In spite of that well-intentioned stupidity, Jen really made an excellent point with this entry. I won't even bother summarizing it, just read it.
Exposed scientific dishonesty illustrates why science is so great
That title may sound counter intuitive, but give me a chance to explain.
You may have heard about the bit of academic scandal that's been happening at Harvard recently. Marc Hauser is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, and Biological Anthropology. He was the leading researcher on the evolution of morality and moral behavior in primates and humans and an author of a number of books, including Moral Minds and (in progress) Evilicious: Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.
In a somewhat amusingly ironic twist, he was found guilty of scientific misconduct, including fabrication of data that will result in several papers being retracted.
This is a very serious situation, especially since Marc Hauser was such a big name in his field. His career is effectively over, and now reseachers in the field have to rethink everything they've learned from him (and cited from him). It's even more serious for his students, whose futures are uncertain when their graduate advisor has such a black mark on his record. It's upsetting to the field of science as a whole, which does rely on a certain level of trust for practical reasons. We peer review to the best of our abilities, but you still have to hope everyone else is being honest like you since it can take time to expose problems.
It's also a little jarring to me personally. Not only will I have to reexamine what I read in one of his books that I greatly enjoyed, but I almost went to graduate school in one of the departments he teaches in. Academic scandals aren't the best way to start your graduate career.
But we have to remember this is what makes science so great. Science is not dogmatic. It's based on peer review and constant criticism. Scientists are still human and make errors, sometimes purposefully and sometimes not, so it's important to have these checks in place. Hauser was a giant in his field, but even he was not immune to scrutiny. It was his own graduate students who brought these problems to our attention at great personal risk.
Some people are using this as a chance to pooh-pooh the whole field of evolutionary psychology. I'm sure it's only a matter of time for creationists like Ken Ham to squeal with glee and twist the facts for their own "Never trust science!!!" agenda. But I really don't think this is quite so tragic. Isn't it good to know that we still expose bad science, even when we may have political reasons to not? Would we rather have evolutionary psychology trucking on without criticism, or get the fraudulent data out in the open? I'd be more concerned with the field if it was just being swept under the table. While it's sad such dishonesty occured, I'm happy to know that we can still sniff it out, correct it, and punish those who perpetuate it.
Maybe I'm being overly optimistic (I know, unusual for me). But I think it's good to use this as an example of why science is the best way of exploring the world around us: Because when our findings are wrong, we'll admit it.
Monday, August 30, 2010
New Left Media has hit another one out of the park. They went to Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor Rally on saturday.
I've mentioned this before in this blog. An appeal to authority argument is a logical fallacy -- basically, it's the argument that whatever you say has got to be right, because someone more important than you said it. Conservatives have been beating the hell out of this fallacy ever since Obama came into office. They're appealing to "the founders." They've been claiming that they are on the side of founders of the United States. I'll get to how wrong they are on this in a little bit, but I wanted to mention this first. I guess raping the only decent generation in the entire history of the country wasn't enough for them, because now they've claimed Martin Luther King Jr. as their own as well.
Glenn Beck has said that Martin Luther King's dream has been "distorted." He's also said, "Damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment! We will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place!" Yesterday, Beck held a "Restoring Honor" rally on the exact spot King delivered his famous speech, 47 years to the day in which it was given. I shit bricks.
MLK is famous for other things besides "I have a dream." He demanded that "President Lyndon Johnson and Congress help the poor get jobs, health care and decent homes.” He said "...we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars — and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power." However, in Beck's "An Inconvenient Book," he says that the poor cannot be helped because they are "lazy." He also thinks President Obama "really is a Marxist. He believes in the redistribution of wealth."
Martin Luther King was famous for being a very religious man. He was a reverend. It was his faith that motivated him to do what he did. He called himself an "advocator of the social gospel." He said that his movement's ultimate goal was "an age of social justice." Glenn Beck, on the other hand, has attacked churches that preach social justice. In fact, if you hear the words "social justice" at your church, you should "run, and don’t listen to anyone who is telling you differently." Because that's "Marxist." He really said this. But that's not the worst of it. He literally said that the civil rights demonstrators were in fact not "crying for social justice."
The biggest thing that separated King from more militant civil rights leaders like Malcolm X was that MLK believed that someone who opposed his views should be engaged with in respectful dialogue. In a 1957 sermon titled "Loving Your Enemies," King said that a man must “discover the element of good in his enemy, and everytime you begin to hate that person and think of hating that person, realize that there is some good there and look at those good points which will over-balance the bad points.” When civil rights demonstrators were attacked by police and their dogs, King asked them not to fight back. Glenn Beck unapologetically ridicules his enemies. He has literally made fun of Barack Obama's 11-year-old daughter. Beck's asked if Barack Obama is the antichrist. He's compared Obama to Adolf Hitler. When Glenn Beck interviewed America's first elected Muslim congressman, he told him to "prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."
Glenn Beck is an absolutely terrible human being. He is either unable or unwilling to connect with the feelings of others. Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest American of the twentieth century. What Beck is doing is beyond insulting. It's sad. As Media Matters so eloquently put it, Martin Luther King would've been on Beck's chalkboard.
But wait a second. Why is Glenn Beck vying for peaceful resistance when the founders promoted violent revolution? Beck, you have the wrong civil rights leader. You're looking for Malcolm X. Hey I have an idea! Let's take a break from the blog real quick to match the quote with the founder who said it!*
*NOTE: One of these people was not actually a founding father of the United States.
1. "Give me liberty, or give me death!" 2. "If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary."
A. Malcolm X B. Patrick Henry
Little known fact: In his Virginia Stamp Act Resolutions, Patrick Henry wrote "I will not rest until streets run red with the blood of the white man."
Civil rights heroes
Here's an angry old person. Glenn Beck's had this guy on his show. He's a Thomas Paine "impersonator," but instead of spouting off the opinions of Thomas Paine, he spouts off neoconservative bullshit about taxation and brown people that would've made the real Thomas Paine shit his kidney.
Bonus points if you made it past a minute.
Let's see, in The Rights of Man, Paine wrote, "Pay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under fourteen years of age."
In the same pamphlet, "It is painful to see old age working itself to death, in what are called civilised countries, for daily bread... pay to every such person of the age of fifty years ... the sum of six pounds per annum out of the surplus taxes, and ten pounds per annum during life after the age of sixty... This support, as already remarked, is not of the nature of a charity but of a right."
