Well, what if we put a golden calf on a white horse?

Charles Pierce comments on the recent abrupt resignation of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a liberal Democratic politician — one of our guys! — whose career “went into the acid bath because, at one level or another, they failed to see women as actual human beings”. The article resonates with me because this is a universal problem everywhere, not just in politics. I run into it in science, in atheism, everywhere. It’s a problem with the human condition.

The search for the person on a white horse is an open invitation to counterfeit engagement and artificial activism. The impact of celebrity on our politics has been devastating enough; see the current tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for details.

See also the list of Intellectual Dark Web phonies. Every time an organization looks for the guy on the white horse to lead them, they are going to experience a colossal pratfall because there is no end of grifters with a bucket of whitewash and a broke-down mule ready to announce their candidacy.

Schneiderman is one of those terrible people with a history of assaulting women, and it’s good that he’s out (for now; expect a comeback attempt soon. The standard waiting time seems to be a few months.) But the rot goes deeper. Who are all these people who knew, but did nothing?

His swift resignation was more than justified and his disappearance from the ongoing drama of this presidency, while unfortunate, is wholly appropriate. He should’ve been in jail years ago.

Instead, for the purposes of this story, we should focus on one small slice of the account.

After the former girlfriend ended the relationship, she told several friends about the abuse. A number of them advised her to keep the story to herself, arguing that Schneiderman was too valuable a politician for the Democrats to lose. She described this response as heartbreaking. And when Schneiderman heard that she had turned against him, she said, he warned her that politics was a tough and personal business, and that she’d better be careful. She told Selvaratnam that she had taken this as a threat.

Who in the hell counsels a friend to hush up a violent assault on these grounds? My politics are as important to me as anyone’s are but if, say, Sherrod Brown came and burglarized your house, I wouldn’t tell you to let him keep your jewelry because we need him to save Social Security. (Note to Senator Brown: I do not believe you are a cat burglar.) This is turning your politics into a graven image, a golden calf of the soul. Believe it or not, there are some things that politics ought not to touch. Physical abuse of any kind is high on that list.

The metaphor may be apt, but it’s also kind of incongruous that so many atheists are hauling around golden calves of the soul. The argument that “So-and-so is an asshole, but he’s our asshole, and his book/podcast/videos are soooo good” is tiresome. They aren’t worth it.

Oh, christ, another self-appointed set of thought-leaders

If it were the Onion, it might be funny, but this is the New York Times promoting a group calling themselves the Intellectual Dark Web. They aren’t particularly intellectual, they’re not part of some “web” of something or other, but they are rather dark. Can we rename them the Dark Dorks?

The list of members consists mainly of people who are demonstrable assholes. They include:

  • Sam Harris
  • Eric Weinstein
  • Christina Hoff Sommers
  • Dave Rubin
  • Jordan Peterson
  • Heather Heying
  • Ben Shapiro
  • Douglas Murray
  • Joe Rogan
  • Maajid Nawaz
  • Bret Weinstein
  • Michael Shermer
  • Camille Paglia
  • Steven Pinker
  • James Damore

Etc., etc., etc. You know, if you really wanted to compile a list of the worst people in America, the shallow populists who poison the discourse with conservative toxins and Libertarian lies, that wouldn’t be a bad start. These are not particularly smart or interesting people — they are good at inflaming other assholes and acquiring a following, but that’s about it. And now they’ve got a great big long article in the New York Times, with grimdark portrait shoots of them standing about in the shrubbery at night.

And just what is the dark intellectual foundation they’re trying to promote?

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women.

Yes? So? No one argues against that. What we argue against is the idea that you can find consistent, biological differences in their minds, or that one gender is the lesser to the other.

Free speech is under siege.

Jesus fucking christ. You’ve got the NY Times spewing your bullshit everywhere, where is your loss of free speech? The whole basis of your sleazy legitimacy is that you’re a bunch of people with large followings!

Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.

Say the status quo warriors who want everyone else to shut up about their bigotry, while howling non-stop about their precious identity.

And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

Uh, these are the people who named themselves the dark web. Not anyone else. Typical. They’re complaining about being victimized by their own term!

Quick, let’s start the Shiny Happy Web! All it takes is declaring yourself special, and people will think you’re a movement. Let’s pass on the dismal dishonest ideas, though, OK?

