Christian masculinity

It’s a horrifying thing. Look at the effect it has on men, amplifying their sense of entitlement.

I find the insistence on “daddy” as a name for your partner to be deeply perverse. If my wife tried it it would probably set me aback, and no, I’m not going to call her “mommy”, or in a Pence-style move, “mother”. Ick.

For that matter, I don’t think I’ve ever addressed my wife with a pet name. She’s a person, dang it, not a toy or a child or a stereotypical role, and she has a name, a real name, and her own identity. Same as me.

If two people in love have nicknames for each other, that’s fine, just not my thing — but if you insist on “sir” or “lord” or “master”, you’re not in love, you’ve got a possession.

(OK, another possibility: if it’s part of a role-playing scenario, that’s also fine. Yeesh, interpersonal relationships are complicated.)

I guess we have to do both

Siggy has a very good essay up about a subject I care about: Blogs vs. YouTube.

Blogging has been declining. I don’t have much evidence, aside from Google trends, but it’s fairly obvious from personal experience. For example, atheist blogs used to be a huge cultural force, with big celebrities and countless indie blogs, and now it’s sort of a backwater with a few networks of marginal relevance, and a mostly dead indie space. And no other blogosphere has replaced what atheist blogging once was.

Maybe his just has to do with my personal circles? As a reality check I tried looking up the question. I learned, according to Google, that blogging is bigger than ever, and is still a great way to make money by advertising your product! Okay, so I should specify that I’m not interested in all blogs, because marketing blogs can go die in a fire. I’m talking about personal blogs, and more specifically essay blogs. Essay blogs are declining, that’s what I meant.

Essays aren’t dead though, because it is now popular to present essays in video format. The video essay is a booming genre, and I for one think it’s great, for the same reason essay blogs are great. But there are also some significant differences.

They make a lot of good points, but I’d add that the barriers to entry for video essays are much higher. Sure, you can do some of it on the cheap, witness all the cell phone camera videos, but the big timers have production skills and are deploying good lighting and even sets. There are also new presentation skills you have to know — being able to speak quickly and smoothly is not a universal ability. I know I’m more comfortable taking an hour or two to write than just getting in front of a camera and talking for 10 minutes. I also don’t have to put on makeup to write something over coffee (not that I put on makeup for any of my videos).

I’ll also disagree with Siggy on one thing: drama is not more difficult on YouTube. In some ways it’s worse. Take some right-winger who is good at just spewing noise and doesn’t bother to actually research what they say (say, Sargon, or Steven Crowder, who make gobs of money on noise), and they can generate lots of drama, much of it consisting of guys yelling at each other. Tim Pool and Alex Jones are nothing but masturbatory auto-generated drama! I manage to avoid much of it by the simple expedient of favoring videos that are under a half hour long. While there are some people who are really good at long format, in-depth conversations, the most successful people on YouTube seem to be cheesy motormouths who can yammer for hours, usually about gossipy trash-talk, or squeaking as they play video games. If you aren’t putting in more time to research what you’re going to say than in saying it, you probably aren’t worth listening to.

Also, one thing the two approaches have in common is they’ve both been saddled with the most hideous names. Blog? Vlog? Bletch.

One of the reasons for the decline of blogs, I’d argue, is the efforts of the big services to concentrate control in their hands. When blogs were big, we were using RSS readers and news feeds, which were distributed mechanisms for customizing and personalizing access. Now everybody is at the mercy of The Algorithm, whatever that is, and goes to a centralized site like YouTube that uses their software to guess what you’d like to see, and often guesses wrong.

The corruption is next door. Wake up!

Conservatives are desperately trying to change the subject. They want to avoid talking about their potential success in banning abortion and instead whine about those naughty leakers who exposed an imminent Supreme Court decision, or point fingers at protesters who stand peacefully outside the homes of Supreme Court justices, shaming them. They’d rather not discuss their actions to criminalize women’s health, something they’d been working towards for decades.

The ADF (Alliance Defending Freedom, an evangelical Christian organization, and today’s grand misnomer) was crowing about getting here four years ago. They figured that the election of Donald Trump had opened the gates and they were going to get everything they wanted. They were right.

“We have a plan to make Roe irrelevant or completely reverse it,” said Kevin Theriot, vice president of ADF’s Center for Life. Denise Burke, senior counsel at ADF, said that she is “really excited” about the strides that are being made to “eradicate Roe.”