My goodness, did Glenn Beck know that he supports a Marxist?
In Agrarian Justice, Paine wrote that we should "Create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property."
Okay wait a second, that really is starting to sound like Marxism now oh fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
But at least we're still a Christian nation, ri-
---
"Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange believe that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies."
"Every phrase and cirsumstance are marked with the barbarous hand of superstitious torture, and forced into meanings it was impossible they could have. The head of every chapter, and the top of every page, are blazoned with the names of Christ and the Church, that the unwary reader might suck in the error before he began to read."
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church."
"The adulterous connection between church and state..."
"There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice."
"The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. The Word of God exists in something else."
"What is it the Bible teaches us? - raping, cruelty, and murder. What is it the New Testament teaches us? - to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith."
(CNN) -- If you're the parent of a Christian teenager, Kenda Creasy Dean has this warning:
Your child is following a "mutant" form of Christianity, and you may be responsible.
Dean says more American teenagers are embracing what she calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." Translation: It's a watered-down faith that portrays God as a "divine therapist" whose chief goal is to boost people's self-esteem.
Dean is a minister, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of "Almost Christian," a new book that argues that many parents and pastors are unwittingly passing on this self-serving strain of Christianity.
She says this "imposter'' faith is one reason teenagers abandon churches.
[...]
Dean drew her conclusions from what she calls one of the most depressing summers of her life. She interviewed teens about their faith after helping conduct research for a controversial study called the National Study of Youth and Religion.
The study, which included in-depth interviews with at least 3,300 American teenagers between 13 and 17, found that most American teens who called themselves Christian were indifferent and inarticulate about their faith.
The study included Christians of all stripes -- from Catholics to Protestants of both conservative and liberal denominations. Though three out of four American teenagers claim to be Christian, fewer than half practice their faith, only half deem it important, and most can't talk coherently about their beliefs, the study found.
Many teenagers thought that God simply wanted them to feel good and do good -- what the study's researchers called "moralistic therapeutic deism."
[...]
"There are countless studies that show that religious teenagers do better in school, have better relationships with their parents and engage in less high-risk behavior," she says. [Such as?] "They do a lot of things that parents pray for."
Dean, a United Methodist Church minister who says parents are the most important influence on their children's faith, places the ultimate blame for teens' religious apathy on adults.
Some adults don't expect much from youth pastors. They simply want them to keep their children off drugs and away from premarital sex.
Others practice a "gospel of niceness," where faith is simply doing good and not ruffling feathers. The Christian call to take risks, witness and sacrifice for others is muted, she says.
"If teenagers lack an articulate faith, it may be because the faith we show them is too spineless to merit much in the way of conversation," wrote Dean, a professor of youth and church culture at Princeton Theological Seminary.
This minister actually has a point. Interpreting the Bible for yourself is phenomenon restricted to modern times. Historically, you'd just be burned at the stake. I think if more teenage liberal Christians would actually read the Bible themselves, we'd be seeing a good number of them making the big push into deism, agnosticism, or atheism. When I was losing my Christianity back in high school, I actually made the choice to start reading the Bible for myself. It was only then when I realized how completely absurd it was. Penn Jillette has a great quote:
"[My minister] sincerely wanted us to do some inquiry into theological questions and I took it very seriously. I may have been the only in the youth group that did take it seriously and I read the Bible cover-to-cover and I think that anyone who is thinking about maybe being an atheist... if you read the Bible or the Koran or the Torah cover-to-cover I believe you will emerge from that as an atheist. I mean, you can read "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, you can read "God Is Not Great" by Hitchens... but the Bible itself, will turn you atheist faster than anything."
I'm glad teenagers are acting like this. It shows that religion to them is nothing but a social construct they feel obligated to be a part of. They see all of their non-Christian friends leading wonderful and productive lives just like everyone else, and they're realizing that Christian churches don't have a monopoly on happiness.
Figured this would be a good followup to the entry a few days ago. Think of this like a countdown, they keep getting better the more you scroll down. I'm pretty sure most of these have been posted in this blog at some point.
#5 Ricky Gervais: Jesus Was My Invisible Babysitter
#4 Amateur Made Atheism Commercial
#3 Instruction Manual For Life
#2 Carl Sagan: A Universe Not Made For Us
#1 The Ultimate Rube Goldberg Machine This video doesn't celebrate atheism, it celebrates science and existence. But I don't care, because I'm putting it here anyway.
When people first find out that I'm an atheist or an agnostic, or whatever the hell I'm calling myself at the moment, one topic that I really hope doesn't come up is morality. I've been asked how an atheist can be a moral person. I know for a fact that I try to be a good person, and being asked how it's even possible is insulting. I would argue that not only does one not need religion to be a good person, but being religious is likely to make you into an evil one.
Imagine this: A young woman was violently raped by her uncle when she was eleven years old. It went on for about a year, and her uncle scared her into silence by telling her that he would murder her entire family, but keep her alive so she would have to live with the thought that it was all her fault. The woman is now in college, and her uncle is going to be released from prison very soon. Her uncle claims to have found Christ while in prison, and would like to see his niece again to apologize for what he did. The woman has been suffering from night terrors throughout the time he's been locked away, and seeing her uncle again would be the worst thing that she could possibly imagine. Her childhood was destroyed. She will never forget what he did to her. She will never forgive him, and she will not see him. Her parents are religious nuts, and they want their daughter to forgive him. They believe that what she is doing is no different than turning her back on God.
This is not a hypothetical thought experiment. This happened. The woman poured her heart out to Reddit in three parts, here, here, and here. She's also a closet atheist and a closet lesbian. The unbelievable ignorance and thoughtlessness with which her parents are treating this situation is blood curdling.
[My mom] said "When you are ready to return to the lord you will be welcomed back with open arms but until then your dad and I have decided that we cannot allow you in this house so long as you hold sin in your heart." My dad nodded but said nothing and made himself scarce.
I got more angry right then than I have in a long time. I screamed at her that she cared more about her "imaginary friend in the sky" than she did about her own daughter, that she loved her child raping brother more than her own daughter, and that there was only one good person in the room and that was me.
