Do I have to do this again?

I should warn you, I’m not in a good mood. The Xmas season does that to me, I’m soured on the ugly combination of raging religiosity and constant consumerism, and then the elevated expectations that the holiday never meets, and the fact that it’s just a brief break between labors that I have to spend getting prepared for the next semester. Just call me Scrooge, and I don’t believe in ghosts, so I don’t expect redemption.

Another thing that doesn’t help is other humans. See that grinning fellow on the right? That’s Richard Eggleston, retired ophthalmologist, and shallow Christian. Also a colossal motherfucking dumbass idiot who used his holiday to write a long cliched letter to his local newspaper in which he declared “We are seeing the last few gasps of macroevolution” and parrots the dumbest, most thoroughly refuted canards of the last 60+ years of creationism, failing to acknowledge even the slightest doubt his dogma.

Before I vomit all over it, let me say that I don’t think most Christians share his views. Most citizens of this country broadly accept the general idea that the Earth is very old and that life has changed over that long history, although many will try to vaguely credit some kind of god as having a poorly-defined role in somehow guiding it, and they may also have a reluctance to say humans are directly a product of that process. We’re special, you know. There is, however, a cult-like subset that actively and stupidly denies pretty much all of science in order to prop up their benighted beliefs about Jesus. Richard Eggleston represents these cancerous polyps growing in the feculent muck of intellectually impoverished Christianity.

He’s also a terrible writer who can’t maintain a train of thought for more than a sentence.

Here’s his opening argument, for instance.

Why do evolutionists spend so much time and effort attacking intelligent design? Not because they think it is wrong and want to “save science” but because they know it to be true and that it will demolish their humanistic world view beliefs. When questions are allowed, it is science. When not, it’s propaganda. True science is evidence-based, as is Christianity. Centuries-old prophecies, of which more than 300 about Jesus were fulfilled, and 1,500 others were mostly fulfilled. The rest are waiting for the apocalypse.

In sum: he knows what ‘evolutionists’ believe; we know that Christianity is true; we are afraid that our “world view” will be destroyed if we admit it. None of that is true. One of the hallmarks of the True Christianity is a complete inability to see the world from another perspective.

It’s the Christians who don’t allow questions…or rather, only tolerate one answer. In that infamous Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, it was Nye who was willing to change his mind given evidence, while it was Ham, who seems to be the source of most of Eggleston’s ideas, who refused to consider the possibility. Eggleston then wanders off into Christian propaganda, claiming that “predictions” from a holy book are evidence, rather than ambiguous claims that have been extensively reinterpreted by apologists, and somehow we’re supposed to believe in an upcoming apocalypse. Focus, man, focus. There are at least a half-dozen assertions in that one paragraph and he can’t back up any of them.

The rest of his long op-ed consists of a string of creationism’s dumbest hits: all of the animal phyla appeared in the Cambrian explosion, there are no transitional forms, quote-mines to claim that well-known evolutionary biologists, like Charles Darwin, Colin Patterson, and Jenny Clack denied the evidence for evolution, and gross misunderstandings of what evolution claims. For example,

They believe billions of years of DNA mutations from nonliving goo somehow spontaneously, in a magical moment, eventually brought humans into existence, a process termed abiogenesis. The evolutionists will cite examples of microevolution as being macroevolution to falsely support their position. Most mutations are fatal.

Nope. No one believes in his “magical moment” that transformed goo into humans.

It’s just too tedious to dissect. And then he ends on nonsense about abortions because, of course, he’s just regurgitating familiar fundamentalist bullshit, and that’s part of the litany.

I am so fed up with the never-ending flood of lies pouring out of stupid old farts like Eggleston, or young farts who have been infected with the pathological poison of this peculiar literalist sect that just shrieks the certainty of their dogma but never pauses to think, and evaluate, and question. A child could see through the entirety of his opinions.

Why is my bedroom so crowded?

I was on the Oregon Trail in reverse for the last couple of days, it took so long to get home. I had to change planes once with the most awkwardly timed layover, and then I had to take a long shuttle ride with a couple of transfers, and then one of the oxen died and I was laid up with dysentery. Finally, though, a kindly lady picked me up and took me home to my home and my bed.

