“No” is less than “Why?”

If you’re looking for a calm conversation about the latest split in the atheist community (don’t ask, it doesn’t matter), here’s Thomas Smith, Kevin Logan, and Kristi Winters talking about it. I just wanted to pull out one YouTube comment that makes me see red — it’s the same attitude that I think is one of the major contributors to the poisoning of the movement, and one I’ve addressed before.

Atheism is a singular answer to a singular question.
The answer is “No”.
The Question, “Is there a god?”
Nothing else should be attached to this definition, by either the right or the left.

So…atheism is a dogma, I guess. There is one question and one answer, and then you’re done. Makes it easy.

I would just ask, how did you arrive at your answer? Is it built on any philosophical foundation at all?

And then I would ask, how does that answer inform your views on everything else? Or does it?

Those are the interesting and important questions, and the answer to those matter. “No” is just an empty negation in a vacuum and is spectacularly stupid and uninteresting.

Oh no. Richard Lewontin has died

This is terrible news. He was so influential on my thinking about biology, personally.

If I had my way, one of his books would be required reading in our introductory biology course (we decide on books as a group, so no, I’m not in charge). My only problem would be picking which one?

Fortunately, I do have total control over your reading habits (I don’t want to know if that’s not true), so I shall command you all to run out and buy and read all of these to do honor to the man.

OK, if you are resisting my influence, pick at least one. The first two are slim books, short and easy; if I were to foist any book on my students it would probably be The Triple Helix. They’re all good, and they all represent a perspective that our society needs right now.

Blogs are dead! Long live the blogs!

I’m beginning to wonder if I’m doing PR wrong (no, I know am). This article by Aaron Rabinowitz on the scourge of anti-“Woke” activism had me wondering if I’ve really missed an angle.

Our story begins on January 24th of 2021, with the formal launch of the UK based Counterweight website, billed as “the home of scholarship and advice on Critical Social Justice ideology”, and committed to “individualism, universalism, viewpoint diversity and the free exchange of ideas”. Counterweight is one of many anti-woke activist organisations that has popped up in the past year to provide resources for organising against wokeness. Despite providing scant evidence that there was a substantive problem their organisation would address, Counterweight’s debut was uncritically covered by several news outlets, including The Daily Mail, Russia Today, The Daily Telegraph, and The Times – the latter two of whom felt Counterweight’s launch warranted front-page coverage. Counterweight’s founder, Helen Pluckrose, was invited to give numerous interviews in the mainstream media.

So I took a look at this Counterweight bullshit, looking at it for content and structure. Content: it has a small stable of contributors who write essays on an irregular schedule. It looks like they get a new post every few days. It’s basically nothing but a multi-author blog — it’s not even as active as Freethoughtblogs, and is kind of the inverse of our goals. Structure: here’s a big difference, with the front end loaded with all kinds of explicit material defending their anti-“Woke” agenda — basically, their ideology is made primary and loud. The Freethoughtblogs entry page is just a table of our authors and their most recent articles. One other content difference is that they must have some minimal essay length, while we don’t, so often here you’ll get a short blurb, while there you can reliably get a solid couple of paragraphs of hatred and ignorance.

And yet, somehow, Helen Pluckrose starting a gussied-up blog site gets write-ups from various well-known, if conservative, newspapers? We didn’t do good PR, I guess, because here you’ll find more and better essays written by genuinely individualistic people who are not hog-tied by the status quo. We also don’t have to struggle to hide our hideous opinions.

That’s what Aaron’s article is mostly about: the Counterweight started up with James Lindsay on board, and then Lindsay tweeted out a bunch of grossly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like this.

Oops! Quick! Get his name off the masthead! But let’s keep all the links to his New Discourses website, and continue to encourage people to read Lindsay, just with a little implausible denial. They don’t mind a little anti-Semitism and racism at the Counterweight, they just want it slightly less prominently labeled. While Freethoughtblogs would explode with anger if someone here favored anti-Semitism, and they wouldn’t be quietly tucked away, we’d do a lot of brutal self-examination, and carry out a public execution, so I guess that’s another difference.

OK, if we had a lot of money (we don’t, we dribble on month to month), I guess I’d do a major makeover, call this place Freethought Magazine or some such (“The Journal of Social Justice Studies”?), and turn the main page into a menu-driven summary of freethought and social justice, but keep all the same writers and list their contributions even more prominently, and catch the eye of the NY and LA Times, maybe a few other major liberal publications. It’s kind of obvious that calling it a blog network made it more easily dismissable.

What are you going to do for me, Mark J. Lindquist?

We’re in trouble. Now is the time for people to begin running for office in the little places, like the 7th congressional district where I live, and where a dud of a Republican placeholder is our current representative. And we have a new, fresh face! Mark J. Lindquist is gearing up to run for that office, and he’s certainly enthusiastic and outgoing, which is a good start.

