It’s like math has a liberal bias. One of the current common tropes from the people making excuses for Romney’s loss is that it was Hurricane Sandy’s fault: it broke Romney’s momentum, it gave an unfair advantage to the incumbent, it discouraged Republican voters.
Oops. Data!
No wonder they usually seek comfort in fantasy and lies. The truth hurts.
It might have also helped if he’d made a few public appearances, but that would have been difficult, given that he’s dead. In the election of Paul Broun (moRon, Georgia), Charles Darwin got 4,000 write-in votes.
Next time, we’ll get him.
Go study this and master the vocabulary. Everyone is so familiar with our brains with their parietal lobes and sulci and ganglia, but do people ever stop to contemplate the cephalopod brain? Nooooo. And it’s pretty cool.
Possibly the most obvious difference is that the nervous system of most invertebrates develops ventrally, rather than dorsally, like ours. Imagine that your nervous system formed on the other side of your throat, so that as the brain expanded, it had to wrap itself around your esophagus.
Although, to be fair, I think we’re mostly in agreement but talking past one another because of our prioritizing of certain premises.
Michael Shermer thinks that “the most any natural science could ever discover in the way of a deity would be a natural intelligence sufficiently advanced to be god-like but still within the realm of the natural world.”; Jerry Coyne claims that there could be, in principle, evidence for a supernatural god — there just isn’t.
My position is that we cannot find evidence for a god, that the God Hypothesis is invalid and unacceptable, because “god” is an incoherent concept that has not been defined. I could claim that a spumboodle exists, for instance, and we could go around and around with you presenting hypothetical examples and listing potential entities or forces that are spumboodles, but we’ll get nowhere if I never tell you what the heck a spumboodle is or what it does or even how I recognize a spumboodle. Without that, the whole concept is untestable and unverifiable. It really doesn’t count if I insist that something undefined exists, and then keep jiggling between vague realities (it exists in our dimension! It has a color!) and contradictory guesswork (it’s transdimensional! And completely invisible!) designed to keep moving the spumboodle away from any possibility of honest evaluation.
Coyne accepts the wobble. On the one hand, he is insisting on general principle in the possibility of existence of a divine being (I think a clear and unambiguous definition of “divine” is a prerequisite for that), but on the other he’s willing to substitute a mundane creature with only unexplainable abilities for “divine”.
Well, yes, we wouldn’t know whether a divine being was absolutely omniscient and omnipotent, or relatively more omniscient or omnipotent than us. But if the degree of, say, omnipotence and omniscience is sufficiently large (i.e, any miracle can be worked, all things can be foretold), then I think we can say provisionally that there is a God. I’ve previously described the kind of evidence that I’d provisionally accept for a divine being, including messages written in our DNA or in a pattern of stars, the reappearance of Jesus on earth in a way that is well documented and convincing to scientists, along with the ability of this returned Jesus to do things like heal amputees. Alternatively, maybe only the prayers of Catholics get answered, and the prayers of Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, don’t.
Yes, maybe aliens could do that, and maybe it would be an alien trick to imitate Jesus (combined with an advanced technology that could regrow limbs), but so what? I see no problem with provisionally calling such a being “God”—particularly if it comports with traditional religious belief—until proven otherwise. What I can say is “this looks like God, but we should try to find out more. In the meantime, I’ll provisionally accept it.” That, of course, depends on there being a plethora of evidence. As we all know, there isn’t.
And that’s where he loses me. What does it mean to be relatively omniscient or omnipotent? If our criterion is that the being has to be a certain amount more powerful than us to be defined as a god, what is that amount? The sun is much larger than us, and has far more power than we do…is it a god? Or will that suggestion be met by the sudden appearance of additional criteria to constantly exclude all entities from consideration that don’t also meet certain unstated requirements?
