The saga of Slippery Sam

Yesterday, I brought on the wrath of the defenders of Slippery Sam. Sam Harris has an amazing talent: he can say the most awful things, and a horde of helpful apologists will rise up in righteous fury and simultaneously insist that he didn’t really say that, and yeah, he said that, but it only makes sense. And they have a battery of excuses that boil down to another contradiction: you must parse his words very carefully, one by one, and yet also his words must be understood in their greater context. They actually have a lot in common with radical Islamists: the sacred holy texts can only be understood in their original language, and the appropriate way to study them is by rote memorization.

So, in a report literally titled racial profiling, we’re told that it’s not about racial profiling at all; the new line is that it’s about anti-profiling, that we should be able to look at a group of people and easily rule out on appearance alone a whole bunch of individuals and make security so much easier. So people who look like grandmas and little old Asian ladies and five year old Scandinavian girls are all perfectly safe, would never harm a fly, and we should just wave them through the lines at the security gates. We should just screen youngish to middle-aged men, because old people and women and children are harmless.

See? He’s not about racism at all, it’s all about ageism and sexism. Nothing to see here, folks.

But at the same time, it’s a lie. Practically the first thing he says is this:

We should be honest. We’re looking for suicidal jihadists.

suicidal-jihadist

It’s not anti-profiling at all, whatever that is. He’s got some sort of vaguely undefined search image in his head for what we ought to be looking, and he’s not very clear on what it is, except that it’s suicidal jihadists, and not Norwegian grandmas. I think it’s something like that guy on the right. I quite agree that if a wild-eyed long-bearded fellow with an AK-47 and an explosive belt shows up at the airport, you shouldn’t let him on the plane. But then, the 9/11 hijackers showed up at the airport clean shaven, nicely dressed in Western clothing, and acted professionally to get aboard. We actually aren’t looking for mad boogey men — we’re looking for rational, determined human beings with evil plans. I don’t know what they look like. I’d rather the people in charge of my safety did not have narrow preconceptions about what they look like. Slippery Sam has bigoted ideas about what they look like, and wants that implemented as policy.

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Terrence Howard explains math

badmath

It’s been a long, long day of teaching and meetings and lab work, and sometimes it’s good to get home and discover why it’s important to teach. Like by learning what a movie star thinks about basic math, along with his history of domestic violence.

“Since I was a child of three or four,” he says, “I was always wondering, you know, why does a bubble take the shape of a ball? Why not a triangle or a square? I figured it out. If Pythagoras was here to see it, he would lose his mind. Einstein, too! Tesla!” He shakes his head at the miracle of it all, his eyes opening wide, a smile beginning to trace itself, like he’s expecting applause or an award. And all you can do is nod your head and try to follow along. He just seems so convinced that he’s right. And that he is about to change the world.

“This is the last century that our children will ever have been taught that one times one is one,” he says. “They won’t have to grow up in ignorance. Twenty years from now, they’ll know that one times one equals two. We’re about to show a new truth. The true universal math. And the proof is in these pieces. I have created the pieces that make up the motion of the universe. We work on them about 17 hours a day. She cuts and puts on the crystals. I do the main work of soldering them together. They tell the truth from within.”

…

After high school, he attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, studying chemical engineering, until he got into an argument with a professor about what one times one equals. “How can it equal one?” he said. “If one times one equals one that means that two is of no value because one times itself has no effect. One times one equals two because the square root of four is two, so what’s the square root of two? Should be one, but we’re told it’s two, and that cannot be.” This did not go over well, he says, and he soon left school. “I mean, you can’t conform when you know innately that something is wrong.”

Ooooookaaaaaaaay.

He seems to be doing all right, despite the disgusting attitude towards women and the most useless and deranged ideas about math.

I feel sympathy for his professor, and relief that all of my students are a lot brighter than Terrence Howard.

Now I have to go to an evening meeting with a bunch of students.

“The Human Rights Movement of the 21st Century”

I just saw this video put out by A Voice For Men: it’s a bunch of drunk guys insulting Amanda Marcotte and Jessica Valenti while doubling over in laughter at their own “jokes”. I am dumbfounded that they thought this was worth recording, and then at the amazing cluelessness that led them to think it would be a good idea to put it on youtube for all to see.

Hint: Obey the sign.

Hint: Obey the sign.

It was posted by Paul Elam, with this comment:

Look, it is just some men having non PC fun. If you find it offensive or a “bad thing” for the men’s movement, you can blow it out your ass.

He’s collecting comments on youtube.

SJWs Please keep those comments coming. I am doing a follow up on this based on your comments. Great lesson in PC and in your own hypocrisy. There is already enough here to work with, but if you want to add gravy…… all the better.

Yes. Because shouting “your pussy stinks” at women is “non PC” bravery. Read Marcotte’s post — she’s got these yahoos pegged, and no amount of bluster is going to get them out of the hole they have willingly dug for themselves.

