It’s the arrogance of creationists that gets me

Before my email went down, I was engaged in an exchange with an Indonesian student.

He wrote to me asking if he could ask me a few questions about evolution. All right, it’s an excess of manners to ask if you can ask, but OK, I told him to go ahead. For future reference, anyone, I’m not into formalities or deference — just put your questions up front, boldly. I’ll either answer or not. When someone is that cautious, though, it makes me suspicious.

His next email informs me that he is writing a book to correct misconceptions about evolution in the Indonesian community, and that he is an undergraduate. A bit presumptuous, don’t you think? Most undergraduates are just learning about evolution and lack the knowledge to write a book, but maybe he’s precocious, and maybe he’s exceptionally well educated, and maybe he’s going to narrow the focus of his book to something appropriate. There are undergraduates who are mature enough to do a good job presenting the scientific perspective, but you’re going to have to show me that you’ve got the chops.

His question, though, floored me. He tells me he’s been reading Harun Yahya’s “beautifully illustrated” Atlas of Creation, and that he wants to know if ‘living fossils’ that have been totally unchanged for hundreds of millions of years exist, and gosh, isn’t that a problem for evolution? And then, I knew he’s playing a disingenuous game and trying to trap me.

Yahya’s book is a transparent fraud full of stolen images that strikes one note over and over again: here’s a stolen photo of a fossil. Here’s another photo of a modern animal. See? They’re identical! Therefore evolution is false. Nobody with even a glimmering of an education in biology would fall for it. Stasis is part of evolutionary theory, and besides, a superficial photo of a fossil or animal with murky provenance, selected specifically for their similarity, is not evidence of much of anything. Creationists have no respect for the evidence, though, so anything that reinforces their faulty assumptions is acceptable, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re Islamic or Christian creationists.

So here’s a guy whose source of information about evolution is a creationist propaganda book, who claims that he has sufficient authority to write his own book about evolution, and he’s asking this fucking stupid question. It wouldn’t be stupid from a layman, but he’s making this obnoxious pretense of authority, and most offensive of all, he thinks I’m stupid enough to fall for it.

I see this over and over again. Creationists have this absurd confidence that they have discovered the great flaw in evolution that thousands of scientists who studied it for years have missed, and they love to spring ‘zingers’ on us that they’re sure will stagger us and send us reeling backwards, to quit in defeat like the professor in Big Daddy.

It’s not going to happen. Trotting out some poorly referenced factlet and your profound misconceptions about evolution aren’t going to shock me. I’m also not at all impressed when you’re the kind of weasely coward who can’t even be honest about your intentions.

Now I’ve lost GMail

This is annoying: I’ve lost access to my email. I was trying to install some software that needed to access my Google account, I mistyped my password, and it then sent me into security hell, with codes sent to various devices that I had to type into various other devices, and somewhere in there I typed the wrong 6 digits into the right device or the right 6 digits into the wrong device, or something, and Google decided to teach me a lesson and locked me out of my account for 48 hours. I guess at that time it’ll allow me to reset my password and go through musical phone-tablet-laptop-desktop games again. I hope I get it right next time.

Anyway, the bad news is that I won’t get any email for two days, and I’m also locked out of my YouTube account. So if you have anything urgent to write to me, be patient.

The good news is that I won’t get any email for two days, except for official email through my university account, so nothing important from students will be missed.

I’m actually finding it kind of hard to complain about taking an email vacation.

No tuffet, no curds and whey required

My wife was just sitting there, quietly reading, when she noticed this little friend descending from the ceiling to sit down beside her, and instead of being frightened away, she yelled for me to come see it. I was mildly surprised — it’s a male Steatoda triangulosa, which have been rather scarce this past summer (it’s generally been a poor summer for all spiders this year).

[Read more…]

The battle is joined! War on Christmas comes earlier every year

The other day, Fox News was hyperfocused on the War on Christmas.

I guess I need to gird my loins or something.

Ken Ham, conjuring atheists into existence

Let’s get all Manichaean on their asses!

Caroline Matas attended an Answers in Genesis conference, and was chilled by what she saw. She was the only one wearing a mask, and was most concerned with why American evangelicals have so much contempt for modern science and medicine. I think Ken Ham delivered the answer.