Her face got white when I said the "imaginary friend" thing but when I finished my tirade she got angry and this is when I found out the real reason she thinks I should forgive my uncle. Paraphrased but essentially she said "You are such a drama queen and you always have been! You have spent the last eight years so embarrassed and ashamed of what you did that you have turned your own flesh and blood into a devil in your mind! I thought all that therapy we wasted our money on finally convinced you that you were just a curious child but you just can't accept any responsibility for anything, can you?!!! You can't forgive Steve because you can't forgive yourself!"
It all made sense right then. My mom didn't believe my uncle was completely at fault for what he did to me. Over the years her mind has revised the truth in a way that would allow her to accept her brother wasn't a complete villain. In her mind now I was a "curious little girl" who had willingly participated and the only reason I was mad at my uncle after all these years is because I'm embarrassed by what I "did".
I said to her "Mom, he raped me."
She rolled her eyes when I said that and it was enough to make me feel numb and she said "Yes technically he raped you and what he did was wrong because you are his niece and you were too young for that sort of behavior but if it really was all his fault why wouldn't you testify in court? I'll tell you why, because you didn't want to have to admit you played a role in it to."
I did have the chance to get my uncle locked up for life way back then but I would have had to go through a trail and I would have had to testify. At the time my mom was more than supportive of my choice not to do this because it was just too traumatizing. I am certain that back then she did not in any way see this as any sort of admission of guilt on my part. Back then she really did believe everything I had told her and she hated my uncle and cursed him as the devil. Over the years she has rationalized things so that now it wasn't entirely his fault.
That was the final straw when she said that. Surprisingly calm I said "Mom he raped me. He forced me, he hurt me repeatedly. He scared me and he terrified me and for you to think I'm just 'embarrassed' shows me you are more crazy than I ever thought. Good bye."
She followed me to the front door as I stormed off like she was going to say something but she never did. Before closing the door behind me I looked at her one last time and couldn't help from being a little vicious so I said "By the way I'm an atheist. Also, 'Jane' isn't just my friend, she's my lover." That made her do her melodramatic fall to the knees and start praying thing she's famous for.
I'm going to make an assumption. I would guess that her mother goes to church often. I'll also guess that she reads the Bible. She seems to be very religious. And yet, if religion is supposed to make you a good person, and if she's very religious, then why is she so fucking evil? She believes her child-raping brother to be a victim, and her eleven-year-old daughter seduced him. There are no words to describe this evil, and the biggest tragedy in all this is that there is no actual hell for these parents to go to.
We've assumed that the mother reads the Bible a lot. She goes to church a lot. We can't say that she doesn't know what the Bible would say for a situation like this, because I'm sure if any one of us would get into a debate with her, her knowledge of scripture would likely be unmatched. And we can't even say she's wrong in terms of scripture. The Bible says that any sin can be forgiven. It says that if anyone does any wrongdoing towards you, you should turn the other cheek. But this is simply wrong. Rape victims should not turn to the other cheek to their attackers (unless they enjoy the thought of even more people telling them it was their fault). Should we have turned the other cheek when terrorists slaughtered 3,000 people on 9/11? It would've made no difference if the Jews had turned the other cheek to the Nazis, because they'd have been slaughtered anyway. It doesn't fucking matter to psychopaths. They're not rational. People like terrorists and Nazis and rapists are completely and irrevocably insane. There is no turning the other cheek towards these people, they need to be either killed or imprisoned because that's the only way to stop them from doing what they do.
I'm sure that most Christians would find the behavior of these parents to be absolutely revolting. However, a good case can be argued that the parents are not wrong in terms of scripture. So this brings me to my main point: the fact that religious moderates even exist proves that morality does not come from the Bible.
It's very clear that the Bible endorses slavery. That cannot be debated. The only time the Bible ever condemns slavery outright is when God's "chosen people" are the victims of it. It gives very specific instructions on how slaves should be treated, how they should be obtained, and when you can have sex with them. When slavery was legal in the United States, slaveowners would use the Bible to defend their actions. And they'd be right.
If we truly got our morality from the Bible, then there's nothing wrong the with enslavement of human beings. There's nothing wrong with stoning disobedient children to death. There's nothing wrong with sentencing homosexuals to death. Mahatma Gandhi is currently enjoying eternal torment. It is a good thing that Christians have taken it upon themselves to disregard these passages today. It is a good thing that Christians today block out all the evil things the Bible has to say, and only focus on the good things. But doing this means that the Bible is not the ultimate source of morality. Every human being decides what is and what is not moral for himself. And civilization has not imploded.
I've heard Christians say that atheism has been responsible for some of the worst crimes of the 20th century. Hitler and Stalin and Mao were all atheists, and that's why atheists are immoral. First of all, Hitler was not an atheist. He referenced God many times in his speeches. The Nazi Party was extraordinarily close to the Papacy. But that's irrelevant, because the important thing to remember is that Hitler did not commit his crimes because he was a Christian. There were countless other political factors in play, and his religion really had nothing to do with it. It's the same for Stalin and Mao. They committed atrocities, but it was not because of their atheism. There were way too many variables going on to blame what they did on any single thing. Atheism has no doctrine except for skepticism. If anything, the biggest problem in these societies is that they behaved too much like a religion. There wasn't enough skepticism going on, and people paid unrelenting loyalty to their leaders and accepted whatever they said as gospel, without ever questioning a thing.
And if we want to lower ourselves a numbers game, then why do proponents of this argument only limit themselves to the atrocities "of the 20th century"? Would they like to pretend that the Inquisition never happened? Or the cultural genocide of the American peoples, thought by the Spanish to be the spawn of Satan? And the thousands upon thousands of innocent people burned at the stake for witchcraft? And the rampant sexual abuse of children that has been going on in the church throughout its entire existence? I could write an entire entry on just the atrocities Christians have committed specifically in the name of Christianity, and it still wouldn't be enough.
From The End of Faith by Sam Harris:
Without warning you are seized and brought before a judge. Did you create a thunderstorm and destroy a village? Did you kill your neighbor with the evil eye? Do you doubt that Christ is bodily present in the Eucharist? You will soon learn that questions of this sort admit of no exculpatory reply.
