Would you believe that a Swedish politician has suggested that their prime minister should end all of his speeches with “God bless Sweden” (translation)? It’s got to be a joke. She explicitly points to the US as a model — why any country would want to emulate the United States’ greatest flaw, its ignorant religiosity, is a mystery to me.
I’m a bit jealous — I didn’t get this amazing email:
As for myself, I believe that science has proved that there has to be a creator (The best mathematicians, physicists, biologists, astronomers,etc all admit they cannot explain how the DNA data gets into each cell/gene and can only be put there by intelligent design. But a campaign of disinformation from the atheist scientific communtity was exposed on British TV (I have the documentary), that proves that even the atheists admitted in secret scientific unpublished journals that all organic life in the universe had to come from a designer creator, and cannot appear randomly. The documentary exposed these findings and carried the atheist scientists through to their final statement and conclusion (which was pretty weak) that all artificial intelligence can appear randomly, but they admit that all organic life has to have a creator. THAT WAS THE COVER UP! THIS WAS EXPOSED AND THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY WERE INFILTRATED BY OCCULT SECRET SOCIETIES AND PAID TO NOT PUBLISH THEIR FINDINGS. (MOSTLY HIGH RANKING FREEMASONS, ROSICRUCIANS, ORDER TEMPLAR ORIENTALIS,ETC). tHE DOCUMENTARY PART 2 STATES THAT 90% OF THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY DO NOT BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION BUT AGREE WITH CHRISTIANS SCIENTISTS THAT NATURAL SELECTION IS A CORRECT THESIS, BUT THEY CANNOT ADMIT THIS, BECAUSE THEIR FUNDS WILL BE STOPPED BY POWERFUL INSTITUTES CONTROLLED BY THESE OCCULT FREEMASONS/BUSINESSMEN WHO OWN MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS
That is impressive, a classic kook-rant that hits all the high points: paranoia (“secret scientific unpublished journals”); conspiracy (“freemasons, rosicrucians, order templar orientalis”); delusions that a majority secretly agrees with them (“90% of the scientific community do not believe in evolution”); and of course, everything is completely made up. And the sudden ramp up into all-caps hysteria is beautiful.
I’m going to have to add something to my to-do list, though: contact the freemasons and find out what happened to my checks. I’ve got about 30 years of outspoken evolutionism that I’ve been giving out for free, and they owe me big time.
A big chunk of Australia is on fire — over 700 homes have been burned, and it’s estimated that over 300 people have been killed. We know the cause: a drought that dried tons of brush to tinder, lightning strikes, and deplorably, apparently a number of arsonists.
Well, that’s what I would say were the causes. But then, I’m one of those materialists. Danny Nalliah, pastor of one of those cheesy evangelical organizations, has a different idea.
CTFM leader, Pastor Danny Nalliah said he would spearhead an effort to provide every assistance to devastated communities, although he was not surprised by the bush fires due to a dream he had last October relating to consequences of the abortion laws passed in Victoria.
He said these bushfires have come as a result of the incendiary abortion laws which decimate life in the womb. Besides providing material assistance, CTFM will commence a seven day prayer and fasting campaign for the nation of Australia tomorrow Wednesday the 11th February.
CTFM has called upon all Australian Bible-believing God-fearing Christians to repent and call upon the Lord Jesus Christ for His mercy and protection over Australia once again.
There’s a simple word for people like Danny Nalliah:
Ghoul.
He sees a catastrophe, pain, and loss of life as an opportunity to proselytize for his idiotic religion. His faith is a parasite that feeds on death and destruction and fear. That’s all he’s got. This is just more of the same from this wretched ghoul: before the fires, he was making similar accusations of blame.
He had previously said drought and the world financial crisis could be partly blamed on human sin.
These people are useless lunatics.
Read all about it: he’s featured in the Toronto Star, and there’s even a nice picture of him.
In case you are unsure, I think he’s the one on the left.
Would you believe that indulgences are back? Do a little dance, say a little mumbo-jumbo, and the Catholic church will declare that you will get time off from your sentence in purgatory after death.
How do they know?
And what if they’re wrong?
