Recursivity

Denyse O'Leary, the world's worst journalist™, continues her streak at Uncommon Decent with a posting that shows that she thinks that philosopher Hilary Bok is a man.

Really, you have to work at it to be this bad at your job.

Tonight Charles Rice from Notre Dame will be on campus at the University of Waterloo to present the annual Pascal lecture. I wrote about Professor Rice and this invitation before, but here are some more thoughts in advance of tonight's talk.

1. There will be a silent protest before and during the talk, from 6 to 9 PM, in the Theatre of the Arts, Modern Languages Building, on the UW campus. One organizer is Shannon Dea, a philosophy professor at UW. The organizers ask that you (a) refrain from interrupting the lecture in any way (b) wear rainbow-themed clothing (c) bring posters (but not on sticks) (d) cooperate with UW security. This is a good, peaceful way to let Charles Rice and the Pascal lecture committee know your disapproval of Rice's views. (Sample Rice quote: "It would make no more sense to force a day-care center to hire an acknowledged or practicing homosexual than it would to make a bank hire an acknowledged or practicing thief." - 50 Questions on the Natural Law: What It Is and Why We Need It, Ignatius Press, 1999.)

2. I've been reading some of Professor Rice's writings on "natural law"; they are so boring and unoriginal I could probably give his lecture for him. Here is some of what we are going to hear:

• An objective natural law exists and is binding on all of us.
  
• Natural law effectively coincides with Catholic dogma on subjects like homosexuality, birth control, etc.
  
• Gay people are "objectively disordered"
  
• The best way to understand the world is by following medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, ignoring 8 centuries of progress in science
  
• Animals have no rights
  
• Evolutionary biologists are wrong; people could not have descended from ape-like creatures because we have souls.
  

3. The local media coverage of the lecture and its protesters has been -- no surprise -- absymal. The Waterloo Region Record, our local paper, has spectacularly failed in its obligation to explain what the controversy is about. The coverage has been so bad that today's paper carries a letter to the editor in protest, written by student Stephanie Chandler.
I single out one reporter, Terry Pender, for his particularly egregious reporting. Here is an archive of some of the local coverage:

• Terry Pender, Choice of speaker at UW sparks protest, March 16 2012
  
• Luisa D'Amato, D’Amato: Campus can set an example as a home of free debate, March 17 2012
  
• Terry Pender, Pair of protests will accompany (post-departure) Charles Rice lecture, March 18 2012
  
• Editorial Staff, A teachable moment at UW, March 20 2012
  
• Greg Mercer, Lecturer at UW prompts silent vigil, March 20 2012
  
• Stephanie Chandler Letter to the editor, March 20 2012
  

4. The University of Waterloo has a well-deserved reputation for censorship in the past. Ironically, it's usually been the University administration that was responsible. From newsgroup censorship to removing newspapers from the University library with coverage of the Karla Homolka case to Ethics Committee harassment of Professor Ken Westhues for remarks he made in a course, to removing copies of the Imprint, the student newspaper, because of articles about sexual topics, the University administration has rarely stood up for the principles of free speech and academic freedom.

Students have, on occasion, unfortunately aped the administration. The most recent infringement was the shameful treatment of speaker Christine Blatchford, whose first talk had to be cancelled because three student protesters failed to move from the stage. Thankfully, this one time the UW administration did the right thing, and apologized and rescheduled the talk.

However, the impulse to censor lives on, as shown in this article that quotes a student, Ashling Ligate, as saying “He [University president Hamdallahpur] could cancel this. He could have sent a much stronger statement.”

More later...

Yet another creationist letter to the editor in my local paper, the Waterloo Region Record.

There are some really terrific stupid lines in this one:

However, I have never heard an evolutionist give an adequate explanation of how life itself began. There is the big bang theory, but it ignores the fact that such an explosion would destroy any kind of life as we know it.

and

The theory of evolution seems to propound that given sufficient time -- millions and even billions of years -- all things are possible, even though the chances of DNA and cell changes to produce current results are infinitely small.

