Too true

Michelle Goldberg elegantly slams the pundits.

In November, several outright Nazis and white supremacists will appear on Republican ballot lines. Arthur Jones, a founder of a neo-Nazi group called the America First Committee, managed to become the Republican nominee for Congress in the heavily Democratic Third District in Illinois. The Republican candidate in California’s 11th District, John Fitzgerald, is running on a platform of Holocaust denial. Russell Walker, a Republican statehouse candidate in North Carolina, has said that Jews descend from Satan and that God is a “white supremacist.”

Corey Stewart, Virginia’s Republican Senate nominee, is a neo-Confederate who pals around with racists, including one of the organizers of the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last year. The longtime Iowa Republican representative Steve King has moved from standard-issue nativist crank to full-on white nationalist; he recently retweeted a neo-Nazi and then refused to delete the tweet, saying, “It’s the message, not the messenger.”

Clearly, the time has come for a serious national conversation. And so political insiders across the land are asking: Has the Democratic Party become too extreme?

We do not have a liberal party in this country. We have a conservative party, the Democrats, and a far-right looney-tunes fascist party, the Republicans. I am not going to pay any attention to the nattering nitwits who want to play Liebermanesque games and express shock that people don’t want the Democratic party to drift farther to the right, to cater to the assholes.

It’s time to swing back to reason.

40% of Americans don’t believe Native people exist?!?

That’s one of the results of a report on American perspectives on native peoples. You know, if we’re going to be upset that some people don’t understand that the earth is older than 6000 years, we ought to be even more outraged at this level of ignorance — an ignorance that dehumanizes.

The study found that largest barrier to public sympathy for Native rights was “the invisibility and erasure of Native Americans in all aspects of modern U.S. society.” Representation of contemporary Native Americans was found to be almost completely absent from K-12 education, pop culture, news media, and politics. Two-thirds of respondents said they don’t know a single Native person. Only 13 percent of state history curriculum standards about Native Americans cover events after the year 1900. For the average U.S. citizen, the main exposure to contemporary Native Americans is through media and pop culture. Unfortunately, contemporary Native Americans are almost completely absent from mainstream news media and pop culture, and “where narratives about Native Americans do exist, they are primarily deficit based and guided by misperceptions, assumptions and stereotypes,” says the report.

Crystal Echo Hawk (Pawnee), co-project leader of Reclaiming Native Truth, said that in the focus groups, “the only references [to Native Americans] that we continuously heard as people were struggling to make a connection were Dances with Wolves and Parks and Recreation. So these stereotypes and caricatures are really forming perceptions of Native people.”

The sheer invisibility of Native people leads to some very warped perspectives about contemporary Native life. Forty percent of respondents did not think that Native people still exist. While 59 percent agree that “the United States is guilty of committing genocide against Native Americans,” only 36 percent agree that Native Americans experience significant discrimination today — meaning nearly two-thirds of the public perceive Native Americans as experiencing little to no oppression or structural racism.

I guess that might go a ways to explaining another phenomenon, that so many Indian women disappear, presumed murdered, every year, and the data is ignored and neglected.

Spend time in Indian Country and you’ll hear this story over and over: A niece, a daughter or a cousin who was taken quickly and violently from this world.

As many as 300 indigenous women go missing or are killed under suspicious circumstances every year in Canada and the U.S., but the exact number is unknown because the Federal Bureau of Investigation isn’t really tracking the numbers.

If they didn’t exist in the first place, they can’t disappear, right?

Do I really want to know “Who Is America?“

I watched two episodes of Sacha Baron Cohen’s show, Who is America? the other day. It made me feel icky and uncomfortable, and I don’t know if I’ll watch it anymore.

The problem for me is that he’s really good at making people expose who they really are, and when the wrong kinds of people drop their masks, you discover how ugly human beings can actually be. It’s distressing. It’s like being Roddy Piper in They Live, discovering the glasses that allow you to see the horrible reality behind the illusion. It’s also interesting because you discover that some people are actually who they present themselves to be, or at least, are much better at keeping the mask on (Congressman Matt Gaetz, for instance, is a gun nut, but he managed to sidestep saying anything that made him look stupid. We should worry about him — he might be a bit smarter than your average Republican).

The Baron Cohen ploy didn’t work on two relatively intelligent, liberal people he tried to trick: Bernie Sanders and Ted Koppel. Sanders just looked exasperated and impatient (but that’s how he always looks), and Koppel tried to pay respectful attention before giving up and ending the interview. You can’t con someone into being someone he’s not, I guess, and a man playing a lunatic right-winger isn’t going to tempt them. One wonders if there is a role outside of Baron Cohen’s range that could trip them up.

