Bleeding from the Bunghole

[mordacious1]

This article may explain some of the craziness going on as of late:

Syphilis Rate Continues to Rise in Minnesota
From U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
September 3, 2013

Syphilis cases among middle aged white "skeptics" in Minnesota have increased tenfold this year compared with last, health officials said recently. The news heightens fears that unsafe sexual practices will also lead to higher rates of Pharwrongilosis (a debilitating disease that affects rational thinking). Fifty new syphilis cases were reported to the Minnesota Department of Health in the first eight months of this year, compared with 32 in the same period last year, said Julia Dripper, an assistant manager at the department.

Thirty-four new cases were among older white skeptics, many in the Morris area, compared with three a year ago, Dripper said. Of the new cases, 19 occurred in people associated with a certain, yet unnamed, blue haired blogger.

Health officials said the trends are alarming for two reasons. They show that people infected with Pharwrongulosis engaged in unprotected sex, and that the risk of Pharwrongulosis infection is two to five times higher among those with syphilis. Earlier this year, state officials reported an unexpected increase in new Pharwrongulosis infections. After declining for five years, the number of Pharwrongulosis infections in white skeptics rose from 93 to 130 nationwide in 2013. The patients were almost exclusively morons.

The infection trend in the Morris mirrors trends in other metropolitan areas, including New York, Los Angeles and Seattle. The CDC last week reported data from several cities indicating that some male and female syphilis patients are engaging in high-risk behavior, including sex with multiple partners at certain "skeptic" conventions, although overall attendance at after parties is in decline, due to a fear of rape accusations. Public health officials must develop new ways to reach people in the skeptic community and develop effective prevention approaches, the CDC said. Raging syphilis is nothing to ignore said Dripper.

[Dick Strawkins]

In the past month Myers has launched attacks on Shermer, Krause, Dawkins, Grothe and Coyne.
And thats just the big name atheists.
It's like he has a list of respected figures he needs to tear down to his level. But he is running out of targets and Becky's targets (which automatically become HIS targets) are getting more bizarre by the hour.

[Brive1987]

Re DJ:

"From an email sent to the WTinc board .."

Just how many anonymous anecdotes can you pump out.

The last comment on that post even had a skepchick regular asking:

Who wrote the email that’s being quoted above? It’s not in lawyerese or from DJ. Who is it?

[Jonathan]

Today's masterclass in critical thinking, unintentional irony and self-awareness, an FTB/A+ crossover special! Reproduced below.

47.
hyperdeath
11 September 2013 at 6:08 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment


Another of Grothe’s “achievements” is TAM London. It started under Plait’s leadership, and was one of the most successful things that JREF has ever done, with tickets selling out within hours. It happened once more under Grothe, but never again. From what I’ve heard, Grothe is so toxic, that he drove the organisers away. I’d like to attend TAM London, and I look forward to the day when Grothe is driven out, and it can resume.

To any of Grothe’s defenders: If I am wrong, what happened to TAM London? Why did it disappear? Where did it go? What destroyed it? You can’t blame Rebecca Watson this time. (Then again, you’re so delusional, that perhaps you can.)

pHred:

That is just vile. Is there any way that they could do a kickstart to raise the 5k to pay JREF back and then find another partner to help with publishing ? There have to be better options.

I doubt that would work. He’d just stonewall any attempt to transfer the money. We’re not dealing with someone who has JREF’s interests at heart. We’re dealing with a high functioning sociopath who deliberately harms the causes he pretends to represent, in order to pursue personal grudges.

[Gumby]

In the past month Myers has launched attacks on Shermer, Krause, Dawkins, Grothe and Coyne.
And thats just the big name atheists.
It's like he has a list of respected figures he needs to tear down to his level. But he is running out of targets and Becky's targets (which automatically become HIS targets) are getting more bizarre by the hour.

I wonder what he hopes to gain from these attacks. Unless he's gone completely mental, which I don't think is the case, he can't really believe that his puerile smear campaigns are going to sway anyone not already in his camp.

I also think he knows he has completely blown his shot at the big time, so I don't know if it's necessarily a case of him trying to tear down bigger names in an effort to make himself look like the more viable alternative.

I'd say it's little more than pettiness and jealousy; the knowledge that he is going down in flames so he tries as much as possible to smear shit all over the people who he thought would always pat him on the head and hand him the reins to the fifth horse.

That way, he can at least appear to be a hero to the gaggle of poisonous rabble he has gathered around himself.

[Gumby]

Today's masterclass in critical thinking, unintentional irony and self-awareness, an FTB/A+ crossover special! Reproduced below.

47.
hyperdeath
11 September 2013 at 6:08 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment


Another of Grothe’s “achievements” is TAM London. It started under Plait’s leadership, and was one of the most successful things that JREF has ever done, with tickets selling out within hours. It happened once more under Grothe, but never again. From what I’ve heard, Grothe is so toxic, that he drove the organisers away. I’d like to attend TAM London, and I look forward to the day when Grothe is driven out, and it can resume.

To any of Grothe’s defenders: If I am wrong, what happened to TAM London? Why did it disappear? Where did it go? What destroyed it? You can’t blame Rebecca Watson this time. (Then again, you’re so delusional, that perhaps you can.)

pHred:

That is just vile. Is there any way that they could do a kickstart to raise the 5k to pay JREF back and then find another partner to help with publishing ? There have to be better options.

I doubt that would work. He’d just stonewall any attempt to transfer the money. We’re not dealing with someone who has JREF’s interests at heart. We’re dealing with a high functioning sociopath who deliberately harms the causes he pretends to represent, in order to pursue personal grudges.

Note hyperdeath's last sentence. It describes PZ Myers perfectly.

[Hemisphere]

Compare the PZ of now to 5 years ago and it is a different person. I know not everyone here was a fan, but for me he was a pragmatic, no-nonsense thinker who usually had something interesting to say, whether or not i agreed with it. Now, he is an embarrassment to himself - the disconnect between his present persona and the old one is so great - to such an extent that I can't believe it isn't due to some form of mental illness.

I note that this deterioration seems to have happened (perhaps coincidentally but definitely noticeably) since the heart op. (Can heart meds do that?)

Heart operations often result in some type of personality change, or a change in cognitive ability. The problem arises when you redirect the flow of blood from the heart and into the heart and lung machine - potentially allowing micro debris or bubbles into the system, which promptly get moved through the brain. The idea of personality or cognition changing after a heart op (only major ops involving a H/L pump) is called 'pumphead'. IIRC there are a few studies that suggest the change in personality/cognition can actually become worse over time in some patients (rather than recovering entirely as is the norm).

I don't know enough to even guess at whether PZ's heart op and his activities in the last 5 years are linked. However, I will say that it is probably far more likely to just be a result of the group he now panders to. Radically changing peoples' minds is pretty easy under certain conditions and pressures.

[Verklagekasper]

218
PZ Myers
...
I get this all the time with students. You can give them a recipe to follow out of a lab cookbook, and they can follow it and it works fine, most of the time. When it doesn’t, they’re lost, because they don’t understand the mechanism, the theory, the whole big background of solutes and solvents, dissociation constants, the interactions between salts and pH and temperature, that whole massive edifice of scientific knowledge behind your simple statement that you take completely for granted.

That’s postmodernism. Wake up and notice all your assumptions.

If you’re a good scientist, you’re practicing postmodernism all the time

No, postmodernism is not about noticing your assumptions. It's about deconstructing and relativizing them. Once he crammed his postmodernism down his students' throats and their experiments don't work, they will not ponder the interactions between salts and pH and temperature, but rather they will consult a Shaman. Because that's easier and, from a postmodernist view, just as valid.

