Month: July 2011

The Problem with Privilege (or: you got sexism in my skepticism!)

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , , 14 Comments

This particular blog debacle has already been done to death pretty well everywhere on the ‘tubes. I usually find that’s about the right time for me to weigh in, so here goes. First, I need to set the stage for those of you just joining us, though I’ve already given you links to this particular rabbit hole in the past, in case you’ve bothered to click them.

Rebecca Watson attended a conference in Dublin recently where she gave a talk addressing the sexism problem that appears to be relatively rampant within the skeptic and atheist communities, a problem that, every time it’s brought up, is generally pooh-poohed by the privileged white men of the community. This is an oversimplification of course, but the talk was generally well-received. It provided examples of behaviour she experiences all too often, being objectified and sexualized at pretty much every con she attends. I’m sure her experiences are not at all out of the norm, either.

After a convention is over, there’s often a traditional follow-up called “Bar-Con” where the convention-goers socialize in the hotel bar for an inordinate amount of time. Rebecca attended this particular convention’s Bar-Con, where the con’s attendees congregated and drank and socialized and generally had a good time. At about four in the morning, Rebecca announced that she was out of steam and was going to head to bed. She left the hotel bar and got in the elevator. A man from the group, evidently an attendee, followed her from the bar to the elevator and got in with her. While she was trapped in this elevator with him, he said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?”
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The Problem with Privilege (or: you got sexism in my skepticism!)
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Rebecca Watson sucks at reading minds

Jason Thibeault, 2 Comments

It’s true. She does. She was completely incapable of reading the guy in the elevator’s mind when he cornered her at 4 am after she’d made clear her intention to go to sleep. Shame on Rebecca for being incapable of reading minds! I mean, it’s so easy! Look at how many people can do it!

Luckily for Rebecca, there are some real mind readers out there to show her how it’s done.

What Watson did was extremely dickish, and contained a large dose of spite. She went for public humiliation over what was, by any reasonable assessment, a pretty minor faux pas in a private situation.

The issue is not that Watson brought up a brought up a posting she thought illustrated a damaging attitude. The issue is that Watson, knowing that McGraw was at the conference, decided to attempt to publicly shame her from her privileged position at the podium.

And one more, from Jerry Coyne:

The concentration on the word “bullying” here, and the assertion that it didn’t happen, simply distracts from the real issue: the obvious fact that Ms. Watson used the occasion of a talk that was supposed to be about something else to air a personal animus against a student, and to lump that student together, implicitly, with other people who had abused Ms. Watson and threatened her with rape. That whole digression was irresponsible and unprofessional, a solipsistic interlude that did not belong in the talk.

Go read more.

Rebecca Watson sucks at reading minds

Paul Baird vs Sye Tenbruggencate Round 3

Jason Thibeault, 2 Comments

When a debate begins with an opening statement like this one, you know it’s going to be a doozy. And this is actually Paul and Sye’s third go-around.

I’d like to thank the viewing audience for taking the time to join us for this debate, I’d like to thank Eric Hovind for hosting this debate in the Creation Today Studios, I’d like to thank Paul Baird for his renewed and apparent undying interest in debating this topic with me. I’d like to thank my brothers and sisters in Christ for their prayers and support but most of all I’d like to thank my lord and saviour Jesus Christ for giving me the opportunity to represent Him before all of you today. Today Paul and I will be debating the existence of God. Since this is our third go around Paul is well aware that my line of argumentation is that the proof that God exists is that without Him you can’t prove or know anything. Proof requires knowledge, truth and absolute laws of logic to name but a few, none of which can be accounted for outside of the God of Christianity. I submit that the only way one can know anything to be true is by or through revelation from God. But Paul and I both claim to know things. A few days ago Paul, on Pauls blog he affirmed that very thing when he said and I quote “The one area of my worldview that seemed to be a problem is much less so, i now know how much I don’t know, which is rather comforting in a strange way”. Well Paul admits that he doesn’t know much he admits that he knows some things but how can Paul know anything since it is my claim that God is a necessary foundation for knowledge.

Bare assertion == truth! I say God is necessary for knowledge, ergo if anyone claims to know anything, God must exist!

