Monday, January 22, 2024

Robert P. Jones on the hidden roots of white supremacy

 By Mathew Goldstein


Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). He is the author of  The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future (published September 5, 2023). His talk at the FFRF Convention is good, if you have not yet seen it then you may want to take a listen below. Protestants inherited a religiously based supremacist attitude from the Catholic Church predating the start of Protestantism that they brought with them to America. Native Americans and Africans were guilty of not being Christian and ipso facto were disrespected as justified in the 1452-1493 Doctrine of Discovery which was repudiated by the Catholic Church last year. 


I have not read his book but I skeptical there is a strong argument that this Christian history was very influential in the writing of the constitution and laws here hundreds of years later. By the time of the Declaration of Independence there appears to have been a considerable amount of tolerance for religious pluralism, at least among the signers, who were determined to try to avoid repeating the religious rancor and warfare between Christians in Europe. They went as far as rejecting any religious test for government office and decreeing free exercise and non-establishment of religion. But this does not mean that Christian supremacist beliefs had no role in promoting the mistreatment of Native Americans and Africans.




Saturday, January 20, 2024

Biologist wrongly demonized by Harvard University

 By Mathew Goldstein




Carole Hooven was a lecturer in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. She’s also the author of the popular book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. Her story, which she describes in her article, Why I left Harvardis one of multiple instances of various public institutions systematically promoting an intolerant, narrow, censorious, overly politicized, opinion conforming demanding, climate. In this particular example, personal attacks were deployed against Hooven by various individuals who had the authority to speak on behalf of Harvard. 


The goal of these attacks is to indiscriminately suppress any conclusion, regardless of how epistemologically valid that conclusion is, that conflicts with conclusions promoted under the misleading banner of “DEI”. Conflicting conclusions that are epistemological valid pose a bigger threat to critical social justice ideology by virtue of being epistemological valid, thus provoking a stronger counter reaction. Critical social justice promotes a fundamentally illiberal framework that prioritizes the ideology over epistemological validity and over merit.


What Hooven says that makes her a target of vitriol is absolutely true: there are just two biological sexes, defined by whether a body is set up to produce large, immobile gametes (females) or small mobile gametes (males). People who are hermaphrodites are almost invariably sterile, and they, along with intersex individuals, comprise about 0.018% of the populationThere are no intermediate gametes and thus there is no third sex across the entire animal and plant kingdoms. The English language word that most accurately characterizes this probability distribution is “binary”. This is not a matter of controversy among sensible biologists. 


In contrast, the sociocultural and mental construct known as “gender” is more of a continuum. The gender probability distribution is difficult to characterize or draw because different people self-identify with many different genders that sometimes may change year to year or even day to day. Most biological males and females match their gender with their biological sex so that the probability distribution resembles a bimodal distribution.


Some of the innocent people being tarred this way, such as Carole Hooven, are secular liberals. Some of the people demonizing innocent people are also secular liberals. The problem is not who is targeting who, although it needs to be said that the intramural aspect of this conflict between liberals is not good for liberalism. The problem is the wielding of a simplistic, dubious, and narrow conception of “social justice” with a religiously ideological and self-righteously intolerant zeal as a cudgel to excuse an ugly demonization of innocent people for the purposes of punishing those who do not self-censor and intimidating other people into selective silence. DEI initiatives can be valuable insofar as they overcome obstacles that were created from bigoted discrimination. But insofar as DEI initiatives instead focus on denigrating and abandoning merit as a tactic to promote equality of outcomes, a.k.a. equity, promoting identity based reverse discrimination, a.k.a. antiracism, defining individuals as oppressors or oppressed by their group memberships,  a.k.a. intersectionality, and the like, while also insisting that everyone pledge allegiance to, and endorse, these conclusions to qualify for admission or employment, it becomes more of a problem than an asset.


To attempt to justify this the left cites the right. The left and right are both committed to this tactic of playing off of each. They both adopt unreasonable ideology driven positions and then claim anyone who does not adopt the same unreasonable position is abetting the other side. This is a fallacious and cynical game of burdening innocent reasonable people with responsibility for the unreasonableness of others that should be rejected. So to avoid any misunderstanding, those of us who say biological sex has a binary probability distribution will also say that transgender medical technology is justified because there is evidence that it benefits some people and therefore should be legal (with restrictions when needed to reduce the risk of harm, particularly for young people). Equal opportunity is a bedrock ethical principle (unlike equality of outcome). Immutable traits that define who we are should not be grounds for denying equality of opportunity. 


