For John, because he’s bored.

Eternal Vigilance FAIL

On Tuesday I was on the bus heading to UBC to be a guest on CiTR’s Radio Freethinker, which was a lot of fun, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

While driving down Broadway, near Cambie, the distinctive red and blue of Vancouver’s finest began flashing both behind and in front of the bus. Ghost cars. The bus stopped, and the doors opened. Two plain-clothes cops got on at the front door, and one at the back. They walked towards each other, and stopped at a guy, about 20 years old, with a back pack. They stood him up, took his bag, cuffed him, and lead him off the bus without anyone saying a word. Their efficiency was a little surprising, and actually kinda cool. They had the guy sitting on the sidewalk with his hands cuffed behind his back when the bus continued on its way.

I have a policy – a personal rule – to record the police doing their jobs whenever I am able. Whether that means using my MP3 player to record audio when I get pulled over, or snapping a quick picture with my phone when I see an officer patrolling, I feel it is both my right and responsibility to observe and document their actions. Not to say I automatically distrust any and all law enforcement officers, I think the vast majority are just great. But they are given a lot of special powers that shouldn’t be taken lightly, and they should at all times be accountable to the public they are meant to protect.

At the time of this incident, I had my MP3 player, my cell phone, and my camera on me. I didn’t take any of them out. I’d like to say it happened too quickly, or I was distracted, or even that I was afraid they would take my stuff away from me, but that’s not what happened. Watching this guy, this stranger, get arrested for I-don’t-know-what, I had a strong feeling that this asshole deserved what he was getting. In all likelihood he did; he probably took something from a store, was clearly seen getting on the bus, and had stolen merchandise in his bag. The cops certainly had no trouble at all identifying him. Still, for me to make that assumption without even making a move to record it just in case something happened is somewhat distressing. I’m disappointed in myself, and I don’t want to let the same thing happen again.

A vaguely similar thing happened last week. I was at a liquor store to buy a Christmas present for my dad (“yeah right” no, really! “sure, we believe you”) and as I was walking through the entrance, a shifty looking guy with a big bottle was heading straight towards the exit. The clerk started yelling at him, “sir? Sir! HEY YOU!!” and the dude took off running out the door. Now, I was halfway in the store with people behind me, and I was carrying bags so it would have been difficult for me to chase after the guy – but I didn’t even consider it in the moment. My initial reaction was “…not my problem.” I would have thought my first instinct would be to go after him. Again, disappointing.

I guess my new years resolution is to try to better live up to my own standards of being a responsible citizen.

My involvement with a right-wing hate group revealed!

A little while ago Vancouver homeopath Sonya McLeod, with whom I have a bit of a history, posted an article on her blog discussing the relation between the H1N1 vaccine and miscarriages. It was an irresponsible piece citing a handful of anecdotes, ignoring anything resembling responsible research, and lacking any discussion of clinical studies, control groups, or base rates. A few skeptics jumped into the comments thread, attempting to be as diplomatic as possible, explaining Sonya’s mistakes. She put up a pathetic defence at first, but soon realized that we were somewhat (barely) organized as a group, and deleted all of our critical comments. You can read the entire exchange here at Asshole Skeptic.

Before she deleted the conversation, she posted this paranoid and delusional bit of shrill nuttery that I simply must share with the world:

It has just come to my attention that Grace is actually [removed]; “she” is a man. [removed] and Jesse are both members of a group called the “skeptics society.” The skeptics have a political agenda: they are anti-environmental and oppose all restrictions on business, especially biotechnology. They are avid supporters of Big Pharma. They are also men, and I believe that they have are addressing me and belittling this blog post in a sexist manner. Instead of listening to what me and these women have to say, they belittle our experiences and tell us that we are wrong. Well I have one thing to tell you: our experience is more real and true than any of your sexism and put-downs.
To read more about the political agenda behind the skeptics society go to: http://elephantsandmice.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/the-weird-beginnings-skeptic-confusion/

I’m almost proud of this – like I’ve earned a skeptical merit badge by being labelled a shill for “Big Pharma.” This is the kind of crap we’re dealing with in Vancouver though. Think about this: there are some people for whom Sonya McLeod is the primary healthcare provider. Think of everything you’ve ever gone to see your family doctor for, then imagine there are people who would have gone to this woman instead. And they would have done what she told them to.

Body Soul & Spirit Expo and Woo-Woo Wands

Yesterday I attended Vancouver’s Body Soul & Spirit Expo – the largest newage and spiritual convention of the year. A few months ago I went to a little community psychic fair. I expected the expo to be like that, but much much bigger. Well, it was bigger, but frankly, not by a whole lot. A little disappointing, in that I would have liked to see more, but also somewhat encouraging that the biggest nonsense convention in the city only draws a few hundred people.