“We have a strategic plan, that is a comprehensive, start-to-finish, from when we’re considering legislation all the way up to the Supreme Court, to challenge Roe,” said Burke. Among the reasons for ADF’s optimism is the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and so many Trump nominees to the federal appeals courts, which ADF believes will lead to courts granting approval to state laws further restricting access to and ultimately banning abortion.

This isn’t a one-off surprise at all. It’s everything they aspire to. Listen to Jerry Falwell brag that he’d been working on revoking women’s rights for 35 years.

They (I’ll get to who “they” are in a moment) aren’t done yet. Miscarriage shall be a crime.

On a humid morning in early October, Brittney Poolaw sat in an Oklahoma courtroom waiting on a verdict. Instead of the jail uniform she’d donned over the past 18 months, she wore a yellow and white blouse. After less than three hours of deliberation, the jury returned with their decision: Poolaw was guilty of first-degree manslaughter. She was sentenced to four years behind bars.

But Poolaw, a 20-year-old and a member of the Wichita Tribe, had not driven recklessly or shot a gun. She’d had a miscarriage.

At least one in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage — it may be as high as one in two. You probably know women who have had miscarriages while trying to have a baby (I know of several, personally). Now imagine them thrown in jail for it. Imagine them being accused of manslaughter. This is what they want, and it’s just the start.

They want to ban contraception.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) on Sunday refused to rule out the possibility that his state would ban certain forms of contraception, sidestepping questions about what would happen next if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

They’ve already started. A Louisiana law bans IUDs and IVF, and calls these acts of, not manslaughter, but homicide.

You really have to look at that law’s provisions to lock this act into existence, without any possibility of ever being overturned. It’d be hilarious if it weren’t so evil.

Any federal statute, regulation, treaty, executive order, or court ruling that purports to supdersede, stay, or overrule this Section shall be in violation of the United States Constitution and the Constitution of Louisiana and is therefore void.

Pursuant to the powers granted to the Legislature by Article X, Part III, of the Constitution of Louisiana, any judge of this state who purports to enjoin, stay, overrule, or void any provision of this section shall be subject to impeachment or removal.

They are like children, and they have even grander plans.

The governor of Texas want to stop educating kids.

Gov. Greg Abbott wants Texas to challenge a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that requires states to offer free public education to all children, including those lacking legal immigration status.

That ruling, known as Plyler v. Doe, struck down a Texas law that had denied state funding to educate children who had not been “legally admitted” to the United States.

We’ve been averting our eyes and lying to ourselves for decades. They couldn’t possibly be this bad, could they? It’s just a few people posturing for their constituents or their congregation, they couldn’t possibly succeed, and you’re probably looking at the ominous possibilities that those danged liberals bring up, saying “Nah, they can’t ban contraception, they can’t destroy the public school system, they can’t take over the government, they can’t establish a theocratic state, it’ll never happen,” and like always, it’s always easier to reassure ourselves that it can’t happen here than to act to prevent it from happening.

The problem is that they have an uncompromising philosophy that requires them to do everything possible to control your life.

…as Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, says: “Not only did Roe vs. Wade establish that there’s a constitutional right to abortion, it also rejected the idea that fetuses are people under the Constitution.” The draft opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, is steeped in language that paints fetuses—no matter what stage of development—as people. And when we lend credence to the idea of fetal personhood, it creates “a situation in which, when there is perceived harm to a fetus, it can be a victim of a crime. You can’t add fetuses to the community of individuals who are entitled to constitutional rights without diminishing the rights of the person carrying that fetus,” Sussman says.

That evil idea is nonsense, unsupported by science. A person does not magically appear at the instant of conception; it’s not black or white, no baby, then <blink> baby. Fetal development is a progressive process that takes a single cell with all the autonomy of a shed speck of dander to a squirming infant over the course of months, and at the expense of the mother’s body and work…and that only begins years of responsibility to make it an independent person. They’ve absorbed this lie that full human beings are created at conception and that a fetus therefore has all the rights that its mother has.

Where does this foolishness come from? Here’s a clue.

The issue has also prompted Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, the House’s lone antiabortion Democrat, to clarify his position.

“My faith will not allow me to support a ruling that would criminalize teenage victims of rape and incest,” Cuellar said in a recent statement. “That same faith will not allow me to support a ruling that would make a mother choose between her life and her child’s.”

