Me and my warlike ways

I’ve always wanted to trigger an international incident, and I guess I got my wish: I unleashed the Horde on Canada. Last week I brought to your attention a poll on abortion by a conservative Canadian MP. You all rushed in and surprised him by bringing in a strongly pro-choice position; he has since rallied the Canadian religious right (or more likely, tweaked a few numbers in the polling software) to produce a lead for the side wanting a complete ban on abortion.

You know the phrase “complete ban on abortion” is impractical, dishonest, and totalitarian, and can only be achieved over the bodies of dead women, right?

Anyway, it’s written up now by Windsor Star columnist Anne Jarvis. The Canadian government doesn’t want to debate abortion at all, and most Canadians are quite content with the current liberal legislation on reproductive rights. What this is is a game by conservatives to gin up the impression that there’s a serious argument being held among the electorate, rather than that there are a few authoritarian cranks lobbying for new laws to oppress women.

It’s what they all do. It’s exactly like the creationists saying we need to argue the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, when no, we do not: the matter has been settled, and only kooks are arguing against the right idea.

Maybe if they sink a lot of the budget into special effects…

There is no accounting for taste or credulity. Universal Pictures is planning to make Eben Alexander’s book into a movie. You remember Alexander; the Proof of Heaven guy, the surgeon who ‘died’ on the operating table and claimed to have visited heaven?

It might be interesting to see the effort. The whole tone of Alexander’s fantasy is one of vagueness, ineffableness, incomprehending awe — he talks about seeing indescribable beings like birds or angels that he can’t do justice to in words, for instance…I don’t think crisp CGI is exactly going to work in his favor.

People suck

I’ve been reading the story of Adalia Rose, a six year old girl with progeria. It makes me sick. Not Adalia, of course, but the fact that when she had fun posting videos on youtube and facebook, the trolls descended.

Sometime in June, Carl Ludwig Sherburne noticed a new "bandwagon," his term for the Internet’s ephemeral obsessions, cluttering his Facebook timeline. The notoriously disruptive 4chan board /b/ had seized upon some evidently sick girl’s Facebook page, and with the Miami Cannibal Zombie meme dying down, the rage among his online peers had shifted to PhotoShopping this child’s veiny, hairless head onto the bodies of famous monsters and extraterrestrials. People pasted her face on E.T., Roger from American Dad, Teletubbies, Land of the Lost Sleestaks, Gollum, Mini Me. There were so many different juxtapositions of this Progeria Girl, as Sherburne would come to call her, that he would start collecting them, like virtual trading cards, and eventually amass more than 500.

…

After Adalia’s passing, he said, the only online trace of her existence would be these cruel images. “You know whose fault it’s gonna be? It’s not gonna be the millions of people on the Internet who looked at them. It’s gonna be yours for letting these pictures escape,” he stammered, as if Adalia’s baby photos were leaked documents. “You are a sick woman. You are more disgusting and horrible than my fat disgusting ass could ever be.” He was nearly spitting. “You are one stupid bitch.”

Sound familiar? Screaming nitwits howling at a sick little girl and her mother, and then blaming the mother for letting Adalia use the internet. They’re bullies, they can’t help themselves, put something to mock in front of them and it’s their target’s fault that they have to bully them.

I’m sorry, Carl Ludwig Sherburne, but you’re wrong. You’re among the most disgusting and horrible things on the internet, and a woman posting her baby photos doesn’t even come close.

I am so over the skeptical movement

I am so over Ben Radford. I thought he was obtuse before. Now I’m convinced that he’s simply an idiot. He attempts to rebut my criticisms.

Myers admits that I’m technically correct that Ensler’s statistics are not exactly right, but claims I’m being “hyperskeptical,” and states that “One billion women have been victims of ‘homicide, intimate partner abuse, psychological abuse, dating violence, same-sex violence, elder abuse, sexual assault, date rape, acquaintance rape, marital rape, stranger rape and economic abuse,’ confirmed by statistics that Radford cites. One billion women. Radford’s hyperskepticism is so fierce that he objects to Ensler using 3 general words – raped, beaten, violated – instead of 26 more specific words, but is willing to overlook the horrific truth that she is correct and one billion women will suffer for their sex in their lifetime.”

Except that I didn’t; Myers misread it. I actually didn’t write the “one billion” figure that Myers misquotes me as saying; that was Ensler’s number. What I actually wrote (check it yourself) was that “one-third of women [have been victims of] homicide, intimate partner abuse, psychological abuse, dating violence, same-sex violence, elder abuse, sexual assault, date rape, acquaintance rape, marital rape, stranger rape and economic abuse.” (One in three women is not the same as one billion if you do the math, though perhaps that’s just my hyperskepticism.)

I was not saying he was technically correct. I was saying that the figure he’s carping about is actually right, and that his complaints are empty. I did not realize that he’d respond by proudly declaring his innumeracy: I’m sorry, but 1/3 of 1/2 of 7 billion people is actually about one billion.

