This is America.

It is 2 am and I am wide awake. I’ve had a nightmare.

It’s my own damn fault. I’ve been watching this video a couple of times a day for the last several days, and I think it’s doing things to my brain.

That transition…it hurts so good. It starts sounding a bit like Simon & Garfunkel, light and happy, and Glover is mugging like an old time minstrel, and then wham, we get a rumbly throb, an act of unspeakable violence, and “This is America”. Oh, sure, pop music has to have a catchy hook so it sticks in your brain, but this is more like a 2×4 upside your cranium. As the song goes on, it keeps on alternating between shuckin’ and jivin’ in the foreground and casual crime in the background.

That’s the dichotomy that jars me out of my sleep. I dream about this video, it’s in the forefront of my mind, but I’m thinking about all these other events going on recently.

I see Lauren Southern, her conventionally pretty white face blown up to ten times the height of a man on a video screen, her amplified voice indignantly declaiming to a crowd about how her free speech has been taken from her.

This is America.

Gina Haspel, the woman who helped cover up the CIA’s record of torture, is asked in her senate confirmation hearings if she would obey a direct order from the president to torture someone.

“I do not believe the President would ask me to do that.”

Oh my god. She really said that.

This is America.

The New York Times runs a really long piece on a collection of apologists for the status quo, people who represent nothing but the shabby id of white people, and puts on the pretense that these are radical intellectuals. No one on the NYT staff notes the irony.

This is America.

The NRA, a criminal terrorist organization, announces that their new president is Oliver North, a convicted criminal who sponsored terrorism in Central America. His first major speech representing that organization denounces the survivors of the Parkland shooting, a group of high school kids lobbying for gun control, as “civil terrorists”.

This is America.

Bitter old white guy on Fox News sneers at John McCain to defend torture.

“…it worked on John [McCain]That’s why they call him ‘Songbird John.’ The fact is those methods can work, and they are effective, as former Vice President Cheney said. And if we have to use them to save a million American lives, we will do whatever we have to.”

I don’t even like McCain. I detest McCain. And oh my god, Cheney is back?

This is America.

That video by Donald Glover is great art, it’s shaking me up. But I shouldn’t blame it for my loss of sleep — it’s only the musical accompaniment to the real nightmare. This is America.

This is where I live.

Can’t sleep. This is America.

If you have a chronic runny nose, maybe your brain is leaking out of your skull

That sounds like an unkind joke, but sometimes it happens.

Jackson was diagnosed with cerebrospinal fluid leak, as in, brain fluid had been leaking through a hole in her skull into her nose. All day, every day. For three years.

She was losing approximately half a pint per day of the fluid that is supposed to surround the brain and spinal cord, doctors told her. If left untreated, the leak could have led to serious infections, including meningitis, vision changes and hearing loss.

I don’t have a runny nose, so I guess I have no excuse.

I still think the Intellectual Dark Web moniker is going to increase the ridicule

Henry Farrell has an interesting take on the Intellectual Dark Web. He argues that their sense of resentment is in some ways justified, because they actually have been displaced from the respect and appreciation their views might once have had. In other words, their shitty opinions no longer get the old beard-stroking regard they would have 10 or 20 years ago.

The traditional safe spaces for pseudoscientific speculation have been taken over, almost literally. The New Republic — which Ta-Nehisi Coates has asserted had perhaps two black staff writers or editors in its heyday and was certainly overwhelmingly white — is now being edited by the leftist multicultural barbarians. Slate has moved away from reflex contrarianism toward a more robust liberalism. And William Saletan, to his genuine credit, has written a serious mea culpa for his previous flirtations with race-IQ theorizing.

Today, contrarianism on race and gender is liable to get fierce pushback in the publications of mainstream liberalism. Intellectual ties to the right can win you toleration if you are David Frum, Ross Douthat, or David Brooks. You may be recognized as a member of a minority that needs to be acknowledged, and as a possibly unreliable ally against Donald Trump Republicanism. However, you are unlikely to enjoy real love or deep acceptance.

