Manitobans are getting busy

Our neighbors to the North are getting out and doing stuff throughout September. They’re launching the You Are Not Alone! campaign, and doing this fancy outreach stuff.

The Humanists, Atheists & Agnostics of Manitoba (HAAM) are having so many good events coming up that we’ve decided to call it the “You Are Not Alone” campaign. It’s “Super Secular September” in Manitoba.

In brief:

– This weekend our booth will be out at the Morden Corn & Apple festival (very bible-belt area of Manitoba) doing outreach.
– Winnipeg transit will run our external bus ads starting September 2.
– Manyfest, another festival in Winnipeg on September 7/8. Outreach again.
– We’re sponsoring a talk on behalf of “Dying with Dignity Canada” on September 10th
– Fourth annual Skepticamp on September 14
– Our regular September meeting on September 21

I imagine they’ll get a few double-takes at the Morden Corn & Apple Festival, which is exactly why atheists ought to do more of that sort of thing.

Ray Comfort sinks to new depths of pathos

So Ray cobbled together some heavily edited footage of people answering questions he asked, called it a “movie”, and is promoting it on the internet. I’ve seen it; it’s a terrible piece of dreck, and yeah, he lies. I’ve been over this a few times before, but I gave him evidence for evolution, and he just cut it right out of the footage since it didn’t fit his claims.

Now he’s got a new strategy for promoting it: he’s taunting Richard Dawkins to “Come out of Hiding”. It’s bizarre. Dawkins wasn’t in the “movie”, he had nothing to do with the “movie”, and Comfort is just trying desperately to attach a big name to his lazy piece of crap. You know, I have some home movies of my kids; I think I’ll try to peddle them as quality entertainment on the internet by telling Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie to quit hiding from the superiority of my family and give me a testimonial.

A number of people have demanded that Comfort release the unedited raw footage so we can see how dishonestly he mangled people’s words. He’s refused. Or rather, he’s now attached conditions: he wants people to pay him for the full video recordings.

American Atheists Inc., have demanded that unedited footage be released, which they believe will show a USC professor giving scientific evidence for evolution. Comfort says that the USC professor didn’t give any, but that he is willing to release the interview if Dawkins pays the same amount he required for a debate with Comfort (payable to the Salvation Army). “I offered him $20,000 to debate me, and he said he would, if I gave his foundation $100,000. He knew that I wouldn’t go that high, so we produced the movie instead.”

Greedy lowlife. Recall that Richard Dawkins produced a documentary, The Root of All Evil?, in which he interviewed various religious figures, which of course had to be edited for brevity. Afterwards he released the full footage of the interviews, freely, so that there could be no argument that he’d edited them dishonestly.

Ray Comfort can make no such claim.

By the way, the article about taunting Dawkins is a disgraceful bit of creationist propaganda, but it’s posted on CNN…as something called an “iReport”, which has a disclaimer that it is not vetted by CNN. What does it take to get on there? Given that apparent creationists get a slot, the bar to entry must be really low.

Narendra Dabholkar assassinated in India

Dabholkar was a leader of the rationalist movement in India, who had been fighting for anti-superstition and anti-black magic bills. He was gunned down by cowards on motorcycles this morning — it was an assassination, plain and simple.

I’m passing along a brief summary I received this morning.

With deep distress and regret I have to report to you the assassination this morning of one of India’s most important Rationalist and Humanist leaders, Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, founder of the Maharashtra Andha Shraddha Nirmulan Samiti or Maharashtra Forum for Elimination of Superstition. News is trickling in.

Inspired by the work of the great rationalist Basava Premanand, Dr. Dabholkar, a medical doctor, plunged into anti-superstition work in 1983 and built a concrete movement in his home state of Maharashtra. He was briefly Vice President of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations, a Member Organisation of IHEU.

A person of great charm and commitment to the cause,he refused to spread his activism outside Maharashtra because he was keen on first developing a branch of his organisation in each village of Maharashtra.

Organisational work of this kind made the movement a force to reckon with in Maharashtra state where he was spearheading the movement for a Bill against Witchcraft earlier called the Anti-Superstition Bill. The earlier Bill was passed in one house of the legislature but did not get through the second. His untiring efforts were successful, and the new Bill garnered the support of all the political parties except that of the Shiv Sena and the BJP. The ruling Congress party, however, did not take it up on the Business Agenda of the Legislature – many suspect that this was because of the upset it would cause to the orthodox. When passed, it would be a most potent weapon in the fight against superstitions which sap the life blood of Indian society.

