Seeing through all the noise

I’ve mentioned this odd duck conference sponsored by Mythicist Milwaukee before…now Martin Hughes clarifies what bugs him about it, too. The meeting has been doing some unusual things. They’ve been advertising some well-known attendees — not speakers, just popular atheists who will be doing the hard work of showing up — which is the first time I’ve seen that.

On Saturday, September 30th, 2017, several atheist celebrities will be at the fourth annual Mythicist Milwaukee Mythinformation Conference. The more well-known names include Matt Dillahunty, Richard Carrier [Wait! I thought we destroyed his reputation and his career! At least, he claims we did that, and is suing us for one million dollars for it], Aron Ra [edit: Aron Ra has recently decided not to attend. His wife cited the reasons here), and Seth Andrews. Their presence at this conference is being well-publicized.

But the people coming to hear these people speak are going to be disappointed. Because none of them are giving a talk.

Which is…weird. I mean, Matt Dillahunty, the one exception, will only serve as a moderator for a debate; he’s not speaking.

Some of them, like Seth Andrews, have been awfully defensive (and offensive) about it, too. I’m curious about a couple of things.

  • Are you being paid, or at least having your travel costs covered, to be an attendee and to promote the meeting?

  • Are you comfortable being window-dressing?

No condemnation if they were to answer yes to either of those questions — it’s just that it would make me a little uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t accept an invitation to a conference on those terms.

But then the next question is, when you’ve got Dillahunty and Andrews and briefly, Aron Ra, why are they being sidelined? Who are the even more brilliant speakers being showcased at this meeting?

Why, in a conference attended by so many shining stars of the atheist movement, aren’t any of the celebrities speaking?

It’s a simple mystery. Here’s the clue: All the speakers at this skeptic conference are anti-SJWs who, for the most part, haven’t had a prominent voice on the atheist conference scene before.

A bit of background: See, the three YouTubers speaking were not given opportunities to speak at VidCon 2017, the major YouTube conference. In spite of the fact that they are fairly popular on YouTube, they have been unable to cross over into a legitimate, respectable level of status…possibly because their views were considered disrespectful to marginalized groups, and the organizers of the conference didn’t want to give those views a platform.

Now that anti-SJW YouTubers have failed to gain legitimacy in the arena of YouTube, it seems they need a stepping stone. Enter the much smaller American atheist community.

And honestly…the conference seems to be a way to give their views legitimacy in the atheist community. I mean, why else would you have these anti-SJWs (who aren’t known as much, these days, for criticizing religion) speak, and have atheist “celebrities” merely come to watch, acting as window-dressing, than to give their more sidelined views legitimacy?

That sounds a little too conspiracy-theorish for me — I don’t think it was a conscious plan by these rather unpleasant youtubers, but more of a conference organizer with anti-SJW leanings seeing an opportunity to both promote their personal ideas, stir up some publicity for their organization, and cheer on a couple of haters they like. That’s it. I suspect the rot is imbedded in Mythicist Milwaukee.

In spite of the well-publicized phenomenon of the atheist celebrities showing up, this is not your average atheism conference. These celebrities, it seems, are there as window dressing — a way to give additional prestige to these voices in a way that seems engineered to give anti-SJW thought greater legitimacy in American atheism, and to show that social justice ideals might be as ill-placed and mythical as religion. Perhaps this anti-SJW perspective failed when it came to the more respectable, “legitimate” corners of YouTube, but if its representatives can get a respectable, influential platform in the much smaller atheism community…maybe they can build on it.

And, so far as I can see, this conference is less about criticizing religion, and more about giving anti-SJW views that platform.

Which, admittedly, may make the atheist community more uncomfortable for me, but there’s no sense in denying the obvious…

Oh, gosh, suddenly a couple of more questions suddenly arise for the window-dressing.

  • Why are you willing to prop up an openly anti-social justice conference of the type that makes many women and minorities “uncomfortable” (to put it mildly) with atheism?

  • If your defense is Free Speech! and that you’re all about the open discussion of ideas,
    why is this conference so one-sidedly promoting anti-humanism? I mean, here’s Martin Hughes speaking about social justice and atheism — the kind of talk not represented in Milwaukee.