In absolute terms, dark web intellectuals enjoy far more access to the mainstream than genuine leftists. But in relative terms, they have far lower status than their intellectual forebears of 20 or even 10 years ago. They are not driving the conversation, and sometimes are being driven from it. This loss of relative social status helps explain the anger and resentment that Weiss describes and to some extent herself embodies. It’s hard for erstwhile hegemons to feel happy about their fall.

There is also an irritating but genuine grain of truth deep beneath the layers of whining. Campus leftists and their allies in the media are often no more open to alternative perspectives than the New Republic white male elite of two decades ago; they can behave badly too. But where dark web intellectuals veer from analysis of that phenomenon into self-pity is in their consistent tendency to treat all skeptical criticism of their purported commitment to truth-seeking as further symptoms of political correctness gone mad.

In that sense, it’s kind of a promising development that they now have to get their photos taken while lurking in the bushes at dusk. The flip side, though, is that while the intelligent, educated people have had enough of their bullshit and are willing to rip into them when they open their ignorant mouths, that gives them an additional cachet with the ignorant…and there’s more of them than there are of us. Hence, all the buckets of money being poured over them.

Do they also ban diet Coke?

The organization run by our coke-guzzling president has just banned Irn-Bru from their golf courses in Scotland, because, they say, it stains the carpets. It’s a lie. I’m pretty sure that it’s because its iron content — I understand it’s made by dissolving an entire medieval claymore into each bottle — makes the Scots unstoppable in any athletic competition, and we all know how much Trump hates to lose.

(I have drunk the stuff, and it’s OK — it’s got a distinctive and vaguely medicinal flavor. I recommend sticking to the whisky. It’s the top selling soft drink in Scotland, though, so this is kind of a rude order.)

I haven’t ever fantasized about this

Good morning! I know you all love to wake up to stories about exotic sexual fetishes, so here you go.

The idea is to replicate the act of being impregnated with eggs. Usually from an alien or insect. If you’ve seen the Aliens movies, you’ll get the picture. Many people find this sort of thing very arousing. The toys are simply phallic-shaped hollow tubes that can be used to insert gelatin eggs into oneself. There is a funnel-shaped hole in the bottom to receive the eggs, which are inserted one by one, forcing them up the tube and out the top.

There’s a video so you can see how it works.

OK, being injected with parasites isn’t one of my turn-ons, but hey, if that’s your thing, now you know where to go.

However, I’m concerned by the maker’s cavalier attitude towards infection.

We are not doctors, and we’re not about to comment on what is safe or unsafe to do to one’s body as it varies from person to person. I can say that I have used them many times without hurting myself, but frankly it is up to the person using it to know their own limits. For instance, if you are allergic to gelatin. If made properly, the eggs are firm, but rubbery, similar to the consistency of gummy bears. They dissolve with body heat rather quickly.

I have made gelatin plates many, many times, and while they’re nice and cushiony for embryos, they are also pure protein and a delicious medium for growing bacteria and fungi. Mmmm, carbon and nitrogen in an easily digestible form. Talk to a microbiologist — there ought to be serious concerns about the sterility of that lovely growth medium you’re stuffing up your whereevers.

The Intellectual Dark Web is an object of ridicule, again

I guess I’m not the only one who noticed the blatant ironies of The Intellectual Dark Web. So did Nathan Robinson.

Weiss says that “offline and in the real world, members of the I.D.W. are often found speaking to one another in packed venues around the globe,” such as the O2 Arena, where they dare to say “That Which Cannot Be Said,” offering “taboo” thoughts like “There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.” (Gosh, perhaps it’s just the fringe conservative circles I move in, but I seem to hear that stuff constantly!)

Well, are they right? Are they being “purged” as part of a “siege” on free speech by the illiberal left? It’s interesting that Weiss chooses to use the formulation “feeling locked out of legacy outlets,” since I seem to remember a great philosopher once saying that Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings. These people may feel as if they are persecuted renegades, suppressed at every turn by Postmodern Neo-Marxists. But there are a lot of facts to say otherwise.