Male puberty alters sports related physical capabilities, to some extent irreversibly, and this has genuine, practical implications for sports that are sex segregated. It is unfair to female athletes to allow transgender women to participate wholesale in female segregated sports. Transgender women with sexually functionally penises pose a potential real world risk to other women in some contexts (for example, shared prison cells). Insofar as the left refuses to acknowledge this, the left is wrong. Sometimes the people who are the most insane are on the left.


Two related videos and related link FIRE sues to stop California from forcing professors to teach DEI (I agree with the plaintiffs and hope they win).









Monday, January 01, 2024

Concerns about gender affirming care

By Mathew Goldstein


Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala was the chief psychiatrist in Finland at one of the first clinics devoted to the treatment of gender-distressed young people. She recently went public with her opposition to the gender affirming protocol where adolescents self-diagnose themselves that she claims originated in the United States and is still widely practiced in the United States with the ongoing support of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Both organizations arrogantly deny credentialed experts within the profession who are dissenters an opportunity to argue in favor of adopting more guardrails at their conferencesRead her article Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous. I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It. 


Scientists and public-health officials in Finland, Sweden, France, Norway, and the U.K. are warning that, for some young people, gender transition medical interventions may be doing more harm than good. Handing off the responsibility for deciding how to proceed to self-diagnosing pre-adolescents and adolescents and their parents is arguably more a self-serving shirking of responsibility than an act of benevolence by the medical establishment. Medical treatment policies should be set to match the available evidence regarding what works best regardless of the agenda of activists. To reduce the substantial risk of doing harm clinicians should adopt a more skeptical, restrained, conservative approach to gender transitioning medical interventions, including hormone blockers, when treating young people.

Sunday, December 17, 2023

U..S. Government misrepresents presidential oath history again

 By Mathew Goldstein


The United States Government Publishing Office hosts Ben’s Guide, which is self-described thusly: “Ben's Guide to the U.S. Government, a service of the Government Publishing Office (GPO), is designed to inform students, parents, and educators about the Federal Government, which issues the publications and information products disseminated by the GPO’s Federal Depository Library Program. It is our hope that Ben’s Guide to the U.S. Government fulfills that role.” They feature a web page titled Oath of Office which makes several misleading claims about presidential oath history.


Until recently they made the following statement with no qualifications: “The President-elect places the left hand on the Bible, raises the right hand, and takes the Oath as directed by the Chief Justice.“ Recognizing that this was not always true, they removed that sentence and added this short paragraph: “The Constitution does not say what the swearing-in must include. While most Presidents-elect chose a Bible, as George Washington did, John Quincy Adams used a book of law, and Teddy Roosevelt did not use any book.” While this is now arguably more accurate, it is still wrong.


First of all, George Washington’s second inauguration did not feature a Bible, so this must be referring to his first inauguration. There was no federal Chief Justice nor any applicable federal oath law (aside from the words of the presidential oath in the constitution) at that time. The oath was therefore administered in New York by the New York State chief judge, Chancellor Robert Robert Livingston, pursuant to New York State law. Swearing on, and kissing, the Bible were state legal mandates (the only legal alternative was to uplift one hand, or both hands , and swear to the “everliving God”) that were repealed in the early 1800’s. George Washington did not choose a Bible, the Bible was imposed on him.


Secondly, John Quincy Adams did not swear his oath of office on a book of laws as an alternative to doing so on a Bible as implied. He read the oath of office from the law book, see March 12, 1825 Niles Weekly Register. It is of historical significance that Chief Justice Marshall relied on a law book for the presidential oath recitations. He administered the oath of office nine times, more often than any other Chief Justice, starting with Thomas Jefferson in 1801. It is likely that most (maybe all) of those early inaugural oath recitations were read from a small law book (a Bible was added for Andrew Jackson’s inauguration). Adams wrote that he witnessed the identical oath protocol four years earlier at James Monroe inauguration, see J. Q. Adam’s diary for 6 March 1821Therefore, it is misleading to imply that John Q. Adams’ inauguration was unique in this regard by singling him out as an exception.

Thursday, November 23, 2023

Meaningless, substance less, anything goes, DEI epistemology

 By Mathew Goldstein


Tragically, nonsense is being promoted in academia by professors under the rubric of scholarship. This foolishness is well entrenched at prestigious secular universities and repeatedly appears in renown academic journals. This unfortunate phenomena spills over from the humanities to the sciences. It is often associated with postmodernist Critical Social Justice ideology (not be confused with actual social justice) which in turn is linked to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). DEI is then linked to civil rights, which provides a compelling excuse for smuggling highly dubious Critical Social Justice ideology into all sorts of topics and institutions. This is a big topic, and I am not an expert, but even with a cursory reading of what it is about it is all too obvious that it is both fundamentally mistaken and counter-productive. So called “Epistemological decolonization” is an example. Read the afore-linked Wikipedia article for a description of the destructive hijacking of epistemology by Critical Social Justice ideology.


