So THAT's What a NATO Strap Is!

And that's also why ordering things from Amazon can be surprising. A NATO band comes in one piece, which was definitely a surprise for me. I had to google how to install the thing on my watch.

By the way, if you're thinking about getting me some watch straps or bracelets or entire watches or just giving me huge crates of cash or large parcels of real estate, first of all, thank you, that's so sweet! But secondly and very importantly, if you get me a watch strap, get me the longest one they got, whether that option is labeled "long," or "extra long," or "Seriously, what are you, a gorilla?" or whatever the case may be. Who could've known that a guy who's 6'3", 300 lbs and constantly lifts weights and 100 lb balls and heavy sandbags and so forth would end up having big wrists, eh? And, yet, apparently, my wrists are somewhat large. Watch bands made for normal humans just don't work.

(I know: I'm seething with greed, always thinking about what I will get, me me me, shower me with money and watch straps and sand bags, and I know it's not an attractive feature. You know that episode of "Ren & Stimpy" which begins with Ren and Stimpy saying their prayers before going to bed, and Stimpy finishes his prayers by saying, "-- and most importantly of all, please look after my dear, dear friend Ren!" and Ren finishes his prayers by saying, "-- and please give me a million dollars, and -- oooh! Huge pectoral muscles!" Makes me laugh and laugh whenever I think about it, because I know I'm just like Ren: surrounded by sweet loving Stimpys, but seething with greed, me me me. I know it's not a great way to be. Well, maybe I've heard it's not a great way to be. Maybe I'm thinking about it. Anyway, I'm not the one on trial here! This post is about NATO watch bands.)

At first I thought that NATO was an acronym for "nylon (something) (something) (something)" bands, but actually, they're called NATO bands because they were first used by NATO, the military alliance. The one-piece design keeps metal off of your wrist -- which may have been more important decades ago, when watch cases might be more prone to corrosion. I don't know. It surprised me to learn that keeping metal off of the wrist was a priority, and I'm just guessing as to why that was -- and also keeps the watch on your wrist if one of the spring bars breaks. The typical NATO strap is made from woven nylon fabric, although now that they're getting popular we're beginning to see more and more made in leather and other materials.

On a conventional watch strap, the spring bars go through holes on either end of the strap -- or to be more precise: on the end of each of the strap's two pieces -- and then are fitted into holes in the watch case. With a NATO band, the spring bars are put in place in the case first. Then you thread the strap through the bars, passing it over the back of the watch,

and then fasten it around your wrist in your choice of various ways. Of course, with the strap going over the back of the watch, that means the view of the watch's back window, if it has one, is blocked. But it's not very difficult to slip the strap the band out for a peek through the window, and then back in again to wear the watch.

Easy or not, though, I don't WANT to have to take off the strap in order to be able to look through the window.

Maybe what watches do is just keep pointing out to you more and more ways how the world isn't perfect. Or maybe: more and more unimportant ways one can be dissatisfied with a wonderful world? Hmm.

73% Of All Internet Memes Are Factually Mistaken

I don't care if Lincoln said it, it's nonsense, because the Internet has made it infinitely easier to check the accuracy of quotes.

And that's what makes all these inaccurate memes so infuriating: people could have taken a minute or two to check the meme's accuracy before sharing it in your favorite Facebook group, and they didn't. They found the assertion made by the meme to be convenient to their arguments, or flattering to their subculture, and so they believed it and spread it around: 85% of Japan's population is atheist. Evangelicals have better sex lives. Tom Paine was a vegan. Constantine and the Pope wrote the entire Bible, start to finish, Genesis to Revelations. That photo of Hillary Clinton hugging Osama Bin Ladn was not photoshopped. Taco Bell is going out of business. Samsung devices are spying on us for the Japanese government. Obama gave Al Sharpton millions of dollars' worth of public funds. There are trillions of dollars' worth of gold ingots in the Vatican Bank. Hillary Clinton can't be trusted. Drinking lots of beer actually does make you sexy. Every one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was an atheist and an Illumitatus. Karl Marx and Otto von Bismarck carried on a secret love affair for 30 years, and Bismarck is the actual author of Kapital.

Has the Internet made people more stupid? Or were they always about this stupid, and the Internet has brought me into contact with more of them? Or is it completely wrong for me to blame the Internet for any of this, because I could just as well have used it to contact brilliant people who are very scrupulous about getting their facts straight before they assert something?

Maybe all that the Internet has done is to demonstrate that I am an idiot, because this is what I have found after 2 decades with this remarkable tool. If I really am surrounded by idiots, does that mean anything at all other than that I have allowed a bunch of idiots to surround me?

One way or another: the search for intelligent life on Earth continues.

"Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby."

