You don’t expect vampires to be ethical, do you?

You knew this was coming, the perfect example of raging capitalism: old people buying young people’s blood.

In Monterey, California, a new startup has emerged, offering transfusions of human plasma: 1.5 litres a time, pumped in across two days, harvested uniquely from young adults.

Ambrosia, the vampiric startup concerned, is run by a 32-year-old doctor called Jesse Karmazin, who bills $8,000 (£6,200) a pop for participation in what he has dubbed a “study”. So far, he has 600 clients, with a median age of 60. The blood is collected from local blood banks, then separated and combined – it takes multiple donors to make one package.

Let’s consider all the ways this is sleazy.

  • Karmazin isn’t paying the donors in proportion to the value of their blood; a unit of blood is worth a few hundred dollars, and he’s just buying it up from blood banks and repackaging it with a significant markup.

  • If he were paying what it was worth to him to donors, he’d be enticing donors to contribute to him for a pointless exercise in imaginary rejuvenation, rather than to blood banks/hospitals for saving lives.

  • Right now he’s depleting the local blood supply by a small amount for his venality.

  • He’s lying and calling it a “study”. There are no control groups. Participants have to buy in with large sums of money, so he’s selecting for only the rich.

  • There is no good evidence that this is an effective and significant treatment for aging. There is some work in mice, but it’s so preliminary that there’s no way to justify leaping into human trials.

  • Imagine that there are solid, measurable improvements in the recipients’ health. I don’t believe in getting something for nothing; then I would have to ask what are the detriments to the donor’s health of giving blood. Are there long term losses? Short term effects? This ‘study’ is ignoring that side of the issue.

Bad science, weak justifications, and wealthy exploiters literally feeding on the blood of the young, like a swarm of geeky overpaid ticks. They are actual vampires. They should think about that, because there is a universally known literary precedent for how one deals with vampires.

I do think that research into, for instance, stem cell replenishment is a good idea — but let’s not pretend that what this guy is doing is serious research. And if these transfusions do have some beneficial effects, it’s time to have some serious consideration of the ethics of such treatments, and their wider effect on society — two things that venture capitalists and vampires don’t know much about, and don’t care about.

Get Out! A message for the atheist movement

A couple have a major disagreement. A metaphorical story.

Spouse #1: I want a divorce.

Spouse #2: But no! You can’t! Marriage is so, so important, and we have to stick together no matter what!

S#1: I’m a feminist, and you put a pic of Milo Yiannopoulis with a word ballon saying “Feminism is Cancer” as the background on your cell phone.

S#2: You can change! Or you can learn to tolerate my little quirks. I have to be me, you know.

S#1: You marched in a white nationalist parade!

S#2: Oh, you and your trivial, petty concerns. Our bond is more important. We have to stick together, for the sake of the marriage. We still have things in common: you think Black Lives Matter, but we can still agree that cops have really tough jobs. Why are you tearing us apart?

I ask, who’s side do you take here? Some of you will say that both sides are talking past each other, and that is correct. Some might then follow through and declare that therefore Both Sides Are Wrong, glossing over the misogyny and racism that one side takes for granted.

But some of us say instead, “Oh no, Spouse #1! Get out! #2 is an asshole with bad ideas!” It seems to me the only rational response: that’s a marriage that needs to end.

But a lot of atheists disagree. At least, that’s what I have to conclude from the last 6 years of abusive behavior by atheists against atheists, who then try to silence disagreement by declaring the inviolable importance of sticking together in the name of the precious Atheist Movement.

In 2016, David Smalley asked, What’s killing the atheist movement?”. His answer: public disagreement about social justice. Reading between the lines, it was clear that it was all the fault of people who criticized other people within the movement. We’re supposed to be quiet, show a unified front, and call each other up on the phone before we dare to disagree publicly. He was completely oblivious to the fact that silence favors the status quo, and that he was taking a side when he demands obedience to the nebulous leadership of the atheist movement.

I slammed him on it. I had a debate with him on his rather obnoxious and ignorant post; you can’t listen to it anymore because it was deleted by its creator. There is still my side of the conclusion, though.

