George Pell missed an opportunity

In 2016, Pell wrote an essay titled “A wise reply to atheism’s strongest argument”. It gets off to a bad start — don’t brag about how wise your answer is before you’ve even given it — but it gets even worse.

You might be wondering what atheism’s strongest argument might be, and I’ll cut to the chase: Pell thinks it’s the argument from evil. Personally, I don’t find it very compelling or interesting, because it presupposes a god whose purposes we’re supposed to be arguing over, but OK, I can see where a Catholic would find it relevant. And then…this is child rapist George Pell. I would think he’s spent a lot of time contemplating evil, rationalizing evil acts, fantasizing about evil, condemning evil people, practicing evil. He’s an evil authority! If anyone is going to be an expert on justifying how god would allow evil to persist, it’s a devout evil-doer who has to be having an interesting internal monologue on the acts he has committed.

Evil and suffering constitute the most formidable argument against monotheism, for those who believe in the existence of one good and transcendent Creator God.

So I settled down to read a challenging argument about how a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient being could co-exist with evil in his personal hand-made universe, and boy was I disappointed. The entirety of his argument is one paragraph. One short paragraph. Most of the essay is namedropping philosophers and theologians and explaining how the resurgence of atheism should jolt us out of our silence and indifference because oh, this is such an important question, and isn’t suffering such a wonderful gift from God yadda yadda yadda. The Catholic bullshit gets thick in there.

But here is the one paragraph which purports to answer the whole Problem of Evil.

I believe that the intellectual arguments now available to be drawn from biology (the discovery of DNA) and from physics and chemistry and the fantastic improbabilities necessary for evolution from the Big Bang to humans, mean that the rational or metaphysical path to the Supreme Intelligence is easier for us than in the past. Thinkers are coming to God from or through science.

It’s lies and nonsense through and through, and it isn’t even relevant to the question.

The intellectual arguments from biology and physics and chemistry are all about the fundamentally natural properties of our universe. They don’t say a god did it; they say chemistry happens whether a god wills it or not. The probability argument is not an answer to the evil argument, and you can’t use improbability to claim that the current state of life couldn’t possibly arise without design and purpose. Also, the more science you’ve got in your life, the less need you have for silly mythology, so no, with few exceptions, scientists aren’t suddenly flocking to church every Sunday.

This isn’t what I’d be interested to hear from Pell. God did wicked things; George Pell sexually molested 13 year old boys. Is he going to claim that DNA and physics and chemistry and biology compelled him to force his penis into a child’s mouth? That it was fantastically improbable that he was wracked with sexual obsessions, therefore God must have made him do it? Save it for the trial defense. I’d like to hear how a man who thinks he is good can commit gross, unforgivable crimes.

Maybe I should just read Dostoevsky instead.

Jacob Wohl: In the running for dumbest person on the internet

Fresh off his trip to make up lies about Minneapolis, Jacob Wohl crawled back under the rock he came from, but not before giving a big interview to USA Today. He gloated about the Minneapolis trip.

He flew to Minnesota last week to “investigate” the rumor that Somali-American Rep. Ilhan Omar married her brother, a mission for which he tried to fund-raise $25,000 from his online followers. Wohl’s trip to the heartland devolved into bizarre tweets in which he suggested that Minneapolis was so overrun by Somali jihadists that he had to wear a bulletproof vest and travel with a team of “security professionals.”

That isn’t the big news, though. The important thing he did was to brag about creating multiple fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook in order to intentionally undermine the next presidential election with fake news.

No, really.

He bragged about his secret operation to corrupt a federal election to a widely read newspaper. There is stupid, and then there is Jacob Wohl stupid. The result was inevitable: he’s been permanently banned from Twitter.

Twitter banned notorious Trump supporter Jacob Wohl from its platform on Tuesday, alleging that Wohl broke the site’s rules against creating fake accounts.

Wohl’s ban came hours after he boasted in a USA Today interview about his plans to create fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook, which he said would be used to manipulate the 2020 election.

“The account was suspended for multiple violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically creating and operating fake accounts,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Daily Beast.

Wohl had already created several fake accounts before he was banned, according to a source familiar with Wohl’s activities on Twitter. Wohl told USA Today that he intended to use the accounts to help Trump in the 2020 election, pushing Democratic primary voters to back weaker candidates who would be easier for Trump to defeat in the general election.

He’s still on Instagram and Facebook — Facebook, because it is notoriously the worst social media site for enforcing even its ineffectual rules, worse than Twitter, if you can believe that. I suspect he doesn’t care about the ban anyway, because he was creating fake accounts…so he’ll just create more fake accounts. He’ll have his friends create fake accounts. There is no credible authentication on any of these sites. And so the manipulation will continue.

It’s possible he’s not the dumbest person on the internet, just one of the least ethical.

“Truly I say to you…you will deny Me”

George Will is what passes for an intelligent man on the conservative side, I suppose, but wow, but religion twists his brain into a pretzel. His latest illogical argument is about the Bladensburg cross. This thing.

