Strange bedfellows

Well, gosh, I’ve seen it all now: Answers in Genesis is eager to defend an evolutionary biologist. I suppose it helps that the biologist is an incompetent boob who promotes a lot of bad ideas, and AiG will always favor bad ideas.

Until very recently the statement that male and female are “real biological categories” wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. Most of society, academia, and even the political arena accepted without question that there are two sexes/genders—male and female. But now, what was formerly a benign statement about an obvious reality will end your career. At least, that’s what happened to one evolutionary biologist.

Colin Wright—an outspoken critic of creation and intelligent design—claims he has been “canceled” for speaking up on the biological reality of male and female. In speaking out against the transgender ideology permeating and transforming our culture, he claims he can no longer find work in academia because he’s been labeled a transphobe or as someone holding ideas simply too dangerous to risk guilt by association. (Creationists have had this same problem for decades—simply holding to what the Bible teaches, and what is confirmed by science, about the age and origin of the earth and life is enough to end careers; ironically, creationists are falsely called anti-science by people who now claim there are more than two genders of humans, which is anti-science.)

Oh, Colin Wright. He’s been whining for a while now that nobody wants to hire him, particularly on his venue of choice, Quillette, where he is a managing editor (which explains a lot). I’m not surprised — if his name came up on a job search here, I’d be arguing strongly that he ought to be rejected, and I doubt he’d even get out of the first round of reviews. He’s an evolutionary psychologist! He claims that if you don’t accept his weird understanding of race and sex, you’re an “evolution denier”. He is a transphobe who is confident that there is no continuum of sex and gender, that there is only an absolute binary. He’s also fond of calling everyone who understands that there are more factors than just genes that affect individual identity “blank slaters”, that inanity that Steven Pinker made popular.

It’s not at all odd that Ken Ham would support a crank scientist who believes bullshit that defies our modern understanding and evidence, and further endorses a lot of regressive, conservative views. The only question is…how does Colin Wright feel about his new best friend?

By the way, another reason to shun the idiots at AiG, besides their stupid ideas about evolution, is that they are deeply transphobic.

I have a cunning plan to get rich

I’m going to remind you all that I’ve really cut back on posting spider photos here on Pharyngula. It makes me sad, but it turns out that that subject seems to repel too many people. So, because I’m a super-duper galaxy brain, I’m posting all the spiders on my Patreon account, which brings in a little revenue that’s being used to pay off my legal debt, to drive away people…who might…contribute to my income? Oh, wait, I didn’t think this through. But anyway, it’s there, if you’re feeling generous, you can join at the $1 tier — that is, you tip me a grand total of $1 per month — or even the $5 tier, if you’re Elon Musk. For a short while now I’ve been posting Spider of the Day there, you should join while you can, because once winter hits here and the spiders all die, I may not be able to sustain that. Get the daily spider photos while you can!

Also, because I am clearly an economic genius, I also post those same photos on my Instagram account, so if you don’t want to pay $1 a month, you can get it for free.

You know, when I look at my brilliantly incompetent fund-raising scheme, I’m surprised that Donald Trump hasn’t hired me for his cabinet.

Not the agnostics, too!

I got a message today about a corner of the internet with which I was unfamiliar — I post it here after doing minimal investigation on my own. I really don’t want to get sucked into another rift.

Hi Prof Myers,

Not sure if you’re aware, but the Admin (and creator) of Agnostic.com (which is mirrored @ humanist.com) has been revealed to be also the creator of slug.com (the IDW site) – and after his outing on their Community Senate group, he posted to confirm and promised to ‘answer all questions in the morning’.

I am (or was) a level 8 at Agnostic.com – which means regular poster over nearly 2 years. There are no levels 10s. There is a small handful of level 9s.

I updated my profile this morning to remove all identifying elements and change my bio to explain my reticence to be involved anymore – and my account was instantly – like, instantly suspended. Looks like an algorithm to suspend.

I think that shit is going to go down now at agnostic… I hope so. It would be interesting if you know more including who he is? Admin created a ‘David Silverman’ group a while back and tried to get him socially reinstated – bringing him in at a level that everyone else has to earn through time and contributions. That got shot down by the members, and David left again very quickly.

I’m a bit surprised that anyone wanted David Silverman in that group. For years, his message has been that there is no such thing as agnostics (or humanists, for that matter) — they’re all just closet atheists who need to come out. Why would you want to bring in someone, without even considering their recent scandalous history, who was antagonistic to the premise of the group?