First, even from the evidence in Weiss’ article, we can see that freely speaking about the “siege on free speech” is impressively lucrative. Dave Rubin’s show “makes at least $30,000 a month on Patreon” while Jordan Peterson “pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month” and recently released a bestseller. Ben Shapiro gets 15 million downloads a month and has published five books, Sam Harris gets a million listeners per episode and has published seven books. Though Joe Rogan insists “he’s not an interviewer or a journalist” (I wouldn’t disagree) his three-hour podcast conversations are among the most downloaded in the world. These dissident “intellectuals” each seem to make about as much money in a month, with far larger audiences, than is made annually by the critical race theorists and gender studies professors they think are keeping them from being heard.

I guess we can put all of them soundly in the conservative camp, since they meet the two main diagnostic criteria: they make money off their persecution complex, and they’re all flailingly hypocritical.

The martyrdom of the most privileged people in America

The contradictions have become obvious. The people who howl most about “identity politics” are the ones most dedicated to propping up the privileges of white male identity. The ones screaming about “free speech” get all the press and are determined to silence those awful SJWs. And the ones who sneer at thin-skinned lefties are the most delicate little flowers.

Required reading for our graduating students who plan on pursuing a career in science

We tend not to talk about this stuff: when we tell our undergraduates about graduate school, it’s all about getting to hang out with smart people all the time and doing science in a lab and constantly learning new things. We avoid talking about the grind, the fluctuating amounts of pressure, the unsupportive pricks who run some labs, and the fact that the whole enterprise is an engine for depression. You’re working on tiny, tightly focused problems in ways that no one has tried before; you’re going to fail and fail and fail, and only occasionally see a flicker of cheerful sunlight. It can be tough.

One scientist writes about the black dog of depression that haunted him throughout grad school.

The days merged into weeks; the failures continued. My supervisor called me to his office. He was unimpressed. I needed to do better, work harder, get it right. Walking back to my bench that day, a black dog walked with me. When exactly it had arrived I can’t say. I was 21. My ramshackle mental defences had been crumbling for a while. I’ll never know what tore the breach. It may have been an admonishment from a lab technician or just one more cloudy culture bottle. Whatever had splintered the final defence, depression was my new master.

It is amazing how we can maintain a facade of normality while behind it a maelstrom of disintegrating sanity roars. By Christmas, I was thinner and quieter, but still me. Time with family and fiancée kept the black dog subdued. It waited.

Instead of seeking help, I counted down the remaining days of holiday like a condemned man. Sometimes you can see deep depression coming for you, slamming doors of escape, tightening the orbits of desperation. Deciding I would kill myself was a relief. I wrongly felt that it was the only door left open. One place the black dog could not follow.

He didn’t kill himself, obviously. And he later found support from other people and clawed himself out of the pit.

But still, when I think back…I am not prone to depression, myself. This is not to say that I don’t experience stress or self-doubt, but that somehow I’m emotionally rather unperturbable (which isn’t always a good thing), and I don’t spiral into that bleakness I see in others experiencing depression. I’m lucky that way.

I can see how the circumstances of grad school can do terrible harm, though. I spent a lot of time alone, slicing away at a microtome or sitting in a dark room feeding copper grids into an electron microscope. There was one faculty member who literally hated me, who would hiss at me in the hallways and once hauled me into his office on a whim so he could tell me to get out of science, that it was his personal goal to destroy any career I might have and prevent my graduation. Less coarse-souled people than I might have been wrecked by that.

Fortunately, I was in one of the good labs — you know, the ones with a helpful advisor and a team of supportive grad students and post-docs, which also helped immensely. Still, I worried when my daughter went off to grad school. It felt a little bit like watching her leap into the maw of a wood chipper, although it’s one where some survive unscathed, others gather scars, and others get ground down to a pulp.

Not to discourage anyone, but you should be aware of this problem.

Well, what if we put a golden calf on a white horse?

Charles Pierce comments on the recent abrupt resignation of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a liberal Democratic politician — one of our guys! — whose career “went into the acid bath because, at one level or another, they failed to see women as actual human beings”. The article resonates with me because this is a universal problem everywhere, not just in politics. I run into it in science, in atheism, everywhere. It’s a problem with the human condition.