Not entirely. Because various atheists atheist in various different ways. Some atheists -- whom I and many other atheists call New Atheists -- have some tendencies which are reminiscent of religious behavior. Like repeating a handful of quotations over and over and over and over and over and over like fundies quoting their favorite half-dozen Bible verses. Like being blind and deaf to valid criticisms of Dawkins, Harris, Hitch & co the way that many religious believers simply refuse to see flaws in their leaders.

And of course, some atheists actually meet on Sunday mornings in places they call atheist churches, with services sometimes led by ex-Christian preachers. That's a particularly obvious way in which atheism is sometimes like a religion in some ways.

Some atheists, including Dawkins, Harris, Hitch & Myers, are unfortunately quite Islamophobic in a manner strongly reminiscent of Christian fundies.

New Atheists and Christian fundies share a profound ignorance on historical topics combined with an unceasing flow of clueless remarks about the history surrounding Biblical topics, New Testament and Old.

Seriously, New Atheists: if there wasn't quite a lot about you which reminded people of the fundies, do you really think that so many of them would say so often that there is? Astonish me: come to grips with some piece, any piece, of valid criticism aimed at you. Admit at long last that some of your critics might have had a point now and then.

More Self-Criticism

A couple of days ago, in the blog post Signs That There's Something Seriously Wrong With Me, I attempted to begin a course of rigorous self-criticism. Now I'll attempt to continue that criticism and get more in-depth:

Earlier today I blogged about a popular talking point among movement atheists, the assertion that they know the Bible better than Christians do, that many of them have read it all the way through. I... Uh... Well I flat-out called that assertion horseshit. So in the post about bible-reading, it seems I did pretty much exactly what I criticized myself for a couple of days ago: I was harshly unpleasant, I delivered more or less a verbal slap in the face.

Well... that's what I do here, in a lot of posts anyway: criticize others without a lot of restraint. But I'm actually not going to criticize the harsh blog post about Bible-reading right now; rather, I'm going to examine some of my actions following the publishing of that post. Maybe I need to critique such posts, maybe I very badly need to do so, but facing that possibility is more than I can handle right now. Crawl before you can walk.

I linked the Bible-reading post in a few online discussion groups, and right away I got some negative responses from atheists claiming to know the Bible very well. Today's self-criticism will consist of examining my responses to some of those comments:

One person claimed that I could open a Bible to any page and he'd be able to tell me exactly how the text had been altered. My response to that was: "Ah, more bullshit, right on cue!" Last I checked there had been no response to that, neither by the person I was addressing nor from a third party.

Another person asked what was my evidence that movement atheists didn't know the Bible well? I told him that I had already answered that question in the link to the blog post, which mentioned how movement atheists' discussion of the Bible tended to revolve around the same 12 verses from Genesis and Leviticus and 5 snarky quotes about the Bible from famous people. He said that wasn't an answer. I felt it was an answer, but I didn't respond, nothing to say occurring to me which I felt would be productive. (Insulting responses occurred to me but I kept them to myself.) After we had exchanged a few more comments, some having to do with the Flood, I said that I was unsure whether Moses or Jesus had existed, much less Noah; he said he doubted if any of them existed; by "all of them" I understood him to mean "all of the people mentioned in the Bible," and I said: "That's exactly the kind of statement that makes me doubt you've read the Bible at all." Perhaps a minute later, I commented: "Sorry, maybe I misunderstood you: if by 'all of them' you just mean 'Noah, Moses and Jesus,' that's certainly completely different than if you meant 'all of the people mentioned in the Bible.'" This guy had been sending a pretty steady of stream of comments, and I waited a while for more, but no more came, and that's when it occurred to me that he might have broken off the conversation, perhaps un-subscribed from the thread, because I was being rude and insulting.

Perhaps other people looking on both of those threads un-subscribed because I was being rude.

Maybe people stop communicating with me all the time because I'm being rude.

I want to be an extremely rich and famous writer. But if I became rich and famous, and got invited to be a guest on "Conan," and Conan and I were chatting about, oh, let's say, the Bible, and at a certain point the crowd responded to something which Conan or I had said with enthusiastic applause, and I turned to the audience, or should I say turned on them, and interrupted the applause by saying something like, for instance, "Applauding that just demonstrates that you're all uneducated and ignorant," well, I suppose it's possible that one single such comment at such a place and time might suddenly make me much less popular. I can imagine Conan, and other talk-show hosts, not inviting me back to their shows because of one single remark like that. And the thing is: I can easily imagine myself saying something like that at such a time and place, saying it spontaneously, without a thought.

And the thing is -- I've said a lot of things like that to a lot of different people over the years. In fact, I've said a lot of things which were much harsher than that to perfect strangers, for no reason at all other than that I thought it would be funny to be mean.

Okay. Getting clearer and clearer: I have a problem. It's especially a problem if I want millions of people to love me.

