Are you depressed enough yet?

No, you are not. Not even close. Go read about our reality.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

But, you say, you don’t want to be depressed. That’s fine, but the only acceptable alternative emotion is fury. Get out and do something about it then.

The kitchen as a metaphor for the war against the patriarchy

Remember Mario Batali’s clunky apology for harassment that included a pizza dough cinnamon roll recipe? We found it hard to believe how inappropriate and off-key the whole thing was.

Welp, someone made the pizza dough cinnamon rolls. It’s beautifully angry. Everything about it — the sloppy, incomplete recipe, the bad combination of pizza dough and a pastry, the terrible result — is a bitter metaphor for the institutionalized sexism women have to deal with all the time. I thought the apology was bad, but now I’m sure the celebrity chef is bad, too.

No, Oprah is not going to be a viable Democratic candidate

In some ways, they’re perfectly good representatives of the yin and yang of our two political parties. Donald Trump: xenophobic, angry, crude, white male. Oprah Winfrey: kind, sympathetic, open, black female. They’re almost caricatures of the right and left. All they need to do is open their mouths in a public forum and stand there like the apotheosis of their representative parties, and people start clamoring to make them our real political leaders.

In the case of Trump, they succeeded, with disastrous results. In the case of Winfrey…most of what I’m seeing is rejection. We’re supposed to be the reality-based community, and Winfrey is missing that one critical aspect that would make her a true avatar of the political left: she stands for fantasy and quackery and feel-good pseudoscience.

…the big qualm I have about the prospect of a President Winfrey: Perhaps more than any other single American, she is responsible for giving national platforms and legitimacy to all sorts of magical thinking, from pseudoscientific to purely mystical, fantasies about extraterrestrials, paranormal experience, satanic cults, and more. The various fantasies she has promoted on all her media platforms—her daily TV show with its 12 million devoted viewers, her magazine, her website, her cable channel—aren’t as dangerous as Donald Trump’s mainstreaming of false conspiracy theories, but for three decades she has had a major role in encouraging Americans to abandon reason and science in favor of the wishful and imaginary.

Remember the Secret, the Law of Attraction? She was big on promoting that. How about the legacy of Dr Oz, Dr Phil, Deepak Chopra, and Jenny McCarthy? We now hear all the time about witch-hunts and moral panics, but it was Oprah Winfrey who enabled this nonsense.

As I say, she is an ecumenical promoter of fantasies. Remember the satanic panic, the mass hysteria during the 1980s and early ’90s about satanists abusing and murdering children that resulted in the wrongful convictions of dozens of people who collectively spent hundreds of years incarcerated? Multiple Oprah episodes featured the celebrity “victims” who got that fantasy going.

Pizzagate is the logical descendant of her shows that featured people claiming there Jewish satanic rituals in which babies were sacrificed — and she didn’t show a scrap of skepticism.

I am constantly being told that Winfrey is going to be groomed for the presidency, that Democrats are just as superficial as Republicans. I don’t believe that for a moment. But if the worst case scenario happened, and we had a 2020 presidential election to decide between Trump (isn’t he going to be impeached before then?) and Winfrey, it would be the end of the American experiment and the complete failure of democracy.

Reminder: Get your flu shot

People are dying of the flu — young, fit, healthy people.

But days after Christmas, Kyler Baughman was worse — coughing and running a fever, his family told the news station. They said he went to a nearby hospital in western Pennsylvania and, from there, was flown to UPMC Presbyterian in Pittsburgh.

Soon after, on Dec. 28, Kyler died of “organ failure due to septic shock caused by influenza,” his mother told WPXI.

I’m also hearing about friends suffering with this unpleasant disease for a week or 10 days. The flu vaccine is not 100% effective, but if it can reduce the odds, you should get it.

The right take

I’ve been reading Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House off and on. It’s tough. It’s terribly written, this kind of gossipy gibbering, and the only thing keeping me going at all is the occasional deliciously vicious insider story that pops up at you. I think, though, that Jeff Sharlet has the right perspective on it.