Hasn’t learned a thing

sciencehowdoesitwork

Sam Harris is still going on and on about how we ought to racially profile airline passengers. We’re looking for suicidal jihadists, he says, so it’s ridiculous that we’d give the same attention to someone who looks like Jerry Seinfeld that we would to someone who looks like Osama Bin Laden. Never mind that extremely few people who look vaguely Semitic are suicidal jihadists; it’s an injustice to white people to subject them to the same indignities as brown people, but it’s not an injustice to falsely target brown people as terrorists because, well, they’ve committed the sin of looking like Osama Bin Laden.

We’ve been around and around on this subject. Bruce Schneier, the security expert, schooled him on the flaws in his idea, and really exposed the shallowness of his thinking. It’s bad security. It alienates people who are just as interested as we are in flying safely. It’s statistically naive, ignoring the problems with false positives.

I think it’s also a premise built on unquestioning bigotry. There is an assumption that people who look a certain way based on race will be less humane, more prone to violence, and a greater danger to law abiding citizens of White America, who would never ever harm anyone. The facts, of course, expose that for a sham.

Here’s an example from the streets of Ferguson.

oathkeepers

Of those three men, who would Sam Harris thinks poses the greater threat to peace and stability in Ferguson? Clearly, it’s got to be the potential suicidal jihadist on the right, not the righteous Christian Oathkeepers who are patrolling the streets with deadly firepower in their hands.

The dismaying thing about this interview with Harris is that he hasn’t budged a bit — the facts explained to him by a security expert didn’t sway him at all from his bias that brown skin and Semitic features equates to fanatical jihadism. Science, how does it work?

Garbage in, garbage out

flood

Bill Nye has a new book coming out in November, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World. In it, he’s going to write about climate change, among other subjects.

This has Ken Ham annoyed. Don’t you know that if you look at everything through the lens of the Bible, you don’t have to worry about climate change? He gives a nice succinct summary of his version of climate history.

Originally, the climate was created perfect, but sin changed everything (Genesis 3), and we no longer have a perfect climate. During the global Flood of Noah’s day about 4,350 years ago the climate was radically changed when the surface of the Earth was reshaped by the Flood. The Flood was followed by an Ice Age, which further changed our climate, and climates have gone up and down since. Fluctuations can happen quite quickly and are not cause for grave concern in regard to man’s supposed impact as Bill Nye claims. So when you start with God’s Word, you have an entirely different worldview through which to view climate change and therefore you reach entirely different conclusions about the nature and severity of it. It is true that Bill Nye’s religion of evolutionary naturalism causes him to wrongly interpret climate change. So, in essence, Bill Nye’s new book is indeed a religious book!

I don’t even know what “perfect” climate is.

But I do know he’s wrong. When your “worldview” is based on false facts, it crumbles.

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Harassment by FOIA

hari

Kevin Folta, a critic of the Food Babe, has been sent a list of demands for his email correspondence under the Freedom Of Information Act. I’m all in favor of transparency, and I can see where FOIA requests can be used to uncover conspiracy or expose intent, but this is a case where Folta has been outspoken and up-front: he thinks Vani Hari is a quack. You don’t need a shadowy paymaster and ulterior motives to explain why a scientist would publicly explain that someone said something that is scientifically wrong.

I also don’t need to rifle through her correspondence to figure out why she’s making these demands, nor does Kevin Folta.

This is all pretty simple. Vani Hari is a self-consumed amateur that is determined to discredit her critics. Why? She sits atop a multi-million dollar empire of corporate slander and internet sales. Why would she possibly exploit expensive public records requests to delve into the emails of a professor dedicated to public education?

Because he teaches facts, and more facts translate to fewer profits for Vani.

So instead of meeting him head-on about the science in a visible and public space, she uses a public records request to sneak a peek through his private correspondence in the hopes of… not sure what.

I’ve been there. I’ve gotten a few FOIA requests myself, and every time they’ve been trivial and pointless, and I wonder what the heck they expect to find. Receipts from George Soros sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to my PayPal account? Spirit commands from Saul Alinsky? Private confessions that the pseudoscience I’m critiquing is valid, but I have to publicly deride it, or the Little People will acquire the Vast Power only I should have at my fingertips?

I think part of it is vanity. They want evidence that the scientist is sitting there seething and writing frantic screeds to all of their friends talking about the quack. In that sense I’ve always shattered the ego of the FOIA pests: typically I’ve only found small handfuls of email that meet their search criteria, and most of the results are accidental.

Vani Hari wants all of Folta’s email that mentions the word “Babe”. It’s not a term I use much, but I checked my email: I’ve got 9 messages that use the word. A grand total of 1 is about Food Babe (someone sent me a link to a parody…there was no money involved, darn it).

The shipping costs would be murder

This magnificent sculpture of a giant octopus tearing down a temple is for sale in Japan. It would be perfect for my front lawn.

octotemple

There are still the small matters of the sad, hungry moths that flutter out of my wallet when I open it, and I should probably talk to Mary before investing in a lawn ornament that would dominate the neighborhood, and oh, yeah, the neighbors might have something to say…