Our Queer Future

There is a wonderful thrill of fear going through the far right right now — it’s a marvel to witness. The latest example is a work of fiction from the Dobsonites, written as a document sent back into our present from a future world in 2012, after an Obama presidency. It’s a dark time for the religious right (although they should just hang on—things apparently get better for them by 2112), and the story tells about all the horrible things that come to pass under Obama.

It’s a weird read. Everything is about the gays — forget changes in the economy, or foreign affairs, or alternative energy, or labor, or anything that might actually affect most people. The whole story is about the gay conspiracy taking control and locking up the guns while spreading pornography throughout the land.

It makes no sense.

It’s absurdly unrealistic, and it isn’t even interesting science fiction. But then I realized…it isn’t a work of SF at all.

It’s a world-building prelude to a work of slash fiction. Future chapters, I’m sure, will include lurid stories of handsome young Christian men being compelled by scantily clothed muscular gay men to watch explicit pornography, followed by more chapters detailing their forcible deflowering by hunky followers of the Obama.

In that context, it makes a lot more sense. Those fellows at Focus on the Patriarchy really do have a lot of repressed issues, I think.

Carnival of the Liberals #76

Oh, the pressure. This somewhat tardy edition of the Carnival of the Liberals happens to be the last one before election day, which makes it important to bring up the issues we ought to be considering as we make our decisions about who we’re going to vote for…although, if you’re liberal, this is a year when the decision is remarkably easy to make. So here we go with an issues-oriented carnival.

Foreign policy: What do you think of the Bush Doctrine, the idea that we should unilaterally and preemptively attack anyone we think might be a threat? Here’s a better plan: Let’s be the good guys.

Health care: Compare and contrast Obama vs McCain on Healthcare. There are important differences in how they would improve the management of the country’s health.

Abortion: To a liberal, abortion is also a health care issue — we care about the health and autonomy of women, something Republican candidates don’t seem to comprehend. Consider McCain’s Legal Errors at the Debate, and Why They Matter.

Poverty: It’s a related issue. How do women break out of the entrapment of pregnancy? It’s a question of Poverty & Choice.

Homosexuality: Conservatives want to strip a significant minority of their rights, and in every election cycle someone gets the bright idea of rousing the right-wing vote by throwing anti-gay legislation on the ballot. This year, California has Proposition 8, a proposed law that would once again make whipping boys of the homosexuals. Read a Brief Analysis of the Yes on 8 Side — they’re really bringing on the sleaze.

Race: Every American election is about race, deep down. When Republicans rail against crime, or welfare, or immigration, it’s all about suppressing minorities further. Greg Laden’s Review of the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Exhibit on Race and Racism has a lot to say about the cultural effects of racial differences.

The economy: With the economy in its current state of crisis, with lending companies receiving massive bailouts, you might be wondering Are you stupid for paying your mortgage? After all, if Wall Street can be forgiven for errors and mismanagement, why can’t you?

Religion: I’m often told that religion is an institution that provides support for the underprivileged — it is a private, charitable source for public assistance. How can that be if, in their ignorance and dogmatic biases, the faithful dismiss important issues in health? There’s nothing like the fallacious belief that mental illness is the work of devils to deprive people of good medical care.

Patriotism: To a liberal, patriotism is not an unquestioning faith in the perfection of one’s country, but a recognition that a country can always be bettered and its flaws corrected. We have a perfectly horrid example of illiberal, unthinking jingoism right here in my home state, with Michele Bachmann and her Anti-American Paranoia. Let’s hope we can get her out of office soon.

In a similar vein, none of our candidates are perfect; there’s a lot I personally dislike about Barack Obama, for instance. What we have to do on 4 November, though, is balance our concerns about the issues in the election, and perhaps follow a harm reduction model of politics — let’s try to get a candidate in office who at least moves the government in a better direction. I think we all know what that means, and the choice is clear: despite his flaws, we need to put Barack Obama in office. Let’s make the country better. Not perfect, but better.

The next edition of the Carnival of the Liberals will be at The Lay Scientist on November 5th. Hey, that’s the day after the big election — that’s going to be an interesting one.

Things are getting desperate on the Republican side

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This is the top news story on Fox right now: a McCain volunteer says she was robbed at an ATM, by a black man of course, and then when the thief saw her McCain bumper sticker, he beat her up and carved a “B” for “Barack” in her face. It’s getting a bit…shrill.

