Trolling trolls truly trolled

Some of you know that there’s a small collection of self-satisfied sexist scumbags who complain endlessly and bitterly about Freethoughtblogs — they’re nothing to be concerned about, especially since they’ve neatly encapsulated themselves, like an abscess, and removed themselves from the conversation. But Ophelia did something amusing: she parenthetically called them out.

(They’re going nuts here these days, by the way. Hundreds of hits every day. Hi Justicar! Hi franc, hi gang. Sure you don’t want to call Greta Hawkins names on Twitter by way of a holiday?)

That’s not the really funny part, though: they replied in the comment thread! I immediately thought of this Calvin & Hobbes cartoon.

The last panel in particular is precisely accurate.

Unbelievable

That creationist rascal Kenwal Hamza is up to his tricks again: he’s convinced the state of Kentucky to invest millions of dollars in his planned theme park, Koran Kountry.

The controversial park is the creation of Answers in Koran, LLC, who seek to bring visitors to the “family-friendly attraction that celebrates the truth of the Koran, and the power of the global jihadist movement to liberate Muslims from the oppression of the infidels and Jews. We also have roller coasters.”

The $300 million park, built on top of a reclaimed surface mining site in Muhlenberg County, was constructed with the help of unnamed international investors from Pakistan and Iran. Their feasibility study projects millions of tourists from the Middle East and South Asia will come to the park in its first three years of operation.

“This day would not be possible without the great help we received from the Beshear administration,” said Kenwal Hamza, CEO of Answers in Koran. “Muhlenberg County is now truly the closest thing to Paradise on Earth.”

They’re going to have rides and celebrate the true history of Islam…no, stop.

This doesn’t work.

Sorry, total fail. It’s bad satire.

No one is ever going to believe that an American state would fund something as stupid as “Koran Country”, or that they’d actually smile and approve tens of millions of dollars to a non-Christian theme park. There’s a plausibility gap a few zillion miles wide.

Although it does go a good job of highlighting the smug sense of Christian privilege that allowed the colossal inanity of Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum” to get built in the first place.

Joe the Plumber is simply not very bright

The recent conversion of Leah Libresco has exposed some really stupid thinking: one of the junior woodchucks at Stedman’s site, for instance, chastised atheists for not realizing that “some people have good reasons for believing in God,” the kind of assertion that should make one stop and think, “Hmmm, and what might those reasons be?” They never follow through and explain what they are. And for the record, I think that Libresco’s reason, because she wants to personify her ethics, is pretty damned stupid.

But here’s a guy who makes Libresco and the Stedmanites look like super-geniuses of reason. Joe the Plumber explains why he became a “Bible-believing Christian” (in case you’re unfamiliar with the code words, that phrase means he’s a fundagelical wackaloon).

He first claims the Bible contains “everything we need to live a great life is right in the Bible”. Really, Joe? You get your plumbing instructions from the Bible? You live your life by the principles of blood sacrifice and retribution? Again, I wish these bozos would get specific: what, exactly, is the principle of life found in the Bible and not found anywhere else?

But then his big conversion moment comes from the fact that his doofus pastor shows him a science book and the Bible and points out that the science book gets revised, but the Bible never changes. My jaw dropped twice!

  1. That science adapts to new information is a strength, not a weakness. No one knows everything; as we learn more and more, an ability to change our ideas is a good thing.

  2. If the Bible were really that inflexible, it would be a terribly useless document — does he really think ‘everything he needs’ is to be found in the words of dead scribes and priests from an ancient iron age civilization?

    But mostly I wanted to ask him if he thought the Bible was originally written in English. I’d also like to see him babble if confronted with your average Christian bookstore, which will contain dozens of versions of his one true Bible.

Joe the Plumber: dumb as a soggy cardboard box full of bricks. And he’s running for congress. Why am I not surprised?

Guilty, guilty, guilty

The verdict has come down, and Jerry Sandusky has been convicted of 45 out of 48 counts of child abuse. He now faces life in prison at sentencing.

But he was just guilty of a poor career choice! Imagine, if he’d been a Catholic priest instead of a football coach, he’d simply be quietly relocated to a new venue, or paid $20,000 for his silence.

Seriously: I will slap you down hard if you dare to make prison rape jokes here. Don’t try it.

Alas, poor Jerry

Jerry Coyne is reading the Bible — the whole Bible, from beginning to end — and is discovering that it is boring and insipid. We could have told him so, but he’s such a scientist and had to confirm the observation himself, and now he’s in for some suffering.

