Tom Morris

The dangers of people search

Twitter’s people search is fun.

I do not consider it a human rights violation because, according to our religious teachings, it has been divinely ordained. My faith dispels any doubts that some might put in my mind.

On what James Wood doesn’t know

Truths and falsehoods alike can be both interesting and uninteresting. It is true that I have milk in my fridge, but so what? That spiders kill their male partners during reproduction is much, much more interesting than how much skimmed milk there is in my kitchen, even though both such matters can be turned into simple, literal assertions of fact. The same is true of falsehoods: if some dastardly thief has stolen the milk from the fridge in my house, my previous assertion of there being milk in my fridge is now sadly false. Again, unless it really was a dastardly thief, the lack of milk in my fridge is still rather dull. The same cannot be said for something like homeopathy which is profoundly wrong about the world, but as crazy pseudoscientific medical systems go, quite amusing and interesting.

True doesn’t equal interesting, false doesn’t equal boring. The two are quite separate properties. I point out this profoundly elementary distinction because it is almost guaranteed that when you hear someone write about “New Atheism”, they will conflate these two very different properties. And often enough they’ll throw in niceness: it’s not enough for something to be true, it also has to be interesting and said by a nice person, otherwise the truth of said assertion becomes highly suspect. Again, being nice has nothing to do with being right: to quote The Dude from The Big Lebowski, “You’re not wrong Walter. You’re just an asshole.”

It is with that philosophical preamble that we should approach James Wood’s piece in the Guardian. It’s filled with so much egregious erring, I don’t know where to start.

First up, there’s the old Subtleties and Oriental argument:

I can’t be the only reader who finds himself in broad agreement with the conclusions of the New Atheists, while disliking some of the ways they reach them. For these writers, and many others, “religion” always seems to mean either fundamentalist Islam or American evangelical Christianity. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and the more relaxed or progressive versions of Christianity are not in their argumentative sights.

No, what atheists oppose is theism. It’s there in the name. If you oppose theism, you will end up in by dint of simple deductive reasoning opposing people who hold to theism. If your God is either nonexistent or very hand-wavy, you’ll end up not being the target of atheistic critique in the same way that if you don’t oppose the right to have an abortion, the people who want the right to have an abortion don’t tend to have much of a problem with you.

Yeah, the first problem with atheists apparently is that they are atheists.

Along with this curious parochialism about the varieties of religious belief comes a simplistic reading of how people actually hold those beliefs. Terry Eagleton and others have rightly argued that, for millions of people, religious “belief” is not a matter of just totting up stable, creedal propositions (“I believe that Jesus is the son of God”, “I believe that I will go to heaven when I die”, and so on), but a matter of more unconscious, daily practice (“Now it is time to kneel down, face Mecca and pray”).

I’m sure that the same is true of political movements: the reason people become, say, white supremacists, isn’t necessarily because they have a stack of beliefs about the supremacy of white people but because it fills some kind of political niche, gives them a sense of positive self-identity in hating others, whatever.¹

But it doesn’t matter. If a belief is wrong, the cause of that belief, or accompanying or directly related psychological states may be interesting but can’t be wheeled out as some kind of response to refutations of those beliefs. I don’t particularly care whether or not prayer is an important unconscious daily practice that forms an important part of your identity, just as I’m not interested in psychoanalysing the white supremacist or the person who posts urban legends on Facebook. The fact that there is non-propositional content to a belief doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention to the propositional content of the belief, and if it’s false, perhaps do something radical like… not believe it.

Fortunately, Wood seems to realise this:

This kind of defence of the deep embeddedness of religious practice has been influenced by Wittgenstein – for whom, say, kissing an icon was a bit like loving one’s mother; something that cannot be subjected to an outsider’s rational critique. Wittgenstein was obviously right, though this appeal to practice over proposition can also become a rather lazy way, for people like the Catholic Eagleton, of defending orthodox beliefs via the back door

Damn straight.

