Not that I expected much, but this review of Sam Harris’s latest with Maajid Nawaz confirms what little I did expect.

It quickly becomes clear, however, that Sam Harris is illiterate when it comes to history. He has a tendency, both in his online writings and in this book, to reduce all 1,400 years of the Islamic past to jihad. The world, he says, witnessed “a thousand years of jihadism” before Bin Laden sent airliners to mutilate the New York City skyline, and Islam spread “primarily by conquest, not conversation.” The historian Zachary Karabell wrote an entire book refuting this simplistic repackaging of history.

…

At one point, Harris even bizarrely rationalizes the Crusades. Remember, he tells readers, the Crusades “were primarily a response to 300 years of jihad” — the emphasis here is his. The Crusades were a “reaction,” he laments, and in any event, holy war was a “late, peripheral” development within Christianity. This ought to be news to the flayed bodies and burned heretics and massacred dissidents put to death by Christianity’s sword. Muslim empires were authoritarian, as were Christian empires. Muslim clerics gave fatwas declaring jihad, and Pope Urban II gave his own decree explicitly calling on Christian subjects to take up arms and reclaim the Holy Land from the Mohemmadans. Why Sam Harris feels the need to take sides in the fanatical squabbles of our barbaric ancestors eludes me.

All of this can be excused, but only up to a point. What is inexcusable, and what should preclude Sam Harris from participating in any more projects on Islamic Reformation, is his complete lack of awareness about Muslims as they actually live today. He censures American Muslims for paying more attention to the coldblooded massacre of three American Muslims at the University of North Carolina than to the crimes of ISIS — proximity to Raleigh over Raqqa may explain why — before going on to say that hate crimes against American Muslims are “tiny in number, often property-related, and still dwarfed five-fold by similar offenses against Jews.” Reread that sentence and take in the moral callousness of this thinker.

At least I enjoyed the review.

It’s a start, anyway. Here are Ten Facebook Pages You Need to Stop Sharing. They are:

InfoWars
Foodbabe
Eat Clean. Train Mean. Live Green.
Joseph Mercola
Prevention Magazine
Natural News
Collective Evolution
MindBodyGreen
Spirit Science
The Mind Unleashed

There’s a lot of pseudo-nutrition and quackery in there, and also a fair bit of “spirituality”. But there are so many other pages that are about as bad! I bail when I see the words “spirit”, “detox”, “cleanse”, “toxins”, as well as anything to do with religion.

Apparently, I need to periodically explain what freethought means, because right now I’m being helpfully informed by many people who don’t have a clue that it means thinking any damn thing you want.

My response: If naive etymology were your guide, then freeways don’t have any traffic rules.

Look, I know a lot of people experience total brain lock when they see the word “free” — just see the usual response to the phrase “free speech” — but you’re wrong. Free speech does not mean there are no limitations on what you can say, it just means the government can’t control the expression of opinions. You still don’t get to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, or commit libel with impunity, or be obnoxious without social repercussions.

Likewise with freethought. We don’t need a damned philosophy to allow you to think whatever you want — there is no way anyone can control your mind. Of course you can think freely! But freethought refers to something more specific: having ideas that are not dictated by dogma or authority, but by reason and empirical evidence. It means free of dogma, not free of all constraints. If you are using the phrases “because that’s the way it’s always been”, “because it’s human nature”, “because the Grand Poobah said so”, “because it’s written down that way in this book”, you are certainly free to think that, but you are not being a freethinker.

I know this is going to blow some minds, but reason and empirical evidence are limitations on your thinking. We impose them on our minds because we value consistency, reproducibility, consensus, and independent confirmation of our conclusions, and those restrictions enable us to achieve that. If we didn’t care about those requirements, well then Jesus loves me and I can fly and weeee, let’s go all kittens and fluffy pillows and pass me that cloud, I need to get high.

The same people who insist on the dictionary definition of atheist seem incapable of reading the dictionary definition of freethought, or even the wikipedia entry. But then, those definitions are more complicated and difficult than off-the-cuff knee-jerk not-thinking that they specialize in, so it’s no wonder they shun the actual evidence.

You may recall that terrible conversation between Sam Harris and British neocon, in which I pointed out a very few appallingly stupid things that were said, and then we got that delightful influx of Harris fans who insisted over and over again that he was taken out of context, he didn’t really say that, and that he also covered his butt with contradictions, so none of it really counted…you know, the usual Harris song and dance. Well, we’re probably going to get some more two-step and soft-shoe, because I didn’t cover half of it. There’s much more awfulness to be exposed to the light.

For instance, Sincere Kirabo calls him out on blatant transphobia.

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I was challenged to watch an anti-feminist video on youtube! My challenger told me he got 16 minutes in before he “couldn’t stomach any more.” I told myself I was made of sterner stuff than that, and the challenge was accepted.

I only got through the first 8 minutes before gagging and having to stop. I am weak. It’s an especially dismal showing because there is almost no content in this video: it’s a guy posturing and sneering through a crudely animated puppet of an armored helmet, and most of it seems to be pointless posing and talking with a funny voice.

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Here you go, Pat Condell telling us how we all have to listen to the big bag of Truth Donald Trump has opened up, and ignore those creepy progressives.

