Not the agnostics, too!

I got a message today about a corner of the internet with which I was unfamiliar — I post it here after doing minimal investigation on my own. I really don’t want to get sucked into another rift.

Hi Prof Myers,

Not sure if you’re aware, but the Admin (and creator) of Agnostic.com (which is mirrored @ humanist.com) has been revealed to be also the creator of slug.com (the IDW site) – and after his outing on their Community Senate group, he posted to confirm and promised to ‘answer all questions in the morning’.

I am (or was) a level 8 at Agnostic.com – which means regular poster over nearly 2 years. There are no levels 10s. There is a small handful of level 9s.

I updated my profile this morning to remove all identifying elements and change my bio to explain my reticence to be involved anymore – and my account was instantly – like, instantly suspended. Looks like an algorithm to suspend.

I think that shit is going to go down now at agnostic… I hope so. It would be interesting if you know more including who he is? Admin created a ‘David Silverman’ group a while back and tried to get him socially reinstated – bringing him in at a level that everyone else has to earn through time and contributions. That got shot down by the members, and David left again very quickly.

I’m a bit surprised that anyone wanted David Silverman in that group. For years, his message has been that there is no such thing as agnostics (or humanists, for that matter) — they’re all just closet atheists who need to come out. Why would you want to bring in someone, without even considering their recent scandalous history, who was antagonistic to the premise of the group?

I had not looked into agnostic.com before — I’m not antagonistic towards them, but personally disinterested — so I had a peek, and saw that it’s a fairly typical social media site covering a wide range of topics. The format seemed disorganized, a real hodge-podge, but OK, again not my thing, but fine for those who wanted that particular community.

I hadn’t even heard of slug.com before, so again I took a look. It’s obvious that agnostic.com and slug.com are using the same exact software. Then you take a look at the topics…hoo boy.

So “Biblical Christianity” is a place for for friendly, helpful, and honest discussions of Christian subjects, while Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, and they’re Laughing at the Hateful Left? As for their Intellectual Dark Web bona fides, here is their ‘about’ page which incoherently declares simultaneously that they are a non-political social community based on open inquiry, the free exchange of ideas, intellectual curiosity, honesty, and responsibility, and that they believe in conservative values and that The IDW is liberalism, as that concept is meant philosophically. Oh boy. “Classical liberals”. Where have I heard that line before?

Oh well, the assholes have staked out another domain under the banner of godlessness. Disappointing.

The grift, oh the grift

Last Fall, there was a conference held in London, the Sovereign Nations conference. The ‘star’ speakers were Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay, so you already know where this is going — the “grievance studies” whiners got together in London to howl at the moon and complain about how they were losing the culture war. The twist here is these were atheists gathering under the leadership of a Christian Nationalist group led by Michael O’Fallon. Curiously, I first heard about this event because Richard Dawkins endorsed it, because apparently he’s a big fan of Boghossian and assumed that anything he was willingly entangled with would be part of the godless agenda. Unfortunately, Sovereign Nations is more focused on Christian conservatism, opposing immigration, complaining about the World Health Organization, and hating George Soros. I guess the Boghossian/Pluckrose/Lindsay trio are willing to overlook their association with an organization dedicated to Catholic dominion because they share a mutual contempt for social justice. If you must, you can read an account of their conference. Or you can read Godless Spellchecker’s live tweeting of the con (curiously, there’s also a strong association between Sovereign Nations and the Mythcon asstwinks.)

They’ve since moved on to creating a new blog, New Discourses, with those three prominently featured; right now, Lindsay seems to be providing most of the content, if you really need a day of reading bad writing and bizarre logic. The discombobulating thing is that New Discourses is Sovereign Nations media, owned by Michael O’Fallon, who wants to promote conservative Christian Nationalism, and yet these arch-rationalist/skeptics/self-proclaimed liberals are willingly associating themselves with the religious right.

It’s a somewhat surprising fellowship until you recognize that there are two things that unite them: a hatred of social justice, diversity, and racial equality, and…MONEY. They’ve been bought and paid for by O’Fallon.

Boghossian and Lindsay were both managers at New Discourses.

This is remarkable. It’d be like discovering that Freethoughtblogs was sponsored by Jerry Falwell Jr, and that I was being paid under the counter by Liberty University. You’d know instantly that there was something more to our agenda than what we were openly stating, and you’d instantly see a mass exodus of our bloggers. Yet Boghossian and Lindsay still claim to be objective rationalists and secularists and part of the atheist movement while being propped up by a Catholic zealot who promotes conspiracy theories and hydroxychloroquine.

Aaron Rabinowitz provides an excellent analysis of these repulsive bedfellows and their filthy philosophical positions and the Kama Sutra of twisty rationalizations they use to bring them together on the Embrace the Void podcast. Listen to that…it’s a mind-boggling hour of revelations. Did you know that the pandemic is a social justice warrior conspiracy to take over the country?

