Saying dumb stuff for fun & profit

I wish I’d jumped on this bandwagon ages ago: just fart out incredibly stupid things with no context and no reason, and then reap the harvest of attention, while never having to justify what I just said. It’s too late for me, though, because Jordan Peterson has already cornered the market.

Atheistic hedonists unconsciously worship Pan.

Look at that! Just 5 idiotic words, and here I am paying attention. The thing is, I can’t resist a puzzle, and the puzzle here is to decipher what’s going through his drug-addled brain to prompt this blurt.

“Atheistic hedonists”…atheism and hedonism are not linked properties. There are theistic hedonists — they probably outnumber the atheist kind — so I don’t understand why he narrowed the subject so much. I suspect it’s more about stringing together seven syllables to sound fancy than about actually making a point.

“Unconsciously worship”…OK, how do they do that? What’s involved in worship that you can do it without intent? What other things does Peterson think human beings worship? He’s using that word rather casually, I think to provide a jarring contrast with atheism, which we don’t generally associate with worship, at least not with the kind of practice followed by theists. So what’s the point? Is he trying to talk about atheists, or hedonists?

After all, the next thing he mentions is an ancient god, Pan. No, atheists don’t worship Pan, consciously or unconsciously. Hedonists might, but not atheistic hedonists who I’d expect to explicitly deny the existence of a god driving their desires. You can be a hedonist for secular reasons, you know.

This is one of those deepities, isn’t it? He subsequently claims we worship Priapus, which suggests an ulterior cause. Priapus was the Greek god of fruits and vegetables, as well as the male genitalia. That hints at another deepity:

Constipated authoritarians deny the divinity of phallic vegetables.

Think about that one for a while. Too bad I’m not on the inanity gravy train like Peterson.

About how I feel about the latest political contretemps

I’m not impressed with the fools who think the two on the left are equivalent to the crook on the right. Those two tell us that the system is sloppier and leakier than it ought to be, the guy on the right is directly practicing his personal criminal intent. It’s that simple.

Also, I think Luckovich’s caricature of Trump is the best out there.

Rapacity

It was the first day of fly lab in genetics. I prepare well in advance, setting up stocks of the red-eyed, scarlet-eyed, and brown-eyed flies the students will need for their very first cross, and I always prepare an excess. The students only need about a dozen flies for this first experiment, and I give them hundreds, just in case. They figure out how to tell males from females, distinguish the different eye colors, how to set up the culture media, and how to carefully set up a defined cross. They got it done.

At the end of lab, I do the clean up. I’ve got containers full of anesthetized flies. I pour them all together, red with scarlet with brown, and then take the small mound of sleeping flies to my lab, where the horror begins.

I think my spiders love the semester I teach genetics, because we generate such a surplus. I made hundreds of extra flies this week, in two weeks the students will generate thousands more, and once they’ve scored them and set up the F1 cross, where do you think the leftovers end up? My lab. Where I just shovel all these unconscious flies into the spiders’ cages.

I have to imagine it from the flies’ point of view. One moment they’re happily frolicking, mating, and laying eggs in a paradise for flies, the next they’re knocked out while the humans tinker with them. Then the majority later wake up in a strange barren box. They groggily stir, rise up, and try to fly away, only to get snagged on the lines of silk strung everywhere. There is no escape. They struggle, they see many of their peers similarly trapped, and then…the spider creeps out and industriously starts wrapping everyone up. Helpless, they can only wait until their turn to be envenomated and sucked dry.

To the spiders, it’s like Christmas. And that makes me Santa Claus.

You should see the spiders right now. It’s just rapacious gluttony everywhere. It’s glorious.

Any train people out there?

We have a new blogger, Bill Seymour at long long short long, and he was writing about trains. That got me thinking: I have two summer trips tentatively planned, and maybe I should go by train. I like a nice leisurely train trip!

The first is to the American Arachnological Society annual meeting in Ithaca, NY.

The second is to Skepticon in St Louis.

I haven’t ridden a train in decades. Would it be practical to take Amtrak from Minneapolis/St Paul to either of those places? I tried perusing the Amtrak site, but good god, if ever there was a web page designed in the 1950s, that’s it.

Freethoughtblogs has a Mastodon server!

HJ Hornbeck has been plugging away at the technical details of setting up a local Mastodon server, Freethought.online. He describes the process at length in Part One, Part Two, and Part Three, and I’m already worn out and intimidated. It’s supposed to be easy, isn’t it? OK, William Brinkman distills it down to the minimal basics. It’s currently an invitation-only instance, but you can leave a request to join here.

…shoot my sperm into an incubator and give it 9 months…

Yes, Virginia, people this ignorant do exist. This little cabal of arrogant men get together to tell each other they’re like gods, that men alone can create life, and the explain the science of it: a man can shoot his sperm into an incubator, and 9 months later, a baby. For reals.

He should try the experiment. That’s all I have to say. Put up or shut up.

You have a hundred million dollars? You can stop right there, I know you’re a crook

The title of this article is a challenge: “I’m a corporate fraud investigator. You wouldn’t believe the hubris of the super-rich.” Oh yeah? Try me. You’d be hard-pressed to tell me about an excess of the wealthy that I wouldn’t believe. And I’m sorry, but the rest of the article is the expected litany of banal privilege: expensive cars, jets, and yachts, tax fraud, organized crime, lies, threats, growing corruption. Ho hum. There’s no such thing as an ethical multi-millionaire, as I expect we’ve all learned.

I did appreciate the core message, though.