It’s their faith, their religion. Ironically, the Christian Bible doesn’t even take the absolutist position they do — these beliefs don’t come from a god, but from generation after generation of male prophets and preachers interpreting their holy book to say what they desire it to say, and endorse their possession and control of women.

And that tells you who they are. They are not The Other, they are not outsiders, they are not freakish cultists. They live among us. They are your aunts and uncles, parents and cousins. They’re your neighbors. Look around your community — it’s guaranteed to be pockmarked with a diverse assortment of churches, protected to an excessive degree by the law, given freedom from taxation or any kind of regulation, thriving like unchecked cancers in every town. Some of them are filled with decent people who care about civil rights for everyone, but in others…right now, at this instant, they are celebrating a new era of oppression, and are planning to elect more town council members, more school board members, more representatives and senators, more people who will tell everyone else that they must obey, they must follow, they must do as they’re told. Women will serve, gay people will be punished, miscegenation must be eradicated, children will be indoctrinated, everyone must accept that their beliefs, no matter how ridiculous, are Truth.

They are us. These oppressive laws are not built on a secular or rational foundation, they are entirely the product of peculiar religious beliefs of a minority that we’ve encouraged to flex and grow.

This insanity is going to continue on. We can fight back and elect better representatives, kick out some incompetent judges, pass laws that, for instance, end those screaming masses outside women’s health care clinics, but ultimately the solution has to be … tax the churches. End the special privileges given to religion. Stop the politicization of the pulpit. You want to endorse politicians, lobby for more restrictive laws, campaign against the heathen? You aren’t a church, you’re a Political Action Group, and should be regulated in the same way.

Bring back separation of church and state. Acknowledge that freedom of religion is one thing, a good thing, but that abuses of that freedom are the root cause of our current damnation. Educate our children about reality as we can see it, not blind mythology.

The Martian absurdity

I saw this comment on Mastodon, and thought it so appropriate that it needs to be spread further.

alien 1: in summary, the humans have nearly rendered the blue planet uninhabitable. The only plan they appear to have is to migrate to the red planet.

alien 2: can they breathe the atmosphere of the red planet?

alien 1: no.

alien 2: is there material there they can eat?

alien 1: no.

alien 2: can the plants and animals of their planet live there?

alien 1: no.

alien 2: is there liquid water there?

alien 1: no.

alien 2: lol wtf?

alien 1: lol idk

WTF, IDK is how I feel about it, too.

Don’t take offense at the Salem Hypothesis!

Every time I mention the Salem Hypothesis, as I did in recent video, I get a bunch of complaints from engineers that they aren’t creationists. I know. Most engineers are not creationists, or even necessarily prone to creationism. That’s not what the Salem Hypothesis says.

Here’s what RationalWiki says:

The Salem Hypothesis is the observation of an apparent correlation between the engineering trade and creationist beliefs (possibly due to crank magnetism, this can also include climate-change denial and other crackpot beliefs).

The hypothesis suggests that people who claim science expertise, whilst advocating creationism, tend to be formally trained as engineers (with the possible exception of chemical engineers).

This hypothesis does not address whether engineers tend to be creationists (the converse); however, it has been speculated that engineering predisposes people to a creation-science view.[citation needed]

There is some evidence that this characterization of respected members of the esteemed engineering profession can actually be extrapolated out to fundamentalism and quackery of all kinds.

Here’s Larry Moran and Bruce Salem explaining further.

The Salem Conjecture was popularized by Bruce Salem on the newsgroup talk.origins. It dates to before my time on that newsgroup (1990) and I haven’t been able to find archives to research the exact origin. The conjecture was explained by Bruce on numerous occasions, here’s a statement from Sept, 5, 1996.

My position is not that most creationists are engineers or even that engineering predisposes one to Creationism. In fact, most engineers are not Creationists and more well-educated people are less predisposed to Creationism, the points the statistics in the study bear out. My position was that of those Creationists who presented themselves with professional credentials, or with training that they wished to represent as giving them competence to be critics of Evolution while offering Creationism as the alternative, a significant number turned out to be engineers.

I know it’s subtle, but it’s not attacking engineers, it’s saying that creationists who claim scientific authority often turn out to be engineers, and not at all qualified.

I’d add a corollary: if they’re not engineers, they often turn out to be MDs or dentists.

Anyway, I also got email from an engineer who understood the distinction.

