Batman vs. Superman — I’m just saying “no”

Comic-Book-Guy

It’s going to be playing here in Morris this weekend. And while I’m usually quick to get in line for escapist fantasy, I think I’m just going to sit this one out. I’m going to catch up on my grading, instead, which sounds like more fun.

The problem with this movie that I can see coming is that it’s a Zack Snyder film, and takes everything far too seriously. 300 was fun in the sense that the joke was on him — it went so far over the top that it became campily bad, and you could watch it for the meta-mockery of raging ahistorical libertarian machismo (and of course Snyder is an acolyte of Ayn Rand.) Battling ubermenschen is right in Snyder’s wheelhouse, and he’ll stuff it full of pseudo-seriousness and completely overlook any human story.

And that humanity is what I’m looking for. Let’s all remember these are all comic book stories — they can deal with big themes, but there should always be a bit of light-heartedness beneath it all. These are stories about people with impossible powers dancing about in brightly colored leotards, after all. A sense of humor is required, but Snyder doesn’t seem to have one.

Of the superhero movies I’ve enjoyed, there’s an inverse correlation between the scope of the story and the pleasure of experiencing them. Those Avengers movies with a giant cast and city-demolishing cosmic enemy? Thud. Boring. The fun movies? Deadpool, Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy? The magnitude of the drama has to be compensated for with sufficient silliness. Man of Steel was possibly the worst of a bad bunch because there wasn’t a scrap of joy in the whole thing — they might as well have painted a scowling face on a wrecking ball and filmed a day of it smashing stuff. It would have been just as entertaining.

So, yeah, I’ll choose to grade papers over watching self-absorbed Comic Book Guy pander to the oblivious hero-worshipping demographic — you know, the kinds of people who think critics ought to be raped for disliking the object of their idolatry. I’m pretty sure those papers will contain an occasional bit that will make me crack a smile — inadvertently or intentionally — so that sounds like a lot more fun than watching angry cartoons punch each other.

The Bundy clan are filthy vandals

pooptrench

The people who occupied the Malheur refuge were more than just sanctimonious criminals — they were also disgusting. Here’s a gallery of photos illustrating the wreckage they left behind. They trashed the place. They wrecked the land. They disrespected the property of the people who worked at the refuge while demanding that their property rights were paramount.

That photo is of their legacy: a shit-filled trench.

That’s how I’ll always remember the Bundys.

North Carolina: You suck.

The Republicans are flailing about to promote their regressive social agenda, and they’re succeeding, at least temporarily. While we’re all distracted by the spectacle of presidential elections, they’ve managed to control legislatures and governorships in many states, and that means they get to push through all kinds of ugly laws.

So North Carolina has passed a ‘bathroom law’, which seems to be the new strategy for getting public approval of odious legislation. They’re making sure men don’t get to sneak into women’s restrooms, how can you disagree with that? Well, I can, but appealing to modesty and privacy works as a great stalking horse when what you’re really about is oppressing minorities. The NC bill isn’t just about regulating bathrooms.

McCrory’s statement and tweets tonight only mention the so-called “bathroom issue” – but in fact the bill excludes LGBT citizens from protections in housing, employment, and public accommodations. The bill also overturns not only the LGBT rights bill in Charlotte, it repeals similar laws in eight other North Carolina municipalities.

McCrory also keeps emphasizing that it is a “bipartisan” bill. There were a few Democrats who voted for it initially, but how can you call it bipartisan when every Democrat in the senate walked out on the vote in protest? It seems to me that that is kind of the opposite of bipartisan support.

So not only are they passing oppressive legislation, they are constantly lying about it. Business as usual for the Republicans, I guess.

Remember this next fall. The election isn’t just about the highest office in the land, it’s also about the entire poisonous nest of scumbags at every level of government. Vote the Republicans out. Don’t even let a professed Republican be elected to dogcatcher.

jpsheffield

A nice twist on the North Carolina law: see this manly bearded fellow? He’s a transgender man. He’s now required by law to use women’s restrooms in North Carolina.

It’s going to be spectacular, what with all the conservative crania exploding, when someone tries to prevent him from entering the room the law says he must use.

I’m sure there are also transgender women who are going to blow everyone’s mind when they use the men’s room. The proponents are all thinking about enforcing strict gender norms, and they’ve just taken an action that is going to make all the people who don’t fit in their narrow little boxes more prominent.

What is wrong with National Geographic?

I’m just watching the whole brand morph into something contemptible — they held out the longest, but it seems to be a general rule that mass media that promotes science will eventually sell out to peddle popular pablum. That’s happening right now before our eyes. Two things leap out at me:

  • The rush to produce religious apologetics. They’re coming out with a new “documentary”, The Story of God, that from this excerpt is clearly total crap with a good budget (they hired Morgan Freeman) and some quality production values.

    That’s terrible. Videos of people gazing wisely into space are not evidence for a deity. Subjective anecdotes from a guy who nearly died recalling the hallucinations his oxygen-starved brain generated are not convincing evidence of an afterlife.

    There is potential for a fascinating analysis of comparative religion, but this does not seem to be that story. That story would be the story of humans grappling with their mortality, not the story of an imaginary being called “god”.

