Fashionably freaky?

I don’t know if I should even mention this. It’s a cowhide vest up for bids on ebay. It’s a pedestrian bit of trash, except…it’s made by Ray Comfort, and is even signed by him. That makes it freakish and weird, and kind of a trophy to wear.

It’s for a woman, size 6-8. I suppose you could get it for your Mom for Mother’s Day, or maybe you would just want to wear it for yourself. It could be a conversation starter, if nothing else. Most of the money from the auction goes to the Foundation Beyond Belief, so it’s also in a good cause.

It’s just weird.

Poll: Should comedians be rude?

Catherine Deveny seems to have hit a nerve. She made a remark about a child star over twitter — “I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid” — which triggered the “Think of the children!” reflex and got her fired from her job writing for the Melbourne Age newspaper.

This subject might be a bit contentious, since people are already wrangling over it in the endless thread. I’m going to have to side with the people who say it was out of line, it was incredibly rude, and…it’s exactly what a comedian should be doing, pushing the boundaries and making people uncomfortable. I felt a bit torn when I read it, too, but this was at an awards show, where women (and in this case, a girl) are tarted up and expected to parade about in fancy fashion in a role that the men are not. It was a very edgy remark since it made the sexualization of an 11 year old blatant, but that was the point!

And it got Deveny fired. I guess The Age wanted a bland, safe, unchallenging comedian.

I am wondering, though, how a comedian can be fired, but Cardinal Pell gets to keep his job. If Australians were so concerned about Protecting The Children, shouldn’t the old idjit been kicked out of the country long ago? Maybe it’s because he wasn’t even trying to be funny.

Anyway, there’s a poll. I don’t expect it to get pharyngulated in the usual way, since the godless vote will be split.

Were Catherine Deveny’s Logies Tweets out of line?

Yes, she picked on a little girl

60%
No, that’s her style of humour

40%

Advocates advocate against advocacy

The advocates of accommodationism and apologetics at Biologos have a new article up claiming that scientists ought not to advocate for science — we’re supposed to emphasize uncertainty. That’s lame; it feeds into the sterile stereotype of the scientist as some kind of dispassionate drone with little enthusiasm for ideas. As Jerry Coyne explains, it’s also hypocritical of a site that promotes religion without hesitation to be arguing that scientists should be more ambiguous.

That’s all we need, is for science to be made more boring, dry, and ambiguous. You’d almost think the Templetonites over there want to sabotage science education.

Christopher Maloney is still a QUACK!

He’s still complaining. Maloney is the naturopath in Maine who makes inflated claims about the efficacy of his magic drugs, and who still pops by here and now then to protest feebly, and he’s still making stuff up elsewhere. It also turns out that he has a page warning the world about me and you readers.

The infamous PZ Myers asked those who visit his blog to repeat this message all over the internet. He chose me because of false accusations from a local freshman, who blamed me for getting his insipid little clone blog kicked off the internet. Since Myers runs a thing called the endless thread, the majority of his popularity is manufactured by random postings. But multiple clone sites attach themselves to his and we have a flotilla of clones masquerading as independent thinkers.

When PZ Myers was questioned, he eventually retracted his original accusations, but his clone sites did not. I have spent considerable time answering questions at both PZ Myers site and Dr. Novella’s sister site. Dr. Novella acts as the “brain trust” and “spanks” anyone who questions PZ Myers.

Whoa. You can manufacture popularity with random postings? Why hasn’t everyone leapt upon this tactic? He also seems to like the terms “clone blog” and “clone site” to refer to anyone on the web who has noticed that Christopher Maloney is a quack.

By the way, I did not retract anything I said about him: he is a quack. Steve Novella is not my servant; I’m sure he’d laugh at the idea that he supports me unquestioningly. Novella dropped the evidence bomb on Maloney, nothing more.