Except, then…

OK, not really (I also didn’t really get dysentery — was being dramatic). The “Modern Crusaders” are not getting anywhere near my house, but instead, are thriving on Twitter. They don’t seem to be trying to be ironic at all. Looking at their Twitter feed, which I am not linking to, their latest post announces that “There is no salvation outside the Catholic Church,” they include a link to a Telegram channel that declares their goal of “Elimination of the demonic forces dominating our people politically and spiritually. Promoting the establishment of a Catholic monarchy,” and what follows is a welter of posts declaring that “Abortion is Jewish,” linking to Nick Fuentes, and engaging in Holocaust denial and Hitler apologetics.

So…just ordinary Twitter, then.

I’m happy to have left that shithole, and I don’t understand how anyone can be a fan of that hateful twerp, Nick Fuentes.

The rising of the full loon

If you’re really curious, my recent debate with Hendricks is now online as a video, with the full Q&A. It’s a cell phone video, so not great quality, but the whole thing is there.

But I want to talk about another problem with doing debates: it stirs up the crazies. I’ll give you some examples. This is an email I got the other day.

For what science and religion, not to mention the rest of us, thought impossible has now happened. History has its first literal, testable and fully demonstrable proof for faith and it’s on the web.

The first wholly new interpretation for two thousand years of the Gospel
and moral teaching of Christ is published and on the web. Radically
different from anything else we known from history or tradition.
Redefining all primary elements including the very nature of Faith, the
Word, Law, Baptism, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit and especially the
Resurrection, this new moral teaching is predicated upon the ‘promise’ of
a precise, predefined, predictable and repeatable experience of
transcendent omnipotence and called ‘the first Resurrection’ in the sense
that the Resurrection of Jesus was intended to demonstrate Gods’
willingness to reveal Himself and intervene directly into the natural
world for those obedient to His Command, paving the way to confirm and
justify, by faith, to the power of divine Will, Purpose, Law, covenant,
and the absolute certainty of ultimate proof!

Thus ‘faith’ becomes an act of trust in action, the search along a defined
path of strict self discipline, [a test of the human heart] to discover
His ‘Word’ of a direct individual intervention into the natural world by
omnipotent power that confirms divine will, law, command and covenant,
which at the same time, realigns our flawed mortal moral compass with the
Divine, “correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering
biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural
evolutionary boundaries.” This is the discovery of the ‘true self’ and
thus is a man ‘created’ in the image and likeness of his Creator.

So like it or no, and most won’t, a new spiritual teaching offering a
testable, predictable, moral wisdom not of human intellectual origin,
transcending subjectivity, wholly testable by faith, meeting all
Enlightenment criteria of direct, evidence based causation and definitive
proof now exists, and carries all the implications that suggests. Nothing
short of an intellectual, moral and spiritual revolution is getting
underway.

Links on request.

I did not request a link.

I think this is a guy trying to stir up interest in his peculiar Christian cult. I made the point before that these debates are often a conflict between certainty and doubt, and here comes someone offering the absolute certainty of ultimate proof! No thanks.

Here’s a fun YouTube comment. Try and figure this one out:

Unfortunately its 2 archytypical minds at work in believers & non believers. In both camps this gets in the way often.

And you must understand current concesus science was authorativly imposed through actvist judges and politics it did not win over the arena of thoughtful science. It violated America’s main rule that we would never impose physical prescriptions upon each other because they was a aware of newtons infinite sums of approximating probability and was very aware of how hard it is to tell where physicalism begins and ends. Interpretations are not hurtful but physical prescriptions are damaging to society and nations.

Its the wrong question, this is typically only formulated by a chaldean mind or thought.
What isn’t God ,is the correct formulated question to ask.

This is hard for a Babylonian deterministic quantitative evolutionary mythological Euclidean mind to think of because its dictated by a radicalized environment governed by these extreme physical lawism structuralisms.
It rather stay in platos cave granting unification & simplicity in the top of the higher archy even if its made up , it needs to connect dots and force the evidence to fit the grand theory of everything to fill in missing links.
It rather live in complexity of many different disciplines cults within cults. Its unaware of its triality navagating this dualistic system.

War time powers of Ww2 & the modernization act traps America back under this chaldean mind model because the classical American mind triality recognized such necessary evil structuralism must give the unity & simplicity to the top so that 18 year old troops deal with Entropic turn over of infinite sums of approximating probability & complexity .

This type of believer says God is universe big bang with math & time is his actual fingertips and through mult verses he chose this one here etc etc etc.

The classical American mind is the only one to ever escape the chaldean mind or platos cave.

