Let’s just call them traitors

The religious right has been having a grand old time at the Faith and Freedom Conference this past weekend. Some of it is laughable, like this decorative addition to the urinals at the venue.

obamaurinal

That’s silly and stupid, but part of the usual political discourse. I’d have been happy to piss on Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush myself — but I’d also recognize that this isn’t the way to win elections.

This is worse. Bobby Jindal is delusional.

Are we witnessing right now the most radically, extremely liberal, ideological president of our entire lifetime right here in the United States of America, or are we witnessing the most incompetent president of the United States of America in the history of our lifetimes? You know, it is a difficult question, he said. I’ve thought long and hard about it. Here’s the only answer I’ve come up with, and I’m going to quote Secretary Clinton: `What difference does it make?’

Obama is neither radical, nor liberal, nor particularly ideological. He’s also not a socialist, nor is he a Kenyan. Obama is a middle-of-the-road, right-of-center, conservative Democrat who has not done anything particularly dramatic while in office. Even Obamacare, which has Republicans chewing the scenery everywhere, was a compromise. Every time some nutcake on the right screams Socialist! it just convinces me further that no one of that party should be in office — we need real solutions to real problems, not this imaginary tribalism.

This is worser. Jindal wants to foment rebellion.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Saturday night accused President Barack Obama and other Democrats of waging wars against religious liberty and education and said that a rebellion is brewing in the U.S. with people ready for a hostile takeover of the nation’s capital.

Jindal spoke at the annual conference hosted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a group led by longtime Christian activist Ralph Reed. Organizers said more than 1,000 evangelical leaders attended the three-day gathering. Republican officials across the political spectrum concede that evangelical voters continue to play a critical role in GOP politics.

I can sense right now a rebellion brewing amongst these United States, Jindal said, where people are ready for a hostile takeover of Washington, D.C., to preserve the American Dream for our children and grandchildren.

That’s all we need: an army of fanatical and self-righteous gun nuts fanned into fury by supposedly responsible leaders of a political party marching on DC for a hostile takeover. Fantasy is sequeing into visions of violence.

Perhaps the Secret Service ought to have a little conversation with Mr Jindal about the legality of encouraging sedition.

The difference between skeptical thinking and scientific thinking

Skepticism has a serious problem, and there are a couple of reasons I’ve grown disenchanted with its current incarnation. Belief is a continuum, and I think that skepticism as it stands occupies an untenable part of that continuum.

On one side lie the extremely gullible; people who drift with the wind, and believe anything a sufficiently charismatic guru tells them, no matter how absurd. Far to the other side are the conspiracy theorists. These are people who believe fervently in something, who have a fixed ideology and will happily twist the evidence to support it, and are therefore completely refractory to reason and empiricism.

And then, somewhere in the middle lie science and skepticism. People readily conflate those two, unfortunately, and I think that’s wrong. Science is all about following the evidence. If a bit of evidence supports a hypothesis, you willingly accept it tentatively, and follow where it leads, strengthening or discarding your initial ideas appropriately with the quality of the evidence. You end up with theories that are held provisionally, as long as they provide fruitful guidance in digging deeper. It is ultimately a positive approach that winnows out bad ideas ruthlessly, but all in the cause of advancing our knowledge. I am far more comfortable with science then skepticism, because I’d rather be working towards a goal.

Skepticism is the flip side. It’s all about falsification and disproof and dismantling proposals. I think it is the wrong approach.

Consider one classic example: Bigfoot. Skepticism is all about taking apart case by case, demonstrating fakery or error, and demolishing the stories of the Bigfoot frauds. That’s useful — in fact, skepticism is most useful in dealing with malicious intent and human fakery — but it doesn’t advance our knowledge significantly. The scientific approach would involve actually studying forest ecology, understanding how the ecosystem works, and getting a handle on what lives in the forest…and at the end, you’re left with something informative about the nature of the habitat, as well as a recognition that a giant ape isn’t part of the puzzle.

