Category: Uncategorized

The posturing of the fetishist

Maddox quite rightly skewers the public posturing of the faux science fans, most of whom can’t even differentiate between science proper and political propaganda:

Any time I see people on Facebook simultaneously liking “iCarly, One Direction” and “The Pauly D Project” while also liking fucking loving science, it raises some red flags. The problem is, people who claim to “fucking love” science don’t. They don’t even like science, let alone “fucking love it.” Want proof? Here are two posts from IFLS. On the left is a typical post, and on the right, a rare scientific post. Note the number of “likes” each post received….

People love science in the same way they love classical music or art. Science and “geeky” subjects are perceived as being hip, cool and intellectual. So people take a passing interest just long enough to glom onto these labels and call themselves “geeks” or “nerds” every chance they get.

 It’s impossible to argue with his logic: “If you ‘fucking love science’, why don’t you do some?”

I also found the incipient cult of the midwitted junior co-signer Neil deGrasse Tyson to be interesting, mostly for the insipid and inadvertently revealing banalities he utters:


“One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.”

I’ll ignore the ironic bait of the obvious and customary oxymoron involved and observe that it should be no surprise that Tyson harbors considerable appeal for the less intelligent. This is a literal paean to cluelessness. Don’t understand X in the slightest? That’s just an indication of how open-minded and progressive you are!

“Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.”

Judging by Tyson and his observed historical illiteracy, it works about as well as the MMR vaccine on a highly allergic child who ends up in a post-jab coma as his parents are financially compensated by VAERS.

“Not only are we in the Universe the Universe is in us. I don’t know of any deeper spiritual feeling than what that brings upon me.”

Ah, the profound depths of Deepak Chopra lite. Again, this is a literal paean to cluelessness; Tyson is openly confessing to his own ignorance of spirituality. How fortunate that it indicates his openness to new ideas. All of this is simple religion-substitute, which is explains how Tyson has become the new softer and cuddlier Dawkins-replacement that Peter Boghossian wanted to be.

“Anti-racism” is a code word

What is meant by “anti-racism” is nothing more and nothing less than “anti-European”. The attacks on “racism” have never been anything more than cynical attempts to leverage minority power in America at the expense of the majority.

A group of employees at South Puget Sound Community College sent out an invitation to all 300 staffers.

The “Staff, Faculty and Administrators of Color” encouraged employees to reply to the invitation to find out the confidential date and time of what was being called a “happy hour” to “build support and community” for people of color.

The invite made it clear white people were not invited.

The email read: “If you want to create space for white folks to meet and work on racism, white supremacy, and white privilege to better our campus community and yourselves, please feel free to do just that.”

If you haven’t figured out that “raciss” is merely a rhetorical weapon and minorities have no more interest in equality than feminists do, you are very, very slow on the uptake. Once Europeans are no longer the majority in a given country, they’ll very soon learn how little interest all the various competing minorities who accused them of racism have in “colorblindness”, “racial equality”, “affirmative action”, “proportional representation” and all the other useful little rhetorical fictions that have been successfully used to prevent Europeans from pursuing any group interests.

Of course, we’re already seeing this develop in the United States, as European-Americans not only flee minority-run homelands such as Detroit and Los Angeles, but the Democratic Party as well. This is why amnesty is so important to Democrats, as they are hoping to import sufficient numbers of Hispanics to counter the transition to race-based power politics.

What they will learn, however, is that La Raza is considerably less amenable to political control than the descendants of slaves have been, and they will be rapidly cast aside by those they thought to “lead” and “represent”.

Obsidian cries raciss

I’m only surprised it took him this long to get around to it. I’ve been waiting for him to take a public shot at me ever since I humiliated him when he was strutting around boasting about “chin-checking chumps” or however it was that the Jive talk went:

Following up on my question above, I note that you cite two very well known bloggers in the Manosphere, who would be considered to fit Kimmel’s characterization like the proverbial hand in glove: Chateau Heartiste, formerly known as Roissy, and Vox Day, of the blog Alpha Game. Both have been cited for their racist views of people of color, and neither seem particularly interested in being inclusive of Men of Color under their tents (in fact, I would go so far as to say that they are both actively hostile to such inclusiveness – I say this based on direct observation and experience of both). As noted above, their astute observations and the like, many of which I do agree with, are utterly undermined by their racism, and gives folks like Kimmel, et al a smoking gun with which to discredit the entirety of the MRM cause.

