Dawkins Go Home: Jesus No, Eugenics Yes

I didn't want to be doing this.  I wanted to find a nice quiet few minutes so I could organise some photos of my trip with Fliss to Scotland, and to fill you in on our exploits in Greece.

Instead, we have to deal with Dawkins.  Again.

Abort [the Down's Syndrome baby you are pregnant with] and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.

There's just nothing left of the man who wrote The Blind Watchmaker any more.  He's been eaten from the inside out by the worst kind of smug, gloating internet troll, a spiteful ghost haunting better people's feeds, grinning from ear to ear as he announces the Logic of Dawkins defeats your puny, thoughtless feelings.

But it isn't the initial tweet I want to talk about. It's so obviously actively vile-going-on-evil that there's nothing to pick at.  It's Dawkins' reply to his critics that we can gain something other than nausea by reading.

Apparently I'm a horrid monster for recommending WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS to the great majority of Down Syndrome fetuses. They are aborted.

This is the worst kind of bad faith goalpost-moving. Dawkins didn't recommend something, he said not doing it is immoral. That's like saying The Smiths called their second album "Meat is Murder" in an attempt to recommend goat's cheese salads. We should also note that just because something does not become moral just because it is common. More to the point, just because something isn't common does not make it immoral, as you'd think a man dedicated to furthering the cause of atheists in strongly religious societies would find easy to comprehend.

I have no intention of discussing the moral quandaries involved in making this sort of decision.  That's not my place.  I've never discovered my partner is pregnant with a baby demonstrating signs of Down's Syndrome.  Even if I had, I'd still not be in the driving seat, for obvious reasons. What I will say is that it's possible to support both sides of a binary decision. You can defend the morality of those who choose option A without calling those who choose option B immoral. You just have to be, you know, a fucking human being about it all.

But it isn't just the sheer awfulness of Dawkin's position and the objectively terrible argument he's using to defend it, it's what the interaction between the two shows: a complete disinterest in the responsibility of people with platforms to consider how they are used.  In Dawkin's world, it would seem you can state that in a world with total information/abortion access no people with Down's Syndrome should exist, and not think it's worth ensuring your accompanying argument survives the most casual inspection.  Because why would that be worth it? Just toss out your fifteen seconds of thought on the subject and move on.

It doesn't matter how many people (Dawkins has one million followers) will be infuriated, enraged or made miserable by his incoherent bumbling. It doesn't matter that when you put so little thought into so emotive a topic and start spouting off about it, you are telling people no more thought is needed and those seeing greater nuance are simply wrong.  It doesn't matter that there are still many people who look up to you and might take your definitions of immorality to heart. All that matters is that you can say whatever you like, whenever you like, because you're Richard Dawkins, and to silence you is to silence SCIENCE!

I really don't think that's a bad definition of a monster at all.

Update: Dawkins has no clarified that he is not telling pregnant women not to do, only saying that if they disagree with him, they are immoral.  Good to have that cleared up. 

He's also whining that he isn't advocating eugenics, because Down's Syndrome apparently contains little in the way of hereditary aspects.  Which, fine. That seems like using pedantic definition-quibbling to side-step an entirely fair general accusation, but perhaps we shouldn't suggest Dawkins is embracing eugenics.  Just, you know, mass extermination, a fact that does not become palatable simply because he doesn't want the end of Down's Syndrome people to be applied retroactively.

Weir Awl Doomed

I'm a bit behind in reading my letters from America, what with all that eagle-chasing/bear-impersonating I've had to do [1]. So I'm only just getting to this, via Elon James White over at Balloon Juice,

"I had to look up the word" Woodger said, according to the account Torkildson published on his personal blog, "because I didn't know what the hell you were talking about. We don't teach this kind of advanced stuff to our students, and it's extremely inappropriate. Can you have your desk cleaned out by eleven this morning? I'll have your

What did Torkildson do to get himself fired as an English teacher in a Utah language school?  He wrote about homophones online. Because what a word!  So provocative, what with those nasty dirty syllables hanging around the start, causing a ruckus.  True fact: homophone is actually a homophone for homosexual! All right, so it isn't!  But you didn't know that! You thought homophone meant homosexual, you filthy-minded fool!

Woodger, for his part, was kind enough to confirm this to the Salt Lake Tribune, just in case anyone took the otherwise entirely wise step of assuming this was all nonsense:

"People at this level of English," Woodger told the Tribune, "may see the 'homo' side and think it has something to do with gay sex."

So I guess that's OK. It's not that Woodger has no grasp of his own language, it's that he's worried all those immigrant-types won't get it and kick off a fuss. You can't trust foreigners to look up words in dictionaries, like he had too! They're too busy flying off the handle when they read about being homo sapiens, or the homogenous nature of humus. I once saw a Spanish statistician shiv his colleague for asking if he'd checked his residuals were homoscedastic!  This is what we're facing, people!