Again, sure, there are good and necessary aspects of skepticism. When you’ve got a fraud like Burzynski peddling fake cancer cures, the skeptical toolbox is helpful. But in the end, when you’ve shown that injecting processed horse urine into people doesn’t help anything, what are you left with? Better to understand the nature of cancer and normal physiology, providing alternatives and useful explanations for why the cancer quacks are wrong. That’s why the best skeptics of quackery are doctors and scientists — they have positive insights to contribute in addition to simple falsification.

So far, I haven’t said anything that makes skepticism bad; it might be better regarded as a complement to the scientific approach, that clears away the garbage to unclutter the operating field. Unfortunately, the current doctrines of organized skepticism open the doors to pathology, because they so poorly define the proper domain of skepticism, and what they do say are inconsistent and incoherent. What we’re stuck with is a schema that tolerates motivated reasoning, as long as it looks like debunking.

So we get skeptics who argue against the dangers of second-hand tobacco smoke, or anthropogenic climate change — it’s OK, because they’re being critical — and these same skeptical entertainers are lauded for berating an MD and throwing him out of a party, because he had criticized their pandering to a quack…and also their climate change denialism. Do I even need to get into their contemptible sexism or their Libertarian bullshit?

And then the movement as a whole has been wracked with this bizarre denial of sexual harassment, and refusal to deal with the issue. I think part of it has to be a culture of dealing with complications by rejecting them — that the movement is full of individuals whose favored approach to the deplorable messiness of human interactions and the existence of malefactors is by retreating into a Spock-like insistence that the problem does not compute, and therefore can be ignored. It’s a culture of explaining away, rather than explaining.

Also…hyperskepticism. Some people take their skepticism to such pathological extremes that they become conspiracy theorists or fanatical denialists of simple human behavior. I encountered an example of this yesterday that had me stunned with its contrarian stupidity. Not all skeptics (hah!) are this bad, but too many tolerate and approve of it.

A short while ago, I received a very nice letter from a young woman in Indiana who liked my book. I scanned it and posted it, with her name and town redacted — it was a lovely example of a phenomenon we’ve noticed for quite some time, of the way the internet and books about atheism have opened the door for many people who had previously felt isolated. It also said kind things about The Happy Atheist, so of course I was glad to share it.

Some nut named Cavanaugh, in the name of True Atheism and Skepticism, has posted a lengthy dissection of the letter. He doesn’t believe it’s real. He thinks I wrote it myself. To prove his point, all he has is the scan I posted…so he has taken it apart at excruciating and obsessive length. He has carefully snipped out all the letters “w” in the letter, lining them up so you can easily compare them. My god, they’re not identical! He has another figure in which he has sliced out a collection of ligatures — would you believe the spacing between letters, in a handwritten letter, is not consistent? She used the word “oblivious” a couple of times…a word that I also have used many times. She wrote exactly one page, not two. He mansplains the psychology of teenaged girls to assert that there’s no way a 15-year-old woman could have written the letter. You get the idea. He is being properly skeptical, accumulating a body of “facts” to disprove the possibility that someone in Indiana actually wrote a letter.

Furthermore, he lards his account with purely imaginative stories about what my correspondent was thinking — he injects his account with the most contemptible interpolations, like this one.

It’s okay, Mr. Myers, she reassures him, I think you’re cool. I’m just like you, and if I can make it through, so can you. Keep spreading the word. Oh, and come rescue me from Indiana — I’ll be legal in 2016.

That was not in the letter, of course: he made it all up. On the basis of his own foul-minded speculations, he transformed a pleasant fan letter into a come-on from a small town Lolita. It’s a disgusting spectacle of hyperskepticism gone wild. Oh, and skepticism and atheism: Jebus, but you do have a misogyny problem. Please stop pretending you don’t.

And boy, am I glad I cut out the name and hometown from that letter. Can you imagine if I’d left it in, and asshole Matt Cavanaugh thought it would be clever to do some investigative skepticism, tracked down her phone number, and called her up to slime her with innuendo directly? It would be a natural and expected step in the hyperskeptical toolbox to make such a thorough examination of all the data.