Worse yet, he then goes on to piously plead that people need to heed the principle of charity in their arguments (I’ve noticed that it’s usually the people who most need charity who are begging for it.) Then — get ready for it — he turns around and writes this appalling piece of ham-handed dreck. Yeah, right. Fuck the principle of charity. No charity for you, Radford.

I’m so over Harriet Hall’s t-shirt. She’s been going on and on, circling around the drain to somehow defend it. It’s simple: she wore it to spite some people she clearly doesn’t like, and to get praise from other people who don’t like Rebecca Watson and the Skepchicks. It’s really that easy. Just admit it and move on. I know it’s hard to admit that you’re that petty, but it would end all this nonsense, and it would be honest. Get over it; the wordy excuse-making is getting embarrassing. Besides, Amanda Marcotte has Hall’s number.

I’m so over Reap Paden. Dear god, he’s so obsessive he’s made another creepy video that says far more about him than me.

The one thing I’m happy to do is publicize these dumbass arguments. Why is it that people who attach themselves to a movement that prides itself on having rationality as its raison d’etre are so godawful pathetic at making a case for themselves?

An argument for gun control that might finally resonate with wingnuts

A tragic story: a man stuffed a gun in his pants and it accidentally went off, shooting him in the penis and leg.

Let’s forestall the usual comments: no, he didn’t deserve to be mutilated this way, OK? But still, this kind of event is what we should worry about more, and which will occur far more, than some murderous villain blazing away at innocents with a gun. Accidents will happen, and the more casual (and incompetent) people end up with deadly weapons in their hands, the more often these irreversible and unfortunate errors will occur, and they will inevitably occur with far greater frequency than homicidal sprees. The best thing that can be said is that at least no one was killed…this time.

Although this particular man will be reluctant to ever hang out with his gun-toting companions in the future. Especially with the little detail that he shot himself with a pink pistol.

I am now even more confident that we need more gun control

If nothing else, I want this asshole disarmed. BigDaddyHoffman1911 is some kind of gun freak from North Carolina who is proud to be walking around everywhere carrying deadly weapons…and here he is bragging about carrying a pair of Glock handguns equipped with 50 round ammo drums each.

What war does he expect to erupt around him so that he’ll need that many rounds? Or does he just have 100 people on his kill list?

Jeez. Gun nuts. There really is something wrong with them.

(via Kick!.)

Show your work, @JoseCanseco!

The baseball player Jose Canseco made a remarkable series of tweets yesterday.

canseco

I may not be 100% right but think about it. How else could 30 foot leather birds fly?
The land was farther away from the core and had much less gravity so bigness could develop and dominate
My theory is the core of the planet shifted when single continent formed to keep us in a balanced spin
Gravity had to be weaker to make dinosaurs nimble
Animal tissue of muscles and ligaments could not support huge dinosaurs even standing up or pump blood up 60 foot necks
elephants today eight tons supersaurs two hundred tons a totally different world. why?
You ever wonder why nothing REALLY big exists today in nature
Ancient gravity was much weaker

Deja vu, man, deja vu. Any old regulars from the talk.origins usenet group will remember this one: Ted Holden and his endless arguments for Velikovskian catastrophism. Holden also claimed that earth’s gravity had to have been much lower for dinosaurs to stand up.

Ted Holden has been repeatedly posting the claim that sauropod dinosaurs were too large to have existed in 1g acceleration. His argument is based on simple square-cube scaling of human weightlifter performance (in particular, the performance of Bill Kazmaier). His conclusion is that nothing larger than an elephant is possible in 1g. His proposed solution is a “reduction in the felt effect of gravity” (by which he seems to mean the effective acceleration), due to a variant of Velikovskian Catastrophism, often called Saturnism. Ted’s materials in their current form can be found on his web pages dealing with catastrophism.

For those not familiar with Velikovsky, he was a pseudoscientist whose claim to fame was that he so nimbly straddled two disciplines and befuddled people on either side. He was a classical scholar who used his interpretations of ancient texts to claim there was evidence of astronomical catastrophes in Biblical times (his scholarship there impressed astronomers and left the real classical scholars laughing), while also peddling an astronomical model that had planets whizzing out of their orbits and zooming by Earth in near-collisions that caused the disasters in the Bible and other ancient civilizations (his physics dazzled the classical scholars but had physicists gawping in astonishment at their absurdity).

Holden at least tried to do the math; he just flopped and did it wrong. Canseco hasn’t even done that much. Vague and uninformed impressions are not justifications for rejecting science. Here are some quick arguments against this nonsense of dinosaurs living in reduced gravity.

  • Dinosaurs exhibit the adaptations required for their mass: limbs are thicker in proportion to their length, bones show large muscle insertions, bones are thick and dense, etc. The biology clearly obeys the scaling laws we can see in extant animals.

  • Holden’s mechanism for reducing gravity is ridiculous: he postulates, for instance, that Mars hovered above the Earth and that its gravitational pull countered part of the Earth’s pull. It would have to be very close to have that effect, and while it’s true that could reduce the ‘felt effect of gravity’, it would only do so briefly before the two planets collided and destroyed all life, and also, you wouldn’t be alive to experience that brief easing of the gravitational load — you’d have been killed in the destructive chaos during the approach, and your body’s behavior would probably be dominated by atmospheric and geological upheavals anyway.

