Jerry Coyne’s bogus fears of “ideological subversion”

I have an unfortunate history with CFI and The Skeptical Inquirer. I ought to be aligned with the principles of skepticism, but too often organized skepticism has been this stodgy, hidebound dinosaur that is more interested in conserving the privileges of a narrow group of people than in actually implementing productive change. So I abandoned it, writing this in 2011.

[Diversity] has long been an issue with the skeptical movement. I used to subscribe to the Skeptical Inquirer, a very good magazine with well-written and substantive articles on skeptical issues, but I let my subscription lapse. It was a strange thing that prompted it; several years ago, there was an issue lauding the leaders of the skeptical movement, and it had a nice line drawing of four or five of these Big Names on the cover: and every one was white, male, and over 70 years old. I looked at it, and I wasn’t mad or outraged — every one of them was a smart guy who deserved recognition — but I saw it, sighed, and felt that not only was this incredibly boring, but that organized skepticism was dead if it was going to turn into a gerontocracy. I didn’t let my subscription lapse in protest, but out of lack of motivation.

Then, a few years ago, they fired Kavin Senapathy, a huge self-own. I commented on that:

That refusal to deal with the biggest social struggles of our time is what has always left me infuriated with the skeptic movement — oh, sure, let’s debunk ghosts and chupacabras and UFOs, but racist and misogynist beliefs are just too hard. They love the magic tricks and tests of dowsing, but eugenics? No one in organized skepticism seems to be smart enough to cope with that.

Merging with the Richard Dawkins Foundation didn’t help, and actually made it worse.

Kavin revealed some rather obvious inside information:

Two years ago, in an inept attempt to address the issue, CFI published a special issue of Skeptical Inquirer: “A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism.” The issue, penned exclusively by white men, demonstrated CFI leadership’s woefully shallow grasp of how racism works. In an article on “critical thinking approaches to confronting racism,” the magazine’s deputy editor, Benjamin Radford, referenced the view of evolutionary psychologist and author Steven Pinker that “the overall historical trends for humanity are encouraging”— a view that has been criticized as glossing over the plights of the most marginalized people. Radford’s contribution to the special issue also seemed to ignore the elephant in CFI’s room: He made not even a passing mention of the staggering racial disparities within his own organization — and within the very pages of the publication he was writing for.

You get the idea. It’s the whitest, most oblivious skeptical organization, although Shermer’s group is competing well with that status. Worse, they aren’t at all interested in broadening their perspectives and getting better. I publicly announced my departure from the organized skepticism movement over these sorts of differences years ago.

Well, now we have achieved the merger of skepticism with the aggrieved privileged conservative crowd. The Skeptical Inquirer has published an article by Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja titled The Ideological Subversion of Biology, which is full of bogus nonsense about how the Progressive Left is strangling science. It’s the same silly crap as that loony In Defense of Merit in Science paper that Coyne coauthored a while ago, and it’s a perfect fit for the Inquirer.

The title is an interesting choice — it’s a blatant call-back to anti-communist hysteria, and will strike a chord with Republicans and MAGAts all across the country. Once upon a time, it was the kind of thing the John Birch Society or Lyndon LaRouche would publish.

It’s really bad. Jerry Coyne has successfully transitioned from respected senior scientist to angry, bitter crank finding common cause with the worst right-wing academic grifters. It’s sad to see.

I’m working on a response to it. Coyne has written a long gish gallop of a paper, so it’s going to take a while, and another thing that’s not helping is that I’m flying off to a 4-day conference this weekend. I’ve also written to the Skeptical Inquirer asking if they’d be interested in publishing a response — I kind of doubt that they will, given their ideological predilections and the fact that they published a load of nonsense in the first place.

Stay tuned. With a few long days at the computer, I might finish a response before my flight on Sunday.

Elon Musk thinks my identity is a slur! EMOTIONAL DAMAGE

I’m afraid that I must confess that I am cis — I have the sexual identity I was assigned at birth — and I’m also heterosexual. I’ve always taken it for granted, I’ve never been tempted to taste of “forbidden fruit,” and I wouldn’t even consider the expense and struggle of hormone treatments or reassignment surgery. I’ve been fortunate to have been born in easy mode, where everything lines up conveniently in the socially conventional way, and I have no desire to be otherwise.