So stands movement skepticism, perfectly tuned to question the existence of chupacabras or UFOs. But also poised to doubt the existence of the US Postal Service, while simultaneously sneering at atheists who reject the biggest chupacabra of them all, god, flying in the grandest possible UFO, heaven. When your whole business model is simply about rejecting fringe claims, rather than following the evidence no matter how mainstream the target, you’ll inevitably end up with a pathologically skewed audience that uses motivated reasoning to abuse the weak. And you end up valuing flamboyance and showmanship over the contributions of science…unless, of course, the scientist has grope-worthy breasts.

So no thanks, skepticism. I’ll stick with science.

Also, if my Indiana correspondent should stumble across this faux “controversy,” I am very, very sorry. Apparently it isn’t quite safe yet for everyone to come out — the wider internet, as well as rural America, has its share of small-minded, pettily vicious shit-weasels.

Key issues to trigger an internet fight

Amanda Marcotte claims to have published a definitive list of the weirdest people on the internet, but I think she’s wrong, and has missed a few. She hasn’t crossed swords with fanatical astrologers, New Age solipsists, or Presuppositionalists yet, apparently.

And the first item on her list might strike you as a bit odd.

1. Anti-male circumcision obsessives. No, not people who are simply opposed to circumcising babies. I’m talking about the people who act like removing a foreskin is one of the greatest human rights abuses of all time, on level not just with the much more serious female circumcision but also with slavery and the Holocaust and who tend to use the word “mutilated” to describe it. Most of them are misogynists whose eagerness to construct an edifice of male oppression has completely overwhelmed any concern that their weirdness is permanently destroying any ability to have a reasonable discussion about the pros and cons of circumcision. Because of the combination of gender weirdness, sexual obsessions, bad faith, and lack of all proportion, they get the number one spot.

But then you read the comments, and most of it is dominated by…anti-male circumcision obsessives. It’s like they’ve crawled out of the woodwork specifically to substantiate the validity of Marcotte’s ranking.

This is not to say that anyone should approve of circumcision. Personally, I consider it cosmetic surgery (in most cases — there are unusual conditions under which it’s medically necessary) that ought not to be inflicted on small children, but I don’t consider it crippling or significantly damaging to sexual activity. Which means I’ll probably get hate mail from both the loons who want to make it mandatory for every one, and the loons who regard it as tantamount to castration.

Ing gets email

It is rather bizarre.

The ONLY way for Hominid branching to be possible is through RACE. Yet you have a professor deliberately teaching junk science which completely DESTROYS the theory of human evolution by saying RACE DOESN'T EXIST. Do you guys REALLY want … to be known as a University teaching nonsense which destroys Human Evolution? … i am only a HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE AND EVEN I KNOW WITH 100% CERTAINTY THAT THIS IS JUNK SCIENCE

The ONLY way for Hominid branching to be possible is through RACE. Yet you have a professor deliberately teaching junk science which completely DESTROYS the theory of human evolution by saying RACE DOESN’T EXIST. Do you guys REALLY want … to be known as a University teaching nonsense which destroys Human Evolution?

…

i am only a HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE AND EVEN I KNOW WITH 100% CERTAINTY THAT THIS IS JUNK SCIENCE

Gosh. I’m only a university professor of biology, not AGuyWhosYoutubeChannelGetsMillionsOfViews with a high school diploma, but I thought the key ingredients for speciation were reproductive isolation and subsequent divergence by drift and/or selection. Not “race”, which is a sociologically loaded term that is poorly connected to any legitimate scientific concepts. Does this guy really think that humanity is poised for branching into 3 or 5 or 7 or 63 (or whatever the current tally of ‘races’ is nowadays) species? Is the unit of any potential speciation event in our future likely to be what we label as ‘race’?

Does anyone know who AGuyWhosYoutubeChannelGetsMillionsOfViews actually is? I’d love to watch some of his videos. I’m sure they’re…entertaining informative amusing irritating.

