This guy I know on YouTube, Phrenomythic, just uploaded a video, Humanoid Aliens: How plausible are they?, and I said to myself, “Hey, didn’t I give a talk on a similar subject years ago?”, and I did! Not only did I, but I had the presentation and my notes neatly filed away, so I decided to just redo the whole thing and put it online again — I think it holds up.
It’s that time of year: the gophers have invaded, and are tearing up our lawn. Mounds of dirt have erupted everywhere! We decided we had to do something, so we reluctantly purchased a trap. An evil, lethal, gopher-killing trap. We put it out last night, and this morning…it had sprung.
I had expected something cute and adorable — something like a large mouse or vole. Instead, when I pulled that snare out, it brought with it a grey behemoth, almost as long as my forearm, with huge curved claws and terrifying yellow incisors. Kinda like this:
AAAAIEEE! I felt bad about killing it, but the neighbors would not have been happy if we were ground zero for a lawn-wrecking plague. Now I’m a little nervous walking around in my yard, with angry vengeful monsters burrowing invisibly beneath my feet.
Police in California detained four women on potential felony charges after a white woman called 911 because the woman of color didn’t return her wave.
Kells Fyffe-Marshall explained how the four women, three of whom are black, were surrounded by 7 cop cars during the ordeal and were told that a helicopter was even tracking the women.
Wow. Detained on potential felony charges because they rented an AirBnB while black.
So, when are these scaredy-cat racist white people going to get surrounded by cops for calling in a false accusation? Or maybe even better, when will the police learn restraint?
The New Yorker has a depressing roundup of various Hitler books. The United States seems to be getting a deserved roasting for acting as a role model.
The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.
America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated.
We’re still really good at that. As the hearings for a new CIA director begin, we’re seeing more grand denials of responsibility for horrors.
Classes are over! Now I get to luxuriate in luxurious laziness for a whole year.
Wait, no. I’m not quite done. There are plans.
I have to get back on track with the exercise program — I was derailed by the last week. So it’s off to the gym this morning.
I have to finalize all the grades for my evolution course, less the final exam (due Thursday), because students want to know exactly where they stand right now, even though the final could easily raise or lower it by a whole letter grade.
Lab audits today. As the biology safety officer, I’m supposed to wander around checking on fire extinguishers and eye washes.
Our chancellor has summoned members of my division to an informal meeting this evening. I guess she doesn’t want to forget the faculty exist, so I’ll stop by and oblige.
Hey, the job searches aren’t over — one more interview on Wednesday, and we’re waiting on administration approval for various things.
Oh, yeah, I’ve got to write one more final exam. Maybe I’ll put that off to tomorrow.
The grand plan is to clear all this clutter out of my life in the next week, so I can buckle down to a strict writing schedule. But I want to get on it noooooooooowwwww.
Jaron Lanier is an insightful weirdo, and he shares his ideas about what went wrong with the internet.
I think the fundamental mistake we made is that we set up the wrong financial incentives, and that’s caused us to turn into jerks and screw around with people too much. Way back in the ’80s, we wanted everything to be free because we were hippie socialists. But we also loved entrepreneurs because we loved Steve Jobs. So you wanna be both a socialist and a libertarian at the same time, and it’s absurd. But that’s the kind of absurdity that Silicon Valley culture has to grapple with.
And there’s only one way to merge the two things, which is what we call the advertising model, where everything’s free but you pay for it by selling ads. But then because the technology gets better and better, the computers get bigger and cheaper, there’s more and more data — what started out as advertising morphed into continuous behavior modification on a mass basis, with everyone under surveillance by their devices and receiving calculated stimulus to modify them. So you end up with this mass behavior-modification empire, which is straight out of Philip K. Dick, or from earlier generations, from 1984.