Now watch as Wood does exactly that.

Rather than simply declaring all religious belief to be non-propositional, which is manifestly untrue, it would be more interesting to examine what might be called the practice of propositional beliefs. We know that people believe all kinds of things, as propositions. But how do they believe them? In this area, the New Atheism has nothing very interesting to say, except to wish away all such beliefs.

Why is it the job of philosophers and scientists to give reasons why people believe falsehoods? There are crazy people on the Internet who spend every waking moment trying to teach the world that the Bush administration flew a missile into the Pentagon in order to give them a reason to, uh, invade Iraq and topple a fairly low-rent dictator, and if only the population wakes up and watches Loose Change, they’ll storm the palaces of power and demand an end to the war in Iraq. Now, if you are a structural engineer and you, say, write an article debunking said belief by pointing out fallacious arguments put forward to support that belief, you don’t have to play amateur shrink for Mr Avery and his pals for that critique to be understood as valid. Either it was a plane or it was a missile, either way the psychology of the believer is irrelevant to the factual question at hand.

Sure, the 9/11 Truthers won’t stop being nutcases, and religious people aren’t going to just stop believing in God, but that’s not the responsibility of the person providing a reasoned critique.

If philosophers (and, well, if you are writing about why God doesn’t exist, you are taking on the role of philosopher even if that isn’t what it says on your business card) fail to satisfy your need for psychological explanation, why is that the fault of the philosopher? If you want psychological explanation for religious belief, try a psychologist. There’s this whole field called psychology of religion which inquires into such subjects. Criticising atheists because they aren’t psychologists of religion is an oft-repeated but utterly pointless exercise.

Another analogy: it’s a common trope of discussions on the Internet and elsewhere that one “cannot prove a negative”. It’s bullshit, of course. We prove negatives all the time. If I prove or, let’s slice away that frequently misunderstood word “prove”, show beyond reasonable doubt that there is a cat sitting on my armchair, I have also proven the accompanying negative, namely that the statement “there is not a cat on my armchair” is false. If you can prove a positive, you can prove a negative. If you think that it is a law of logic that you can’t prove a negative, you don’t understand logic. I can show you very easily that if you can prove a positive, you can also prove a negative. It’s true and trivially so. You may reject my demonstration and continue to believe this falsehood, but it’s not my responsibility to show you why you believe that falsehood. And I can’t. I’m not a psychologist, I’m not a mindreader, I’m not you, and, frankly, I don’t give a shit. If you want to carry on believing that you can’t prove a negative, all I can do is to sit back and hope you one day have a sudden burst of inspiration and decide to go read a logic textbook and that I never have to be a defendant with you in the jury.

Where does Wood go now?

But people’s beliefs are often fluctuating and changing – it is why people lose their faith, or convert to faith in God.

Okay. Yes. People’s beliefs change. Big news. Sometimes they even change their beliefs based on reasoned argument. Hence why it’s kind of a good idea to have reasoned argument even if it turns out to be useless for many.

Wood then goes on to tell of a conversation with some believers. One turns out to not be a believer in heaven and hell:

When I, who was raised in a strongly and conventionally religious home, expressed surprise and suggested that once one stops believing in heaven one might as well stop believing in God, he said, more vehemently: “It’s exactly the opposite: not believing in heaven and hell is a prerequisite for serious Christian belief.” Trapped in the childhood literalism of my background, I had not entertained the possibility of Christian belief separated from the great lure and threat of heaven and hell.

Again, logic fail here. God can exist without heaven and hell. That’s fairly obvious. I’m not sure if heaven and hell could exist without God: that’s a bit harder to unpack. But given that I believe in neither of them, it’s not something I worry about too much. Anyway, if heaven and hell depends on the existence of God, then not believing in heaven and hell doesn’t mean that you cannot or should not believe in God. If you’ve got good reason to believe in God and then you find reasons to not believe in heaven and hell, to conclude form that there is no God is a case of denying the antecedent.