Babu Gogineni

Glossolalia is not God

TJ Luhrmann (remember her? Templeton grant awardee who likes to pretend religion is all sweetness and light?) is now defending speaking in tongues in the NY Times, with one concluding caveat.

Speaking in tongues still carries a stigmatizing whiff. In his book “Thinking in Tongues,” the philosopher James K. A. Smith describes the “strange brew of academic alarm and snobbery” that flickered across a colleague’s face when he admitted to being a Pentecostal (and, therefore, praying in tongues). It seems time to move on from such prejudice.

Why? It’s a silly practice…well, actually, I can see some virtue in the practice, but absolutely none in the rationalizations used for it. For instance, there are bits of this that I don’t object to, until the end.

What dawned on me in Accra is that speaking in tongues might actually be a more effective way to pray than speaking in ordinary language — if by prayer one means the mental technique of detaching from the everyday world, and from everyday thought [yes, isolating oneself in mindlessness], to experience God. [who says?]

She mentions other practices, like meditation to disengage from thought, and focusing and filling one’s minds with imaginary scenes from scripture. She left out the more obvious example, though: doo wop.

Obvious to me, anyway. Sha na na, sh-boom sh-boom.

There is something in our brains that connects with repetition and rhythms and sounds — it’s why music exists. It can feel good and it can even have physiological effects to remove ourselves from the world or to just soak in a mood, and I can sympathize with the idea that people find pleasure in it. But “to experience god”? No. That’s where Luhrmann goes off the rails. And it’s going to carry a “stigmatizing whiff” for as long as deluded apologists for religion continue to pretend it has anything to do with a god.

Her article is titled “Why We Talk in Tongues”. It doesn’t answer the question at all, and she never will as long as she’s looking for explanations in magic.

Shooby-doo-wop-do-wop-wop-wop-wop.

You can tell when someone isn’t familiar with creationist cant

Darn it. For a brief moment, I thought there was a chance that Ken Ham had said one thing that was true and honest. RawStory is running this article, Creationist radio ad: Evolution cannot be debunked with reason, and Addicting Info echoes the sentiment, with Creationism Advocate Admits That Science Proves Evolution, But Says We Should Believe The Bible Anyway. They say Ken Ham has suggested this:

You cannot convince people that evolution is false with logic, according to the founder of the Creation Museum in Kentucky.

In a 60-second radio ad released Thursday, Answers in Genesis President Ken Ham admitted there was no scientific evidence that conclusively demonstrated that evolution was a lie.

They’ve completely misread his statement. What he actually said is familiar creationist dogma, and comes nowhere near their interpretation. Listen for yourself.

The hopeful rational websites are focusing on this statement:

We have solid proof in in our hands that evolution is a lie: the Bible. You see, we can’t depend solely on our reasoning ability to convince skeptics. We present the evidence and do the best we can to convince people the truth of God by always pointing them to the Bible.

It doesn’t say what they think it says. Notice the “solely”; creationists will claim that they are using their reason, even when they aren’t. Notice also that he says they “present the evidence”; they don’t, they ignore most of it and distort the rest, but they claim to be presenting scientific evidence to support their arguments.

What was also cut out of that particular quote was this little preamble: “Romans chapter 1 tells us that God has revealed himself in nature”. Ken Ham argues all the time that his view of nature and the physical evidence supports the claims of the Bible. He just also claims that the Bible itself is powerful evidence against evolution.

Look, I know that Ken Ham is an ignorant fool, and I know that his museum is a craptastical pile of lies and nonsense, but you will make no progress in an argument with creationists if you try to pull this misleading “gotcha” garbage and distort their words. Ken Ham did not say that “You cannot convince people that evolution is false with logic” — he firmly believes that the convoluted rationalizations he performs are logical (for years he’s been pushing this deadly dull book by Jason Lisle that claims to be a logical analysis of science, for instance).