My response is at Alpha Game. But suffice it to say that my deep and abiding concerns for the African-American community are only exceeded by my dedication to the plight of the Heian Japanese. Of course, I am hostile to “inclusiveness”. As an open and avowed elitist, it tends to come with the territory.

I actually find it vaguely surprising that people are still trying to play the race card in 2014. Hispanics quite openly hate Blacks and are actively driving them out of their most archetypical communities. Whites and Jews are “gentrifying” them out of their historic homes, which is the genteel way to say “financial ethnic cleansing”. I mean, who is still pretending that desegregation is even remotely viable? Who is still dumb enough to pretend that the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t a fundamentally wrong-headed failure?

It’s even stranger that they still attempt to play it on me. First, I can trump it with my own Man of Color card. Second, I should think I have made it abundantly clear that I am not in the least bit afraid of being labeled anything from Toddler Slayer to RSHD.

“All men are created equal” cannot possibly apply in a material sense in any world where all men are not even equally homo sapiens sapiens.

The mysteries of TENS

Dr. James M. Tour of Rice University confesses he simply cannot grasp what everyone at Scienceblogs and the Panda’s Thumb and Richarddawkins.net just knows to be true. Because science.

I will tell you as a scientist and a synthetic chemist: if anybody should be able to understand evolution, it is me, because I make molecules for a living, and I don’t just buy a kit, and mix this and mix this, and get that. I mean, ab initio, I make molecules. I understand how hard it is to make molecules. I understand that if I take Nature’s tool kit, it could be much easier, because all the tools are already there, and I just mix it in the proportions, and I do it under these conditions, but ab initio is very, very hard.

I don’t understand evolution, and I will confess that to you. Is that OK, for me to say, “I don’t understand this”? Is that all right? I know that there’s a lot of people out there that don’t understand anything about organic synthesis, but they understand evolution. I understand a lot about making molecules; I don’t understand evolution. And you would just say that, wow, I must be really unusual.

Let me tell you what goes on in the back rooms of science – with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. I have sat with them, and when I get them alone, not in public – because it’s a scary thing, if you say what I just said – I say, “Do you understand all of this, where all of this came from, and how this happens?” Every time that I have sat with people who are synthetic chemists, who understand this, they go “Uh-uh. Nope.” These people are just so far off, on how to believe this stuff came together. I’ve sat with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. Sometimes I will say, “Do you understand this?”And if they’re afraid to say “Yes,” they say nothing. They just stare at me, because they can’t sincerely do it.

I was once brought in by the Dean of the Department, many years ago, and he was a chemist. He was kind of concerned about some things. I said, “Let me ask you something. You’re a chemist. Do you understand this? How do you get DNA without a cell membrane? And how do you get a cell membrane without a DNA? And how does all this come together from this piece of jelly?” We have no idea, we have no idea. I said, “Isn’t it interesting that you, the Dean of science, and I, the chemistry professor, can talk about this quietly in your office, but we can’t go out there and talk about this?”

If you understand evolution, I am fine with that. I’m not going to try to change you – not at all. In fact, I wish I had the understanding that you have.

But about seven or eight years ago I posted on my Web site that I don’t understand. And I said, “I will buy lunch for anyone that will sit with me and explain to me evolution, and I won’t argue with you until I don’t understand something – I will ask you to clarify. But you can’t wave by and say, “This enzyme does that.” You’ve got to get down in the details of where molecules are built, for me. Nobody has come forward.

The Atheist Society contacted me. They said that they will buy the lunch, and they challenged the Atheist Society, “Go down to Houston and have lunch with this guy, and talk to him.” Nobody has come! Now remember, because I’m just going to ask, when I stop understanding what you’re talking about, I will ask. So I sincerely want to know. I would like to believe it. But I just can’t.

