Let’s all hope the Ark eventually sinks

Yet another video on the Ark Park:

I agree completely with Matt Dillahunty’s impression of the Ark: it’s not that impressive. It’s filled with pointless bric-a-brac — wooden box after wooden box filled with nothing, or filled with a static model of an ancient organisms. The “information” inside consists of wall after wall of posters. I’ve said it before: they were so focused on building a great big boat-like object, they put little effort into what goes inside.

I also agree that the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate was a bad idea. I think Nye pulled it off, because Ham was such an obtuse twit that he gave away the show. Nye got the basics right, but there thousands of people who’d have been just as competent at the debate side, and wouldn’t have granted Ham the prestige of a famous opponent.

In other news, the latest assessment of the attendance figures show that Ham has been…exaggerating. He’s been claiming to have had a million visitors in the last year, but the tax payments say that they’ve had 750,000 visitors in the last 11 months, and it’s unlikely that they had one quarter of their entire yearly attendance in one month. Either Ham is lying about his attendance, or he’s been shortchanging the county tax assessors. Either one is possible, I suppose, but neither are particularly ethical.

Faception is phrenology for the 21st century!

What? You never heard of Faception? It’s amazing!

Faception is first-to-technology and first-to-market with proprietary computer vision and machine learning technology for profiling people and revealing their personality based only on their facial image.

Faception can analyze faces from video streams (recorded and live), cameras, or online/offline databases, encode the faces in proprietary image descriptors and match an individual with various personality traits and types with a high level of accuracy. We develop proprietary classifiers, each describing a certain personality type or trait such as an Extrovert, a person with High IQ, Professional Poker Player or a Terrorist. Ultimately, we can score facial images on a set of classifiers and provide our clients with a better understanding of their customers, the people in front of them or in front of their cameras.

In short, they claim to be able to take a picture of you, and in a fraction of a second, in the absence of any other information, be able to determine your personality. It’s done with computers, so you know you can trust it.

But, you know, we have these meat computers in our heads that have been trained through millions of years of evolution and throughout our development to be extraordinarily sensitive to faces. We can respond to an eyebrow that lifts a fraction of a millimeter, a lip that curls just so, a pupil that dilates by a hairs-width. We are really, really good at reading emotion and incredibly subtle social cues from facial expressions. There are autistic individuals who have more difficulty than most at picking up on those cues, but I suspect they’re far, far better at it than any computer program.

But even with this amazing sensitivity, do you really think you could look at a snapshot and accurately judge whether someone is a poker player or a terrorist? Don’t you suspect you’d get very different perspectives on the person’s personality if the snapshot were taken at a party, vs. taken at a funeral? Have you ever discovered that your first impression of someone, on the basis of their appearance, proves to be totally wrong once you get to know them better? Just on the face of it, this is an absurd claim they are making.

We haven’t even gotten to the actual “science” that they claim supports their thesis.

The face can be used to predict a person’s personality and behavior.

This claim relies on a combination of two known research observations

​

OK. They’ve got two justifications. Here’s the first. The second isn’t going to get any better.

1. According to Social and Life Science research personalities are affected by genes.​

In fact genes play a greater role in determining key personality traits like social skills and learning ability than the way we are brought up by our parents, researchers claimed.

Researchers from Edinburgh University studied more than 800 sets of identical and non-identical twins to learn whether genetics or upbringing has a greater effect on how successful people are in life. Writing in the Journal of Personality, the researchers found that identical twins were twice as likely as non-identical twins to share the same personality traits, suggesting that their DNA was having the greatest impact.

There’s an obvious problem with this argument: identical twins don’t have identical personalities. I’ve known a few identical twins, and it’s true that it may be hard to tell them apart visually, but try talking to them. They’re different people. Shocking, I know. Also, I think every twin has heard the joking question about which one is the evil twin, which the good twin (and is tired of it). How does software that only examines the most superficial aspects of a person fail to recognize this fundamental issue?

And, oh Jesu, they bring up that nonsense about measure the relative roles of genetics or upbringing. It doesn’t work that way! Both are interdependent. Genes will be expressed differently depending on the environment. Anyone who brings up nature/nurture as if they are competing hypotheses should be kicked to the curb and ignored.

But now watch the magnificent flying leap they have to make to argue that personality and facial features are linked.

2. Our face is a reflection of our DNA​

Researchers have identified five of the genes that shape a person’s face. Researchers previously knew that genetics played a large role in determining face shape, since identical twins share DNA. However, little was known about exactly which genes are involved. Three genes were thought to have roles in the arrangement of facial features, and the new research confirmed their involvement.

There are more than 3 or 5 genes involved in face development. Facial structure, like all complex traits, is almost certainly omnigenic. In point of fact, though, claiming that only a small number of genes affect face shape effectively contradicts their own argument, because that implies that these genes could do their job in morphology while another, completely different set of genes work to generate personality. Do these guys even understand what they’re talking about?

Working on mice, researchers have identified thousands of small regions of DNA that influence the way facial features develop. The researchers said that although the work was carried out on animals, the human face was likely to develop in the same way. In fact, It’s already possible to make some inferences about the appearance of crime suspects from their DNA alone.

Let it be stipulated that genes play a role in morphology, and that individuals who are genetically identical will develop very similar facial features. This is not a point of contention. The question is whether there is a correlation between physiognomy and personality. Do people with the same shape of nose have similar political stances, for instance? Is there a connection between bushy eyebrows and charitable giving? Is ear shape linked to gambling skill? These are the questions they need to answer.

They claim on their “classifers” page that this is the face of a pedophile, for instance. I think that looks like about half the white dudebros who work in tech. Are you comfortable with that suggestion? Because I’m not.

