I am not impressed with your anti-spider bigotry, Science Times

Well, this is a stupid sensationalist headline: New Species of Spider Found in Mexico Able to Rot Human Flesh. Yeah, so? This is a common property of many venoms, such as those in some wasps and snakes, and it makes sense that a spider, which relies on injecting toxins and enzymes that break down cells and tissues, would do so. How else would they slurp out the digested guts of their prey? These spiders have no interest in eating people, or “rotting human flesh”, so it’s an obnoxious way to distort the story.

I can just imagine spider tabloids running stories title “New Species of Primate Found With Large Fleshy Butts Capable of Crushing Innocent Spiders”. It completely misses the story.

Here’s a pic of the lovely beast in question.

It’s called Loxosceles tenochtitlan, and it’s distinguishing characteristic is not that it has a remarkable venom, but that males and females have unique genitals in a lock-and-key arrangement, which is also common in invertebrates.

In a statement released by the university, Valdez-Mondragon explained the difference: “As L.tenochtitlan is morphologically similar to L.misteca, it was initially thought that it had been introduced to this region by the shipping of ornamental plants. But when doing molecular biology studies of both species, we realized that they are different.” Valdez-Mondragon described the species and noted the difference between L.tenochtitlan and L.misteca lies in the male spider’s palp or the organ that enables touch in arachnids. It is also noted that the female L.tenochtitlan has a distinct looking sexual organ compared to L.misteca. Valdez-Mondragon explains that at first glance, the two species of spiders can look identical, but L.tenochtitlan can be identified because of its dark brown color which is dull compared to the other species and on its back is a very visible violin pattern.

The story goes on to claim that “humans are naturally repulsed at the sight of “creepy crawlies” like spiders.”

The Science Times is not one of my approved popular science sites. Too much trash written by people who have only the most passing acquaintance with science.

This man is not a racist

You know he’s not because he says he’s not.

That’s how racism works, you know: if you think a nation founded on black slavery, and another nation that carried out brutal ethnic cleansing, are just peachy, saying the magic words “I am not a racist” absolves you of all blame. You can support policies that promote white supremacy, you can put up Nazi flags like they’re Christmas decorations, you can intentionally put up pallets painted with Confederate symbols and point them at a minority-majority school, but as long as you deny that you’re a racist, you’re safe.

For bonus points, you can get really irate if someone accuses you of being a racist as long as you insist you’re not a racist, and then you can turn it around and accuse them of being racist against white people. What’s really neat-o is that if they then say “I am not racist!” you can smirk knowingly, because you know that everyone who says that is lying.

Words are magic!

But I thought they were the law-and-order party?

Matt Bevin lost the election to the governorship of Kentucky, so in his last few weeks in power he has decided to throw a petty tantrum and release hordes of violent criminals from the prisons. That’ll teach those voters!

Matt Bevin is no longer the governor of Kentucky, but his decisions continued to send shock waves through the state’s legal system this week after he issued pardons for hundreds of people, some of whom committed violent offenses.

Bevin issued 428 pardons since his defeat to Democrat Andy Beshear in a close election in November, the Louisville Courier Journal reported. His list includes a man convicted of reckless homicide, a convicted child rapist, a man who murdered his parents at age 16 and a woman who threw her newborn in the trash after giving birth in a flea market outhouse.

He also pardoned Dayton Jones, who was convicted in the sexual assault of a 15-year-old boy at a party, Kentucky New Era reported.

You know, Kentucky has very strict laws against possession of marijuana, so there are certainly a great many people in the prisons for that crime. Couldn’t he have released them, instead? I would think 428 potheads having parties at home would be far less of a threat to the citizenry than child rapists and murderers.

It’s become quite clear that when a Republican says they’re a law and order candidate they’re lying, just as much as when they claim to be True Christians™. The actual truth of the matter is that they’re just sadists who love the power to torment others.

That’s how the right-wing mind works

In Ohio, the Republicans tried to get that impractical and impossible “let’s just reimplant ectopic pregnancies in the uterus!” ideas enshrined in a law. The problem with that plan is that implantation is a complex biological process that entangles delicate maternal capillaries with equally delicate capillaries in the embryonic placenta — it’s like proposing to stitch two sponges together in perfect alignment. This isn’t a plumbing problem, where you couple a few pipes together and voila, the flow is restored, and further, interruption of the exchange of nutrients between mother and embryo is fatal to the embryo.

