Please, no more martyrs

Two good men gave their lives in Portland to defend innocent women from a right-wing hate-monger.

Ricky John Best was a father of four and an army veteran. He ran for political office, saying, “I can’t stand by and do nothing”, something we should all be saying.

Taliesin Namkai-Meche was a college student. His last words as he was taken away by the medics were, “Tell everyone on this train I love them”.

The survivor of the attack, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, opposed prejudice against Muslims and said “I just hope that people are listening and try to do something about it.”

The women are horrified.

Republican party representatives, on the other hand, are looking at this situation and suggesting that maybe they ought to hire more white nationalist religious fanatics as security guards.

Multnomah County GOP chair James Buchal, however, told the Guardian that recent street protests had prompted Portland Republicans to consider alternatives to abandoning the public square.

I am sort of evolving to the point where I think that it is appropriate for Republicans to continue to go out there, he said. And if they need to have a security force protecting them, that’s an appropriate thing too.

Asked if this meant Republicans making their own security arrangements rather than relying on city or state police, Buchal said: Yeah. And there are these people arising, like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.

Asked if he was considering such groups as security providers, Buchal said: Yeah. We’re thinking about that. Because there are now belligerent, unstable people who are convinced that Republicans are like Nazis.

Hmm. Maybe if you don’t want to be thought of as like Nazis, you shouldn’t be identifying with murderous fascist kooks and suggesting that far right white nationalist groups and rabid anti-government militias like the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters are legitimate supporters of your political party.

But please, no more deaths of good people. Let’s destroy these goons at the ballot box.

Pornographers, spiritual and secular

I was just reading this thought-provoking essay by Alan Levinovitz, The Awful Pleasures of Spiritual Pornography. Oooh, “spiritual pornography”, I wonder what that is, I thought. Levinovitz provides two examples: this is a review of Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture by Anthony Esolen and The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by the unpleasant Rod Dreher. And I have to say, this kind of pornography isn’t fun at all.

…the soul of these books is not love of God; it is bitter loathing of those who do not share it. They are a kind of spiritual pornography that works against spiritual regret, designed to arouse climactic cries of Yes! Yes! in its readers, pleasing the soul’s darker parts by swapping a hollow fantasy of physical union for an equally hollow fantasy of moral warfare: a Manichean vision of a virtuous few battling mightily against everyone else.

The basic engine of what I read — and its intended effect on readers — is little different from that of 19th-century anti-Catholic literature, the Left Behind series, Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness, and Jack Chick’s wild-eyed cartoon tracts. Spiritual pornography, in all of its incarnations, stars easy heroes and villains. The heroes are idealizations of the target audience, which encourages narcissism, and the villains are caricatures of The Other, which encourages bigotry. And although a little spiritual pornography probably does no lasting harm, frequent, concentrated doses can seriously damage individual souls, and, worse, society at large.

I have to wonder if Dreher would find the comparison to Jack Chick to be terribly déclassé, but still rather flattering, in a vulgar way. He might think you’ve gone a bit too far if you point out another example of spiritual pornography, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which similarly treats the outgroup as literal child-murdering servants of Satan. But then this review makes a fairly safe accusation: that it’s not Jews or Catholics that are the new targets, but those damned liberal secularists. Dreher and Esolen would be fine with that, because their entire oeuvre is about how they deserve condemnation.

“Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan,” observed Richard Hofstadter in his classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” using as his exemplar a hugely popular 19th-century fabrication by one Maria Monk, who accused priests of systematically raping nuns, then baptizing and murdering whatever children resulted.

The 21st-century equivalent is not anti-Catholic but anti-secular, a category capacious enough for atheists, reform Jews, New Age mystics, nihilist Nietzscheans, even liberal Christians — the last of these described by Dreher, derisively, as “moralistic therapeutic deists,” and Esolen, appallingly, as Persecutors and Quislings — anti-anyone, really, whose religiosity is deemed less austere than that of the pornographer.

Calling spiritual pornography a fantasy helps to evoke its psychological appeal, but the world it conjures up is closer to that of the fairy tale. Both genres are built on two foundational features: dramatic arcs that proceed from Order to Disorder to Order, and clearly defined roles and rules that map neatly onto good and evil. It’s a world that trades humans for archetypes, nuance for simplicity, and the tangled skein of history for the orderly vectors of myth — but if you’re on the side of the angels, living in it feels really, really good.

