“Death of the author” dies at age 53

A satire site summarizes JK Rowling’s swan dive into the sewer:

“What’s amazing is that not only has J.K. Rowling positioned herself as the female Orson Scott Card,” said comparative literature professor Nicole Mathews, “but she has also done so in a fraction of the time. It took Card decades to fully explain his deeply upsetting hatred and many more years to face backlash. Rowling is managing to accomplish this in a matter of weeks. That’s powerful. That’s progress.”

“And just like Orson Scott Card, Rowling included a ton of pro-trans symbolism in her books without realizing it,” Mathews added. “What was once Ender’s soapy naked bathroom fight with another boy is now the magical Sorting Hat that places you into a category when you are born into the school, forcing you to figure out your own place for yourself.”

Now explain HP Lovecraft. He was an out, hate-filled racist from day one, and wasn’t embarrassed by it, and his work still holds a certain degree of squeamish respect. Could it be the hypocrisy of pretending to be a liberal, open-minded progressive while hiding the rotten blemish at your core is the damning part? Maybe not…Card was always a conservative Mormon at heart.

Maybe what’s dying here is the “death of the author” itself.

My first Pirate Spider

The other day, I caught a spider I didn’t recognize — this is not at all uncommon, I’m an amateur trying to learn — and I had to post it on iNaturalist to get it identified. It was a Pirate Spider! I’d never seen one before. If you’re not familiar with pirate spiders, they’ve earned their name: they are predators of spiders that board other spider’s webs and kill the owner and loot her of her life, arrrr.

Pirate spiders are members of the spider group that includes all the “orb weavers” – those that make the prototypical, circular webs we are all familiar with – but they do not make webs.

In fact, they have lost the ability. They can still produce silk, which they use to build egg sacs and wrap prey. But they are anatomically incapable of spinning a web. The number of silk “spigots” on their spinnerets is dramatically small compared to their relatives.

Instead, they invade the webs of other spiders, in a bid to lure and then kill the hapless architect. Gently, they pluck the strings of the web, enticing the host to approach.

Once the host spider has ventured close enough, the pirate makes its move.

First, it encloses its duped prey within its two enormous front legs. These are fringed with massive spines, called “macrosetae”, which they use to trap the host within a prison-like basket.

Then, the final move: the pirate bites its prey and uses its fangs to inject a powerful venom that instantly immobilises it.

I include my photo below the fold.

[Read more…]

Brainwashed!

I have been informed that the following video of a British children’s entertainer on YouTube from a few years ago is a ghastly attempt to indoctrinate children into accepting the trans agenda. How dare they! So I watched it to see what it was all about.

I should warn you that it is extraordinarily powerful brainwashing. I watched it, and found myself thinking, “Gosh, this all seems perfectly reasonable — it’s about tolerance and acceptance.” That just goes to show you how insidious and evil those trans people are, because damn, it’s so effective. Beware! They want you to teach children to be egalitarian!

The real terrorists

There’s a protest in New Mexico. Some of the protesters try to tear down a statue to a conquistador. The shooting starts. Who’s doing it? Why, the gentlemen in military costumes, carrying military firearms, who are then treated respectfully by the police.

The right-wing militia and the police are rather hard to tell apart in that picture. It’s also amazing how when it’s an armed mob of white people with obvious violent intent, they get treated so gently, and how the murder militia responds so calmly and meekly. They know they’re not going to be spontaneously throttled or battered or executed. They aren’t worried at all.

This is the future, as illustrated in this excellent comic.

I’m not afraid of black people, but man, these armed white terrorists are the big worry.

The guy they shot is in critical condition but recovering, by the way. The whole gang of marauders need to be tried for attempted murder.

The terrorist has been identified and arrested. His name is Stephen Ray Baca. He’s scum.

“The heavily armed individuals who flaunted themselves at the protest, calling themselves a ‘civil guard,’ were there for one reason: To menace protesters, to present an unsanctioned show of unregulated force,” New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) said in a statement. “To menace the people of New Mexico with weaponry — with an implicit threat of violence — is on its face unacceptable; that violence did indeed occur is unspeakable.”

Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller (D) said the statue would now be speedily removed as an “urgent matter of public safety” until authorities determine a next step.

Fine. So when a bunch of soldier-wannabes in costume show up waving guns at a protest, tell the police to speedily remove them, too.

What did Satan do that was so bad?

I saw this meme about Satan, and it made me ask a question. What horrible acts did Satan do in the Bible?