Sadly, I didn’t get any pictures or recordings, but I did have a few interesting interactions with the merchants. I think I’m going to tell my stories one at a time, to drag this out into a week’s worth of blog content. First up: the Woo-Woo Wands!

There was a booth with two items on display: a “How to Communicate with Dolphins” instructional DVD, and packaged dowsing rods, labelled “Woo-Woo Wands”. I told the woman at the booth that I’ve heard the term ‘woo-woo’ used pejoratively, and asked why she had decided to self-apply it. She said “many people call all this stuff woo-woo,” which is true, but didn’t really answer my question. I got the impression that she really didn’t take herself too seriously, which is good!

Dowsing is an ancient practice where the movement of rods, wands, or sticks held by the dowser is said to indicate either the location of some substance (commonly water or metals) or something more ethereal, such as energy, emotions, or ‘ley lines‘. I asked what these particular dowsing rods were able to detect. She told me she could use them to determine whether somebody was thinking happy or sad thoughts. I can’t imagine this skill being terribly useful, as one could just ask the person how they’re feeling, but maybe she uses it on Atlantean spirits who wouldn’t lower themselves to speak our vulgar tongue, I dunno.

She asked if I would like to see a demonstration. I said yes, and she came around the booth, holding the rods out in front of her. She stood still and waited until the rods ‘centered’ – both came to face straight ahead. It was actually pretty neat to see the ideomotor effect in action; it really did look like the rods were responding to some force. She asked me to think a negative thought, which I did (I remembered when my childhood dog died) and the rods slowly crossed. “See? That’s the negative energy.”

She ‘centered’ them again and asked me to think of a happy thought, which I did (smooching) and the rods spread apart, facing directly away from one another. She took a few steps back to show me how far my positive energy propagated. Amazingly, the rods continued to gage my personal emotions even when she moved away from me, and much closer to a whole group of people who were sharing their fears about covert government conspiracies – surely a vortex of negative emotion.

That would have been the end of the demonstration, but I asked her if she could tell me, based on what the rods did, what kind of thoughts I was thinking, without knowing beforehand. She was very open to the idea – to her credit she was honest and friendly the whole way through. At this point, Rob and Ethan from Radio Freethinker came by and asked if they could record the test, which the woman graciously agreed to. She ‘centered’ the rods and told me to go ahead. I tried to remain expressionless, and I held in my mind the image of someone being brutally killed with a machete. I wanted to be as unambiguously negative as possible. Her rods spread apart, and she said she was picking up “joyous images.” When I told her that was incorrect, she said “that’s interesting” and offered a few possible reasons – there are a lot of people around, it could have been picking up someone else’s thoughts, etc. I felt her reasons were honest though, she didn’t blame me for the false reading or anything like that.

It was not a great experiment, all in all. Plenty of uncontrolled variables, tiny sample size, and not double blinded. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the first single blinded test she’s ever taken part in. It was a fun experience for me, at least. I would love to organize a more scientific trial of some local dowsers. It’s the perfect kind of claim to test: clear criteria for success and failure, easily randomized, and easily blinded.

I would love to have bought a set of Woo-Woo Wands for myself, but frankly, she was charging far too much for what amounted to little more than two bits of bent copper wire. And I never got to ask her about the dolphins…

Skeptic North launches today

Skeptic North is a new skeptical blog with a specifically Canadian focus. It’s a group blog with many contributors, myself among them! I’m scheduled to have a post up tomorrow, but just between you and me, I still have no friggin’ idea what it’s going to be about. There’s already some good stuff up there though, check it out!

Here’s the introductory message from the editor:

Welcome! Skeptic North is the first blog to have a truly pan-Canadian scope: We’ve got a great team of Canadian skeptic authors from across the country and from a wide-range of backgrounds, both academic and professional. Come learn a bit about us!

Although our scope is not limited to Canadian issues, we will aim to be your one-stop-shop of choice for all things related to Canadian skepticism. We’re a new organization, and this blog will go through some minor changes and tweaks in the opening salvo, but bear with us as we deal with our growing pains.

I sincerely thank you for taking the time to visit this new site, and promise that our team will strive to make it worth your while to keep coming back.

Sincerely,
Steve Thoms
Editor-in-Chief.

What Free Speech Means to Me

Today is International Blasphemy Day – an initiative headed by the Center for Inquiry to raise awareness of limitations placed on free expression in the context of insulted religious sensibilities throughout the world. Of course, this is something I support; as someone who is non-religious, I don’t wish the act of holding the beliefs I do to become a punishable crime. I also think blasphemy laws are silly in general terms. There is not one set of rules for blasphemy – the very state of being Christian is, in some cases, blasphemous to certain Muslims, for example. Suppressing dissenting opinions is a clear indication that you aren’t able to defend your own views very well, and as my friend put it, “if God is so puny that he needs us mere humans to police each other against profaning His Sacred Name, then we are the fools for being duped into worshiping him in the first place.”

