David Silverman fired from American Atheists

I told you this was coming down. Buzzfeed just published the news that Silverman has been fired for financial malfeasance and sexual assault. The personal accounts from several women are sordid, to say the least — you can go read the article for the terrible details, but it sounds like this was a case where there was no doubt about what needed to be done.

It’s terrible news for organized atheism. David was a friend, and was an aggressive, effective promoter of fierce atheism. He was also imperfect — he antagonized some people, and American Atheists made some bad decisions under his leadership, trying to court conservatives at CPAC, and supported some questionable billboards.

None of it matters. The documented behavior is intolerable. I heard some of the stories from the whisper network, but nothing I heard was as horrible as the truth.

Uh-oh. This might just turn everyone gay.

It’s the Straight Pride pin. I am horrified by how boring it is.

This is supposed to represent my sexual orientation? It just makes me look back on my life with regret. Put it away. Honestly, I have no problem with being a straight married man, I just think the symbol for my lifestyle ought to communicate at least a little joy and happiness and enthusiasm, rather than this tepid blandness.

It doesn’t even have any squid on it. What is the point?

Banned by Answers in Genesis!

There is a home-schooling conference — ugh — going on in Calgary right now, which had invited Ken Ham as a speaker — ughugh. Paulogia, a very Canadian (that is, polite to a fault) critic of creationism, bought a ticket to the event and was planning to attend and listen, nothing more.

He had his ticket revoked. He was personally contacted by both the head of AiG Canada and the president of the homeschooling association to inform him he wasn’t welcome. What an amazing honor!

The whole story is here:

Someone has finally figured out Jordan Peterson

Elizabeth Sanderson’s explanation makes perfect sense.

Never before have I encountered such a complex, intelligent, and daring work of satire. This “Jordan Peterson” character is the most cutting-edge performance art I have ever encountered. No sincere leftist commentary has ever exposed the link between seemingly banal conservativism and borderline-fascism in such an easily understandable way. This one-man-show is the bumbling Canadian answer to Laibach. As an expert in pseudo-academic nonsense, I have to salute my superior on this one.

“Jordan Peterson” is a work of parody known as stiob: “an overidentification with the person or idea at which it is directed and that it is often impossible to tell if stiob is sincere support, ridicule, or a mixture of the two.” Stiob arose from the late Soviet years, during the Brezhnev era. There are many eerie similarities between that time and our own – the government was largely ran by a cadre of septuagenarians, wages had stagnated, yet all official narratives insisted that there was no alternative. The horizon of possible futures was closed. Into this fray, a new form of parody emerged, one that was often indistinguishable from the thing it was criticizing.

Take, for example, the Slovenian industrial band Laibach. Their artwork and performances are rife with totalitarian imagery, which leads many to wonder whether or not the band themselves are fascist. Laibach can be seen as an example of “stiob”, employing a strategy of subversive affirmation or over-identification in order to tease out truths that cynical distance could not. It is not “satire” as we would usually understand the word.

I’d never heard of “stiob” before, but it seems to be a real and useful term. So I’ve also picked up a new addition to my vocabulary!

Despite his recent notoriety, the most towering accomplishment Peterson leaves behind is his earlier book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. This is the greatest academic practical joke ever conceived. Despite its name and intimidating 500+ page length, the book manages to pull off the impossible, and leave the reader with no meaning whatsoever.

It reads like a cross between Joseph Campbell and Timecube, interspersed with diagrams of the auto-fellating dragon of chaos. Peterson seems hellbent on finding every hokey pseudo-science and subsuming it into his personal worldview. Jungian psychology, evolutionary psychology, social Darwinism… the man has spent decades on what is fundamentally unprovable quackery. It’s sprawling, pedantic, repetitive – a commentary on the demand for quantity over quality that has become so common in academia today.

Move over, Boghossian. Maps of Meaning is the satire you wish “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” could have been. You missed the mark by failing to notice that the social movement ripe for parody is the centrist/alt-right/pseudo-skeptical gang you belong to.

