Really, if religious people made this kind of argument more often, I’d regard them far more charitably.
OK, but personally I regard Mr Rogers as a nice guy and all, but not someone who reflects my attitudes very well. I think I’d have to pray to an unfeeling void, or possibly an arbitrary lethal force that might kill me or allow me to live with no reason necessary.
It’s a valid choice. 🤷♂️
I should be linking to others on FtB more often — there’s good stuff here. I just take it for granted that you’re all looking at the groovy stuff on the sidebar, as I am, so I’ll just mention a few things that jumped out at me this morning.
Of course, if you understand the theory of evolution, you realize his claim is likely to be utter nonsense. Abstract thinking is not a black-white thing; it’s a range of capabilities that, even among people, we see a huge variation in. Any capability with huge variation is subject to selection, and so it can evolve. Since people are descended from earlier ape-like creatures, it is quite believable that non-human animals would also display the ability for abstract thought, in varying degrees. And they do! Ethologists, who actually study this kind of thing, disagree with Egnor. (Also see baboons and crows, to name just a couple more examples.)
Hey, I know my cat is cunningly scheming all the time. She’s lying on a futon next to me right now, and she has all kinds of strategems for tricking me into serving her desires.
You’ve probably heard that the NY Times has been fluffing Hope Hicks, who has been subpoenaed to testify about her former employer, the Trump administration. According to Maggie Haberman, apparently the decision to comply is an “existential question” which can only be answered with some flattering portrait photography. I have a better answer to that question: ask your lawyer, and do what they say. They’ll tell you that noncompliance isn’t an option. This has been a short answer to a stupid question.
Unfortunately, that the “newspaper of record” even considers this a worthy question tells us that the NY Times is not on the side of the people.
The anti-democratic limits on acceptable discourse accepted and propounded by the Times must be opposed. The Times and Haberman and her editors are not worthless. Ignoring the Times is not a principled and logical and effective way to deal with their anti-democratic trolling. Instead, the Times must be countered each and every time they embrace the ideology of an accountability-free elite. We must never forget that the Times isn’t portraying the Trump administration as wise and sympathetic philosophers working to divine the best possible response to problems of Gordian convolution and unsolvability. The upper ranks of the Times (including Haberman and her editors) are portraying the Trump administration as wise and sympathetic philosophers because they, too, believe themselves better off in a world without accountability for the US elite.
It’s easy to condemn Fox News as a propaganda organ for the Republicans. It’s distressing to see that the NY Times is, too.
The latest controversy that is roiling the atheist community is that a YouTuber, Rationality Rules, made a video about transgender athletes that was a seething mass of boiling bullshit — it was wrong on the facts, made up “facts”, cited Joe Rogan as an authority, and made a sweeping (and false) conclusion that women’s sports were about to be overwhelmed by a horde of Y-chromosomes taking hormone replacement therapy so that they could pwn the little ladies and win trophies. It was blatant nonsense, demolished Rationality Rules cultivated perception of being a ‘scientific’ observer, and even he was forced to admit that he got some things wrong, although he’s been slow to confess to specifics. The Atheist Community of Austin, which had recently had him on The Atheist Experience, made a statement repudiating his transphobic comments, and that’s when the shit hit the fan.
Another deep rift has formed, between the people who can clearly see the glaring transphobia in Rationality Rules’ video, and those who have decided that this must be overlooked and forgiven because, dang, he’s such a good atheist defender of reason.
Oh, jesus, we’ve been here before. Somehow being right about one thing, the nonexistence of gods, means you must be right about everything, especially if you hold poisonously regressive views.
Anyway, HJ Hornbeck tries to summarize the chaos (there’s more than one video, an apology video, all kinds of vehement denials everywhere), and he’s right that there is one clear conclusion: Rationality Rules made lots of transphobic statements and assumptions. If you’re arguing against that crystal-clear fact, you ought to turn in your Official Skeptical Atheist card. If you’re arguing that such attitudes are acceptable, please stay on your side of the rift.
I work on a college campus, and I can tell you that we get more diverse political views than are represented on, say, Fox News. Public display boards are plastered with that Turning Point USA bullshit. The College Republicans routinely bring in speakers with inane points of view — anti-abortion, pro-religion, anti-environmental crap that I despise. If I, a left-leaning college professor at a liberal arts college, have no power to silence right-wing stupidity, then how can you claim that we have so much censorship power? If you’re so in favor of free speech, why do you complain about students using their free speech to protest?
Well, somebody understands that there is no free speech crisis on college campuses, at least.
“Chilling” is the word used in the Washington Post headline to describe college students’ supposed hostility to free speech. A new poll appears to indicate that 20% of college students believe it is appropriate to use violence to shut down hateful or offensive speakers. Thanks to a carefully orchestrated campaign, the notion that universities are hostile to the free exchange of ideas is slipping into mainstream opinion. It is a phony crisis manufactured by the same people who fuel the engines of climate denial. Right wing activists and donors are fighting to undermine universities because their values cannot thrive there. Modern conservatism is failing on campus because it shrivels in an atmosphere of intelligent, open debate.
