The Reason Rally was a festering pile of fail and AIDS

thunderf00t is one of the few septic/atheist personalities I still like. Don't agree with him on everything of course, and sometimes he is kind of cringey, but I would still say he is pretty solid on science and in reasoning over all. Here is his summary of the event:

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I AGREE

Brief breakdown:

• Likely inflation of attendance figures by officials; thunderf00t may well be lowballing it but tens of thousands is highballing it for sure
• White guy sitting at Black Nonbelievers booth which I'll actually give a pass for although this is further evidence of the septic/atheist movement's descent in identity politics rather than, like, the truth
• Hideously off-key singing from a men's choir that I assume was trying to sound uplifting but unintentionally sounded like the requiem from 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Shilling for Mad Art Lab, the unnecessary and useless competitor to Makerspaces, started by Surly Amy
• Shilling for some album called In Reason I Trust which I previewed on iTunes and as I expected it was really cringey spoken word stuff that isn't fit for much else other than deep borehole disposal
• Endorsement by Steve Shives
• Really ****ty comedian who could barely make an audience of sheep laugh—I mean these are the sorts of people who laugh at Rebecca Watson's jokes ffs
• A pair of young women who fancy themselves the atheist Garfunkel and Oates but need a little practice let's say
• Cara Santa María challenging thunderf00t on chemistry and failing, not part of the Rally but egregious enough to point out—it was re: thermo—and why is she in a leadership role exactly?
• A live YouTube chat no one showed up for
• Acting like all "nones" are atheists which is not warranted by the Pew data in question; pisses me off

I saved the best for last of course, and that was Kelly Carlin's stilted monologue starting at around the 9:45 mark, with the relevant excerpt here:

... I want you to look at these hands; look down at these beautiful hands; I want you to look at these hands—look at them—and I want you to pretend that you are an alien or a visitor from another world and you have never seen a hand before in your life. What you hold, and behold, is the most unique object in the cosmos! A human hand of planet Earth!

And it actually gets even cringier after this, which you may look into yourself but good Lord I am struggling to unpack all this fail. Alright, alright, alright:

• If you were an extraterrestrial that somehow had the means to get here you would either have at least one hand, probably more, or something equivalent, possibly even better. (A highly detailed suggestion by Hans Moravec can be found here: http://ift.tt/290sXIF and mind you no one said that the extraterrestrials need be biologicals.) At a bare minimum the visitor would broadly speaking understand these sorts of effectors and what they do in general. The human hand would very likely be among the least unique things seen by an experienced and perhaps jaded stellar wayfarer.
• We don't exactly have a very representative sample of the cosmos so declaring anything on Earth to be the "most unique" throughout its entirety is a tad premature to say the very least.
• Even so there is already ample reason to think that the human hand is not the most unique object in the entire cosmos. It is likely that such a thing has already come into being and died out on countless worlds. It is likely moreover that countless worlds continue to harbor this design.
• But one doesn't even need to weigh the nebulous probabilities of astrobiology to reach this conclusion: the human hand is already homologous to countless other such structures of creatures both living and now (long, long) extinct. Here is a but a tiny sample of such homology:
  
  

This may be the cringiest thing I've ever heard a humanist atheist ever say, and I've heard plenty from Ann Druyan.

Lastly, I didn't want to include this in the fail compilation because it is more of a personal observation, and a more speculative one, that I wouldn't consider a knockdown argument against anything she said, but if I were in the shoes, or other appropriate pedal garments, of the captain of this vessel that had arrived at Earth and saw and understood the Reason Rally, or much of anything else going on on this planet for that matter, I would not be so awestruck by this pseudo-profundity of human life, but instead shouting orders from the bridge, making sure something like this happened to the little blue planet very soon:



And to wrap this all up I initially wanted to make a statement about how the septic/atheist community has now reached its nadir. But I won't. I don't think there is any real limit to the ****tiness it can attain. Just now I thought briefly about what Reason Rally 2020 might hold. And, on that note, it's time to go and watch Jacob's Ladder to lift my spirits a bit. Good day, forum.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/29932wc