Maloney has also given the Pharyngula gang an entry in his main menu. Are you flattered? He claims there that I have moderated him out of existence. He has not been banned in any way, however; his evidence is that he includes a copy of a comment that did not get posted. It has five links in it. Hmmm…I guess I must have targeted that one for deletion because it was so persuasive. The fact that we have filtering software that screens comments for excessive links is irrelevant.

Oh, well, I guess I’ll just have to be kind and reply by boosting Maloney’s reputation on Google as a quack a little more.

That’s no universe!

Stephen Wolfram has mastered the art of being intellectually provocative and extremely annoying at the same time. He’s talking about very cool stuff here, but I’m put off by the excessive hype — apparently he wants to model the fundamental properties of the entire universe in some code in the computer, and while I sympathize with the idea that maybe the theory of everything really will lead to something both fundamental and simple, I’m not convinced that it will just pop out of a program that is sufficiently synthetic.

Perhaps it would be more persuasive if he said something more specific than waving a hand at a squiggly diagram of a 3-dimensional set of looping lines on the computer screen and announcing that that there was our universe.

At last! The Vatican takes action!

Finally, the church is beginning to clean up its act. The Vatican has announced that it is investigating three orders of nuns in Washington state — what perverted and revolting acts have these nuns committed to draw the ire of the Catholic church? I’m sure your imagination is working hard right now.

The Vatican says it’s following up on complaints of feminism and activism.

Oh, my god … heads will roll. They’ll be ostracized, exorcized, and excommunicatized. No mere buggery of children here, but feminism? Jesus is weeping in heaven above, and the angels are grounded with grief.

Sam Harris v. Sean Carroll

The discussion is interesting. Sam Harris recently and infamously proposed that, contra Hume, you can derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, and that science can therefore provide reasonable guidance towards a moral life. Sean Carroll disagrees at length.

I’m afraid that so far I’m in the Carroll camp. I think Harris is following a provocative and potentially useful track, but I’m not convinced. I think he’s right in some of the examples he gives: science can trivially tell you that psychopaths and violent criminals and the pathologies produced by failed states in political and economic collapse are not good models on which to base a successful human society (although I also think that the desire for a successful society is not a scientific premise…it’s a kind of Darwinian criterion, because unsuccessful societies don’t survive). However, I don’t think Harris’s criterion — that we can use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals — is valid. We can’t. We can certainly use science to say how we can maximize well-being, once we define well-being…although even that might be a bit more slippery than he portrays it. Harris is smuggling in an unscientific prior in his category of well-being.

One good example Harris uses is the oppression of women and raging misogyny of the Taliban. Can we use science to determine whether that is a good strategy for human success? I think we can, but not in the way Harris is trying to do so: we could ask empirically, after the fact, whether the Taliban was successful in expanding, maintaining its population, and responding to its environment in a productive way. We cannot, though, say a priori that it is wrong because abusing and denigrating half the population is unconscionable and vile, because that is not a scientific foundation for the conclusion. It’s an emotional one; it’s also a rational one, given the premise that we should treat all people equitably…but that premise can’t claim scientific justification. That’s what Harris has to show!

That is different from saying is is an unjustified premise, though — I agree with Harris entirely that the oppression of women is an evil, a wrong, a violation of a social contract that all members of a society should share. I just don’t see a scientific reason for that — I see reasons of biological predisposition (we are empathic, social animals), of culture (this is a conclusion of Enlightenment history), and personal values, but not science. Science is an amoral judge: science could find that a slave culture of ant-like servility was a species optimum, or that a strong behavioral sexual dimorphism, where men and women had radically different statuses in society, was an excellent working solution. We bring in emotional and personal beliefs when we say that we’d rather not live in those kinds of cultures, and want to work towards building a just society.

And that’s OK. I think that deciding that my sisters and female friends and women all around the world ought to have just as good a chance to thrive as I do is justified given a desire to improve the well-being and happiness of all people. I am not endorsing moral relativism at all — we should work towards liberating everyone, and the Taliban are contemptible scum — I’m just not going to pretend that that goal is built on an entirely objective, scientific framework.

