What is wrong with the National Education Association?

I expect teachers to do better. I expect them to have some standards and some social awareness. So why, at the expo held in Minneapolis this year, did they allow these regressive scum to have a booth there?

That’s the NEA Ex-Gay Educators Caucus. They’re working to eliminate intolerance and discrimination against ex-gay students, teachers, and their supporters, but not so much working to eliminate intolerance and discrimination against gay students, teachers, and their supporters. They’re big pals with the Patriarchy Research Council, promote Walt Heyer, and are all entangled with conservative religious dogma. It’s a group dedicated to spreading misinformation and bigotry, and there they are, accepted by the NEA.

Here’s another group that was represented at the conference.

WTF? What is the NEA thinking? This is an anti-science group supported by Answers in Genesis!

For 17 years, Answers in Genesis has voluntarily supported the Creation Science Educators’ Caucus at the largest meeting of public educators in the world—the NEA (National Education Association) convention. It is one of the most liberal organizations in America today, promoting homosexual behavior, abortion, etc.

AiG as a ministry would not normally be allowed to have a booth at such a humanistic convention, but AiG has been invited by the Caucus to be a major part of staffing its convention booth and providing resources to be given away to public school teachers and leaders. Over the years, tens of thousands of books, booklets, DVDs, and other resources have been freely put into the hands of public school teachers, and each year hundreds of educators have been engaged by our witnessing team at the Caucus booth.

Here’s one reason this lunacy persists: money.

In all, over $70,000 worth of resources (a significant amount of the funds for this was given by special donors) including about 2,000 Check This Out DVDs, plus 2,000 other DVDs, 1,100 books, and 600 magazines were freely given to the public school teachers over the six day conference!

But there’s also another one: history. The NEA is stuck with bad caucuses because of antiquated rules.

Even more curious: The NEA Creation Science Educators’ Caucus. This one apparently was formed decades ago under earlier rules, when a caucus needed only one member to win recognition. It still has only one member, its founder, whose primary purpose is to distribute materials that argue for an alternative to evolutionary science. Tony Ramsek, a volunteer for the group—not a delegate—told me it plans to give 3,000 DVDs away at the convention. He emphasized that they’re not for classroom use: “We want to educate the educators,” he said.

Here’s an idea, NEA — join the 21st century, purge the anti-science, anti-human bullshit from your meetings, and support good education. Right now, you’re setting a terrible example. The Creation Science Educators’ Caucus is clearly a single kook being used as a tool to allow AiG to pour money and lies into the conference. Plug that leak.

There’s always an excuse

Gizmodo points out the obvious: isn’t it strange that as hand-held, reasonably high quality cameras become ubiquitous, the number of UFO photos is dropping? You can also insert “bigfoot”, “ghosts”, “chupacabra”, or “angels” for “UFO”, they’re all the same thing. You’ve got an unlikely phenomenon that you claim has a physical manifestation, and yet as it becomes easier to record things, your phenomenon vanishes off into the distance.

But don’t worry. They have excuses.

While there are still hundreds of reports each month, that data doesn’t include many clear photos. Harzan had an explanation for why so many of the UFO photos are blurry: “UFOs are basically manipulating space-time. And when they do that, it requires a high electromagnetic field. That distorts the images.”

Harzan did have some tips for anyone who wants to see a UFO. “Just being outdoors, being in a quiet place, and thinking about it tends to be one way you could attract these crafts,” Harzan said. “There appears to be some kind of a consciousness connection.”

Here’s what bugs me, then. Does this Harzan bozo now repudiate all of the old photos of lights in the sky, flying pie plates, etc.? Because their existence would repudiate his claims of UFOs being space-time manipulating objects lost in a fog of electromagnetic haze. It’s the inconsistency that kills their arguments.

Creationists on the move!

Yeesh. There’s a new creation “museum” that is basically a big trailer touring around the Midwest. It’s called Semisaurus — and they’re going to be spreading miseducation all over Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri in the next few months.

Oh, boy. Cowboys and dinosaurs. Wasn’t there a cheesy movie about that?

Fortunately, it looks small and cramped, so they’re not going to be able to shuffle too many kids through their bullshit.

The really sad thing is that they’re not coming to Minnesota. If they were, I’d be sure to show up to point and laugh.

Dawkins and “Dear Muslima”

Now that Zombie Pharyngula has been raised from the dead and is sort of walking mindlessly over at ScienceBlogs, I have another complaint, and it’s aimed at National Geographic. Years ago, when they took over, one of the things they decided to do was to port over all the old content to WordPress.

They botched it. They botched it bad.