I do mostly agree, I say as I look at the godawful smear of obnoxious ads that are currently fueling this site, many of which are totally inappropriate to our mission. But I didn’t see much of that hippie socialism in action. People wanted things for free…for me. Outsmart the Man and get free phone service, or free cable TV, or a pile of documents that they don’t want us to have. It was more of a Repo Man sensibility.
Few of the early hackers had any kind of social consciousness. Steve Wozniak was as pure as they come — he just wanted to make elegant gadgets, and once he got rich, he gave free concerts and tried to inspire better education, but his faith was in technology for technology’s sake, and he got left behind in the mad scramble for money. Bill Gates was in it for the cash: has everyone forgotten his petulant temper tantrums when people gave away copies of Microsoft BASIC for free? Steve Jobs wasn’t shy about trampling over anyone who got in the way of his ambitions. These kinds of people were the foundations of modern Silicon Valley, the Silicon Valley that is now a haven for conservative vampires like Peter Thiel. And seriously, Zuckerberg? You think there was ever a speck of human feeling in that android? It was never built on altruism. It was never about sharing the benefits and power of technology with the world.
Everyone tends to romanticize the early days and wonder how we got into this miserable situation now. I agree with Lanier that it certainly is a miserable situation…but think we also tend to see the 1970s and 1980s in a false light. Those dang mirrorshades put a rosy pink glow on the world.
As Lanier points out, it’s all about the concentration of power, and power corrupts.
But then there’s this other thing about the centralization of economic power. What happened with Maoists and with communists in general, and neo-Marxists and all kinds of similar movements, is that on the surface, you say everybody shares, everybody’s equal, we’re not gonna have this capitalist concentration. But then there’s some other entity that might not look like traditional capitalism, but is effectively some kind of robber baron that actually owns everything, some kind of Communist Party actually controls everything, and you have just a very small number of individuals who become hyperempowered and everybody else loses power.
And exactly the same thing has happened with the supposed openness of the internet, where you say, “Isn’t it wonderful, with Facebook and Twitter anybody can express themselves. Everybody’s an equal, everybody’s empowered.” But in fact, we’re in a period of time of extreme concentration of wealth and power, and it’s precisely around those who run the biggest computers. So the truth and the effect is just the opposite of what the rhetoric is and the immediate experience.
I can imagine how the faculty and staff at Colorado State are feeling about this PR disaster. The cops pulled two native American students out of a tour group because someone else in the group phoned in a complaint.
Police body camera footage and telephone recordings captured an incident in which two Native American teenagers were pulled from a Colorado college tour and questioned after another tour member reported “odd” behavior by “creepy kids.”
The accusation: “people were worried because you were real quiet”. Quiet. That’s a crime now? They behaved politely and didn’t cause any trouble…clearly a case for cops.
I blame the racist woman who called this in, but I also blame the police: they should have asked her what they were doing, and when she said they were “real quiet”, they should have said that that’s not a problem, and if you’re going to call up the cops with such bullshit complaints, she’s the one who ought to be pulled out of the tour group and questioned. But no, they take two quiet young men aside and frisk them and ask for proof that they’re actually invited members of the tour.
The CSU president has published a statement about the incident.
Two young men, through no fault of their own, wound up frightened and humiliated because another campus visitor was concerned about their clothes and overall demeanor, which appears to have simply been shyness. The very idea that someone – anyone – might “look” like they don’t belong on a CSU Admissions tour is anathema. People of all races, gender identities, orientations, cultures, religions, heritages, and appearances belong here. As long as you want to earn a great education surrounded by people with the same goal who come from every part of our state, our country, and our world, then you belong here. And if you’re uncomfortable with a diverse and inclusive academic environment, then you probably have a better fit elsewhere.
It would be unfair to penalize the child of the woman who made the baseless complaint, but I hope she at least feels unwelcome at CSU.