The New Atheism is locked into a similar kind of literalism. It parasitically lives off its enemy.

What he’s comparing New Atheism with isn’t literalism, that’s just shitty logic. There is a difference.

“Parasitically lives off its enemy”? Yeah, so does feminism. If there weren’t any misogyny and discrimination against women and there was complete equality, there would be no need for feminism. Responses to arguments are dependent on those arguments existing. Terming that “parasitism” might be a bit strong. But, again, how is this a big deal? Pointing out the wrongness in religious arguments when there aren’t religious arguments is impossible. But… religious arguments do exist.

Just as evangelical Christianity is characterised by scriptural literalism and an uncomplicated belief in a “personal God”, so the New Atheism often seems engaged only in doing battle with scriptural literalism; but the only way to combat such literalism is with rival literalism.

Err, no, it isn’t. Who says that “combatting” scriptural literalism is the goal of atheism, new or musty? If you spend your time speaking in tongues and rolling around the floor in the name of Jesus, fine. I can’t speak for all atheists, but just for myself, I think that religious beliefs are epistemically unjustified. Is this literalism? What am I being “literal” to? What text exactly? The collected works of Richard Dawkins? No, personally, I prefer something with a bit more philosophical meat like Michael Martin’s Atheism: A Philosophical Justification. But I’m not going to quote chapter and verse of that because… that’s a bloody stupid thing to do. This “rival literalism” thing is bollocks.

Since militant atheism interprets religious faith, again on the evangelical or Islamist model, as blind – a blind leap of faith that hurls the believer into an infinite idiocy – so no understanding or even interest can be extended to why or how people believe the religious narratives they follow, and how often those narratives are invaded by doubt, reversal, interruption and banality.

How does “militant atheism” interpret religious faith? There’s no interpretation about it. I see fellow citizens, some have crazy beliefs, others don’t. I challenge the people with the crazy beliefs and leave the people with the more moderate beliefs alone. No interpretation at all. I fully accept that there are mild religious people, as do Dawkins and the rest of them. If you are opposed to religion, you’ve got to pick your targets, just as you do if you are, say, a feminist. Back in the early days of feminism, getting the right to vote and the right to work is more important than correcting people who say “love”. If you are fighting for gay rights, being able to get married is nice, but it plays second fiddle to not being murdered. To say that atheists in general think that all religion is exemplified by fundamentalist Christians is crazy. I know tons of atheists and none of them think that: with one or two exceptions, we’re pretty much happy to accept that religion is a wide label.

But there’s still a problem here. Yes, I’d rather have more Jainists and Quakers in the world than fundamentalist wackaloons shooting doctors who perform abortions and forcing schools to teach creationism or whatever the stupid shit of the week the crazy lobby are up to. But however nice I think plenty of liberal religious people are,² I still think they are wrong on this whole God thing.

Wood goes on to criticise Dawkins…

There is a telling moment in The God Delusion when Dawkins speculates on why countless generations of people believed in God. How could belief in an illusion have persisted for so long? Dawkins suggests that we have evolved an HADD, a “hyperactive agent detection device”: “we hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only indifferent.” His example of this elementary mistake comes from the episode of Fawlty Towers in which John Cleese’s car breaks down. Cleese gets out and starts hitting the car. This is an example of HADD, and by extension, of mankind’s belief in God. Now, do you really think that offering a minute from Fawlty Towers is an adequate analogy for millennia of religious belief? This is not about whether one believes in God or not. One can be an unbeliever and find this a bit feeble.

Wood here is confusing analogy with explanation. The explanation is that humans have evolved to detect agency, and the Fawlty Towers example is just that: an example. Dawkins isn’t saying that religious belief is as trivial as a sitcom, he’s saying you can see this as an example of agency detection in miniature, and things like conspiracy theories and religion are agency detection writ large. It’s a pretty well-selected example.

