The right heart, but too few

A small group of women disrupted (in a small way) Joel Osteen’s megachurch protesting their stance on women’s rights.

More of this. The only reason Osteen could ignore it is that there weren’t enough protesters. If you live near one of these hideous, oppressive megachurches, do try to get out now and then and let them know what you think of their ideas. They had 13 activists in the pews, they were kind of swamped out by this gigantic, opulent temple to gullibility.

OH NO! If that’s the audience, I don’t want to be popular

This is an odd looking graph of traffic to my latest YouTube video.

You might want to congratulate me on that sudden surprising surge of traffic in the middle of the night, but don’t. Apparently, that’s when the magical YouTube algorithm started recommending the video to others, and it brought an influx of Peterson worshippers, as the comments reveal.

all these years and you still can’t get 10 k subs??? JP just hit 5 million and growing. You’re in the final stage of your life, stop being so jelous. Btw, you shpould check out JP’s interview with Roger Penrose, eat your heart out.

But here’s the thing: I’m not concerned about traffic. I look at the most popular videos on the medium, and it’s garbage like Pewdiepie and the Paul brothers and bizarre twisted animated children’s videos designed to milk clicks out of babies. I’m content with my tiny little niche. I’ve also got a real job, fortunately, and the $50 my channel brings in every month is fine.

Then there are the feeble defenses of Peterson:

Peterson clearly states that what he is saying is highly speculative. If your going to critique the man at least do it honestly.

There’s a whole bit in my video where I point out that Peterson is flinging about the word “speculation” as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Useful speculation has to be built on some kind of empirical, testable framework. Peterson is lazy and doesn’t do the work of justifying it.

Most common, though, are the people who deny his transphobia (the thing that made him famous!) and have a knee-jerk hatred of social justice.

I realize Peterson’s claims about consciousness traveling up and down the micro and macro levels is nonsense, but so are the accusations of transphobia towards Peterson and Dawkins. Myers never really bothers to explain how they’re transphobic. At least not in this video. I think Myers should maybe spend more time investigating his own biases and irrationalism than those of Peterson if he has such obvious blind spots.

I thought Peterson’s transphobic comments have been so thoroughly covered elsewhere that I didn’t have to discuss them, and could focus on where he intrudes stupidly on my area of expertise, biology. I guess I was wrong. Do I need to make my next video about that? I’d rather not, because Peterson is such a twit.

Of course, there are still swarms of anti-SJW clowns out there.

I am not going to talk much about Peterson, but here is my problem. PZ Myers is supposed to be a scientist and yet he let’s social justice which has nothing to do with Science leak in.

I help a Transgender person overseas and help feed him and fix his bike, so this isn’t about hate or anything, but pronouns and having many sexes is against the Scientific data.
It’s more like a problem with the mind itself and social justice should not be mixed with Science.

This is why I am upset, because if you are a Scientist, you should have NOTHING TO DO WITH STUFF THAT”S NOT SCIENCE AT ALL, it’s more pseudoscience than actual real science.

Disappointed in you PZ, I thought you would be better than that.

This is really shameful and I think that’s worse than whatever Peterson is going on about.

What Scientific data is against pronouns and having many sexes? I suspect he couldn’t name anything.

I’m also unsurprised that there are people who think social justice should not be mixed with Science, but then have no problem at all with the irrational, unjust garbage that Peterson freely mixes in to his science-free babbling.

I guess I’m going to have to make more spider videos to flush away these clowns and get my traffic down where it’s supposed to be.

How long until we get to Cloud Cuckoo Land?

Someone asked Elon Musk when we’d be landing people on Mars.

His answer: 2029. In seven years.

I’d like to know when everyone finally realizes that Musk is completely out of touch with reality. The current big project his hired engineers are working on is the Starship (such hubris…) heavy lifter — they’re making bigger and bigger rockets, and that is supposed to take off this year. But that isn’t even touching the real problem of getting people to Mars. It’s a 7-9 month one-way trip! 21 months if you plan to bring them back home…not that I’m at all confident that Musk would care about that, he’s not going, after all. He’s nowhere near working out the problems of sustained life support in an incredibly hostile environment, where the crew would be completely isolated from any chance of aid, and where they’ll be soaking in radiation. No one is going to be ready in seven years. The tech won’t be here.

I’ll remind you that we got to the Moon six times, with astronauts hopping around for a few days each time, and that was it. We haven’t gone back. It’s doable, I could imagine people could make a few more trips in the 2030s to the Moon, but that’s trivial in comparison to going to Mars.