But now, to my immense surprise, I discover that my identity is anathema on certain social media platforms. I have become…a slur.

The words “cis” or “cisgender” are considered slurs on this platform.

Ironically, this dictate has been delivered by a cis man. He must be a self-loathing cis heterosexual man.

Honestly, cis is simply an objective, non-judgmental descriptive term. It is not and never has been an insult. What’s next? Will Elon Musk ban people who use terms like “man” or “woman,” too?

Missing submersible is still in the news

We’re in the countdown phase: newspapers are now reporting estimates of the number of hours of oxygen left in the device. That’s like estimating the degree of misery and suffering five people might currently be experiencing on the basis of practically no information.

It’s fairly roomy for a crypt

What little information we do have tells me that all five are dead and died virtually instantaneously. The stories that matter are about the shortcuts and problems this company’s submersibles. Did you know that little porthole in front was only rated for a depth of 1300 meters while the big carbon fiber tank was going down to 4000 meters? Oops.

The tourist submersible that went missing while exploring the Titanic wreck was previously the target of safety complaints from an employee of OceanGate, the parent company that owns the sub and runs tourist expeditions of the wreck. That employee complained specifically that the sub was not capable of descending to such extreme depths before he was fired.

That’s according to legal documents obtained by The New Republic. According to the court documents, in a 2018 case, OceanGate employee David Lochridge, a submersible pilot, voiced concerns about the safety of the sub. According to a press release, Lochridge was director of marine operations at the time, “responsible for the safety of all crew and clients.”

I’ll make two bold predictions: 1) the submersible and its occupants are the victims of a catastrophic implosion. 2) Hoo boy, the lawsuits that are about to land on OceanGate means that company will catastrophically cease to exist.

Trans boxer defeats cis athlete!

It happened again. A trans person used the natural advantages of their true biological origins to change sex and rule over the cis folk in an athletic competition. We have to do something to stop this!

Except it was a trans man who was assigned female at birth who beat a cis man in a boxing match. I am so confused. Does this mean “biological women” are naturally, intrinsically better at boxing than born men?

Quick, someone use TERF logic consistently to explain this away for me.

Cool! Let’s go to Enceladus!

So that’s why aliens in UFOs have been visiting Earth

I fully support exploration of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It’s a complicated body, it’s got frozen water ice, it has oceans of water beneath all that ice, and analysis has shown that it has all the elements essential for life (CHNOPS). Even a biologist would love to know more!

So here’s someone with a plan to get to Enceladus, the Space Ocean Corp. I hate it already. It’s fantasy math.

SPACE OCEAN CORP is a private Texas holding company. Incorporated September 2021. Regulation D 506(C) Unregistered Security Offering. Investor Deck (pdf)

Water is worth $1 Billion per gallon in space (on Mars, on other moons and planet). If a mission to collect it costs $8 Billion; and we’re able to collect just 10 gallons, it can be sold at a $2 Billion net profit. Collect 1,500 to 100,000 gallons, then gross profit is $1.5 Trillion to $100 Trillion.

I’m not an economist, but…isn’t scarcity the reason they’ve invented this imaginary value of $1 Billion per gallon? It’s not really worth that much. No one is paying (or can afford) a billion dollars for a gallon of water. This entire prospectus is built around this magical number as if it is real.

There are over one quadrillion gallons of water on the moon Enceladus. The volume of a sphere of water with a 25 mile deep radius is approximately 72 quadrillion gallons. If we set up a well for $6-$8 Billion, the initial cost to Space Ocean Corp investors will be a drop in the bucket compared to the ROI gain in market cap.

I can multiply numbers together. I can calculate the volume of a sphere. That is not the basis for a complex, high-tech space industry. But they’re using this elementary fact to fish for investors! Stupid, innumerate, delusional investors. Is Peter Thiel available?

They continue. They’ve got a glib Neil deGrasse Tyson quote! That’s worth money, right?

Goal: Extract & Store water from ocean moons. Phase 1) video an ocean on a moon in the solar system. Phase 2) extract water from that moon. Phase 3) sell the water to space companies and organizations. Phase 4) repeat. Phase 5) Video every ocean in the solar system.