[windy]

I get this all the time with students. You can give them a recipe to follow out of a lab cookbook, and they can follow it and it works fine, most of the time. When it doesn’t, they’re lost, because they don’t understand the mechanism, the theory, the whole big background of solutes and solvents, dissociation constants, the interactions between salts and pH and temperature, that whole massive edifice of scientific knowledge behind your simple statement that you take completely for granted.

That’s postmodernism. Wake up and notice all your assumptions.

Doesn't that example actually show the opposite of what he's trying to say? The students can't "notice" those assumptions, they still need to learn them! And if they start questioning them, or even the protocol in the lab cookbook, the experiment will more than likely go to shit (since they won't yet know which parts are safe to tweak).

If you’re a good scientist, you’re practicing postmodernism all the time

The headachy thing is that I think this is close to true. The slight virtues of a post-modernist viewpoint are already incorporated into science. And (as noted up thread) scientists were already doing it much better than post-modernists do, before anyone thought up post-modernism.

Great postmodernist thinkers: Copernicus, Galileo, Maxwell, Lyell, Darwin, Einstein...

[Tapir]

Has the Feminist Golem gone after Daniel Dennett yet?

Dennett is a fan of Dawkins' memes (as a useful tool) so it can't be long before PZed figures he can trash two privileged birds with one stone.

[Ericb]

Mine was a quote from Leonard Nimoy in a Simpsons episode but that poem is great! Havn'e heard it since I was a kid. Thanks for reminding me. :)

Actually I think your quote comes from Star Trek DS9 :

Dr. Julian Bashir: Out of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?
Elim Garak: My dear Doctor, they're all true.
Dr. Julian Bashir: Even the lies?
Elim Garak: Especially the lies.

The Nimoy Simpsons quote goes:

Hello. I'm Leonard Nimoy. The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth? The answer is no."

[Tribble]

218
PZ Myers

10 September 2013 at 9:11 pm (UTC -5)

OK, guys, you really need some help here. For example:

heat albumin to 100 degrees centigrade in a solution of phosphate buffered saline with beta mercaptoethanol at 1 atmosphere, it’s non-covalent bonds will dissociate.

That’s true. That’s a fact. Proteins have measurable, quantifiable properties. There are some wacky postmodernists out there who’ll try to argue with that, but most won’t. Instead, they’ll ask you,

What does it mean? What is the context? What is the purpose of dissociating non-covalent bonds in that molecule? What is the framework of knowledge in which that fits?

Most scientists are comfortable with the distinction between data and information (I think). You’ve plopped out a datum. Fine. Now explain why.

I get this all the time with students. You can give them a recipe to follow out of a lab cookbook, and they can follow it and it works fine, most of the time. When it doesn’t, they’re lost, because they don’t understand the mechanism, the theory, the whole big background of solutes and solvents, dissociation constants, the interactions between salts and pH and temperature, that whole massive edifice of scientific knowledge behind your simple statement that you take completely for granted.

That’s postmodernism. Wake up and notice all your assumptions.

No, asshole. This is post-modernism:

A number of different philosophical and historical schools, often grouped together as "postmodernism", began reinterpreting scientific achievements of the past through the lens of the practitioners, often positing the influence of politics and economics in the development of scientific theories in addition to scientific observations. Rather than being presented as working entirely from positivistic observations, many scientists of the past were scrutinized for their connection to issues of gender, sexual orientation, race, and class. Some more radical philosophers, such as Paul Feyerabend, argued that scientific theories were themselves incoherent and that other forms of knowledge production (such as those used in religion) served the material and spiritual needs of their practitioners with equal validity as did scientific explanations.

Post-modernism, in practice, gives equal weight to 'woo' and non-rational, non-evidential methods of 'understanding.' It's not just about the scientific method, it's about how your race, sex, sexual orientation, etc., etc., etc., influence how you do your work. Which is bullshit.

Even worse, his post is stupid. He's got a bunch of ignorant (but trying to learn) college students in a cowtown college. Some of them are there because they HAVE to be there (they need that science lab course to graduate) so they're minimal effort people. But even the serious ones can fuck the lab up and they can't fix it because they don't have the vast amount of knowledge necessary to understand what they did wrong.

Or, in short, it's ignorant college students being ignorant college students. I made mistakes in lab in both high school and college. But the mere fact I made them and couldn't correct them didn't validate PoMo. It just meant I lost marks because I fucked up some classic experiment that had no relevance to anything I would ever do again in my life and I was doing it by recipe to replicate some scientific discovery somebody made hundreds, if not thousands, of years before.

All this reminds me of a YouTube video where Dawkins is giving a speech on PoMo and Feminism. Dawkins is mocking the PoMo-feminism's answer to why we're really proficient with our science/engineering on solids, but not fluid dynamics. Paraphrasing, the PoMo Feminist explanation was not along the lines of "It's not because fluid dynamics are fucking hard and some of the smartest people in the history have struggled." No, it was because ' 'fluids' are 'woman like' while solids are 'male like' and male prejudices have made it difficult for males to understand it.'

Anyway, I find it kind of funny in a very sad "John Davison the Crank" sort of way. He's recapitulating Gould's 'Non-Overlappoing Other Magestira' argument only it's even broader because now it's lost "non-overlapping" and it's encompassing woo, religion and science as well. A far fall from the UseNet /Internet Warrior who'd have never gone that route before he started suffering from whatever brand of crazy that's gotten into his head.

[Ape+lust]

PZ's spent 2 years trying to draw an Is from his Oughts and it's driven him mad.

I don't know enough to even guess at whether PZ's heart op and his activities in the last 5 years are linked. However, I will say that it is probably far more likely to just be a result of the group he now panders to. Radically changing peoples' minds is pretty easy under certain conditions and pressures.

Re: pumphead. He had stents put in. That doesn't require a hookup to a heart/lung machine, does it?

PZ spent the bulk of his early blogging years raging impotently at the GOP and its dominionist faction. He never swung an election, never swayed a school board, never got a congressman to change his/her vote. He did however, accrue enough juice to move the direction of atheists/skeptics to his liking. Which worked fine for him until he purged everyone but sycophants from his orbit, which made him think he could just order up a Cultural Revolution and finish the job. Now he's on the downslope of his power, back to yelling at people who won't listen, and pulling dirty tricks out of desperation.

[Service Dog]

[youtube]v455A1RAIDw[/youtube]

http://i.imgur.com/a1vPLUm.png

[BillHamp]

Post-PZ Myers

I get this all the time with students. You can give them a recipe to follow out of a lab cookbook, and they can follow it and it works fine, most of the time. When it doesn’t, they’re lost, because they don’t understand the mechanism, the theory, the whole big background of solutes and solvents, dissociation constants, the interactions between salts and pH and temperature, that whole massive edifice of scientific knowledge behind your simple statement that you take completely for granted.

In other words, PZ thinks his students are idiots. These considerations, which he labels postmodern, are as old as experimental science.
There is an old and great response to 'postmodern' thought from Noam Chomsky; it's worth reading even if you don't particularly like him. The more hard-boiled side of the left - which I happily belong to - is largely sick of this shit.

PZ calls his students idiots every chance he gets. There are several things wrong with doing that:
1. It is a form of bullying. Talk about a power differential.
2. It is a form of rationalizing, whereby he attempts to make up for his own failures by insulting others. Ironically, if his students are idiots, it reflects on him moreso than it does them.
3. It is highly likely that several of the students in his class are smarter than him. It is just a game of odds. There is only one PZ Myers, but dozens in his classes. Odds, are, one or two are smarter than the instructor. In PZ's case, the odds are even higher.

