Our marriage is over!

It seems awfully harsh that my wife will learn about the impending dissolution of our relationship on a blog post, but it’s true. There has been a formal announcement on the interwebs. All marriages will be imminently nullified by Jesus, and since our wedding was most definitely officiated by a Jesus-lovin’ god-walloper, I don’t see any loopholes.

Wait. It’s an interpretation of the book of Revelation? That’s a relief. I guess I can ignore it, even though the prospect of living in sweet, delicious sin was appealing.

It did make me think of one thing, though. You know how the Republican party has discredited itself by nominating an orange turd with cotton candy floss for hair and very tiny hands for the presidency? Not just his ridiculous appearance and behavior, but his lack of policy knowledge and his absurd accusations and second amendment solutions…all conspire to demolish the credibility of the entire party, and expose the hypocrisy of its leaders.

I would suggest that the Book of Revelation does the same for all of Christianity. That it was included at all in the early formulations of dogma should be an embarrassment — it’s as if a physics textbook were to include a screed from the Time Cube guy, or a biology textbook had a chapter on the age of the earth that just babbled on about 6000 years and the Great Flood. Even if there are nice, poetic, humanist sections of the Bible, shouldn’t the incorporation of raving apocalyptic lunacy as a legitimate part of the story, especially when the most demented members of the faith seem to gravitate towards it, tell you that this is not a credible text?

It’s not alone, either. The book of Genocide — I mean, Genesis — and Leviticus and the misogynistic dictates of Paul…shouldn’t they all make you hold the ol’ Holy Book at arms length and deposit the nasty book in the nearest trash can? You can talk all you want about the sweetness of the Song of Solomon or the Psalms, or the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, but that just makes the whole thing the canonical shit sandwich made with the best pickles and good chewy homemade bread.

Academic failures in elementary humanity

Here’s the deal: I am paid to teach, which means I have a professional relationship with my students, and it’s an ongoing relationship that typically extends over four years. My job is to educate them in those domains of biology I specialize in. The administrators here have an expectation that I will show up, be prepared, behave professionally, and engage with students at a level beyond lecturing at them: I advise them on professional opportunities, I write recommendations, I try to help with small crises that might derail their progress.

I do not have sex with them or beat them up. This should be obvious, right? Those kinds of behaviors would be antithetical to my university’s mission and my obligations.

This seems to be a poorly understood concept at the University of Sussex. Dr Lee Salter was a lecturer there. He was convicted of viciously beating his girlfriend (warning: graphic photos of a battered, bloody woman at that link), a woman he met as a student.

This is where it gets into some difficult boundaries. She was a former student, she is an adult, and this was a consensual relationship. That part, you can’t prohibit…but it’s a bit skeevy, and says that you should be keeping an eye on the guy to make sure he is not preying on students.

The part where he batters her bloody was not consensual. That part immediately moves the relationship from slightly creepy (but maybe it was “true love”!) into flagrant criminality. That’s where you’ve revealed that this wasn’t a healthy relationship between two adults, but an abusive relationship with a man who thinks he’s the boss.

Gail Gray, chief executive of RISE, Brighton and Hove’s specialist domestic abuse service, said: “This is not a romantic ‘Educating Rita’ scenario. This is about a man who has abused and exploited his position of power and authority to perpetrate domestic abuse.”

So far, so tawdry. But what is appalling is that the administrators at this university were completely aware of his behavior, and continued to allow him to teach students, despite the clear violation of university policies.

During the 10 month period between his arrest and conviction, Salter continued to teach, the university has admitted, while Ms Smith said she remained so traumatised she was afraid to leave the house.

This is despite regulations laid out on the university’s own website which say “staff and students are subject to disciplinary procedures that, amongst other things, proscribe violent behaviour”.

The policy reads: “The University will take disciplinary action in accordance with its procedures against anyone who behaves in a violent manner including, should it be necessary, the immediate exclusion of the perpetrator from the campus.”

“The University may also seek injunctions to exclude the perpetrators of violence form University premises in order to protect staff and students from further violent incidents.”

These problems will continue to arise as long as the awareness that domestic violence is unacceptable fails to be understood at all levels. Too often, having something written in a policy handbook is a cover-your-ass move to forestall actually doing something about it.