I have to confess that I think this is where the atheist movement has gone astray, and has too often veered into secular pornography — we possess a kernel of truth, that there is absolutely no evidence for gods, or even a coherent definition of what a god is, and it’s all too easy to segue from that grain of true knowledge to an absolute certainty that those who don’t agree with us are total idiots in all things. We demonize them right back.

It gets worse when the only time atheists find common cause with religious absolutists is when they find another scapegoat to abuse. Right now we have a sect of atheists who have decided that one religious group, the Muslims, are wronger than another religious group, the Christians, so they argue about which one is more evil and form alliances to wage war on whole cultures and suggest that maybe we should convert them from one wrong philosophy to another wrong philosophy as a tool of pacification.

What we should be arguing, as atheists, is that all of them are wrong about the indefensible god-nonsense, but that all of them, like us, are humans who have one life to live, and who come from long lines of humans with rich histories and diverse cultures that we ought to acknowledge and respect. Our obligation as atheists is to protect the rights and dignity of all of our fellow human beings, not to use differences in belief as a pretext to deny those rights and dignities to other human beings. We should, as people of science, be in universal agreement that all people are people, with equal rights, including a right to live and think freely.

Yes, it feels really, really good to live in the reality of True Science and Reason. It feels a lot less good when you’re trapped in that reality with people who seriously argue that all those outside of our shared intellectual domain ought to be arrested, deported, bombed, and tortured, who doubt the intellectual capacity of people with darker skins, or people who were brought up in a different faith tradition. You’ve joined the so-called Rationality Club only to discover it’s also open to secular pornographers.

It’s kind of disillusioning.

The pig-man gets more press

The media do like their kooks. They’re far more entertaining than the truth. So once again, the ludicrous Eugene McCarthy, the man who believes humans are the product of hybridization between pigs and chimpanzees, gets a long write-up that dwells far too long on McCarthy’s pathetic rationalizations. His justifications are superficial and often wrong: they amount to looking in a mirror, and noticing that we’re kinda mostly hairless, just like pigs, and we have lots of body fat, like pigs, and we have organs, just like pigs, and we’re bipedal, just like pigs, and we have tusks, just like pigs, and we have nipples, just like pigs, and we have 12 of them, just like pigs, and we’re even-toed ungulates, just like pigs…you get the idea. He’s an idiot, but he’s an idiot who makes long pseudoscientific lists with sciencey terms, so he impresses the rubes.

His ill-informed views get another long airing in which he gets to present his self-pitying schtick of being a martyr to intolerant scientists, and how he’s a true revolutionary who’s going to change the modern paradigm. He’s basically full of shit. The whole article could have been truncated to its early statement of the premise:

Since the early ‘80s, he has believed that humans are the result of an errant sexual encounter between our closest relative, the chimpanzee, and the animal with which we seemingly share all aforementioned traits: the pig.

Followed by this one paragraph buried deep in the story:

The most damning refutation of McCarthy’s hypothesis is “the absence of any pig or pig-related genes in the human genome,” according to Roger Butlin, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Sheffield in Britain. Instead, the human genome is “entirely consistent” with the explanation that humans are great apes, most recently sharing an ancestor with living chimps and bonobos, he said.

Yep. If we were pig-chimp hybrids, it would jump out at us from the data. The sequences aren’t there. We’re done.

But the article goes on. McCarthy has an excuse — he always has an excuse.

If McCarthy did crave more recognition from mainstream experts (he doesn’t, he insists), his best bet would be to look for a signature unique to pigs in the DNA of humans but not other apes, said John McDonald, a biology professor at the University of Georgia and a former advisor of McCarthy’s.

A few years ago, McCarthy tried to do just that. He and a friend wrote a computer program to search the human genome for traces of pig hybridization. But the task was too computationally intensive. “It would have taken a lifetime to process the data on the small computers we had access to,” he said.