But the real horrors are the people who cheerfully and willingly go along with his schtick, especially since blithe brutal strongman Erran Morad seems to be most effective. Trent Lott, Larry Pratt, Dana Rohrabacher, Joe Wilson, Joe Walsh, and Dick Cheney were obliging, and seemed to have no hesitation about endorsing torture or arming toddlers. That’s who they are. It took little prompting to trigger them to sign on to an evil agenda.

Worst was Georgia state representative Jason Spencer, who was eager to bare his buttocks and run around screaming racist and homophobic epithets with only a little direction. He has now resigned. His excuse was revealing.

“Sacha Baron Cohen and his associates took advantage of my paralyzing fear that my family would be attacked,” Spencer said, adding that the techniques he demonstrated were meant to deter “what I believed was an inevitable attack.”

A Republican motivated by baseless, foolish fears. Who would have thought it? It’s not just fear, it’s ignorance, because he was willing to believe that an Islamic terrorist with a gun would be so terrified of being turned “homo” if he was touched by Spencer’s butt that he’d throw his gun away and flee. That excuse is a non-excuse. It’s an admission that bigotry is built into his core assumptions about the world. It’s further reason that he shouldn’t have run for office in the first place.

Of course, he got elected, which tells you much about the electorate that I didn’t want to know. That’s also exposed in the segment where Baron Cohen visits Kingman, Arizona. He plays a rather clueless, wimpy, liberal developer who wants to build a $385 million mosque in the town, at a kind of town hall meeting (I do wonder how he recruited attendees, though — they don’t seem entirely representative. Or if they are, I’m even more horrified.) This leads to all kinds of angry words and bigoted rhetoric — not only do they hate Muslims, who are all terrorists, but they’re afraid it will attract black people, who aren’t welcome there. The townsfolk are quite willing to shout all kinds of racist things when angry.

Which is why I’m not exactly a fan of the show. Maybe it’s an education we need, to learn how many of our fellow Americans are both dumb as a stick and full of hate, but I don’t have to like it. Aren’t I cynical enough yet? This show keeps telling me no, that I have to dive deeper into the bleak darkness.

What’s in the box, Gwyneth?

It’s a mysterious cylinder with a USB port and a bluetooth transmitter. Guess what it is!

It’s the Elvie Trainer from Goop! You’re supposed to slide it up your hoo-hah and do your kegels while an app on your phone reports on your strength and frequency. It costs $200.

You know, it’s not a terrible idea, unlike most of what sloshes around on Goop. It says it’s made of “100% waterproof medical grade silicone”, so it’s probably safe, if you keep it clean. Strengthening your pelvic floor is probably a good idea, and having an overpriced widget that gives you feedback might be useful.

I am entertained by the idea of broadcasting from your vagina, though. It’s too bad there isn’t an equivalent for vagina-less people, though, because kegels are a good exercise for men, too. Wait, now I’ve got an idea for a perineal clamp with a force sensor that records the tension in your taint, and works for all sexes. Call me, Gwyneth, I wanna get rich.

We need a paleotheology department to research this

I hate to admit it, but this theory actually makes a kind of sense to me.

Challenging long-held views on the origins of divinity, biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, presented findings Thursday that confirm God, the Almighty Creator of the Universe, evolved from an ancient chimpanzee deity.

The recently discovered sacred ancestor, a divine chimp species scientists have named Pan sanctorum, reportedly gave rise over millions of years to the Lord Our God, Maker of Heaven and Earth.

“Although perhaps not obvious at first glance, there are actually overwhelming similarities between the Supreme Being of today and this early primate deity who preceded Him,” said Dr. Richard Kamen, a leading biologist who also heads Berkeley’s paleotheology department. “The holy chimp moved around on all fours, but its descendants eventually began walking upright to expend less energy while foraging across the infinite reaches of the universe. This of course led to the bipedalism of modern-day God.”

Do we really need 4500 words about an unrepentant pedophile?

This profile of W. French Anderson really needs some editing. Lots of editing. It’s about 4500 words long, and most of it is self-serviing puffery — we learn how highly he thinks of himself, how tough he is, that he recently aced his driving test, how he won a high school debate in 1951, and how he did some ambitious science in the 80s and 90s, but he’s unimpressed by this CRISPR stuff. The arrogance just oozes through the page, which I guess is one virtue of the article, but still it is tediously long. If I were editing it, I’d cut it down to less than 250 words. Here are the salient words; the rest is just noise.

