Wait, what? AOL still exists?

I have learned that AOL is buying the Huffington Post, which is an act of compounding irrelevancies. AOL was a joke (something about landfills full of shiny disks) ten years ago; the Huffington Post started with a flake running the show and has descended to capitalizing on celebrity sleaze, and is on its way to becoming the Weekly World News of the internet. I think the two of them belong together, and hope they sink each other.

But pay no mind to my cynical and pessimistic views. Go read a more substantial summary of the ongoing fluff collision.

People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.

Justice in the UK apparently regulates all kinds of things.

The 41 year-old had been in a relationship with a man whom he lived with and told officials “it would make me feel happy” for it to continue.

But his local council decided his “vigorous sex drive” was inappropriate and that with an IQ of 48 and a “moderate” learning disability, he did not understand what he was doing.

A psychiatrist involved in the case even tried to prevent the man being given sex education, on the grounds that it would leave him “confused”.

Mr Justice Mostyn said the case was “legally, intellectually and morally” complex as sex is “one of the most basic human functions” and the court must “tread especially carefully” when the state tries to curtail it.

But he agreed that the man, known only as Alan, should not be allowed to have sex with anyone on the grounds that he did not have the mental capacity to understand the health risks associated with his actions.

Oh, come on. Fruit flies can have sex; it’s not something that requires a great deal of intellectual capacity to perform adequately. And I think the man understands sex perfectly. “it would make me feel happy” is a beautiful reason to do it.

And deciding to enforce unwanted celibacy on someone because they aren’t educated enough to understand the consequences while also refusing to educate him is grossly injust.

The threat of competition

For a moment there, I was worried. Here I was, putting the readership to work writing a best seller based on the magic power of pope guts, and then Charles Stross, a real writer, writes up his own treatment based on the same premise. Fortunately, he has also announced he will not write it.

But man, while the principled writers with standards are going to turn up their nose at this, you know every contemptible hack who scribbles up potboilers for sale in airport bookstores is pouncing on the idea right now. Write faster, people! We have to be more contemptible and more hackish if I’m going to exploit this market opportunity!

Hey! Who let those Rethuglicans into my state government?

It’s astonishing how regressive Republicans can be. Would you believe the Minnesota Republicans think women are worth less than men, and are willing to pass legislation legalizing that view?

Minnesota Republicans have introduced legislation that would repeal the 1984 Local Government Pay Equity Act (LGPEA), which directs local governments to ensure that women are paid the same as men. While local governments say reporting requirements are costly, equal rights groups say the law needs to stay intact in order to ensure fair pay, especially for women of color.

HF7/SF159 would repeal a laundry list of mandates on local governments — including regulations on part-time police officers, agricultural programs for low-income farmers and grants for libraries — but buried in the bill is a full repeal of the LGPEA.

Republicans have lately grown very fond of tossing descriptive rhetoric into the titles of their legislation. I would propose calling this one the “Buy Female Slaves Cheap Act”, except that I’m worried that such a label would make the Republicans stampede to favor it.

Deeper in the article, it mentions that Minnesota was the first state to pass pay equity laws. Once upon a time, we would have been proud of that.

You don’t really want to be like Ray Comfort, do you?

Last week, I made a post criticizing poor atheist arguments, and in particular, citing atheists who fall back on the limp crutch of the dictionary to justify their beliefs. This made many people upset. I have been named idiot of the week for failing to understand the meaning of atheism, and I’ve got one wanking manic obsessive on twitter insisting that I must make a public apology for daring to try to redefine the meaning of the word “atheism”. Commenters are declaring that they are proud to be Dictionary Atheists.

They’re all wrong. I’m not redefining atheism, nor am I declaring the dictionary wrong: I’m saying it is insufficient. Also, no one is a Dictionary Atheist, and the folly lies in pretending that you are one.

I do not have the power to redefine the word, and I’m also smart enough to know it. I only wish those readers had been smart enough to realize that, too. My article was not a top-down commandment (it’s peculiar and revealing that so many thought it was), but was instead a bottom-up recognition of an obvious fact.

Everyone who is an atheist is so because of other, prior ideas. I’m not saying that there is one set of ideas that make for a True Atheist™, but rather that if you claim there are not, if you pose as someone who is an atheist simply because you don’t believe in gods, you are failing to consider your own philosophical foundations. Calling yourself a Dictionary Atheist is like taking pride in living an unexamined life.

That’s it. And that’s what really annoys me, people who can’t recognize that there’s more to their atheism than blind acceptance of what a dictionary says.

It’s sad to see that so many atheists have something in common with Ray Comfort. As you might expect, Comfort completely distorts what I wrote to claim that I was “pointing out the non-existent foundations of atheism.” Not so, of course, since I was saying the precise opposite: that atheism has strong and rich foundations, and is not simply a blanket rejection of deities.

