How can you bring people to reason without a whip?

I’ve been doing a little research lately into the use of common, happy atheist terms, like “reason”. Here’s a truly hideous example of how the vague word “reason” can be used as a tool to advocate for great evils. Did you know that kidnapping, torturing, and murdering people is the only way to get others to recognize the virtue of rational thought?

Bonus points for treating reason and religion as equivalent enlightened phenomena.

A triumphant moment in history

Today I was surprised to learn that there was one time — one time only — that Charlie Brown managed to kick the football, and it was thanks to Spider-Man.

This is what radioactive spider bites were intended for.

Suddenly, meetings

Nothing for a year, and suddenly I’ve got two meetings at once this week. The big one is the annual meeting of the American Arachnological Society, which begins on Thursday and continues until the following Wednesday. It’s a virtual meeting (I think registration is still open, and it’s cheap at $20) so it’ll be almost a week of nothing but spider talk on a fairly loose and casual schedule. I am so looking forward to it.

And then, on Sunday, I’m going to have to skip an online poster session because — hold on to your hats, this is unbelievable — I’ve been invited to speak to the Atheists of Florida. An atheist meeting? Do they still have those? And they invited me? Don’t they know who I am? Sheesh. A fellow works hard to destroy the whole atheist movement and a few years later they all forget.

Anyway, they probably think they’re safe, since I’ll be talking about science. Little do they know, my topic is the biology of intelligence, and one of the things I’ll be doing is taking apart atheist buzzwords, like “rationality” and “reason” and “logic” and “intelligence” by explaining how spiders, and other animals, are also logical and intelligent, and are probably better atheists than humans, since none of them have any need for that god hypothesis.

Expect schisms, rifts, and recriminations all across Florida after my poisonous spirit touches the state. It’s what I do.

A dismal day for spiders

Grey, cloudy, cool, raining. We did a little early morning spidering, checking out the Stevens County Fairgrounds, and found nearly nothing. The barns were open, but they’ve been shut up for over a year, so the spiders probably starved to death — two years ago, there were lots of fat orbweavers thriving in the shadowy corners of the cattle barn, feeding on juicy flies. But no cows last year meant no flies meant no spiders.

The pandemic has been hard on us all.

I spotted one teeny-tiny juvenile orbweaver lurking in a concrete drain pipe, out of the rain. That was it. I guess it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to be out in weather with giant water-drops bigger than your whole body splashing down, punching big holes in your home.

We did see some nice Parasteatoda and one jet-black brawny S. borealis hiding inside the windows of the 4H administration building, where we couldn’t get at them. They waved to us and asked us what the heck we were doing out in the rain. So we decided to come home and sit inside and drink hot coffee, like smart sensible spiders.

At last, we’ve all been invited to speak at Skepticon!

Yeah, you. Get to work preparing your talk and putting it on video.

Our theme for Skepticon 13, starting on Friday, August 13, is things that scare us. Our panels will be on creepy-crawlies, horror as genre, and math. That leaves huge portions of this topic still begging to be covered. You can help fill in the gaps with a video of 3 minutes or less.

Do you have a favorite cryptid that other people haven’t heard of? Does your corner of the world share an unusual superstition or moral panic? Do you have the inside scoop on a “real-life mystery” that caught the public imagination? Are you good at explaining a particular piece of political fear-mongering? Have we left out something else important or funny about being scared? Tell us! Tell the world!

The theme is “things that scare us”? Well, I’m out. I can’t think of anything scary or creepy-crawly. But maybe you can! It’s also only 3 minutes. Being cogent in 3 minutes is harder than you think — you’ll have to pare out all the rambling asides and hesitations and coughing fits and that cool story you would have mumbled out if you were chatting at the bar.

Go for it, though! I expect to see you all there!

Oh what a beautiful morning!

Here’s what’s nice about being an early bird: it’s cool still, it’s quiet, the spiders built their webs overnight and are ready to show them off, and that morning light low on the horizon is absolutely perfect for visualizing webs. Also, the spiders are having their breakfast so you can see lots of predatory action.

Not here, though: I put photos of spiders on iNaturalist and Instagram, and also on Patreon, although it costs a dollar a month to see them there.

If you’ve got the earworm, you can listen to the rest of the song on YouTube. The corn isn’t quite as high as an elephant’s eye though, yet.