My name is [redacted] and I am a Mechanical Engineer and graduate from Michigan State University. I am not a creationist, but I did find out I was working with at least 2 young earth creationists. In a building of ~15,000 people at the former FCA/Chrysler headquarters that isn’t surprising. It was my first exposure to such ideas in person. My circle of friends/coworkers couldn’t believe someone had those ideas.

After watching some of your discussions I see they all seem to use the same tactics. I’d use their numbers for the Grand Canyon v Mount St. Helens river carving time and their numbers would work out to make the Earth older than 6,000 years, so they’d jump to a different topic without admitting the error. They’d deny evolution say it was never observed. I’d tell them about MSU’s long running evolution project in the physics building so off to another topic, then another ad nauseam.

Anyway, I just wanted to give you at least a data point to help offset the Salem hypothesis. I wonder what makes us lean toward creationism, odd. Honestly, it’s kind of sad, as I got into engineering because I wanted to know how the real world actually works. I cant imagine chaulking it up to a sky daddy and not thinking about it.

Just for laughs, though, here’s a creationist who thinks the Salem Hypothesis is just great.

Perhaps the reason that engineers are more likely to be critical of evolution, is because evolution actually is more of a question of engineering than biology, as it deals with the development of the most intricate, purposeful systems available. Thus, the field of study most likely to be able to correctly analyze this question would, in fact, be engineers.

See? Not knowing anything about biology is an advantage for certain kinds of engineers who want to pontificate on evolution.

What an odd little beastie

I never heard of the Thylacocephala until I saw this video, and they are bizarre arthropods, now extinct, unfortunately. I learned something new!

At first I thought these were some strange planktonic creatures, but they were 20-30cm long. They were actively swimming predators that looked like some kind of remote drone submersible. They thrived from the Ordovician to the upper Cretaceous, making it kind of ridiculous that I knew nothing about them until now.

Road trip, end of July

Here’s a little good news: Skepticon 14 is happening on 29-31 July.

I’m experiencing a little trepidation about attending an in-person meeting, but these are smart skeptics, they’ll all be practicing good hygiene and will wear masks, right? I know I will be.

What also tempts me is that I plan on driving there, slowly, with frequent stops, and maybe a couple of overnight stays en route. I intend to couple the trip to a spidering expedition in Iowa and Missouri. The farther south I go, the greater the likelihood of finding black widows somewhere, which would be cool.

Is it weird that I’m more comfortable with finding large venomous spiders than I am with meeting people?

Y’all better call your moms today!

I am clearly not suited to a life of manual labor. You see, I started on a little summer project this morning. I don’t know how long I’ve got, but I’m definitely going to die long before my wife, and it’s not as if I’m leaving her a vast inheritance — this old house is about it. I decided I need to do some home improvements before it’s too late, and the immediate task that came to mind is repainting the dining room and bedroom. Both were afflicted with terrible wallpaper that was peeling, as well as being hideous, and I know that Mary will have to sell the place and move to someplace less remote once I kick the bucket, and while she’s worrying about papers and cremation and all that other nonsense, she’s not going to have time to prep the house for resale.

So I figure I’ll do a few things while I’m still ambulatory. I started with stripping the wallpaper with a steamer this morning.

There’s a lot of bending and stooping and working near the floor and also higher up, and I got through about half the job, and hour and a half into it, before my back decided to go into spasms. This was not pleasant. I can tell I will not last long at all in the work camp after the Republicans take over, but now at least, I can sit down and pop ibuprofen for a bit, until I recover, and can get the remaining half done.

As long as I’m sitting down, I called my mother to wish her a happy Mother’s Day. Have you called yours, if you have one, and if she’s the kind of mother who deserves your affection? I’ve got one, and she does. Unfortunately, she also has voice mail. Oh, well.

Jeez, this photo is 10 years old? I’m getting old.

So you’ve been reminded, and I better remind my kids, ’cause their mother deserves a call. They can also say hi and be grateful to me, because I was thinking that once I’m dead, if I don’t get the various jobs I’m planning done, they’re going to have to come home to Morris and do all the house maintenance themselves to help their mother out.

Something is wrong!

Do any of you old-timers recall TXPiper, the obnoxious racist creationist I banned in 2013? Would you believe he still occasional pesters me with blindingly stupid email? I must be spectacularly compelling and charismatic, since so many of these bozos never go away. I wish they knew how to quit me.

He threw a whole lot of stupid at me the other day, so I had to respond with a video.

Transcript below the fold.

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