It’s true what you suspected: all men are secret scumbags

I guess I’m going to have to read more of the traditional women’s magazines. Elle has a good writeup on the two scandals of the week.

The first is the revelation that Harvey Weinstein is a serial sexual harasser. I did not know that he recently published a mea culpa.

In a statement published by the Times in full, Weinstein writes,“I came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different,” and that “I cannot be more remorseful about the people I hurt and I plan to do right by all of them.” However, he’s also announced that he plans to sue the Times, with his attorney Charles Harder insisting that the story “is saturated with false and defamatory statements about Harvey Weinstein,” so it’s unclear exactly which faults Weinstein is admitting or how far his remorse goes.

Hang on there, Harvey. I came of age in the 60s and 70s, too, and that’s not true. Women did not suddenly become human beings in 1980. There were assholes then just as there are assholes now, but many of us did not treat women the way Weinstein did. Stop blaming it on the era. Harvey was and is simply one of the assholes.

And what’s with the lawsuit? It’s a NY Times article. The NY Times is always cautious and guarded and timid and surrounded with lawyers, and it’s not as if the article made shrieking claims that couldn’t be traced to sources. What exactly does he object to? I can understand why he’s being vague, though; if he gets nitpicky with some irrelevant little detail, it’s just going to make the accusations he can’t defend stand out even more.

Also, people who fling around frivolous lawsuits to silence people who criticize them are slime.

The second scandal is that dump of Breitbart emails that revealed what a gang of Nazis they are. I guess I was distracted by that repellent video of Milo vamping to “America the Beautiful” while his fans were giving him Nazi salutes that I overlooked a key fact: Milo was a front for a horde of mainstream journalists who used him to inject misogyny and racism into the discourse.

Consider that Buzzfeed article, which left so many of the women I know feeling rattled and peeved. The bulk of the article was dedicated to illuminating the hidden media ecology of the alt-right, and Breitbart’s ties to white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups. But many women were alarmed, not by what it revealed, but at the extent to which it confirmed their own suspicions about male colleagues.

The Breitbart slime machine, as per Buzzfeed, is fed by a network of “sleeper James Damores” — “vexed but silent for fear of losing their jobs or friends, kvetching to Yiannopoulos as a pressure valve.” The emails that Buzzfeed provides show Yiannopolous and his co-conspirators discussing female peers’ sex lives (Anita Sarkeesian’s ex was the topic of one e-mail), suggesting new lines of attack (tech reporter Dan Lyons questioned Zoe Quinn’s birth sex), spotlighting articles and authors that they thought were deserving of a pile-on, and otherwise using a burgeoning fascist movement to promote their apparent grudges against female and non-binary colleagues.

Besides reaching out routinely to flaming white nationalists for advice, Milo was getting voluntary input from otherwise staid journalists who let their hair down and their misogyny fly free in private emails. One of them was Mitchell Sunderland, who publicly makes noise about being a feminist while privately siccing professional misogynists on a “fat feminist”.

In one email that Buzzfeed cites, Milo is implored to “[p]lease mock this fat feminist,” a reference to feminist author and New York Times columnist Lindy West. All the emails are bad, but this one stands out because it was sent by Mitchell Sunderland, the one-time managing editor of Broadly, VICE Media’s women’s vertical. Sunderland has publicly said that one must “love feminism” to work there.

If Sunderland “loves” feminism, feminism should get a restraining order. The Buzzfeed cache suggests he used his repartee with Milo to go after feminist writers and organizations. Once, while he was still at Broadly, he sent his Breitbart contacts a Broadly video about the Satanic Temple and abortion rights; “do whatever with this on Breitbart. It’s insane,” he wrote. The next day, the smear appeared on the site: “‘Satanic Temple’ Joins Planned Parenthood in Pro-Abortion Crusade.” It’s hard to tell if Sunderland was consciously anti-choice and anti-feminist when he took the job at Broadly, but what is true is that he learned the lingo of feminism well enough to get paid for it, turning out reams of #content wherein he mocked fake male allies and critiqued the shallowness of various women’s feminism.

Mitch “Lying Sack of Shit” Sunderland has been fired. No word yet on whether the other closet sleazeballs exposed in the email have met a similar fate.

