I am not sure which is more problematic, the fact that prominent atheist scientists are purporting to speak for the majority of us, or the fact that they will be used by the ChristoNazis to say "see, even your side agrees with us about our current boogeymen."
Even though Dawkins, Krauss, Coyne, et. al. are full on transphobes now and beginning to lean into the racism, I would hope that they can realize that the Christian Nazionalists just see them as useful idiots and back away from being so public with their bigotry.
PS: Dawkins defending transphobic trolls: fuck right off, this is the only engagement from me you get.
We just had the Nazis in Iowa pass legislation (and sign into law) that removes Gender Identity from our Civil Rights statutes.
Aime Wichtendahl, Iowa's first elected trans person, gave an impassioned speech on the House floor, only to have it fall on mostly deaf theofascist ears. https://youtu.be/e5BmebxmA2w?si=t0d4W1nfgHn_rrzE
Aime - and the entire LGBTQ+ community - needs our help, before it's too late:
Like a pack of bullies against one. The dehumanisation of LGBT folks is evil and makes me want to honestly give up and call our species a lost cause.
The one per cent we should be focusing on are the ruling class - the Musks and the Trumps - billionaires who secretly despise us and make our lives a misery. Think it was Laverne Cox who said: 'Trans people aren't the reason you can't afford to buy eggs. We're not the reason why you can't afford to rent or buy a home. You're focused on the wrong one per cent'.
That was an incredible speech, and I applaud Aime Wichtendahl for her bravery in standing tall in the face of discrimination and hate. Thank you for sharing.
Dawkins is so uterly hateful. A new atheist movement is desperately needed right now. There's an organisation for black atheists in the US, which is all good - but the fragmentation makes me sad. Now is the time for unity.
They are all damaged goods. I know what happened to Dawkins (stroke) but the rest I suspect a variety of insults. All of the necessary and cherished institutions of Liberal Western Civilization are under attack- and these evil idiots come riding in to bayonet the corpse.
Agree with the negative assessments of Krauss & Dawkins, I was forced to watch them on youtube anytime I visited family. I couldn’t stand Dawkins, so arrogant and disrespectful. The NA types made me squirm. Regardless of them, I’ve been set in my religious views since I became an atheist at 9yo, when the lesson I learned was “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Nothing to do with religion tho, what happened to Jerry Coyne? I was really bothered when his name came up as a transphobe, yuck. His ideas on generational trauma helped change my life. I got results from research that led to helping me become the happy person I am today.
I used to have some respect for Coyne until I actually dealt directly with him. He's a logical fallacy machine in search of sycophants for his cult of personality.
Coyne falling in with the transphobic intellects was news for me, but of the "Of course" variety. His "Biology is not Bigotry" piece tacitly defending transphobia is an appeal to science/nature. In reality, bigots cherry-picks biology because all the science does not matter. The All Lives Matter crowd doesn't believe All Science Matters.
My theory is they are all this way because they are old and no longer significant, but they still find relevance within their former enemies. Dawkins is now a "cultural christian." That's because large swaths of the humanist community won't engage with him. I absolutely do not believe his stroke has anything to do with how he treats transpeople, because all the NuAtheists are just banal reflections of each other. Shermer, Pinker, Krauss, Coyne, CFI. They all had strokes that turned them antitrans? No! When they say "Science doesn't care about your opinion," what they mean is I don't care what you think. They are all ivory tower elitists. And no longer worth our time. My admiration ended when they started punching down.
I am glad for you that Coyne's ideas on generational trauma has helped you. But that Coyne has been spent (sorry, couldn't resist). When Cosby was revealed as a sexual predator and rapist, I was stunned. It took me a while to deal with it. Growing up, I enjoyed his shows, but I came to the realization that Cosby doesn't provide me with anything that cannot be found elsewhere. There are a lot of great comedians that aren't sexual predators. I can still enjoy Good Omens because Terry Pratchett wasn't a sexual predator. I do like Sandman, but it's tainted. However, Gaiman isn't the only great writer out there. A bunch of others don't come with baggage. You can appreciate the information Coyne provided. However, in the end, Coyne was just the messenger, it's what you did with the information that ultimately matters. In life, you will find a lot of teachers, and you will always outgrow them; you should always outgrow them. It's good to be grateful for them, but it will always be you that put the work in.
Thank you so much for your reply, Sean your comment means a lot to me. I stopped paying attention to those men after I broke up with the family narcissist. I wonder if she is still firmly in the Dawkins camp…
You're welcome. I'm glad to help in some small way.
Wondering is always natural. I've often thought about people I've fallen out with. In the case of my ex-gf, I have the katana scar to remind me of a decision well made.
Pinker has always been full of himself. "Western Civilization" is a code word for White Supremacy, and apparently Pinker finds no problem with that. He's probably secretly a fan of Charles Murray. Pity we can't go see his office and look through his book shelves....
I used to admire Pinker, more from the halo effect of being part of CFI, which was founded by the likes of Carl Sagan and James Randi. But that halo is severely tarnished and damaged. That's why I left CFI.
I would not be surprised if he was a eugenicist. He may not intend to be, but results are what matters. If the results don't match your intentions, then you're doing something wrong.
I don’t know why you think atheist scientists (or any scientists) are purporting to speak for anyone other than themselves. Just because someone shares their opinion, that doesn’t extend any further than that person. The voice of a single white man certainly isn’t unanimous for all white men, so why should an atheist scientist be any different? Let’s all start looking at facts as facts, regardless of who is saying them. Just because Biden says d or did something, doesn’t automatically mean it’s good or right. Not everything Trump says or does is bad or wrong. We have to stop being so partisan that we can’t evaluate individual topics based on data and reality, and not cloaked in the boogeyman of the person saying it.
