It’s “Ask an Atheist Day”?

I guess it is. You can ask me anything, but there’s nothing in the rules that says I have to answer.

I probably won’t. I volunteered to help out with new student registration today, I’m going to be locked into working with students all day long, so most of the questions I’m going to be asked are along the lines of:

  • “Why is my class section full?”
  • “Am I actually going to have to take an 8am course? I don’t get up before noon.”
  • “I’d like to take 30 credits this semester & get it all over with. Why won’t you let me?”
  • “Prerequisites? What are those? I want to take that 4000 level course in Fancy Science right now!”
  • “Where’s the pre-med course?”
  • “Why do I have to take a history course? I’m going to be a doctor!”
  • “No one told me I’d need math to be a bio major! Why are you doing this to me?”
  • “I can’t get into that course I’ve been looking forward to? Why does the universe hate me?”

At least I can answer that last one as an atheist. The universe doesn’t hate you, it doesn’t care about you at all.

You may ask, “Why are you volunteering to do this? Aren’t you on sabbatical?” Especially since this is such a highly stressful day for the incoming students — it’s not registration day without at least one student breaking down and crying because they’re confused by all the information coming in, and all the decisions that have to be made. I’m doing it because these are students who will be starting up in the fall, and I have to return to the classroom in the fall, and I better make sure the new students are ready for me.

Another question: “Do I really have to return to my labors in the fall?” <breaks down weeping>

Yes. Because the universe hates me.

“It’s just a joke” is a joke of an excuse

Matthew d’Ancona has seen through the game and noticed that the excuse of “satire” is a hollow shell of a rationalization, especially when listeners know that the plain, literal meaning of the “joke” is what’s actually intended, and what they find most amusing is that you’ll actually be flustered and unable to cope if they say their horrible statement was “just a joke”. It’s the tool that Carl Benjamin, Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson have used to crawl to prominence.

In what moral universe is the statement “I wouldn’t even rape you” categorised as “satire”? For this is how – in an interview on Sunday with the BBC’s Andrew Marr – Gerard Batten, Ukip’s leader, described a tweet sent to the Labour MP Jess Phillips in 2016 by Carl Benjamin, now one of his party’s principal candidates in the European elections.

According to Batten, Benjamin is a “classical liberal”, “not a bad person”, “a proponent of free speech” and “wasn’t actually making a literal statement”. And there we were, thinking that he was just a vile misogynist, using social media to declare whether, in his opinion, a member of parliament should be raped or not.

In this universe, let’s assume that everyone is of average intelligence and able to comprehend their native language. The Benjamin rape “joke” is a gimmick that is read by everyone for what it is — a statement of misogyny and cruelty and contempt. The “it’s satire” claim is a pretense that everyone can see right through, but that defenders of misogyny, who are also intelligent enough to know it is socially unacceptable, can use to argue to their mothers that they don’t really think about harming women, while they can simultaneously snicker with the lads down at the pub about judging women on their fuckability.

d’Ancona and many others can see right through the rhetoric, and the people who pretend they can’t simply don’t want to.

Benjamin was invited to an atheist conference (a damning fact in itself), and the audience cheered and whooped when he repeated that remark. Don’t ever try to tell me that your typical atheist is gifted with greater intelligence and insight into reality — I’ve seen the fact that they’re just as susceptible to self-delusion and ignorance put on display. And also just as easily manipulated by terrible people who reassure them that their prejudices are righteous.

No more Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe has died. This annoys me, though.

Wolfe went on to write over 30 novels, with his best best-known work, The Book of The New Sun, spanning 1980-1983. The series is a tetralogy set in the Vancian Dying Earth subgenre, and follows the journey of Severian, a member of the Guild of Torturers, after he is exiled for the sin of mercy. Over the course of the series the books won British Science Fiction, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Nebula, and Campbell Memorial Awards. In 1998 poll, the readers of Locus magazine considered the series as a single entry and ranked it third in a poll of fantasy novels published before 1990, following only The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

Every few years, I pick up and reread The Book of The New Sun, because it is amazingly well-written, subtle, clever, and deep. Wolfe was a phenomenal writer, while Tolkien was a plodder who tapped into a well of mythology and told fairy tales. It is a tragic injustice that Wolfe was ranked third after that guy.

Also, if you thought Lord of the Rings was going to be tough to turn into a movie, Severian’s story is even more impossible, so Wolfe isn’t going to get a post-mortem surge in popularity after translation to a new medium. No one is cosplaying his characters. I wouldn’t say there’s no slash fiction about them, Rule 34 and all that, but moral ambiguity and unreliable narrators aren’t easily dragged into simplistic storytelling.