It state man made language, time & maths are inspired by god, only by his grace do we have a mind that can read his left over fingerPRINTS that’s legable.
This mind follows the evidence where it leads it knows the human dashboard can never removed from the system thus this system is the proper place to unify individual systems .
God is not in a rock or under a rock he was separated from his creation at different points but through us thy will be done. Through Jesus salvation the unification of tripartite nature of man past present and future. It is the grand unification of objects physica cause l,subjective secondary effect & idealogical minds. Mind body and soul. You know whole deal ,father ,son holy spirit represents the 3 natures of our reality .

What kind of archytypical mind do you have, a chaldean mind, a Babylonian deterministic quantitative evolutionary mythological Euclidean mind, or a classical American mind triality?

What if two of the most annoying people in the world had a conversation?

This is how I like to see conservatives represented: briefly, and distilled down to the essence of their lunacy. I guess Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones sat down together for a tête-à-tête, with Carlson being fawning and praising Jones, and Jones being mutedly rabid. You couldn’t pay me to sit through the whole thing, but here it is edited down to 56 seconds.

It’s rather revolting watching Carlson sucking up all the shit Jones is spraying all over the place, so under a minute is right there at the limit of my tolerance.

Avi Loeb has an opinion

The greatest mass extinction in the history of the world took place 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian. 99% of all species died off at that time.

Avi Loeb has an idea.

Popular opinion considers the Permian-Triassic extinction to have been triggered by volcanic eruptions that created the Siberian traps, and humanity to be the first technological civilization on Earth 250 million years later.

Oh. Popular opinion says it was caused by formation of the Siberian traps. Except I have a big problem with that statement: Popular opinion is mostly unaware of the traps, has no idea when the Permian occurred or what happened there, and would be clueless if you asked the average pedestrian what caused the extinction. Popular opinion is irrelevant.

What matters is the evidence that geologists bring to bear on the question. The Siberian traps are real, the massive lava flows that created them too place right around the Permian-Triassic boundary, and they are likely to have been a major contributor to the extinctions — there may have been other factors as well, but look at the scale of the catastrophe that we know occurred coincident with the end of the Permian.

That’s not opinion, that’s real. I’d rather listen to the evidence given by geologists than the weird-ass speculations of a weird-ass physicist.

Yeah, Avi Loeb has an alternative “hypothesis.”

Is it possible that the devastating global warming event was caused 252 million years ago by industrial pollution from a technological civilization? This would have required first intelligence to emerge only 6 percent earlier in the 4,540-million-year history of Earth.

Wait, so geology is an opinion, but this dumb brain fart is worth considering? He even admits that he has no evidence whatsoever for this claim.

Any technological infrastructure left on the surface of Earth from that early civilization could have been demolished by geological activity including subduction, covered by water or tarnished by meteor impacts and weathering.

Instead, he suggests that vague reports of unidentified objects supported by daft nebulous statements from politicians are best interpreted as relics from intelligences that destroyed vast swathes of Planet Earth a quarter of a billion years ago.

The Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, submitted two recent reports in 2022 and 2023 to the US Congress, admitting the existence of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) whose nature is unclear, some of which exhibiting trans-medium maneuvers between air and water. Could these relics be evidence for a civilization that predated us on Earth 252 million years ago?

This possibility would overcome the challenges associated with UAPs arriving to Earth through interstellar travel and the puzzle of why such UAPs are here right now despite the vastness of cosmic space and time.

And if I had a slice of ham I could have a ham sandwich if I also had some bread. He’s got no evidence of an alien civilization, and he’s got no evidence that UAPs exist as material technological phenomena, but slap those two dumb ideas together, and he thinks he has something. He’s an incredibly bad scientist.

This is a familiar progression, though, if you’ve watched the UFO fashions come and go. First they were spaceships from Mars, then they were from distant stars, then they were vessels from the Hollow Earth, then they were psychic manifestations piloted by Bigfoot, etc., etc., etc. They’re all just fever dreams from fanatical weirdos, like Loeb.

You just gotta…

Okay boomer

Winning a Nobel prize does not mean you are a smart guy. It means you have a lot of in-depth knowledge about a very specific, narrow scientific domain, and it’s bad news when people treat you as a universal oracle.

I remind people that Jim Watson and William Shockley were horrible racist bigots — they just knew a bit about the structure of DNA or how transistors work. Kary Mullis was a super flaky space cadet who had an insight into DNA replication. Don’t bother asking them how any other aspect of the universe works.

Now I’ve got another example of bad Nobelists: John Clauser. He won a Nobel in 2022 for his work on quantum mechanics, and I’ll trust that he knew his stuff. Unfortunately, now he’s decided that he’s an expert in climate change. Great news! There is no climate crisis! he says.