Now, I understand microevolution, I really do. We do this all the time in the lab. I understand this. But when you have speciation changes, when you have organs changing, when you have to have concerted lines of evolution, all happening in the same place and time – not just one line – concerted lines, all at the same place, all in the same environment … this is very hard to fathom.

I was in Israel not too long ago, talking with a bio-engineer, and [he was] describing to me the ear, and he was studying the different changes in the modulus of the ear, and I said, “How does this come about?” And he says, “Oh, Jim, you know, we all believe in evolution, but we have no idea how it happened.”

Smells like quality science. And before the usual science fetishists leap in to assert the obvious and declare: “yeah, well, that doesn’t prove God exists,” I will readily admit that it does not. But, (and here is the point), it does prove that there are very rational reasons to doubt the unevidenced assertion that “evolution is a fact”.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, I am an evolution skeptic, not an evolution denier. I do not judge the truth of the belief by the behavior of the believer, although if I did, the behavior of the evolutionary true believers would be sufficient to convince me that the existence of unicorns, fairies, and leprechauns combined is considerably more likely than fish magically turning into monkeys over time due to beneficial mutations taking advantage of the multitude of changes in the water.

The problem of engagement

Toni Weisskopf, the Baen Books editor and one of the voices of sanity in traditional SF/F publishing, provides her perspective on the inevitability of war between the rabbits of Pink SF/F and the rationalists of Blue SF/F in a guest post at Sarah’s place:

The latest fooforaws in the science fiction world have served to highlight the vast cultural divide we are seeing in the greater American culture. SF, as always, very much reflects that greater culture.

It is also nothing new. When fandom was first starting there was the “Great Exclusion Act” when a group of young, excitable, fanboys attempted to spread their political/fannish feud propaganda at the first Worldcon in New York, and were not only prevented from doing so but not allowed back into the con. All fandom was aflame with war! (The fact that this line is a cliché is also a clue that fandom is not, and never has been, a calm peaceful sea of agreement.)

The reason we have a fandom to disunite now, is because calmer heads prevailed. Bob Tucker in particular, with intelligence and humor, led fandom to the idea that it ought have nothing to do with greater world politics, but should concentrate on the thing we all loved, that being science fiction. (Mind you, his sympathies were with the ones who were excluded, but he was able to overcome his own political inclinations for the best of fandom.)

The fact that fandom as an open culture survived more than seventy years is a testament to the power of that simple, uniting concept. That we are once again looking to be rift by a political divide was perhaps inevitable. But as fandom has grown, expanded and diluted itself, we may have won the überculture wars and lost our heart.  We have not been able to transmit this central precept to new fans. Geeks are chic, but somehow we’ve let the fuggheads win.

And, from my observations, this is an inevitable consequence of the creation of any kind of fandom, from tattoos to swords to us. There is a thing people like. Thing people make initial contact with each other to discuss things and thingishness. At some point a woman (and it’s usually women, no matter what the thing) organizes gatherings, and thing fandom grows bigger and better. At some point, the people who care not about things, but merely about being a big fish in a small sea, squeeze out the thing people. Sometimes thing fandom just dies, sometimes it fissures and the process is recreated. So the fuggheads always win. The only question is how long can we delay their inevitable triumph?

Forget delaying them. I agree with what she is saying about the inevitability of the attempted infiltrations, but I very much disagree that their triumph is inevitable. We don’t have to let them in. We don’t have to let them oh-so-helpfully volunteer to make things easier for us and take those weighty responsibilities off our shoulders.

And most of all, we don’t have to sit back and lament the fact that they’ve taken over and ruined the organizations and institutions that we used to love. We can walk away without looking back, leave them to their inevitable implosion, and build new and better ones. But we have to learn from the failures of our predecessors. When the bureaucrats and the activists and the whiners start in with their usual routine about access and fairness and reaching out, we need to kick THEM out, not foolishly listen to them and let in the destroyers.

Don’t throw pearls before swine. Don’t attempt to engage rationally with madmen and fools.

Disarmament is always dumb

I’m only surprised that it took the Ukrainians almost a quarter of a century to regret their unilateral disarmament. Did they learn nothing from the fate of Czechoslovakia 52 years before?