Up until that other post a couple of days ago I tended to agree with my Mom's opinion of me: that I'm a sensitive angel and a misunderstood genius. Can't really go 100% with that assessment any more. (Thinking about this reminded me of Marge Simpson looking at each member of her family in turn and saying what she admired about them, and coming to Bart, and saying: "I like Bart's... [long pause] ...I like Bart.") Whaddayagonnado, she's my Mom. I love you, Mom. But if I continue in this new habit of looking mercilessly at myself, maybe I can become a little less of an unbearable asshole. And maybe that will lead to some good changes in my life. I would like a whole bunch of good changes in my life, please.

One thing I'm not going to do is to start lying, and saying positive things I don't mean. For example: I stand by what I said about movement atheists/New Atheists not being the Biblical scholars they claim to be. It may be a harsh truth, but it's the truth. But maybe I can change the way I phrase things, change my choice of words. Maybe in some situations, for example, "I call bullshit" is a less constructive choice of words than, oh, I don't know... "I think we may have been living with an illusion here." I will give all of this some serious thought.

As always, I wonder how many Facebook groups I've been banned from today.

Victor Stenger Is A New Atheist, And I'm Still Not

When I first learned back in 2010 that there was a group called the New Atheists who were very vocally critical of religion and its interference with reason, I at first assumed I was one. And I suppose that's a judgement call, and that I could be regarded as a New Atheist. But I no longer consider myself to be one. I'm as critical of religion as I ever was, but the thing is, I also find myself butting heads with New Atheists on a regular basis, and also, and perhaps this is the very crux of this particular biscuit: I don't see New Atheists criticizing each other. I was going to say: "I don't see New Atheists criticizing each other very much," but the thing is, I don't see it at all.

Victor Stenger calls himself a New Atheist. I wasn't entirely clear about that until this article of his. I agree with most of what Stenger says in this new article. Like him I see a basic conflict between religion and science. (I see this conflict as becoming clearer and sharper as science develops, and as our understanding of religion develops, based on the study of history and other things which in other languages are called sciences but which in English are not, which is unfortunate, and seems to have interfered with some English-speaking scientists' understanding of those other disciplines.) I agree with Stenger that science's quarrel is not just with religious fundamentalism, but with religious "moderates" as well. The point of departure of the "moderates" are the same holy texts read by the fundies, the "moderates" refuse to cease according those texts an importance above that of other texts, they still engage in magical thinking, in short: the distance between the "moderates" and the fundamentalists is not nearly as great as the "moderates" would have you believe. I can't keep myself from constantly underlining this point by always putting quotation marks around the word "moderates."

So far I seem just like a New Atheist, and it's not surprising that for a while I thought I was one.

It seems that very many of the New Atheists are scientists, in the narrow English definition of science as pure natural science. And science lives and breathes on debate and self-criticism and the constant modification and refinement of its views in light of new information. So do other disciplines, but the New Atheists don't seem to criticize each others' statements about religion and society and history and archaeology. It's ironic, and it's very unfortunate: when these scientists, the New Atheists, take on religion, their approach is quite unscientific. History and archaeology have peer review and debate just as much as biology does, but it seems as if this would be news to the New Atheists. In a few recent Wrong Monkey blog posts I've discussed an example of this, the statement by the big Mac Daddy of New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, that the Old Testament authors were "Bronze-Age goat herders," when in fact Hebrew did not begin to be written until the Iron Age, the Old Testament was written by city dwellers such as Temple scribes, herdsmen at the time tended to be illiterate, and those rural Israelites who did tend herds raised many more sheep than goats. If Dawkins had made such a thoroughly-mistaken statement about biology, his colleagues would've been all over it instantly, and quite soon, whether good-naturedly or shame-facedly, he would have been compelled to issue a public retraction for the sake of his professional reputation.

But what criticism of Dawkins' "Bronze-Age goat herders" meme there has been has come from outside of the New Atheist community. Which has led some New Atheists to declare that "no one at all" has any problem with it. On the contrary, it has become a tremendously popular meme among New Atheists. Astonishingly, it's repeated by many people who don't seem to care whether it's accurate or not -- it expresses contempt for the Bible, that's the main thing. It also expresses contempt for accuracy in historical statements, and, astonishingly, New Atheists are simply not calling each other on that.

Or on any statement of opposition to religion, it seems. Here are a couple of examples culled from the comments on Stenger's article. Examples of stupid rash statements made by New Atheists and deemed by other New Atheists not to require challenge or criticism;

"Religion isn't just a collection of yokels incapable of understanding current scientific theory. It is a system of social incapacitation, perpetuated by the worst amognst us, made efficient over a very long period of time undeserving of your respect. "

You're undeserving of my respect, Sparky! Religion currently comprises billions of people. Not all of those billions beling to the worst among us, nor are all of the worst among us religious. "Incapacitation" does not describe all of what religion is. The world simply isn't that black-and-white. Sorry to be the one to break it to you, Bubba, but any time you've got a group of billions-with-a-b of people, some of what some of them are doing some of the time is going to be good.