That’s right. I do think if a speaker comes on campus to advocate for violence against certain groups, then we shouldn’t tolerate the intolerance, and they should be told to go speak at a Klan rally instead, and that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to pelt them with milkshakes as they’re safely escorted away. That does not mean that we oppose a diversity of ideas…it means that doing harm will not be supported.
The idea that this reasonable assumption of non-destructive behavior is somehow “chilling” is a product of people like the Koch brothers or Dennis Prager or Charlie Kirk. They’re the ones who run the propaganda mills that are trying to shut down the free exchange of ideas and replace them with slavish dogmatism. They aren’t even very good at that.
More interesting than the flaws in the poll’s execution is the buried lede: the poll failed. Look behind the absurd headlines and the poll demonstrates the opposite conclusion. College students are much more open to free speech than the general public. If it’s “chilling” that 20% of college students misunderstand free speech, what word should we use to describe the quarter of the American public and almost half of Republicans who support censoring unfavorable media outlets. Also from this poll, the college students who identified as Democrats were more open to free speech than their Republican peers. And perhaps the most important lesson from these poll results: a carefully constructed poll can get a small minority of respondents to endorse almost anything.
The real problem is that a majority of college students have outgrown the reactionary Old Guard, the 1950s mentality that is crumbling away as the white majority recedes into an angry, resentful minority. Women outnumber men. The assumption of privilege is under assault.
What is really happening on college campuses? Young Americans, exposed to some of the most intellectually open environments that have ever existed in a human society, are rejecting the values of The Last Jim Crow Generation to an almost unanimous extent. This trend extends beyond politics. Younger Americans are making better, smarter, more morally admirable choices than their parents and grandparents in almost every respect. Today’s college students are less likely than their forebears to use illegal drugs, smoke cigarettes, or engage in dangerous or irresponsible sexual practices. They are less likely to get pregnant or marry early. Younger Americans are better informed, more tolerant of dissent, and less bigoted than older generations. They even have higher average IQ’s. Our political system is about to be rocked by a wider generation gap than we faced in the Sixties.
We should be proud that a younger generation is turning out better than we were, but no — instead, rich fucks just want to poison the well of new ideas. We have an opportunity here, to encourage people who could repair the damage my generation has done, don’t let the cowering guardians of the status quo burn it all down.
For everyone who still worships the sacred ideal of debate…
This Memorial Day, I learned that the very first Memorial Day was a remembrance by freed black slaves in Charleston, South Carolina in honor of the union dead. That seems like a significant fact we weren’t taught in school.
It bears reminding, too, that our soldiers fought a major war to end the Nazi threat. A lot of people have forgotten that swastikas were once trophies taken from a fallen enemy, not something to celebrate today.
My wife and I traveled to St Cloud, Minnesota today, where the Veterans of Foreign Wars were putting up a new monument. It was a surprise for her. My sons had gotten together and donated to have her father’s name, Robert Gjerness, put on the monument: he was a Minnesota native who had served as a Marine Raider in the Pacific War, and had fought some of the fiercest battles there, like Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. He didn’t talk much about it, but he’d let his grandchildren play with his box of medals, and they have fond memories of their grandfather, who died a few years ago.
We remembered.
It’s the least we can do.
Snapchat has this new gender swap feature, where it will modify your photo by applying filters to fit certain gender stereotypes. I do not use snapchat, and this one feature does not interest me at all, so I haven’t tried it (but I’m sure I’d be lovely if I did).
But then I ran across this: 99 D&D Female Character Art Pieces. They’re fabulous! Some amazing art in there. For a moment, though, I felt that twinge of regret that I, a male, am not represented at all in that collection.
(Pause for a moment to give all the women out there a chance to smirk and say “Oh you poor dear. Now you know how it feels, white man.” Fair enough.)
But then I had an idea: forget Snapchat, can you gentlemen find a gender-swapped version of your ideal D&D self in that collection? Mine was easy to spot — I couldn’t be that lean, grim warrior archetype. This would be me:
Your turn. Link to your fantasy gender-swapped self-image in the comments.
Here’s an equivalent Fantasy Art Males page so the women can play, too!
Case in point: that time when human fat was a valuable commodity.
Whether procured from plant, animal, or human sources, in one form or another fat has been an important element in the European pharmacopoeia since ancient times. For reasons that are not quite clear, a medicinal interest in human fat was especially pronounced in the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1543, the physician Andreas Vesalius instructed anatomists who boiled bones for the study of skeletons to carefully collect the layer of fat “for the benefit of the masses, who ascribe to it a considerable efficacy in obliterating scars and fostering the growth of nerves and tendons.” Vesalius knew what he was talking about. At the time, human fat was widely considered—and not just by “the masses”—to be efficacious in healing wounds, and was typically harvested from the recently deceased. In October 1601, after a particularly bloody battle during the Siege of Ostend, Dutch surgeons descended upon the battlefield to return with “bags full of human fat,” presumably to treat their own soldiers’ wounds.