That’s what Dictionary Atheists imply. Not me.

When will the AAAS stop pandering to superstition?

Jerry Coyne has made a strong observation, and is also hinting at an alternative, about the way the AAAS panders to religion. Once again, they’re having a session at the national meeting in February dedicated to the accommodationist view, with a one-sided slate of speakers all preaching about the compatibility of science with superstition. We’re all getting a little tired of this, I think; it’s the same old story where a bunch of credulous apologists get to trample freely all over science in the name of putting up a façade of simpering friendship with religion, all in the name, they say, of political expediency.

Coyne is peeved about several things: the dishonesty of the evangelical position (no, the Trinity is not supported in any way by science), the blatant bias of these discussions that are presented as if they are an open-minded way of handling the issues when they only offer one side, and the unrepresentative nature of these panels that completely ignore with the purpose of implicitly rejecting the views of a very large bloc of American scientists. It’s freakin’ obvious that the AAAS is pandering to evangelical Christianity, and that minority views that are actually in opposition to science are being presented as reasonable compromises. Here’s what Coyne says and suggests:

What irks me about all this are two things. The first is the complete omission of contrasting anti-accommodationist views. There is a huge subset of AAAS members who don’t feel that science and faith are in harmony–indeed, that they are in dire conflict. Those views never get represented at these meetings. You will never see a AAAS symposium on “The incompatibility of science and faith,” with scientist-speakers like Richard Dawkins or Victor Stenger. (What a lovely thing that would be!). The AAAS chooses to present only one view, as if it represented a majority of its members. What about the many of us who feel that the best thing for science–and humanity as a whole–is not respectful dialogue with evangelical Christians, but the eradication of evangelical Christianity?

I agree that a realistic symposium at the AAAS that didn’t try to whitewash Christianity into a friend of science and reason would be wonderful — I’d want to go. Like him, I doubt that it would happen, in particular because it would be misrepresented by the accommodationists. It’s already happening; if you look at the comments there, you’ll find Nick Matzke mangling the idea. He’s obsessed with the last sentence I quoted above, and apparently believes that such a symposium would consist of ringleaders of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy plotting how to destroy Christians. The session topics would be something like this:

  1. Why all religions are evil and must be eradicated

  2. Christians: Should they be burnt at the stake, or merely imprisoned for life?

  3. Ignition temperatures and incineration requirements for human bodies

  4. Closing hymn of praise to Richard Dawkins

I don’t think Nick Matzke can even imagine what a group of secularists would find useful at AAAS — he’s projecting quite a bit, and presuming that such a session would be as one-sided and blinkered as these sessions the evangelical Christians are running. They wouldn’t. I’m as antagonistic to religion as Coyne is, maybe more so (hey, there’s another session possibility: “Atheists Roast Christianity,” where we all vie with each other to insult religion the most), but unlike what the Matzkes of the world assume, we are actually aware of the political situation.

If I were in charge of organizing such a beast, here’s what I’d look for. I’d want to have an honest religionist or philosopher/historian of religion there to give a talk on key doctrinal conflicts: what are they? How do modern Christians and Muslims and Jews resolve them? They are there, of course: there are major points like teleology in the universe and mind-body dualism that are unsupported or even contradicted by science. He wouldn’t have to endorse or oppose any of those points, but simply, clearly, explain where the conflicts lie.

I’d want someone to discuss secular approaches to school and public education. These do NOT involve teaching atheism in the schools. I’m a big fat noisy atheist myself, but when I get into the classroom to teach one of those controversial topics like evolution, my atheism is not an issue, and I don’t tell the students they have to abandon their gods to be a scientist. What the attendees at AAAS do not need is someone telling them how wonderful Christianity is; what would be useful is someone explaining how to teach honest, evidence-based science without compromising their principles, no matter what they are.

I’d want someone with political and legal expertise to discuss what the law actually says about science education. The perfect person would be someone like Barry Lynn, or Sean Faircloth, or Eddie Tabash — a person who could lay out exactly what kind of political tack scientists should take with legislators to keep the taint of religious bias out of support for science.

Actually, the atheist-run version of such a session would be what a science organization should want: instead of some half-assed stab at rapprochement with clearly unscientific, irrational, traditional metaphysics, and instead of the tribal war council the accommodationists imagine, it would be a rational discussion of how secular scientists (which would include religious scientists who are committed to keeping their beliefs out of the lab and classroom) can get their jobs done in a crazily religious country. As long as these pious zealots are left in charge, though, that’s not what we’re getting.

I can go to atheist meetings to get my rah-rah on for godlessness; people like Leshner, the organizer of the currently planned come-to-Jebus meeting, can go to church and get their idiot-ology affirmed there. An AAAS symposium ought to be actually accomplishing something for all of the members of the organization, not just the atheists and especially not just the deluded apologists under loyalty oaths who want to Christianize science.