I never thought I’d want people to stop sending me free books

I know, I should be grateful. Unfortunately, Sturgeon’s Law applies, maybe especially to free books.

So I got one yesterday, and the back cover was simultaneously tantalizing and repellent, which much I agree with, and other bits that sound like nonsense, and I think the author’s confidence is unwarranted.

I don’t know what the hell the book is about, or who it’s for — it seems to be trying to get an atheist audience, with a little sop thrown in for theists. I gave it the benefit of a quick glance, and opened it to see…

Oh, no. Not this creationist nonsense. I tried to figure out the context — is he arguing that this is wrong or right? (It’s not right.) Is he just trying to present different perspectives? I couldn’t tell. If you can’t be clear about your intent and meaning, I’m not going to work extra hard to extract it for you. All I know is he has a great fondness for logic games, frequently breaking into numbered syllogisms that left me bored.

I tried to find the bit where he explains how he knows a god is the energy source for the universe, but I gave up.

You get a reputation as an atheist, and suddenly everyone is sending you bad proofs. It gets wearing.

The thing I want to tell every jerk who is prolonging the pandemic

I need a great big box of these cards.

I’d give the first one to Joe Rogan, who was diagnosed with COVID-19, and thought it serious enough to spend buckets of money on treatments — mostly useless crap — and is now going around and saying it was no big deal

I got up in the morning, got tested and turns out I got COVID. So we immediately threw the kitchen sink at it — all kinds of meds: monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin … everything. And I also got an NAD drip and a vitamin drip, and I did that three days in a row.

Vitamins and NAD will not treat a viral infection. Ivermectin is garbage. The monoclonal antibodies would help, but you know, if he’d been vaccinated he’d be making those himself.

The Food and Drug Administration has authorized monoclonal antibody therapy as an emergency treatment for COVID-19 to fight off severe illness. The FDA has not, however, approved the use of ivermectin, which some vaccine skeptics swear by — despite a lack of scientific evidence to support their claims, not to mention the potential harmful effects of taking the anti-parasitic drug at high doses.

IV treatments such as NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) and vitamin drips are usually administered in an effort to improve general fitness and wellness — though there isn’t much scientific proof to back their efficacy either.

I’m sorry he got better. People might have noticed and done the sensible not-like-Joe-Rogan thing if he’d died.

I’m gonna need a big box of those cards. After Rogan, I’d have to hand them out to everyone in my university administration, and then I’d have to go to the local grocery store and carpet the floor with them, and then walk the streets and stick them in the windshield of every over-sized pickup truck driven by maskless yahoos, and then…

You, too, can report gynecologists…and profit!

This is some horrifying dystopian bullshit. Already, Texans are lining up to commit economic terrorism on doctors at the Pro-Life Whistleblower site. Report a doctor! Make beaucoup bucks!

The Texas Heartbeat Act is unique because it calls upon private citizens to hold abortion providers and their enablers accountable. Any person can sue any abortion provider who kills an unborn child after six weeks of gestation—and any person can sue anyone who aids or abets these illegal abortions. All of these individuals must pay damages to the person who sued them of at least $10,000 for each illegal abortion that they perform or assist.

Any person can sue any abortion provider, and just reporting them grants you $10,000 dollars.

And our Supreme Court just let this slide.

Here’s one possible solution:

Honest biologists can’t tell you when human life begins

Honest biologists like Sahotra Sarkar, that is. Unfortunately, the people that pushed the Texas anti-choice law are liars for Jesus, not biologists at all.

A recent friend-of-the-court filing in that case implicitly claims that biology – and therefore biologists – can tell when human life begins. The filing then goes on to claim explicitly that a vast majority of biologists agree on which particular point in fetal development actually marks the beginning of a human life.

Neither of those claims is true.

There is no definitive single marker for the moment when a zygote becomes “human” — we can’t even define satisfactorily what humanity means, but one thing for sure, it’s not going to be discovered by molecular biologists. Maybe by philosophers or artists or writers or something, but I suspect that if you asked them, they’d all shrug and say they don’t know either.