A sad announcement from Ed Brayton

Ed Brayton and I had some contentious disagreements back in the day, but we managed to put all that behind us and set up the Freethoughtblogs network with a mutual understanding that we needed something beyond the atheist movement, some kind of organization that would support diversity and social justice and not just tearing down religion. He named the network — we agreed that we didn’t want “atheist” anywhere in our label, even if we were effectively an atheist group, because even then the word was getting tainted — and he and I together made the initial investment in the site. We owe a lot to Ed.

Unfortunately, he’s also suffered from serious health problems over the years, and left the network he built to run a blog on Patheos. This was an amicable decision with zero drama behind the scenes or in front of it — he just decided that he couldn’t cope with the day-to-day chores of management, and just wanted a space where he could write with no pressure.

His health has worsened. He’s been in and out of hospitals for a while. People have been asking me how he’s doing, since his postings have become intermittent, and I don’t know either! Unfortunately, he just posted this to Facebook:

I’m giving up and calling in hospice. I just can’t do this anymore. To those who know me in real life I love you and I’m sorry. I did my best.

He always has done his best, and he will be missed.

Looking for Argiope in West Central Minnesota

Sorry, but I didn’t include the photos here, which are all closeups of great big hairy spiders with bold coloring. The complete illustrated story is on Patreon, and the photos are on two posts on Instagram.

Mary and I went on a little spider hunting loop yesterday, looking for Argiope. We took a southeastern route, heading off to Swift county, then detouring a bit south to clip through Chippewa county, then due east to Kandiyohi, and finally north and back west through Pope county to home. Our strategy was simple: drive through farm country on state and county roads, keeping an eye on the ditches that parallel all roads around here. When we saw lots of grass and brush filling the ditch, and when there was a safe place to pull over in the car, we’d stop and stroll about, looking for webs.

We really needed an “I Brake for Spiders” bumper sticker, because we were probably annoyingly slow. Good thing the roads were nearly empty!

One catch to this approach is that good grassy roadsides were scarce. Apparently, good Republican farmers have little to do and lots of tractors, so they trim everything. Have you ever seen a drainage ditch that looks like a manicured lawn? We did, everywhere. The best places had 1-2 meters of grass, where we’d walk in and be in the weeds to chest height or over our head. Actually, the best places were nature preserves and restored prairie.

We persevered, though, and found Argiope in every county we visited. They’re common, but they really don’t seem to like the kind of place where big bipedal mammals frequently bumble around. Living near people is OK, but they better not ever come over to visit.
So here’s one from Swift county:

Classic Argiope aurantia. Big, black and yellow, and a meter wide orb web with stabilimentum zig-sagging down the center.
Chippewa county is the emptiest place we visited, lacking any large towns and consisting of nothing but farms. They do have Argiope aurantia, though.

Kandiyohi county is kind of the inverse. It does contain one big town, Willmar, which was right in the way of our route, and Argiope does not like cities much. We finally found one as we were driving away by our usual expedient of pulling into farm access roads where the residents weren’t overzealous lawn fanatics.

We’d actually planned to hit up a couple more counties, but the weather turned grim, all gray and rainy. Even as I write this I’m listening to thunder. We’d decided to skip a northern loop of our drive and go home through Pope county, where we found Argiope trifasciata in a nature preserve.

One cool thing about this one is that there were two other webs in the same little patch, only a few centimeters away, and they were occupied by males, hopeful consorts I would guess.

We’re going to do it again next weekend, aiming for a western and northern loop, passing through Big Stone, Traverse, and Grant counties. Also on our list is another trip to the Ecostation in Ottertail county.

One rule for you, one for me

Did you hear the one about social media having a liberal bias? Yeah, right.

Facebook has allowed conservative news outlets and personalities to repeatedly spread false information without facing any of the company’s stated penalties, according to leaked materials reviewed by NBC News.

According to internal discussions from the last six months, Facebook has relaxed its rules so that conservative pages, including those run by Breitbart, former Fox News personalities Diamond and Silk, the nonprofit media outlet PragerU and the pundit Charlie Kirk, were not penalized for violations of the company’s misinformation policies.

Misinformation is OK if you are a Republican. Better yet, it’s the breath of life for those asshats. Oh, and bite me, Facebook.

In related news, never buy anything from Teespring. They’re fine with selling merchandise with swastikas, but don’t you dare add a rainbow to it. They’ll yank the hippie-dippy love & peace apparel from their product line, but if you want a black t-shirt with Nazi symbols all over it, no problem.

Teespring, which is owned by KA Design, says it didn’t sell any of the design and didn’t profit from it. In a video on its Facebook page, KA Design said the swastika is thousands of years old and is a symbol of peace, love, life and other ideas. But the Nazi party corrupted that symbol, the company added.