I’m not on the side of Boghossian and Lindsay, OK?

Critical Race Theory is simultaneously a profound readjustment of how we see American history, and a trivial, obvious fact. Yes, the United States was founded by genocidal European colonizers who built their country on the backs of African slaves. Yes, the Founding Fathers were philosophical hypocrites who wrote elegantly and beautifully about liberty and freedom and human rights and then went home to rape black women. Yes, that lovely classical architecture and those white pillars were erected on an Indian burial ground by black slaves. Get used to reality and accept it and do something about it.

The only people who reflexively object to Critical Race Theory are the worst and whitest buffoons in the country. So who do we see eagerly marching up to the microphones and cameras to express their dissent from reality? Two representative white atheists with arrogance to spare and a history of whining about “grievance studies,” Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay.

Jesus fuck, it’s embarrassing to be an atheist anymore.

Their ignorance got exposed and ridiculed on air, and now Michael Harriot completes the disembowelment. This is a truly ugly execution. Jimmy and Petey really need to stay at home, hiding under their bed, from now on.

Lindsay and Boghossian are college professors who have turned whitesplaining into an academic field called Grievance Studies. Basically, they propose that social justice is just a bunch of whining from people who don’t want to be held accountable for their lack of agency, unlike our white brethren who are coasting off a quarter of a millennium of privilege and convulse into conniptions at the very mention of this country’s racist past.

That’s just the prelude. Marc Lamont Hill, the man in the middle, let the two insipid fuckwits dig their own graves for 10 minutes. I about died when Lindsay, thinking he was so clever, tried to go on the counterattack and tell Hill that he was made uncomfortable by the word “folk” because Germans used the word “Volk” in Nazi propaganda. What a maroon…but here, enjoy the idiocy for yourself:

Or just savor Harriot’s summary:

So when Lindsay and Boghossian began whitemanning using polysyllabic words to explain why all the negroes are wrong, they had no idea that Hill was a practitioner of the ancient African tradition of knowing what the fuck he’s talking about. The pair filibustered through two segments while Hill patiently allowed them to say the things they made up. When they were done, Hill surprised Pinky and No-Brain with why they would not be able to take over the world with their pseudo-intellectual tripe.

“Of course, we’re running out of time but I’m going to respond just so people don’t think I don’t have a response,” Hill said, before launching into an explanation that Critical Race Theory is only related to Critical Theory in the way that bullshitting is related to having someone slap the shit out of you; it’s not the same shit. They may have known that Hill was the author of six books and holds a Ph.D. in the subject on which they speculated, but they were unaware that Hill also holds the position that can only be described by the things he is not.

He is not one of their lil’ friends. He is not Boo Boo the fool. And, most importantly, if they thought they were going to overwhelm someone with their white-centric Critical Racist Theory, they should have known:

Marc Lamont Hill is not the one.

Bewildered, Lindsay could only respond by saying: “You actually know a lot about this.”

And then, with a smile, Hill invites them to come back on sometime to continue the discussion. He sure knows when he’s got some tasty fish on the line.

This is not a fundraiser — it’s Juneteenth!

You may notice a Juneteenth logo on the left side of the window, where we usually put a link to a fundraising page. This is a bit awkward, because we want to honor and celebrate Juneteenth, but not appropriate it, so we’re taking a low key approach. Various bloggers around Freethought blogs have written or will be writing about civil rights, liberation, justice, all those sorts of things associated with Juneteenth, and I’ll be linking to them on our fundraising page, which is not about fundraising, this time. Look for that to appear tomorrow.

It’s also awkward for us because, well, Freethoughtblogs has no African American bloggers. We used to, but you may have noticed that we have a fair amount of turnover here, with new blogs joining and old blogs departing, possibly because we’re a good place to get started with public engagement, but since we don’t pay our bloggers and we had the recent episode with a jerk trying to silence us with a lawsuit, there’s always the appeal of greener pastures. Also, we’re maybe a little too low key in advertising blogging opportunities — we do have an application process, but it’s subtly buried in the “About FtB” link in the top bar. I should probably do something about that.

Freethoughtblogs is committed to supporting a diverse network of bloggers here. If you’d like to join a socially conscious, diversity affirmative network, let us know!