He does not admit that “there was no scientific evidence that conclusively demonstrated that evolution was a lie”. Again, he is convinced otherwise. These non-scientists have deluded themselves thoroughly into believing that putting up a cast of some dinosaur bones and then saying that the animal died in the Flood means they have “scientific evidence” that evolution is false.

I’d love it if a creationist were to come right out and admit that the evidence kills creation and that they hold to their faith in spite of the evidence (one that I know of has done exactly that, Kurt Wise, but he’s an exception, and Ken Ham is no Kurt Wise). I do not think putting words in the mouths of creationists helps. I hate it when creationists twist our words (*cough*Ray Comfort*cough*), and I don’t appreciate it when people on my side twist their words. Deal with their arguments fairly, they’re easy enough to crush.

SkepticDoc, M.D.

Do I place a higher value on reason, critical thinking, and skepticism or on the interpretation of feelings as accurate indicators of truth (e.g., if I feel harassed, I was harassed), arguments from experience, and the uncritical acceptance of third wave feminist ideology?

Some tendentious derpwad on the internet

All claims require evidence, whether they are extraordinary or not. And a claim, in and of itself, is not, by definition, evidence.

Some other derpwad on the internet

I don’t know what it is, but some skeptics have adopted this calcified attitude towards what constitutes reasonable evidence and reasonable claims. It seems to me that these are nothing but excuses contrived to justify denying reality, and that they are actually toxic to any kind of functional, societally useful version of skepticism; this is the skepticism of the status quo.

What if people actually operated as these advocates for purblind skepticism suggest? So I paid a call on SkepticDoc, M.D., the very acme of this form of skepticism. Here is how the visit went.

PZ: Doctor, lately I’ve been experiencing shortness of breath and an ache in my left shoulder when I exert myself…

SkepticDoc: Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down! See the name on the shingle? It’s SkepticDoc. Do you have anything other than your feelings to justify wasting my time here?

PZ: What? I’m telling you my symptoms…

SkepticDoc: Yeah, yeah, your feelings. Do you have some physical evidence that you felt pain? Some independent corroboration that you felt this remarkable “ache”? So far, this is just gossip.

PZ: It prompted me to come here, pay money, face some physical discomfort, and apparently have my condition mocked and dismissed. But what you’re supposed to do now is test me, find evidence of the cause of the problem and help me get better.

SkepticDoc: Right. Sure. But why should I bother? Look, people live to be about 70 years old on average, that’s over 25,000 days without dying of heart disease. The odds that you’re actually experiencing these symptoms is really, really low, so it’s a waste of my time to take you seriously. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

PZ: But I’m a 57 year old man with a family history of heart disease and a prior incident that required hospitalization! This isn’t extraordinary!

SkepticDoc: A professional victim, eh? Your kind are always in here giving me your sob story. Well, boo hoo hoo. Look at all the people who aren’t having trouble with heart attacks, and try to be like them. They aren’t in here taking up my office hours.

PZ: So you aren’t even going to examine me?

SkepticDoc: Oh, all right. I’ll take a look at your chart.

Hmmm.

Says you’re a college teacher, right? Made these same complaints a couple of years ago, same time of the year…right before classes start? Interesting.

Your job is a little stressful? You think another couple of cushy weeks in a bed with pretty nurses waiting on you hand and foot is looking pretty good right now? Yeah, I’ve seen your type.

PZ: Getting stuck in a hospital isn’t a vacation! And I like my work!

Wait, what are you doing? You’re supposed to be interpreting my medical history, not trying to psychoanalyze me. Yes, I have a history of heart disease. That’s why I’m being careful and coming to you now.

SkepticDoc: Aha, you admit it!

PZ: I admit what?

SkepticDoc: That this is your personal problem, and that you’re expecting someone else to help you. It seems to me we have a little problem with personal responsibility here. Grow a spine!

PZ: But…but…you’re a doctor. This is your job.

SkepticDoc: That’s right. I’m in charge. But my first job here is to find a reason and place the blame. By the way, I notice you’re a bit overweight.

PZ: Yes.

SkepticDoc: Stop it. Just stop eating. When someone comes by with a cookie or a hamburger or a carrot or something, just don’t eat it. If you find it hard to say no to a second helping, just leave some food on your plate. It really is that easy.

PZ: OK, mea culpa. I’ll watch the diet more closely. But this is a problem right now, I’m worried and I need your help.