A number of my fellow journalists are saying privately and publicly that Michael Wolff’s book is no big deal — “nothing we didn’t know already.” This makes me think of people who see some piece of modern art, a Jackson Pollack or an Ellsworth Kelly, and say, “I could do that.” Yeah, but did you?

Exactly. I know it’s a bad book, but why didn’t any of the excellent journalists who are sneering at it now write a better book first? Wolff is a hack and a bit sleazy, but if he’s saying what everyone already knew, at least he had the guts to actually go against the cozy insider culture that infects government and the media right now.

Which would you prefer: An asshole who relishes his access to power as an ornament with which to improve his status with other elites, or an asshole who betrays it? Wolff, who by many accounts will betray just about anybody, was the writer for the job of bringing us inside the administration that wants to screw everybody.

When you put it that way…I want the asshole that’s willing to write about the bad crap going down at the cost of getting kicked out of the White House press room. I want a newspaper publisher who is willing to go to press with the story that will cost them easy access to the spin the administration wants to give to everyone, and instead has to work to get the story.

Chloroform, consent…they’re both the same thing, right?

I keep getting told by ignorant regressives that our universities exclude radical and conservative ideas — that somehow, these institutions that value the free exchange of ideas so much that they have this thing called “tenure” to protect people who say stuff offensive to conventionality are actually dedicated to concealing the True Facts, whatever they may be, that can only be seen by Classical Liberals and Libertarians who have the clear sight.

It’s all nonsense. I’ve been to creationist talks on college campuses — it’s fairly routine, and that bullshit is about as openly counterfactual as you can get. Milo Yiannopoulos spoke at the University of Minnesota last year, and that bozo is creepy and wrong, but he got to babble in a university facility. Heck, I’ve spoken on university campuses all around the country, and you all know what a wacko I am. It takes being truly violent or hateful to get yourself booted off of a campus.

So I am not surprised that University College London hosted a eugenics conference now. In the 21st century. In one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Even though they’re mainly reduced to preaching at churches nowadays, the Discovery Institute is still having an event at Seattle Pacific University in March. This shit is still dribbling out everywhere, and they love to borrow the respectability of a university building to dress up their turds.

But this UCL conference also exhibits another interesting phenomenon. It features a whole sewage pit full of well known racists.

A central figure in the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) is the white nationalist, extremist Richard Lynn, who has called for the “phasing out” of the “populations of incompetent cultures.” Lynn, who is President of the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), spoke at the conference 2015 and 2016, along with four of the six members of the UISR’s Academic Advisory Council.

Lynn’s UISR runs the journal Mankind Quarterly, whose founders include a leading member of Mussolini’s eugenics taskforce, and whose board once boasted Nazi Joseph Mengele’s personal mentor.

Six members of the current board, including editor-in-chief Gerhard Meisenberg, spoke at both the 2015 and 2016 conferences, while a further 16 LCI speakers have written for the journal in recent years. In total, 82% of those who spoke at both 2015 and 2016 conferences are directly associated with either UISR or Mankind Quarterly.

The UISR is bankrolled by Lynn and Meisenberg’s Pioneer Fund, a Southern Poverty Law Centre-listed hate group founded by Nazi sympathisers with the purpose of promoting “racial betterment”.

Beneficiaries of the fund include a magazine devoted to a “penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question,” and Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance, whose conferences have hosted prominent far-right figures Richard Spencer (an white supremancist who gained prominence after Trump’s election), Nick Griffin (ex-leader of the British National Party), and David Duke (another white supremacist, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan).

Helmuth Nyborg, a member of the UISR Academic Advisory Council, gave a lecture at last year’s American Renaissance conference which argued that Denmark’s gene pool would suffer from immigration from the Middle East. Nyborg spoke at the LCI in both 2015 and 2016. He has written numerous articles for Mankind Quarterly as well as a book for the UISR memorializing the former head of the Pioneer Fund, white nationalist J. P. Rushton.

James Thompson, the honorary UCL academic who acts as the host of the conference, is a member of the UISR Academic Advisory Council. His political leanings are betrayed by his public Twitter account, where he follows prominent white supremacists including Richard Spencer (who follows him back), Virginia Dare, American Renaissance, Brett Stevens, the Traditional Britain Group, Charles Murray and Jared Taylor.

