He did it again

Once again, Bill Maher (and his science expert, David Duchovny) went off on a tirade against vaccination on his show, full of ignorance and stupidity and lies. Time to read Orac some more.

Bill Maher and his apologists frequently gasp in indignation whenever someone like myself or other skeptics call him antivaccine. Unfortunately, as I showed last week, antivaccine tropes fly fast and furious out of his mouth. His misleading claim about the lack of vaccinated/unvaccinated studies is not only misleading, but objectively not not true. It simply isn’t. Also, whenever antivaccine organizations try to do such studies themselves, inevitably they’re utterly worthless and/or actually show the exact opposite of what antivaccinationists had hoped. When vaccinated/unvaccinated studies are planned, they are actually attacked by antivaccine groups because these groups know that the studies won’t show what they hope they’ll show.

Yes, the claim that there’s never been a “vaccinated/unvaccinated” study is an antivaccine trope, tried and true. What Maher said about it would have been perfectly at home on the websites of antivaccine groups, such as Age of Autism, SafeMinds, VaxTruth, and the National Vaccine Information Center. Ditto his analogies about the immune system “needing a workout” by combatting “real disease,” an analogy so breathtakingly ignorant of actual immunology and infectious disease that Maher should really just hang his head in shame.

Maher has zero credibility with me.

What if we could make a better world by not believing in gods?

I think I’ve been trying to say the same thing for a few years, but it’s good to see Feminace say it clearly.

On the other hand, it’s the sort of atheism that we need so badly. An atheism that goes beyond “I don’t believe in gods”. One that goes past the dictionary definition and into “Now what do I do about it?”.

That’s the atheism I’m interested in. The one that tries to make the world a better place without god. If that’s not yours, fine (okay, not fine, but I’m not going to waste time arguing with you), but get the fuck out of my way.

It’s always depressing to see how many people will wax indignant at the thought that they might be expected to make the world a better place without god. How dare we?

It’s sort of the atheist version of this cartoon.

betterworldfornothing

Intelligent Design creationists unable to grapple with the substance. Surprise!

Uncommon Descent linked to my criticisms of the Biology of the Baroque, Intelligent Design creationism’s latest misconception, that biologists believe every detail of every organism is the product of natural selection…but they didn’t bother to quote any of my criticisms. It’s weird. They could have quoted the gist of my complaint:

So evolution should produce only the biological equivalent of sterile gray Soviet architecture, and if you find something that is the equivalent of a Baroque church, then evolution is refuted. This entire argument is built around what Michael Denton calls the fundamental assumption of Darwinism…that all novelties are adaptive. To which biologists around the world can only say, “Fu…wha?” in total confusion. That is not one of our assumptions at all. Novelties are going to arise as a product of chance mutation; if they are not maladaptive (and sometimes even if they are), they can spread through a population by chance-driven processes like drift. And some elaborate fripperies can acquire a selective advantage, like that example of Soviet architecture, the peacock’s tail, which this video actually uses as an example of non-adaptive order.

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You know who else tweets really stupid, offensive stuff?

Ken Ham.

Let’s see…diminishing the horrors of the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges, equating women’s health care and autonomy with Naziism, neglecting to mention that most abortions are spontaneous “acts of God”…you know, probably the least stupid thing in this cartoon was advocating the useless response of prayer to something Ham claims is mass murder.

Welp, I guess that means he’s going to get rewarded with a speaking gig at a major atheist/skeptic conference now.

Stop the beatification of Scalia

I’ve been seeing so many articles praising Scalia, now that he’s dead. He was a consistent jurist; he was enthusiastic and lively; he was best friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg; he was steadfast and sincere in his beliefs.

I don’t give a fuck.

For me, this is what defines Scalia: his dissenting opinion in Edwards v. Aguillard. The man was a confident ignoramus.

The body of scientific evidence supporting creation science is as strong as that supporting evolution. In fact, it may be stronger…. The evidence for evolution is far less compelling than we have been led to believe. Evolution is not a scientific “fact,” since it cannot actually be observed in a laboratory. Rather, evolution is merely a scientific theory or “guess.”… It is a very bad guess at that. The scientific problems with evolution are so serious that it could accurately be termed a “myth.”

The core of his argument was that the creationists said they were teaching the scientific evidence, and gosh, they sure seem sincere when they insist there is no religious purpose to teaching that the world was created in 6 days and there was a big flood and a boat, so who am I to question them? His originalism and insistence on a strict literal interpretation of what was said was a disingenuous sham that he hypocritically adopted whenever he saw a conclusion he wanted to reach for.

It’s also ironic that he was an affirmative action hire. Maybe he should have been appointed to a lesser court, except that I don’t believe any court in our country would be well-served by a racist dumbass.

Obama will nominate a competent legal scholar to the Supreme Court

yandle

I’m seeing lots of rumors that Obama has made his choice for Scalia’s replacement (but no good confirmation), and that he’ll make the formal announcement on Thursday. Her name is Staci Michelle Yandle, and she is a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois.

For some reason, the rumor sites are all emphasizing the fact that she is a black lesbian woman, rather than the real shocker, that Obama isn’t installing another far right wackaloon in the slot.

I don’t know that I trust this rumor, but if true, it would show that Obama is completely out of fucks, which would be awesome.

Sorry to confuse you all — there is no good evidence for any specific choice anywhere. I’m just amused at the headlines that all babble about “black lesbian woman”, and you know that when Obama does deliver a choice, unless it’s a “white heterosexual man”, the headlines will all be entirely about the person’s color, sexual orientation, and gender.

Seven billion problems, and declining fertility isn’t one of them

I have many peeves, but one of them is this: the near-permanent state of anxiety some people have about fertility. Not just their personal fertility (anxieties about too much or too little of that are reasonable), but cultural fertility. We are apparently doomed if not enough of the right people, and by that they usually mean us white people, have enough babies. My annoyance is prompted by this post, in which a man-baby predicts the end of the Western world, because feminists don’t have enough children.

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Maybe we can rename it MRAtheism?

Modern atheism continues its swirling journey down the drain hole of irrelevance.

There are two predominant reasons that can explain why sexism exists in the atheism movement. The first reason is the influence of social Darwinism. Philip Kitcher, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, wrote in The New York Times in 2012 that the first tenet of social Darwinism is the belief that “people have intrinsic abilities and talents (and, correspondingly, intrinsic weaknesses), which will be expressed in their actions and achievements, independently of the social, economic and cultural environments in which they develop.” A concept such as “men are from mars, women are from Venus” is one version of such gender-essentialist, social Darwinist ideas.

In the atheism movement, social Darwinism has played out as the justifiable assault of women by (naturally) aggressive men. Buzzfeed’s Mark Oppenheimer detailed many accounts of alleged sexism, sexual assault and coercion in his excellent exposé on the atheism movement. “Some women say they are now harassed or mocked at conventions, and the online attacks—which include Jew-baiting, threats of anal rape, and other pleasantries—are so vicious that two activists I spoke with have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder,” he writes.

In related news, NECSS has retracted their disinvitation of Dawkins to their conference. Why? What changed? They don’t say. They just had second thoughts.

Or they got a bunch of cancellations and pushback and decided to bugger principle in favor of the bottom line.