A good reason for being atheist is you arrived at it through deep thought and reason. Sometimes I assume everybody’s like that, but they’re not, some become atheist because they were lazy and didn’t want to bother with theocracy. Others, someone along the line got to them and indoctrinated them into an atheist concept, but not through reason and deep thought.
The If Books Could Kill podcast has a two parter on Pinker and The Better Angels of our Nature. Well worth listening. It's a fairly nuanced analysis of Pinker and his book.
I'll read your article tonight when I'm at work. After a quick perusal, I look forward to it.
Their book about the war on science seems to be more about their own war on human decency. They should stick to pure science, because once they get outside their discipline, their expertise drops off sharply.
"In a February 2018 article describing allegations that "range from offensive comments to groping and non-consensual sexual advances",[53] BuzzFeed reported a variety of sexual misconduct claims against Krauss, including two complaints from his years at Case Western Reserve University"
Damn. I knew that Krauss had gone over the hill and Pinker along with him, but Boghossian? Bloody hell. Once again, people whose thoughts I once admired have been scratched, and the right-wing nut job underneath has been revealed.
It IS a Monday, though, so I guess it figures... 😝
There is a literary concept that can be applied here, I think. It's called "death of the author". It is where the meaning of a text is not dependent on the author's intentions, but on the reader's interpretation. We can still respect some of their ideas, while acknowledging that they are garbage humans who forgot to apply their methods to themselves. It's how I can still enjoy Harry Potter while detesting the TERF that wrote it.
True. Seems as though we've run onto a LOT of that lately, and it's not encouraging. I'm still an atheist and a liberal and a THOUGHTFUL progressive (I think there are SOME progressives out there who have all but lost their minds!), and I mean to stay that way.
Thankfully we still have peeps like Aron Ra, Matt Dillahunty, and Seth Andrews ... I HOPE!
I don't think we will lose them. They all came out of the fundie rabbit hole. They know what's there, and deliberately shed the anti human rights positions.
I read a comment on Facebook yesterday a woman going off on Progressive liberals… It’s like they live in a fantasy world that was made up for them. They spent the last 40 years dealing with liberal Progressive who have been their friends their neighbors, held the door open for them, stopped on the road if they needed help. Felt like they were safe and reliable neighbors even with their children and all of a sudden they are the demons and evil in their lives. They now hate half of America. Until I retired I was the only liberal regional manager in my company we would meet back in Cleveland and I was always hearing… Are you sure you’re liberal? I would respond, yeah I’m a typical liberal. Some would want to argue with me. What we are seeing today is a good explanation of how somebody like the Jews could so quickly be demonized for politics.
Some people separate the art from the artist. My approach is no POS can provide anything that I can't get elsewhere. Cosby isn't the only comedian, and Krauss and et. al, aren't the only scientists. They are no longer significant and find relevance in the arms of their former enemies. Funny how that worked out.
Their 'war on science' has real 'war on Christmas' vibes, doesn't it? This book should be called "Never Ending Festivus: A Perpetual Airing of Grievances."
Sounds like nothing but the usual whingeing from chronically aggrieved old white guys afraid of losing their hegemony and clout. It shouldn't surprise anyone they've found a new home among the perpetual victim class on right wing.
But I see nothing about any real problems facing science, scientific research, and especially the accurate communication of science information to the public. Put this baby in the Blowhard's Hall of Shame.
how many were fired at NOAA, or the EPA? What happens in hurricsne season? What happens when pollution laws are relaxed and snow is grayafter a nour? Or glittery sht flots in the air?
What happens when the H5N1 virus mutates to become airborne and easily transmissible to humans? Most reputable scientists think we're only one mutation away from that disaster.
Disaster? It may be more of an apocalypse. Childhood diseases we haven't seen in decades will be back with a vengeance thanks to the brain-dead antivaxxers, and there may not be enough immunogolists left to develop and produce enough vaccines against either those, or the next H5N1 mutation. "The Stand" was supposed to be fiction, not a forecast.
It's heartbreaking to see scientists and their support staff who worked their asses off during COVID to research and produce a life-saving vaccine in record time treated like shit by this current administration. The first time around, the Orange Orc disparaged their efforts by calling the pandemic a hoax and then by not even deigning to recognize their Herculean efforts. This time around, he installs Bobby Brainworms as their agency head, and allows the Blue White Sack of Whale Intestines and his Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turds to rampage through their agency and fire hundreds of staffers for "underperformance." Those left are terrified, demoralized, and dangerously short-staffed in the event of another widespread outbreak.
Those civil servants fired from other agencies, from probationary employees to experts who spent years working for modest salaries to help keep the country running, did not deserve this shameful treatment either. Imagine being locked out of your building by a gang of obnoxious over-privileged frat boys and learning that these assholes had fired you for no reason except that they could. The POTUS and the Blue-White Sack of Whale Intestines couldn't even be bothered to do the deed themselves, so they sent in the hired help.
These mass firings will cripple the country and the economy for certain. It may also end up killing millions of American citizens. The sad thing is, not all of them will be MAGAts.
I always put it this way: there is not one thing that has gone wrong with your life that has anything to do with transgender people existing, flourishing, or living in their lives. Not one.
Transgender people do not affect the price of eggs.
Transgender people are not invading foreign countries.
Transgender people are not a nuclear threat.
Transgender people don’t affect the price of gas.
Transgender people are not canceling free speech or free elections.
Transgender people are not crippling the government, firing large numbers of people, or endangering Social Security and Medicare.
