So this is what skepticism has become, Michael Shermer interviewing racist bigot and cult leader Stefan Molyneux because he is one of the most articulate podcasters for reason.

People were flabbergasted. How could he do this? Shermer has an excuse: ignorance.

I’ve done a few interviews in my time, and I always look into the other person ahead of time, if, for nothing else, to have some idea of what topics would provide a good discussion. No, not Shermer! He knew nothing and did zero prep. I don’t believe him, but if I did, that would tell me his podcast has to be total crap.

Don’t you worry about Shermer, though. He’s moving on to grand new projects that won’t be at all skewed by his biases, no sirree bob.

The membership in the Intellectual Dork Web is small and self-proclaimed, so I don’t understand the point of a “scientific survey”. Is this to be an assay where the questions are contrived so he can say that Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson aren’t really conservative right-wingers? I trust him to do that about as much as I trust him to honestly vet the people he interviews on his podcast.

Answers in Genesis got a dose of reality, and it slapped them hard in the face. They sent a pair of representatives to the American Alliance of Museums‘ National Conference, and boy howdy were they ever shocked. They had all-gender bathrooms and stickers to declare your preferred pronouns!

Drs. Purdom and Rivera are responsible for designing many of the wonderful programs, workshops, and other educational activities we offer here at the Creation Museum. But the potential usefulness of the AMA meeting was completely eclipsed by the “virtue signaling” and political correctness of the organizers.

It eclipsed it so much that Purdom and Rivera skipped the whole conference and went sight-seeing in New Orleans.

The whole point of a conference supporting LGBTQ+ individuals is to get that irrelevant stuff out of the way: the conference is about museum content, and by stripping away all the formalities, they streamline everything. Does anyone want to waste time correcting every single person who comes up to them and misgenders them? No. Put it on a sticker, put it in the program, put it on a conference slide, presto — no fuss acceptance.

One of the first things Georgia and Jennifer noticed when they arrived were the signs posted outside the restrooms.

As you can see, the AAM invited everyone to use whichever restroom facility they wanted. Now, that view is anti-science, anti-genetics, anti-biology, and anti the truth about male and female. Jennifer said that, because the lines to the women’s restroom were long, several women left the line and used the men’s restrooms since the signs invited them to use whichever restroom they wanted. This is probably not what the organizers had in mind!

Science does not dictate society’s approach to gender issues, so that’s not anti-science. It’s not anti-genetics or anti-biology, because we know that sexual differentiation is complex and multi-layered, and isn’t the result of a holy book decreeing that there can be only two genders. Having to pee or poop is something all humans have to do, so it makes sense that such facilities can be used by all humans.

I suspect the organizers had the fact that attendees could use any facility that they wanted in mind — using a restroom is not some grand statement that requires a fanfare and a calligraphic testimonial about the nature of your particular gender. Again, the organizers want people to just get the job done so they can get on with the business of the conference.

In a further denial that we’ve been created male and female (Genesis 1:27), the convention featured ribbon stickers for attendees to attach to their name tags if they so chose. These stickers announced one’s preferred pronoun, and they came in three options: he/him/his, she/her/hers, and fill in the blank for whatever pronoun they preferred.

Ho hum. Completely routine at conferences nowadays.

Clearly, the AAM wants to be seen first and foremost as an LGBTQIA+ ally. But, really, it’s an outright denial of biological and biblical reality—we’re created male and female. A denial of this truth leads to confusion and chaos, as was exhibited throughout the convention.

I’ve been to many conferences with this approach. I’ll be attending Convergence next month, where gender neutrality is taken for granted. It causes no confusion or chaos, but rather the opposite. How would they know that the convention was chaotic? They abandoned it the first day!

What the Hamites want you to think is that this was an example of persecuting Christians.

