Moral panics and the bigoted subversion of biology

Fresh off that paper about how the liberals are destroying “merit” and science, Jerry Coyne fearlessly rides his hobby horse onto the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer, where he complains about a a grave threat to biology. That threat? Ideology and dogma are strangling research and scientific communication. Scientists are too cowed to speak their minds. Well, except for Jerry A. Coyne and his coauthor, Luana S. Maroja, who are willing to confront the dogma of the Progressive Left.

It’s somewhat peculiar to read the complaints about a dogmatic stranglehold from these people. Coyne is a well-known, established, and successful scientist — he is a graduate of Harvard, and is now an emeritus professor of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, one of the most prestigious institutions of evolution research in the country. Maroja is a full Professor of Biology, and Chair of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Program at Williams College. I don’t see how they can complain that their careers have been “strangled” by the Left.

Coyne and Maroja are the establishment.* Their careers are built on convincingly supporting the dogmas of biology (which is not necessarily a bad thing at all.) They have immense amounts of academic power and influence, and have far more potential to be the strangler, rather than the strangled. Yet somehow they have the idea that science is being politically purged by progressive social justice, which they claim doesn’t care about truth.

That’s a remarkable claim, fundamentally paranoid and conspiratorial, and I’m going to have to see strong evidence to support it. Coyne and Maroja write that they have six specific examples from just their field of evolutionary biology — examples of leftists distorting biology and altering education and devaluing “merit.”

Let’s see it. They’re going to give us six examples of “misstatements spread by ideologues” that they believe are impeding science.

1. Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum.
Coyne & Maroja claim this is false because there are only two kinds of functional gametes, sperm and eggs, and therefore there can be only two sexes. The claims of gender ideologues can be trivially dismissed because they can’t trot out a third kind of gamete, or can’t name all the other sexes. Furthermore, people aren’t assigned sex at birth, so it is not a sexual construct, but rather, sex is an observation of biological reality.

The Coyne & Maroja argument is nonsense at every level. First, we humans are not our gametes — we are complex multicellular organisms. To argue that gametes are definitive is a gross oversimplification that ignores physiology, behavior, psychology, and culture, all of which are affected by sex. This is an example of extreme reductionism.

It’s also an argument designed to misrepresent and distort the positions of their critics. No one is arguing that there are other kinds of gametes; trans men and women are not claiming to have transformed their gametes to some other form, and the ones I’ve talked with are acutely aware that their gonads do not metamorphose. Trans men may still be capable of pregnancy, trans women will not ovulate, and they do not pretend otherwise. This is the kind of argument that shows that the ones proposing it are totally unaware of the nature of trans culture, they are arguing against a proposition that no one is making.

As for the claim that the definition of sex at birth is simply a biological observation…well, that wrecks their premise, because the sex of a baby is not a question of what kind of gametes they are producing. It’s a superficial examination of morphology. You can have a penis or vagina without any correlated gamete production!

Here’s what I, a biology professor and progressive Leftist, teach in my classes.

Biological sex is the product of a complex cascade of molecular and cellular activity in embryonic development that continues for decades — for the entirety of an individual’s life, in fact — and there are multiple opportunities for variation. These variations can accumulate to produce a continuum of outcomes, so that the broad categories of men and women encompass a vast diversity of human forms and ideas and behaviors.

I would say that claiming that humans are trivially reducible to two simplistic categories is the greater distortion of biological facts and diminishes the evolutionary consequences of the differences within a sexual category.

Do Coyne & Maroja do a better job of explaining and dismissing the second misconception of those progressive leftists? No, they do not.

2. All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.

While you might be able to find a few fringe individuals who espouse that view, it’s not at all representative of what academic biologists — or even the majority of informed laypersons — think. This is a common pattern in the Coyne & Maroja review, though, misrepresenting the perspective of the people they critique by inventing a straw man argument. They go on to cite Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate, as if it were a fact-based source of data rather than a subjective and dishonest mess of prejudicial assertions. The biologists I know would laugh at this notion that people are blank slates.