We are, in fact, in a battle with hate within our communities. While much of what we have been speaking about is born of ignorance, we can educate against ignorance. The hate that is in the hearts of white supremacists as they attempt to frighten and isolate people across this country is not ignorance. It’s a malignant choice. The increase in racist and anti-Semitic symbols and language and demonstrations across America’s college campuses has been well-documented. We at CSU have simply chosen to deal with these issues in a more open manner, and that comes at a potential reputational cost to CSU for being public when such things occur. But history has shown us that hate grows in the face of silence. Hate is not made uncomfortable. Hate does not shrink from fear. What affects hate is our willingness to shine a bright and unwavering light on it and to face it and confront it.
There is no place for hate at Colorado State University, and we will not be silent when we see it.
Now…chew out the cops, too. Don’t accept the excuse that they were just doing their jobs, because part of their job should be recognizing when exercising pointless authority causes more trouble than it solves.
Just a hippie gypsy…that’s my grandson.
Clay Johnson is a man who gained a powerful reputation during the Howard Dean campaign as a smart guy who knew how to use the emerging internet technology as a tool for politics. He has since gone on to be an important tech guy in Democratic and progressive politics, rising ever upward.
He also has a powerful reputation as an abuser of women. But that doesn’t matter. It never seems to matter.
Let’s begin with his apology.
Johnson, in interviews with HuffPost, described his history in the workplace as “awful” and said it filled him with shame, hurt and regret, although he disputed the details of most of his accusers’ stories.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said when asked if he had sexually assaulted two women on the Dean campaign. “What I can tell you is, I had two women complain to management on the Dean campaign about sexual harassment, and I was given a warning.” Later, he said his memory of his encounter with Schacht didn’t include anything he would describe as “assault.”
“My entire career was littered with treating people very poorly,” he continued. “Whether that was the Sunlight Foundation, the Dean campaign, or anywhere else I worked. I did not behave appropriately. I was awful to people, to nearly every single person, and I really wish I hadn’t been.”
What an odd “apology”. There’s no word of apology to the people he hurt, but more of an admission that he was generally awful…but not as awful as his accusers say he was.
That’s kind of a mantra with him. Sure, he was rude and crude, but never as bad as the women he victimized say. Oh, yeah, there was one woman who has a grudge against him, but it’s just stale old personal drama.
…he emailed Miller in June 2008 to warn her that he and Schacht had a history from the Dean campaign. “She hates me,” he wrote, in an email he shared with HuffPost. “Absolutely despises me. Happy to talk to you about it in person, but it’s mainly gossip, innuendo, stale and old. It is weird, I’m happy to talk about it with you. But the short story is: It was a presidential campaign, it was Vermont. She was like 22, I was 26 and we were both shamefully less professional in the workplace. You can put the rest of that story together. I promise there’s not a long slough of disgruntled female campaign staffers in my closets. But there is one, and it is her.”
That woman, Schacht, is someone he attempted to rape. The full, explicit details are in the article. I’ll pass on repeating it here, since, after all, it’s just “gossip, innuendo”. And it didn’t matter at all. Two women accused him of assault in the Dean campaign, but that didn’t check his career in the slightest.
During Johnson’s first job in politics, on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, Schacht and a fellow campaign worker separately accused Johnson of sexual assault. Word of both women’s complaints reached several of Dean’s top deputies. But Johnson kept his job, and his work on the campaign became his ticket to a high-profile career.
He went on to co-found a pathbreaking political consulting firm. Powerful groups and people sought his thoughts on the future of tech in politics; his Twitter banner shows him cracking a joke to a roomful of government officials including President Barack Obama. Despite Schacht’s warning about his behavior, the Sunlight Foundation chose him to head its flagship technology division. He left amid a staff insurrection over his lewd and menacing behavior. And still, he rose higher.
I guess it’s just a fact of life in politics, even progressive politics.
