Do we really need a taxonomy of idiots?

I’m going to be a bit contrarian. Years ago, one phenomenon that was horribly popular among skeptics was the identification and labeling of logical fallacies — it sill is, as far as I know. There’d be a debate, and after the goofball had made his arguments, our side would triumphantly list his Official Fallacies, preferably in Latin, and declare victory. Here’s an example of thorough detailing with nice graphical fillips to give you a feeling of satisfaction as you tear your opponent apart.

I’m not arguing that these aren’t fallacies — they definitely are, and they do invalidate an argument. As a tactic, though, is this effective? You might as well be peppering your opponent with colorful stickers while propping up your ego and reputation with language that comes out of a first year logic course. It all does nothing. I’ve witnessed creationists gushing out a blizzard of logical fallacies — they’re creationists, after all, and they’re defending very silly ideas — emerging unfazed and undefeated, and the audience is never persuaded to abandon their beliefs. They’re right, don’t you know, since God or their incestuous circle of fellow conspiracy theorists agree with them, so who cares if the college boy knows a bunch of fancy words. Anyone who disagrees with us is a Fake Expert with Nefarious Intent and so can be disregarded. Also, the only Latin fallacy they know is ad hominem, and they’re pretty sure that it means strongly disagreeing with me so anyone who thinks the earth is round or that it’s billions of years old or that the climate is changing are guilty of a logical fallacy, too.

It might be satisfying to have a scorecard and tally up errors, but this isn’t a baseball game and there are no referees to award you with victory. These lists of fallacies isolate you from the audience and short-circuit any attempt to make a well-meaning exploration of the deeper reasoning behind bad ideas.

Good riddance, Richard Lynn

The table to the right is a list of the bottom 10 nations for IQ, as reported by Richard Lynn in 2002. Should we really believe that the people of Ghana have an average IQ of 58? It’s a ridiculous claim. It’s not possible to assess an entire nation in that way, it implies that most people there lack the brains to tie their shoes, and further, he argues that the entire population of the continent of Africa were cretins. Does that sound credible to anyone? Well, maybe to hardcore racists who somehow let that shoddy work pass peer review and get published in the journal Intelligence.

I do notice that Lynn revisited that work in 2010, and suddenly Ghana’s average IQ score shot up to 71. Remarkable progress for 8 years. Shouldn’t that alone have called the hereditarian premise into question?

Well, finally, a major publisher is proposing to re-evaluate all of Richard Lynn’s work, which is something. The publisher is Elsevier, so I don’t expect much from them, though.

A leading academic publisher is reviewing its decision to publish research papers by the late British professor Richard Lynn, an influential figure in the discredited field of “race science” who argued western civilisation was threatened by genetically inferior ethnic groups.

Elsevier provides access to more than 100 papers by Lynn, including several iterations of his “national IQ” dataset, which purports to show wide variations in IQ between different countries but which has been criticised by mainstream scientists for serious flaws in its methodology.

The database, a cornerstone of scientific racism ideology that was first published in 2002, is being used in online propaganda by a new generation of well-funded “race science” activists, whose activities were uncovered in a recent investigation by the Guardian and the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate.

Yeah, it’s about time…although his flaws and fallacies have been well known for decades.

Critics say Lynn relied upon samples that were unrepresentative or too small to be meaningful. According to Sear, Angola’s national IQ was based on 19 people from a malaria study, while the Eritrean average IQ was derived from tests of children in orphanages.

The 2010 iteration of the dataset asserted an average national IQ of 60 for Malawi, 64 for Mozambique and 69 for Nigeria – all below the typical threshold for intellectual disability. “It is wholly implausible that an entire world region should, on average, be on the verge of intellectual impairment,” wrote Sear in a critique of the 2019 edition.

That semi-secretive “race science” organization is the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) (racists have been busy ruining the reputation of a perfectly good word, diversity, by tying it to fundamentally anti-diversity goals), which is led by the odious Emil Kirkegaard and was, at least formerly, funded by a Seattle tech bro named Andrew Cornu. It’s nothing but good times for these hateful wackaloons, thanks to a recent election, and who have been capitalizing on the unwarranted academic reputation of their hero, Lynn.

Trump, who has promised mass deportations should he win a second term as US president, told an interviewer last month: “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” In June Steve Sailer, credited with rebranding scientific racism as “human biodiversity”, was given a platform by the former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson on his podcast.

