Hell hath no fury like a Canadian Kermit snubbed

I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but Cambridge is one of those prestigious “elite” universities, and sometimes they do exhibit some good sense.

Oh, but Peterson is mad about this. How dare they deny him an appointment! They owe him!

University of Toronto psychology professor Dr Jordan Peterson had planned to be with Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity for two months in autumn.

But on Wednesday the university took the invitation back after a review.

Dr Peterson said the faculty had “made a serious error of judgement in rescinding their offer to me”.

He has fired back.

This is what we academics call “burning your bridges,” or “guaranteeing that you’ll never get a second invitation,” or “confirming the wisdom of their decision,” or “hah, what college would want you as a visiting professor after that childish outburst,” etc. Poor man. He gets no respect from his peers, so he’ll have to settle for a consoling tongue-bath from his mob of under-educated manbabies.

A free society does not imply that no one has to compromise

New Zealand leads the way.

But what about Free Speech, you say. What about the right to life, liberty, and happiness, I reply, because right now there are assholes everywhere who feed off that hate and fantasize about slaughtering more people. Like this guy.

Isn’t it nice that he’s Unafraid to speak the Truth? Truly, a great Free Speech Warrior. It’s too bad that what he does with that speech is plan and incite the murder of multitudes of human beings.

Human ideals are often contradictory and none are absolute, and I’m afraid that on the hierarchy of needs, the right to live is far above the right to speak, which is in turn far, far above the right to carry around a big fuckin’ murder gun.

It’s a world-wide pandemic of brain-eating parasites

Driftglass gives a pithy summary of the American variant.

…like any other cult, Republicans have conditioned themselves not to respond to external realities any more. Public embarrassment doesn’t work because Republicans have killed the part of their human souls that is capable of being embarrassed. Bringing down a hellfire of facts and figures doesn’t work because they simply will not recognize facts or figures from non-cult members as legitimate. Same for appeals to reason, to history or to basic human decency. Hell, citing their own words back to them from five minutes ago when their cult believed the exact opposite of what they believe now will elicit nothing more than a cow-dumb stare, followed by a smirk because, Bwhahahah!, they just owned you snowflake.

But then I see their analogs everywhere: the doltish Brexiteers, Fraser Anning and his gang of thugs, and I’m willing to bet we can find similar examples in the non-English speaking world. And then there are the anti-vaxxers, who may not be Republican at all, but who see the slow painful deaths of their own children as a triumph. It’s the Zombie Apocalypse, and it has crept up on us unawares. Only we don’t get the easy out of shooting them in the head, because they’re still human.

PragerU is just another creationist garbage heap

I had a rough day today, after a couple of poor nights of fitful sleep, so I was mostly useless and unfocused all day long. But then I got a second wave this evening, partly driven by my disgust with this horrible, dishonest, fraudulent organization called PragerU, so I talked into a microphone for a bit to vent. Maybe I’ll sleep better tonight having purged myself of some black bile.

The Templeton Foundation honors another gullible apologist

Marcelo Gleiser has been awarded the Templeton Prize. When asked what he’d done to deserve it, his answer was his belief in humility, which is pretty darned unhumble, if you ask me. Especially since he then goes on to make some arrogant pronouncements.

I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” Period.

But he has no problem with those people of faith, like the Templeton people who awarded him this great lump of money, who think, “I do believe even though I have no evidence for my beliefs, simply I do believe.”

He also gets atheism wrong. Of course there are a lot of dogmatic atheists who are all about simply refusing to believe and think that is sufficient, but a lot of us are instead making a point that is implicit in Gleiser’s own words: that evidence is important. An idea must have concordance with our observations of the world. An atheist is simply someone who has certain expectations and standards for sweeping declarations of how the universe works, and rejects the poorly supported assertions of religion…and further, sees no hope of progress in understanding from the mystical approach.

It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations.

Oh, bullshit. Here are some declarations.

Vaccines are effective in the prevention of disease.

The Earth is a sphere, moving through space in compliance with laws of celestial mechanics.

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

“I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method.”

We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.” And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that. This positions me very much against all of the “New Atheist” guys—even though I want my message to be respectful of people’s beliefs and reasoning, which might be community-based, or dignity-based, and so on. And I think obviously the Templeton Foundation likes all of this, because this is part of an emerging conversation.

No, the Templeton Foundation likes that because they favor and promote the hypothesis that there is a god, and agnostics like you are a useful tool for making excuses that their beliefs are rational and supported by the evidence.

A scientist (and an atheist) can make the declaration that a particular hypothesis is incoherent and unsupported by any plausible evidence. We do all the time. Those “New Atheist” guys are all happy to say that all you have to do is clearly define what you mean by “god” (first point of failure: no religion does) and provide reproducible evidence for this being (second failure), and they’ll listen and revise their beliefs accordingly. That the godly have consistently failed spectacularly in accomplishing either of those aims is actually pretty good evidence that they’re making it all up.

Gleiser is willing to admit there is “no evidence for God or any kind of god”, but he is too chickenshit to draw any rational conclusion from that. He’s also unwilling to ask the next question that follows — “So why do you believe in a god?” — and drill down into what the actual mechanisms behind this unsupported belief might be, which makes his unwillingness to pursue the truth incompatible with the scientific method. I’ve always thought that method involved questioning everything, but he seems to think it stops at the point where it makes big-money donors uncomfortable.

The best gods are the spider gods

This True News Story missed the most important detail.

After long eras of systemic racial discrimination by humanity, God has clarified he will keep inventing new, terrible kinds of spider until we stop.

“Okay guys,” said God after Donald Trump’s second attempt at a travel ban, while screwing giant mandibles onto the front of a new tarantula model. “You brought this one on yourselves, though.”

If they’d thought to look closely at the god doing the speaking, they might have noticed that he looks like this:

Or this:

Everyone knows the True Name of God is Iktomi, or Anansi. He’s creating new spiders to build webs in our bones if we don’t stop. He’s not trying to get you to stop, though, he’s just anticipating that your eye sockets and rib cages will provide plenty of homes for his children.

s/creationist/fascist/

Wow. I was listening to this video and thinking, “I’ve heard all this before — these are the arguments against debating creationists from 20 years ago!” They’re all there: the “for the audience” claims, the Gish gallop, every lie takes 10 seconds to give, 10 minutes to refute, etc., etc., etc. It was, like, deja vu, man.

The only difference is that the creationists were never arguing for genocide. I don’t think.

It makes me regret those debates I had with creationists.

What’s the etiquette for wearing ironic fash bling to a memorial service for people killed by the fash?

Dear Abby,

I was going to pay my respects to the innocent dead murdered by a terrorist who praised Donald Trump and made various fascist dogwhistles to online fascists. Is it cool if I wear my red MAGA hat and smirk a bit? Or will it make me look like an insensitive, arrogant ass?

P.S. I’m a Canadian in Canada. Trump2020! 14/88!

Jeez, these boys are dumb.