It’s interesting that the AAM was being very cautious not to offend anyone and to come across as welcoming, tolerant, and accepting to everyone . . . except for Christians or others who believe that we’re created male and female. They don’t care if they offend or isolate Christians, a trend we increasingly see in a culture that claims to be tolerant. What we see is that they are only tolerant of views that agree with theirs! It makes you wonder how many museums that belong to AAM have policies and teaching that align with these secular, unbiblical views.

So, having a sign on the restroom door that says you aren’t allowed to stare at, question, or threaten other users is offensive to Christians of his sort. Which of those three things did the AiG contingent want to do?

Most educated, aware professionals implement such tolerant policies as much as they can, and as educated professionals, they are a majority secular in purpose.

So really, this conference turned out to be a gathering not primarily about museum programs and workshops, but the AAM allowed it to be an LGBTQ agenda-driven conference disguised as a museum conference.

No, it was primarily about museum programs and workshops, open to all professionals, and how you peed was disregarded. Ken Ham just thinks a museum conference ought to be more about putting people into one of two bins.

Speaking of disguises, why were those two frauds even in attendance? The Ark Park isn’t a museum, it’s a church disguised as a science museum.

I’m happy to see, though, that we now have a simple way to keep creationist trolls out of our events. Just put this sign on the door.

Big bonus: It’ll repel all those regressive atheists, as well! It’s amazing how much alike creationists and a certain ugly contingent of the atheist community sound.

Well, this just made my morning: Nathan Robinson shreds the most annoying man in the world, Steven Pinker. I thought I’d pull out one brief quote to illustrate, but it was nearly impossible — I just wanted to pull out the entire dang thing and frame it and hang it on my wall.

But OK, one tiny bit:

I do not mean to dwell too much on the tone of Pinker’s writing, but it’s important to see how dishonest centrist critics of social justice rhetoric can be. Pinker treats the left as hysterically overstating its case, of calling everybody racists and despoilers, even as he brands them Nazis and Stalinists. One of the common themes I see in critics of social justice politics is engaging in the very thing they’re accusing the left of doing. There are countless examples of this in Pinker’s work. For example, in The Blank Slate, which is strongly critical of mainstream feminism, he cites Gloria Steinem saying: “What you need is people who see through literature like Andrea Dworkin, who see through law like me, to see through art and create the uncompromised woman’s visual vocabulary.” Pinker concludes from this quote that Steinem is “oblivious to the danger inherent in a few intellectuals’ arrogating the role of deciding which art and literature the rest of society will enjoy.” This is an incredibly audacious remark for a book with entire sections on which art is the Good Art and which art is “ugly, baffling, and insulting art”:

“In this chapter I will diagnose the malaise of the arts and humanities and offer some suggestions for revitalizing them… Once we recognize what modernism and postmodernism have done to the elite arts and humanities, the reasons for their decline and fall become all too obvious.”

When you say it, it’s dangerous elitism. When I say it, it’s Science!

The Blank Slate was the book that ended my interest in paying attention to what Pinker was saying. Even the title was a gigantic straw man, and the internal contradictions were overwhelming. Robinson goes on to point out something I’ve seen repeatedly in the atheist community:

Hypocrisy doesn’t make the underlying arguments untrue, but I think it’s critical to explaining why the left can end up with an unwarranted reputation for being unreasonable and emotional: Our critics operate just as much from “feeling” and instinct, but insist that they’re just being Objective. My colleague Aisling McCrea has written about how mere invocation of the word “logic” is used as proof that one is being logical. “Reason” becomes a brand rather than a description of an actual process by which the other side’s arguments are carefully analyzed and responded to fairly. (I’ve shown how both Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro mangle basic reasoning.)

The path to popularity always seems to be tag your identity with a lot of buzzwords, even if you don’t actually implement them. It was a gigantic tactical error on my part not to call this site “The Amazing Logical Reasonable Rational Skeptical Atheist White Man” instead of boring ol’ “Pharyngula”. I’d be rich and popular today! There sure are a lot of successful atheists who parade their virtuous identity politics in the name of their channel.