"The single quote: 'Ignorance is Bliss' covers the entire article. People are afraid, so they take comfort in their willful ignorance. It's as simple as that."

Your worldview is as simple as that. Mine's not.

I didn't have to look long or far to find those statements. But New Atheists criticizing such simpleminded statements made by other atheists? That's as rare as a New Atheist challenging Dawkins' "Bronze-Age goat herders" meme. (Well. I suppose I shouldn't call something rare if it's possible that it's completely nonexistent.) And a group which doesn't keep itself honest and call each other out on such a basic level of crude clueless statements made on behalf on the group is a group of ignorant fanatics. When a group is too busy criticizing their enemy to criticize itself at all, it greatly diminishes whatever effect its legitimate criticisms might have had. With a complete lack of self-criticism, the group will eventually wither away and disappear, or so one certainly hopes, and good riddance and the sooner the better.

So, is Stenger himself guilty of any of these clueless whoppers, putting them out there to the approval of the in-group, while the group of others who are listening at all keeps shrinking? Yes, he is, as a matter of fact he wrote one in this very article:

"From its very beginning in prehistory, religion has been a tool used by those in power to retain that power and keep the masses in line."

Oh man, where do I start? Well, for one thing, nobody knows when religion began. For another, we know very little about how religion functioned tens of thousands of years ago. At this point, the best we can do is guess -- not only about the nature of religion at that time, but about any of the power relationships within human society. But Stenger's statement is a nice black-and-white, 100%-anti-religion gross oversimplification of the kind New Atheists love. They won't criticize it, they won't pay attention to those of us who will. They live in a bubble.

Burst Your Bubbles

Many Leftists seem to do nothing -- or at least nothing publicly -- but dispute teeny-tiny points of theory with other Leftists, points which hardly add up to a flea-fart. They've been living in Leftist bubbles. As opposed to, oh, say, observing capitalists and conservatives, their ostensible opponents, for years they've hardly ever heard or read a word which wasn't spoken or written by other Leftists, many of whom have been living in similar bubbles. The reason I can't find the connection between what they say and McConnell or Merkel is because there is no connection. They'd say: Mitch who? Angela who? and snarl at me for interrupting their tirade against what they assert is a laughably inconsistent description of the deconstructionist challenge to synoptic analysis brought forth by another inhabitant of their bubble. What smart grid? What demonstrations? What brown coal? Fracking, what's that? What minimum wage? Where was I? Now, as LaCapra has asserted...

There's a Leftist blog whose only theme seems to be that a certain Leftist publishing house is corrupt and capitalist. The accusation is contained in the name of the blog. I wonder whether the publisher did anything to anger the blogger besides refuse to publish his or her work.

It's not just Leftists who inhabit bubbles, of course, although it was a look around the Leftist blogosphere which got me thinking about bubbles over the course of the past few days. And of course not all Leftists are bubble-dwellers: some observe non-Leftists, and get out of doors now and then and look around and what have you -- which of course makes them targets of hasty and horrified dismissal by the bubble-dwellers, who have no idea what they're talking about. (What agrarian uprising?) I lived in New York City for a few years, and was struck by the number of people I found who very rarely went more than two or three blocks away from their homes -- with the exception in some cases of a subway ride to and from work, but in other cases their jobs were within the three-block-square bubble as well. I rarely left the city, which you might think of as bubble-dwelling as well, but I roamed all over that city, finding fascinating things all over and being appalled at the thought of living there and never wanting to roam more than three blocks from home.

And of course there are all sorts of Internet bubbles: people who log time on one social-network site or among the comments of one news outlet or on a forum or discussion group as if it were a full-time job. I've done a little bit of that -- and fled a few such sites when I saw what I was doing.

A news-and-analysis TV show on which the host will every day ask several questions of the "Don't you agree that [long involved assertion] ?" format, asked of a small group of regular guests chosen because they will reliably almost always, in fact, agree -- that's a bubble. And it's one-half to three-quarters or more of a lot of news-and-analysis shows, even some of the better ones. And it's boring, even if I agree. An hour's worth of that with six people all agreeing could be done much more efficiently and usefully, in my opinion, by the host by him- or herself in about 5 minutes -- 5 minutes, I could agree or disagree, or even -- imagine such a thing! -- be uncertain and induced to ponder, while I get on with whatever's next.

But it wouldn't satisfy the craving for the bubble, the neighborhood, the cadre, the party within the party, the tribe.