You are not told the names of your accusers. But their identities are of little account, for even if, at this late hour, they were to recant their charges against you, they would merely be punished as false witnesses, while their original accusations would retain their full weight as evidence of your guilt. The machinery of justice has been so well oiled by faith that it can no longer be influenced.
But you have a choice, of sorts: you can concede your guilt and name your accomplices. Yes, you must have had accomplices. No confession will be accepted unless other men and women can be implicated in your crimes. Perhaps you and three acquaintances of your choosing did change into hares and consort with the devil himself. The sight of iron boots designed to crush you feet seems to refresh your memory. Yes, Friedrich, Arthur, and Otto are sorcerers too. Their wives? Witches all.
[...]
Or you can maintain your innocence, which is almost certainly truth (after all, it is the rare person who can create a thunderstorm). In response, your jailers will be happy to lead you to the furthest reaches of human suffering, before burning you at the stake. You may be imprisoned in total darkness for months or years at a time, repeatedly beaten and starved, or stretched upon the rack. Thumbscrews may be applied, or toe screws, or a pear-shaped vise may be inserted into your mouth, vagina, or anus, and forced open until your misery admits of no possible increase. You may be hoisted to the ceiling on a stappado (with your arms bound behind your back and attached to a pulley,and weights tied to your feet), dislocating your shoulders. To this torment squassation might be added, which, being often sufficient to cause your death, may yet spare you the agony of the stake. If you are unlucky enough to be in Spain, where judicial torture has achieved a transcendent level of cruelty, you may be placed in the "Spanish chair": a throne of iron, complete with iron stocks to secure your neck and limbs. In the interest of saving your soul, a coal brazier will be placed beneath your bare feet, slowly roasting them. Because the stain of heresy runs deep, your flesh will be continually larded with fat to keep it from burning too quickly. Or you may be bound to a bench, with a cauldron filled with mice placed upside-down upon your bare abdomen. With the requisite application of heat to the iron, the mice will begin to burrow into your belly in search of an exit.
Should you, while in extremis, admit to your torturers that you are indeed a heretic, a sorcerer, or a witch, you will be made to confirm you story before a judge--and and attempt to recant, to claim that your confession has been coerced through torture, will deliver you either to your tormentors once again or directly to the stake. If, once condemned, you repent of your sins, these compassionate and learned men--whose concern for the fate of your eternal soul really knows no bounds--will do you kindess of strangling you before lighting your pyre.
And so we're left with the one question that's at the heart of all this: where does morality come from? It's certainly not the Bible, because a literal reading of the Old Testament requires that heretics be put to death, and I'm sure the Christians of the Middle Ages would've had a very special place for me on their racks if they could read this.
I don't know for certain where morality comes from. Nobody knows for certain, and anyone who claims to is a liar. Many Christians often say that if we did not have the Bible to guide us, then there would be rampant anarchy. No one is to say that murder or rape should be wrong, so those things would be going on willy nilly. The fact that I am neither a murderer nor a rapist should be enough to convince them that this is wrong. Let me turn the question around: are they not committing murder or rape for the single reason that the Bible says it's wrong? Do they have urges to take part in these things, with only their fear of eternal punishment holding them back? That didn't stop the Inquisition. BOOM.
Neurologists are beginning to have an idea of where morality comes from: being moral simply makes us feel good. Acting good towards other people releases dopamine into your brain -- the very same chemical released during sex or drug use. We may have evolved this tendency because others typically treat us in the same way we treat them. If we look out for others, others will look out for us, and our chance of survivability increases. We are unselfish for selfish reasons.
This explanation is shaky, and very well may be wrong. But it's something that, at least for the time being, makes sense.
A debate within the atheist/skeptic community that has been silently brewing for a long time now has finally been brought right out into the open. Every year, the largest gathering of skeptics and critical thinkers in the world go to Vegas to what they call The Amazing Meeting, named after James Randi's stage name, The Amazing Randi. This year, the keynote speech was given by Phil Plait, the founder of BadAstronomy.com.
Plait's message to his fellow skeptics was this: stop being dicks. He's taken note of how terribly the skeptic community can treat other people, often throwing insults or scoring cheap points instead of trying to sway them. The general public is going through enough without us insulting them: we are telling them that their magical world is a sham, that psychic powers and their new age bullshit is not real, that there is no afterlife, that the Judeo-Christian God does not exist; and these are things that people would really rather not hear. In addition, society at large has painted anybody who's skeptical of anything at all as spiteful or emotionally dead, and so people usually dismiss what we have to say before we even say it. People have a hard time understanding exactly what skepticism is, and simply view it as cynicism rather than a passion for truth. In Plait's own words, skepticism is a hard sell.
Plait believes we need to look at our ultimate goal -- getting the world to think reasonably -- and examine the best ways of accomplishing it. Instead of calmly debunking every claim one by one, over and over again, we should instead be encouraging people to think critically for themselves, so we can stop treating them like their hands need to be held. That old saying about teaching a man to fish is the perfect metaphor for this. If people know how to think -- by not accepting things outright before demanding a good reason to -- our job will already be done because reason will come to them naturally. They will already have all the tools in their head.
It was a really brilliant speech, and the full half hour is right here if you have the time to spare.
The skeptic community is divided. Calling it a "community" is a bit generous, because when we're so few, internet blogs and youtube videos are the only things we have going for us. And there are actually a lot of big blogs discussing this, as Plait illustrated himself in his... blog. The voices against this are either motivated by mental masturbation, or simply don't understand what Plait was trying to say, so I won't comment on those morons any further.
Plait made another entry describing the positive reaction he got, and this passage alone is why we need to be doing this.
As we left the auditorium and went out into the hall, someone beckoned to me. I went over, and they told me that an old friend wanted very much to talk to me. Down the corridor I saw Kitty, indeed an old friend and someone very active in the skeptical community in general and the JREF community specifically. As I approached her, to my distress, I saw she had been crying. Concerned, I rapidly went to her, and over the next few minutes, between sobs, she told me how much my talk meant to her. She is religious, in a rather generic way (you could call her a deist, someone who believes in a non-specific god) and over the years has received quite a bit of ostracism from the community. This, despite her long and strong support for speaking up against psychics, ghost hunters, UFO believers, alt-meddlers, and the rest.
