This man should just admit that he wants to kill women

I apologize for scaring you all with that dour, nasty visage. That’s Keith Kidwell, a North Carolina state legislator, looking like a giant angry cockroach wearing a skin suit, but I know I shouldn’t pick on his looks. Maybe he’s just sour because he recently lost his primary race, so he’s about to be ousted from the legislature. In revenge, though, he just dropped a stinky dooky on North Carolina, House Bill H1232, which has the absurd title AN ACT TO AMEND THE NORTH CAROLINA CONSTITUTION TO DECLARE THAT A DISTINCT AND SEPARATE HUMAN LIFE BEGINS AT THE MOMENT OF FERTILIZATION AND SHALL BE HELD INVIOLATE AS AN INDIVIDUAL PERSON AND PROTECTED BY THE LAWS OF THIS STATE FROM THE MOMENT OF FERTILIZATION UNTIL NATURAL DEATH, SO LONG AS THAT PERSON IS NOT CONVICTED OF A CAPITAL OFFENSE. Let’s take a look at this bill which starts out stupid and bad and quickly evolves into something evil and wicked.

It is a matter of indisputable scientific fact that a distinct and separate human life begins at the moment of fertilization.

This is a bill motivated by traditional, conservative, and religious ideology, so it’s dishonest and hypocritical to claim it’s about indisputable scientific fact. It’s a fact that the conceptus is human, in the broadest possible sense of the word; it’s not an oppossum or a grasshopper. It is not a fact that a conceptus represents a full human life. My right pinky finger is definitely human, but that does not imply it is an autonomous person who must be protected independent of my whole self. This is a common gambit played by the anti-abortion fanatics, equating a cell with the totality of the multicellular being. A zygote, a blastula, a gastrula, a neurula, a pharyngula are all a long way from being a person.

I wish there was a way to educate people on the complexity of development — we are the product of a whole series of radical changes in our morphology, yet there are always these ignorant fools who want to reduce our existence to an array of black-and-white binary changes. You are either a full human or are non-existent. You are a man or a woman, no other options are possible. All life must be flattened to one thing or another. This is a familiar strategem by the life-begins-at-conception absolutists, and this reductionism is not an indisputable scientific fact, it’s an ideological bias.

It’s about to get much worse. Remember from the title of this bill that the right to life only applies to those that are NOT CONVICTED OF A CAPITAL OFFENSE. This is a curious loophole because the bill is trying to define abortion as a capital offense. The state must protect the life of its citizens…

As such, that new human life is recognized by the State as an individual person, entitled to the protection of the laws of this State from the moment of fertilization until the moment of natural death.

…EXCEPT…

Any person who willfully seeks to destroy the life of another person, by any means, at any stage of life, or succeeds in doing so, shall be held accountable for attempted murder or for first degree murder, respectively. Any person has the right to defend his or her own life or the life of another person, even by the use of deadly force if necessary, from willful destruction by another person.

The effect of this law is that if a woman seeks to get an abortion, she is guilty of attempted murder. If she gets an abortion, she is a murderer. And any person has the right to defend the conceptus with deadly force, which doesn’t make a lot of sense — killing the person trying to get an abortion kills the fetus, too, making you a murderer under this law, on top of being guilty of killing the mother. That last point doesn’t really matter, since the woman doesn’t count as a protected member of society.

Why not just call this law one that declares open season on pregnant women? This is a law that makes murdering abortion doctors a right, which would have been a useful justification for the guy that murdered George Tiller.

I hope that H1232 fails and makes Keith Kidwell’s face look even more nasty and mean. One promising sign is that he had an initial co-sponsor to the bill, Ben Moss, who has since withdrawn his support after considering the implications of a bill that strips the right to live from women who had an abortion, and empowers any citizen who wants to go harlot-hunting.

There will be more stupid laws trying to declare a zygote as a complete adult human being. They’ve been doing this for years.

How would a future anthropologist interpret the graveyard of Everest?

A few days ago, I got sucked into a weird vortex of a YouTube category. I watched ONE (1) video about climbing Mt Everest, and then of course the algorithm started feeding me more and more Everest videos, specifically Everest Disaster videos, and wouldn’t stop. I’m currently going cold turkey on anything about mountain climbing, rejecting every video the system offers me, to try and break the cycle. I’ll probably be offered videos about Everest until I’m 900 years old.

But I did learn a few things, and one of the reasons I kept watching them was a sense of horror. Sure, there were skilled mountaineers who trained and trained and brought deep physical and mental abilities to the mountain, and I have to respect that. Everest has become a carnival attraction for “influencers” and business people who just want the glory of being able to say they climbed the tallest mountain. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to book sherpas to lead them on a grueling march, and to probably carry them to the top and back down again, all so they can gloat on Instagram.