“Water in space costs $10,000 per pound to put into orbit … If you can get it there cheaper, that’s a business model.” Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Future of Colonizing Space- Neil deGrasse Tyson- WGS 2018

Space Ocean Corp and several organizations are partnering up to send a spacecraft to collect water on Enceladus, with the potential to generate a profit of up to $100 Trillion from the initial investment of $8 Billion. Join us!

The ocean on Enceladus is 25 miles deep, making it a valuable source of water in deep space, worth an estimated $1 billion per gallon. We are looking to collect between 1,500 and 100,000 gallons of water from this source and store it on the moon or in orbit, at a Lagrange point, for sale to space organizations.

We’re aiming to launch a private mission to Enceladus, despite the fact that there have been more than 10 government missions already planned for the moon.

By the way, every page on that site has a header with that slogan, Video every ocean in the solar system and store the water, to sustain life in space. It’s in their goals, to video an ocean and to video every ocean in the solar system. I don’t get it. Are they counting on that sweet YouTube money to make them profitable?

I would just ask a simple question: where is that $100 trillion profit coming from? Who is paying that money to Space Ocean Corp? Carolyn Porco (you know, the famous planetary scientist) had that same thought, and asked them about it.

When I asked, ‘What’s your business model?’, they said, ‘Musk’.

What did I tell you? They’re looking for stupid, innumerate, delusional investors. That’s a good choice, except…Musk doesn’t have $100 trillion.

I would love to see Enceladus explored, but one thing this company ignores is that if there is extraterrestrial life there, we would need to be exceedingly careful to avoid contaminating it. I don’t see Space Ocean Corp giving a damn about that — more likely they’d be complaining about the environmentalists wrecking their money-making plan. They are from Texas, after all.

The debate bros are getting wound up again

Here we go again. “Debate me!” shriek the loony antivaxxers; “Why should I,” say the scientists; “That proves you’re wrong,” whine the usual crowd of gullible idiots.

The inciting incident in this case was the king of the fuckin’ online idiots, Joe Rogan, who invited batshit anti-vaxxer loon Robert F. Kennedy Jr onto his show, listened to him respectfully, and then agreed thoroughly with him, to the point of telling respectable and highly qualified scientist Peter Hotez to come on his show and debate him.

Last Thursday, Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster who inked an exclusive deal with Spotify for $200 million, hosted Kennedy for a three-hour conversation. Kennedy told Rogan’s more than 10 million listeners that “vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.” Rogan, a comedian and former host of Fear Factor, spent the entire episode validating Kennedy’s views. Kennedy was presented as a brave truth-teller, standing up to powerful forces. Anyone who doesn’t accept Kennedy’s conspiracy theories, according to Rogan, is unable to think for themselves.

Kennedy spent the better part of an hour rehashing an article he wrote in 2005, which falsely claimed that childhood vaccines are linked to autism. The article was so flawed it was ultimately retracted by the outlet that published it, Salon. “[C]ontinued revelations of the flaws and even fraud tainting the science behind the connection make taking down the story the right thing to do,” Salon’s editor wrote.

In the piece, Kennedy relied extensively on the work of Mark Geier, a doctor whose license to practice medicine was revoked by Maryland in 2011. Geier pushed the vaccine-autism link as a frequent expert witness. He also misrepresented his credentials and developed “a ‘protocol’ for treating autism that involved injecting children with the drug that is used to chemically castrate sex offenders at a cost of upwards of $70,000 per year.”

Naturally, one of Rogan’s army of cranks showed up at Hotez’s house to taunt him.

A prominent vaccine scientist said he was accosted outside of his home after a Twitter exchange with podcaster Joe Rogan, who challenged him to debate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. over the weekend.

“I just was stalked in front of my home by a couple of antivaxers taunting me to debate RFKJr.,” Houston-based scientist Peter Hotez tweeted Sunday.

The debate bros were pissed off because Hotez turned Rogan down. Among those debate bros was Elon Musk.

“He’s afraid of a public debate, because he knows he’s wrong,” Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted in response to Rogan, who claimed Hotez’s response was a “non answer.”