Confusing analogy with argument and then getting all huffy about the analogy is something I’ve seen countless times before, and I’m bored to tears with it. Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote a paper back in 1971 called A Defense of Abortion. Imagine, if you will, a literary critic reading said paper. He’s a bit crap at the whole logic thing, but gets caught up with the analogies, then skips the argumentation between the analogies. He comes away rather frustrated and writes a piece that berates Thomson for “comparing abortion to…” and then lists the various hypothetical scenarios and analogies she used. Now put yourself back in the position of Thomson (or any philosopher, really) and imagine the response on reading said argument.

“Of course,” Thomson would say regretfully, “I wasn’t saying that abortion is exactly like being kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers who use your kidneys to keep a famous violinist alive. And of course I don’t think abortion is exactly like being trapped with a rapidly-growing baby in a house with no windows. And of course getting pregnant is not like having a ‘babyseed’ come and land in your carpet. What kind of looney reads these analogies and fails to understand that they are analogies?”

So it would be for Thomson and so it is for the atheist reading the pontifications of literary types on the writings of the New Atheists.³

Marx said that the study of religion was the most serious project an intellectual could have. If I told you that the history of warfare, say, could be “explained” by some recent discovery of a particular receptor in the brain, that Agincourt and Austerlitz, Antietam and the Ardennes were all essentially the same thing, because produced by a universal delusion, what would I have told you about the nature of warfare, of politics, of statecraft, of the enormous mass mobilisations that Tolstoy characterised as “the swarm-like life of mankind”?

Sigh. Another straw man. How many times do I have to repeat this? It’s not the job of atheists New or Old to explain religion any more than it’s the job of vegetarians and vegans to explain meat-eating. Again, psychologists and sociologists exist. Go ask them. I’m not interested in why religion exists. I’m not uninterested exactly: if we come up with a good explanation that fits all the evidence, it’d be interesting to find out. But it’s not my primary concern.

One good place to study that “swarm-like life”, and to see religious belief seriously represented and seriously examined, is the modern novel – from, say, Melville and Flaubert in the 1850s to the present day. Melville, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Beckett, Camus – and in our own time José Saramago, Marilynne Robinson and JM Coetzee – have all shown sustained interest in questions of belief and unbelief; many of them have struggled with the departure of God.

That presumes that religious belief needs to be “seriously examined”. If the fundamental basis of it is false, why bother with serious examination? Do we need “serious examination” of the Loch Ness Monster? But, you know, I’m not a philistine, I’m not opposed to serious examination of falsehoods. And I’m open to the idea that falsehoods can lead to us learning interesting and useful things about humanity and the world. But, again, there’s the conflation of true with interesting going on here. Religious belief may be interesting, and, sure, Camus and Flaubert and so on: they are interesting. But how does that change the thing that the philosophers care about: is it true?

Is it true? is the question we care about. Things can be true and interesting, true and uninteresting, false and interesting or like Wood’s column, false and uninteresting.

One last thing.

Dawkins is dead to metaphor, and tries to annul it by insisting on the literal occurrence, contained in actual words, of the virgin birth and the resurrection.

Dawkins is dead to metaphor? This is the guy who gave the world giant robots controlled by selfish genes, ideas spreading as memes, evolution softening away at “mount improbable”, and so on. Dawkins is one of the few scientific writers who turns a bloody good metaphor.

Sigh again.

Despite my recent visit to Israel, I find myself militantly neutral on everything related to Israel and Palestine. Both countries have crazy religious looneys fucking things up for the sane people; peace in the Middle East would be a darn sight easier if there were less crazy people with fervent beliefs that God is on their side. It is in that context that Glenn Beck speaking in Jerusalem makes me even more conflicted: because fundamentalist Muslims, Jews and Christians haven’t screwed up the Middle East enough, let’s add wackadoodle Mormons to the mix? Sigh.

