Maybe I’m just too cynical

Kevin Drum is being way too optimistic here.

But his latest howler at a town hall in New Hampshire—especially after his weak debate performance last night—might finally be his death knell. Note: the issue isn’t the questioner. There are lunatics in every crowd. This one declared, “We have a problem in this country: it’s called Muslims….They have training camps growing where they want to kill us.” Then he asked “When do we get rid of them?” Did he mean all the Muslims? Just the fantasy training camps? Who knows. But all Trump said was this: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things.” No pushback, no nothing. I’m sure he’ll be walking this back soon, but it might be unwalkable. If there’s any justice, this might finally do him in.

Among all the stupid, bigoted, ridiculous things that Trump has said, why should having him agree to someone saying We have a problem in this country: it’s called Muslims be the one that does him in? We’ve had a presidency built around the Muslim threat that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and Dick Cheney is still going on bragging about it. Has there ever been any substantial downside for people who want to denigrate Muslim lives?

After all, we have one dead famous atheist who advocated bombing Iran, and responded to pragmatic arguments that that would just create more terrorists by suggesting that the solution to that was to kill them all. And we’ve got another live famous atheist who could write this:

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.

He still has swarms of defenders. And these are the supposed smart people.

I’m hoping the Trump balloon pops soon. I don’t have much confidence that his open pandering to bigotry will be the pin that does it.

Jesus. Bill Maher.

Bill Maher really went off on the case of Ahmed Mohamed and said maybe liberals should drop the political correctness and consider that maybe being cautious is a good thing.

Maher made it clear that of course the Texas teen deserves an apology for being arrested over a clock, but said there’s nothing wrong with being a little suspicious when there’s a young Muslim student with something that “looks exactly like a fucking bomb” and there are young Muslims “blowing shit up” all over the world.

The exact quote, in defending the Irving police “erring on the side of caution”, is this bit of blinkered bigotry:

For the last 30 years, it’s been one culture blowing shit up over and over again.

In case the reference is unclear, he’s not talking about the United States of America.

He also claimed that we put [arrested] a kid after school for a couple of hours. This is not the end of the world. No, it’s not, but way to go, minimizing injustice, Bill Maher and panel of three wealthy white guys!

I don’t expect Maher to lose his show after this long pattern of egregious bigotry, just as I don’t expect Trump to suddenly be shunned for one more incident. But it won’t even end the reverence the atheist community has for Maher.

Milo Yiannopoulos needs pizza and a wank

bot

Milo’s up to the same old sexist nonsense again — what a hack. His latest is a bit of contrived outrage about sexbots. He’s for ’em. He somehow thinks liberal SJW’s are going to suppress the technology, as if we care. I think he was so upset that he drank until he couldn’t see straight and then started typing.

Who, or what, men have sex with is the basis of our civilisation. It is the driving force behind our greatest accomplishments. Men don’t compete for abstract pleasure: they compete to bag the best mate. The internet, the pyramids and the moon landings would not exist were it not for man’s desire to have sex with woman.

Keep in mind that this was written by an openly gay man. He does not really believe that aspiring to sex with a woman is the basis of our civilisation or the driving force behind our greatest accomplishments (oh, and by the way — I read the hyperbole and the padded prose of first year students, and they aren’t this bad). He’s just pandering to his audience of juvenile MRAs and angry people who are pissed off that there are women in video games.

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Always bet on the lawyers to win

It’s a sure thing. Rebecca Watson tallies up the cost of dealing with Ben Radford’s legal blustering — but it’s incomplete. Not just because Radford never lets it end (he settled with Karen Stollznow and signed an agreement that the matter was formally closed and not to be discussed publicly any further…and then started barreling about threatening people about the subject he wasn’t supposed to discuss), but we don’t have the other side of the legal costs. How much has Radford thrown away on his crusade? I hope and suspect that it has been a lot more than anyone else has spent.

I’m confident that his lawyer is a very happy and successful person, at least.

Oh, jeez…the Republican candidates tried to pick their own code names

In the debate, the Republicans were asked what code names they wanted if they became president. The only appropriate response to such a stupid question is “What? Presidents don’t pick their code names.” There are also guidelines for the selection of such names.

According to established protocol, good codewords are unambiguous words that can be easily pronounced and readily understood by those who transmit and receive voice messages by radio or telephone regardless of their native language. Traditionally, all family members’ code names start with the same letter.

The codenames change over time for security purposes, but are often publicly known. For security, codenames are generally picked from a list of such ‘good’ words, but avoiding the use of common words which could likely be intended to mean their normal definitions.

They’re not grand statements about your dreams and ideals! So what did the candidates do? They picked ludicrously unusable thumpery.

Chris Christie: True Heart (Going for irony, I guess…something about corruption would be more appropriate)
John Kasich: Unit One (Just announce you’re a boring nonentity, already)
Carly Fiorina: Secretariat (She’s comparing herself to a horse?)
Scott Walker: Harley (Union Made in the USA!)
Jeb Bush: Ever-Ready (For what? )
Donald Trump: Humble (Derp.)
Ben Carson: One Nation (Simultaneously arrogant and incomprehensible. It’s perfect)
Ted Cruz: Cohiba (Speak English! And cigars are bad for you.)
Marco Rubio: Gator (McKlusky? Played by Burt Reynolds? I suddenly feel like this is an Archer episode)
duckhuntMike Huckabee: Duck Hunter (the resemblance is uncanny)
Rand Paul: Justice Never Sleeps (“Batman” would be shorter)

I give up. This election is going to be a circus.