Terror below!

It’s that time of year: the gophers have invaded, and are tearing up our lawn. Mounds of dirt have erupted everywhere! We decided we had to do something, so we reluctantly purchased a trap. An evil, lethal, gopher-killing trap. We put it out last night, and this morning…it had sprung.

I had expected something cute and adorable — something like a large mouse or vole. Instead, when I pulled that snare out, it brought with it a grey behemoth, almost as long as my forearm, with huge curved claws and terrifying yellow incisors. Kinda like this:

AAAAIEEE! I felt bad about killing it, but the neighbors would not have been happy if we were ground zero for a lawn-wrecking plague. Now I’m a little nervous walking around in my yard, with angry vengeful monsters burrowing invisibly beneath my feet.

Wave! Wave like your life depended on it!

Because it just might.

Police in California detained four women on potential felony charges after a white woman called 911 because the woman of color didn’t return her wave.

Kells Fyffe-Marshall explained how the four women, three of whom are black, were surrounded by 7 cop cars during the ordeal and were told that a helicopter was even tracking the women.

Wow. Detained on potential felony charges because they rented an AirBnB while black.

So, when are these scaredy-cat racist white people going to get surrounded by cops for calling in a false accusation? Or maybe even better, when will the police learn restraint?

Corn-fed cherub-cheeked cheerful malignity, that’s us!

The New Yorker has a depressing roundup of various Hitler books. The United States seems to be getting a deserved roasting for acting as a role model.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated.

We’re still really good at that. As the hearings for a new CIA director begin, we’re seeing more grand denials of responsibility for horrors.

The transition to liberty is not swift

Classes are over! Now I get to luxuriate in luxurious laziness for a whole year.

Wait, no. I’m not quite done. There are plans.

  1. I have to get back on track with the exercise program — I was derailed by the last week. So it’s off to the gym this morning.

  2. I have to finalize all the grades for my evolution course, less the final exam (due Thursday), because students want to know exactly where they stand right now, even though the final could easily raise or lower it by a whole letter grade.

  3. Lab audits today. As the biology safety officer, I’m supposed to wander around checking on fire extinguishers and eye washes.

  4. Our chancellor has summoned members of my division to an informal meeting this evening. I guess she doesn’t want to forget the faculty exist, so I’ll stop by and oblige.

  5. Hey, the job searches aren’t over — one more interview on Wednesday, and we’re waiting on administration approval for various things.

  6. Oh, yeah, I’ve got to write one more final exam. Maybe I’ll put that off to tomorrow.

The grand plan is to clear all this clutter out of my life in the next week, so I can buckle down to a strict writing schedule. But I want to get on it noooooooooowwwww.

Must every rebellion evolve into an evil empire?

Jaron Lanier is an insightful weirdo, and he shares his ideas about what went wrong with the internet.

I think the fundamental mistake we made is that we set up the wrong financial incentives, and that’s caused us to turn into jerks and screw around with people too much. Way back in the ’80s, we wanted everything to be free because we were hippie socialists. But we also loved entrepreneurs because we loved Steve Jobs. So you wanna be both a socialist and a libertarian at the same time, and it’s absurd. But that’s the kind of absurdity that Silicon Valley culture has to grapple with.

And there’s only one way to merge the two things, which is what we call the advertising model, where everything’s free but you pay for it by selling ads. But then because the technology gets better and better, the computers get bigger and cheaper, there’s more and more data — what started out as advertising morphed into continuous behavior modification on a mass basis, with everyone under surveillance by their devices and receiving calculated stimulus to modify them. So you end up with this mass behavior-modification empire, which is straight out of Philip K. Dick, or from earlier generations, from 1984.

I do mostly agree, I say as I look at the godawful smear of obnoxious ads that are currently fueling this site, many of which are totally inappropriate to our mission. But I didn’t see much of that hippie socialism in action. People wanted things for free…for me. Outsmart the Man and get free phone service, or free cable TV, or a pile of documents that they don’t want us to have. It was more of a Repo Man sensibility.