Awareness of the scope of the problem isn’t a concern for Republicans, though. Let’s see how the sausage is made.

An Ohio lawmaker who proposed legislation extending insurance coverage to a procedure considered medically impossible as a way of fighting abortion worked closely on the bill with a conservative lobbyist, according to newly released emails.

State Rep. John Becker, a southwestern Ohio Republican, got help from Barry Sheets, a lobbyist for the Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio, as he crafted a measure that’s since drawn international scrutiny for its questionable medical grounding, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported Wednesday.

The bill prohibits insurers from covering abortion services, but provides an exception for a procedure “intended to reimplant” an ectopic pregnancy in a woman’s uterus.

Becker told the newspaper he never researched whether re-implanting an ectopic pregnancy into a woman’s uterus was a viable medical procedure before including it in the bill. Sheets declined comment.

“I heard about it over the years,” Becker said. “I never questioned it or gave it a lot of thought.”

First step: partner up with a fanatical anti-abortion zealot who writes the bill for you.

Second step: Don’t question what they say. You don’t need to understand what the lobbyist wants, and thinking about it is just awkward.

Presto! You have a law legislating the impossible! It sure makes your ignorant electorate happy, though.

I wish I could say we should require better education in biology, and science in general, before lawmakers are allowed to write laws dictating how reproductive biology works, except that there sure seem to be a lot of anti-choice doctors who run for Republican positions. They ought to know better, but they don’t.

Check out our updated roster on FtB!

We’re back on track here at Freethoughtblogs now that we’ve stomped a SLAPP suit into the mud. We’ve streamlined the lineup a little bit, archiving some of the blogs that haven’t been updated in a while (non-judgmentally, of course — their authors can get their blogs reinstated by dropping a note to us.) You can visit any of the listed blogs and find recent stuff.

We’ve also added 4 new blogs, with possibly a few others on the way. You should visit…

  • Andreas Avester. You may have noticed them commenting around these parts, and now they’re doing an art & philosophy & politics & social justice blog.
  • Impossible Me. Another familiar face: Abbeycadabra, writing about social justice, mental health and trans issues, broadcasting from her lair in Canada.
  • From the Ashes of Faith. Megan is a long-time blogger who is new to us, writing about mental health & parenting & atheism, naturally.
  • Scalpen. Raniel Ponteras is coming to us from the Philippines, and will be writing about the history of science and medicine.

We’re open to new applications as well, although it will be several months at least before we do another review. You can read our about page to get an idea of what we’re looking for.

Freethoughtblogs is open to new bloggers, upon approval. To apply, fill out our application form.

Don’t be discouraged if you have little blogging experience; we’re interested in providing opportunities to new voices. If you are inexperienced, we may give you a temporary account on our guest platform to give you a chance to try it out. However, samples of your writing are the most important criterion for acceptance.

What we are looking for: people who can contribute regularly, where “regularly” is loosely defined as at least once a month. We won’t be keeping close track, but we’ve noticed that those who write occasionally tend to easily lapse into those who don’t write at all.

We demand that our contributors are in favor of social justice causes. If you’re not for feminism, or racial equality, or trans rights, you are going to clash with our values and won’t last long here.

We also appreciate diverse voices. Atheism has been and still is dominated by white male voices, and while that is not a strike against anyone, we’d like to provide outlets for others, too.

Self-perception is a very twisty concept

Below is a response to a question on Quora: Why does President Trump move and stand so strangely? I thought it was insightful, because I’ve also wondered why he persists in painting himself orange, why he has such weird candy floss hair, why he constantly makes those strange gestures as he talks. Hasn’t anyone told him that they make him look strange and freakish? I suppose it’s good that one doesn’t feel constrained by fashion, and is bold about facing the world as he wants, but he always seems to act as if he thinks he’s a beautiful, brilliant golden god. This explanation seems more likely.

Trump has some odd ideas about how he appears to the world, obviously. He dyes his skin a strange color, and does some very strange things with his hair. He knows that this makes him a joke in the eyes of the world, which is not the intended effect – he’s vain, thin-skinned and very publicity-conscious. So there’s some weird processing that happens in his head that makes him say “The fake news makes fun of me, but it’s because they’re jealous. Sad! Women want to grab my pussy!”

It’s a kind of dysmorphia, like Michael Jackson turning a perfectly good face into a Phantom-of-the-Opera physiognomic tragedy, while thinking he was getting closer and closer to perfection. Or like the body image of an anorexic, where everyone is saying with increasing urgency that they’re wasting away, and yet they see themselves as not thin enough.