I do think it’s sweet that so many garbage humans have been exposed to the light of day by their common connection, Milo Yiannopoulos.

Does David Marchant believe he provided a quality learning experience?

Multiple women are filing sexual harassment charges against a prominent geologist, David Marchant. After reading the accusations, if true, Marchant is not at all suited to a life of teaching.

Willenbring alleges that Marchant, her thesis adviser, then 37, greeted her daily with the words: “Today I’m going to make you cry.” He slept in his own tent and Lewis in the cook tent, leaving Willenbring to share a tent with Jeffrey Marchant, she writes. According to Willenbring, Marchant told her repeatedly that his brother had a “porn-sized” penis, and said she should have sex with him and feel lucky for the opportunity.

One week, Willenbring alleges, David Marchant “decided that he would throw rocks at me every time I urinated in the field.” She cut her water consumption so she could last the 12-hour days far from camp without urinating, then drank liters at night. She says she developed a urinary tract infection and urinary incontinence, which has since recurred. When blood appeared in her urine, she alleges, Marchant prohibited her from going back to McMurdo for treatment.

“Most days,” Willenbring writes, “I would listen to long discussions about how I was a ‘slut’ or a ‘whore.’” When she disagreed, she alleges, “he would call me a liar and say, ‘There’s no place in science for liars, is there Jane? Is there Jane?’” repeating the phrase for up to 20 minutes.

As they neared camp near the end of one arduous day, Willenbring alleges in the complaint that Marchant waited above her on a steep slope. He said, “I noticed someone hasn’t cried today,” grabbed her by the backpack and threw her down the slope, she writes. She climbed up twice more; each time, she claims, he shoved her down again, leaving her bruised, with an injured knee and a twisted wrist.

In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.

That isn’t just sexual harassment, it’s sadistic abuse of a student who is dependent on her instructor and isolated from any support network of any kind. There is also corroboration from other students who were in the field with them.

Willenbring writes that she waited to file her complaint with BU until October 2016, shortly after she received tenure, for fear of professional reprisal from Marchant before she had established herself as a scholar. Several of the women involved and two male witnesses say they feel guilty about not speaking out at the time, guilt that fuels their desire to speak now.

I would hope they feel guilt. Allies ought to speak up when they hear of these things.

Speaking of allies…

Nearly all of the women say they considered reporting the abuse at the time. Doe met with then–department chair Carol Simpson after returning to BU to discuss filing academic charges against Marchant. Doe’s letter alleges that Simpson, noting Marchant’s “sizeable” reputation and funding, “asked me if it wouldn’t just be easier on me to complete my degree and leave. I was astonished, deflated, and, I believed at that time, left without recourse.”

Jesus fucking christ. An academic reputation ought not to shield you from criminal failures to meet your academic obligations as a scholar and a teacher and a citizen of a research community. Bringing in grant money is not the weregild for mistreating those in your care.

I’m impressed with Willenbring for persisting in the face of such traumatic abuse to earn a career of her own in science. I’m not at all impressed with Marchant, no matter how many publications and grants he might have.

Chasing those sweet, sweet Dave Rubin dollars

It seems some in the atheist movement are casting an envious eye on the money to be made by pandering to the alt-right crowd. They’re easily spotted — they’re the ones protesting that they really are liberals (usually with a “classical” or “neo” as a prefix, or a ” but” as a permanently attached suffix), while they spend all their effort on chastising Leftists or Black Lives Matter activists or Progressives or anyone who is fucking pissed off at the state of the country, and ignoring Nazis and white nationalists to complain that the people who consider the treatment of black folk to be discriminatory and historically and currently oppressive are the real racists. I just wish they’d be honest and recognize that they’re aligning themselves in favor of Nazis in the name of Free Speech, while working hard against progressives, because they shouldn’ta oughtnota say them there things.

The latest repeat offender in this game is Dave Smalley, who has written another of his one-sentence-per-paragraph declarative jeremiads. How dare The Left call Ben Carson a “white supremacist”? (no attribution given). How dare The Left call Gad Saad a “Nazi”? (no attribution given). How dare a Black Lives Matter activist tell white people “Get your own damn people, and tell them to stop being racists!” (no attribution given). And then he says, Is this not prejudiced? Is this not discrimination? Is this not segregation?, only a few sentences/paragraphs later to piously declare, I didn’t call her names. I’m not labeling her as a racist. She’s just toxic. That’s better. No name calling here, no sir!