Yikes. Let’s go kill some people, and then smear their bloody greasy bits on any injuries we might receive. I’d normally think that shooting medics was an evil act, but what do you do when you watch their doctors descend on your friendly fallen to rip out their guts?
Once you got home, you’d find there was an active trade in the bodies of executed criminals, and any other dead people they could get their hands on, to sell in the local drugstore.
The wise druggist kept large supplies of human fat (Axungia hominis) on hand alongside numerous other solids and liquids derived from human corpses, a class of materia medica known as “mummy.” If fortune smiled on the fat trade when the rate of executions increased, it would have been positively beaming during the Terror days of the French Revolution. According to some reports, certain Parisian butchers started offering their customers an exciting new item: graisse de guillotiné, supposedly procured from the corpses of the freshly executed.
I wonder if Walgreens has any in stock? In a capitalist economy, creating a demand for graisse de guillotiné might actually make billionaires worth something to humanity.
Back in the early 1990s, I lived in King of Prussia and worked in North Philadelphia, at Temple University. It was a hellishly bad decision to live there, but we had had to find an apartment from a long distance away, and all the information we had to go on was that King of Prussia had excellent schools for our kids, and so we ended up living next door to the biggest mall in the country. That was bad enough, but the killer was the commute. I’d have to get up at 5am, very quietly so as not to disturb the kids, have a light breakfast, and then go catch a bus for my voyage down the River Styx Schuylkill Expressway.
There’d often be some downtime — gosh, I’m ready, but I’ve got 20 minutes to catch the bus. It’s not as if I could get any work done. My eyes would be glazed, I’d be sucking down coffee with trembling hands, I’d sit as one lost in the desolation of hell. So I’d flip on the TV, with the volume down low. There was nothing on at that hour but cheesy infomercials and one thing: Kenneth Copeland, or as I liked to think of it, the Creepy Puppet hour.
It was perfect for my state of mind. I was too tired to manage any kind of coherent thought, but Kenneth didn’t provide any. What he did do, with his beady little eyes and leather skin, was provide a mesmerizing exhibition of weird random facial expressions: smiling by making a huge toothy grimace, glowering by scowling and lowering his eyebrows that his eyes almost disappeared, and changing his expression at a manic pace with almost no association with the point he was making. I thought of him as a creepy puppet because when you’ve watched him a while, you begin to realize that there’s no one there, that there’s an alien persona or personas inside his head trying to mimic human responses, and thinking they’ll be more convincing the more extreme they are.
Years later, I’d get the same impression from Andy Serkis’s performance as Gollum. This is what a psychopath looks like, trying to pass as normal in public.
Now you can watch the same alien in action. A reporter from Inside Edition caught him between flights on his expensive private jet and asked him some questions about his lavish lifestyle. It’s horrific watching the animatronics struggling with limited, but exaggerated, expressions and phrases to talk with a human.
I never watch Kenneth Copeland’s gospel show anymore. I no longer need to get in the right frame of mind for a commute on the Schuylkill. Praise the Lord!
Every state has a little Florida Man in it. In Wenatchee, Washington, Cameron Wilson was carrying a gun in his front pocket — we’re already in the territory of Bad Ideas — when it went off and sent a bullet ripping through his testicles.
Upon arriving at the hospital, a doctor was operating on the gunshot wound when a balloon of marijuana slipped out of Wilson’s anus, court records show, according to the report.
So he was smuggling marijuna in his rectum, in a state where marijuana is a legal drug. That’s just brilliant.
I grew up in the lush, cosmopolitan, progressive Western side of Washington, and it’s terrible to say, but Mr Wilson is representative of how we saw the Eastern half of the state, which was the domain of conservative ranchers, feral teenagers, and a thriving drug trade. And now, there’s a proposal to split Washington in two! It makes sense at a cultural level — East and West are very different places — but it makes no sense at all that Eastern Washington would want it. They’d lose all the economic benefits of sharing resources with the wealthy Puget Sound region, and they’d no longer be able to check the more progressive policies that come out of Seattle. They’d be a poor, arid, politically weak rump of a state.
Worse, the proposal is coming from Matt Shea, a Christian Identitarian who wants to wage Biblical war on sodomites, atheists, communists, and heretical Christians (“Biblical war” means, to him, killing any man who resists and taking their women and children as slaves), and who was divorced for spousal abuse, and who organized and led a hate group in Spokane. He’s completely wackaloony.
Shea claims his breakaway state of Liberty would rival Texas in prosperity
. Except, or course, that Eastern Washington lacks oil or a seaport or much of anything in the way of industry or trade. They do have cows. And sagebrush. Pretty scenery. Rocks.
Oh, and real estate and a massive nuclear waste site.
And though Liberty would have far fewer people, it would gain national political clout and rival or surpass many other Western states in population and wealth. It would be larger than Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. It would continue to capture billions of federal dollars to clean up the Hanford nuclear site.
It’s also populated with people who shoot their balls off. The kind of people who would vote for Matt Shea.
No matter how blatantly Nazi-like they are, they’ll find it useful to deny. Don’t let them get away with it.