For years I’d been hearing leftists claim that conservative thought is always mobilized in defense of the ruling classes. In response, many right-wingers have taken to insisting they are, in fact, “classical liberals”, and that their politics flows from a respect for freedom and markets rather than defending the powers that be. Enter Jordan Peterson. On the surface he seems like a milquetoast conservative. But when it comes time to defend inequality, Peterson points to animal hierarchies as a justification. His individualism does not arise from a place of ethical consideration, but out of biological essentialism and social darwinism.

The bumbling professor, despite all of his appeals to the contrary, keeps accidentally rediscovering fascist ideas.

There are moments where he almost breaks character – take his story about lobsters, in his more recent book. Peterson knows nothing about biology, but he plunges forward with complete confidence, shamelessly preaching an understanding of evolutionary psychology that sounds like it was ripped straight from a Pick Up Artist forum.

If taken seriously, he is moronic and dangerous. But taken as a work of intellectual Outsider Art? Goddam brilliant.

Dang. Am I going to have to rethink my opinion of Peterson?

At least I’m not going to have to rethink my opinion of his followers — all dupes.

Californians, do the rest of us a favor

The California legislature is considering a comprehensive net neutrality bill, which the big corporations like AT&T really hate. I’d like to see it become law for you all, because that would mean us little people in flyover country who don’t have any significance at all could then point to you as a shining example.

We need you to contact your representatives and tell them to get off their butts and do the right thing, and ignore those well-heeled lobbyists who are waving money at them.

Contact:

Ben Hueso (Chair) | 916–651–4040 | @BenHueso
Robert Hertzberg | 916–651–4018 | @SenateHertzberg
Steve Bradford | 916–651–4035 | @SteveBradford
Henry Stern | 916–651–4027 | @HenrySternCA
Jerry Hill | 916–651–4013

Tell them to support SB 822 to restore net neutrality.

OrbitCon starts tomorrow!

You can see the lineup for this weekend’s online social justice conference at the Orbit. It should be good! I’m not presenting, but quite a few of the FtB crew are joining in.

I am helping out a little bit, though — I’m hosting the talk by Sarah Levin on How to Incorporate a Secular Values Message into Your Advocacy on Saturday at 11 Central. I think that means I’ll be running interference on questions, which you can submit in advance right here. Actually, all the talks have associated pages where you can post questions, so do that for anything that tickles your fancy.

It has always been thus

We look at the world now and wonder how the alt-right could possibly have any popularity at all — such odious ideas, such terrible ignorant people. But the seeds were planted a long time ago. I was just reading Starship Stormtroopers, a 1977 essay by Michael Moorcock, in which he looks back on recent issues in science fiction, colored by the experience of the Vietnam War and the protests against it. I remember that time, and what I think of are the hippies, and campus radicals, and revolutionary music, and peace and love and rejecting bourgeois capitalism. And now I wonder how did that generation grow up to populate the worst, most corrupt, most destructive government in our history?

The answer is right there in that culture of the 60s-70s. We just didn’t notice the contradictions imbedded in it, which Moorcock points out in the context of the popular SF readings of the day.

There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them — a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants — a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence — a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn’t disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkein or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began. Most of it warns the world of ‘decadence’ in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping — not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.

Ouch. I read all of those authors, but at least I can say I came to detest them, with the exception of Lovecraft, which I’ve always read as hilariously badly written dystopian kitsch. But otherwise, I agree — even Tolkien, who has become even more popular today thanks to that series of wildly successful movies, created a wierdly asexual, regressive, pastoral universe where old traditional values, like aristocracy and kingship, were revered. Moorcock also hammers on that.