SkepticDoc: What problem? I just checked the heart transplant registry, and your name isn’t on it. If this were a really serious problem, you’d have gone all the way to applying for a transplant immediately, so I think the fact that you’re taking a lesser step means your problem can’t possibly be that bad.

PZ: Huh? Are you suggesting I need a heart transplant? You haven’t even looked at me! I’ve detected symptoms of an onset of a possible problem, and I’m here taking an appropriate first step to diagnosis and treatment.

SkepticDoc: I don’t know. You look fine to me — you don’t seem to be having a heart attack now, your color’s good, if a little flushed, all the observable evidence says you’re not in need of any kind of medical attention. Why are you bothering me?

PZ: I told you! Chest pains!

SkepticDoc: And I told you, I don’t believe this personal testimony nonsense. And hey, didn’t you earlier say the pain was in your shoulder? Now you claim it’s your chest? You’re not very credible, liar.

PZ: <storms out>

A few minutes later…

Nurse: Dr. SkepticDoc! Dr. SkepticDoc! That man who just left your office … he has collapsed by his car, his face is turning purple, I think he’s having a heart attack!

SkepticDoc: You say. Do you have any evidence to back up that unusual claim?

[and…scene!]

This story has been entirely fictional. There is no SkepticDoc, M.D. in my town, and no humane and responsible doctor would express the kind of absurdly hyperskeptical attitude we see in the cited derpwads. Also, I’m in fine health and am not experiencing any chest pains…I mean, shoulder aches!

Never trust a science article with lists

They’re everywhere. I hate them. There are entire networks dedicated to creating goddamned lists, trusting in the human compulsion to go through each entry in the list…which are usually on separate pages, with separate ads, all calculated to increase advertising clicks. And at the end, they’ll present you with a list of more lists, with provocative titles, and they try to get you on the obsessive mindless click trail. They’re evil, manipulative, and almost always vapid. They’re the slot machines of the web. I’m looking at you, AlterNet, Salon, Huffpo, Gawker, whatever — you’re all padding miniscule content and increasing the noise level on the internet.

Even sites that are fun play the devious SEO game. The Oatmeal is one of the worst. I’m not talking about the content, I’m condemning the psychological trickery of the presentation.

The latest example that got me was on Salon: it’s an article titled “9 scientific facts about breasts”; it was originally on AlterNet as “The 9 weirdest facts about boobs”. Notice the linkbait title? (Linkbait that worked, by the way.) And as usual, when you actually read the article, it’s nonsense through and through.

Here are the 9 “facts”.

  1. Poor men like big breasts while financially secure men prefer smaller breasts.

    Simplistic reductionist drivel which regards people by a single parameter and draws decisive conclusions from it. Source: Psychology Today. Anytime you see “science” presented in Psychology Today, just ignore it and throw the magazine in the trash. It’s a garbage source, a kind of pseudoscientific Daily Mail.

  2. Hungry men desire big breasts while satiated men prefer a smaller chest.

    More of the same. Source: Psychology Today.

    Fuck you, Psychology Today.

  3. Men not interested in fatherhood find large breasts less attractive.

    An evolutionary psychology study based on asking 67 college men about their preferences. In Psychology Today. Goddamn, Psychology Today, but you suck.

  4. Squeezing breasts may prevent cancer.

    Not from Psychology Today! An actual scientific source! COMPLETELY MISINTERPRETED AND MISREPRESENTED. There’s this thing called contact inhibition, and cells also respond to distortion with changes in their cytoskeleton that can cause changes in activity. This study was done on cultured cells, confining them tightly with an artificial matrix. It has no relationship at all to the mechanical factors in squeezing breasts.

  5. Women who get breast implants are three times more likely to commit suicide.

    OK, this is one I can believe. It’s based on a statistical analysis of women who’ve undergone plastic surgery and committed suicide.

    What it means, though, is the question. Women with self-esteem problems that try to solve them with surgery are more prone to suicidal thoughts? Women compelled by financial burdens to acquire more appeal by breast augmentation are more prone to suicide than economically secure women? Who knows. You’re not going to find out on a blitz through a link farm!

  6. Sexist men preferlarge breasts.

    British white men showed cartoons of breasts have a preference. Whoa, I never saw that one coming.

    Reported in the Huffington Post. Fuck you too.