Gah. The hypocrisy and dishonesty are infuriating. Could all you guys just admit that you’re right-leaning and that you use the claim that you’re a centrist as an excuse? (While failing to note that the American version of the “center” is somewhere close to fascism everywhere else in the world.) I prefer a straightforward wingnut to these chickenshits who like to pretend they’re liberal.

Anyway, I’m not going to delve into a sentence by sentence deconstruction of this foolish sucking up to delusional deplorables since, fortunately, the Utah Outcasts did a great job taking it apart.

I’m just going to remind you all that the people who protest the loudest that they aren’t really Nazis are the ones who enable the Nazis, and all too often are hiding the fact that they identify with and sympathize with Nazis more than they do progressives. If you have to whine and cry and repeat over and over again that no, you aren’t conservative, no, you’re not on the same side with white supremacists, you might want to ask yourself why so many people that you claim to be allies with are thinking that.

That’s gonna leave a mark. Here’s another post ripping into Smalley.

Is this what men are supposed to aspire to?

Story after story plays out in the same tawdry way. A man becomes rich and influential, with a reputation and fans and a secure life. I try to imagine myself in that position, and it’s not too hard; I’m not rich or famous, but I’ve got reasonable income that means I don’t have to worry, children who’ve grown up and made me proud, and a stable, happy, long term relationship. What if I were an order of magnitude more wealthy? What if I was powerful enough to have clients who relied on me to further their career?

I like to think that if I were in such a position, I’d use it to help people who needed it, would use my greater influence to shape the world in ways I like, would be able to do more to help my family. There’d be a bit of selfishness, too, of course — I’d have more computer toys, more books, more nights out at fabulous restaurants with my wife. At least, I think that’s what I’d do with more luxury.

But apparently not. As a man, if I were wealthy and powerful, this is what I’m supposed to want.

Two decades ago, the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein invited Ashley Judd to the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for what the young actress expected to be a business breakfast meeting. Instead, he had her sent up to his room, where he appeared in a bathrobe and asked if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower, she recalled in an interview.

There’s more. There are years of Weinstein using his abilities to play cheap sexual games with the women in his employ.

In 2014, Mr. Weinstein invited Emily Nestor, who had worked just one day as a temporary employee, to the same hotel and made another offer: If she accepted his sexual advances, he would boost her career, according to accounts she provided to colleagues who sent them to Weinstein Company executives. The following year, once again at the Peninsula, a female assistant said Mr. Weinstein badgered her into giving him a massage while he was naked, leaving her “crying and very distraught,” wrote a colleague, Lauren O’Connor, in a searing memo asserting sexual harassment and other misconduct by their boss.

I don’t get it. It’s so pathetic — Weinstein is an otherwise normal man, wealthier than most, with a career that lets him fund (and profit from) the production of art, and this is how he uses his power, to play cheap, needy games with those with less power, to attempt to get momentary pleasures out of the suffering of others? To rise so high in one’s own domain and then to use it in such a shabby, contemptible way…why? And it happens so often, with recent examples of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. What disease lurks in men’s hearts that this kind of childish, cruel, pointless behavior emerges as they get older and richer?

At least it makes me happy that I’m unambitious enough that I don’t desire to rise out of my ordinary middle-class life — who knows what kind of monster I’d turn into if I had a million dollars? But it does suggest that we need to start a charity to save the poor pitiful Hollywood moguls and spoiled heirs and corporate big guns. We need to restore their humanity and rescue them from the emergence of the poisonous imago dwelling within them by taking most of their money away and distributing it to the poor. It’s the only decent thing to do.

I wonder what the threshold for spawning the horrible man-child incubating within us men-folk is? I don’t think it would be ethical to do the experiment to find out.

Or it could be that Harvey Weinstein is and always has been a terrible human being.