[BarnOwl]

After reading Chomsky's thorough dissection of postmodernism-as-critique-of-science (thanks for the link!), it seems to me that PoMoZus hasn't thought through the implications of postmodernist approaches to knowledge. Instead, he appears to be using postmodernism as a way to 1) legitimize the "contributions" of outsiders, such as the Skepchicks, to scientific "research," 2) legitimize the largely baseless accusations and critiques of white heteronormative males within the atheist/skeptic and scientific communities, and 3) promote himself as a leftist and progressive activist for social justice. His anecdote about students in chemistry lab pretty much flies in the face of postmodernism, as the students would be using the reviled "craft and technology" to measure pH, temperature, etc. and applying the hegemonic construct of the scientific method in their experiments. At least I hope they wouldn't be using alternative "ways of knowing" that involve tasting chemicals or floating tea leaves in beakers or stirring the entrails of sacrificed animals.

There is a festering pomo "ways of knowing" contingent at many universities, including mine, and I find myself having e-mail or face-to-face (in meetings) skirmishes with them at least once a month. Part of this is my compulsive need to argue against new age pomo bullshit, and admittedly it's somewhat stupid politically, since all of the pomo "ways of knowing" advocates outrank me. Several of them are deans.

As an aside, PoMoZus didn't have open heart surgery; he had several stents placed, but a heart-lung machine isn't required for that operation. Not that that eliminates effects of heart disease or heart medications on his mental status, but just in the interest of medical accuracy.

[Hemisphere]

Re: pumphead. He had stents put in. That doesn't require a hookup to a heart/lung machine, does it?

I believe you are right. We can rule out a connection between heart op and insanity in Peezus then. It's just good old-fashioned craziness resulting from original personality and a life of bitterness.

[Hemisphere]

At least I hope they wouldn't be using alternative "ways of knowing" that involve tasting chemicals or floating tea leaves in beakers or stirring the entrails of sacrificed animals.

In my youth, I correctly identified an unknown substance in a chemistry practical by tasting it. It was a far faster method than conducting the various experiments we were tasked with using. I'd have had a very short career in chemistry, but I'd have been a PoMo hero.

[Trophy]

I had some big laughs reading the pharyngula thread on Dawkins. Not as big as usual, because thier usual over-the-top screaming and bitching has become a bit boring. But still, it's pretty amusing how Caine wields his/her/hir/hix/xix moderation powers, like "Wheee, look I've a big fucking hammer!!"

I think Dawkins response is a bit weird, but it definitely does not require frothing of the mouth. Besides, I don't get why people assume that he is projecting his experience onto others (as in "I was not hurt so no one was hurt"). That's a stupid conclusion. As a student you live and hang out with many other students so sometimes you can get a feeling of how they feel, or hear gossips, or even fucking talk to them about their experiences. with Facebook and all the social media, you can easily find most of your classmates. Specially, if you turned out to be Dawkins, you can be your classmates will be looking for you on FB. They assume Dawkins is totally clueless about what has happened to his classmates and that he has not talked to them since which does not seem to be a reasonable assumption.

[Cunning Punt]

.... In the meantime a total of (I think) 12 states in the USA have passed laws restricting abortion from the 2nd trimester onwards, not to mention laws designed to shut down Planned Parenthood. But hey, there are bigger feminist fish to fry, right? There are rumored rapists to call out, Cons that won't you bend the rules for special snowflakes, alleged jokes made in poor taste by Suppressive Persons, privileged old white guys who minimize child abuse (except they don't), and on and on. Useless cunts.

[Linus]

Well when there was all that nonsense in the UK a couple of weeks back where some poor lady was getting hundreds of rape threats a day on twitter - it turned out the vast majority were "Nothing wrong with her a good shagging wouldn't sort out". Rape threat? my fucking arse

Speaking of rape, and bad jokes... Back in 2009, David Letterman made a joke about one of Sarah Palin's daughters getting knocked up. This resulted in a group of crazy protesters outside of CBS demanding that Letterman be fired. Many of them were insisting that his joke was a "rape joke", and some were claiming that having told the joke made Letterman a rapist.

O&A's Sam Roberts got some good interviews out of them. Worth a listen if anyone's bored (the best one starts at 2:30 into part 2, although the first lady is pretty good too):

[youtube]yZMEaJNrJ14[/youtube]
[youtube]L86GHYj4U8Q[/youtube]

[Reap]

Among other things Al talks about his exchange with Rebecca
ReapSowRadio #73

[Tribble]

218
PZ Myers

10 September 2013 at 9:11 pm (UTC -5)

OK, guys, you really need some help here. For example:

heat albumin to 100 degrees centigrade in a solution of phosphate buffered saline with beta mercaptoethanol at 1 atmosphere, it’s non-covalent bonds will dissociate.

That’s true. That’s a fact. Proteins have measurable, quantifiable properties. There are some wacky postmodernists out there who’ll try to argue with that, but most won’t. Instead, they’ll ask you,

What does it mean? What is the context? What is the purpose of dissociating non-covalent bonds in that molecule? What is the framework of knowledge in which that fits?

Most scientists are comfortable with the distinction between data and information (I think). You’ve plopped out a datum. Fine. Now explain why.

I get this all the time with students. You can give them a recipe to follow out of a lab cookbook, and they can follow it and it works fine, most of the time. When it doesn’t, they’re lost, because they don’t understand the mechanism, the theory, the whole big background of solutes and solvents, dissociation constants, the interactions between salts and pH and temperature, that whole massive edifice of scientific knowledge behind your simple statement that you take completely for granted.

That’s postmodernism. Wake up and notice all your assumptions.

If you’re a good scientist, you’re practicing postmodernism all the time

See this is what I don't get. And maybe I'm wrong and I don't know dick shit about post-modernism..and quite frankly I don't really care...but...

Doesn't that destroy his own particular brand of feminism? Isn't patriarchy theory, or at least in the way it's commonly used, just a massive assumption...one they're claiming is an absolute objective fact at that?

Maybe I'm a PoMo then, but I agree that we need to notice all our assumptions and how they could be wrong in any given situation. Now, it's easier said than done, especially when talking about society as it's something of massive levels of complexity, but it's something we should take note of.

But that flies in the face of SJW thought patterns, where again, their theories MUST be treated as objective fact, and their assumptions universally correct. It's a huge double-standard, and personally, I think it's just a weapon to be used against undesirables (in their eyes).

Right. Because logical consistencies are not part of their cause. But what else can we expect from a cause that lives on the folly of youth and cynical oldsters exploiting it?

Sometimes I wonder if Orwell thought he might be 'too radical' with 1984. That maybe he should 'tone it down' to be 'more realistic.' And then he'd lived and seen what our governments and social movements have become.

What would he make of our society? And would he think "I'm going to have to 'take this novel to 11' if I'm going to remain ahead of the curve..."

[Dick Strawkins]

http://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2013 ... ompromise/

Ally Fogg writes a piece about the pros and cons of anonymity for the accused in rape trials and points out that those accused, if found innocent, are often targeted by people who refuse to accept anything other than a guilty verdict.

He's immediately accuse of being a rape apologist by Ibis3:

Why is there a need for anonymity for rape defendants? Because even when someone is acquitted, large numbers of people continue to assert their guilt, and that was vividly proven on Twitter this week.

You’re fucking kidding, right? It couldn’t be because

the innumerable tweets and message-board comments I’ve seen calling for the witness in this trial to be named and shamed, imprisoned for making false allegations or simply abused and insulted by people calling her variations on “a lying little bitch.”

and the various rape threats and other threats of violence that would be directed at a specific person–already a survivor of a traumatic experience? For fucking ever.