I saw an interview with some American In charge of some sports organisation or other. They asked him how many athletes were in his organisation and he said 400,000+. They then asked him how many trans athletes there were – 10. So even if the idiots are right about trans athletes, it's hardly a huge problem– More of a moral panic in my view.
And it should be judged on a case by case basis, by scientific experts in athletics, it should never be a concern for laypeople who know nothing about trans person who have not gone through puberty, and the minute differences between them and a cis girl.And let all the kids play sports together regardless. I hate that the republicans use it to divide all of us women trans and cis.
While belief in a Supreme Being is correlated with other irrationality, it is not the cause, as these fine minds demonstrate. One can disavow religious convictions and still fall prey to petty grievances and work that into a lather of hate.
Many years ago now, Dicky Dawkins published the now-infamous "Dear Muslima" letter- the gist of which was that women in progressive Western countries should sit down and shut up about misogyny and abuse because elsewhere in the world women have it worse.
The irony of him whinging and crying persecution over being told off for his bigotry, all these years later, is thick enough to fucking drown in.
“Not sure why any author would duplicate a title, especially when the first book actually covered the same topic in far more depth than this one.”
I know why. It’s so that folks will be confused about which one is reputable and buy theirs by mistake. And since one of the writers had a hand in the first book, they can ride on the legitimacy coattails of that book. I don’t know why they’d expect scientific thinkers to be duped so easily, but since they were themselves easily manipulated to be awful, I’m sure they just assume everyone else is.
Seriously?!? They wrote an entire book just to say they hate brown people, LGBTQ people, and women. They’ve already told us all this every time they open their mouths. Not a one of them has been able to hide their bigotry for decades now. This book is just an expression of their grievances over being held accountable for their actions and lies. Wah wah wah. Too bad, so sad.
* Being a peeping Tom is not quite the same but I don't know anything more accurate. How would you call jerry fartwall junior watching his wife being fucked by another man ?
Voyeur exists in French but “Se rincer l'oeil” had a broader meaning, watching porn is “se rincer l'oeil”. In a vanilla context, voyeur is watching people without their consent.
Prayer won't help the plane's airspeed or altitude, nor will it enhance the brains of the pilot or copilot. And anyone whose ever flown will tell you: lose any two of those three, and the third one won't matter for long.
Regarding the death of science and what is killing it - I was interacting with a post on a fb group I’m in about a “study” by Moms Across America. The group I interacted with is I Require This to be Satire. The Moms group is a group supposedly concerned with the health of children in the USA and they test food for heavy metals and poisons. They focus on school lunches and apparently Girl Scouts cookies. The subject of their current study is the cookies and Joe Rogan talked about their study on his podcast. Moms was upset that USNews didn’t accept the report at face value because it wasn’t peer reviewed. It also had a small data size, the cookies were from only a few states and their claim was 100% were contaminated. I popped onto Moms website and looked at their impact report to see where they’re getting money and stuff. What I saw was that RFK Jr was their biggest influencer. Also, there was language that was dog whistling about transgender children even though the group focuses on food safety their language is quite right wing culture war driven. They also had a small”health market” on the website, offering so called healthy alternatives to the types of products they “study” like pesticides and seed oils and vitamins. Not that having endorsement by Joe Rogan isn’t enough of a red flag, but these few things I four with only a few clicks on their website. Savvy as I am, I don’t expect many folks to even know where to look for RFK Jr. let alone understand the dog whistles on the site.
Anyway, most the people commenting on the Moms fb post directly were all about cancelling Girl Scouts cookies, but the most concerning aspect was the brushing off of the lack of peer review. (This is where the anecdote ties in with the subject matter of the article) Most people on the right believe the authors of this book because they don’t understand the scientific process. They think peer review is just a way to make money, like the folks running a study just pay others to sign off on the study and then its conclusions are now “true”. Rather than the rigorous review of the entire process that peer review is. It might actually be the way certain studies are peer reviewed for greedy corporations and right wing think tanks, but it isn’t not how honest science is conducted. Honest science that finds the reality of diversity in science to be beneficial to discovering answers, and that using updated language clarifies reality, and pretty much all the crap these morons are lamenting is ruining science. This dumbing down of the scientific method, corrupting it with payoffs, pretending bigotry is merit based, and so on is what is destroying trust in science. It isn’t allowing other voices to be heard, other viewpoints to study, correcting old arguments or refining language to fit the current understanding and not tolerating criminal behaviors (sexual harassment and assault).
These men aren’t the cutting edge of science anymore, and that’s on them for ending their curiosity and learning. If they were before, they did it for themselves for the benefits it provided them, to have followers fawn over their every breath, to be the first person folks turn to fame and fortune. But once they’ve gotten these things, they stopped being actual scientists. They started saying things to get their name in lights, rather than what is real. They stopped learning about new findings, new information, new ways of doing or thinking or living. What is the real war on science is the incuriosity of the incurious people leading the scientific community.
It is Girl Scouts cookie time. Support the scouts if you can.
We already know GS Cookies aren't good for you. That doesn't change the fact they're delicious and so far it seems like they support a decent organization for children. But they support diversity and inclusion, so of course they're hated by the right
News that I expect to surprise no one here: I checked the list of authors/editors at the top of the article, and yes, they are all aging white men who at least seem to be hetero and cisgender.
This new book certainly seems to be little more than whining from a previously more privileged group about how said group should get its status back. We've all heard some of the comments from various bigoted tech individuals talking about how they won't marry outside their ethnicity, and we know most of those fields are still very much favor men over women and white over brown. Those DEI initiatives were barely scratching the surface, and pretending otherwise is just an exercise in denial. Seems to me what we get out of this new book is just a list of old white men who really need to check their privilege.