With young people in cities across Britain rioting and looting because, well, other people are rioting and looting, this is rather a fun take on it. Given an accident on the M1, if one idiot gets in the hard shoulder, it’s rather depressing to see that the “law-abiding motorists” the Daily Torygraph frequently bang on about decide to pull into the hard shoulder, thus potentially preventing emergency service vehicles actually getting to the accident.

Funny how all the discussion of the “me me me society” that has suddenly emerged in the last few days hasn’t discussed these sort of twats and the many thousands of people who are mean, selfish and self-serving not because they are on a shithole council estate but because they don’t want to be stuck in a traffic jam in their air-conditioned Merc for an hour or so and are thus happy to prevent ambulances getting to accident victims.

Welcome to the Big Society. When the government stop funding your local library or youth club or pre-school, it’s the sort of people in the video they are expecting to run them instead.

And even high-minded newspapers such as the Guardian decided more than two decades ago to fill their pages with trivia because they judged that the general public was becoming dumber and shallower.

Quoted for hilarious: Ron Knight of Knight Mediacom International threatens Wikipedian

I used to find Wikipedia’s legendary Administrator’s Noticeboard/Incidents rather scary and depressing. I now tend to find it hilarious. And today is no exception.

A guy called Ron Knight (check his LinkedIn profile) has threatened a Wikipedia administrator for deleting the self-promotional article about his company, “Knight Mediacom”–not to be confused with the other MediaCom.

The full text of his e-mailed legal threat is up on the ANI thread.

Mr. Schumin;

You have under your actions, pretenses and non-authority, with lack of education and understanding on the history of our firm, deleted the Wikipedia page for Knight Mediacom International, which you state has no other Wikipedia references, nor credible references to exist. If you have done your homework, you will have found countless references to Knight Mediacom International by both ISBN and UPC code, as the only authorized video distribution company to have distributed the works of CCTV and seven leading motion picture studios in China, as well as the USA, Belgium and Brazil, all within the United States, all of which titles may be found on Amazon and countless other film and motion pictures based resource and reference sites.

Further, other Wikipedia links were in fact linked to Facets Multimedia, FAO Schwarz, Archie Comics, Universal Studios and other major media firms in the United States. While reviewing your credentials, which appear collegiate at best and Wiki web based only, I would suggest that the next party can just as easily, with no further credentials, decide to delete you and your respective history and page on Wikipedia, solely for you as just a Web blog, it makes you of no importance nor credential should someone in turn just choose to delete you. You may well be a college student, but you have no professional track record nor any link to be “cleaning up” as a “credible clean up source” for a public Wiki space, and certainly you possess no credible certificate of noteworthiness of linked commercial industry nor brands.

Last, as you have deleted a trail from our time and investment in positioning actions on the web as a basis for stating a protection of trademarked intellectual properties and copyrights, which could be cause for a justified pursuit in the Courts against you, as a principal action to be construed as a case of action in law, this action should we choose can cause you great time, trouble and costs for your rather non well researched decision on such action.

Clearly your action to delete a company file is troublesome, and may well be so for you.

This note is made to be civil. You should return to Wikipedia and Undelete the Page for Knight Mediacom International, with explanation that you had failed to do complete research on all historic links, ties and other references, less aside from a court case filing, you may not wish to find someone simply coming along to delete You and your web based positions.

You have deleted our Intellectual Property as positions using Wiki references as the tool in our pursuits of trademark and copyrights filings and published position protections, and we maintain full rights on these claims of loss and damages. We trust you will take soonest action to return to Wikipedia and Repost to remove the Delete of Knight Mediacom International, with all its linked references within 10 days of receipt of this email notification.

Do what’s right. Awaiting your soonest action and reply.