Again, for the Free Speech! dogmatists, this isn’t saying that Mythicist Milwaukee can’t hold a Nazi rally if they want, but it’s clear that they are trying to legitimize blatant anti-feminist, racist views as a respectable part of atheism. Why would anyone support that? Unless they’re sympathetic, of course.

But that looks awesome!

Superman is being a good guy again. Apparently, in the latest issue, he intervenes to stop a white nationalist shooter from killing immigrants.

And then he collars the wanna-be murderer and shames him. Superman is a real Social Justice Warrior!
Or maybe just an everyday decent human being with magic powers.

Yes! That looks like a good story with a good message.

Except…I got that story from Breitbart. They think it’s deplorable. Apparently, preventing the murder of innocents is un-American and socialism.

In an act of Super socialism, once police arrive, our Social Justice Supes orders them to protect the illegal aliens to make sure they are “safe and cared for.”

This latest episode should not surprise anyone.

DC Comics long ago declared that Superman is no longer American. Where once the hero touted the ideals of “truth, justice, and the American way,” like a good leftist, Superman is now a “citizen of the world.”

In a story from 2011, Superman proclaimed that he could no longer be an American citizen because “the world’s too small, too connected” to work just with the U.S.A.

So a true hero would defend American capitalistic values only, and if a few brown people get gunned down, that’s just the price of doing business? I simply do not understand how these people could look at that simple fantasy story and think Superman should be supporting the Nazi. Except maybe if you’re a Nazi.

Mary Schweitzer and the mysterious dinosaur soft tissue

Science has an overview of Schweitzer’s work. You may recall that she published descriptions of cells and soft tissue imbedded deep in fossilized dinosaur bone. That work is much beloved by creationists (it means those bones must be young, they say), but despite starting out as a creationist, she does not support that claim of a young age. She’s a theistic evolutionist.

She went back to school at Montana State University in Bozeman for an education degree, planning to become a high school science teacher. But then she sat in on a dinosaur lecture given by Jack Horner, now retired from the university, who was the model for the paleontologist in the original Jurassic Park movie. After the talk, Schweitzer went up to Horner to ask whether she could audit his class.

“Hi Jack, I’m Mary,” Schweitzer recalls telling him. “I’m a young Earth creationist. I’m going to show you that you are wrong about evolution.”

“Hi Mary, I’m Jack. I’m an atheist,” he told her. Then he agreed to let her sit in on the course.

Over the next 6 months, Horner opened Schweitzer’s eyes to the overwhelming evidence supporting evolution and Earth’s antiquity. “He didn’t try to convince me,” Schweitzer says. “He just laid out the evidence.”

She rejected many fundamentalist views, a painful conversion. “It cost me a lot: my friends, my church, my husband.” But it didn’t destroy her faith. She felt that she saw God’s handiwork in setting evolution in motion. “It made God bigger,” she says.

I’ve read her papers, and they’re real head-scratchers. She seems to do good work; she documents everything carefully; she interprets the results cautiously. They don’t jibe well with expectations — chemistry ought to show more decay — but heck, data is data, if there are sound observations we’ve got to conform the theory to the evidence, not the other way around. She is reporting stuff that seems colossally unlikely, though.

Schweitzer’s most explosive claim came 2 years later in two papers in Science. In samples from their 68-million-year-old T. rex, Schweitzer and colleagues spotted microstructures commonly seen in modern collagen, such as periodic bands every 65 nanometers, which reflect how the fibers assemble. In another line of evidence, the team found that anticollagen antibodies bound to those purported fibers. Finally, they analyzed those same regions with Harvard University mass spectrometry specialist John Asara, who got the weights of six collagen fragments, and so worked out their amino acid sequences. The sequences resembled those of today’s birds, supporting the wealth of fossil evidence that birds descend from extinct dinosaurs.

It’s difficult to believe, but then there’s another dilemma: we expect extraordinarily strong evidence before it should be accepted, but how strong does it have to be? Is this too nitpicky?

She needs more fossils to quiet a continuing drumbeat of criticism. In addition to raising the specter of contamination, Buckley and others have argued that antibodies often bind nonspecifically and yield false-positive results. Critics also noted that one of the six amino acid sequences reported in the 2007 paper was misassigned and is likely incorrect. Asara later agreed and retracted that particular sequence.

