Quote ot the Time Being: The Spoils of War

Today's quote comes from Ed Brayton of Dispatches from the Culture Wars, on a topic I recently thought about, again:

Probably the single biggest passage that did it for me was Numbers 31. This is the attack on the Midianites. The Israelites believed that two Midianite women had “tempted” two men to worship their god instead of Jehovah. As a result, Moses commanded — supposedly because God told him to do so — that all Midianites be slaughtered. Except for the virgin females, who were divided up among the soldiers as the spoils of war. And it occurred to me that this is something that even Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin didn’t do. Even Nazi Germany didn’t force the women they’d conquered to marry the men who had slaughtered their fathers and brothers. That’s how barbaric it was, it went beyond anything even the worst human beings would do. And this is the same being that supposedly commands us to love one another and to do unto others as we would have them do unto us? It just didn’t add up for me.

To make things worse, a lot of fundamentalists believe Moses is being rewarded with eternal bliss for leading a "holy" life.

As for the evils of Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin, the fact that they didn't order anything like this suggests that even our archetypes for complete monsters are still less evil than the god of the Old Testament. Even if you try to detach the god from the barbarism, it still makes a far more horrifying vision for humanity than anything modern fundies can confabulate for the "degradation" of our civilization. How exactly are rock and roll, Harry Potter, and equal marriage rights going to produce anything even remotely as bad?

Quote of the Time Being: Being Right

Thanks go to The Christian Cynic for providing it:

The desire to be right and the desire to have been right are two desires, and the sooner we separate them the better off we are. The desire to be right is the thirst for truth. On all counts, both practical and theoretical, there is nothing but good to be said for it. The desire to have been right, on the other hand, is the pride that goeth before a fall. It stands in the way of our seeing we were wrong, and thus blocks the progress of our knowledge.

---W.V.O. Quine and J.S. Ullian, The Web of Belief

Quote of the Time Being: Supernaturalism

From Sastra: "Supernaturalists seem to have a lot of trouble trying to make sense of abstractions and levels of experience: they want to take everything literally, as irreducible substances. Love is only real to them if it’s a thing, a sort of spiritual-substance which is made of neither matter nor energy because it is the immaterial essence of love. Ironically, that makes them super-materialists — spinning material into finer and finer substances until like only comes from like. Love is derived from love. Otherwise, it can only have the same properties that were there in its origin.

Despite their claims to be so comfortable with “higher levels” of reality, supernaturalists are concrete thinkers. They can only make sense of immaterial abstractions by turning them into spirit-things in a spirit-world. It’s the same sort of composition fallacy that causes people to have a serious problem with understanding how life can come from non-life. Things are supposed to be stable, discontinuous units of essential natures which are forever separated by what they ARE. If inert matter can live, it must be because a vital force made of life gets into the matter to somehow to make it live."

A Real Patriot

The big man PZ posted about her. Ms. McKinsey is an example of what I think of as a real patriot. She used a powerful example to show one of the core values that once made America great: Freedom of expression. She stepped on an American flag to demonstrate that we have the freedom to express our feelings without fear of government reprisal. That includes criticism against the government or the nation as a whole.

For her valor, she gets rewarded with an insane mob of idolators who worship the flag but hate America and everything that flag represents to us. If these people had their way, the flag would become an icon of nihilism, tyranny, stagnation, and ignorance. I stand by Ms. McKinsey. I hope that the children took her lesson to heart, even when so many adults have failed to do so.

Quote of the Time Being: Vitalism

From puppygod: "The problem with vitalistic theories is that they are wrong. Demonstrably wrong. Thanks to modern biochemistry and physics we understand in quite fine details where the "life force" come from, how it is transformed and distributed. It comes from hydrogen fusion in the sun, plants capture photons energy in chemical bonds of hydrocarbons, we can move thanks to energy released from ATP hydrolysis etc. etc. Postulating some kind of metaphysical "life force" different from well-known biochemical reactions is ridiculously superfluous. It's as ridiculous as claiming that cars move thanks to motion spirits that dwell in the oil fields and are transferred via gasoline and willpower of the driver into cars and make the cars go. And adding half teaspoon of powdered cheetah bones to brakes fluid will repair windshield wipers of your car and make it go faster by making motion spirits happy. "

Quote of the Time Being #25

It's a long comment over at Orac's place by Antaeus Feldspar.

Pure ownage of a straw man factory who showed up in the thread.