Trump has an inner vision of himself that is exaggerated beyond any version of ‘normal’ – you can extend this to his psychological self-assessment – but in his mind he’s beautiful and sexy and he doesn’t have an alternate self-image. His orange skin and strange hair-art are cleverly covering over his weaknesses, he thinks.

In some degree, this isn’t so uncommon. Men with beards often brush off helpful comments like “Beards are so aging …” because they see themselves as mature and wise, perhaps, and their weak chin and vague jawline as something they feel needs to be hidden from the world. Women with strange Flashdance haircuts originating in the wayback time see their look through the same eyes as when they were 16. They know it isn’t contemporary, but it’s kind of locked in – they ‘look like themselves’ to themselves. When you look at that self-inflicted mess that John Bolton has for a face, you wonder what he thinks he’s playing at, but he’s like Trump – he looks in the mirror and he sees ‘intelligence’, perhaps. Some sort of a cunning disguise for the underlying ordinariness.

Trump takes a set of fashion faux-pas and private beliefs – that orange-dyed skin looks healthier, that his crazy greasy hair is youthful, that long ties make him appear taller and narrower, that suits cut too big hide his bulk and make him appear more impressive – and makes them into his superhero costume, his disguise.

Then he has ritualized ways of moving and posing that are part of the same scheme. You rarely see photos of Trump looking natural. He’s always posing, creating some look that in his own mind is as marvelous as his hairdo. When he sits he likes to get his knees apart to show off everything “down there”, then put his fingertips together between his legs in a sort of steeple, spire pointed down. He was probably told by someone a long time ago that this was an alpha position that symbolically shows that you’ve got a great big penis. When he talks he does that thumb-to-4th-finger thing, a variant of the A-ok sign. It means nothing, he just does it at random, but in his mind it’s an impressive gesture that indicates precision, perhaps, like a chef emphasizing just a soupçon. When he reads a teleprompter he slumps unhappily from one side to the other, tipping his head first this way, then that, like an animatronic figure in a Disney theme-ride. That seems to him to make it more casual, less stiff. When he stands he tilts forward, probably so that his belly isn’t the point of furthest advance, but perhaps for some other semi-magical reason.

It’s all of a piece – his weird look, his weird postures and movements, and his weird exaggerated sense of himself.

PS: I should add, to calm the angry legions of bearded gentlemen who feel they were materially harmed by what I said about beards, that it wasn’t about beards per se but about feedback. If someone says that beards are aging, they’re saying they wish you’d shave. That’s just them, and just you. Maybe all the really sexy ones think you look fantastico!! Who knows??

I picked beards as an example of anything-about-the-way-you-look because I have a beard. Instead of making mock of others I thought “What would Jesus do?” and Jesus would plainly have used a beard, long hair, and a crown of thorns as examples of things that critics might fuss about.

I can sympathize with that. I have my own self-image, and it shocks me every time I look in a mirror or hear my voice — only unlike Trump, rather than a golden god, I see myself as a schlumpy, homely, shambling blob, and the problem with mirrors is that they so accurately confirm my self-portrait.

Also, about beards…their presence or absence is just a thing. I keep mine because I’ve had it for forty years, and shaving it off makes me look so different that it adds an uncanny valley sensation to the expected schlubbiness. Our self-image is strongly built on prior experience and familiarity, you know. Trump likewise is accustomed to looking in the mirror and seeing an orange glow with pale rings around the eyes, capped with a wisp of pink floss. Anything else would seem alien to him.

He’s still creepy.

OK, enough contemplating homely old geezers. Here’s a palate cleanser, a little beefcake to put in your dreams.

Yeah, sure, that’s what all Americans think they look like. Right.

Maybe Dr Seuss was right

I consider myself an adventurous eater — you name it, I’ll try it. However, one thing has always repelled me: Brussels sprouts. Ick. Yuck. I haven’t had them since I was a kid, and even then then it was more a matter of rolling them around on my plate until my parents would give up and let me leave the table.

Well, that cannot stand. I can’t call myself a brave foodie unless I can defeat this challenge. Especially after reading this:

So tonight I made Brussels sprouts and mushrooms with cheese and a side salad.

They weren’t bad. Not the worst thing I’ve made, and I’d be willing to try them again.

Are we screwed? It sure looks like we are.