At least Pinker doesn’t do that. He doesn’t have to — his name has become synonymous with Calmly Misleading Apologist for the Status Quo.

Go read it. It’s a work of art.

Remember, Sam Harris is the atheist leader who once, when asked where all the women were at in atheism, explained it away by saying atheism lacked that “estrogen vibe” instead of noting all the women who have been leaders and who were currently hard-working activists.

I think it may have to do with my person slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people..People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree instrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women. The atheist variable just has this – it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.

He has a great big blind spot for anyone who isn’t a rich white man. So when he says bullshit like this:

A paradox for our time: The far Left is disproportionately white, wealthy, and well-educated. So extreme “wokeness” is now one of the most glaring symptoms of “white privilege.”

— Sam Harris (@SamHarrisOrg) May 19, 2019

A paradox for our time: The far Left is disproportionately white, wealthy, and well-educated. So extreme “wokeness” is now one of the most glaring symptoms of “white privilege.”

He’s just doing it again. It’s because all the black men and women, and Hispanic men and women, and LGBT people who have been fighting for the Left all this time are invisible to him. That far Left is awesomely diverse, while his “Intellectual Dark Web” and the alt-right are a mess of mediocre white people suckling at the teats of conservative think tanks and promoting the status quo that maintains their privilege.

But this is typical of the tin-eared pronouncements from Harris, probably the most clueless of the “Four Horsemen”, and the one who is still regarded as the premier figurehead of alt-atheism. If only this was a position he could be fired from, but he’s still propped up by a horde of white male cultists.

If only philosophical SWAT teams existed…although the members would probably spend more time arguing with each other than battling those prominent boobs with bad philosophical imaginations.

The commentary is good, too.

There are a large number of people who spend a good majority of their time and energy worrying about something called “postmodern neo-marxists”, while rather amazingly, not being able to name a single one, or describe what they believe. Apparently though, these mysterious postmodernists think that “everything is as true as everything else” (a position that no one has ever held), and are engaged in some kind of systematic plot to destroy Western Civilization, by using…linguistic relativism, or something? It’s kind of hard to say.

I don’t know about you, but my plots are all more chaotic than systematic.

I have, all the time. I remember when atheism was about idealism and anger at ignorant tribalism and superstition. Then I remember that the atheist movement imploded because it filled up with libertarians, misogynists, islamophobes, homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes, war mongers, racists, apologists for Nazis, and generic cowards who refused to think that secularists had any duty other than denying the existence of gods, and realize that atheism would have been just as criminal as the benighted belief systems we wanted to replace.

No, you don’t want to talk to me today. The only person I want to have a conversation with is me from 20 years ago, so I can rip all of the hope out of his skull.

Their doctors are going to be so surprised!

From a #QAnon group on Facebook.

It might not be the most serious or rigorous movement in history, you know? pic.twitter.com/bEWs7ffxkl

— Colin (@Kolyin) May 13, 2019

Sam Harris has a long interview with Kara Swisher (1’40”! transcript here), which even in written form puts me to sleep. Fortunately, Paul Campos has extracted some of the more bizarre, Sam-defining bits for me, and gets right to the problem of the Intellectual Dark Web. They pooh-pooh the harm and danger of white nationalism and racism and general bigotry, trivializing it and suggesting that it’s not important, which allows them to fan the flames of racial bias while neatly divorcing themselves from its outcomes. What stuns me is his argument for doing this: white nationalism is an ideology, but it’s not a religion, therefore it’s not as bad?

The difference I would draw between Christchurch, a white supremacist atrocity, and what just happened in Sri Lanka or any jihadist attack you could name, the difference there is that white supremacy is an ideology, I’ll grant you. It doesn’t link up with so many good things in a person’s life that it is attracting psychologically normal non-beleaguered people into its fold. It may become that on some level.