Did he learn anything from this? No. Earlier this summer in 2017, he wrote another post that is nearly exactly the same as the previous, except that now he boldly states who the villain is: How the Regressive Left Is Killing the Atheist Movement. I hadn’t read it before, because I’ve written off any interest in anything Smalley has to say, but it’s an amazing piece of work: he starts by explaining that this is a result of a series of conversations he’s had with people like Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, Adam Carolla, Pete Boghossian, and Lawrence Krauss.

Wow. What a diverse collection of dissenting voices. Were Sam Harris and Dave Rubin busy that day? They are the only people I can think of who might have improved on that stellar collection of manifold heterogeneity.

Actually, it’s a collection of bogus conservative atheist bullshit. It’s got everything. Witch hunts. The horseshoe theory. Insistence that he’s the reasonable one. Misrepresentation of everyone else. It’s one long atheist dudebro cliche. All the problems in his first post were exponentially amplified.

It’s not just me. The Thomas Smith at the Serious Inquiries Only blog reamed him out. Which is good, because now I don’t have to address it.

But that’s not all. Smalley then made his garbage post the subject of his talk at Gateway To Reason. Watch, if you can bear it.

Most disappointingly, it was posted by Seth Andrews, who I thought was fairly level-headed. He prefixed it with this message:

At the 2017 Gateway to Reason Conference in St. Louis, David Smalley (host of Dogma Debate) gave his perspective on the challenges and often public divisions among atheist activists, and in regard to online interactions as a whole.

It’s a perspective…uploaded and presented here as a conversation starter, as so many are fervently seeking a fairer, more tempered, and more civil exchanges and interactions between people

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” – Harper Lee

Fairer. More tempered. More civil. Applied to a speech in which Smalley trivializes our differences and begs people to stop criticizing fellow atheists. In which he sets up all kinds of irrational dichotomies. That thing in my imaginary dialog where Spouse #2 suggests that pointing out, as Black Lives Matter does, that cops are murdering people is reasonably countered by pointing out that we can still agree that cops have really tough jobs? He actually says that.

People at that conference applauded and cheered and laughed. Except, I noticed, Alix Jules and a few others scattered around the room. An amazing number of atheists thought that deplorable performance was commendable, including Seth Andrews. My estimation of Andrews has dropped significantly now.

The video already has a large number of positive comments! I’ll give you one example, representative of the kind of atheist who agrees with Smalley.

The skeptic-atheist community broke apart when Cultural Marxism was introduced into it e.g. third wave feminism, identity politics, intersectionality. New rules for behavior and speech were introduced. This ideology even demonised the most prominent and influential atheists like Dakwins or Harris as bigoted, racist, islamophobic white males.
As a counter movement, many skeptics became fiercely anti-SJW. There the division took place.

The “Cultural Marxist” remark gives it away. This is one of those pseudoscientifically racist people who whines about white genocide. That’s the audience for Smalley’s message. He doesn’t care.

Stephanie Zvan was there at the talk. She didn’t like it.

So what the hell did Smalley do in his talk? Start with what he didn’t do: He didn’t address a single one of Thomas Smith’s criticisms. He didn’t modify his thesis, and he didn’t change his examples. The Black Lives Matter/cops have tough jobs was in the talk just as it was in the post—worded differently, but still missing the point Smith notes. He didn’t actually call out the “Regressive Left” specifically, but that’s where his examples of bad behavior came from.

You see, we’re throwing people away in this movement for not being pure and perfect. We’re excommunicating imperfect people willy-nilly, and people are leaving atheism because it reminds them of their old churches that did this. Because, you know, people didn’t actually leave their churches over the god question, despite this being the basis for the atheist movement’s claim to any kind of broad rationality. No, they left because people were mean to each other. Petty mean.

What does he mean? He means holding people to account for things like retweeting white nationalists when those white nationalists make a point someone agrees with. Or at least that’s the part of the situation he mentioned. He left out the content of any retweets in the movement that might fit his description and didn’t talk about any hypothetical tweeter’s response to being criticized for making the error.

Yes. Objecting to racism is now “being mean” to some in the movement. We’re excommunicating people over mere sexism and racism! Not mentioned is that somehow the people being “excommunicated” are people at the top, like Dawkins and Harris, who haven’t gone anywhere, who are still lauded as the leading voices of the movement, who still get speaking gigs at atheist conferences, who are still turned to when the media needs a quote from an atheist.

