I don’t miss this jerk at all

What was the worst moment in the George W. Bush presidency? You might be thinking it had to be the loss of life in 9/11, or the war and its devastation, or the consequences of his bad economic decisions, but no…to poor sensitive George, it was the moment a black man publicly criticized him.

MATT LAUER: You say you told Laura at the time it was the worst moment of your Presidency?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yes. My record was strong I felt when it came to race relations and giving people a chance. And — it was a disgusting moment.

This moment, when dopey incoherent Kanye West clumsily expressed his anger at Bush’s neglect of New Orleans.

Ah, the self-absorbed obliviousness of the truly privileged. Incurious George’s worst moment was when someone said something bad about him.

Survivor Pharyngula: The Anti-Climax

I’ve hated those Survivor TV shows for as long as they’ve been on — I’ve never been able to sit through a single episode. Staging a phony zero-sum game and encouraging backstabbing betrayal and vicious psychopathic behavior is not my idea of fun.

I have this fantasy version of the game in which there are months of lead time, lots of promos highlighting the most odious aspects of each contestant’s personality, with elaborate web sites (all in flash, of course) pushing the competitive edge, all working to build audience anticipation to a fever pitch. Then the day of the premiere comes, and everyone tunes in and is sitting on the edge of their seat waiting for the blood to flow. It begins with a tracking shot from a helicopter of all the contestants lined up on the beach: there’s the smarmy announcer, the yuppie, the stoner, the bitch, the liar, the OCD freak, the bumbler, the pretty one, the fanatic, the lazy one, the self-righteous preacher, the clueless one, etc., all looking smug and ready to cut each other’s throats. The copter pulls away to a long shot of them artfully posed on a glittering tropical beach, when suddenly…a bright flash! The camera and chopper tumble about erratically! As the pilot and cameraman get everything back under control, the view swivels to a fiery red and black mushroom cloud rising from the sea, where the island has ceased to exist. And then, finally, the opening title appears in some melodramatic apocalyptic font: SURVIVOR: GAME OVER, MAN. Fade to black. Cut to one hour of solid commercials for Viagra, tranquilizers, and adult diapers.

That’s a little violent, I know. Alternative ending: the helicopter just flies away, carrying the entire camera crew with it, leaving the whole crop of contestants, staff, and producers abandoned on the island. No camera time for any of them; their only prize is to survive and find a way home again, without the artificial structure of bizarre games and cash prizes. The final title is SURVIVOR: WHO CARES?.

This episode of Survivor Pharyngula concludes with the second ending. I was a little worried when I got up on Sunday morning and discovered that the entire site was down and you couldn’t get to anything on Scienceblogs at all — had somebody read my mind and pushed the self-destruct button? Uh-oh. But no, that was a completely independent event, entirely accidental. The planned outcome is as follows: nothing happens at all. I fly away from the game, waving bye-bye, and telling you all that you’ll get no help from me, and you need to work it all out for yourselves.

Why, yes, I am a deceptive rat-bastard. Haven’t you figured that out yet?

I was hoping that this would be a little exercise in self-awareness: I thought the message was a little obvious, especially given that the results included a lot of popular commenters and the process involved throwing p*o*o. You were supposed to recognize that the line between a troll and a regular and valued commenter was sometimes very thin indeed.

I need you all to take a moment and see things from my perspective. I don’t read the comments in detail; I can’t. I skim through them. I get them all forwarded to my email account, where I can easily sort through them and get a feel for the big picture. I’m still in the helicopter, flying over the city, looking down on the traffic, and all I care about is that it is moving smoothly; it’s fine with me if you’re all honking your horns and waving angry fists out the windows, as long as everyone is moving along. I sometimes see major blockages developing as someone tries to disrupt the flow, and I’ll remove the troublemaker, especially if they have a habit of screwing up conversations; sometimes I’ll set up alternate routes, new threads with the idea of diverting some of the noise; and sometimes I’ll spot obvious maniacs who come barreling in screeching and howling, and I’ll use my disintegrator beam to take them out before they cause a pile-up. But I’m usually a bit aloof from the comment threads. I have to be, and I often feel like it’s a mistake for me to dive in, fun as it would be, because having an invulnerable helicopter cruising along in the traffic lanes is a recipe for disaster.

