The Freedom from Atheism Foundation is wrong about everything

If you’re at all interested in how religion wrecks people’s brains, take a look at the Freedom From Atheism Foundation (also on Facebook, where it’s updated more frequently. All the worst shit is on Facebook.) I thought the cartoon on the right was typical, because the little kid’s reply in no way addresses the point Cartoon Dawkins was making, but apparently they think it’s cogent.

It turns out they’ve been claiming that I support them, which is weird. That claim was noted on RationalWiki.

This webshite website is so biased and full of hate that many would consider it to be a “hate group”, as it frequently uses lies, generalizations, and intentional misrepresentations to defame atheists — but then of course, if they do all of that, then they are totally not a hate group, you intolerant, militant atheist. In fact, the FFAF even claims to “love” the very people whom they work so hard to dehumanize. In a brilliant display of deliberate dishonesty, the Freedom From Atheism Foundation also falsely claimed that they were “endorsed” by PZ Myers, despite the fact that he openly stated in his blogpost that he does not at all agree with them, criticizes their claim that “atheism is a religion”, and states that their goal is “all about restricting religious freedom.”

Never be ironic in titling your posts about them, because they won’t get it…or will deliberately misrepresent it.

Conservapædia doesn’t get it, either.

Atheist activist PZ Myers issued a statement on May 9, 2014 called “I support the Freedom From Atheism Foundation”. In this statement, Myers stated “I am happy to agree that atheism should be kept out of the public square, if religion is also excluded. There’s this principle called secularism that I think is a good idea, and the only way to accommodate a religiously diverse community.”

I hope the title of this post clarifies everything for those little minds.

Grim business

It looks like the Ukrainians are currently winning, although who knows what will happen when the Russians throw 300,000 conscripts into the meat grinder. What I’m getting out of the news, though, is how bloody and brutal the war is in reality. It’s not shifting lines on a map, it’s dead people. Every gain costs lives.

The Ukrainian soldiers waved, hooted and raised their fists in triumph as they drove out of the strategic eastern city of Lyman on Monday, riding M113 armored personnel vehicles provided by Western countries. They passed eight corpses of enemy Russian soldiers who died trying to run from a Ukrainian counteroffensive that swept through the area and is still going, putting the lie to President Vladimir Putin’s annexation claims.

What I find shocking in that Washington Post story is that it goes on to describe the bloated corpses. I did not expect that. I guess there’s a fine line to be drawn here — you don’t want to sanitize a violent war.

Along the same lines, here’s a blog that consists of transcribed text messages from a volunteer fighting in Ukraine. The volunteer is an American veteran who went off to war (my thought: what the heck is wrong with him? Going to fight, just because fighting is what he does.) It’s all about making people dead.

This has got to end sometime, but I don’t see an end in sight.

He’s getting desperate

Trump just forwarded a prayer to his followers on Trump Social. I think he’s broken and desperate.

I think that if there were a god, such a being would see right through Trump’s chicanery and know that he’s far more creepily secular than his opponents, and would immediately strike dead with a lightning bolt any MAGAt who had the affrontery to make that prayer.

Are those red hat fools still milling around out there? There is no god. QED.

Cheaters!

Walleye fishing is a big deal here in the upper midwest, and fishermen may be known to exaggerate the size of their catch somewhat, but this is going too far. In a fishing competition, one team did more than just talk up their catch, they committed abuse of an animal corpse to pad their numbers.

The competition in Cleveland was supposed to last two days but was cut down to just Friday because of bad weather. Fishermen in roughly 65 two-man teams started the day in a specific location on Lake Erie and had eight hours to catch the biggest set of five fish.

That was going to be Runyan and Cominsky, until Fischer pulled 10 weights totaling seven pounds out of their entry, the tournament director said. Plus, Fischer added, he found filets from other fish that had been stuffed down the walleyes’ throats to beef them up. Unlike weights, filets escape the notice of metal detectors.

“It was just simply walleye filets inside of a walleye,” he said.

Wow. That’s just blatant. Those two guys are going to be so intensely ostracized in the fishing community, and they’re never going to be trusted again, that they ought to just hang their heads in shame, throw their gear in the trash, and never set foot in a boat again. If you think cancel culture is harsh on the internet, getting caught lying to such an extreme is going to utterly ruin these guys’ hobby.

Chase Cominsky, left, and Jacob Runyan, right

Wait, those guys’ coats are splattered with commercial logos? Did they have pro sponsorships? Kiss those goodbye, too.

The gods themselves oppose the bosses

We must unionize to defeat the evil giants.

From the 1970s, huh? At a time when I would sometimes read comic books to my staunchly pro-union father. No wonder I got no pushback from my parents when I was avidly reading that trashy stuff — it was fundamentally righteous.

Waiting for an arachnologist to win their Nobel

After all, we can study spider evolution too, and it’s a notably branchy tree, especially compared to those loser primates who are in decline.

That last number, 62 spiders in 10-30 species living in our homes, is probably a very conservative estimate. That’s close to what I’ve seen in my cold northern home, and I know I’ve grossly undercounted everything.

It’s Nobel week, and paleogenomics wins!

First up, look who won the 2022 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine: it’s human evolution! As represented by the paleogenomics work of Svante Pääbo, who has been recovering ancient genomes, digging up old Homo sapiens and Neandertals and Denisovans.

I do have one reservation, though: the Nobel announcement claims “the ultimate goal of explaining what makes us uniquely human.” I don’t think we can accomplish that by decoding genome sequences. Identifying the different ancestral groups that led to us is interesting and informative, but let’s not get hung up on just DNA.

