Hey Rutherford, Goldacre, Humanists and Skeptics

instead of actual fair and decent practices such as paying a decent living wage or ensuring an ethical supply chain, both of which cost money and eat into shareholders profits, they could just pay lip service to social causes. Win win for them.

Absolutely. Talking loudly but not doing anything at all.

It’s the superiority that I can’t stand. They think they’re not only so intellectual but they’re so brave speaking up in the way they do. And in reality they’re such cowards. It’s the same with the ones who think they’re leading the resistance and would have actually been in the Stasi’s list of top ten snitches.

And yes to the advertising! I was watching an ad not so long ago and it was one of those spoken word poem things, very emotive, and I thought oh yes this must be for a charity cancer and it turned out to be for a bank.

You’d think the science fans and rational men like Rutherford and Goldscre would want to come out and speak against this assault on research and researchers. But they’ve been quiet on this throughout.

Yes. I think the reasons for opposing gender ideology fall into two categories. Category one is the ethical stuff - the misogyny, the homophobia, the sterilisation and abuse of children. I would have hoped that Rutherford et al would have something to say about those, but they don't, and that's shocking enough.

Category two is the offence gender ideology commits against rationality and science. It's the sort of thing that would normally be meat and drink to these guys, who routinely sneer at homoeopathy, anti-vaxxers and the like. Gender ideology is at least as irrational as homoeopathy (more so, I'd argue), but there hasn't been a peep out of them. It suggests to me that the reason they sneer at anti-scientific ideologies is not because they care about the harm done by anti-scientific thinking but because they think it makes them look clever. The belief that men can be women is probably the most irrational idea I have ever come across, and yet they would rather protect their public image than speak out against it.

HornyHornersPinkyWinky that’s so true about advertising and marketing. I’ve been noticing it for the past couple of decades. I remember when Sainsbury’s “Tu” range was launched (prob even longer ago) and the slogan was “it’s all about you”. That sounded so odd to me then, like I associated that with something a selfish person would be told in an argument! The idea that you are the centre of the universe and only you matter is so big in marketing and it’s works in direct opposition to the concept of actual social cohesion even while companies drape themselves in lgbtq flags.

Another one is bloody innocent drinks, all over the chatty marketing speak trying to act like they’re your best mate. I read one package that said something like “we’re all super friendly here at innocent, if you’re passing by why not pop in for a chat!” Can you imagine if you did? They’d probably call security.

And there’s a New Look near me that says on it “here for you 24/7”! I always think you’re selling cheap dresses, you’re not the fecking Samaritans!

I’d rather read “we treat our workers well”. Which to be fair some do, eg Timpson. As long as it’s really true.

I can't find the original text, but I remember reading that the radical feminist Mary Daly pointed out that none of the great Enlightenment philosophers and thinkers ever mentioned, let alone condemned, the witch-burning craze in Europe during the early modern period. You would think, wouldn't you, that for men trying to propose rational thought and evidence as an alternative to superstition that witch-burning would be a prime example of the thing they were fighting against. Yet, they completely ignored it.

I guess we see something of the same impulse in men like Rutherford et al.

Sorry for the big long ranty posts, a bit off topic but I also think this is why advertising has gone a bit ridiculous, full of emotional manipulation these days. I would love someone to do a comparative analysis of advertising speak, tone, messaging from 20 - 30 years ago compared with today. It is couched in so much lovey-dovey speak, and the messaging is so much about 'we care, we understand you, we're here for you, we're one of you' etc. It's weird and sort of intrusive.

I keep thinking - no, you're not my friend, you're not my community, you don't actually give a shit about me - you are a brand, a company trying to make a profit, trying to sell me something, just do that please!

I suppose it all fits in with trying to distance themselves from being the big, bad profiteers. They can align themselves with the little people while making huge profits off us...

This is such an interesting topic OP, I remember watching a Peter Boghossian interview where he was similarly complaining about the Atheist movement buying into all this crap - despite their previous sneery distain for unevidenced belief systems. It seems like this is the one issue where scientists, skeptics etc. refuse to adhere to their own rules.

And I agree about the economic inequality being surreptitiously absent from conversations or campaigns about equality these days. The reality is that childhood poverty is still a huge indicator of a range of problems in adulthood - addiction, homelessness, incarceration etc. But I suppose it's harder to solve, and requires more than just a trendy flag. And like you say this is a very convenient way for wealthy, educated, established people to align with the 'underdogs' without having to give up an of their financial gains.