Great stuff - typical for our local newspaper.

Let's see: start with a guy who claims that left-wing intellectuals are responsible for the death of culture because they are intellectually dishonest.

Let him be the book reviewer for a book written by a fierce right-wing partisan described over and over again as a "pathological liar" (and with good reason).

Have the reviewer say not a single word about the well-documented dishonesty of the author of the book he is reviewing. And, for good measure, have the reviewer make ill-considered remarks about neuroscientists, claiming that their goal is to "empty life of its mystery".

Result: pompous drivel applauded by my favorite faux journalist.

But it is funny!

Jovana Gec, an AP reporter, was scammed by a Serb family near Belgrade into believing that two children have "magnetic" properties that allow silverware to stick to their bodies.

The accompanying photos do not show a single piece of silverware attached to the body in a position parallel to the ground.

There are two possible explanations. The first, which I doubt, is that the children have swallowed powerful NdFeB (neodymium) magnets.

The second is more prosaic, but much more likely. The "sticky" items are simply being balanced on the kids' bodies, aided by a bit of sweat. Here is a video of a similar claim by another Serb family that looks completely unimpressive. It was debunked by Benjamin Radford back in February, but apparently Ms. Gec was too lazy to do a web search.

And - no surprise - my local paper, the Waterloo Region Record decided to run this article in a prominent position on page F10. That's par for the course for the Record.

Recursivity's Bad Journalism award of the month goes to Ms. Gec and her credulous editors at the AP, with honorable mention to the Record for reprinting it.

There's a certain kind of columnist who, whenever some deplorable event occurs (such as the recent riots in Britain), doesn't hesitate to use it to rail opportunistically against some perceived moral failing. Reliable scapegoats to blame include liberals, immigrants, and atheists. And the morons who read these columnists eat it up.

Michael Coren is that sort of columnist.

He offers "six ways to prevent a repeat of London, Vancouver, Toronto scene". But his "six ways" are mostly vague appeals to religious morality, with no specifics.

Let's look at each of Coren's solutions in turn:

1. "Reduce the role of the state and, as a balance, increase the role of the family."

Right, because in the days when the state played little role in supporting health and the poor, there were never, ever, any riots in Britain? The Economist dismantles that claim. England has a long history of violent youth; the Economist traces it back to at least 1751.

Coren says, "parents are not informed by law if their underage daughters tell doctors or teachers they are sexually active, but they are left to face the consequences when teenage pregnancy or STDs occur." But ironically, he supports a church that declares birth control to be a sin. No disconnect there, no sirree.

2. "State-supported education and health care may, arguably, serve a purpose, but state-supported welfare and social services have become so all-embracing that individual self-reliance has evaporated. The balance is important here. Neither the fanatical libertarian nor the obsessive socialist model works."

I'd agree with the last line, but not the first. Where's the evidence? The last time I looked, European social democracies such as Sweden and Norway were prospering (in terms of objective measures, e.g., healthy life expectancy, longevity, child mortality, and homicide), while more libertarian countries such as the US do not do as well. And European social democracies lead the world in scientific papers per capita; no sign that social democracy has sapped "self-reliance" there.

3. Stop the war on religion. Whatever your view of faith and God, the massive decline of religious observance and community in Britain has removed one of the glues that held the country together.

This is just an insane fantasy. There is no "war on religion", metaphorically or otherwise. God-soaked commentators like Coren are just so used to not being questioned about their beliefs that they mistake demands for evidence, or questions raised about their beliefs and their consequences, as a "war". In reality, it's just that religion is increasingly being subjected to the same standards as other truth claims about the world. Religion has been exempt from these standards for far too long. If, for example, Coren supports the Catholic Church's ban on condom use and thinks that this ban is a boon to people in developing countries, let him make that case without appealing to sectarian dogma.