During a fiery news conference at the Four Seasons hotel here Tuesday, speakers denounced climate change as a hoax perpetrated by a “global cabal” including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and many leaders of the Catholic Church.

It might have seemed like a fringe event, except for one speaker’s credentials. John F. Clauser had shared the Nobel Prize in physics last year before declaring Tuesday that “there is no climate crisis” — a claim that contradicts the overwhelming scientific consensus.

The event showcased the remarkable shift that Clauser, 80, has undergone since winning one of the world’s most prestigious awards for his groundbreaking experiments with light particles in the 1970s. His recent denial of global warming has alarmed top climate scientists, who warn that he is using his stature to mislead the public about a planetary emergency.

Clauser, who has a booming voice and white hair he often leaves uncombed, has brushed off these concerns. He contends that skepticism is a key part of the scientific process.

I like my skepticism informed and based on evidence, thank you very much. You don’t just run around denying things — you have to actually do the work of showing that those things are wrong. This is a case where someone is making “skeptical” claims on the basis of a false authority and ego. So what is Clauser’s argument?

Clauser, who has never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate change, has homed in on one message in particular: The Earth’s temperature is primarily determined by cloud cover, not carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. He has concluded that clouds have a net cooling effect on the planet, so there is no climate crisis.

I had to go looking for the scientific basis for this claim, and I found it. It’s NASA. On a site called Climate Kids, it’s for children who want to know more about climate science, so it’s a good match for Clauser’s level of understanding.

Clouds within a mile or so of Earth’s surface tend to cool more than they warm. These low, thicker clouds mostly reflect the Sun’s heat. This cools Earth’s surface.

Clouds high up in the atmosphere have the opposite effect: They tend to warm Earth more than they cool. High, thin clouds trap some of the Sun’s heat. This warms Earth’s surface.

What about when you look at the effect of all clouds together? Cooling wins. Right now, Earth’s surface is cooler with clouds than it would be without the clouds.

Uh-oh…he’s right? Not really. The site goes on to say,

Climate scientists predict that as Earth’s climate warms, there will also be fewer clouds to cool it down. So, unfortunately, we can’t count on clouds alone to slow down the warming.

I’d also point out that clouds are only one factor in climate, and I’d need a quantitative understanding of the relative contributions of clouds vs., for instance, greenhouse gasses. I’d want to get the opinion of a genuine expert in the field, a real climatologist. Like Michael Mann.

Michael Mann, a professor of earth science at the University of Pennsylvania, said this argument is “pure garbage” and “pseudoscience.”

The “best available evidence” shows that clouds actually have a net warming effect, Mann said in an email. “In physics, we call that a ‘sign error’ — it’s the sort of error a freshman is embarrassed to be caught having made,” he said.

Of course, does Michael Mann have a Nobel prize in quantum mechanics? He does not. All he has is relevant expertise in the actual field in question, but no shiny gold medal.

In other embarrassing revelations, we also learn something else about Clauser.

Tuesday’s event was organized by the Deposit of Faith Coalition, a group of more than a dozen Catholic organizations that argues “those pushing the anti-God and anti-family climate agenda need to be called out and exposed,” according to its website. Clauser, who is an atheist, needed some convincing to be the keynote speaker, a coalition spokesman acknowledged.

Have I ever mentioned that it’s not just Nobelists, but also sometimes atheists can be big fucking idiots?

Someone want to break the news to him?

In a long and horrific article that recounts all the terrible safety violations and tragic deaths and injuries at SpaceX, we get Musk’s perspective on workplace safety.

“Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company,” said Tom Moline, a former SpaceX senior avionics engineer who was among a group of employees fired after raising workplace complaints. “The company justifies casting aside anything that could stand in the way of accomplishing that goal, including worker safety.”

Someone needs to explain that rushing as fast as possible to get to a place does not translate into safely and reliably arriving at that place. “As fast as possible” exposes his real goal, which is to win a race and feed his ego. He wants bragging rights. Getting a shambling wreck of a space base installed on Mars while its crew dies slowly (or instantly!) is not what people mean by “going to Mars”. It is going to kill any interest in “going to Mars” for any more responsible space nerds in the future, though.

Also, the “saving humanity” schtick is old and overblown. Putting a few people on Mars in a ramshackle station that decays away for lack of utility is not going to save humanity. Did that temporary outpost in Vinland save the Vikings?