Ukraine may have to arm itself with nuclear weapons if the United States and other world powers refuse to enforce a security pact that obligates them to reverse the Moscow-backed takeover of Crimea, a member of the Ukraine parliament told USA TODAY.

The United States, Great Britain and Russia agreed in a pact “to assure Ukraine’s territorial integrity” in return for Ukraine giving up a nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union after declaring independence in 1991, said Pavlo Rizanenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament.

“We gave up nuclear weapons because of this agreement,” said Rizanenko, a member of the Udar Party headed by Vitali Klitschko, a candidate for president. “Now there’s a strong sentiment in Ukraine that we made a big mistake.”

Perhaps the biggest cost of America’s strategically foolish intervention in Ukraine is the way it will put an end to any attempt to get Iran, North Korea, or any other country that doesn’t want to be invaded, occupied, or partitioned to give up their nuclear ambitions. The lesson being taught is this: never give up your nukes.

Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.

Signed and Limited Edition: Freehold

In honor of the tenth anniversary of its first publication, Mike Z. Williamson and Baen Books are offering a signed hardcover limited edition of Freehold, the first in his Freehold Universe series. It is now available for preorder, so if you are a fan of my mortal enemy and occasional bete noire, M-Zed, this would be the time to act before they run out.

There is no “ADHD”

A doctor with more than 50 years of medical practice asserts that ADHD is an umbrella of symptoms, not a disease in itself. And he also declares that the treatment can be considerably worse than many of the underlying causes.

Back in the Seventies, I believed in ADHD. It seemed to explain the attention issues that affected so many children. But over the years I’ve come to realise that the symptoms actually had a whole range of underlying causes that were being ignored because of the knee-jerk diagnosis of ADHD. As I argue in my new book on the subject – which has generated a furious controversy in America, where I work as a behavioural neurologist – we’ve become stuck in a cycle of misdiagnosis of ADHD and over-prescription of stimulants such as Ritalin. Only by properly investigating, identifying and treating these causes can we help our patients.

In the case of the 13-year-old boy, I ordered a series of blood tests. These showed he had an iron deficiency: after school, while his mother was out at work, he binged on junk food that was high in sugar but low in iron.

Iron deficiency (anaemia) causes physical fatigue, poor attention and concentration, and memory problems. As soon as his iron intake improved, with iron pills and more fish, fruit, vegetables and nuts, his performance and behaviour improved hugely, too.

The ADHD diagnosis and the stimulants had masked the real problem, as is so often the case. In France, a study in 2004 found 84 per cent of children diagnosed with ADHD were iron deficient, compared with 18 per cent of ‘non-ADHD’ children. Yet time and time again, doctors miss the real problems – some serious, some easily correctable – by automatically reaching for the ADHD label.

In my book, I identify more than 20 causes of the symptoms that are called ADHD…. Many ADHD patients have other conditions, such as depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. These are said to ‘co-exist’ with ADHD, but in my view they’re the actual cause of the ‘ADHD’ symptoms. Treat them and you will treat the ADHD.

Failing to treat them and pumping the patient with stimulants instead only makes things worse. The side-effects of stimulants include reduced appetite (dangerous for children, who need a good diet), sleep disturbance (tiredness can exacerbate attention problems), anxiety, irritability, depressed moods, delayed puberty and, in adults, sexual problems (such as erectile dysfunction). And long-term use of stimulants makes people resistant to them, meaning they need higher and higher doses. The drugs can damage memory and concentration, and have even been linked to reduced life expectancy and suicide. Yet stimulants are being prescribed more and more frequently, creating a health time bomb and neglecting the real causes of the problems.

A seven-year-old girl was brought to me because she was disruptive in class, fidgeted and talked loudly. She had been diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Adderall (similar to Ritalin), but it caused sleeping problems that made her more disruptive.

I had her eyesight tested and she was found to be significantly near-sighted: her disruptive behaviour in class stemmed from boredom, brought about by the fact she could not see the board properly. Once she was given glasses, her behaviour improved almost overnight. She no longer had ‘ADHD’ – or rather, she never had it in the first place. Similarly, many ‘distracted’ children who stare out of the window, are, in fact, suffering from eye strain and need glasses, not stimulants.

