of the Gish gallop manifests not just on the debate stage these days, but in the op-ed pages of major newspapers falsely demonizing “critical race theory,” decrying DEI and getting prominent university presidents fired. Rufo and like-minded advocates know how to flood the zone with a steady barrage of disinformation until, as the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt noted, “people no longer can believe anything”, losing their “capacity to act” or “to think and to judge”, and “with such a people, you can then do what you please.”

What we once thought of as an obscure reference to weird creationist tactics has become common parlance. Just about everyone knows what a Gish Gallop is, and every time a Republican steps up to a lectern we can trust them to deploy it. We have seen Trump use it; even his rallies are a random, scattershot collection of confusing nonsense. Sharks and electric batteries, anyone? Crowd sizes at his past events? Hannibal Lecter? It’s madness.

Ask one of those veterans of the evolution wars what we should do when confronted with a galloping Gish. The first bit of advice is the simplest.

The best advice for scientists, honed after years of fighting creationist and climate-denial drivel, is to eschew fake debates on stages as simply lending megaphones to liars.

Unfortunately, politicians are trapped by convention and have to do debates. So, specifically, what should someone do when compelled to participate in a debate?

Now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, the next debate, scheduled for September 10, will likely feature Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who better be prepared to counter Trump’s Gish gallop more forcefully. She will face a well-practiced con artist and loud dissembler who will flood the zone with enough falsehoods to outshout the former prosecutor and senator. (Speaking as an evolutionary scientist, there are no prizes for guessing which side of the evolution-creation debate these two candidates fall on, either.) When it’s her turn to respond, Harris should turn the tables on Trump by calling him out as a liar without bothering to refute each lie and refocus the audience on her own message. When asked how she might respond if Trump started stalking her on stage, Harris said she would turn around and ask “Why are you being so weird?” Indeed, her campaign has already leaned into this strategy to highlight and mock just how extreme the Republican agenda has become. It just might see her win the next debate as well.

This is good advice for all the youtubers who get sucked into engaging with liars and fools. First, don’t. Second, if you must, focus one one thing instead of a thousand and drill down hard to expose the dumbass. Third, make it clear that your opponent is not a scientist, is not qualified to address the evidence, and is just a weird pretentious clown who is wasting everyone’s time.

Good god, I pray that my children like me a little bit

These hateful conservative weirdos are all concerned about their legacy (at least, they pretend they are), but they never stop to think that maybe their many children will reject their narrow-minded, painfully short-sighted ways. After all, their kids have seen what the parental dogma does to families first hand.

Case in point: Elon Musk’s disowned daughter, Vivian Wilson, is spilling all the tea about her horrible, absent father.

I understand your new angle is this “western values/ christian family man” thing but it’s such a weird choice. You are not a family man, you are a serial adulterer who won’t stop fucking lying about your own children. You are not a christian, as far as I’m aware you’ve never stepped foot in a church. You are not some “bastion for equality/progress”. You called arabic the “language of the enemy” when | was 6, have been sued for discrimation multiple times, and are from Apartheid South Africa.
You are not “saving the planet”, you do not give a fuck about climate change and you’re lying about multi-planetary civilization as both an excuse, and because you want to seem like the CEO from Ready Player One. I would mention the birth rate stuff, but I am not touching that weird 14-words breeder shit with a ten foot pole. You single-handedly disillusioned me with how gullible we are as a species because somehow people keep believing you for reasons that continue to evade me.

Every parent ought to live to earn the honor and respect of their children. If they can’t do that, they don’t deserve to have kids. It’s that simple.

I’ve read a few romance novels, some fantasy, and a lot of bad science fiction

I prefer all of them to loony flat earth trash.

Candace Owens tries so hard to make women who read silly romance novels sound stupid, while she pretends to be an intellectual.