He thinks that the Supreme Court should rule that this is not a religious symbol. His arguments for this are, well, fucking stupid.

It was for reasons of traffic safety that the government in 1961 acquired the ground on which the Bladensburg cross sits. If, 58 years later, a few people in this age of hair-trigger rage choose to be offended by a long-standing monument reflecting the nation’s culture and traditions, those people, not the First Amendment, need help. The court should so rule when, sometime before this term ends in June, it announces its decision in this case, as the nine justices sit beneath a frieze that includes a symbol of religion: Moses with the Ten Commandments.

Bladensburg last had the nation’s attention because of the shambolic events of Aug. 24, 1814. President James Madison fled from there, where feeble American resistance enabled British soldiers to proceed to torch the president’s house and the Capitol. At Wednesday’s oral argument, the court, sitting across the street from the Capitol, can begin to tidy up its establishment clause jurisprudence that Justice Clarence Thomas correctly says is “in shambles.”

Here’s the enlightened reasoning he uses to arrive at this counterfactual conclusion.

  • It’s just the Outrage Brigade complaining. They “choose to be offended”, so they should just not choose that way. Only people who take Christianity for granted have voices that count.
  • It’s tradition. Yeah, so? Slavery was a tradition, too. That something was done one way in the past does not entail that it must be done in the same way for eternity.
  • It’s passive. No one is going to be converted just by walking past a cross, which is true, but that’s not the concern. This is on government land. It sends the message to everyone that the government favors one religion over another.
  • Honoring the war dead is a secular purpose. Sure, it’s even a humanist purpose. But what matters here is how they’re honored. Would Will make the same argument if the symbol were an inverted pentagram instead of a cross? No, he would not. He would freak out that the dead were being honored with sacrilege…to him.
  • There are other Christian symbols in government facilities. Yep. That’s not an argument for keeping others, it’s an argument for tearing them all down. Or, if they’re artistically worthy, neatly excising them and transferring them to private hands.
  • Circumlocutions. Many defenders are referring to this as a “cross-shaped object”, as if that passively removes all religious context. If I say a statue is only shaped like a winged demon osculating the hind end of a goat, that doesn’t abruptly turn it into an abstract, neutral object that would make no heretical impression on a passing Christian.

The whole thing is ridiculous. This cross was dedicated as an explicitly Christian symbol.

Representative Stephen W. Gambrill of the Fifth Maryland District delivered the dedication address, in which he stated: “You men of Prince Georges County fought for the sacred right of all to live in peace and security and by the token of this cross, symbolic of Calvary, let us keep fresh the memory of our boys who died for a righteous cause.”1 An invocation was given by Rev. A.J. Carey, pastor of St. Jerome’s Catholic Church. Rev. B.P. Robertson, pastor of the First Baptist Church pronounced a benediction.

For a court that claims the intent of the authors of the Constitution must be respected to suddenly pretend that the plain intent, clear symbology, and openly stated purpose of a giant Christian cross can be disregarded so they can maintain a dishonest pretense is absurd to an extreme degree. This is Christian conservative hypocrisy.

But I’m a pragmatist. I’m willing to compromise. I’m willing to cut George Will and other fanatics some slack and let them have their obvious Jesus monument if they’ll concede that we can reinterpret the Second Amendment to mean that only official military organizations of the US government are free to bear arms. You know, that’s less insane than putting on a pious act that a Christian symbol of Calvary is nothing but two sticks at right angles to one another.

Also, hey, George Will: read Matthew 26:34.

All right, what do I need to do to get a woman to look at me like this?

If I have to wear a dress, I’m willing — it’s a small price to pay. I’d also be flattered if I got a man to look at me like that.

In my case, I think it’s going to take a heck of a lot more than just a skirt, sad to say.

Oz and Phil are a disgrace to their titles

I despise “psychics”, so I’m happy to see John Oliver go after them. He makes a very good point, too, that those media personalities like “Dr” Oz and “Dr” Phil who cheerfully endorse psychic quackery on their shows are just as evil.

It wouldn’t be John Oliver if they didn’t have a gimmick. This time, they’ve set up a website with their “psychic”. Go ahead, get a reading. It’s just as accurate as John Edward.

Catholic Child Rapist Pell convicted

Finally. It’s been revealed that Cardinal George Pell is officially a convicted child rapist.

Cardinal George Pell, one of the most senior figures in the Catholic Church, sexually assaulted two 13-year-old choirboys at a cathedral in the Australian city of Melbourne 22 years ago, according to a verdict by an Australian jury in December that has been suppressed by a gag order until now.

Details of the assault are at the link, I’d rather not repeat them.

Celebrate the conviction by playing this song LOUD. It’s a lovely catchy piece of music, and now it’s especially appropriate.

Now to print a few of these out and post them around the science building…

It’s hard to recruit students for research projects when you’re off on sabbatical. I’ve got one lined up so far, but I have ambitious plans for the summer and would like to get one or two more, so I’ve put together a recruitment poster.