And the idea that just because someone’s been found not guilty in a court, we should then turn off our own reasoning faculties and assume he’s innocent, especially when it comes to cases of sexual assault (look up the reporting and conviction statistics) is preposterous. I’m not even reading the rest of this crap rape apology post.

:doh:

[codelette]

.... In the meantime a total of (I think) 12 states in the USA have passed laws restricting abortion from the 2nd trimester onwards, not to mention laws designed to shut down Planned Parenthood...

Those laws seem to just repeat the modern application of Roe vs Wade. Abortion can happen until viability and viability is now down to 24 weeks.

[EdwardGemmer]

Rebecca Watson tweets that Dawkins "mild pedophilia" he was a victim of is a dealbreaker for her. Cause victims are gross, I guess?

[Tribble]

Gefan, thank you for another video. Brilliant...and look, their providing more material all the time. Is their a next movie idea in the works, or am I being greedy?

Too much good analysis from so many to comment on...enjoying it very much. A question or two for those more knowledgeable and astute than myself...Is Peezus really trying to kill science to save it? Post modernism does not seem a good fit for a scientist, but excellent for a demagogue. Is this a conscious decision on his part to separate himself from the pack, as some have suggested, or is he simply trying to quell the cognitive dissonance that arises by his new brand of femi-faith clashing with the scientist? Or is he simply going batshit insane? Or a combination....? If he was facing a criminal trial instead of a civil one, I would guess he was firming up an insanity plea.

I actually do think its that. Part of me is actually worried for the guy.

Compare the PZ of now to 5 years ago and it is a different person. I know not everyone here was a fan, but for me he was a pragmatic, no-nonsense thinker who usually had something interesting to say, whether or not i agreed with it. Now, he is an embarrassment to himself - the disconnect between his present persona and the old one is so great - to such an extent that I can't believe it isn't due to some form of mental illness.

I note that this deterioration seems to have happened (perhaps coincidentally but definitely noticeably) since the heart op. (Can heart meds do that?)

Lipitor can cause a form of chemical dementia and amnesia in a subset of the population. Many elderly people who take a lot of medications often have to take anti-psychotics because of the unfavorable interactions between them even though any one drug of their cocktail does nothing of that sort. Heart attacks are also known to provoke anxiety, depression and PTSD in those who have suffered them. Those mental illnesses, left untreated, are known to cause behavioral changes in the heart-attack sufferer and increase the risk of another heart-attack.

Beyond that, I don't know bupkis. Heart disease is something that's not in my family tree going back to my great-great grandparents so I've never learned anything about it. Mostly we die of 'one too many risks taken' or being really old.

[Ericb]

Rebecca Watson tweets that Dawkins "mild pedophilia" he was a victim of is a dealbreaker for her. Cause victims are gross, I guess?

I'd love for them to go full court Shermer on Dawkins. Though he'd probably ignore it being British he have much looser libel laws to play with.

[rpguest]

218
PZ Myers

10 September 2013 at 9:11 pm (UTC -5)

OK, guys, you really need some help here. For example:

heat albumin to 100 degrees centigrade in a solution of phosphate buffered saline with beta mercaptoethanol at 1 atmosphere, it’s non-covalent bonds will dissociate.

That’s true. That’s a fact. Proteins have measurable, quantifiable properties. There are some wacky postmodernists out there who’ll try to argue with that, but most won’t. Instead, they’ll ask you,

What does it mean? What is the context? What is the purpose of dissociating non-covalent bonds in that molecule? What is the framework of knowledge in which that fits?

Most scientists are comfortable with the distinction between data and information (I think). You’ve plopped out a datum. Fine. Now explain why.

I get this all the time with students. You can give them a recipe to follow out of a lab cookbook, and they can follow it and it works fine, most of the time. When it doesn’t, they’re lost, because they don’t understand the mechanism, the theory, the whole big background of solutes and solvents, dissociation constants, the interactions between salts and pH and temperature, that whole massive edifice of scientific knowledge behind your simple statement that you take completely for granted.

That’s postmodernism. Wake up and notice all your assumptions.

If you’re a good scientist, you’re practicing postmodernism all the time

Yes, and this explains why the scientific revolution didn't occur until the second half of the twentieth century, when postmodernists invented doubt.

:roll:

seems a bit prescient

http://i.imgur.com/GUMpMaV.png

guess pz is going to have to re-divorce skepticism all the re-time

[Aneris]

Listening to Al Stefanelli on Reap Sow #73 -- in the background while I am doing non-boring work. I understand that the Twitter inactive remark somehow upset Al. You gave the impression that it was important to you, and you wanted to set it straight (which is okay, but then don't say it wasn't important to you). Just my comment for now, now you're about to discuss Gefan's Clownfall (which I have shared on Twitter, thx Gefan).

[rpguest]

Rebecca Watson tweets that Dawkins "mild pedophilia" he was a victim of is a dealbreaker for her. Cause victims are gross, I guess?

[Verklagekasper]

Sometimes I wonder if Orwell thought he might be 'too radical' with 1984. That maybe he should 'tone it down' to be 'more realistic.' And then he'd lived and seen what our governments and social movements have become.

Orwell certainly inteded it to be radical. He extrapolated developments in socialist movements that he found disturbing into the future. But he'd probably be surprised how close to reality his novel has turned out to be. Especially regarding its description of an ideology which is pretended to be for the good of people, yet which has to offer nothing but radical contempt for anything human and for the notion that there exists a truth other than what the party defines as such on an arbitrary and daily base. We read the book back then in English class, but I could appreciate its brilliance only decades later when I read it again. Just look at 1984's concept of "sex crime", then watch the SJW trying to criminalize sexuality that evades their regulation. The book is almost prophetic.

[Guest]

THIS is seriously what people are getting up in arms about?

http://i.imgur.com/Ocetlln.png

they are seriously that idiotic?

[Gumby]

Rebecca Watson tweets that Dawkins "mild pedophilia" he was a victim of is a dealbreaker for her. Cause victims are gross, I guess?

I thought "Dear Muslima" was supposed to be the "deal breaker" for Rebecca Watson... what a melodramatic baby she is.

[Aneris]

Rebecca Watson tweets that Dawkins "mild pedophilia" he was a victim of is a dealbreaker for her. Cause victims are gross, I guess?

Unfortunately "mild pedophilia" is a dealbreaker for me :( RT @t_kennedy9: I think you two have romantic tension!
4:44 PM - 10 Sep 2013

Right, since Rebecca Watson was a total fan of Richard Dawkins before.

[Verklagekasper]

Rebecca Watson tweets that Dawkins "mild pedophilia" he was a victim of is a dealbreaker for her. Cause victims are gross, I guess?

I thought "Dear Muslima" was supposed to be the "deal breaker" for Rebecca Watson... what a melodramatic baby she is.

Every two years since 2011, she has ultimately had enough of him.

[EdwardGemmer]

Rebecca Watson tweets that Dawkins "mild pedophilia" he was a victim of is a dealbreaker for her. Cause victims are gross, I guess?

I thought "Dear Muslima" was supposed to be the "deal breaker" for Rebecca Watson... what a melodramatic baby she is.

Every two years since 2011, she has ultimately had enough of him.

I took it as she wouldn't have sex with Dawkins because he was sexually assaulted as a child.

[Ape+lust]

Lipitor can cause a form of chemical dementia and amnesia in a subset of the population. Many elderly people who take a lot of medications often have to take anti-psychotics because of the unfavorable interactions between them even though any one drug of their cocktail does nothing of that sort. Heart attacks are also known to provoke anxiety, depression and PTSD in those who have suffered them. Those mental illnesses, left untreated, are known to cause behavioral changes in the heart-attack sufferer and increase the risk of another heart-attack...