Carroll brings up another set of problems. Harris is building his arguments around a notion that we ought to maximize well-being; Caroll points out that “well-being” is an awfully fuzzy concept that means different things to different people, and that it isn’t clear that “well-being” isn’t necessarily a goal of morality. Harris does have an answer to those arguments, sort of.

Those who assumed that any emphasis on human “wellbeing” would lead us to enslave half of humanity, or harvest the organs of the bottom ten percent, or nuke the developing world, or nurture our children a continuous drip of heroin are, it seems to me, not really thinking about these issues seriously. It seems rather obvious that fairness, justice, compassion, and a general awareness of terrestrial reality have rather a lot to do with our creating a thriving global civilization–and, therefore, with the greater wellbeing of humanity. And, as I emphasized in my talk, there may be many different ways for individuals and communities to thrive–many peaks on the moral landscape–so if there is real diversity in how people can be deeply fulfilled in life, this diversity can be accounted for and honored in the context of science. As I said in my talk, the concept of “wellbeing,” like the concept of “health,” is truly open for revision and discovery. Just how happy is it possible for us to be, personally and collectively? What are the conditions–ranging from changes in the genome to changes in economic systems–that will produce such happiness? We simply do not know.

The phrase beginning “It seems rather obvious…” is an unfortunate give-away. Don’t tell me it’s obvious, tell me how you can derive your conclusion from the simple facts of the world. He also slips in a new goal: “creating a thriving global civilization.” I like that goal; I think that is an entirely reasonable objective for a member of a species to strive for, to see that their species achieves a stable, long-term strategy for survival. However, the idea that it should be achieved by promoting fairness, justice, compassion, etc., is not a scientific requirement. As Harris notes, there could be many different peaks in the moral landscape — what are the objective reasons for picking those properties as the best elements of a strategy? He doesn’t say.

I’m fine with setting up a set of desirable social goals — fairness, justice, compassion, and equality are just a start — and declaring that these will be the hallmark of our ideal society, and then using reason and science to work towards those objectives. I just don’t see a scientific reason for the premises, wonderful as they are and as strongly as they speak to me. I also don’t feel a need to label a desire as “scientific”.

Maybe he was just doing research

George Alan Rekers is a fairly well-known anti-gay activist. He’s one of those scientific types who claims that being gay is curable, is best known for his claim that adopted children of gay couples are more prone to suicide, and is also one of the founders of the Patriarchy Research Council, with James Dobson. Oh, and of course he’s a Christian minister.

He just got back from a ten-day European tour — crusaders for heterosexuality deserve a break now and then, too — when it was discovered that he had hired a “rent boy” for the trip. He had picked the young fellow out from a web site that describes his sexual attributes and offered explicit services for pay, but Dr Rekers said he just hired him to…”lift his luggage”. I am unfamiliar with that euphemism, but I’m sure it was fun.

To even greater amusement, it is also revealed that Rekers, staunch opponent of adoption by gay couples, adopted a child — a 16 year old boy.

They hypocrisy is strong in this one.

Who to blame for the oil spill?

Everyone knows by now that there has been a catastrophic oil platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the biggest oil spill in American history…and it is still spewing and people are still talking about expanding offshore drilling. The actual causes of this accident stem from deregulation and exceeding legal restrictions, but you know, that assumes that no one wanted this environmental disaster to occur; we are presuming that it actually is a horrible accident.

It takes a mind unfettered by the constraints of reason and evidence to assume otherwise. It requires the brain of Rush Limbaugh.

The cap and trade bill was strongly criticized by hardcore environmentalist wackos because it supposedly allowed more offshore drilling and nuclear plants. What better way to head off more oil drilling and nuclear plants than blowing up a rig? I’m just noting the timing here.

Limbaugh’s official transcript is different (don’t ask me why), and even crazier — he babbles about SWAT teams sent down to the Gulf and Al Gore inciting civil disobedience to further his crazy claims.

I think he’s been reading too many Michael Crichton novels.