The conspiracy theorists were looking in the wrong place

All those claims of a pedophile ring in the imaginary basement of a pizza place…psssht. False flag. Distraction. All that stuff. Instead, they should have gone digging into the backgrounds of billionaires and people closely connected to Donald Trump. Clots of filth keep tumbling out of the pipeline connected to Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein is struggling to recover the reputation he had in his glory days.

In the early Aughts, Epstein was known to rub elbows with the likes of Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Woody Allen and Kevin Spacey. His enigmatic rise from Dalton physics teacher to “international moneyman of mystery” who palled around with Prince Andrew and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was chronicled by the tabloids and New York magazine and Vanity Fair, which in 2003 reported, “Epstein is known about town as a man who loves women—lots of them, mostly young.”

I wouldn’t be particularly gratified to have rubbed elbows with that quartet. But being a registered sex offender now damages his ego, so he’s been flinging out millions of dollars in charitable donations through a newly labeled company, Gratitude America Ltd. I suspect one reason for laundering the money through this company is because the recipients of his largesse would love to have some of his money, but at the same time they’d rather not be caught rubbing slimy elbows with Epstein.

So Epstein has been filtering money to Larry Summers, Harvard, Deepak Chopra, a cancer research institute, Elton John’s AIDS foundation, various art philanthropies, etc., etc., etc. All this is claimed in tax filings by Gratitude America. But then it gets confusing…

The Daily Beast left messages for all the schools and charities that Epstein’s group listed as beneficiaries. Some representatives said they didn’t know who operated Gratitude America Ltd. Others said they never received any such donations.

In an email, Howard Straus, president of the Cancer Research Wellness Institute, said his group has “NEVER received a donation of that magnitude from ANYONE.”

“I would know,” Straus continued. “We are perennially short of funds, and would love to be the recipient of such largesse, but not from sexual predators.”

Jennifer Park of New York Concert Artists said her group never received a donation from Gratitude America. “I am sorry but you have completely wrong information,” she said in an email, adding that her nonprofit was perhaps confused with another group.

Well, cool. Shady stuff is going on. Someone ought to investigate.

In other news, another victim has stepped forward to testify against Epstein and his cronies. Maria Farmer was an employee of Epstein’s, and witnessed the young girls trooping off to his bedroom, and her own sister was molested by Epstein. There are also claims that Alan Dershowitz was actively involved in the rape romps.

“To my knowledge, I was the first person to report Maxwell and Epstein to the FBI. It took a significant amount of bravery for me to make that call because I knew how incredibly powerful and influential both Epstein and Maxwell were, particularly in the art community,’’ she wrote.

Farmer’s affidavit is one of 15 exhibits attached to a defamation complaint filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, against Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s most vocal and powerful attorneys.

Giuffre claims in the lawsuit, as she has in past court filings, that Dershowitz, 80, knew about and participated in a sex-trafficking operation involving underage girls and run by Epstein and Maxwell, and that she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz and other prominent, wealthy men when she was underage.

I don’t know what Epstein thinks he’s going to accomplish with multiple large donations (maybe) given semi-anonymously. It’s all just confirming to me that anyone with billions of dollars in their pocket is a dishonest sleaze, and we should be working to take their money away.

It’s not as if they actually earned it, you know. No one earns a billion dollars.

Adventures in building science gear

I’m eager to start surveying and collecting spiders, so I prematurely made a Berlese funnel, a kind of filter for collecting small invertebrates from soil samples. I say “premature”, because I made it just before last week’s big blizzard hit, so everything inside refroze, and I’d also overloaded it with too much gunk. So reset: cleared it out and tried again with a smaller sample and warmer weather. It worked!

No spiders, though. Other little critters. I’ll be hesitant to jump into any leaf piles in the future, I tell you what.

Invade Africa — all of Africa — to punish “woke Twitter” for the Notre Dame fire

Andy Ngo, always a reliable source of hypocrisy, started a Twitter thread to document all the wicked Leftists who expressed joy at the burning of Notre Dame. It’s bizarre, because many of those Leftists are making legitimate points. France led a colonial empire, but we don’t see as much grief for the murdered and exploited peoples. Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque was burning at the same time, and got only a tiny fraction of the attention. Notre Dame is the responsibility of the French state, and there has been bickering for years about the cost of maintenance with the Catholic Church, yet the church still uses it for religious services. Catholicism is an odious cult, yet it gets treated with unwarranted respect (again, Notre Dame’s historical value is preserved by the French Republic, yet this is treated as a loss for Catholicism). Americans demolish Indian lands to build ugly monuments or dig mines, but there’s rarely an outcry about disrespecting their history (well, Indians cry out; we rarely pay any attention).

It’s complicated. I think it’s important to preserve European historical sites, but I feel the same about Native American sacred sites and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and Jagannath Temple and Borobudur and a thousand other places, even when I have little cultural connection to them and may even detest the religion that drove their construction. Human history is full of majestic accomplishments, but they’ve all got warts on them. We’ve got to appreciate the good behind them, but never forget the warts. A tragedy like the Notre Dame fire occurs, and people rush to both deify and demonize the building — let’s try to have some perspective, OK?