Rather than citing an unqualified non-biologist to tell us what biologists think, I’d recommend instead Lewontin’s The Triple Helix, which is far more representative. Lewontin explains that the evolution of individuals is explained by the interplay of genes, organisms, and the environment. Note that genes are part of the equation, a significant part, but that you can’t explain genetics except in the context of their environment.

It’s a little surprising that they ignore this common view, since Lewontin was Coyne’s mentor at Harvard.

So what would this deranged Leftist teach in his biology classes?

There are clear average differences between men and women, but the attempt to tease them apart into purely biological and purely cultural differences is a futile exercise, often ideologically motivated. Biology and culture are inseparable, and what makes you you is a complex pattern of interaction between the two.

3. Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions.

Great. On this one, he cites me directly as the purveyor of this supposedly misguided claim. I wrote, “The fundamental premises of evo psych [evolutionary psychology] are false,” which is accurate, I did say that. I also said a lot more, explaining what those faulty premises are…but Coyne & Maroja omit that, for some unexplainable reason. Instead, they come up with an anodyne definition of evolutionary psychology: our brains and how they work–which yield our behaviors, preferences, and thoughts–sometimes reflect natural selection that acted on our ancestors.

One problem here is that I agree with that sentence, so once again, they have invented dissent where none exists and have hidden away the problem with evolutionary psychology. The idea that genes and evolution have shaped our behavior is accepted and not at all problematic, but Coyne & Maroja assert that opponents of evolutionary psychology deny the role of evolution on behavior.

Bluntly, that is an outright lie.

They think they can get away with it because they’ve obscured what premises of evolutionary psychology I consider false. It’s a quote mine.

Where I consider evolutionary psychologists to fail is in methodology and poor theory — they take the unjustified shortcut of assuming any modern behavior is the product of genetic traits that were locked in place in the Pleistocene, and are always the product of selection, and that therefore any hypothetical selective scenario they invent is valid and worth publishing as science. They seem to be entirely oblivious to alternative modes of evolution, treating natural selection as the only significant force, ignoring the facts of drift and migration. They are masters of the just-so story, building hypotheticals about ancient human ways of life and ‘testing’ them with surveys of middle-class students enrolled in Psych 101 courses.

I do not deny that human biology and behavior are the product of evolution, but rather that evolution is more complex than evolutionary psychologists imagine it to be, and that the tools of psychology are sadly inadequate to address the problem.

What I teach in the classroom:
Every species is the product of a long history of evolutionary forces, and those forces involve more than just a cartoonish idea of endlessly optimizing selection. You’ve learned about nearly-neutral theory, about lineage analysis, about the mathematics of comparing traits (they would have gotten all that in even my introductory classes), and that accurately determining the evolutionary trajectory of a population requires detailed measurement and observation and rigorous mathematical analysis. Please do apply what you’ve learned to behavior and psychology, but do it better than the evolutionary psychologists have.

4. We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals.

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. In this section, Coyne & Maroja plunge into the world of the genetic basis of IQ scores and educational attainment and are saying that we should study genetic differences in the minds of people. The problem with that, and the reason we should discourage that kind of research, is that it inevitably leads to garbage science. Weak correlations will get used to prop up all kinds of biases. That’s why this topic is so popular among right-wing zealots and racists. They say,

This kind of study (genome-wide association studies, or GWAS) has, for example, turned up nearly 4,000 areas of the genome associated with educational attainment. Fascinatingly, many of these genes are active mainly in the brain. Using GWAS studies, it’s now possible to make fairly accurate predictions about a person’s appearance, behavior, academic achievement, and health simply by analyzing the DNA of an individual and calculating their individual “polygenic scores” based on large samples of their population.

No, you can’t do that.

GWAS are basically fishing expeditions — you search for correlations between genetic markers and social or behavioral phenomena. It might be useful when coupled to specific, prior hypotheses, but much of it is grinding through thousands of statistical correlations and grabbing any that rise above a chosen chance criterion. It can be hopelessly noisy. Look at the result of GWAS of “educational attainment” (already, a uselessly broad category): 4000 “areas” (not genes, just broad chunks of chromosomes) are somehow associated with learning, and we can at best say that many are active in the brain. Almost everything is active in the brain! Almost everything is active in the pancreas! Sorting out what is relevant is the problem, and we’re nowhere near achieving that.