Unfairness, injustice, colonization, bigotry, economic exploitation, and the like, are not remedied by refusing to take seriously our responsibility to reliably identify what is non-fictional. If there is one reliable method (empirically anchored reasoning), and that method was utilized most successfully historically by white males in Europe, and Europeans unjustly exploited non-Europeans, and utilizing that one method fictionalizes traditional beliefs that were, and still are, considered to be non-fictional by many people, then it does not follow that we need to replace that one reliable method with a plurality of other, unreliable methods, in the name of social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusiveness, or civil rights. This is why the entire enterprise of re-defining epistemology for the purpose of achieving social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusivity, and civil rights, is flat out silly. Yet over and over again, lots of people are proudly claiming to be doing just that. They are corrupting one field of scholarship after another by mistakenly reframing almost all scholarship as being primarily about the single minded pursuit of an ideologically distorted conception of social justice.


The proponents of Critical Social Justice typically refuse to condescend to debating with their opponents. It is not good enough for the opponents of Critical Social Justice to have studied, and be knowledgeable, regarding the claims made by Critical Social Justice advocates. The proponents arrogantly and presumptuously insist everyone must first decolonize epistemology, etc., and actively incorporate such Critical Social Justice advocacy into their worldview to qualify as being competent enough to publicly discuss social justice. This circular, doxastically closed, approach is a classic indicator/symptom of dogmatism which goes together, hand and glove, with intolerance and authoritarianism. It is anti-intellectualism covered up with a superficial gloss of intellectualism. It lacks integrity.


Solicitations of statements of adherence to the tenets of Critical Social Justice, partially disguised as being solicitations for DEI statements, are being included in employment applications as mandatory competitive qualifications for being hired at secular institutions, much like statements of religious self-belief are included as conditions for employment at religious institutions. Instead of deity to worship and serve, there is systemic injustice to destroy. Penitence and evangelism are deemed essential. Students, to qualify as decent people and citizens, are obligated to endorse the complete set of doctrines and practices as instructed by the clerics. 


It is difficult to avoid noticing how deeply rooted in resentment Critical Social Justice is. Some resentment is good, we should resent unfairness. There are a surfeit of injustices that we should resent. However, epistemology is about how we should go about distinguishing non-fiction from fiction. Resentment has no place here. And yes, the true versus false distinction does make a meaningful difference, it is the difference between our beliefs, and our belief based behaviors, being rational versus being irrational. Epistemology is merely one of the academic subjects being undermined by this all encompassing secular ideology, much like epistemology is merely one of the academic subjects undermined by all encompassing religious ideologies (most of theology).


Advocates of populist, almost anything goes, DEI epistemology should consider European white male Aldous Huxley’s accurate observation in his 1932 book “Texts and Pretexts” that what we claim to know is true is often actually false when we fail to anchor our factual claims in publicly available and verifiable, external to ourself, evidence:


It is man's intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. … Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.

Monday, November 06, 2023

Ayaan Hirsi Ali commentary on Hamas

 Mathew Goldstein


Recent Interview on Fox News


Everything she is saying here is accurate.

Most state medical boards are too inactive

 By Mathew Goldstein


Disciplining physicians who exhibit incompetence or whose conduct is illegal or abusive towards patients is a chief responsibility of the state medical boards. State licensing boards and health care entities, including professional societies, are required to report to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) certain adverse licensing and disciplinary actions taken against individual practitioners. Malpractice insurers and other payers are also required to report all malpractice payments made on behalf of individual practitioners. State level summary information that does not identify individuals is publicly available. 


Public Citizen’s Health Research Group calculated the rate of serious disciplinary actions per 1,000 physicians in each state per year averaged over three years 2019, 2020, and 2021. They defined “serious disciplinary actions” as those that had a clear impact on a physician’s ability to practice. They utilized the information on the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) website (fsmb.org/physician census) to determine the total number of physicians in each state.