What I want is something like the Higgs boson: a description of a set of properties, inferred and observed, that can be used as a reasonable boundary for identifying the phenomenon. If you’re going to dignify it with the term “hypothesis”, there ought to be some little bit of substance there, even if it’s speculative. The god proponents can’t even do that. God beliefs are remarkably specific — belief in Jesus as an admission ticket to paradise, for instance — but somehow, when it gets down to saying who, what, where, when, and why, they all fly to pieces, and when it comes to saying how they know of its existence, all goes silent, or subsides into ritualistic repetitious chanting of words from a holy book.
The only way to win this game is to not play. Don’t concede the possibility that X might exist unless you’ve got clear criteria for defining the bounds of X’s existence, and it’s up to the advocates for X to provide that basic foundation. If they can’t do that, reject the whole mess before you brain gets sucked into a twisty morass of convoluted theological BS.
(By the way, I do agree with Coyne on one thing: I also reject Shermer’s a priori commitment to methodological naturalism. If a source outside the bounds of what modern science considers the limits of natural phenomena is having an observable effect, we should take its existence into account. If Catholic prayers actually affected medical outcomes, we shouldn’t reject it out of hand because of the possibility of a supernatural source. But it’s still not evidence for a god, unless you’re going to commit to defining god as a force that responds to remote invocation via standard Catholic ritual chants by increasing healing…in which case god becomes something we can disprove, and also faces the prospect of consolidation with other phenomena. Maybe god becomes the placebo response, for instance, in which case he’s been reduced to something feeble.)
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly. Aaaaaaaaaardvaaaaaark!
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
Halloween is over, and you know what that means: it’s time to start peddling stuff for the Christmas season, and it’s also time to start up the War on Christmas again. You can do both at the same time!
Last year, we created the Happy Monkey greeting card set. You can still get them! And you should get them soon, because you don’t want to leave all your postal obligations dangling until the last minute, and risk Aunt Gladys getting her Happy Monkey card on New Year’s Eve, meaning that she spent all of Christmas dinner glaring at you for your neglect.
But this year, we are dialing the knob up several notches beyond Monkey, all the way up to Squid. Yes, it’s true: you can now confound and confuse and conniptulate your relatives by sending them Squidmas cards. Also, they’re adorable.
And if that’s not enough, remember that the Pharyngula store has plenty of baffling geegaws to stuff into Squidmas stockings.
Especially a paper about scientific fraud that uses this clever figure? (It’s short and openly accessible, go ahead and read it.)
I’m envious. But then, it is a pretty good summary of the kinds of wickedness some scientists are up to. I’d have to put a few of the scientists in the ENCODE consortium in level II, and evolutionary psychology is definitely condemned to level III.
It’s titled the nine circles of scientific hell, so sorry, creationists don’t even register.
I’m feeling so frustrated: I’m buried in work right now (and hey, Skepticon this weekend!), but after the election, it’s a target rich environment for whiny far right conservatives making excuses for their defeat. And I don’t have time to look at them all, let alone savor the schadenfreude. But here’s one that’s got all the sexist and racist tropes Republicans love, and it was on Christian Men’s Defense Network, a blog that is now playing turtle as people point and laugh at it, so you might also try this link if the cached version is gone.
we should have known how the leftists in the media and the Obama campaign (redundant, I know) intended to define the campaign. Because on radio ads, on TV, and on the web, the Democrats tried to make this election about a single issue:
The right to slut.
Or more precisely, the right to slut without the responsibility of consequences. The famous “gender gap” isn’t really a gap based on gender. The right overwhelmingly wins older and married women. The “gender gap” should more accurately be called the slut vote.
I think he just called all the women who voted for Obama “sluts”. Note also how he casually slid in another excuse: the media is all synonymous with the Obama campaign, never mind that Fox News…screw it, we can just end the sentence like that, FOX NEWS, period. Argument refuted. I could also make the case that none of the other networks are exactly liberal.
But wait, this guy isn’t done. It’s not enough to just blame the election on slutty women, he’s also got to make the racist argument.