Respectfully,

Ron Knight President Knight Mediacom International
C.c. Charles Grimes, Counsel at Law, Grimes & Battersby
C.c. Peter Eichler, Counsel at Law, Jennings & Strauss, Attorneys at Law
C.c. Paul Mirowski, Counsel at Mirowski Law, LLC

Apparently, according to this incompetent dickmuncher, it is the legal responsibility of Wikipedia administrators to not delete his content, and presumably it is also the legal responsibility of the Wikimedia Foundation to continue hosting “his” intellectual property, even though when he submitted it to Wikipedia, he presumably saw the bit on the edit page that said:

Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable.

By clicking the “Save Page” button, you agree to the Terms of Use, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.

And below that:

If you do not want your writing to be edited, used, and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here. All text that you did not write yourself, except brief excerpts, must be available under terms consistent with Wikipedia’s Terms of Use before you submit it.

“Deleting it because it is shit” is definitely included in “edited, used, and redistributed at will”.

Anyway, if you are thinking of hiring Ron Knight of Knight Mediacom International for the wide variety of media-related services he offers, you may wish to take the above into consideration, as he seems to be legally incompetent despite apparently retaining the services of three lawyers. He doesn’t seem to understand that no aspect of American copyright law entitles you to threaten Wikipedia administrators for deleting self-promotional content. Also, do feel free to savour the terrible grammar, sloppy sentence construction and general stupidity of the letter. Ask yourself: do you want this man working for your business?

If you feel you want to share Ron Knight’s legal theories with the world, feel free to link to this page with any link text you feel appropriate.

Or you could learn from Mr Knight’s failings: if/when your Wikipedia page gets deleted, sending a poorly-written, clueless legal threat to a Wikipedia administrator is a terrible way to promote your business or, indeed, getting your Wikipedia page restored. But it will amuse people, or at least the morally bankrupt ANI readers, for a few hours.

They can’t stop twisting and lying about assisted dying

Terry Pratchett’s documentary ‘Choosing to Die’ has, according to the press, brought the debate about assisted dying back to the foreground. Which means in practice that the usual sources of idiotic blather are spouting off again.

Where do we start? Oh, religion of course. Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, who has previously said that gay people should “repent and be changed”, told The Telegraph:

as a public service broadcaster, the BBC has an obligation to provide a balanced presentation of the moral issues of the day, especially when legality is also at stake

Implying of course that the BBC is “biased” in this. If anything, the BBC is far too biased towards the views of people like Mr Nazir-Ali. Whenever the BBC cover something that is supposedly a ‘moral’ issue, the usual parade of religious types turn up to harumph and moan. Back in 2006, I wrote a post entitled The BBC, abortion and religious ‘experts’ which shows how BBC News dramatically overemphasies coverage of the views of the Church on abortion compared to the views of academics. Given that we have a whole field of expertise devoted to studying the ethical nature of medical and biological sciences, they get consulted rather less often than men in frocks with theology degrees.

Indeed, the BBC sticks the subject of ethics together with religion as if they are like Steptoe and Son or Laurel and Hardy. If you tune into something like ‘The Big Questions’, you’ll get some actual big question like whether we should bomb Libya with something like whether or not Satan exists which, for the 90%+ of people who don’t go to Church or don’t take the whole thing more literally than they do Chinese fortune cookies is completely fucking irrelevant.

How would a “balanced presentation” play out? How about for every hour of sport on television, we could have an hour of a programme for people who like nothing more than whinging about how sport is a pointless and crap enterprise? Every hour of Songs of Praise and All Things Considered or Thought for the Day, we could have an hour of angry atheist ranting? If you are up for the “balanced presentation” thing, let’s start with religion.

And while we are at it, we have another clergyman, this time on the follow-up programme with Jeremy Paxman. Michael Langrish, the Bishop of Exeter:

I want to see much more emphasis placed on supporting people when living than assisting them in dying.

Okay. How is that a useful contribution to anything? If I go for a meeting with my bank manager and he tells me that my account is hundreds of pounds overdrawn, and I said “I want to see much more emphasis placed on you giving me a free Mars bar than telling me off for being financially imprudent”, that’s all well and good… but he is under no obligation to stop caring about my financial problems until he has satisfied me with free Mars bars.