Can you guys imagine being married to me? My my poor husband, he rolls over, he’s like, what are you reading? And I feel like a regular wife says something, I don’t know, maybe a love series. Nora Roberts sweeping her away. Me, on the other hand — he rolled over, he asked me and I said, oh, I’m reading a flat earth theory. And it dawned into an entire conversation. He’s like, why are you reading a flat earth theory? And I’m like, because somebody messaged me on Monect about it, and they included some links, and I’m just reading them. I don’t know. I’m just an interested person no matter what. If there’s a bunch of people that believe something, I now want to know what it is that they believe. And, of course, he pushed me on this, and he was talking about the earth curvature and science. And I said to him, listen. I’m not a flat earther. I’m not a round earther. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science. I have left the megachurch of science because what I have now realized is that science, what it is actually, if you think about it, is a pagan faith.

Sorry, lady, you were never a member of that “megachurch”. Witness the fact that you are bragging about taking flat earth theory seriously.

Who remembers when lots of conservatives were reliable supporters of science and engineering, and called liberals “moonbats” for their crazy hippie ideas? What happened to them, anyway? Are they all dead?

Why I left Facebook

It hurts so much when friends and family post this sort of thing.

Devout Christians have found by looking through a microscope a gene in your D and A that makes you an atheist. It’s the Satan gene what do you say to that atheists Satan made you this way so god must be real

You can’t argue with that. All you can do is close the window, delete your facebook account, send a hit squad of clowns armed with pies to Zuckerberg’s house, and resign from the human race.

If only they hadn’t made that last comment

Honestly, I could have ignored this. It’s nothing but familiar anti-trans stupidity, inventing sharp distinctions out of blurry ones, pretending overlaps in morphology don’t exist. There’s just so much of it that I don’t have the will to address it all. But that last bit…I saw red.

Male skeletons literally have more ribs than female skeletons and many other differences. Did you go to an online college?

That is simply not true. Did you go to a bible college?

America’s gain is the UK’s loss

To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed that Nigel Farage was planning to campaign for Trump in the US, so I didn’t care that he abruptly decided to leave my country and campaign for himself.

Nigel Farage on Monday announced that he would return to frontline British politics as leader of the Reform party and run for a seat in the election next month, scrapping his previously stated position of skipping the race in order to focus on supporting Donald Trump.

“I’ve changed my mind, it is allowed, you know!” Farage told a hastily arranged press conference. He said he will remain leader for the next five years in order to hold the expected Labour government to account.

Goodbye. Don’t care, you wanker. Fuck off already.

Understandably, though, his prospective constituents in Essex did have strong opinions about his reentry into their business.

Nigel Farage’s surprise campaign for the upcoming British general election got off to a sticky start Tuesday when someone chucked a milkshake in his face.

From this we get the only portrait of Nigel Farage I ever want to see.

Perfection.

It shouldn’t take so long to recognize a fool

I’ve seen Terrence Howard in Crash and Red Tails and the first Iron Man (he wasn’t in any of the sequels, I wonder why?), and he was fine as an actor. It’s when he goes off script that you discover that he is totally nuts. Professor Dave explores some of his lunacy.

It’s 48 minutes long, but most of it is redundant — at his first attempt to explain that 1 x 1 = 2, or his redrawn periodic table, or his wacky 3-dimensional models of elements, it’s clear that he has lost the plot. And then the video gets into Howard’s 3 hour long interview with Joe Rogan, and it becomes clear that Rogan is just as ignorant and deluded and deranged and useless.

I’ve seen no more than a few minutes of Rogan in short excerpts, and knew from my first exposure that he was a fraud. Nowadays, when I see an account on social media that is trying to sell how smart he is, I insta-block that channel. I’d do the same with any mention of Howard, except that everyone sees how foolish he is, and he isn’t getting paid millions of dollars to babble for hours on Spotify every day.

An entertaining debunking of evolutionary psychology

This video is definitely not going to be to everyone’s taste, but I enjoyed it (what I’ve seen of it — it’s 3½ hours long! I don’t have time for the whole thing). Part of it because I agree wholeheartedly with its conclusion that evolutionary psychologists are a mob of pretentious wankers, but also the reason for the length is that münecat actually reads and summarizes more evo psych papers than I’ve ever read myself. Also, she frequently breaks to sing and dance.

If that’s to your taste, or if you just enjoy seeing Geoffrey Miller, David Buss, Jordan Peterson, etc., getting skewered, I recommend this video. Or if you already know that evo psych proponents are nothing but bullshit artists, you can skip it.