I’ll also remind you of the history of Musk’s grand projects. He was going to solve traffic with tunnels, remember.

It turned out to be a pitiful short, but expensive, tube that a few cars at a time could drive through. When Musk promises, expect something far short of the dream.

He might be vaguely aware of that.

That first comment is a lie. He doesn’t love humanity — maybe he has a few idealistic fantasies about his vague vision of “humanity”, but he’s an out of touch billionaire who is totally isolated from the herd. That’s why he hates traffic and mass transit, he wants to live in a bubble.

That last bit though, that oh-look-a-squirrel moment, is perfect. Yeah, I believe he’s capable of marketing pez dispensers.

Saying the quiet part out loud

This is sickening. Some of the Gender Critical assholes think they’ve achieved critical mass to begin their program of eradicating transgender people.

Helen Joyce says every person who is transgender is damaged and is a huge problem to a sane world and we’re going to have to accommodate them for 50,60,70 years, and their solution is reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition. This is some kind of Nazi shit. But she’s not being heartless, oh no! It’s for the greater good! You gotta dehumanize your target (they’re damaged), present them as a “problem”, suggest the preliminary step is to prevent them from proliferating, and then the ground will be prepared for the final solution.

I can recognize eliminationist rhetoric when I see it.

Textbook Giveaway #3!

I’ve told you the way this works a few times now. Just leave a comment telling me which book you want and why, and I’ll choose someone to receive a free book. These are generally not easy to read popular books — these are reference texts, kind of on the dense and heavy side, but full of information.
Your choices this time are:
Fundamentals of Human Physiology, by Stuart Ira Fox. Yeah, I’m not ashamed to admit it, I’ve taught A&P. I hope I never have to again, so I can bear to part with this one. I’ve still got several others.
An Introduction to Biological Evolution, by Kenneth Kardong. This is a fairly slender paperbound text, a little on the light side for what I want when teaching evolution. It’s not bad, though.
Neuroscience, by Purves and others. Also pretty good, if not the massive magisterial monster text of Kandel. This one I think is already earmarked for someone who asked for a neuro text in Giveaway #2. (Trust me, you don’t want Kandel unless you need to press a witch to death.)
There are many more on my shelves. If you don’t get it this time, check again next month for a different selection.

This is as announced on my Patreon page, but you don’t need to sign up to win a book.

I f’in hate evolutionary psychology

Sorry, I saw this evo psych study and had to vent.

Here’s the protocol: subjects were primed with powerpoint slides of modern economic devastation with an explicit slide with text saying the 21st century is a “harsh and unpredictable world”. The controls, near as I can tell, saw the same slides without the text. Then they flashed a slide of topless women’s torsos with breasts of varying shapes and sizes, and asked the subjects to rate the women.

Let me just say that if you’re doing any kind of psych study that ends with a request to rate women’s breasts, you’re doing something wrong. I can’t even begin to unpack all the assumptions you’ve pre-loaded into the work.

And then the results are underwhelming: a bunch of bar graphs that show very little variation in the responses, with a few showing statistically significant but totally unimpressive differences. Overall, men rated women with larger breasts as more attractive, fertile, healthier, reproductively successful, and likely to befriend. The n was 144, all drawn from college students at a midwestern American university, so of course we can infer universal principles of human evolution from it.

Here’s the kind of graph you can make as an evo psych goofball.

Dazzling information. If you hate yourself as much as I do, you can read the paper, too. It’s awful. So many statistics to strain to extract something significant from noisy data already compromised by cultural indoctrination.

How did one sentence become the Sacred, Inviolable Word of the Constitution?

You know the sentence: “A well regu­lated mili­tia, being neces­sary for the secur­ity of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” It’s Holy Writ. It may not be questioned, or at least, the interpretation that means anyone can own a weapon of mass murder, may not be questioned. One may wonder how that came to be, especially given the more limiting interpretation that prevailed over most of American history. Here’s a good summary of the twists and turns that led to our current armed state.

“A fraud on the Amer­ican public.” That’s how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amend­ment gives an unfettered indi­vidual right to a gun. When he spoke these words to PBS in 1990, the rock-ribbed conser­vat­ive appoin­ted by Richard Nixon was express­ing the long­time consensus of histor­i­ans and judges across the polit­ical spec­trum.

Twenty-five years later, Burger’s view seems as quaint as a powdered wig. Not only is an indi­vidual right to a fire­arm widely accep­ted, but increas­ingly states are also passing laws to legal­ize carry­ing weapons on streets, in parks, in bars—even in churches.