“That’s worrying,” says Maria McNamara, a paleontologist at University College Cork in Ireland. “If you are going to make claims for preservation, you really need to have tight arguments. At this point I don’t think we are quite there.”

The biggest problem, though, is this one: all these results come from one and only one lab.

But no one except Schweitzer and her collaborators has been able to replicate their work. Although the study of ancient proteins, or paleoproteomics, is taking off, with provocative new results announced every few weeks, most findings come from samples thousands or hundreds of thousands of years old—orders of magnitude younger than Schweitzer’s dinosaurs.

“I want them to be right,” says Matthew Collins, a leading paleoproteomics researcher at the University of York in the United Kingdom. “It’s great work. I just can’t replicate it.”

That’s something I wish the creationists who bring up her work could understand: we want her to be right. I want to be able to go to a databank and download protein sequences from T. rex. I want to see a molecular phylogenetics comparison of Stegosaurus and Hadrosaurus osteocyte proteins. I think it would be awesome to compare sequences from different ceratopsians and assemble a family tree.

What I want and what we’ve got are two different things, though, and if only Schweitzer has the magic hands to extract this information, I’m not going to trust it. I don’t reject it out of hand, but damn,
it really needs more replication. At this point I don’t want to see another paper from her — I want to see it coming from another, unaffiliated lab. That would be better confirmation.

We’re #7!

The US News & World Report rankings have come out, and for the 19th year in a row, my university is in the top 10 in its category of public liberal arts colleges. It’s always a weird listing: the top 4 are, as usual, military schools.

Another stand-out feature: look at the tuition costs for all of the schools. We’re half the price of our peers. (Comparisons are a little complicated, because some schools give big breaks for in-state tuition (we don’t), and wealthier schools offset tuition with bigger financial aid packages, and it doesn’t include the fact that Indian students get free tuition at UMM. But we’re a bargain.)

Cassini must die

It’s happening tomorrow: the Cassini probe is being ordered to destroy itself by crashing into Saturn. It seems harsh. You’ve sent a tourist to an exotic location to go crazy taking vacation snaps, and then instead of a return trip, you reward them with a request to send more pictures of their suicide. I guess it is a spectacular way to go.

And then you learn that those photos were taken with a one megapixel camera. No, really. It’s got some fancy filters to extract more information from its photos, but otherwise, I’ve got better cameras in my electronics junk drawer. It was launched in 1997, so I guess that is to be expected.

Clearly, what this means is that NASA must launch more robots into space with more up-to-date fancy cameras. I know, the budget is tight, but if it will help, I’ll give them the phone out of my pocket — it has a higher resolution camera on it.

Until that next robot goes skyward, you can watch the final moments of Cassini early tomorrow morning. The timing is perfect: it looks like I can just check in right around the time I get up and watch the death of a space probe before I have to go off to work.

Climate change is happening now

You can’t deny it — or rather, you can, but you have to ignore all the evidence. Here’s a list of seven climate hotspots where the shifts are already obvious: southern Spain, Bangladesh, Malawi, the Svalbards in Norway, Brazil, the Philippines, and so the Americans don’t wander off and wonder where those places are, New York. They’re all depressing, but I found the news about the Amazon to be most discouraging.

Perhaps most ominous is the fact that a positive feedback loop appears to be in play. As the Amazon dries, Nobre says, tropical forest will gradually shift to savanna, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and further adding to global warming.

“When we see a dry season of over four months or deforestation of more than 40 percent then there is no way back. Trees will slowly decay, and in 50 years we would see a degraded savanna. It would take 100–200 years to see a fully fledged savanna.”

The Amazon then would be unrecognizable, along with much of Earth.

We don’t know what all the global consequences of losing the Amazon rain forest would be, but apparently, we’re going to do the experiment and find out.

Meanwhile, there are still people who believe it’s not a problem, and that market forces will compensate for our new hot, dry, stormy, flooded reality. The scientific research is 97% in agreement, which is already remarkable, given how much scientists like to argue. And the other 3% is junk science.

But what about those 3% of papers that reach contrary conclusions? Some skeptics have suggested that the authors of studies indicating that climate change is not real, not harmful, or not man-made are bravely standing up for the truth, like maverick thinkers of the past. (Galileo is often invoked, though his fellow scientists mostly agreed with his conclusions—it was church leaders who tried to suppress them.)

