Whoa. NECSS has principles!

Richard Dawkins was supposed to be one of their speakers this year. But then he approvingly tweeted a certain video, and…this happened.

The Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism has withdrawn its invitation to Richard Dawkins to participate at NECSS 2016. We have taken this action in response to Dr. Dawkins’ approving re-tweet of a highly offensive video.

We believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom to express unpopular, and even offensive, views. However, unnecessarily divisive, counterproductive, and even hateful speech runs contrary to our mission and the environment we wish to foster at NECSS. The sentiments expressed in the video do not represent the values of NECSS or its sponsoring organizations.

We will issue a full refund to any NECSS attendee who wishes to cancel their registration due to this announcement.

I thought I was the guy who was supposed to be blacklisted!

Jaw dropped, lost somewhere on the floor

Richard Dawkins does it again. Citing a crude cartoon from Sargon of Akkad that claims feminists are in league with Islamists? Fuck me.


Obviously doesn’t apply to vast majority of feminists, among whom I count myself. But the minority are pernicious.

The text on the video: Feminists and Islamists have basically the same ideology, demonstrated through the magic of song by SyeTenAtheist. A pile of nonsense, favorably promoted by Richard Dawkins. Demonstrated. Jebus. I’d at least expect him to understand the meaning of that sentence.

Just add norovirus and this cruise would be perfect

There’s something called a Conspira-Sea Cruise, and it’s apparently “holistic”, which I suppose is a good thing. You wouldn’t want it to make that trip from LA to Puerto Vallarta in pieces, you know! They’ve got all kinds of speakers: there’s a futurist, a lot of Libertarians, a paranormal investigator, UFO people, a Spiritual Space Cleaner, astrologers, and a child-killer (Andy Wakefield is a speaker), so they’ve got all the people that you’d want to be trapped on a boat with, far from land.

They’ve also got a skeptical journalist on board, giving day-by-day reports of the shenanigans. Thank you, Colin, for taking the hit, and the extra pounds from the buffet, for us. It’s going to be entertaining. It reminds me a bit of the Paradigm Symposium, which I should think about attending this spring, except that it might conflict with a real science meeting I have to attend.

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The Trumpification of atheism

Amy Roth makes me sad with her perspective on the history of involvement with skepticism and atheism. How do you destroy a movement? By making enemies of the people who care about it.

Then Richard Dawkins made fun of Rebecca in the comment section of another blog. Literally within moments of that happening all of the women on Skepchick who were active writers at the time (most of them long gone now) became targets of an online hate campaign. It literally happened so fast that I didn’t have time to process it. One day I was a Dawkins and SGU fan who was dedicated to making the world better by encouraging more people to get involved with organized skepticism, atheism and critical thinking and then the next day I told I was part of a clique of radical feminists who should be raped and killed.

Atheism as a movement suffers from some serious internal contradictions. Atheism is largely an intellectual position, but the movement has aspirations to become popular and common, so it has to appeal to a broad base. Unfortunately, rational evaluation of an idea is rarely the key to popularity. You need to associate this one idea with something deeper, more universal, and more applicable to every day life. Morality. Humanity. History. Community. There are a thousand ways we could make reason and evidence-based decision making a part of our lives.

But you aren’t allowed. A significant fraction of atheists have looked at a dictionary and decided that atheism means denial of gods and absolutely nothing more. We have a noisy contingent that denies any consideration of broader meaning. But how did you come to this conclusi…HUSH! But doesn’t the absence of higher beings mean we…QUIET! Doesn’t this mean the human community is even more…ZIP IT! But there are deep implicati…SHUT UP! I AM AN ATHEIST BECAUSE THE DICTIONARY SAYS SO, AND IT DOESN’T SAY I HAVE TO DO NOTHIN’!

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Contracts? What?

Lyz Liddel is answering questions about the Reason Rally. It’s been off to a slow start, with only a small number of speakers, so there have been some concerns about what’s going on behind the scenes. But she still can’t give out any names.

I wish I could give you specific names right now! Alas, we’re still negotiating contract details and I have been sworn to utmost secrecy until those contracts are finalized (because leaking that information at this point could cause the speakers to back out, and that would be no fun).