She was crying because what I said was something she had longed to hear from someone, anyone, in the skeptic community for years: that we need to be less antagonistic, and more inclusive. When we exclude someone for one belief they may have, we are losing them despite whatever other skeptical drive they might possess. And that means we all lose.
She was not alone, either. Another young woman, one I had never met before, similarly approached me and told me much the same story. She was crying as well. Eventually I heard from others who told me there were several people in the audience who were crying because they had felt so alone. Many were feeling so isolated from the skeptical community — and had experienced so many encounters with other skeptics who were rude, boorish, insulting, and dismissive — that they were seriously considering leaving the movement altogether.
I also heard from hundreds — hundreds — of people thanking me for what I said. They had seen others be jerks, or had been jerks themselves, and were contrite about it.
The support I have received has been very encouraging. The drop in the level of demeanor I had been seeing was disheartening to say the least. I’m very glad to know that so many people took this topic to heart.
And, at the very least, it has helped spark a conversation that, in my opinion, is long overdue in the skeptic community. We need to be skeptical of ourselves as much as we are of any claims made by others, and we should be reminded of that every now and again.
I try to send this video to every person I know who's confused about what skeptics do, or why we think the way we do. To this day I still don't think anyone I've sent it to has bothered watching it past a couple minutes.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
The Cronkite Faith and Freedom Award is given to journalists "who courageously promote democratic values, defend religious freedom and reinvigorate informed civic participation." This year, it's being given to Rachel Maddow.
No one is more deserving of this award than she is. Except Fareed Zakaria. Whenever I see right wing pundits talk about Maddow, they always smear her as some far leftist loon, when there's actually nothing partisan about her. She gives the facts, and then she gives her opinion, backed up by those very facts. And she just has fun with it. She doesn't treat the sky as if it's falling like Olbermann or Hannity or Beck. She's basically Jon Stewart, but with no jokes. I wish she wasn't gay, because I am in love with this woman.
If this blog doesn't make it obvious enough, I'm extremely frightened by the way the political winds in this country are blowing. We have a fast paced 24 hour news cycle which sensationalizes the dumbest little things, while failing to report the events that are actually important (or at least in a way in which the general viewer can understand). What we get is a nation is idiots. And we get the worst kind of idiot: the idiot who thinks he's informed. The result is a bunch of mobs demanding mob rule. Debating facts with them is meaningless; they have numbers, and argumentum ad populum is of course never wrong.
Currently, the mob is angry over a Muslim community center being built two blocks away from the World Trade Center site. In the end, it really doesn't matter what anybody's opinion is over this. The First Amendment very clearly prohibits the government from stepping in and stopping this from happening. This is not up for a vote. If you truly believe that this should not happen, then you think it's okay to override the Bill of Rights, and you are quite literally an enemy of the United States. If we're allowed to do this, then which religion will be next? Where will it end? It's so mind-numbingly frustrating to me that the very people who claim to love the country so very much are the ones who are demanding that we begin dismantling it. They're traitors and they don't even know it.
Which is exactly why Olbermann's Special Comment monday night was so refreshing to me. In a sea of ignorance and hate, this is like a breath of fresh air. It's just too bad that the rest of the country is too fucking dumb to listen.
So apparently Republicans manufactured another fake controversy during my week without news. Not only are they trying to get the 14th Amendment repealed (as an ultimate sign of love towards their precious Constitution), now they're making up stories about "terror babies" to scare the shit out of their supporters into following along. Terror babies. I did not make up that phrase. Terrorists are sending pregnant women into America so that when the babies grow up, they'll have U.S. citizenship and attack America as UNITED STATES CITIZENS! Because as everyone knows, if a terrorist isn't a citizen of the country he's attacking, his superpowers disappear!
I'm leaving for Michigan tomorrow and won't be back for a week, so here's the weekly youtube. This is just as true today as it was twenty-six years ago. I can't believe how hard Reagan fucked this country.
"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." -Seven Weinberg
I'm reading a book right now called The End of Faith where Sam Harris makes an argument against religious moderates. He says that even though the moderates mean well, their constant repeating of "not all of [religion] is violent" prevents us from having a dialogue about the central cause of all religious terrorism: religion.
While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance--and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The texts themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to God's law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question--i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us--religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.
I think this is the biggest problem we have with the gay marriage issue. There are even religious moderates, all over the place, who are otherwise perfectly moral and sane, who do not believe gays should be allowed to marry. Many religious people who support same sex marriage, or at least the hollow equivalent of civil unions, at the very least sympathize with where the gay marriage opponents are coming from; and this really does prevent us from criticizing anti-gay bigots to the fullest extent. There is no excuse to opposing gay marriage. That worldview really shouldn't be tolerated. An opinion's worth should be weighed with how much logical validity it contains, and in logical terms, the ideas of these people make absolutely no sense. There is no valid argument against same sex marriage. If a bad idea makes no sense, then it should be thrown out and laughed at like the disgrace it is, not blasted on the airwaves as if it holds just as much weight as logical facts. If every opinion was equal, we would be teaching creationism and flat earth theory in public schools. America's public discourse is an embarrassment.
Here's what I mean: these are the opinions of people who oppose same sex marriage. This is their reaction to Prop 8 getting overturned. I can't even wrap my head around this. I can't possibly comprehend how any person could ever believe this shit.
May the Lord have mercy on us. He spared Sodom & Gomorrah (edited to add: for awhile), so perhaps He will spare California. I almost wouldn't mind if He didn't.
This is a camel's nose in the tent type situation. When the disintegration of the family is complete, except for those few peculiar die-hard religious nuts, at least many of us can look back and say that we fought to preserve the family. We know that in this dispensation there won't be another absolute apostasy. I would have hated to have been a prophet at the end of a previous dispensation when the entire world rejected your message and turned from God. The tares will separate from the wheat all on their own. Just make sure you stay wheat.
It's also extremely problematic that Judge Walker is a practicing homosexual himself. He should have recused himself from this case, because his judgment is clearly compromised by his own sexual proclivity. The fundamental issue here is whether homosexual conduct, with all its physical and psychological risks [lol], should be promoted and endorsed by society. That's why the people and elected officials accountable to the people should be setting marriage policy, not a black-robed tyrant whose own lifestyle choices make it impossible to believe he could be impartial. His situation is no different than a judge who owns a porn studio being asked to rule on an anti-pornography statute. He'd have to recuse himself on conflict of interest grounds, and Judge Walker should have done that.