  • Canseco’s mechanism is pathetic. We already have gravitational variations on the planet, with primary differences between the equator and the poles. These amount to a roughly 0.5% difference in weight — so a 200 pound person weighs 199 pounds at the equator, and 201 pounds at the North Pole. So, most optimistically, if all the gravitational anomalies happened to be piled up on one side of the planet, let’s assume that the Mesozoic variation was greater, all the way up to 1% less on the supercontinent. So that 200 ton supersaur Canseco is concerned about would instead weigh…198 tons. Oooh. That’s enough to make his objections disappear?

At least Canseco is not as delusional as Holden. But if he starts tweeting about giant teratorns carrying Neandertals on their backs, who then fly to Mars and build giant monuments in Cydonia, get him some help, OK?

I get email: explosive beginnings

sheldon_car

I still do get lots of letters from creationists. Their general tone is usually one of smugness: they’ve got a “gotcha” question they can’t wait to unload on an evilutionist.

dear prof pz myers

can an explosion(big bang)+time= a car?

yours

א ב

Why do you ask a yes/no question about something as complex as the origin of the universe? I can tell from how you chose to ask this question that you aren’t actually interested in the answer, but only want a binary response in which you can either get a “no,” in which case you’ll preen and claim you’ve got me to agree that natural causes are impossible, or you’ll get a “yes,” in which case you’ll fall back on your ignorant intuition and tell me that that is impossible. You aren’t sincere, and you aren’t curious, and you are not an honest seeker after the truth.

Your question is also badly formed; I can’t answer yes or no because it’s phrased in such a way as to reveal your false assumptions. You are equating your colloquial understanding of an explosion to a cosmological event, the Big Bang, and also making an implied demand for a complete causal chain covering a period of 13.8 billion years. A bit presumptuous, don’t you think, that you feel you can dash off a thoughtless question and expect a persuasive answer on a difficult topic?

It’s a commonplace cliche that a teacher will tell a class that there’s no such thing as a stupid question. The teacher is lying. I’ve run across many stupid questions, and you, sir, have written one. It’s not even amazingly stupid or creatively stupid or newly stupid; it’s mundanely stupid. It’s the stupidity of a parrot squawking what, to it, are nonsense syllables, and expecting a cracker for its effort. Further, it’s not a parrot repeating fragments of the speech of great philosophers or scientists, but a parrot fed on nothing but an aural diet of the mumblings of benighted fools.

So, I’m sorry, but I’m unimpressed. Try harder. Try thinking for a change.

As for the meat of your question, the cosmological expansion of the universe in the first instant of its beginning was something a little more profound and substantial than an “explosion”. The phrase “Big Bang” is shorthand, a metaphor, for a process that is seen in a rich data set of observations and that can be encapsulated in the language of physics and math. You’re clearly a religious person: ask your rabbi about “metaphors”. They’re used even in your holy books, and you’ll find yourself led to even more ridiculous conclusions about the nature of the universe if you follow every one of them strictly literally.

But if we generalize your question and ask whether explosions can lead to greater complexity and even greater organization, the answer is yes. A better example of such a phenomenon that better fits your casual understanding of the meaning of the word “explosion” is the aftermath of supernovae. The reactions that occur in the hearts of stars are part of a process called nucleosynthesis, in which smaller atoms are fused (it’s why these are called fusion reactions) to produce larger atoms; from a starting point of hydrogen stars build up larger atoms, like carbon and iron. And then at the end of their lifetime, the stars literally explode, dispersing those large elements in vast clouds that condense under the influence of gravity to form new stars and planets.

So yes, the iron in your car was forged in a star and scattered to our planet in an explosion. The carbon of which automotive engineers and factory workers are made was also assembled in a star that exploded.

The second term in your equation, time, is also an attempt to trivialize a phenomenon. Yes, “time” built us. But by time, of course, more sensible people mean a complex set of historical interactions and natural processes that were necessary for change to occur. Why do you regard it as something insignificant? We could say that you were the product of a messy eruption of fluids and cells from your mother and father plus “time”…but do you consider your embryonic development, your growth as a child and adolescent, your education (which, I’m sorry to say, was actually where you were shortchanged), your experiences and years of thoughts (shallow as they were), are simply reducible to a four-letter word?

Can ovulation/ejaculation+time=you?

Only in the most trivial and unhelpful sense. Just like your question.

Why the Republican Party as we know it is doomed

Because its base is made up of people like Kathleen O’Brien Wilhelm:

Signs that read “Deer Crossing” and the like are going to continue to pop up throughout our country including Avon Lake, but who are these signs for? Deer cannot read, do not obey the law and probably will cross where they wish. Although adorable companions, it is hard to remember the last time that the news reported an animal talking, thinking or providing significant input for the benefit of society. Yet, these signs cost taxpayers like so much of government.

It gets better from there. Just go read. Don’t say I never provided the Horde with amusement.