#michael shermer

[masao-micchi]

[#tmakidjonau] 

nah but what if gerry meets michael and the distortion but fails to recognize them as one entity 

----

Michael: (sees gerry) oh my gosh it's a tiny eric delano!! :D I knew your father!! :D  Gerry: ok???

(eventually becomes good friends through jon)

(much later)

The distortion: Ge - Gerard: ew ew wtf is that ugly thing get away from me im getting a headache The distortion: The distortion: The distortion: (closes the door and sobs)

(later) Gerry: Oh hi michael what's up Michael: ? ? ?

----

and so Michael is terrified to let gerry know that he’s the spiral LMAOOOOO 

im so mad i cant draw hahaixst anyway maybe next year 

[fuckyeahreligionpigeon]

Nails it!

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-adults-are-still-in-charge-at-the-university-of-florida-israel-protests-tents-sasse-eca6389b

The Adults Are Still in Charge at the University of Florida

By: Ben Sasse

Published: May 3, 2024

Higher education isn’t daycare. Here are the rules we follow on free speech and public protests.

Gainesville, Fla.

Higher education has for years faced a slow-burning crisis of public trust. Mob rule at some of America’s most prestigious universities in recent weeks has thrown gasoline on the fire. Pro-Hamas agitators have fought police, barricaded themselves in university buildings, shut down classes, forced commencement cancellations, and physically impeded Jewish students from attending lectures.

Parents are rightly furious at the asinine entitlement of these activists and the embarrassing timidity of many college administrators. One parent put it bluntly: “Why the hell should anybody spend their money to send their kid to college?” Employers watching this fiasco are asking the same question.

At the University of Florida, we tell parents and future employers: We’re not perfect, but the adults are still in charge. Our response to threats to build encampments is driven by three basic truths.

First, universities must distinguish between speech and action. Speech is central to education. We’re in the business of discovering knowledge and then passing it, both newly learned and time-tested, to the next generation. To do that, we need to foster an environment of free thought in which ideas can be picked apart and put back together, again and again. The heckler gets no veto. The best arguments deserve the best counterarguments.

To cherish the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly, we draw a hard line at unlawful action. Speech isn’t violence. Silence isn’t violence. Violence is violence. Just as we have an obligation to protect speech, we have an obligation to keep our students safe. Throwing fists, storming buildings, vandalizing property, spitting on cops and hijacking a university aren’t speech.

Second, universities must say what they mean and then do what they say. Empty threats make everything worse. Any parent who has endured a 2-year-old’s tantrum gets this. You can’t say, “Don’t make me come up there” if you aren’t willing to walk up the stairs and enforce the rules. You don’t make a threat until you’ve decided to follow through if necessary. In the same way, universities make things worse with halfhearted appeals to abide by existing policies and then immediately negotiating with 20-year-old toddlers.

Appeasing mobs emboldens agitators elsewhere. Moving classes online is a retreat that penalizes students and rewards protesters. Participating in live-streamed struggle sessions doesn’t promote honest, good-faith discussion. Universities need to be strong defenders of the entire community, including students in the library on the eve of an exam, and stewards of our fundamental educational mission.

Actions have consequences. At the University of Florida, we have repeatedly, patiently explained two things to protesters: We will always defend your rights to free speech and free assembly—but if you cross the line on clearly prohibited activities, you will be thrown off campus and suspended. In Gainesville, that means a three-year prohibition from campus. That’s serious. We said it. We meant it. We enforced it. We wish we didn’t have to, but the students weighed the costs, made their decisions, and will own the consequences as adults. We’re a university, not a daycare. We don’t coddle emotions, we wrestle with ideas.

Third, universities need to recommit themselves to real education. Rather than engage a wide range of ideas with curiosity and intellectual humility, many academic disciplines have capitulated to a dogmatic view of identity politics. Students are taught to divide the world into immutable categories of oppressors and oppressed, and to make sweeping judgements accordingly. With little regard for historical complexity, personal agency or individual dignity, much of what passes for sophisticated thought is quasireligious fanaticism.

The results are now on full display. Students steeped in this dogma chant violent slogans like “by any means necessary.” Any? Paraglider memes have replaced Che Guevara T-shirts. But which paragliders—the savages who raped teenage girls at a concert? “From the river to the sea.” Which river? Which sea?