What should have happened is that the university administration should have said, “You’re going on a trial for beating up a former student? You’re not going into a classroom until this is resolved, and are on academic leave.”

His colleagues should have said, “Nope, we’re not working with you until this is cleared up.”

And the students at the university should have been made aware of the charges, so that they wouldn’t sign up for a course and then discover it’s being taught by an accused violent abuser. There’s an element of coercion there — students must take certain courses at certain times to graduate on schedule, so the entire university has to take responsibility for the professoriate, for their safety.

We also discover that this wasn’t unusual for Salter.

Described by Ms Smith as a manipulative and cruel man”, Salter alluded to her of having previous relationships with former students. She said he attended his court sentencing accompanied by another young student from the University of Brighton.

The court heard that Salter’s relationship with that student would be “closely monitored” as part of his sentencing.

Jebus. This is a guy with a thing for young students. He’s a predator. He should not be employed by any educational institution, because he brings disrepute to the entire profession.

Yet the University of Sussex kept him on the job until only recently? I didn’t know that lecturers in media and film were such a rare commodity that they had to be retained at all cost (I know science professors aren’t; if I were tossed out for good cause there’d be a long line of applicants ready to step right into my shoes.)

Quacks & creationists: heed this

John Timmer explains some experiments in physics that have exposed some unexpected behavior by protons. Read that article to get the story, but this little bit jumped out at me as universally applicable to all science.

This may sound like a minor puzzle, but remember that the proton’s radius is tied into theories like the Standard Model, so the result suggested that there might be something wrong with our understanding of some basic physics. Theorists, naturally, responded with enthusiasm and developed some new models that added an additional fundamental force that influenced the muon’s interactions with the proton.

Show a scientist a problem, a real problem with data to back it up, and scientists naturally respond with enthusiasm. That’s the Standard Model of Scientific Behavior.

When scientists respond with a groan and a facepalm when you tell them your new theory for how humans evolved, or how chi flows through the body, or how to cure cancer with mango smoothies, or worse, announce that your scientific explanation is invalid because it doesn’t include the Bible or the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita, it’s because you don’t understand how science works. Real difficulties with an idea get us worked up and excited. Imaginary difficulties lacking in substantial evidence are uninteresting and mean we have to shoo away an annoying loon.

We’ve already confirmed that some people are irrational and ignorant. That observation has been replicated repeatedly and doesn’t enthuse anyone at all.

Related: here’s a professional physicist who consults with self-taught “theorists”.

The majority of my callers are the ones who seek advice for an idea they’ve tried to formalise, unsuccessfully, often for a long time. Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in engineering or a related industry. All of them are men. Many base their theories on images, downloaded or drawn by hand, embedded in long pamphlets. A few use basic equations. Some add videos or applets. Some work with 3D models of Styrofoam, cardboard or wires. The variety of their ideas is bewildering, but these callers have two things in common: they spend an extraordinary amount of time on their theories, and they are frustrated that nobody is interested.

She charges $50 for 20 minutes of consulting, in which she directs them towards current literature and advises them on the deficiencies in their background that they need to fill. I’ve had so many of these kinds of people harangue me with their ideas and objections to evolution, but I never realized I should be charging for the service.

Except, for $50 they’d probably expect me to be nice.

“Honeypot for assholes” is accurate, but probably didn’t make it past Twitter’s marketing department

Buzzfeed has been generating some genuinely informative articles lately — it’s become much more than a clickbait site. This article on Twitter’s colossal failure to police itself is a great example. Twitter has had this ongoing harassment problem practically since its founding, the founders knew it, and they have done nothing about it.

By March 2008, exhausted and disillusioned by a torrent of tweets calling her a “cunt” and a “whore” and publicizing personal information like her email address, Waldman reached out to Twitter again, this time to the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey. After a series of phone calls to the company went nowhere, Dorsey and Twitter went silent. So in May, Waldman went public, detailing her ordeal in a blog post, which caught fire in media circles.

Twitter, then still a startup, was fresh off a buzzy SXSW debut, and Waldman’s post was an unfamiliar bit of bad press, depicting Dorsey in particular as an unsympathetic, even cowardly, chief executive. “Jack explained that they’re scared to ban someone because they’re scared if it turned into a lawsuit that they are too small of a company to handle it,” Waldman wrote. While Twitter founder Biz Stone issued a formal acknowledgment of the problem, arguing that “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content,” Dorsey was silent. Co-founder Ev Williams was more critical, posting tweets that cast doubt on Waldman’s claims and halfheartedly apologizing with a simple “our bad.”