“[T]hey stigmatized the swastika forever. They won. They limited our freedom. Or maybe not? The swastika is coming back,” the video said.

Sure, Nazis corrupted it and made it representative of their hateful ideology. That’s a significant part of its history now. It ain’t coming back until everyone forgets WWII and the Nazis and the Holocaust, so everyone can just stop playing stupid and stop pretending that shameful blight on the world never existed.

Reminder: we’re playing Minecraft tomorrow at noon central time

I announced a group game on Sitosis the other day, and I have noticed a surge of enrollments on that server this week. Uh-oh. There might be a few problems.

  • There are rules for joining and playing on the server. Make sure you read them!
  • If you want to make a last-minute application to join, be kind to the admins, who have to individually approve each application. If you haven’t already joined, it’s probably too late to get in for tomorrow.
  • The server has a limit of 20 simultaneous log-ins. I didn’t think it possible we’d get that many users, but from the number of new users, we might. If we hit the limit, we’ll just have to do an additional session later this week.
  • If 20 people sign on before I do, well, the livestream will go on and it’ll just be me talking over a blank screen. Exciting!
  • We’ll use the Freethoughtblogs Discord server for voice chat. That might get interesting, with me trying to monitor that, the YouTube chat, and the game, all at the same time.

I have some trepidations that this might all disintegrate into total chaos. We’ll see how it goes. We like to experiment, right?

My mission for the day

I have received a mission request from iNaturalist. I have chosen to accept it. It did not self-destruct after I read it.

Records of Argiope aurantia (Yellow Garden Spider) and Argiope trifasciata (Banded Garden Spider) for 2020 started getting posted a couple of weeks ago. These two species are some of the most photographed spiders in Minnesota thanks to the female spider’s habit of sitting in her web in sunny locations like prairies and gardens. These species are easy to distinguish from one another and no other orb weavers match either their size or bold patterns.

Last fall the members of this project joined forces to find 13 new county records for Argiope aurantia and 12 new county records for Argiope trifasciata. But we still haven’t recorded these species in every county in Minnesota so I’m throwing down the gauntlet once again! Can we make these two species the first two spiders known from every one of Minnesota’s 87 counties?

The following 35 34 counties have no records of Argiope aurantia:
Aitkin, Beltrami, Big Stone, Carlton, Cass, Clearwater, Cook, Crow Wing, Grant, Houston, Hubbard, Itasca, Kanabec, Kittson, Koochiching, Lake, Lake of the Woods, Mahnomen, Marshall, Meeker, Mower, Murray, Nobles, Otter Tail, Pennington, Pine, Polk, Pope, Red Lake, Redwood, Roseau, St. Louis, Swift, Traverse, Wadena

The following 34 counties have no records of Argiope trifasciata:
Aitkin, Benton, Big Stone, Cass, Clearwater, Cook, Dodge, Fillmore, Freeborn, Goodhue, Hubbard, Itasca, Kanabec, Kandiyohi, Koochiching, Lake of the Woods, Mahnomen, Marshall, Martin, McLeod, Mille Lacs, Morrison, Murray, Norman, Pennington, Pope, Red Lake, Roseau, Sibley, Steele, Swift, Todd, Wadena, Wilkin

I’ll update this post as new county records get established. Happy spidering! (yeah, that’s a thing!)

You know what this means — ROAD TRIP! I noticed that West Central Minnesota counties are largely represented on the list. In my region, only Stevens (where UMM is), Douglas (where the larger city of Alexandria is), and Stearns (St Cloud) have had records for these species. Mary and I figure we can hit up 3 or 4 neighboring counties and make a small dent in that list today, and get out and explore at the same time. We might also squeeze in our local grocery run and have a picnic. We can’t lose!

We made a trial run last night, just here in Stevens county. We found lots of Argiope just in the grassy ditches that run alongside the highways around here, so this ought to be easy. If any of my fellow Minnesotans in more distant counties want to join in, please do.

If you don’t know what these spectacular spiders look like, I posted some photos on Patreon and Instagram.

Antici…pation

All baby spiders are now accounted for, but I may not be done yet. There are two more egg sacs awaiting the emergence of more hordes of spiders in the lab, and the only thing that might be sparing me right now is the temperature. The science building is at 18°C right now, which is cruel and wasteful, but it’s been that way all summer, I don’t know why. I have to go home now to thaw out — my fingers are just frigid. The rest of me is OK, because this is how I dress in the lab now, in August.

It’s nice to have an excuse to wear my spider sweater in the summer, but still…

Also the hat is necessary to control my pandemic hair, so I can’t blame that on the physical plant.

Wait, you didn’t want to see a picture of me, you wanted to see a sexy photo of a mama spider and her great big egg sac? OK, I put it on Patreon and Instagram. Trust me, the spider is beautiful and maternal, despite having to deal with an unusually chilly environment.