I read a theory a while ago about the fact that after the 2008 economic crash, many companies needed a way to distract from the fact that wages were stagnating etc. but they still wanted to appear to be progressive/ have positive brand association (without spending much money) and therefore aligned themselves with rainbow flags, and Blm etc. whatever was the social cause of the moment. So instead of actual fair and decent practices such as paying a decent living wage or ensuring an ethical supply chain, both of which cost money and eat into shareholders profits, they could just pay lip service to social causes. Win win for them.

I agree. Although the misogyny on the Left has been long held ( probably going back to Marx) it is the 'I'm so good and virtuous therefore everything I do is good and virtuous' that allows no questioning of anything they do. It is also catnip to entitled men. Also the studious avoidance of any talk of class unless like Owen Jones you forget to mention your University lecturer parents in favour of your miner etc great grandparents! Because talk of class being a driver for inequality, no matter what race you were would mean them having to acknowledge their own privilege. I won't vote Tory and never have or will but at least they are honest about class, which is how they have ended up with such a diverse Cabinet. They don't really care what colour you are, as long as you are one of them. As an Asian woman, the thing that most annoys me is the Lefts stereotyping of Asians. Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel and the rest are individual people, as are the rest of us, influenced by things that happened in their lives ( including racism) but class wise they track to most Tories. They were not 'too stupid to realise what they were doing' when they decided to be Tories. They are not ' race traitors' they are people who thought about what was best for them and made a decision, just like White Tories are entitled to do, including the huge numbers of blue collar working class Tories. Black and Brown people can be pleasant or unpleasant. Some are pretty racist about other black and brown people. Some are extremely wealthy. We are not a homogeneous hive mind that has to think the same way and if we don't we don't understand racism. Especially when most of the time it's coming from middle class white people with trust funds.

I remember in my 20s wondering how anyone could be right-wing because surely being left-wing aligned with goodness - fairness, progressiveness, helping the poor, opposition to inequality. Why would anyone not want that thought I naively. So I thought of tories as simply mean and nasty people and lefties as nice people.

Then it took a lot of life experience, combined with the changing political landscape, for me to start noticing that a lot of lefties weren’t nice at all, a lot of them also seemed very unquestioning and ill-informed, and misogyny was rife. Once we all had kids, supposedly lefty families still seemed to have a traditional expectation for the woman to do everything. I’ve met a LOT of smug lefty men who’ve told me things like we don’t need feminism any more as women have equality now, or done things like unthinkingly help themselves to all the free time they fancy and leave their wife with none. Or glide to high-ear ing success at work as a white male, despite being mediocre. I had cognitive dissonance about it for ages with my own ex. How could someone “nice” and left-wing live out and benefit from inequality in their own life like that?

I’m still a lefty myself, at least economically. But I’ve realised for so many left-wing people it’s about being seen as a good person, not caring about equality or actual progress towards something better. And then believing they’re let off the hook so they can be venal and selfish and convince themselves they aren’t. And I have more respect for tories than I used to because at least they’re honest with themselves that they’re ok with inequality and you can argue with that directly. Whereas with wokery, especially transactivism, you’re dealing with this weird defensiveness/Darvo and inability to see the inequality they’re perpetuating and making worse by embracing the idea that you can just change reality in the name of social justice.

Humanism was a development of Christianity, not just in a general, everything in the west comes out of a Christian worldview kind of way - it was an explicitly Christian philosophical position based on a specifically Christian metaphysics.

Later humanists shed the metaphysical underpinnings (without really replacing them with anything) and also, in many instances anyway, made it a sort of materialist idea, so all of the elements that in Christianity aren't meant to be seen as historical phenomena but are understood as eschatological suddenly need to manifest historically in the material world.

A bit like Marxism, which maintains the idea of meaningful progress to an end, but it's all played out in the physical world, because it believes that's all there is.

It's kind of interesting that there doesn't seem to be much awareness of this in the humanist society, at least from what I've heard from people.

Yes I agree. I have found it quite difficult to articulate in my head why I feel uncomfortable with 'progressives'. What do they mean by 'progressive'? Just because you call yourself progressive, doesn't automatically make yourself so. I do think it is people thinking that being progressive means they will automatically be on 'the right side of history ( another stupid made up phrase) but because they are wealthy/university educated and in many cases, White and Male, they are a member of the most privileged group in society. So how can they be the good guys without causing any detriment to themselves socially or economically? By fighting for 'social justice' they can virtue signal to their hearts content and still know that they have the cushion of money to protect their own daughters from battered women's shelters or mixed sex wards, and they can have 'people like them' ( White, male, middle aged and middle class) can suddenly turn into a marginalised minority group that they can support. Humanists are almost exclusively these types too, so its no surprise they feel they are morally and intellectually superior, so even when they are wrong, in their heads, they are right.