Time to nuke the fault line and split the rift deeper

Thomas Smith wraps up his experience at the Mythcon conference. It wasn’t good. It’s clear that Carl Benjamin is a waste of time, as are his followers. He ends with the suggestion that next year, if they double down and invite yet another group of shitlords, let ’em have a shitlord conference…but if you’re anyone with a drop of social awareness and even a hint of conscience, don’t participate and don’t attend. The only problem with that, unfortunately, is that white supremacy has become a fruitful path to become YouTube-famous, so they’ll still have an audience. They just won’t have prominent mainstream atheists, and they’ll also be lacking all the atheists who support social justice (the only atheists worth listening to). Dig the rift deeper, and cut them loose.

Meanwhile Skepticon is about a month away, and if you want to help out the decent side of atheism, donate to help it happen.

Matt Dillahunty delivers his position on the conference.

Letters from an imbecile

Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will; her fight against this violation went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Oliver Wendell Holmes dismissed her rights with the remark that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Now you can see for yourself how imbecilic Carrie Buck was. Some of Buck’s letters have been published. Here’s one sample:

Dearest Mrs. Berry, Will write to you this A.M. This leaves me real well and getting along just fine. Mrs. Berry I have wrote to Dorris several times since I have been here and haven’t gotten any answer from it. I guess there are lots of girls going away now. I had a letter from mother here several days ago and said for me to send her some things. Will it be o.k. for me to do so or not. Will you please let me know. Give her my love and tell her I will write to her later as I haven’t got time to write now as I have got some work to do. Give Miss Vian (?) my love and all of the girls. Well I must close for now. With Love, Carrie B., Bland, Va.

That’s perfectly normal, an average human being with average human concerns having a conversation with another person. These are also scans of her letters, so you can also see that she had remarkably clear penmanship — not that penmanship is the mark of a worthy human, but it does show that she had normal skills and values.

What we did to this woman was a tragedy and a crime.

So tired of the “freedom” excuse

You’ve heard it before. “They hate us for our freedoms”. It’s a catch-all excuse, where we can simultaneously pat ourselves on the back for being so “free”, whatever that means, and condemn others for not being as “free”. I’ve developed a bad reaction to that: I want to know what you mean by “freedom”. Freedom to exploit people? Freedom to harass? Freedom to eat bacon? Freedom to pray to your gods? There are a lot of freedoms that are worth exercising, and many of those that I’m happy to say can be exercised in my country. There are also things people call freedoms that are truly awful, and those get exercised, too — like the freedom to take advantage of underprivileged people. There’s also a tendency for my fellow Americans to assume that America is the land of the free, and that everyone is equally and completely free, which is not true. They also tend to get angry if you point out the shortcomings of America, in particular that different people have different degrees of liberty.

So my usual reaction is to wonder how the ‘freedom’ cheerleaders define freedom, and whether they seriously think the ideal is to be free of all responsibilities and obligations. It’s usually used vacuously, as a dogma that is not to be questioned.

Which means that I had to facepalm at this complaint about new atheism. That’s fair; there are good reasons to criticize, and an important part of intellectual growth is to address good faith criticisms. I read this, for instance, and didn’t reject it out of hand.

Many new atheists, including Dennett or Dawkins, have been criticised for being too radical. The phrase “militant atheist” is often thrown about. The general worry is that they have little patience or compassion for religious people and the reasons why they choose religion.

I’ve heard that complaint frequently enough that we should pay attention to it and try to deal with it. I wasn’t particularly impressed that this critic then goes on to babble approvingly of Alain de Botton, one of the shallowest, least interesting, wanna-be replacements for Richard Dawkins ever.

But don’t worry! He’s got a suggestion for what the next generation of atheists need to do.

What should we do then? Is there a genuine, not merely superficial alternative to both religion and the “something bigger” new atheists talk about? I suggest that there is a very simple alternative: we should try to avoid forcing a straight-jacket on our ever-changing self – by religious doctrines or by one of these “projects” the new atheists talk about. We should accept and cherish our freedom to change.

For the new atheists, freedom plays a very limited role. You are free to choose what you devote your life to, but once you’ve done that, your life is on a fixed track – no more free decisions. The new atheists’ “projects”, just as religious doctrines, put unreasonably severe constraints on our inner freedom.