I had not looked into agnostic.com before — I’m not antagonistic towards them, but personally disinterested — so I had a peek, and saw that it’s a fairly typical social media site covering a wide range of topics. The format seemed disorganized, a real hodge-podge, but OK, again not my thing, but fine for those who wanted that particular community.

I hadn’t even heard of slug.com before, so again I took a look. It’s obvious that agnostic.com and slug.com are using the same exact software. Then you take a look at the topics…hoo boy.

So “Biblical Christianity” is a place for for friendly, helpful, and honest discussions of Christian subjects, while Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, and they’re Laughing at the Hateful Left? As for their Intellectual Dark Web bona fides, here is their ‘about’ page which incoherently declares simultaneously that they are a non-political social community based on open inquiry, the free exchange of ideas, intellectual curiosity, honesty, and responsibility, and that they believe in conservative values and that The IDW is liberalism, as that concept is meant philosophically. Oh boy. “Classical liberals”. Where have I heard that line before?

Oh well, the assholes have staked out another domain under the banner of godlessness. Disappointing.

The grift, oh the grift

Last Fall, there was a conference held in London, the Sovereign Nations conference. The ‘star’ speakers were Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay, so you already know where this is going — the “grievance studies” whiners got together in London to howl at the moon and complain about how they were losing the culture war. The twist here is these were atheists gathering under the leadership of a Christian Nationalist group led by Michael O’Fallon. Curiously, I first heard about this event because Richard Dawkins endorsed it, because apparently he’s a big fan of Boghossian and assumed that anything he was willingly entangled with would be part of the godless agenda. Unfortunately, Sovereign Nations is more focused on Christian conservatism, opposing immigration, complaining about the World Health Organization, and hating George Soros. I guess the Boghossian/Pluckrose/Lindsay trio are willing to overlook their association with an organization dedicated to Catholic dominion because they share a mutual contempt for social justice. If you must, you can read an account of their conference. Or you can read Godless Spellchecker’s live tweeting of the con (curiously, there’s also a strong association between Sovereign Nations and the Mythcon asstwinks.)

They’ve since moved on to creating a new blog, New Discourses, with those three prominently featured; right now, Lindsay seems to be providing most of the content, if you really need a day of reading bad writing and bizarre logic. The discombobulating thing is that New Discourses is Sovereign Nations media, owned by Michael O’Fallon, who wants to promote conservative Christian Nationalism, and yet these arch-rationalist/skeptics/self-proclaimed liberals are willingly associating themselves with the religious right.

It’s a somewhat surprising fellowship until you recognize that there are two things that unite them: a hatred of social justice, diversity, and racial equality, and…MONEY. They’ve been bought and paid for by O’Fallon.

Boghossian and Lindsay were both managers at New Discourses.

This is remarkable. It’d be like discovering that Freethoughtblogs was sponsored by Jerry Falwell Jr, and that I was being paid under the counter by Liberty University. You’d know instantly that there was something more to our agenda than what we were openly stating, and you’d instantly see a mass exodus of our bloggers. Yet Boghossian and Lindsay still claim to be objective rationalists and secularists and part of the atheist movement while being propped up by a Catholic zealot who promotes conspiracy theories and hydroxychloroquine.

Aaron Rabinowitz provides an excellent analysis of these repulsive bedfellows and their filthy philosophical positions and the Kama Sutra of twisty rationalizations they use to bring them together on the Embrace the Void podcast. Listen to that…it’s a mind-boggling hour of revelations. Did you know that the pandemic is a social justice warrior conspiracy to take over the country?

A sad announcement from Ed Brayton

Ed Brayton and I had some contentious disagreements back in the day, but we managed to put all that behind us and set up the Freethoughtblogs network with a mutual understanding that we needed something beyond the atheist movement, some kind of organization that would support diversity and social justice and not just tearing down religion. He named the network — we agreed that we didn’t want “atheist” anywhere in our label, even if we were effectively an atheist group, because even then the word was getting tainted — and he and I together made the initial investment in the site. We owe a lot to Ed.

Unfortunately, he’s also suffered from serious health problems over the years, and left the network he built to run a blog on Patheos. This was an amicable decision with zero drama behind the scenes or in front of it — he just decided that he couldn’t cope with the day-to-day chores of management, and just wanted a space where he could write with no pressure.

