You’d think the importance of emotions & empathy would be of obvious importance to any movement

If you’ve got an hour, you might find it worthwhile to listen to this podcast by Thomas Smith, Emotion is Critical to Reasoning. There’s good stuff in there about this myth of über rationality by Libertarians and some atheists — you can also hear about in Julia Galef’s talk about The Straw Vulcan, also summarized here. I’m finding that there’s no one more emotional than an alt-right supremacist getting challenged on their cherry-picked and distorted “facts”, while the lefties are usually quite happy to acknowledge that their values are a product of their emotions, specifically empathy.

I listened to it while I was grading papers this morning, and found that I was more charitable in evaluating their work. I expect the students will henceforth insist that I can’t listen to or read anything by creationists or right-wingers, because it might make me much more critical.

Poisoning of a movement

Sigh. I might once have been willing to take exception to this characterization of the history of New Atheism, but I can’t anymore. I just can’t. It’s all too true, and what should have been an opportunity for reason to rise ascendant has been drowned in a rising flood of idiots who use “reason” as an empty buzzword.

Once Bush left office, the promoters of “intelligent design” curricula retreated from the public sphere, and millennials asserted themselves as the least religious generation to date; the group that had coalesced around the practice logically refuting creationists needed new targets. One of the targets they chose was women. Militant atheism had always been male-dominated, but it took several years and a sea change in American politics for the sexism within its ranks to fully bloom. In 2011, skeptic blogger Rebecca Watson described in a YouTube video how a male fellow attendee of an atheist conference had followed her into an elevator at 4 a.m. in order to ask her on a date—behavior that, understandably, made her uncomfortable. The community erupted into what was later remembered as “Elevatorgate.” A forum was created to harass Watson, and Richard Dawkins himself wrote a comment telling her to “stop whining” because she had it better than victims of honor killings and female genital mutilation.

This dynamic played out again and again. In 2012, the popular atheist vlogger Thunderf00t (real name Phil Mason) aimed his sights at Watson in a video titled “Why ‘Feminism’ is poisoning Atheism,” thereby reigniting the previous year’s controversy. This time it took off, leading him to create several follow-up videos accusing women of destroying the paradise that was New Atheism for their own gain. In 2013, Mason inaugurated his “FEMINISM vs. FACTS” series of videos, which attacked Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist video game critic who was then receiving an onslaught of harassment and violent threats for daring to analyze Super Mario Bros. This sort of idiocy, combined, again, with the growing popularity of jibes associating outspoken atheists with fedoras, neckbeards, and virginity, led to an exodus of liberals and leftists from the “atheist” tent. Those who remained for the most part lacked in social skills and self-awareness, and the results were disastrous.

And then the author starts talking about Stefan Molyneux and James Damore, and it just gets worse.

So here we are. There is still no god, religion is bunk, but the atheist movement has become a dogmatic label used by assholes, racists, and misogynists.

Changing face of Easter Island

Easter Island has been used as a cautionary tale — the inhabitants denuded the island of palm trees while wasting their resources on colossal religious statuary, and then destroyed themselves in an orgy of self-destructive wars. Only there are a few problems with that myth emerging.

It seems that the palm trees were demolished early in the colonization of the island…not by the people, but by rats that had hitchhiked to the island. The people of Rapa Nui adapted and had a stable agricultural system that allowed them to thrive, and what caused their population to collapse was not internal conflict, but external forces.

Throughout the 19th century, South American slave raids took away as much as half of the native population. By 1877, the Rapanui numbered just 111. Introduced disease, destruction of property and enforced migration by European traders further decimated the natives and lead to increased conflict among those remaining. Perhaps this, instead, was the warfare the ethnohistorical accounts refer to and what ultimately stopped the statue carving.

There’s a lesson here, all right. That lesson is that you should trust the hard work of serious anthropologists who do deep, evidence-based research, rather than the self-serving stories spread by colonial empires or the speculations of dilettantes.

research

Did you know that the human hand might evolve to better use cell phones, according to research? You know, quote-unquote research, that version of inquiry that involves click-baity wild guesswork and misinformed speculation?

The freakish forecast includes a pointed finger to tap the screen with greater precision, gel-like pads for a more secure grip and an indented palm where the device could sit.

The evolutionary changes to the shape of the human hand would not only make it easier to use a smartphone, but also avoid a range of injuries and strains associated with using your mobile phone.

The gruesome concept image came after a study of 1,000 British adults revealed more than a quarter of respondents had injured themselves while using their phone.

The research, conducted by the mobile phone comparison team at www.broadbandchoices.co.uk, found black eyes from dropping the device while using it in bed was the most common complaint.

Oh, yeah, from the prestigious University of Broadband Choices. That’s plausible.

They also made an x-ray of that hand in Photoshop, in case you doubted the scienceyness of it all.