Maybe I should have used a scientifically accurate close-up of a spider face instead of something bright and cartoony, but I have to get them into the lab first. Then they’ll learn to love our new arachnid reality.

Oooh, I’m a disruptor now!

Cool, I’m on this podcast, The Disruptors. According to the blurb, this is what we talked about.

  • The problem with religion and creationism clouding public discord
  • Why evolution is so important to understand and how conservatives have created fake doubt
  • How embryos evolve and why understanding the stages is actually quite important
  • Why PZ’s more than a little worried about CRISPR and genetic engineering
  • The truth about Gattica and designer babies
  • Why Buddhism’s not much better than other religions in PZ’s book
  • How religion came to be and why we’re still a long way off from eradicating it
  • Why fake news mirrors religious beliefs and is caused by many of the same human flaws
  • What scientists should learn from preachers and priests
  • How to think about education and reforming communitiies
  • Why the world is so divided and what we can do about it
  • The science of gene testing and why we know a lot less than we think we do

I’m old, my memory is going, I don’t remember everything we talked about, but apparently it was everything. You be the judge, let me know what I got wrong.

Also, for those of you into podcasts in general, I’ll be on Philosophers in Space later this week, despite being neither a philosopher nor in outer space. I’ll let you all know when that drops.

And the Oscar goes to…

Congratulations to the Best Picture! At least it wasn’t Crash.

I didn’t watch the Oscars. Instead, I watched Roma on Netflix during the ceremony. It was a tough sell — the movie I’d seen before this one was Alita: Battle Angel, so the contrast was shocking. Cleo doesn’t battle a single cyborg even once in the whole show. It was also a long slow build, with the interminable beginning just being the floor getting washed and other mundane tasks by a young housekeeper in a Mexican home.

Also, in this one I wouldn’t have minded the dog getting shot. No one ever played with Borras, but he was always pooping on the floor, and anytime the door was opened they had to yell at the help to hold the dog. He was just another chore for Cleo.

But the movie may be a slow build, but it becomes increasingly affecting, and it deals with how the working poor have to cope with emotional trauma that is far more common and damaging than robots on roller blades. Roma isn’t a popcorn movie, and it’s the kind of movie where every frame is supposed to be art, but I think I spent my evening well.

What if Snow Crash was actually a documentary?

The novel Snow Crash analogized human minds to computer operating systems and suggested that they could be just as susceptible to bad code, like a mind virus. There’s a lot to like about the idea, but the book takes it very literally and has people’s brains being wiped and taken over by a mere brief exposure to a potent meme…which is ridiculous, isn’t it?

Maybe it would take repeated exposures to do that.

We’re doing the experiment right now. Facebook has these “content moderators”, a job farmed out offsite to groups of people who are required to view hours of atrocious content on a tightly regimented schedule built on the call center model. They don’t get to escape. Someone posts a video of someone being murdered, or of a naked breast, and they have to watch it and make a call on whether it is acceptable or not, no breaks allowed. No, that’s not quite right: they get 9 minutes of “wellness” time — they have to clock in and clock out — in which they can go vomit in a trash can or weep. It sounds like a terrible job for $29,000/year. And it’s having lasting effects: PTSD and weird psychological shifts.

The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.”

Maybe Clockwork Orange was also a documentary.

It’s not all horrifying. Most of the work involves petty and mundane complaints from people who just don’t like what other people are saying, a domain where the principle of free speech applies. The company, other than the routine fact that it’s run by micromanaging assholes, is above average in how it treats its workers (which tells you what kinds of horrors are thriving under capitalism everywhere else, of course).

Everyone I meet at the site expresses great care for the employees, and appears to be doing their best for them, within the context of the system they have all been plugged into. Facebook takes pride in the fact that it pays contractors at least 20 percent above minimum wage at all of its content review sites, provides full healthcare benefits, and offers mental health resources that far exceed that of the larger call center industry.

And yet the more moderators I spoke with, the more I came to doubt the use of the call center model for content moderation. This model has long been standard across big tech companies — it’s also used by Twitter and Google, and therefore YouTube. Beyond cost savings, the benefit of outsourcing is that it allows tech companies to rapidly expand their services into new markets and languages. But it also entrusts essential questions of speech and safety to people who are paid as if they were handling customer service calls for Best Buy.

I think part of the problem is that we treat every incident as just another trivial conversational transaction, yet that is the least worrisome aspect of social media. There are obsessives who engage in constant harassment, and this approach just looks at it instance by instance, which means the obsessive simply has to escalate to try and get through. It ignores the possible of planned maliciousness, where organizations use the tools of propaganda and psychological manipulation to spread damaging ideas. You check one of their memes, they simply reroute around that one and try other probes with exactly the same intent. No one can stop and say, “Hey, this is coming from a bot farm, shut it down at the source” or “This guy is getting increasingly vicious toward this girl — kill his account, and make sure he doesn’t get another one”. It’s all about popping zits rather than treating the condition.

As long as Facebook and Twitter and Google persist on pretending this is a superficial symptom rather than a serious intrinsic problem with their model of “community”, this is a problem that will not go away.