I don't deny that religion can hold people together. But it can just as easily drive them apart. There are many reasons why immigrants came to North America, but the religiously tolerant climate of their home country wasn't one of them. Coren doesn't present any evidence that the "war on religion" led to the riots, and as the Economist article shows, similar violent events have occurred in England for at least 250 years.

4. Control immigration, so it is based on the cultural and social needs and unity of the host population as well as on compassion and economic growth.

And what do you think immigration is based on now? Go read this page from Citizenship and Immigration Canada to see the kinds of professions that Canada is looking for. Surely physicians, nurses, social workers, and psychologists contribute to the "cultural and social needs" of the country.

5. Liberate the police from the whims of political correctness and government fashion.

Right. If only the police had been able to taser those damn rioters, that would have taught them a lesson. After all, it's not like the police had anything at all to do with the immediate cause of the riots.

6. Do not romanticize the worst of lower-class antics on TV and in cinema and music. Entertainment once presented a world worthy of aspiration, now it glorifies the mud and muck.

This is exactly the same argument that the small-minded made 60 years ago against classics like Caldwell's Tobacco Road. Coren is no better.

Boors like Coren don't have any interest in thinking deeply about the causes of mob violence and how to remedy them. They're just interested in blaming the usual suspects from some assumed position of moral superiority. From their mouths, a fountain of stupidity spews forth.

I previously wrote about Tom Bethell, the blathering buffoon and faux journalist who never met an anti-evolutionary argument that was too stupid for him to parrot.

Now he's back again in the New Oxford Review. It's not surprising at all that the forum he chose is a self-described "orthodox Catholic magazine". What other magazine would publish this drivel? (Well, maybe National Review.) It takes a lot of chutzpah to call evolution "dogma" and then later publish in a rag that boasts its "unswerving loyalty to her Pope and Magisterium".

Bethell doesn't give any indication that he interviewed anyone except ID hacks for his screed. That's journalism? No. A real journalist interviews people who don't agree with his preconceptions. And the text shows it. How many misrepresentations, selective quotations, and misunderstandings can you find? No creationist chestnut is too stupid to repeat. He even drags out the corpse of the Colin Patterson quote! (It was debunked long ago.)

But the single funniest line is the claim that "Doug Axe and his assistants at the Biologic Institute may end up surpassing the Darwinists in pure research". Not bloody likely, especially if Axe continues to publish in an ID vanity journal where he is the Managing Editor.

Naturally, ID's other faux journalist, Denyse O'Leary is fully on board with Bethell. The funniest thing about O'Leary is that she calls herself the "UD News team", and suffers from recurring fantasies that her blog is going to replace the New York Times.

Claire Berlinski, right-wing "journalist" and daughter of the nonentity David Berlinski, thinks something is strange because real scientists don't want to appear in her home video with creationist Paul Nelson.

Since you seem rather dense, I will try to explain it to you, Claire. It's because creationists and anti-evolutionists have a history of making phony and dishonest videos, and because real scientists have better things to do than to appear in your propaganda film. It's because your undergraduate degree in history and doctorate in international relations don't even remotely prepare you to understand the scientific issues you claim to be interested in. And having creationist philosopher Paul Nelson there probably didn't help things, either.

Claire, Claire... you'd do much better if, instead of trying to "expose" evolution, you actually read some evolutionary biology textbooks. Futuyma is a good start.

I have been having some of the strangest interactions I have ever had, with both Charles Lewis, religion columnist of the National Post, and Stephen Meurice, the Post's editor-in-chief. They resulted from my blog post reacting to Lewis's column, entitled Dear atheists: most of us don't care what you think.

First, Meurice. I asked him why it was acceptable to have Lewis's headline, but not acceptable to have the analogous headline with (say) "Jews" replacing "atheists".

I found his reply rather surprising. He thinks the distinction is that most Jews are born into their faith, while atheism is just "an opinion".

One great feature of both American and Canadian democracies is that we find discrimination against people for irrelevant attributes to be unacceptable. This principle is behind laws against employment discrimination, and the recent repeal of DADT. (Canada, I'm glad to say, ended discrimination against gays in the military long ago.)