And many of them die for this dubious distinction.

Three out of every 10 expeditions to Annapurna result in a casualty. That rate is slightly lower for Kangchenjunga (29.1%) and lower still for K2 (22.9%). Everest only comes in at sixth place, with a casualty rate of 14.1%.

Of course, that rate is so much lower because so many more people are tempted to climb Everest. Each one, no doubt, a highly motivated individual.

They’re dying, and for what? There are lines, as if this is a Disneyland ride. They stack up on guide ropes, planted by the long-suffering sherpas, and may have to stand and shuffle for hours as the mob is led up, one by one, to the summit. It’s insane.

The whole thing is an extreme test of physiological endurance…and money. They climb above the “death zone,” so called because no human being can survive at such low oxygen concentrations for long. You enter the “death zone,” and you start inevitably dying slowly (or quickly), and what you have to do is get to the summit and down as rapidly as you can, so you can get back down to the altitude where the atmospheric pressure is high enough that your body can repair itself after its exposure to lethal deficiencies of air. Did I already say it’s insane? It’s madness.

People die in this vain endeavor, and their bodies get left on the mountain.

Some of the frozen, dessicated bodies are used as landmarks.

Green Boots, arguably the most famous body on Everest, has been identified as Tsewang Paljor, Head Constable of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), though some think it might be his colleague, Lance Naik (i.e. Lance Corporal) Dorje Morup. Both were members of a three-man ITBP climbing party that perished in the infamous blizzard of May 1996, which also took the lives of five other mountaineers.
…
Some bodies are known landmarks, as Green Boots used to be: “The German” on the second step of the north face route, the “Saluting Man” near the south summit, the “Icefall Body”, in the Khumbu glacier field, and “Sleeping Beauty” on the southeast ridge, until she too was removed from view in 2007.

What a fate. And it’s all in service to a lethal tourism industry, where people are killing themselves to expose themselves to a physical challenge. I’m sorry, but if you tell me you climbed Everest, I’m not going to be impressed — I might just feel pity for your deluded ambitions.

One of the consequences of this wasteful enterprise is a mountain littered with dead bodies, ropes, colorful nylon tents, and stacks of empty oxygen bottles. More people are willing to risk their lives for a photo op than are willing to risk their lives to clean up the horrible mess of debris they leave behind.

That did get me wondering, though. Ötzi was a wonderful discovery of a 5,000 year old corpse of a Copper Age man, with artifacts of his time, that has stirred up a lot of curiosity about what he was doing in the Alps, how he died, how was all his gear used. Why was he climbing those mountains? I’m wondering how future anthropologists in 7000 CE would feel on discovering this treasure trove of a 21st century high-altitude garbage dump/graveyard, and what questions they might ask. Why were all these people in bright nylon clothing up there at 6-8000 meters anyway?

I’d just say they were glory-seeking idiots.

What is music anyway?

Yesterday, I stumbled across this duo, Angine de Poitrine, and they scrambled my brain. I was listening to this weird microtonal math rock played by a couple of people in goofy polka dot costumes. Canadians are a strange people.

Just look at the frets on this guy’s bass. It took a while for my nervous system to rewire itself to recognize this as music, but then I couldn’t listen to anything else for a while.

Let’s all forget that Gad Saad exists

The other day, while I was browsing, I was interrupted by an ad for PragerU. I despise PragerU, the totally fake university that specializes in fake history and fake science, led by that smarmy old fraud, Dennis Prager. What caught my ear, though, is that this ad featured Gad Saad desperately pushing his new book, Suicidal Empathy.

I have not read the book. I will never read the book. Gad Saad is a pathetic figure, a pick-me guy for the right wing, who is a professor of marketing who rides the evolutionary psychology bandwagon. I’ve written about him a few times before, in particular his efforts to deny the existence of toxic masculinity while simultaneously exemplifying the attitudes and stereotypes that represent toxicity. Like any good evo psych wanker, he justifies treating women poorly by mentioning animals with aggressive, violent mating strategies, as if they apply to us.

Even Larry Moran, who doesn’t normally dip into culture war issues, ripped Gad Saad a new one. Saad is just a sad embarrassment of a man who desperately wants to be legitimized by more successful evo-psych grifters, but doesn’t quite have the smarts to assemble a coherent, logical argument.