There is such a volume of potential correlations that it may well be that most of what GWAS are picking up are accidental correlations by lineage — that is, the parameter is common among certain groups of people not because it plays a role in, for instance, intelligence, but because the people showing that trait are related. The danger is that, for example, you might think you’ve found a gene associated with the success of a certain group, but it’s only a coincidence and is actually irrelevant. Then that chance coincidence gets picked up as evidence of superiority of the tested group, and you’re off to the eugenics races.

It’s simply silly to suggest that we could feed a genome sequence into a computer, and it will then compute the organism. That’s genetic determinism, and it doesn’t work. Twins have strong physical similarities, but do twin pairs all share the same personality? I come from a blue collar family, generations of farmers and laborers, all good people but not really interested in things like college…I have to suspect that if universities had used a DNA sample as an admissions test, I’d be out picking fruit and plucking chickens in Yakima.

Coyne & Maroja are actually almost right in what I’d teach my classes.
We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals, unless we have clear causal and functional information and specific hypotheses about the genes we are studying. Vague, sloppy generalizations will be abused!

5. Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.

Oh god, make it stop. Coyne & Maroja take a bold step in favor of race realism.

To be fair, they take a waffly stance, being ambiguous about how we ought to talk about ethnicities instead, about how many races/ethnicities there are, and how we can use race information to fine-tune medical treatments or even how we can solve crimes by reconstructing perpetrators from their genetic information (see previous section; no, you can’t). He uses these excuses to defend…Bo Winegard?

Indeed, even writing about this subject has led to sanctions on many scientists, who have “found themselves denounced, defamed, protested, petitioned, punched, kicked, stalked, spat on, censored, fired from their jobs and stripped of their honorary titles.” A well-known example is Bo Winegard, an untenured professor in Ohio who was apparently fired for merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups. This is why most biologists stay far away from this topic.

“merely suggesting the possibility” is a curiously tepid way to describe a guy who openly describes himself as an “ethno-traditionalist”, “cultural nationalist”, and “racial realist” and who calls Arthur Jensen his “intellectual hero.” He’s a loud and proud racist who thinks white people are superior!

Here’s how I handle this in my classes:
Don’t be a fucking racist goober.

More seriously, in the last two weeks of my genetics course I gave the students a dozen peer-reviewed papers on how geneticists were addressing the issue of race, put them in groups, and had them give presentations on the papers they chose to discuss. Get into the literature, and you’ll discover most modern geneticists have little patience with so-called “scientific racism,” any more than they are interested in discussing “scientific creationism.” There are exceptions, obviously. Usually they’re posting on Quillette or other race-realist forums. Or publishing in Skeptical Inquirer or the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

6. Indigenous “ways of knowing” are equivalent to modern science and should be respected and taught as such.

On Coyne’s blog, he seems to be moderatly obsessed with New Zealand indigenous culture, thinking it compromises science, somehow. Maori culture is a complex mix of ideas.

Matauranga Māori, the indigenous way of knowing in New Zealand, is a mélange of empirical knowledge derived from trial and error (including the navigational ability of their Polynesian ancestors and Māori ways of procuring and growing food) but also includes nonscientific areas such as theology, traditional lore, ideology, morality, and legend.

That sounds like a liberal arts curriculum to me. Teach the history, the cultural practices, the religion and mythology…just as we do in Western societies. You can’t, for instance, teach the history of science without discussing Catholic theology and its contributions; you also can’t avoid discussing the oppressive aspects of a culture without also talking about art and beauty. I don’t see the problem, although I’m not familiar with the Maori.

I do teach at a non-tribal American Indian serving institution, though, and I think their concerns are overblown. The Lakota have a myth that their people emerged from a cave — they can even point to a cave in South Dakota called Maka Oniye as their origin. We teach this in our Indian Studies classes, since it is a lovely story and tells us about how the Lakota think of themselves (it also includes a spider god, Iktomi, which I find quite nice). But we don’t teach it in our biology classes. There are no angry Lakota citizens shaking their fists at us and demanding that we incorporate it into our curriculum. Perhaps Coyne is thinking that these indigenous peoples have the same fanatical certainty that Southern Baptists do. They don’t. They would just appreciate it if you showed a little respect for the people who were displaced by Western colonialism.