So he tried to reinvent BLAST, a publicly accessible program that you can run on NIH’s computers over the internet, and couldn’t get it to go. You know, ya great goofy loon, you could also pick up any of a number of molecular phylogeny papers and find that other people have done the work for you. That’s what molecular phylogeny is all about: you gather a bunch of DNA sequences from a bunch of different species, and you compare them and weigh the differences, and you throw them into a computer program that churns through all the species and all the genes and spits out a summary of how closely related they are. It’s been done! The pig and chimp lineages separated in the Cretaceous.

Can we just be done with this? Media, ignore the clown capering over there — there are good science stories to discuss.

I do have to end with one final quote from McCarthy.

There’s also another reason McCarthy remains so attached to his ideas: He believes altruism, not competition, is the way of the world. With neo-Darwinism and natural selection, competition is a fact of life, and that logic can be used to justify war, conflict, and ethnic cleansing (“Darwin’s biggest fan was Hitler,” he said).

That’s a common creationist claim, but it’s wrong. Hitler was not a fan of Darwin, and even if he were, it would not have the slightest implications for the truth of the theory.

Jim Watson needs to retire to a nice, remote beach somewhere far from everyone else

Dr. James Watson, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, 7.23.06

It’s long past due. He’s been shooting himself in the foot and then stuffing it in his mouth to gnaw on it for decades. He was in the news for his racist, sexist views ten years ago.

The article is like a summary of Watson’s greatest gaffes.

In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He later insisted he was talking about a “hypothetical” choice which could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that “stupidity” could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great.”

Zuska has another one.

He smiles. “Rosalind is my cross,” he says slowly. “I’ll bear it. I think she was partially autistic.” He pauses for a while, before repeating the suggestion, as if to make it clear that this is no off-the-cuff insult, but a considered diagnosis. “I’d never really thought of scientists as autistic until this whole business of high-intelligence autism came up. There is probably no other explanation for Rosalind’s behaviour.

At that time I thought he was a horrible old man but I argued that he ought to have the right to speak freely…and he does. He speaks very freely. But what he says is neither intelligent nor insightful, and he doesn’t deserve respect for his stupid opinions. Especially when tolerance just means he never learns and keeps doing the same thing over and over again.

Now the Carl Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois has cancelled an invitation to speak.

A research institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign agreed to host James Watson, a Nobel laureate whose work is credited with discovering the structure of DNA, to give a lecture there. But the event was quickly called off amid faculty concerns about whether it was appropriate to host someone like Watson, whose statements have been widely condemned as racist.

Watson has made numerous controversial comments over the years and also has been condemned for sexist and homophobic statements.

But his comments on race have led many to say he should be shunned.

In a 2007 interview, he said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” Further, he said that while people hope that all groups are equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” (He also said that some black people are smart, and has apologized, although many question the sincerity of his apology.)

I had dinner with Watson at a small restaurant in New York several years ago. It was the most uncomfortable two hours of my life. All he wanted to talk about was race, and the conversation was all about our geneaology. He asked what my ancestry was, and when I told him half Scandinavian, half Scot/English/Irish he immediately judged me acceptable company, and started explaining my personality to me. Scandinavians are intelligent but cold and aloof, and share the same problems that the Japanese have: they are among the smartest people in the world, but they lack the passion and drive to accomplish great things. You know who may not be as intrinsically intelligent, but make up for it with their aggressive need to get things done? The Scots/Irish! Best people on the planet! The perfect combination of ambition and smarts!

I think he thought he was flattering me, but I just wanted to sink into my chair and down through the floor and drop into a subway tube. Heck, dropping into a sewer line would be preferable.

It was difficult to get a word in edgewise with this guy, but after that pronouncement he looked at me expectantly — I could tell there was a question he wanted me to ask. So I obliged, knowing exactly what the answer would be. “So, Jim, what’s your ancestry?”

“Scots/Irish!” he cackled.

And then he regaled the table with tales of brave explorers and pioneers and soldiers, all his people. I tried to strike up a conversation with his wife, instead, who seemed very nice and a little distressed at her husband’s mania.