I’d be very annoyed if I juggled beads for hours and hours and then found out that the High Supreme Cosmic Jailer only gave time off for life minutes spent smelling flowers or something.
Oh, well, at least they aren’t selling get-out-of-purgatory-free cards just yet. When that happens, we’ll have to go through another 30 Years War, and once was enough.
Since I had the effrontery to critize futurism and especially Ray Kurzweil, here’s a repost of something I wrote on the subject a while back…and I’ll expand on it at the end.
Kevin Drum picks at Kurzweil—a very good thing, I think—and expresses bafflement at this graph (another version is here, but it’s no better):
(Another try: here’s a cleaner scan of the chart.)
You see, Kurzweil is predicting that the accelerating pace of technological development is going to lead to a revolutionary event called the Singularity in our lifetimes. Drum has extended his graph (the pink areas) to show that, if it were correct, these changes ought to be occurring at a still faster rate now…something we aren’t seeing. There’s something wrong in this.
I peered at that graph myself, and the flaws go even deeper. It’s bogus through and through.
Kurzweil cheats. The most obvious flaw is the way he lumps multiple events together as one to keep the distribution linear. For example, one “event” is “Genus Homo, Homo erectus, specialized stone tools”, and another is “Printing, experimental method” and “Writing, wheel”. If those were treated as separate events, they would have inserted major downward deflections in his chart a million years ago, and about 500 to a few thousand years ago.
The biology is fudged, too. Other “events” are “Class Mammalia“, “Superfamily Hominoidea“, “Family Hominidae“, the species “Homo sapiens“, and the subspecies “Homo sapiens sapiens“. Think about it. If the formation of a species, let alone a subspecies, is a major event about a million years ago, why isn’t each species back to the Cambrian awarded equivalent significance? Because it wouldn’t fit his line, of course. As he goes back farther in time, he’s using larger and larger artificial taxonomic distinctions to inflate the time between taxa.
It’s also simplifying the complex. “Spoken language” is treated as a discrete event, one little dot with a specific point of origin, as if it just poofed into existence. However, it was almost certainly a long-drawn-out, gradual process stretched out over hundreds of thousands of years. Primates communicate with vocalizations; why not smear that “spoken language” point into a fuzzy blur stretching back another million years or so?
Here’s another problem: cows. If you’re going to use basic biology as milestones in the countdown to singularity, we can find similar taxonomic divisions in the cow lineage, so they were tracking along with us primates all through the first few billion years of this chart. Were they on course to the Singularity? Are they still? If not, why has the cow curve flattened out, and doesn’t that suggest that the continued linearity of the human curve is not an ineluctable trend? This objection also applies to every single species on the planet—ants, monkeys, and banana plants all exhibit a “trend” if you look backwards on it (a phenomenon Gould called “retrospective coronation”), and you can even pretend it is an accelerating trend if you gin it up by using larger and larger taxonomic divisions the farther back you go.
Even the technologies are selectively presented. Don’t the Oldowan, Acheulian, and Mousterian stone tool technologies represent major advances? Why isn’t the Levallois flake in the chart as a major event, comparable to agriculture or the Industrial Revolution? Copper and iron smelting? How about hygiene or vaccination?
I’ll tell you why. Because not only is the chart an artificial and perhaps even conscious attempt to fit the data to a predetermined conclusion, but what it actually represents is the proximity of the familiar. We are much more aware of innovations in our current time and environment, and the farther back we look, the blurrier the distinctions get. We may think it’s a grand step forward to have these fancy cell phones that don’t tie you to a cord coming from the wall, but there was also a time when people thought it was radical to be using this new bow & arrow thingie, instead of the good ol’ atlatl. We just lump that prior event into a “flinging pointy things” category and don’t think much of it. When Kurzweil reifies biases that way, he gets garbage, like this graph, out.
Now I do think that human culture has allowed and encouraged greater rates of change than are possible without active, intelligent engagement—but this techno-mystical crap is just kookery, plain and simple, and the rationale is disgracefully bad. One thing I will say for Kurzweil, though, is that he seems to be a first-rate bullshit artist.
I don’t think he’ll be sending me a copy of his book to review.
I got one thing wrong in my original article: he did send me a copy of his book, The Singularity is Near! I even read it. It was horrible.