But that isn’t the interesting part. Those people are boringly familiar, the same mob of contemptible racist jerks who show up all the time and get far more attention than they deserve. What’s interesting is yet another example of kook magnetism. People who have vile views about the personhood of different racial groups also seem to attract people who have vile views about consent and sex. Why do these racist fronts always seem to have a few people with abominable ideas about pedophilia?

Another major organiser of the LCI is Emil Kirkegaard, who has attended all four conferences and even designed the website. Although he refers to himself as a “polymath” and Thompson describes him as a “very bright young guy”, Kirkegaard is not an academic. His highest qualification is a Bachelor’s in linguistics.

Having dropped out of his Masters degree, instead preferring to be “self-taught in various subjects”, Kirkegaard now runs OpenPsych, a platform for non-peer reviewed psychology papers, along with Davide Piffer of Mankind Quarterly. Piffer is a fellow LCI-speaker, and was praised by Richard Lynn as having done “brilliant work identifying the genes responsible for race differences in intelligence.”

Authors on OpenPsych include Kevin MacDonald, described by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as “the neo-Nazi movement’s favourite academic”, who praised Anders Breivik as a “serious political thinker with a great many insights and some good practical ideas on strategy.”

I know, any article about these kinds of conferences is just an unrelenting geyser of name dropping of awful people, and it’s hard to stop listing the appalling associations, but lets just take a look at Kirkegaard. He’s one of those anti-semitic ‘white genocide’ lunatics, but that’s not even the worst part of his character: he has a way to justify raping children. I’ll put it below the fold; you may not want to continue at this point.

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I guess I’m not the only one disenchanted with movement atheism

Somebody is mad as hell.

Remember when we used to get so pissed off at theists telling us we had no basis for morality, that we’d probably murder and rob banks without a god to keep us in check, and we could just point to religious terrorism and child-raping priests and smirk? Those were the good old days. It turns out that dogma and authoritarianism can afflict even secular communities. There goes our more-rational-than-thou defense!

One amusing fact for you all: when Ed Brayton and I were putting together this little network we’re on, we were trying to figure out what name to give it. I was all for something in-your-face, with “atheism” front and center and some kind of impudent logo. Ed advocated for something a bit more…open and friendly, and came up with Freethoughtblogs, emphasizing freedom from dogma rather than loud atheism. Oh, man, he was right. It would be awkward if this were Atheismblogs right now.

A Puzzle for Humanism

I should start by saying: unlikely my previous posts, this isn’t properly a book review. The major ideas in the discussion spring out of Kate Manne’s book Down Girl: The Logic of Mysogyny. I do give a general review of the book over on Goodreads; TL;DR: The book is excellent, timely, and thoughtful; people should read it. Manne illustrates a particular problem that I think is worth raising on this blog, given the discussions of ethical positions around humanism, feminism, Atheism+, etc.

Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” is one of the most widely cited phrases in public ethics and social justice, but it is often egregiously misused. Somewhat famously, Chelsea Clinton cited it in discussion of a man casually committing a horrific act of violence; political scientist Corey Robin was quick to point out that this is not the way Arendt was using the phrase. Documentarian Ada Ushpiz has similarly pointed this out in criticizing Eva Illouz. To gloss over these longer responses there, the dialectic goes like this.

Many folks think that “the banality of evil” refers to the attitude of indifference towards humans by the person causing harm; the idea that evil can be regarded as banal by the person committing the evil act because they have dehumanized the victim. This is the wikipedia gloss on Arendt’s view, butthe focus on dehumanization actually gets the point entirely (and dangerously) wrong.

Manne points out, as Arendt did as well, that many callous and casual acts of violence are not the result of dehumanization of the person against whom one directs the violence, but rather the result of paranoid or vindictiveness. The effort to dehumanize Jews holds far less prominence in Nazi thought than the thought that Jews were manipulating the political state of affairs, exploiting gentile Germans, and the like. It was not regarding them as inhuman, though there are tropes that track dehumanization, but rather the paranoia around “the Jewish Question.”

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