Not so, according to a review published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology. The researchers tried to replicate the results of those 3% of papers—a common way to test scientific studies—and found biased, faulty results.

Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, worked with a team of researchers to look at the 38 papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the last decade that denied anthropogenic global warming.

“Every single one of those analyses had an error—in their assumptions, methodology, or analysis—that, when corrected, brought their results into line with the scientific consensus,” Hayhoe wrote in a Facebook post.

But of course it is that flawed 3% our elected officials have chosen to accept, and we don’t have a mechanism for removing deluded idiots from office.

The creationist playbook

Too, too true: a former creationist writes about the strategies they were explicitly taught to use in debates. You won’t be surprised to learn that they’re bogus, dishonest, and only effective with people who don’t know much biology.

The main thing that they taught us was that most people don’t know a whole lot about biology. Most people just take what is taught them and they regurgitate it for a test in the classroom without ever thinking about what they’ve regurgitated. So they hammered on a lot of the various things that were taught in biology class and then they simply reframed them in a new way and asked us to think about them… really, really think about them. Of course, since we were kids, we needed to be walked through how to think about them. Of course, they were more than happy to shepherd us.

I’ve noticed that creationists don’t like to argue with anyone who is knowledgeable — with me, they constantly try to steer the discussion away from my expertise towards geology or astronomy or nuclear physics, stuff they know less about than I do, but which I’m not going to be as comfortable addressing.

But they don’t worry, even if they are talking with an expert. They’ve got another ace up their sleeve. Say stupid shit to piss off your opponent! Then you win.

The first thing they asked us to notice was that there was a dialectic (they didn’t use that word, but that’s what they pointed out). That is to say, that the argument wasn’t really about Science at all. Science, they pointed out, was a *METHOD*. It wasn’t a team or something to cheer. Heck, it wasn’t something to get emotional about at all. But look at how emotional all those scientists got when we were arguing Creationism, they pointed out. And that’s not all! Look at how emotional all of these “Evolutionists” got throughout history! They gave us one of those quotations that’s attributed to everyone from Augustine to C.S. Lewis: “The Truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend It. Get out of Its way. It can take care of Itself.”

The problem with that, and it’s a fact that scientists are often reluctant to acknowledge, is that we don’t become scientists out of dispassion. Good scientists are enthusiastic about their work, and they also care deeply about the truth. Seeing someone who is dishonest and cavalier with the facts is offensive and disturbing, and yes, we’ll be angry with someone who lies. Who lies to children. Who misleads public policy.

Also, fuck CS Lewis. Here’s another quote for you: “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on”. The truth is often hard. It takes work and knowledge and experience to defend it. Any ass with a Bible can defend a lie.

The other thing they learned was to seize upon examples where scientists were initially enthusiastic, and then found to be in error. The example he uses is Nebraska Man, an erroneous classification of a pig’s tooth as belonging to an ancient hominin.

It was the exuberance that they had us focus on. Not the fact that there was nowhere *NEAR* consensus among scientists at the time. Certainly not the fact that once it was found out that stuff was retracted appropriately. It was the enthusiasm for finding this stuff in the first place. The statements that rubbed it in the face of people who believed in The Bible. The drawings. Oh, goodness. The drawings. “They made these drawings of people after they found *A TOOTH*!” (“From an *EXTINCT* pig!”)

The author gets it wrong, still. Nebraska Man was not published in any journal; it was entirely promoted by the newspaper media of the time, the reconstructions were commissioned by the press. Even in explaining what they were taught, the author is still getting it wrong, and exaggerating the scientific response.

Think about more recent and more solid discoveries. The initial response to reports about Homo floresiensis, the hobbit was a combination of enthusiastic interest and outright dissent about the interpretation of the specimens. Look at Homo naledi. Is it significant and representative, or is it a weird relict population of doomed oddballs? Where does it fit on the family tree? Did they actually practice crude ritual burials? Scientists tend not to leap on new discoveries with the certainty the creationists attribute to us — there’s a lot of questioning and demands for more evidence.

So instead the creationists memorize lists of things they barely understand, to use as a confrontational tool.