Do I need to add that this is not a serious leader? This is a man-child.

Four SpaceX employees told Reuters they were disturbed by Musk’s habit of playing with a flamethrower when he visited the SpaceX site in Hawthorne. The device was marketed to the public in 2018 as a $500 novelty item by Musk’s tunnel-building firm, the Boring Company. Videos posted online show it can shoot a thick flame more than five feet long. Boring later renamed the device the “Not-A-Flamethrower” amid reports of confiscations by authorities.

For years, Musk and his deputies found it “hilarious” to wave the flamethrower around, firing it near other people and giggling “like they were in middle school,” one engineer said. Musk tweeted in 2018 that the flamethrower was “guaranteed to liven up any party!” At SpaceX, Musk played with the device in close-quarters office settings, said the engineer, who at one point feared Musk would set someone’s hair on fire.

I work in a place that takes people’s safety seriously. If our chancellor showed up and giggled while firing off a flamethrower in the atrium, we’d be calling the police and demanding their immediate resignation. But then, we don’t claim our role is to “save humanity” and lack the overwhelming sense of importance that excuses idiot behavior.

The Golden Crocoduck

These creationist goobers are worse than low-hanging fruit — they’re rotting on the ground and indistinguishable from the droppings of frugivores — but a good debunking with evidence is still entertaining and informative. Potholer54 has given out his annual Golden Crocoduck award, and I can tell it was a difficult choice. So many amazingly deserving twits, and he has to pick just one!

This year, it goes to Matt Powell, because not only is he a gibbering fool, but he is blatant in his dishonesty.

For next year, though, I would like to nominate Eric Hovind, who has gotten positively hyper on social media lately, and is flooding Xitter with the most stupid assertions, which mostly seem to have been stolen from Harun Yahya’s Atlas of Creation. Copying your homework from one of the most clueless creationists on the internet (or, now, in a Turkish prison) is a truly stupid move, Eric.

Ken Ham sees racist pigeons!

Ken Ham is outraged that the liberal media and woke scientists are inserting racism into ecology. He cites an article titled How L.A.’s bird population is shaped by historic redlining and racist loan practices. He thinks this is imposing racism on birds.

When you think of bird habitats, racism might not be the term that comes to mind! But recently the Los Angeles Times ran an article on how the bird population in LA is “shaped by historic redlining and racist loan practices.” Why?

Well, because more birds, and a greater diversity of birds, are found in areas with more trees and shrubbery. Those areas tend to be wealthier, both now and historically. Fewer birds are found in areas made of mainly concrete and buildings. And those areas tend to be more impoverished.

Birds preferring greener habitats are, of course, not surprising to anyone who knows even a little bit about birds. But those who look at the world only through the lens of so-called race will see racism everywhere—even observing “remarkably segregated” birds! Such ideas are permeating our culture.

Uh, yeah. Animal populations will be shaped by environmental factors. One of the environmental factors observable in cities is the effect of poverty and the availability of greenery. Something that has historically shaped the distribution of greenspace is racism. There is a pretty clear chain of cause and effect and correlation here.

I mean, Ham explained it clearly and succinctly. Does he not understand it? Does he think the scientists went off with an a priori assumption that racism did it, and then cherry picked observations to justify their conclusion? That’s how creationists do science, after all.

But don’t worry, he has a solution to all this racist thinking. The problem, as he sees it, is that people don’t hear enough of the Western canon of classical music.

An assertion that probably just gave you whiplash…but that’s what he wants to fix. Play Bach in the streets, and chase those racist birds away, I guess.

Yes, this kind of thinking can now be found everywhere—from bird studies like this to which classical music is selected for students to learn to play. I was recently speaking with a piano and voice teacher who has a passion for high-quality music education. He shared that progressivism has completely overwhelmed the fine arts, including music, to the point where the standard canon of Western classical music (think Bach, Beethoven, Handel, etc.) is being ignored in favor of only minority or underprivileged group music (so music isn’t selected based on merit or even historic value but on intersectionality).

I don’t believe him.

I do believe that music curricula might be including more diverse selections than the traditional repertoire, but come on, do you really think students never hear Für Elise or Eine Kleine Nachtmusik any more? That music instructors don’t care about the musical merit of a piece? Absurd.

But really, this was just a clumsy and feeble attempt to plug his friend’s “new” musical program that will teach music through the lens of a biblical worldview. I’m used to creationist non-sequiturs and bad reasoning, but this one extreme, even for Answers in Genesis.