…

More than eight years after Waldman’s ordeal, harassment on Twitter is rampant — so much so that it has become a primary destination for trolls and hate groups. So much so that its CEO declared, “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.” So much so that numerous high-profile users have quit the service, citing it as an unsafe space. Today, Twitter is a well-known hunting ground for women and people of color, who are targeted by neo-Nazis, racists, misogynists, and trolls, often just for showing up. Just this summer, actor Leslie Jones was driven off Twitter after a barrage of racist comments and death threats, only to return after a personal reassurance from Dorsey himself. Last week, Normani Kordei of the pop group Fifth Harmony also stepped away from the service after suffering years of “horrific and racially charged” tweets. Despite its integral role in popular culture and in social justice initiatives from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, Twitter is as infamous today for being as toxic as it is famous for being revolutionary. And unless you’re a celebrity — or, as it turns out, the president of the United States of America — good luck getting help.

Part of this problem is a gross ideological commitment to “free speech” — which isn’t really what anyone means by free speech. It ought to mean a commitment to refusing to favor one political or social position over any other, but instead, it’s become about allowing anyone to vomit shit freely, everywhere, so that raw useless noise dominates over any signal. Dogmatic free speech purists actually diminish the availability of free speech by prioritizing the protection of garbage over information and even friendly discussion. And it clearly is a weird philosophical absolutism by a few of the founders.

This maximalist approach to free speech was integral to Twitter’s rise, but quickly created the conditions for abuse. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, which have always banned content and have never positioned themselves as platforms for free speech, Twitter has made an ideology out of protecting its most objectionable users. That ethos also made it a beacon for the internet’s most vitriolic personalities, who take particular delight in abusing those who use Twitter for their jobs. This spring, the Just Not Sports podcast posted video of sports fans reading a sampling of the hateful tweets that the sportswriters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro received while writing and reporting. The video amassed over 3.5 million views on YouTube. Its message: This level of depravity is commonplace on Twitter.

Every useful medium has limitations on what can be said. Your local newspaper will not freely post letters to the editor that contain the kinds of sexual and racist slurs that I get every day on Twitter. There are always limits. They are necessary to maintain the utility of the communication channel. You would think an organization that is solely dedicated to promoting communication would understand this.

But here’s another clue about what makes them so oblivious.

Looking back on Twitter’s early years, multiple former senior employees cite Twitter’s disproportionately white, male leadership — a frequent, factual critique of Silicon Valley’s biggest and most influential tech companies — as creating an environment where building tools to combat harassment was a secondary concern. “The original sin is a homogenous leadership,” one former senior employee told BuzzFeed News. “This is part of what exacerbated the abuse problem for sure — because they were often tone-deaf to the concern of users in the outside world, meaning women and people of color.”

I predict that the white men behind Twitter also have a number of Libertarian twits with a sophomoric, privileged view of the world.

Another revelation is that Twitter has automated filtering tools to block out the worst sorts of trolls, and that these were deployed to the benefit of Barack Obama and Caitlyn Jenner when they did a Q&A on the medium. They aren’t perfect — they never are, and trolls will evolve their behavior to evade filtering — but it isn’t clear why they only provide this benefit for a tiny number of celebrities. I would love to have such a service switched on for me. Ariel Waldman probably would, too.

Waldman, like every single one of the dozen people interviewed for this story, stressed that she loved Twitter; that when it works as it should, it’s empowering, exciting, even life-changing. But, like almost every participant in this story, Waldman’s voice grew tired while making excuses for Twitter’s shortcomings. “I mean, the thing is that it’s just getting to that point where it’s become such an exhausting service to use,” she said with a heavy sigh. “That blocking 20 awful people every day has to be a part of my logistical reality — even when I’m not seeking abuse out. It’s just — it feels like so much work to use Twitter, and that should be a real red flag. They’ve clearly showed they don’t want to make abuse a priority.

“It’s like, who would reasonably want to use a service that does this to you?”

So far today, I’ve only blocked two obnoxious trolls, which is a light day (who knows, though, it’s still early). But she’s asked a good question: why do I have to chop through so much dead wood every day just to use their simple service?