But in July 2006, Anderson was convicted of three counts of lewd acts on a child and one count of continuous sexual abuse, including fondling her genitals. The sexual assaults started in 1997 when the girl was 10 and Anderson was 60, prosecutors said, and lasted until 2001 — abuse that his victim testified in court caused her “pain that led me to cut my own body and contemplate suicide.” Her mother ran Anderson’s lab, and he had mentored the child academically and in karate.

Before sentencing Anderson to 14 years in prison, Judge Michael Pastor said he had caused the girl “incalculable” emotional damage: “Because of intellectual arrogance, he persisted and he got away with as much as he could.”

…

It was not only the audiotape but also emails that helped convict Anderson. In response to the girl’s emailed request for an apology, for instance, he wrote that he “can understand what would drive a person to suicide. For me, a powerful 9-mm bullet through the head would be the way to go” and “just in case, I have bought the ammunition.” In another email, he wrote that he “came to the sad conclusion that there must be a very bad part of me that, now that I have recognized it, has to be permanently suppressed.”

OK, actually we could have ended it with the first paragraph. It’s enough. I’m indulging the writer.

Instead of hearing all that glurge about W. French Anderson’s grand scientific dreams stunted by his ten years in prison, the real story ought to have been about the cost and loss of opportunity to his victim, and to his victim’s mother, who was sufficiently qualified scientifically to run his lab. There’s the real loss to science, not the absence of an egotistical pedophile.

But we don’t hear their story, because they refused to be interviewed for this article. That ought to have told the author and her editors that maybe this is a story they should have shredded. W. French Anderson has had his decades in the spotlight. It’s past time to let him go.

Wanna see Jesus?

A caller to the Atheist Experience gives the recipe (skip ahead to 17:20 to hear his explanation). Tracie transcribed the formula and is asking for volunteers.

The subject must do the following:

1. State, “Jesus Christ, if you’re real, come show me that you’re real.”

2. Abstain (again, for entertainment purposes, not barring you from work or necessary interactions) from internet, TV, movies, music, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, smoking, sex/masturbation/any form of sexual pleasure, for a period of 7 days.

Note: You are not required to fast, and are discouraged from doing so.

Bonus: the guy claims that seeing Jesus corrected his vision. Better than Lasik!

Warning: the guy goes on and on about his phantasmagorical hallucinations at tedious length, and doesn’t seem to understand how evidence works.

Well, this movie might be fun

I’ve long had a thing for Aquaman, he was my favorite comic book superhero when I was growing up. If you’d asked me then what superpower I wanted, it was none of that boring stuff like flying or super-strength — breathing underwater and talking to fish sounded awesome. So now out of the shambles of the DC superhero franchise comes a new Aquaman movie — I hope it’s more along the lines of Wonder Woman than the Bat-gloom and Super-morose po-faced stuff they’ve been turning out lately.

Are you rich? Get it out of your head that it’s because you’re better than the rest of us

I’ve run into this circular argument often; it’s painfully in common in Libertarian circles. It’s the idea that being rich is proof of one’s superiority.

The image of the world as an arena of cut-throat competition is seductive. Any trust-fund aristocrat can chuckle about the unpitying law of the jungle and feel like a raw, scrappy survivor. At this point, the richest 1 percent of the American population controls roughly double the wealth in this country that the bottom 90 percent of the population does. If this nation’s staggering economic inequality is just an example of natural selection, then our dysfunctional distribution of wealth is simply proof that all is right with the world. The myth of economic Darwinism justifies the gutting of the American middle class – even as it’s espoused by a GOP that claims not to believe in Darwinism itself.

The article mainly talks about the many alternatives to natural selection, and about how selection can be destructive, not always a benefit. It doesn’t follow up on the most obvious counter to the trust-fund aristocrat’s argument. Does anyone really believe the extremely rich earned their wealth? Is Jeff Bezos actually superior, with greater intelligence and cunning and discipline, than everyone else in the country? It should be clear that while yes, it does require ability to follow through and become a billionaire, these people are beneficiaries of luck, as well, and that they’ve followed a path that gives them rewards grossly disproportionate to their actual talents.

It’s also the case that if you look into the history of social darwinists, the people who most strongly promoted this idea, they tend to be terrible, awful, bigoted people. Social darwinism also predated the actual development of evolutionary theory, and was in many ways contradicted by observation, so as the article explains, too often we see pseudoscience presented as factual science simply by sticking the words “evolution” or “Darwin” on it.