I got the gist of his thesis from the ad. He’s trying to thread a needle here: he can’t quite say that empathy is bad, because he wants you to empathize with him, but at the same time he wants you to know that the empathy practiced by Leftists is undeniably evil and wicked. Empathy that leads you to regard Muslims as human beings is “suicidal,” after all. And don’t get him started on women and “effeminate” men!

The book is reviewed in Jacobin, and the review confirms everything I’d expect of Saad.

For those of you who don’t know who he is — likely a larger group than he’d be willing to admit — Saad is a Canadian professor at Concordia University who has spent the last few years as a major figure in anti-woke online spaces. Long regarded as a poor man’s Jordan Peterson, Saad has since grown in stature through his indomitable quest to kiss every square inch of Elon Musk’s ass. Elon has returned the favor by beating the drum for Saad’s ideas through a manic series of Tweets, frenetic even by his standards.

Reviews of Saad’s recent book, even by the ideologically sympathetic, suggest even his natural fan base is tuning out. Center-right outlet Quillette resented Saad’s “narcissistic ramblings,” while a scathing review in UnHerd described Suicidal Empathy as peddling “fake science” and relying “on a relentless drumbeat of fear-mongering regarding rape and crime.” That even his ideological friends are tiring of this shtick is a testament to how mind-numbingly boring Suicidal Empathy is.

Uh-oh–when an evolutionary psychologist loses the affection of Quillette, you know he’s on the way out. He relies on caricatures of left wing perspectives that he exaggerates into absurdity, so it’s no surprise that his arguments fall apart, even if you sympathize with his views. He has to distort everything to make his case.

Nominally the book is about the rise of “suicidal empathy.” Undeniably a catchy neologism, Saad defines suicidal empathy as a “dysregulation of an otherwise noble virtue.” While he acknowledges that empathy is valuable in some contexts, in the hands of woke progressives it has become an existentially damaging force. The “suicidally empathetic person feels guilty that they were born in the West, whereas others were not so fortunate. They feel guilty that they were born with white skin and hence suffer from ‘Dermatological Original Sin.’ By committing Civilization Seppuku, they can demonstrate their noble virtues as a form of pious self-hatred.”

This dysfunctional empathy, often emotionally adjacent to liberal narcissism via the drive to applaud oneself as more noble and altruistic, is at the root of virtually every progressive stance ever taken. For Saad, “epistemological empathy” is invoked in academia to silence those committed to a “deontological” quest for the truth. Toleration for Muslims is a form of “Islamophilic empathy.” Empathy for criminals leads us to care “more about the rights of rapists and felons than their victims.” Climate activism is “misguided empathy” from those who want to “protect Mother Earth from being raped by capitalism.” Socialism itself — which Saad points out is preferred by women, a point against it — is rooted in “misguided empathy.”

He’s playing a simple-minded game. If you don’t think black people should be discriminated against for the color of the skin, well, that must mean you hate and are ashamed of white people. If you think we should protect ecologies from raging industrialism, by golly, you really hate capitalism. And if you like socialism, you’re a woman, you pussy.

Now you can understand why I won’t read his book. The banality is exhausting. I’ve seen a few of his videos and read a few of his articles, and know that he’s simply a knee-jerk bigot. Hard pass.

To be fair, though, I should at least quote some of Gad Saad’s own words.

In other words, women are more likely than men to violate the deontological principles that define academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the pursuit and defense of truth, in the service of a consequentialist ethos rooted in misguided empathy. The rapid feminization of academia has been astonishing to watch. I have recently attended departmental meetings where it was unclear to me that it was not a kindergarten classroom in terms of the incessant focus on emotional safety and empathetic understanding.

Does that sound like a man anyone, especially any woman, would want to spend 5 minutes in conversation with? Does he even sound like he’s aware of the bigotry implicit in his words?

I’ve been in many departmental meetings, and yes, the safety and well-being of our students comes up fairly often — because it matters. If you were a student, would you want a professor who rolls his eyes at the thought of trying to understand you?

It’s going to be a boring election season in Minnesota

The state conventions have put up their choices for governor, since Walz has announced that he won’t be running.

On the Democratic side, we’ll have Amy Klobuchar, the current senator. I can’t get excited about her — she’s your standard inoffensive middle-of-the-road Democrat, a reliable candidate with lots of money behind her. I’ll almost certainly vote for her, with no enthusiasm.

The Republican side is trying to be exciting, but just comes off as weird. Of course Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy, was nattering around the edges, talking a big game, but no way were our Republicans going to get that weird — he lost the nomination, but don’t worry, you know he’s going to continue to flush his money away in a quixotic campaign.