I get email — theistic tears edition

cryingjesus

This one guy keeps sending me faux-sincere emails asking me to confirm that atheism is in trouble.

Dear Mr. Myers,

Recent reports point to British atheism being in trouble.

With atheism faltering in Britain, is American atheism headed for trouble?

Sincerely,

Paul

He only sends me links to two blogs, one titled “Examining Atheism” and the other called “Combatting Atheism”, which sound exactly the same, and are almost certainly also written by my very concerned correspondent. The kinds of ‘evidence’ he uses to show that atheism is doomed are the number of google searches for the word “atheism”, the number of immigrants to Great Britain, the publication of yet more apologetics from the likes of the tiresome Lennox and McGrath, and — get this — Ray Comfort’s new movie, The Atheist Delusion. It’s pathetic, wishful thinking on his part, nothing more, and the insincerity of his polite requests suggest nothing but dishonesty on his part. But sure, I’ll answer his question.

No.

I would make two general explanations of that answer.

One is that we are seeing a shake-up within the atheist movement — there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the kind of atheism that is easy to measure with the crude metrics my correspondent wants to use. Let’s call it “Charismatic Atheism”, where people happily embrace the points of view offered by “thought leaders” like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, often without doing much thinking for themselves. That is a legitimate gateway into atheist ideas, and had a surge of success in the 2000s. It was a way to bring in a strong cohort of people who were quite open about saying that they were atheists.

But it’s not a long-lasting effect, and it’s actually antithetical to the strengths of atheism, which ought to be freethought, evidence-based thinking, and self-criticism. Hero worship is the path to orthodoxy and dogma. So while I might like Hitchens personally, and find many of his ideas worthy and beautifully expressed, I also consider him entirely wrong on some other ideas. Meanwhile, there are some atheists who practically worship the guy, use photos of Hitchens as avatars, and get very irate if you point out that he was also a war-mongering neocon. That represents a split within the movement, and demonstrates a growing dissent. We also see a lot of authoritarian atheists, for instance, or nonegalitarian atheists who despise feminism, and a robust atheism will not simply hide these significant conflicts in the name of protecting the idea that there is no god as dogma. But that’s all good. Atheism is not the kind of monolothic institution that, for instance, the Catholic church is, or other churches try to be, and that is exactly the way it should be.

For many people, atheism has become something we take for granted, and is not the primary cause we struggle to advance. There are other, more important battles to be fought. The label is less important than the body of secular ideals, and the failure of religion to recognize secular goals. More atheists are openly embracing humanism, especially in Britain, where the BHA is very successful.

Which brings me to my second explanation: that you’re finding fewer google searches for the word “atheism” (as if that is even a useful metric) does not change the fact that religion has failed to provide one word of truth, and that the defense of religious belief has collapsed into absurdist irrelevance. If you are citing Ray Comfort, or Kent Hovind, or Ken Ham to support your ideas, you’ve lost — they’re people who actively promote counterfactual nonsense. I see a lot of desperation for affirmation in Paul’s sad little letters, not confidence. That’s where I like to see believers, weak in their faith and grasping at straws.

Nowhere in Paul’s blogs does he present a speck of evidence for theism. He just whines endlessly about atheism, and he can’t even muster any substantive criticisms of atheist thought — it’s solely about how he thinks atheism is becoming less popular. That is not evidence that theism is correct. If I was the last person on Earth calling themself an atheist, it would not make any difference at all in the validity of that mish-mash of bullshit called Christianity or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism.

He can keep sending me his emails, though. His irrationality and desperation only serve to make me stronger.

Only mostly dead

Sometimes, New Scientist puts a strange twist on their stories — like this one, Universal ancestor of all life on Earth was only half alive. I got stuck on just the title. “Half alive”? What does that mean? It’s describing a paper that did a comparative analysis of genes found in 1800 bacteria and 130 archaea to identify what was common between them, which would suggest what genes were present in the last universal common ancestor.

Now we have the best picture yet of what that ancestor was like and where it lived, thanks to a study that identified 355 genes that it probably possessed.

“It was flabbergasting to us that we found as many as we did,” says William Martin of the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, who led the study. The findings support the idea that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) lurked in hydrothermal vents where hot water rich in hydrogen, carbon dioxide and minerals emerged from the sea floor.