The issue with women in tech starts much earlier than that. Girls are subtly (mostly) discouraged from Math and science as early as elementary school. Then as they progress they're faced with an increasingly unaware sexism by males who are used to only interacting with other males in these environments and don't think about the fact that their ribald jokes and other behavior might be offensive (much less why).
At least that's what it seems like from my experience and perspective.
Oh yeah, I was told by one supervisor in the Army that my mechanics score on the ASVAB was my worst score. My only response was to state that it might have been, but it was still higher than his best score. He was lying to try to convince be to be a secretary rather than a mechanic so I would quit showing him up.
I'm well aware. If my dear now deceased parents had started encouraging me in the Algebra I was taking waaaay back when instead of pushing the "obedience" and "women are intended to be a help-meet for their men" I might have managed an actual career somewhere in the tech field. Sure, Mom and Dad told me several times "oh honey, you can do whatever you want!" but against that religious message of "the only good woman is an obedient woman" I struggled pretty hard with the mixed messages.
Women and persons of color in STEM fields often have to be at least twice as good at them to be considered half as competent. The worst thing these authors and editor are doing is pretending that the 'merit' system of the past was ever anything resembling fair.
TELL me about it. Who knows how many smart talented women who could have reached for the stars and made a difference never even had a chance to try, because of the condescending, entrenched sexism that repeatedly told them not to worry their pretty little heads about all that 'techinical stuff.' Why, the poor little things might hurt themselves.
Only in the last decade or so. I was raised in a fairly misogynistic environment, with a lot of talk about women's equality, but not much action.
In my late 20s my father (non-custodial parent) told me if I'd been born a woman, I'd have the option of having some guy get me pregnant and support me, but since I'm a man, I'd have to work for a living.
Grace Hopper. But history is not really part of the STEM curricula. So what little gets mentioned is heavily subject to the White-male-het-cis washing.
That's too bad, hearing that computer science isn't a white male field could push POC and white women towards careers they discard because white men. There is still hope, after all modern medicine, for some of its short history was once a white male territory too.
I am not sure which is more problematic, the fact that prominent atheist scientists are purporting to speak for the majority of us, or the fact that they will be used by the ChristoNazis to say "see, even your side agrees with us about our current boogeymen."
Even though Dawkins, Krauss, Coyne, et. al. are full on transphobes now and beginning to lean into the racism, I would hope that they can realize that the Christian Nazionalists just see them as useful idiots and back away from being so public with their bigotry.
PS: Dawkins defending transphobic trolls: fuck right off, this is the only engagement from me you get.
We just had the Nazis in Iowa pass legislation (and sign into law) that removes Gender Identity from our Civil Rights statutes.
Aime Wichtendahl, Iowa's first elected trans person, gave an impassioned speech on the House floor, only to have it fall on mostly deaf theofascist ears. https://youtu.be/e5BmebxmA2w?si=t0d4W1nfgHn_rrzE
Aime - and the entire LGBTQ+ community - needs our help, before it's too late:
https://aimeforiowa.com
Like a pack of bullies against one. The dehumanisation of LGBT folks is evil and makes me want to honestly give up and call our species a lost cause.
The one per cent we should be focusing on are the ruling class - the Musks and the Trumps - billionaires who secretly despise us and make our lives a misery. Think it was Laverne Cox who said: 'Trans people aren't the reason you can't afford to buy eggs. We're not the reason why you can't afford to rent or buy a home. You're focused on the wrong one per cent'.
The one per cent are the takers
That was an incredible speech, and I applaud Aime Wichtendahl for her bravery in standing tall in the face of discrimination and hate. Thank you for sharing.
Here's my testimony from earlier that day. I made a Nazi cry, which brought me a bit of joy.
https://youtu.be/ETLlwMp9ojg?si=Wra1LLKcp7kQTTvw
Standing O, Joe!! Thank you for your courage in using your voice for those who are being othered by a pack of bigots. 🙌🙌🙌
Awesome!
It's always a good day when you ruin a Nazi's day!
OUTSTANDING, Joe! Kick ass and take names!
Awesome, dude! Can you imagine them shutting down one of their nazi sympathizers who suggested they can legally arm themselves?
Thank you Joe! Where do we follow you to learn the skills you mention?
Now she will be a target for harassment and abuse, and even threatened with violence.
I suspect that's already been the case.
Bigots never wait for permission.
She has been for far longer than I've known her.
Wow! That was just freaking BRILLIANT! Me 'at's off to Aime, big-time!!!
Dawkins is so uterly hateful. A new atheist movement is desperately needed right now. There's an organisation for black atheists in the US, which is all good - but the fragmentation makes me sad. Now is the time for unity.
They are all damaged goods. I know what happened to Dawkins (stroke) but the rest I suspect a variety of insults. All of the necessary and cherished institutions of Liberal Western Civilization are under attack- and these evil idiots come riding in to bayonet the corpse.
Dawkins was an ass before his stroke.
But I do enjoy the 2 books I mentioned. And JK Rowling is another mean ass who wrote beautifully.
I think Dawkins has been high on his own supply for a quite a while. Likely, true of his Pity Poor Me knitting circle as well.
Agree with the negative assessments of Krauss & Dawkins, I was forced to watch them on youtube anytime I visited family. I couldn’t stand Dawkins, so arrogant and disrespectful. The NA types made me squirm. Regardless of them, I’ve been set in my religious views since I became an atheist at 9yo, when the lesson I learned was “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Nothing to do with religion tho, what happened to Jerry Coyne? I was really bothered when his name came up as a transphobe, yuck. His ideas on generational trauma helped change my life. I got results from research that led to helping me become the happy person I am today.