Most Christians don’t read this book that they claim is the divine and holy word of an omniscient being, which would be odd if they actually believed that. If I had a message from a cosmic alien intelligence, I’d sure be studying it carefully. Unfortunately, even a casual scrutiny of the book reveals no useful knowledge, and no sign of a special privileged source of information.

I’ve attended and observed Bible studies. They really don’t look at the book — which isn’t surprising, these are generally people who think of reading as boring work and can’t be troubled to read a good book — they usually have a ‘study guide’. This is a book that excerpts a few verses and then tells the reader what they’re supposed to mean, in the context of their particular and peculiar sect. You know what question the study leaders often get? “What do I believe?”

I find that mind-blowing.

Anyway, let’s hope Jerry’s brain survives rolling about in drivel.

By the way, a hint: he mentions how awkward it is to be seen reading the ‘holy’ book. One solution: I’ve got it on my iPad, so if I’m caught I can tap a button and quickly swap in some kitten photos or something slightly less embarrassing.

Science: It’s a Girl Thing!

The European Commission is trying to get more women involved in science, which is good, except…look at their Science: It’s a Girl Thing campaign. Jesus wept.

Serious man sits at microscope. Fashionable, slender girls slink in on ridiculous high heels and vogue to shots of bubbling flasks, splashes of makeup, twirling skirts, and giggling hot chicks. Seriously, this is not how you get women excited about science, by masquerading it as an exercise shallow catwalking. This is a campaign that perpetuates myths about women’s preferences. The lab is not a place where you strut in 3″ heels.

How do you get people excited about science and science careers? By talking about science. Ben Goldacre made some excellent comments on twitter about this.

The EU have funded a campaign to make women in science wear shorter skirts. http://bit.ly/KYRkBk #sciencegirlthing

Time and again with these high budget state funded science communication activities, they dumb down, shoot for the mainstream, and miss.

Meanwhile I can’t help noticing that the really nerdy stuff done by ppl like me and @robinince is commercially successful in the marketplace

I realise that sounds cocklike, but it’s true. Dumbed down state funded sci comms is patronising and fails to meet its stated objectives.

People – not just nerds – like nerd stuff. They like the details. They’re not thick.

@flypie @robinince we fill out rock venues, my book sold 400,000 copies, i dont know what more metrics you want. Nerd detail sells.

@edyong209 @robinince we make, a fucking, profit. we sell nerd details, and people buy it, while state £ sci comms patronises tiny audiences

The real tragedy is that somewhere, a marketing cock is celebrating that their “controversial” campaign is being discussed #sciencegirlthing

Also, to my vast surprise, for once the youtube comments are actually intelligent.

Oh wow, I can’t remember when I last felt this patronised. I’m pretty sure the message “scientists think that women are giggly, superficial and obsessed with fashion” isn’t going to get more of us doing science. Just eww. I have a physics degree. I managed to get it without strutting around a lab in a minidress and stupid shoes and doing ‘sexy’ pouts.

Rachael Borek

Please tell me that this is a sad joke. Being female and working in a laboratory I find it patronising in the extreme. I can’t believe that any intelligent woman watching this would not want to punch the advert-makers in the face. Is this REALLY what you think women interested in science want?? Go look at clips of Kari Byron hosting Mythbusters and then come back and apologise to everyone.

Catherine Du-Rose

Oh my god. I haven’t been this revolted by something since I heard about the human caterpillar. This is so insulting! I can’t find the words to properly articulate how irritated I am by this. Please tell me this isn’t a trailer – I mean, there’s not going to be more like this? I cannot imagine anything that would turn an intelligent girl off a subject faster than being patronised.

littlelixie

I’m a girl and I’m a scientist. I definitely do not go prancing around making make up. I work on a computer and do processing. Science is not a girl thing, it’s an everyone thing, everyone who is passionate enough about doing what they love. This is a terrible, terrible video, and I feel very offended, and I know my male colleagues do not see me like this. I feel rather disgusted.

chandratap

Hey, next time an organization tries to do the right thing and encourage more diverse people to participate in science, how about if you actually talk to scientists and try to understand what motivates them, rather than dragging some refugee from the fashion and music video world to tell women how to be scientists?

Gosh, the grapes sure are sour over here

Benjamin Radford, a regular at The Amazing Meeting, has decided he doesn’t like blogs, and never has, no sir. This is a fact which he has chosen to announce in a blog by citing his first blog entry.