It only gets worse from there, but Paul is more than up to the task. Good read.

How much more ground will Sye cede before he abandons presuppositional apologetics? My guess: all of it. He will cede every inch of ground before he abandons the notion that by presuming he’s ceded no ground, he automatically wins any argument.

Paul Baird vs Sye Tenbruggencate Round 3

Symphony of Science: The Case for Mars

Jason Thibeault, , , 5 Comments

Every one of these Symphony of Science songs makes my heart sing. I have to admit sometimes autotune makes my ear twitch, but this series has been incredibly good in that respect. Either they’ve got their autotune shit together so it doesn’t make me flinch, or the content is simply awesome enough to divert my attention from the autotuning.

I agree that we should be reaching for Mars in ten years rather than fifty, but unfortunately, one country has a virtual monopoly on space exploration at the moment, and they’re more interested in maintaining an occupation in two countries and engaging in a third war simultaneously at the moment. Real shame, that. Not to mention the domestic social change that could be effected, think of all the science that could be done with those hundreds of billions of dollars spent on pushing the brown people into the dirt!

Update: Apparently this is from June 3, 2010, not 2011. Not fresh. Not new. It was new to me, but evidently not to hipper, more with-it bloggers like The Black Widower who has significantly more to say than I do.

Symphony of Science: The Case for Mars

Lone skeptic successfully ‘intends’ guilty verdict for James Arthur Ray

Jason Thibeault,

By now if you’ve been following the case as I have you must know that James Arthur Ray, a popular proponent of the Law of Attraction, has been found guilty of three counts of negligent homicide and sentenced presumably to six years of prison, though the actual sentence is still pending.

For those of you not in the know, James Arthur Ray is a bestselling author, and was a guest speaker in the DVD production of The Secret. He has for a very long time advocated the idea that every event that happens in your life, you manifest through your thoughts via ‘intention’, and that it is possible to turn your life around simply by (as with The Secret) changing your mental habits. Now, there are a number of psychological traps that people can get caught into, where one self-sabotages every effort, and there are a number of self-help books that attempt to provide you with methods of overturning those traps, each with varying levels of scientific backing. But this isn’t one of those — what Ray, The Secret, and the Law of Attraction propose is far, far deeper than any of that.

In these philosophical frameworks, it works like this. If you win the lottery, you’ve been thinking good things — you’ve been ‘intending’ correctly. If you get cancer, you’ve been thinking bad things. The vicissitudes of your fortunes become self-directed, so bad fortune is resultant of your own sin. Rather than accepting that some bad things happen through no fault of your own, and that most good things actually take work to achieve, you cast yourself adrift to be carried on life’s waves and wherever it ends up taking you, you are wholly responsible by virtue of your mental discipline. If the exercise doesn’t work, and you don’t succeed, why, it’s not the fault of the guy that sold you the book or DVD that explained how to do it! It’s obvious that if you fail, you simply Weren’t Doing It Right(tm).

Oh, and something-something-quantum-physics. Because you just can’t have a modern new-age bullshit sundae without a quantum cherry on top! Since particles do weird things at the quantum level, you can throw the word “quantum” into any nonsense and suddenly people think it’s a proven scientific fact because basically nobody actually understands quantum physics. It makes a lovely gap to shoehorn any old bullshit into.

It’s karma writ large, and a lot of people are making a lot of money by peddling this nonsense as though it’s some kind of deeply held secret that only the successful people of this world knew about. Granted, the people on top of this particular grift have made a good amount of money simply by selling this hogwash, and people from all walks of life were buying it, from down-on-their-luck middle-aged mothers to ambitious salesmen who just can’t seem to overcome intense intra-office competition. James Arthur Ray ran a retreat to cater to these customers looking to quantum-manipulate their fortunes, though in reality he was offering nothing more than a day in a sweat lodge, out of which people would emerge (at least in theory) psychologically pumped up for having overcome such a trial of endurance. 56 people paid $9695 apiece to attend his October 8, 2009 “Spiritual Warriors” ceremony, which was designed to mimic (albeit poorly) the Native American sweat lodge tradition.