Yes, because only straight people should be allowed to decide the fates of gay people. Gay people can't be judges because they're not like us normies.
This is a travesty of justice. The majority of Californians -- and two-thirds of black voters in California -- have just had their core civil right to vote for marriage stripped from them by an openly gay federal judge who has misread history and the Constitution to impose his San Francisco views on the American people. The implicit comparison Judge Walker made between racism and marriage is particularly offensive to me and to all of us who remember the reality of Jim Crow.
Luke Otterstad, 24, of Sacramento, outside the courthouse with his fiance, Nadia Shayka, 22, wearing T-shirts that read "bride" and "groom": "I'm very upset. I feel like I don't live in America."
An America that recognizes equal rights for all of its citizens is not an America I want to live in.
The debate over gay marriage really pisses me off. It shouldn't even be a debate anymore, since a rational argument against it simply does not exist. The same tired arguments have been debunked over and over again, and yet everyone insists on repeating them. And it works. It's infuriating. These morons are completely deaf.
Social issues are always the most prominent things on my mind when I vote, and when it comes to social issues, Republicans are downright monsters. Only a monster would gleefully deprive happiness from other people of whom he knows nothing about, and believe himself to be morally just in doing so. Although this is a huge victory for civil rights, we still can't forget all the other states where same sex marriage is still illegal. And this is likely going to go to the (extremely conservative) Supreme Court.
A couple years ago for my speech class, I wrote a speech arguing in favor of same sex marriage. I'm really passionate about this issue, and I figure this is as good a time as any to share some of this. Here's my favorite tidbits:
One of the strongest and most used arguments against same sex marriages is that it is unnatural—that it is not the way nature, or God, intended things to be. In our every day common sense thinking, it's easy to see why this is convincing. There is no natural way for a gay couple to procreate. There's no apparent use for homosexuality, evolutionarily speaking. But the same can be said of some straight marriages. Not all straight couples wish to have children. Many aren't even able to. So should we then tell those married couples that they're only together out of lust or perversion, and that their marriages are no longer valid?
The concept that homosexuality is somehow abnormal to nature is a myth. Hundreds of species engage in gay behavior, such as bears, chickens, cheetahs, penguins, whales, or gorillas. In fact, according to Bruce Bagemihl in his book, “Biological Exuberance,” among the 1,500 species of animals that have been extensively observed by humans, 450—almost one-third—of them have exhibited homosexual behavior. The range of this behavior varies from briefly exerting one's dominance, to the complete rejection of heterosexual partners (even while in heat), or even life-long pairings where the partners go so far as to adopt and raise orphans.
This brings us to another argument, that gay couples are not capable of raising a healthy child. If the critics honestly believed this, then why is there never a peep about the convicted felons, murderers, and known child molesters who are perfectly able to get married and have children, and do so every single day? There is no outrage over these scumbags raising children, on the same level of outrage over gay couples.
The claim that a child needs both a mother and a father in order to be raised correctly is also false. There have been dozens of studies on this topic, nearly all of them contradicting this claim. They show that there is no difference, whatsoever, among children raised by straight parents, and those raised by gay parents.
[...]
Anti-gay marriage proponents also argue that to allow gays to marry would open the door to other, more sinister things, such as bestiality, or incest, or polygamy. This is a classic slippery slope. Its only use is to incite fear into whoever would listen. These things are all unspeakably terrible, so we obviously shouldn't take the first step that would lead to them. If this were really true, wouldn't these things have already happened in countries where same sex marriages are legal? They're already legal in countries like Canada, Spain, and Norway. No one is demanding to be married to animals, or their own sisters, or to have multiple wives, in any of these countries.
The fact of the matter is that supporters of gay marriage are advocating for two consenting adults to be wed. Nothing else. Gay marriage opponents should stop treating them like they're the ones hoping for incest and bestiality, when these horrifying things have absolutely nothing to do with the debate.
[...]
There's also this concept that allowing gays to marry would somehow lessen the marriages of straight couples, that since it isn't the way marriages have traditionally been done in the past, it would somehow be a threat to marriages that are already legal. I personally don't see how allowing more marriages would be a threat to marriage. The main reasoning behind this traditional thinking is the Bible. The Bible says that a man shall not lie with another man, that it is an abomination. The Bible also says that God hates divorce, and yet 50% of straight marriages in America end in failure. Why is divorce legal?
This leads us to the most popular argument—that homosexuality goes against the Bible and Christian principles; and since America is a Christian nation, gay marriage should not be legal. Regardless of the fact that not all Christians agree with this interpretation, America is not a theocracy. There is nothing wrong with a person in government using the Bible as his moral compass, but making important decisions which impact the lives of others, using only one interpretation of a book which not everyone even agrees with, is not only irresponsible, it's downright un-American.
The founding fathers, while most of them were indeed Christian, still hated the idea of religion integrating into government. That's what Europe did. That was for kings. The founders were products of the Enlightenment—an age where freethinkers would strongly oppose organized religion, and would rather worship God on a more personal level, which doesn't interfere with anyone else's beliefs. Many founders, including Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, weren't even Christians at all, they were deists, meaning they believed in a personal creator, but not one which interacts with the affairs of the universe. George Washington himself is quoted to saying “...that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
I won't try to argue that the founders would support same sex marriage, because let's be honest, they wouldn't. They were products of their time, with standards and morals different than our own. In fact, on one occasion where Washington discovered that two soldiers in his army had tried to commit homosexual acts, he quickly tried them, and kicked them out.
But whether the founders themselves would or wouldn't have supported same sex marriage is, for the most part, irrelevant. They realized that topics would come up in future generations which they would have no control over, and they left the constitution open to interpretation just for that reason. Slavery, for example, was a heated debate, even during their time. They knew the issue would not be resolved within their lifetimes, so the topic was purposely left out of the constitution altogether, leaving that abomination on mankind to be debated for almost another century. The point is that times change, and the founders knew this. Society should try to change itself for the better, as better ideas become available, instead of trying to halt those ideas completely.
[...]
The fact that we are still debating things like this is extremely sad. People like to compare gay marriage rights to women's suffrage at the turn of the century, or to the civil rights movement during the 50s and 60s. And while the movements themselves are completely different, the arguments and philosophies surrounding them are extremely similar.