But it is quite strange to suggest that discrimination against irrelevant attributes becomes unacceptable only when those attributes arise from the circumstances of one's birth.

If Meurice's view is correct, then we should be free to discriminate against adult converts to any religion. After all, the Jew who converts to Christianity was not born into his faith; he chose it, presumably after some intellectual struggle, and therefore, pace Meurice, it is just "an opinion". Similarly, we should be free to discriminate against adherents of new religions, such as Scientology or Branch Davidianism, since many adherents were not born into those faiths. This is clearly ridiculous.

Meurice's view also implies that if atheism becomes more mainstream - to the point, let's say, where most adherents are born atheists - then suddenly it would become unacceptable to discriminate against it. But isn't this the opposite of what should be the case? Established viewpoints don't need much protection; it's the more unfamiliar that routinely gets discriminated against.

So I don't think Meurice's distinction makes much sense.

Charles Lewis has also been corresponding with me - but in the oddest, passive-aggressive sort of way. At one point he wrote "I will never think of you again", but a few days later he was badgering me to publish this response on my blog. At another point he said he would call me to discuss a misunderstanding; when he finally did, he wouldn't let me speak, called me "weak-minded", and hung up in a huff.

The misunderstanding came about when I wrote a long response to some of his points, and even offered to buy him a coffee if he were ever in town. But he apparently didn't see that response, because he wrote back "you could have answered and created a dialogue". I've tried to resolve that, but he doesn't seem to want to listen.

If this is representative of the state of journalism in Canada, we're in deep trouble.

I wrote to Gordon Fisher, President of the National Post; Douglas Kelly, the Publisher; Jonathan Harris, VP of Digital Media; Stephen Meurice, the Editor-in-Chief; and Jonathan Kay, Managing Editor, Comment.

I asked them all the same thing: if it would not be acceptable for someone at the National Post to write a piece entitled "Dear Jews: Most of us don't care what you think", why is it acceptable for Charles Lewis to do so with "Jews" replaced by "atheists"?

Not a single person at the National Post was courageous enough to reply.

It speaks volumes, doesn't it, about the double standard that allows atheists to be criticized in the most vituperative and bigoted ways, with no uproar?

Addendum: (December 20). Stephen Meurice responded to me on December 17. Here is my response.

If you can stomach it, read this appalling piece of dreck by Charles Lewis, religion writer for the National Post.

It's hard to know what to make of it, other than that Lewis is terribly, terribly threatened by the rising popularity of atheism and atheist writers. He doesn't seem to know a damn thing about atheists, but believes they are all horrible, boring utopians.

As evidence of this, he trots out Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and labels them "dreary". Hitchens, dreary? Lewis must be living in some bizarro universe where dreary means "vastly entertaining".

If I had to name a single famous person I'd love to have dinner with, it would be Hitchens, who knows much more about politics and history than I do, and is witty to boot. Dawkins would be a close second. Come to think of it, having them both for dinner would be perfect: Hitchens can talk about art, history, and politics, and Dawkins can talk about science.

I understand perfectly well why Lewis feels threatened by Hitchens. It was Hitchens who wrote The Missionary Position, exposing Mother Teresa as a pious fraud who loved poverty and suffering for everyone except herself. Lewis, who himself wrote on Mother Teresa, can't accept that characterization. But it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.

Lewis claims "most atheists do not have a clue what religion is about". Like most bigots, though, he doesn't present a shred of evidence for this claim. If he bothered to look at the evidence, though, he'd conclude just the opposite: atheists know more about religion than Protestants and Catholics.

Lewis gives North Korea as an example of a "godless society". But he doesn't dare mention the European social democracies, such as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, all of which are good examples of peaceful, prosperous societies with significantly lower levels of religious belief than either Canada or the US. Nor does Lewis mention the behavior of officially religious societies, such as Afghanistan. That's simple dishonesty. Perhaps Lewis should review the Ten Commandments -- as I recall, there was this prohibition against "bear[ing] false witness".

