Wow! Free Advertising for Jesus!

Fox & Friends (blechh, ick) ran a special feature on the Ark Encounter (puke) last week. Ken Ham is thrilled. Wouldn’t you be, if your cheesy sideshow got a free national promotion on the channel that directly targets your target demographic of yokels and dumbasses?

Answers in Genesis writer and speaker Bodie Hodge was recently interview by Todd Piro from FOX & Friends (on the FOX News channel) down at the Ark Encounter. The resulting 3-minute video on the life-size Ark attraction was phenomenal. Bodie not only explained this world-class attraction but clearly gave its biblical and evangelistic message. How often do you get to hear the gospel on national television?

All the time, Ken, all the time. I’m an American. Evangelical christianity is constant low-level stench that permeates the whole country.

You can watch the whole thing, and the commentary from the low-wattage bulbs sitting on the couch. You learn that Todd Piro is really easily impressed.

This really is life-size of the ark, he says. I don’t know what that means. The Bible gives some rough dimensions, that’s it, so they filled a rectangle of that size with wood and concrete and steel, does that mean it was real? No, it does not. Also, later, when Todd is asked what most impresses him about the ark, he answers that it was the Big Door. It was really big, you know. Therefore, the Bible is true.

Bogus Hodge is asked why the Ark is so successful (is it?) when religion is in decline all across the country, and he gives a dishonest answer: because it’s non-sectarian and appeals to people of all faiths, with even non-believers coming in droves. That is not true. The Ark Encounter is extremely sectarian, building on an extremely narrow subset of Protestant, evangelical Christianity that likes to pretend that it is universal. It isn’t. I can’t speak for people of other faiths, but I know the non-believers are showing up for the spectacle of stupidity, and to laugh at it.

And honestly, how can he claim it’s designed to appeal to all faiths when he flat out declares that the purpose of the “Ark” is to show the message of Jesus Christ is true? That nonsense is only topped by Todd Piro’s assertion that kids visiting the “Ark” will get a sense of history.

Fox is the propaganda channel, and now they’re promoting the state religion. This isn’t good because, unfortunately, Fox is effective at poisoning brains.

One problem is that once someone gets pulled into the Fox News vortex it naturally leads to other scummier enterprises. You might start out signing up for a Fox email list or one from the president then quickly find your email being sold far and wide to increasingly less reputable charlatans. “The thing that makes me maddest about this is that it’s about money,” one correspondent said. His dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a year ago. “I guess Mike Huckabee has been selling his email to fucking everybody, including one list I noticed when I was getting his email set up called Beyond Chemo. They are selling him his own anger and a bunch of mushroom pills for all the money he doesn’t have anymore,” he said. “He’s gonna die destitute because of this shit and people belong in prison for seeing this as a business opportunity.”

Religion is already a potent brainwashing agent, seeing it team up with an effective disseminator of lies makes for a chilling combination. I’m beginning to think all the zombie movies and TV shows are reflecting a genuine concern that is in the air.

Nurses play cards, cops eat donuts, and other stereotypes

You’ll have to excuse my home state. Walla Walla is a lovely town in a beautiful part of the country, but it is in the eastern half of Washington, which has more than its fair share of rural ignoramuses.

I understand… making sure that we have ‘rest breaks’ and things like that. But I also understand that we need to care for patients first and foremost… I would submit to you that those [critical access hospital] nurses probably do get breaks! They probably play cards for a considerable amount of the day!

Sen. Maureen Walsh (R), Walla Walla

I’ve known a few nurses in my time. What I don’t get is why, if they’re spending most of their time playing cards all day, they come home with aching backs and sore feet all the time? I’ve been in hospitals before, and I’m the one who is lying in bed the whole time, while the nurses are all hustling about on tight schedules, getting the work done. What card game is this that can be done in short bursts and is physically demanding?

I must also beg to differ. This Republican is defending an exemption that benefits hospitals, allowing them to demand mandatory overtime from the nursing staff rather than hiring enough nurses to do the job without overworking them, and that means that care for patients is not first and foremost — hospital profits are. Understandably, that is a very Republican position to take.

Damn, but American health care is such a chaotic mess, thanks to capitalism.

Another summary of the Peterson/Žižek debate

This one is from the Guardian.

Peterson’s opening remarks were disappointing even for his fans in the audience. They were a vague and not particularly informed (by his own admission) reading of The Communist Manifesto. His comments on one of the greatest feats of human rhetoric were full of expressions like “You have to give the devil his due” and “This is a weird one” and “Almost all ideas are wrong”.

I’ve been a professor, so I know what it’s like to wake up with a class scheduled and no lecture prepared. It felt like that. He wandered between the Paleolithic period and small business management, appearing to know as little about the former as the latter. Watching him, I was amazed that anyone had ever taken him seriously enough to hate him.

Hang on there, bucko. I’m a professor, I’ve never experienced that. I always have an outline, at least, and a set of points I want students to understand, not that I can claim I’m always fully prepared to give an elegant, well-crafted lecture. I have a bit of anxiety about just showing up and babbling extemporaneously. I have no illusion that I’m good at it.