The Prophet Muhammed

But the concept of free speech goes much, much deeper than defending and protecting my own opinions. Free speech, or more accurately free expression, is the guarantee that you will not be forcibly restrained or punished for holding, publicly expressing, or communicating any concept, statement, or belief whatsoever. Sure, that includes beliefs which are blasphemous to any religion, and expressions of those beliefs, such as the cartoon shown to the left which incited murderous riots in Denmark and brought the debate over their blasphemy law into public focus. But, it also includes ideas and opinions which I, and any reasonable human being, would find absolutely loathsome.

The right to express the belief that those who insult Islam should be put to death must be protected. So too must the beliefs that women should be subservient to men, that 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy, that childhood vaccinations cause autism, that the world would be better if homosexuals were exterminated, and that speech should be regulated and censored by governments. It is possible to oppose such beliefs in the furthest extreme while supporting with equal strength the right to hold and express them. More so, I think it is vital for the success of a free democracy to do just that.

I have heard people say that they support free speech in regards to controversial topics, where there are reasonable opinions on either side, but that when speech crosses over into the patently and demonstrably false, or when it becomes hateful, that it is then reasonable to put a stop to it. I couldn’t disagree with this more – I truly see the issue as an all or nothing case. My disagreement mainly comes from an emotional place, in that it simply feels wrong to me to restrict any sort of idea no matter what. I think what underpins those feelings is the belief that no one should have the kind of power that allows mere thoughts and words to be restricted and punished, period. I’m wearing my Thomas Paine shirt today, which contains the following quotation:

“He that would make his own liberties secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

The quotation could be interpreted as a pragmatic argument – if we allow the ruling party to restrict ideas which are distasteful to me, they might then restrict my ideas which are distasteful to them. The response to that would be to say that as long as you only restrict obviously false and hateful ideas, the precedent doesn’t apply to my ideas. That may be true, but I think Paine meant something deeper. I think he was saying that once you grant any measure of power to the majority of a population over thoughts and expressions, and more importantly the ability to define which thoughts and expressions are allowable, you have opened a way to unchecked tyranny. Not to say that tyranny is an immediate or even inevitable outcome, but without solid and uncompromising protections for even the smallest and craziest of minorities, it becomes extremely difficult to reverse the process of slowly turning each minority opinion, one by one, into a crime. At what point will each of us find ourselves in an undesirable minority?

Oh boy, OK, this post has gone in a weird libertarian direction that I didn’t intend. I was having trouble even finishing the above thought, which I will take as a sign to simply move on. The point I wanted to get across is that as we celebrate blasphemy, which most of my readers will agree is a victimless ‘crime’, we should keep in mind that the principles we’re supporting go much further than ourselves, and that the freedom to openly express offensive ideas is not one bit less important when we’re the ones who happen to be offended.

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only.

A Short History of Medicine

Quick and dirty, this is stolen from the wonderful Dr. Harriet Hall’s slideshow at the Skeptics Toolbox conference last month:

God Vs Science: a frustrating fable

The other day a friend sent me a link to a story entitled “God vs. Science,” which is supposedly a transcript of a conversation between an atheist professor and a religious student about the existence of an omnipotent God and the philosophy of evil. I won’t repost the story, as it is quite long, but you can find it here (there is one important difference between the version I was sent, and the one at that link: the version my friend sent me made the claim that the student was, in fact, one Mr. Albert Einstein). My friend said that reading the story made her “blood boil”, but she wasn’t sure exactly why it was so frustrating.

Below is the (unedited) response I sent, with thoughts on what the story gets wrong, and why it may be so frustrating for people who disagree with its intended lessons.

Wow, it sure is arrogant.

The professor (i.e. ’science’) is a weak and desperate man who really isn’t using any science at all – his arguments are all bad philosophy and rhetoric. There’s a lot of messing with word definitions, as if the way the english language is set up has anything to do with reality (‘faith’ in brain ownership = ‘faith’ in Jesus? ‘existence’ of a concept = ‘existence’ of a physical object?). That’s one of my biggest frustrations with religious apologetics; so much of it seems deliberately confusing, with the same words being used in different ways without ever being strictly defined. Presenting the professor like that makes the assumption that science and religion are on the same intellectual level, which of course we know they aren’t, and that they both use the same kinds of arguments, which of course we know they don’t.