And then, at that point, it became VITALLY important that we each learned what “really” happened. We had to learn the names and dates of the so-called hoaxes. We had to learn, by memory, the differences between (deep breath) Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man and Java Man and Peking Man and we had to have these facts at our fingertips. (Keep in mind: This was before Smartphones were a thing.) We had to be able to argue this stuff at a moment’s notice because…

Java Man and Peking Man were not hoaxes. That’s one of the dangers here — they blur fact and fiction together, because that’s a way to taint the facts.

Among the tools we were given to expose the dialectic was The Gish Gallop. Named after Duane Gish, this is when you give 12-15 “whatabouts” in a very short period of time. Again: this was before the internet. So the people we were talking to didn’t have all of human knowledge in their back pocket. The best part about the Gish Gallop is that, in a very short period of time, it communicates familiarity with the various theories and, since it’s probably impossible for anybody under the best of circumstances to deal with 12-15 “whatabouts” in a very short period of time, it communicates *GREATER* familiarity with the subject than the person with whom we were arguing. That doesn’t really help with the person you’re arguing with, but wasn’t necessarily about changing the mind of the person we were arguing with.

There have been a few satisfying incidents in my time when I’ve been arguing with a creationist who isn’t smart enough to change the subject to a field I don’t know much about, and they give me those 12-15 “whatabouts” and I’m able to answer every one. It requires a little luck, because I don’t know everything so they can stump me, but there was this time a creationist had been getting batted down with every point, so he dragged out an obscure one — a fossil bed in Peru with many whale fossils, which he argued was proof of a global flood. I’d coincidentally read the paper that morning, so I was able to tell him all about it (it was a shallow beach, the site of frequent strandings over a long period of time), and even cite the source.

Speaking of getting emotional…he was standing there with his mouth open turning purple. It was hilarious. Honestly, though, usually they succeed in bringing up something I haven’t heard of at some point, and I shrug and say, “I don’t know”, which is fine for any scientist to say, but they treat it as some kind of grand victory.

And then there’s the grand kicker, the strategy that you still see in frequent use.

Yet another tool: The Odious Conclusion. You can see this trick above in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Either this good thing is true or this odious conclusion is true. Since we want to avoid the odious conclusion, therefore, the good thing is true! How this worked for Young Earth Creationism was to invoke eugenics. If you were arguing with someone only passing familiar with the theory of evolution, it was easy to set them up and get them to argue that there was a choice between Young Earth Creationism and some particularly odious statement. “If evolution was true, doesn’t that mean that eugenics could work?” was a fun one (remember: no internet in the back pocket). You’d find that most people had never even thought about the question and it was fun to ask questions focusing on whether evolution leads to odious conclusions. Then, of course, you could point out that if God created everyone equal, you didn’t have to worry about whether or not the eugenicists had a point. Force them to choose between something pleasant and something odious.

Unfortunately, that still works on lots of people. “Do you want to die someday, or do you want to live forever” is difficult to address when the honest answer is that everyone is going to die eventually, while the Jebusite gladhander is lying and saying he has the magic formula to live forever. It’s the same con that the alt-medicine frauds use: “Do you want to suffer with chemotherapy, or take my juice cleanse and poop the tumors away?”, said as if both treatments were equally effective.

The irony of it all: free speech rights used as a cudgel of oppression

For years, the most unpleasant characters on the internet have been using the cry of “free speech!” as an unrestricted, unquestioned privilege that must be respected over all others. It’s magic. No compromise is allowed; all you have to do is invoke “free speech”, and you can bulldoze all over other people’s expectations of privacy, or safety, or even of their right of free speech. I think free speech is a good thing, and we shouldn’t tolerate government dictating what we’re allowed to say, and people should be able to freely discuss their opinions and ideas in a participatory democracy, but that needs to be balanced with other rights as well (“what other rights?”, I can imagine the basement-dwelling trolls of the internet asking, “there are no other rights but my right to spew the sewage floating in my brain everywhere.”)

So we should appreciate the free speech that allows someone to say, “I believe I have the right to own an M16,” even though I personally disagree with that and I think there ought to be a heck of a lot more gun control, but that right to free speech ends when they add, “and I think I have the right to track down your address and blow your brains out if you disagree.” That changes everything from a good if annoying discussion to a threat and a danger. Likewise if they try a lesser threat, “and I think I have the right to force you to argue with me and I’m going to harass you until you agree.”

