John Horgan criticizes Adler's Newsweek piece on "The New Naysayers"

Science writer John Horgan (author of the excellent book Rational Mysticism) weighs in on Jerry Adler's "The New Naysayers" in Newsweek, an article about Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris:

As I expected—can it be otherwise for a mass-market essayist?–he panders to his audience, which is after all predominantly religious. (Adler notes that a recent Newsweek poll found that 92 percent of Americans believe in God and only 37 would vote for an atheist for President.) He does a fair job of summarizing the “highly inflammatory” arguments of Dennett/Dawkins/Harris, namely, that religions make false and contradictory claims and spur people to commit destructive acts. But Adler not-so-subtly distances himself from the skeptics’ viewpoints.
...
And what is Adler really saying here? Just this: we must give a pass to delusional beliefs that are held sincerely by millions of people, especially if they are Newsweek subscribers. I have my differences with Dawkins et al, but I admire their courage, especially compared to the cowardice that afflicts pop-culture intellectuals like Adler when they write about religion.

P.Z. Myers has are more detailed critique of the Newsweek piece here.

McCain endorses religious right theocrat candidate Len Munsil

John McCain continues his pandering to the religious right by endorsing Republican candidate for Governor of Arizona, Len Munsil. Munsil, who attended Arizona State University at the same time I did, was editor of the ASU newspaper, the State Press. Now he runs an extremist religious right policy organization, the Center for Arizona Policy, which opposed the removal of Arizona's laws banning cohabitation and oral sex. (They were removed anyway, by a moderate female Republican Governor, Jane Dee Hull.) Munsil drafted Arizona's law on marriage (which defines marriage to preclude gay marriage) and is behind Proposition 107, the Protect Marriage Arizona Amendment, which amends the Arizona Constitution to prohibit the creation of civil unions or the granting of any legal status for unmarried persons that is similar to marriage.

I've previously written about Munsil here, where I describe how he refused to print a letter to the editor I wrote criticizing factual errors in an editorial he wrote in the State Press.

You can find out more about Munsil and his supporters and detractors at this Arizona Republic blog entry, "Munsil: I'm a Reagan, Kyl-style Republican." I've left a number of comments there.

Arizona Republicans accuse RNC chairman Ken Mehlman of lying

Rep. Jim Kolbe (R, AZ District 8) is not running for re-election, so there are five Republicans seeking the nomination. Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, in a meeting with four of those five and a representative of the fifth in Tucson on March 30, told them that the RNC would not intervene in the primaries, but rather would devote its funds to assisting the campaigns of whoever the local Republicans of District 8 selected to represent them. The RNC changed its mind, however, and spent $122,000 on advertising for candidate Steve Huffman, its preferred candidate.

Randy Graf, who is the current front-runner for the nomination, issued a joint press release with the other Republican candidates (minus Huffman) condemning Mehlman and the RNC for their dishonesty and broken promise.

Huffman has criticized Graf for being slow to fire a campaign manager who had a conviction for "corrupting young girls" but has in turn been embarrassed by allegations that his own campaign treasurer, Bill Arnold, took photos through the windows of the home of Huffman's ex-wife, state senator Toni Hellon. The photos were used to create a website apparently designed to discredit her if Huffman were to have run against her for her state legislative position. Hellon has sued Arnold for invasion of privacy, but apparently supports her ex-husband's nomination.

Graf is also a member of the Minuteman Project.

District 8 is fairly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, with the former having about a 5% advantage. Looks like it will be a dirty race.

Investigative reporter attacked by real estate scammers

KTLA (Los Angeles) reporter John Mattes was attacked by Assad "Sam" Suleiman and his wife, Rosa Amelia Barraza, while attempting to interview Brian Phillips about Suleiman's violence directed at Phillips. Suleiman had been the subject of a July story by Mattes, showing that he had forged documents to purchase homes with the identities of other people, and was renting or leasing them out. Mattes ends up with a bloodied face and cuts to his eye from Suleiman attempting to gouge his eyes out.

Barraza keeps up a nearly continuous stream of verbal abuse after pouring a bottle of water on the camera, hitting Mattes in the face with it, stealing a microphone from the cameraman, and threatening to get a gun and to send Mattes to Tijuana or Ensenada.

"Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin killed by wild animal

It was just a matter of time, but the "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray, not a crocodile or a poisonous snake. While filming his show at Batt Reef off the coast of Queensland, Australia, he swam up too close on a stingray and the poisonous barb at the end of its tail penetrated his chest and heart. CPR was administered by crew members, but Irwin was pronounced dead shortly thereafter. He was 44 years old.