“It’s spot on with regard to the hydrothermal vent theory,” Martin says. He describes LUCA as half-living, because it may have depended on abiotic reactions in the vents to produce many of the chemicals it needed.

That last bit is where they lost me. I’m about 0.4% salt, which is abiotically derived…does that mean I’m only 99.6% alive? And what about water? I’m 60% water, which means I’m now 39.6% alive, or mostly dead. If you’re just talking about chemical reactions, I don’t have an autonomous power source, but rely on daily input of organic material produced by other living creatures. So by that definition, I am a mostly dead, or undead, zombie PZ that lives by ghoulishly feasting upon the bodies of the living.

When I put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.

But I think what is messing us up here is a continuing bias towards vitalism — there is no distinction between “life” and “chemistry”. If you just accept that, we’ll all stop wasting our time trying to figure out what part of our biology is life vs. not-life. This video is a nice simplified approach to the problem of the origin of life, but it also seems hung up on a pointless distinction between “dead chemicals” and “living cells”.

At least the story does make the case for the increasingly dominant hypothesis for the origin of life on earth — that it came from reactions that exploited electron gradients found at deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

One characteristic of almost all living cells is that they pump ions across a membrane to generate an electrochemical gradient, then use that gradient to make the energy-rich molecule ATP. Martin’s results suggest LUCA could not generate such a gradient, but could harness an existing one to make ATP.

That fits in beautifully with the idea that the first life got its energy from the natural gradient between vent water and seawater, and so was bound to these vents. Only later did the ability to generate gradients evolve, allowing life to break away from the vents on at least two occasions – one giving rise to the first archaea, the other to bacteria.

Please, please go Galt again

Jason Lewis was a conservative talk radio host in Minneapolis, and a couple of years ago he quit, on air (most likely this was totally staged — his colleagues weren’t particularly convincing actors, and for people shocked about his abrupt departure, they sure spend a lot of time plugging his new website). This is his very Libertarian on-air announcement.

He’s an amazing jerk. He’s so Libertarian, he doesn’t see a problem with slavery.

In 2009, Lewis complained that “real Americans” believe Hurricane Katrina victims were “a bunch of whiners.” Last year he claimed, “the median income for blacks in America would make them rich in most African nations, not most – all.” He went on to argue that the United States government lacks the authority to outlaw slavery.”

“In fact, if you really want to be quite frank about it, how does somebody else owning a slave affect me?” Lewis said in an audio commentary added to his book Power Divided is Power Checked: The Argument for States’ Rights. “It doesn’t. If I don’t think it is right, I won’t own one, and people always say, ‘Well, if you don’t want to marry somebody of the same sex, you don’t have to, but why tell somebody else they can’t?’ Uh, you know if you don’t want to own a slave, don’t. But don’t tell other people they can’t.”

It’s rare to see a Libertarian quite so open about the fact that his philosophy is entirely “ME ME ME” and not at all about individual human liberty, since he doesn’t even consider the rights of the slaves. It’s very nice that if he disagrees with slavery, he just won’t own one…but what if he agrees with slavery, but his slave doesn’t?

Well, he’s come back from Galt’s Gulch to run for congress, and has actually won the Republican primary in Minnesota’s 6th district. We know you all miss Michele Bachman, so there’s a chance he’ll be there in congress to make Minnesota look just as ridiculous.

He’ll be running against Democrat Angie Craig in November. A woman. This could be interesting, considering what Jason Lewis thinks of women.

I never thought in my lifetime where’d you have so many single, or I should say, yeah single women who would vote on the issue of somebody else buying their diaphragm. This is a country in crisis. Those women are ignorant in, I mean, the most generic way. I don’t mean that to be a pejorative. They are simply ignorant of the important issues in life. Somebody’s got to educate them.

There’s something about young, single women where they’re behaving like Stepford wives. They walk in lock step – is that really the most important thing to a 25-year old unmarried woman – uh getting me to pay for her pills? Seriously?! Is that what we’ve been reduced to? You can be bought off for that?

You’ve got a vast majority of young single women who couldn’t explain to you what GDP means. You know what they care about? They care about abortion. They care about abortion and gay marriage. They care about ‘The View.’ They are non-thinking.

Sadly, it looks like it’ll be a close race, when it shouldn’t be.