Many are startled to learn that the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t rule that the Second Amend­ment guar­an­tees an indi­vidu­al’s right to own a gun until 2008, when District of Columbia v. Heller struck down the capit­al’s law effect­ively banning hand­guns in the home. In fact, every other time the court had ruled previ­ously, it had ruled other­wise. Why such a head-snap­ping turn­around? Don’t look for answers in dusty law books or the arcane reaches of theory.

You know, it has the words “well regulated militia” right there in the sentence, and it turns out the phrase “bear arms” had a very specific meaning to the Sacred Founding Fathers: it didn’t mean to just carry a musket in case you saw a squirrel to shoot, it had the implication of being armed in warfare. That’s all been lost, thanks to the activities of one effective organization, the goddamned NRA. The NRA has only a partial quote on the wall of their building.

Today at the NRA’s headquar­ters in Fair­fax, Virginia, over­sized letters on the facade no longer refer to “marks­man­ship” and “safety.” Instead, the Second Amend­ment is emblazoned on a wall of the build­ing’s lobby. Visit­ors might not notice that the text is incom­plete. It reads:

“.. the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The first half—the part about the well regu­lated mili­tia—has been edited out.

Interesting. Also revealing is this interview with attendees at the NRA conference this past week.

The gun-waving fanatics will defend to the death the Holy Second Amendment, but they don’t even know what it says, despite being only one sentence long.

Then to learn that the whole modern justification for ubiquitous guns is built on lies, half-truths, and quote mining…jesus, what an embarrassing foundation of pseudo-scholarship.

Thomas Jeffer­son offers numer­ous oppor­tun­it­ies for pro-gun advoc­ates. “Histor­ical research demon­strates the Founders out-‘NRAing’ even the NRA,” proclaimed one prolific scholar. “‘One loves to possess arms’ wrote Thomas Jeffer­son, the premier intel­lec­tual of his day, to George Wash­ing­ton on June 19, 1796.” What a find! Oops: Jeffer­son was not talk­ing about guns. He was writ­ing to Wash­ing­ton asking for copies of some old letters, to have handy so he could issue a rebut­tal in case he got attacked for a decision he made as secret­ary of state. The NRA website still includes the quote. You can go online to buy a T-shirt emblazoned with Jeffer­son’s mangled words.

I thought creationists were the most shameless of liars, but gun-fondlers are giving them a run for the money. Although I also suspect there’s a huge overlap between gun-fondlers and bible-thumpers.

What is going on in Ohio?

The state seems to be a magnet for bad political ideas, and is striving to become the Yankee Texas. Recently, it was the extreme gerrymandering that no one wants to fix (hey, maybe political parties shouldn’t be in charge of defining districts?), and now…this new law.

If you’re unhappy that you lost a contest in high school, just accuse your opponent of being transgender, and demand a thorough investigation. Ohio Republicans will help by demanding that their pants be pulled down to inspect their genitals, followed by an invasive internal inspection, then a blood draw to have their testosterone levels measured, and a cheek swab to check out their chromosomes. FREEDOM! They’re the party that is going to get the intrusive legislation of Big Government off your backs by legislating that your school can insist on ad hoc genital, hormone, and chromosome inspections, all in the name of protecting women’s sports.

Yeah, that’s exactly what women athletes have been demanding, that others can request gynecological exams at will.

“University” is not a word that should be associated with “scam”

I think it’s part of the Right’s efforts to undermine education — steal the word “university” and attach it to rank garbage. Think PragerU. Think Trump University. Think University of Austin. All trash. Now how about this: a blockchain university, Woolf U.

In a lengthy August 2018 interview with Disruption Hub, Woolf’s founder Joshua Broggi — a philosopher of religion at Wolfson College, Oxford — tells how he was first inspired to blockchain by a student who wanted to pay his university fees in cryptocurrency.

Broggi thinks “blockchain” could solve all manner of issues in higher education, even the problem with adjunct teaching, the gig economy of academia — “when I look around my faculty, they spend a significant portion of their time acquiring their next temporary position, and that’s really a wasteful use of these extremely talented peoples’ time” — even though Woolf’s plan is also a gig economy. His answer to this detail is that the Woolf model will assure a steady supply of students for the independently-contracting academics to teach.

As of October 2018, Broggi was still confident in the blockchain approach — “We literally could not do what we are doing without a blockchain,” he told ABC News — though actual blockchain academic Michèle Finck told ABC she considered the project fundamentally “misunderstands what a university education is about,” and would be a GDPR disaster.

Broggi also stated at this time that tuition would be $5,000 per year — down from the $19,200 he had estimated in March 2018.