This is a common enough tactic in public debate, but it really pisses me off. “I want to see more emphasis placed on y than x.” Okay, fine, but we are debating x so kindly talk about x. What is especially annoying about it is that saying this instantly makes it seem like people who are pushing x aren’t interested or are actively opposed to y.

Most people who are in favour of providing assisted dying are happy with the general goal of “supporting people”. If you want to help disabled people, campaigning hard against a government hell-bent on cutting back severely on incapacity benefit and disability living allowance is the issue. This weaselly little rhetorical technique means you can make it seem like those who are arguing for access to assisted dying are somehow against, err, “supporting people”.

Finally, there is Liz Carr who has repeatedly brought up the fact that assisted dying is “a minority issue”.

Basically her argument is that only a small number of people would be affected by assisted dying, and therefore we shouldn’t pass a law to change anything.

Let’s apply that principle to some other issue. From June 2009 to June 2010, there were around 14,000 rapes in Britain. Now, there are 60 million people in Britain. That means only 0.02% of the population is raped. The Sexual Offences Act was last amended back in 2003. Would it have been a good argument to say that since only 0.02% of the population are affected by rape in a given year, we shouldn’t bother changing the law because it is “a minority issue”?

Of course not. If something is unjust we should change it, even if it only affects a small number of people.

I’m happy for there to be a renewed debate on assisted dying. But the debate is currently facile: it consists of a group of people explaining a current legal absurdity (namely that you can currently have an assisted suicide in Switzerland if you can afford it, but if we changed the law, you could have assisted dying with less bad consequences and available for people who can’t afford to go to Switzerland), and another group saying “BUT BAD THINGS MIGHT HAPPEN!! WE SHOULDN’T DO ANYTHING!!” even though in Oregon and Belgium and the Netherlands and so on said bad things have (thankfully) completely failed to materialize.

In the technology industry, we have a term for what the anti-assisted dying people are doing: spreading FUD.

happytimenow:

Hey there, non-believers! Enjoy the opportunity to make serious bank during the Rapture later this month by using this print-friendly, rapture-ready will. (See CNN’s story for End Times details.)

This reminds me greatly of when I played EVE Online. Occasionally, people would come onto the forum and complain that the game sucks and that they were leaving. The standard response was always

“Can I have your stuff?”

If you, dear reader, honestly believe the world is ending on Saturday, can I have your stuff? Post a comment below and I’ll get right back to you today or tomorrow about signing a legal agreement to transfer all your assets come Saturday. I’m especially interested in large country mansions and Ferraris anywhere in the Greater London area. If you give me your house and car, I’ll even look after your pets if you find yourself raptured off to heaven. There’s nothing to worry about: I am a hellbound atheist firmly in the service of Satan. If you want to give me your stuff before you to join the super awesome Jesus club, get in contact now!

Weekly Idiocy in Review #1: Collecting the Froth

I was going to keep posting idiocy today just to make a point. But there is so much idiocy, it all needs to be bundled together into one post. If people like this, it might turn into something like a weekly idiocy review.

First off, Mike Adams (aka. “The Health Ranger”), the vote-stuffing “natural health” dimwit has been off in la-la land exploring “quantum consciousness” and being a doltish idiot in the process. His usual self then. See Pharyngula.

Uganda almost passed the kill-gay-people bill again, the Guardian reports. This guy reckons it goes against Christian teaching, which is why it was not promoted by a horde of American evangelicals and the established Church of Uganda (the local Anglican franchise). Except, you know, it was.

Newt Gingrich:

I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion.

Tell that to Jared Lee Loughner or Scott Roeder (see Assassination of George Tiller) or, indeed, the Ugandan gay population.

Good news from the State of Maryland: Mark Geier, a quackaloon who thinks that the best way to treat autistic people is to give them chemical castration drugs, has had his medical licence suspended. See Neurodiversity, Science-Based Medicine and Respectful Insolence.