So, yes, I’ve heard more than enough of Jim Watson. I think we all ought to be a bit Watsoned out at this point, and I don’t see any purpose in inviting him to give public lectures anymore. You never know: he might launch into a fact-free fairy tale about having dark skin, being fat, and being over-sexed as linked properties caused by exposure to the sun and living in tropical countries, illustrated with a slide show of women in bikinis.

He really did that.

I’m just surprised that any professional organization would be so unaware of his reputation that they’d invite him in the first place.

She’s a good dog

Ollie is a good dog, yes she is. Such a good dog! It’s not her fault that she has ended up on the editorial boards of medical journals.

…in one respect, the Staffordshire Terrier differs radically from her canine peers: she has a burgeoning academic career, and sits on the editorial boards of seven medical journals.

As you may have guessed, the journals on whose boards Ollie sits are of the predatory variety. These are shadowy, online publications that mimic legitimate journals, but are prepared to publish anything in exchange for a fee that can run into thousands of dollars. Predatory journals prey on desperate young researchers under huge pressure to get their research published to further their careers.

Ollie’s owner is Mike Daube, Professor of Health Policy at Curtin University in Perth. Ollie likes to watch Mike working on his computer, and Mike gets a lot of emails from predatory journals. Wondering just how low these journals would go, he put together a curriculum vitae for his dog – detailing research interests such as “the benefits of abdominal massage for medium-sized canines” – and sent it off to a number of these journals, asking for a spot on their editorial boards.

She has also been asked to review papers. I suspect she’d be a harsh critic, despite being such a good dog, because usually when you put a paper on the floor they poop on it. And that’s good! Good doggie!

Why Fox News is a joke

It’s a whole collection of Baghdad Bobs. You have to see this ludicrous fascist propaganda from Jeanine Pirro to believe it.

Here are just her opening sentences.

President Trump has wrapped up his intense 9 day overseas international voyage that by all accounts was a home run. Our commander-in-chief, the pillar of strength and a true advocate for America. His message: clear and unequivocal. There was no apology, no wimpish behavior, and no bowing down to other leaders. But instead, strength, honor, and determination.

“By all accounts”? You mean like this one, Trump’s ally-angering trip abroad, explained in 7 images, or possibly this one, The Most Cringe-Worthy Moments From Trump’s First International Trip? Or possibly this account, The Ugly American’s road trip: Donald Trump and America’s declining culture. Or Trump’s behavior at NATO is a national embarrassment. Or The 8 Most Embarrassing Moments from Trump’s *ONE DAY* at NATO. Or Our Embarrassment in Chief’s International Trip Is No Laughing Matter.

Pirro is raving and completely disconnected from reality…how does she remain employed? Or rather, how come Donald Trump hasn’t snatched her away to be his new press secretary?

If you can bear to sit through the whole thing, at the end her big point is that Trump is perfect, and he has only one problem: leakers. The leakers in the White House are the true traitors who must be rooted out and punished. She looked like she wanted to pound the table, except that such vigorous action might make her face fall off and expose the hate machine behind it.

Is this a Texas thing?

This is not what teachers are supposed to do, and in fact, this is kind of the opposite of a teacher’s role. A teacher at Anthony Aguirre Junior High handed out fake certificates, including one labeled ‘most likely to be a terrorist’, to kids, while other teachers laughed. It’s just a joke, don’t be so sensitive, yadda yadda yadda.

And if that wasn’t appalling enough, another teacher also handed out fake awards to their kids, including “most likely to blend in with white people” to a black student.

Did they think that was a compliment? Because that would be all kinds of fucked up, too.

The school administration has clammed up — they say these teachers will be ‘disciplined’. I have no idea what that means, nor does anyone, and it does no one any favors to fail to be transparent about these sorts of problems.

It sounds to me, though, like there are some teachers at that school who are not suited to their profession and need to find new jobs.

Meet the Freethought Bloggers #1!

I’m getting together in small groups with some of our fellow bloggers here to help you all figure out what they’re up to. First up are William Brinkman of the Bolingbrook Babbler and HJ Hornbeck of Reprobate Spreadsheet. We had a brief conversation about what they’ve been writing about recently.

I’ll be doing some more of these over the summer, and in fact have another one scheduled for this evening. While you’re waiting for that, as I’m sure you are, visit Brinkman and Hornbeck.