By the end of it, there isn’t really any logical argument or specific claim being made, so there’s no way to respond to it. The person who posts that story can sit back smugly, and the only thing you can really do is start arguing semantics, which isn’t very satisfying. Maybe that’s the source of the frustration? I guess you could say that a good God wouldn’t make a universe whose neutral state is evil, but that would be sinking down to their level and giving them undue credibility.

Of course, the line at the end about the student being Albert Einstein is just ridiculous. That claim alone forces the story to have happened at a specific university during a brief period of time. If it were true, we would be able to identify the exact professor! Not to mention that Einstein as a student was average at best, and wouldn’t have been going around challenging his teachers. The story would also have to have been told originally by one of a small number of classmates Einstein had, yet of course no sources are given. I wonder if the semantic arguments even make sense in German. Einstein was also Jewish (at least culturally – he was openly atheist as an adult), and the theology in the story is distinctly Christian.

I found this on Snopes, which discredits the Einstein connection, but also has some good points on why the story itself is appealing to the religious, and why it might be particularly maddening for the non-religious:
http://www.snopes.com/religion/einstein.asp

Can anyone else offer further insight into why the story might raise the temperature of one’s blood? Or perhaps I’ve made an error myself, and someone wants to defend the arguments of the apocryphal student?

Alaska Hank

This is how the world should be.

About a year and a half ago I was browsing Craigslist’s ‘free stuff’ section, and I saw an ad for Alaska Hank. Alaska Hank had a really cool project going on. He was collecting recyclable material – mostly bottles and cans – in order to raise enough money to buy a ticket for a cruise to Alaska, a life-long dream of his. It was a very ambitious project, certainly novel, and it had an admirable social and environmental component too. At the time, I had a fairly large pile of bottles and cans growing in my kitchen, and I didn’t particularly revel in the notion of cleaning, sorting, and transporting them all to the depot for a few lousy bucks. So I called up Alaska Hank, thinking if nothing else, he’d be doing me a favour carting away this mess.

Hank showed up in a bitchin’ van, branded with his website and slogan. He had to have been the nicest guy I’ve ever met, and I know some pretty friendly dudes. Alaska Hank is a man who knows what life is about. He’s an older guy, retired, but the enthusiasm he showed for his project and for the goal he was working toward was rare and impressive. It was really clear that meeting people, helping them out, and working towards a goal were just as important to Hank as was the goal itself. After helping him load up his van, I wished Hank all the best with his fundraising and the eventual cruise, and he went on his way.

I got periodic updates from Hank via an email newsletter. The recycling effort went well, Global and CTV ran segments on him and his project, and sure enough he hit his goal and got his cruise not long after.

That was a year ago, almost exactly. I haven’t thought about Hank much since then, but the other day I was looking at the pile of bottles and cans in my kitchen. It was getting fairly large, and I didn’t particularly revel in the notion of cleaning, sorting, and transporting them all to the depot for a few lousy bucks. So I looked up Hank’s website, wondering if he had another trip he was saving up for. Turns out he never stopped collecting recyclables, but now all the money raised was going to Christmas gifts for the children’s wards at local hospitals, and to food and clothing charities for the homeless of Vancouver. What a guy!

He just left with my load of beer bottles and pop cans. I suspect that he actually made a special trip from North Vancouver just for me, because I had asked if he could come before the weekend, not realizing he makes regular trips on Mondays. He is as clearly committed to this charity work as he was to the original cruise project – probably even more so. Alaska Hank is a hell of a guy. I hope I can find the sort of meaningful personal fulfillment he has when I’m at his age; really, at any age. That’s how the world should be.

Vancouver Psychic and Healing Fair

So the other day I went to a psychic fair. I really don’t have much to say about it! It was quite a disappointment. I was hoping to record some of the conversations I had with the exhibitors, but the background noise plus the emptiness of their arguments would have made any recording not worth the bandwidth. See Blogosaurus for a summary.

The only thing I can really add is just to emphasize again the utter lack of substance in the newage arguments. At least religious apologists have spent a lot of time and effort constructing complex and seemingly airtight arguments. Now, I  believe they can be refuted, but it takes a skilled debater to find the chink in the armour of an apologist, and often, by formal debating standards, the apologist comes out on top.

With these psychic healers and clairvoyants, there isn’t even an argument to dispute! The concept of evidence is nonexistent. Technical, scientific words are flung with abandon like shit in the chimp cage on burrito Tuesday.  I didn’t even get the sense that it was in any way malicious. I think everyone there was totally honest. The prices of their wares were not outrageous, they weren’t attempting any hard sells, it seemed like they were just trying to support a modest lifestyle by selling absurd bullshit that they totally believe works, yet can’t defend with a shred of credible evidence.

OK, now I’m just ranting, which isn’t what I wanted to do. Really, I have nothing to say. Hopefully these guys offer a more substantial windmill against which to tilt.