“We just pass creeps from campaign to campaign,” said Meg Reilly, vice president of the Campaign Workers Guild, a new union seeking to organize political workers across the country. “The excuse becomes, ‘We’ll deal with this once the candidate gets elected.’ People tell themselves that if they’re working for this candidate who’s really fantastic, who opposes sexism and racism, then everyone on the campaign is immune from committing the same sins.” Once the election ends, little prevents abusive employees from starting a second act in government, political advocacy or nonprofits.
Responses to his increasingly egregious behavior were ineffective. Johnson himself dismissed them.
Johnson couldn’t recall anyone asking him questions about his behavior. But there had been one repercussion, he said: Rogan, in the presence of his co-deputy campaign manager, Tom McMahon, gave Johnson a warning. “They were like, ‘This complaint has come in, so like, cool it,’” Johnson said. “I would say it made me more defensive. I’m not sure I would say it altered my behavior.”
Then there’s this weird defensive behavior from his employers, even the ones who kicked him to the curb.
At the end of 2007, Blue State Digital forced Johnson out. “Clay was asked to leave the company because his partners didn’t want to work with him anymore, not because of any allegations of inappropriate behavior,” the firm said in a statement. “Clay would not be hired today, we’re glad we fired him over a decade ago and we regret he was ever associated with the company.” The firm wouldn’t provide further details.
Wait, wait, wait. They don’t want to work with him, they wouldn’t hire him again, they regret ever hiring him…but they won’t give details? They say it wasn’t because of inappropriate behavior? This is insane. This is how abusers can keep going from prestigious job to prestigious job. This is how a pattern of bad behavior perpetuates itself.
Other companies give a few details.
Many of Sunlight’s staff members would come to have issues with Johnson as well. Johnson routinely made obscene comments toward his co-workers, according to multiple former Sunlight employees. Nisha Thompson, one former employee, described him as “leery” and “a bully.” Once, she ran into him at a bar outside of work. As soon as she said hello, she claims, Johnson replied, “I’m going to fuck you in the ass.” He sought her out at work the next day to say he’d been blackout drunk, Thompson said.
Johnson’s most frequent target was a young digital designer who reported directly to him. Her desk was next to Johnson’s, and other members of the labs team said she was the butt of all his lewdest comments. In summer 2010, he said something so inappropriate that the team, in dramatic fashion, dragged her desk away from his and surrounded her with their own desks. No one could recall the exact comment. But both the designer and a former Sunlight employee, Hafeezah Abdullah, said the incident involved Johnson spraying the designer in the face with a can of compressed air used for dusting keyboards. The designer and at least one other team member told HuffPost they complained to the head of operations, who was Sunlight’s de facto HR rep.
I’m trying to imagine a workplace so dysfunctional that people rearrange the furniture to block a sociopath’s access to a colleague; where one of the workers gets blackout drunk (and admits it), and makes obscene suggestions to a coworker. I can’t. I guess I’ve been fortunate, or possibly, oblivious. It sounds to me, though, that Clay Johnson has been disruptive everywhere he works, leaving a trail of chaos through every organization he’s been associated with, and nothing he’s done has substantially harmed his career. Every setback is an opportunity for him to move upwards.
The rape story was appalling. It’s this little incident that tells you something about his destructive personality.
All this time, “his party trick was bringing women down a notch,” said Erie Meyer, the tech worker. At Personal Democracy Forum in 2013, Johnson humiliated her by saying to a group of CEOs she was meeting for the first time, “This is Erie Meyer. She’s Gray Brooks’ fiancée and she has herpes.” She was neither engaged nor did she have a sexually transmitted infection, but “this was Clay’s way of letting people know that I was a plus-one — I was not a person of note.” Meyer sobbed in a stairwell and skipped the rest of the conference.
A year later, Johnson became a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
That’s why I started with his “apology”. I can believe he knows he has been awful to people. I don’t believe he cares, except when it might interfere with his career — it’s total selfishness.
If you’ve never cared about other human beings all of your life, if you’ve treated your peers as garbage, why should I believe you’ve suddenly discovered empathy now?