The Encyclopedia of American Loons keeps growing, and there are some great new entries this month. Rick Joyner is right at the nutty edge of evangelicalism. How crazy? Sarah Palin crazy. Watch this video. The original isn’t online anymore, but in this video there are a few little bits of Joyner’s craziness. My favourite is when he asks his congregation to “pull out your cell phones and call someone who needs a touch from God”. In the original video, they got someone up to to the front of the congregation who sounds like she is on crack, and she starts babbling about how Jesus sent “anointing” down the phone line and the person on the other end “got the fire of Jesus”.

Then there’s Alex Jones, who I only found out recently interviewed an elected representative of mine, Nigel Farage MEP. I knew Farage was slightly nutty (he’s in UKIP after all), but I didn’t think he consorted with Alex Jones. The full thing is on YouTube along with lots of comments about how Alex Jones and Farage are fighting the evil socialist lizard-man agenda.

Finally, there’s Phillip E. Johnson, the godfather of Intelligent Design. As an undergraduate, I wasted far, far too much time reading his atrociously-written books. Instead, you can read Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliant review of Johnson’s book and back from before Michael Ruse lost it, Ruse’s take on Johnson’s later book where Johnson completely froths at the mouth about the evils of “naturalism” while never really bothering to explain what it is he is arguing against. (As someone trained in philosophy, I oppose this. Johnson gives lawyers a bad name. I repeat, Johnson gives lawyers a bad name.)

Those dastardly skeptics are keeping up the pressure on homeopaths by complaining that their non-medicine is indeed not medicine. But the homeopaths have a cunning plan: they are going to make it seem like skeptics are racists who hate people from the Indian subcontinent. No, really. Screenshot

Chatting with my husband last night about the complaints by the Advertising Standards Authority here in the UK agains homeopaths, we think we have come up with a plan to put an end to this nonsense. We can play the race discrimination card if we get this right.

I was rather hoping they’d play the present scientific evidence that show your alternative medical system isn’t totally bogus card. But the race discrimination card certainly serves as an amusing substitute if the science card has been lost or otherwise misplaced.

Commentary and further slightly exasperated giggling available at Skepchick, Sceptical Letter Writer, Le Canard Noir, The Science Bit.

Video of the week: Santorum

Time for some Santorum:

When the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter says that Muslims are trying to “insinuate” Sharia law, he actually means “institute”.

Until next time, enjoy being accused of racism while you pick out an engagement ring for your “man-on-dog” marriage. If you’ve got any suggestions or feedback on whether to continue with ‘Weekly Idiocy in Review’, email, post a comment or tweet my Facebook or whatever bullshit social networking thing you prefer.

While many world leaders praised the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden, the president of Peru went a step further on Monday, calling the development the first miracle of Pope John Paul II since he was beatified last weekend.

“I have said that his first miracle has been to remove from the Earth this demonic incarnation of crime, evil and hatred,” Peruvian president Alan Garcia said, according to CNN affiliate America TV in Peru.

A retired MTA employee has pumped his $140,000 life savings into an ad campaign warning that the world will end on May 21.

Eddy and Boyd have claimed the laurel wreath of “victim” so as to dignify credulity as a method. They argue that it would be a Eurocentric, ethno-biased slur to “people’s religion” the world over if we did not broaden the analogy of present-day experience (with which to judge past-event claims) to include that of various Pentecostals, third world shamans, and New Agers. The viewpoint of such a “confederacy of dunces” the authors dub a “democratized epistemology”.

We’ve been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture.

For speaker Michael Gilbert, the author of The Disposable Male and a researcher at USC, even the intimation that girls might be equal—or, let’s say, physiologically comparable—so scars young men that they no longer want to be “breadwinners.” In the manner of gay marriage making weddings less awesome for everyone else, he thinks it a scandal that boys can’t be the only ones to play sports now, or get bar mitzvahed.