It could have happened, but there are just a few odd details here. She claims the assailant used a knife — a very dull knife — to cut her cheek, but all there are are faint scratches, not real cuts. It’s also lettered quite nicely, not exactly like the work of an angry mugger on a struggling woman.

But the most glaringly obvious detail is that the letter is backwards. As if it were done in a mirror. Hmmmm.

More crazy from that homeschooling mom

She may have deleted her post that called for killing homosexuals, but now she’s put up a guest post from some freaky Baptist minister, shrieking about “Sodomites” who are being punished by her loving god, with quotes from the usual suspects — Romans and Leviticus — demanding that they be put to death.

That Christian deity sure is a cranky, bitter, hateful old guy, isn’t he? And Christians sure are talented at inventing imaginary enemies to work themselves into a frothing rage over.

Here’s something else Darwin didn’t have

Tracking of the HMS Beagle by a manned space station. I don’t know why; maybe those pre-Victorian Space Engineers had their steam-powered space-stations all tied up trying to find the source of the Nile or plotting invasion routes into Afghanistan, or something. This time around our 21st century panjandrums of outer space have their priorities a bit more in focus, and NASA has committed to using the ISS to watch the new Voyage of the Beagle. Read the Beagle Project for more details.

I’m just relieved that finally we’ve found something useful for these space nuts to do — providing supplemental assistance to a biological and historical project, instead of noodling around staring at space rocks, space debris, and space vapor.

Your brain is the next battleground

“YOU cannot overestimate,” thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, “how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You’re gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about… how Darwin’s explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it… I’m asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.”

Sound familiar? That’s exactly the same rhetoric the Discovery Institute has used towards evolution, and it’s just as false. It’s to be expected, since this is the ranting of a DI fellow.

What Schwartz is arguing for is dualism: the idea that the mind is not the product of the activity of the brain, but is somehow generated supernaturally, with the brain being nothing but the host or receiver for the emanations of an immaterial ‘soul’. Contrary to his claims, however, this is definitely not a popular view in the neuroscientific community — if anything, the trend is going far, far away from what he claims, with the evidence growing that the reductionist, materialist approach to the brain is the best way to understand how it works. It’s not breaking down. Just as evolutionary theory has been strengthened by advances in molecular biology, so too has the materialist view of the mind been strengthened by multidisciplinary approaches in neuroscience.

The article is reporting on a meeting of these DI-sponsored loons, and it really does sound like a delightful coterie of idiots. Denyse O’Leary was there, along with Mario Beauregard, who together authored what I consider the worst book of 2007, The Spiritual Brain, and so far I’ve read nothing as bad in 2008, so they may deserve a lifetime award. It’s a book that was practically unreadable in its incoherent style, and which was full of illogical claims built from fallacious premises and bad experiments. Schwartz provides more excellent examples of the nonsense these guys are propagating.

To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use “mindful attention” to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology – the material brain is changing the material brain.

That makes no sense. The perception of mental activity is associated with detectable changes in the activity of the brain; that is not evidence for dualism. Would it be evidence for the idea that the mind is the product of the brain if our most sensitive instruments revealed that while people composed sonnets or solved calculus problems or daydreamed about Tina Fey nude, their brains were as inert as large lumps of cold silly putty? I think not. These data are exactly what we’d expect if thought were the product of brain activity, that we’d see brain activity while people were thinking. We even have experimental evidence of correlated brain activity preceding individual awareness of conscious thought…again, as we materialists would expect.

The article points out that this is a looming concern, and it’s one I’ve been talking about for a long time. Just as evolution challenged religious literalists preconceptions about human exceptionalism and our origins, and made itself a focus of concerted hatred by the dogmatists, neuroscience is the next big science that is going to antagonize them, since it challenges other fundamental concepts of primitive religious thought, such as the idea that we have immortal souls separate from our flesh, that we are imbued by our creator with this magical element at some instant, such as conception. Remember that this is the papal escape clause: Catholics can accept physical evolution, but that the significant spiritual event was the endowment of a soul on the human lineage at some indefinite time in the past. It’s also going to be a flashpoint for the anti-choice crowd, who want to claim personhood and identity on clumps of cells that don’t even have any neural tissue — it yanks the basis for their claims right out from under their feet.

The only thing sparing us right now is that most public school science classrooms never introduce anything about neuroscience, so it avoids the problem so far of actually directly antagonizing ignorant yahoos who don’t like their children liberated from the biases of their parents’ ignorance. Give it a few more years, though, and let it become a bit more high profile, and it will trigger furious outrage in many more. After all, it is so degrading to be told that your finest thoughts are made from well-ordered meat.