The only experience I’ve had with our Indian students that comes even close is that, several years ago, some visitors commented on the fact that we had a display of mounted owls at the entrance to our atrium, which was mildly offensive to Native Americans who regarded owls as symbols of death. So we moved them. It’s not hard to respect people’s beliefs, and it does no harm to the science.

No one teaches that cultural preferences are equivalent to what we teach in physics, chemistry, and biology.

Coyne & Maroja are also indignant about the idea of repatriation — that Native Americans are demanding the return of bones from museum collections. They don’t seem to appreciate that these remains were stolen, looted from grave sites, or even taken directly from murdered or executed Indians. I guess it’s true that we progressive lefties consider consent important, and that it even trumps Science.

I would just ask how they would feel about the Jewish skull collection that was to be displayed at the Reich University of Strasbourg after WWII (fortunately, a plan that was aborted by the Reich’s defeat). The bones were returned to their families, where possible, and re-interred. The situation is directly analogous to what Native Americans experienced, except that imperialist forces haven’t yet been defeated. Why is one case an example of basic human decency, while a horrible anti-scientific crime in the other?

How would I teach this? I don’t. I suspect Coyne & Maroja don’t, either, and that neither have had to accommodate Maori traditions, so it’s a silly thing for us to be concerned about. If I did teach something in the appropriate field, I would probably steal the words of Jennifer Raff, who studies paleogenomics.

Actually, repatriation laws have really enabled a lot of the work I and some of my colleagues do. A lot of my work in North America is on ancestral remains that have been returned to tribes. As part of that process, some tribal representatives have come to me and said, “We are interested in studying the DNA before we rebury our ancestors.” A lot of these remains have been languishing in storerooms, and as part of NAGPRA they’ve been cataloged and looked at and new things have emerged as a result. Human remains from Shuká Káa [formerly On Your Knees] Cave in Alaska, for example, were excavated with the cooperation of local tribes and showed people living in the area today are related to an individual who died 10,300 years ago.

It’s not anti-science to take the beliefs of the people you work with into account. It’s the racism and colonialism and sexism and pseudoscience that are anti-science. Raff is pointing out that respecting the people of the cultures she studies literally benefits the science.

I’ll have to stop here — this is already over twice the length of the response Skeptical Inquirer was going to allow me, so I don’t think there’s any point in trying to submit it to them. I do have to say a bit about Coyne & Maroja’s conclusion, because that’s where they let all the fascist paranoia hang out.

Progressive ideology is growing stronger and intruding further into all areas of science. And because it’s “progressive,” and because most scientists are liberals, few of us dare oppose these restrictions on our freedom.

What restrictions on our freedom? I can say what I think, Coyne & Maroja can say what we think, and the only cost is that we each think the other is an asshole. I can live with that. So can the Emeritus Professor and the Chair of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. Of course, Coyne is only going to be able to publish this nonsense in not-very-distinguished journals. That’s fair, though, since his work clearly lacks merit.

And mainly what he’s going to do is complain about a nonexistent existential threat to all of science because it is infested with those dang liberals.

Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.

OK, now I’m inspired! I will continue to speak up against the toxic effects of conservative ideology on my field. You know, the ideology that would deny the existence of trans individuals; that advocates for genetic determinism; that thinks a sloppy science like evolutionary psychology that defies standard theory and practice is worthwhile; that promotes outmoded and dangerous ideas about IQ and the genetic basis of all behavior; that wants to return to an early 20th century version of race pseudoscience; and that thinks indigenous people who express their cultural beliefs ought to be silenced. Fine. I’ll declare that the Coyne & Maroja vision of science is broken and ultimately damaging. They represent old dogmas and tired ideas.

I do hope science is someday very different from the bad science that racists and sexists want to promote, and that the big change is that women and gay and trans people can work in science without old cranky scientists claiming that their existence does irreparable harm to the field.

