I no longer support Cthulhu

After years of affirmation and endorsements, he has finally sunk to a depth of evil and depravity and corruption that even I can no longer abide. Cthulhu has joined the Republican party.

cthulhu-president

I could forgive him if he’d become a Christian or a Muslim, I could even look the other way if he started blogging at Patheos, but a Republican? Intolerable.

Anyway, I’m now in the market for a new evil god of nightmarish wickedness to which I can give my sarcastic support. Suggestions welcome.

I’m kind of leaning towards Jesus.

Farewell, Ed

As you may have heard, Ed Brayton is leaving FtB. His health has suffered, because he is the point man here, and one of the defining features of the current atheist movement is that it is populated with assholes who hate the idea of any kind of social justice movement, so they’ve been making life hellish for a guy who has had more than enough work trying to keep the lights on and the engines running.

So why am I leaving? Also omnipresent since the start of FTB, as I’m sure you well know, has been controversy. The bloggers here have often gone on crusades and launched battles, most of them necessary and justified. But along with that has come a great deal of drama and stress. I’ve endured several threats of lawsuits against me as the owner of the network over the words and actions of others. I’ve had continual demands that I do something about this or that blogger, that I throw them off the network or censor them. I’ve been caught in the crossfire of a great many fights, continually taking shrapnel in battles that I wasn’t even involved in.

He’s basically retiring to Patheos, where all the lazy slackers of atheism go to avoid controversy and get money. I can’t blame him. He’s been tortured enough.

The rest of us are still here, though, and we’ve got a committee that will be stepping up to take the place of one guy — we hope that will diffuse the attacks, although I’m pretty sure they’ll start ramping up now.

So nothing changes.

Katha Pollitt is on the mark

She has written an excellent post on abortion.

I cringed as I watched Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, apologize in a YouTube video last month for the lack of “compassion” in two doctors’ language at supposed business lunches arranged and secretly recorded by the anti-abortion Center for Medical Progress.

Not because she wasn’t eloquent, but because of what her words said about the impossibly narrow path abortion providers now are forced to walk. After all, have you ever heard an apology from a crisis pregnancy center for masquerading as an abortion clinic? What about the women in Texas who lost access to gynecological care when the state defunded Planned Parenthood and did not, as promised, adequately replace its services? Has anyone said sorry about that?

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At least one person will enjoy the Republican debate tonight

MITCHEM

A commissioner of Lincoln County, North Carolina, Carrol Mitchem, was told by the courts that he could not continue to require sectarian Christian prayer to open meetings of the commission. This prompted him to open his mouth and let the dumbassery flow, like a rippling river of sewage and ignorance.

Changing rules on the way the United States was founded, Constitution was founded (I don’t like), Mitchem told the paper. I don’t need no Arab or Muslim or whoever telling me what to do or us here in the county what to do about praying. If they don’t like it, stay the hell away.

Mitchem echoed that sentiment to WBTV on Friday.

I ain’t gonna have no new religion or pray to Allah or nothing like that, Mitchem said. He added that anyone who doesn’t want to hear a Christian prayer can leave and wait until we’re done praying.

We’re fighting Muslims every day. I’m not saying they’re all bad, Mitchem said. They believe in a different God than I do. If that’s what they want to do, that’s fine. But, they don’t need to be telling us, as Christians, what we need to be doing. They don’t need to be rubbing our faces in it.

But rubbing everyone else’s faces in his vile religion, well, that’s perfectly OK.

Not only does this man vote, he’s active in local politics. We’re doomed.

I nuked Morris, Minnesota

You can bomb your hometown too! Just put your location into that link, and it’ll show you the area of devastation if your town were hit by the Hiroshima bomb. Here’s the effect if the nuke went off at my house:

morrisbomb

I was a bit disappointed, actually. All that happens to Cyrus is broken windows? The area of firestorms and gross destruction is totally within the bounds of where I routinely walk every day. It somehow seems so much smaller than I imagined.

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Listicles get published in peer-reviewed journals!

psychhelp

I used a cruel headline, but this is actually a useful list: Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases. It’s not just the popular media that mangle scientific language, but also more technical works sometimes slip into misleading shorthand. For instance, #1 on their list of bad terms:

(1) A gene for. The news media is awash in reports of identifying “genes for” a myriad of phenotypes, including personality traits, mental illnesses, homosexuality, and political attitudes (Sapolsky, 1997). For example, in 2010, The Telegraph (2010) trumpeted the headline, “‘Liberal gene’ discovered by scientists.” Nevertheless, because genes code for proteins, there are no “genes for” phenotypes per se, including behavioral phenotypes (Falk, 2014). Moreover, genome-wide association studies of major psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, suggest that there are probably few or no genes of major effect (Kendler, 2005). In this respect, these disorders are unlike single-gene medical disorders, such as Huntington’s disease or cystic fibrosis. The same conclusion probably holds for all personality traits (De Moor et al., 2012).

Not surprisingly, early claims that the monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A) gene is a “warrior gene” (McDermott et al., 2009) have not withstood scrutiny. This polymorphism appears to be only modestly associated with risk for aggression, and it has been reported to be associated with conditions that are not tied to a markedly heightened risk of aggression, such as major depression, panic disorder, and autism spectrum disorder (Buckholtz and Meyer-Lindenberg, 2013; Ficks and Waldman, 2014). The evidence for a “God gene,” which supposedly predisposes people to mystical or spiritual experiences, is arguably even less impressive (Shermer, 2015) and no more compelling than that for a “God spot” in the brain (see “God spot”). Incidentally, the term “gene” should not be confused with the term “allele”; genes are stretches of DNA that code for a given morphological or behavioral characteristic, whereas alleles are differing versions of a specific polymorphism in a gene (Pashley, 1994).

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A holy relic!

One thing I do not miss at all about living in Salt Lake City was the bland, totally credulous way the television news would report on all things Mormon. No claim was too ridiculous if it was said by the Church of Latter-Day Saints, and all the officials of that organization were treated as revered and unquestionable sources of authority. I just had to keep the television off and shun the newspapers every year at the time of the General Conference.

So this news story gave me horrible flashbacks: smiling Mormons announcing new lunacy to the straight faces of reporters. The church is going to let the peons view the sacred Seer Stone of Joseph Smith! Stand back in awe!

seerstone

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How does this get past an editor?

dustyspringfield

From a review by Roger Lewis of a biography of Dusty Springfield:

Call me a crazy old physiognomist, but my theory is that you can always spot a lesbian by her big thrusting chin. Celebrity Eskimo Sandi Toksvig, Ellen DeGeneres, Jodie Foster, Clare Balding, Vita Sackville-West, God love them: there’s a touch of Desperate Dan in the jaw-bone area, no doubt the better to go bobbing for apples.

It is thus a tragedy that Dusty Springfield’s whole existence was blighted by her orientation, which explains ‘the silence and secrecy she extended over much of her life, and her self-loathing’. One glance at her chin should have revealed all — but the Sixties was not a fraction as liberated and swinging as people now assume. ‘Being gay was either a pitiable affliction or an actual mental illness,’ Karen Bartlett reminds us in this sympathetic biography. Victims were treated with aversion therapy and electric shocks.

My theory is that you can always spot an asshole by the thoughtless bigotry they say.