I used to have some respect for Coyne until I actually dealt directly with him. He's a logical fallacy machine in search of sycophants for his cult of personality.
Coyne falling in with the transphobic intellects was news for me, but of the "Of course" variety. His "Biology is not Bigotry" piece tacitly defending transphobia is an appeal to science/nature. In reality, bigots cherry-picks biology because all the science does not matter. The All Lives Matter crowd doesn't believe All Science Matters.
My theory is they are all this way because they are old and no longer significant, but they still find relevance within their former enemies. Dawkins is now a "cultural christian." That's because large swaths of the humanist community won't engage with him. I absolutely do not believe his stroke has anything to do with how he treats transpeople, because all the NuAtheists are just banal reflections of each other. Shermer, Pinker, Krauss, Coyne, CFI. They all had strokes that turned them antitrans? No! When they say "Science doesn't care about your opinion," what they mean is I don't care what you think. They are all ivory tower elitists. And no longer worth our time. My admiration ended when they started punching down.
I am glad for you that Coyne's ideas on generational trauma has helped you. But that Coyne has been spent (sorry, couldn't resist). When Cosby was revealed as a sexual predator and rapist, I was stunned. It took me a while to deal with it. Growing up, I enjoyed his shows, but I came to the realization that Cosby doesn't provide me with anything that cannot be found elsewhere. There are a lot of great comedians that aren't sexual predators. I can still enjoy Good Omens because Terry Pratchett wasn't a sexual predator. I do like Sandman, but it's tainted. However, Gaiman isn't the only great writer out there. A bunch of others don't come with baggage. You can appreciate the information Coyne provided. However, in the end, Coyne was just the messenger, it's what you did with the information that ultimately matters. In life, you will find a lot of teachers, and you will always outgrow them; you should always outgrow them. It's good to be grateful for them, but it will always be you that put the work in.
Thank you so much for your reply, Sean your comment means a lot to me. I stopped paying attention to those men after I broke up with the family narcissist. I wonder if she is still firmly in the Dawkins camp…
You're welcome. I'm glad to help in some small way.
Wondering is always natural. I've often thought about people I've fallen out with. In the case of my ex-gf, I have the katana scar to remind me of a decision well made.
Pinker has always been full of himself. "Western Civilization" is a code word for White Supremacy, and apparently Pinker finds no problem with that. He's probably secretly a fan of Charles Murray. Pity we can't go see his office and look through his book shelves....
I used to admire Pinker, more from the halo effect of being part of CFI, which was founded by the likes of Carl Sagan and James Randi. But that halo is severely tarnished and damaged. That's why I left CFI.
I would not be surprised if he was a eugenicist. He may not intend to be, but results are what matters. If the results don't match your intentions, then you're doing something wrong.
I don’t know why you think atheist scientists (or any scientists) are purporting to speak for anyone other than themselves. Just because someone shares their opinion, that doesn’t extend any further than that person. The voice of a single white man certainly isn’t unanimous for all white men, so why should an atheist scientist be any different? Let’s all start looking at facts as facts, regardless of who is saying them. Just because Biden says d or did something, doesn’t automatically mean it’s good or right. Not everything Trump says or does is bad or wrong. We have to stop being so partisan that we can’t evaluate individual topics based on data and reality, and not cloaked in the boogeyman of the person saying it.
Just because someone is an atheist, it doesn't follow that they have a rational world view.
Sad fact.
A good reason for being atheist is you arrived at it through deep thought and reason. Sometimes I assume everybody’s like that, but they’re not, some become atheist because they were lazy and didn’t want to bother with theocracy. Others, someone along the line got to them and indoctrinated them into an atheist concept, but not through reason and deep thought.
Speaking of Steven Pinker, over on Quora, I once wrote on why I consider him to be overrated as a public intellectial.
https://www.quora.com/Is-Steven-Pinker-totally-overrated/answer/Jim-Farmelant
We taught The Language Instinct in an undergrad Linguistics class in the late 90s. I could feel Pinker's ego dripping from the text.
The If Books Could Kill podcast has a two parter on Pinker and The Better Angels of our Nature. Well worth listening. It's a fairly nuanced analysis of Pinker and his book.
I'll read your article tonight when I'm at work. After a quick perusal, I look forward to it.
Their book about the war on science seems to be more about their own war on human decency. They should stick to pure science, because once they get outside their discipline, their expertise drops off sharply.
"In a February 2018 article describing allegations that "range from offensive comments to groping and non-consensual sexual advances",[53] BuzzFeed reported a variety of sexual misconduct claims against Krauss, including two complaints from his years at Case Western Reserve University"
As we already saw, they have troubles with pure science too when transgender people are concerned.
But biology is not bigotry.
However, bigotry cherry-picks biology.
#AllScienceMatters
Damn. I knew that Krauss had gone over the hill and Pinker along with him, but Boghossian? Bloody hell. Once again, people whose thoughts I once admired have been scratched, and the right-wing nut job underneath has been revealed.
It IS a Monday, though, so I guess it figures... 😝
There is a literary concept that can be applied here, I think. It's called "death of the author". It is where the meaning of a text is not dependent on the author's intentions, but on the reader's interpretation. We can still respect some of their ideas, while acknowledging that they are garbage humans who forgot to apply their methods to themselves. It's how I can still enjoy Harry Potter while detesting the TERF that wrote it.