There is an argument going on right now between fascist white nationalists and universities in which administrators and centrists are caving in before the magical mantra of “free speech!” This is what happens when you lose perspective and decide that one right trumps all the others. In the name of Free Speech, people who believe millions of other people should lose all of their rights and be deported, deprived of recourse to legal redress, be kicked out of school, or even imprisoned or murdered, get to further incite these gross violations of liberty on college campuses.

In a grotesque parody of the Berkeley students who stood up for civil rights on Sproul Plaza in 1964, the far right has made free speech on campus a shield for hate groups as it recruits and organizes. College administrators’ knee-jerk defenses for free speech avoid addressing legitimate concerns regarding safety and academic freedom for faculty and students.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ quoted John Stuart Mill in defense of free speech, but conspicuously left out the context. Mill firmly believed speech that advocated harm to others is an abuse of the right to speak. In 1969 the Supreme Court agreed, ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio that there is no free speech right to advocate violence when violence is likely to occur. There are, in fact, solid legal reasons, particularly after Charlottesville, why campuses can and should deny a platform to far-right speakers, precisely because they encourage violence against specific groups and enable situations of imminent danger.

“Free speech” is an all-purpose slogan disingenuously used to mask violent threats and an outright take-over of, ironically enough, the right of free speech. You don’t really believe that Ann Coulter, Steve Bannon, and Milo Yiannopoulos are making a principled defense of socialists, communists, academics, artists, and progressives to discuss their ideas, do you? They hate those guys! They want to intimidate and suppress liberals, and have found that mouthing the words “free speech” are a great way to do it, since moderates tend to cave before it.

The threat of white-supremacist violence is real. Leaked threads from an alt-right message board reveal the sadistic aspirations of self-identified Freikorps who gathered online in hopes that their “Day of the Rope”—referring to a Kristallnacht-inspired mass lynching and genocide depicted in the white-nationalist novel The Turner Diaries—would kick off at Berkeley on April 27 when Ann Coulter had been scheduled to speak.

No altercations materialized that day, but determination to provoke violence and justify a state crackdown on antifascist resistance motivates far-right groups to keep coming back to Berkeley. Breaking this iconic “commie” stronghold, in their eyes, would achieve a major milestone on their path to power.

Right-wing speaking events—including the “Free Speech Week” scheduled for late September at Berkeley, featuring the odious trifecta of Yiannopoulos, Coulter, and Steve Bannon—are part of an increasingly coordinated nationwide effort among far-right groups to recruit on college campuses. Using free speech as a wedge to silence dissent and discredit opposition, they intend to radicalize white youth by waging psychological warfare on academic leftists, social-justice organizations, and minorities. It should be no surprise that Jeremy Christian, white-supremacist murderer of two men in Portland, cried out “Free speech or die!” during his day in court. For white supremacists, the push for free speech is directly connected to their campaigns of terror.

We also mustn’t forget that these “free speech” advocates are using it as a tool to do harm to minorities and women — and behind their strategy is an appeal to the comfortably privileged to sit back and let them do the dirty work of securing their sheltered nice ideals at the expense of the life and liberty of the underclasses.

Tone-deaf campus administrators continue to ignore the warnings of students and faculty, and prioritize making campuses “safe for free speech” by militarizing university spaces with a heavy police presence—unsurprisingly, with disproportionately detrimental effects on students of color. Violent confrontations can be avoided entirely if responsible decision-makers acknowledge that fascist gatherings by their very presence pose a threat to our spaces of work and learning. Trump’s repeal of DACA this week makes this imperative even more urgent; we must not forget that what is being contested at Berkeley is not just “free speech” for racists but the enforcement of sanctuary-campus policies against ICE.

It cannot be the sole responsibility of communities facing white-supremacist violence to be suitably respectable victims for public consumption. Commentators, politicians, and campus administrators must reject the alt-right’s framing of this as a battle over free speech. Regardless of the far right’s strategies to divide us, we must prioritize the safety of students and amplify the voices of the vulnerable—not promote narratives that serve racist ideologies.