Bari Weiss created a short, simple label for the worst people in media: “IDW”

It’s been six years since Bari Weiss published that silly New York Times article conjuring the Intellectual Dark Web into existence. I think a lot of us here, at least, instantly recognized that it was PR for a gang of grifters and that Weiss was trying to be the Queen Bee of an imaginary movement. It’s about time we got a retrospective on Weiss’s propaganda flop. Where is the IDW now? How are its heroes doing? The short answer is that they’re thriving, cruising along with growing audiences, because they’ve become the clowns in the circus.

So let’s take a look at the IDW today. Eric Weinstein:

Eric Weinstein, a mathematician who spent years working for right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, gave the IDW its name—which he has described variously as a “half-joke” and also a brilliantly calibrated troll designed to get maximum attention. He’s considered one of the least extreme of the original IDW members.

But both in 2018 and now, Weinstein decries what he calls the “gated institutional narrative” and the irredeemable systemic corruption he believes has infected a vast array of institutions, from academia to the media. He’s convinced that many of these institutions are conspiring to silence himself and his friends (and prevent them from winning Nobel Prizes).

Jordan Peterson:

While Peterson was always prone to hyperbole, he has become increasingly unhinged.

He now says climate activists want to “sacrifice the poor,” compares them to Nazis, and suggests that global elites are using climate change as an excuse to depopulate the planet. He compares this effort to “genocidal societies” with a “utopian vision” which leads to the “mass destruction of millions of people.” He believes Vladimir Putin may well be on the right side of a civilizational battle against wokeness. He describes COVID-19 as a “so-called pandemic” and claims it’s “highly probable” that the vaccines (which he refuses to call “vaccines”) were more dangerous than the disease.

Dave Rubin:

Rubin’s North Star was “civility.” But these days he tweets things like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) is a “dishonest communist cunt,” and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is a “vile jihadist cunt.” Tweeting recently about United States Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Samantha Power, Rubin said, “this bitch can fuck off.”

Ben Shapiro:

Another member of this tribe devoted to civility and rational discourse is the popular conservative podcaster and writer Ben Shapiro. As the right-wing’s angry motormouth one-time wunderkind, he’s remained somewhat consistent—having gone from saying things like, “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue” to things like, “Hamas is running Columbia University.”

Bret Weinstein:

Here are a few of Weinstein’s fascinating insights today: He suspects that the United States is involved in a plot with China and the WHO to create a “turnkey totalitarian planet.” He claims that a “credible estimate” of the number of deaths caused by mRNA vaccines is 17 million. He suggests that China is financing infrastructure in Central America to launch an “undeclared invasion” with a covert army of “military age” men. He’s a big fan of RFK, Jr., who compared public health measures during the pandemic to Nazism and the Holocaust.

Joe Rogan:

To cite just one example, when Weinstein recently suggested on The Joe Rogan Experience that vaccine mandates in the U.S. military were meant to purge ethical and freethinking soldiers and replace them with disloyal and compliant immigrants—a force that would be “capable of acting on behalf of tyranny against Americans”—Rogan didn’t offer any critical comment.

Instead, he said: “Holy shit. Then you have a real coup.”

Candace Owens:

In a 2017 interview with Rubin, Owens said, “I think abortion is really just about population control.” Rubin replied with a characteristically uncritical and incurious follow-up: “That’s some serious red-pill right there.” In 2018, Owens claimed that liberals want to “exterminate blacks via Planned Parenthood, which she would later describe as a “silent genocide.” She said Black conservative politicians are “all called coons” by the media. She declared that “the word ‘racism’ is repeated obsessively by people who wish to enslave black people to the Democratic Party.”

Five months before Weiss published her piece, Owens called for the imprisonment of journalists and political opponents—something that probably should have pricked the ears of a movement which claimed to be unwavering in its defense of free speech and civil discourse.

There are others mentioned, including Christina Hoff Summers, Majid Nawaz, Douglas Murray, etc., but you get the idea. The IDW was a tarnished brand from the outset, and it’s only gotten worse as its members descend into greater madness.

Bari Weiss has an awesome legacy. Let’s hope it catches up to her someday.