I sympathize with the people who feel some schadenfreude at the destruction of one artifact that represents crimes against humanity at the same time that it represents a great human achievement. I don’t mind them reminding us all of the badness that lurks within that monument — I’d do the same. As long as you’re tolerant, no matter how angry you are, and not plotting active destruction yourself, I can respect that.

The interesting thing about Ngo’s thread, though, is that, as you might expect, it’s drawn out the right-wing hypocrites. They’re all deploring how hateful the Left is for expressing a personal dislike of Catholicism, or French imperialism, or thinking it’s only fair that France feel the kind of loss other nations have felt. But they’ve got their own rabid bigotry that they overlook.

There’s the usual call to destroy Islamic holy sites.

You know, Al-Masjid Al-Haram is even older than Notre Dame. If you’re calling for its destruction, you aren’t motivated by an appreciation of history or art, but by simple ideological vengeance. Then you don’t get to complain when people have an ideological contempt for Notre Dame.

Or how about this delusional threat?

He, personally, is going to invade Africa. All of Africa. This vast continent, with a deep history and thousands of complex cultures, is responsible for burning European cathedrals, and he is going to march over there and spank everyone. His reason? To spite people on Twitter he doesn’t like.

Mr Ngo wanted to expose wicked Leftists, but ended up holding a mirror to his own clique.

Oh no! I forgot Paul Nelson Day again!

You can’t really blame me, can you? He’s so bland and forgettable, and has such goofy ideas. I was supposed to celebrate last week, on 7 April, so I guess I’ll just celebrate now.

There will be another Paul Nelson Day. Meh. Except…

Goddammit Plato, shut up.

I see from the comments that everyone else has forgotten who Paul Nelson is.

Good.

OK, I’ll explain: Nelson is a fellow of the Discovery Institute, an Intelligent Design creationist whose schtick was to register and attend legitimate scientific meetings and present “evidence” that evolution needed a designer. At one meeting where I met him, he had a poster claiming that he had a metric called “ontogenetic depth” that he could measure, and had been measuring, to show the complexity of developing organisms. I was interested. I asked him for his protocol so I, too, could go into my lab and get a number for the complexity of zebrafish. He said he would. He didn’t. I asked him multiple times, every time he had an excuse and promised to get it off to me soon. He never did. Still hasn’t. Apparently, his poster was presented under false pretenses and his method was imaginary.

So I take this opportunity every year to remind a creationist of his failure, and to highlight his dishonesty to everyone else.

I wonder where he got those of ideas of masculine entitlement?

Minnesota had its own local tragedy recently: a man walked up to a child at the Mall of America, and abruptly and intentionally threw them off a 3rd floor balcony. The child is currently in critical condition at a local hospital. Beyond the act itself, what’s horrifying is the attacker’s reason.

“He said he planned to kill an adult, because they usually stand near the balcony, but he chose the Victim instead,” the complaint said.

Aranda told investigators he had been going to the Bloomington mall for several years “and had made efforts to talk to women in the Mall, but had been rejected, and the rejection caused him to lash out and to be aggressive.”

He had been pestering women and been rejected, so he marched off and decided to murder a random innocent. He felt justified in killing someone because women spurned his creepy ass.

Now there’s a sense of entitlement. I am a man, therefore women owe me sex. If they don’t give it me, I can vent my frustration by murdering people. If I am caught, I can give that as my explanation and expect officials to sympathize.

Tangled web, check. Woven, check. Deceived…uh, not check.

There’s a newspaper in Alabama that has a reputation for promoting some incredibly racist garbage, the Democrat-Reporter, which was run by a good ol’ boy named Goodloe Sutton. “Was”. It’s been sold.

Maybe.

The new owners are CT Harless and Sabrina McMahan, nominally. The story has to be read to be believed. They are incapable of saying any word of truth, and lead a reporter who asked a few simple questions about their background on an amazing runaround. “Are you the CT Harless who said he was an Imperial Wizard of the American White Knights?” “No, that was my brother.” “Your name is Chuck Harless?” “No, Chris, my brother is Chuck, we were both called CT.” (sounds confusing.) “But you bought the paper?” “No, I don’t own it. I’m just helping out the owner.”

It goes around and around, and there’s a transparent charade where CT has a friend call up the reporter posing as “Chuck” of the KKK to disavow any connection. It’s so stupid, with constantly changing excuses, that it’s hilarious. And of course CT/Chuck/Chris/Sabrina are threatening to sue the reporter if he publishes any of it. I still don’t understand why they’re being so evasive, unless it’s just that they have the habit of lying.

I don’t think the KKK/American White Knights are recruiting the very best.