True. Seems as though we've run onto a LOT of that lately, and it's not encouraging. I'm still an atheist and a liberal and a THOUGHTFUL progressive (I think there are SOME progressives out there who have all but lost their minds!), and I mean to stay that way.
Thankfully we still have peeps like Aron Ra, Matt Dillahunty, and Seth Andrews ... I HOPE!
I don't think we will lose them. They all came out of the fundie rabbit hole. They know what's there, and deliberately shed the anti human rights positions.
I don't think so, either. I've met both Aron and Seth and was very impressed with their ease, friendliness, and good nature.
I read a comment on Facebook yesterday a woman going off on Progressive liberals… It’s like they live in a fantasy world that was made up for them. They spent the last 40 years dealing with liberal Progressive who have been their friends their neighbors, held the door open for them, stopped on the road if they needed help. Felt like they were safe and reliable neighbors even with their children and all of a sudden they are the demons and evil in their lives. They now hate half of America. Until I retired I was the only liberal regional manager in my company we would meet back in Cleveland and I was always hearing… Are you sure you’re liberal? I would respond, yeah I’m a typical liberal. Some would want to argue with me. What we are seeing today is a good explanation of how somebody like the Jews could so quickly be demonized for politics.
We tend to want to beatify great artists and authors, but sometimes amoral shits make great art - or 'The God Delusion' or 'The Blind Watchmaker'...
Some people separate the art from the artist. My approach is no POS can provide anything that I can't get elsewhere. Cosby isn't the only comedian, and Krauss and et. al, aren't the only scientists. They are no longer significant and find relevance in the arms of their former enemies. Funny how that worked out.
These people are the History Channel of the science community.
Boghossian started publishing hoax/fake papers in 2017.
+++
Their 'war on science' has real 'war on Christmas' vibes, doesn't it? This book should be called "Never Ending Festivus: A Perpetual Airing of Grievances."
Sounds like nothing but the usual whingeing from chronically aggrieved old white guys afraid of losing their hegemony and clout. It shouldn't surprise anyone they've found a new home among the perpetual victim class on right wing.
But I see nothing about any real problems facing science, scientific research, and especially the accurate communication of science information to the public. Put this baby in the Blowhard's Hall of Shame.
how many were fired at NOAA, or the EPA? What happens in hurricsne season? What happens when pollution laws are relaxed and snow is grayafter a nour? Or glittery sht flots in the air?
What happens when the H5N1 virus mutates to become airborne and easily transmissible to humans? Most reputable scientists think we're only one mutation away from that disaster.
Disaster? It may be more of an apocalypse. Childhood diseases we haven't seen in decades will be back with a vengeance thanks to the brain-dead antivaxxers, and there may not be enough immunogolists left to develop and produce enough vaccines against either those, or the next H5N1 mutation. "The Stand" was supposed to be fiction, not a forecast.
It's heartbreaking to see scientists and their support staff who worked their asses off during COVID to research and produce a life-saving vaccine in record time treated like shit by this current administration. The first time around, the Orange Orc disparaged their efforts by calling the pandemic a hoax and then by not even deigning to recognize their Herculean efforts. This time around, he installs Bobby Brainworms as their agency head, and allows the Blue White Sack of Whale Intestines and his Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turds to rampage through their agency and fire hundreds of staffers for "underperformance." Those left are terrified, demoralized, and dangerously short-staffed in the event of another widespread outbreak.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/17/nx-s1-5300052/federal-employees-layoffs-cdc-nih-fda.
Those civil servants fired from other agencies, from probationary employees to experts who spent years working for modest salaries to help keep the country running, did not deserve this shameful treatment either. Imagine being locked out of your building by a gang of obnoxious over-privileged frat boys and learning that these assholes had fired you for no reason except that they could. The POTUS and the Blue-White Sack of Whale Intestines couldn't even be bothered to do the deed themselves, so they sent in the hired help.
These mass firings will cripple the country and the economy for certain. It may also end up killing millions of American citizens. The sad thing is, not all of them will be MAGAts.
A new Black Death thanks to RFK jr. (Asshole of All Maladies).
We can call it Captain Trips.
They want people to die. Its a major plank in their platform.
I always put it this way: there is not one thing that has gone wrong with your life that has anything to do with transgender people existing, flourishing, or living in their lives. Not one.
Transgender people do not affect the price of eggs.
Transgender people are not invading foreign countries.
Transgender people are not a nuclear threat.
Transgender people don’t affect the price of gas.
Transgender people are not canceling free speech or free elections.
Transgender people are not crippling the government, firing large numbers of people, or endangering Social Security and Medicare.
I saw an interview with some American In charge of some sports organisation or other. They asked him how many athletes were in his organisation and he said 400,000+. They then asked him how many trans athletes there were – 10. So even if the idiots are right about trans athletes, it's hardly a huge problem– More of a moral panic in my view.
More of a “burn the witch” type of problem.
And it should be judged on a case by case basis, by scientific experts in athletics, it should never be a concern for laypeople who know nothing about trans person who have not gone through puberty, and the minute differences between them and a cis girl.And let all the kids play sports together regardless. I hate that the republicans use it to divide all of us women trans and cis.
https://scontent-ord5-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/482028360_1885677978885222_5423352678203037545_n.jpg?_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=127cfc&_nc_ohc=XDUNDl8uDp4Q7kNvgGDM06T&_nc_oc=AdiGCk10Xhw_sG0_uFwEhkGzU54eVZ5xplMMiIswFcYDSlvyqkPW-pRgqZmkIMUoHY4&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-2.xx&_nc_gid=AyrGmQ6woxg5t3Cl3cEICEP&oh=00_AYCtsVEur-HSa5RAlmC12gVRFIzhpPaxgdnjU-9QMKkujA&oe=67CBC826
👏👏👏👏👏
Wonder how they feel about the Jews ......🤔
Indeed.