Every day I become more convinced we are doomed as a species.  Every day I become more convinced that being doomed as a species is exactly what we deserve.

[1] I would have thought a hungover academic, even a bearded one, would not be easily confused with an ursine aggressor, but my friends' three-year old son begs to differ; I'm either a bear or "a big dog"; ironically he thinks actual big dogs look like moles.

It's Basically Bird Racism

Obviously this - via Friend of the Blog Llama God - is brilliant in every way.  The absolute tip-toppymost of "fanwank" (a disgraceful term for so rewarding a hobby). I'm not sure where the idea comes from that there are enough Great Eagles to take on the Nazgul, and it's not like Mordor didn't have any ranged weapons or the ability to put trolls at every entrance to Mount Doom, but as an answer to "why not use the eagles?" it's supremely well-crafted.

Except...  why is everyone so dead set on the eagle flight idea in the first place? To me the response to why it was never tried was always obvious: the Great Eagles are sentient creatures just like men, Dwaves, Elves and Hobbits. Why on Middle Earth would we assume they'd be any more resistant to the One Ring than Boromir or Saruman were? Hell, everyone was pissing their chainmail boxer shorts over the idea Sean Bean might grab the Ring and start causing trouble. Can you imagine how screwed Middle Earth would be if a giant flying predator with talons that could rip an elephant into steak tartare decided it was time to become an invisible master sorcerer?

"Hey Gandalf, I just realised we could have flown eagles to Mount Doom and saved us months of exhausting travel and dangerous encounters!"
"Hey Frodo, I just realised the brutal dictatorship of an unstoppable flying magic bird of prey would fucking suck!"

It's a much less pretty theory than the one at Tickld, I grant you, but it has the advantage of treating animals smart enough to speak both English and Moth (and man would I have loved to see that scene - "What's that, Mothie? Little Gandalf's trapped up a tower? SQUAWK!") and show up to battles for the freedom of civilisation as something more than glorified private planes. Talking animals deserve our respect, even if in this case I'm asking that we respect them enough to be terrified that they might succumb to temptation and become our ruthless avian overlords.

Five Things I Learned On Mull/In The Trossachs

1. Walking around Tobermory I quipped that Mull's signature pop song shouldn't be "Mull of Kintyre" but "Everyday is Like Sunday" because it seemed so quiet and closed up so much of the time. Thinking back, though, it occurs to me that it was Sunday, or a bank holiday, for the only two days we were there, so I'm probably being rather unfair. In any case there's some great places to eat  - Cafe Fish combines award-winning and delicious seafood with a non-existent dress code - and some curious shops that offer amongst other things two-pint ale flagons carved from cow horn, which is now my favourite possession.

There's also an exceptionally rare postbox just off the main street which features the legend E VIII R; the locals having flat-out refused to go to the bother of changing it just because, in our host's words "The bugger up and abdicated after six months".  Apparently this postbox is a big hit with Japanese tourists, which is further proof that this world is full of delightfully different cultures and almost everything is wonderful to someone. For my part it was just somewhere to stick my postcard to my parents complaining that we didn't get to see any otters.

(Seriously, otters, what the hell? We went on two trips to spot the little bastards and got bupkiss, after spending the whole week's holiday last year failing to see the family that actually lived on the beach outside our cottage door, and when we went to Blair Drummond to see otters in a zoo they still didn't make a showing, which means I've now seen more tigers in Scotland than I have otters. Otters: almost as bad as leopards).

2. Eagle chicks are all kinds of awesome.  For just £8 each we got to spend two hours staring through telescopes at a juvenile white-tailed eagle who was a week late in fledgling, which meant firstly that it was bigger than any other bird that had lived in the nest (a ridiculous eight-foot wooden bowl you could sleep in yourself if you'd thought to bring enough blankets) and secondly that it spent the whole time leaping onto nearby branches and spreading its wings, in the hopes that this somehow would count as flying.  During the same trip we also got to see an adult white-tailed eagle and a golden eagle doing their best to ignore each other in the sky, and a trio of red deer grazing on the horizon.

3. Whilst geology as a subject is awful and wrong, there are places in the world where I must accept that rock looks very pretty.  The island of Staffa is one such place. Fliss has taken her camera off with her to a hen weekend so I can't show you any of our pictures - I might put some up next week - but Staffa looks like it's been slapped together by three different Gods with absolutely no interest in paying attention to each other.  It also contains Fingal's Cave, which is an absolutely beautiful chamber of green-tinted rock and blue water, in which pink jellyfish float (or possibly lie dead, it was hard to tell).  Even an unfortunate outbreak of screaming rahs couldn't ruin the experience, though to their credit they gave it their very best fucking try.