Also, someday I hope staid old conservative skeptic organizations learn to recognize a moral panic when they see one and refuse to fuel it with more hysterical paranoia of the sort we see in the Coyne & Maroja article.

*By the way, so am I — I’m an old white heterosexual cis man. Isn’t it interesting how two people who belong to the same privileged demographic can have such radically different views?

Cool! Let’s go to Enceladus!

So that’s why aliens in UFOs have been visiting Earth

I fully support exploration of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It’s a complicated body, it’s got frozen water ice, it has oceans of water beneath all that ice, and analysis has shown that it has all the elements essential for life (CHNOPS). Even a biologist would love to know more!

So here’s someone with a plan to get to Enceladus, the Space Ocean Corp. I hate it already. It’s fantasy math.

SPACE OCEAN CORP is a private Texas holding company. Incorporated September 2021. Regulation D 506(C) Unregistered Security Offering. Investor Deck (pdf)

Water is worth $1 Billion per gallon in space (on Mars, on other moons and planet). If a mission to collect it costs $8 Billion; and we’re able to collect just 10 gallons, it can be sold at a $2 Billion net profit. Collect 1,500 to 100,000 gallons, then gross profit is $1.5 Trillion to $100 Trillion.

I’m not an economist, but…isn’t scarcity the reason they’ve invented this imaginary value of $1 Billion per gallon? It’s not really worth that much. No one is paying (or can afford) a billion dollars for a gallon of water. This entire prospectus is built around this magical number as if it is real.

There are over one quadrillion gallons of water on the moon Enceladus. The volume of a sphere of water with a 25 mile deep radius is approximately 72 quadrillion gallons. If we set up a well for $6-$8 Billion, the initial cost to Space Ocean Corp investors will be a drop in the bucket compared to the ROI gain in market cap.

I can multiply numbers together. I can calculate the volume of a sphere. That is not the basis for a complex, high-tech space industry. But they’re using this elementary fact to fish for investors! Stupid, innumerate, delusional investors. Is Peter Thiel available?

They continue. They’ve got a glib Neil deGrasse Tyson quote! That’s worth money, right?

Goal: Extract & Store water from ocean moons. Phase 1) video an ocean on a moon in the solar system. Phase 2) extract water from that moon. Phase 3) sell the water to space companies and organizations. Phase 4) repeat. Phase 5) Video every ocean in the solar system.

“Water in space costs $10,000 per pound to put into orbit … If you can get it there cheaper, that’s a business model.” Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Future of Colonizing Space- Neil deGrasse Tyson- WGS 2018

Space Ocean Corp and several organizations are partnering up to send a spacecraft to collect water on Enceladus, with the potential to generate a profit of up to $100 Trillion from the initial investment of $8 Billion. Join us!

The ocean on Enceladus is 25 miles deep, making it a valuable source of water in deep space, worth an estimated $1 billion per gallon. We are looking to collect between 1,500 and 100,000 gallons of water from this source and store it on the moon or in orbit, at a Lagrange point, for sale to space organizations.

We’re aiming to launch a private mission to Enceladus, despite the fact that there have been more than 10 government missions already planned for the moon.

By the way, every page on that site has a header with that slogan, Video every ocean in the solar system and store the water, to sustain life in space. It’s in their goals, to video an ocean and to video every ocean in the solar system. I don’t get it. Are they counting on that sweet YouTube money to make them profitable?

I would just ask a simple question: where is that $100 trillion profit coming from? Who is paying that money to Space Ocean Corp? Carolyn Porco (you know, the famous planetary scientist) had that same thought, and asked them about it.

When I asked, ‘What’s your business model?’, they said, ‘Musk’.

What did I tell you? They’re looking for stupid, innumerate, delusional investors. That’s a good choice, except…Musk doesn’t have $100 trillion.

I would love to see Enceladus explored, but one thing this company ignores is that if there is extraterrestrial life there, we would need to be exceedingly careful to avoid contaminating it. I don’t see Space Ocean Corp giving a damn about that — more likely they’d be complaining about the environmentalists wrecking their money-making plan. They are from Texas, after all.

