Who all is going to see Black Panther this weekend?

I’m tempted to stay up way past my bedtime to catch it — we’re having a midnight showing at the Morris theater. I’m encouraged by the trailer and a few reviews. I only have two reservations, which are actually common complaints about the recent crop of superhero movies.

  • Please don’t let it be about yet another cosmic villain with godlike powers threatening the fate of the entire planet. Smaller stories are better. You’ve already got unbelievable heroes, don’t overwhelm the audience with even more amplified conflicts.

  • Please let there be some sense of humor about the whole affair. The protagonists are bouncing around in colorful tights. They shouldn’t take themselves too seriously.

Good examples of why you don’t need to blast us with gigantic world-shaking, universe-spanning battles are Logan and Ant Man. Perspective, please! Also, look at Thor: Ragnarok — despite the daunting title, it turned out to have quite a bit of humor about the whole romp.

I’ll be able to handle it if it violates either suggestion, but not both: deadly sober comic book movies about vast cosmic consequences will just put me to sleep. Especially if I do go for the late night showing.

Evergreen tweet


The NRA argument boils down to a belief that massacres are part of the price of constitutional liberty.
This implies that the Founders were all psychopaths.

They might have been. But I’m confident that the whole dang NRA organization is run by psychopaths, who are trying to encourage psychopathy in the American populace.

Didn’t see it coming

The Florida mass-murderer had a lot of problems: he was a “loner” (uh-oh, so was I!), and other kids thought he was “weird” (damn, that’s me again), and he’d also been treated in the past for mental health concerns (I was not, but there should be no stigma with getting help). Those all seem like irrelevant points to me, not associated with going on a shooting rampage, but there were other signs, which his foster family didn’t even notice.

Jim Lewis said the family is devastated and didn’t see this coming.

Maybe it’s because people don’t pay attention to the right signs. Like this one:

Victoria Olvera, a 17-year-old student, said Cruz was expelled last school year after a fight with his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend. She said Cruz had been abusive to his girlfriend.

“Abusive to women” — that one warrants a great big check mark in a large box at the top of the checklist. If you can’t respect one class of people, you’re probably already well-practiced at dehumanization and lack empathy.

He was in a fight so severe that he was expelled from school? There’s another sign, a propensity for violence. Unfortunately, once you’re kicked out of school, there isn’t a fallback institution where this kid’s problems could be corrected.

What else might have been a concern?

According to the family’s lawyer, who did not identify them, they knew that Cruz owned an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, but made him keep it locked up in a cabinet. He did have the key, however.

Teenagers do not need an AR-15. I can sympathize with someone enjoys target shooting or hunting, although I don’t do either, but that’s a weapon that’s not particular good for either hobby. It’s good for stroking while you have bloody power fantasies.

Mutchler recalled Cruz posting on Instagram about killing animals and said he had talked about doing target practice in his backyard with a pellet gun.

Target practice with a pellet gun? Fine. Killing animals? Bright red flashing lights and a siren going off.

“He started going after one of my friends, threatening her, and I cut him off from there,” Mutchler said.

“Threatening people” is one of those things that has been treated as perfectly fine on the internet — it’s just free speech, man, you know you can’t say anything against free speech. Unless you threaten to kill the president, of course. Then for some reason they’ll think you might be a real danger to an Important Person, so they investigate further and open a file on you. Threaten an ordinary citizen…well, suck it up, ignore it, even if he does have an AR-15 and instagrams photos of dead animals and has a history of physical abuse.

“There were problems with him last year threatening students, and I guess he was asked to leave campus,” Gard said.

They knew.

The parents, the school administrators, his peers, they all saw it coming. They knew this kid was a powder keg ready to go off. But you don’t get to condemn guns or abuse of women as a serious warning sign — those things are OK in this culture — so they did nothing.

Well, they did nothing except abandon the kid to his own devices, where he festered and got worse. Let’s see a stronger, more active response to dangerous people than neglect.

And let’s take their damn guns away.

Playing games…for Science!

For the past few days (and wrapping up today) I’ve been at the Science Museum of Minnesota as one of a team of advisors helping them on a future interactive exhibit on evolution, which I’m not going to tell you about, except to say that they have an ambitious schedule and maybe you’ll get to see it as early as this summer. One of the things we had to do yesterday is introduce ourselves with a 5 minute talk about what we can contribute to the project, and so I threw together a little something about my background and my experience as a teacher, yadda yadda, and because I could, I put up an illustration on YouTube to play on the screen behind me — so I used this one, which is just a general time-lapse of zebrafish development.