Or maybe it's just 'roid rage </unqualified_diagnosis>

http://i.imgur.com/YmlnzQ2.png

[Tony Parsehole]

Lipitor can cause a form of chemical dementia and amnesia in a subset of the population. Many elderly people who take a lot of medications often have to take anti-psychotics because of the unfavorable interactions between them even though any one drug of their cocktail does nothing of that sort. Heart attacks are also known to provoke anxiety, depression and PTSD in those who have suffered them. Those mental illnesses, left untreated, are known to cause behavioral changes in the heart-attack sufferer and increase the risk of another heart-attack...

Or maybe it's just 'roid rage </unqualified_diagnosis>

http://i.imgur.com/YmlnzQ2.png

Never thought I'd hear PZ Myers being accused of steroid induced aggression. Mind you, I never thought I'd see a petition being endorsed by "atheist leaders" to make Richard Dawkins say sorry for not being more upset about his childhood molestation.

[Kevin Solway]

Rebecca Watson tweets that Dawkins "mild pedophilia" he was a victim of is a dealbreaker for her.

I don't believe that Dawkins has made any deals with her!

[Guest]

In the past month Myers has launched attacks on Shermer, Krause, Dawkins, ....

I wonder what he hopes to gain from these attacks....

I listened to PZ's radio appearance on WFMU.

It was very ho-hum. I thought, "so, this is the version of himself that PZ uses to peddle his book."

It began with him describing Morris, MN. Population 5,000. 3,000 of those are students. 15 churches, and he uses all the slight variations in Lutheranism to indicate that his neighbors are idiots. (I guess he wants them to be Big Tent Lutherans, then? Now he's opposed to infighting?) There's no dedicated bookstore in Morris, he says. I thought he was just doing his usual Garrison Keillor schtick... "I'm just a simple biology prof at a small school, I don't know why I get millions of hits on the internet, aw shucks."

But then I realized that the smalltown self-derp-recation was due to him thinking of the call as his Big Moment on NYC radio, interacting with people worthy to consider his equals— not like those undergrads and hicks back home. He made sure to say that he travels to NY and DC "on the weekends", but on weekdays he enjoys the simple life where he can "walk everywhere." What a sophisticated country gent!

Callers tried to say 'science can't explain everything' by invoking acupuncture, UFOs and reports of near death experience. PZ said that had all been debunked many times over by science, presenting not-much-more than his usual tone of Condescending Professorial Forbearance as evidence. (Which I don't find compelling, as he uses the same tone to defend bogus rape stats and The War In The Atheist Community Between Those Who Think Women are Human Vs. Those Who Only See Women As Fucktoys.)

I don't know if it registered with him that the bigcity callers were full of superstition, just like the neighbors he despises. Or that the callers' reference to Hassidic women having to ride in the back of buses-- suggests that the conservativism he decries back home might pale next to the bigcity version. That may not have fit the script he wanted to believe. I'm betting it was all "intellectually stimulating conversation with New York public radio", when he got off the phone and smugly mentioned the interview-- to everyone he saw on campus for the rest of the day.

I speculate that PZ's subsequent post-modernism post is all about his insecurity at being a backwater nobody: He uses the internet to play at being a big-league-academic-somebody. Post-modernism appeals to him because he thinks that's-what the big boys still talk about at cocktail parties. Feminism is what he thinks Important Liberals talk about. He trashes Dawkins, Shermer, Krause... to make it seem like he's at their level.

The radio show isn’t really worth listening to. No fireworks.

The host did gently allude to deeprifts around 40 minutes in, and PZ played the magnanimous voice of reason. He said any movement will experience ‘growing pains’ and his opponents want to establish a church-like hierarchy, whereas he wants equality.

[Service Dog]

In the past month Myers has launched attacks on Shermer, Krause, Dawkins, ....

I wonder what he hopes to gain from these attacks....

I listened to PZ's radio appearance on WFMU.

It was very ho-hum. I thought, "so, this is the version of himself that PZ uses to peddle his book."

It began with him describing Morris, MN. Population 5,000. 3,000 of those are students. 15 churches, and he uses all the slight variations in Lutheranism to indicate that his neighbors are idiots. (I guess he wants them to be Big Tent Lutherans, then? Now he's opposed to infighting?) There's no dedicated bookstore in Morris, he says. I thought he was just doing his usual Garrison Keillor schtick... "I'm just a simple biology prof at a small school, I don't know why I get millions of hits on the internet, aw shucks."

But then I realized that the smalltown self-derp-recation was due to him thinking of the call as his Big Moment on NYC radio, interacting with people worthy to consider his equals— not like those undergrads and hicks back home. He made sure to say that he travels to NY and DC "on the weekends", but on weekdays he enjoys the simple life where he can "walk everywhere." What a sophisticated country gent!

Callers tried to say 'science can't explain everything' by invoking acupuncture, UFOs and reports of near death experience. PZ said that had all been debunked many times over by science, presenting not-much-more than his usual tone of Condescending Professorial Forbearance as evidence. (Which I don't find compelling, as he uses the same tone to defend bogus rape stats and The War In The Atheist Community Between Those Who Think Women are Human Vs. Those Who Only See Women As Fucktoys.)

I don't know if it registered with him that the bigcity callers were full of superstition, just like the neighbors he despises. Or that the callers' reference to Hassidic women having to ride in the back of buses-- suggests that the conservativism he decries back home might pale next to the bigcity version. That may not have fit the script he wanted to believe. I'm betting it was all "intellectually stimulating conversation with New York public radio", when he got off the phone and smugly mentioned the interview-- to everyone he saw on campus for the rest of the day.

I speculate that PZ's subsequent post-modernism post is all about his insecurity at being a backwater nobody: He uses the internet to play at being a big-league-academic-somebody. Post-modernism appeals to him because he thinks that's-what the big boys still talk about at cocktail parties. Feminism is what he thinks Important Liberals talk about. He trashes Dawkins, Shermer, Krause... to make it seem like he's at their level.

The radio show isn’t really worth listening to. No fireworks.

The host did gently allude to deeprifts around 40 minutes in, and PZ played the magnanimous voice of reason. He said any movement will experience ‘growing pains’ and his opponents want to establish a church-like hierarchy, whereas he wants equality.

[Gumby]

In the past month Myers has launched attacks on Shermer, Krause, Dawkins, ....

I wonder what he hopes to gain from these attacks....

I listened to PZ's radio appearance on WFMU.

It was very ho-hum. I thought, "so, this is the version of himself that PZ uses to peddle his book."

It began with him describing Morris, MN. Population 5,000. 3,000 of those are students. 15 churches, and he uses all the slight variations in Lutheranism to indicate that his neighbors are idiots. (I guess he wants them to be Big Tent Lutherans, then? Now he's opposed to infighting?) There's no dedicated bookstore in Morris, he says. I thought he was just doing his usual Garrison Keillor schtick... "I'm just a simple biology prof at a small school, I don't know why I get millions of hits on the internet, aw shucks."

But then I realized that the smalltown self-derp-recation was due to him thinking of the call as his Big Moment on NYC radio, interacting with people worthy to consider his equals— not like those undergrads and hicks back home. He made sure to say that he travels to NY and DC "on the weekends", but on weekdays he enjoys the simple life where he can "walk everywhere." What a sophisticated country gent!

Callers tried to say 'science can't explain everything' by invoking acupuncture, UFOs and reports of near death experience. PZ said that had all been debunked many times over by science, presenting not-much-more than his usual tone of Condescending Professorial Forbearance as evidence. (Which I don't find compelling, as he uses the same tone to defend bogus rape stats and The War In The Atheist Community Between Those Who Think Women are Human Vs. Those Who Only See Women As Fucktoys.)