Steve Shives points out exactly where this split in the community occurred. One flashpoint where the differences crystallized: Rebecca Watson and Elevatorgate. You remember that — when Watson, in response to a late-night suggestion in an elevator said “Guys, don’t do that”, and an angry horde of entitled assholes shrieked and sent rape threats, and an even larger group of atheists looked at the years of harassment and the quiet one-liner with David Smalley’s attitude and declared that both sides were equivalent and bad.

This is what is making the atheist movement irrelevant and ugly: that there are people who close their eyes to injustice, like David Smalley, and others who exploit that to turn the whole thing into foul nest of entitled asshats who prop up the status quo. Where once we were a radical force for a new perspective on humanity, now it’s a home for white nationalism and casual sexism and the same old dogmas, because too many of its advocates consider equality and human dignity trivial, petty concerns not worth calling out members for. It’s populated with people who cannot recognize the distinction between racism and criticizing racism. (You know who else, besides David Smalley, cannot do that? Donald Trump.)

Atheism has squandered its momentum on a defensive old guard and apologists for neglect of events happening in our world. I’m going to have to suggest that we all abandon it. Let’s find an organization that openly states that they want to dismantle the structures of white supremacy and sexist oppression.

Take a listen to James Croft. Humanism is a better future.

Flattery will get you everywhere

A couple of years ago, someone put together a compilation titled “Best of PZ Myers Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks”, and I missed it! O, my ego! It just grew two sizes larger!

Oh, wait. It’s on YouTube. I just read the comments.

  • Pz myers is a douchebag SJW.

  • maybe avoid this guy in the future, he’s a twat!

  • PZ is an idiot and an asshole.

  • SJW morons will be SJW morons. Myers is one disgusting primate.

  • I’m sorry, but PZ is a douche.

  • PZ Myers gives a bad name to atheists…just so you guys know, he hurls rape accusations at fellow atheists when they disagree about feminism…

  • This guy is a total moron trying to look like an intellectual.

  • fuck PZ. shes a weak ass bitch.

Momentarily nonplussed…but then I realized these are comments on YouTube, and my ego inflated another two sizes.

You should not date Nate

Nate has an interminable web site in which he talks about how unique and special and hardworking he is, and how he abhors 95% of what other people like (it’s a kind of negging), and how he wants to meet a special someone for a vacation date. Maybe magic will happen!

I think “magic” is his special secret word for sex.

Anyway, after going on and on about his unusual creative lifestyle and how he’s sure there are very few women who could possibly be interested in him, he lays down his requirements for a date:

As far as age is concerned, if you are somewhere between 22 and 35 that’s just fine. If you have a slender, healthy body, a reasonably slim waist, and a very pretty face then, quite frankly, you sound like heaven to me!

How prosaic and predictable. Just another marketing guy trying to pick up girls.

By the way, it’s even worse than that: he markets nutritional supplements, the shiny new ploy for snake oil salesmen, and he hates the FDA because it is an inept, deplorable, and useless organization.

I think those are his special secret words for “knows I’m a con artist and a quack”.

Creationism at the movies

Eric Hovind has been working on (and raising money for) a movie called Genesis: Part 1: Paradise Lost: 3D or something like that. It’s supposedly a 3D animated retelling of the Christian creation myth, as interpreted by modern apologists. Hovind is constantly pumping it up as a big time real movie release.

Only…Paulogia does an interesting analysis of the expenses and what has been said about it over there in Hovindland, and it sounds like it won’t be a genuine movie distribution deal — it’s more of a one-shot promotion involving theater rentals and bused in crowds of churchgoers. It’s the usual. Just as they pretend to be scientists, they pretend to do movie production.

They should try to book the Morris Theater for their one-night release. I know there are a lot of believers in this town who’d attend, and at least one skeptic. I’d also mention it to my students and encourage them to show up and think critically, so I’d probably manage to drum up a few more for their attendance figures. Here’s the theater contact info, Eric! Make it happen!

But it’s only a calculation and numbers

Richard Dawkins used his recently much calmer Twitter account to snipe at something he doesn’t seem to understand.