Hey, Daily Express, next you should do research on how your journalists will evolve. I’m picturing something with an enlarged pelvis, a clawlike hand, and a long, kinked forearm, the better to reach up their asses and pluck out stories.

A little too close to home

The latest xkcd:

The alt text: “It's like I've always said–people just need more common sense. But not the kind of common sense that lets them figure out that they're being condescended to by someone who thinks they're stupid, because then I'll be in trouble.”

Somebody turn that into a poster that we can hang up as a reminder at atheist conferences.

Humorless goons out to wreck Halloween

They’ve always been around. I remember trick-or-treating as a kid, and there were always those houses where you knew you’d get a Bible tract instead of candy, or worse, a lecture or an attempt to pray with you. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the kind of kid who would TP their trees or egg their windows in retaliation, even though they deserved it.

It’s not surprising that Ken Ham is into the game. He wants us to share Jesus Christ with trick-or-treaters by handing out A Biblical and Historical Look At Halloween by Bodie Hodge, which will cost you only $29.99 for a pack of a hundred. So not only do you get to annoy children with sanctimony, Answers in Genesis gets more shekels for their coffers. Win-win! Except for the kids.

If you’re too cheap for that, you can get 100 Dino-Bucks for only $5.99.

Hey, and you can also leave these as a tip next time you’re at a restaurant! I don’t quite understand the point of this strategem — Ray Comfort does it too — where Christians try to lure you into reading their dogma with fake money. It’s as if they intuit that the rubes they want to appeal to are naturally drawn to wads of cash.

You can also buy the DVD for $9.99, or read the contents of this noise online. What I find amusing is that it complains about cultures that ‘celebrate’ death — how dare they?

Death is a terrible reality for all of us—not something to celebrate or treat as fun. Death is the punishment for sin. Since all of us are sinners (Romans 3:23), we must realize that death is coming.

That’s funny stuff coming from proponents of a death cult. I think they’re most annoyed by people who flip off and mock death, rather than worshipping it.

Someone is wrong in the movie theater!

Did you know that For over 150 years, one convincing lie has prevented billions from knowing the truth? The trailer for this awful movie makes a heck of a lot of bogus assertions and doesn’t present one speck of evidence.

I’ve noticed that Eric Hovind’s one-night stand, Genesis: The Movie is going to be playing at a theater two hours away from me, in St Cloud. It’s on a Monday evening, on 13 November, when I can get away from work early enough to make it, and I’m tempted to go and document how bad it will be.

Your mission: talk me out of it. I get enough from the trailer to see it’s going to be one long irrational Gish gallop built on flimsy premises and bad arguments, so the movie will be a waste of time, but it might be interesting to talk to some of the people in attendance (or even the organizers) to diagnose what’s going on in their heads.

So tell me why that would be a bad idea so I can just stay home and read a good book instead.

I’m already aware of the possibility that I’d show up and get thrown out of the theater. That’s happened before.

“Both sides! Both sides!”

There’s a new movie out, The Pathological Optimist, about Andrew Wakefield. I agree with the adjective, at least.

The blurb for the movie includes a notorious phrase.

THE PATHOLOGICAL OPTIMIST takes no sides, instead letting Wakefield and the battles he fought speak for themselves.

There are questions on which it is fair to give equal attention to both sides. “Is football a better game than baseball?” “Which is better on a pizza, pineapple or jalapenos, or both?” There are some things where the evidence hasn’t settled one way or another, and we should pursue alternatives, but there are others where there is no controversy. “Is the Earth flat?” “Is the earth about 6000 years old?” “Are black people and women as deserving of rights as white men?” If you’re going to address those questions honestly, taking no sides is dishonest and biases the argument in favor of the untenable side.

Orac is having none of that nonsense, and reviews The Pathological Optimist.

The “take no sides” claim sends up huge red flags for me. My retort to this is that, when it comes to pseudoscience, “not taking a side” is taking a side, the side of giving that pseudoscience far more believability and stature than it deserves. It’s also utter nonsense to claim that “letting Wakefield and the battles he fought speak for themselves.” If there’s one misconception about documentaries, it’s that they are (or should be) objective. They’re not. A documentary filmmaker has a story to tell, and that story is very much colored by how she chooses to frame it, what she decides to show (and, equally importantly, not to show), what order scenes are shown in, who is interviewed and who isn’t, and even the music and narration used. Bailey’s film no more “lets Wakefield and the battles he fought” speak for themselves than Wakefield’s VAXXED is an objective portrait of a CDC “conspiracy.” It is how Miranda Bailey chose to tell Wakefield’s story. Indeed, it’s hard not to note that the only people directly interviewed for the film are Andrew Wakefield, his family, and his supporters. All criticism of Wakefield comes in the form of grainy archival footage from TV news interviews, which Wakefield or one of his supporters gets to answer.

Taking no sides is intellectually vacuous and dishonest. The one thing they could to make it worse is to have somewhere in it the odious phrase, “agree to disagree”.