While belief in a Supreme Being is correlated with other irrationality, it is not the cause, as these fine minds demonstrate. One can disavow religious convictions and still fall prey to petty grievances and work that into a lather of hate.
"The problems with DEI."
From Odon Vallet "Fuck you".
When white men complain about being silenced, show them this. This is cancel culture.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Girls_Robotics_Team
Many years ago now, Dicky Dawkins published the now-infamous "Dear Muslima" letter- the gist of which was that women in progressive Western countries should sit down and shut up about misogyny and abuse because elsewhere in the world women have it worse.
The irony of him whinging and crying persecution over being told off for his bigotry, all these years later, is thick enough to fucking drown in.
“Not sure why any author would duplicate a title, especially when the first book actually covered the same topic in far more depth than this one.”
I know why. It’s so that folks will be confused about which one is reputable and buy theirs by mistake. And since one of the writers had a hand in the first book, they can ride on the legitimacy coattails of that book. I don’t know why they’d expect scientific thinkers to be duped so easily, but since they were themselves easily manipulated to be awful, I’m sure they just assume everyone else is.
Seriously?!? They wrote an entire book just to say they hate brown people, LGBTQ people, and women. They’ve already told us all this every time they open their mouths. Not a one of them has been able to hide their bigotry for decades now. This book is just an expression of their grievances over being held accountable for their actions and lies. Wah wah wah. Too bad, so sad.
WHY I SUPPORT Gay and Trans rights.
https://scontent-ord5-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/482087003_1885768812209472_8820866883968470850_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=127cfc&_nc_ohc=F2ng3htUvBQQ7kNvgHgGwzX&_nc_oc=AdhRLfCsiwW875N2hYwIh9Fg1PEQc7vnAyI6e0lgO5E9Kipxx91HbUNC1zddMyju_hI&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-2.xx&_nc_gid=A9VXz7qhuvZPVfvayGydAVG&oh=00_AYA7NTwHhOGcRA9XEQ1izqJ_jPZfAy0N3HwgOk7qJJMzaw&oe=67CBF24B
Denying the existence of something does NOT stop that "something" from existing.
Nothing fails like prayer.
https://scontent-ord5-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/481193449_1885756882210665_8018827772020718289_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=127cfc&_nc_ohc=VeY4EuAGsr4Q7kNvgHgmU1R&_nc_oc=AdjRX-7yCs7NsvldtaLifcpYA3TiLiEEQSajuiLZXXeW0G6YC8cU6lwmz1IyT5djSgY&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-2.xx&_nc_gid=AQo32kDO7XmF4FAOufKvKMi&oh=00_AYBtMaDd7VuQvVjmzqtDSgfSu57ZgfW0AHhl7Z5g5p558w&oe=67CBF27C
I had heard that the most commonly heard thing on the black box was "SHIT".
Strange name for a god. Maybe it's spelled differently.
I can't look at Bagat's links at work, but if you're talking about an airplane's black box, I would have thought FUCK would be the number one word.
Prayers can work, when pets with good humans want something. Ask your cat.
Truth
Praying to the deity that let a plane full of people die because he was distracted by a damn sparrow.
Or "Se rincer l'oeil*".
* Being a peeping Tom is not quite the same but I don't know anything more accurate. How would you call jerry fartwall junior watching his wife being fucked by another man ?
The usual term, especially involving sex is, voyeur. Which we probably stole from you.
Voyeur exists in French but “Se rincer l'oeil” had a broader meaning, watching porn is “se rincer l'oeil”. In a vanilla context, voyeur is watching people without their consent.
It technically has that meaning, but you don't hear the term much except in sexual situations here in the sex-obsessed States.
This is what'll happen when you drink black water.
I remember the woman on the picture not being his wife.
Gross. And pathetic.
Prayer won't help the plane's airspeed or altitude, nor will it enhance the brains of the pilot or copilot. And anyone whose ever flown will tell you: lose any two of those three, and the third one won't matter for long.
In the aviation world there is a truism “There are old pilots, and bold pilots, but there are NO old, bold pilots.”
Regarding the death of science and what is killing it - I was interacting with a post on a fb group I’m in about a “study” by Moms Across America. The group I interacted with is I Require This to be Satire. The Moms group is a group supposedly concerned with the health of children in the USA and they test food for heavy metals and poisons. They focus on school lunches and apparently Girl Scouts cookies. The subject of their current study is the cookies and Joe Rogan talked about their study on his podcast. Moms was upset that USNews didn’t accept the report at face value because it wasn’t peer reviewed. It also had a small data size, the cookies were from only a few states and their claim was 100% were contaminated. I popped onto Moms website and looked at their impact report to see where they’re getting money and stuff. What I saw was that RFK Jr was their biggest influencer. Also, there was language that was dog whistling about transgender children even though the group focuses on food safety their language is quite right wing culture war driven. They also had a small”health market” on the website, offering so called healthy alternatives to the types of products they “study” like pesticides and seed oils and vitamins. Not that having endorsement by Joe Rogan isn’t enough of a red flag, but these few things I four with only a few clicks on their website. Savvy as I am, I don’t expect many folks to even know where to look for RFK Jr. let alone understand the dog whistles on the site.