But I think he’s doomed.

Nice website, but it’s all about Mark. It’s like a vanity page for Mark Lindquist: I learn that he’s served in the Air Force as an analyst for the NSA, and when he got out he’s been working as a motivational speaker for Fortune 500 companies, and he aspires to sing the National Anthem at the Superbowl. I could find nothing about policy. For instance, this is is a largely rural district, with a lot of farmers who tend to vote Republican — where does he stand on agricultural policies? Personally, I’m a university professor, and I want to know what he’s going to do for education. I can’t find it! At the top of his web page, it says he is “reinventing American politics”…how? What’s he doing differently?

His big plan is to sell books to fund his campaign, thereby getting big money interests out and changing American politics. It’s not very revolutionary.

If he’s the Democratic nominee, he’d probably get my vote simply because I’ll vote against Republicans automatically, but he’s going to have to work harder at presenting some deeper policy vision if he wants to sway my Republican neighbors, who consistently outnumber me around here.

It’s climate change! And global warming! It’s two, two nightmares in one!

Waking up at the end of a sweaty, restless night thanks to these hot summer temperatures (which are going to be hotter still today), I encountered this peculiar little article about the words we use to describe our climate. I didn’t like it much.

We should stop calling it “climate change.” Now, before you object, bear with me, and let’s investigate the history of the term.
We used to call it “global warming.” Not so long ago. The big we, as in, all of us, because that is what the norm was. That’s the term which dominated public discourse, and you’d read it in papers and books and articles. Not the seemingly anodyne “climate change.”
That was a far, far more accurate term. And that was the problem.
Here’s little factoid for you. Do you know who invented the term “climate change”? Frank Luntz. The Republican “strategist.” Why? Because “global warming” was dangerous. Because it was true. Too frightening. Too true. Too real. Too self-explanatory, powerful, and strong. It had to be Orwellianized. It had to memory-holed. Doublespeak had to be crafted — to create the impression that there was some “debate” on this topic.

That first bit is inaccurate. We still call it global warming, in addition to the term “climate change”. It is true that Luntz, who happens to be one of the most despicable servants of the Republican party and is evil incarnate, proposed that the Bush administration avoid the term global warming and switch to climate change because “you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate” because that’s what Luntz does — he makes rhetorical tweaks to create confusion and promote dishonesty. He’s the Republican party’s Wormtongue. But his trick is to make the truth look false, and this is a case where he has taken the language of the truth and distorted it. The answer isn’t to abandon true statements, but to make that truth known.

What the writer of that piece was doing was suggesting that we be just like Frank Luntz, and that appalls me. No, I refuse.

The truth is that scientists use both terms to clarify the phenomenon they’re discussing, not to obscure it. So here’s NASA, explaining global warming vs. climate change, first defining global warming.

Global warming is the long-term heating of Earth’s climate system observed since the pre-industrial period (between 1850 and 1900) due to human activities, primarily fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere. The term is frequently used interchangeably with the term climate change, though the latter refers to both human- and naturally produced warming and the effects it has on our planet. It is most commonly measured as the average increase in Earth’s global surface temperature.

And then climate change:

Climate change is a long-term change in the average weather patterns that have come to define Earth’s local, regional and global climates. These changes have a broad range of observed effects that are synonymous with the term.

Changes observed in Earth’s climate since the early 20th century are primarily driven by human activities, particularly fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere, raising Earth’s average surface temperature. These human-produced temperature increases are commonly referred to as global warming. Natural processes can also contribute to climate change, including internal variability (e.g., cyclical ocean patterns like El Niño, La Niña and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) and external forcings (e.g., volcanic activity, changes in the Sun’s energy output, variations in Earth’s orbit).

This is not Luntzian double-speak. Heating up the atmosphere increases climate variability, so in addition to record-breaking summer heat waves, we also get more tropical storms and the polar vortex.

The USGS also knows the difference.

What is the difference between global warming and climate change?
Although people tend to use these terms interchangeably, global warming is just one aspect of climate change. “Global warming” refers to the rise in global temperatures due mainly to the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. “Climate change” refers to the increasing changes in the measures of climate over a long period of time – including precipitation, temperature, and wind patterns.

And here Phil Plait explains the terms.

I’ve known for years that the term “climate change” was in fact promoted by Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who suggested using it because it’s less “frightening” then saying “global warming”*. But as usual, facts won’t stop the talking heads at Fox News, who claim it’s a liberal term. I like how Media Matters (who created the video) put the actual clip with Luntz in at the end.
Ironically, Luntz has a point, though not the one he meant to make. The increase in heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t just make things hotter. It changes weather patterns, and can create droughts in one place and flooding in another. Over a long enough time, it will in fact change the climate, so the term is actually correct.