Young men and women with little grasp of geography or history—even recent events like the Palestinians’ rejection of President Clinton’s offer of a two-state solution—wade into geopolitics with bumper-sticker slogans they don’t understand. For a lonely subset of the anxious generation, these protest camps can become a place to find a rare taste of community. This is their stage to role-play revolution. Posting about your “allergen-free” tent on the quad is a lot easier than doing real work to uplift the downtrodden.

Universities have an obligation to combat this ignorance with rigorous teaching. Life-changing education explores alternatives, teaches the messiness of history, and questions every truth claim. Knowledge depends on healthy self-doubt and a humble willingness to question self-certainties. This is a complicated world because fallen humans are complicated. Universities must prepare their students for the reality beyond campus, where 330 million of their fellow citizens will disagree over important and divisive subjects.

The insurrectionists who storm administration buildings, the antisemites who punch Jews, and the entitled activists who seek attention aren’t persuading anyone. Nor are they appealing to anyone’s better angels. Their tactics are naked threats to the mission of higher education.

Teachers ought to be ushering students into the world of argument and persuasion. Minds are changed by reason, not force. Progress depends on those who do the soulful, patient work of inspiring intellects. Martin Luther King Jr., America’s greatest philosopher, countered the nation’s original sin of racism by sharpening the best arguments across millennia. To win hearts, he offered hope that love could overcome injustice.

King’s approach couldn’t be more different from the abhorrent violence and destruction on display across the country’s campuses. He showed us a way protest can persuade rather than intimidate. We ought to model that for our students. We do that by recommitting to the fundamentals of free speech, consequences and genuine education. Americans get this. We want to believe in the power of education as a way to elevate human dignity. It’s time for universities to do their jobs again.

Mr. Sasse is president of the University of Florida.

==

This is the way.

Never forget that the "speech is violence" people have spent the last few weeks trying to gaslight everyone that their violence is just protected speech.

[aezterx]

[quotelr]

Creationists have also changed their name ... to intelligent design theorists who study 'irreducible complexity' and the 'abrupt appearance' of life—yet more jargon for 'God did it.' ... Notice that they have no interest in replacing evolution with native American creation myths or including the Code of Hammurabi alongside the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

Michael Shermer

[usunezukoinezu]

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

Michael Shermer (inspired by Baruch Spinoza)

[preacheroftruthblog]

The Butt-Shermer Debate On The Existence Of God -- David W. Hester

On October 25 2023, a debate was held on the campus of Faulkner University. This alone would have made news, but both the topic and the participants drew even more attention. Kyle Butt of Apologetics Press affirmed the existence of God, and Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society denied. The story of how this debate came to be is interesting. In the spring of 2022, Mitch Henry became the…

[mygrowingcollection]

Michael Shermer

[hourback]

On Skepticism: Michael Shermer & Jeremy Rys on DarkHorse

I’m hooked on On Skepticism: Michael Shermer & Jeremy Rys on DarkHorse on Castbox. Check out this episode! https://castbox.fm/vb/629229477

[tomorrowusa]

One thing that people keep forgetting is that the U in UFO stands for UNIDENTIFIED.

Whenever a large number of people hear or see "UFO" they assume that it means some extraterrestrial civilization is here to spy on us, take our genetic material, or even eat us. Most of the time sightings turn out to be something with a more down-to-Earth explanation.

Considering what we've done to this planet and the rapacious dictators we often put in power, any intelligent species would probably want to avoid our planet.

Recent hearings by a congressional committee on UFOs were about what you'd expect in Kevin McCarthy's House.

When renowned skeptic Michael Shermer watched the recent U.S. Congressional House committee hearing — which included shocking testimony about UFOs, alien spacecraft and alien remains — he was, perhaps not surprisingly, unimpressed. Indeed, what was more amazing to Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, was the fact that such a hearing was even taking place.  "It's astonishing it's come this far without any real evidence, without anybody in the scientific community making an appearance," said Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine. "We are still seeing not a shred of physical evidence." But the fact that the House Oversight Committee would take the time to listen to allegations of dead aliens, crashed alien spacecraft and a secret government program to retrieve such technology, signifies to some just how seriously some U.S. politicians are treating the subject of UFOs, or UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomena. 

