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.

You don’t get to be “over” rape

Oh, great. Ben Radford has put his foot in his mouth again. Radford has announced that he is “over” rape, that he doesn’t like the “One Billion Rising” efforts by Eve Ensler because she abuses statistics, and that he’s going to beat up a whole bunch of straw feminists. You can tell he’s got all of his ideas about what feminists believe from listening attentively to anti-feminists — it’s rather like reading an anti-evolution rant from someone who has got all of his information from creationist web sites. It tells us nothing useful about the subject under discussion, but it’s extremely revealing about the critic’s personal biases.

Ophelia has already set all of his straw on fire, but I have to mention that I agree with him on one thing: this One Billion Rising stuff leaves me cold, for reasons that Natalie Gyte articulates so well. Radford’s reasons, though, are classic hyperskepticism. Ensler has said that one in three women will be raped, violated, or beaten in their lifetime, which is where that “one billion” number comes from. Radford objects! It’s not true!

The correct statistic is not that one billion women will be raped in her lifetime (as Ensler said in an interview on Democracy Now!), nor that one in three women “will be raped or beaten” in her lifetime (as Ensler states on the One Billion Rising web site), but instead that one-third of women “has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused” in her lifetime (as referenced in the study linked to on the web site). “Otherwise abused” includes “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.” All these are serious, legitimate problems, but not all of them are physical beatings or rape (nor even involve men). This is important because mischaracterizing the statistic as reflecting women either being “raped or beaten” harms victimized women instead of empowering them by not reflecting the true diversity of forms of abuse.

You know, when someone tells me that statistics are being distorted for a cause, I imagine someone misrepresenting the data with exaggeration or understatement to bias it in a prejudicial direction. I don’t consider simplifying for a public interview while keeping the core numbers accurate to be using “misleading statistics to support their social agendas.”

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.

Maybe it’s a good thing he’s over complex social issues; from now on he can stick to the easy stuff, like debunking bigfoot stories, that are apparently at the upper limit of his intellectual capacity.

Sasquatch is ill-served

zztop

Melba Ketchum issued a press release announcing that she had sequenced Sasquatch DNA. That was back in November.

It stalled out at that point. It turns out the paper couldn’t get past peer review, and no one was going to publish it. We’re all heartbroken, I know.

But now she has overcome all the obstacles, and it’s finally in print! You can read the abstract.

One hundred eleven samples of blood, tissue, hair, and other types of specimens were studied, characterized and hypothesized to be obtained from elusive hominins in North America commonly referred to as Sasquatch. DNA was extracted and purified from a subset of these samples that survived rigorous screening for wildlife species identification. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequencing, specific genetic loci sequencing, forensic short tandem repeat (STR) testing, whole genome single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) bead array analysis, and next generation whole genome sequencing were conducted on purported Sasquatch DNA samples gathered from various locations in North America. Additionally, histopathologic and electron microscopic examination were performed on a large tissue sample. vel non-human DNA.

Umm, yeah, I know, it kind of falls apart in the last sentence, but that’s what it says.

How did she get it published?

Well, she says she bought an existing journal and renamed it (the Journal of Cosmology was on the market, and I hoped most fervently that that was it…but no, JoC is still online). So she owns the journal. It’s now called De Novo.

Then she came out with a special edition. It’s Volume 1, Issue 1. It contains precisely one paper, hers.

You should be laughing by this point.

The online journal is a mess. The layout is funky-ugly, it’s difficult to figure out how to actually get to the paper, and when you navigate to it, it’s got a wretched little “Buy Now” button imbedded in a couple of intersecting blocks of color in a hideous table-like layout. It reminds be of the esthetics of JoC.

Anyway, it’s $30 to buy a paper so bad they had to build a custom journal around it to get it published. Not interested.

Pwning David Barton

Barton is such a lying tool. Chris Rodda catches him in an outright lie: Barton claims that gun accidents didn’t occur in 18th century America, and that he could only find two accounts of such problems. I guess he must be a very bad historian, then, in addition to lacking any sense, because Chris just went browsing and found lots of accounts of accidental shooting deaths and injuries (as you’d expect — guns are dangerous tools, of course you’re going to get accidents!)