There is something unique to our era that encourages the charlatan. As well as investigating corporations, I am also a novelist, and I think we live in the age of the corporate fairy-tale: a magical land of unicorns and eternal growth. “What’s the story?” investors like to ask about the latest hot start-up, willing the narrative to be true even as they live the myth of their own absolute rationality.

Elon Musk once said: “Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time.” Put another way, if the emperor believes he is wearing wonderful clothes, others will start to believe it too. When I was researching my debut novel, in which a tyrant’s wife stands trial for her husband’s corruption, I found someone else making an eerily similar point to Musk. It wasn’t from another business leader; it was Imelda Marcos. “Perception is real,” the wife of the former Philippines dictator said. “And the truth is not.”

The ultra-rich are all in the business of selling an illusion. All the criminality and corruption is leaving the illusion in tatters, though, let’s hope that more people will see through the game.

Spiders make it look easy

What’s the difference between engineering and hacking? I think this video is a good illustration. Some guys decided to try and make a giant rideable mechanical hexapod, and documented how the whole project floundered and ultimately failed on video.

It’s infuriating how half-assed they were about the work. They start by welding together big chunks of steel together. No model, no prototyping, no estimating forces, negligible planning. They get something that sort of crudely moves individual components, and then slap together a rough controller (“each of the legs makes the same movement, with different timing,” ha ha), and try to get it to just stand up, and then take a few steps. It’s constantly failing, and then they rush in and replace another component with one that’s more powerful, not worrying about all the cascading consequences of such an action. Eventually they get it to clumsily walk a few steps and tear its own frame apart.

It’s the power of brute stupidity in action. I’m appalled that they got so much money and invested so much time in such a poorly thought-out project.

I half expected them to come to the revelation that it was a hexapod, not a spider at all, and try to weld on two more legs to make it work. That kind of ad hoc make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach characterizes the whole thing. The video is a kind of anti-advertisement for ever hiring these clowns to do a serious project.

What lesson should I learn?

I’m still awfully sick with a nasty ugly cold, but I showed up in class today to teach, feeling like I have no choice in the matter. Precautions taken: I wore a mask (I always wear a mask anyway), I canceled all personal appointments where I’d have to meet with students one-on-one, and I’m just generally staying away from all contact. I can’t imagine canceling class, which would have all kinds of downstream effects — canceling the second week of class? For a bad cold? Why not just abort the semester, you wimp?

I ended up just channeling my inner university administrator. We don’t care about no infectious disease, we’re about delivering product to our customers, so damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

I was providing synchronous zoom access, and about a half dozen students were taking advantage of it. If a bunch of students come sniffling up to me in the next week complaining about feeling as bad as I do right now, I will be fully sympathetic and do what I can to accommodate them. But otherwise, I just have to follow the American model of handling disease.

The religion that is destroying America

Sometimes, I too can swaddle myself in cherished delusions and believe for a time that the world might get better. Look! The “nones” are gradually increasing in number, and less than half the American population denies evolution! The trends are going the right way! Then, unfortunately, I have to read some uncomfortable facts.

Pentecostalism, broadly speaking, now has as many as 600 million adherents worldwide, or more than a quarter of all Christians. It has a huge presence in Brazil, where it played a decisive role in the rise of the populist demagogue Jair Bolsonaro; in Hungary, where it helped elevate the explicitly illiberal Viktor Orbán; and in Guatemala, where Pentecostal evangelicalism was exported from the United States to counter the influence of the Second Vatican Council and the rise of liberation theology. It is surging among migrant workers in Gulf states, where some Pentecostal networks provide key services to the disempowered, and also in Nigeria, where human trafficking organizations have infiltrated certain Pentecostal networks. From the perspective of some global leaders of the movement, the United States looks like an aging and corrupt capital—the kind of place where missionaries must go as much as the place where they come from.

The evidence suggests that their timing is good. “Pentecostalism represents a rare feat in American religion—a tradition that is growing,” according to Ryan Burge, assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. “The Assemblies of God, which stands as the largest Pentecostal denomination, has seen a 50 percent increase in membership over the last three decades, while every other prominent Protestant denomination has seen their membership decline precipitously.”

Katherine Stewart calls them “Spirit Warrior Christians”, and we’ve all seen them in action. They’re the wackaloons who go into hysterics about the gays and the trans, who serve as prayer leaders and spiritual consultants to Republican politicians, and regard deep ignorance as a good qualification to serve in government. They are best defined by who they hate.

The demons that merit the emphasis of reactionary Pentecostals and neo-charismatics today often have to do with the belief that the secular liberal world is infested with “the LGBT agenda” and, in particular, “transgender ideology.” Whatever one makes of the policy details, considered abstractly, the relentless focus on this single issue is an expression of hostility toward a perceived liberal establishment. If evil has a face, it is that of the “expert,” the professor, and perhaps above all the liberal nonbeliever who urges everybody to pursue their own ideas of good and base their moral code on the principles of empathy and rationalism, rather than biblical truth.

You talkin’ about me?

It’s way past time we started doing something about the root causes of this lunacy, and it’s not about evangelizing atheism at people. It’s about correcting the inequalities in society.

The most fruitful line of investigation and response has to focus on the root causes of the religious transformation. Religion in America is starting to look more like religion in Brazil and Guatemala because America, in some aspects, is starting to resemble Brazil and Guatemala: increasingly unequal, bitterly divided, corrupt, rife with disinformation, and unstable. If we want people to choose different gods, we might think about tackling the conditions that lead them to prefer one kind over another.

The oligarchs have plowed the land of America, and found it fertile.