What I can say is that if even a few of the speakers we’ve received preliminary “yes” responses from come through, our lineup for 2016 is going to knock the socks off the 2012 rally. We have mainstream musicians (in two rather surprisingly different genres), nationally known celebrities, and some very high-profile politicians who are interested in speaking.

Ooookay. It’s still a little odd. I was in the first one, and there were no “contracts” for many of us, I couldn’t imagine on insisting that the organizers hold off on naming me once I’d agreed, and I especially couldn’t imagine changing my mind if I were listed on a program before my “contract” was signed.

Maybe they’re signing really big names who live in a different kind of world than peons like me, but none of this rings true. Say there are some people who are more demanding than I was; hold off on them, but there must be lots of others who are eager to see this thing take off. I’ve been holding off on committing to attend because I want to see more reason to go to the Reason Rally, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

I hope Robyn Blumner will soon express her current position on divisive issues

I have some hopes for the new leader of CFI, Robyn Blumner, so I’ll look forward to her future commentary. In particular, I’d like to know if she still thinks women no longer need the Equal Rights Amendment, as she wrote in 2001, or whether we can expect more dismissals of responses to sexist remarks as hysterical political correctness, as she wrote in 2005.

To be fair, she also wrote stuff about being an atheist in 2004 and about torture in 2008 and about feel-good culture in 2009 and most recently, her opposition to religion in politics…and I can agree with her comments there.

But man, some of the old stuff on record is troubling.

What does it mean?

The RDF is merging with CFI.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science and the Center for Inquiry, two of the world’s most respected freethought institutions, have announced their intent to merge. The new organization, which will be the largest secularist organization in the United States, will bear the name of the Center for Inquiry (CFI), with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science (RDFRS) becoming a division of CFI.

Robyn Blumner, currently president & CEO of RDFRS, will become CEO of the combined entity on January 25. Ronald A. Lindsay, currently president & CEO of CFI, will retain the title of president until the merger is complete, and will work closely with Blumner during the transition period. Previous to leading RDFRS, Blumner was a syndicated columnist for the Tampa Bay Times and led two statewide affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union.

We’ll have to see how this shakes out. It looks from here like the RDF is absorbing CFI, which could get…interesting.

I wonder what Rebecca Watson thinks?

Speaking of Richard Dawkins refusing to allow me to be invited to events where he is speaking, for the many years I performed at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS), which began as a live show on my former podcast, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, the organizers could never quite convince Dawkins to attend. Well, I quit SGU and now NECSS has announced that the first conference they’ve planned since my exit will feature Richard Dawkins as the keynote.

In conclusion, the skeptic/atheist sphere is an embarrassing shitshow and the organizations will continue polishing Richard Dawkins’ knob until he dies, at which point he will be sainted and his image will be put on candles and prayed to in times when logic is needed.

I don’t think she’s impressed.

I argued with a cartoon this morning

This one:

Isn’t the cartoon a simple answer to a serious problem? Does that make it wrong?

I also thought about the revolutionary ideas in science, like evolution. Darwin’s answer is not complex — it’s fundamentally very simple — but it has deep implications and complex consequences, and yes, it’s a long and winding road if you try to follow all the details that flow from it. But it’s not the complexity that makes people reject it. If complexity were an objection, there would be no Catholics or Muslims in the world.

It’s the mismatch between simple and wrong perceptions and simple but right reality.

Evolution says that biological change is a property of populations — that every individual is a trial run of an experimental combination of traits, and that at the end of the trial, you are done and discarded, and the only thing that matters is what aggregate collection of traits end up in the next generation. The individual is not the focus, the population is.

And that’s hard for many people to accept, because their entire perception is centered on self and the individual. That’s why they invent stories of life after death and eternal life, because what’s the point if you just live for a brief time, and then die? The point only emerges when you step away from it and see the world from a different perspective, that of the population.

So I have to reject the premise of the cartoon. People are willing to avidly embrace difficulty and complexity if it conforms to their personal biases, if it affirms what they want to be true.

What is going on with the Sioux Falls Free Thinkers?

psychic

I haven’t gone to any of their meetings, but their web site weirds me out. There’s the name: that space makes a difference. Freethought is “a philosophical viewpoint which holds that positions regarding truth should be formed on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism, rather than authority, tradition, revelation, or other dogma”, and as I’ve said repeatedly, it is not a pointless label for thinking whatever you want (everyone gets to do that, whether you’re a hidebound Catholic or Islamist, or an atheist scientist). So I’m a little skeptical when someone confuses freethought with freedom to think any damn thing.