Lewis claims "Atheists are under the ridiculous illusion that religious people think that all they have to do is call out to God and help will be on the way". Well, no. Atheists know that there is a huge variety of religious belief, and we also know that many Christians do believe exactly what Lewis says they don't. Pretending that this is not a large strain of North American religious belief is, simply, dishonest.

Lewis says "Faith is not up for debate". Well, I've got news for you, Chuck: you're wrong. In a free society, you don't get a pass because you call your beliefs "faith" and pronounce them off limits. Can't justify them? Fine with me. Just don't expect me, or anyone else to take you seriously.

I can just imagine the reaction if Lewis wrote a column entitled "Dear Jews: most of us don't care what you think". No doubt he'd be fired in a minute. But criticizing atheists is just fine.

Why on earth is the National Post employing this ignorant bigot?

A fun article from Salon about the very worst of opinion journalism.

But how could they possibly have forgotten Charles Krauthammer, the embodiment of everything that is wrong with mainstream commentary?

Religion reporting seems to attract some of the very worst elements of the journalism profession. Some, like my local paper's Mirko Petricevic, have never met a religion they didn't like; they never ask a single hard question of a believer. Others, like NPR's Barbara Bradley Haggerty, apparently view their profession as a means to convert others to their religion. (She's a member of the World Journalism Insititute, whose goal is "to recruit, equip, place and encourage journalists who are Christians in the mainstream newsrooms of America first and then the world.")

Haggerty's at it again, with a story about how academia supposedly discriminates against religious conservatives.

Unfortunately, her poster child is Mike S. Adams, a first class looney-tune who has called for "atheist-haters" to join atheist student groups at universities and hence destroy them. Poor Mike S. Adams, who was discriminated against by getting tenure at his university.

That's the best that Haggerty can do to support her claim? Pathetic.

What happens when a newspaper hires an ignoramus as a columnist?

You get this kind of drivel, which has been deftly taken apart by media culpa.

David Warren seems to have attended the Denyse O'Leary school of ignorance.

Over at Uncommon Descent, Denyse O'Leary, the world's worst journalist™, gives us a list of her favorite science books --- in her usual barely literate style. (Note to Denyse: the plural of "coo" is not "coo's".)

No surprise, three of them aren't written by scientists: Darwin on Trial, Signature in the Cell, and Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution. Of the other two, one was written by a very mediocre scientist who made basic mistakes in previous books, and the other by a man whose bogus claims were repudiated by his own department. In Denyse's topsy-turvy world, actual scientists can be dismissed as "mooches and tax burdens", or "British aristocrats".

The late Martin Gardner studied this kind of crankery and knew how to recognize it. A scientific crank, Gardner said, "has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories." It is not possible to reason with this kind of idiocy -- ridicule is the best response.

Actually, Denyse's list would be a good start on a list of the Worst Science Books. Do you have any more nominations? I'll start with Judith Hooper's Of Moths and Men, Arthur Koestler's The Case of the Midwife Toad, and anything by Jeremy Rifkin.

NPR's science reporter Nell Greenfieldboyce just now (2 PM EST, March 30) referred to the Large Hadron Collider sending "beams of proteins whizzing around a 17-mile circular tunnel, then smash[ing] them together at high speed, creating a shower of debris". I sure hope that was just a slip of the tongue. Any science journalist who doesn't know immediately what the difference between a proton and protein is, and why the LHC would be smashing the former and not the latter, doesn't deserve a job.

So, it looks like Denyse O'Leary, the world's worst journalist™, didn't like my simple example showing that Stephen Meyer's claims about information are false.

Meyer claims information can only come from a mind. But this is clearly not true. For example, meteorologists collect information all the time about the environment: wind speed, wind direction, precipitation, etc. Based on this information, they make predictions about the weather. But this information did not come from a mind - it came from the environment.

O'Leary is unable to refute this argument, so all she can do is babble in response, as follows:

What mind indeed? If we experience either snow or dull, freezing rain here tomorrow, why should I be surprised? This is the season officially known as winter.