Peterson clearly has no such concerns.

He said things like “Marx thought the proletariat was good and the bourgeoisie was evil”. At one point, he made a claim that human hierarchies are not determined by power because that would be too unstable a system, and a few in the crowd tittered. That snapped him back into his skill set: self-defense. “The people who laugh might do it that way,” he replied. By the end of his half-hour he had not mentioned the word happiness once.

Žižek didn’t really address the matter at hand, either, preferring to relish his enmities. “Most of the attacks on me are from left-liberals,” he began, hoping that “they would be turning in their graves even if they were still alive”. His remarks were just as rambling as Peterson’s, veering from Trump and Sanders to Dostoevsky to the refugee crisis to the aesthetics of Nazism. If Peterson was an ill-prepared prof, Žižek was a columnist stitching together a bunch of 1,000-worders. He too finished his remarks with a critique of political correctness, which he described as the world of impotence that masks pure defeat.

I am not particularly fond of this assertion, though.

And they both agreed, could not have agreed more, that it was all the fault of the “academic left”. They seemed to believe that the “academic left”, whoever that might be, was some all-powerful cultural force rather than the impotent shrinking collection of irrelevances it is. If the academic left is all-powerful, they get to indulge in their victimization.

And that was the great irony of the debate: what it comes down to is that they believe they are the victims of a culture of victimization. They play the victim as much as their enemies. It’s all anyone can do at this point.

I am too powerful and influential and relevant! I am! <flails wildly, falls to knees> I am important!

Validate me! Please!

Žižek vs Peterson: A nothingburger.

I guess Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek had their great debate in Toronto yesterday. You know how I feel about debate and Jordan Peterson, while Žižek is simply someone I don’t read and have no interest in, so you can guess how enthusiastic I was about this event. Fine, you like to watch a couple of gomers share a tureen of warm spit on a stage — knock yourself out, have a grand time, I’m not going to tell you you can’t. I’m more interested in Nathan Robinson’s commentary on it.

I didn’t get far in that, even. The debate started an hour late, and practically the first thing out of Peterson’s mouth is that he didn’t have time to read any of Žižek’s work (neither have I, but I’m not the one challenged to debate him), and even more surprisingly, he admits that he, voluble scourge of Postmodernist Communists, studied up by reading the Communist Manifesto … for the first time ever.

Oh, come on. It’s a long pamphlet, a summary of the ideas for the proletariat. This is the minimal amount of effort you put into preparing for a debate that some of your fans are paying $1500 to see? After you’ve spent years damning an ideology that you haven’t read?

It sounds like Žižek’s performance wasn’t much better.

I hope all the attendees got their money’s worth.

YouTube skepticism is a sham

Several years ago, I engaged this blithering twit who called himself Armoured Skeptic. He was one of a faceless horde of cartoon avatars on YouTube who were making bank on whining about feminism (see also Thunderf00t and every response video to Anita Sarkeesian). Even now his schtick is to complain about Atheism+ and SJWs and self-righteously declare himself a crusader for Free Speech. I guess it’s a strategy that works, because he’s got almost half a million subscribers. Even back in 2015, though, it was obvious that he was a shallow incompetent who titled himself a “skeptic” because that was a shortcut to the claim of critical thinking that didn’t require actually, you know, thinking.

He’s still pumping out the crap, giving “skepticism” a bad name (as if it could be besmirched even more), and now he has appeared on Rebecca Watson’s radar because he, a so-called skeptic, gave credence to conspiracy theories that the Muslims set fire to Notre Dame.

It’s true. You can be a gullible, bumbling, pretentious goofball like Armoured “Skeptic” and gain a large following on YouTube simply by spitting on social justice.

Oh, and here’s another notorious YouTube skeptic/atheist personality who promotes racialist pseudoscience:

Structuralism does not imply that evolution runs on rails

I got a guest spot on Jackson Wheat’s channel, where he’s rebutting a guy who claims that structuralism means that evolution will inevitably lead to humans — that intelligent bipedal mammals are an ideal form that life will converge upon because it is encoded in the natural laws of the universe. That isn’t what structuralism implies at all! Gould and Lewontin’s spandrel paper is not saying that cathedrals are inevitable, but that some architectural features will emerge as a consequence of physical constraints rather than by design.

Jackson explains it all, and I intrude near the end to say a few pro-structuralist marks while totally repudiating the idea that evolution runs on invisible rails that mean certain forms are necessary.

Yay, archaeologists!

It’s too bad a few rotten apples are tainting the archaeology barrel, because we need more responsible archaeologists speaking out. Fortunately, the fightin’ archaeologists are on the job.

Pakal’s supposed seat in a spaceship is just one example of what Anderson and others call “pseudoarchaeology,” which ignores the cultural context of ancient artifacts and uses them to support predetermined ideas, rather than test hypotheses, about the past. Common beliefs include that aliens helped build the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, that refugees escaping Atlantis brought technology to cultures around the world, and that European immigrants were the original inhabitants of North America.