I know about the horrors God is said to have committed — plagues and smitings and genocide and wars of conquest and murdering all but 8 people on Earth — but all this Satan character seems to do is tempt people away from worshipping the psychopathic deity. I’m not sufficiently informed about the Bible to know all the details, so…are there stories about Satan afflicting people with boils? Siccing bears on children? Asking people to murder their neighbors? There’s a notable lack of specific crimes attributed to the so-called bad guy. It’s a book claimed to be written/inspired by God — do we need to introduce Christians to the concept of the unreliable narrator?

A baffling philosophical question

A reader asks me a philosophy question. I’m not a philosopher, and if I were, I’d probably be a bad one.

I am aware from your blog Pharyngula that you are a materialist when it comes to the issue of consciousness, and that you feel that neuroscience and physIcal processes are enough to explain consciousness. But I have a question for you about your views regarding this.

There is one very puzzling aspect of consciousness which I have always puzzled over; and that is the very perplexing question of why, out of the numerous consciousnesses existing in the universe at all places and all time periods, the consciousness of this particular individual is the only one that is actually ME. A common way this question is often phrased is “Why am I me and not someone else?” The philosopher Benj Hellie calls it the vertiginous question, and he puts it like this: “Of all the subjects of experience out there, why is this one — the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie (substitute yourself for him) — the one whose experiences are actually live (i.e., present, or available, or currently being experienced).

It seems to me like this is a perplexing question regardless of whether materialism or dualism is true, because either way, it seems equally irresolvable. If materialism is true, you can ask “Why am I this brain and not some other brain?”, and if dualism is true, you can ask “Why am I this soul and not some other soul?” Neither option provides any more of an answer than the other. So it seems this question is separate from, and neutral with regard to, the whole materialism vs. dualism question.

So do you have any ideas on how this very puzzling mystery could possibly be explained?

Thank you, and good luck with your blog and everything else!

I know nothing of Benj Hellie and have never read anything by him. I don’t even understand the question, which may be why I don’t find it “puzzling” or “perplexing”. As a materialist, my consciousness and sense of self is entirely local, a product of the physical properties of my brain. I wouldn’t hold up a rock and ask, “Why is this rock this rock, and not that other rock?” I don’t think objects are interchangeable, therefore selves are not interchangeable.

I must be missing something, because the question just looks stupid to a materialist and doesn’t seem to resolve anything about dualism. Maybe someone out there can find something that makes sense of it.

Hsu is rightfully embattled — he shouldn’t have any authority

Look, I don’t hate physicists — I have friends who are physicists! They can use my bathroom any time! It’s more that there a few rotten apples who insist on ignorantly stepping into my discipline and making grand (and false) pronouncements about how biology works, apparently because knowing physics makes them think they know everything. And it’s annoying, especially when they get grant money for it (e.g., Paul Davies), publish rubbish in physics journals without question, and get fawned over by the mass media for it. I’ve also noticed that there’s a kind of thin actinic line of other physicists who reflexively rally to the defense of any of their own, no matter how inane, against interlopers from outside the domain of physics — which is kind of hard to imagine, since they simultaneously believe that everything is in their domain.

I have to snipe again, though, because another physicist is in the news. Students and others are calling for the removal of Stephen Hsu as VP of Research and Graduate Studies at Michigan State University.

Some physicists think that because they know physics, and physics is difficult, that they are qualified to work in other disciplines. Sometimes a physicist wandering from physics turns out fine, particularly if they make use of their obvious quantitative skill; I’m thinking here of David Layzer’s well-known critique of Arthur Jensen’s IQ work. Other times it is disastrous, such as William Shockley’s eugenic proposals. Yesterday evening the Graduate Employees Union (GEU) of my own university, Michigan State University, posted a long Twitter thread that shows that the Senior Vice-President for Research and Innovation, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Stephen Hsu, here at my own university, Michigan State University is much closer to Shockley than he is to Layzer.

I’ve written before in this space on how scientific racism gains purchase when supposedly mainstream sources publish and promote it. I find the evidence in the GEU Twitter thread to be good examples of Hsu promoting outrageous figures by appearing with them on podcasts and Youtube videos, such as that of the loathsome Stephan Molyneux.