The testimony the committee heard was devoid of serious proof to back up what was stated.

While he had made the claims in public before, it was the testimony of a former air force intelligence officer, retired Maj. David Grusch, that captured the most attention.  Grusch told the committee he had been asked in 2019 by the head of a government task force on UAPs to identify all highly classified programs relating to the task force's mission. At the time, Grusch was detailed to the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates U.S. spy satellites. He said he'd been informed of "a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program." Grusch also alleged that government officials had retrieved non-human "biologics" from the crafts.

The expression "non-human biologics" could accurately be used to describe mouse poop. 😆

Americans have big mouths. Accusations of a multi-generational cover-up of extraterrestrials crashing on Earth sound too stupid for words. The recent case of Jack Teixeira trying to impress his internet buddies by leaking classified documents puts this into perspective.

In 2020, Congress instructed the director of national intelligence to provide "a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data" from multiple agencies.  That report, made public the following year, did not find extraterrestrial links in its reviews of mysterious aircraft sightings. But many of those sightings could not be explained.

Of course they could not be explained. We are not omniscient. Tornadoes couldn't be explained 150 years ago. And we are still discovering new subatomic phenomena. But just because something in the sky can't be explained doesn't mean it's automatically little green men from Planet Zontar.

I concede that various national security agencies may not wish to reveal that they know more about foreign intelligence gathering efforts than is publicly known. That's one way to feed them false information. That may have been a reason the Chinese balloon was not immediately shot down.

As an amateur astronomer, I am aware of how boring our local star (AKA: the sun) must appear to anybody viewing this sector of the galaxy. It's middle aged and stable. It is not the sort of object that would attract much attention.

And we have only been sending radio waves into space since the late 19th century. Those waves would not have been significant until the 1920s. So there's a radius of maybe just 100 light years where anybody with the capability of detecting them would have noticed.

Humans have always had difficulty understanding that they are not the center of the universe.

I do believe that there are probably extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy – but they are few. And they almost certainly wouldn't look like us or use the type of technology we're used to. Of the many millions of species on Earth, only the other great apes (gorillas, chimps, and orangutans) look even remotely like us; don't expect a creature which evolved on a distant planet with much different biology to look even like a Klingon or Ferengi.

Those short bipedal "aliens" with big eyes in pop culture are strictly products of Earthly imaginations. Genuine intelligent extraterrestrials are probably far more extraordinary; author David Brin's Kanten (essentially sentient trees) would be one hypothetical example.

Back to Congress, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank wrote a hilarious column about the House alien hearing...

Aliens are among us – and they want to impeach Biden (archived)

I could go on and on, but I'll let the late astronomer Carl Sagan have the last word on this...

"[E]xtraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

[thepnictogenwing]

a rumination on the meanings of the stars (if any)

I have this curious notion, entirely unprovable of course, that being from the far North of the Earth does something to your worldview, because of how the sky looks at night.

consider that near the Equator, you can see almost every constellation, almost every star. the entire celestial vault revolves into view, from North to South celestial poles.

but near the North Pole, you see the Pole Star high up, and the entire sky wheels around it—and you don't see most of the stars in the Southern celestial hemisphere. I feel like...growing up with that, and knowing only half the stars in the sky...I think that does something to the human mind. something subtle but lasting.

it's not fashionable to think of the stars as having any effect on the human mind or human behavior. the "skeptical" and "rational" crowd, the Neil Tyson crowd, scoff at the idea that the Moon or the stars or any other celestial bodies can exert any influence on humanity—even though people see all these celestial bodies, use them to navigate, use them for timekeeping...

...so why the fixed denial? why assert that the Moon can't possibly do anything to people, even though it's bright and obvious in the sky--even though the Moon causes most of our tides, and causes the entire Earth to change shape periodically, altering its surface gravity?

astronomy and astrology consider themselves to be bitter enemies, and I don't like that. astrology was based on empiricism—that is to say, the astrologers began with something that they could measure and keep track of, namely the clockwork motions of celestial objects. if the old astrologers thought that they discerned a pattern in human events that corresponded with the motions of the heavens, then they must have discerned that through experience.