Most of it was exactly like the example above: Kurzweil tosses a bunch of things into a graph, shows a curve that goes upward, and gets all misty-eyed and spiritual over our Bold Future. Some places it’s OK, when he’s actually looking at something measurable, like processor speed over time. In other places, where he puts bacteria and monkeys on the Y-axis and pontificates about the future of evolution, it’s absurd. I am completely baffled by Kurzweil’s popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination.
I actually am optimistic about technological progress, and I think some of the things he talks about (nanotechnology, AI, etc.) will come to pass. But I do not believe in the Singularity at all.
Nanotech is overhyped, though. They seem to be aspiring to build little machines that do exactly what bacteria and viruses do right now…and don’t seem to appreciate the compromises and restrictions that are a natural consequence of multifunctional systems. I also don’t believe in the gray goo nightmare scenario: we’re already surrounded by a cloud of miniscule replicating machines that want to break our bodies down into their constituent molecules. We seem to cope, usually.
I think we will develop amazing new technologies, and they will affect human evolution, but it will be nothing like what Kurzweil imagines. We have already experienced a ‘singularity’ — the combination of agriculture, urbanization, and literacy transformed our species, but did not result in a speciation event, nor did it have quite the abrupt change an Iron Age Kurzweil might have predicted. Probably the most radical evolutionary changes would be found in our immune systems as we adapted to new diets and pathogens, but people are still people, and we can find cultures living a neolithic life style and an information age lifestyle, and they can still communicate and even interbreed. Maybe this information age will have as dramatic and as important an effect on humanity as the invention of writing, but even if it does, don’t expect a nerd rapture to come of it. Just more cool stuff, and a bigger, shinier, fancier playground for humanity to gambol about in.
Enjoy a little happy music.
People are requesting an open thread to just talk about whatever they want, and I’m willing to oblige. Here you go. Let it all hang out.
However, since I’m a tyrant who must meddle to some degree, I impose one restriction: no libertarianism. It’s a cancer that is taking over way too many threads, and I’m contemplating making it grounds for banning, as it’s the same thing as the godbotting evangelical stuff. I’ll delete anything that goes down that tiresome road in this thread.
And if you mention Ayn Rand, you will be taken out and shot. <Wait, guards, not me! Any mention of she-who-will-not-be-named after this!>
The other problem with media coverage is that certifiable idiots get to open their mouths and their noise goes unquestioned in print. Here’s a regrettable example of an ignorant opinion piece, one so egregiously stupid that even Ian Musgrave is reduced to indignant spluttering.
The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. It surprises me he is not chided for his innate scientific conservatism and metaphysical complacency. He won’t take his depiction of Darwinism to logical conclusions. A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide. Publicly, he advocates none of them.
You would think that, since Darwin himself did not consider any of those actions to be either commendable or a consequence of his theory, maybe someone would realize that perhaps those aren’t logical conclusions of “Darwinism”. You would think that somebody would consider that, while Newton described the acceleration of falling bodies accurately, it does not imply in any way that he he advocated pushing people off of tall buildings. Rational people might be able to see that.
The author of the piece is a professor of theology, though, so we ought to have lower expectations. I’m pretty sure he is probably capable of eating with a fork without putting his eye out.
I must recommend an excellent editorial in the Guardian. Somebody there gets it; all the “he said she said” journalism that we get is a failure of the media to get to the basic truth of a story.
There can be no such equivocation in the week of a survey which showed that only around half of all Britons accept that Darwin’s theory of evolution is either true or probably true. In a democracy, citizens should respect each other’s beliefs; and citizens have a right to express their beliefs. But in a democracy, a newspaper has an obligation to what is right. The truth is that Darwin’s reasoning has in the last 150 years been supported overwhelmingly by discoveries in biology, geology, medicine and space science. The details will keep scientists arguing for another 200 years, but the big picture has not changed. All life is linked by common ancestry, including human life. The shameful lesson of this 200th anniversary of his birth is that Darwin’s contemporaries understood more clearly than many modern Britons.
That’s the lesson to be taught in this week, at the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. There is a hard core of fact to science, and all the waffling about to negate the ideas of common descent and natural selection is driven by ideology, not evidence.