So here’s the outcome: no one is getting banned, yet. One gomer, yanshen71786, is showing real potential for it — responding to a request to demonstrate that he demonstrate that he can be an interesting commenter with yet another long series of self-righteous, plodding recitations of his dogmas ain’t encouraging — but I do have some rather bendy and subjective principles at work here, and I’m not going to undercut them in this instance. This is mostly a free-speech zone, and if you want to come in and preach racism and homophobia and misogyny and creationism and libertarian politics, all things I hate, you can…and we have a body of opinionated smart commenters here who will cheerfully carve your ass up, season it well, roast it, and serve it back to you with a garnish of bacon, and that’s the way I like it. You can cuss. You can argue vehemently. You can fight angrily. None of these are bannable offenses, and if they were, most of the valued OM winners would be banned right now.

Get it? Because you disagree with someone isn’t cause to ban them.

I’m sorry to disappoint. I do agree, though, that the comment threads are getting a little rough and dog-eat-dog, but it’s not entirely the fault of the recent influx of brain-dead trolls. It’s also because the culture here has gotten a little trigger-happy, so I’m making a call to everyone to think for just a moment before blasting away…for only a moment, though, so that you can aim a little better, and without any condemnation of the blasting away part, which is always fun.

Here are a few rules to follow. Well, actually, they’re more like guidelines — we’re a rather lawless bunch, and in particular, I’m a kind of Chaotic Neutral overlord, perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to sporadic infractions, or even to charge in and break my own rules if I want. I generally don’t for the entirely pragmatic reason that some degree of predictability helps fuel the fires.

  1. The “post no bills” rule. I detest spammers, and they come through routinely and I simply eliminate them without comment. But there are occasional commenters who come through and do the equivalent—they’ve got their boring hobby-horses and they repeat the same tired claims over and over again. If you can’t be creative in your arguments and respond intelligently to your critics, you’re just another spammer. I will delete you. Pharyngula is not your billboard.

  2. The “stupid is as stupid does” rule. You can be a dick here, you just can’t be a stupid dick. Barreling in with idiotic claims that have been dealt with a thousand times before, as if you’ve got something novel to say, is a behavior guaranteed to stop a thread cold as everyone turns their cyberpistols on you. It’s boring. I’ll whisk you away for your own good and tell you to go play in the kiddie sandbox somewhere else.

  3. The “three strikes” rule. This one has been informally in operation for years, and it’s a simple idea: if you see a comment from someone you’ve never heard of before, a newbie, don’t open fire right away. Politely ask for clarification, begin a conversation, and if they demonstrate inanity after they’ve made three comments, then you can open up with the flamethrower. Give new people a chance!

  4. The “no prayers” rule. This is something that’s beginning to annoy me: the frequent calls for banning of individuals from other commenters. I am not your personal deity who will throw thunderbolts at objects of your wrath, and you don’t get to invoke a deus ex machina to give you a shortcut in an argument. Don’t tell me to ban someone. Don’t threaten anyone with banning. I’m watching, and if someone is genuinely disruptive and sending threads into a death spiral of acrimony, I’ll notice and take care of it. But if someone is disagreeing with you or is just being stupid or hateful, it’s your job to deal with it, not mine. Relish the challenge, savor the gristly bloody chore of taking them in your teeth and chewing them up.

  5. The “make ’em laugh” rule. Are you really, really angry with someone? Do you just want to make them explode and disappear and never comment here again? You could always use the Firefox killfile script, but you could also follow the formula many of the more popular commenters here do: ridicule, sarcasm, and comedy. It works! Calling someone an asshole is cathartic, but if you really want to make it sting, mockery is much more potent. It also keeps the conversation going entertainingly, rather than in boring back-and-forth wrangling. I’m much more inclined to let a non-productive argument continue if it is amusingly expressed.

We now commence our regular schedule of ads for Zoloft and Depends.