The debate bros are getting wound up again

Here we go again. “Debate me!” shriek the loony antivaxxers; “Why should I,” say the scientists; “That proves you’re wrong,” whine the usual crowd of gullible idiots.

The inciting incident in this case was the king of the fuckin’ online idiots, Joe Rogan, who invited batshit anti-vaxxer loon Robert F. Kennedy Jr onto his show, listened to him respectfully, and then agreed thoroughly with him, to the point of telling respectable and highly qualified scientist Peter Hotez to come on his show and debate him.

Last Thursday, Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster who inked an exclusive deal with Spotify for $200 million, hosted Kennedy for a three-hour conversation. Kennedy told Rogan’s more than 10 million listeners that “vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.” Rogan, a comedian and former host of Fear Factor, spent the entire episode validating Kennedy’s views. Kennedy was presented as a brave truth-teller, standing up to powerful forces. Anyone who doesn’t accept Kennedy’s conspiracy theories, according to Rogan, is unable to think for themselves.

Kennedy spent the better part of an hour rehashing an article he wrote in 2005, which falsely claimed that childhood vaccines are linked to autism. The article was so flawed it was ultimately retracted by the outlet that published it, Salon. “[C]ontinued revelations of the flaws and even fraud tainting the science behind the connection make taking down the story the right thing to do,” Salon’s editor wrote.

In the piece, Kennedy relied extensively on the work of Mark Geier, a doctor whose license to practice medicine was revoked by Maryland in 2011. Geier pushed the vaccine-autism link as a frequent expert witness. He also misrepresented his credentials and developed “a ‘protocol’ for treating autism that involved injecting children with the drug that is used to chemically castrate sex offenders at a cost of upwards of $70,000 per year.”

Naturally, one of Rogan’s army of cranks showed up at Hotez’s house to taunt him.

A prominent vaccine scientist said he was accosted outside of his home after a Twitter exchange with podcaster Joe Rogan, who challenged him to debate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. over the weekend.

“I just was stalked in front of my home by a couple of antivaxers taunting me to debate RFKJr.,” Houston-based scientist Peter Hotez tweeted Sunday.

The debate bros were pissed off because Hotez turned Rogan down. Among those debate bros was Elon Musk.

“He’s afraid of a public debate, because he knows he’s wrong,” Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted in response to Rogan, who claimed Hotez’s response was a “non answer.”

“I will add $150,000 to @joerogan’s wager so now $250,000 can go to charity and the public can hear an open debate on an important topic,” billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman tweeted.

Refusing to debate an ideologue does not prove you’re wrong. That’s not how logic works. Upping the ante does not change the problem with debate. The simple fact is that RFK is a deluded kook with a whole battery of bad ideas in his head. He thinks WiFi causes disease, and Rogan agrees.

RFK Jr.: Wifi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.
Rogan: How does wifi open up your blood-brain barrier?
RFK Jr.: Now you’ve gone beyond my expertise.

Utterly nuts. Bonkers to the nth degree. These two guys might be qualified to operate a public circle-jerk, but they know nothing about the science, so what is to be gained by debating them? That is not a way to resolve any scientific issue. It has always been a problem that glib liars have an automatic edge in debate.

The Sophists highlight the problem with public debates: they are easily gamed with lies, rhetorical skill, and clever wordplay. In order for a debate to actually be worthwhile, both participants must be sincerely dedicated to finding the truth; if one side is not committed to the truth, they will have an advantage, because it is much easier to spout falsehoods than it is to refute them. The technique of spouting too many nonsense points to refute has its own name, called the Gish Gallop, after a young earth creationist who used the technique to criticize evolutionary theory.

The Gish Gallop is effective in live debates largely because the audience does not have enough specialized knowledge to ascertain the validity of a criticism. Science is hard, complicated, and nuanced; when a dishonest debater spouts a dozen nonsensical points, their opponent will not have time to adequately address each of these points. This can give an audience the impression, based simply on the volume of arguments on each side, that the dishonest debater has won the argument.

A live debate is also extremely limited because the participants do not have time to do research to respond to an opponent’s comment. Even experts in a field usually do not have all the relevant data for their field in their head to be recalled at a moment’s notice; again, the Gish Galloper has the advantage here, in that they are usually just providing a list of attacks and are not concerned with accuracy.