In fact, the arguments that were used against interracial marriage are literally, word for word, the exact same arguments that are being used against gay marriage right now. According to the History News Network, there were four main arguments against interracial marriage. First, judges claimed that marriage belonged under the control of the states rather than the federal government. Second, they began to define and label all interracial relationships (even longstanding, deeply committed ones) as illicit sex rather than marriage. Third, they insisted that interracial marriage was contrary to God's will, and Fourth, they declared, over and over again, that interracial marriage was somehow unnatural.
This man is a personal hero of mine. He is a complete badass. He can't be easily defined, politically. In the 1960s, he travelled to Cuba to take part in a little Marxist idealism. Post-9/11, he supports interventionism and the Iraq War. He's also an extremely respected journalist and historian (I'd recommend his book on Thomas Paine and his writings). But I love him the most for his stance on religion, because I agree with it so damn much. Wikipedia:
Although he has been identified as being an exponent of the "new atheism" movement, Hitchens is a secular humanist, describing himself as an anti-theist, and a believer in the philosophical values of the Age of Enlightenment. One of his most famous arguments opposing theism is that the concept of God or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion, which inhibits these things, as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. Hitchens wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in the 2007 book god Is Not Great.
Hitchens is the most brilliant debater I've ever seen. If anyone is ever talking to him, and if that person disagrees with one of his opinions, he will get owned. He is generally kind and civil towards those of an opposing view if they're able to form rational thoughts, but when he's arguing against people who have no capacity for human reason, he pulls no punches, and is absolutely brutal.
Here he is on the death of Reverend Jerry Falwell. It's glorious. Falwell, as you may remember, was the disgusting pile of shit who said such classics like,
"AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals."
"The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country."
Or of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'"
Right. Only gay people get AIDS, the founding fathers were all possessed by Satan, and secularism was responsible for 9/11. The exact opposite of religious fascism was responsible for 9/11.
"This is tomfoolery on your part."
But Christianity is the only religion he has a beef with. Hitchens is an equal opportunity hate machine. Here he is demolishing the opinion of a Muslim who doesn't believe in free speech.
Now, if these two videos are the first time you've been exposed to the brilliance of Christopher Hitchens, you may start to think he's a snobbish asshole. Not so. A snobbish asshole wouldn't be able to stand ever being wrong. Like all free thinkers, Hitchens relishes the situations where he can be wrong, for situations like that bring you closer to truth in an extremely confusing world.
Case in point: Not too long ago, Hitchens supported the notion of waterboarding terrorists, and denied that it was torture. The editor of Vanity Fair then challenged him to undergo it himself. Chris accepted without any hesitation. After it was over, he switched his opinion immediately. The entire thing was videotaped.
Hitchens has always been a heavy smoker and drinker. Wikipedia: "In 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough 'to kill or stun the average mule', noting that many great writers 'did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind.'" On June 30, Hitchens had to cut short the book tour for his memoir to undergo treatment for oesophageal cancer. And I didn't even freaking hear about it until a few days ago. I went out and got god Is Not Great, if only to put a few more dollars in his pocket. It'll be good reading material for Michigan next week.
Nobody knows yet if this cancer is going to kill him. I may not agree with every one of his opinions, but I truly love this man to death whenever he opens his mouth. This news really did crush me. Hitchens' own attitude about the whole thing seems to be nonchalance and slight confusion. Here's an article he wrote recently explaining all of his feelings about it. It's really worth reading in its entirety:
I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services. They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had to do quite a lot of emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians at this sad border post had shown me a few other postcards from the interior and told me that my immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist. Some kind of shadow was throwing itself across the negatives.
The previous evening, I had been launching my latest book at a successful event in New Haven. The night of the terrible morning, I was supposed to go on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and then appear at a sold-out event at the 92nd Street Y, on the Upper East Side, in conversation with Salman Rushdie. My very short-lived campaign of denial took this form: I would not cancel these appearances or let down my friends or miss the chance of selling a stack of books. I managed to pull off both gigs without anyone noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each show. This is what citizens of the sick country do while they are still hopelessly clinging to their old domicile.
The new land is quite welcoming in its way. Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited. The country has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication—as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. For example, an official met for the first time may abruptly sink his fingers into your neck. That’s how I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and that one of these deformed beauties—located on my right clavicle, or collarbone—was big enough to be seen and felt. It’s not at all good when your cancer is “palpable” from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn’t even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. Many needles were sunk into my clavicle area—“Tissue is the issue” being a hot slogan in the local Tumorville tongue—and I was told the biopsy results might take a week.
Working back from the cancer-ridden squamous cells that these first results disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth. The word “metastasized” was the one in the report that first caught my eye, and ear. The alien had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node. And its original base of operations was located—had been located for quite some time—in my esophagus. My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
The bargaining stage, though. Maybe there’s a loophole here. The oncology bargain is that, in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even surgery. So here’s the wager: you stick around for a bit, but in return we are going to need some things from you. These things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head. This certainly appears to be a reasonable trade. Unfortunately, it also involves confronting one of the most appealing clichés in our language. You’ve heard it all right. People don’t have cancer: they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality. You don’t hear it about long-term sufferers from heart disease or kidney failure.
Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.
It’s quite something, this chemo-poison. It has caused me to lose about 14 pounds, though without making me feel any lighter. It has cleared up a vicious rash on my shins that no doctor could ever name, let alone cure. (Some venom, to get rid of those furious red dots without a struggle.) Let it please be this mean and ruthless with the alien and its spreading dead-zone colonies. But as against that, the death-dealing stuff and life-preserving stuff have also made me strangely neuter. I was fairly reconciled to the loss of my hair, which began to come out in the shower in the first two weeks of treatment, and which I saved in a plastic bag so that it could help fill a floating dam in the Gulf of Mexico. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the way that my razorblade would suddenly go slipping pointlessly down my face, meeting no stubble. Or for the way that my newly smooth upper lip would begin to look as if it had undergone electrolysis, causing me to look a bit too much like somebody’s maiden auntie. (The chest hair that was once the toast of two continents hasn’t yet wilted, but so much of it was shaved off for various hospital incisions that it’s a rather patchy affair.) I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penélope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn’t even notice. In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice.