"pareidolia", the skeptic might sneer—as if that explained anything at all. "pareidolia" is a neutral word, or it ought to be neutral anyway; the human mind naturally seeks patterns and correspondences in things. it requires effort, investigation and inquiry and above all time and patience, to determine whether such patterns are meaningful.

turning "pareidolia" into a mere skeptical sneer is to say that pattern-matching is BAD, and that humans are fools for detecting patterns or coincidences in things...and that's to the liking of authoritarians, as it happens. they don't want people noticing patterns.

Neil Tyson is an authoritarian; he wants you to think that he and his friends (like fellow sexual assailant Michael Shermer) have everything worked out. they have all the knowledge, all the answers; we the people are meant to be mere passive consumers of their wisdom.. (we're also meant to believe that all reports about their sexual misdeeds are mere lies, and that we're fools to discern any pattern of behavior from Shermer and Tyson—more "pareidolia" at work, they might say.)

Tyson, ultimately, doesn't want us looking at the sky. he doesn't want us to see these things for ourselves, to have our own feelings about the Moon and the planets and the stars; he doesn't want us to derive our own sense of meaning from these things. he and his "skeptical" friends wish to be the sole authorities on the sky.

above all we're not supposed to think that there's anything mysterious or poetical or (heaven help us) anything mystical about the celestial sphere. the "skeptical" way is to reduce everything to mere matter, mere things, mere data: the Moon is only a ball of stuff.

everything's already settled and explained away, in the Tyson / Shermer "rationalist" mindset—the STEM-lord mindset. we're not supposed to have feelings about the Moon or the stars, any more than we're supposed to have feelings about arithmetic, or about electrons.

but what if they're wrong?

what if the celestial vault really is mystical? maybe arithmetic is full of cosmic mystery? maybe electrons bear not merely electric charges, but also divine enigmas?

what if the stars aren't just matter? what if they...matter?

~Chara of Pnictogen

[spreadfire1]

🌼🦗 There's no insect in the picture this time. Although our pattern-seeking brains instinctually make it easy for us to recognize insect-like shapes. So if we have the chance, we should not blindly trust our gut instinct. By that I mean, if we are in no situation of immediate danger that requires a fast instinctual reaction, better double-check. Evolutionary speaking, it is less dangerous to have false positives (detect danger where there is none) than to have false negatives (not detect danger when there is danger). As a result, the humans that survived best are adept to find patterns whether they exist or not. (see also Michael Shermer: “we have the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency”) Michael Shermer points out that humans make mistakes and that finding patterns, meaning, intention or agency where there is nothing is the main reason for self-deception or religious beliefs. 🖖😊

[pragmatic-zone]

Why the military UFO's are likely software glitches

Great discussion between Michael Shermer and Joe Rogan about the new UFO sighting by military planes. I'm on the sceptic corner, i.e. there's plenty of ordinary explanations that sufficiently explain what we see to not result in the extraordinary. And even the drone part, even though plausible, I'm doubtful as that would be a credible, direct military threat and has likely been investigated (if you have almost daily sightings, I'm sure several special ops units have been scouring the area for visual confirmation).

One argument I want to add here is that likely software glitches are part of the problem, probably not the root cause but making it bigger. For one everything on the screen is software enhanced and suspect to errors in that enhancement similar to previous generation optical glitches. Secondly, the purpose of the system is to identify and track military targets like other planes and buildings. Drones and birds and other small things is not a priority for the software developers. Filtering out those was probably never a requirement from the beginning and if it was on the table, that's the kind of stuff that tends to get cut or minimized when the project inevitably falls behind of it's schedule. Nobody will spend months in test flights capturing data about drones for developers to implement a working filter.

Also unlike Joe claimed, these are not the "best sensors known to man" but rather the cheapest one that fit the size and weight requirements and got the primary fob done. Unit cost is a primary concern so they'll use a 10% cheaper sensor if they think it will be enough let alone spend 10x on the next gen unit.

Most likely these will quietly get rarer and rarer as the software in the systems gets iterated and improved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fih4cYdsoYs

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[pedroam-bang]

The Breakfast Club (1985)

[dogdailyafternoon]

day 5

why is this image on my phone

crossover moment 🤯🤯