Few of the early hackers had any kind of social consciousness. Steve Wozniak was as pure as they come — he just wanted to make elegant gadgets, and once he got rich, he gave free concerts and tried to inspire better education, but his faith was in technology for technology’s sake, and he got left behind in the mad scramble for money. Bill Gates was in it for the cash: has everyone forgotten his petulant temper tantrums when people gave away copies of Microsoft BASIC for free? Steve Jobs wasn’t shy about trampling over anyone who got in the way of his ambitions. These kinds of people were the foundations of modern Silicon Valley, the Silicon Valley that is now a haven for conservative vampires like Peter Thiel. And seriously, Zuckerberg? You think there was ever a speck of human feeling in that android? It was never built on altruism. It was never about sharing the benefits and power of technology with the world.

Everyone tends to romanticize the early days and wonder how we got into this miserable situation now. I agree with Lanier that it certainly is a miserable situation…but think we also tend to see the 1970s and 1980s in a false light. Those dang mirrorshades put a rosy pink glow on the world.

As Lanier points out, it’s all about the concentration of power, and power corrupts.

But then there’s this other thing about the centralization of economic power. What happened with Maoists and with communists in general, and neo-Marxists and all kinds of similar movements, is that on the surface, you say everybody shares, everybody’s equal, we’re not gonna have this capitalist concentration. But then there’s some other entity that might not look like traditional capitalism, but is effectively some kind of robber baron that actually owns everything, some kind of Communist Party actually controls everything, and you have just a very small number of individuals who become hyperempowered and everybody else loses power.

And exactly the same thing has happened with the supposed openness of the internet, where you say, “Isn’t it wonderful, with Facebook and Twitter anybody can express themselves. Everybody’s an equal, everybody’s empowered.” But in fact, we’re in a period of time of extreme concentration of wealth and power, and it’s precisely around those who run the biggest computers. So the truth and the effect is just the opposite of what the rhetoric is and the immediate experience.

So now Native Americans are “creepy kids”?

I can imagine how the faculty and staff at Colorado State are feeling about this PR disaster. The cops pulled two native American students out of a tour group because someone else in the group phoned in a complaint.

Police body camera footage and telephone recordings captured an incident in which two Native American teenagers were pulled from a Colorado college tour and questioned after another tour member reported “odd” behavior by “creepy kids.”

The accusation: “people were worried because you were real quiet”. Quiet. That’s a crime now? They behaved politely and didn’t cause any trouble…clearly a case for cops.

I blame the racist woman who called this in, but I also blame the police: they should have asked her what they were doing, and when she said they were “real quiet”, they should have said that that’s not a problem, and if you’re going to call up the cops with such bullshit complaints, she’s the one who ought to be pulled out of the tour group and questioned. But no, they take two quiet young men aside and frisk them and ask for proof that they’re actually invited members of the tour.

The CSU president has published a statement about the incident.

Two young men, through no fault of their own, wound up frightened and humiliated because another campus visitor was concerned about their clothes and overall demeanor, which appears to have simply been shyness. The very idea that someone – anyone – might “look” like they don’t belong on a CSU Admissions tour is anathema. People of all races, gender identities, orientations, cultures, religions, heritages, and appearances belong here. As long as you want to earn a great education surrounded by people with the same goal who come from every part of our state, our country, and our world, then you belong here. And if you’re uncomfortable with a diverse and inclusive academic environment, then you probably have a better fit elsewhere.

It would be unfair to penalize the child of the woman who made the baseless complaint, but I hope she at least feels unwelcome at CSU.

We are, in fact, in a battle with hate within our communities. While much of what we have been speaking about is born of ignorance, we can educate against ignorance. The hate that is in the hearts of white supremacists as they attempt to frighten and isolate people across this country is not ignorance. It’s a malignant choice. The increase in racist and anti-Semitic symbols and language and demonstrations across America’s college campuses has been well-documented. We at CSU have simply chosen to deal with these issues in a more open manner, and that comes at a potential reputational cost to CSU for being public when such things occur. But history has shown us that hate grows in the face of silence. Hate is not made uncomfortable. Hate does not shrink from fear. What affects hate is our willingness to shine a bright and unwavering light on it and to face it and confront it.

There is no place for hate at Colorado State University, and we will not be silent when we see it.

Now…chew out the cops, too. Don’t accept the excuse that they were just doing their jobs, because part of their job should be recognizing when exercising pointless authority causes more trouble than it solves.