Quote of the Time Being #24

From James Sweet:

By the way, I recently coined the term The Quantum Gambit for the following argument:

1) My insane theory doesn't make any goddamn sense.
2) Quantum theory is supported by mountains of evidence, but even it's strongest proponents (e.g. Feynman, Schroedinger, etc.) have gone on record saying that it doesn't make any goddamn sense.
3) Therefore, my insane theory is probably supported by mountains of evidence.

Quote of the Time Being #23

Provided by Scott, over at Orac's place:






RJ's comment #30 reminds me of a joke I heard recently which is actually quite on-point.

Two Taliban fighters are talking in Afghanistan. One of them comments, "Those American Marines are such incompetents, their marksmanship is pathetic!" The other one asks, "How do you know that?" And the first replies, "Well, I've talked to a bunch of our guys who were shot at by them - the Marines missed every time!"

If you don't see the connection, think about it for a bit. Hint: Selection effects.

Speedy Q&A #3

Q. Why do scientists reject Creationism?

A. Because when you're testing hypotheses, the null hypothesis of "It's completely random" is among the first to go.

Quote of the Time Being #22

From Ciaphas on a thread provided for the unapologetic apologist, Rhology:

I've always felt the religious nutball position about morality was rather odd. Their religion is amoral; the only reason you shouldn't do something is because you'll be punished for it, not because it's actually wrong.

I always get the impression that they're sitting at home going "It would be really fun to go on a multi-state murderous rampage, but if I do God will kick my ass. *sigh*".

Awesome Poetry

Hat tip to PZ for showing me this:



Storm sure repeats a lot of doggerel. This Tim Minchin guy did a wonderful job, but I feel like typing up some of my thoughts on Storm's thought-stopping cliches:

"Knowledge is merely opinion."

Last I checked, opinion was stuff that you couldn't prove or disprove. Science may not get up to mathematics in certainty, but we can gather a lot of evidence and get extremely high confidence values.

"But the human body is a mystery..."

And getting less and less so, thanks to continual medical advances.

"Science just falls into a hole when it tries to explain the soul."

And it's been steadily filling the holes these woos call souls. Just like any anti-materialist screed, gaps are used to fill a petty need. (Great, now I'm doing it.)

"Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy..."

Far less than the alties. Real medicine has to go through a battery of tests before it's accepted and marketed. That's how it should be. Yes, they've got a profit motive to encourage them to cut corners, but that's why the FDA and similar organizations exist to police them. Alties are just complaining about their competition and generally turn to rants against the FDA because they want deregulation so they can sell anything without worrying about consumer protection measures.

"...They promote drug dependency..."

This is something I find really odd coming from an altie. I've often run into woos who try to convince me that I'm really sick, bombarded with vague toxins, dangerous electric fields from powerlines, miasmas, that I'm dehydrated from not drinking 8 glasses of pure water, or that I'm malnourished because I cook my food. So they try to get me to buy their juices, pills, and waves of their hands. And they want me to get regular sessions.

"...At the cost of natural remedies."

Someone doesn't know their medical history. Many medicines are derived from natural sources. Pharmaceutical companies just refine them to get rid of unnecessary (or even dangerous) other ingredients.

"...They're immoral and driven by greed..."

More reason to maintain consumer protection groups and not give in to altie propaganda. You know, I wonder just how big the profit margin on sCAM typically is. Probably much larger, especially for stuff like homeopathy.

"Why take drugs when herbs can solve it?"

If an herb can solve it, that pretty much makes it a drug. And many drugs are just the concentrated active ingredient of some herbs.

"Why do chemicals when homeopathic solvents can resolve it?"

Homeopathy is absolutely pure bunk.

"Shakespeare said it first: There are more things in Heaven and earth than exist in your philosophy."

Of course there are. Science is about finding them. When we find something new, our philosophy is designed to expand. We've been dreaming up and finding stuff for a long time. Unfortunately for the woos, they never dreamt of any of it at any time. All they have is bald assertion that it's something else.

"Science is just how we're trained to look at reality..."

Said by someone obviously not trained in science. Most people aren't. Besides, even if everyone got trained in scientific thought, what's wrong with that? Science is an inherently expansive, adaptive way of thought. Woo is reactionary.

"...It doesn't explain love or spirituality..."

Someone doesn't pay much attention to the world.

"How does science explain psychics..."

Trickery, confirmation bias, various other observation fallacies. Turns out there's always a simpler explanation than psychic powers. Which haven't contributed anything to our knowledge of the universe.

"auras"

Same set as psychics.

"the afterlife"

What afterlife? Evidence, please.