You have to picture me standing at the lectern, saying something like, “…and this is the experimental animal I work on”, clicking on the play button, and turning to wave gracefully at the screen…and discovering that YouTube had inserted an ad at the beginning, and that what I was pointing at was a shirtless, hunky, muscular man flexing and saying something about an exercise or diet program, I don’t know, because I was busy clicking on the “skip ad” button.

Now everyone has a much more exciting impression of my research.

Aside from that little misstep — do not trust YouTube to serve up your sober, serious videos — it’s been an enlightening experience. My colleagues here have an eclectic mix of skills, with theater people, professional game designers, and museum directors all contributing to the construction and critique of this coming exhibit. Our evenings have been spent playing games, looking for ideas that could be used to involve and inform the general public.

I have been introduced to escape rooms. I did not have the slightest inkling these even existed until this weekend. I guess I’ve been totally out of it, and you’re probably going to tell me you’ve been doing these for ages, and make me feel old.

Anyway, for my fellow old codgers, escape rooms are a big booming business right now. The idea is that someone designs an elaborate series of puzzles in a locked room — you have to figure out a hidden code with clues in the room to find a secret switch that opens a concealed door that leads to a room with more puzzles that then fit with clues to reveal more puzzles, for instance, and if you solve them all within a certain time limit you are allowed to escape, or discover the murderer, or save the world, or something. They seem to be hugely popular — a search for Minneapolis escape rooms reveals they’re dotted all over the map.

And now, I’ve gone from a state of total ignorance to having played 3 escape rooms at the Science Museum’s expense.

I’ve learned many things this week — if you want to teach people about science, it’s helpful to listen to theater people and game designers, and it’s good to get away from the model of telling people what the answer is to instead have them figure it out for themselves. Also, escape rooms are kind of fun.

Engaging Jordan Peterson is enlightening and frustrating

I’ve made two videos about Jordan Peterson now: in the first, I addressed the basic errors in biology he made in a television interview, and in the second I drilled down into the bad biology in the first chapter of his book, where he would have presumably been more rigorous in his treatment (he wasn’t). The results have been interesting. Note that what I was doing was cutting through the fog of obfuscation he throws up around one simple point, and was actively avoiding any temptation to deal with extraneous issues, like social justice, or mere feminism, or his confusion about whether behaviors are culturally or biologically determined.

It sort of didn’t work.

The comments have been weird. A fair number of his fans are willing to admit that I popped Peterson’s balloon on that one point — he really is making illogical arguments, and you can’t simply announce what ideal human behavior is from the behavior of lobsters, and Peterson is just wallowing in the naturalistic fallacy — but they don’t care. They just move on to something I didn’t address here and announce that he’s still right.

Peterson can be confusing to listen to. I think he makes some excellent points…. but we gotta give PZ the nod with respect to evolutionary biology.
This video has confirmed that we need to be careful when listening to Jordan Peterson. Some of what he says…particularly with respect to religion….seems purposefully obscurantist and unnecessarily confusing.

I’m right there with him on the “pronouns” issue though. There is only XY and XX. Anything else is pretense. (notwithstanding the 1% of people born intersex)

I wonder if this person has even seen his karyotype? Probably not. Very few people have. But the thing is that I did not address Peterson’s gender misconceptions in either of these videos, so why fall back on something that I’d have to make another video to address?

And then there is this sentiment:

Even if ALL of Peterson’s scientific references are incorrect, his greater messages are more important, and that’s why his book is waking the globe.

These are young men who mostly identify as skeptics and atheists and hard-bitten realists (although I don’t know about this specific individual), and look what they’ve sunk to. That’s pure faith-based acceptance of a conclusion while seeing the evidence for it debunked. It’s sad to see. This is where organized skepticism has led us — to a tool you can use as a blunt instrument, without comprehension, to shout down science while waving science as a banner.

Some don’t even bother with argument.

And the thing is … Peterson makes a strong and persuasive case against the SWJ woo that you appear to promote.

PZ, you are a clown. The only reason anybody takes you seriously is that because those who do are brainwashed social justice warriors who will support anybody, no matter what they say, who loudly spouts their rhetoric. Take the SJWs away, and you would just be the laughing stock of everybody.