Excuse me, I have to go throw up in the corner.

The Discovery Institute is working hard to prove that the Intelligent Design creationism movement isn’t dead. So, they have a post listing all their great accomplishments since the Dover decision. There have been lawsuits and movies!

The cause of academic freedom has also seen significant victories. In one case, as we reported here, “[T]he University of Kentucky paid $125,000 to settle a lawsuit by astronomer Martin Gaskell who was wrongfully denied employment because he was perceived to be skeptical towards Darwinian evolution.” Two other Darwin skeptics received settlements for discrimination. Applied Mathematics Letters retracted mathematician Granville Sewell’s article critical of neo-Darwinism; a lawsuit followed, leading to a public apology and $10,000 payment to Sewell. After the California Science Center (CSC) cancelled the showing of an intelligent design film, Darwin’s Dilemma, the American Freedom Alliance sued. The CSC paid $110,000 to avoid going to trial over the evidence that they discriminated. And the film Expelled drew over 1.1 million viewers to movie theaters to learn about discrimination against scientific dissenters from Darwinism.

They have lawyers! And people pay money to settle their nuisance suits! What a triumph for Intelligent Design science creationism.

They also have people writing books, and can scrape up a few people to give them positive reviews.

Public outreach on intelligent design is also doing very well post-Dover. In 2009, Stephen Meyer published Signature in the Cell, which received praise from famed atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, who named it “Book of the Year” in the respected Times Literary Supplement of London.

In 2013, Meyer published Darwin’s Doubt which made the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists. That book was endorsed by scientists including Harvard geneticist George Church and Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin. UC Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall gave Darwin’s Doubt a serious review in the top journal Science and participated in a radio debate with Meyer.

I’ve read both of Meyer’s books; they are delusional exercises by a long-winded narcissist. It’s lovely for them that Thomas Nagel liked it, but then Nagel’s gone full loopy creationist. McMenamin is a crank. They keep touting the fact that it was reviewed in Science, but they never tell you what the review said. Hint: it’s not a positive review.

Finally and most importantly, science supporting ID continues to move forward. Several areas of research have seen groundbreaking progress, including work by the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (using computer models to test Darwinian evolution) and Biologic Institute (exploring evidence for ID in biology). To date, there are more than eighty peer-reviewed articles supportive of intelligent design, with over fifty of them published post-Dover.

Virtually none of this “work” is getting published in serious science journals; it’s all going into cheesy dumpsters of bad science like the Journal of Cosmology, or their own house organ, Bio-Complexity. Eighty articles is nothing, especially when you are claiming to be founding a whole new discipline and approach to analysis. Eighty articles, when you’ve got a whole propaganda mill dedicated to pushing your ideas, is an abysmal failure.

Also, when you look closely at their list of ID creationism science articles, they are exposed as puff pieces, empty musings, and noise published by hacks.

But the Discovery Institute always looks on the bright side.

Given how quickly ID scholarship is moving forward in so many areas — science, public policy, and culture — we can only anticipate how much stronger ID will be twenty years after Dover.

Have you ever read The Wedge Document? In the late 1990s, the Discovery Institute proposed to get 100 academic articles published in the scientific literature. Now, a decade and a half later, they are bragging about 80…and most of them are transparently garbage.

Nope, sorry guys, “Intelligent Design” is a spent force. The only reason it’s still coasting along is because the evangelical/fundamentalist creationists still like to use it as a pseudo-secular cover when proposing their laws, to get around that pesky separation of church and state thing. But even there, the real blow that the Dover trial dealt to them was in exposing that ID creationism was terrible at providing that excuse. Barbara Forrest smacked ’em hard.

Creationism is still around and still causing trouble, but the success story there is old school young earth creationism, and that’s not a good thing for anyone. Still, it must hurt the fellows at the Discovery Institute when they look at Answers in Genesis and see that all their sneaky dissembling was for nothing.

What a relief. This is my first day off without a mountain of grading hanging over my head, and I was thinking I was going to have to deal with the idiot complaints that I’m a hypocrite because I despise Islam and Christianity, while we ‘social justice warriors’ are supposed to love Islam more and make excuses for the atrocities perpetrated in its name.

Which, when I put it that way, is so patently stupid that I shouldn’t have to even address it. You can regard beheadings with horror and reject the religious justifications for it while recognizing that somebody can be Muslim and feel exactly the same way. But Marcotte spells it all out: Liberals are not soft on, sympathetic towards, or defensive about Islamic terrorism. I’ve banned a surprising number of people this week who have barged in and triumphantly acted is if the fact that the killers in the San Bernardino were radicalized Muslims was a repudiation of the idea that we should regard Muslims as human beings.

This has gone on long enough. It’s time to say it straight: Just because conservatives believe there’s some kind of global battle between Christianity and Islam doesn’t mean that liberals have to agree, much less that they take the “Islam” side of that equation. On the contrary, most liberals see fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam as categorically the same and categorically illiberal in their shared opposition to feminism and modernity.

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Here’s a clever trick: take a Christian Bible. Conceal the cover behind the cover of the Muslim Koran. Then do person-in-the-street interviews where you read off the worst passages from the book and get people’s reactions.

They’re both pretty awful, aren’t they?