His health has worsened. He’s been in and out of hospitals for a while. People have been asking me how he’s doing, since his postings have become intermittent, and I don’t know either! Unfortunately, he just posted this to Facebook:

I’m giving up and calling in hospice. I just can’t do this anymore. To those who know me in real life I love you and I’m sorry. I did my best.

He always has done his best, and he will be missed.

Looking for Argiope in West Central Minnesota

Sorry, but I didn’t include the photos here, which are all closeups of great big hairy spiders with bold coloring. The complete illustrated story is on Patreon, and the photos are on two posts on Instagram.

Mary and I went on a little spider hunting loop yesterday, looking for Argiope. We took a southeastern route, heading off to Swift county, then detouring a bit south to clip through Chippewa county, then due east to Kandiyohi, and finally north and back west through Pope county to home. Our strategy was simple: drive through farm country on state and county roads, keeping an eye on the ditches that parallel all roads around here. When we saw lots of grass and brush filling the ditch, and when there was a safe place to pull over in the car, we’d stop and stroll about, looking for webs.

We really needed an “I Brake for Spiders” bumper sticker, because we were probably annoyingly slow. Good thing the roads were nearly empty!

One catch to this approach is that good grassy roadsides were scarce. Apparently, good Republican farmers have little to do and lots of tractors, so they trim everything. Have you ever seen a drainage ditch that looks like a manicured lawn? We did, everywhere. The best places had 1-2 meters of grass, where we’d walk in and be in the weeds to chest height or over our head. Actually, the best places were nature preserves and restored prairie.

We persevered, though, and found Argiope in every county we visited. They’re common, but they really don’t seem to like the kind of place where big bipedal mammals frequently bumble around. Living near people is OK, but they better not ever come over to visit.
So here’s one from Swift county:

Classic Argiope aurantia. Big, black and yellow, and a meter wide orb web with stabilimentum zig-sagging down the center.
Chippewa county is the emptiest place we visited, lacking any large towns and consisting of nothing but farms. They do have Argiope aurantia, though.

Kandiyohi county is kind of the inverse. It does contain one big town, Willmar, which was right in the way of our route, and Argiope does not like cities much. We finally found one as we were driving away by our usual expedient of pulling into farm access roads where the residents weren’t overzealous lawn fanatics.

We’d actually planned to hit up a couple more counties, but the weather turned grim, all gray and rainy. Even as I write this I’m listening to thunder. We’d decided to skip a northern loop of our drive and go home through Pope county, where we found Argiope trifasciata in a nature preserve.

One cool thing about this one is that there were two other webs in the same little patch, only a few centimeters away, and they were occupied by males, hopeful consorts I would guess.

We’re going to do it again next weekend, aiming for a western and northern loop, passing through Big Stone, Traverse, and Grant counties. Also on our list is another trip to the Ecostation in Ottertail county.

One rule for you, one for me

Did you hear the one about social media having a liberal bias? Yeah, right.

Facebook has allowed conservative news outlets and personalities to repeatedly spread false information without facing any of the company’s stated penalties, according to leaked materials reviewed by NBC News.

According to internal discussions from the last six months, Facebook has relaxed its rules so that conservative pages, including those run by Breitbart, former Fox News personalities Diamond and Silk, the nonprofit media outlet PragerU and the pundit Charlie Kirk, were not penalized for violations of the company’s misinformation policies.

Misinformation is OK if you are a Republican. Better yet, it’s the breath of life for those asshats. Oh, and bite me, Facebook.

In related news, never buy anything from Teespring. They’re fine with selling merchandise with swastikas, but don’t you dare add a rainbow to it. They’ll yank the hippie-dippy love & peace apparel from their product line, but if you want a black t-shirt with Nazi symbols all over it, no problem.

Teespring, which is owned by KA Design, says it didn’t sell any of the design and didn’t profit from it. In a video on its Facebook page, KA Design said the swastika is thousands of years old and is a symbol of peace, love, life and other ideas. But the Nazi party corrupted that symbol, the company added.

“[T]hey stigmatized the swastika forever. They won. They limited our freedom. Or maybe not? The swastika is coming back,” the video said.

Sure, Nazis corrupted it and made it representative of their hateful ideology. That’s a significant part of its history now. It ain’t coming back until everyone forgets WWII and the Nazis and the Holocaust, so everyone can just stop playing stupid and stop pretending that shameful blight on the world never existed.