Perhaps it’s my limited imagination, but I fail to see how blockchain helps anything here. Broggi seems to be getting fired up about a tool (a bad tool) for managing payments to administrators, which is a bizarre focus for a university, but a pretty good one for a scam, where the money rolling in is all that matters. I’m trying to remember the 1980s when spreadsheets were all the rage…did anyone propose a Spreadsheet University, where everyone was excited about using VisiCalc to track budgets and grades? This is not to imply that blockchain has all the utility of a spreadsheet — it doesn’t — or that spreadsheets aren’t extremely useful for managing grades (I use them all the time), but that no one would look at a tool like that and say, “Hmmm. I am inspired to wrap a whole university in that, it’s far more important than trivialities like a curriculum.”

Poor Broggi. He seems to have lately realized that you shouldn’t name your scam “Scam University”, and “blockchain” has become synonymous with “scam”, so he’s had to delete the word “blockchain” from his promotional materials.

The word “blockchain” seems to have vanished from Woolf’s site some time between September 2018 and January 2019 — and the page title changed from “Building The First Blockchain University” to “Building a Borderless University.” The main headline is now “Not your typical online university,” and the front page speaks of video tutorials with a “real professor” and two or three students.

That leaves me wondering what makes Woolf University different from other fly-by-night student-loan-exploiting fake university out there. The answer is…nothing.

Oh hey, speaking of fake universities, let’s check in with the University of Austin. June 2022 is a big month for them, because this is when they have their very first course offering, “The Forbidden Courses“. They’ve had to scale back a bit, unsurprisingly. The courses will not be held in Austin — they’ve rented some lovely spaces in Dallas for the whole thing. The “course” is all of 4 days long, and there are two course sessions…you could apply for both if you wanted. It is not accredited.

No, our program is not a credit-bearing or degreed program. Students may not earn continuing education credits, credit hours, or a diploma for participation in this program. Each course will occur over ten hours in one week.

The “course” itself is an incoherent schmear. They’ve gathered together a set of ideologues and told them, apparently, to talk about whatever they feel like. There is no clear theme, no synthesis, just third-rate conservative rock stars asked to talk at the students.

WEEK ONE

Niall Ferguson on free vs. unfree societies in the 20th century
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on free speech, religion, and women’s rights
Dorian Abbot on approaches to climate change
Rob Henderson on the psychology of social status

WEEK TWO

Kathleen Stock on varieties of feminism
Jacob Howland on ideology
Deirdre McCloskey on capitalism: catastrophe or triumph?
Thomas Chatterton Williams on black male writing from Richard Wright to Ta-Nehisi Coates

There are also “workshops”. It is not clear what they are workshopping.

WORKSHOP LEADERS
Arthur Brooks, Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership, Harvard University
Nadine Strossen, Professor of Law, New York Law School; former President of the ACLU
David Mamet, award-winning playwright and author; Pulitzer Prize winner
Peter Boghossian, Philosopher and Author
Bari Weiss, journalist and best-selling author
Carlos Carvalho, Professor of Statistics, UT-Austin
Joshua Katz, Classicist, Princeton University
Lea Carpenter, novelist and screenwriter
Edward Luttwak, military strategist and author
Joe Lonsdale, CEO of 8VC, Co-Founder of Palantir
Balaji Srinivasan, Angel Investor and Tech Founder
Maleka Momand, Co-Founder & CEO, Esper
Katherine Boyle, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz
Robert Steffens, Co President, Marvel Entertainment
Geoff Lewis, Founder & Managing Partner, Bedrock
Amber Allen, Founder and CEO, Double A Labs
Jack Abraham, Founder, Managing Partner & CEO at Atomic
Michael Solana, Vice President, Founders Fund

So you show up for one of these forbidden courses, and there’s a mob of like 20 professors waiting to divvy up the 10 hours of instruction, and each one has their own peculiar hobby horse they’re riding, and they anticipate a group of 30-40 students, and then what?

I looked at that mess and figured their student body was going to be tinier than they expect, except they did one thing exactly right. They are paying bodies to attend.

Due to the support of a generous grant from our donors, there is no cost to attend the program. Hotels, some meals, and activities are covered by UATX. A $300 stipend will be given to participants to defray costs from travel, some meals, and other incidental expenses. Any additional costs will be the responsibility of participants.

Whoa. I wish we could just pay our students to attend my university, and take care of their housing and meals at no cost. This is what you get when millionaires and billionaires back your efforts to destroy public education. I wonder what contribution Elon Musk made?