So tired I’m not going to talk about that wanker any more. I’ll just let Rebecca Watson provide the update.
I’m amused to see that the Peterson zealots have found a way to blame his feelings on a woman.
The whole dang Peterson family needs to be quarantined with the Trump family, and then we lock the door and never open it again.
I was asked to join a discussion about Islamic embryology by a fellow named Kenny Bomer (he has a YouTube channel), and I foolishly agreed, since it’s a topic I know well — well, the embryology part, at least — and I’m willing to try and educate. I’ll be on his show at 6:30pm Central time on Friday, 28 August. I see that a lot of his videos go on for hours, but I can’t see that happening here, since all the Quran has on embryology is a scant few lines cribbed from Aristotle and Galen…but then, the Christians go on for decades about a few lines on just the first page of the book of Genesis, so I’ve learned to never be surprised at how much religious folk can obsess over the exact interpretation of tiny fragments of text.
Oh well. I’ll be on for as long as I’m having fun. We’ll have to see how long that will be. Bring a stopwatch!
That’s all I can conclude from this video. I won’t be getting one for a while, so maybe I’ll just have to glue a hat to my head.
Amateur cosmologists sure get themselves tangled up in a lot of bullshit, don’t they?
I’m also not worried about Roko’s Basilisk.
It’s not exactly a day of celebration. Apostasy Day is a time to reject oppressive dogmas.
22 August is being chosen as Apostasy Day because it is the UN Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief. Moreover, late August marks the start of a second wave of mass executions of apostates in Iran in 1988 after brief “trials”. Thousands who responded negatively to questions such as ‘Are you a Muslim?’, ‘Do you believe in Allah?’, ‘Is the Holy Qur’an the Word of Allah?’, ‘Do you accept the Holy Muhammad to be the Seal of the Prophets?’, ‘Do you fast during Ramadan?’, ‘Do you pray and read the Holy Qur’an?’ were summarily executed.
On the newly established Apostasy Day, we renew calls for the:
• commemoration of the victims of apostasy laws
• an end to the criminalisation and the death penalty for apostasy in countries under Islamic laws
• an end to shunning, threats and honour-related violence from families of apostates
• affirmation of freedom of thought, conscience and belief as well as opinion and expression in compliance with the United Nation Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 18 & 19).
Speak out! You can add your name to the list of signatories, at the very least.
I stopped believing in gods, but I haven’t yet acquired an appreciation of the cunning work of Satan. I’m kind of liking the view from the intermediate point of evolution, so I don’t know that I’ll ever move on to satanism.
You know the arguments against design are pretty good at defeating Satan, too, right? Maybe we should use that as a selling point more often: “Get an education, Satan hates science!”
Recently, Harris was skewered in Salon, as he’s been skewered everywhere else — his Ezra Klein interview made his inadequacy obvious, and that weird exchange with Bruce Schneier in which he just waved away the words of an internationally known security expert so he could continue to support racial profiling exposed his racism. This story just sums up everything we already knew.
But over time, Harris withdrew from expressing his opinions through platforms designed to ensure a minimum level of intellectual integrity. He began blogging and then started an enormously popular podcast, his principal medium for the past seven years. He stopped publishing peer-reviewed research papers. He opted not to submit articles to media outlets that imposed some editorial control over what they publish. Instead, he created a small media empire that enabled him to say whatever he wants, whether or not the message is misleading, the claims are factually erroneous, the reasoning is fallacious and so on. In other words, he figured out a way to bypass intellectual accountability — to opine as much as he wants about topics he doesn’t understand without peer-review, editorial oversight or other quality-control measures.
Like Trump, Harris seems wholly uninterested in getting things right. He claims to care about intellectual honesty and good scholarship, yet he consistently spouts misinformation on his podcast that could easily be corrected if only he were to engage — sincerely, and in good faith — those who disagree with him (very often actual experts on the topics of racism, feminism, social justice and so on). Indeed, so far as I can tell, Harris has become one of the greatest sources of misinformation on social justice issues in the United States today. His contribution to scientific racism — his boosting the visibility of claims like Black people are almost certainly dumber than white people for genetic reasons — will no doubt be one of his greatest, and darkest, legacies.
There’s good news and bad news here, though. The bad news is that yes, he’s a terrible, shallow person with a large audience — he’s sharing a niche with Joe Rogan — who promotes bad information. The good news is that over the years he has retreated into his own personal safe space, a hug box for racists.
Years ago when we were both on the atheist conference circuit (on different tiers, he was the high-priced speaker who demanded a security detail, I was the guy who was happy to be there and didn’t charge a fee), he was annoyingly ubiquitous. You couldn’t escape him. He was at every con, he was in every atheist magazine, I’d turn around and there he’d be with a big guy in a dark suit and sunglasses, glowering.
But now he’s got his podcast and a dedicated fan base, and I haven’t seen him or read anything by him in ages. You have to make an effort to find him and listen to his words, and I don’t, so that’s nice. I picture him as an unpleasant cyst that has become encapsulated in fibrous connective tissue, still there and it still hurts when you poke at it, but at least it’s not oozing pus all over everything else anymore. We should probably get it removed surgically some day.
Oh, jeez, remember when every time you pointed out some racist, stupid thing Harris said, there’d be some slimy fan boy showing up in the comments to complain that you’d taken him out of context? Let’s hope those days are over.
I’m going to try to get regular about this YouTube thing, so I’m proposing to start a simple anti-creationist series for my Sunday mornings. Try this on for size!
Gotta do something other than go to church, you know.
It’ll be my last weekend before classes come crashing down on my head, so I’m going to take advantage of it.
Skepticon starts tomorrow! Tune in!
I’m looking forward to this as well: Lovecraft Country airs on Sunday!
It’s a great book, and it looks like HBO is doing right by it. There’s a write-up in the LA Times about that horrible racist, HP Lovecraft, and why he is surprisingly popular.
Lovecraft helped create a genre now known as “cosmic horror,” stories filled with dread and terror at the knowledge that humans are not the most important things in the universe.
“He was beginning to write at a time when science was making vast and profound discoveries,” says Klinger. “What he came to believe, I think deeply and honestly, was that human beings were insignificant little dust motes in this enormous universe and that eventually we would discover that we were not particularly significant.”
Science has been spending a few centuries working to move the center of the universe away from us, so it fits with an ongoing trend. Now we just have to dislodge that center from white people, which is proving to be the hardest step of them all. Lovecraft Country, though, does its part in the decentering. Don’t read Lovecraft, read the more recent authors that have been bringing us cosmic dread without the petty racism. (Another author I’d recommend: the work of Ruthanna Emrys, who takes on the perspective of the fish men of Innsmouth.)
Hey, can we pretend Skepticon is taking place in Lovecraft country?
