Johnny Hart is extinct

My uncle Ed, my fun uncle who took a long, long time to grow up, had two favorite comics on the funny pages: The Wizard of Id and B.C. I liked them, too, and we followed them regularly. Of course, that was in the 1960s and early 70s, and I’m afraid they were afflicted with that syndrome common to long running strips: fading relevancy, recycled humor, the growing impression that the caroonist was phoning it in and didn’t really care anymore, as long as he got his syndication check. Johnny Hart, the creator of those strips, was a particularly sad case, because compounding the problem of staleness was an especially annoying and intrusive simple-minded religious stupidity. And now he’s gone. It’s unfortunate, in part because I regret any death, but also because he wasted so many of his last years cranking out crap and soiling his reputation.

I’ll forget about his religion, and remember instead my uncle chuckling over the Sunday funny pages.

Welcome Shifting Baselines!

We have a new scienceblog here, Shifting Baselines, authored by Jennifer Jaquet and associated with Randy Olson’s Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project. She has already opened up shop with an absolutely horrible, conflicting argument:
Should We Continue to Eat Seafood?

“But it tastes so good,” I whimper.

Al Gore slaps me to the floor and kicks me in the ribs a few times. “But it’s bad for overfished oceans!”

I don’t know what to do. I’d have fish or some nice marine invertebrate every night for dinner, but I have a different constraint: my wife and daughter are not fans. About the only time I have seafood is on those rare occasions I go out for dinner without the family, and since I’m not giving them up, I guess I’m effectively adopting Jennifer’s position and, if not giving it up absolutely, at least cutting back consumption greatly.

Disagreeing with Wilkins

Wilkins is not happy that I jumped down Pagels’ throat for a stupid comment in an interview. He thinks I ought to take Pagels more seriously (as did some of the commenters here), and, unfortunately, also goes on to mischaracterize the uppity atheist arguments, like so:

This is what I reject about the Dawkins/Moran/PZ aggressive atheism – it takes the most stupid version of religion, argues against it, and then claims to have given reasons for not being religious. At best (and here I concur) they have given reasons not to be stupid theists. But a good argument takes on the best of the opposing view, not the worst.

Alas, as is common for criticisms of this kind, the “best” of the religious views are mentioned as a mythic monolith on a far-off mountaintop, rather than actually stated, making them rather difficult to take on. I think it’s because whenever anyone tries to state them, there’s usually a lot of hemming and hawing and admissions that they don’t actually believe in these arguments, they’re just trying to be fair and state that there are good arguments out there. It’s basically a bait-and-switch: They say, “I may believe X, but here’s Y; you can’t refute Y!” Then we pound on Y for a while, and they say, “Why are you wasting my time with arguments against Y? I believe in X!” So you pummel X for a bit, and they announce, “I may believe X, but here’s Z; you can’t refute Z!” And so it goes, endlessly. This is the theme I argued in an essay on Edge.

[Read more…]

I am insane

Hrrm … I seem to have stretched myself a little too thin this weekend. Early this morning I drove off to Minneapolis and Minicon to pick up Skatje and catch a few panels at the con, and then I drove back — I just got back a half hour ago — and despite the fact that there are a great many interesting things to talk about, this day has been a bit too much. Minneapolis really must pick itself up and move about 150 miles further west — I’ll appreciate it, and St Paul will be eternally grateful.

I will address Wilkins/Rosenhouse, Grayling, Klinghoffer (grrr), Mooney, Laden, etc., but right now my brain demands a total shutdown for a little bit.

If you really need a good Easter anti-religion rant to tide you over, read Skatje’s. She got to sleep in the car while I was dodging semis on I94 for most of the day.

300

The movie 300 has finally arrived in Morris, and I saw it last evening. I’d heard a lot about this film, in particular that it was loaded with relationships to current events—the war in Iraq, in particular, with arguments for it being pro-war, anti-war, a jingoistic propaganda film, etc. The arguments are all wrong. I could tell exactly what this movie’s hidden meaning was: it’s a retelling of the creation-evolution struggle! “But of course!” you’re all saying to yourselves, “It’s so obvious, now that you mention it!”

[Read more…]

A brief note about Minicon

From Geoff Arnold, it seems there is a cult of Schneier. Since I said hello to Bruce Schneier in my brief visit to Minicon yesterday, I feel that I am obligated to set the facts straight. It’s all true. He is a god among men, and the earth would tremble at his footsteps if he wasn’t so beneficent that he insisted on levitating himself everywhere.

Speaking of deities on earth, I also got to briefly meet Teresa Nielsen Hayden at her panel on conversations on the net. Yes, in person, she is exactly like she is on the web, only more so. Somebody interrupted her, she raised a finger, and with a glance disemvowelled him on the spot, something you really do not want to see occurring in the real world. Alien geometries were involved; people reduced to consonants are angular, dysphonic, disturbing, and very hard on the eyes.

Fortunately, I only waved to Patrick Nielsen Hayden from a distance, otherwise an evening in the presence of a Trinity might have perturbed even my absolutely inflexible dogmatic atheism.

I am a little jealous of Skatje, who is spending all day and all night today and most of tomorrow at the con.

Skatje’s keeping us up to date on the con at her weblog. I’ll have you know I introduced her to de Lint’s books, and now she’s going to be bringing home a bunch more for me to read. Bwahahahaha! My clever scheme bears fruit at last — there’s the true reason I had kids, merely so they would one day bring me books.

Three years and counting

I was just reminded that last year at this time I announced an anniversary. In March of 2004, I critiqued this mysterious abstraction called “ontogenetic depth” that Paul Nelson, the ID creationist, proposed as a measure of developmental and evolutionary complexity, and that he was using as a pseudoscientific rationale against evolution. Unfortunately, he never explained how “ontogenetic depth” was calculated or how it was measured (perhaps he was inspired by Dembski’s “specified complexity”, another magic number that can be farted out by creationists but cannot be calculated). Nelson responded to my criticisms with a promise.

On 29 March 2004, he promised to post an explanation “tomorrow”.

On 7 April 2004, he told us “tomorrow”.

On 26 April 2004, he told us he was too busy.

On 13 January 2005, he told us to read a paper by R Azevedo instead. I rather doubt that Ricardo supports Intelligent Design creationism, or thinks his work contributes to it.

Ever since, silence.

One day has stretched into three years. I would fear that Paul Nelson has fallen into a chronosynclastic infundibulum and come unstuck in time, except that he still pops up saying the same stuff at creationist conferences. Maybe he just forgot, and this thread will remind him so that he’ll show up and post that promised explanation in a comment.

Tomorrow.