They got all the articles converted, as near as I can tell, but the comments…huge numbers of comments were lost. I’m talking hundreds of thousands of comments. I told them this, they didn’t care, and that was one of my first presentiments that this whole deal was not going to go well. It didn’t. They did a half-assed job and then neglected the whole thing, until it fell apart.

For instance, take a look at this short post from July of 2011. I remember it because the comments section turned into a huge firestorm of fury and outrage, to the point where people were linking to the comments directly, not my article, all over the place. Look now, and it’s empty, not a single comment survived.

That’s a shame, too, because it was a critical moment in the history of the atheist movement. This was one of the trivial events that led to the disintegration of what had been a growing community, and clued in a lot of us to the rot underneath it all. It was the moment when Richard Dawkins shat the bed.

I at least saved the text of those critical comments, that I also verified were directly from Dawkins himself, so I’ll put them here.

This is “Dear Muslima”.

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

How can you forget “Zero Bad”?

Many people seem to think it obvious that my post was wrong and I should apologise. Very few people have bothered to explain exactly why. The nearest approach I have heard goes something like this.

I sarcastically compared Rebecca’s plight with that of women in Muslim countries or families dominated by Muslim men. Somebody made the worthwhile point (reiterated here by PZ) that it is no defence of something slightly bad to point to something worse. We should fight all bad things, the slightly bad as well as the very bad. Fair enough. But my point is that the ‘slightly bad thing’ suffered by Rebecca was not even slightly bad, it was zero bad. A man asked her back to his room for coffee. She said no. End of story.
But not everybody sees it as end of story. OK, let’s ask why not? The main reason seems to be that an elevator is a confined space from which there is no escape. This point has been made again and again in this thread, and the other one.

No escape? I am now really puzzled. Here’s how you escape from an elevator. You press any one of the buttons conveniently provided. The elevator will obligingly stop at a floor, the door will open and you will no longer be in a confined space but in a well-lit corridor in a crowded hotel in the centre of Dublin.

No, I obviously don’t get it. I will gladly apologise if somebody will calmly and politely, without using the word fuck in every sentence, explain to me what it is that I am not getting.

Richard

The Internet doesn’t forget, but it does tend to make those memories fragmented and inconvenient to access.

Hank Campbell did not find Ken Ham objectionable at all…he’s some scientist.

Dan Phelps just reminded me of a laughable example of how wrong Hank Campbell can be. This is something he wrote in 2010.

In another chapter in the Democratic War on Science, Kentucky scientists are concerned about Democratic Governor Steve Beshear’s announcement that the state is partnering with Answers in Genesis (AIG) to create “Ark Encounter,” to make what developers call a full-scale ark including models of dinosaurs. Cost: $150 million.

Yeah, he actually has a series of posts on how the Democrats are the anti-science party, unlike the Republicans.

It has dinosaurs, so these are not the young earth creationists who believe in no science at all (dinosaurs did not exist 6,000 years ago, obviously) but Daniel Phelps, an environmental geologist for the state, believes the tax breaks the park will get (it claims to be creating 900 jobs) is “government entanglement with religion”.

Emphasis mine. Uh, Hank…they claim the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, and that dinosaurs didn’t go extinct until the Middle Ages.

“I don’t envision people, especially those with science backgrounds, wanting to move to a state where the ‘ark park’ has government support,” says Phelps, though providing tax breaks for anyone creating jobs is not really government support. If anything, it would be discrimination not to give them the same tax breaks it would provide to a company engaged in paleontology.

If a group of paleontologists opened a business and declared that no employee would be hired if they were Christian, that would be the proper comparison. You know that AiG demands that all employees agree to a statement of faith, right?

And doesn’t Phelps live in Kentucky, since he is president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society? Would he not move there because an ark has dinosaurs at a theme park? He must not visit Disney World because he can’t actually travel Back to the Future either.

  1. Dan Phelps has lived in Kentucky longer than AiG has.

  2. You do realize it’s not a problem to have dinosaurs in a theme park, right? The problem is a theme park that outright lies about the science.

I do wonder if Campbell has been informed about Answers in Genesis’s agenda yet. That thing read like an Emily Latella routine, without a punchline.

Dialectic, not debate

I am learning to hate debate.

Really hate debate. It’s everywhere, and it’s bad and wrong, and I think it’s contributing to our social ills — all of social media is soaking in this ridiculous debate culture, and it’s stunting and poisoning our interactions.

Sounds like hyperbole, I know, but I can’t help it — my eyes cross and steam trickles out of my ears at just the word “debate”. And I’m not alone: here’s an article from a scientist who won’t debate science.