"or the power of prayer"

Prayer doesn't work.

"But you're just closed-minded, I think your FAITH in science and tests is just as blind as faith of any fundamentalist."

Projection, thy name is woo. Science is designed to accomodate change and expansion. Anything can be challenged.

So, that's the last we hear of Storm in the thing. One of my favorite bits from Tim as a metaphor for this bizarre craving for the supernatural:

To gild refined gold,
To paint the lily,
To throw perfume on the violet,
Is just fucking silly.

Song of the Time Being #1

I just couldn't pass this up.




Posted in a Pharyngula comment thread:

Jesus the Magic Zombie
On the cross and comatose
And if you ever saw him
You would even say "He's toast!"
All of the Roman soldiers
Used to laugh and call him names
They wouldn't let poor Jesus
Undermine the Roman state
Then one sultry Pass-over
Judas came to say:
"Jesus with your halo bright,
I will fuck you up tonight"
Then all the soldiers grabbed him
They all shouted out with glee:
"Jesus the Magic Zombie
We're gonna nail you to a tree!"

Quote of the Time Being #21

"God isn't only shrinking (or learning to squeeze into tight corners), he is also becoming more and more bland. He's gone from a gutsy meat and veg buttkicker to being a wimpy Divine Oneness one-size-fits-all insipid new age bootlicker." -yakaru

Under the Microscope: What the Bleep? Part 1

Well, I've been watching some debunks from the awesome Captain Disillusion, and a few crappy UFO videos (giving them 1 star) suggested by people asking Cap'n D to debunk the dots in them. As a result, YouTube's recommending some woo for me. Think I'll take on one guy's video that popped up as a result. I haven't watched yet, but the one I'll be starting with claims that quantum mechanics justifies woo. I think I know where this will be going. Clicking over, and embedding so you can watch for yourself.



The start's rather random, with sprinkled in phrases, ideal for quote mining. Given the CGI, I'm thinking this is "What the Bleep Do We Know?" a particularly wootastic movie. The most recent comment says so and asks yourti, the video's poster why he didn't label it as such.

One that sticks out asks how we can know anything if the self is intangible. There's a nicely vague word woos probably love. "Self" probably qualifies as an abstract. Money also strikes me as an abstract, but good economists can make some predictions on it (Though the data's noisy enough to have no shortage of people calling it a soft or non-science). It's not immaterial at least, since it has effects on behavior and such.

Gets into parallel realities, which doesn't exactly help out the woos. If I could shift to a parallel reality, I'd be observing things change around me. And there'd be my parallel version to assassinate if I wanted to take over his life.

"Have you seen yourself through the eyes of someone else you've become?"

Uh, what's that got to do with the lookalike in the scene? But yeah, I have: It's called reminiscing, and it's a function of memory, often distorted with nostalgia.

"Looked at yourself through the eyes of the ultimate observer?"

I should call up my brother. Some theist philosopher ended up saying stuff doesn't go away when no one's looking because a deity's doing the observing. Of course, since this'll be on quantum mechanics, I'm curious how this ultimate observer works. Observation isn't a passive process.

After the fauxlisophical scene with people asking the "big" questions, "We can't explain it" and talking about people who investigate getting "lost down the rabbit hole". Yeah. From what I've seen, the people who actually study QM are much more stable than the people who just look long enough to declare it weird and magical.

I can dig the people who say it gets weirder and cooler the more you look. I know some proper scientists got quote mined, so I should be on the watch. Next guy goes on about QM explaining "how we feel about the universe" or some crap, but I think we can agree he's one of the deep woos.

Ramble about what sounds like the Indigo Children crap, and another guy going on about paradigms. Sorry, fella, but that won't help out. Science is pretty well anti-paradigm by its self-correcting nature.

"Modern materialism strips the people of the need to feel responsible." ...Wonder what he's been smoking. He's right in that religion does that. Don't see how QM imbues responsibility, since it's a part of modern materialism. I also don't see how weirdness links to responsibility.

"The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery." Uh, fella, we're in the mystery because we want to be in the know, even if that's fatal for the mystery.

And title screen, confirming this guy didn't label his stuff properly. Though, that might be because he wants to avoid DMCA's. Anyway, I hope this means there'll be less random jumping around interviewees.

Onto some scene while a guy asks why we keep recreating the same stuff. Uh, we don't. We don't create reality, we're made from it.

"Internal world" and "external world". There's no difference between them. They're made of the same stuff, and no, the discovery of QM doesn't change that.