The Dark Enlightenment loons and HBD

Remember the Dork Enlightenment? It’s this bizarre ‘movement’ consisting largely of head-up-their-asses libertarian types with a fetish for the kind of medieval world they played in their Dungeons & Dragons games…but they’ve got Silicon Valley money and have happily embraced cult recruiting techniques, so they’re also somewhat dangerous. One escapee from the Dark Enlightenment has posted his account on a Catholic blog.

The Dark Enlightenment Exposed

I first heard about the Dark Enlightenment (aka “Neo-Reaction” or just “Reaction”) last year, the year after I graduated from college and was interning at a conservative think tank. I briefly become involved with the Dark Enlightenment and then left the movement in disgust. Here is what I learned:

– The Dark Enlightenment is controlled by what the media call “Sith Lords”. You have more public Lords like Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, but there are even some Lords up higher whose names are not revealed. They say the Master Lord says ‘Et Ego in Arcadia’ which is an anagram for ‘Tego Arcana Dei’ (“I hide the secrets of God”).

– But only the media call them ‘Sith Lords’. In Inner Speak, they will often use phrases like the Men of Númenor or the Eldars.

– I never met any of the higher Eldars, but I did once meet an Eldar in Training. I don’t know his real name but people called him Legolas. He had long blond hair, was dressed like a 19th century count, and wore a pendant that had both a Christian Cross and Thor’s Hammer on it.

– The movement is a weird mixture of ethno-nationalists, futurists, monarchists, PUAs (“pick-up artists” like Chateau Heartiste), Trad Catholics, Trad Protestants, etc. They all believe in HBD (what they call “human biodiversity” i.e. racism) but disagree on some other minor points.

– The religious people in the movement (both Christians and pagans) practice what is called “identitarian religion” (religion that doesn’t deny ethnic identity).

– Some of the rising stars of the Dark Enlightenment on the internet seem to be Radish Magazine, Occam’s Razor Mag, and Theden TV.

– The Dark Enlightenment allegedly has millions of dollars of money to play with. They have a couple big donors. One is rumored to be a major tech tycoon in Silicon Valley. They actually had a private 3-day meeting on an island which was furnished with a French chef, etc. Different forms of formal attire were required for each day (tuxedos, 3-piece suits, etc), and some weird costumes were required too (capes, hoods, etc) — which sound like a pagan cult. (I wasn’t at this function but heard about it.)

– I was initiated into the first stages of the Dark Enlightenment, which involved me stripping down naked so people could “inspect my phenotype”. I was then given a series of very personal questions, often relating to sexual matters. I was then told to put on a black cape. (I really regret doing this but at the time I was younger, more impressionable and eager to please.)

– For the initial oath taking, everyone must swear on a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species, just to show their fidelity to HBD. After that, for the later oaths, seculars will swear again on Darwin, while Christians will swear on the Bible, and pagans on the Prose Edda or Iliad.

– At one of the meetings I heard someone continuously chanting “gens alba conservanda est” (Latin for “the white race must be preserved”) and then others were chanting things in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Old German, but I don’t know those languages so I can’t remember exactly what they were saying.

– They also have all their own secret handshakes, and their own terminology [like the Cathedral ("political correctness"), thedening ("re-establishing ethnic group identity"), genophilia ("love of one’s own race"), NRx ("neoreaction"), etc.].

– On the philosophical level, this movement is not entirely original. Much of it is borrowed from the Identitarian movement in Europe. They also all detest democracy. They are not trying to be a “populist movement” but are only trying to convert other elites to their way of thinking.

This whole movement is like a secret cult, which is why I left. Also, because of the valiant and brave efforts of people on the net exposing this movement, I saw this cult for the evil it truly is. Please stay away from it.