All humanity should be proud of Newton & the precision of eclipse forecasting (oh but surely an eclipse is only a social construct?)

The first part is true. We can predict these things thousands of years in advance; yesterday’s eclipse was announced years ahead of time, maps were produced that told everyone precisely when and where it would be visible, and presto, they were correct, as everyone rightly expected! There are brute facts about the relative movements of 3 astronomical bodies that can be calculated with impressive precision.

But why the snide remark about a “social construct”? The eclipse was also a social construct! We attach a value to witnessing these events, and also to conversing about them to our friends and families, and on social media. People felt awe when the sun was obscured by the moon. They wrote about it, they took pictures. They traveled long distances to witness it, and felt the effort was worth it. Some of us didn’t bother, because what we individually value is also a social construct. Eclipses would continue to happen if humanity managed to eradicate itself; the shadow will continue to move across a planet of smoke and ash and crumbling skeletons, but this other cultural dimension will have vanished, and we wouldn’t have science communicators feeling proud of their accomplishments, they wouldn’t be explaining how it occurs, and we wouldn’t be telling their children about it.

Did you know we can trace the path of totality by mapping the traffic jams afterwards? Newton did not forecast that. He couldn’t, despite the fact that traffic patterns are also a brute material fact. Because it was a consequence of the social construct built around the eclipse.

It was also weird to see that put-down of the importance of social structures in interpreting astronomical events because just a few hours earlier, he wrote this:


“Listening to the eclipse” http://bit.ly/2vh3u51 I journeyed to Austria for 1999 eclipse. There was a moving wave of human yells & whoops

What? Why did he travel all the way to Austria to watch a highly predictable shadow? Why did the humans in attendance yell and whoop, when all that happened is that it got dark for a few minutes? Stay home. Run an astronomy simulation and get the numbers and parameters. The rest is only a social construct.

Scientism is also a social construct, by the way.

False advertising

An organization called Mythicist Milwaukee is putting on a one day skeptic/atheist conference called Mythcon, a “mythinformation conference”. I think they’re living up to the name. They’ve posted this announcement:

Mythicist Milwaukee’s upcoming conference is a place to share ideas. Yet, white supremacy, racism and sexism are not among them.
We vehemently stand against bigotry of any kind. Instead, we are focused on promoting dialogue about culture, religion and freedom of thought at our upcomoming Mythinformation Conference.
Our speakers and attendees celebrate a wide diversity of opinion. However; those who engage in hate and violence under the guise of “free speech” or “protest” are not welcome.

Fine sentiments. One problem: three of their four speakers are Sargon of Akkad, Armoured Skeptic, and ShoeOnHead, people who have no reputation as skeptics, and are known only for their anti-feminist and anti-social-justice rants on YouTube. Nothing more. Any reputation they have is of the negative sort — they’re part of that cohort of gamergate/alt-right screechers that have monetized their presence on YouTube and Patreon and make money off strident bullshit against Anita Sarkeesian.

They’re free to do that. Mythicist Milwaukee is free to invite a cluster of neo-fascists to speak at a conference. However, what is appalling is that they’re advertising this as skepticism, and piously declaring that they oppose white supremacy, racism and sexism while hosting a trio of alt-right feminist-hating dorks to headline their event. I know if I attended a meeting that declared that they stand against bigotry of any kind, and first thing I saw was frikken’ Sargon of Akkad taking the stage, I’d walk out and leave because they’d lured me in under false pretenses.

It’s also chickenshit. You want to preach racism and misogyny, you get to do that; but why are you so cowardly that you hide your position with a dishonest disclaimer? Are you ashamed of your views? You should be.

If you want to know more about why these three are terrible choices for speakers, here’s a thorough rundown.

Nazis cured cancer?

I got some spam this morning from “Natural Health Choice”, which you can guess from the name is not going to be a trustworthy source. And when you click on that link (I don’t recommend it), there’s another sign of fraud: they put up a video with no controls and force you to listen to a whole lot of garbage before they’ll tell you the secret of how to cure cancer, or rather, tell you about the book you can order from them that’ll give you a painless, easy natural cure for cancer with no chemotherapy or surgery.