And I think I spot one person who's actually a scientist. He talks about the observation thing, and it doesn't require us conscious people: Things whack things to nail them down (collapse wave functions), essentially. That's how I understood QM.

Example of watching a brain's activities: Looking at an object and imagining and object trigger many of the same areas to light up. Nothing wooey about that. The act of imagining simulates sight in the brain, and looking at an object triggers recognition processes to the ideas of objects we hold for reference. Of course, woos will take that to mean that an imagined object is exactly as real as an observed object. I get the feeling this is a real neurologist or something being put into this "creating reality" context instead of just describing mental processes and the shortcuts that backfire into things like deja vu.

Onto Part 2:


"This camera is seeing more than what is around here because it has no objection and no judgment."

...What? We can look at what it showed by playing back the tape. Cameras are objective because they don't leave out the things we would label as irrelevant or unimportant. It's built to record, while we're built to survive and not waste precious time looking at blades of grass while a lion charges at us.

Going on about how our eyes might see more than our brains process. Duh. We prune stuff off to save time and sometimes ego. I'm now wondering if this is a scientist who had a bit of verbal stumbling recorded.

New interviewee saying we're trained only to see what we believe is possible. Uh, no. If that were the case, I'd be staring at blank screens during chunks of Mythbusters and videogames would never subvert my expectations. She goes on that bogus story about the Indians being unable to see the ships. Skeptico's covered this, along with the whole movie.

More baseless assertion about us creating reality. Possible quote mining of a guy who might have been blindsided by a 'why not solipsism?' type question. I could be wrong, because his computer has some seemingly pointless graphic of a brain. I hope that's his screen saver. No, we can't have certainty. That doesn't mean any of this reality creation crap is true. Series of probable quote mines.

The protagonist describes the ship dream and her roommate, sister, or whatever is apparently very easily impressed. She goes on about past lives, parallel worlds, and so forth. Uh, does it ever occur to these people that sometimes a dream is just a dream? Mention of anxiety medication, which I seem to recall that she abandons though the magic of QM at the end of the movie. Uh, you do realize they prescribe the stuff because it shows success when tested, and this What the Bleep stuff hasn't shown any promise, last I checked.

Guy talking about decisions in life depending on QM effects not "washing out". Our "macro world" understanding depends on quantum effects generally averaging out. They were accurate before QM's discovery, and they're still accurate afterward. Depending on odd QM effects not to cancel out is depending on massive dumb luck.

He apparently has some rage for subatomic physics since he's describing it as "made up". Well, the theories exist today because they're accurate in their predictions. We don't know it all yet, of course, but we're doing a hell of a lot better than the woos. ---Moves onto disjointed stuff about how weird QM is. Says without apparent basis that disappearing/reappearing particles are moving between parallel worlds. For pair production, I believe the answer is that they don't add up to anything: Opposite charges, spin, momentum, etcetera.

Guy talking about time and why it seems to move in one direction. I guess he's not acquainted with entropy. The reason we can't "remember" the future is because our memories are assembled by "spontaneous" chemical reactions that move towards overall increasing entropy. Reverse the process, and you're disassembling memories. Only way out of that would be dualism, and that's a new question I think I'd like to ask them.

Clip ends with her moving into some magic basketball court of unlimited possibilities. Moving onto part 3:



Start going on about matter mostly being empty space. That's odd, but that doesn't change the fact that dropping a hammer on your toe will probably hurt. Its solidity and mass are still the same, even if there's a lot of space between its parts. Somehow, though, this guy ends up saying the most "solid" thing it can be compared to is a thought. Somehow, I fail to see the connection. A thought is a complex collection of molecules (made of atoms) and electrical signals (made of an electron current). That's kind of like saying a hammer is made of jackhammers. One guy goes on to apparently conflate thoughts with the physicist's use of "information."

Talks about going back in time in QM. Uh, no. Whatever point you're making about the weirdness of applying the time axis to that level, it doesn't mean we can actually go back in time. No one from the future showed up to that time traveler's convention.

Dr. Quantum comes up. I saw this guy's skit earlier (not shown yet). He left out the part that observation is an active process. If you look at a rock, you have to shine a light on it, which warms it up. If you look at something as tiny as an electron, you're going to do more than just warm it up. Also, observation has nothing to do with consciousness. Substitute "whacking" for "observing" and you've got something that might be more appropriate. Plenty of rambling on about the word, and this one guy going on about poking around the brain and not finding "the observer". Uh, guy, the whole freaking brain is the observer. It's a system, not a distinct entity. We look at the parts to find out how our whole selves act as observers.