There has to be a typo in there: Radish Magazine is an organic food/healthy living site which almost certainly has no connection to the pasty-pale Hot Pockets-gobbling clientele of the Dark Enlightenment. [I stand corrected: there is also a Dark Enlightenment associated Radish Mag.] I think the writer meant Taki’s Magazine, which with Occam’s Razor Mag and Theden are among the more popular sites for neo-racists. Visit them at your peril — they will fill you with rage.

You might also notice the overlap between the Dark Enlightenment dogma and HBD dogma. They’re all championed by biological ignoramuses who think they understand evolution, but really don’t — and they happily trumpet their bigotry as scientifically justifiable. Here’s one list of the shared beliefs of both HBD and the Dark Enlightenment. Really, it’s just old-fashioned racism of the sort Houston Stewart Chamberlain would have endorsed, right down to their muddled love/hate relationship with science — evolution is only useful if it can be twisted to agree with their preconceptions, while they yearn more for religious justifications, especially the Identitarian religion they want to practice.

Another area of overlap is with the MRA/PUA crowd, as noted above. Lately, the obnoxious kooks who flood my email and twitter accounts with ‘proof’ that I’m an evil feminist have taken to sending me links to places like Taki’s Magazine. Apparently, I’m supposed to see the mad scribblings of John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer as evidence that science shows that I’m wrong about everything. Some of them don’t even seem to be aware of the racist tone of their sources (but I could be wrong), and are cherry-picking from the reactionary right to find just the bits that agree with their views on women.

The Dark Enlightenment, with their contradictory name, are looking pretty dark, at least. It seems to be the fulminating cloaca of the internet, where all kinds of sewage drifts to mingle and react to produce a cloud of noxious fumes. The only responsible thing to do is…flush.

Think about why it was trending

Remember that video by Joshua Feuerstein in which he claimed to destroy evolution in 3 minutes? It went viral. The BBC interviewed him, and got Aron Ra’s perspective. Feuerstein himself is bragging about the power of Social Media.

But they don’t ask why that video got so many views. I saw it because so many other atheists were linking to it…and laughing. It was this beautiful distillation of rank, raving creationist idiocy — a supremely confident ignoramus gushing over creationism’s dumbest hits as if they haven’t been smacked down a thousand times before.

Feuerstein got his moment of fame because he was that week’s stupid cat video, or comedic compilation of crotch punches, or amazingly clueless thing said by a Republican.

Girl criticizes math ability of old man

But…but…everyone knows that girls suck at math. So how can Christie Wilcox batter George Will’s out-of-his-ass math calculation so thoroughly? This cannot be.

I have a theory, which is mine, that Republicans have been experiencing many generations of selection for stupidity. This theory makes a prediction that newer Republicans ought to be significantly stupider than older Republicans. I know what you’re thinking: George Will is pretty damned stupid. How could they get worse and still manage to reproduce?

But here’s a case in point. Eric Cantor, also pretty damned stupid. But is he stupider than George Will? Well, that is debatable, but we do know that he’s stupid enough to get defeated by a teabagger in a landslide. And one thing we know for sure, his challenger, Dave Brat really is incredibly stupid.

As for the winner, Brat seems a very bad combination of serious religious quester and devout Randian economist, a combination that would have had Ms. Rand herself reaching for the opium pipe. He got his undergraduate degree at Hope College in Michigan, which is run by the Reformed Church in the United States, a conservative evangelical wing of the United Church Of Christ. He then got a Masters in Divinity at Princeton, which is a very conservative seminary and now, according to his website, Dave attends St. Mary’s Catholic Church with his wife Laura and their two children: Jonathan, 15 and Sophia, 11. So either he’s a Douthatian convert, god help us, or his faith is all over the lot, which may account for his rather startling announcement last night that he won because God was speaking through the voters of the Seventh Congressional District of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

So far, my hypothesis is confirmed. Rather strongly confirmed. I predict that by 2020 the Republican establishment will be plucking up dying earthworms on the sidewalk after a rain and running them for high office as intellectual superstars.

And then Christie Wilcox will just have to sit there, stunned into silence, rather than running circles around Republicans who try to do elementary arithmetic. That’ll teach her.