Contrary to common belief, the primary reason the Democrats own the black vote has nothing to do with civil rights. The Democrats were only partially supportive of civil rights in the 60′s (with southern Democrats advocating “segregation forever”). Lincoln was a Republican, and Republicans in the House and Senate voted for civil rights legislation in the 60s.
Rather, Democrats have won the black vote because the black community is dominated by illegitimacy, and the Democrats are willing to subsidize and support that illegitimacy (as well as provide access to cheap abortions) so as to take away from sluts the consequences of their actions. Consequently, young black people grow up on the dole and not only never realize there might be something wrong with that, but eventually come to believe that’s the way it should be. The Democrats have won the black vote by first “empowering” single black mothers.
Raise your hands if you think the Republicans will learn from their loss and realize that this is an attitude that needs to be repudiated. I predict that in 2016 these losers will be the core of the Republican base, still, and they’ll do little more than try to cloak the more overt expressions of sexism and racism in yet more dog whistles.
Oh, that wasn’t enough demented thuggery for you? Here’s a bracing and NSFW video if you’ve got 20 minutes to spare.
Want more amusement? See Conor Friedersdorf tear into conservative illusions, all promoted by their favorite pundits…who all led their party into the wilderness with bad information.
In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign-policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood’s convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama’s America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense — not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there’s no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it’s often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.
On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just
got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while the New York Times got it right. Hint: The Times hired the most rigorous forecaster it could find.It ought to be an eye-opening moment.
But I expect that it’ll be quickly forgotten…
There’s so much opportunity for sweet, sweet schadenfreude coming out of yesterday’s electoral results, from the Big News about Romney losing to local things like Sonny Bono’s widow getting edged out by a progressive Latino physician, thus flipping the Coachella Valley House seat to a non-Republican for the first time since the Reagan Administration. But this one’s my favorite:
California Democrats appear to have picked up a supermajority in both houses of the state Legislature Tuesday night, a surprise outcome that gives the party the ability to unilaterally raise taxes and leaves Republicans essentially irrelevant in Sacramento.
I first moved to California in 1982, just four years into the Great Reign of Stupidity launched when the state’s voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978. Prop 13 was (and is) politically popular due to its strictly limiting property tax increases on residential properties. Since 1978 any criticism of the measure is taken as demanding old people be taxed out of their homes, and thus it’s become a third rail in California politics.
But the measure also did two other things:
Since then, especially as the electorate in California gets younger and browner and more liberal, the whole purpose of the California Republican Party has been to obstruct the state government’s authority to raise and spend money doing frivolous socialist market-meddling things like paving roads, or fixing broken windows in schools, or buying textbooks that were published sometime after the Apollo Program ended. And a fair number of otherwise non-braindead Californians went along for the ride, because who likes taxes?
It was a pretty foolproof business plan on the Republicans’ part:
There have been other horrible effects of Prop 13 besides the obvious cuts in education infrastructure and social services kind. For instance, the cap on property tax assessments provided a serious incentive for municipalities and counties to approve sprawling development so that they could generate revenue by taxing the new properties. Local governments have had little incentive to promote things like infill development, which would add new properties to the tax rolls by destroying existing properties.
And if you’ve paid attention to the Left Coast at all in the last few months, you know the end result of all this: a state teetering on the edge of an insolvency that would make New York City’s crisis in the 1970s look like running out of lunch money — all due to the Republican Party’s stranglehold on the legislative process.
Yesterday the voters of California approved not one but two tax increases — one more a loophole closing on out-of-state businesses — and, it seems, whittled the Republican presence in the Assembly and Senate down just below 1/3. There are still Republicans in Sacramento, and they still serve important functions. For instance, in the case of Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, America’s Stupidest Legislator, he often provides much-needed comic relief.
But now it seems that they may not have much to say about actual adult pursuits like paying for services and raising revenue, because the Dems may well have that supermajority. The Democrats are not in any way immune from the temptation to grandstand or engage in chicanery, but I still allow myself the hopeful sense that maybe, for the first time since I landed here, the grownups will be in charge for a while.