Rogan is a dangerous and malicious fraud with a gigantic audience and huge amounts of money, and there he is, spewing all this crap over the body politic, and they’re eating it up. We ought to be terrified. We also not to grant him a millimeter of respect and credibility.

The aliens took over Tucker Carlson’s brain!

Tucker Carlson started a new show on Twitter, of all places. It was ten minutes of Tucker in a barn spouting off conspiracy theories. He has already received a cease-and-desist letter from Fox News, saying he’s under a non-compete agreement.

It’s not going great, in other words.

Here’s his mission. He’s treading on Alex Jones’ toes!

What exactly happened on 9/11? Well, it’s still classified. How did Jeffrey Epstein make all that money. How did he die? How about JFK and so endlessly on.

Also, he’s more like an Art Bell wanna-be. His big story was this one:

Yesterday, for example, a former Air Force officer who worked for years in military intelligence came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. government has physical evidence of crashed, non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft.
…
It was clear he was telling the truth. In other words, UFOs are actually real and apparently so is extraterrestrial life. Now we know. In a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell, the story of the millennium. But in our country, it doesn’t.

He never did have a good handle on the truth.

Goodbye, Tucker. Even if you become popular again, it will be as a crackpot, a joke, a goofball on the fringe that everyone laughs at.

Who keeps putting all these globes everywhere?

Kandiss Taylor ran for governor of Georgia on the slogan, Jesus, Guns, and Babies, which is the perfect Republican mantra. She also promised to execute sheriffs who disobeyed her rules. To everyone’s immense surprise, she lost big time, getting only 3.4% of the vote. Don’t worry, she’s doing the Trump thing and contesting the election, saying it was rigged.

She’s in the news again. She went on a flat-earth podcast to denounce globes.

https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1660677910959730688

Would you believe she has a PhD in counseling and was employed as a guidance counselor at an elementary school for 19 years? I think someone needs to go back and check on those poor kids.

I think we’ve found the perfectly distilled essence of Republicanism, and astoundingly, someone even worse than Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Another example of why I despise Christianity

It leads stupid people like Ray Comfort to say things like this:

The Queen of rock ‘n’ roll passed into eternity today. All the money that Tina Turner possessed, all her fame, all her awards, and accolades now mean nothing. The only thing that matters, is “Were her sins forgiven?”

OK, I forgive her sins. Done.

Maybe better questions to ask when someone dies are: “Did they make the world a better place? Did they create beauty? Did they inspire? Did they speak truth to the world?”

Tina Turner gets a yes to each question. Ray Comfort gets a slow, sad shake of the head.

I think I saw this guy on Dr Strangelove

Michael Flynn (remember him? Former security advisor to Trump, couldn’t keep his mouth shut talking to the Russians, now a QAnon-loving, Christian Nationalist wacko?) has a new grift. He’s one of the founders of a site called 4thePure, which is dedicated to helping people who haven’t been vaccinated. It’s a combination dating site, blood bank, sperm and egg donation site, location for weird webinars with Q creeps, and most importantly, a vector for misinformation. And it only costs $2500 for a lifetime membership, which will give you a 25% discount on overpriced merch (which doesn’t exist yet…coming soon!).

General Jack D. Ripper is real! Now I’m worried about the Doomsday Machine.

I think Kat Abu is too young to make the Dr Strangelove connection.

Poor Peterson, beset on all sides

I’ve said before that Jordan Peterson is a bad biologist, not any kind of biologist at all, and especially not an evolutionary biologist. When someone knowledgeable in the field looks at his expertise, he’s not even a good clinical psychologist. What, exactly, is he supposed to be good at? We can definitely say it sure isn’t ancient languages and the Bible.

…I discuss in detail how Peterson routinely tries to use ancient myths and the Bible to support his various noxious viewpoints, despite the fact that he has absolutely no understanding of the academic study of these subjects and his interpretations of them display a profound ignorance of the historical and cultural contexts from which they originate and how ancient audiences understood them.