As a developmental biologist, I’m satisfied with the idea that a human being emerges gradually from progressive interactions between cells and environment — it is not a unitary thing, and therefore doesn’t have a single discrete point of appearance. That’s been the position of informed scientists since roughly Aristotle.

That doesn’t stop the liars for Jesus from pretending that biology supports their claim.

The most recent high-profile example of this claim is in that amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court in the Mississippi case.

The brief, coordinated by a University of Chicago graduate student in comparative human development, Steven Andrew Jacobs, is based on a problematic piece of research Jacobs conducted. He now seeks to enter it into the public record to influence U.S. law.

First, Jacobs carried out a survey, supposedly representative of all Americans, by seeking potential participants on the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace and accepting all 2,979 respondents who agreed to participate. He found that most of these respondents trust biologists over others – including religious leaders, voters, philosophers and Supreme Court justices – to determine when human life begins.

Then, he sent 62,469 biologists who could be identified from institutional faculty and researcher lists a separate survey, offering several options for when, biologically, human life might begin. He got 5,502 responses; 95% of those self-selected respondents said that life began at fertilization, when a sperm and egg merge to form a single-celled zygote.

That result is not a proper survey method and does not carry any statistical or scientific weight. It is like asking 100 people about their favorite sport, finding out that only the 37 football fans bothered to answer, and declaring that 100% of Americans love football.

In the end, just 70 of those 60,000-plus biologists supported Jacobs’ legal argument enough to sign the amicus brief, which makes a companion argument to the main case. That may well be because there is neither scientific consensus on the matter of when human life actually begins nor agreement that it is a question that biologists can answer using their science.

That is methodologically a terrible survey. I’d like to know the details of the question: the summary implies that they were given “options”…a multiple choice question? Was “This question is bullshit” one of the options? I think probably not. Just the idea of putting the question in the form of multiple choices or true/false limits the potential accuracy of the answer.

The bottom line is that ideas are being misrepresented by these supporters of abortion bans, and no, biologists cannot answer, or have a significantly more nuanced answer, than they want, so they are intentionally lying to the courts. Can we get ’em for perjury?

The overall point is that biology does not determine when human life begins. It is a question that can only be answered by appealing to our values, examining what we take to be human.

Perhaps biologists of the future will learn more. Until then, when human life begins during fetal developments is a question for philosophers and theologians. And policies based on an answer to that question will remain up to politicians – and judges.

Except, please, keep the theologians out of it. They’ve only got dogma, not evidence.

The experiment continues!

The gang here at Freethoughtblogs is going to try to do a regular podcast sort of thing — we’re not sure what to call it, so right now it’s the Podish-Sortacast. We’ll be going live on Sunday, 5 September, so join in the fun. We’d also like to hear from you: what kinds of things do you think an FtB podcast should talk about? What do you think of when you hear about our group?

Also, it’s going to be a surprise which of the many bloggers here makes an appearance. We might have a rotating cast, who knows?

Bye-bye, Roe v. Wade

The Taliban is winning everywhere. After taking over Afghanistan, they’ve now conquered American women’s bodies. Texas has banned all abortions after 6 weeks, and our conservative Supreme Court has punted and refused to deal with this assault on liberties.

A Texas law that bans most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect Wednesday, as a midnight deadline for the Supreme Court to stop it came and went without action.

Just wait. More abortion bans are coming.

The Texas case comes at a pivotal time for abortion rights, with Republican-led state legislatures around the country having enacted a string of increasingly restrictive laws. The Supreme Court this fall will consider one of them — Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks. Antiabortion activists have urged the court to use that to overturn Roe, the 1973 decision that said women have a constitutional right to abortion.