So don’t abandon “climate change”, use it with “global warming”. Just know what they mean.

Definitely don’t change your usage either to agree with or spite Frank Luntz, advisor to Newt Gingrich, though. That man is going to go down in history as one this generations greatest monsters, the Goebbels of anti-scientific propaganda. Fuck him.

Reminiscing

I was just thinking that it was a strange coincidence that my ancestors, at least well back into the early 19th century, were all farmers and carpenters and such living here, in Western Minnesota, and that my grandfather had left this cold frigid place for the West coast after WWII, where I was born…and now I’ve ended up right back here. Well, almost — my grandparents and great grandparents and great-great grandparents etc. all lived even further north, on the flat basin of old Lake Agassiz, where the prairie was utterly flat and the winter winds could howl across the farm unimpeded by pesky hills. Then I stumbled onto a small collection of old photos.

Here’s my great-great-grandfather, Jens Westad. No, I never met him. The photo has to be from some time around the turn of the century.

I very much like the formal style. The really tall kid in the back is my great-grandfather, Peter Westad. I did know him, visited him fairly often, did chores like weeding his garden for him, but he died when I was 13. He was a handsome man, with a lovely thick mustache.

I think that photo would have been taken in his mid-twenties, maybe around 1906 when he married my great-grandmother, who was also wonderful and could make an excellent pie or fishhead soup. Here she is in a family portrait.

This one must have been taken sometime in the 1930s, before my grandfather, the young man on the far left, got shipped off to the far Pacific islands to build runways for the army.

I think that sometime this summer I should take a few days to visit the north country up around Gary and Fertile Minnesota since I seem to have fairly deep roots in that region. Not that anyone would remember the Westads, or that anything is left of their residence — damn, but we humans are impermanent — but it would just be nice to see a bit of the land that shaped my family.

Also…spider collecting trip!

We’re in this business for the unanswered questions

What I like about this episode of Crash Course Zoology is that it shows that it shows how scientists aren’t at all afraid of evolutionary mysteries, or of being wrong about something. Take that, creationists! That seems to be their primary line of attack, and all they’ll get out of me when they point out how our knowledge is incomplete is bafflement. Yeah, we know. That’s why we’re scientists.

Also, it’s got spiders in it.

The next episode is going to be about the species concept. Gosh, it’ll be nice when that one is finally explained!

I just really like going to the movies, OK?

We have a lovely classy little movie theater in town, it was closed for a year and a half due to the pandemic, and now that it’s open again, I can’t resist. I have to spend one evening in a cozy air-conditioned theater with a mob of people watching whatever is showing that week, no matter how awful it is, which is how I ended up suffering through F9: The Fast Saga last night. I was not prepared — I might have seen bits and pieces of the Fast & Furious franchise on television before, but they were forgettable and left a minimal impression. Cars? Explosions? That was about it. But now I know better. This is quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen, and I am a glutton for bad movies.

It was incredibly stupid. To my great shame, I didn’t understand half of what was going on, because the damn thing expected me to have absorbed all the lore of previous entries in the franchise.

For instance, Charlize Theron has a “role” in the story. She is, apparently, some evil mastermind everyone fears — we are not told why — and she’s introduced as a gorgeous woman caged in an isolated transparent box surrounded by mysterious glowing poles, like a laser warning or defense system, that had to be turned off before anyone could approach. This box was totally empty, except for the very well dressed Ms Hannibal Lecter, and I had to wonder through most of the movie…how did she go to the bathroom? She has a different outfit in every scene…how? These were the questions that dominated my thoughts about the movie, because she was so thoroughly irrelevant to the plot — so irrelevant that later, she’s shown to have been released from her box and is now running the whole bad guy operation. None of it makes any difference.

Otherwise, it’s just a whole lot of cars driving around fast with people shooting machine guns out of them. They have one wild twist in that they acquire these superpowerful electromagnets that the good guys install in their cars, and so with a twist of a dial they can yank guns out of people’s hands, or lift an entire street full of cars…which are somehow not drawn to the car with the supermagnet, but to bad guy’s cars, conveniently. Also, it doesn’t matter how much mass the supermagnet car is manipulating, it itself experiences no force. The violations of simple physics are numerous and offensive.

There’s also a rocket car they drive into a satellite.

One amusing moment: a character notes of John Cena and Vin Diesel that they figured out they were brothers because of the family resemblance. That jarred me right out of my musings about Charlize Theron’s privacy problem because what was that based on? Entirely on the diameters of their necks?

The stupidity of this movie can be summarized in one fact: this is apparently the tenth movie in the franchise, but they couldn’t count that high, so it was named F9.

Oh, well. The summer promises to be full of bad movies, so I guess it’s convenient that early on a floor has been set. It can only get better from here on out, right? If it doesn’t, maybe I’ll finally be cured of my movie-going habit.