Moloch just ate another baby

Once upon a time, Todd Starnes tried to get me fired. He raged about me on Fox News, posted it on various wingnutty sites, and made enough noise that a university lawyer contacted me to let me know that they were getting all these complaints…and also to reassure me that they had my back, and nothing I said was actionable.

So you’ll forgive me if I chortled smugly at this headline.

It’s good news, also because it makes me wonder if Fox News is getting a bit worried about their intimate association with far-right radicals and is trying to edge away a bit. Democrats may worship Moloch, but Republicans definitely worship Mammon, and their god is feeling some heat lately.

There clearly is big money in self-help books and pick-up artistry, though

I think I first heard about Peter Boghossian years ago when that “street epistemology” fad swept over atheism, and I thought that sounded like a good idea — being able to communicate about key concepts in atheism and skepticism in a casual, informal way? Sign me up. Then I witnessed some of it at meetings and on YouTube and was quickly de-impressed. It mainly seemed to be a game of leading questions calculated to trap uninformed people into contradictions, not into thinking, and to leverage their discomfort into considering alternatives. Proponents hate me when I say it, but Ray Comfort figured this out before they did, and he’s not exactly a brilliant philosopher.

My disenchantment only grew as I learned more about this Boghossian fellow. He’s an obnoxious ass! Are you telling me he’s a master of the gentle art of persuasion? If so, he doesn’t practice what he preaches.

Now he’s come out with this book, How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide, which is just nuts. What next? Trump writing a book on modern physics, Deepak Chopra writing about mathematical rigor, PZ Myers becoming an Instagram model, Uwe Boll producing a movie classic? Boghossian and his coauthor, James Lindsay, are temperamentally and intellectually incapable of writing a guide to handling challenging conversations. They’ve always relied on simply pandering to the biases of their right-wing friends.

I’m never going to buy their book and have no interest in reading it. Oliver Traldi has written a review…a charitable review, even, although it does reject their approach, and notes that a lot of it is rehashed pablum from the self-help genre.

All in all, How to Have Impossible Conversations was better than I expected. If you do as Boghossian and Lindsay say and not as they do, you’ll probably be more successful in persuading people during contentious conversations — as long as you have enough common sense to exclude the weird shit as well.

That “not as they do” is important. Boghossian and Lindsay are just the worst.

Traldi also brings up another criticism that I’d felt worming around in my guts in all my encounters with this “street epistemology” stuff, but he expresses it well for me.

If, as Boghossian and Lindsay seem to indicate, the readers’ own beliefs are as brittle as anyone else’s and rest on as shaky a foundation, why should they be in the business of trying to persuade anyone of anything? If we are really masters of doubting everything we believe, why would persuasion techniques be a rational thing to try to engage in? What would we be trying to persuade people of… stuff we ourselves don’t think is true? Who in the world would that help?

That’s a fundamental question. What, exactly, are we atheists trying to do? Answer that first, before you try to tell others how they’re supposed to be like you.

Farewell, Midnight

Way, way back when we first moved to Minnesota, almost 20 years ago, one of the promises I made to my daughter Skatje to help reconcile her to the move was that we’d let her get a cat. We did! In the spring of that year she adopted Midnight.

She loved that cat. Midnight has been her constant companion through high school, through college, through grad school, through her marriage, and now through the first year of her child’s life. Iliana and Midnight have gotten along pretty well.

While Midnight has been lively and alert every time we’ve seen him, he’s been steadily accumulating geriatric cat health problems, with years of urinary tract infections and kidney problems, and was recently diagnosed with a large tumor in his digestive tract that was just going to get worse. After twenty years of mutual loyalty, it would have been unkind to let him suffer more.

So yesterday, Midnight was put to sleep.

It’s a funny thing, but he was a bit of a pain in the neck — we still have a big urine burn on the floor in my office, where he’d sneak into a corner to pee — but you don’t get to love someone because they’re convenient. He’s going to be missed, and remembered, in our family.

Jenny appears!

Usually, Jenny By-The-Front-Door is huddled up inside her nest, and at best I see a waving leg or three. Tonight, though, she made a rare appearance. Isn’t she beautiful?

I really want to dig into the intricate pigment patterns on Parasteatoda abdomens.

Sanders hospitalized. Relax, it’s no big deal, he has access to modern medicine

All right, everyone, stop freaking out. Bernie Sanders complained of chest pains, was taken to the hospital, had a few stents put in, and now all the babbling twits on social media are clutching their pearls and declaring him too old to be running for president, saying he had a heart attack, and questioning his ability to continue. This is nonsense. Sanders did the right thing, treating a potential problem pre-emptively, as we should all do (if we had good health care).

I experienced the same problem in 2010, and sensibly chose to go to the hospital at the first twinge, and then was diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening condition, and had a procedure to install some stents. I was told to take it easy for a few weeks afterwards, and it didn’t even interfere with me going back to work teaching.

Do the math. That was over 9 years ago, and I haven’t experienced any kind of cardiac episode since. I could have served two terms as president without a hitch! This is the kind of routine treatment everyone ought to be able to get as necessary, and that allows one to go on to live a healthy, productive life for years afterward.

(By the way, I still favor Warren for president, but wouldn’t object at all* if Sanders were in office…and my wife is still feeling the Bern all the way.)

*OK, I lied, it doesn’t matter who gets elected, I’ll find something to complain about.

Evolutionary Psychology, the favorite discipline of old white men everywhere

Matt Lubchansky

Well, some old white men, anyway. Jeffrey Epstein loved evolutionary psychology because it was used to justify rapey behavior and abuse of women — it’s good for the species, don’t you know, rich abusers wouldn’t exist if they didn’t have an adaptive advantage. So Epstein threw money at helpful apologists like Robert Trivers and Martin Nowak (boy, did he throw a lot of money at him), and they obliged by rationalizing the worst activities of men. Meanwhile, other hangers-on who did not even like, let alone get paid by him, were still well-pleased by the chauvinism of EP, and heaped praise upon it without even requiring any quid pro quo. I don’t know which is worse.