It does make me wonder if they’ve run their own photos through the machine, and whether the software has been optimized to weed out all the non-flattering descriptors. I wouldn’t be surprised if the first pass of the alpha version classified everyone as “asshole”, and they worked assiduously so it would instead classify them as “genius”.

But where is the evidence that face and personality are linked in a predictable way? Here we go.

And indeed, researchers were able to demonstrate that “Internal facial features are signals of personality and health. While these type of affirmations are quite recent, in Chinese history, there have been people that have studied the “mapping of the face” for thousands of years.

Also, the epigenetics phenomena has recently demonstrated, in academia researches and March 31th 2017 Science magazine.

Vague reference, no specific citation.

Vague reference to Chinese tradition.

Handwavy mention of epigenetics buzzword.

This is bad stuff. It’s just more hocus-pocus, like astrology or phrenology or iridology or tea-leaf reading or Myers-Briggs tests or any of a thousand gimmicks that have been used to make false claims throughout history. This Faception boondoggle is going to be no more effective at detecting terrorists than it would be at ferretting out witches.

Worse, it just genetic determinism coupled to racism as an excuse. Cesare Lombroso lives! It does make one wonder if his pickled head doesn’t actually dictate racist pseudoscience to bad writers and software authors.

Narcissistic, oblivious arrogance: that’s the New York Times

The New York Times wastes some more space on that whiny turd, Alan Dershowitz.

But this summer, Mr. Dershowitz says that because he has expressed views that back President Trump, he no longer feels so welcome on the Vineyard, a summertime epicenter of progressive values, money and sheer Democratic power in the United States.

He’s being “shunned”, he says, and for his plight, he gets a write-up in the New York Times. I don’t give a rat’s ass for Alan Dershowitz, but this is so symptomatic of how bad the NYT has become. It’s not just that a cranky old man (hey, where’s MY feature?) gets a sympathetic article, but that phrase: Martha’s Vineyard is the “epicenter of progressive values”? Martha’s Vineyard, vacation spot of the rich? If there’s any clearer picture of the delusions of the NYT and the Democratic party, this idea that Martha’s Vineyard matters, I’d like to see it.

But then, the NYT and the Democratic party have been ongoing oblivious catastrophes for years. Now a former executive editor has a few words to say about that.

I’m feeling about the NYT now like I did when my son cheated on a test in 10th grade. I loved him to death, believed he was a thoroughly wonderful young man, but he needed a course correction. So I left my desk at The NYT, where I was DC [Bureau] Chief, met his school bus and read him the riot act. He needed a course correction.

So does the NYT… it’s making horrible mistakes left and right.

This sums up her litany of complaints:

More narcissism: It’s always about us. Yikes. Distance is part of journalism’s discipline.

It’s that narcissism that allows them to think they are doing good by including a line-up of deplorables on their opinion pages, and printing complete garbage with a straight face. Like this piece by Matt Schmitz, an editor at First Things, a website that claims to present a “theological perspective on life in America today”. It got past an editor because the editors at the NYT all have their heads up their asses.

Baffling as it may be to elites, Mr. Trump embodies a real if imperfect model of family values. People familiar with the purple family model tend to view his alienation from his children’s mother as normal and his closeness to his children* as exceptional and admirable. I saw this among my acquaintances in Nebraska. Even those from red families were more likely than my acquaintances in New York to know someone who has had a child out of wedlock or is subject to a restraining order.

Mr. Trump’s purple family values may even explain some of his populist appeal. Global leaders like Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker appear to have stable and loving marriages. But their childlessness makes them worse exemplars of family values in the eyes of some non-elites than divorcees who have multiple children — a category that includes Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s far-right League party, and Marine Le Pen, of France’s National Rally party, as well as Donald Trump. Contempt for elite respectability is reflected not only in the respective party platforms, but in the personal lives of these populist leaders.

First hint to any NYT editor with the flexibility to swivel their heads in their colon and peep out with one eye through their anus: reject any submission that uses “elites” in that way. They’re talking about a grifter billionaire, but to them, the “elites” are working class Democrats.

Do not accept the normalizing of misery and the pathologizing of women. It is not normal to find alienation from your children’s mother as admirable. It happens, it happens all the time, but it’s a consequence of poverty and drug and alcohol abuse. Jesus, guy…listen to some country western songs. Alienated families are not a happy outcome. Single mothers are in for a world of struggle. He portrays these “red” families as moral monsters, who are just fine if their daughters experience marital difficulties and grief and alienation, and consider Trump to be an exemplar of an admirable lifestyle. These are lies. These are the excuses Trumpist bigots tell themselves to pretend they have good intentions.

And then…oh my god, look how he twists the perspective to make fascists look like the true models of familial unity. They have children! That’s enough to make them good people. But then he makes it seem that a few more liberal world leaders have been rejected by the American “non-elites” (Jesus fuck, how does this usage persist? Thanks, NYT) because they don’t have kids…as if those red-staters are so familiar with the family lives of European politicians. One thing we do know is that they were familiar with the fact that Hillary Clinton has a daughter, and that there seems to much love and respect between them, because Rush Limbaugh called her a “dog” and because they hated her. They knew that the Obamas had two daughters and a strong family, because those “non-elites” loved to fling racist vitriol at them.

If there was even a hint of truth in Schmitz’s bullshit, wouldn’t those wingnuts in Nebraska that he cites have been admiring Clinton and Obama, and cheering on the family values that they claim to love so much? But no, that would undermine his argument that good Americans love Nazis for their kinder.

But the New York Fucking Times published it. Because the NYT is a garbage rag that is completely out of touch with reason and reality that blithely publishes right-wing propaganda.

*One word comes to mind: Tiffany.

Now I understand.

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.