Eschew Nostalgia The Refuge Of The Lazy And Egotistical

THINKING BACK to the blogs I enjoyed reading in the early years,  it made me think of the ones I didn't enjoy much and that, inevitably, led me to wonder if PZ Myers is still doing it.   I wondered what the guy who owed his fame and, well, maybe fortune, to he atheist fad of the 00's had thrown in the towel,  maybe my pointing out the immense improbability and ulitmately, unbelievability  of one of his biggest publicity stunts, his "Great Desecration" hoax had convinced him to give that kind of thing up.

Well,  I traced him back to where I stopped paying attention to him, at the ridiculously named "Free Thought Blogs"  where many if not all of the bloggers will tell you that free thought is impossible due to us being a product of material causation and, so even if they admit we have thoughts - and not a few of those guys deny even that -  those are as predetermined as John Calvin thought the final disposition of our souls were due to double-predestination.   It is funny how the materialist-atheist-scientistic types who deny the possibility of free thought are called "free thinkers."   Guess they get called that by the unthinking, including themselves.  

I started reading his recent posts but, while we may agree on some politics and even on some of the more absurd aspects of pseudo-Christianity,  it was just the same old crap I read back when he was one of Epstein's and Maxwell's protogees.  

One thing, since he is a professional teacher of biology, struck me as monumentally stupid was the headline: 

All eugenicists are incompetent geneticists.

which has to be one of the stupidest headlines on  a college teacher's musings I've ever read  outside of teacher of composition declarations about using the passive voice in writing.    

Starting with the first generation of post Mendel geneticists, virtually every one of the most famous of them was a eugenicist.  Galton, Pearson,  Fisher, Huxley, Haldane,  Watson, Crick, . . .  any geneticists who have bought into the neo-eugenics of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology,  . . .  There have been geneticists who weren't eugenicists but they tended to not be the public face of that specialty, were often attacked and damaged by their conventional colleagues and,  my guess, is that they are a relatively small minority in that field.   Academics, including scientists, are mostly cowardly careerists, when it comes down to basic facts.    I can't imagine a biology teacher who was aware of the real history of their topic wouldn't know that.    I have to wonder what he's teaching his students.   That is, unless he's holding that all those famous geneticist-eugenicists were incompetent geneticists,  in which case that field has got really deep problems.   I mean other than that modern genetics and physiology have overturned much of the still reigning dogma of it.  

One of the things I discovered during the new-atheist fad was that even the academics among them were prone to saying flat-out false things,  I got into a lot of brawls with them when they lied about things that were easily disproven,  the quote by Jurgen Habermas quote about the importance of Jewish and Christian morality for modern egalitarian democracy,  "Orac's" pseudo-errudition that "only creationists use the word "Darwinist,"  the fact that we can actually know nothing about the first organism to have lived on Earth because there is absolutely no physical evidence of what it was like or how it arose from non-living matter, etc.   I've written about all of those with links - unfortunately some of them no longer work, but I always checked them at the time I posted them. 

Well, that's enough of going down memory lane.   I don't mind doing that with pop music once a week on Maine Public Classical,  though I generally get off before they get to 1965 when the music generally mostly sucked.   But nostalgia is mostly a lazy form of self-indulgence.  It's one of the things they do at the ExLax and Geritol set at baby blue.   Simps is always posting old pictures of himself,  something I've spared People here,  though I did post him in his stupid Groucho beret once, to make a point.