Pinker is a talented popularizer of science and authored several books on language which were generally well received. He has attracted controversy, however, for engaging with popular debates on evolutionary psychology’s more sweeping claims in the 1990s. His 2002 book The Blank Slate is a sustained attack on those academics, intellectuals, and feminists who weight nurture more heavily than nature in the development of human behavior. While defending the book A Natural History of Rape, whose authors Craig Palmer and Randy Thornhill (a Trivers coauthor on the Jamaican symmetry work) helpfully advise women to wear modest clothing to prevent assaults, Pinker describes typical rapists as “losers and nobodies,” “outcasts,” or perhaps “ethnic rioters.” The billionaire science enthusiast is not included in Pinker’s rapist typology.

Heh, yeah — The Blank Slate is the terrible piece of crap that totally soured me on Pinker. It’s a dishonest polemic contrived to advance a dead perspective by pretending it was obviously true while taking malicious swipes at everyone who had a more nuanced, sophisticated view of the interplay between genes and behavior. I am not surprised that he became a proponent of evolutionary psychology, which was just more of the same old ignorant adaptationist garbage. When I compare the careers of two Harvard professors, Gould and Pinker, one of whom wrote two great books, The Mismeasure of Man and Ontogeny and Phylogeny, and a multitude of essays revealing his fundamental humanism, and the other of whom is a darling of modern racists and rapists, I have to think that the wrong one died early.

There is one thing to do now.

Epstein is dead, and now beyond the reaches of human justice, but it is still possible to hold his enablers and scientific sycophants to account. It is necessary, but not enough, to demand that individuals like Trivers and Nowak and institutions like Harvard and MIT return the millions they received from Epstein. The ideas produced by these scientists also matter. Evolutionary psychologists have naturalized, and even at times excused, male sexual violence, but evolutionary biology is not the sole province of reactionary white men. Those of us working in this field must push back on both the corrupt funding system at elite institutions and flawed ideas these institutions have produced.

If your beliefs require propping up with large amounts of cash from self-serving rich people, then maybe they deserve to be starved for a while. It should cost you credibility to be a recipient of donations from evil men: give the money back, let’s see if your ideas can stand on their own without the support of corrupt processes.

A tangled web of lies about dinosaurs

Never ever get entangled in the lies of creationists, is the lesson from this story. It involves a Trumpster member of the house of representatives, Mark Meadows; a creationist schoolteacher named Dana Forbes; an unscrupulous documentarian, Doug Phillips, who we later learn was screwing his underage nanny; a homeschooler named Pete DeRosa who leads phony ‘dinosaur hunting expeditions’ with the goal of proving they’re only 4,000 years old; Joe Taylor, proprietor of the Mt Blanco Fossil Museum, another creationist propagandist; and of course, Ken Ham, whose slimy rich fingers slither into everything.

To make a complex story short, Forbes finds a fossil allosaur on his property in Colorado, and makes a deal with Taylor to excavate it. Then DeRosa organizes an expedition of school kids, including children of Meadows, to “find” the fossil, while Phillips is making a movie of the event called “Raising the Allosaur”, which was sold by Phillips’ Christian front, Vision Forum. Vision Forum has since suspended sales of the video, citing “ethics-based issues”, and is now defunct. Meadows bought the site from the original owner and later sold it to Answers in Genesis in a set of transactions that are curiously omitted from the financial disclosure forms required of a member of congress. The allosaur skeleton was also eventually donated to AiG, and it now stands in the Creation “Museum”, where they claim it is evidence that the Earth is 6000 years old.

Five years ago, the Peroutka Foundation donated the skeleton to the Creation Museum, which is operated by Answers in Genesis. The museum had the skeleton reappraised, and declared its value at a million dollars. It is now one of the museum’s main attractions. On the front of the display is a note thanking the DeRosas; no credit is given to Forbes or Taylor. “The intact skeleton of this allosaur is a testimony to a catastrophic, rapid burial, which is confirmation of the global Flood a few thousand years ago as recorded in the Bible,” the Creation Museum insists, on its Web site. “There is no correlation between the age and intactness of a fossil skeleton,” Kirk Johnson explained, in an e-mail. He added, “It is important to note that their claim is demonstrably and profoundly incorrect.”

Every step in the process is crooked and tainted by unsavory characters with no qualifications to back up their claims, and the fossil ends up as misrepresented evidence in a phony creationist tourist trap. The testimony on display here is about the sleaziness of creationists.

The only character I feel pity for in the story is the poor abused Allosaurus.

Who invented this bad comic book villain?

Here we have an example of unbelievably bad writing. This plan makes no sense, unless your goal is just to create pointless pain and suffering. The only motivation for this kind of scheme is mindless ignorance and hatred, and yet the villain is supposedly rich and well-connected. Doesn’t he have anything useful to do with his wealth? Even a greedy desire for more money would leave more room for plot development than just looking for a moat with venomous snakes and shooting peasants in the legs.

The only thing that can happen next is for a Schwarzenegger or Willis type of meathead hero to come along and blow him away ignominiously, with some kind of wise-ass remark. It’s been done, it was boring then, it’s stupid now. Send the script back for a complete rewrite and come up with something plausible.

Wait, what? It’s not fiction?

Jesus fucking christ.

Baby #Spider

One day old. This was a tough photo to take — the little spiderlings respond to any touch with frantic escape behavior and end up running all over the place, and they refuse to pose nicely for a picture.

I note that even shortly after emergence they have the banded legs and scattering of dark abdominal pigment.