I didn’t need to listen to it. They give it away at the top of their page: a photo (unlabeled, of course) of Otto Warburg. He apparently discovered a metabolic pathway that is only used by cancer cells, and not healthy cells. It’s a lie. None of their lead-up to promoting the Warburg effect is actually true: no, it’s not a way to trivially cure cancer with your diet. Nothing Warburg figured out has been suppressed.

The one remarkable thing about it is how they’re plugging it. They make a big deal of the fact that it was discovered at a Nazi medical center (wait, that’s a positive thing?), and that the Nazis had a cure for cancer in 1944 and that it was suppressed by the American conquerors. Why? I don’t know. I couldn’t stand listening to it that long to find out. I stopped when they announced that if you follow their special diet,

Pretty soon, a shocked oncologist will tell you, “I don’t believe it. Your cancer just disappeared.”

They also whine that their website is going to be shut down by the mysterious pro-cancer powers-that-be, so you’d better act fast. I don’t think it will be shut down soon enough, not because I like cancer, but because lying con artists who exploit people’s fears with lies and false promises deserve to be crushed and given jail time.

Joint statement from AA and the IHEU

David Silverman of American Atheists and Andrew Copson of the International Humanist and Ethical Union have issued a statement on the raging racism in America. They’re against it.

That these people feel emboldened to march and protest in 2017 in the United States sickens us. Their views are reprehensible, their actions are abhorrent, and they have no place in our civil society. We stand in solidarity with the targets of the hatred espoused by these white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

As many have said, bigotry in America in 2017 isn’t just people in white hoods and robes. It’s people who are our neighbors, coworkers, and even government officials engaged in subtle acts of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and religious hated. It is our obligation as humanists and as citizens of this nation—and indeed the world—to fight this bigotry at every turn.

Silence is not an option. Anyone who does not forcefully and unequivocally condemn the bigotry of these people is complicit in their actions.

Our thoughts and support are with those who have been injured in Charlottesville and the families of the people who lost their lives. We must remember that this violence didn’t start and won’t end in Charlottesville. We must be prepared to confront it across the nation wherever we find it.

I’m glad that they condemn not just the angry men and women with clubs and shields, chanting slogans about Jews, but also the silent complicity of the majority. It’s also interesting because many of the alt-right are atheists or agnostics; Richard Spencer, for example, is openly atheist.

I would say it is definitely a young movement. I’d say that it is predominantly white millennial men. It is not sort of stereotypically conservative in its profile. I’d say that probably it is a more secular population than the country overall. That is, there are a lot of agnostics and atheists or people who are just generally indifferent to religion. And I think that it is a fairly well-educated movement on average, that as I think that probably the model alt-right member has at least some college education.

So we like to argue that religion does not instill any sense of morality in people, and it doesn’t. That claim is supported by the fact that while so many corporate people resigned from Trump’s business advisory council over his fascism that he dissolved it, but no one from his evangelical council (here’s a list of some of the most horrible people in America) have taken a similar step. They’re more interested in praising Trump’s appalling responses.

However, that religious leaders are propping up racism does not mean that all believers are racist, nor does the fact that many racists are atheists mean that the atheist organization leaders are racist; it also does not imply that Nazi atheists are not True™ Atheists. What it means is that there is an additional piece of the puzzle of what makes for a good human being beyond their beliefs about a deity, and that many Christians, Muslims, and Nones are lacking that piece…and that one of the roles of any organization that intends to be a lasting, positive contributor to our society’s well being ought to include ethical principles as an essential component.

Keep in mind that while the religiously indifferent showed up in Charlottesville with clubs and shields and anger, many of the nuclei of resistance were centered around religious institutions in the city. It’s great that American Atheists is speaking out in opposition, but we also need to have atheist representatives who travel to these trouble spots and link arms with the principled clergy. We’ve got lines of men and women in funny robes forming barriers to white nationalists, and we need outspoken atheists who stand in solidarity with them. Otherwise, we cede ethical leadership to the religious.

We also need to own the godless folk within the alt-right. We cannot effectively repudiate them if our first response is to deny the fact that there are a great many deplorable atheists, and if we fail to include a moral dimension in our philosophy.