Federal judges across the country have cited Roe and other precedents to block six-week bans in other states before they took effect. But the lawsuits that stopped those statutes targeted government officials who would enforce the bans, which proponents dub “heartbeat bills” because they say that is when a doctor can first detect a fetal heartbeat. Doctors opposed to the bills dispute that description, saying the fluttering that is detected cannot exist outside the womb.

The Texas law, in contrast, was designed to make it more difficult for abortion rights advocates to win such pre-enforcement injunctions. The statute empowers individuals, instead of state government officials, to bring legal action in civil court against those who help women seeking a prohibited abortion.

That’s a terrifying twist. All those busybodies who screech and march in front of abortion clinics are now empowered to sue doctors and nurses. Finally, we can appropriately describe something as a “witch hunt”!

Iceland’s culture of accountability

I have entirely favorable memories of Iceland — I’d like to go back someday. But then I get this news that sends mixed messages. The national men’s football team is a horror off the field.

Arnarsdottir told national broadcaster RUV that she and another woman were sexually assaulted in a club in Reykjavík by a well-known player from the Icelandic national team in September of 2017. Both women were left injured and filed police complaints the next day, she said. Arnarsdottir’s family also informed the soccer federation and her parents spoke to Bergsson directly, she added.

The allegations threw Bergsson and the soccer federation into a crisis and put new attention on similar accusations against current and former players on Iceland’s national team. Those accounts include allegations that some players perpetrated a gang rape roughly 10 years ago.

But wait! There’s more! The chair of the Football Association of Iceland had declared that there hadn’t ever been any reports of sexual assaults by the team. Oh, this is familiar: the president of the James Randi foundation also tried to claim that there hadn’t been any reports of harassment at their annual meeting, and boy, did that backfire when women raised their hand to say that they had filed reports. Was the organization in the habit of sweeping any unflattering accusations under the rug?

You can guess what happened one day after the denial.

One day after that interview on national television, Thorhildur Gyda Arnarsdottir spoke out on the same network to say Bergsson’s denial was false, saying that both he and the federation were well informed about an incident she reported four years ago.

You might be thinking there’s nothing like a mixed message in this story — it’s all bad. But there is one positive outcome.

The entire board of Iceland’s soccer federation has abruptly resigned after being accused of mishandling allegations of sexual assault committed by players on the national team — and of covering up at least one alleged incident. The board also issued an apology to the victims, saying it believes them and promising to do better.

Iceland seems to have a culture of accountability. Just to remind you, 40 years ago they had a massive economic crash, and they responded by throwing those responsible in jail.

Unlike all other nations with capitalist-run economies, Icelanders refused to bail out the criminal bankers. Parliament passed emergency legislation to take over the major banks domestic operations and established new banks to handle them. The government, however, did not take over any of the foreign assets or obligations. Those stayed with the original banks gone bankrupt.1

Folk got behind recovery. Many politicians now listened to the people and refused to cut back on social services. People utilized their natural resources to attract the tech industry. Commercial fishing remained strong. The tourist industry bloomed. The International Monetary Fund conceded that Iceland “surpassed pre-crisis output levels”.

Best of all, Icelanders jailed the criminal bankers. By early 2016, 26 bankers had been sentenced to a total of 74 years in prison. Charges ranged from breach of fiduciary duties to market manipulation and embezzlement (thievery). The average sentence was from four to five and one-half years.

See? They do things right. Let’s hope their football team can respond properly and do better.

I’m escaping into outer space at the end of this week

I’m ready to play a game.

It’s the end of my first full week of classes, and I need to unwind, so let’s explore strange new worlds on Friday evening. I’m thinking we’ll just take off in our starships from this location in Euclid to a nearby unexplored system and investigate whatever planets we can find…or kill pirates or strafe the surface, if you want to go that way. If you’ve got the game, you know how to use those mysterious glyphs to teleport to a planet I’ll be hanging out on at the beginning. If anyone else shows up, we can talk about what we should do, otherwise I’ll just zoom out alone into the void.

There are rumors of a big new update coming along at some time in the future, so if that drops on Friday or earlier, I’ll obviously have to change my plans.