The actual Republican nominee is…Kendall Qualls. You’ve never heard of him. He pops up here now and then, runs for an office, fails, and then we all forget him until the next election. His claim to fame is that he is a healthcare executive. They might as well have nominated Satan for all the popularity he’d have.

Satan might have been a better choice, since the Republicans also announced their commitment to outright evil.

The convention day began at 9 a.m. with a prayer from Father Richard Kunst of Duluth that the adopted platform of the party “promotes true, good, conservative values, fiscally and socially,” followed by the Pledge of Allegiance.

A delegate then called for a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020 and is in prison. State Rep. Danny Nadeau, R-Rogers, led a 10-second moment of silence after taking an informal vote.

Monday was the sixth anniversary of Floyd’s death.

And then after hailing Derek Chauvin, they all met their Grindr dates and went off to a black mass, where they drank the blood of poor children.

I wonder what happened to the coward who attacked Jey?

Jey McCreight is an old friend I’ve known since they were a an undergraduate studying biology in Indiana. I’ve been happy to see their accomplishments over the years: grad school, a post-doc, landing a job at 23andMe as a genomics expert. They were also an activist in the atheist movement — Jey was one of the minds behind Atheism+, and we all know how well that effort to incorporate more humanism into atheism went. Now they are still an activist, founding the organization BeyondXandY arguing that biology is nonbinary and that people are more than their chromosomes. Jey clearly is bold and optimistic enough to take on noble causes in spite of all the haters, and doing the right thing as a trans man has got to be one of the braver things they have done.

Last month, this happened:

McCreight said they had been advertising the event with flyers across the city that included their photo and had also appeared in the local LGBTQ+ publication, Windy City Times. They assume the event’s publicity is how the attacker recognized them.

“I’m telling this story now because I’m finally in a place where I can talk about it without really freaking out badly,” McCreight said, explaining that there are still a lot of gaps in their memory of that night, but they think they were walking home alone from getting food.

The attacker asked if they were McCreight, and McCreight cheerfully confirmed, assuming it might be someone who appreciated their work.

“He very quickly pushed me to the ground and started repeatedly punching me in the eye,” McCreight said. “Afterward, I thought he had maybe hit me with a brick or something because it was so painful. I had never been beat up before in my life.”

McCreight said the attacker also used a pocket knife to cut them all over their body, but not deep enough to leave permanent damage.

“It was very scary. He even tried to strangle me briefly with something that thankfully didn’t work well and just kind of left an abrasion on my neck.”

McCreight said they don’t remember how they got away or if the person eventually just let them go. But somehow, they got home. It took them over a day to realize they needed an ambulance because they were in such a daze.

But on May 1, McCreight recounted, they realized they needed help. An ambulance took them to Chicago’s Advocate Health Center, where they said they received excellent care, which included emergency surgery on their eye. After that, it took weeks for their vision to return to normal.

“I think it’s really important for people to know that this is the reality of being trans in the United States,” they said. “I’m a non-violent nerdy cat guy who likes talking about science and wants to be the next Bill Nye, and because of that, someone basically tried to kill me or at least beat me up bad enough to scare me into silence.”

They said for a little bit, they considered giving up their public-facing activism in the wake of the attack. But then, hospital staff of all kinds – from doctors to nurses to the people bringing them meals – all learned about McCreight’s work and told them to keep going.

“They all told me not to give up on my dream.”

Horrifying. That some guy would just turn and attack a friendly, nerdy fellow walking down the street because they are trans is appalling. Listen to them telling their own story, and support BeyondXandY.

I have been replaced

I’m a bit frustrated — this stupid knee doesn’t allow me to walk on rough ground. I can handle floors and sidewalks, but this part of my yard where Mary has been planting new berry bushes is mostly inaccessible to me. Yesterday, Mary tells me she has spotted some interesting new spiders on the leaves. Can I come look? Not without risking a fall.

It would be a bit much for me to hand her my Canon D8 with the 100mm macro lens, so instead I gave her a clip-on magnifying lens for her iPhone, which she was already comfortable using, and she went off into No Man’s Land and got a bunch of very nice photos of these tiny (less than 3mm) guys, and left me feeling useless.

Anyway , what she had found was a lot of meshweavers, small spiders that put down sheet webs, which they use to catch smaller prey, like aphids and leafhoppers. Meshweavers are a gardener’s friend, so it’s good to see them hard at work protecting our raspberries. This is a dwarf spider, also called a money spider:

And this is a pair of dimorphic meshweavers. One species, but males and females look dramatically different.

Clearly, it’s time for me to hang up my pretense of being an arachnologist and teach Mary how to use the D8. I’ll just park myself in a rocking chair on the deck and watch her have all the fun.