The interesting thing was that at the time many of the pro-US-involvement writers were (and by and large still are) the most popular sf writers in the English-speaking world, let alone Japan, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, where a good many sf readers think of themselves as radicals. One or two of these writers (British as well as American) are dear friends of mine who are personally kindly and courageous people of considerable integrity — but their political statements (if not always, by any means, their actions) are stomach-turning! Most people have to be judged by their actions rather than their remarks, which are often surprisingly at odds. Writers, when they are writing, can only be judged on the substance of their work. The majority of the sf writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto-fascists to a man and woman! There is Lovecraft, the misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism and the left, who, like many a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of ‘good leadership’; there is Tolkein and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly disguised working class agitators — fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances. To all these and more the working class is a mindless beast which must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security) — the answer is always leadership, ‘decency’, paternalism (Heinlein in particularly strong on this), Christian values…

Leading to the present day, where that paternalism is worshipped, and yelling about decency and Christian values is a mask over the most atrocious corruption.

At least his characterization of John Campbell is vastly entertaining, if horrifying.

Indeed, it’s often been shown that sf supplied a lot of the vocabulary and atmosphere for American military and space technology (a ‘Waldo’ handling machine is a name taken straight from a Heinlein story). Astounding became full of crew-cut wisecracking, cigar-chewing, competent guys (like Campbell’s image of himself). But Campbell and his writers (and they considered themselves something of a unified team) were not producing Westerns. They claimed to be producing a fiction of ideas. These competent guys were suggesting how the world should be run. By the early fifties Astounding had turned by almost anyone’s standard into a crypto-fascist deeply philistine magazine pretending to intellectualism and offering idealistic kids an ‘alternative’ that was, of course, no alternative at all. Through the fifties Campbell used his whole magazine as propaganda for the ideas he promoted in his editorials. His writers, by and large, were enthusiastic. Those who were not fell away from him, disturbed by his increasingly messianic disposition (Alfred Bester gives a good account of this). Over the years Campbell promoted the mystical, quasi-scientific Scientology (first proposed by one of his regular writers L. Ron Hubbard and aired for the first time in Astounding as ‘Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind’), a perpetual motion machine known as the ‘Dean Drive’, a series of plans to ensure that the highways weren’t ‘abused’, and dozens of other half-baked notions, all in the context of cold-war thinking. He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were ‘natural’ slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery, that the moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest and that the blacks were ‘against’ emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in ‘leaderless’ riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles! I was speechless (actually I said four words in all — ‘science-fiction’ — ‘psychology’ — Jesus Christ!’- before I collapsed), leaving John Brunner to perform a cool demolition of Campbell’s arguments, which left the editor calling on God in support of his views — an experience rather more intense for me than watching Doctor Strangelove at the cinema.

Now I’m left feeling like nothing ever changes.

Arrgh, Bergman!

I had this terrible debate with Jerry Bergman years ago, and a video was hosted on YouTube by someone else (thank you very much!), and I just put a copy on my own channel. Here it is. You may have already seen it, and I summarized it long ago. This is the debate where Bergman announced that carbon was irreducibly complex, and therefore proved that the universe was designed, and that atheists have been protesting and getting removed from schools the periodic table of the elements, a persecution that he documented in his rambling, awful book, The Slaughter of the Dissidents.

Also, by the way, lots of credit to Mark Borrello, the moderator of the debate, who I thought did an exemplary job of giving both sides fair and equal time.

But this debate was also critical in defining my antipathy to debate, and it’s in those words, “both sides”. There are not two sides here. They are not equal. There is a reasonable, evidence-based side (in this case, mine) and there is a whining man-child side where “facts” can be made up as you go, and debate is a scheme designed to elevate nonsense to the same level as science. This is not sour grapes; I think, by any estimation, I “won” this debate to the point where creationists in the audience came up to me afterwards to admit it, although usually with the excuse that Bergman was bad and a smarter Christian debater would have clobbered me. I also don’t think it was my talent that won out, though — I don’t think I’m a particularly good debater — but just that even in a format contrived to give the weakest arguments every benefit, science is hard to overcome.

I’ve attacked religious beliefs…using science!