These outlandish beliefs have been circulating for decades, but archaeologists like Anderson are now mobilizing to counter them. They are taking to Twitter, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and newspapers to debunk false claims and explain real archaeological methods, and they plan to compare notes this week during a symposium at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting here. “My profession … needs to do a better job of speaking out,” Anderson says.

It’s getting worse, and some of the blame has to fall on gullible media. All those aspirational cable channels that bloomed in the last few decades, planning to teach and educate people about the wonders of the universe have all fallen into corruption.

He and others are alarmed by the rising popularity of pseudoarchaeological ideas. According to the annual Survey of American Fears by Chapman University in Orange, California, which catalogs paranormal beliefs, in 2018, 41% of Americans believed that aliens visited Earth in the ancient past, and 57% believed that Atlantis or other advanced ancient civilizations existed. Those numbers are up from 2016, when the survey found that 27% of Americans believed in ancient aliens and 40% believed in Atlantis.

“I look at these numbers and say … something has gone massively wrong,” Anderson says. He can’t say exactly what is driving the rise in such ideas, but cable TV shows like Ancient Aliens (which has run for 13 seasons) propagate them, as does the internet.

And further, there’s an ugly strain of fanaticism behind pseudoarchaeology.

Today, “Most archaeological research is unavailable to the public,” she says, obscured by jargon and locked behind paywalls. “But you want something from pseudoarchaeology? I can find you 15 references,” all easily accessible online and on TV.

Re-engaging with the public is an uphill battle, Head says. Debunking specific claims, as Anderson did with Pakal’s “spaceship,” is merely a first step. To make a lasting impact, she and others say, archaeologists must proactively share their work and, in particular, explain their methods step by step. That’s important to counter the common pseudoarchaeological claim that researchers are hiding evidence for aliens or Atlantis.

This isn’t easy work, especially online. All the women interviewed for this article have been harassed online after tackling pseudoarchaeological interpretations. Mulder recently fielded replies that included a knife emoji after she tweeted about research showing that people of diverse ancestries, rather than only Western Europeans, lived in Roman Britain. Colavito reports receiving death threats after a host of Ancient Aliens urged his fans to send Colavito hate mail.

I didn’t get that much hate mail for fighting creationism. It ramped up when I criticized Catholicism (there are some extraordinarily fervent Catholics out there who’d clearly like to burn me at the stake), and it went into overdrive when I openly supported feminism, and now most of my hate mail comes from … atheists, some of whom are even more fanatical than Catholics. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not so much religion that drives the hatred, but dogma about race and gender roles that turns people into foaming-at-the-mouth hate machines (but of course, religion does contribute to promoting that dogma).

The flat earth cult

I don’t think I could survive attending a flat earth conference. The stupidity is a huge backward step for humankind. Michael Marshall attended one, though, and survived. He’s a stronger man than I am, because this would wreck me.

The Earth, according to Nesbitt, is more likely a diamond shape, with East-West travel facilitated by 4D space-time warps along the edges, allowing for a “Pac-Man” version of reality – where a traveller might sail off one side of the screen, and appear at the other side. That diamond is propped up on seven circular pillars, “because God likes the number seven”. This version, he explains, fits the evidence better, and is supported by the Bible, in the book of Job.

Several speakers throughout the weekend take time to highlight that evolution is a myth, accompanied by occasional heckles of “monkey men!” from audience members.

Here’s a telling excerpt. This whole flat earth nonsense is simply weaponized religiosity.

Nesbitt shared what he called the “Flat Earth Addiction” test – seven questions Flat Earth proponents should ask themselves, including “Have people said that you are pushy or obsessive about Flat Earth?”, “Have you thought that if only everyone knew about Flat Earth the world would be a different place?”, and “Have you noticed that you spend less and less time with your family and friends and more and more time talking to Flat Earthers?”.

Looking around the room, I could see knowing nods, as people recognised themselves in each question. The questions, Nesbitt explained, were taken from a checklist used to determine whether someone is in a cult. The implication seemed lost on the audience.

An American esthetic

Hey, I survived registering a bunch of students yesterday! Barely. Spending hours trying to be on and enthusiastic with young people is sometimes tough for this old guy. I’m usually used to having time for my eyes to go black as my soul recedes into the void for recuperation, so I emerged from my day of brightness and light feeling drained. But it was worth it.

Part of my recovery technique was to sit back and watch something on the TV, and this time I tuned into Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé on Netflix. It was non-stop intellectual stimulation, though, and got me thinking.

Remember Nirvana’s “Feels Like Teen Spirit” video? That one tore down that common American experience, life in a public high school. The bleachers, the cheerleaders, the marching bands…all just a framework for ennui, melancholy, dismay. I loved it, still do, but it’s not exactly optimistic.

Beyoncé takes that same framework and turns it into a fierce celebration of music, dance, HBCUs (man, a lot of the dialogue is about the power of education and community), the black experience, liberty, and womanhood. The interludes where they show the process of creating show were exhausting — so much work and talent went into assembling a complex show. Beyoncé is a genius.

This is the America I want to live in.

“The charge on you is to make this country more than it is today.”

Maya Angelou

That’s the opposite of “MAGA” — it’s looking forward rather than desiring to return to the past.