Infested!

For the last few months, my home office has been plagued with these annoying fluttering moths. I swat them as fast as I see them, but their numbers have been increasing, and last night was the worst — they were trying to fly up my nose, my ears, my wherevers, and there was just a cloud of them in the house. It was these guys:

Rice moths. Ick. Evil incarnate. We finally realized where they were coming from — the kitchen pantry is right next to my office. I had proudly stashed away maybe 50 pounds of dry goods, in preparation for the zombie apocalypse, and they had found my repository. Everything was double bagged, wrapped in plastic and stashed in storage containers, so I thought we were safe.

No, we were not safe.

We went through the containers and found that almost everything contained eggs and web clusters (except the lentils — apparently they don’t care much for lentils). Everything had to be thrown out. We dismantled all the pantry shelves and washed them down with bleach and hosed everything down. I wanted to cleanse it with fire, but Mary thought soap, water, and bleach would do the job. We’ve got some glass canisters that will go in the pantry once we’ve reassembled everything.

This was not how I wanted to spend my Saturday, but at least I can say the moth swarm in my office is currently greatly diminished.

I need more spiders in my house, although maybe the rice moths were just too disgusting to consume.

What “myth of the tech genius”?

Was there ever such a myth? I guess it’s been shattered now, since Musk’s battles with Twitter have forced him to reveal the contents of his cell phone. It’s a mess of banality and unwarranted confidence and egotism.

What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.

In no time, the texts were the central subject of discussion among tech workers and watchers. “The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks fucking dumb,” one former social-media executive, whom I’ve granted anonymity because they have relationships with many of the people in Musk’s texts, told me. “It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”

You might be wondering who has the privilege of chatting to Elon Musk. It’s a gang of rich idiots.

Appearing in the document is, I suppose, a perverse kind of status symbol (some people I spoke with in tech and media circles copped to searching through it for their own names). And what is immediately apparent upon reading the messages is that many of the same people the media couldn’t stop talking about this year were also the ones inserting themselves into Musk’s texts. There’s Joe Rogan; William MacAskill, the effective altruist, getting in touch on behalf of the crypto billionaire and Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried; Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (and the subject of a recent, unflattering profile); Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, NIMBY, and prolific blocker on Twitter; Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who was recently revealed to have joined a November 2020 call about contesting Donald Trump’s election loss; and, of course, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO. Musk, arguably the most covered and exhausting of them all, has an inbox that doubles as a power ranking of semi- to fully polarizing people who have been in the news the past year.

Few of the men in Musk’s phone consider themselves his equal. Many of the messages come off as fawning, although they’re possibly more opportunistic than earnest. Whatever the case, the intentions are unmistakable: Musk is perceived to have power, and these pillars of the tech industry want to be close to it. “I love your ‘Twitter algorithms should be open source’ tweet,” Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, said, before suggesting that he was going to mention the idea to members of Congress at an upcoming GOP policy retreat. Antonio Gracias, the CEO of Valor Partners, cheered on the same tweet, telling the billionaire, “I am 100% with you Elon. To the mattresses no matter what.”

Lonsdale is also one of the money men behind the University of Austin. Don’t you just love his casual assumption that he gets to talk to members of Congress, and they’ll listen? I don’t have that privilege. You probably don’t, either. Money is the only factor that gives you access.

Believe the evidence, ignore the cranks

Isn’t this a fairly obvious strategy? To set transgender policy, look to the evidence. It’s what I would recommend. Unfortunately, that’s not how policy is established.

The current spate of anti-trans positions has little to do with evidence-based research, science or data.

Here’s one example. Anti-trans campaigners often argue that allowing trans women to use women’s toilets and changing rooms will increase sexual assaults. In fact, research has shown the opposite. One study tallied criminal incidents related to assault, sex crimes or voyeurism in public toilets, locker rooms and changing areas in parts of Massachusetts that had laws against trans discrimination, and compared them with those that hadn’t. It found no evidence that these laws put women at risk, and concluded that “fears of increased safety and privacy violations as a result of nondiscrimination laws are not empirically grounded” (A. Hasenbush et al. Sex. Res. Soc. Pol. 16, 70–83; 2019). Furthermore, there is evidence that transgender children who cannot use toilets and locker rooms that match their gender identity are at increased risk of assault (G. R. Murchison et al. Pediatrics 143, e20182902; 2019).

Nevertheless, a false ‘protection’ argument has been used to justify anti-trans ‘bathroom bills’ in Alabama, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Tennessee, and to buttress trans discrimination in the United Kingdom.

Politicians’ claims also have little to do with empirical evidence when it comes to gender-affirming care. Alabama’s law banning provision of such care to minors described the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapies as “experimental”. It did not mention that 22 US medical associations endorse these medications as well-established treatment for gender dysphoria in young people.

Case in point: Graham Linehan. He says we literally don’t know who to believe.

He’s against trans rights, and now he’s doubting the existence of COVID (citing Bret Weinstein!) and climate change, all because he’d rather listen to hucksters lying about the evidence than accept something contrary to his biases. He is getting sucked right down into the conspiracy theory pipeline, and you can trust that he’s going to get worse and worse. He is actively demonstrating crank magnetism.

That Nature article has a good suggestion on where to start. There’s plenty of research and evidence on these matters…the problem is that it all says Linehan is WRONG, so he won’t look at it.

Much evidence-based research is already available. More is still needed, but it is either a lie or a cop-out to say that there’s not enough research to make informed policy decisions. Instead of whipping up arguments to churn culture wars, elected officials and those around them should look to the evidence.

You could also start by unsubscribing from Weinstein’s podcast.