One other thing you might do, though, is that a link to the story is on Reddit…and some people have even downvoted it. Why? I don’t know. Rodda’s story is full of hard evidence that Barton was completely wrong. Those of you with Reddit accounts might head over there and give your honest opinion.

Atheists are responsible for creationism!

Here’s something that really, really annoys me: clueless idiots who blame atheism for creationism.

I don’t have stats but I strongly suspect that the strenghtening of creationism with the simultaneous rise of public atheism is not a coincidence.

That isn’t just ahistorical ignorance: it requires such short-sightedness that they aren’t able to look back even a decade.

The major events in creationism that led to their expansion were the publications of the Scofield Reference Bible and The Fundamentals in the early years of the 20th century, and the publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961. Neither periods were associated with a rise in atheism. The first actually coincides with the third Great Awakening; I don’t want to diminish the importance of Robert Ingersoll and the Golden Age of Freethought, but lets not pretend that these were serious challenges to the ubiquitous association of the church with morality and political power. They were promises of secularism that didn’t threaten the status quo all that much, yet. If you wanted something that was scaring many conservatives of that time, look to the Suffrage Movement. I don’t see many people arguing that women’s rights were responsible for creationism, but I expect they are out there.

The second major event in creationism came after the entrenchment of Christianity in the 1950s as part of the Cold War. Our money was splattered with “in God we trust” and “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance in the 1950s; where, pray tell, were the loud aggressive atheists who prompted those religious actions in that period? Is anyone seriously going to argue that the era of the gray flannel suit and Ward Cleaver and the Red Menace was a time of high atheist activity?

Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s lawsuit to end the reading of the Bible in public schools was settled by the Supreme Court in 1963. It was not a trigger for widespread public piety, but was a response to that association of patriotism and civil life and religiosity that had been brewing in this country since the end of World War II. American Atheists was founded after “in God we trust”. Finding a causal relationship that pins the blame on atheism has a few temporal difficulties.

The Institute for Creation Research was founded in 1972. Answers in Genesis was founded in 1980. The NCSE was established in 1983, in response to the rising influence of creationism in the schools (and it is explicitly NOT an atheist organization). No one was trying to insert atheism into the schools in the 1960s. No one is trying to do that even now, but we’ve been dealing with efforts to push Genesis crap and faith-based bullshit in the schools for at least 60 years.

The Moral Majority was big news in the early 1980s, and was founded in 1979. I was wide awake and politically aware in the 1980s; there were no big atheist role models making a noise in the public sphere, they were still little more than a despised minority at the time, and most people were surprised to learn that atheists even existed in America.

The recent rise of public atheism can be traced to a number of influential books. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, by Susan Jacoby, published in 2004. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason in 2004 and Letter to a Christian Nation in 2006, by Sam Harris. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins in 2006.

It’s been less than ten goddamned years.

And we’ve still got idiots claiming they see a correlation between creationism/public religiosity and outspoken atheists.

Listen, whenever you see someone making that claim, you know you’ve found an idiot talking out of their ass. Give them a look of contempt and walk away.

This just in: Fox News ‘experts’ are lying shitsacks

You might have seen this already: Media Matters caught it and it’s making the rounds, including at my green energy joint at KCET. Fox News talking head Shibani Joshi says the reason Germany’s leading the U.S. in solar power installations by a factor of about 20 is that Germany has more sun than we do in the U.S. It’s toward the end of the clip:

Money quotes: Gretchen Carlson asked “What was Germany doing correct? Are they just a smaller country, and that made it more feasible?” Joshi: “They’re a smaller country, and they’ve got lots of sun. Right? They’ve got a lot more sun than we do.”

Here’s the inconvenient truth (as they say), courtesy the National Renewable Energy Laboratory:

NREL-Insolation-map-2-8-13

It’s almost like they just don’t care they’re lying.