Responding to Holocaust Deniers

Orac at Respectful Insolence recently commented on how he first got involved in responding to Holocaust deniers. In reading his commentary, I was reminded of my own limited involvement on GEnie and Usenet's alt.revisionism in responding to the Holocaust deniers, at a time when Bradley Smith's organization, Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) was placing full-page ads in student newspapers at universities across the United States. I did a Google Groups search and found this posting that I made on alt.revisionism in response to some people who were attacking Holocaust deniers using namecalling and without offering facts or evidence to refute their claims. As it turns out, Orac was also a contributor to this thread, as were the Scientology-supported "random poetry" bots, which forged the names of major contributors to various newsgroups in an attempt to drown them out and make the groups unreadable. (Read Scientology defector Tory Bezazian's account of the spamming of Usenet.)

This posting led to a short debate with science writer Andrew Skolnick, who strongly disagreed with me--his opinion was that Holocaust deniers should get nothing but ridicule, and no one should bother trying to respond to them. I think this is the wrong approach to Holocaust denial, the wrong approach to creationism, the wrong approach to 9/11 conspiracy theories, and the wrong approach to Scientology, for reasons I give below. I do agree that it can be a bad idea to give advocates of crackpottery wider exposure or a respectable forum, but there are plenty of fora on the Internet and elsewhere where these bad ideas should be responded to with good and accurate information.

From:		James J. Lippard
Date:		Fri, Sep 24 1999 12:00 am
Email:		lipp...@discord.org (James J. Lippard)
Groups:		sci.skeptic, alt.revisionism

I first encountered claims that the Holocaust never happened sometime during my undergraduate years in college. At that time, I had recently abandoned the religious faith of my family, and I had gone from being a somewhat gullible believer to a somewhat militant atheist. I felt that I had been betrayed by authority figures in my life, and I set out to find the facts for myself. I was prepared to find that "everything I know is wrong."

Fortunately, my first exposure to Holocaust deniers was on the GEnie online service, where there were some extremely well-informed people responding to the Holocaust deniers with facts. For me, the sometimes emotional appeals were the kinds of argumentative techniques I had come to distrust, and those who clearly had facts at their disposal were the ones to be relied upon. While the Holocaust deniers tried to present themselves as being cool, dispassionate observers presenting the hard facts, it quickly became obvious that their collection of facts was similar to the collection of facts of creationists which I had been fooled by earlier in my life.

I've never spent a whole lot of effort on examining the history of the Holocaust, primarily because I was devoting my effort to other things, and because I saw that people like Ken McVay, Jamie McCarthy, and Danny Keren on alt.revisionism seemed to have things well in hand. (My big "bogus" issues which I've done a large amount of research on are creationism and Scientology; the patterns of delusion and deception seem to be pretty much the same.)

What has prompted me to write this is that I fear that there may be others here who are in a situation like I was when I first encountered this stuff. This present discussion seems to be dominated by emotional responses and namecalling, by claims that Holocaust deniers are Nazis, that they should be silenced, driven off, or even thrown in jail. I suspect that I would have taken the Holocaust deniers much more seriously in my younger days if that had been the nature of the responses to them on the GEnie service. Those of you are responding in that manner, please give this some thought. If you don't have the facts at your disposal to respond to the actual claims being made, then maybe you should leave the bulk of the responding to those who do. I'm not saying there is no place for the emotional response, or for pointing out what you see as the ultimate consequences of the views being expressed, or the motivations behind them--but just keep in mind who may be in the audience and how they may react to what you are saying. You may be accomplishing exactly the opposite of what you want.

--
Jim Lippard lipp...@discord.org http://www.discord.org/
Unsolicited bulk email charge: $500/message. Don't send me any.
PGP Fingerprint: 0C1F FE18 D311 1792 5EA8 43C8 7AD2 B485 DE75 841C

Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests 15 aliens in Roswell working for U.S. military contractor

I guess the skeptics were wrong on this one. Turns out the aliens were in Hangar 1083, not Hangar 18.

(Via jwz's blog.)

The hypocrisy of the FreeRepublic.com crowd

In 2000, an article about "The Secret FISA Court: Rubber Stamping Our Rights" created outrage and prompted comments like this:

This is beyond frightening. Thank you for this find.

This does not bode well for continued freedom. Franz Kafka would have judged this too wild to fictionalize. But for us - it’s real.

and this:

Any chance of Bush rolling some of this back? It sounds amazing on its face.

But today, when there's warrantless NSA surveillance that makes the FISA Court look like significant judicial oversight, the comments are like this:

Privacy is a false argument and has been for some time. Your insurance company and the credit bureaus have more on you than the feds do and you can do nothing about it. I would rather be secure knowing that the feds were looking over my shoulder and keeping me safe. I have nothing to hide, and in times of war, these steps are necessary.