  7. Bras accelerate sagging.

    Based on one 15-year old study that has not, as far as I can discover, been replicated, women who stopped wearing bras saw “their nipples lifted on average seven millimetres in one year in relation to the shoulders”. Strangely, while I was easily able to find 23 papers in the databases which had Jean-Denis Rouillon as an author, none of them say anything about bras or breasts. Exercise physiology, yes; massive studies applying calipers to hundreds of women’s breasts, no.

  8. Men who like small breasts prefer a submissive partner.

    “You may get the psychological hint that she’s not trying to compete with other women who have larger breasts, and therefore she’ll be loyal to you. Or maybe the very first girl you had a crush on had small breasts, and if she constructed your earliest example of what’s sexy, her memory may still lead you to find small-breasted women exciting.” Barf.

    Published in Men’s Health. There’s another one to toss on the fire.

  9. Staring at boobs extends a man’s life by five years.

    A discredited urban legend, and the article admits it. They knew the story was garbage, but hell, no one will care…throw it in the list.

    “Clearly, not all online “scientific studies” are authentic or even convincing, for that matter,” they say.

    Well, duh. And this article is an example.

Join me in vowing to never again follow a listy link trail. Just say “no”. Recognize that they’re very, very bad and represent the worst of manipulative SEO tricks.

Also, unsubscribe from Psychology Today, Men’s Health or any of these ghastly pop psych and trendy “health” magazines. They’re lying to you.

They’re still bacteria…and fish…and apes…and…

Ray Comfort has been doing a great job of stirring up his minions on twitter, who, without exception, seem to be as ignorant as he is. I already mentioned one, Republican Mom, who combines dismal stupidity with chipper smugness, but there are others. And they seem to be going after everyone with a reputation for defending evolution. I’m not feeling besieged, though: it’s more like a swarm of fluff.

They’re also going after Carl Zimmer (and a bunch of the names he mentions are familiar — there aren’t that many of them, but they’re all really noisy and each one is peppering lots of people with the stupid). He’s now written a very nice post explaining their error.

Here’s what creationists like Comfort always do to deny evolution: they demand an example of a new feature evolution, of evolution in action. Then we give them one (we have many) in some species of bacterium or fish or whatever. They ignore it (seriously, they promptly wave it away and pretend that what we’ve told them isn’t what they asked for), and immediately turn to all the other traits of the organism that are still unchanged, and announce, “Well, it’s still a bacterium.”

It’s infuriating. Here’s a single-celled organism that evolved two tails; “it’s still a single-celled organism.” Here’s a fish that evolved armor plating; “it’s still a fish.” Here’s a fruit fly that evolved a whole new mating signal; “it’s still a fruit fly.” Notice what’s common in every case: the conscious denial of what you just told them. It’s not just ignorance, it’s willful ignorance.

There’s no way around this game. They demand something that evolution does not predict, and claim its absence falsifies evolution. If I had an experiment in which a population of single-celled bacteria evolved into a multi-cellular mouse while recorded by a video camera (which would falsify all of our evolutionary theories, by the way), they’d ignore the miracle and say, “Well, they’re still both made of cells, aren’t they? It’s still cells.”

Once upon a time, a population of apes evolved an upright, bipedal stance — but they still had hairy ape bodies and binocular vision and grasping hands — they were still apes, but they were on the long road to us. And we are still apes with a host of shared attributes with chimps and gorillas and orangutans. When you see Ray Comfort and he denies that he is an ape, point out that by his “they’re still just X” argument, he has scapulae and hair follicles and a liver and jaws and an autonomic nervous system just like a chimp, and if he’s going to deny the evolved differences, he’s still just a chimpanzee. He’s still got a spine, just like a fish, so he’s still just a fish. And he’s bilaterally symmetric, just like a worm, so he’s still just a worm.

Who’s richer?

It must be Ray Comfort Day on twitter or something, because he has his followers whipped up into a fine froth. Among the recent noisemakers was someone called Republican Mom (I already dislike her) who said this to me:

The atheist scientists are richer than Ray is silly little boy! Big business evolution is! $$

Then I did nothing, but someone else looked it up. In case you’re curious, here’s Ray Comfort’s worth in 2008. I’d have to say he’s doing quite a bit better financially than I am.