Of course, that has nothing to do with how QM uses the term.

"Four layers of the bio-body suit." Fun. A dualist. Maybe he's found the homunculus the other guy was looking for.

Anyway, that's 3 parts out of 10. Think I've done my due for the day.

Another Thought Many Have Had

"You've heard about some of these pet projects they really don't make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not."

-Sarah Palin.

And a quick search on Wikipedia:

"Lysenko's "revolution in agriculture" had a powerful propaganda advantage over the academics, who urged the patience and observation required for science. Lysenko was admitted into the hierarchy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and was put in charge of agricultural affairs. He used his position to denounce biologists as "fly-lovers and people haters," and to decry the "wreckers" in biology, whom he claimed were trying to purposely disable the Soviet economy and cause it to fail."

IDiot Quote of the Time Being #1

I saw this, and I just had to start a new series. In two days, I've heard two Creationist arguments I've never heard before. The first is sufficiently lampooned in this video. The second I'll leave to readers:

there is a large amount of ice still within our star system.about 4500 years ago a giant ice-snow ball scattered throughout out star system. that ice-snow can still be found in many places in our star system eg. rings of saturn, haleys comet ,our moon's spot crators, earth north arctic and ant-arctic magnetic poles,etc.. (ice is magnetic)

[Emphasis mine]

Star Trek Quote of the Time Being

Been recording late night showings of Deep Space Nine for a while. Love that particular series quite a lot. But, to tie this in with the skeptical theme, got a quote here that pretty well describes the crazy about Creation "Science", where they change the explanation for a given thing, like whether archaeopteryx was "fully bird" or "fully reptile."

Anyway, the DS9 episode was "The Wire." Doctor Bashir starts digging into the past of Garak, the disgraced Cardassian spy, and gets him to tell the story, or rather stories of why he was exiled. After everything's resolved, Bashir complains about the contradictions:

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

I find myself thinking about that a lot when I bump into a YEC.

Some Live Journal Guy Wins the Internet

PZ and apathyincarnate showed him to us. Kudos, mad props, and whatever else to ari_rahikkala for putting it down so well.

It's just so beautiful!

The theory of childhood, also known as child origin, is a damnable, loathsome and indefensible lie. How can any thinking person suppose all humans used to be babies once? There is no development path from babies to adults, no transitional forms between these two species. Show me even one baby with the head of a grown man on his body. Can you? No? Not even a bearded toddler? No adults with unfused skullbones, outside unfortunate disorders? Not even a tiny little newborn girl suddenly sprouting a respectable bosom? You can't find them, because they don't exist. There isn't a single transitional form between children and adults, and you will never find one because the theory simply is an unscientific lie.

The development of children has been well-researched in our six-month study following a sample of one thousand children and adults of various ages. We have conclusively proven that while there are minor changes in features like height and body fat, and replacement of deciduous teeth with permanent teeth, incontravertibly still every creature in the study that started out as a child had only slightly more adult features at the end of the observation period than at its beginning. Children and adults are separate kinds and there will never be sufficient changes to change one into the other. We reject any evidence from longer-term studies as we believe the laws of physics have changed within the last year.

To claim people come from children is demeaning and morally degrading. We have observed how children behave. If we acted like small children we'd all be demanding and impatient, and we'd be cheating, lying, and stealing from each other all the time. If the theory of childhood were true there would be no morality, and with no morality to build one on, no society. Childhood is a wicked lie used by charlatans to justify evils such as public schools.

There is no consensus on the theory of childhood in the scientific community. We should teach the controversy. Our children will be served well to learn that the prospect of them becoming adults is merely a theoretical idea. Many children come from families that do not subscribe to the theory of childhood, and they could be disturbed if the theory were taught as fact.

Bad News

My grandmother died last night from natural causes. She lasted as long as she did thanks to modern medical science. I would definitely place her as one of the early influences that led me to becoming the scientifically minded blogger I am today. She studied botany and biology in college during days when fewer people took women seriously in science.

So, I leave you with some of her words that express an attitude of mine so eloquently:

I know a man who won't look up at the sky at night because "they're trying to trick us." I can't imagine going through life like that.

Quote of the Time Being #20

Another gem in that thread, this time by BobC:

"Anyone who believes in heaven is an idiot. Anyone who believes in hell is an asshole."

Summarizes my view pretty well, though I would use far, far stronger language than 'asshole.'