The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

The fundamental premise of evolutionary psychology assumes that human evolution completely stopped with the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens 200,000 years ago. Discuss.

Rep. John Boehner is so opposed to this fictitious “government takeover” of health insurance.

I wonder why.

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First thing’s first. “Assault” is not the right term for this, but only because it carries a specific legal meaning that requires physical contact. But that doesn’t justify waving away the situation I’m about to discuss as no big deal, because it is.

The Escapist has a news post entitled “Female Gamer ‘Sexually Assaulted’ While Playing PS3“. According to the original posting on the Playstation forum, a female player (the poster’s roommate) was harassed by another, male player, who insisted on following her avatar around and crouching behind her, as if staring at her ass. He didn’t stop after being asked to stop or after the female player (and others present) threatened to report him, which she and several others eventually did.

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As if it weren’t bad enough that one of his more famous books is just a paraphrase of Pinker’s The Blank Slate or that his PowerPoint presentations are so awful as to be considered crimes against humanity under the Geneva Convention or that he insists on promoting his libertarianism in every talk, no matter how irrelevant to the topic, he’s apparently taken to concern trolling now.

The facts are these. Shermer wrote a rather bland article about religion and evolution for CNN. Jerry Coyne quoted two paragraphs of Shermer’s conclusion and explained why it represents both an arrogant and unrealistic view of people’s religious beliefs. But he called Shermer an “accomodationist”, which is an apt descriptive term for someone who feels, as Shermer evidently does, that religion and science can coexist — accomodate one another, if you will. In response, Shermer threw a hissy fit about the big, mean Jerry Coyne being a big, mean meany head to him.

At no point in Shermer’s whine does he bother to explain why his position is not, as Coyne claims, profoundly arrogant. He just quotes a couple of commenters and has a good laugh about how superior he is to Jerry Coyne and how enlightened he is, even while he digresses to say that “there is more than one way” and suggests that even the unwashed, unsophisticated, rabid mongrels like Coyne and Dawkins might have a place. There might be some use for that, he says, then quotes someone else who says that Shermer’s approach will “reduce religion’s virulence”. I see that asserted all the time. I’d like some kind of demonstration, at some point, that it actually works.

Because this is the part of Coyne’s post that Shermer ignored to focus on the term “accomodationist”:

Who is Shermer, I suggest, to tell people what beliefs should or should not “matter” to them? Try telling this to a fundamentalist Christian or a devout Muslim. To these folks, scripture is scripture, and it matters that it is true. If, as recent work suggests, prayer doesn’t work, should Shermer tell the faithful that it doesn’t matter whether or not they pray?

That’s a good question. Coyne’s use of fundamentalists for his example was inapt, though. The question applies just as equally to any believer. How is Shermer telling someone, “Oh, you can believe in this kind of god but not that kind of god?” any better than what Shermer sees as Coyne’s “head-on, take-no-prisoners, full-frontal assault”. How is it any less offensive? I’d argue it’s not. It’s just that Coyne and Dawkins and PZ Myers have the honesty to admit what they genuinely believe — that there is not evidence for the existence of a god — rather than pussyfooting around it saying, “Well, I don’t think there is, but you can think there is, and I won’t say anything about that as long as you believe everything else I think you should.”

The bottom line is, Shermer’s mockery is all out of proportion with the fact that Coyne raised a good point. And for that matter, Shermer doesn’t acknowledge the fact that he is, in fact, despite his own protestations to the contrary, attempting to dictate what is and is not an acceptable form of religious belief. Which is fine, if for fuck’s sake you just have the integrity to admit that you’re doing it.

I was going to write a snarky post here, in reference to Ray Comfort’s hideously dishonest mangling of The Origin of Species, in which I declared my intent to publish an abridged version of the Bible that cuts out everything except the parts where God orders the Israelites to commit genocide and maybe that one part where Jesus has the badass line about bringing not peace but a sword.

Then I remembered that the Conservative Bible Project already exists.

One of the shitty things about living in funky urban neighbourhoods is that you have to deal with assholes who come into said urban neighbourhoods because they hear people talking about how great they are, then are shocked, shocked at all of the horrible moral deparvity going on around them. My god, people are drinking the demon rum! They’re having parties! They must be stopped.

This kind of bullshit shut down one of my favourite bars, Cambridge’s B-Side Lounge, and apparently there’s a stuck-up prick trying to bring the same teetotaling assholery to Davis Square. I don’t know much about Ward 6′s current alderwoman, Rebekah Gewirtz, but she’s gotta be better than this Campano joker:

“I don’t like the way the square is going. Whenever you have that many liquor licenses, drugs and violence follow,” said Campano. “I would like to see mercantile and retail — a nice mix.”

Maybe he hasn’t noticed, but that’s what’s already there. But I guess we don’t have a fucking Wal-Mart, so we’re not “mercantile and retail” enough.

These prudish fucks need to just move out to the exurbs where they don’t have to endure the horror of horrors that I like to call “having shit to do after 6 pm”.

Ben Goldacre has a fun article about a completely bogus story in the UK’s Sunday Express claiming “Jab ‘As Deadly As The Cancer’”, referring to the UK’s HPV vaccine and giving the impression of a direct quote. As Ben Goldacre explains, the Express quoted Dr. Diane Harper for the headline and claimed that she was one of the scientists responsible for developing the vaccine. Of course, it turns out that the only thing the Express got right was the fact that Diane Harper exists and is a medical doctor:

I did not say that Cervarix was as deadly as cervical cancer. I did not say that Cervarix could be riskier or more deadly than cervical cancer. I did not say that Cervarix was controversial, I stated that Cervarix is not a ‘controversial drug’. I did not ‘hit out’ – I was contacted by the press for facts. And this was not an exclusive interview.

If only she had a paid consultant to help frame her message, this whole misunderstanding could have been avoided! If she would just stop being SUCH a scientist, she wouldn’t be misunderstood like this. Obviously. Obviously.

This has always been my problem with Nisbet, Mooney, Olson camp. They’re extremely cynical about the stupidity of the public and ineptitude of scientists while simultaneously being incredibly naive about their pals and colleagues in the journalism industry. The fact that they can see this kind of blatant, deliberate misrepresentation and conclude that scientists are at fault makes them either criminally stupid or stupidly venal. But then removing planks from one’s own eye has never been as lucrative as publishing books and making films about the motes in others’, has it?

Я очень болеть всех этих Русский спамеров.

So, earlier today I Twittered™ about Glenn Beck’s ridiculous frog video, which got linked on Skepchick. I was working under the assumption that he actually killed a frog on TV, which seems crazy: but, hey, it’s Glenn Beck. Anyway, various people have pointed out that he appears to grab a rubber frog and that you can’t actually see anything go into the pot of boiling water, two things that I missed from the low quality YouTube version.

Since I have to leave for karaoke with Rebecca Watson in a few minutes, I’ll just ask a question instead of writing up my full thoughts on the matter: does pretending to boil a fake frog on TV rather than actually boiling a live frog on TV make Glenn Beck any less crazy?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

I didn’t create this “Questions” post category to not use it. Anyway, today’s question comes from Matt Lauer:

Is it worse if some of this opposition to President Obama is fueled by outright racism, or is it worse if some liberals, in an attempt to defend President Obama and his plans, invoke the charge of racism to discredit the critics?

The former, Matt. Being racist is worse than pointing out when other people are acting like racists. (Incidentally, this is exactly what his guest says.)

Thanks for playing, folks! See you next time, when the question will be, “Is it worse if Hitler exterminates a shitload of Jews, or is it worse if some guy calls Godwin’s Law in an argument?”