So when Clinton engages in eavesdropping (rubber stamped by the FISA Court), it's a threat to the republic, but when Bush does it (without any judicial oversight), it's no problem.

Hat tip to Gene Healy at Cato, by way of The Agitator.

Tech Liberation Front brings on a Discovery Institute representative

The Technology Liberation Front is a blog I've been reading for a few months for its quality contributions on issues involving technology, regulation, copyright, digital rights management (DRM), network neutrality, and so on. It covers a lot of the same topics as Ed Felten's excellent Freedom-to-Tinker blog, with a strong libertarian bent.

What a disappointment it was to see that the newest contributor, Hance Haney, comes from the Technology & Democracy Project at the Discovery Institute. While Haney is in Washington D.C. and is not affiliated with the intelligent design wing (the Center for Science and Culture), crackpot George Gilder is a senior fellow of the TDP.

I commented to this effect at the Technology Liberation Front, which prompted a response from Lewis Baumstark:

As I have no previous knowledge of Hance or the Discovery Institute, I prefer to allow him to live or die here on the merits of his debate and analysis, not on his link to a pro-ID institution.

Lewis should remedy his ignorance of the Discovery Institute before coming to a conclusion about whether such an association taints Hance's reputation and credibility--surely he would not have said the same if Hance was a representative of the (in some ways more honest) Institute for Creation Research or International Flat Earth Society. As readers of this blog know well, the Discovery Institute has a long history of dishonest and deceptive public statements and attempts to influence public opinion, public policy, and educational standards. Do a Google search for "Discovery Institute site:lippard.blogspot.com" or "Dembski site:lippard.blogspot.com" for numerous examples at this blog; many more can be found at scienceblogs.com (especially Dispatches from the Culture Wars and Pharyngula) or The Panda's Thumb.

Jim Harper of TLF responded to Lewis's comment by writing "And the winner is . . . Lewis Baumstark! Curious. Courteous. Way to go, Lewis!" How odd that he would declare Lewis the "winner" when Lewis claimed ignorance of the Discovery Institute, or call him "curious" when his comment betrayed no interest in rectifying that ignorance. "Courteous," I'll grant.

I agree with the comment at TLF from Cog (of the Abstract Factory blog):

The Discovery Institute ought to be shunned by all right-thinking people, simply as punishment for so shamelessly polluting our public discourse about science. Everybody associated with the Discovery Institute should know, and never be permitted to forget, that their affiliation with that institution tars their name and calls their integrity into question.

This isn't to say that we should pre-emptively dismiss everything Hance says, but that he should never forget the cost that this affiliation will have for his professional reputation and all the views that he professes to hold. The suspicion of Lippard and others (myself included) is entirely rational, and promotes the proper working of the information ecosystem, just an investor's skepticism about former Enron executives would be rational and promote the proper working of the market.

Precisely so--it's not that Hance can't make valid or useful contributions, it's that anything he says needs to be given extra scrutiny because he willingly associates with and is employed by an organization with an established and continuing record for deception and dishonesty. "Guilt by association" is fallacious for evaluating the validity of an argument, but the company you keep is often a good indicator of your character and can create prima facie evidence about your reliability that your own words and actions may then confirm or refute.

I've experienced this myself--I'm employed by a company with a financial scandal in its past (Global Crossing). I continue to work there because I believe that the scandals are in the past and those responsible for them are no longer associated with the company, though my resume will likely always be somewhat tainted by the association and give me an extra hurdle to overcome. I consider myself fortunate that not only has the company cleaned up its act (the financial filings under the current CFO have been praised by former critics of the company for their completeness and transparency) but that my area of employment was quite distant from the scandal and has received public praise.

UPDATE August 28, 2006: Julian Sanchez comments on this subject here. Adam Thierer has responded to the controversy at the Technology Liberation Front, but he does not even attempt to address the issue raised by the Discovery Institute's regular practice of deception and dishonesty.

UPDATE August 30, 2006: Tim Lee has responded to the controversy head on at TLF.

Ed Brayton fisks Seth Cooper

At Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton has an excellent fisking of Seth Cooper, former attorney for the Discovery Institute. Cooper tries to argue that Judge Jones (of the Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board case) displayed bias and hostility towards Jon Buell of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics both in his behavior and by refusing to allow the FTE to intervene in the case.

Brayton points out that there's no evidence of any hostility in the questioning of Buell and that the facts and legal precedent strongly supported the refusal of FTE intervening one month before the end of discovery. He points out dishonesty by Buell, who falsely stated that "Neither "Creationism" nor its synonym, "Creation Science" was ever used in any Pandas manuscript, as alleged."

The post is a pleasure to read, go see it here.