You may be missing the spectacle of pitting idiots against one another, but have no fear, some of them are still on track for expulsion if they can’t lighten up and be more participatory than preacherly. And that’s addressed to more than just the known trollish objects of our contempt.

Miss me?

Scienceblogs was down for the count most of the morning — we had some annoying technical glitch on the server, nothing malicious. Now you can read this. Right? If you can’t, let me know by leaving a comment describing exactly how the site is no longer visible, why you can’t comment, and any other strange circumstances that impair your ability to read or write the page you are viewing or commenting on.

Breathtaking editorial arrogance

A woman wrote an article on LiveJournal, freely available to readers and for her own interests, and then the managing editor of a small magazine picked it up and published it, without notification and without, of course, payment. When the author contacted the editor and pointedly brought up the matter of the ethical lapse, suggesting that compensation could be in the form of a donation to the Columbia School of Journalism, the editor, Judith Griggs, condescendingly wrote back with this load of tripe:

Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.

But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!

Whoa. Patronizing, critical snark from the wicked witch who plainly stole somebody else’s work for her personal gain. By the way, apparently the bits that needed editing were literal transcriptions of 16th century spellings from an old cookbook which the editor updated, not flaws in the author’s writing.

Just to add a little extra irony to the whole affair, Judith Griggs’ email had this signature:

This electronic message may contain information privileged for the addressee only.
Please be advised that the Cooks Source email addressee is not intended to be transferred to any other addressor, and any copying, distribution or use of the contents of this message is prohibited.

I think Ms Griggs is about to discover that her snootiness is going to be transferred, copied, and distributed to a greater extant than she imagined.

They’re all still arguing against me!

Ever since I ferociously asserted that god was not only dead, but never existed and never will exist, and that no amount of hand-waving speculation will convince me otherwise, those thuggish provisionalists have been gunning for me. Jerry Coyne tried, and now Greta Christina pounds on me, trying to convince me I’m wrong. They’re not succeeding.

I’m merely being honest here. I read Greta Christina’s list of events that would convince her, and I have to say that none of them would sway me. They’d convince me that there are unexplainable phenomena and beings greater than myself, but I already believe that with no problem and without budging from atheism. I’ve already dealt with the 900 foot tall Jesus fallacy (it’s not a prior conclusion of religious thought), and while finding amazingly detailed scientific information in a holy book would be impressive, evidence of beings in the past who were smarter than me isn’t evidence of a god. Also, they haven’t because they didn’t, so postulating circumstances that have been shown not to have occurred is only persuasive in the most abstract and imaginary way possible. I suppose you could postulate that I would be rich if my fabulously wealthy great-aunt had left me her billions in her will, except of course that I didn’t have a fabulously wealthy great-aunt.

Sorry, guys, you’ve failed. Your arguments haven’t even touched my premises.

But wait! There’s another challenger, that sneaky, devious, underhanded, philosophizing gadfly, John Wilkins. I don’t think he’s even trying to address what I was arguing, and he’s snuck in an interesting possibility. He calls it the Greek Panthon test, and he’s basically defining “god” as something with the possibility of existence, unlike the usual ethereal all-pervasive omniscient omnipotent eternal entity that we’ve been indoctrinated to accept as the only true kind of god in our culture. His definition is simple: If it would be a god in the Greek Pantheon, then it’s a god. So capricious, cranky beings with human-like qualities but just a little more oomph and privilege than your average vanilla human, creatures with something that would look to us like super-powers, are all gods.

So angels and saints are all gods, and Christianity becomes a polytheistic religion. Batman is a god. The Easter Bunny is a god. Babe Ruth is probably a god now. Tiger Woods might be a god, but I think the convention is that deifications tend to happen after some isolation from mundane testability, i.e. death.

So I think I’d concede that if you provide a sufficiently trivial definition of a god (but only trivial in the sense that it is probably the most common and most universal understanding of what a god is, anyway!), then you would be able to come up with evidence that would convince me of the existence of that specific being. The requirements for this being, though, would have to be sufficiently loose and achievable that you’d also end up redefining most atheists as polytheists, and you’d probably also piss off all the believers who would be even more peeved at the lumpers who diminish the exclusivity of their pantheon than they are with the atheists who simply say their pantheon is false.