I don't know if it registered with him that the bigcity callers were full of superstition, just like the neighbors he despises. Or that the callers' reference to Hassidic women having to ride in the back of buses-- suggests that the conservativism he decries back home might pale next to the bigcity version. That may not have fit the script he wanted to believe. I'm betting it was all "intellectually stimulating conversation with New York public radio", when he got off the phone and smugly mentioned the interview-- to everyone he saw on campus for the rest of the day.

I speculate that PZ's subsequent post-modernism post is all about his insecurity at being a backwater nobody: He uses the internet to play at being a big-league-academic-somebody. Post-modernism appeals to him because he thinks that's-what the big boys still talk about at cocktail parties. Feminism is what he thinks Important Liberals talk about. He trashes Dawkins, Shermer, Krause... to make it seem like he's at their level.

The radio show isn’t really worth listening to. No fireworks.

The host did gently allude to deeprifts around 40 minutes in, and PZ played the magnanimous voice of reason. He said any movement will experience ‘growing pains’ and his opponents want to establish a church-like hierarchy, whereas he wants equality.

[VAXherd]

Also, looking at what they had planned:
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/jre ... unity.html

The surveys are being collected by volunteers at events where parents may be especially vulnerable to anti-vaccine messages.

Doesn't exactly sound like the type of paper that would pass muster under peer review. It is probably about as useful and representative as an opinion poll on a Fox News website.

Just to note: Specifying the population you're sampling from is not a problem.

The stickiness with informal surveys tends to come from non-standard sampling procedures. They don't render the data meaningless, but you need to work harder at understanding the method to determine what kinds of interpretations are valid.

If there is a holdup on "publication", such issues might be the reason. Reviewers frequently recommend changes to papers, and if the JREF is on the outs with the authors, that could be a barrier to forward motion.

[Gumby]

Oops. Fucked up my response.

Anyway, PZ said he wants equality and his opponents want a churchlike hierarchy? He actually fucking said that??? Ha. You got it exactly backwards, Peez. We're not the ones enforcing conformity through silencing, shaming, callout culture and suppression of free speech. Silly liar.

[katamari Damassi]

In the past month Myers has launched attacks on Shermer, Krause, Dawkins, ....

I wonder what he hopes to gain from these attacks....

I listened to PZ's radio appearance on WFMU.

It was very ho-hum. I thought, "so, this is the version of himself that PZ uses to peddle his book."

It began with him describing Morris, MN. Population 5,000. 3,000 of those are students. 15 churches, and he uses all the slight variations in Lutheranism to indicate that his neighbors are idiots. (I guess he wants them to be Big Tent Lutherans, then? Now he's opposed to infighting?) There's no dedicated bookstore in Morris, he says. I thought he was just doing his usual Garrison Keillor schtick... "I'm just a simple biology prof at a small school, I don't know why I get millions of hits on the internet, aw shucks."

But then I realized that the smalltown self-derp-recation was due to him thinking of the call as his Big Moment on NYC radio, interacting with people worthy to consider his equals— not like those undergrads and hicks back home. He made sure to say that he travels to NY and DC "on the weekends", but on weekdays he enjoys the simple life where he can "walk everywhere." What a sophisticated country gent!

Callers tried to say 'science can't explain everything' by invoking acupuncture, UFOs and reports of near death experience. PZ said that had all been debunked many times over by science, presenting not-much-more than his usual tone of Condescending Professorial Forbearance as evidence. (Which I don't find compelling, as he uses the same tone to defend bogus rape stats and The War In The Atheist Community Between Those Who Think Women are Human Vs. Those Who Only See Women As Fucktoys.)

I don't know if it registered with him that the bigcity callers were full of superstition, just like the neighbors he despises. Or that the callers' reference to Hassidic women having to ride in the back of buses-- suggests that the conservativism he decries back home might pale next to the bigcity version. That may not have fit the script he wanted to believe. I'm betting it was all "intellectually stimulating conversation with New York public radio", when he got off the phone and smugly mentioned the interview-- to everyone he saw on campus for the rest of the day.

I speculate that PZ's subsequent post-modernism post is all about his insecurity at being a backwater nobody: He uses the internet to play at being a big-league-academic-somebody. Post-modernism appeals to him because he thinks that's-what the big boys still talk about at cocktail parties. Feminism is what he thinks Important Liberals talk about. He trashes Dawkins, Shermer, Krause... to make it seem like he's at their level.

The radio show isn’t really worth listening to. No fireworks.

The host did gently allude to deeprifts around 40 minutes in, and PZ played the magnanimous voice of reason. He said any movement will experience ‘growing pains’ and his opponents want to establish a church-like hierarchy, whereas he wants equality.

You've reminded me how much I hate Garrison Keillor.

[windy]

I think Dawkins response is a bit weird, but it definitely does not require frothing of the mouth. Besides, I don't get why people assume that he is projecting his experience onto others (as in "I was not hurt so no one was hurt"). That's a stupid conclusion.

Dawkins is just being a postmodernist, they need to wake up and check their assumptions.

[katamari Damassi]

Over at Shakesville they're calling Dawkins a "child rape apologist". Also, ranking what abuse is bad and what is worse is "auditing".

The insanity eventually reaches a point where it's more sad than funny.

[Guestus Aurelius]

218
PZ Myers

10 September 2013 at 9:11 pm (UTC -5)

OK, guys, you really need some help here. For example:

heat albumin to 100 degrees centigrade in a solution of phosphate buffered saline with beta mercaptoethanol at 1 atmosphere, it’s non-covalent bonds will dissociate.

That’s true. That’s a fact. Proteins have measurable, quantifiable properties. There are some wacky postmodernists out there who’ll try to argue with that, but most won’t. Instead, they’ll ask you,

What does it mean? What is the context? What is the purpose of dissociating non-covalent bonds in that molecule? What is the framework of knowledge in which that fits?

Most scientists are comfortable with the distinction between data and information (I think). You’ve plopped out a datum. Fine. Now explain why.

I get this all the time with students. You can give them a recipe to follow out of a lab cookbook, and they can follow it and it works fine, most of the time. When it doesn’t, they’re lost, because they don’t understand the mechanism, the theory, the whole big background of solutes and solvents, dissociation constants, the interactions between salts and pH and temperature, that whole massive edifice of scientific knowledge behind your simple statement that you take completely for granted.

That’s postmodernism. Wake up and notice all your assumptions.

No, asshole. This is post-modernism:

A number of different philosophical and historical schools, often grouped together as "postmodernism", began reinterpreting scientific achievements of the past through the lens of the practitioners, often positing the influence of politics and economics in the development of scientific theories in addition to scientific observations. Rather than being presented as working entirely from positivistic observations, many scientists of the past were scrutinized for their connection to issues of gender, sexual orientation, race, and class. Some more radical philosophers, such as Paul Feyerabend, argued that scientific theories were themselves incoherent and that other forms of knowledge production (such as those used in religion) served the material and spiritual needs of their practitioners with equal validity as did scientific explanations.

Post-modernism, in practice, gives equal weight to 'woo' and non-rational, non-evidential methods of 'understanding.' It's not just about the scientific method, it's about how your race, sex, sexual orientation, etc., etc., etc., influence how you do your work. Which is bullshit.

Even worse, his post is stupid. He's got a bunch of ignorant (but trying to learn) college students in a cowtown college. Some of them are there because they HAVE to be there (they need that science lab course to graduate) so they're minimal effort people. But even the serious ones can fuck the lab up and they can't fix it because they don't have the vast amount of knowledge necessary to understand what they did wrong.