Anil Potti likes to keep his name in the internet spotlight

Anil Potti is the dodgy researcher who, after being found guilty of scientific fraud, hired an online reputation manager to fluff up his name. Then the guy who made stuff up in 18 papers and padded his CV fled to North Dakota, where he’s working in a cancer center…now that’s chilling, isn’t it?

His latest exploit is to get posts critical of him yanked from Retraction Watch, the site that monitors journals’ behavior when fraud is exposed.

It’s a familiar strategy.

  1. A site says something rude (like the truth) about Potti.

  2. Fake site posts a copy of the rude article.

  3. Fake site files a DMCA claiming that the original article was a copyright violation.

  4. Rude article disappears! Anil Potti triumphs! He has successfully scrubbed criticism from the internet!

Oh, wait. Didn’t I just mention his name multiple times? He may have to rethink his grand plan, because it’s just going to make the situation worse for him.

“Peace process”? “Cease fire”? WTF?

This is utterly bizarre. We’ve got a bunch of people whining for a “cease fire” in the atheist community. It makes no sense at all.

“54°40′ or Fight” required negotiations. Rockets being fired across the border might need a cease fire. A displaced ethnic minority might have grounds for asking for reconciliation in a peace agreement. All these sorts of things involve two parties coming together with specific and conflicting demands on each side, with the goal of resolving them in some sort of compromise.

Specific demands. Get that? It’s important. There’s nothing to discuss if we aren’t bring some specifics to the table.

And that’s the thing: I am making no demands of the other side in these arguments. None at all. They can complain all they want. So what are we supposed to compromise on? I don’t give a damn what they do. Nothing we can argue over is going to compel me to like those assholes — that’s not something you can do in a “peace process” — and it’s quite clear that the feeling is mutual.

And the converse is also true: they have not said what I’m supposed to stop doing or change…well, other than stop being an evil feminist or whatever, which we know isn’t going to happen. It also doesn’t matter what they want, I’m not planning to change anything.

This is a reasonably diverse blog; I write about what interests me, against what I dislike, for causes I care about; no one is going to be able to tell me to stop writing about X. I’m also going to disagree with people, and say so. And yes, the blog content will continue to reflect my concerns about science, liberal politics, feminism, the environment, developmental biology, random weird observations, and whatever the hell strikes my fancy. These aren’t negotiable items.

This blog is not fixated on my hatred of some other person on the net; contrast that with our opponents, who have built an entire forum dedicated to their hatred of all things associated with Skepchick, Freethoughtblogs, and feminism. I do not troll other people’s sites. I do not create anonymous accounts for email or twitter which I use to express my secret contempt for anyone. I do not create sockpuppet accounts or fake accounts purporting to represent my enemies for the purpose of sowing confusion and lies. I do not address women by slang names for their genitals. I do not stoop to making photoshop collages of my opponents’ faces pasted onto pornography or clowns or animals (it would be hard to do, given that most of my opponents are anonymous cowards.) I do not court hate sites like AVoiceForMen for their endorsement or approval.

I do not tell the people on the other side of this argument to stop doing that. In fact, I am quite happy with the fact that they are the kind of corrupt and demented ignoramuses who would continue to indulge in such nonsense. So what is there to negotiate here?

Let’s get right down to the obvious fact: those yahoos hate us because we use our voices to speak out for feminism, social justice for all, and a willingness to advocate for all that as a natural extension of rational thought. That’s the real difference, and the only difference that counts here; and no, I’m not going to change that under any circumstances. It is not something I can compromise on. My silence on issues I care about will not be a bargaining chip.

I don’t care whether it’s an overt opponent or someone pretending to be a neutral party; I don’t give a good goddamn for anyone trying to dictate my causes. I’m also going to roll my eyes at anyone claiming to be disinterested and just trying to heal a Deep Rift, because every time someone protests that they “just want a dialogue”, they’re stalling to preserve the status quo. There is no compromise on equal rights for women and minorities, because any compromises are always seeking to settle on inequality.

There’s not one thing I would change about what I do. And I’m going to laugh in the face of anyone who tries to tell me otherwise.