Survivor Pharyngula: The Second Round

I have reviewed the audition tapes you all sent in for Survivor Pharyngula, averaged together the scores given to people who had multiple recommendations, and sorted them into a ranked list, and then arbitrarily threw out everyone who got below a score of 40. Here’s the list of Enemies of the Threads.

  • yanshen71786
  • Professor Frink
  • j-brisby
  • Al B. Quirky
  • Sili
  • MaxH
  • Manny Calavera
  • Brownian
  • Joshua Zelinsky
  • Ing
  • Walton
  • Cuttlefish
  • Ogvorbis
  • sandiseattle

Rascals and troublemakers, every one. But the list is too long! I have to whittle it down a bit before we move on to the next stage, so in my role as capricious autocrat, I’m going to give them all a chance to ask to be excused. Beg for mercy, entertain me, show cause to keep you around, and perhaps I shall decide on a whim to remove you from the list. It doesn’t matter if I agree with your views or not, demonstrating a sense of humor would be a plus, as would being able to make a rational argument.

I want this list cut in half, at least — if every one of these people shows that their presence is worth something to the site, maybe I’ll just call the whole show off.

So, before I throw you to the mercies of the Pharyngula commentariat, you irksome infernal rabble-rousers can show me why I should keep you around. Unless you want to be thrown to the mob, of course…

Atheists can be stupid, too

This is the worst case of atheist buttery I’ve ever seen. I’m left with this terribly greasy, bloated feeling after going through it, and I think my arteries were clogging up just reading it. This fellow Malcolm Knox is an atheist who happily sends his kids off to the Catholic church, which is just fine (his wife is Catholic)…but he’s got to rattle off ten terrible, awful, stupid excuses for why he has to do it. It’s embarrassing how pathetic his reasoning is. And my SIWOTI syndrome compels me to take each one apart.

  1. In his 1995 open letter to his 10-year-old daughter Juliet, Dawkins counselled her against belief based on “tradition, authority or revelation”. Because children, he writes, are “suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them”. If this is true, surely it applies to atheism as much as to belief. To keep my children out of church would be to impose my unbelief upon them by the exact mechanism that Dawkins warns against.

    False dichotomy. Not sending kids off to be indoctrinated in church does not imply that you are instead sitting them down and preaching atheism at them. If they want to go, let them; if they don’t, let ’em stay home. That is not imposing beliefs on them, quite the opposite, it is giving them the freedom to choose.

  2. Imagine growing up in a world where the most imposing monuments of architecture are unknown places. Do atheists really want their children to think of churches as fearsome compounds of weirdness?

    Yes.

    And seriously, you can explain to them what a building is for without sending them to sit in it for a few hours every week. With that attitude, he’s going to have to troop the kids off to every little architectural oddity for instruction.

  3. I don’t believe Jesus raised Lazarus, or walked on water, or fed the masses with those loaves and fishes. I don’t believe in the seven-day Creation, the Flood, the burning bush or the parting of the Red Sea. Yet I cannot imagine feeling at home in Australia without knowing those stories.

    So buy a book of Bible stories. They’re cheap and common. Really, it doesn’t take tedious weekly instruction to get the gist of the major stories in the Bible.

    Unless your kids are really stupid. I’m beginning to think Mr Knox has little respect for his children, since they apparently have to be repetitively hammered with Genesis before they’ll recognize Noah’s Ark.

  4. When (not if) my children rebel, it would have more meaning if they knew what they were rebelling against. I mean rebellion in the broadest sense: artistic creativity, inventing secret languages, striking out for independence. I mean rebellion in the sense that I rebel against Hitchens’s 300-page anti-religion harangue, God Is Not Great, even though I agree with every word. There’s something particularly bullying about singing in the choir being preached to.

    So you send your kids off to literally sing in the choir being preached to? This makes no sense. Maybe it would be of benefit to the children to rebel against something rational and interesting; is he really pretending that he’s sending them to church so they’ll someday have an easy mark to flail against?