Well, that certainly showed me!

When confronted with my simple counterexample to Meyer's silly claim, it seems intelligent design advocates have three choices:

1. They can deny that things like wind speed, wind direction, etc. are actually information. Then they have to claim that weather forecasters make their predictions without any information as input at all. This hardly seems like it will convince anyone.

2. They can claim that the physical world's attributes are the products of a mind. But then everything is designed, so it is pointless to claim they have a novel argument for the designedness of biological organisms, since their claim is universal.

3. They can concede that wind speed, wind direction, etc. are information, but not the particular kind of information they had in mind. This is not likely to convince anyone either, since by Meyer's own definition these measures qualify as information. Nor is it likely to convince anyone who has examined the many critiques of Dembski's CSI.

So expect the intelligent design advocates to resort to more childish tactics. Already the commenters have taken to making fun of my name, and calling me stupid and dishonest. Yup, that's the way to answer the argument.

Every town's got one -- the prudish busybody who can't stand the fact that information about sex is available at the public library.

So when Marti Shigley found a copy of Eric Marlowe Garrison's Mastering Multiple Position Sex in her public library, she did what every censor wants to do: she checked the book out and is refusing to return it. She reportedly said, "When I opened it, I could not believe how graphic it was, and I thought my word if one of those kids had picked this up and looked inside of it they would have been ruined for life."

Shigley is a criminal and a first-class jerk. But what's even worse is that the local TV station, reporting on Shigley's crime, blotted out portions of the book's cover and refused to provide its title.

Now that's crappy journalism!

Denyse O'Leary is a local Roman Catholic pro-intelligent-design, anti-evolution "journalist" whose writing is typically at the grade six level -- perfect for her audience. Based on what I've seen, she seems impervious to actual argument, preferring instead to slam what she delightfully calls "Darwinbots". In her writing, she rarely interviews people who disagree with her, and she elevates people who agree with her to the status of authorities. For example, she routinely refers to creationist David Tyler as a "physicist"; I guess that sounds better than admitting that he is a professor of "clothing design and technology".

But today she has sunk to a new low, by attempting to blame the recent murder at the Holocaust museum on Darwin's theory of evolution. Nearly all the commenters point out how insane this is, but, as usual, O'Leary is completely impervious to their reasoning.

If O'Leary were consistent, she'd also be blaming the crash of Air France 447 on Newton's theory of gravity.

Update: no surprise here - O'Leary's claimed "breaking story" isn't original with her; it comes from the odious David Klinghoffer.

When it comes to inane and credulous reporting about religion, my local newspaper, the Waterloo Region Record, is unsurpassed. Reporter Mirko Petricevic has never met a religion he doesn't like. His "reporting" consists mostly of taking dictation from believers, without ever challenging them.

This Saturday the Record published a full-page article about the Canadian chapter of "Creation Ministries International", formerly known as Answers in Genesis. Petricevic gives these anti-science crackpots a full page of free publicity, while not asking them a single hard question.

Reading the article, you wouldn't really understand how overwhelming the weight of evidence against the creationist case is. Petricevic gives the scientific point of view short shrift, mentioning only that "Scientists generally believe the world we know formed about 4.5 billion years ago" and "Many scientists accept that dinosaurs lived about 60 million to 225 million years ago and that humans emerged in Africa between 120,000 and 200,000 years ago". Many scientists? How about saying forthrightly that the scientific consensus is supported by the vast, overwhelming majority of paleontologists and anthropologists?

Defenders of science get only four column inches out of 36, and the defense is rather tepid. As if underlining the reporter's bias, the article closes with two pointers to creationist web sites, but not a single pointer to any website countering creationist claims.

With the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth coming up, I'm fully prepared to see additional shoddy journalism from the Record.

Addendum: Compare Petricevic's article with this article in the Toronto Star. Neither article is very good, but at least the Star article talks about what scientists actually believe, as opposed to what creationists believe.