They are now labeling mass deportations as “re-migration.”

It’s about time his work was publicly repudiated. In fact, it’s about time his corpse was dug up and kicked into the nearest sewage ditch, although that’s pointless now — it should have been done while he was still alive (he died in 2023).

Sowing the seeds of revolution, and they don’t even know it yet

The CEO killer may have been caught. The alleged murderer is named Luigi Mangione, and he’s not quite what I expected.

He is from a prominent Baltimore family, and attended a private, all-boys high school in Baltimore, called the Gilman School, according to school officials.

Mr Mangione was named as the valedictorian, which is usually the student with the highest academic achievements in a class.
…
A former classmate, Freddie Leatherbury, told the Associated Press news agency that Mr Mangione came from a wealthy family, even by that private school’s standards. “Quite honestly, he had everything going for him,” Mr Leatherbury said.
…
Mr Mangione went on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science, according to the school, and founded a video game development club.

He comes from a wealthy family in the Baltimore area that owns country clubs and other businesses, although it sounds like he’s fallen away from that family in recent months. He’s well-off, a privileged member of the upper middle class, but he was apparently radicalized by a severe spinal injury that has sporadically left him in agony. He was rightly enraged by the criminal health policies of the United States by his personal experience.

Insurance company CEOs ought to be trembling in fear. It’s not just the poor who are stirring, it’s everyone recognizing that living in thrall to for-profit insurance companies is a bad situation. Here I am, a tenured college professor with a stable income, and I’m hesitating to retire (especially after the last election), because I’d have to depend on the predatory sharks of some random, greedy insurance company if my health failed…it’s safer to remain in the bosom of the one particular greedy insurance company that my university chose for me.

We’re all going to have to read more Marx and Engels, I think.

Engels on ‘Social Murder’
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call that deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call this deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or the bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them … to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual …
Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845 [1967]), p. 126 (Panther Press)

Dismantle the system. Shut down private insurance companies, create a single pool controlled by the government that pays out to each according to the needs of the citizens. Don’t allow managers of those funds to draw salaries of $10 million — no one needs that kind of income, especially not if we prevent people from wobbling on the edge of bankruptcy if they get sick.

I wasn’t eligible to enlist for the Battle of the Somme, being -41 years old at the time

Sometimes I miss Twitter. It’s the place where you can find the dumbest arguments and most stupid people on the internet, and the idiocy has gotten even more concentrated as the smart people bail out. Look what I missed!

Jessica M: Women deal with periods, pregnancy, and menopause. What do men have to deal with?
Lee Anderson: Try the Battle of the Somme.

For dog’s sake, man, that is hyperbole so extreme it makes you look even more ridiculous than your bluster would lead me to expect. You’re a 57 year old man who has never done any military service who was born long after the Somme, and a realistic answer would have been “Swollen prostate, erectile dysfunction, and a bloated sense of entitlement.”

Although I’ve long abandoned Twitter, I haven’t yet deleted my account, and I still get occasional notifications by text. Lately it’s mostly been Graham Linehan raging, so it’s amusing, but isn’t at all tempting me to re-engage.

Ask before opening fire

Have you ever had a health insurance claim denied? Before you run out and shoot an insurance executive, use the Claim File Helper to uncover the paper trail that led to the decision.

ProPublica’s Claim File Helper lets you customize a letter requesting the notes and documents your insurer used when deciding to deny you coverage. Get your claim file before submitting an appeal.

After you’ve followed the chain of decisions, then you can consider terminating some rich a-hole. It’s the polite thing to do.

Confidently ridiculous

Oh boy. There are places on the internet that are still full of arrogant ignorance. A creationist charged into a subreddit with some, ummm, assertions.

Athiesm is a religion that insidiously postures itself as science, indoctrinating the youth with made up stories about the origins of life, and history of the universe.
Example of atheist beliefs in science that are not proven or factual and simply a belief yet are taught as factual science.

Why is it that these guys who hate atheism so much don’t know how to spell atheism? That’s especially ironic given that nothing he complains about are actually tenets of atheism. His gripe is with science, not atheism — a great many religious people are entirely comfortable with accepting every idea on his list. It’s just that most (not all) atheists don’t have any problem with the authority of science, it takes a dedication to religious dogma to so readily accept counterfactuals.

Let’s look at his claims one by one.

1. We are stardust

This is not an atheist idea.