Anyway, most the people commenting on the Moms fb post directly were all about cancelling Girl Scouts cookies, but the most concerning aspect was the brushing off of the lack of peer review. (This is where the anecdote ties in with the subject matter of the article) Most people on the right believe the authors of this book because they don’t understand the scientific process. They think peer review is just a way to make money, like the folks running a study just pay others to sign off on the study and then its conclusions are now “true”. Rather than the rigorous review of the entire process that peer review is. It might actually be the way certain studies are peer reviewed for greedy corporations and right wing think tanks, but it isn’t not how honest science is conducted. Honest science that finds the reality of diversity in science to be beneficial to discovering answers, and that using updated language clarifies reality, and pretty much all the crap these morons are lamenting is ruining science. This dumbing down of the scientific method, corrupting it with payoffs, pretending bigotry is merit based, and so on is what is destroying trust in science. It isn’t allowing other voices to be heard, other viewpoints to study, correcting old arguments or refining language to fit the current understanding and not tolerating criminal behaviors (sexual harassment and assault).
These men aren’t the cutting edge of science anymore, and that’s on them for ending their curiosity and learning. If they were before, they did it for themselves for the benefits it provided them, to have followers fawn over their every breath, to be the first person folks turn to fame and fortune. But once they’ve gotten these things, they stopped being actual scientists. They started saying things to get their name in lights, rather than what is real. They stopped learning about new findings, new information, new ways of doing or thinking or living. What is the real war on science is the incuriosity of the incurious people leading the scientific community.
It is Girl Scouts cookie time. Support the scouts if you can.
We already know GS Cookies aren't good for you. That doesn't change the fact they're delicious and so far it seems like they support a decent organization for children. But they support diversity and inclusion, so of course they're hated by the right
If someone had told me ten years ago that I could piss off Nazis by eating cookies, I'd have laughed in their face.
And I'd have been wrong.
*𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩 𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩*
The GSA got rid of my favorites (S'mores). Oh, cruel world!
Mine are the caramel delights, what was once in certain areas called Samoas. Thin mints still rock too.
I bought 4 boxes of caramel delights this year.
I still go for Do-si-dos, though not as much as I used to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrxJiBOpu60
"RFK Jr was their biggest influencer" That is the biggest takeaway.
I saw this a few days ago in my feed. Bon appétit
https://youtu.be/AbX8BCxp66c?si=X7FDoEB_UT-i86P-
“From assaults on merit-based hiring…”
Oh no! They misspelled “They’re not giving mayonnaise colored penises jobs over more qualified minorities” wrong.
Uh oh. My penis is mustard colored. I should probably see a doctor.
Yellow? Brown? Black? Honey?
Or have you been naughty with the Grey Poupon again?
Purple ?
Mustard with blueberries that DM bought once by curiosity.
If that's the case he can keep it.
News that I expect to surprise no one here: I checked the list of authors/editors at the top of the article, and yes, they are all aging white men who at least seem to be hetero and cisgender.
This new book certainly seems to be little more than whining from a previously more privileged group about how said group should get its status back. We've all heard some of the comments from various bigoted tech individuals talking about how they won't marry outside their ethnicity, and we know most of those fields are still very much favor men over women and white over brown. Those DEI initiatives were barely scratching the surface, and pretending otherwise is just an exercise in denial. Seems to me what we get out of this new book is just a list of old white men who really need to check their privilege.
The issue with women in tech starts much earlier than that. Girls are subtly (mostly) discouraged from Math and science as early as elementary school. Then as they progress they're faced with an increasingly unaware sexism by males who are used to only interacting with other males in these environments and don't think about the fact that their ribald jokes and other behavior might be offensive (much less why).
At least that's what it seems like from my experience and perspective.
Oh yeah, I was told by one supervisor in the Army that my mechanics score on the ASVAB was my worst score. My only response was to state that it might have been, but it was still higher than his best score. He was lying to try to convince be to be a secretary rather than a mechanic so I would quit showing him up.
I'm well aware. If my dear now deceased parents had started encouraging me in the Algebra I was taking waaaay back when instead of pushing the "obedience" and "women are intended to be a help-meet for their men" I might have managed an actual career somewhere in the tech field. Sure, Mom and Dad told me several times "oh honey, you can do whatever you want!" but against that religious message of "the only good woman is an obedient woman" I struggled pretty hard with the mixed messages.
Women and persons of color in STEM fields often have to be at least twice as good at them to be considered half as competent. The worst thing these authors and editor are doing is pretending that the 'merit' system of the past was ever anything resembling fair.
TELL me about it. Who knows how many smart talented women who could have reached for the stars and made a difference never even had a chance to try, because of the condescending, entrenched sexism that repeatedly told them not to worry their pretty little heads about all that 'techinical stuff.' Why, the poor little things might hurt themselves.
🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
It's explicitly said in Podkayne of Mars and it was published in 1963.
I have no problem imagining you cringing with all these sexual straight or pseudo lesbians jokes.
Only in the last decade or so. I was raised in a fairly misogynistic environment, with a lot of talk about women's equality, but not much action.
In my late 20s my father (non-custodial parent) told me if I'd been born a woman, I'd have the option of having some guy get me pregnant and support me, but since I'm a man, I'd have to work for a living.
The tech bros should start ny learning the story of their own field, starting with Ada Lovelace.
Grace Hopper. But history is not really part of the STEM curricula. So what little gets mentioned is heavily subject to the White-male-het-cis washing.
That's too bad, hearing that computer science isn't a white male field could push POC and white women towards careers they discard because white men. There is still hope, after all modern medicine, for some of its short history was once a white male territory too.
Movies can help with that like Hidden Figures and the Imitation Game (where many people learned Alan Turing was gay)
Thank you, Hemant, for always pointing out the assholery of these assholes.