Classes are over. Christmas is less than two weeks away. I’ve got a month of relaxation ahead of me. So what do I do? Read the most godawful depressing doom and gloom stuff.

Anglo-American society is now the world’s preeminent example of willful self-destruction. It’s jaw-dropping folly and stupidity is breathtaking to the rest of the world.

The hard truth is this. America and Britain aren’t just collapsing by the day…they aren’t even just choosing to collapse by the day. They’re entering a death spiral, from which there’s probably no return. Yes, really. Simple economics dictate that, just like they did for the Soviet Union — and I’ll come to them.

Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are now the pre-eminent symbols of suicidal collapse in the world right now. The core problem, though, isn’t going to disappear if those two were to melt into decaying goo right this instant. They have a network of criminal bureaucrats supporting their regimes. And below those are vast mobs of ignorant rubes willing to vote for them.

We are caught in a death spiral now. A vicious cycle from which there is probably no escape. The average person is too poor to fund the very things — the only things — which can offer him a better life: healthcare, education, childcare, healthcare, and so on. The average person is too poor to fund public goods and social systems. The average person is too poor now to able to give anything to anyone else, to invest anything in anyone else. He lives and dies in debt to begin with — so what does he have left over to give back, put back, invest?

A more technical, formal way to put all that is this. Europeans distributed their social surplus more fairly than we did. They didn’t give all the winnings to idiot billionaires like Zucks and con men like Trump. They kept middle and working classes better off than us. As a result, those middle and working classes were able to invest in expansive public goods and social systems. Those things — good healthcare, education, transport, media — kept life improving for everyone. That virtuous circle of investing a fairly distributed social surplus created a true economic miracle over just one human lifetime: Europe rose from the ashes of war to enjoy history’s highest living standards, ever, period.

I don’t think there is no escape, but this is a generational problem. We’re not going to dig ourselves out of the hole in a single election cycle, that’s for sure, and it’s going to take long term effort at root of our societies to repair it.

The problem is the same problem every democracy faces: demagoguery. For the last 70 years, US politics has been the playground of boogeymen. First it was the Commies, an external threat that led to the construction of the military/industrial complex, stupid wars, and a wasteful build up paranoia and guns. Then in the 60s it switched to an internal boogeyman: race and immigration. It turns out that if you play up a vast imaginary existential threat, you can lead the sheep to slaughter themselves. They’ll dismantle health care and education and social welfare willingly, just on the threat that The Other will benefit. The Republicans have built their base on bigotry, while the Democrats have gone along willingly on the promise of neo-liberalism and do-nothing centrism. The problems just grow and grow, building more generations of ignoramuses who make the problems worse and worse.

And so it goes.

I’d like to think we’ll reach a breaking point and the destruction of our pride and prestige will snap people out of these delusional acts of self-destruction, but they only seem to amplify themselves. Wreck education, and our lead in science and technology crumbles, and you’d think the people would say we need to repair the educational system to catch up…but no, instead they whine that it’s all those liberals coming out of the colleges that are the cause, so they resolve to wreck it more.

And that’s where we stand, thrashing about and chasing all the wrong solutions.

I’m sure there’s a way out. It’ll require some resolve and will, though, and it’s far easier to blame brown people and intellectuals and uppity women.

As soon as I posted this, I discover an excellent illustration of the problem.

Yep. The problem isn’t that we’re busy demolishing our infrastructure and tearing apart the people who make up our society, it’s that we aren’t doing enough to smash those “parasites” and root out the imaginary genetic inequalities. It’s people like Bo Winegard who are killing us all.

The secular predator problem

You probably don’t want to hear a summary of the latest descent into chaos of the atheist community, but in case you do, this is a good one with all the receipts to explain David Silverman’s fuck-up.

If I were to give any advice to David, it would be to say that the path to being a good person is often counter to being an influential and powerful person. He wants the latter, but in light of his terrible assumptions and abuses, the only way forward for him is to accept some humility. He’s never going to be the bold, heroic atheist in the eyes of the people again … but then, most of us never were. We cope.

Spider story time

This is a brilliant idea, in principle. Maybe I need to start reading to the spiders.

Except…no, not Charlotte’s Web. The spider [spoiler] dies at the end [/spoiler]! This is not the inspiration I want to give the spiders. I’m trying to get them to breed, and telling them they’ll die afterwards isn’t exactly a great message.

Maybe I should read them this one.