Secular scientists might claim that they allow observation and replicable experimentation to dictate their conclusions, but Answers in Genesis argues that scientists are deluding themselves about their true “starting point.”

Ham famously argues that there are only two religions—conservative Christianity based on a literal and univocal reading of God’s word and secular humanism derived from “man’s word.” At this week’s conference, he went a step further, claiming that secular scientists cannot claim a “neutral position,” because any worldview that is not actively in service of his version of orthodox Christianity is “hostile” to God and “desperately wicked” in its thinking.

“If it’s not for Christ, it’s against,” Ham told a cheering audience.

Well then, count me in as against Christ. I think there are a lot of Christians out there who don’t accept Ham’s narrow-minded, pig-ignorant view of their faith, and are going to be surprised to learn that they are against Christ, but OK. It’s nice for us atheists to have abruptly become the majority.

However, this also reminds me of the time I was paired up to present at a humanist meeting with David Silverman. His message was that everyone there was actually an atheist — every Christian humanist, every Jewish humanist, every agnostic, every one who still went to church but thought god was a more complex concept than an anthropomorphic old guy in the sky, even deists like Thomas Jefferson — if you didn’t subscribe to an orthodox, literal-minded version of your religion, you were an atheist, and you should admit it to yourself and everyone else. It did not go over well. There was much eye-rolling and head-shaking in the audience, and I had to amend my talk on the fly to explain that I did not endorse Silverman’s views.

I think David and Ken would have gotten along famously. They have exactly the same sentiments about religion.

The terrible thing about this perspective is that as soon as you make everything us-vs.-them, you’ve got a tool to shoehorn everyone into opposing camps on every issue. It doesn’t matter that the Bible says nothing about vaccines — you can tell everyone that you don’t like ’em, and you’re a man of God, therefore anyone who is a true man of God should despise vaccines.

Studying evangelical media has made me keenly aware of how quickly and thoroughly this narrative can be employed to train consumers in the orthodoxy of the moment. What matters is not what happens to fall in its crosshairs: critical race theory, secular humanism, same-sex marriage, vaccine mandates; the fuel running the machine is a belief that this world is split into two “religions”—the “true” one and the “false” one whose aims are unceasingly hostile and evil.

Or, hey, if you are a misogynistic sado-masochist who bullies women and is the former head of a major atheist organization, then every true atheist should be a misogynistic sado-masochist. I think there are a few too many atheists who would go along with that.

We saw this coming long ago

Pat yourself on the back, creationists. You’ve succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. I’d give special appreciation to the Discovery Institute, which came up with so many potent slogans. “Teach the controversy!” “Teach both sides!” So many school administrators and politicians fell for it, taking it for granted that what a school was supposed to do was throw every crank idea at the students, and let them sort it out…while teachers were supposed to sit back and provide no guidance from hard-earned learning and experience, because that would be “bias”. How dare you teach all that evidence-based science about evolution and the history of life on Earth, don’t you know that’s discriminating against fringe theories that have no logical, rational, evidential basis? Make room for Ken Ham, right next to Darwin and Fisher and Simpson and Beadle and Tatum and…it’s a long list.

But that’s the triumph of their idea, that education shouldn’t be based on merit, and that teachers are useless unless they promote their propaganda.

And now it’s come to this.

A senior school administrator in the Lone Star State was recorded telling educators that if they’re going to keep books about the Holocaust in their classrooms, they must also stock material representing “opposing” views or “other perspectives.”

NBC News has obtained a recording that it says features Carroll Independent School District executive director of curriculum and instruction Gina Peddy explaining to teachers that House Bill 3979 requires them to offer alternative information when it “comes to widely debated and currently controversial.” That, by her account, includes the systematic execution of millions of people — mostly Jews — at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.

“Make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives,” Peddy said.

You can hear the whole thing here. Listen to the administrator tell the teachers how she wants to work with them and help them, but if they offer a book that teaches about the Holocaust, they better also include a book about Holocaust denial. The teachers sound appalled and horrified.

The administration’s excuse:

In a statement, a Carroll spokeswoman said Peddy’s example about the Holocaust reflects the district’s attempt to comply with a new state law that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues.

The law says we have to “teach both sides”. That is so familiar, as is the language about “widely debated and currently controversial” issues. All you need to do to make an issue widely debated and currently controversial is to get a local ignorant church pastor to stand up and argue for bullshit. Presto! Debate! Controversy! Therefore it has to go into the curriculum. It’s only fair, after all.