“I will add $150,000 to @joerogan’s wager so now $250,000 can go to charity and the public can hear an open debate on an important topic,” billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman tweeted.

Refusing to debate an ideologue does not prove you’re wrong. That’s not how logic works. Upping the ante does not change the problem with debate. The simple fact is that RFK is a deluded kook with a whole battery of bad ideas in his head. He thinks WiFi causes disease, and Rogan agrees.

RFK Jr.: Wifi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.
Rogan: How does wifi open up your blood-brain barrier?
RFK Jr.: Now you’ve gone beyond my expertise.

Utterly nuts. Bonkers to the nth degree. These two guys might be qualified to operate a public circle-jerk, but they know nothing about the science, so what is to be gained by debating them? That is not a way to resolve any scientific issue. It has always been a problem that glib liars have an automatic edge in debate.

The Sophists highlight the problem with public debates: they are easily gamed with lies, rhetorical skill, and clever wordplay. In order for a debate to actually be worthwhile, both participants must be sincerely dedicated to finding the truth; if one side is not committed to the truth, they will have an advantage, because it is much easier to spout falsehoods than it is to refute them. The technique of spouting too many nonsense points to refute has its own name, called the Gish Gallop, after a young earth creationist who used the technique to criticize evolutionary theory.

The Gish Gallop is effective in live debates largely because the audience does not have enough specialized knowledge to ascertain the validity of a criticism. Science is hard, complicated, and nuanced; when a dishonest debater spouts a dozen nonsensical points, their opponent will not have time to adequately address each of these points. This can give an audience the impression, based simply on the volume of arguments on each side, that the dishonest debater has won the argument.

A live debate is also extremely limited because the participants do not have time to do research to respond to an opponent’s comment. Even experts in a field usually do not have all the relevant data for their field in their head to be recalled at a moment’s notice; again, the Gish Galloper has the advantage here, in that they are usually just providing a list of attacks and are not concerned with accuracy.

Rogan is a dangerous and malicious fraud with a gigantic audience and huge amounts of money, and there he is, spewing all this crap over the body politic, and they’re eating it up. We ought to be terrified. We also not to grant him a millimeter of respect and credibility.

If it’s any consolation, we also treat people horribly

Traffickers are overloading boats to enable people to flee terrible conditions in North Africa and the Middle East, with disastrous results.

In the early hours of Wednesday, 14 June, an old fishing vessel carrying up to 750 people capsized and sank 47 miles off the Greek coast.

So far 79 people have been confirmed as dead. Only 104 had been rescued by the time the search was called off, so it’s possible that more than 600 people have been lost in total. Survivors report that the boat sank “in minutes” in a place where the sea is four kilometres deep. It is unlikely the bodies, including up to 100 children, will ever be found.

The battered fishing vessel left from Tobruk, eastern Libya, and was heading for Italy despite Greece being a closer destination. The reason why is clear. In the past three years, Greece has enacted an increasingly harsh policy of pushbacks, making it almost impossible for asylum-seekers to arrive safely on Greek territory.

Many of the victims were Pakistani. You’ve got to wonder how bad life is in Pakistan that they would risk drowning or Greece, where the survivors have now been thrown into barren warehouses under armed guard. They must have been hoping to reach civilized Great Britain, that land of prosperity and liberty that would treat them with dignity and respect.

I’m joking, of course.

If any of the survivors of the shipwreck make it to Calais, and brave another crossing over the English Channel, their reception will be no better than in Greece. Starting later this month, the Home Office plans to house people seeking asylum in the UK onboard a barge that has been likened to a floating prison by multiple organisations, including MSF UK.

The Bibby Stockholm is a barge that has been designed for 220 people. Is currently being refitted in Falmouth to accommodate 500 asylum seekers. It has been the target of an ongoing resistance campaign led by local groups, with regular protests and actions linking up to the #NoFloatingPrisons campaign launched by my refugee support organisation Reclaim The Sea.

Prison hulks are a long and dishonorable tradition in English history. Respect history!

Don’t forget or forgive America, either — we’re pretty casual about wrecking countries outside our borders, creating the refugees that are fleeing to their oppressors.