Hsu shares a conceit all too common among physicists: that “it’s really high math ability that is useful for discovering things about the world — that is, discovering truth or reasoning rigorously.” But his behavior shows that this is manifestly untrue. All the quantitative sophistication in the world does not help in disciplines that require interpreting texts in historical contexts, understanding social nuance, or properly recounting the past for present-day audiences. Add in a heaping dose of conspiracy arguments and you can quickly end up promoting racist, especially antisemitic interpretations of history. This is what happened when Hsu interviewed his friend Ron Unz last year. The Senior Vice-President for Research and Innovation at my University heaped praise on a promoter of Holocaust denial on his podcast; clear evidence of Hsu’s complete lack of scholarly and intellectual judgement.

This isn’t some harmless academic argument, like how many aliens are dancing on the planets of the galaxy, but the promotion of bad ideas that do great harm to people. Hsu consorts with racists like Stephen Molyneux and Ron Unz; he openly promotes eugenics; he holds ridiculous ideas about the unlimited perfectability of human genetics, despite being pig-ignorant of biology; he believes women are inherently less suited to careers in science and engineering. His views are rejected by the American Society of Human Genetics, but I guess his authority in theoretical physics overrides that. The real shocker here is that MSU was willing to promote a blatant, unapologetic bigot with ties to racist, white nationalist organizations to a prestigious position in their administration. I guess believing in the intrinsic inferiority of minority students is no obstacle to putting the guy in a position of power at a university.

I tangled with Hsu a few years ago, ripping into his belief that we can breed people for an IQ of 1000, as if IQ is a real entity and breeding people is like breeding chickens. Remember the chickens, the mainstay of his argument?

That fat chicken is your brain. Let the dumbass physicist control your breeding, culling the less brilliant progeny from your line, and eventually your many-times-great-grandchildren will have great huge brains and be many times smarter than Stephen Hsu, and nah, there won’t be any side effects and we’ll just ignore the inhumanity of the process and we’ll pretend there aren’t any physical limitations. All you have to do is imagine an immense perfectly spherical brain floating in a frictionless vacuum.

How do physicists get away with publishing this crap?

And further, why does the media give them attention for it?

As the Guardian credulously claims, New calculations come up with estimate for worlds capable of communicating with others. That number is…36. What a load of bullshit. I think I’ve finally realized what the Drake Equation is good for: it’s an arbitrary formula that allows physicists to freely tweak the parameters and get a new number that they can publish. No, really, that’s all this paper is — they came up some new numbers to plug into the cascade of bullshit numbers in the Drake Equation, and got a new number. Surprise!

GIGO. It’s all GIGO.

The Guardian does get quotes revealing some of their assumptions.

Basically, we made the assumption that intelligent life would form on other [Earth-like] planets like it has on Earth, so within a few billion years life would automatically form as a natural part of evolution, said Conselice.

Wait, what? Automatically? Every Earth-like planet is going to form intelligent life within a few billion years, as a natural part of evolution? That certainly is a simplifying assumption, I guess. It means their number is hugely inflated.

He’s not done, though!

[If intelligent life forms] in a scientific way, not just a random way or just a very unique way, then you would expect at least this many civilisations within our galaxy, he said.

Oh. If the evolution of intelligence is scientific, then it produces intelligence. If chance or unique conditions play a significant role, then it’s not scientific. I hope evolution is listening. Maybe it should take some physics courses?

He added that, while it is a speculative theory, he believes alien life would have similarities in appearance to life on Earth. We wouldn’t be super shocked by seeing them, he said.

life on Earth. Like it’s one thing that he can picture in his mind. What exactly does life on Earth look like?

Is this it?

Or this?

Maybe it’s this, which Dr Physicist wouldn’t be at all shocked to see.

I have a few new rules:

  • No more papers that use the Drake equation. It’s been done to death, it can be manipulated to produce any answer you want, and most of the parameters are indeterminable fantasies. It’s like publishing horoscopes.
  • Physicists don’t get to publish papers on life in the universe unless accompanied by a responsible evolutionary biologist. All these godawful cocky physicists do is demonstrate that they don’t know jack about biology — they know less than your average non-scientist, because they’re stuffed full of bogus assumptions about how it must work.
  • The media can’t just gather a couple of like-minded physicists to comment on a “life in the universe” paper. Somehow, they always manage to find a creationist to give a “fair and balanced” perspective on biology, but a physics boffin is an unquestionable source, no matter how stupid his ideas are.

I still have my old rule: when a physicist opines on biology, throw overripe tomatoes.

I do wonder if physicists are even capable of feeling embarrassment or shame. Somebody should do an experiment.