In fact, as a general rule, I refuse to debate basic science in public. There are two reasons for this: first, I’m a terrible debater and would almost certainly lose. The skills necessary to be a good scientist (coding, caring about things like “moist static energy”, drinking massive amounts of coffee) aren’t necessarily the same skills that will convince an audience in a debate format. It is very fortunate that things like the atomic model of matter do not rest on my ability to be charming or persuasive.

But second, and maybe more importantly: once you put facts about the world up for debate, you’ve already lost. Science isn’t a popularity contest; if it were, I’d definitely vote to eliminate quantum mechanics, set π to 1, and put radium back in toothpaste. I really, really don’t want sea levels to rise, rainfall patterns to shift, and heat waves to intensify. Climate change is definitely not my first choice. But physics and chemistry don’t care what I, or anyone else, wants.

On the first point: I agree, debate is a very specific skill, and it takes practice to do well. It’s not something that is part of scientific training. Maybe it’s used more in law, but law ain’t reality. There are useful skills involved in debating, like logic and rhetoric, and maybe it’s good for kids to do some of it in high school…but after that, it’s not relevant to most real world interactions, which are an order of magnitude more complex than anything dealt with in debating.

On the second point: YES. This is the cardinal sin of the debate mentality, that you reduce the problems of the world to two sides, and you settle the issue with rhetoric and a popularity contest. That’s not how anything works. It’s a garbage strategy for simultaneously avoiding dealing with the real issues, elevating the two artificially simplified positions to an equal standing, and allowing the most golden-tongued babbler to come away with a sense of accomplishment. So you’ve got hacks like William Lane Craig acquiring a reputation as a great debater, when all he is is someone who recites horseshit with great confidence.

This attitude that debate, no matter how bogus the subject, is healthy has permeated everything. So the media, instead of explaining a subject with sufficient depth that the consumer comes away having learned something, instead takes the lazy approach of pitting experts against assholes, putting them on panels and letting them yell it out, and allowing the audience on both sides feel like they won. This is why Kellyanne Conway still gets invited on talk shows — she’s a lying crapnugget, but the media munerators who organize these spectacles just want the conflict. This applies to Jack Kingston, Corey Lewandowski, any of that mob of demented liars who do the talk show circuit. Why? It’s not as if you’re going to receive any insight from them…but the media just keeps on booking the same ol’ goofballs and wasting our time.

This is why people are playing games with that flat earth nonsense. Being a contrarian gets you a platform, automatically, and the wrongness gets amplified.

So lately I’ve said on my youtube hangouts that I’m not going to bother with the creationists who beg me to invite them on — they have nothing of value to contribute. They’ve been getting a bit irate, like this flaming nutcase who calls himself seeksmostprophecy, or something goofy like that.

You like to talk about creationists, slandering them, calling them names and you don’t allow them to participate. No honest discourse there. You disqualify yourself as a scientist.

Yes, I call myself a scientist, which means I understand and accept the evidence that says the earth is old, and organisms evolved. Arguing otherwise disqualifies them from rational discourse — there are more interesting things to discuss than their ignorance. What really annoys them is when you tell them they don’t get to freeload off your expertise, and they’re not going to get equal billing with even a mediocre, unknown scientist.

But still, it’s incessant: every time you point out some failure of reason or knowledge by some guy on the internet, his defenders will rush in with their ploy to salvage his reputation: debate! Debate him now!

My God, your a professor! LOL,

Your dimwitted almost child like analysis of doctor Jordans immense knowledge wisdom and expertise is almost comical to the degree of being woefully sad and pathetic.

Id love to see this brainwashed tepid clown debate the professor.

He would chew what little you have to offer up and spit it out like the diseased refuse it is..

You could have just shown that he was wrong about the sum of 2 + 2, and they’ll whine at you that you have to resolve this great conflict with a debate. No, I don’t. I’ve just explained why he’s wrong, given you the correct answer, and you don’t get to prolong your time in the spotlight with more clueless yammering.

So, no, fuck off. Sometimes that’s all you can say.

Or you can be more, umm, smooth about it, like Jay Smooth. He’s suggesting that you don’t give the trolls air to breathe.

Note that this does not mean you ignore the trolls, but that you use whatever platform you’ve got to express yourself and your disagreement, and you don’t let them commandeer your platform to promote nonsense. Discuss and disagree, but don’t enable further promotion of bad ideas. Dialectic, not debate.



You might also check out a pair of philosophers arguing about “Is Debate Useful?” over tea, or whatever stronger stuff ContraPoints is drinking. They’re not quite as dismissive as I am, but still, they think it’s a question worth pondering.