The search for the person on a white horse is an open invitation to counterfeit engagement and artificial activism. The impact of celebrity on our politics has been devastating enough; see the current tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for details.

See also the list of Intellectual Dark Web phonies. Every time an organization looks for the guy on the white horse to lead them, they are going to experience a colossal pratfall because there is no end of grifters with a bucket of whitewash and a broke-down mule ready to announce their candidacy.

Schneiderman is one of those terrible people with a history of assaulting women, and it’s good that he’s out (for now; expect a comeback attempt soon. The standard waiting time seems to be a few months.) But the rot goes deeper. Who are all these people who knew, but did nothing?

His swift resignation was more than justified and his disappearance from the ongoing drama of this presidency, while unfortunate, is wholly appropriate. He should’ve been in jail years ago.

Instead, for the purposes of this story, we should focus on one small slice of the account.

After the former girlfriend ended the relationship, she told several friends about the abuse. A number of them advised her to keep the story to herself, arguing that Schneiderman was too valuable a politician for the Democrats to lose. She described this response as heartbreaking. And when Schneiderman heard that she had turned against him, she said, he warned her that politics was a tough and personal business, and that she’d better be careful. She told Selvaratnam that she had taken this as a threat.

Who in the hell counsels a friend to hush up a violent assault on these grounds? My politics are as important to me as anyone’s are but if, say, Sherrod Brown came and burglarized your house, I wouldn’t tell you to let him keep your jewelry because we need him to save Social Security. (Note to Senator Brown: I do not believe you are a cat burglar.) This is turning your politics into a graven image, a golden calf of the soul. Believe it or not, there are some things that politics ought not to touch. Physical abuse of any kind is high on that list.

The metaphor may be apt, but it’s also kind of incongruous that so many atheists are hauling around golden calves of the soul. The argument that “So-and-so is an asshole, but he’s our asshole, and his book/podcast/videos are soooo good” is tiresome. They aren’t worth it.

Oh, christ, another self-appointed set of thought-leaders

If it were the Onion, it might be funny, but this is the New York Times promoting a group calling themselves the Intellectual Dark Web. They aren’t particularly intellectual, they’re not part of some “web” of something or other, but they are rather dark. Can we rename them the Dark Dorks?

The list of members consists mainly of people who are demonstrable assholes. They include:

  • Sam Harris
  • Eric Weinstein
  • Christina Hoff Sommers
  • Dave Rubin
  • Jordan Peterson
  • Heather Heying
  • Ben Shapiro
  • Douglas Murray
  • Joe Rogan
  • Maajid Nawaz
  • Bret Weinstein
  • Michael Shermer
  • Camille Paglia
  • Steven Pinker
  • James Damore

Etc., etc., etc. You know, if you really wanted to compile a list of the worst people in America, the shallow populists who poison the discourse with conservative toxins and Libertarian lies, that wouldn’t be a bad start. These are not particularly smart or interesting people — they are good at inflaming other assholes and acquiring a following, but that’s about it. And now they’ve got a great big long article in the New York Times, with grimdark portrait shoots of them standing about in the shrubbery at night.

And just what is the dark intellectual foundation they’re trying to promote?

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women.

Yes? So? No one argues against that. What we argue against is the idea that you can find consistent, biological differences in their minds, or that one gender is the lesser to the other.

Free speech is under siege.

Jesus fucking christ. You’ve got the NY Times spewing your bullshit everywhere, where is your loss of free speech? The whole basis of your sleazy legitimacy is that you’re a bunch of people with large followings!

Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.

Say the status quo warriors who want everyone else to shut up about their bigotry, while howling non-stop about their precious identity.

And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

Uh, these are the people who named themselves the dark web. Not anyone else. Typical. They’re complaining about being victimized by their own term!

Quick, let’s start the Shiny Happy Web! All it takes is declaring yourself special, and people will think you’re a movement. Let’s pass on the dismal dishonest ideas, though, OK?