  • The lack of appreciation of good, solid content. I’ve just learned that NatGeo is going to discontinue Brian Switek’s Laelaps blog. That’s shocking, too: Switek puts out quality science regularly, every week or two, and he has an excellent reputation. The reason given for kicking him out is that he didn’t generate enough traffic to the site.

    That’s appalling. That sends a message: NatGeo doesn’t care about the quality of your content, just how many eyeballs swivel in your direction. If that’s your metric, then you’re doomed to drive right down into the pit of popular garbage.

    Maybe they can replace him with a Kardashian.

Watching something that was good and valuable slowly rot away is depressing.

Creationism and evolution reconciled?

Michael Mamas thinks so, and he has published his thesis in that world-class journal, the HuffPo. He claims to have figured out how biology and religion are actually talking about exactly the same thing…which is to say, they should both agree with his New Age bullshit.

You will not be surprised to learn that the underlying secret of all existence is vibrations.

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The War on Bathrooms

It’s getting ridiculous. Now Minnesota Republicans have teamed up to propose a bill outlawing gender-neutral bathrooms. Why are Republicans so obsessed with bathrooms? I don’t know. Personally, I can’t get worked up about where someone carries out excretion, as long as they’re discreet and don’t make a mess.

A striking fourty-four Republicans have cosponsored a bill in the Minnesota House that would block businesses and other employers from providing gender-neutral restrooms or from enacting policies that allow transgender employees to use appropriate restrooms. The bill, like one introduced in the Minnesota Senate on Friday, amends the Minnesota Human Rights Act, the nation’s first nondiscrimination law barring discrimination based on gender identity.

HF 3374 and its identical counterpart HF 3395 defines “sex” as “A person’s sex is either male or female as biologically defined.” The bill does not mention people who fall outside the male-female binary such as those who are intersex, nor those whose sex designations have been legally changed under Minnesota law.

I’m a biologist, and I don’t know how to unambiguously define every person’s sex. Chromosomes? Genitals? Those can give conflicting messages. Culturally, sex is a behavior and an attitude, and that doesn’t align well with the signs labeling bathroom doors. Should I only pee in the presence of people who don’t want to have sex with me? That’s easy — 99.9999% of the human race can share a bathroom with me. And that rare 0.0001% who do would include both men and women. Shall we also prohibit gay men from using men’s rooms? (I shouldn’t say that — Republicans might think that’s a dandy idea for more oppressive legislation.)

Fortunately, this is Minnesota, where the Republicans are a minority, and I suspect that not only will it fail to get out of the legislature, but if it does, our Democratic governor will veto it.

Chaos/Savagery and the elimination of Grey Zones

I’ve been reading Scott Atran to try to figure out what is going on with these attacks in Europe, and he has some important insights. What are their goals? To eliminate the Grey Zone and polarize nations. They win when they isolate immigrant populations.

The core strategy outlined in the ISIS playbook, The Management of Chaos-Savagery (Idarat at-Tawahoush, required reading for every ISIS political, religious and military leader, or amir), is to fill the void wherever chaos already exists, as in much of the Sahel and Sahara, and create chaos that can be filled as in Europe.

In reality, today’s Brussel attacks represented just the latest, ever more effective, installment for fomenting chaos in Europe and thereby “Extinguish the Grey Zone,” along the lines of 12-page editorial published in ISIS’s online magazine Dabiq in early 2015. ‘The Grey ZOne’ describes the twilight area occupied by most Muslims between good and evil – in other words, between the Caliphate and the Infidel, which the ‘blessed operations of September 11’ brought into relief. The editorial quotes Osama bin Laden, for whom ISIS is the true heir: ‘The world today is divided. Bush spoke the truth when he said, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”’, with the actual ‘terrorist’ being the Western Crusaders. Now, ‘the time had come for another event to… bring division to the world and destroy the Grayzone.’A welcome to Syrian refugees would clearly represent a winning response to this strategy, whereas wholesale rejection of refugees just as clearly represents a losing response to ISIS. We might wish to celebrate diversity and tolerance in the grayzone, but the general trend in Europe and the majority of the US political establishment and population is to collude in erasing it.

The following are axioms drawn from The Management of Chaos-Savagery (Idarat at-Tawahoush, required reading for every ISIS political, religious and military leader, or amir), and from the February 2015 editorial in Dabiq (online ISIS publication), on “The Extinction of the Gray Zone.” ISIS’s actions have been, and likely will continue to be, consistent with these axioms:

Diversify the strikes and attack soft targets – tourist areas, eating places, places of entertainment, sports events, and so forth — that cannot possibly be defended everywhere. Disperse the infidels’ resources and drain them to the greatest extent possible, and so undermine people’s faith in the ability of their governments to provide security, most basic of all state functions.

· Motivate the masses to fly to regions that we manage, by eliminating the “Gray Zone” between the true believer and the infidel, which most people, including most Muslims, currently inhabit. Use so-called “terror attacks” to help Muslims realize that non-Muslims hate Islam and want to harm all who practice it, to show that peacefulness gains Muslims nothing but pain.

· Use social media to inspire sympathizers abroad to violence. Communicate the message: Do what you can, with whatever you have, wherever you are, whenever possible.

I suspect that ISIS is planning a coordinated attack across multiple cities in Europe to ramp up the process of extinguishing the gray zone, and to also shift the focus of its possible adherents away form its increasingly noteworthy military containment in Syria and Iraq.

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