As I write my first entry for the sparkly new “Free Thinking” blog, I’m skeptical of its utility. While I have spent much of my career promoting critical thinking and skepticism, I’m concerned about joining the noise, the glut of words inundating the Web and indeed the world.

By most estimates there are over 120 million blogs out there on the World Wide Intertubes. It seems everyone has a blog; teens are blogging, grandmothers are blogging, almost anyone with access to a computer, an opinion, and some spare time has a blog. The Web has democratized the dissemination of information, but not necessarily improved the content quality. There’s incredibly good, useful info on the Web, but the signal to noise ratio is higher than ever.

Of course, some blogs are better than others, but according to a statistic I just made up (so you can’t check), 98.3 percent of blogs are irrelevant, self-indulgent musings and journaling, read by the blogger and one or two friends.

Blogs are inherently personal; they rarely include references; they are short, thus allowing for little or no detailed, critical analysis. In this age of blogging and Twitter, communication comes in smaller and smaller bites, conveying less and less information. For people to accurately understand the world around them, they need more information and context, not less.

So he makes up a statistic and doesn’t bother to cite anything, so blogging is all noise and doesn’t include references (hint, Mr Radford: it’s called a “link”, some of us use them heavily.) And nobody reads them, except a few of the bloggers’ friends. He could make a case for that, I suppose; I sure don’t read Radford’s attempts at blogging, and only ran across this one because DJ Grothe praised it on twitter. (Oh, I so want to see Radford’s critique of twitter — I’m sure it will be as perspicacious as his complaints about blogs.)

Then he concludes by announcing that blogs still suck.

The same problems and issues I identified are still around, if anything magnified by the exponentially growing World Wide Web. Since that first blog I have been witness to (and occasional victim of) flame wars, troll attacks, misrepresentation of others’ positions (both obvious and subtle), and so on. We’ve all seen bloggers resort to feigned outrage, insults, and invective in their efforts to stir up controversy and increase page hits. This sensational, shock-jock sleaze is nothing new, and has been immensely successful for Jerry Springer, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and their countless blogging ilk. It’s not helpful or productive, but it gets attention.

Still, media has always had the inherent problem of separating out the wheat from the chaff, the insightful from the banal, the incisive from the divisive. Such is the price for the democratization of speech that the Internet brings: anyone with a computer has equal access. It’s probably true that most of everything is crap-but it’s a shame that we must work so hard to find the non-crap.

There’s a grain of truth to what he says, and I’m trying to think of some productive suggestion that would help improve the web, and I’ve come up with one: Ben Radford could stop blogging, and stop adding to the noise.

But he’s also deeply wrong. You could make the same arguments about books, or magazines, or newspapers: they’re mostly junk. The only solution, obviously, is for everyone to stop writing. Everyone, but especially Mr Radford, who can then go back to talking about chupacabras. And then he can ignore every criticism made of his work by telling himself they’re just trying to stir up controversy and increase page hits.

This claim that blogging is all about stirring up controversy to get page hits is also nonsense, but nonsense that gets regurgitated regularly by every old school pundit who objects to getting criticized. It’s wrong. I can tell you what gets you traffic: reliable, sustained writing on subjects of interest to an audience. Just controversy is never enough; it’s the people who can write well about controversy who win the audience. If you can’t do that — and Radford certainly can’t — you lose, and you have to resort to whining that all your competitors for eyeballs are all hacks and cheaters who don’t have the skill at communicating that you do.

But actually, his second to the last paragraph does get to the source of his unhappiness: he has been the victim of blogging. The poor man last got on our radar when he wrote a most ludicrous and appalling piece of pseudo-skeptical, evo-psych bullshit to justify sexism. It was piece that ignored reason and evidence, what few scientific articles he used to support his claims he understood poorly and mangled misleadingly. Rebecca Watson spanked him hard; I took him to school on his abuse of the science; Stephanie Zvan showed that his rationale made no sense; the blogosphere, that wretched hive of irrelevant, self-indulgent musings, lit up with pointed criticisms of Radford’s ghastly abuse of skeptical thinking. His response? Throw up more banal, divisive crap. And get slammed again.

This was a case where blogs were actually extremely good at separating the wheat from the chaff. It’s just that we’ve determined that Ben Radford is the chaff.

And now the chaff is complaining, on a blog.

(Also, I have to add: DJ, your proxies aren’t helping.)