I used to be a regular lurker and occasional participant on Ben Goldacre’s now defunct forum. It was indeed quite a sexist place to hang out but I grew up in the 70s and 80s so it didn’t really faze me. The positive outweighed the negatives.

At least one of the ex-regulars is now de rigeur for being a fairly prominent Twix sex realist. There are a few sensible posters left in their New Place, but it’s largely a brainless TWAW echo chamber, when they can bring themselves to discuss it. Cass=tumbleweed. It’s very sad.

It really is mindblowing how that idea of progess/justice/rights/diversity and equality has latched onto transness to the cost of all else, and trans rights/gender identity "diversity" is used to mean "diversity" in general. So you have hospitals, libraries, councils, train stations and workplaces plastering themselves in trans flags (or to some extent, it's "LGBTQ") to demonstrate their inclusivity. I don't understand how they can make that decision, especially people involved in politics, healthcare etc, without noticing or caring that inclusivity and diversity involves lots of other things like disability, sex, ethnicity, age, poverty etc and that it's odd that just one thing is being prioritised.

And yes it happens because it appeals massively to anyone in charge who can tick a box by featuring the trend of the moment and simultaneously not have to actually change any of the power imbalances or unfairnesses they should be dealing with - and of course in the case of women, gay people and some disabled people, female prisoners etc, actively make things worse and more dangerous for them.

Although another extremely bonkers thing about this is how many employers (the actual managers who sift through CVs) are reluctant to hire apparently transactivist types because they're scared to get sued if anyone puts a foot wrong, So the whole caboodle has actually encouraged discrimination against trans people too.

Absolutely spot on. Belief in progress is a modern secular religion. In this worldview, mankind is on an inevitable journey from the caves to the stars, and any setbacks are only temporary.
Anyone who is perceived as attacking progress will be treated as the worst kind of blasphemer or infidel.
Author John Michael Greer has a lot to say on this.

As I see it, the "left" in the West have more or less given up on economic equality or economic justice (socialist ideas), so are going for social equality/justice instead. It is an easier option, and allows them to have their cake and eat it - benefiting from capitalism and economic inequality whilst still seeing themselves as "the good guys".

And thanks for citing Galileo OP - one of my heroes. I’d bloody love to hear what he had to say about this capture of authority by something so unevidenced. He would be fabulously and poetically scathing. He’s probably spinning in his grave fast enough to power a small city.

I think humanists, like everyone else, are hindered by the use of "believe in" to mean different things, including:
— to hold something as valuable, desirable or important, and think that it's possible (e.g. "I believe in working hard and doing your best"),
— to accept that something is true or really exists, and, often, to accept it without, or even despite, any evidence (e.g. "I believe in ghosts"), and
— to have confidence in something or someone (e.g. "I believe in our new president").

So I "believe in" human progress, in that I think it's valuable, desirable and important for human society as a whole to develop in ways that change things for the better, and think (well, hope) that it's possible.

But I don't "believe in" the existence of human progress as an ineluctable force whose presence we see written on history and can reasonably project into the future.

And the amount of confidence I have in human progress… er, yeah, that varies

One of the areas where I've always differed from H-UK is that they're a bit more optimistic than I am about humanity's ability to do this 😅 But I think behind all the guff, the organisation's "belief in" human progress is probably more of the aspirational type, like mine, than it is of the "human progress as a truth in whose existence we believe" type. They do tend to write about this stuff in a way that gets up my nose a bit, tho.

And I agree that secular humanism of the type the BHA/H-UK subscribes to is very much influenced by the culturally Christian background of many of its current members, as well as probably the vast majority of its originators, at least in the UK. I mean, to be fair, how could it not be? But they/we could do better at critically examining these influences.

I also wonder what Rutherford’s colleague Hannah Fry thinks, who has done a lot of work on sex disparity in maths and has survived a female-only cancer. I struggle to imagine she’s on board, or at least hope she’s not.

Agree OP. It’s not just that humanists, skeptics and media “fun science” types tend to see themselves as progressive, but also that they’re often led by lefty males, some of them comedians, who are a core demographic for wokebro misogyny. Those “witty” science programmes are mainly led by these types.

I do wonder what goes on in the mind, and household, of Brian Cox who is married to Gia Milinovich but works closely with Robin Ince. I don’t see him making any public statements on it but I might have missed something.

I do personally understand not being able to speak out publicly - I have had to be careful as I’m freelance in a notoriously captured field. I’m a single mum and need to earn a living. I’ve survived the last decade by keeping my head down. But I haven’t gone along with it either. And if you’re in the public eye and supposedly a rational voice on science there’s no excuse for endorsing gender ideology. It should be absolute low-hanging fruit for anyone who wants to unpick pseudoscience.

So, so disappointed in Rutherford.