The base material of the universe is hydrogen — it’s mostly hydrogen. So the question is, where did the heavier elements come from? The religious belief is that a god simply poofed them all into existence. A better, non-miraculous explanation is that the process of nucleosynthesis, a fusion reaction that takes place in stars, built up the carbon and iron and oxygen etc. over time, and that these elements were scattered throughout the universe and used as building blocks for planets and people etc. We have evidence for nucleosynthesis. We lack evidence of divine poofing.

2. Human beings are apes

This is not an atheist idea.

Humans definitely belong in the ape clade — the morphological, genetic, and molecular evidence link us. If an alien were to classify and categorize life on Earth, they would group us with the other primates. There is no evidence to suggest that humans are discretely unique in a way that makes them non-apes. This is an old, failed argument by creationists that there is something in the human brain that isn’t shared with other apes.

3. The earth is 5 billion years old

This is not an atheist idea.

Go argue with the physicists and geologists. We know for sure that the Earth is older than 6000 years old, the usual number trotted out by creationists.

4. Human beings share a common ancestor with apes that we evolved from in Africa millions of years ago

This is not an atheist idea.

Geneticists and anthropologists have the details. We can, for example, measure the differences between the genomes of humans and chimpanzees, measure the rates of mutation and fixation, and estimate how long the two species have diverged. It’s millions of years. The anthropologists can tell us our ancestors were African. Where is the creationist evidence for, for example, the Garden of Eden or Adam & Eve?

5. Everything evolved from a single cell organism

This is not an atheist idea.

Likewise, we have evidence of all the shared commonalities between us and all other organisms. We have evidence of the processes that generate the differences. Common origin is the most parsimonious explanation. Meanwhile, the Christian Bible doesn’t even contain the concept of cells, or single-celled organisms. Would he like to argue with the evidence for cell theory?

6. Fish evolved into amphibians, and then into reptiles, and then birds, and then mammals?

This is not an atheist idea. It’s also not a scientific idea. It’s a creationist bogosity.

For someone trying to argue with evolution, he sure doesn’t seem to understand the theory. He presents a linear caricature of evolution, and claims that’s what we teach? Mammals didn’t evolve from birds, or from modern reptiles, or from modern amphibians, or modern fish. Come on, do better.

All of these claims are not proven. Yet, they are taught as fact. The definition of fact is a thing that is known or proven to be TRUE. Again, none of these claims are nor can they ever be proven to be true. Therefore they are not factual and should not be treated as factual. That is Where the indoctrination accusation claims stand because these beliefs are treated as proven factual science when they are an indoctrination of athiest beliefs being taught as factual science about the origins of life which is religious.

Allow me to quote one of the slides I present in my introductory biology class.

There is no such thing as “truth” or “proof” in science! All knowledge is provisional and subject to revision.

Scientists do use the word “fact”, but only in the sense that Stephen J. Gould defines:

In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

This class has nothing to do with atheism; it’s not a subject we discuss at any point in the semester.

Another thing I teach:

Science is not a catalog of facts to be memorized.

Science is a process for acquiring and evaluating new knowledge.

Religion does the opposite of that; it’s an interpretation of a few old myths presented as inviolate dogma. There’s no way you can regard science as a religion.

And why is a religious dogmatist using “religious” as a pejorative?

He throws in a few references, but they’re all from Answers in Genesis, and therefore can be dismissed out of hand.

It’s a grading day

I’ve been parked in my office since 6:30, working away at grading. I’ve made good progress, and what helps is keeping the good music pounding away — I’ve found music to be extremely helpful in keeping my mind focused, which probably says something about my brain. It’s been a lot of Bauhaus & Daft Punk, which probably also tells on my brain.

Anyway, while reading all these essays, I also figured out that I want this baby doll for Christmas.

A totalitarian police state falls and goes splat

Sometimes, life comes at you fast. One moment you’re moaning over the fact that wanna-be tyrant got elected in the USA, the next you’re watching a wanna-be tyrant getting slapped down in South Korea, and the next you’re watching a full-blown tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, running for a helicopter to flee Syria before the mob gets him. Putin is very disappointed. Chaos reigns! The citizens are looting the palace!

Forgive me, I’m self-centered and too America-centric, but that got me wondering what we could get by descending on Mar-A-Lago with axes and crowbars.

Now we wait and hope that this is a resurgence of democracy and that a peaceful Syria emerges from the wreckage.