Or, in short, it's ignorant college students being ignorant college students. I made mistakes in lab in both high school and college. But the mere fact I made them and couldn't correct them didn't validate PoMo. It just meant I lost marks because I fucked up some classic experiment that had no relevance to anything I would ever do again in my life and I was doing it by recipe to replicate some scientific discovery somebody made hundreds, if not thousands, of years before.

All this reminds me of a YouTube video where Dawkins is giving a speech on PoMo and Feminism. Dawkins is mocking the PoMo-feminism's answer to why we're really proficient with our science/engineering on solids, but not fluid dynamics. Paraphrasing, the PoMo Feminist explanation was not along the lines of "It's not because fluid dynamics are fucking hard and some of the smartest people in the history have struggled." No, it was because ' 'fluids' are 'woman like' while solids are 'male like' and male prejudices have made it difficult for males to understand it.'

Anyway, I find it kind of funny in a very sad "John Davison the Crank" sort of way. He's recapitulating Gould's 'Non-Overlappoing Other Magestira' argument only it's even broader because now it's lost "non-overlapping" and it's encompassing woo, religion and science as well. A far fall from the UseNet /Internet Warrior who'd have never gone that route before he started suffering from whatever brand of crazy that's gotten into his head.

:text-goodpost:

The "different ways of knowing" trope must be the stupidest thing to come out of PoMo. Human intuition is trotted out as an example as another "way of knowing" as if scientists themselves never use it. "Knowledge" gets conflated with "belief." The definition of "truth" is widened to incorporate subjective feelings so that it can be criticized for not being objective and so that scientists (who are using a much narrower definition of "truth") can be labeled naive positivists.

Language has a way of enabling us to delude ourselves. How we define concepts such as "science," "postmodernism," "knowledge," "truth," and "belief" would, in a perfect world, be of little importance, because we'd all just agree on some set of definitions and move on with doing something useful. But people being people, we're very good at forming connections between things (such as the concepts listed above) but not very good at keeping our definitions straight as we do so. Clarity and precision suffer as a result, and we end up arguing against straw men, unwittingly fighting over semantics rather than substance. And we enable charlatans to do these things intentionally.

There is a solution to these limitations of language and mind, and it involves calling bullshit on each other when we slip, putting our ideas to the test, and rigorously and methodically cooperating with each other to gradually discard ideas that don't work and tentatively keep those that do. The speed at which this approach will eliminate the bad and steer you toward the good depends on what field you're in, but the approach itself is the only game in town (yes, even in "softer" fields of inquiry like the humanities). It's been around for a few hundred years, and the word we use for it is "science," not "postmodernism."

Interestingly, some other languages use their word for "science" to encompass a much broader range of fields than we do in English (I have the German "Wissenschaft" in mind). That doesn't necessarily mean that their scholarship is any better, but our customarily narrow use of the word does give English-speakers the impression that "science" is about doing experiments in a laboratory, when really it's about keeping ourselves honest as we try to better understand things.

Certainly there's plenty of insightful scholarship worth keeping that came from postmodernism. But in this case, I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't throw the bath water out with the baby.

[FrankGrimes]

In the past month Myers has launched attacks on Shermer, Krause, Dawkins, Grothe and Coyne.
And thats just the big name atheists.
It's like he has a list of respected figures he needs to tear down to his level. But he is running out of targets and Becky's targets (which automatically become HIS targets) are getting more bizarre by the hour.

I wonder what he hopes to gain from these attacks. Unless he's gone completely mental, which I don't think is the case, he can't really believe that his puerile smear campaigns are going to sway anyone not already in his camp.

I also think he knows he has completely blown his shot at the big time, so I don't know if it's necessarily a case of him trying to tear down bigger names in an effort to make himself look like the more viable alternative.

I'd say it's little more than pettiness and jealousy; the knowledge that he is going down in flames so he tries as much as possible to smear shit all over the people who he thought would always pat him on the head and hand him the reins to the fifth horse.

That way, he can at least appear to be a hero to the gaggle of poisonous rabble he has gathered around himself.

I don't think he's gone completely mental. Just enough to make him look like a fucking idiot on the intertubez and that spills over into meatspace enough for people to back out of the room slowly.

Honestly, I think he may have thought he could be one of the Four Horesman at some stage. That dream is long gone (it was never really there), but in the meantime he really did have a good crack at it regardless - FTB was his crack ... so to speak. I don't think he meant for it to be the animal that it has become but he's obviously been looking for something to make him money so that he wouldn't have to deal with those stupid students and put effort into actually doing science (something I'm sure he's actually good at - lazy cunt). Yeah, at this stage I think he's just a lazy cunt.

And along came Beccy - his one true but unattainable love - with all those unbrushed teeth and that fuck-you-Imma-drink-till-the-sun-comes-up attitude. Ya' know she's all representin' the chicks an shit. Cute (interesting but ugly) glasses and boys stickin' money down her top. Meh, who could resist right?

Well, I think he's gone a few steps too far over the last few months, trying to keep his status to impress Ms Yellow Teeth and it's starting to hurt. He now comes across as confused and worried. And he deserves all of that worry. He's a lazy, selfish prick who should have known better. And even when he get's a chance to sort things out handed to him on a fucking platter he still doesn't have the guts to do what he knows he should - which is fuck off. And not in a welcoming way. In the kind of way that equates with "Fuck off the internet you dumb fuck. No-one wants you here. But before you go, apologise to all the people you've willfully tried to hurt over the years." Pfffft. That list alone would make a better book than the one he's pimping to the stupid people.

Gumby, I love your work but you aren't going soft on the fucker are you? I mean, he's clearly gone nuts - not completely but considerably - and as we know, his attempted take down of all and sundry prominent atheists has been fairly methodical. Granted, he tends not to own the crap that he posts - more like, here's some shit people, feed on it - then watches the mess from the sidelines, but he's pretty good at initiating it all.

:| Don't mind me. Just finished editing a 5 page lawyer letter :| Not for me.. Someone else.

[Mykeru]

Which is almost, just almost relevant to the thread header.

Are the viruses that ravage one's gastro-intestinal tract especially well-pleasing in shape, or are they as fucking ugly as I imagine them to be?

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photo ... ermath.jpg
"I don't care how cute they are"

P.S. I would like to thank the douche at the gym for working out and then puking copiously in the locker room a week and a half or so ago because you couldn't miss a work out even if you were spraying toxins like a demented law sprinkler and designate you "Suspected Viral Vector Ground Zero"

Fucker.

[welch]

Gefan, thank you for another video. Brilliant...and look, their providing more material all the time. Is their a next movie idea in the works, or am I being greedy?

Too much good analysis from so many to comment on...enjoying it very much. A question or two for those more knowledgeable and astute than myself...Is Peezus really trying to kill science to save it? Post modernism does not seem a good fit for a scientist, but excellent for a demagogue. Is this a conscious decision on his part to separate himself from the pack, as some have suggested, or is he simply trying to quell the cognitive dissonance that arises by his new brand of femi-faith clashing with the scientist? Or is he simply going batshit insane? Or a combination....? If he was facing a criminal trial instead of a civil one, I would guess he was firming up an insanity plea.

I actually do think its that. Part of me is actually worried for the guy.

Compare the PZ of now to 5 years ago and it is a different person. I know not everyone here was a fan, but for me he was a pragmatic, no-nonsense thinker who usually had something interesting to say, whether or not i agreed with it. Now, he is an embarrassment to himself - the disconnect between his present persona and the old one is so great - to such an extent that I can't believe it isn't due to some form of mental illness.

I note that this deterioration seems to have happened (perhaps coincidentally but definitely noticeably) since the heart op. (Can heart meds do that?)