  5. So they may come home with unanswerable questions. Who made God? Why can St Mary save some sick people and not others? I send my children to church not to find the answers – they won’t – but to come home with more questions. With unanswerable questions, they can puncture the infantile myth of their father’s omniscience.

    Hey, how about having them come home with difficult, interesting questions? Like what are neutrinos, how are traits stored on chromosomes, and daddy, can we dissect the roadkill in front of the house? I think it’s great to encourage kids to ask questions, but why settle for stupid questions?

  6. There is one basic distinction for which I admire the Catholic Church. As the coverage of Mary MacKillop’s canonisation showed, even if you reject the mumbo-jumbo of miracles, there is much to be gained from the example of selflessness.

    I grew up going to church. There were nice people there. But they did not have a monopoly on selflessness, and it is offensive for Mr Knox to be perpetuationg the myth that they do.

  7. Without it, they can never be tolerant, only indifferent. As Hitchens reminds us, churches have been bastions of religious exclusivity and intolerance. But the great crimes of the 20th century were alliances of the fundamentalist few and the indifferent many.

    Wait, what? I thought you just said they were bastions of selflessness.

    And once again, Knox plays the false dichotomy card. Not going to church every week is not synonymous with complete ignorance of and indifference to religion.

  8. Religion is not synonymous with ethics. The content of NSW’s proposed schools ethics classes has been robustly debated. But to substitute ethics for scripture is akin to replacing food with vitamin pills. Biblical parables, or teachings from Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or any other religion, may contain ethical lessons. They may not. But they do much else besides.

    What? Mr Knox does not say. There’s just something in those old superstitions he wants taught, which is not an argument.

  9. Kids don’t get indoctrinated that easily. If children’s minds were putty, they would emerge into adulthood caring for the underdog, distrusting materialism, cherishing the environment and standing up against the corrupt. These (Judeo-Christian) precepts are embedded in pretty much all of the children’s film, television and literature I’ve ever seen. Do children grow up to embrace those beliefs? The evidence suggests otherwise.

    See #4. When it’s convenient, Mr Knox argues that kids will rebel against what they’re taught; when it suits him, he claims that they ignore what they’re taught. Which is it?

    Also, he has a pollyannaish view of film, tv, and literature. Maybe he should take the kids to see the latest Saw film instead of Veggie Tales.

  10. Because I had to. When my son finished his first Communion classes after two months of Sundays, he was in a celebratory mood. “Yay, now I don’t have to go to church any more!” “Not so fast,” I said. “There’s still confirmation.” He wasn’t too pleased. “But you don’t have to go to church every Sunday.” I replied: “I did when I was your age.” Did it do me any good? Possibly. It didn’t make me a believer, but it left me with some knowledge of what I was unbelieving in.

    “I had to suffer when I was your age, so you get to be miserable, too”. Wow. Give that man a parenting award!

None of these were reasonable arguments for sending your kids to church every week. Not one. These are feeble exercises in rationalizing an irrational decision.

And his conclusion is even worse.

At worst, Sundays in church give hours of boredom in which the young mind can roam. Kids don’t get much of a chance to get bored. As the filmmaker Peter Weir once said, the creative mind should actively seek boredom. My children’s schooling is more engaging than mine and their leisure hours are filled with more varied activity. A little boredom now and then, sitting in church while they’re thinking about something else, can send them off to new places inside the lozenges of those stained-glass windows. The boredom of that Sunday hour, if boredom is the worst of it, might be more precious than it seems.

So lock your kids in a closet for a few hours every week.

No, boredom is not a virtue. There’s a difference between boredom and having leisure time…and an even greater difference between leisure and compulsory silence and immobility.

How about this: instead of church, give the poor kids two hours of free time on Sunday morning — no chores, no forced activity — and turn them loose in a room full of books and toys. And don’t sermonize at them, but tell them that they can talk to mommy and daddy all they want, and you’ll listen.

Jeez, but this Knox fellow seems like a sucky father.