I got name-dropped as the bad guy in an article titled “Are miracles outside the realm of science?” You see, this guy, Carl Drews, published an article in PLoS One that made up a convoluted scenario to explain how Moses could have parted the Red Sea, taking advantage of some unlikely wind patterns. I objected to it. I guess that still burns Mr Drews.

The biggest threat to scientific inquiry came from the New Atheists. The New Atheists are a small group of militant atheists who have taken it upon themselves to attack religious beliefs using science. A blogger named PZ Myers stated that he would reject the published paper out of hand if he were selected as a peer reviewer. The comments on his blog were similar to the hostility endured by climate scientists in publishing their research. The journal PLoS ONE came under pressure to retract the paper. Fortunately for me and for science in general, the executive editor, Damian Pattinson, held firm. I wrote about these events in my book “Between Migdol and the Sea.”

Except that my objection wasn’t because I’m an atheist — it’s because this article was bad science. Here’s my article that so annoyed Drews, and this was my conclusion that led Drews to feel that atheists were oppressing him:

And how is this garbage getting published in PLoS One? If a paper like this were plopped on my desk for review, I’d be calling the editor to ask if it was a joke. If it wasn’t, I’d laugh and reject it — there is no scientific question of any significance being addressed anywhere in the work. Is this representative of the direction PLoS is going to be taking, with low standards for acceptance and what had to have been nonexistent review?

A suggestion for Mr Drews, the author, who sounds like he is a software developer affiliated with a research institution: you aren’t a scientist, stop pretending to be one. I’ll also say the same thing I tell every creationist pseudoscientist who tries to resolve their mythical stories with unconvincing handwaving about science: it doesn’t work. We see right through you. Bad, overstretched technical justifications for miraculous events are even less persuasive than simply declaring “My omnipotent god did it with magic”.

His article was nothing but some contrived jiggery-pokery to rationalize a miraculous event described in his holy book that we don’t know even actually happened. This is not an interesting question. As I said then, “It should have been rejected for asking an imaginary question and answering it with a fantasy scenario.”

My atheism gives me the privilege of being able to look at his arguments from outside the Christian bubble, but I didn’t say it shouldn’t have been published because God doesn’t exist. I even pointed out that his rationale doesn’t work from an honest Christian perspective.

It doesn’t even make sense from the perspective of a believer. So one of the great miracles of the Bible is being reduced to a meteorological fluke with an entirely natural explanation? It makes bible stories compatible with science by making the supernatural elements of the story completely irrelevant, which is nice if you’re an atheist, but only if you’re an atheist who is very gullible and willing to accept other elaborate prior premises.

I said “honest Christian”, although I sometimes doubt their existence. I think Mr Drews is playing games.

I approached the Biblical story of Moses crossing the Red Sea respectfully, knowing that this epic event is very important to many religious people — myself included. I recognized the limits of what science can and cannot conclude. We can state that the narrative is plausible, but we cannot state that God was or was not involved. In particular, I avoided the use of the word “explain,” because to many people that term means to “explain away.” Exodus portrays the crossing of the Red Sea as a mighty work of God, and the hydrodynamic details of the crossing do not take away from that faith-based view. Most readers could understand that idea, whether they were religious or not.

Let’s cut through the crap. Drews believes a super-powerful, omnipotent being purposefully parted the Red Sea for Moses, and he wants to simultaneously argue that mundane, natural processes could have separated the waters, which makes his magical explanation superfluous. He uses the mundane explanation as an excuse to get his religious story published in a scientific journal. You shouldn’t have to be an atheist to be able to see right through that.

Also, by the way, note what he did there: he says his work makes the Bible story “plausible”. That’s not true. If you read the PLoS article, you’ll learn that it is actually an implausible and unlikely event, requiring a “particular circumstance of topography and wind direction”. Bad science is bad science, whether you’re an atheist or a theist.

Drews does answer the question in the recent article’s title.

By its very nature, that miracle — the resurrection — is outside the realm of science. I define a miracle as God’s temporary suspension of natural laws in response to human need.

Yep. But that won’t stop him from trying to publish religious apologetics in science journals.