I honestly don't see any difference other than targets and allies. His tactics with those who aren't following his dogma haven't changed in as long as I've read him. Look at how he and his commentariat treated anyone who wasn't rabidly on the PEPSI IS EVIL side of that entire idiocy. Had nothing to do with SJW issues, or feminism.

(not very) deep down, PZ's a demagogue, always has been.

[Kevin Solway]

Anyway, PZ said he wants equality and his opponents want a churchlike hierarchy? He actually fucking said that??? Ha. You got it exactly backwards, Peez. We're not the ones enforcing conformity through silencing, shaming, callout culture and suppression of free speech. Silly liar.

I'm surprised he didn't say that all his opponents are rapists and pedophiles, to be consistent with what he writes on his blog.

[mordacious1]

In this clip of The Big Bang Theory, it's shown that coffee means sex and that there are gradations of wrong (rape is more wrong than a quick fondle):

[youtube]F_1zoX5Ax9U[/youtube]

[welch]

In other news, apparently Welsh is a MRA or something (this is news to me too):

http://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2013 ... mment-8813

278
carnation

September 10, 2013 at 6:40 am (UTC 1)

@. John Welch 270

That’s one of the silliest things that i have ever read.

If your attacker is a man you have a decent chance of being “treated fairly”. Unless The Marquis of Queensbury rules are applied, protagonists in a fight rarely treat each other fairly. You’re also assuming that the fight will be between two people, very often this isn’t the case. I’ve witnessed groups of men attack a single man on a number of occasions.

Your second paragraph is an embarrassing mishmash of half baked infantile myths. Do you understand how police and justice systems work? Do you honestly believe that all a woman has to do is say “he hit me” to have someone jailed and labelled a domestic abuser for life? Do you honestly believe that the press will follow the story in the way that you describe? If you do, I strongly urge you to study jurisprudence and police procedures and to avoid MRA blogs. They are full of similar juvenile, lurid gibberish.

This is what Carnation is responding to (it is #277 not #270):

http://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2013 ... mment-8809

277
John C. Welch

September 10, 2013 at 2:00 am (UTC 1) Link to this comment

Lucy @274

I’d much rather be attacked by a man. Not out of any machismo, but because I know that an effective defense in an attack, other than running away, (which really is the best defense. Hard to get hit when you’re running like hell) is going to leave the other person somewhat battered and bruised as well as me.

If my attacker is a man, I have a decent chance of being treated fairly, and my attacker will have a very hard time of feigning innocence.

If my attacker is a woman, I’m going to curl up in a ball if i can’t outrun them and hope that I don’t get killed, because if I fight back, all she has to do is say “he hit me” or “he hit me first” and I’m wrong. it may eventually get sorted out, but I’ll do some jail time, and run a high risk that I’ll be labeled a domestic abuser for life. Because that’s what the press will run with and even if they apologize and retract, that retraction will never have the SEO results of the original accusation.

LOL.

I've been pretty clear that the MRA folks do have some legitimate core issues, such as divorce/family court inequities and the inequities in the way the courts treat men and women accused of the same crime.

I think their movement, overall, does them no favors, and I've seen very few MRA groups that aren't as deep into their victimhood as the SJW derps are into theirs.

That doesn't mean I dismiss the areas where they are correct. same thing with feminists. The movement does them no favors, but I'm not going to dismiss legitimate issues just because of loud derps.

[FrankGrimes]

Mine was a quote from Leonard Nimoy in a Simpsons episode but that poem is great! Havn'e heard it since I was a kid. Thanks for reminding me. :)

Actually I think your quote comes from Star Trek DS9 :

Dr. Julian Bashir: Out of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?
Elim Garak: My dear Doctor, they're all true.
Dr. Julian Bashir: Even the lies?
Elim Garak: Especially the lies.

The Nimoy Simpsons quote goes:

Hello. I'm Leonard Nimoy. The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth? The answer is no."

Nice! :clap: Never knew that. The intricacies of Simpsons comedy and the timeless brilliance of Star Trek.

[ccdimage]

Rehabilitated post-modernism I guess http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ ... ent-689225

218
PZ Myers

10 September 2013 at 9:11 pm (UTC -5)

OK, guys, you really need some help here. For example:

heat albumin to 100 degrees centigrade in a solution of phosphate buffered saline with beta mercaptoethanol at 1 atmosphere, it’s non-covalent bonds will dissociate.

That’s true. That’s a fact. Proteins have measurable, quantifiable properties. There are some wacky postmodernists out there who’ll try to argue with that, but most won’t. Instead, they’ll ask you,

What does it mean? What is the context? What is the purpose of dissociating non-covalent bonds in that molecule? What is the framework of knowledge in which that fits?

Most scientists are comfortable with the distinction between data and information (I think). You’ve plopped out a datum. Fine. Now explain why.

I get this all the time with students. You can give them a recipe to follow out of a lab cookbook, and they can follow it and it works fine, most of the time. When it doesn’t, they’re lost, because they don’t understand the mechanism, the theory, the whole big background of solutes and solvents, dissociation constants, the interactions between salts and pH and temperature, that whole massive edifice of scientific knowledge behind your simple statement that you take completely for granted.

That’s postmodernism. Wake up and notice all your assumptions.

If you’re a good scientist, you’re practicing postmodernism all the time

What does evolution mean? What is the context? What is the purpose of evolution? What is the framework of knowledge in which that fits?
What happens when that framework of knowledge has holes in it?
The argument goes something like- evolution is bullshit because you can't explain the origins of life.

[FrankGrimes]

Also, postmodernism will allways disappear up its own ass - it's designed like that.

[Cunning Punt]

.... In the meantime a total of (I think) 12 states in the USA have passed laws restricting abortion from the 2nd trimester onwards, not to mention laws designed to shut down Planned Parenthood...

Those laws seem to just repeat the modern application of Roe vs Wade. Abortion can happen until viability and viability is now down to 24 weeks.

Yes, and abortion is relatively rare after that time too. I doubt the lawmakers who wrote these laws care about that, or about the improvement of medical treatment such that viability is earlier than when Roe vs Wade was decided.

Still, that wasn't my point. My point is there are real work for these people to do (IMHO, you may think everything is fine) and all they are doing is fighting over bullshit.

[Service Dog]

It began with him describing Morris, MN. Population 5,000. 3,000 of those are students.

Oops. He said 2,000 students. Not 3,000.

Anyway, PZ said he wants equality and his opponents want a churchlike hierarchy? He actually fucking said that??? Ha. You got it exactly backwards, Peez. We're not the ones enforcing conformity through silencing, shaming, callout culture and suppression of free speech. Silly liar.

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/52286

[circa 39:30]

HOST
So can you talk about the state of atheism as a movement today?....


PZ
....We're struggling a little bit with a movement that's got a fairly primitive hierarchical set-up and having some conflict of with some of our leaders and things like this, but otherwise...

HOST
That sounds like a church!

PZ

Ooooooh, yeah, doesn't it. That's the terrifying thing. Um, you know, the thing is, that I think it does sound like a church. Because whenever you're trying to set up a hierarchy. Whenever you're trying to say that-- "here are these people who are on top and are in charge'-- You're setting up a social structure that's prone to failure.

As I said, this particular network that I'm on is very much committed to an egalitarian view which is 'no priests'. No priest equivalents, even. Let's keep this community of equals that are discussing things. And that's why there's some tension as to how we are going to grow and resolve this.


Ultimately atheism is a decision of conscience and intellect.

It is is not something that you can spread via spreading dogmatic words, creeds that you have to follow.
A personal discovery that has to come about.


That's why atheism is not quite like like your standard religion and it shouldn't be. And that's why we worry that if you impose the standard structures people use in these organizations it will become like one.


http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/images/20 ... u_sxsw.jpg