No one has ever believed that having little kids snort cocaine and smoke meth was a good idea. So how did anyone ever come to buy into the idiot concept that giving them speed was medically sound?

I always considered “ADHD” to be complete BS. One boy with a supposed case of it was magically cured and never had any trouble controlling his behavior around me after I picked him up by the throat and told him that if he ever kicked me again, I’d rip his balls off and feed them to him.

The ignorance of Cosmos

As expected, the science fetishists are cooing happily over the latest media foray into demonstrable ignorance of religious history:

Here’s the thing: Even “Cosmos” points out that Bruno had no scientific basis for his theories. “His vision of the cosmos was a lucky guess,” says Tyson. So why is the long-dead philosopher important enough to rate hero status? That would be because “Cosmos” takes his case as one of “martyrdom.”

What “Cosmos” does not point out to its audiences that the Catholic Church didn’t really care about Bruno’s views on the Earth moving around the Sun. His crimes — the ones for which he was executed — were theological. Several actual scientists in this period happily investigated the ideas of Copernicus’ theories without running into trouble. Even Galileo only got in trouble when he published books that directly mocked the Church’s adherence to the Earth being at the center.

Why does this matter?

So what if Giordano Bruno wasn’t a scientist and wasn’t executed for science? There are three big reasons why this does, in fact, matter and why it hurts “Cosmos” to get it wrong.

1. To borrow one of Tyson’s famous quotes, the good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it. The same goes for history. Getting the history of science wrong hurts science itself. Why believe the science if other parts of the show are inaccurate?

2. Making Bruno into a martyr for science basically makes 100 years of historical research useless. The idea of Giordano Bruno as a scientific hero only originated in the 19th century, when he was championed by several historians. Since then, most have classified him as a philosopher sharing dangerous ideas in a dangerous time.

3. It’s an unstated goal of “Cosmos” to champion science and scientific reasoning over superstition and religious dogmatism. But you’re not going to win over anyone by vilifying religion in the face of science. Add in Bruno flying into space in an overtly crucifixion stance almost seems like giving religion the finger. You don’t win arguments that way, “Cosmos.”

The strange thing is that the science fetishists are always talking about a hypothetical religious ignorance of science while openly demonstrating their own ignorance of history, in particular, the history of the very religion they denigrate on false bases. At least one atheist is aware of the historical illiteracy of his co-irreligionists:

One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who has the lack of common sense to hang around on atheist discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level. I generally do this because the alternative is to admit that the average person’s grasp of history and how history is studied is so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing….

It’s not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the
people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply
picked this [bullsh–] up from other websites and popular books and
collapse as soon as you hit them with some hard evidence. I love to
totally stump them by asking them to present me with the name of one –
just one – scientist burned, persecuted or oppressed for their science
in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually
try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing
considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have
failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently
so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil
Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too
scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of
Medieval scientists – like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger
Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley,
William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of
Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa – and
ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages
without molestation from the Church, my opponents have usually run away
to hide and scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong….

Cosmos must have him groaning with despair.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND

Castalia had already announced that we would be publishing John C. Wright’s collection of essays, TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, which will be published in April. Today we are absolutely delighted to be able to say that we will also be publishing AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, a collection of four novellas set in the Night Land of William Hope Hodgson.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is the first of five novels and novellas written by Mr. Wright to be published by Castalia House. It clocks in at 116,500 words and will be priced at $4.99. We will release the English ebook later this month; the German translation is already underway with an anticipated July release. We also expect to publish a hardcover version this summer.

Apologies to those waiting for THE ALTAR OF HATE, but we are delaying it until April in favor of Mr. Wright’s book. It will be sent to the pre-release reviewers in a few weeks.

Speaking as a reader and as a fan, I can say that the Night Land novellas are spectacular. They combine the intelligence and gigantic scale of Iain M. Banks with the eldritch forboding of H.P. Lovecraft, but with a humane soul that is alien to either of the two late authors.