Ad wars a-comin’

Freethoughtblogs is a small content provider on the web: we openly and unabashedly serve a tiny niche of the available market (if you think atheism in general is a big thing, you need to get some perspective. Religious sects get a bigger slice of the pie, and heck, automotive makers are YUUUUUGE. There are many niches that totally dwarf us). And yet even us little people have infrastructure needs — gone are the days when I could just plug in some CMS widgets on my lab computer and have my site run in the background. We had to buy a dedicated server and have it hosted, with monthly fees, and with a tech person who has to keep it all running reliably, deal with those DOS attacks, etc. It all costs money, real cash.

So we’re dependent on some kind of revenue stream, and that comes from…ads. I hate the ads. You hate the ads. I would love to have some alternative means of covering our maintenance costs, but I haven’t seen a good strategy yet. I suppose we could go the route of public broadcasting, and yell at you every month to pledge to your local freethought blog network, but I think that would be about as unpleasant as the ads, and would also require us to work at fundraising. Most of us aren’t here for the money, you know, and playing pitchman is deeply uninteresting.

So this story fills me with trepidation: the big guns — Apple, Google, and Facebook — are warring over ads and adblocking, and guess who’ll be collateral damage?

But taking money and attention away from the web means that the pace of web innovation will slow to a crawl. Innovation tends to follow the money, after all! And asking most small- to medium-sized sites to weather that change without dramatic consequences is utterly foolish. Just look at the number of small sites that have shut down this year: GigaOm. The Dissolve. Casey Johnston wrote a great piece for The Awl about ad blockers, in which The Awl’s publisher noted that “seventy-five to eighty-five percent” of the site’s ads could be blocked. What happens to a small company when you take away 75 to 85 percent of its revenue opportunities in the name of user experience? Who’s going to make all that content we love so much, and what will it look like if it only makes money on proprietary platforms?

There are other things that aren’t discussed. Google is the master dominator of ads on the web — most of our ads are served up by Google. And Google isn’t the benign impartial deliverer of ad content that you might think. They have RULES. Show a hint of nudity in a photo on one of our pages, and someone can report it (we have no shortage of assholes looking to report such things) and Google will just shut down ads for our entire network. We’ve had long weeks with zero revenue because of bullshit like that.

Further, ad providers are not well-behaved. There is a constant competition for the people providing us with ads to inject sneaky code — it’s not enough to display your wares decorously in the space provided. They have to pop up, or pop under, or slide onto the screen, or switch on autoplay video so some shill can babble at you, and we all fucking hate that, and we turn on our adblockers. People come to a web site for the content, and if some goddamn cable company uses that as an excuse to dominate the screen with a dancing floating singing window, it defeats the purpose of going to the site. This whole ad-blocking conflict is an example of the tragedy of commons.

And we’re mostly helpless. We sign a contract, we dedicate a chunk of our page real estate to the ads, and our ad host gives us a little piece of code that fetches ads from some servers somewhere else, and we willingly place that parasitic sucker on our site, for the money. The money that we need to have a site at all.

The near future isn’t going to be fun.

I did not watch the Republican debate

It would be good to be politically informed, but I think the GOP and the media have colluded to produce noisy spectacle and pointless demagoguery, so I skipped the whole thing — we all have better things to do with 3 hours than watch out-of-touch prudes and bigots purse their lips and yell. Also, I knew I could get a better digest of what was said on the web today.

It turns out I was right, and didn’t miss anything important. I checked the big name news sites, too, and they’re pulling the same shit they always do: what are the rankings in the horse race? Who ‘won’ this debate? Who delivered the best zingers? I want to know what policies (they’re Republican, I can guess they’re all heinous) they’re pushing, not who got win, place, and show among the yahoos.

I did learn that Carly Fiorina’s magic solution to all problems is to increase the size of the military. And she was considered the ‘winner’.

Winnipeg this weekend

reasonfest-LOGO

Tomorrow, I’ll be heading off to the River City ReasonFest — it’s not too late for you to sign up!

I’m also going to be freaking out a little bit — I have somehow managed to lose the file for my presentation (I recently did a major cleanup of my drive, and I think I might have accidentally disintegrated it). I’m either going to have to frantically reconstruct it, or repurpose another talk. So come for the surprise! Who knows what I’m going to say this weekend? I might just tapdance on stage.

Dr Oz has seen the error of his ways!

He has announced that Dr. Mehmet Oz is changing the direction of his show! No more quackery for him!

The entire upcoming season of The Dr. Oz Show — which kicks off Monday, September 14 — will focus on the mind-body connection and feature a partnership with former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, MD.

In the past, Dr. Oz has come under fire for the advice given on his show. Now, the newly focused program will use medical and other experts whose advice is based in research.

Orac is not impressed. Neither am I. It’ll take a sustained improvement in rigor before I’ll believe it.

Unfortunately, his choice of a topic does not fill me with confidence. I can imagine the frantic meetings to try and hammer out a new direction that has just enough credibility to let them claim they’re being scientific, but still plenty of slop to allow them to continue to pitch snake oil. Green coffee beans don’t have any evidence of medical efficacy, but there’s evidence that if you believe hard enough in green coffee beans they can have a therapeutic effect! Also, Placebos work!.