Laurie Penny has some vigorous words for the Nazis — and that’s free speech, too. When all you’re fighting for is the right to be a shitlord, you don’t get to claim the mantle of Hero of Free Speech. There is a whole interlinked network of sometimes conflicting rights, and picking the easiest one to defend because it doesn’t compromise your lifestyle of blaming the less privileged for your failings isn’t heroic.

So let’s be clear: getting fired because you hate women is not an equivalent hardship to getting fired because you happen to be one. People who have been disowned by their parents for being gay or transgender aren’t going to have sympathy when your mum and dad find your stash of homophobic murder fantasies and change the locks. Getting attacked for being a racist is not the same as getting attacked because you are black. The definition of oppression is not “failure to see your disgusting opinions about the relative human value of other living breathing people reflected in society at large.” Being shamed, including in public, for holding intolerant, bigoted opinions is not an infringement of your free speech. You are not fighting oppression. You are, at best, fighting criticism. If that’s the hill you really want to die on, fine, but don’t kid yourself it’s the moral high ground. I repeat: You cannot be a rebel for the status quo. It would be physically easier to go and fuck yourself, and I suggest you try.

The fact that some people—the women, people of color, immigrants and queer people you want put back in their proper place—disapprove of you does not make you edgy. A bag of cotton wool is edgier than you lot. Fighting for things to go back to the way they were twenty or thirty or fifty years ago does not constitute a bold resistance movement. It constitutes the militant arm of the Daily Mail comments section. Fighting real oppression involves risk, and before you start, I’m talking about real risk, not some girl on the internet calling you a cowardly subliterate waste of human skin, like I just did.

I’ll support your call for free speech when you stop using it to marginalize the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for everyone else, and when it stops being a proxy for defending the status quo and your privileged status rather than the right that allows the oppressed to have a voice.

Bugginess lately? Should be better now.

You may have noticed that the Freethoughtblogs site has been obnoxiously flaky lately. Our brilliant part-time tech person, Alex, seems to have figure out the problem: our recent comments add-on was scanning all the comments from all our posts, which means it was working way too hard for too little effect. I had to look; Pharyngula alone has over 10,000 posts and almost a million comments, and the stupid little add-on was trawling through all of that every time it rebuilt that one menu.

It’s been fixed now. You can continue to stuff the network with comments; the software is going to ignore the ancient comments on ancient posts.

The software business sure is persnickety.

Humans are already a little bit porny

The internet has a lot of pornography, because human beings are fascinated by sex. How much, though? If you try to google the stats, unfortunately, mostly what you get is horrified anti-porn crusaders who are prone to inflating the numbers and calling it an epidemic, or a plague, or a perverted nightmare of hellish hedonism. But here’s one estimate that seems sober and reasonable:

● In 2010, out of the million most popular (most trafficked) websites in the world, 42,337 were sex-related sites. That’s about 4% of sites.

● From July 2009 to July 2010, about 13% of Web searches were for erotic content.

That sounds right: common, easily found when you look for it (and many people are looking for it!), but not exactly flooding your browser at the instant you turn it on. I know about the big name porn sites, like PornHub, and I’ve even seen them a few times, but that kind of content is also easily avoided…well, except for when some asshole gets the clever idea to email me piles of gay porn, but that’s what the delete key is for, and gmail filters.

I didn’t even know there were Twitter accounts that distribute pornography freely, until now. Now I know. Because Ted Cruz’s twitter account favorited a tweet by @SexuallPosts, and that’s all the internet is babbling about this morning.

OK, I know that the hypocrisy is delicious, but I just wish that we could get half as much mocking, laughing, smirking finger-pointing over Cruz’s sanctimonious public prudery that we get over his closet prurience. This is a man who tried to ban sex toys, who wants to control what people are allowed to do in the privacy of their bedrooms, and wants to oppress LGBT people. We ridicule when he’s caught watching a porn clip, which I’d guess nearly everyone reading this has done at some point in their life, and we call down a greater firestorm of scorn over that than we do his attempts at anti-human, anti-woman legislation, which I hope most of us deplore.

The difference is that you can get elected on a platform of denying abortion, hating gays, and suppressing sexuality, while the ‘revelation’ that you have seen moving pictures of naked people having sex, and maybe even liked it, can kill your political career. That seems backwards to me.