It doesn’t have all the elements of a true religion. I mean, there are ways in which it’s entangled with certain forms of Christianity. Again, there’s not a death cult of martyrdom forming there. It’s conceivable that one could form there. I’m not ruling out the white supremacists for causing a lot of havoc in the world. But in reality, white supremacy, and certainly murderous white supremacy, is the fringe of the fringe in our society and any society. And if you’re gonna link it up with Christianity, it is the fringe of the fringe of Christianity. If you’re gonna debate a fundamentalist Christian, as I occasionally do, if I were to say, “Yeah, but what about white supremacy and all the …” He’s not gonna know what you’re … It’s not part of their doctrine in a meaningful way.

Where I come from, a bad idea is a bad idea, and we don’t excuse it if it avoids being entangled with a religion. I’m comfortable with saying religion is a bad idea, but it is only one member of a much larger class of bad ideas, especially problematic when you’re trying to give a special status to a category as broadly diverse and amorphous as religion.

What’s particularly obnoxious about this twisty exercise in special pleading is that it is so transparent in what he’s trying to do: he is once again straining to make the case that Islam is uniquely evil. That only Islam is a “death cult of martyrdom”, that any instances of Christianity inspiring mass murder are weird outliers that can be ignored, while any instances of Muslims committing mass murder are truly representative of the faith. If I had to argue against such a ludicrous claim, I’d take a twofold approach.

First, if you’re gonna debate a fundamentalist Muslim, and you were to say, “Yeah, but what about suicide bombers and all…”, that Muslim is likely to be annoyed that you’ve brought up an insulting stereotype and is going to tell you that murder is not part of their doctrine in any meaningful way, and that terrorism is the fringe of the fringe of Islam. They might also point out that Harris seems to be deeply ignorant about the religion (I’ve seen him handwave away the assessments of Arabic speakers and researchers in the field of Middle Eastern culture), and that his popularity is entirely a consequence of his appeal to equally ignorant bigots.

Secondly, though, I’d explain that many Western nations, built on Christian foundations, seem to be entirely comfortable with prolonged, brutal warfare against Islamic countries, which makes uncaring mass murder a rather significant element of our ‘faith’, and that what we’ve been doing is ongoing oppression that empowers the terrorist fringe of a fringe. I’d point out, as Campos does, that the rising of the Right has succeeded in taking over our government, and is a greater internal crisis than any distant threat from angry foreigners in oil rich countries, no matter what their religion.

I mean who doesn’t recognize that white supremacy is absolutely at the ideological core of the political movement that at the moment happens to control the government of the most powerful nation in the world? Sam Harris, that’s who!

And as for the claim that there’s no connection between white supremacist ideology and fundamentalist Christianity, that would seem to be belied by the fact that fundamentalist and/or evangelical Christians make up by far the most significant voting bloc in the coalition of white supremacists and conservative ethno-nationalists (but I repeat myself) who have taken over the Republican party and most of the government of the United States.

A bad idea is a bad idea. I don’t care if it’s sponsored by a fringe of a fringe, or by mere ideologues, or by Christians or Muslims, or even by bizarrely popular atheists — racist claims that have no foundation in legitimate science and that are used to further discrimination and hatred must be opposed. Sam Harris is one of those deplorables who deserve condemnation.

He’s so oblivious and dim, too. When asked what can be done about all the racists taking advantage of social media, here is his reply:

[T]here’s just no way for us to keep track of what’s on our platform, right? So you know, the AI can’t do it. If we turn up the filter on white supremacy, we’re going to catch too many ordinary Republicans and we’re even going to catch certain Congressman, right, and we might even catch the president, and so that doesn’t work.

A scientist would say that, if we objectively tune our filters to detect expressions of white supremacy and racism, and we then find that we catch a bunch of “ordinary Republicans” who we already know are wont to spout off racist remarks, that’s a sign that the filters work. Harris’s bias is pretty naked there.