Do not read this article

I’m serious. It’ll ruin your day. It will lower your opinion of humanity.

I’m sure there’s something more pleasant you can read to start your day.

OK, here we go. I warned you.

It’s monkey torture.

It’s a niche market on YouTube and the dark web, and in particular, Telegram, with it’s encrypted posts. People in places with lots of monkeys catch them, and then people in wealthy countries send them money with requests to do horrible things on video to them: hit them, stab them, drown them, decapitate them, throw them in a blender. By the way, these were all baby monkeys.

Kapetanich found half a dozen other monkeys on the YouTube like Mini. There was Monkey Ji, Baby Ciko, Chiro, Sweetpea, Mona — all baby long-tailed macaques being tortured on film. Some of the monkeys had developed physical tics from the stress. Monkey Ji was known for holding her head in her hands and rocking back and forth. Mini would grip her sides. The monkey haters in the comments loved it. “Abused multiple times a week since a baby. She has lived a TERRIBLE life,” someone wrote, approvingly, under a video of Mini. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a monkey more broken.”

By that point, hundreds of different YouTube channels were posting videos of baby macaques being abused. In some, the monkeys appeared to die on screen. “Watch them try to breathe while their idiotic brains shut down,” wrote one commenter. Lucy Kapetanich was horrified by what she saw. It hurt to watch as Mini’s owner cooed an Indonesian endearment — “sayang” — to her and then smacked her in the face. It all brought Kapetanich to tears more than once. But the monkey haters loved it.

“He sayang-ed Mini and then immediately smacked her!” wrote one, screen name “Grace”.

“Man I love those videos.”

You might wonder what kind of people get into this kind of stuff. One group on Telegram was called Ape’s Cage, and they seemed like ordinary people.

Ape’s Cage contained about 400 people. The cast of characters was a mixture of the strange and — even stranger — the seemingly normal, all known to one another by their screen names. There was the Torture King, who had invited Kapetanich in; there was “Sadistic”, a gas station attendant and grandmother in rural Alabama; there was “Bones”, a former US Air Force airman from Texas with a big collection of guns; and “Champei”, who caused chaos and infighting in every group he joined. There was “Trevor”, who couldn’t contribute during daytime hours because, “no phone at work, nuclear stuff”.

And it wasn’t just Americans, there were dedicated members in Europe and Australia. Among the cruellest contributors to the group was “The Immolator”, a 35-year-old woman who loved birds and lived with her parents in the English midlands.

The good news is these people were also rather stupid: they left clues to their identity all over the place, were freely talking about their personal life, their homes, their jobs, what they did in their spare time when they weren’t watching someone take a power drill to a baby monkey. In the US, distributing animal torture porn videos is illegal, and some are now facing prison time. The police will sporadically crack down on this stuff, and some of the social media organizations are committed to removing torture porn. Some.

In a statement, YouTube told us that animal abuse had “no place” on the platform and the company was “working hard to quickly remove violative content”. “Just this year alone, we’ve removed hundreds of thousands of videos and terminated thousands of channels for violating our violent and graphic policies,” the statement said. Telegram told us it was “committed to protecting user privacy and human rights such as freedom of speech”, adding that its moderators “cannot proactively patrol private groups”.

Of course Telegram is committed to free speech über alles. That’s much more important than the ongoing suffering of a lot of “tree rats.”

Humans just kind of suck.

One of our submarines is missing

It’s a submersible, actually, but that doesn’t fit the song as well.

A small group of wealthy tourists went on an outing to dive down to the wreck of the Titanic, and they haven’t come back up yet.

A search and rescue operation is underway for a missing submersible operated by a company that handles expeditions to the Titanic wreckage off the coast of St John’s, Newfoundland, in Canada.

The vessel has up to 96 hours of life support, officials said Monday.

That 96 hour number is a comforting fiction, so I won’t be waiting on tenterhooks for a happy ending. The Titanic wreck is about 3800 meters down. When things go wrong at that depth, they go catastrophically wrong. To lose both radio contact and the ability to rise to the surface suggests a major disaster.

But maybe there will be a rescue in the next day or two, and then I can point and laugh at the 3 tourists who spent a quarter million dollars each to experience what must be the most terrifying thrill ride ever.