Peterson frequently makes etymological arguments, which I’ve always found silly and are typically used creatively by know-nothings to make rhetorical points. Fake etymologies are common on the internet. The annoying thing about Peterson is that he uses them to sound “scholarly,” but he’s using them in bizarre ways.

By the way, sin. There’s two derivations of the word sin: one is chet, which is from the Hebrew, and the other is hamartia, from the Greek. And they both are archery terms that mean to miss the target.

And then he goes on to babble about sports arenas and crowds and I don’t know what, all while gesturing madly. It’s weird display. Very cringe.

But he’s getting everything wrong! Not that that would slow him down in the slightest.

In these few short sentences, Peterson has already made three serious errors. First, he mispronounces the Hebrew word חֵטְא (ḥeṭʾ)—a noun derived from the verbal root ח־ט־א (ḥ-ṭ-ʾ)—as /t͡ʃɛt/ (pronouncing the ⟨ḥ⟩ at the beginning like the ⟨ch⟩ in cheese) when it should actually be pronounced /χɛt/. This is a pronunciation mistake that no one who actually knows anything about Hebrew would make, since the sound /t͡ʃ/ does not exist in ancient or modern Hebrew. By mispronouncing the word in this blatant manner, Peterson clearly demonstrates that he does not even know the Hebrew alphabet.

Second, Peterson claims that these words are “derivations of the word sin,” but this is factually incorrect. Neither of these words is the etymological root of the English word sin; instead, they are ancient Hebrew and Greek words that occur in the texts of the Bible that modern translators normally render into English as the word sin because translators have decided (whether rightly or wrongly) that sin is the closest English equivalent of these terms.

Etymologically speaking, the English word sin actually derives from the Middle English word sinne, which derives from the Old English word synn, which derives from the Proto-West Germanic word *sunnju, meaning “responsibility,” “care,” “worry,” or “need.” This word, in turn, derives from the Proto-Germanic word *sunjō, meaning “truth.” This, in turn, comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₁sónts, meaning “a thing which exists or is true,” which is the active participle of the Proto-Indo-European verb *h₁es-, meaning “to be.”

Third and finally, Peterson claims that both the Hebrew word ḥeṭʾ and the Greek word ἁμαρτία are “archery terms,” but this is only partly true. It is true that ancient texts do use both of these words to refer to when a person shoots an arrow or throws a spear and misses their intended target. Nonetheless, ancient texts also use both of these words in a much more general sense to refer to any kind of mistake or failure that a person makes. In fact, some of the earliest attested occurrences of the word ἁμαρτάνω use it in this more general sense to mean simply “make a mistake.”

I’ll take the author’s word for it all, but using a tenuous link between sin and archery is already ridiculous. It’s an unwarranted extrapolation and interpretation, even if the etymology were correct. It’s like if I were talking about developmental biology, using technical terms we take for granted, like “competence” and “induction” and “determination,” and used a dictionary to declare that we thought embryos were self-willed intelligent beings. No, it’s more that embryologists in the 1920s were enamored with psychology and were borrowing terms to apply to concepts that had absolutely nothing to do with minds.

Peterson is that clueless nerd with a dictionary making stuff up to justify his conclusions.

Florida. Charter school. Principal a fan of Elon Musk. Need I say more?

This is not the person you want running your school.

A Florida principal resigned during an impassioned school board meeting on Tuesday, after it was revealed she tried to send $100,000 from the school’s account to a scammer posing as Elon Musk.

Jan McGee – the principal of Burns Science and Technology charter school in Oak Hill – claimed she spent months talking to a man online who was pretending to be the richest man on Earth, NBC affiliate WESH reports.

McGee was reportedly trying to net a multi-million dollar donation in the school, in exchange for a $100,000 check. Thankfully, the school’s business manager cancelled the check before it could be cashed.

The principal was repeatedly told she was speaking to a scammer, according to other administrators at the meeting. School staff members also pointed out other issues they have with McGee and accused her of fostering a toxic work environment.

McGee resigned after multiple staff members said they refused to work for her any longer, according to WESH.

If I really wanted to be a con artist, I would definitely move to Florida.