Guys who make me embarrassed to be a guy

Stop it. Just stop it. I’m usually quite happy to be male — it’s an incredibly lucky sex to be, and I’m chockful of hormones that joyfully confirm all of my biases — but then there are these other guys that are so stupid about it that I become uncomfortable. We should all be happy with who we are, and it’s not women who make me squirm, it’s the members of my own sex who do everything so badly. And there have been some terrible examples lately.

  • Men who think women owe them sex. Like this terrible story of a man who didn’t get the sex he wanted on a date. Don’t you know, he spent $30 on tolls?

    rejection

    It’s her decision, full stop. Don’t argue. And when you go on that kind of entitled rant, it just confirms how right her decision was.

  • Here’s another brand of obliviousness: a man wants his mother to be in the delivery room when his wife gives birth. His mother is apparently very critical and demanding, and his wife put her foot down and said no, so he went…running to Reddit to get advice on how to overrule her?

    You know you’ve got problems when you think Reddit is a good source for relationship advice. You ought to know you’re really screwed up when even the Reddit community is nearly unanimous in declaring that you’re a clueless doofus and you need to respect your wife’s wishes.

  • MRAs. Enough said.

Hasn’t neoliberalism done enough damage?

ronald-reagan

Time for it to die, and for the corpses of von Mises and Hayek to be dug up, paraded through the streets, and thrown into the Tiber. Every once in a while, I get some ass who snootily tells me that his (strangely, it’s always been a man) brand of liberalism is superior to mine, and then proceeds to announce that he is a true “classical liberal” (translation: he’s a flaming Libertarian) or more rarely, that he is a “neoliberal”, although that species of conservative prefers to hide the term under a fog of economic buzzwords. I detest them all.

Now George Monbiot has written a wonderful summary of the crimes of neoliberalism, that poisonous doctrine of St Reagan and St Thatcher. It’s one of those essays where I do a disservice to it by quoting only a small portion of it — but I’ll do it anyway, just so I can tell you to go read the whole thing.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

It is the most pernicious and pervasive ideology of our time. I’ve been hearing a lot of it in complaints about tenure and teachers’ unions lately — “these are just efforts to give teachers job security“, as if that were some horrible abomination. Shouldn’t we aspire to give everyone job security? Isn’t it a good thing when people can rely on stable employment and income? But no, much of the public has absorbed this notion that chaos and fragility are virtues, that we need to be able to, for instance, fire people as punishment for inefficiency.

They never seem to care that the beneficiaries of that ruthlessness all seem to be the most useless parasites, the profiteers and rent-seekers and exploiters of the market. The punishment is the thing. We’re all getting screwed over, but hey, at least we get the vicarious thrill of seeing someone else screwed over even more.

The science fair conundrum

honestsciencefair

Back when I lived in Philadelphia, I used to judge a couple of science fairs every year. It was a discouraging experience.

You’d go through the exhibits with a partner and a checklist, and, for instance, you’d see some kid who’d put together something with duct tape and string and a couple of sad looking plants next to a kid who’d had connections at UPenn and had used a sequencer, a confocal microscope, and a battery of fluorescent probes to put together a gigantic shiny display of images so bright they glistened. Guess who’d win? And it was sad because sometimes the kid with the simple experiment done with homemade gadgets had been more creative and curious and true to the spirit of the science than the kid who’d been fed some high-tech gadgetry and pooped out an answer.

Carl Zimmer is similarly concerned. Too often science fairs get sidetracked into celebrating the mindless use of expensive instruments over the business of thinking like a scientist.

If I were a public school teacher trying to get students involved in a science fair, I know what I would do.

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This explains why John Kasich is still running for president

He’s losing badly. But from the lofty height of his own self-regard, he is the champion of all. Watch this cringe-worthy video of Kasich pompously lecturing yeshiva students about what’s really important in Judaism.

It’s being called goysplaining — he’s so oblivious that he thinks he can correct Jewish scholars on what they’re actually studying. We can’t let this man become president, because he’d be too infuriating to everyone.

Sarah Palin delivers a sick burn, she thinks

Ooh, ouch.

Bill Nye is as much a scientist as I am.

Actually, though, she’s almost right. Bill Nye is not a scientist, he’s a science guy, which is something different. He was trained and worked as an engineer, was a science educator and popular TV show host, and is currently the CEO of the Planetary Society, an institution dedicated to promoting science. But strictly speaking, he’s not doing any of the things scientists traditionally do, which seems to be mainly writing grants and tearing our hair out in frustration at the science illiteracy of our nation. He’s just trying to do all the things that might help make scientist’s jobs a little easier.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is a babbling ignoramus who despises basic research and evolution, and is campaigning against actions to reduce climate change. She’s actively anti-science.

So, no, sorry Ms Palin, but Bill Nye is about a billion times the scientist you are.

We wuv you so much, Governor McCrory!

The Minnesota GOP is just as backward and ignorant as the GOP in any southern state. They recently tried to pass one of those awful bathroom bill that are the hot new fad among regressives; it got killed, fortunately. But we still got to listen to some prudish whining about safety (because transgender people are dangerous) and privacy (because peering at crotches is standard behavior in the bathroom), and lots of accusations that transgender people are the real bullies here. Watch the parade of bigots here:

They got their dreams of slapping down transgender men and women crushed, so the 35 Republican Minnesotans wrote a letter to McCrory of North Carolina telling him how much they liked him and wanted to follow his ideas.

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Sunday at the Rondo Public Library

I’ll be there, talkin’ evolution. You should come. Details in the latest Minnesota Atheists newsletter (pdf).

We’re coming into the big city on Saturday to putter around in some parks, so if you see me around, don’t be surprised. I’m hoping to catch some sun for a change, although I hear it’s going to be cloudy all day. Probably for the best, I should ease myself gently into this springtime nonsense.

Smug and rotten

Listen to the judges on this Ecuadorian talent contest. They say they respect the opinions of the contestant, they aren’t judging her, but the bottom line is that they declare that she can’t win a singing competition because she doesn’t believe in god. They use her disbelief as an excuse to hector her and act all pious and sanctimonious.

Arrogant hypocrites. Don’t ever let these kinds of assholes call atheists arrogant — just show them this clip. Then puke on their shoes.

The internet does not forget

We all remember this event, in which policeman John Pike casually hoses down students at UC Davis with pepper spray. Not only is it memorable, but if you google “UC Davis” the story is going to pop up on the first page of results.

uc-davis-police-lt-john-pike

The administrators at UC Davis are a bit touchy about the whole incident and wanted to do something about it. So what did they do? They hired one of those shady ‘reputation management’ companies to somehow expunge the story and image from search results, at a cost of at least $175,000. Those things never work, and you’re a fool to try them.

Except…maybe they did accomplish something.

Now when you search for UC Davis, the first results are all about the university’s dodgy, clumsy, ill-planned, and wasteful attempt to whitewash their reputation.

The lesson you should learn is that trying to cover up your sins with worthless SEO is going to only change your search results to a) remind everyone of the bad thing you did, and b) let them know that you’re desperate to cover it up.

Good work, administrators at UC Davis! You’re working hard to further stain the reputation of a very good school.