That’s not how education works. It has never worked that way. You can thank the creationists for a decades-long campaign to misrepresent how science and teaching work so they can get their fables and lies into the classroom. The end result: opening the door for Nazis and kooks to pollute public education. Fuck those motherfuckers, every one.

I get Christopher Rufo spam

I’ll lead with the happy news: I survived another grueling Thursday coupled to my continuing Achilles tendon agony. But I did get through the whole day without puking (the pain is intense enough that when I have to hobble for any length of time, I get nauseous) and actually, the throbbing stabbing pain is starting to ease up, thanks to a heavy drug dose from my doctor yesterday. Hooray for not losing my stomach contents! Hooray for some easing of the pain!! Hooray for lots of good drugs!!! Gosh, I sure hope my lecture this morning was comprehensible.

But now I’m home, and I find spam from some crappy conservative liars, and my gorge begins to rise again.

Dear Friend,

You are not, and never will be, my friend.

Are you ready to become even more effective in the fight against radical curriculum in your schools?

Yes. Always have been. You know that the “radical curriculum” is the conservative/capitalist propaganda promoted by billionaires, right? I am so totally against that.

Since we started Breakthrough Ideas, this fight has been one of our main areas of focus.

No, I don’t think so. The founder of this organization is a failed Republican candidate for the US House from Illinois, whose campaign in 2020 was built around the idea of put[ting] in place the infrastructure to begin the pushback operation against the socialism that invaded the US House in 2018. She also ran, and failed, for governor of Illinois. I think her only idea is to build up Wingnuttia.

She seems to have founded this half-assed think-tank in 2020/2021, after she flopped everything else, in order to continue her grift. I have no idea who is funding it.

Now we are teaming up with nationally-renowned education and critical race theory expert Christopher Rufo to give you the information you need to influence your local school boards and push back on toxic ideologies.

Wait wait wait. nationally-renowned education and critical race theory expert? Hold your horses, lady. Rufo has zero qualifications in education. He doesn’t understand or is lying about CRT; he has none of the training or experience in law, philosophy, race relations, or history to have earned the title of “expert”. He’s a fraud through and through. Here’s his background from Wikipedia.

Rufo was previously a visiting fellow for domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation and a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute.[12][11] Later, he was a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Christian think tank known for its opposition to the theory of evolution and advocacy for intelligent design to be taught in public schools.[11][13][14] In 2017, Rufo was a plaintiff in a lawsuit to prevent Seattle from imposing a 2.25% income tax on sums above $250,000 a year for individuals and over $500,000 for couples.[15] In 2018, he unsuccessfully ran for the Seattle City Council.[16] Rufo voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 United States presidential election.[5]

Yeah, he’s just another right-wing grifter oozing out of the woodwork of a series of think-tanks. Not an expert in anything but profitable parasitism.

Oh, the best part: the bill.

Check out Christopher Rufo’s video invitation here!

You can listen to Rufo on Zoom for an hour for the low, low price of $25, which is a bit over-priced. Or you can listen to him in person if you’re willing to fork over $50 and travel to some random wedding venue in Illinois (there is a McDonald’s next door), and for a lousy $250 you can attend the VIP Q&A session for a half hour.

Jesus. Unqualified hack gets those kinds of ticket prices for just lying out of his ass. I’m such a failure, I should have made up more shit to get on the right-wing rubber chicken circuit and the no doubt substantial speaking fees. On the plus side, I won’t get publicly disemboweled for my ignorance on national TV.

I’m full of alien substances now

I got shot up with Pfizer a few months ago, yesterday I got a buttload of pain-numbing happy juice, and today…

When can I officially be designated a cyborg transhuman mutant alien hybrid? I’m looking forward to when my nictating membranes, extra limbs and nipples, and compound eyes kick in.

I hope you’re all getting all of your vaccinations so we can team up and take over the world.

I’ll probably end up voting for Kamala Harris in the next election

After all, can you imagine a Republican stating these obvious truths?

This does not mean I agree with everything she, or the Democratic party, says or does, but that there is a clear, distinct separation between the two parties on at least some issues, and I’ll always go for the one that doesn’t lie about our history.