These are my first raw reactions to being stricken. I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice. My heart and blood pressure and many other registers are now strong again: indeed, it occurs to me that if I didn’t have such a stout constitution I might have led a much healthier life thus far. Against me is the blind, emotionless alien, cheered on by some who have long wished me ill. But on the side of my continued life is a group of brilliant and selfless physicians plus an astonishing number of prayer groups. On both of these I hope to write next time if—as my father invariably said—I am spared.
The original Starcraft is now twelve years old. Any person who has ever played video games should have memories with it. I vividly remember my first time. I was at Drew Muehle's house with my other friend, Drew Kuhnke. It was the first time for both of us. Kuhnke and I played each other, while the Muehle brothers were constantly looking over our shoulders and telling us what to do. We both picked Zerg, and we just kinda chilled in our bases for an hour, scared shitless to attack the other. Kuhnke and I played endless hours with Age of Empires, and that was the only RTS we were familiar with. Playing one in space, with all these cool new units and buildings and upgrades to tinker around with was one of the greatest gaming experiences I've ever had.
Starcraft holds a special place in my heart because it was the very first game I can remember where I felt a real attachment to the plot. Until that time, I expected video games to be nothing more than blowing shit up and making people bleed, but the characters in Starcraft actually gave me a motivation to continue. As gay as it sounds, I really did feel a connection with these people and their struggles.
Unfortunately, I've always sucked playing against other people, and multiplayer is what Starcraft has always been geared towards. That's why I wasn't initially all that excited for SC2. But then my brother sent me that trailer at the top, and it pumped me the fuck up again. All those memories I just described came flooding back, and I wanted more.
Only the Terran campaign is available in this. Blizzard is planning on releasing two more games in a short while covering the Zerg and Protoss stories (which will each be at a reduced price). The plot did not disappoint. In the first game's Terran missions, you and Arcturus Mengsk are freedom fighters battling against the oppressive government known as the Confederacy, until Mengsk betrays you and thrusts himself into power. Set four years after the original Starcraft, you're now fighting against Megsk's government, while simultaneously trying to fend off the pending Zerg invasion.
The length of the story seemed just about right, but many of the lines during cinematics seemed forced and out of place. I wish I could say I could forgive that because they're to be expected in a game like this, but I can't. The original Starcraft's dialogue was spot on, and there's really no excuse for it. Terrans try to be cowboy badasses though, so I'm sure the cheesy lines they love won't be as numerous in the Zerg and Protoss games.
I know I have non-gamer readers of this blog, so instead of describing what exactly you do in this, Blizzard went and released a a short video explaining everything
You have three very different races to choose from. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and a good deal of the fun is learning and compensating for them.
Terran
The Terran are humans. They are descendants of a failed colonization attempt sent from Earth centuries ago. Cut off from their home planet, they decided to settle in and form a civilization of their own.
Terrans are a good place to start playing. They're much more straightforward than the Protoss and the Zerg, and they can really excel at defense if you know how to play them right. They can use massive starships and huge walking mechs. And nukes. Fucking nukes.
Zerg
The Zerg are made up of many species integrated into the swarm by infestation (zombification, basically). Originally, they obeyed the Overmind. During the events in the first game, the Overmind infested a Terran Ghost (a special agent with psychic abilities) known as Sarah Kerrigan. Combined with those psychic powers, the infestation transformed her into something truly horrific. After the Overmind's death on Aiur, Kerrigan assumed command of the entire swarm, and led it throughout the galaxy on a path of blood and destruction.
The Zerg are hard to play well, which is why I hate them. You have to be super aggressive, or else you're going to lose. The Zerg produces weaker troops en masse, and they depend on overrunning the enemy to win. By lategame, they're practically unstoppable. They do not rely on technology in any way. Every one of their weapons is completely biological. Even their buildings are living creatures.
Protoss
The Protoss are very old, and very technologically advanced. They hold honor and battle to the highest regard, but at the same time they're able retain their wisdom and restraint. They are fucking badasses. Initially hostile to Terrans, the greater threat of the Zerg has at least stopped them from killing each other on sight.
The Protoss are my favs. Their army is generally more expensive, but they also pack more of a punch. They use awesome beam weapons and light shows.
As said above, I really suck at playing against other people. Then recently I started going into internet forums to maybe see what I'm doing wrong. Apparently the Protoss are made for harassment and sneaky things, while I was playing them like you're supposed to play Terran -- basically just trying to build a powerful army and stomping the foes. So I'm sticking with Terran for now until I can get a better handle on how this game works.
I'm getting a lot better, too. I told myself I would not go online until I can beat an AI on hard, which is exactly what I did earlier today. I felt awesome. But when you're going one-on-one against a faceless stranger for the first time, you start to feel really anxious, considering what that person could be doing through the fog of war. And you can't think. That's what always scared me off. But I read a tip that listening to music which really pumps you up helps a lot. So I made myself a playlist with a bunch of screaming death metal, and it fucking worked. I stopped getting nervous, and I was able to think about what I was doing.
I had my first big victory today. Me and this guy's skill level were about the same, and all we had done was basically spar here and there at each other's base entrances. I was scouting around and discovered that his army was on its way to my base again. That meant his own base was undefended. I took a couple Banshees and sneakily flew them behind his base, where they destroyed all of his probes, completely demolishing his economy. It was around that time where he reached my entrance, where my defenses wiped him out without much trouble. He ragequit, and I felt like a fucking badass.
I never took this game very seriously before, but I'm beginning to see why so many people find it so damn fun. It's moments like that. The game's general atmosphere is orgasmic, the gameplay is balanced to perfection, and the community manages to be both competitive and extremely helpful at the same time. It plays almost exactly like the first game, which is exactly how it should be. You can't improve perfection.
Verdict: 9.4
People literally play this game as a profession. Matches are broadcast on national television in South Korea. Players earn money from sponsors. People have died in South Korea from not eating or sleeping while playing this. Starcraft is practically that country's national sport.
I'm starting to really get into some of these professional games. It's like football. I've even found a player to become a fan of. He's TheLittleOne. His strategies are really creative. If you have a few minutes to spare, you should watch this amazing match. If you know how to play the game and can follow along, it's going to be really fucking exciting. It starts at 16:17, but the embedding code should take you there automatically.