Where has techno-optimism gotten us?

Back in the 2000s, I used to write for Seed, the glossy, artsy, fabulously interesting magazine that tried to do for science what Wired did for technology in the 90s. I liked the magazine, but it tried too hard and went belly-up in 2012, leaving behind a diaspora of science writers who’d been briefly nourished at its teats.

That was too bad, but maybe it was for the best: it could have encouraged a generation of obnoxious twits who thought they understood science, but really just liked fancy fonts, odd layouts, and money. You know, like Wired spawned. Imagine a world where naive pseudo-scientists announce that we just need to science more shit and all our problems would be solved, and we just need to tweak a few genes and mix up some new pharmaceuticals and…oh, wait. We live in that world. Never mind.

Anyway, what brought this to mind is that Marc Andreessen, the very rich guy who turned an early investment in Netscape into billions of dollars, and who has been rewarded with regular columns in the Washington Post, has scribbled up something he calls the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which I haven’t read. I don’t want to read it, because I’ve read a few of his WaPo columns, and he’s just another spoiled conservative wanker who actively repels me with his narrow, selfish perspective. But Dave Karpf read it! He didn’t like it.

In the manifesto (which, let’s be honest, reads more like an extended twitter thread), Andreessen positions himself as a brave, bold truth-teller: We are being lied to he declares. We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology… Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential… For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently… It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag. It is time to be Techno-Optimists.

This is a familiar diatribe. Louis Rossetto used to say exactly the same thing back in WIRED’s startup days. Rossetto insisted that the media and the government were clinging to power by trying to scare people away from the liberatory power of the internet. The only thing that could stop inevitable technological progress was a culture of pessimism and fear. As recently as 2018, Rossetto was calling for a return to “militant optimism,” insisting that the sole barrier to our bright, abundant future is a pessimistic mood. Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, and Peter Schwartz all hit similar themes throughout the 90s. Their “Californian Ideology” was a mix of libertarianism and technological optimism, declaring that all of the world’s problems could be solved if we would just sit back and let the engineers of techno-capitalism do their work.

I asked the same question Karpf does: who is lying to us?

Who is lying to us, Marc? You serve on the boards of trillion-dollar companies. A few of your peers own media companies. A few others have chosen to bankrupt media companies that write mean things about them. You have been celebrated for thirty years as the genius-inventors-of-the-future. If the public is turning against you, who ought to be held responsible for such a change in the public mood?

Isn’t it funny how the richest people in the country, the ones who have profited exorbitantly off the current system, are so upset at any criticism of the system. It’s as if a mysterious entity is threatening to take some of their yachts away, when in reality, the sheep are too busy trying to forage for grass rather than look up and plot to overthrow the minority that are gnawing on rack of lamb. Maybe the rich are worried we’ll notice, so they give us these semi-religious artifacts of techno-idolatry as a distraction. And it’s been working!

What makes Andreessen’s 90’s retread so odd is the way he frames it as a challenge to the status quo. Technological optimism has been the dominant paradigm throughout my adult life. We have spent decades clapping for Andreessen and his buddies. We have put them on magazine covers. We stopped regulating tech monopolies. We cut taxes for the wealthy. We trusted that they had some keen insight into what the oncoming future would look like. We assumed that the tech barons ultimately had our best interests at heart.

Even amidst the techlash years, public criticism of the tech platforms ultimately amounted to very little. The ranks of the tech billionaires grew. The largest companies that we associate with digital technology reached trillion-dollar valuations. Their every announcement of a bold new technological future was treated with extraordinary credulity. (remember the metaverse? Remember Web3?)

I have a special place in my heart for this little passage, though.

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

That’s ripped straight from the book, Jurassic Park — the section where the protagonist rails against modern science, handing all-powerful tools to students who don’t know what they’re reading. I read it as a grad student, and I could tell you it was straight-up bullshit. But I’ll let Kieran Healy dismantle that claim:

Yeah. Exactly. Andreessen is a guy with a bachelor’s degree, nothing more, who got lucky. If I were playing God, and one of my students got $1.7 billion, I’d at least insist on a small percentage. All we can really do is guide students to interesting stuff and hope they can use it in their lives. I don’t even have a single billion of dollars, and I’m mainly worrying about how I’m going to pay for health care when I retire — I don’t have the leisure to do any social engineering.

But I do have time to look up and notice who has all the money and power and desire to play god with everyone else’s lives. One of them is this bullet-headed fuck: