I may get tired of using Pete Campbell pulling faces to illustrate my posts, but not yet. Not yet.

I remember how, just a couple of years ago, there was a lot of hand-wringing in skeptic circles over whether or not to apply rationalist thinking to religious claims, mainly because some skeptics---who were all atheists themselves, by the way---were concerned that it was impolitic not to create a giant Shall Not Touch bubble around magical claims that were deemed "religious". Well, the Reason Rally this past weekend shows that the pro-atheists basically won that debate, and the increasing racial and gender diversity of the community demonstrates that it was a good idea. No, now it turns out that there's a cow more sacred than religion, with a number of self-identified skeptics and atheists freaking out at the increasing willingness of writers and thinkers in the community to apply critical thinking skills to political claims. Apparently, you can criticize religion all you want, but to dare insist on the facts when it comes to global warming or especially the offensive claim that women are full human beings? That's where some folks are drawing the line. 

Rebecca Watson has a post up about the problem of pseudoscience proliferating on the right, and the unwillingness of the supposed warriors against pseudoscience to do anything about it. She uses her spot on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe to, on occasion, talk about things like states forcing doctors to read scripts full of medical misinformation to women seeking abortion, and every time she does, she gets a rush of letters from dudes scolding her to keep her focus on the important issues to skeptics, such as Bigfoot and UFOs.

Now, don't get me wrong. My eyes roll like a motherfucker whenever I see an advertisement for a Bigfoot or UFO show on TV. Still, there's a top limit of how much damage some of the more apolitical pseudoscience out there can do. Skeptics like to draw attention to when homeopathy contributes to illness or people waste money on fantastical claims, and these are important issues, but they are absolutely dwarfed by the amount of pain and suffering that misinformation about reproductive health causes. I rail against anti-vaccination idiots all the time, but even in the worst case scenarios---measles outbreaks, etc.---the cost in money and human suffering from the misinformation is really limited next to the cost in money and suffering from political pressures to force women to bear children they don't want. And that's just in the U.S. In other countries, where misinformation about abortion and contraception have even more influence on the law, maternal mortality rates are sky-high because of unwanted child-bearing and illegal abortion. I don't even want to talk about how much of the AIDS crisis stems from political concerns that these idiot so-called skeptics want to believe are hands-off. Without taboos around sex, homophobia, misogyny, and religious groups spreading misinformation about the effectiveness of condoms, we'd be looking at a much lower transmission rate worldwide than we're seeing now. 

Interestingly, one political issue tends to get widespread support in the skeptic community across partisan lines, and that's regarding evolutionary theory. Everyone is for it, and everyone thinks that religious claptrap denying it should be taken out of schools. I will bet you a lot of money that Rebecca doesn't get nasty emails about not getting political when the topic comes up on Skeptic's Guide. This, even though the opposition to evolutionary theory and the opposition to abortion rights are the same group of people, nearly exactly. I support this political activism against creationism, obviously. But let's not pretend it's not political. It stems from the same theocratic impulse as does the opposition to abortion rights, and frankly I see them as very similar issues.

But while I support activism around the evolution vs. creationism debate, I have to point out that the global warming issue is far larger and more immediate of a problem. If we can't get to a point where science trumps political bullshit on global warming, THE EARTH IS DOOMED. Okay, perhaps not completely doomed, but seriously fucked. We're already irreversibly fucked in many ways on this, but if we continue to treat it like a weird side issue, we're going to be fucked in all sorts of amazingly novel ways. I suspect a lot of global warming denialists don't really believe their own bullshit; they just figure they'll be dead before it's time to pay the piper. They may be right, though there's reason to believe the effects are coming faster than scientists previously thought, so their gamble may not be paying off. Either way, the utter lack of compassion for the rest of humanity is galling. Skeptics who refuse to discuss this issue because it's "political"---even though they happily dive into other political issues like creationism---are being cowards and babies. 

Sebastian at Obsidian Wings wrote a post that probably got lost in the holiday shuffle, but it's something incredibly serious, which is the use of drug dogs as nothing more but an excuse to turn illegal searches into legal ones. Turns out the dogs are probably not sniffing drugs so much as they're reacting to their master's subconscious signals that they want to search Person X. This is an important issue for everyone, but skeptics especially need to be on this, because it's really ovious what's going on here, which is that drug dogs are a modern update of the Clever Hans problem. 

Clever Hans (in German, der Kluge Hans) was an Orlov Trotter horse that was claimed to have been able to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks.

After a formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reaction of his human observers. Pfungst discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who had the faculties to solve each problem. The trainer was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues.[1] In honour of Pfungst's study, the anomalous artifact has since been referred to as the Clever Hans effect and has continued to be important knowledge in the observer-expectancy effect and later studies in animal cognition.

Sebastian recounts research showing that dogs' tendency to signal has more to do with what the cop is thinking than what the dog is smelling. Anyone who knows dogs should have guessed this one; dogs are basically human-obsessed machines who watch their humans super carefully and try very hard to please them. Of course drug dogs are more worried about pleasing master than producing good results. The real world results are predictable, but no less upsetting for it:

A tracking study was done of drug sniffing dogs in Illinois which found that the searches their 'alerts' triggered found no evidence of drugs 56% of the time. For Hispanic people searched as a result of the 'alerts' there was no evidence of drugs 63% of the time. 

You can read about it at the Chicago Tribune.  The cops are pulling the "well, they're guilty of something" bullshit, saying the dogs are smelling drugs that used to be there. Maybe. But again, I point to the well-documented Clever Hans effect and suggest that it's something else entirely, which is that the dogs are picking up on the officers' prejudices and acting accordingly. 

Obviously, the ultimate goal here is to call off the War on (Some People Who Use) Drugs, which is run on magic and bigotry, and does more to destroy communities than to prevent drug addiction. But in the more immediate future, we must demand an immediate end to all use of drug dogs, certainly until it can be demonstrated in double blind studies run by experts that the dogs are detecting drugs and not reacting to subconscious signals sent by police. Since I highly doubt that can be demonstrated, basically I'm saying that drug dogs should be permanently banned. Even if they worked, they're basically a cheap attempt by law enforcement to skirt constitutional protections, but since they don't even work, they're nothing but a magic trick used to distract from what's really going on: cops conducting illegal searches based on their own prejudices. 

PZ Myers has a really cool blog post up now about a new theory of menstruation put out in a paper by Emera, Romero, and Wagner, who appear to be actual biologists, instead of those psych profs and anthropology profs who get called "evolutionary biologists" every time they wank off in public with unevidenced theories about how we evolved to have 50s-era gender roles. It's one of those things I want to flag for feminists particularly, because I think really understanding the scientific discourse around human female biology can go a long way to chilling some of the uglier debates that go on about "nature" and things like reproduction, menstruation, etc. Basically, the problem for biologists regarding human menstruation is that it's surprisingly uncommon for mammals to have monthly menstruation. Not all mammals---as PZ says, other primates, bats, and elephant shrews menstruate---but by and large, most mammals only build up a uterine lining after an embryo implants and begins the pregnancy cycle. On paper, this seems like the smarter move, survival-wise. It uses fewer resources and avoid the health problems that can accompany menstruation if you're not lucky enough to live in a hygienic environment. (Or, as PZ puts it, "filling a delicate orifice with dying tissue seems like a bad idea.") I'll add that it's particularly confusing for it to happen in humans, who are social animals who tend to be private about our body functions. How much so changes across cultures, sure, but overall, we're private animals. Finding ways to conceal menstruation in order to participate in public life has been a hassle for women throughout history, and unfortunately for many, the answer today is still "avoid leaving the house until it's over". So, the question is why: why would we evolve a unique-ish trait that is a physical and social burden to an extent that it also impacts our ability to survive and optimally reproduce? There's a lot of theories, but this new one is pretty interesting:

The answer that Emera suggests is entirely evolutionary, and involves maternal-fetal conflict. The mother and fetus have an adversarial relationship: mom’s best interest is to survive pregnancy to bear children again, and so her body tries to conserve resources for the long haul. The fetus, on the other hand, benefits from wresting as much from mom as it can, sometimes to the mother’s detriment. The fetus, for instance, manipulates the mother’s hormones to weaken the insulin response, so less sugar is taken up by mom’s cells, making more available for the fetus.

Within the mammals, there is variation in how deeply the fetus sinks its placental teeth into the uterus. Some species are epithelochorial; the connection is entirely superficial. Others are endotheliochorial, in which the placenta pierces the uterine epithelium. And others, the most invasive, are hemochorial, and actually breach maternal blood vessels. Humans are hemochorial. All of the mammalian species that menstruate are also hemochorial.

That’s a hint. Menstruation is a consequence of self-defense. Females build up that thickened uterine lining to protect and insulate themselves from the greedy embryo and its selfish placenta. In species with especially invasive embryos, it’s too late to wait for the moment of implantation — instead, they build up the wall pre-emptively, before and in case of fertilization. Then, if fertilization doesn’t occur, the universal process of responding to declining progesterone levels by sloughing off the lining occurs.

Bonus! Another process that goes on is that the lining of the uterus is also a sensor for fetal quality, detecting chromosomal abnormalities and allowing them to be spontaneously aborted early. There is some evidence for this: women vary in their degree of decidualization, and women with reduced decidualization have been found to become pregnant more often, but also exhibit pregnancy failure more often. So having a prepared uterus not only helps to fend off overly-aggressive fetuses, it allows mom a greater ability to be selective in which fetuses she carries to term.

I don't know that I can make it even more clear that PZ, who is a gifted science educator. What I want to talk about is how critical theories like this, and understanding the science of human reproduction, are to really understanding why our social/political debates over female reproductive systems are completely bonkers. That's because those debates are often built on the debate over what's "natural". Obviously, the best answer to anyone who says that women can't or shouldn't do X (have an abortion, use contraception, use the pill for suppressing a period) because of nature should be dismissed out of hand as using the naturalistic fallacy. But when it comes to ladies and our leaky bodies (though, of course, men's are just as leaky---leaky is the sort of natural state of bodies), a lot of people insist stridently that the naturalistic fallacy should be put on hold. Here's the thing that understanding the science should really help you realize, however: Nature doesn't have a single, unchangeable "intent" for women and our bodies, nor are women's wills automatically in conflict with nature.  I bracketed out some contentious areas for some thoughts on what PZ explains means for various debates on women's reproductive capacities and what's "natural".

1) Abortion. This one is a no-brainer. Anti-choicers claim abortion is unnatural, but as PZ's writing explains, it's actually perfectly natural. Women's bodies go through a lot of unconscious processes to determine if now is a good time to have a baby. Biologically speaking, the idealized reproductive strategy for a woman is to have babies when she's in the best possible state to raise them. The unconscious body does some of this work, but what makes human beings awesome is that we have these large brains that can supplement our natural processes and make them more efficient. "I'm not ready to have a baby" is an equally valid message coming from the brain as from inside the uterus. Unless, of course, you believe that women are inherently inferior creatures who should be constrained from self-care and family care in order to satisfy the desires of mostly strangers who have psychological issues around sex. To which I say, you have an entirely different argument to prove then. 

2) Contraception. Anti-choicers like to portray menstruation as the product of some inherent female tendency to nurture at all costs. In fact, PZ caught David Barton before making facetious arguments about how all animals but humans will sacrifice the health and lives of mothers for the young, which is not only false but obviously false. (Death of mothers tends to equal death of young from lack of care.) The image that anti-choicers paint of the monthly uterine build-up is that it's like a baby nest that you're making, and efforts to keep "babies" from making their homes there are somehow unnatural. The reality is far more complex. It's not that uterine lining isn't about nurture, but it's about so much more. It seems it's also likely about protecting a woman's body from the parasitic (biologists' word, not mine!) qualities of the embryo and fetus. It's also about sorting the good from the bad. But most importantly, it's a system that's got wastefulness built into it. That women menstruate so much means that saying no to babies a lot more than saying yes is a built-in part of the system. Contraception, alongside abortion, is simply a logical extension of the pre-existing system. 

3) Contraception, part two. Unfortunately, many feminists run with the naturalistic fallacy to bash hormonal contraception, saying that you shouldn't take it because it's not "natural". Again, neither are cars or clothes or condoms, for that matter, but for some reason, this argument has its hooks in many. A lot of people find it weird to stop the process of ovulating and then having a real period (as opposed to the fake one the pill creates, or suppressing your period altogether with continuous pill use) every month, which they assume must have some value in and of itself. But if you actually look at the science, the notion that we "should" be having a monthly cycle even while not trying to conceive doesn't really compute. Whether or not this particular theory is the truth, the reality is that constant ovulation and menstruation serves no purpose outside of being the best that evolution could come up with to reproduce. Humans have come up with better ways of handling these functions, so why not use them? An honest look at evolution shows that nature doesn't always know best, and some times it creates biological processes that look like what you rigged up as a home repair to avoid having the money to do it right. If evolution could have created a situation where women simply will their uterine lining to start building as they get closer to wanting to conceive, and then and only then ovulated, that would be in women's best biological interests. That technology goes ahead and does that for us is a blessing, it really is. 

Now, if you can't take the pill or don't want to, that's great. Don't. Please. I'm serious. This is not a guilt trip. The point is that there's no reason to make broad arguments about how it's "unnatural" or that there's some great purpose to menstruation that we can't know and so shouldn't suppress it to be safe.*

So, in sum: PZ's post is about one of the many theories to explain why humans menstruate. It may or may not be the best theory, but what it shares in common with all other theories is a baseline understanding that the ovulation-menstruation cycle is, at best, inefficient and often dangerous. It's not necessarily bad, but it's certainly not good. And definitely not good enough to overrule women's express desires to abort any one pregnancy, prevent ovulation, or prevent menstruation.

*The other argument that I hear from feminists on why menstrual suppression is bad is that men benefit from women not bleeding on their dicks when they have sex. Okay, but I figure women also benefit. It's weird to cast men and women's interests as always opposed, when mostly they're in line. You know who really doesn't benefit from bleeding all over the place during sex? Sheets. If you have something against sheets, I suppose you can start from there, but be assured that most people are simply not going to get on the anti-sheets train. Especially women, who do most of the washing of sheets. 

From an intellectual, political perspective, I really loathe anti-vaccination nuttiness. Just like with anti-choicers, I will never completely understand what compels people to support choices and policies that will objectively create health problems where none need exist. I hate the shunning of evidence for woo, and I especially hate the way parents are encouraged to substitute their own dislike for getting their children vaccinated (kids hate shots!)  for intellectual assessment of the necessity of vaccination.

But now I have one more reason to loathe anti-vaccination nuts. They made me feel kind of hot---and not in a fun, sexy way---all damn afternoon. Though I imagine it will fade in a couple of hours, I am running a slight fever, and Jenny McCarthy and the sea of yuppie no-vaccination parents are to blame. 

You see, I agreed this morning to get a Tdap, which is a combination tetanus, diptheria, and pertussis vaccine. It used to be that adults getting a booster for tetanus (every ten years, people---keep up with your shots!) or tetanus/diptheria alone, but now they toss the pertussis in with it. Pertussis is better known by the name "whooping cough". Just last year, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices  recommended that adults, especially those with regular exposure to small children, start getting pertussis boosters along with their tetanus shots, in response to a surge in whooping cough cases, which have resulted in at least 10 infant deaths in California alone. The reason for the surge in whooping cough cases? Anti-vaccination activists. Yep, because of paranoia about vaccinations, vaccination levels for whooping cough have fallen below herd immunity levels, causing the disease to come back. And it's an ugly one even if you don't die, I'll tell you. From this handy-dandy cheat sheet debunking the nine most prominent anti-vaccination arguments comes this description of the hell that is whooping cough:

Whooping cough is much more than “just a bad cough”. Kids often turn blue from lack of oxygen during coughing fits, they may vomit after severe attacks, and even fracture ribs. There is no cure for whooping cough – antibiotics are given to help stop the transmission to others – you just have to hope your immune system can fight it. Severe complications such as pneumonia and brain damage occur almost exclusively in unvaccinated people and in babies under 6 months of age the symptoms can be severe or life threatening. Whooping cough is also known as the 100-day cough making it a chronic and potentially fatal disease.

Frontline showed a video of a baby with whooping cough who was coughing so hard he was unable to take a breath and nearly died. It took me days to shake that horrible image from my head. Terrible stuff. So when my doctor suggested I get a Tdap, I was like, "Where do I sign up?" I'm not someone who spends a lot of time directly around children, but it still seemed to my doctor and myself like I really should get vaccinated. I live right smack dab in one of the major areas where there are both a lot of young children and a lot of yuppie parents who buy into anti-vaccination nonsense, meaning that I'm simply in an area that probably has fallen below herd immunity levels. I'm somewhat surprised that Brooklyn hasn't had an outbreak to rival the ones in yuppie-thick areas of California, in fact. So getting a shot that helps raise that herd immunity, even by a little bit, seemed like the right thing to do. But I am kind of paying for it a little right now. So I'm blaming Jenny McCarthy and putting the word out there to the adults reading this blog to get your booster shots. If you're feeling like whooping cough isn't that big a deal, please watch that episode of Frontline. And then go get vaccinated. 

Of course, I may have just run a slight fever from a tetanus shot alone, to be completely fair. And that particular vaccine? That one is just for me, because dying of lockjaw seems scarier to me than being burned alive. 

I'm a religious reader and super fan of GOOD, but once in awhile they fall into some of the more annoying yuppie-left habits, forcing me to write complaining blog posts like this one. I only gripe because I love! The sin this time came, sadly for me, amidst a challenge you all know I'm going to support whole-heartedly, a "get healthy" challenge. But to my mind, a large part of being healthy is being evidence-based in your health choices, which can do two things for your health. One, it makes your choices more effective. Two, it saves you the stress of having to attend to a lot of things that are meaningless, like whether or not something is "natural" or "homeopathic", freeing up time in your day to do things that are genuinely good for your health, such as exercising, eating right, and sleeping 8 hours a night.

Day 8 of the challenge, therefore, is getting it from me. Cord Jefferson surprised me by writing an anti-soap screed, since he recently wrote an evidence-based explanation of why you should wash your hands every time you use the bathroom. That post made me even more cognizant of times I really should be more careful about washing my hands, and reminded me that I need to get a whooping cough vaccine update in order to be a good citizen who doesn't put physically weaker people in danger of catching germs off me. So I was surprised to see him dismiss soaps and shampoos as "chemicals" that are dangerous for their, well, chemicaliness.

In January of this year, prompted by the GOOD challenge to swear off soap for a month, I stopped using soap, body wash, and shampoo on my hair, face, and most of my body. My armpits and crotch still got lathered, but the rest of me was free of all the lab-made junk that goes into our hygiene products nowadays. Eight months later, I’m still not using soap, and my skin and hair have never felt or looked better. The moral of the story: You don’t need a bunch of nonsense dreamed up by chemists to stay healthy and be happy.

This might be a good time to point out that there's a great deal of variation in how much filth people have on their bodies. Some people are greasier and hairier than others, and some people have hormone levels that cause their sweat to be extra-smelly. Some people are up to stuff that gets them dirty. If a quick rinse does it for you, good for you, but individual results may vary. I'm not fond of heavy duty anti-perspirants, but I've come to realize how much of a godsend they are for people whose body chemistry isn't quite like mine. Plus, I just really like the feeling of being squeaky clean. Don't try to guilt me out of one of these little joys in life that harms no one. And that's my next point: the argument for why soap is "bad" isn't there.

Though most people eat, drink, and use dozens of foodstuffs and products per day, the vast majority of us never actually look at the labels and ingredients lists on most of our products. We’ll read countless blog posts, but not the little square on the back of our face wash that tells us we’re rubbing acid on our cheeks every morning.....

Should you actually be putting salicylic acid near your eyes? If the answer to these questions is no, try going a day without that product and see how you feel. If the answer is still yes, that’s fine, too. At least you’ll be far more aware of what it is your putting in and on your body day in and day out.

I get that he's trying to agree that individual choices may vary, but it's clear that the "correct" answer is that one shouldn't use salicylic acid because it's a Chemical. There's no actual argument here for why it's not safe, and certainly no producing of evidence for why one should hesitate to use this chemical; it's just unnatural-sounding and an acid to boot. This is just poor reasoning, plus a really unnecessary swipe at chemists, who are no more evil a group of people than anyone else. Honestly, they're probably better on average than we journalist types.  

I blame Michael Pollan in part. He crafted some food rules that were intended to reorient people to eating healthy in a way that was less work than going through elaborate processes of educating yourself about everything that goes into food, by simply trying to push people towards simpler food that wasn't crafted in a lab in order to maximize your calorie and fat consumption. But in doing so, he reaffirmed the Cult of the Natural, i.e. the belief that because something has a chemically-sounding name, it's automatically suspicious. And we're seeing that logic taken to an extreme here.

The funny part is that salicylic acid is "natural". If you simply called it "willow bark extraction", the naturalism cult people would be eating that shit up. It's also pretty safe if used correctly, and I can attest is very good at holding off adult acne problems. But even if it wasn't "natural", the problem here is simply assuming that something is dangerous because it sounds complicated. There's no reason to assume that. I'm sorry to see such poor reasoning being passed off as health advice at GOOD. I realize filling 30 days is hard to do, but a better use of their time would be to encourage people to do things like get up and walk around more, or add more fruits and vegetables to their diets. 

Today at XX Factor, I counter a lot of the reporting on a Johns Hopkins-based study of 6 sub-Saharan African nations and the factors that influence sexual frequency.  Researchers found that the more decision-making that a woman did in her household, the less frequently she reported having sexual intercourse. For those of us who spend a lot of time reading about public health research, this study read like many, many others that are like it, which are looking at the intra-personal politics in areas where there's a lot of negative health consequences related to sex (high maternal mortality and HIV transmission are the biggies), with an eye towards developing interventions that will reduce the incidences of these kinds of problems.  For instance, what someone might take away from this study is that women who have a lot of power in non-sexual negotiations at home probably has more power when it comes to sexual negotiations, which can in turn make it easier for a woman to prevent HIV transmission and time her pregnancies.  

What this wasn't was an evolutionary psychology study, as far as I can tell. But, as I report at XX Factor, that's exactly how it was read by many journalists.  Reporter after reporter decided to spin this as if it were researchers suggesting that not only do "bossy" women get laid less, but that the researchers were suggesting that this is due to an evolved, genetic response in men to abhor assertive women. The Huffington Post even went so far as to compare this research to some bullshit nonsense being asserted without evidence by a evo psych devotee at Florida State. (He found evidence that greater gender equality leads to women having more sex in various countries, but he did not actually establish evidence for his convulted theory that this shows women are hurt by feminism because it forces them to put out more---which he asserts, evidence-free, women don't like to do.)  There's nothing in the comments from the researchers I've read that suggest that they were saying such a thing, or that they were interested in extrapolating genetic theories from their research at all. The head of the Johns Hopkins study is Michelle Hindin from the department of population and family health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health---I'm guessing a public health researcher who has no relationship whatsoever to evolutionary psychology, because she's probably too busy doing real research.

As I note at XX Factor, what this study probably shows even more is that sexual choice-making is highly influenced by culture and circumstance, because these women, living in areas where HIV prevalence is way higher than here and where it's primarily transmitted through straight sex, have a different environment than empowered women in countries where women have lower risks. I suspect strongly this influences their idea of how much and what kind of sex is good for them. 

So why was this study touted as some kind of evo psych bullshit "proving" that men lose their hard-ons when women start making decisions, and that this is inborn and not something anyone can change by changing society?  Well, I think it's because there's such a constant stream of such bullshit evo psych research being sent to newspapers in chipper press releases that this has become the dominant model of reporting on science looking at sex and gender. Evo psych ideologues don't even need to spell out their claims that most to all sex-and-gender choices are programmed genetically and unchangeable.  They've trained (oh irony!) journalists to fill in that assumption themselves.  So much so that when a study that has no relationship to evolutionary psychology comes across reporters desks, they apply the "men are like this, women are like that" evo psych model of assuming that misogynist stereotypes are biological facts, and they run with it. 

It's really disturbing to see the 21st century version of phrenology  get so much play in the mainstream media. But now it's gobbling up real science coverage.  That's fucked up.

With all that in mind, I'd like to invite anyone that's going to be in Brooklyn tomorrow night to come to Union Hall for the next installment of the Story Collider series. Story Collider is a story-telling series that focuses on stories about the personal impact that science has had on the lives of the story tellers.  I'm honored to say I've been invited to tell a story, and I'm going to write about how being a critic of evolutionary psychology made me more interested, as a writer, in science overall.  The headliner is Carl Zimmer, and he'll be joined by Anna North, Mark Katz, Bora Zivkovic, Tricia Rose Burt and myself. Buy your tickets in advance, if you can, because it often sells out. 

I usually don't post on Sundays, but man, I have to vent.  Nothing gets my eyes rolling faster than the hand-wringing over the way that atheism and skepticism are merging, which is a phenomenon that is due in part to the spate of "New Atheist" publications, but is mainly a reaction to the influx of a younger, more diverse, more political crowd into the halls of skepticism.  And that crowd has grown up under the threat from the religious right, and so are just less inclined to see pushing back against homeopathy and claims about Bigfoot as being a good use of your time when claims about Jesus and miracles have created a radicalized right wing intent on destroying the country.  

Look: atheism is the result of applying critical thinking and demands for evidence to the god hypothesis.  It's not any different than non-belief in all sorts of supernatural claims, such as ESP and ghosts.  All of the weaseling around that is intellectually dishonest.  It's not about critical thinking, but about politics and frankly, not taking on religion because religion is seen as too powerful. 

This latest example of said hand-wringing, written by Daniel Loxton, particularly teed me off because he appears to have a larger agenda of undermining actual diversity attempts in the movement, because increasing diversity comes at the "cost" of running off conservatives who have an interest in disproving space aliens and Bigfoot, but maybe aren't so keen on having the comfortable worldview challenged.  But I'd point out that the squeezing out of conservative interests has been good for skepticism; as another blogger at Skepticblog notes, the dwindling in numbers of conservatives (and conservatives who call themselves "libertarians" in a pathetic bid to get laid more) means that the movement is ceasing to be crippled by the shameful tolerance of global warming denialists.  Seriously, you can't be a skeptical movement if you allow people pushing the "global warming in a hoax perpetuated by a worldwide conspiracy" to go unchallenged. 

Anyway, Loxton decided to shit all over the work of people looking at improving gender, sexual oriention, class, and race diversity in the movement by complaining that the panel at The Amazing Meeting dedicated to this didn't have any fucking Christians on it.  He firmly believes that the god hypothesis should be off-limits for skeptics, and that there should be a bright line between atheism and skepticism.  This is ridiculous.  "God" is a supernatural claim just like fairies and ghosts.  Just to show you how ridiculous he's being, I'm going to replace the references to god and religion with references to another untestable claim, that we all have fairy godmothers who look out for us and do little magic things we don't even notice.

The irony of a fairy-disbelieving-only panel on “diversity” did not escape me, but I expected it to pass without comment. The sentiment that skepticism is an anti-fairy club is recent, but it has taken root very quickly. As with other sorts of “do-fish-know-they’re-wet?” privilege in other, larger communities, the assumption of default disbelief in fairies is rarely questioned in the skeptical subculture. Indeed, the panel set out to discuss diversity in gender, sexual orientation, age, race, class, education, and physical ability—but not fairy belief.

See what I mean?  The excuse from "traditional" skeptics for making an exception for religion is that the god hypothesis is an untestable claim, and they're only interested in testable claims.  But as this fairy example shows, that's not really true.  There are plenty of things skeptics are skeptical about because of the preponderance-of-evidence standard.  We don't believe in ESP or ghosts or fairies because no one has ever produced solid evidence in favor of these things existing, and we combine that with an assumption that these things are highly unlikely and so the burden is on the people making the claims to prove them.  I don't see how god is any different.  People try to produce evidence in the way of miracles and good fortune, but the proof always falls apart on inspection.  Yes, it's true that you can't test whether or not there is a god somewhere that simply refuses to show himself, but that's also true of fairies, people with ESP, and ghosts.  And yet it's considered a good use of skeptical time to point out the weakness of the ghost/ESP argument.  So why not god? 

Well, because of politics, which Loxton cops to:

At least one speaker at TAM9 was herself religious (Pamela Gay) and there were, as always, members of multiple religious groups and spiritual traditions in the audience. These skeptics often express that anti-theism is a barrier to participation in our science-based events. Whatever your own feelings about religion, this is obviously a topic which fits under the heading of “diversity.”

Well hell, if the main goal is making people with ridiculous beliefs feel comfortable, why stop at the god hypothesis?  People are also touchy about their diets, and so expressing skepticism, as is done in another post, about food trends such as non-allergic people cutting gluten from their diets, is probably a bad idea, too.  I've probably gotten more defensive reactions from people who suspected my eyebrow twitched because they're on the caveman diet than because they said something about god around me.  I've also encountered people who believe that they figure out what others are thinking not because they pick up on body language and social cues, but because of magic, and they are just as hostile as people who know you think it's a bit silly you think that Jesus was born to a virgin.  If discomfort is to be avoided at all costs, let's just disband now. 

But Loxton has an ulterior motive here:

This empirical focus has allowed the skeptical community—old and white and bearded as it may have been—to enjoy other kinds of diversity. If political ideology is not a topic for our movement, then anarchists, libertarians, liberals, and conservatives can happily share the same big tent. If science-based skepticism is neutral about nonscientific moral values3, then the community can embrace people who hold a wide range of perspectives on values issues—on the environment, on public schools, on nuclear power, on same-sex marriage, on taxation, gun control, the military, veganism, or so on. It’s a sort of paradox: the wider the scope of skepticism, the less diverse its community becomes.

In other words, the kind of "diversity" he supports is one where a bunch of well-off, older white men can enjoy talking about the silliness of Bigfoot without having to bother with those political concerns that are unavoidable when people who get the shit end of the stick---women, non-white people, poorer people, disabled people, gay people---get involved.  There are many flavors of white-dude-whose-privilege-shields-him-from-having-to-be-politicals, but those darn diverse people are forever being political because they don't have an option to ignore oppression that directly affects them.  Personally, I'm far more concerned about a group that's politically diverse only because they all live in the same bubble than one that's got racial and gender diversity because everyone has a shared concern about religious power. 

In other words, I support a diversity of viewpoints, not a diversity per se of views. A group of skeptics isn't made stronger because some people diverge from the norm because they believe they have an army of small fairies to do their bidding, but it is strengthened by improving the number of women and people of color who can speak to communities who aren't currently being reached. 

Anyway, as I noted before, claims that you can maintain scientific discourse while pandering to the emotional comfort of conservatives have been demonstrated to be false.  Even without all that icky race and gender diversity question, you still had the problem of global warming and the fact that conservatives pretty much have to believe the conspiracy theory that it's all a hoax in order to justify their political ideology.  

As soon as I saw this story about how internet use is subtly reshaping our brain activity, I expected immediately to see hysterical, hand-wringing coverage.  Cord's story that I link is responsible coverage---he points out that different doesn't automatically mean worse---but when it comes to technology and how it's changing us, you usually see nothing but hysteria in mainstream media. But plugged the head researcher's name into Google News and didn't really see too much to worry me.  Most people reported it pretty straightforwardly.

The crux of the research is this people's realization that information they need is easy to search online means they are less likely to memorize it.  However, this doesn't mean their brains are degrading.  On the contrary, people are organizing their brains so that they're better at finding stuff, aka researching.  As long as the internet is there for us, knowing how to find something matters more than just knowing it.  

I have no problem with this. Setting aside the shiny new technology, the fact of the matter is humans have spent a great deal of our history trying not to have to memorize stuff, in part because it's a waste of time and energy and in part because we literally have too much information that we need to know to simply store it all in our brains. So we outsource.  The main way we do this is to write stuff down. But we also build filing cabinets, Rolodexes, libraries. But the obvious advantage of technology is that it makes all this faster,  making memorizing stuff even less necessary.  I've become addicted to Evernote, myself, which means that I practically have to remember nothing, except how to find out what I need to know.  Which gives me more brain space for remembering that awesome song I liked so I can play it on Turntable.

Another benefit of this is memory is imperfect.  When we commit something to memory, it tends to get degraded over time, because our brains store stuff less perfectly than a computer does.  You see this problem a lot when people are having technology-free discussions.  They think they remember something important, but they get the details wrong.  They say "10,000" when they mean "100,000".  What I've noticed since the rise of the internet is people are more concerned about their own personal accuracy.  Stuff that didn't matter before---did that movie come out in 1986 or 1988?---now matters more, because it's so easy to look it up.  We used to let that shit go, as a people.  Now we look it up on our phones.  

While some lament the way this changes the rhythm of conversations, I actually think it's a good thing.  We need more enthusiasm for accuracy in our culture, and that's a good place to start.  I look forward to the day when people who go on cable news shows all have very easy to navigate mini-computers in front of them, so when they're jumping into an argument, they are better armed with actual facts that they have verified before they start flapping their jaws.  I mean, it won't change anything about Fox News---they'd probably ban such devices---but it would do a world of good for everyone else. 

Recently, I was catching up on some podcasts and one that was particularly good was this recent Point of Inquiry with George Lakoff.  Even if you're familiar with Lakoff's theories, it's a good summary, and the host Chris Mooney conducts a good interview, as usual.  But I had one quarrel with it.  Mooney asks Lakoff about science denial---an even more relevant question in light of the fact that denying science has become mandatory for Republicans vying for national office---and Lakoff started off by saying that science denial is rooted in a conflict between scientific discoveries and the metaphorical framework that conservatives or liberals use to view the world.  Of course, the problem that this answer faces is that conservatives have made science denialism a huge part of their worldview and liberals have not.  Conservatives deny science facts when it comes to evolutionary theory, reproductive health, global warming, and pretty much anything that might challenge their ideology.  But science denialism just isn't as widespread with liberals.

Lakoff's take on this was a tad unsatisfactory for me.  His reason for the disparity struck me as sound enough, which is that avenues of scientific inquiry tend to be framed in terms of what is good for human beings, which fits into the liberal worldview.  (HIs theory is that liberalism is governed by a model of nurturance whereas conservatism by a model of hierarchy, two models he calls the Nurturing Parents vs. the Strict Father.)  On the other hand, conservatives have a Strict Father view, where truth is a matter of what the father figure dictates it to be, and everything---even scientific fact---must submit to the strict father's authority.  Liberals are more egalitarian, so knowledge tends to be ranked less by how it fits into a hierarchical model of authority and therefore needs to be taken on its own merits, i.e. how in a nurturing family every family member, including wives and children, is allowed to have their own worldview and father doesn't always know best.  So, just as a wife or a child who is armed with facts is allowed to argue with a father and win the argument if they're in the right, scientists are allowed to operate with more freedom in the liberal worldview.

Lakoff realized there were limits to this, and that there are definitely cases where science conflicts with liberal values and therefore runs a risk of being rejected by liberals.  But the only example he could think of was one where the science eventually fell apart, i.e. when liberals resisted scientific claims of IQ differences between the races.  He was right that liberals rejected these theories out of hand without the evidence to disprove them, but since liberal scientists like Stephen Gould eventually made a mockery of the poor evidence conservatives brought to bear for these theories, turning them into "theories", I kind of thought he was cheating a little.

A more troubling example is vaccination denialism, and the entire tent of liberals being quick to panic about "chemicals", even when the evidence that said chemicals are toxic just isn't there.  In my experience, vaccine denialism is rooted in a nurturing-mother worldview on steroids.  Many vaccination denialists tend to have a counter-theory where disease isn't prevented by medical interventions, but that all children need is a highly attentive mother who feeds them nothing but organic food and wheatgrass, and they won't need any silly vaccines.  Vaccines are demonized by equating them with the strict father worldview---doctors are cast as imperious patriarchs who force toxins on mothers and their children.  In a weird way, anti-vaxxers are the what conservatives imagine feminists to be, women who are bound and determined to replace the patriarchy with a matriarchy where things like "feminine intuition" replace reason and common sense.  Of course, real feminism has nothing to do with this, but I do think that there's a strain of matriarchal hooey that a percentage of liberals can drift towards.  Even feminists.

Ironically, however, I think it's feminism itself that works keep this kind of bullshit in check.  Feminism is rooted in an ideology of equality, and the rejection of stereotypes about feminine intuition.  In fact, most feminists I know see this kind of mother-knows-best hippie shit as just the same old gender stereotypes, repackaged as empowerment but actually putting women right back in the kitchen.  Having power over your child's diet and medical care shouldn't be confused with having real power in the world.  Kicking and screaming at a doctor's knowledge isn't the same thing as demanding that men stop hoarding scientific knowledge for themselves. 

So I think Lakoff had it right, but only half right.  I think that he's right that liberal's worldview of egalitarianism is one that automatically makes more room for facts, because people who abandon authority as the source of knowledge will be drawn to rationality and evidence.  But it's interesting to consider that the egalitarianism in the liberal worldview is in conflict with the nurturance, at least on a metaphorical level.  These internal conflicts aren't unique to liberals, of course.  Conservatives also have tension in their model, mostly between the idea that father knows best and the belief that discipline is geared towards bringing children up so they can be adults and take over the role of strict fathers.  You see this particular tension playing out between conservative populists and elites, with the former acting the part of the grown son who has reached the point where he's challenging his father over who's the man of the house.

Thank you, Sean on Twitter, for making my day last night by drawing my attention to the latest front in the battle of wingnuts vs. science.  Often, when we pro-science sorts are arguing about evolution with wingnuts, they’ll pull the “it’s just a theory” card, to which we often reply, “It’s also called the theory of gravity.  Are you going to argue with gravity?”

Answer: Of course they are.

I sometimes still find that people on the liberal, or at least thoughtful, side of the fence still think that global warming denialism and creationism are discrete things borne out of an emotional need not to believe either in global warming or evolution, and while that’s true, I think it’s deeper than that.  I think that science itself is under attack, and that the reason that conservatives are so eager to lash out against it has to do with an anti-modernist bent.  This is especially true when you understand that science really is a threat to religion.  A lot of people say it’s not, because science doesn’t address “spiritual”  needs, but said folks are really overrating the importance of spirituality for most people—-or assuming that this urge isn’t better scratched by loving others and enjoying life.  Religion really draws its power from explanation.  It gives order to the world.  And science is poaching that territory rapidly, which pisses off authoritarians, because they rightfully understand that if they lose the power to create facile goddidit explanations for everything from gravity to the problem of evil, they will lose their power over people. Thus, the attack not just on specific scientific theories, but on science in general, and most of academia, as well.

The latest installment is Bill O’Reilly’s war on gravity. Or, specifically, his belief that goddidit is a better explanation for the tides than the real explanation, which is that they’re created by a combination of moon and Earth gravity.  He had this exchange with David Silverman, president of the American Atheist Group on his show:

O’REILLY: I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O’REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can’t explain that.

Of course, the problem with this is that 3rd graders can in fact explain that, at least well enough to basically trump the goddidit theory.  You don’t need in-depth knowledge to understand that gravity pulls on the oceans, and they basically slosh around, except with predictable regularity because the moon is predictable.  Once this was pointed out to O’Reilly, he called people who understand the theory of gravity “pinheads” and suggested they hadn’t thought this through, because they totally didn’t know where the moon came from!  Also, they can’t explain why god gave us a moon but didn’t give those uninhabited planets moons.*

I would like to point out that O’Reilly’s explanation of why you have to believe in god because that means there is “order”.  To which I must point out that this is the authoritarian, patriarchal mind at its best—-he wishes to believe that him being on top of others is the natural order, so he creates a parallel fantasy of a white guy in the sky who created everything, and his power is derived from the magical white guy in the sky, because presumably they look alike and are both assholes. Also, said white guy in the sky making all the rules means you don’t have to think any more, just obey.  People who say that religion is about “spirituality” miss this, because really, many religious people like O’Reilly like religion because it makes the universe seem small and orderly.  In reality, the universe is huge and, from the small human perspective, seemingly chaotic, making an atheist understanding of nature ironically more awe-inspiring than any petty god invented by mostly illiterate people from the ancient world.

At one point in this rant, O’Reilly, in an attempt to be satirical, suggests that the non-god explanation is something crazy, like suggesting that a meteor hit the planet and created the moon.  In fact, this is basically what happened.

Because we know how the Moon got there (a Mars-sized planet struck the Earth a glancing blow about 100 million years after it formed, splashing debris into orbit which coalesced to form the Moon).

I’d read the whole post by Phil Plait, who breaks down just how silly this all is.  Basically, we know all the stuff that O’Reilly claims we don’t know: where the Sun came from, where the moon came from, and of course, why other planets don’t have moons.  The answer to that is, they do.  Mars—-who O’Reilly says doesn’t have a moon—-has two.  If I recall from my days of star-gazing with my dad, Jupiter has like eleven billionty moons.  If you’re trying to make an argument that god loves us special best by looking at moons as evidence, then you have to believe god loves Jupiter most of all. 

The only move O’Reilly can make now is to attack the theory of gravity, which is how all these other ideas hang together.  Screw attacking Darwin!  It’s time to go after Newton!**  Maybe O’Reilly can work with the Insane Clown Posse on their next big hit single, “Miracles II: Falling Apples, How Do They Work?” 

The good news is that this expanded war on science from conservatives is going to eventually come into conflict with their support of endless spending on weapons research, some of which requires knowledge of the basics of astronomy and physics that explain how the moon got there and the tides works.

*Yes, I know.  Finish the post before leaving a comment crowing about how I didn’t note that there are other moons, because I did, in fact, do so later in the post.  I don’t want you to look foolish in your eagerness to demonstrate your swift recall that Mars has two moons.

**Seriously, we all know is more complicated than that, and that Einstein played a role in revising Newton’s theories, etc. Just let that pedantry go for a moment and enjoy the joke.

I was lucky enough to be the first speaker at Skepticon 3.  I was unlucky enough to have a cold.  But you can barely tell!  I was really happy with this talk, so check it out.

Via Media Matters comes one of those stories that really drives home how much you have to, if you’re a modern conservative, completely switch off your brain so that no evidence or reason ever penetrates.  And just in time for the holiday season, too! Here is the story that kicked off the stupid-fest:

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you—because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools.”

Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin’s blog had the best possible response ever to this little rhetorical flourish.

When you’re pushing a myth, there’s no more appropriate entity to pray to than a mythical goddess.

Seventeen words, three lies—-two direct lies, one implied.  That’s not a wingnut record, but a nice contender in terms of packing bullshit into minimal space.  Well-played, Powers!  Let’s take these lies one at a time.

1) Global warming is a “myth”.  This one is kind of awesome, because it’s an exact reversal of the truth.  The conspiracy theory that would have you believe the vast majority of the world’s scientists have colluded to falsify data and create an elaborate lie about global warming is hard enough to believe just on the organizational level, but the assumption that their motivation was to steal your penis-substitute SUV makes it even better.  I would actually say that it’s harder to believe that this could happen than there’s a moon goddess of reason, and I’m a pretty hardcore atheist.  But as Christian apologists are always whining, you can’t prove a negative—-there could be a teapot in space, an invisible dragon in my kitchen, and a Mayan moon goddess.  But you can disprove the assertion that global warming is a myth, due to the overwhelming amount of that stuff that we in the field of knowing how to use our brains call “evidence”. 

2) Christiana Figueres and her “moonbat” coalition actually intend to pray to Ixchel.  If you can read, you’ll see the problem with this assertion.  Figueres said, at least according to this report, that you should be inspired by Ixchel.  This is what those of us in the field on knowing-how-to-read call an “allusion”: “Allusions are often indirect or brief references to well-known characters or events….. Allusions are often used to summarize broad, complex ideas or emotions in one quick, powerful image.”  Allusions to mythological figures are a common rhetorical flourish.  If Figueres, for instance, was Greek, she could have made a similar speech asking her audience to be inspired by the ancient Greek goddess of reason, Athena.  This likely wouldn’t have created nearly as much snickering on the right, however, because Athena has a long history of being referred to in European literature.  Once you get the white people literary allusion blessing, I guess you’re not as funny any more.  So extra points deducted for using racism to bolster your non-argument.

3) That Ixchel is a myth, but Jesus is totally real.  This isn’t stated, but implied in the context of a wingnut landscape that involves lots of screeching about the “War on Christmas”. (Malkin is a consistent warrior on behalf of the belief that someone is trying to steal Christmas from her.)  The amount of proof that a god was born to a human virgin, sacrificed his life to save all of mankind from paying for a woman who ate an apple, and rose three days after dying is equal to the amount of proof that a moon goddess gave birth to 13 sons, two of whom created heaven and earth.  Which is to say, there is no proof of either. Apply reason and logic to both stories, and they are equal.  Except that the former is more obviously misogynist in its summary, so I suppose some wingnuts would see that as “proof”, but by actual logic standards, it’s not. 

I would generally caution people who are so gung-ho about believing in Jeebus to carefully consider if they want to even acknowledge, much less deny, other beliefs.  The realization that other people believe something you’ve always believed wasn’t true—-whether it’s that a moon goddess blesses childbirth or that heaven involves virgin-boinking—-is often the first step to looking at your own beliefs with a critical eye.  Skepticism about other supernatural claims puts more people on the path to atheism than any other factor, I’d guess.  For people invested in keeping believers believing, the smartest stance is to pretend no one has ever actually had a belief other than yours.

But Powers did write more than one sentence in his post, so the stupidity doesn’t stop there!  While this statement fails on the test of packing as many lies as he can into minimal space, I liked it for just general dickwaddery. 

Here’s an image of Ixchel found on a Wikipedia page. If Helen Thomas and Code Pink had a love child…

That’s some top-notch argumentation there!  Powers doesn’t find that this ancient drawing of a goddess makes his dick hard, therefore neener neener neener.  That Ixchel is no looker!  She’s nothing like the Virgin Mary.

Now there’s a fine piece of ass—-she could almost be a Fox News anchor, if she just submitted to the bleach bottle.  Either way, Powers would totally stick it to her.  What other proof do you need?  Powers and his penis’s reaction to religious art is far better evidence in the argument over whether global warming is real than all those stupid scientists and their dumb numbers and measurements.

And, in one of my favorite wingnut tics, Powers basically contradicts his already silly argument:

In any case, it looks as if Ixchel is smiling on the Cancun Summit attendees:

Let’s see how this works.  Global warming isn’t real because there’s a moon goddess that Powers totally wouldn’t stick it to, which means that liberals are ugly and sexless.  But global warming also isn’t real because people who accept the evidence have fun at parties, which you, the embittered wingnuts, are jealous of because that’s certainly not the life you’re living.  Liberals are evil because they’re no fun/too fun.  And that makes global warming not real.  If he’s only have called the attendees hipsters, I think we would have had a real contender for the contest of what wingnut post best exemplifies using button-pushing on an audience of embittered assholes with insecurity complexes over actual reason.

All weekend at Skepticon, books were everywhere.  The book seller had books about atheism, about science, and books written by the speakers.  There were books being purchased, read, carried around, and signed.  But these were not the books that were the ones being most discussed, even as the speakers hawked their own books from stage.  That honor went to two highly contested texts: the Holy Bible and On the Origin of the Species.  Never were two books so discussed while remaining largely unread. 

Copies of The Origin were all over the place.  The reason was that a creationist group set up in front of the convention to protest it (which was really odd to me, but was shrugged off by a lot of people who had dealt with these folks before), and their form of protest was to hand out copies of The Origin with an intro to it written by evolution denialist Ray Comfort.  His creationist group put out their own version of The Origin in order to swing people towards creationism a couple of years ago, and they’ve been handing out free copies ever since.  You can tell the second you see their copies of the book that they’ve vandalized the text somehow, simply because their copies are a lot lighter than the actual book On the Origin of the Species.  A quick Google search demonstrates that this suspicion in correct, that the Comfort version of the book has four excised chapters, because Comfort doesn’t actually want people exposed to the evidence that Darwin marshaled for his theory.  He also replaced Darwin’s actual introduction with his own evolution denialist gobbledy gook.  Comfort would have you believe that actually reading The Origin will turn you against it, but his censorship of its actual contents proves that he knows that claim is false.  Conventioneers responded to this peculiar protest by taking the books and then circulating them around so that the speakers could sign them, turning them into souvenirs of the event. 

The other book that was being carried around by some folks was the Bible.  They snagged the free ones that the Gideons put in hotel rooms, and also asked speakers to sign them.  (I joked that I should have written, “Have a bitchin’ summer!” as my tag in the Bible, except my handwriting is so poor that people probably wouldn’t get the joke.)  One guy came up with a fun idea of putting stickers that said “I Doubt It” that were advertising Skeptical Inquiry on the Bible and then returning it to the hotel room for the next person to find.  This entire incident was another reminder to me of how different it is to be an atheist living in hyper-liberal and tolerant areas (like I do).  My usual stance towards the Bible is indifference, honestly.  It’s not that I don’t know about Gideon Bibles, for instance, but I so rarely think about them that it would have never occurred to me to look for one in my room for any kind of protest stunt to pull.  But I think in some parts of the country, being mindful of the non-stop Christianity shoveling isn’t a choice. 

As Ray Comfort clearly understands, actually reading On the Origin of the Species is likely to move someone closer to accepting evolution.  In contrast, actually reading the Bible tends to turn people away from faith, which is why churches tend to discourage it, substituting “Bible study” for actual Bible reading.  But it was clear from the way these books were being bandied around that this isn’t really about what’s in them, but what they symbolize: traditionalism vs. modernity, faith vs. reason, patriarchy vs. feminism.  And that’s fine, I guess.  Something had to be the symbols for that, though there’s a distinct reluctance on the part of the modernists in this equation to make Darwin’s book a symbol, because we reject the idea of treating science like received wisdom.  But you have to work with what you got, not what you wish you had.

