Mainstreaming absurdity

I remember, once upon a time, back in the 1990s, while reading the usenet group Talk.Origins, that some creationist named Lionel Tun declared that all animals used to be vegetarian, and that T. rex used its teeth to cut down trees and eat tough fruit, like pineapples, and that their jaws were clearly designed to slice open coconuts. This was obviously contrary to the mechanics of these carnivorous animals’ jaws, their anatomy, and their digestive physiology. We laughed and laughed, and this was one of the gleefully cited examples of creationist idiocy that got cited for years afterwards.

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Dancing with the stars!

This year, Skepticon is hosting a prom on Saturday night — there will be dancing and music, and all that usual stuff. In addition, they’re selling off tickets to dance with various speakers, so if you’d like a slow dance with Matt Dillahunty, pay up $20 to get on his dance card, or if you want a fast dance with Surly Amy, cough up $10.

It’s a nice fundraising idea. But you may be wondering why I am not on the roster of eligible dancers.

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One week until Skepticon!

It’s the seventh Skepticon, happening next week in Springfield, Missouri. I’ll be there, speaking at the ungodly hour of 9pm on Saturday night — it’s got to be like Nerd Hell, where all you’ve got to do on Saturday night is sit and listen to some old greybeard drone on. But the rest of the con will be fresher and sweeter, so you should go!

Also, right up until the last minute, they’re always looking for donations. It’s a free conference, you know, but only to the attendees…somebody has to pay the bills somewhere.

The Discovery Institute, professional as always

I get fundraising emails from the Discovery Institute. You’d think they’d realize the utter futility of asking me for money, but it is a source of cheap laughs, especially when they say really stupid things to drum up cash for their liar’s institution. They love to throw their website numbers at me, which makes me really laugh.

In 2013, ENV had more than 700,000 unique visitors. This year we are on track to receive more than 900,000 unique visitors. That’s a lot of people who are benefitting from our daily coverage from writers including Casey Luskin, Ann Gauger, Paul Nelson, Jay Richards, John West, David Klinghoffer, and more.

Idiots, every one. Unless you’re a circus, it’s not usually positive PR to list the clowns on staff. But it’s their next paragraph that made me do a double-take. Innumerate as always, the Discovery Institute:

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Two white dudes spend an hour talking about how racist and sexist it is to criticize other white dudes

It was a painful 50 minutes, but I listened to the entirety of Peter Boghossian and Stefan Molyneux patting each other on the back, in this video, Feminists vs. Atheists: The Death of Rational Discourse. I think you can tell from the title that there is not much hope for rational discussion here, and from the two speakers, you know it’s going to be awful. What I did was listen while I was engaged in some other work, and just extract a few paraphrases of the conversation now and then, when they said something particularly tiresome.

And really, that’s what it’s all about: reciting cliches at each other without thought, repeating bogus accusations we’ve all heard a thousand times before. These are not people who think very deeply about much of anything.

So what I’ve done below is scribble down the general tenor of the discussion. This is not a transcript. I’ve included some time points so if you really want to, you can go back and check on all the context.

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The spiritual brand

Russel Brand apparently has an autobiography out; I haven’t seen it, nor am I at all interested in reading it, but Nick Cohen has. It’s titled Revolution, and this sort of says it all about that.

His book tells us much about him and little about the rest of humanity. Brand says that he is qualified to lead a global transformation, not because of the quality of his thought, but because he has transformed his private life. “I may not have overthrown a government. But [I have] navigated myself from one set of feelings where drinking and drugs were my only solution to a state where I never drink or take drugs.” It is perhaps too easy to reply: “Well, bully for you.” I accept that freeing yourself from addiction and finding inner peace can have more beneficial effect than any political programme the powerful can implement. But Brand is offering his Beverly Hills Buddhism as a political programme, not a self-help guide. Everything is corrupt, his theory runs. All politicians are the same. Reforms won’t do, and no one can expect him to relinquish his fortune until there has been “systemic change on a global scale” (a useful condition that last one).

The systemic change that means the most to Brand is an embrace of meditation and pantheism. The greatest villain of Revolution is not a super-rich financier but Richard Dawkins. Brand denounces him as a “menopausal” proponent of “atheistic tyranny” because Dawkins denies the existence of the supernatural. He pulls a succession of shabby tricks to bolster his claim that religion does not authorise oppression. Anyone who claims that Jesus, Allah, Krishna or the fountainhead of any other religion endorses homophobia instead of the “union of all mankind” is “on a massive blag”, he says. Brand has to ignore Leviticus’s edict that the punishment for men who sleep with other men is death, St Paul’s hysterics about lesbianism and the hadiths that have Muhammad saying that the punishment for sodomy is death by stoning. In other words, he has to ignore several millennia of real and continuing religious repression, so he can make his spiritualism sound emancipatory rather than cranky.

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