Nothing in those videos was “SWJ woo” — it was straightforward, basic biology and science. I focused on the narrow point at hand. It doesn’t matter. Any criticism of Peterson will be dealt with by huddling with the ideological tribe and cursing those damned sssjooooos.

If I were to do it again — I do not plan to do it again — I wouldn’t be so restrained. I’d point out that his book is terribly written, relying on a fog of flowery prose and long digressions into irrelevant issues to conceal his central conceits. If he embeds his message in a cloud of noise, you can still see it as a negative space, his readers can imbed it in their brains, but he never has to expose himself to the risk of a direct statement…and when you do catch him saying something specific, he can trust his fans to defend him by saying, “Hist, poltroon, look over there in the mist, a vague outline of something that refutes what Jordan said, therefore he didn’t really say what you caught him saying!” But wink, wink, nudge, nudge, they know exactly what he’s saying, his “greater messages” that are “waking the globe”.

I’ve written about his inanity on gender issues, but you can read far more from Siobhan. His fans sound even worse, but that’s only because they don’t have the political sense to conceal their views behind a cloud of evasion and verbiage.

I recommend this video by Peter Coffin. He takes the opposite approach from what I did — instead of taking a microscope to one narrow point and stabbing it with a micropipette, he steps way back to look at the big picture and expose Peterson’s general strategies. It’s good.

Obviously, the comments are predictable, claiming that he’s strawmanning and taking Peterson out of context. That’s what happens when you try to argue rationally with people who have abandoned all reliance on reason.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer organization

Good news, everyone. Turning Point USA, the obnoxious right-wing organization that papers my campus with conservative propaganda posters, seems to be flaming out…or at least, one can hope.

A former student activist for conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA on Monday called the organization a “shithole” with “increasing levels of drama” and “some of the most incompetent, lazy, and downright dishonest people I have ever encountered.”

Is anyone surprised?

Behold their fine plumage

Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines:

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte last week told soldiers to shoot female rebels in their genitals, the latest in a series of violent, misogynistic remarks.

Addressing a group of former communist rebels on Feb. 7, Duterte, who served as a city mayor before becoming president, appeared to encourage Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to target women in conflict.

“Tell the soldiers. ‘There’s a new order coming from the mayor. We won’t kill you. We will just shoot your vagina,’” he said.

“If there is no vagina, it would be useless,” he continued, appearing to imply that women are useless without their genitals, according to local media reports.

Donald Trump, president of the United States:

“We’ve had a great relationship,” Trump told reporters, sitting with Duterte at the start of the bilateral meeting. “This has been very successful.” He praised Duterte’s handling of the summit and said, “I’ve really enjoyed being here.”

As Trump pivoted to talking about the nice weather in Manila, Duterte cut off the American reporters who tried to press Trump on human rights.

“Whoa, whoa,” he protested. “This is not a press statement. This is the bilateral meeting.”

Duterte at one point called reporters “spies,” prompting Trump to chuckle. “You are,” Duterte repeated.

But every day is Doubting Darwin day!

Today is Charles Darwin’s birthday — he’d be 209 years old if he hadn’t kicked the bucket in 1882. It’s a good excuse to find something to celebrate, so go have a cupcake or something. I’m planning to spend the next few days working with people at the Science Museum of Minnesota on a science education project, which sounds appropriately productive and entertaining. But, you know, the best way to celebrate Darwin’s life and research is to ask questions, question everything, and explore new ideas, which is how Mr Darwin would have liked it. Although you shouldn’t do that just one day a year. Every day is a day to learn something new.

I just wish the creationists could do that. Eric Hovind and his merry band of ignoramuses have declared today to be Doubting Darwin Day, unaware that the sentiment is already inherent within the scientific program, and are distributing their 15 questions for evolutionists flyer again. I’ve seen many versions of this kind of thing over the years; they tend to be repetitive and tendentious, and are a combination of a) questions long answered, b) interesting questions they are unaware that people are actively studying, and c) assertions of Christian dogma that we don’t care to address. I’m not going to bother with them (note that I have to get to St Paul today to do a bunch of fun/work), so I’ll just turn it over to Jackson Wheat.

When will the creationists learn that if their questions can be answered by a well-informed undergraduate, maybe they aren’t asking particularly challenging questions?