I’ve come to my conclusion.

No, you’re not going to change my mind by debating me. But maybe if you can put together a coherent, constructive argument otherwise, I might consider it.

Visceral horror

For years, I was involved in these uncomfortable debates within the atheist community where one side would argue “Reason and Science!” and the other would say “Emotions matter!”, and I would uneasily argue that they both matter — uneasy because I’m happier talking about science and am not at all charismatic or able to draw on any kind of emotional sympathy. Old Nerd Talking, that’s me.

But right now, in the court of public opinion, we’re seeing the debate play out, and what’s clearly winning is emotion — and, I think, reason as well, but it’s the feelings that are driving the discourse. I think that’s important. It really settles the argument that both are necessary. What’s punching everyone in the gut so hard is that the Republicans have thrown away any attempt to mask their lack of humanity.

An example: when my kids were very young, I let them watch what I thought was a harmless, fun, children’s movie. I didn’t realize that it was a horror movie.

That movie was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Does anyone remember this character?

It was striking: my kids were fine with the movie, until this guy shows up — a villain called The Child Catcher who snatches up children and drags them away from their families. He affected them immediately in a way that no other monster movie ever did. They’d cover their eyes. They’d run out of the room. They probably had nightmares about him, because all I had to do was say the words “Child Catcher!” and they’d shudder. I think if they had the choice of being attacked by the wolfman or the Child Catcher, the wolfman would win every time.

I got to visit my little grandson a few weeks ago. He’s 7 months old. Babies are fine-tuned, sensitive people detectors, and you could see it in his behavior, the way his eyes would light up and he’d squirm with happiness when he saw his mommy and daddy. He’s barely a person, he’s new and squishy and helpless, and the first concept his newly developed brain is forming is a love for his parents. I realized that I’d die fighting anyone trying to separate them.

It’s totally irrational. But this stuff matters. Donald Trump and the entire Republican party have steered themselves right into Child Catcher territory.

I’d like to think this would lead to their downfall, but unfortunately, Trumpsters also love children, and the only way they can resolve the dissonance is to dehumanize brown children even more — they aren’t babies, they’re future MS-13 gang members! That’s precisely what we’re seeing right now, and it could make everything even worse.

It’s getting easier to retaliate against the Peterasts

I have just been lectured in a YouTube comment about how I, and all of us leftist college professors, are examples of Professor Peterson’s warnings about the misuse of American tax dollars in support of the Cultural Marxist tactic of “critical theory,” by which they intend to destroy Western Civilization in order to make all of us live like they do in Venezuela and North Korea. Therefore I must post this video.

I’m a product of “Western Civilization”, I live within it and benefit from it, and think the economic chaos in Venezuela is tragic and destructive, and no sane person would want to live under North Korea’s totalitarianism. Jordan Peterson is utterly bonkers, and his fans are all infected with a serious case of the stupids.

P.S. Did you know Karl Marx is also a product of “Western Civilization”, and that he was not a post-modernist?

How to respond to a creation “museum”

There are creationist “museums” all over the place — I’ve been to ones in Kentucky, Washington state, and Missouri, and maybe a few others, but they’re all rather forgettable. I haven’t been to the the Big Valley Creation Science Museum in Alberta (how could I, what with the Royal Tyrrell right nearby?), but someone visited it and posted a summary. Harry Nibourg, the guy who runs it all, sounds like an enthusiastic glad-hander who is happy to give anyone a tour of his personal garbage heap. But I think these tourists summed it up well.

While I was there, a retired English couple had been making their way around the exhibits. As they reached the end, Harry asked them what their professions were. Turns out they’re retired biology teachers.

Harry asked,” Did you understand what you were looking at, and did it change your minds?

In the polite manner that only the English can achieve, the husband replied, “Well, you see, I think your museum is a crock of shit.”

Harry offered that they should “agree to disagree.”

That last line…is there any other phrase that is a better example of passive-aggressive truculence and an admission of a failure to defend one’s ideas than “agree to disagree”? Hate it.

Why does Jordan Peterson hate education?

Sheesh. Jordan Peterson came out with a video in collaboration with the awful PragerU, and it’s basically an anti-education screed, relying on misrepresenting universities, students, postmodernism, Marxism, and all the things he hates uncomprehendingly. So I responded to it.

I include my sorta script down below, but I’m not sure how comprehensible it’ll be, since the video is just me commenting on still frames from the PragerU BS. You’ll probably find ContraPoints on Peterson’s incoherence more enlightening.

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