There was some amount of butt hurtness from the actual (and rare) accomodationists about the fact that this conference was mainly about atheism.  Even talks that weren’t about atheism had atheist implications.  Mine, for instance, was about feminism as the rational position, but the entire first half of it was about how religion is a major obstacle for women’s rights.  (The second half was about pseudo-science.  I’ll be putting it online soon, I hope.  They were taping all the talks given.)  PZ Myers talked about evolution and how it works on a genetic level, but the conclusion was about why evolutionary theory is, whether people like it or not, a threat to the god hypothesis.  Rebecca Watson’s was about Christmas and the value of the various fantasies about it, but the conclusion was about atheism and whether or not atheists should celebrate Christmas.  (Her conclusion was abso-fucking-lutely.)  The claim was being floated that 3 out of 15 speeches were on atheism, but honestly, ever single one I was able to catch was about atheism on some level.

And that’s fine.  It’s asinine to claim that the focus on atheism is going to run off a handful of religious people who might otherwise be interested in skepticism because they’re skeptical of UFOs and Bigfoot.  Not that it isn’t true, but it’s basically beside the point.  This claim underestimates the intelligence of religious people, because it assumes they don’t understand that skeptical claims about other supernatural beings have implications for claims about god.  It also assumes they wouldn’t get that they’re in a thicket of atheists because everyone just politely refuses to talk about the obvious. 

But more than that, the argument fails to honor the people who actually show up, who actually give money, and who actually care about this event.  Those people want to talk about religion.  They fall into two camps, though many people have a foot in each one.  First you have people like me, who are atheist activists because we see the horror religion does in the world and we simply think challenging it is more important than challenging beliefs in, say, fairies.  Then you have people who’ve actually been the direct victims of horrible actions taken in the name of religion, or they’re close to someone who has, and for them atheist organizing is a healing thing to do.  For instance, there’s a whole lot of child abuse going on in this country in the name of Jesus Christ, and people who see that and are distressed by it don’t need someone blabbing on to them about how they have to turn down the volume on their objections because they might offend someone. 

Talking about atheism doesn’t preclude talking about other stuff.  The fear is that if you talk about atheism too much, you’ll run off religious people who might otherwise add value.  But I would argue that the atheist talk gets people in the door, and once there they are happy to hear your arguments about resisting quack medicine, promoting science, and, in my case, embracing feminism.  You would lose half those sets of ears if this was a conference that had more stuff about Bigfoot than it did Jesus.  That’s just a cold, hard fact.  People turn against religion for emotional reasons, but that doesn’t mean their arguments aren’t rational. Treating the angry atheists like they count less because they’re angry is simply unfair.  They should be angry.  Also, that they are angry doesn’t mean they are strident, humorless, or scary.  As I noted above, for instance, instead for reacting to the creationists protesting the event by yelling at them, most people expressed their anger with humor, by defacing the books with the signatures of noted heathens speaking at the event.  When you speak to people, they often have stories of beatings at the hands of fundamentalist parents, harassment at work from believers, and feelings of isolation in their various communities because of their atheism.  They should be angry.  I feel a lot of the debate about turning down the volume on atheism is telling the angry people that their feelings don’t count, and that’s simply unfair.

Woof, the day really got by me.  My apologies.  Subsequently, I don’t have a lot of stuff bookmarked that I can come up with bloggeriffic insights for, but that doesn’t mean I want to keep you hanging without anything to talk about.  So, more fascinating research, this time from Amanda Hess.  She linked Charlie Glickman, who wrote an interesting post in the ever-rare vein of “both/and” discussion on porn and the effect it has on men when it comes to the way they view and treat women.  “Both/and” because both critics of porn and defenders of porn seem to have a point about the relationship between porn and aggression in men.  Check out this graph of research on porn use in men, once they broke the men down into groups based on a range of sexual aggression (click the graph to make it bigger):

Charlie summarizes:

For men at the lower end of the sexual aggression range, there was either no difference or only small changes in their sexual aggression due to porn use. However, for men at the level of moderate or high risk for sexual aggression, there was a correlation between more porn use and increased sexual aggression. We need to be very clear that correlation is not causation- there’s no way to tell from this research what the causal links may be. Porn use could increase aggression, aggression could lead to more porn watching, they could both be the result of another set of factors, or (most likely, in my opinion) all of the above.

In other words, it’s true that some groups of men don’t have a correlation between heavy porn use and sexual aggression, but some men absolutely do. 

I’ve noted in the past that I think the outsized role that misogyny plays in porn probably has to do with the fact that a small percentage of heavy duty porn users dictate the market.  I speculated that most men spend not very much time looking at porn compared to other activities, but that some men are complete pornheads who have to be staring at it all the time.  I suspect that men who look at porn well beyond the basic “get on, get off, get on with some other activity”  amount are way more likely to be in it to see women hurt and degraded, on top of just wanting to get off.  And since they look at it way more and spend way more money on it, the industry caters to their demands.  Which is why, to quote a friend of mine, in a lot of porn videos there seems to be a need to have a winner and a loser of the sexual encounter, and the woman is the loser.  And men who are less interested in having their ego shored up this way simply tune out or refuse to analyze some of the misogyny in a lot of porn, because they see it mainly as a masturbatory tool. 

Well, I don’t know how well this research fits that thesis of mine, but one thing that it does show is that men are highly likely to assault women do often have an extremely intense relationship with porn.  And I’m guessing they prefer the meanest, nastiest shit you can find.  Again, I have no doubt that many porn producers are well aware of this, and cater to it because they make so much money off it.

Hey, feminist, skeptics, atheists!  Or feminist skeptic atheists, and their allies.  If you want something fun and amazing to do in November, check out Skepticon.  It’s awesome in general, because not only are they about promoting science and skepticism, they tend to hang out the atheist flag as well. And not only that, they’ve invited me to speak this year about the intersection of feminism and atheism—-how religion is used to oppress women, and why atheism activism and the promotion of critical thinking help feminism.  And how we can do a better job of it, of course.

They plant this conference in Springfield, Missouri, which is in the thick of a super-religious area where atheists can often feel isolated.  This sort of thing reduces that sense of isolation.  The conference runs November 19th through 21st.  To get this done, they have to fund raise, so if you have some extra money, feel free to give here.  This helps keep it free for anyone to attend. And if you want to come, please register here.  The speakers are listed here, and they’re soon going to advertise the hotel for the conference.

It’s always been my sense that feminism, skepticism, and atheism are a natural fit.  Woo-based feminism that engages in wishful thinking about a non-existent matriarchal past and non-existent goddesses has never appealed to me.  I think feminism is strongest when it’s feet are planted firmly on the ground.  Moreover, skeptics and active atheists actually go after two of the biggest weapons used to abuse women: pseudo-science and religion.  On the former, I like to give the floor to Jill from I Blame The Patriarchy.

Science is a process by which one discovers actual truth. Have Pinkfaced Captains of Industry and their Dude Nation minions subverted the scientific method for evil? Sure. Does their having done that invalidate the method itself, to the extent that goddessy ladies should pooh-pooh the whole idea in favor of some kind of magic lady-worship cult, the centerpiece of which is faith in “feelings”?.....

Patriarchy is the problem, not science. Science does not oppress women. Dude culture oppresses women. I’m not advocating “science equality,’ either. I’m advocating — as always — liberation from oppression. Is anything more liberating than truth-n-beauty? I ask you.

If you’re ready to get your butt hurt on about that, please read her follow-up post that explains beautifully how concepts like “intuition” were invented by the patriarchy to other women. 

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