Then there’s the motto on every one of their web pages: Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent!. Whoa, what? A Calvin Coolidge quote that reeks of Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking? Look again at that freethought definition — does it mention that truth is determined by thinking really hard and stubbornly about it, or does it say something about “logic, reason, and empiricism”?

And this page: Do People Have Psychic Abilities? Open-Minded Free Thinking at its Finest. It completely misrepresents the status of the science.

Let’s get real. There is no supernatural anything. Nothing is outside of reality. There is no single God, and no Gods, no Ghosts, no Goblins and no Ghouls. They are all fabrications of the human mind in an effort to make sense of what we experience but don’t understand. Our minds create an imagined reality or experience and we accept our imagining as something real. We seek a reason for existence and we just can’t seem to accept that IT JUST IS.

Nonetheless there is strong evidence for anomalous psychic experiences such as extrasensory perception. That doesn’t mean these experiences are outside of reality, that they are somehow supernatural. It just means we don’t understand these experiences and cannot explain them YET. That’s why we use science to study them. First to explicitly identify what it is that people are experiencing, and second to perform further experiments to understand how these experiences physically work.

No, there is no strong evidence for ESP. None at all. It’s been pursued for years by dogged people who think persistence and determination alone are omnipotent, and that if they just keep chasing marginal statistical anomalies with sufficiently sloppy experimental procedures, they will be able to prove that it exists. But the author of this piece has their own interpretation: the scientific establishment has been conspiring against paranormal phenomena.

Unfortunately many skeptical scientists see the study of extrasensory perception as a threat to science. They have already decided these experiences cannot be real. To protect science from the “charlatan” scientists performing these experiments they created a committee to set up rules and tests that the parapsychology research results must pass before they can be accepted as valid science. So the parapsychologists went back, designed tests that met the very strict rules required, and performed the tests again. Many of the tests still came out positive for extrasensory perception. OOPS.

So the skeptical scientists went back to the their drawing board and made the tests virtually impossible to pass for just about any research. One of the skeptical scientists actually quit the committee having realized this was not about making objective tests for parapsychology research to pass. It was about making tests that did not allow parapsychology research to pass PERIOD.

Demanding greater rigor in the face of anomalous results is exactly what scientists are supposed to do; if the phenomena can not survive tests that exclude error and prosaic explanations, than the phenomenon is not what the psychic proponents think it is. This exactly what happened when some physicists found that neutrinos traveled faster than light: a surprising claim like that requires that other, alternative explanations be excluded, and careful repetition and analysis found experimental error that explained the result.

I suppose you could argue that “It was about making tests that did not allow physicists with faster-than-light research to pass PERIOD”. But this is how I see it:

So the chorus has sung and the final curtain has fallen on the faster-than-light neutrino saga. “The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action—an unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments,” Bertolucci says in a CERN press release. “That’s how science moves forward.” Fair enough. But can we move on now?

The final curtain has also fallen on the psychic powers myth. Can we move on?

#DontCryWolfe

dontcrywolfe

Please don’t. I’ve had to rant at a few people lately who credulously post these superficially cool memes that dissolve into absolutely unworkable nonsense when you think critically about them for even a moment, and they’re all coming from this persistent self-promoter named David Avocado Wolfe. Worst of all, I’m seeing these coming from atheist and skeptic groups, people I’d expect to put a little more thought into the evaluation of claims.

This guy is a cancer quack, and is marketing New Agey supplements that are supposed to do magical things for your body. For instance, he’s selling Himalayan Crystal Salt, which he claims contains 84 natural, essential elements (note that he’s careful not to call them “chemicals”, which are all bad). In addition to sodium and chloride, like the cheap stuff you buy at the grocery store, it also contains trace elements (also like any food grade product you buy at the store), which includes arsenic and plutonium.

Wolfe is a no-talent, incompetent, dishonest fraud: the one skill he has to an extreme degree is in marketing, and the only thing he markets is himself. If you push something at me from David Wolfe, I will cut you off completely.