4. If you are on a quest to see red deer, one can do worse than to get lost in the Trossachs and start arguing about how exactly such a disaster has happened.  Nearby deer will become embarrassed at hearing the domestic and flee for a less awkward area.  This can allow remarkably close encounters, and as an added bonus shift the disagreement onto the subject of the best way to indicate map-searching should be abandoned because there are fucking deer now.

5. A male tortoise sounds whilst mating like an old man reaching orgasm whilst chewing a kazoo.  The female tortoise, for its part, can continue to stuff her face with grass whilst her lover gets on about his business. Reasonable minds can disagree as to whether our chelonian friends have received the better deal.

Recommendations: the quite cheap Eagle Watch experience, though it's probably best to book on the day and check online as to whether there are chicks about - if the chick we watched had fledged when she was supposed to, we'd have spent two hours looking at an empty nest. Our bed and breakfast Cuidhe-Leathain was lovely, with a great room, tasty & inclusive breakfasts, and pairs of Scottish Bearded Collies and Maine Coon cats for stroking/decompression opportunities (John Cole is right; Maine Coons are just the best). The Lunga/Staffa tour was pretty good, with plently of seabird spottings (the puffins will happily sit within ten feet of you, which is rather nice), though for £65 a pop it's maybe a bit risky should the heavens open halfway through. The previously mentioned Cafe Fish is delicious, and whilst it's not cheap, it's definitely less expensive than its reputation suggets.  Moving to the Trossachs, the Lade Inn has phenomenal food and an attached ale shop that came close to reducing Fliss to tears of joy (and entirely succeeded in reducing her bank account; if I'd been driving a larger car I suspect she'd have tried to buy up the shop's entire stock).

Dawkins Go Home: The Hypothesising

I guess it wouldn't feel like a proper week if Richard Dawkins hadn't said something obnoxiously unpleasant. Unlike his earlier comment (which, now I think about it, was also this week) that Muslim scholars should be called "scholars" because actual scholars read more than one book, though, this one is at least worth tearing down, rather than noting that when Christian people are horrible Islamophobes they at least get to drink communion wine whilst they're doing it.

Trigger warning here, though; Dawkins thinks he's making some noble stand against those who don't want to discuss rape, which rather means I'll have to essentially discuss it as well, in the most general and I hope least affecting terms I can.

Friday Talisman: Taking It Easy

It's the Magus today. I love the Magus. He might want to acquire the Crown of Command and rule all the land, but he'll be buggered if he's going to stand up to do it. You have to respect that level of unrepentant apathy.

Soy-Protein Purple Isn't People!

"Greetings, glorious liberators!"

The SFX Forum's "best companion" discussion has reached the Sixth Doctor.  This is actually a really difficult one, more so than it might at first appear. As I said at the time:

On the one hand, I much prefer Nicola Bryant to Bonnie Langford, and even my unashamed love of "Terror of the Vervoids" doesn't stretch so far as to arguing it's even in the top three Colin Baker stories. Moreover, more so than with any other Doctor's run, there is almost nothing here to distinguish a good companion story from a good story full stop; the best companion stories are where their almost completely superfluous roles happen in an interesting story rather than a dull one.

So all of that should make me plump for Peri. Except... say what you want about how little Langford actually offered as Mel, at least she wasn't essentially being treated as a psychologically and occasionally physically abused woman. At least she wasn't fridged in a particularly nasty way (I don't just mean in terms of how unpleasant her fate was, I mean the fact that's immediately twisted into evidence against the Doctor, as though her death matters most in terms of how much harder a job the "real" hero now has to escape his fate). Watching Peri is hard. Ignoring Mel is easy.

But I think the very fact that Peri is often treated so despicably by the show is why we should choose her in one of the moments she was treated best. We can't just shuffle past so sad and mean-spirited a period, we have to separate what went right from what went (so, so) wrong, otherwise how will we learn to do better?

As I say, then, I'm really just picking a story which is at least fairly good, and in which Peri isn't either strangled or pointlessly killed off. "The Two Doctors" is out because I don't have the energy for more racism after "Talons...", which really only leaves me with "Vengeance..." and "Revelation...". The former has the better metaphor, but since we're talking about Peri I'll go for the latter purely because the Doctor is at his least abrasive here (for that season, at least) and, if we're going to focus on how Peri could have been so much better used, I'd rather we discussed it in an episode where she's allowed to wrap up properly.

Which I stand by, in the main, though in retrospect I probably should have plumped for "Mysterious Planet" (not having seen in it in twenty years probably didn't help there).   Still, "Revelations..." is what we plumped for; the usual witterings are below the fold. As predicted, I could find little to say on Peri herself, though in large part that's bnecause the story actually relies on our main characters getting very little to do.