The opposite of religion is not the slavish following of “something bigger” as the new atheists suggest. The opposite of religion is freedom.

Baffling. What “projects”? Is this a thing among the new atheists? (I think I’d know.) What “straight jacket” [sic]? Where is this assertion that new atheists aren’t allowed to change and grow, that they’re on a fixed track? This is news to me.

And what is his alternative? Fucking “freedom”. What does that mean? It’s stunning that this platitude comes from a professor of philosophy. Define your terms. What do you mean by the “opposite of religion is freedom”? Religion is slavery? All a slave must do is accept atheism and they are free?

We need good criticisms because we do need to improve our image and our approach. This is not a useful argument. We don’t need hackneyed bromides. Explain what “freedom” means in a social movement.

The Chocolate Ritual

I was reading about this secret Nazi convention back in my hometown of Seattle. It is, as expected, a collection of unpleasant, ignorant people, who are also prosperous young professional men, so I suspect it’s the kind of crowd Mythicist Milwaukee would love to attract, so maybe they should read it for tips.

But there’s one bit that picqued my interest. Apparently there’s a famous Nazi author lurking back home.

When I’d asked Krafft back in 2015 how many white nationalists resided in Seattle, he responded “not many.” The only local voice for white separatism was the laughably uncharismatic Harold Covington of Northwest Front, who according to Krafft, asks people for money immediately upon meeting them. Surprisingly, some white nationalist circles now hold Harold Covington in high regard. That’s especially true among younger followers (including the church Shooter Dylann Roof). His “racially aware” Northwest sci-fi novels are required reading among convention attendees. Some have read all of them. To prep for the forum, I planned on reading Covington’s best-known works. I started with a young adult novel about a delinquent and his cheerleader girlfriend in the Seattle race war, but gave up after forty pages because the book is unreadable.

“Unreadable”? That sounds like a challenge. So I looked him up on Amazon to see if any were available for free, since no way in hell was I paying for them. None are free. But some had some had fairly extensive free previews, so I could get a taste. It was not a good flavor. These things are full of misogyny, racism, and violence by smug, oblivious white men with guns.

So I started on one, called The Brigade. The beginning was not auspicious. It’s about a guy who decides to murder two women because they got a friend of his arrested and thrown into jail. He was arrested because — of course he did nothing wrong — he called his girlfriend a “dyke”. That is enough of an excuse for ZOG to throw an innocent white man into prison!

The real problem is that she was a…wait for it…a feminist.

“Oh, she was always like that, ever since she came back from the university,” said King with a shrug. “I mean, what else do you expect from U of O? I just figured she rebelled against her religious upbringing when she went to college, trying to be chic and fit in, and then she just never sort of grew out of it. I actually used to think it was kind of cute, kind of her way of retaining her youth.”

“Yeah, well, baby tarantulas grow up into big fucking poisonous spiders,” Hatfield reminded him.

Yeah, I went to the U of O, too. No wonder I turned out this way. But I have to object: tarantulas are not poisonous. Neither are feminists.

But you might be wondering what terrible thing his girlfriend did to deserve having the criminal insult of “dyke” thrown at her. He caught her in flagrante with another woman!

Which leads to a hilarious revelation.

“Strike her?” laughed King bitterly. “My God, have you seen that creature? She’s built like a bulldozer! I lost my temper is all, when I walked into my living room and found them doing–dear Christ, what they were doing–I can’t even talk about it!”

“The Chocolate Ritual,” said Hatfield. “I know. It is supposed to be for bonding between female lovers. Most people have no idea of what homosexuals actually do. You were unlucky enough to get a crash course.”

The things you will learn in this book. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read much further, because the original article is correct: this book is unreadable, and stops being funny fast. Yes, Our Hero sneaks into a house, and callously murders the two lesbians with a big gun. It kind of makes all the protestations about innocent, harmless men being unjustly accused by conniving women ring false. Not funny at all.

There’s also lots of crap about organizing paramilitary brigades, and boring details about military weapons. Not recommended, except for burning or wiping your ass.

Any lesbians reading this should chime in with an explanation of what the Chocolate Ritual might be, though, since I clearly don’t know as much about what homosexuals do as Harold Covington.