Through the ceremony, Ray encouraged participants to stay to symbolically overcome the struggles in their real lives. He said, “You will have to get to a point to where you surrender and it’s O.K. to die.” When the participants started vomiting, shaking, or experiencing delusions, Ray ignored them. When a number of them collapsed, Ray fled. Eighteen were hospitalized for burns, respiration problems, kidney failure and other issues associated with heat. Three died.

Without question, Ray was guilty of negligent homicide. I’d contend that with the complete nonsense he was peddling, the celebrity he had attained by peddling that nonsense, and lack of controls that he could easily have put into place to prevent injury or death but failed to implement, he is guilty of a whole lot more than simple negligent homicide, though the jury found him not guilty of manslaughter.

Throughout the trial, the denizens of his Law of Attraction forums had been “intending” that he be found not guilty. Not because he wasn’t actually guilty, mind you, but because of his celebrity status and his appealing message — that one can shape reality as easily as one can in the dreamscape of the movie Inception. If the jury had found him not guilty, we’d have a new and powerful group of nonsense-peddlers to contend with; as far as I’m concerned, we have too many of them as it stands without the meteoric rise of one of the benchwarmer factions, so I’m glad for a number of reasons that justice was served with regard to Ray. I hope they throw the book at him, though I suspect he’ll probably get the minimum sentence and the forum goobers (and Ray himself once he goes on his post-jail tour) will probably talk about how big a win the whole episode has been for them.

Meanwhile, however, a few days before the verdict came down, Twitter user @swskeptic (Rose Garcia) posted a Twitwall entry that would prove prophetic in hindsight. The full details of the ‘intention’ have not yet come to pass, but she’s at least successfully overturned the ‘intentions’ of Ray’s followers:

Until the verdict comes in, I’m going to be focusing on manifesting for James Arthur Ray the opportunity to learn from another very charismatic leader who also has strong opinions about how people should live their lives. If there’s any justice in this country then by next week, James Arthur Ray should be playing full on with Arizona’s own sheriff Joe Arpaio. I think it’s fitting that a man who prescribed extreme experiences for other people should have an extreme incarceration experience himself. Therefore, I’m sending my intention out to the universe that James Ray will be given the opportunity to experience a transformation in the Arizona desert this summer with the harmonic justice of sheriff Joe. After listening to James Ray’s ‘teachings’ for 3 ½ months, I know he wouldn’t want me to send out some weanie intention to some wussy white collar prison. No. I think James Ray has attracted an incarceration as extreme as his workshops, and Sheriff Joe is the just the extreme kind of man for the job. Sherrif Joe’s ideas on justice are about as skewed and James Ray’s ideas on spirituality, so these two should attract each other. Instead of dealing out justice to the poor and the marginalized people of Arizona, my intention is that sheriff Joe use his sadistic skills to provide James Ray with a truly intense incarceration experience. And that’s at the bargain basement price of $2.00 / day.

The forecast for today in Maricopa County is 114 degrees, so this is the perfect time for a man who believed that intense heat was a path to a spiritual break-through can break through Sherriff Joe’s chain gang.

If Ray’s incarceration includes working on the chain gang, then a single skeptic will have out-intended the whole crew of Ray’s followers who actually believe this shit is real. I had joked about this privately a few days ago, wondering when the first skeptic would claim responsibility for having wished Ray into prison, but had no idea someone would actually do it. Nor that they’d have done it in advance of the verdict.

Can we call this a win for skepticism, or not, though? Because I’m sure many of Ray’s well-‘intentioned’ followers, each of whom believing in the concept truly and without reservation, would simply wave this failure away as either themselves not doing it right, or of the skeptic being some kind of closet agent for a rival self-help guru and simply being better at manifesting her reality than they are. Or worse, that this skeptic is somehow endowed with awesome reality-shaping powers, and if only she would just drop her skepticism and harness these powers for the betterment of mankind…!

Fighting with people who believe so whole-heartedly in nonsense is a full-time occupation. Seriously, could you imagine a whole room full of people who think they’re the guy from Dark City? There’d be nary a flying dagger to be seen, at the very least.

Lone skeptic successfully ‘intends’ guilty verdict for James Arthur Ray