Michigan averaged 1.74 serious disciplinary actions per 1000 physicians.  Michigan’s rate is lower than the highest three rates for the years 2017-2019.  I agree with Public Citizen that the highest rate currently observed is unlikely to be the best that can be achieved nor is it likely to be adequate for protecting the public from dangerous physicians. Many states took no, or little, disciplinary action against physicians promoting disproven or unproven treatments for COVID-19. Public Citizen points out that “data from the NPDB show that by the end of 2021, 9,286 U.S. physicians have had five or more malpractice-payment reports since the NPDB began collecting such information in 1990. This is a malpractice record worse than 99% or more of all physicians who have practiced since then. Yet, dangerously and unacceptably, three-quarters (75%) of these 9,286 physicians have never had a medical board licensure action of any kind, serious or nonserious.” Also “almost half of physicians deemed worthy of discipline by their peers with whom they practice had no action taken by a licensing board.” We can nevertheless assign an A+ (100%) grade to the Michigan rate and grade the other states from that sub-optimal starting point. 


Maryland’s rate is 0.89 which ranks 25th among all states. That earns Maryland an F grade (51%) relative to Michigan’s rate.  Virginia’s rate is 1.02 which also earns an F grade (58%). Marylanders and Virginians, like the citizens of most states, should be concerned about the poor performance of state medical boards. 


Public Citizen notes: “For $2.50 per physician per year, boards can purchase “continuous query” from the NPDB for each licensee. the licensing boards of Florida, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Wyoming enrolled substantially all their licensees in continuous query. All of these states except Wyoming — a low population state for which a relatively few licensure actions could make a relatively large change in ranking position — were among the twenty highest ranked states.” Yet “In 2022 the licensing boards of 29 states had no physicians enrolled in the Data Bank’s continuous query service. Six of those 29 state boards made no single name queries to the Data Bank. Seven state boards only had between one and fifty physicians enrolled.” Those numbers are pathetic.

Sunday, October 29, 2023

An essayist evangelizes for religious “truths”

 By Mathew Goldstein


Religion Unplugged published an article by Paul Prather who describes himself as a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky on October 23 titled An Essayist Evangelizes Readers For Atheism. His article was a response to an article by Kate Cohen published by the Washington Post on October 3 titled America doesn’t need more God. It needs more atheists. Paul Prather somewhat misrepresents her article’s content so you may want to read her article if you read his article. His argument will probably be persuasive to some of the people who read it, which is a reason why I decided to publish a response.


Paul Prather criticizes Kate Cohen’s argument because, he says, “among other things, it fails to understand how people of faith really function in the world.” He starts by claiming that “some myths” were not intended to be taken literally. He then cites the Genesis account of creation as an example. He is correct that myths are not found “in scientific textbooks”, which is a bigger concession to non-theism than he recognizes. He attempts to counter this concession by asserting that the metaphors of his religion are instead “spiritually true” and “eternal, cosmic truths”. The word “truths”,  asserted here with nothing of substance to support it, is carrying too much of his argument with too little justification to succeed.


Religious texts lack credibility for various reasons, including their reliance on stories (a.k.a. myths) that can be interpreted literally or metaphorically with no clear demarcation in the text itself regarding which interpretation is correct. Deities are either ontological facts or fictions. Metaphorical myths, a.k.a. spiritual  truths, are incapable of establishing ontological facts. Spiritual truths are subjective and as such cannot be equated with eternal, cosmic truths which are necessarily objective.


The fact versus fiction dichotomy matters, particularly when we are allegedly discussing eternal, cosmic truth. If the content of religious texts purporting to reveal the existence of deity are all metaphorical then religious texts are no different than poetry or fictional novels. Yet who worships poetry or novels? Poetry and novels can be alluring, if you enjoy poetry or novels then good for you, consider yourself to be lucky. People can participate in weekly poetry or novel readings and occasional seasonal poetry or novel festivals containing lots of metaphors revealing spiritual truths without any ontological baggage attached. Theistic religions are not like that because they are attached to eternal, cosmic truth claims anchored in ontological fact claims, one of which is the existence of deity.


Paul Prather says “doubt is part of any healthy faith“. Doubt should be proportional to evidence. The less evidence the more doubt and the more evidence the less doubt. Doubt should be diminished to the point of becoming insignificant when the evidence is strong. The word faith here is an admission that the evidence is insufficient to rationally compel belief and therefore doubt is rationally compelled, which significantly undermines the ambitious assertion that the same faith reveals eternal, cosmic truth.


Paul Prather then says “Well, on the days that I believe, here’s what I believe.” While our beliefs will change over time as we learn more, for ontological questions it is unlikely that our access to evidence is going to change on a daily basis to justify such daily alternations in our beliefs. When someone says their belief about how the universe operates alternates on an almost daily schedule it indicates that person is probably not anchoring their understanding of how the universe operates in evidence properly. This conclusion is bolstered by the final line in his article, a quote from the Gospels of someone appealing to Jesus for assistance: “I do believe. Help my unbelief!”. If that quote is supposed to qualify as evidence for theism then we disagree about what qualifies as evidence.